m certain. Monmouth's communications with the
king, when we reflect upon all the circumstances of those communications,
deserve not the smallest attention; nor indeed, if they did, does the
letter which he afterwards withdrew prove anything upon this point. And
it is an outrage to common-sense 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 part