To make the indictment, therefore, more extensive, the intention of murdering the king was comprehended in it; and for proof of this intention the conspiracy for raising a rebellion was assigned; and, what seemed to bring the matter still nearer, the design of attacking the king’s guards. Russel perceived this irregularity, and desired to have the point argued by counsel: the chief justice told him, that this favor could not be granted, unless he previously confessed the facts charged upon him. The artificial confounding of the two species of treason, though a practice supported by many precedents, is the chief, but not the only hardship of which Russel had reason to complain on his trial. His defence was feeble: and he contented himself with protesting, that he never had entertained any design against the life of the king: his veracity would not allow him to deny the conspiracy for an insurrection. The jury were men of fair and reputable characters, but zealous royalists: after a short deliberation, they brought in the prisoner guilty. Applications were made to the king for a pardon: even money, to the amount of one hundred thousand pounds, was offered to the duchess of Portsmouth by the old earl of Bedford, father to Russel. The king was inexorable. He had been extremely harassed with the violence of the country party; and he had observed, that the prisoner, besides his secret designs, had always been carried to the highest extremity of opposition in parliament. Russel had even adopted a sentiment similar to what we meet with in a letter of the younger Brutus. Had his father, he said, advised the king to reject the exclusion bill, he would be the first to move for a parliamentary impeachment against him. When such determined resolution was observed, his popularity, his humanity, his justice, his very virtues, became so many crimes, and were used as arguments against sparing him. Charles, therefore, would go no further than remitting the more ignominious part of the sentence which the law requires to be pronounced against traitors. “Lord Russel,” said he, “shall find that I am possessed of that prerogative which, in the case of Lord Stafford, he thought proper to deny me.” As the fury of the country party had rendered it impossible for the king, without the imminent danger of his crown, to pardon so many Catholics, whom he firmly believed innocent, and even affectionate and loyal to him, he probably thought that, since the edge of the law was now ready to fall upon that party themselves, they could not reasonably expect that he would interpose to save them.