g to conciliate a man
who had once been, and might perhaps again be, a terrible enemy, allowed
their prisoner to go freely about the town, [391] His uneven legs and
his hideous face, made more hideous by the shearing which his ears had
undergone, were now again seen every day in Westminster Hall and the
Court of Requests, [392] He fastened himself on his old patrons, and,
in that drawl which he affected as a mark of gentility, gave them the
history of his wrongs and of his hopes. It was impossible, he said,
that now, when the good cause was triumphant, the discoverer of the plot
could be overlooked. "Charles gave me nine hundred pounds a year. Sure
William will give me more." [393]

In a few weeks he brought his sentence before the House of Lords by a
writ of error. This is a species of appeal which raises no question of
fact. The Lords, while sitting judicially on the writ of error, were not
competent to examine whether the verdict which pronounced Gates guilty
was or was not according to the evidence. All that they had to consider
was whether, the verdict being supposed to be according to the evidence,
the judgment was legal. But it would have been difficult even for a
tribunal composed of veteran magistrates, and was almost impossible for
an assembly of noblemen who were all strongly biassed on one side or
on the other, and among whom there was at that time not a single person
whose mind had been disciplined by the study of jurisprudence, to
look steadily at the mere point of law, abstracted from the special
circumstances of the case. In the view of one party, a party which even
among the Whig peers was probably a minority, the appellant was a
man who had rendered inestimable services to the cause of liberty and
religion, and who had been requited by long confinement, by degrading
exposure, and by torture not to be thought of without a shudder. The
majority of the House more justly regarded him as the falsest, the most
malignant and the most impudent being that had ever disgraced the human
form. The sight of that brazen forehead, the accents of that lying
tongue, deprived them of all mastery over themselves. Many of them
doubtless remembered with shame and remorse that they had been his
dupes, and that, on the very last occasion on which he had stood before
them, he had by perjury induced them to shed the blood of one of
their own illustrious order. It was not to be expected that a crowd of
gentlemen under the influe