A good number of people were collected in the open space near the cathedral; for the room in which the magistrates were called to assemble was not far distant, and a rumour of the meeting had spread through the city, that being market-day, and had caused some agitation in the place. Sir John Newark was well known in Exeter, and he was very popular--most rogues are. His name was soon pronounced among the people. They gathered round him, pressed upon his horse, cheered him, asked him questions. The sounds reached some of his fellow magistrates, who had collected in the neighbouring inns, and they came out to see what was the matter. The great body of people gathered together were decidedly Jacobite, and the magistrates, who had their eyes upon the knight, were of the opposite faction; but he managed skilfully between them. To those in the crowd near him, whom he knew, he spoke a few words of a very inflammatory nature; but, when the people called upon him to speak to them aloud, he harangued them for a few minutes, from his horse's back, in language which suggested more than it expressed. He besought them to be peaceable, orderly, tranquil, and to make no disturbances; but he painted, in glowing colours, and with much oratorical power, the disturbances which had taken place in other parts of the country, told them how the men of Dorchester had assaulted and pumped upon the magistrates, when reading a proclamation from the government; how, in another place, they had burnt in effigy "the great personage whom they very improperly called the Elector of Hanover;" how they had driven a party of the military out of one town, and forced the mayor in another to drink King James's health against his will. But, all the time, he besought them to abstain from such unseemly demonstrations of the popular feeling, and assured them that he doubted not, he trusted, he hoped, they would ultimately obtain all they could rightly desire, without any recourse to violence or breach of the law.