ciliate the party which he believed to
be irresistible, determined to vote against the court. The Duchess of
Portsmouth implored her royal lover not to rush headlong to destruction.
If there were any point on which he had a scruple of conscience or of
honour, it was the question of the succession; but during some days
it seemed that he would submit. He wavered, asked what sum the Commons
would give him if he yielded, and suffered a negotiation to be opened
with the leading Whigs. But a deep mutual distrust which had been
many years growing, and which had been carefully nursed by the arts of
France, made a treaty impossible. Neither side would place confidence
in the other. The whole nation now looked with breathless anxiety to the
House of Lords. The assemblage of peers was large. The King himself was
present. The debate was long, earnest, and occasionally furious. Some
hands were laid on the pommels of swords in a manner which revived the
recollection of the stormy Parliaments of Edward the Third and Richard
the Second. Shaftesbury and Essex were joined by the treacherous
Sunderland. But the genius of Halifax bore down all opposition. Deserted
by his most important colleagues, and opposed to a crowd of able
antagonists, he defended the cause of the Duke of York, in a succession
of speeches which, many years later, were remembered as masterpieces of
reasoning, of wit, and of eloquence. It is seldom that oratory changes
votes. Yet the attestation of contemporaries leaves no doubt that,
on this occasion, votes were changed by the oratory of Halifax. The
Bishops, true to their doctrines, supported the principle of hereditary
right, and the bill was rejected by a great majority. [22]

The party which preponderated in the House of Commons, bitterly
mortified by this defeat, found some consolation in shedding the blood
of Roman Catholics. William Howard, Viscount Stafford, one of the
unhappy men who had been accused of a share in the plot, was impeached;
and on the testimony of Oates and of two other false witnesses, Dugdale
and Turberville, was found guilty of high treason, and suffered death.
But the circumstances of his trial and execution ought to have given an
useful warning to the Whig leaders. A large and respectable minority of
the House of Lords pronounced the prisoner not guilty. The multitude,
which a few months before had received the dying declarations of Oates's
victims with mockery and execrations, now loudly ex