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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 March 2010
I did as farre as I could follow the directions of my councell … but the impudent violence of the Ch: Just: overthrew all.
(Sidney [to Henry Neville?] 22 November)By these means I am brought to this place. The Lord forgive these practices, and avert the evils that threaten the nation from them.
(Sidney, Last Paper (1683))For my part, I can no way match this dying Gentleman, but in the Courage of some of the old King's Regicides Executed at Charing Cross … this departing Enthusiast … made his Exit like a perfect second Harrison.
THE TRIAL
THE ARRAIGNMENT (7 NOVEMBER)
Sidney was arraigned – that is, required to plead to the indictment – two weeks before his trial. After the trial, he looked back on the arraignment as a crucial loss of the initiative. Denied the gambit of ‘pleading over’, upon which he had placed such reliance, ‘by the violence and fraud of the chief justice’ ‘I was forced to plead not guilty, and theareby lost the advantage, which was never to be recovered … and they would never [thereafter] suffer me to get out of the snare in which they had caught me.’ ‘Thus it came to pass’ reported one contemporary ‘[that] he lost that point he hoped to have been relieved by in Law.’
It was on 6 November, the day after his last letter to Hampden, that Sidney was suddenly informed by ‘the lieutenant of the Tower, that an habeas corpus was brought unto him’, and that he would be brought to plead the next day.
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