On the night of May the 23rd, that fixed for the general rising, Neilson was re-arrested outside Newgate, where he was reconnoitring, with a view to leading an attack on this Irish Bastille, and inaugurating the projected Irish Revolution after the French model, by the liberation of Lord Edward and the other chiefs imprisoned in it. Unfortunately Neilson was too well known to the prison authorities for his presence in the neighbourhood not to excite suspicion. He was taken prisoner by a file of soldiers after a desperate resistance and lodged in gaol in a pitiable condition of body, but his mind more determined to resist tyranny than ever. Grattan told his son that when Neilson was taken, his clothes were torn off him, his body wounded all over by the soldiers hacking at him, he was cut and scarred in upwards of fifty places, and was only saved by the number of his assailants. On June the 26th, bills of indictment were sent up for high treason against Samuel Neilson, the two Sheareses, John McCann, William Michael Byrne, and Oliver Bond. Counsel were named by all the prisoners except Neilson, who refused to name any. We find in the Life of Grattan by his son a graphic description of the scene in court to which Neilson was brought heavily ironed. “When brought into court the noise of his entrance was like the march of men in irons. He was called on to plead, and asked if he had anything to say; he replied in a stentorian voice, ‘No! I have been robbed of everything—I could not fee counsel; my property—everything has been taken from me,’ and he turned away. But he came again to the front of the dock, and said, ‘For myself I have nothing to say; _I scorn your power, and despise that authority that it shall ever be my pride to have opposed_; but I may say—not that I value it—why am I kept with these weighty irons on me, so heavy that three ordinary men could scarcely carry them? Is it your law that I should be placed in irons, and in such irons?’” The execution of the Sheareses took place on July 14th, that of McCann on the 19th. In order to save the lives of Byrne and Bond, Neilson with some others of the State prisoners consented to enter into terms with Government. Byrne, in spite of these negotiations, was executed on July 28th, and Oliver Bond died, under very suspicious circumstances, after having been respited. The circumstances attending Bond’s death, and the chagrin caused by the Government’s perfidy with regard to the compact (which they not only broke in the most flagrant manner, but represented, in their account of it to the public, in a way most injurious to the prisoners’ honour) had a very bad effect on poor Neilson. He was literally at death’s door when the word came from the Castle on March the 18th, 1799, that the State prisoners were to be deported to an unknown destination on the following morning.