THE VERDICT.
Then, without a word having been spoken in Wintoun’s defence, the verdict of the peers was taken. There were ninety present. Thomas, Lord Parker, was the first called upon to pronounce an opinion; and this youngest lord, whose coronet was not a week old, arose, placed his right hand on the spot where he supposed his heart to be, said ‘Guilty, upon my honour!’ and resumed his seat. Each succeeding peer performed exactly the same action, and repeated precisely the same words. The last fatal word was pronounced by the Lord High Steward himself. Not one of the ninety was favourable to Wintoun, but the first who pledged his honour to the verdict soon became a greater criminal than the lord at the bar. He it was who as Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Macclesfield, anticipated being driven from his post by resigning the Great Seal. He had sold masterships in Chancery for great sums of gold, and winked at, if he did not encourage, those masters in recuperating their purchase money by embezzling that of the suitors.
Wintoun heard the adverse judgment with perfect calmness, but that Friday night’s drive from Westminster Hall to the Tower was not a pleasant one. The Gentleman Gaoler carried his axe all the way, with the edge towards the condemned earl. The London Jacobites, as they grouped together in their public or private resorts, had some faint hope in an application for arrest of judgment.
SIR CONSTANTINE PHIPPS.
The day to make that application was Monday, March 19th. All the preliminary ceremonies having been duly performed, the earl was asked what he had to say why judgment should not pass. Wintoun turned his eyes towards Sir Constantine Phipps, and that great lawyer, in the most apologetic tone, had only half expressed his ‘humble hopes that, if their lordships pleased, there was a point of law,’—when, suddenly, the Attorney-General arose in a flutter of indignation, ‘I hear,’ he cried in a sort of pious horror, ‘a gentleman of the long robe offering to speak!—and to a point of law; before, too, the accused had propounded the point, and their lordships had allowed that it was one!’ The Attorney, having fallen back on his seat, full of breathless amazement, Mr. Cowper, with the utmost legal fervour, could hardly find words to express his surprise that Sir Constantine should presume to speak! ‘If,’ said Phipps, ‘I had only been heard ten words more——.’ ‘No!’ interrupted Thomson, ‘he has no right to be heard one word more!’ And the Lord High Steward followed with a stinging rebuke at Sir Constantine’s audacity in daring to speak before he had obtained the permission of the House. That was what Phipps was about to ask for when Northey heard his voice and choked it in the utterance. Sir Constantine sat perfectly silent under the accumulated rebuke, but he was at length allowed to speak on the point that in the impeachment the time of any alleged overt act was not stated with proper certainty. The Jacobite lawyer made a good speech, in which he said that,—if in an indictment for less perilous actions the time of action was omitted, the indictment would fail. How much more should an indictment fall through which perilled life, and omitted to state the date on which the act was committed, which placed the accused in danger of death. To general charges the Earl of Wintoun could not be expected to give particular answers. Had a day been named, which brought him and a stated act together, he might have brought forward witnesses to prove an alibi. But every charge was laid down against acts committed ‘on or about.’
A FIGHT FOR LIFE.
Williams followed up his leader on this line by saying that ‘on or about!’ a certain day would be bad; ‘on or about September,’ worse; but ‘in or about September, October, and November,’ was worse than all. Then, in allusion to Wintoun being called ‘the unhappy lord,’ Williams remarked, ‘He is unhappy as being in that doubtful state of memory,—not insane enough to be within the protection of the law, nor sane enough to do himself in any respect the least service whatever.’ At this natural observation all the managers of the Commons became ‘uneasy,’ as they said, at the learned gentleman going into a matter of fact. Mr. Williams therefore restored their equanimity by simply declaring that as the impeachment was defective, judgment should not be executed.
THE FIGHT GROWS FURIOUS.
The managers and their legal advisers had agreed that Lord Wintoun’s counsel should be allowed to speak only on condition that the managers of the impeachment on the other side should have the last words. They followed accordingly. Mr. Robert Walpole suggested that Sir Constantine Phipps had forgotten that Lord Wintoun’s case was not in an ordinary court of law, but in a Court of Parliament, which was not to be bound by common procedure. ‘What might quench,’ he said, ‘an Indictment in the courts below should never make insufficient an Impeachment brought by the Commons of Great Britain.’ The delighted Attorney-General went on the same war-path, and proclaimed that parliamentary impeachments were not to be governed by the forms of Westminster Hall. Mr. Cowper added that the courts below had many forms for which no reason could be given. ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘in parliamentary process, that nothing is necessary that is not material.’ ‘Besides,’ said Thomson, ‘time, date, and places were laid in the five days at Preston. For the deeds done there, Lord Wintoun had been convicted, and judgment could not legally be stayed.’
Phipps and his colleagues replied that they were not convinced by the arguments of their opponents; and the Attorney-General had the last word in a speech, the chief point in which was the assertion, sarcastically conveyed, that as far as concerned the rights of the Commons of Great Britain, Lord Wintoun’s counsel had left the case just where they found it.