When before the Council, he was asked, if he acknowledged the King’s authority, &c. he answered as the magistrate’s authority is now established by act of parliament, and explanatory act, that he denied the same. Being also examined anent the excommunication at Torwood, he declined to answer, as being an ecclesiastical matter, and they a civil judicatory. He owned the lawfulness of defensive arms, in cases of necessity, and denied that those that rose at Bothwell, &c. were rebels: and being interrogated anent the Sanquhar declaration, he declined to give his judgment until he had more time to consider the contents thereof. He further declared, he could not give his sense of the killing of the Bishop; but that the scriptures say, upon the Lord’s giving a call to a private man to kill, he might do it lawfully; and gave the instances of Jael and Phinehas. These were the most material points on which he was examined. While he was in prison, a gentlewoman who came to visit him, told him, weeping, “That these Heaven daring enemies were contriving a most violent death for him; some, a barrel with pikes to roll him in; others an iron-chair, red-hot, to roll him in,” &c. But he said, “Let you nor none of the Lord’s people be troubled for these things, for all that they will get liberty to do to me, will be to knit me up, cut me down, and chop off my old head, and then fare them well; they have done with me, and with them for ever.” He was again before the Council on the 19th, but refusing to answer their questions, except anent the excommunication. There was some motion made to spare him, as he was an old man, and send him prisoner to the Bass during life; which motion being put to a vote, was, by the casting vote of the Earl of Rothes, rejected; who doomed him to the gallows, there to die like a traitor. Upon the 26th he was brought before the justiciary, and indicted in common form. His confession being produced in evidence against him, he was brought in guilty of high treason, and condemned, with the rest, to be hanged at the cross of Edinburgh, and his head placed on the Nether Bow. When they came to these words in his indictment, viz. having cast off all fear of God, &c. he caused the clerk to stop, and, pointing to the Advocate, Sir George M’Kenzie, said, “The man that hath caused that paper to be drawn up hath done it contrary to the light of his own conscience, for he knoweth that I have been a fearer of God from mine infancy; but that man, I say, who took the Holy Bible in his hand, and said, It would never be well with the land, until that book was destroyed, &c. I say, he is the man that hath cast off all fear of God.” The Advocate stormed at this, but could not deny the truth thereof. When they got their sentence announced by sound of trumpet he said, “That is a weary sound, but the sound of the last trumpet will be a joyful sound to me, and all that will be found having on Christ’s righteousness.”