Note 165 — Chapter XV · ON THE REIGN OF WILLIAM III.

The prominent instance of Sawyer's delinquency, which caused his expulsion, was his refusal of a writ of error to Sir Thomas Armstrong. Parl. Hist. 516. It was notorious that Armstrong suffered by a legal murder; and an attorney-general in such a case could not be reckoned as free from personal responsibility as an ordinary advocate who maintains a cause for his fee. The first resolution had been to give reparation out of the estates of the judges and prosecutors to Armstrong's family; which was, perhaps rightly, abandoned.

The House of Lords, who, having a power to examine upon oath, are supposed to sift the truth in such enquiries better than the Commons, were not remiss in endeavouring to bring the instruments of Stuart tyranny to justice. Besides the committee appointed on the very second day of the convention, 23 Jan. 1689, to investigate the supposed circumstances of suspicion as to the death of Lord Essex (a committee renewed afterwards, and formed of persons by no means likely to have abandoned any path that might lead to the detection of guilt in the late king), another was appointed in the second session of the same parliament (Lords' Journals, 2nd Nov. 1689) "to consider who were the advisers and prosecutors of the murders of Lord Russell, Col. Sidney, Armstrong, Cornish, etc., and who were the advisers of issuing out writs of quo warrantos against corporations, and who were their regulators, and also who were the public assertors of the dispensing power." The examinations taken before this committee are printed in the Lords' Journals, 20th Dec. 1699; and there certainly does not appear any want of zeal to convict the guilty. But neither the law nor the proofs would serve them. They could establish nothing against Dudley North, the tory sheriff of 1683, except that he had named Lord Russell's panel himself; which, though irregular and doubtless ill-designed, had unluckily a precedent in the conduct of the famous whig sheriff, Slingsby Bethell; a man who, like North, though on the opposite side, cared more for his party than for decency and justice. Lord Halifax was a good deal hurt in character by this report; and never made a considerable figure afterwards. Burnet, 34. His mortification led him to engage in an intrigue with the late king, which was discovered; yet, I suspect that, with his usual versatility, he again abandoned that cause before his death. Ralph, 467. The act of grace (2 W. & M. c. 10) contained a small number of exceptions, too many indeed for its name; but probably there would have been difficulty in prevailing on the houses to pass it generally; and no one was ever molested afterwards on account of his conduct before the revolution.