The establishment of this despotic order was resisted in France; but it may perhaps surprise the reader that a recorder of London, in a speech, urged the necessity of setting up an Inquisition in England! It was on the trial of Penn the Quaker, in 1670, who was acquitted by the jury, which highly provoked the said recorder. "_Magna Charta_," writes the prefacer to the trial, "with the recorder of London, is nothing more than _Magna F----!_" It appears that the jury, after being kept two days and two nights to alter their verdict, were in the end both fined and imprisoned. Sir John Howell, the recorder, said, "Till now I never understood the reason of the policy and prudence of the Spaniards in suffering the Inquisition among them; and certainly it will not be well with us, till something _like unto the Spanish Inquisition be in England_." Thus it will ever be, while both parties struggling for the pre-eminence rush to the sharp extremity of things, and annihilate the trembling balance of the constitution. But the adopted motto of Lord Erskine must ever be that of every Briton, "_Trial by Jury_." So late as the year 1761, Gabriel Malagrida, an old man of seventy, was burnt by these evangelical executioners. His trial was printed at Amsterdam, 1762, from the Lisbon copy. And for what was this unhappy Jesuit condemned? Not, as some have imagined, for his having been concerned in a conspiracy against the king of Portugal. No other charge is laid to him in this trial but that of having indulged certain heretical notions, which any other tribunal but that of the Inquisition would have looked upon as the delirious fancies of a fanatical old man. Will posterity believe, that in the eighteenth century an aged visionary was led to the stake for having said, amongst other extravagances, that "The holy Virgin having commanded him to write the life of Anti-Christ, told him that he, Malagrida, was a second John, but more clear than John the Evangelist; that there were to be three Anti-Christs, and that the last should be born at Milan, of a monk and a nun, in the year 1920; and that he would marry Proserpine, one of the infernal furies." For such ravings as these the unhappy old man was burnt in recent times. Granger assures us, that in his remembrance a _horse_ that had been taught to tell the spots upon cards, the hour of the day, &c., by significant tokens, was, together with his _owner_, put into the Inquisition for _both_ of them dealing with the devil! A man of letters declared that, having fallen into their hands, nothing perplexed him so much as the ignorance of the inquisitor and his council; and it seemed very doubtful whether they had read even the Scriptures.[53] One of the most interesting anecdotes relating to the terrible Inquisition, exemplifying how the use of the diabolical engines of torture forces men to confess crimes they have not been guilty of, was related to me by a Portuguese gentleman.