t showed, by look and
gesture, such strong resentment at the barbarity and injustice with
which he had been treated, that his enemies spread a calumnious report
concerning him. He was drunk, they said, or out of his mind, when he was
turned off. William Penn, however, who stood near the gallows, and whose
prejudice were all on the side of the government, afterwards said that
he could see in Cornish's deportment nothing but the natural indignation
of an innocent man slain under the forms of law. The head of the
murdered magistrate was placed over the Guildhall. [469]

Black as this case was, it was not the blackest which disgraced the
sessions of that autumn at the Old Bailey. Among the persons concerned
in the Rye House plot was a man named James Burton. By his own
confession he had been present when the design of assassination was
discussed by his accomplices. When the conspiracy was detected, a reward
was offered for his apprehension. He was saved from death by an ancient
matron of the Baptist persuasion, named Elizabeth Gaunt. This woman,
with the peculiar manners and phraseology which then distinguished her
sect, had a large charity. Her life was passed in relieving the unhappy
of all religious denominations, and she was well known as a constant
visitor of the gaols. Her political and theological opinions, as well as
her compassionate disposition, led her to do everything in her power for
Burton. She procured a boat which took him to Gravesend, where he got
on board of a ship bound for Amsterdam. At the moment of parting she
put into his hand a sum of money which, for her means, was very large.
Burton, after living some time in exile, returned to England with
Monmouth, fought at Sedgemoor, fled to London, and took refuge in the
house of John Fernley, a barber in Whitechapel. Fernley was very poor.
He was besieged by creditors. He knew that a reward of a hundred pounds
had been offered by the government for the apprehension of Burton. But
the honest man was incapable of betraying one who, in extreme peril, had
come under the shadow of his roof. Unhappily it was soon noised abroad
that the anger of James was more strongly excited against those who
harboured rebels than against the rebels themselves. He had publicly
declared that of all forms of treason the hiding of traitors from his
vengeance was the most unpardonable. Burton knew this. He delivered
himself up to the government; and he gave information against Fernley