The case was carried to the Court of King’s Bench, on the 21st of October, 1722. The accused traitor was brought into court, heavily chained and fettered. Threats from loyal Whigs assailed him as he staggered beneath his clanking burthen through Westminster Hall. A cowardly fellow shouted that Layer, or the plot, must die! Two or three men, waiting to be summoned on the jury, declared that, if called, they would hang him! He mentioned these insults in court, and he asked that he might be allowed to stand free of the grievous bonds which oppressed him. He would then have his reason clearer, and he might hope for ‘a fair and tender trial.’ Chief Justice Pratt promised him ‘a fair and just one,’ but would not order his bonds to be unloosed. The Attorney-General, Raymond, said, ‘He has as much liberty as is allowed to prisoners who have tried to escape.’ Yorke, the Solicitor-General, declared that Layer’s complaints were only made to excite sympathy. Pratt agreed with both gentlemen. Hungerford, Layer’s chief counsel, protested that this was the first case of a prisoner from the Tower coming loaded with irons to plead; and Kettleby, also on his side, maintained that Layer had a right to stand unshackled before he pleaded to the charge against his life. This latter barrister tempered his boldness with a little servility. ‘Having been appointed by your lordship to defend the prisoner, I will not apologize for the course I take.’ This was one way of begging the court to excuse that course. Layer, in pitiful state from painful organic suffering, which was aggravated by his heavy load of chains, was compelled to stand. The sympathising ‘gentleman gaoler’ held up his captive’s bonds in his own hands, to save him from fainting. The charge was then read in Latin, and Kettleby argued its worthlessness, if not in law, in the badness of its Latin. ‘It is Latin,’ he said, ‘that may go down in Westminster Hall, but it would not in Westminster School.’ Similar pointed remarks came up at the close of long—very long—winded discussions, to which Sergeant Pengelly, for the Crown, replied by expressing his suspicion that Kettleby’s objections, made with such pomp and ceremony, probably meant something else than mere quashing of the indictment; upon which all the judges, Pratt, Powys, and Fortescue Aland, declared all the objections groundless; but a world of words was wasted before Layer could be brought to plead. Ultimately he pleaded Not Guilty, and he was ordered back to the Tower. He asked earnestly to be allowed to have there the comfort of the company of his wife and sister. In his hour of great peril, he thought of his two best, truest, and wisest friends. Pratt sanctioned the companionship of the wife alone. Layer urged that she would be subject to humiliating search on the part of rude warders every time she passed to or fro; but that when there were two women, one might save the other from gross insult. ‘No, no!’ said the Chief Justice, ‘we must not be too forward in allowing women to go there. We all remember how an escape from the Tower was managed by women going thither.’

THE TRIAL.

The trial was opened on the 21st of November. Layer stumbled forward to his place, still weighed down by irons. Pratt, at the sight, exclaimed, as if the matter occurred to him for the first time, ‘I will not stir till the prisoner’s irons are taken off;’—accordingly they fell; and the next scene in the drama was the calling and challenging the jury. Layer recognised some of them who had said they would hang him if they were on the panel, and his ‘challenge for cause’ was allowed. His right to peremptory challenge was also unquestioned, but almost invariably when Layer accepted the juror, by remaining silent at the calling of the name, the Attorney-General struck in with the cry: ‘I challenge him for the king,’ and the possible Tory or Jacobite was set aside. A FALSE WITNESS. Every avenue of escape was as carefully closed by the Whig lawyers. The junior counsel, in opening the case, asked how the jury could find a man not guilty who had fled from justice as soon as he was accused. The jury were told, moreover, that even if it were possible they could not convict him, they would have ‘to enquire of his goods and chattels;’ thus forfeiture of estate seems to have followed the mere charge of high treason! Layer was charged with every possible sort of treason, but the heaviest and highest included all the rest,—regicide, or what Layer’s Jacobite friends called ‘securing the person of King George in safety from the mob.’ Wearg did not go into detail with much bitterness, and the Attorney-General, who followed, confined himself to a renewal of circumstances already detailed. He then called Stephen Lynch, and a very accomplished villain stept into the box with ostentatious alacrity. He was objected to by Layer as a man who had confessed to treason, and who was about to give evidence which had already bought for him a promise of pardon. This was pooh-poohed by one of the judges. Lynch, he remarked, might speak the truth under that promise; and suppose he did not, he could not be questioned on it. Lynch’s evidence showed one side of Jacobite hireling life. He (a broken-down merchant) had been engaged in affairs, he said, with a Dr. Murphy, abroad and at home. By Murphy he was introduced to Layer, who engaged him in a special affair, and paid him money for furthering the end desired by himself and confederates; or, he and ‘other gentlemen,’ as the witness called them. The means were the enlisting of discontented soldiers when the camp broke up; seizing the Tower, the Mint, the Bank, &c.; getting possession of the king and royal family, and (like the Cato Street conspirators of later days) murdering the commander-in-chief and ministers whenever the plotters could find them together. For all these objects ample aid was promised at all the several points, and much preparation was made, but there was vexatious delay, which Lynch protested against; and, most singular of all, there were two or three visits to the house of Lord North and Grey, in Essex, where the ‘affair’ was discussed; but not a word was said by Lynch, or asked by counsel on either side, to show what part in the ‘affair’ was borne by that peer of the realm.

