f the soldiers,
who were very rude and violent. I beseech your lordship to make that
construction of it, and not harbour an ill opinion of me because of
those false reports that go about of me, relating to my carriage towards
the old King, that I was anyways consenting to the death of King Charles
I; for, my lord, that is as false as God is true. I was not out of my
chamber all the day in which that king was beheaded, and I believe I
shed more tears for him than any other woman then living.

"And I do repeat it, my lord, as I hope to attain salvation, I never did
know Nelthorp, nor did I know of anybody's coming but Mr. Hicks. Him I
knew to be a Nonconformist minister, and there being, as is well known,
warrants out to apprehend all Nonconformist ministers, I was willing to
give him shelter from these warrants, which I knew was no treason."

"Have you any more to say for yourself?" he asked her.

"My lord," she was beginning, "I came but five days before this into the
country."

"Nay," he broke in, "I cannot tell when you came into the country, nor I
don't care. It seems you came in time to harbour rebels."

She protested that if she would have ventured her life for anything, it
would have been to serve the King.

"But, though I could not fight for him myself, my son did; he was
actually in arms on the King's side in this business. It was I that bred
him in loyalty and to fight for the King."

"Well, have you done?" he asked her brutally.

"Yes, my lord," she answered; and resumed her seat, trembling a little
from the exertion and emotion of her address.

His charge to the jury began. It was very long, and the first half of
it was taken up with windy rhetoric in which the Almighty was invoked
at every turn. It degenerated at one time into a sermon upon the text of
"render unto Caesar," inveighing against the Presbyterian religion. And
the dull length of his lordship's periods, combined with the monotone
in which he spoke, lulled the wearied lady at the bar into slumber. She
awakened with a start when suddenly his fist crashed down and his voice
rose in fierce denunciation of the late rebellion. But she was dozing
again--so calm and so little moved was she--before he had come to apply
his denunciations to her own case, and this in spite of all her protests
that she had held the rebellion in abhorrence.

It was all calculated to prejudice the minds of the jurymen before
he came to the facts and the law of the c