The Historical Nights' Entertainment - Rafael Sabatini (chrysanthemum read aloud TXT) 📗
- Author: Rafael Sabatini
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rebellion, and that she had been in London until Monmouth had been
beheaded.
“If I had known the time of my trial in the country,” she pursued,
“I could have had the testimony of those persons of honour for me.
But, my lord, I have been told, and so I thought it would have been,
that I should not have been tried for harbouring Mr. Hicks until he
should himself be convict as a traitor. I did abhor those that were
in the plot and conspiracy against the King. I know my duty to my
King better, and have always exercised it. I defy anybody in the
world that ever knew contrary to come and give testimony.”
His voice broke harshly upon the pause. “Have you any more to say?”
“As to what they say to my denying Nelthorp to be in the house,” she
resumed. “I was in very great consternation and fear of the
soldiers, who were very rude and violent. I beseech your lordship
to make that construction of it, and not harbour an ill opinion of
me because of those false reports that go about of me, relating to
my carriage towards the old King, that I was anyways consenting to
the death of King Charles I; for, my lord, that is as false as God
is true. I was not out of my chamber all the day in which that king
was beheaded, and I believe I shed more tears for him than any other
woman then living.
“And I do repeat it, my lord, as I hope to attain salvation, I never
did know Nelthorp, nor did I know of anybody’s coming but Mr. Hicks.
Him I knew to be a Nonconformist minister, and there being, as is
well known, warrants out to apprehend all Nonconformist ministers,
I was willing to give him shelter from these warrants, which I knew
was no treason.”
“Have you any more to say for yourself?” he asked her.
“My lord,” she was beginning, “I came but five days before this into
the country.”
“Nay,” he broke in, “I cannot tell when you came into the country,
nor I don’t care. It seems you came in time to harbour rebels.”
She protested that if she would have ventured her life for anything,
it would have been to serve the King.
“But, though I could not fight for him myself, my son did; he was
actually in arms on the King’s side in this business. It was I that
bred him in loyalty and to fight for the King.”
“Well, have you done?” he asked her brutally.
“Yes, my lord,” she answered; and resumed her seat, trembling a
little from the exertion and emotion of her address.
His charge to the jury began. It was very long, and the first half
of it was taken up with windy rhetoric in which the Almighty was
invoked at every turn. It degenerated at one time into a sermon
upon the text of “render unto Caesar,” inveighing against the
Presbyterian religion. And the dull length of his lordship’s
periods, combined with the monotone in which he spoke, lulled the
wearied lady at the bar into slumber. She awakened with a start
when suddenly his fist crashed down and his voice rose in fierce
denunciation of the late rebellion. But she was dozing again - so
calm and so little moved was she - before he had come to apply his
denunciations to her own case, and this in spite of all her protests
that she had held the rebellion in abhorrence.
It was all calculated to prejudice the minds of the jurymen before
he came to the facts and the law of the case. And that charge of
his throughout, far from being a judicial summing-up, was a virulent
address for the prosecution, just as his bearing hitherto in
examining and cross-examining witnesses had been that of counsel
for the Crown. The statement that she had made in her own defence
he utterly ignored, save in one particular, where he saw his
opportunity further to prejudice her case.
“I am sorry,” he said, his face lengthening, “to remember something
that dropped even from the gentlewoman herself. She pretends to
religion and loyalty very much - how greatly she wept at the death
of King Charles the Martyr - and owns her great obligations to the
late king and his royal brother. And yet no sooner is one in the
grave than she forgets all gratitude and entertains those that were
rebels against his royal successor.
“I will not say,” he continued with deliberate emphasis, “what hand
her husband had in the death of that blessed martyr; she has enough
to answer for her own guilt; and I must confess that it ought not,
one way or other, to make any ingredient into this case what she was
in former times.”
But he had dragged it in, protesting that it should not influence
the case, yet coldly, calculatingly intending it to do so. She was
the widow of a regicide, reason and to spare in the views of himself
and his royal master why she should be hounded to her death upon any
pretext.
Thereafter he reviewed the evidence against her, dwelt upon the
shuffling of Dunne, deduced that the reason for so much lying was
to conceal the damning truth - namely, that she knew Hicks for a
rebel when she gave him shelter, and thus became the partner of his
horrible guilt. Upon that he charged them to find their verdict
“without any consideration of persons, but considering only the
truth.”
Nevertheless, although his commands were clear, some of the jury
would seem to have feared the God whom Jeffreys invoked so
constantly. One of them rose to ask him pertinently, in point of
law, whether it was treason to have harboured Hicks before the man
had been convicted of treason.