A CONFEDERATE.

Lynch was succeeded by Matthew Plunket, a discharged sergeant, a confessed traitor, and an avowed purchaser of safety by giving testimony against the counsellor. According to this witness, he himself was a simple-minded soldier, who had been beguiled into attending Sacheverel’s church, in Holborn, and drawn further away from loyalty by a tippling, insinuating, ‘unjuring parson,’ named Jeffreys. Parson and sergeant met and drank and concocted treason in half the taverns of Fleet Street and Drury Lane. The ex-sergeant, having received his fee, was told that his services would be required in enlisting old soldiers who could discipline a mob. On yielding consent, Plunket was introduced to Layer, who encouraged him by the assurance that Lord North and Grey, an experienced soldier, was the ‘promoter’ of the enterprise, and that Lord Strafford was deeply engaged in it. Plunket affected to be scrupulous, like Lynch, on religious grounds. Would not bringing in the Chevalier be putting a Papist on the throne? What of that? asked Layer, the usurper who now sits there is a Lutheran. What’s the difference? The ex-halberdier thought there was none.

The cross-examination was carried on simultaneously by the two barristers and their client. Neither of them made the slightest allusion to the peers referred to by Plunket, and all three wandered from the point at issue.

LAYER’S LADIES.

The next step was to prove the discovery of treasonable papers in Layer’s handwriting. This proof was established by King’s Messengers, who, acting on information, made seizure of such papers in a house in Stonecutter’s Yard, Little Queen Street. Layer had entrusted them to the keeping of ‘an honest woman named Mason,’ who kept the house with equally honest ladies in it. He called them ‘love letters,’ said they were worth 500l., and was anxious that his wife should be kept from all knowledge of them. ‘What’s your trade, mistress?’ asked Kettleby. ‘What’s that to you?’ rejoined the honest woman; with which reply the learned gentleman seemed satisfied.

LAYER’S ‘SCHEME.’

Her testimony helped Layer towards the scaffold, for among the papers was one entitled the ‘Scheme,’ which a Mr. Doyley, in whose office, many years before, Layer had been a clerk, swore to be in Layer’s handwriting, to the best of his belief. This most damaging document bore, by way of epigraph, these words: ‘Au défaut de la force il faut employer la ruse.’ In detail it gave instructions how the insurrection was to be begun, carried on, and ended,—from the first summoning of soldiers in their lodgings, and of drilled mobs, to their various quarters in and about London, to the insulting direction which bade ‘an officer to go to Richmond, and at the exact hour of 9, to seize on Prince Prettyman, and bring him away to Southwark.’ The details were made out as a stage-manager might note down dramatic business, wherein every actor knows what he has to do, and can find no obstacle in the doing of it, except from his own dulness. When some comment came to be made by the Chief Justice on this and on certain correspondence between Layer and the Pretender, Mr. Hungerford interrupted with ‘I humbly beg your lordship’s pardon——,’ but Pratt cut the remark and the maker of it short by petulantly exclaiming, ‘Sir, if you will not hear me, you’ll teach me not to hear you!’ After this rebuke, ample proof was adduced of the intimate relations which existed between the Pretender’s family and Mr. Layer’s. One instance was, that the exiled prince and his wife had consented to stand, by proxies, godfather and godmother to Layer’s daughter. The proxies were Lord North and Grey and the Duchess of Ormond. The ceremony was privately performed at a china shop in Chelsea, the minister being, doubtless, what Plunket would have called ‘an unjuring parson.’