We may be, perhaps, less inclined to attribute this material omission to the laxity which has been already remarked to be usual in our older laws, than to apprehensions entertained by the barons that, if a mere design to levy war should be rendered treasonable, they might be exposed to much false testimony and arbitrary construction. But strained constructions of this very statute, if such were their aim, they did not prevent. Without adverting to the more extravagant convictions under this statute in some violent reigns, it gradually became an established doctrine with lawyers, that a conspiracy to levy war against the king's person, though not in itself a distinct treason, may be given in evidence as an overt act of compassing his death. Great as the authorities may be on which this depends, and reasonable as it surely is that such offences should be brought within the pale of high treason, yet it is almost necessary to confess that this doctrine appears utterly irreconcilable with any fair interpretation of the statute. It has indeed, by some, been chiefly confined to cases where the attempt meditated is directly against the king's person, for the purpose of deposing him, or of compelling him, while under actual duress, to a change of measures; and this was construed into a compassing of his death, since any such violence must endanger his life, and because, as has been said, the prisons and graves of princes are not very distant.[228] But it seems not very reasonable to found a capital conviction on such a sententious remark; nor is it by any means true that a design against a king's life is necessarily to be inferred from the attempt to get possession of his person. So far indeed is this from being a general rule, that in a multitude of instances, especially during the minority or imbecility of a king, the purposes of conspirators would be wholly defeated by the death of the sovereign whose name they designed to employ. But there is still less pretext for applying the same construction to schemes of insurrection, when the royal person is not directly the object of attack, and where no circumstance indicates any hostile intention towards his safety. This ample extention of so penal a statute was first given, if I am not mistaken, by the judges in 1663, on occasion of a meeting by some persons at Farley Wood in Yorkshire,[229] in order to concert measures for a rising. But it was afterwards confirmed in Harding's case, immediately after the revolution, and has been repeatedly laid down from the bench in subsequent proceedings for treason, as well as in treatises of very great authority.[230] It has therefore all the weight of established precedent; yet I question whether another instance can be found in our jurisprudence of giving so large a construction, not only to a penal but to any other statute.[231] Nor does it speak in favour of this construction, that temporary laws have been enacted on various