The banker’s trial was put off from time to time, between July and December. The public in general were beginning to doubt its ever coming on at all; and the autumn seemed dull to people now long used to excitement, when London suddenly heard that Charles Radcliffe’s widow, with a son and two daughters, had arrived in London, and had taken a mansion in, then highly fashionable, Golden Square. She was a Countess (of Newburgh), in her own right; but, of course, the gentry with Jacobite sympathies, who called on her, recognised her as Countess of Derwentwater. This arrival in Golden Square may have had some influence on a demonstration at Westminster Abbey. For years, on the anniversary of that rather un-English king and canonized saint, Edward the Confessor, groups of Roman Catholics were accustomed to gather round his shrine, kneeling in prayer. ‘Last Tuesday,’ says the ‘Penny Post,’ ‘being the anniversary of Edward the Confessor, the tombs were shut in Westminster Abbey, by order of the Dean and Chapter, to prevent the great concourse of Roman Catholics, who always repair there on that day. Notwithstanding which, most of them were kneeling all the day at the gates, paying their devotions to that Saint.’ This incident having passed out of discussion, the trial of Macdonald was looked for. When it did come on, in December, at St. Margaret’s, Southwark, it disappointed the amateurs of executions, and delighted the Jacobites. The prisoner’s main plea was that he was French, and was legally at Culloden. The jury found that he was not French, but was a Scotch rebel. He was sentenced to death; but the whole thing was a solemn farce, the sentence was not carried out; and we shall presently see wherefore he was immediately liberated on condition of leaving the kingdom for ever, with liberty to live where he pleased, out of it. [Sidenote: _SERGEANT SMITH._]