CHAPTER XXXIII
IN THE LORD CHANCELLOR'S COURT
The great Hall at Westminster was already thronged with people at an early hour of the morning, and the servants of the Knight Marshal and the Lord Warden of the Fleet had much ado to keep the crowd back with their tipstaves.
All London was taking a holiday to-day: an enforced holiday as far as the workers and merchants were concerned, for there surely would be no business doing in the City when such great goings-on were occurring at Westminster.
The trial of His Grace the Duke of Wessex on a charge of murder! A trial which, seeing that the accused had confessed to the crime, could but end in a sentence of death.
It is not every day that it is given to humbler folk to see so proud a gentleman arraigned as any common vagabond might be, and to note how a great nobleman may look when threatened with the hangman's rope.
Is there aught in the world half so cruel as a crowd?
And His Grace had been very popular: always looked upon, even by the meanest in the land, as the most perfect embodiment of English pride and English grandeur, he had always had withal that certain graciousness of manner which the populace will love, and which disarms envy.
But with the exception of his own friends, people of his own rank and station, who knew him and his character intimately, the people at large never for a moment questioned his guilt.
He had confessed! surely that was enough! The loutish brains of the lower proletariat did not care to go beyond that obvious self-evident fact. The meaner the nature of a man, the more ready is he to acknowledge evil, he seeks it out, recognizes it under every garb. Who, among the majority of people, cared to seek for sublime self-sacrifice in an ordinary confession of crime?