The clamor and outrage of the populace, during the trial, were extreme: great abilities and eloquence were displayed by the managers, Sir William Jones, Sir Francis Winnington, and Serjeant Maynard: yet did the prisoner, under all these disadvantages, make a better defence than was expected, either by his friends or his enemies: the unequal contest in which he was engaged, was a plentiful source of compassion to every mind seasoned with humanity. He represented that, during a course of forty years, from the very commencement of the civil wars, he had, through many dangers, difficulties, and losses, still maintained his loyalty: and was it credible, that now, in his old age, easy in his circumstances, but dispirited by infirmities, he would belie the whole course of his life, and engage against his royal master, from whom he had ever received kind treatment, in the most desperate and most bloody of all conspiracies? He remarked the infamy of the witnesses; the contradictions and absurdities of their testimony; the extreme indigence in which they had lived, though engaged, as they pretended, in a conspiracy with kings, princes, and nobles; the credit and opulence to which they were at present raised. With a simplicity and tenderness more persuasive than the greatest oratory, he still made protestations of his innocence; and could not forbear, every moment, expressing the most lively surprise and indignation at the audacious impudence of the witnesses. It will appear astonishing to us, as it did to Stafford himself, that the peers, after a solemn trial of six days, should by a majority of twenty-four voices, give sentence against him. He received, however, with resignation, the fatal verdict. “God’s holy name be praised,” was the only exclamation which he uttered. When the high steward told him, that the peers would intercede with the king for remitting the more cruel and ignominious parts of the sentence, hanging and quartering, he burst into tears; but he told the lords, that he was moved to this weakness by his sense of their goodness, not by any terror of that fate which he was doomed to suffer.