Lord High Steward—This House is adjourned to the House of Lords.
Then the lords went in procession, in the same order that they came into the court.
The next day Lord Mohun was tried on a similar indictment before the same court. And most of the same witnesses having given the same evidence again, he was acquitted and discharged. He then expressed himself thus:
Lord Mohun—My lords, I do not know which way to express my great thankfulness and acknowledgment of your lordships' great honour and justice to me; but I crave leave to assure your lordships, that I will endeavour to make it the business of the future part of my life, so to behave myself in my conversation in the world, as to avoid all things that may bring me under any such circumstances, as may expose me to the giving your lordships any trouble of this nature for the future.
Then proclamation was made dissolving the Commission, and the Court adjourned.
As is well known, the duel described in this trial is the original of that described in Esmond between Lord Castlewood and Lord Mohun; it may therefore be of interest to transcribe a few passages out of the latter work, premising only that there seems to be some faint relationship between Captain Macartney, Lord Mohun's second in his duel with Lord Castlewood, and the Lord Macartney who afterwards assisted him in the same capacity in his final meeting with the Duke of Hamilton. Lord Castlewood, as will be remembered, had come up to London to fight Lord Mohun, really on account of his relations with Lady Castlewood, nominally as the result of a quarrel at cards, which it was arranged should have all the appearance of taking place. Lord Castlewood, Jack Westbury, and Harry Esmond all meet together at the 'Trumpet,' in the Cockpit, Whitehall.
When we had drunk a couple of bottles of sack, a coach was called, and the three gentlemen went to the Duke's Playhouse, as agreed. The play was one of Mr. Wycherley's—Love in a Wood. Harry Esmond has thought of that play ever since with a kind of terror, and of Mrs. Bracegirdle, the actress who performed the girl's part in the comedy. She was disguised as a page, and came and stood before the gentlemen as they sat on the stage, and looked over her shoulder with a pair of arch black eyes, and laughed at my lord, and asked what ailed the gentleman from the country, and had he had bad news from Bullock fair?
Between the acts of the play the gentlemen crossed over and conversed freely. There were two of Lord Mohun's party, Captain Macartney, in a military habit, and a gentleman in a suit of blue velvet and silver, in a fair periwig with a rich fall of point of Venice lace—my Lord the Earl of Warwick and Holland. My lord had a paper of oranges, which he ate, and offered to the actresses, joking with them. And Mrs. Bracegirdle, when my lord Mohun said something rude, turned on him, and asked him what he did there, and whether he and his friends had come to stab anybody else, as they did poor Will Mountford? My lord's dark face grew darker at this taunt, and wore a mischievous, fatal look. They that saw it remembered it, and said so afterward.
When the play was ended the two parties joined company; and my Lord Castlewood then proposed that they should go to a tavern and sup. Lockit's, the 'Greyhound,' in Charing Cross was the house selected. All three marched together that way, the three lords going a-head.'