to call Lord Grey’s narrative written, as he himself states in his letter to James II., while the question of his pardon was pending, an authentic account.  That which is most certain in this affair is, that they had committed no overt act, indicating the imagining of the king’s death, even according to the most strained construction of the statute of Edward III.; much less was any such act legally proved against them.  And the conspiring to levy war was not treason, except by a recent statute of Charles II., the prosecutions upon which were expressly limited to a certain time, which in these cases had elapsed so that it is impossible not to assent to the opinion of those who have ever stigmatised the condemnation and execution of Russell as a most flagrant violation of law and justice.

The proceedings in Sidney’s case were still more detestable.  The production of papers, containing speculative opinions upon government and liberty, written long before, and perhaps never even intended to be published, together with the use made of those papers, in considering them as a substitute for the second witness to the overt act, exhibited such a compound of wickedness and nonsense as is hardly to be paralleled in the history of juridical tyranny.  But the validity of pretences was little attended to at that time, in the case of a person whom the court had devoted to destruction, and upon evidence such as has been stated was this great and excellent man condemned to die.  Pardon was not to be expected.  Mr. Hume says, that such an interference on the part of the king, though it might have been an act of heroic generosity, could not be regarded as an indispensable duty.  He might have said with more propriety, that it was idle to expect that the government, after having incurred so much guilt in order to obtain the sentence, should, by remitting it, relinquish the object just when it was within its grasp.  The same historian considers the jury as highly blamable, and so do I; but what was their guilt in comparison of that of the court who tried, and of the government who prosecuted, in this infamous cause?  Yet the jury, being the only party that can with any colour be stated as acting independently of the government, is the only one mentioned by him as blamable.  The prosecutor is wholly omitted in his censure, and so is the court; this last, not from any tenderness for the judge (who, to do this author justice, is no favourite with him), but lest the odious connection between that branch of the judicature and the government should strike the reader too forcibly; for Jeffreys, in this instance, ought to be regarded as the mere tool and instrument (a fit one, no doubt), of the prince who had appointed him for the purpose of this and similar services.  Lastly, the king is gravely introduced on the question of pardon, as if he had had no prior concern in the cause, and were now to decide upon the propriety of extending mercy to a criminal