whose varied talents would have fitted him equally to be a chemist, shipwright, jockey, or dancing-master, the horseman, angler, walker, musician, whose energy tired while his company delighted the most brilliant of English courts, more admirable than Crichton had he not been more indolent, he laboured in an inner life at a great endeavour and, chiefly by letting himself be misunderstood, achieved it.[452] He restored the crown to its ancient place in the state, whence his father and his grandfather had let it fall. He gave Parliament just enough rope to hang itself. TRIALS FOR TREASON CHAPTER I MAGISTRATES AND JUDGES The trials of the Popish Plot have remained the most celebrated in the annals of our judicial history. Their reports occupy three volumes of the State Trials and more than two thousand pages of crowded print. They contain twenty-two trials for treason, three for murder or attempt to murder, eleven for perjury, subornation of perjury, libel, and other misdemeanours. They gave rise to proceedings in Parliament against two Lord Chief Justices, and against two judges of the Court of King’s Bench. They are a standing monument to the most astounding outburst of successful perjury which has occurred in modern times. It is due to their connection with these trials that posterity has branded the names of three[453] judges with lasting infamy, and that fourteen men executed as traitors have earned the reputation of martyrs. Not only are they filled and brimming with the romance of life and death, but there lies locked within them the kernel of that vast mass of treason, intrigue, crime, and falsehood which surrounds and is known as the Popish Plot. Strangely enough, therefore, they have been little studied and never understood.