They requested that they might not continue long exposed to the gaze of the multitude, and, having each an halter fixed round his neck, and a cap drawn over his face, holding by each other's hand, they tottered out upon the platform in front of the prison. In making the rope fast within, John Sheares was hauled up to the block of the tackle, and continued nearly a minute suspended alone before the platform fell. It did fall, and instantly both were suspended. After hanging about twenty minutes, they were, at a quarter after three o'clock, let down, when the hangman separated their heads.[697] Much feeling was roused by this sanguinary act. Classic students who lived in the past started in horror, comparing the Sheareses to 'the hapless victims' described by Gibbon: 'the two brothers of the Quintilian family whose fraternal love endeared them to posterity--whose bodies seemed animated by one soul--and whose union in death is due to the cruelty of Commodus.' Grattan loudly condemned the men 'whose misrule had brought Ireland to so black a crisis. The question men should have asked was, not why was Mr. Sheares upon the gallows?--but why was not Lord Clare along with him?' And two years later, in a speech of resistance to the Union, he declared that the treason of the minister against the liberties of the people was far worse than the rebellion of the people against the minister. But even in the latter sense, Henry Sheares must be held guiltless. John, pouring out to his sister, in an agonised letter, his most secret thoughts, writes: 'Heaven is my witness how assiduously I sought to keep aloof, in any of my political concerns, from _him_;' and there is not a line in the evidence of Armstrong to prove that Henry took any active part in the treason. Addis Emmet, Arthur O'Connor, McNevin--all the men who had been at the head of it, and its very soul, were at that hour in gaol. O'Connor declared that he and his colleagues knew nothing of the Sheareses; and it is certain that neither of them had ever intrigued with France, as O'Connor and the others had done. The names of the Sheareses find no place in the list of marked men that Turner gave Downshire (p. 7, _ante_). This omission can be easily accounted for. Arthur O'Connor, in a letter to Dr. Madden, which pointed out some inaccuracies, writes:-- You seem to think the Sheares were leading men in the Union,[698] whereas, I may say, they never entered it, so as to be known to us. The fact is, they were just entering it when they were cut off. It was the younger Sheares's Proclamation, which was an act purely personal, without the knowledge or concurrence of the Union, that has misled some to think he and his brother were deeply engaged in the Union.' The following is one of the letters, already promised, and now published for the first time. It is written by Henry previous to his trial:--