Volume 2

Portraits and lives of remarkable and eccentric characters.

Date:
[1819?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Portraits and lives of remarkable and eccentric characters. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Newcastle, upon a design to deliver up Hull to the king’s party, life correspondence was disco¬ vered, and both father and son were taken pri¬ soners, and sent to the Tower. When brought to trial, he endeavoured to evade the charge, and produced some witnesses of quality, on purpose to take off the testimony of the evidence against him, but failed in the proofs. He then insisted on the great service he had done before at Hull, from which he expected honor and preferment: his disappointment in this respect seems to have induced him to join the king’s interest. He received sentence of death on the 27th of December, 1644, and was ordered for execution on the 31st, on Tower-hill, where a great multi¬ tude was assembled round the scaffold to witness the scene; but, as he was on his way thither, a reprieve came from the lords for four days, which the commons so resented, conceiving their privi¬ lege invaded, that they ordered he should die on the 2d of January, which accordingly took place, (his son suffering the day before for the same offence.) They both departed this life with much reluctance, and, at the awful moment when all the .apparatus of death was before them, they