rt, by the king's appearing
personally as his brother's accuser,[*] and pleading the cause against
him. But a sentence of condemnation, even when this extraordinary
circumstance had not place, was a necessary consequence, in those times,
of any prosecution by the court or the prevailing party; and the duke of
Clarence was pronounced guilty by the peers. The house of commons were
no less slavish and unjust: they both petitioned for the execution of
the duke, and afterwards passed a bill of attainder against him.[**] The
measures of the parliament, during that age, furnish us with examples of
a strange contrast of freedom and servility: they scruple to grant, and
sometimes refuse, to the king the smallest supplies, the most necessary
for the support of government, even the most necessary for the
maintenance of wars, for which the nation, as well as the parliament
itself, expressed great fondness: but they never scruple to concur
in the most flagrant act of injustice or tyranny which falls on any
individual, however distinguished by birth or merit. These maxims,
so ungenerous, so opposite to all principles of good government, so
contrary to the practice of present parliaments, are very remarkable
in all the transactions of the English history for more than a century
after the period in which we are now engaged.

The only favor which the king granted his brother after his
condemnation, was to leave him the choice of his death; and he was
privately drowned in a butt of malmsey in the Tower; a whimsical choice,
which implies that he had an extraordinary passion for that liquor. The
duke left two children by the elder daughter of the earl of Warwick;
a son, created an earl by his grandfather's title, and a daughter,
afterwards countess of Salisbury. Both this prince and princess were
also unfortunate in their end, and died a violent death; a fate which,
for many years, attended almost all the descendants of the royal blood
in England. There prevails a report, that a chief source of the violent
prosecution of the duke of Clarence, whose name was George, was a
current prophecy, that the king's son should be murdered by one, the
initial letter of whose name was G.[***] It is not impossible but, in
those ignorant times, such a silly reason might have some influence;
but it is more probable that the whole story is the invention of a
subsequent period, and founded on the murder of these children by the
duke of Glocester. Comines rem