Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 391, May, 1848

Sixty French knights were massacred in the prison of Matagrifone, at the instigation of the ferocious Ruggiero de Lauria, so soon as he learned the treason of Alaimo and Maccalda. For these a tragical end was reserved. At the commencement of the following reign, the defender of Messina was thrown into the sea, a halter round his neck; and it was conjectured that Maccalda Scaletta, also met a violent death in the obscurity of her dungeon.

Charles was not more fortunate in military operations than in secret plottings. In vain did he besiege Reggio; for want of provisions he was compelled to return to Naples. But although fortune proved so fickle, his bold spirit remained unbroken, and he conceived a gigantic plan, which was to avenge all his disasters. He resolved to fall upon Sicily at the head of considerable forces, whilst a powerful French army entered Arragon. But death nullified his schemes. Whilst upon the road from Naples to Brindes, to prepare the new armament, he was compelled by the violent attacks of ague, from which he suffered continually since his misfortunes, to stop at Foggia. His hour had come. By his will, made upon the day of his death, he left the kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the county of Provence to his son Charles prince of Salerno; and, failing him, to his grandson Charles Martel, then twelve years old. His testamentary dispositions completed, he turned his thoughts to things spiritual. Margaret of Burgundy, summoned in all haste to her husband's side, arrived but just in time to receive his last adieu. He expired in her arms, the victim of grief as much as of disease, overtaken by premature old age, but full of faith in his good right and in divine justice. Upon his deathbed he was untormented by remorse; he beheld neither the threatening shade of Conradin nor the rivers of blood with which he had inundated Sicily; his eyes and lips were fixed with love upon the cross, whose most faithful defender he esteemed himself. At the supreme hour, and with his last breath, he made a final and impious manifestation of the overweening pride and self-confidence that were amongst his most prominent qualities during his life. "He confessed himself, and demanded the last sacrament, sat up in his bed to receive it worthily, fixed his eyes upon the redoubtable mystery, and, speaking directly to the body and blood of Christ, addressed to them these words of audacious conviction: 'Sire Dieu, as I truly believe you to be my Saviour, I pray you show mercy to my soul. Since it is certain that I undertook the affair of Sicily more to serve the holy church than for my own advantage, you ought to absolve me of my sins.'"⁸

The body of Charles was transported to Naples, and buried in the cathedral, under a pompous mausoleum. His heart was taken to Paris, and deposited in the church of the Grands Jacobins, with this inscription: —

"LI COER DI GRAND ROY CHARLES QUI

CONQUIT SICILE."

Upon her husband's death Margaret retired to her county of Tonnerre, where she had founded an hospital, and passed the rest of her life in pious and charitable exercises. "The first chevalier in the world has ceased to live," exclaimed Pedro of Arragon, on learning the death of Charles of Anjou. He himself survived his great rival but a few months. After conquering Philip III. of France in the defiles of Arragon, a victory which procured the fortunate Arragonese the soubriquet of Pedro de los Franceses, he died very penitent, restoring his possessions to the church, whose liegeman he acknowledged himself, and putting under the protection of the holy see his two kingdoms of Arragon and Sicily, which he bequeathed to his sons, Alphonso III. and Jaime II. About the same time Martin IV. ended his days, full of grief for the loss of Charles of Anjou, to whom he was devotedly and blindly attached, – "An attachment," says M. de St Priest, "which excites interest, so rare is friendship upon thrones, and especially in old age. Thus was Charles of France, brother of St Louis, followed to the tomb by the most remarkable of his contemporaries. A new epoch began; the age of Philip le Bel, of Boniface VIII., and of Dante. The great poet, so severe to the living Capétiens, has treated them better in the invisible world. Whilst he has precipitated Frederick II. and the most illustrious Ghibellines into the depths of the eternal chasms, he shows us – not in torture, but awaiting a better destiny – not in the flames of purgatory, but in the bosom of monotonous repose, in the shade of a peaceful forest, in a valley strewed with unknown flowers – Charles of Anjou and Pedro of Arragon, seated side by side, reconciled by death, and uniting their grave and manly voices in hymns to the praise of the Most High."

