and five were in their places.  Many thought that the Bishops ought to have been permitted, if not required, to withdraw; for, by an ancient canon, those who ministered at the altars of God were forbidden to take any part in the infliction of capital punishment.  On the trial of a peer impeached of high treason, the prelates always retire, and leave the culprit to be absolved or condemned by laymen.  And surely, if it be unseemly that a divine should doom his fellow creatures to death as a judge, it must be still more unseemly that he should doom them to death as a legislator.  In the latter case, as in the former, he contracts that stain of blood which the Church regards with horror; and it will scarcely be denied that there are some grave objections to the shedding of blood by Act of Attainder which do not apply to the shedding of blood in the ordinary course of justice.  In fact, when the bill for taking away the life of Strafford was under consideration, all the spiritual peers withdrew.  Now, however, the example of Cranmer, who had voted for some of the most infamous acts of attainder that ever passed, was thought more worthy of imitation; and there was a great muster of lawn sleeves.  It was very properly resolved that, on this occasion, the privilege of voting by proxy should be suspended, that the House should be called over at the beginning and at the end of every sitting, and that every member who did not answer to his name should be taken into custody.762

Meanwhile the unquiet brain of Monmouth was teeming with strange designs.  He had now reached a time of life at which youth could no longer be pleaded as an excuse for his faults; but he was more wayward and eccentric than ever.  Both in his intellectual and in his moral character there was an abundance of those fine qualities which may be called luxuries, and a lamentable deficiency of those solid qualities which are of the first necessity.  He had brilliant wit and ready invention without common sense, and chivalrous generosity and delicacy without common honesty.  He was capable of rising to the part of the Black Prince; and yet he was capable of sinking to the part of Fuller.  His political life was blemished by some most dishonourable actions; yet he was not under the influence of those motives to which most of the dishonourable actions of politicians are to be ascribed.  He valued power little and money less.  Of fear he was utterly insensible.  If he sometimes stooped to be a villain,—­for no milder word will come up to the truth,—­it was merely to amuse himself and to astonish other people.  In civil as in military affairs, he loved ambuscades, surprises, night attacks.  He now imagined that he had a glorious opportunity of making a sensation, of producing a great commotion; and the temptation was irresistible to a spirit so restless as his.

He knew, or at least strongly suspected, that the stories which Fenwick had told on hearsay, and which King, Lords and Commons, Whigs and Tories, had agreed to treat as calumnies, were, in the main, true.  Was it impossible to prove that they were true, to cross the wise policy of William, to bring disgrace at once on some of the most eminent men of both parties, to throw the whole political world into inextricable confusion?