Henry Craik, ed. English Prose. 1916.
Vol. I. Fourteenth to Sixteenth Century
Francis Atterbury (16621732)
M
All these circumstances, my lords, being considered, together with the public manner, the length and solemnity of my trial, before so august a court of judicature, by which means “I am made a gazing-stock, both by reproaches and afflictions, and a spectacle to the whole world”; I have stood in this place day after day, to hear myself accused of the blackest crimes, and openly reviled; I have been represented as a Papist in disguise, as a rebel, as an enemy to her Majesty’s person and government, and a favourer of the Pretender, though I have abjured him (but not forgot him, as a learned person was pleased to say); that is, as the worst of perjured villains: I have been called “an insignificant tool of a party” on the one hand, and “a most dangerous incendiary” on the other hand, nay “an angel,” that is, a devil, “detached from the infernal regions”; all these things, I say, being considered (and your lordships, I am sure, in tender compassion to me, will consider them), it is most certain, that, whatever be your lordships’ determination concerning me, I cannot escape without being a very great sufferer; and I shall have been abundantly punished, though I should have the happiness to be by your lordships at last acquitted.
Yet I cannot reflect without comfort (the greatest of comforts next to that of a good cause and a good conscience) that I answer for myself this day before the most illustrious assembly in the world, the whole body of the nobility of Great Britain; whose princely extraction and high quality, whose magnificent titles and splendid fortunes, whose hereditary candour and generosity, inherent in noble blood, inseparable from the birth and education of peers; in a word, whose solid judgment, and exact skill in the laws of this realm, so eminently qualify them for the final determination of justice; who are neither to be swayed by hopes, overruled by fears, nor misled by any false prejudice or passion. If it must be a man’s misfortune to labour under such hard circumstances as mine, it is no small mitigation of them, that he pleads his cause before such judges, who, he knows, will decide it with the strictest impartiality, equity, and honour.