and passion, that heretofore hath wrought
more violently, but never expended itself in a stronger passion. Hereof
his Majesty shall hear when the Lords come to him. The lawless liberty
of the Tower, so long cockered and fostered with hopes exorbitant, hath
bred suitable desires and affections. And yet you may assure his Majesty
that by this publication he won little ground.' He gained so little
that, as he wrote in this year, he was, after eight years of
imprisonment, as straitly locked up as he had been the first day.

[Sidenote: _Search for Evidence of Guilt._]

When his imprisonment was most severe, it was moderate for his guilt if
he were guilty. In its times of least oppressiveness it was an enormity,
if he were innocent. To himself, who knew that he was guiltless of the
treason imputed to him, and was convinced that his gaolers knew it, his
imprisonment under any conditions appeared a monstrous iniquity. He
could never desist from protesting against the wrong. It was the
grievance as much of his enemies that they had him fast in prison, and
could neither browbeat him into acknowledging the justice of his doom,
nor prove its justice. They had obtained his condemnation rather than
his conviction. They were incited by his appeals to redoubled efforts to
establish his original guilt. Some, the King for example, may, from
rooted prejudice, have believed him guilty. No less than his most
malignant and unscrupulous foes they resented furiously their inability
to demonstrate it. They regarded it as evidence merely of his abominable
craft. The ordinary and extraordinary laxity of his confinement
indicated their doubt of his fair liability to any. The intervals of
rigour were meant to notify to the sceptical that the Government was at
last on the track of evidence which would confirm the equity of
everything from the beginning done against him. Constantly he had to
stand on his defence against attempts to palliate the effrontery of the
Winchester judgment by experimental accusations that he had been
tampering with new conspiracies. For ten years the contest proceeded
between him and the Court on that basis. He asseverated the right of an
innocent man to freedom, and the Court went on searching for proofs of
its right to put him into captivity. His adversaries might have been
content with the degree of ruin they had wrought if he would have
acquiesced in his fall. He insisted on regarding himself as living,
though he could