From this imperfect sketch of the character and conduct of this singular personage, it may easily be conceived how obnoxious he was become to the court and ministry: what alone renders them blamable was, the illegal method which they took for effecting their purpose against him. On Sidney’s trial, they produced a great number of witnesses, who proved the reality of a plot in general; and when the prisoner exclaimed, that all these evidences said nothing of him, he was answered, that this method of proceeding, however irregular, had been practised in the prosecutions of the Popish conspirators; a topic more fit to condemn one party than to justify the other. The only witness who deposed against Sidney was Lord Howard; but as the law required two witnesses, a strange expedient was fallen on to supply this deficiency. In ransacking the prisoner’s closet, some discourses on government were found; in which he had maintained principles, favorable indeed to liberty, but such as the best and most dutiful subjects in all ages have been known to embrace; the original contract, the source of power from a consent of the people, the lawfulness of resisting tyrants, the preference of liberty to the government of a single person. These papers were asserted to be equivalent to a second witness, and even to many witnesses. The prisoner replied, that there was no other reason for ascribing those papers to him as the author, besides a similitude of hand; a proof which was never admitted in criminal prosecutions: that allowing him to be the author, he had composed them solely for his private amusement, and had never published them to the world, or even communicated them to any single person: that, when examined, they appeared by the color of the ink to have been written many years before, and were in vain produced as evidence of a present conspiracy against the government: and that where the law positively requires two witnesses, one witness attended with the most convincing circumstances, could never suffice; much less, when supported by a circumstance so weak and precarious. All these arguments, though urged by the prisoner with great courage and pregnancy of reason, had no influence. The violent and inhuman Jefferies was now chief justice; and by his direction a partial jury was easily prevailed on to give verdict against Sidney. His execution followed a few days after: he complained, and with reason, of the iniquity of the sentence; but he had too much greatness of mind to deny those conspiracies with Monmouth and Russel, in which he had been engaged. He rather gloried, that he now suffered for that “good old cause,” in which, from his earliest youth, he said he had enlisted himself.