ked and strenuously
defended. The Tories declared that he appeared to them to have done
only what, as counsel for the Crown, he was bound to do, and to have
discharged his duty to God, to the King, and to the prisoner. If the
award was legal, nobody was to blame; and, if the award was illegal,
the blame lay, not with the Attorney General, but with the Judges. There
would be an end of all liberty of speech at the bar, if an advocate was
to be punished for making a strictly regular application to a Court, and
for arguing that certain words in a statute were to be understood in a
certain sense. The Whigs called Sawyer murderer, bloodhound, hangman.
If the liberty of speech claimed by advocates meant the liberty of
haranguing men to death, it was high time that the nation should rise
up and exterminate the whole race of lawyers. "Things will never be well
done," said one orator, "till some of that profession be made examples."
"No crime to demand execution!" exclaimed John Hampden. "We shall be
told next that it was no crime in the Jews to cry out 'Crucify him.'" A
wise and just man would probably have been of opinion that this was
not a case for severity. Sawyer's conduct might have been, to a certain
extent, culpable: but, if an Act of Indemnity was to be passed at all,
it was to be passed for the benefit of persons whose conduct had been
culpable. The question was not whether he was guiltless, but whether his
guilt was of so peculiarly black a dye that he ought, notwithstanding
all his sacrifices and services, to be excluded by name from the mercy
which was to be granted to many thousands of offenders. This question
calm and impartial judges would probably have decided in his favour. It
was, however, resolved that he should be excepted from the Indemnity,
and expelled from the House, [560]

On the morrow the Bill of Indemnity, now transformed into a Bill of
Pains and Penalties, was again discussed. The Whigs consented to refer
it to a Committee of the whole House, but proposed to instruct the
Committee to begin its labours by making out a list of the offenders who
were to be proscribed. The Tories moved the previous question. The House
divided; and the Whigs carried their point by a hundred and ninety votes
to a hundred and seventy-three, [561]

The King watched these events with painful anxiety. He was weary of his
crown. He had tried to do justice to both the contending parties; but
justice would satisfy neither. The