The hope that saving the time of the court by pleading guilty might perhaps redeem life, if it failed to secure liberty, not only induced many prisoners to make that plea, but others to withdraw the plea they had previously put in, of not guilty. James Swinburne had pleaded not guilty, but he and his friends took a new course. They had so manipulated the king’s evidence, that the witnesses now stoutly swore that they believed Swinburne was mad. The Judges, at all events, were in possession of _their_ senses. They knew nothing about ‘exacerbation of insanity,’ and cared as little for ‘the mad doctor’ who was said to have had the prisoner under his care. They wisely remarked that if a criminal was proved to be mad, his life might be saved, ‘but then it must be such a madness as showed a total deprivation of reason, which appeared not the case with the prisoner.’ Swinburne was found guilty, and the judge sentenced him to death. His brother, Edward Swinburne, was put to the bar after him. Patten was the chief evidence, and that rascal coolly deposed:――‘I saw Mr. Edward Swinburne at Wooler, where I myself joined the rebels. I brought in eighteen men with me; and Mr. Edward said, I was welcome with my troop, and need not fear being ill received.’ Patten added other evidence equally condemnatory of himself, on which, not he, but Edward Swinburne was convicted, and condemned to be hanged! Mr. Richard Butler was sentenced to the gallows, on similar testimony! Meanwhile, they were sent back to various prisons, but most of them to Newgate. [Sidenote: _SCOTT’S NEWGATE._] Scott (in ‘Rob Roy’) has reflected the interior of Newgate at this time. Sir Hildebrand Osbaldiston with his wounded son John, and the memory of his other son, Wilfrid, slain at Preston, had an original in that gloomy prison. The dying John, bequeathing, with his last breath, his cast of hawks, at the Hall, and his black spaniel bitch called Lucy, was not without a prototype in that dungeon. So it was with the religious visit of the chaplain of the Sardinian Ambassador, permission for which was got with difficulty;――and the dying, less of fear of the future, than of utter breaking down of mind, heart, and body;――and the suspicion on the part of the Jacobites as to the intentions that lay under the proffered kindness of a Whig. The following picture too appears to be a faithful reflex of the original:――