Lastly, ‘the unhappy lord’ himself, who was the subject of this mortal controversy, was asked if he had anything to say why the sentence of the law should not be carried out against him. He referred to his counsel, and then the old series of explanations and irritable squabbling, which Wintoun seemed delighted to provoke, ensued. At length, on being told that if anything was to be said in arrest of judgment, it must come from him, the doomed earl tranquilly remarked, ‘Since your lordships will not allow my counsel to speak, I don’t know nothing.’
THE SENTENCE.
The Lord High Steward then proceeded to deliver sentence. He prefaced it by a speech, full of commonplaces about his own office, the crime of rebellion, and the duty of punishing rebels. Lord Cowper then proceeded to reconcile the earl with what he had to go through, by observing:—‘Believe it, notwithstanding the unfair arts and industry used to stir up a pernicious excess of commiseration towards such as have fallen by the sword of justice (few if compared with the numbers of good subjects murdered from doors and windows of Preston only), the life of one honest loyal subject is more precious in the eye of God, and all considering men, than the lives of many rebels and parricides!’
The Lord High Steward fully illustrated those sentiments by condemning the earl to be hanged, to be cut down alive, to be ‘disembowelled before his face, the bowels to be burnt, and the body quartered.’ It was the old sentence against treason. Its form and spirit showed the ancient horror of that crime.
DOOM BORNE WORTHILY.
The Earl of Wintoun behaved as became a gentleman. He was calm and dignified. His bearing won for him much sympathy. He turned away from the bar, with his head nobly raised, his eye fixed on the edge of the axe which was now carried thus significantly before him, and with something on his brow that may have been the reflection of his thoughts that he had not so nearly done with life as their sternly polite lordships perhaps expected.
Lady Cowper made rather harsh record of Wintoun in her Diary. She says, ‘He received sentence of death, but behaved himself in a manner to persuade a world of people that he was a natural fool, or mad, though his natural character is that of a stubborn, illiterate, ill-bred brute. He has eight wives. I can’t but be peevish at all this fuss to go Fool-hunting. Sure, if it is as people say, he might have been declared incapable of committing Treason.’
The truth is that the ‘illiterate brute’ may have spoken such English as he used to hear in the smithy, but it was as good as much that was spoken by country squires. The Jacobites would have made London echo with their shouts if he had been acquitted. The Whigs manifested no gladness that he was condemned. His passage to the Tower was witnessed in respectful silence.
The Earl of Wintoun never asked nor sanctioned others to ask for the life he had forfeited. He had defended it, but not altogether heroically, for he had attempted to show that he had been deluded into joining the rebels, that he had never been actively engaged for them, and had never had an opportunity of escaping from them. Apart the defence, his action was not without dignity; and the ultimate result showed that he had more brains than he had credit for, even from the friends and acquaintances who imagined they knew him best.
THE JACOBITE LAWYER.