Not to tarry here, either. Soon as he had disembarrassed himself of his captive train--committed to the keeping of Fiennes--he was off again into Somersetshire, there to measure swords with Maurice and the Marquis of Hertford. As he rode out through the Bath gate at the head of a troop of steel-clad cuirassiers--"Hesselrig's Lobsters"--the citizens of Bristol felt more confident of safety than ever since the strife began. For now they were assured against danger, outside as within. Internal treason had been awed, the traitors cowed and crushed, by what had befallen the conspirators of March the Seventh. The two chiefs of them, Yeomans and Boucher, had been tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death--a sentence soon afterwards carried into execution. Grand efforts were made to get them off; the King himself, by letter, threatening to retaliate upon the poor captives taken at Cirencester--such of them as remained unmurdered. Old Patrick, Earl of Forth, his Majesty's Lieutenant-General, was put forward as the writer of the barbarous epistle. But canny Scot and accomplished soldier as his lordship might be, in a polemical contest he was no match for the lawyer, Fiennes, who flung the threat back in his teeth, saying: "The men we have tried and condemned are not soldiers, but spies and conspirators. The prisoners you took at Cirencester are prisoners of war. I would have you observe the distinction. And know, too, that for every hair of their heads that falls, I will hang ten of your curled Cavaliers--make Bristol a shambles of them." Though not Nathaniel Fiennes's exact words, they convey his meaning very near. And he could and would have acted up to them, as the King and his counsellors knew. So, whether or not they deemed his argument rational, it was unanswerable, or at all events unanswered, by a counter-threat; and the Cirencester prisoners were spared execution, while the Bristol conspirators went to the scaffold. Much has been made of the King's forbearance in this affair by those who did not, or would not, comprehend the motive. It was pure fear, not humanity--fear of a still more terrible retaliation. At that time the Parliament held ten prisoners for one in the hands of the Royalists--men of such rank and quality, his Majesty dared not put their lives in peril, much less let them be sacrificed. He had his revenge in secret, however, since under his very nose at Oxford many of the hapless captives from Cirencester miserably perished, through the torturing treatment of the Royal Provost-Marshal, Smith.