Curtly he answered them that beyond doubt it was, and upon that
assurance the jury withdrew, the Court settled down into an expectant
silence, and her ladyship dozed again in her chair.
The minutes passed. It was growing late, and Jeffreys was eager to
be done with this prejudged affair, that he might dine in peace.
His voice broke the stillness of the court, protesting his angry
wonder at the need to deliberate in so plain a case. He was
threatening to adjourn and let the jury lie by all night if they
did not bring in their verdict quickly. When, at the end of a
half-hour, they returned, his fierce, impatient glance found them
ominously grave.
“My lord,” said Mr. Whistler, the foreman, “we have to beg of your
lordship some directions before we can bring our verdict. We have
some doubt upon us whether there be sufficient proof that she knew
Hicks to have been in the army.”
Well might they doubt it, for there was no proof at all. Yet he
never hesitated to answer them.
“There is as full proof as proof can be. But you are judges of the
proof. For my part, I thought there was no difficulty in it.”
“My lord,” the foreman insisted, “we are in some doubt about it.”
“I cannot help your doubts,” he said irritably. “Was there not
proved a discourse of the battle and of the battle and of the army
at supper-time?”
“But, my lord, we are not satisfied that she had notice that Hicks
was in the army.”
He glowered upon them in silence for a moment. They deserved to
be themselves indicted for their slowness to perceive where lay
their duty to their king.
“I cannot tell what would satisfy you,” he said; and sneered. “Did
she not inquire of Dunne whether Hicks had been in the army? And
when he told her he did not know, she did not say she would refuse
if he had been, but ordered him to come by night, by which it is
evident she suspected it.”
He ignored, you see, her own complete explanation of that
circumstance.
“And when Hicks and Nelthorp came, did she not discourse with them
about the battle and the army?” (As if that were not at the time
a common topic of discussion.) “Come, come, gentlemen,” he said,
with amazing impudence, “it is plain proof.”
But Mr. Whistler was not yet satisfied.
“We do not remember, my lord, that it was proved that she asked any
such question.”
That put him in a passion.
“Sure,” he bellowed, “you do not remember anything that has passed.
Did not Dunne tell you there was such a discourse, and she was by?
But if there were no such proof, the circumstances and management
of the thing are as full proof as can be. I wonder what it is you
doubt of!”
Mrs. Lisle had risen. There was a faint flush of excitement on her
grey old face.
“My lord, I hope - ” she began, in trembling tones, to get no further.
“You must not speak now!” thundered her terrible judge; and thus
struck her silent.
The brief resistance to his formidable will was soon at an end.
Within a quarter of an hour the jury announced their verdict. They
found her guilty.
“Gentlemen,” said his lordship, “I did not think I should have
occasion to speak after your verdict, but, finding some hesitancy
and doubt among you, I cannot but say I wonder it should come about;
for I think, in my conscience, the evidence was as full and plain
as it could be, and if I had been among you, and she had been my
own mother, I should have found her guilty.”
She was brought up for sentence on the morrow, together with several
others subsequently convicted. Amid fresh invectives against the
religion she practised, he condemned her to be burned alive - which
was the proper punishment for high treason - ordering the sheriff
to prepare for her execution that same afternoon.
“But look you, Mrs. Lisle,” he added, “we that are the judges shall
stay in town an hour or two. You shall have pen, ink, and paper,
and if, in the mean time, you employ that pen, ink, and paper and
that hour or two well - you understand what I mean it may be that
you shall hear further from us in a deferring of this execution.”
What was this meaning that he assumed she understood? Jeffreys had
knowledge of Kirke’s profitable traffic in the West, and it is known
that he spared no means of acquiring an estate suitable to his rank
which he did not possess by way of patrimony. Thus cynically he
invited a bribe.
It is the only inference that explains the subsequent rancour he
displayed against her, aroused by her neglect to profit by his
suggestions. The intercession of the divines of Winchester
procured her a week’s reprieve, and in that week her puissant
friends in London, headed by the Earl of Abergavenny, petitioned
the King on her behalf. Even Feversham, the victor of Sedgemoor,
begged her life of the King - bribed to it, as men say, by an offer
of a thousand pounds. But the King withheld his mercy upon the
plea that he had promised Lord Jeffreys he would not reprieve her,
and the utmost clemency influential petitions could wring from
James II was that she should be beheaded instead of burned.
She suffered in the market-place of Winchester on September 2d.
Christian charity was all her sin, and for this her head was
demanded in atonement. She yielded it with a gentle fortitude and
resolution. In lieu of speech, she left with the
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