transported without legal trial to Barbados. Such procedure, whether it be counted as an evasion or as a breach of the law, was evidence of the difficulty which Oliver would increasingly feel in meeting his enemies otherwise than by the exertion of arbitrary power. A more difficult question arose when two judges sent to try Royalist prisoners in the north doubted their competency, on the ground that an ordinance defining the offences constituting treason, which the Protector, in accordance with the Instrument, had issued before the meeting of Parliament, could not make a rebellion against the Protectorate to be High Treason. The two judges were at once dismissed, and soon afterwards Chief Justice Rolle was compelled to resign office because he was unwilling to enforce the payment of customs upon a certain Cony; whilst the three lawyers who argued on Cony's behalf--one of them being Serjeant Maynard, who lived to welcome William III.--that he was not to pay duties imposed by Protector and Council without the consent of Parliament, were sent to prison till they had apologised. One historian after another has accompanied his account of these proceedings with the observation that there was here a conflict between law and the tyrant's plea, necessity. There was nothing of the sort. The question was whether the Instrument was a valid constitution. If it was, there could be no reasonable doubt that rebels against the Protectorate were legally traitors, or that customs-duties applicable to the payment of the army and navy were legally set, not by Parliament, but by Protector and Council.