Note 746 — Chapter XII

State Trials, vol. vii. passim. On the trial of Green, Berry, and Hill, for Godfrey's murder, part of the story for the prosecution was, that the body was brought to Hill's lodgings on the Saturday, and remained there till Monday. The prisoner called witnesses who lodged in the same house, to prove that it could not have been there without their knowledge. Wild, one of the judges, assuming, as usual, the truth of the story as beyond controversy, said it was very suspicious that they should see or hear nothing of it; and another, Dolben, told them it was well they were not indicted. Id. 199. Jones, summing up the evidence on Sir Thomas Gascoigne's trial at York (an aged catholic gentleman, most improbably accused of accession to the plot), says to the jury: "Gentlemen, you have the king's witness on his oath; he that testifies against him is barely on his word, and he is a papist" (Id. 1039): thus deriving an argument from an iniquitous rule, which, at that time, prevailed in our law, of refusing to hear the prisoner's witnesses upon oath. Gascoigne, however, was acquitted.

It would swell this note to an unwarrantable length, were I to extract so much of the trials as might fully exhibit all the instances of gross partiality in the conduct of the judges. I must, therefore, refer my readers to the volume itself, a standing monument of the necessity of the revolution; not only as it rendered the judges independent of the Crown, but as it brought forward those principles of equal and indifferent justice, which can never be expected to flourish but under the shadow of liberty.