All of this was to make bad weather for me, yet I was resolved to go to my lords of the Admiralty and make a plain discovery of all the things which had taken place. Scarcely able to pull my breeches over my shrunken knees, I nevertheless paid my score and set out by coach for London. The coach had not gone three leagues from town before she was hove to, and, behold you, the king’s messengers were there, looking for old Bill May. “You are one of Every’s men,” they said, hauling me out the gangway. “We have a warrant to take you.” “You only anticipate me,” said I, “for I was on my way to London to discover all.” They bore me off to Bath in a carriage of their own, and there before his Grace the Duke of Devonshire I was examined touching my part in Mr. Every’s enterprise. I made a clear account of all that I have here set down; but despite that I was remitted to Newgate Gaol to be tried as a felon. In this close I found when I came in my old shipmates Joseph Dawson, Edward Forseith, William Bishop, James Lewis and John Sparkes, with young Middleton and one Dan, who had crept home by one ship and another, only to be snatched up as I was. One person and another, recognizing us for Every’s men, had betrayed us. We went first to trial on an indictment of piracy of the _Gunsway_. We were confronted by a bench of more than a dozen judges; we were harried by a shoal of prosecutors; we were lied about by one witness and another, yet in spite of all--in spite of all that Dan and Middleton, a saucy lad aboard our ship, who were King’s evidence; in spite of the thunderings and belching and blasts of the lawyers, the jury--true men and good--returned us not guilty. That put the king’s counsel to be the laughingstock of the country, so to save their faces they put us to another trial, this time for the stealing of the _Charles the Second_ at the Groyne. For witnesses they brought again young Middleton as well as Mr. Gravet, the old second mate, and the liar Creagh. Not only did these tell of the matter at the Groyne, but Middleton and one or two others went all over the Indies and up to New Providence again,--which was a sly way of trying us twice for one offense. How the judges and lawyers admonished the jury! “If you have the true English spirit, if you believe in the Christian religion--I had almost said, ‘If you love your mother’--you must convict these rascals at the bar.” How they belabored the jury which had acquitted us on the first trial; you would have thought they were nothing other than Frenchmen in disguise, and the veriest traitors, heretics and homicides. Aye, they did for us: guilty. Last night the clerk of St. Sepulcher’s[12], as the custom is, came under our windows with his bell and cried to those who might have to die on the morrow to repent their sins. The doleful sound threw me into a horror; I fear that my name will be in the morning’s death warrant. [12] The church that stood across from Newgate.