A close, clinging web from which no man, be he the premier peer of England or the humblest commoner, could ever hope to escape.
The web of a rough and misguided justice, of a law of the talion, retributive and blind, distributing with an impartial hand condemnations and punishments to guilty and innocent alike, to the martyr and to the felon, to the coward and the deceived.
This was not a decadent, puny century, peopled with neurotics and feeble-minded weaklings, it was a century of men!—men who were giants alike in their virtues and their passions, their vices and their atrocities, narrow in their views, but staunch in their beliefs, savage in their creeds and prejudices—but MEN for all that.
"The more heinous the offence the less chance shall the prisoner have of justifying his conduct." That was the dictate of the law.
"For truly," said Sir Robert Catline, Lord Chief Justice of England, in the course of the trial of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton for high treason, "justice must not be confused by sundry arguments in the prisoner's cause, which might lead to his acquittal and the non-punishment of so grave a fault."
Witnesses were seldom, if ever, examined in the presence of the accused. Depositions were extorted—often by torture, always by threats—from persons who happened to be friends or associates of the prisoner.
An acquittal?—perish the thought! Let the citizen look to himself ere he fell in the clutches of his country's justice; once there he had little or no chance of proving his innocence.
Lest the guilty escape!
Always that awful possibility! Rough justice demanded punishment—always punishment—lest the guilty escape!
And the people as they listened knew that they had come to see a man's last day upon earth.