causing persons, disguised as officers, to pretend that they had arrived at Dover and Northfleet with expresses from France on the morning of Monday, February 21st, 1814, announcing the overthrow of Buonaparte and the conclusion of the war.

In the following condensed report of this most interesting trial, we trust to satisfy the sceptical, and demonstrate to the conviction of the candid, that the verdict of guilty against Lord Cochrane was rash and inconsiderate; that the doubtful declaration of Not Proven, the cautious answer of the puzzled Scotch juror, would have been stronger than the facts justified. Yet, even if this conclusion be correct, the jury ought not to be visited with heavy blame, for seldom had a more untoward combination of circumstances occurred to bias their judgments. Of the guilt of two of the conspirators, De Berenger and Cochrane Johnstone, the uncle of Lord Cochrane, there could exist, after the conclusive evidence adduced, no reasonable doubt; yet the same counsel defended both uncle and nephew, and his topics on behalf of the one could not fail to be heard with incredulity, when he was constrained to attempt to explain away the strong facts which crushed the other. It was a sad mistake their being jointly defended by the same counsel. The cases should have been kept scrupulously apart; they could not sever in their challenges, but they ought to have severed in their defence. The answers of each should have been presented to the jury by a different voice; it should have been shown palpably, and on the view, that the portion of each was not one and indivisible, but entirely distinct and separate.

The arch artificer of the fraud, Mr. Cochrane Johnstone, had artfully contrived that the three cases, Lord Cochrane's, Mr. Butt's, and his own, should appear as one-‘tria juncta in uno,' that in their nescience and ignorance his own contrivance might be confounded. He clung to his colleagues with the desperation of a drowning man, and, as a natural consequence, borne down by his weight, they perished together. Had either Topping, Scarlett, or Brougham, defended Lord Cochrane singly, and presented his case apart, there is every reason to believe, from the evidence, that there would have been a different result. The refusal of Lord Ellenborough to

permit an adjournment at midnight tended, also, severely to cripple and harass the counsel for the defendants. After fifteen hours in court, Serjeant Best could not be expected to master all the topics that presented themselves on behalf of his three several clients, or distinguish nicely the different shades of guilt; and he afterwards frankly told the querulous lord that he had not been able to do him full justice. The counsel was disabled from speaking, and the jurors from listening, by physical exhaustion and fatigue. The fact which pressed most strongly against Lord Cochrane was the dress which De Berenger wore at the time of the interview with him at his own house on the morning of the fraud, immediately on his effecting it. Lord Cochrane having sworn in his affidavit that he wore a green uniform, the proof being that he entered the house in red, Serjeant Best endeavoured to explain away the variance by the dangerous argument that his client had made a mistake, and, having been accustomed to see De Berenger in green, had confounded one colour with another. Lord Cochrane insisted that there was no mistake, and had given positive instructions that his servants should be called to prove it; but, with a culpable rashness, he neither attended the consultation nor the trial, nor even perused the brief in which the colour of the coat was described to be red; and the counsel in court, believing him to be mistaken, perhaps wilfully, adventured an ingenious but perilous interpretation of their own, which is supposed to have wrecked their client. There was a much better solution, had a night's interval been permitted, that De Berenger had more than an hour's leisure, being left with his portmanteau in the parlour by himself, to change his dress; or, if he had not availed himself of that opportunity, that his great coat, when buttoned, only showed the collar of the coat, and that the uniform was red with green facings, green being the only colour visible. Though he afterwards exchanged this coat for a black one, which Lord Cochrane lent him, there was no proof where he changed it.

The vehement reply of Mr. Gurney on the following day, in the full possession of his energies, eager and resolute to detect the clever imposture, and the stern summing up of

Lord Ellenborough, commenting with indignant eloquence on the false alibi of De Berenger, and his appearance before Lord Cochrane, "fully blazoned in the costume of his crime," scarcely gave a chance of acquittal. The charge of the Chief Justice, breathing throughout a lofty tone of scorn, and irony, and contempt, never suggesting a doubt, and barely disguising his own emphatic conviction of the guilt of each, was peculiarly calculated to impress the minds of a Special Jury of London merchants and bankers, who must have sympathised warmly in the alarm and anger of the Committee of the Stock Exchange at so successful a fraud upon the monied interest. That they should have deliberated for two hours and a half after such a charge, shows how much doubt must have remained in this one case, possibly in the case of Mr. Butt also. As to De Berenger and Cochrane Johnstone, there was no occasion to quit the box, for of their guilt there could by possibility exist only one opinion.

