WILLIAM AND MAEY.

179

were any, I should be obliged to my Lord to tell me what theywere.” Disgraceful as had been the appearance which thisdegenerate heir of an illustrious name had made at the OldBailey, the appearance which he made before the Committee ofMurder was more disgraceful still. * It is pleasing to know thata person who had been far more cruelly wronged than he, butwhose nature differed widely from his, the nobleminded LadyBussell, remonstrated against the injustice with which theextreme Whigs treated Halifax. **

The malice of John Hampden, however, was unwearied andunabashed. A few days later, in a committee of the wholeHouse of Commons on the state of the nation, he made a bitterspeech, in which he ascribed all the disasters of the year to theinfluence of the men who had, in the days of the Exclusion Bill,been censured by Parliaments, of the men who had attemptedto mediate between James and William. The King, he said,ought to dismiss from his counsels and presence all the threenoblemen who had been sent to negotiate with him at Hunger-ford. He went on to speak of the danger of employing men ofrepublican principles. He doubtless alluded to the chief ob-ject of his implacable malignity. For Halifax, though fromtemper averse to violent changes, was well known to be inspeculation a republican, and often talked, with much inge-nuity and pleasantry, against hereditary monarchy. The onlyeffect, however, of the reflection now thrown on him was to callforth a roar of derision. That a Hampden, that the grandsonof the great leader of the Long Parliament, that a man whoboasted of having conspired with Algernon Sidney against theroyal House, should use the word republican as a term of re-

* The report is in the Lords’ Journals, Dec. 20, 1689. Hampden’sexamination was on the 18th of November.

** This, I think, is clear from a letter of Lady Montague to LadyRussell, dated Doc. 23. 1689, three days after the Committee of Murder hadreported.

CHAP.

XV.

1689 .

12 *