cluded his speech," I am now to take leave of your Lordships, and of this honourable House, perhaps for ever: I shall lay down my life with pleasure in a cause favoured by my late dear, royal mistress. When I consider that I am to be judged by the justice, honour, and virtue of my peers, I shall acquiesce, and retire with great content; and, my Lords, God's will be done." After the debate was closed, the Duke of Shrewsbury acquainting the House that the prisoner was suffering much from gravel, Oxford was allowed the indulgence of remaining in his own house, under the custody of the Black Rod. On his quitting the House, he was followed by a large concourse of people, who gratified him by their shouts of "High-Church and Oxford for ever." When, on the following day, he was again brought to the bar of the House of Lords, the Peers, (notwithstanding Dr. Mead declared that his life would be endangered by his committal to prison,) decided that he should be conveyed to the Tower. He was conducted thither by another formidable assemblage of the populace, who showed, by their generous sympathy with the oppressed statesman, and by the opprobrious expressions which they heaped on the Whigs, that the opinions of the existing ministry and of their German master, were widely different from those of the people of England. The conduct of the Earl of Oxford, at this crisis of extreme difficulty and danger, assimilates rather to the conceptions which we form of the VOL. II. G character of an ancient Roman, than to that of the man who, a few months before, had clung to power with a discreditable tenacity, and had resigned it with a vulgar display of intemperate rage. Turning from the exhortations of those friends who advised him to avoid the scaffold by flight, diseased as he was in body, and broken in his fortunes, he trusted proudly to the integrity of his past conduct, and stood alone in the consciousness of his own innocence. "They were quite mistaken in his temper," observes Pope, "who thought to get rid of him by advising him to make his escape from the Tower. He would have sat out the storm let the danger be what it would. He was a steady man, and had a great firmness of soul; and would have died unconcernedly, or perhaps, like Sir Thomas More, with a jest in his mouth."* Oxford, with unquestionable justice, may be accused of having acted as a sycophant and a dissembler; but whatever may have been his private weaknesses or public failings, it must be admitted that his conduct under actual proscription, and with the prospect before his eyes of suffering a violent death, was deserving of the highest praise. Pope thus eulogizes the philosophy of his friend : "A soul supreme, in each hard instance tried, The rage of power, the blast of public breath, The result of the formal investigation, which took place into Oxford's conduct, seems to have been an early conviction on the minds of his enemies as well as his friends, that no offence amounting to high treason could be reasonably laid to his charge. Satisfied of this fact, his enemies would willingly have deferred the trial from time to time, and thus have indirectly doomed him to a perpetual imprisonment, had not the Earl himself, after a confinement in the Tower of two years, insisted on their bringing him before the tribunal of his peers. With his characteristic prudence and caution, he not only waited patiently till time should have softened the acerbity of party feeling, but preferred his application at a period when a recent change in the administration, and some dissensions among its members, added considerably to his chances of obtaining an acquittal. The ministry no sooner found themselves compelled to bring Oxford to trial, than their object seems to have been to procure his enlargement, without provoking an investigation which, perhaps, would have been little creditable to themselves. Accordingly, by means of Walpole, a feigned quarrel was got up between the Houses of Lords and Commons, as to the manner in which the prosecution was to be conducted; the Lords, it seems, were at once for proceeding to the charge of high treason, while the Commons were desirous of regularly investigating every article in the impeachment. On the 24th of June, 1717, the day appointed for the trial, Westminster Hall presented the stirring and magnificent scene which it usually exhibits on such solemn occasions. The peers assembled at the appointed hour; the Commons attended as a committee of the whole House; the King, the Royal Family, and the foreign ambassadors, were present; and, with the usual ceremony, Harley was conducted from the Tower, and placed at the bar. As might have been anticipated, the dispute as to the mode of conducting the prosecution was renewed. The Lords, consequently, adjourned to their own house, and, after some discussion, announced their intention to adhere to their former resolution of proceeding at once to the articles of high treason. On this, the Commons demanded a free conference, which was refused by degrees the dispute became more warm; the Lords sent a message to the other House that they intended forthwith to proceed with the trial; but the Commons took no notice of the intimation, and unceremoniously adjourned. On the 1st of July, the Lords again took their seats in Westminster Hall; the prisoner was called to the bar; no prosecutors made their appearance, and Oxford was unanimously acquitted. From the period of his release from the Tower, the Earl of Oxford assumed the character of a private man. He seems to have contented himself with the society of learned persons, and with the amusement of adding to his noble library, and amassing that splendid collection of manuscripts, which, with the additions made by his son, Edward, the second Earl, was afterwards purchased by the Government, and deposited in the British Museum. The Earl of Oxford was twice married. By his first wife, (Elizabeth, sister of Thomas, first Lord Foley,) he had issue, Edward, his successor, and two daughters - Abigail, married to George, Earl of Kinnoul, and Elizabeth, married to Peregrine, Marquis of Carmarthen, afterwards Duke of Leeds. The Earl's second wife was Sarah, daughter of Thomas Middleton, Esq., a son of Sir Hugh Middleton, Bart., by whom he had no issue. If we may trust the assertion of Dr. Johnson in his fine poem, "The Vanity of Human Wishes," the last years of the fallen minister were afflicted by disease, engendered by his former attendance on courts, and by the vexations to which his ambition had subjected him. "What gave great Villiers to the assassin's knife, Possibly, there may be more of poetic licence than of severe truth in this passage; more especially, as the presumption of Oxford's bodily sufferings, and the inferences drawn from them by the poet, appear to be unsupported by any graver evidence. |