The sentence that was passed on Lord Cochrane would justify the suspicion that justice had been measured out oppressively, if not vindictively. He was sentenced to pay a fine to the king of 1,000l., to be imprisoned in the King's Bench prison for twelve calendar months, and "to be set in and upon the pillory, opposite the Royal Exchange in the city of London, for one hour between the hours of twelve at noon and two in the afternoon." From this last infamous punishment, usually reserved for perjurers, seditious libellers, and miscreants convicted of nameless crimes, Lord Cochrane's long career of glory ought assuredly to have exempted him. The hero of the Basque Roads had stood too erect to stoop to the pillory. The laurel wreath had too lately been twined round his brows to let them be exposed on a scaffold. One universal hiss at the harsh and unprecedented sentence in a case of conspiracy, a general cry of indignation and horror, ran through Westminster at their gallant representative being thus exposed to infamy. But the spirit of Lord Ellenborough was too firm and undaunted to quail before the voice of popular clamour, and a day was actually fixed for the exposure, when, on the motion of Lord Ebrington in the House of Commons to remit this part of the sentence, Lord

Castlereagh announced that the ministers had advised the Prince Regent to remit it as to all three, "the crime being too rare and too alien to the spirit of Englishmen to appear to them imperatively to require such an exposure."

But this tardy announcement of clemency did not avail to save the instrument of punishment itself, now that public attention was called to it, from being abolished. For one hundred years since De Foe had written his bitter Ode to the Pillory, this capricious engine of mob tyranny had been converted, at their caprice or fury, into a platform of triumph or a scaffold of death.

Dr. Shebbeare had stood there to receive the plaudits of the fickle mob, attended by a footman in livery, guarding off with an umbrella the rays of the sun, or, perchance, some unlucky missile. Williams had dropped down dead the moment he was set free, the mutilated victim of their vengeance. Just as their humour dictated, it was used as an instrument of mental torture only, or a lingering, vindictive, cruel execution. They stoned to death a fellow-being whom even the sanguinary laws of that period could not condemn to die. The populace were made his judge and his executioner. It went down before the national indignation, and this relic of the punishments of a barbarous age is abolished for ever.*

This ignominious torture formed the only part of the sentence that was remitted. The Bank of England preserves among its archives the identical 1,000l. note on which Lord Cochrane has indorsed his indignant protest against the cruel iniquity of his sentence. He endured his imprisonment in the King's Bench prison from the 21st of June to the 6th of March following, when he quitted the walls, thinking, to use his own phrase, that he had stayed long enough in prison to evince that he could endure restraint as a pain, but not as a penalty, with the sole object of assuming his seat in Parliament, and of reminding that assembly that their sentence of expulsion had been reversed by the people, and of demanding a strict investigation into the conduct of his judge. He appeared accordingly in St. Stephen's Chapel on March 21st, and was immediately seized by the assistants of the Marshal, it being noon, and no other member there, and reconBy statute 56 George 3. c. 128.

veyed to prison. For this escape he was subsequently tried at the Surrey Assizes, August 1816, and defended himself, "conceiving that the injustice done to him on a former occasion was in part attributable to the conduct of his counsel." He then proved the hardships he had suffered on his recapture, being placed for three weeks in the strong room, which had no fireplace, and where his health had suffered by the cold damp and offensive smells. A committee of the House of Commons declared their opinion that it was not a fit place of confinement. The jury found Lord Cochrane guilty, as there could be no doubt on the facts, but accompanied their verdict with the declaration—"We take the liberty of saying that the punishment which he has already received is quite adequate to the offence of which he was guilty."

These inflictions, however, formed by no means the heaviest part of his punishment, the necessary though collateral effects of his conviction and sentence. He was expelled the House, but afterwards unanimously re-elected for Westminster, and, such was the enthusiasm in his favour, without a contest. He was deprived of the command of the Tonnant, on whose outfit he had expended above 1,000l., and, what he must have felt more acutely than any pecuniary loss, prevented earning fresh laurels on the deep in his country's service. His name was struck out of the navy list— a name that will be printed in capital letters in England's history, by the side of Nelson's, and Collingwood's, and Exmouth's. As a crowning humiliation, he was stripped of his title as Knight of the Bath; his banner was taken down at midnight from Henry VII.'s Chapel. In his own bitter language, they played a midnight game of football with his decorations; his spurs were to be hacked off the heels of the person who represented him with a butcher's cleaver.

These indignities wrongfully inflicted, the sequence, in his mind, of an unjust verdict festered in his brain. He displayed an excusable soreness of feeling, a morbid irritability, which might well arise from the perverted sensibilities of a man of honour, and struck at all, as if every man's hand was uplifted against him. He accused his attornies and counsel of Report of the Trial at Guildford.