d English soldiers to be burned alive. The governing
principle of his whole conduct, it is said, is not vainglory, or
ambition, or avarice, but a deadly hatred of Englishmen and a desire
to make them miserable. The nation is vehemently adjured, on peril of
incurring the severest judgments, to rise up and free itself from this
plague, this curse, this tyrant, whose depravity makes it difficult to
believe that he can have been procreated by a human pair. Many copies
were also found of another paper, somewhat less ferocious but perhaps
more dangerous, entitled A French Conquest neither desirable nor
practicable. In this tract also the people are exhorted to rise in
insurrection. They are assured that a great part of the army is with
them. The forces of the Prince of Orange will melt away; he will be glad
to make his escape; and a charitable hope is sneeringly expressed that
it may not be necessary to do him any harm beyond sending him back to
Loo, where he may live surrounded by luxuries for which the English have
paid dear.

The government, provoked and alarmed by the virulence of the Jacobite
pamphleteers, determined to make Anderton an example. He was indicted
for high treason, and brought to the bar of the Old Bailey. Treby,
now Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and Powell, who had honourably
distinguished himself on the day of the trial of the bishops, were on
the Bench. It is unfortunate that no detailed report of the evidence has
come down to us, and that we are forced to content ourselves with such
fragments of information as can be collected from the contradictory
narratives of writers evidently partial, intemperate and dishonest. The
indictment, however, is extant; and the overt acts which it imputes to
the prisoner undoubtedly amount to high treason. [457] To exhort the
subjects of the realm to rise up and depose the King by force, and to
add to that exhortation the expression, evidently ironical, of a hope
that it may not be necessary to inflict on him any evil worse than
banishment, is surely an offence which the least courtly lawyer will
admit to be within the scope of the statute of Edward the Third. On this
point indeed there seems to have been no dispute, either at the trial or
subsequently.

The prisoner denied that he had printed the libels. On this point it
seems reasonable that, since the evidence has not come down to us,
we should give credit to the judges and the jury who heard what the
witnesses