All this while, arraigners and hangmen were kept in great professional activity. While rebel officers and men were being tried at Southwark and hanged at Kennington,――a process which went on to the end of the year,――so grand an episode was offered to the public in the trial of the rebel peers, that it took, in the public eye, the form of the chief spectacle, to which the Southwark butcheries were only accessories. [Sidenote: _IN WESTMINSTER HALL._] When the day for the arraignment of the ‘rebel lords’ was fixed for July 28th, there was a general movement of ‘the Quality.’ All who belonged to it rushed to the country to get a preparatory breath of fresh air. Nobody, who was at all Somebody, or related thereto, was expected to remain there for the season. ‘You will be in town to be sure, for the eight and twentieth,’ wrote Walpole to George Montague (July 3rd). ‘London will be as full as at a Coronation. The whole form is settled for the trials, and they are actually building scaffolds (for spectators) in Westminster Hall.’ [Sidenote: _PREPARATIONS FOR THE NEW TRIALS._] The general public watched all the preliminaries of the trials of the lords with much interest. On the first Tuesday in July, late at night, the workmen began to enclose nearly two-thirds of Westminster Hall, ‘to build a scaffold for the trial of the lords now in the Tower.’ The mob watched its progress eagerly. By the next day, as we read in the papers, ‘the platform of the same scaffolding was laid, being even with the uppermost step of that leading to the Courts of Chancery and King’s Bench.’ All the colours that hung there since 1704, the trophies of Marlborough’s victories, were taken down, and all the canopies were removed from the shops or stations, in the hall, in order to make way for the galleries and scaffolding, which, it was said, would be kept up for some years, in case of future trials of Jacobites of lordly degree! All the following Sunday night, fifty workmen were plying saw, nail, and hammer; but the gates were shut to keep out a mob which, by pressure, noise, and drinking, impeded the work in hand. A favoured many, however, gazed at the royal box, for the Prince and Princess of Wales, on the right of the throne, and one on the left, for the Duke of Cumberland and his friends. Boxes were also erected for the foreign ministers next to the duke’s. No member of the royal family had the bad taste to be present, but the Duke of Cumberland took the oaths which would enable him to sit, as a peer, in Judgment on the lords whom he had captured. Happily, he thought better of it, or he was better advised, and he was becomingly absent from Westminster Hall, both as judge and as spectator.