he had not been a party to it. His large fortune however,
and the use which he was well known to have made of it, marked him out
as a fit object for punishment. He, like Charnock, asked for counsel,
and, like Charnock, asked in vain. The judges could not relax the law;
and the Attorney General would not postpone the trial. The proceedings
of that day furnish a strong argument in favour of the Act from the
benefit of which Friend was excluded. It is impossible to read them
over at this distance of time without feeling compassion for a silly ill
educated man, unnerved by extreme danger, and opposed to cool, astute
and experienced antagonists. Charnock had defended himself and those
who were tried with him as well as any professional advocate could have
done. But poor Friend was as helpless as a child. He could do little
more than exclaim that he was a Protestant, and that the witnesses
against him were Papists, who had dispensations from their priests for
perjury, and who believed that to swear away the lives of heretics was
a meritorious work. He was so grossly ignorant of law and history as to
imagine that the statute of treasons, passed in the reign of Edward the
Third, at a time when there was only one religion in Western Europe,
contained a clause providing that no Papist should be a witness, and
actually forced the Clerk of the Court to read the whole Act from
beginning to end. About his guilt it was impossible that there could be
a doubt in any rational mind. He was convicted; and he would have been
convicted if he had been allowed the privileges for which he asked.

Parkyns came next. He had been deeply concerned in the worst part of
the plot, and was, in one respect, less excusable than any of his
accomplices; for they were all nonjurors; and he had taken the oaths
to the existing government. He too insisted that he ought to be tried
according to the provisions of the new Act. But the counsel for the
Crown stood on their extreme right; and his request was denied. As he
was a man of considerable abilities, and had been bred to the bar, he
probably said for himself all that counsel could have said for him;
and that all amounted to very little. He was found guilty, and received
sentence of death on the evening of the twenty-fourth of March, within
six hours of the time when the law of which he had vainly demanded the
benefit was to come into force. [680]

The execution of the two knights was eagerly expected by the