violent speech in favour of the attainder in the House of Lords. The judges, when consulted, gave as their unanimous opinion that none of the charges proved against him amounted to treason by any known or established law.

On the 4th of January six Peers met and voted that he should suffer the punishment of a traitor. With some difficulty the Archbishop got the sentence of hanging commuted into beheading. The Commons ungraciously consented. It is curious that he should have been so anxious about it; the death of a felon seemed to have offended his personal dignity-as a Peer he was privileged to decapitation.

When the tidings reached him that the attainder was passed, Laud's own manuscript breaks off.

Upon this the king sent him secretly from Oxford a full pardon, sealed with the Great Seal, which he received with very great joy, as a testimony of the king's continued affection.

THE place where he suffered is probably more familiar to foreigners than to ourselves, though it

is at our doors.

Some of us may have visited the

The

Tower in childhood-few of us visit it in later life. The Tower abuts upon a great space now called Trinity Square, from the Trinity House which occupies the upper end of it. It is separated from it by the moat. The whole place is called Tower Hill. It is a low incline above the river. view of the water and shipping is blocked by tall warehouses and wharves.. Opposite the Tower is the Church of All-Hallows, Barking, a Gothic church spared by the fire of London, the interior quaintly fitted by Sir Christopher Wren. Its surname of Barking it owes to the fact that it was anciently a small dependency, technically a cell of the Abbey of Barking, in Essex. It is a living of which the Archbishop of Canterbury has long been patron. Laud was buried there first, before the body was transferred to Oxford.

The centre of the square is planted with trees and occupied by a quiet garden. The place where the scaffold stood is indicated by a dark pavement. On the Sunday when I first saw it, the whole place had a singularly peaceful, almost deserted look, as if it belonged to a past order of things, and had outlived the tragic memories and dismal scenes enacted within its limits. The air was pure and clear; there was no sound of traffic; it seemed to stand away even from the life of the mighty city that lay all about it. But all the week it is far different ;-crowded with vehicles and thronged with passers-by, it lies at the very centre of the huge trading world. Here Laud suffered.

And here Heylyn rises into a strain so noble and so moving that I cannot forbear from giving the whole of his account: for, once read, it does not seem possible that any other should be written. It is of the very essence of high tragedy. There is no moralizing, no regret, no personal factor. A record in grave grand English of the words and deeds of the last great scene. About the whole of it there is no sadness, but a note of quiet triumph the railing interruptions and pestering questions, the utter weariness of the sufferer and his intense desire to be gone; and yet a magnificent collectedness, so that he is himself to

the last, with his quaint turns of expression and characteristic mode of speech, till the busy life was still. Whatever the life had been, it is one of the great deaths of history.

"Meanwhile, the manner of his death troubled the good Archbishop not a little; and with a deeply Christian magnanimity and largeness of heart, whatever some poor, unworthy minds have thought or said about it, he was not above petitioning his malicious enemies, that, considering he was a Bishop in the Church, he might die by beheading rather than by the gibbet. Which request the Commons at first violently refused, but did afterwards assent unto.

"The passing of the Ordinance being signified to him by the then Lieutenant of the Tower, he neither entertained the news with a stoical apathy, nor wailed his fate with weak and womanish lamentations (to which extremes most men are carried in this case), but heard it with so even and so smooth a temper, as shewed he neither was ashamed to live, nor afraid to die. The time between the sentence and execution he spent in prayers and supplications to the Lord his God; having obtained, though not without some difficulty, his chaplain, Dr. Sterne, who afterwards sat in the Chair of York, to attend upon him. His chaplains,

THE EVENING BEFORE.

137

Dr. Heywood and Dr. Martin, he much wished might be with him. But it seems it was too much for him to ask. So instead, two violent Presbyterians, Marshall and Palmer, were ordered by Parliament to give him religious consolations which consolations his Grace quietly declined. Indeed, little preparation was needed to receive that blow, which could not but be welcome, because long expected. For so well was he studied in the art of dying, especially in the last and strictest part of his imprisonment, that by continual fastings, watchings, prayers, and such like acts of Christian humiliation, his flesh was rarified into spirit, and the whole man so fitted for eternal glories, that he was more than half in heaven before death brought his bloody but triumphant chariot to convey him thither. He, that had so long been a Confessor, could not but think it a release of miseries to be made a Martyr.

"On the evening of the 9th, Sheriff Chambers, of London, brought the warrant for his execution. In preparation to so sad a work, he betook himself to his own, and desired also the prayers of others, and particularly of Dr. Holdsworth, fellow-prisoner in that place for a year and a half; though all that time there had not been the least converse betwixt them. This evening before his passover, the night