ed. In this paper he was made to complain of the unfairness of a
trial which he had himself in public acknowledged to have been eminently
fair. He was also made to aver, on the word of a dying man, that he knew
nothing of the papers which had been found upon him. Unfortunately his
declaration, when inspected, proved to be in the same handwriting with
one of the most important of those papers. He died with manly fortitude.
[12]

Elliot was not brought to trial. The evidence against him was not quite
so clear as that on which his associates had been convicted; and he was
not worth the anger of the government. The fate of Preston was long in
suspense. The Jacobites affected to be confident that the government
would not dare to shed his blood. He was, they said, a favourite at
Versailles, and his death would be followed by a terrible retaliation.
They scattered about the streets of London papers in which it was
asserted that, if any harm befell him, Mountjoy, and all the other
Englishmen of quality who were prisoners in France, would be broken
on the wheel. [13] These absurd threats would not have deferred the
execution one day. But those who had Preston in their power were not
unwilling to spare him on certain conditions. He was privy to all the
counsels of the disaffected party, and could furnish information of the
highest value. He was informed that his fate depended on himself. The
struggle was long and severe. Pride, conscience, party spirit, were on
one side; the intense love of life on the other. He went during a time
irresolutely to and fro. He listened to his brother Jacobites; and his
courage rose. He listened to the agents of the government; and his heart
sank within him. In an evening when he had dined and drunk his claret,
he feared nothing. He would die like a man, rather than save his neck by
an act of baseness. But his temper was very different when he woke the
next morning, when the courage which he had drawn from wine and company
had evaporated, when he was alone with the iron grates and stone walls,
and when the thought of the block, the axe and the sawdust rose in his
mind. During some time he regularly wrote a confession every forenoon
when he was sober, and burned it every night when he was merry. [14]
His nonjuring friends formed a plan for bringing Sancroft to visit
the Tower, in the hope, doubtless, that the exhortations of so great a
prelate and so great a saint would confirm the wavering virtue of