On the Sunday after the execution, a clergyman in the parish preached from 2 Corinthians i. 12, out of the simple words, ‘For our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience, that in simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom, but by the grace of God, we have had our conversation in the world, and more abundantly to you-ward.’ Out of such simple text and of similar simple comment, the Whig zealots strove to weave a charge of treason. Text and comment, they said, justified young Matthews, on the ground that in what he did, he acted conscientiously. [Sidenote: _AN INNOCENT VICTIM._] In what he did, a Government now would see small offence; but the young Jacobite knowingly ran the risk of death in the doing it. There was nothing in him of the murderer, but everything of true loyalty to the prince whom he looked upon as his king. From the time he was taken, there was no indulgence allowed him as there was to the rebel lords in 1716. What was necessary to make life even tolerable was denied to the brave lad who would not betray his Jacobite employer. Throughout the horrors of the Condemned Hole, horrors that Dante would not have dreamt of to heighten the terrors of his hell, Matthews never lost patience or self-control. He was like the young Spartan who is said to have let the fox eat out his heart rather than betray his agony by a cry. One hasty word alone fell from him, when the ruffian turnkey hammered off the convict’s double fetters, on the fatal morning. The fellow’s hammer fell as often on the Jacobite’s ankles as on the iron rivetted round them, and this cruelty brought a hasty word to Matthews’s lips, but he soon possessed his soul in patience again, and went the way to death in quiet submission. That death was more ignominious in its form than that suffered by more guilty and, socially, more noble, offenders. But the young Jacobite underwent his doom with all the dignity of Derwentwater, all the unostentatious and manly simplicity of Kenmure. If you cannot, of your charity, as you pass St. Botolph’s, pray for the soul of young Matthews the Jacobite, you will not refuse, with knowledge of why and how he suffered, to give a tender thought to the memory of the most innocent of the victims of loyalty to the Stuarts. [Sidenote: _POLITICAL PLAYS._]