Walpole, Jekyll, and others, maintained the king’s right to arrest whom he pleased, and under any circumstances; but the former assured many members near him, in conversation, that the information against the Doctor was supported by oath. ‘Doctor Freind,’ said Shippen, ‘is a prisoner for nothing more than what he has said in this House; and the members, therefore, were deprived of the freedom of speech.’ Walpole, of course, expressed himself amazed that anyone should for a moment suppose that any ministry could be capable of so base a thing as to take up any gentleman for what he said in that House, without any other reason. Pulteney described the speeches of Freind, in defence of Kelly and Atterbury, as excuses which one traitor made for another. To which Shippen with great warmth declared that it was past bearing for a member to be called a ‘traitor,’ before he was proved to be one. At the end of it all, a majority of the House justified the king in sending Freind to the Tower, and expressed a hope that he would keep him there.
DEBATE IN THE LORDS.
The Doctor quietly turned his imprisonment to good purpose, by producing his ‘De quibusdam Variolarum generibus,’ and laying down the plan, subsequently carried out, of his famous ‘History of Physic, from the time of Galen to the beginning of the Sixteenth Century.’
Lords Strafford, Kinnoul, North and Grey, with Atterbury, were compromised so far as the evidence of the Captain-Lieutenant Pancier of Cobham’s Dragoons went. He deposed that he had been told by one Skene that the above peers were concerned in the plot. This took place when a Committee of the House of Commons visited Layer, under sentence of death, in the Tower. Plunkett deposed that he had heard Layer say the same of the Earls Scarsdale, Strafford, and Cowper, Lords Craven, Gower, Bathurst, and Bingley, all of whom were said to belong to a seditious company called Barford’s Club. Motions to get Pancier, Skene, and Plunkett before the House of Peers were made and lost. Lord Cowper was the only peer who denied the alleged facts by a formal declaration; he shocked Lord Townshend, moreover, by his ridiculing as a fiction ‘a horrible and execrable conspiracy.’ Townshend, however, acknowledged that the peers named were blameless as to the allegations. It was on this occasion that the Earl of Strafford declared his feelings in a very lofty manner. ‘I have the honour,’ he said, ‘to have more ancient noble blood running in my veins than some others; so, I hope I may be allowed to express more than ordinary resentments against insults offered to the peerage.’ This vain boast was founded on the fact that the Wentworths held land in Yorkshire in the Saxon times. But the Barony, Viscountcy, and Earldom dated only from the reign of Charles I., in the person of Thomas Wentworth, who was born in Chancery Lane, in 1593. The later earl, who boasted of the antiquity and the nobility of his blood, was once rebuked in the House of Lords by Earl Cowper. Lord Strafford had referred to Marlborough as a general who ‘fomented war.’ In reply, Earl Cowper remarked, ‘The noble lord does not express himself in all the purity of the English tongue; but he has been so long abroad, he has forgotten both the constitution and the language of his country.’
The jokers had their fun out of this serious matter. Pasquin, in March, sarcastically congratulated the Ministry on their vigilance and success in detecting the horrid conspiracy; adding, ‘A great Patriot was heard last Tuesday night to declare in a public Coffee House, that after hearing the Report of the Commons, “no man in his senses would doubt there had been a PLOT. N.B.—He said this without any grimace!”’
CONDEMNATION OF PLUNKETT.
Several weeks elapsed before the first of the three accused persons was disposed of. It was not till April that the Bill against Plunkett went through all its legal stages, whereby he was condemned to perpetual imprisonment, with forfeiture of all his possessions, and in case of breaking prison, followed by recapture, death, for himself and any who might aid him.
KELLY’S TRIAL.
Kelly was next brought from the Tower, before the Lords. Like Plunkett he was so rigorously watched in his prison that two warders were at his side night and day, and even the use of a knife was prohibited. There were certain fees to be paid to the Governor for severe duties, with which the captive would willingly have dispensed; and a rent was required for his room, the tenancy of which was imposed on him against his will. For these matters, however, the Government that prosecuted him furnished him with means.
The Jacobite lawyer, Sir Constantine Phipps, fought his client’s battle with aggravating pertinacity. He denied the legality of evidence which consisted, as in Plunkett’s case, of copies of letters, the alleged originals of which no one but the reporting committee had seen; and also did he deny the validity of testimony founded on mere hearsay. Sir Constantine, however, was sharply pulled up by the Lord Chancellor, who informed him that their Lordships had had full satisfaction of the truth of the extracts copied from letters, and of the hearsay evidence on other occasions. Kelly’s friends among the peers attempted to attach a rider to the Bill, providing that, on his giving good security he should be permitted to reside abroad. The attempt failed. An extract from one of the letters addressed to Kelly, and seized when in his possession, relating to a dog brought from Paris, was supposed to have reference to Atterbury, and to be very redolent of treason. Phipps ridiculed this, but Lord Cartaret rose and said: ‘I have received letters from his Majesty’s Minister in Paris, relating to Kelly’s procuring a dog in Paris, for some person here.’