The political separation of the island and continent of Sicily was now complete, but none foresaw its long duration. The period immediately succeeding the death of Charles of Anjou was one continuous struggle between Naples and Palermo, the former striving to regain lost supremacy, the latter to retain conquered independence. For a moment the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, torn in twain by a great popular movement, was on the point of reuniting; the great result obtained by the Sicilian Vespers seemed about to be lost, and the Vespers themselves to lose their rank of revolution, and subside into the vulgar category of revolts and insurrections. Strange to say, the foreign dynasty that had profited by the successful rebellion, was itself on the eve of destroying the work of its partisans. After the ephemeral reign of Alphonso III. King of Arragon, eldest son and successor of Don Pedro, Don Jaime, second son of this Prince, united upon his head the crowns of Sicily and Arragon. The will of the two deceased kings had been to keep these crowns separate. Don Pedro verbally, Don Alphonso by a written will, had called the Infante Frederick, son of one and brother of the other, to reign in Sicily so soon as Don Jaime should take possession of the hereditary sceptre of Arragon and Catalonia. Jaime disregarded their wishes. He kept Sicily, not for himself, but to restore it to the enemies of his family, to his prisoner, now chief of the house of Anjou, agreeably to a secret treaty they had entered into during the captivity of Charles II. If M. de St Priest is correct in placing the first negotiation of this treaty so far back as the summer of 1284, soon after the action in which Charles lost his liberty, it is difficult to understand what could then have been Don Jaime's motives. His father and elder brother dead, it is more easy to explain them. We must remember that before falling into the hands of the terrible Ruggiero de Lauria, Charles, then Prince of Salerno, commissioned by the King of Naples to make concessions to his subjects, had proclaimed a political reform, under the auspices of Martin IV. After the death of this Pope, his successor Honorius, also a declared partisan of the house of Anjou, extended still further these political privileges, and the convention known in the history of Naples as the Statutes of Honorius (Capitoli d'Onorio) there long had the force of law. In view of these privileges, imposed by papacy, and conceded by the dynasty whose despotism had driven Sicily to revolt, the dynasty established by that revolt was compelled to bid higher for popular approbation. The rival royalties began a dangerous race in the path of reform. The Arragonese could not allow the Angevine to surpass him in generosity. Don Jaime saw himself compelled to make such concessions to the clergy and aristocracy, that Sicily retained but the mere shadow of a monarchy. The authority awaiting him in Arragon was certainly not more absolute; but there, at least, he found himself in his native country and hereditary dominions; habit, tradition, old affinities, compensated what the supreme power lacked in strength and extent. In Sicily things were very different. The island was altogether in an unsatisfactory state. The chiefs of the aristocracy, the authors of the revolution, had all rebelled in turn. It had been found necessary to put to death Caltagirone, Alaimo de Lentini, and other leaders of the Arragonese intrigue. The air of Sicily seemed loaded with rebellious infection. Even Ruggiero de Lauria, and John of Procida,⁹ were suspected of disaffection. Nor did the profits of the island compensate the anxiety it caused. Exhausted by war, Sicily yielded no revenue, but required support in men and money. More than this, the papal anathema still remained upon the family of Pedro of Arragon. It weighed upon Don Jaime and upon his mother Queen Constance. Courageous though she was, the daughter of the excommunicated Mainfroy, the widow of the excommunicated Pedro, had difficulty to support the interdict. Successive popes sustained the interests of the French dynasty, and bestowed the crown of Arragon, a fief of the holy see, upon Charles of Valois, brother of Philip le Bel. True, possession did not accompany the gift, to which the Arragonese did not subscribe, but drove back Philip the Bold when he tried to introduce his son into his new kingdom, an attempt which cost him his reputation and his life. Still Don Jaime was anxious, for various reasons, to have the donation annulled. To this end he addressed himself to the King of Naples, still prisoner at Barcelona, offering to give him up Sicily, and even to aid him to reconquer it, on condition that the Pope removed the interdict from his house, and that Charles of Valois was compelled to renounce the title of King of Arragon. Moreover, a matrimonial alliance, always an important tie, but especially so in the middle ages, was to seal the friendship of the two monarchs. Don Jaime was to marry the princess Blanche, eldest daughter of the King of Naples, and granddaughter of the great Charles of Anjou. Boniface VIII., greatly attached, at the commencement of his popedom, to the interests of France, joyfully acquiesced in these arrangements.

Every thing seemed arranged, when unexpected obstacles arose. On the one hand, Charles of Valois, having neither dominions nor crown, obstinately resisted the transfer of his imaginary kingdom; on the other, the Sicilians declared they would die to a man rather than acknowledge the sovereignty of the house of Anjou. They summoned Don Jaime to renounce his project, and when he persisted in it, they raised to the throne the Infante Frederick, at first with the title of Lord of Sicily, afterwards with that of King. This prince proved worthy of the national choice. In vain did Boniface VIII. assail him in turn with flattery and menace; the new king of Sicily remained faithful to his people. By a strange concurrence of circumstances, he found himself opposed in arms to his brother Jaime of Arragon, now the ally of his father-in-law, Charles II., who had recovered his liberty and returned to his dominions. In spite of his own and his subjects' valour, Frederick III. was at first nearly overcome. The house of Anjou would have reconquered Sicily, but for the defection of the fickle King of Arragon, who abandoned his allies and returned home, carrying with him the contempt of all parties. After various changes of fortune, a definitive treaty of peace was concluded between the belligerents, under the auspices of Rome. By its conditions, Frederick III. was to retain the crown of Sicily for his life, with the title of King of Trinacria, invented to avoid infringement on the rights of Charles II., who kept the title of King of Sicily, with the reversion of the dominions for himself and his direct heirs, after the death of Frederick, who married Eleanor, youngest daughter of Charles. The basis of this treaty was manifestly unstable, its very letter was soon effaced: and Frederick, disdaining the singular title of King of Trinacria, soon resumed his rightful one. There were thus two kings of Sicily, on this and that side the straits, and from that period dates the term, the Two Sicilies.

During a reign of thirty-four years, Frederick III. did much for the nation that had placed him at its head. A scholar and a legislator, he encouraged letters, navigation, and trade, established a national representation, and bequeathed his subjects the famous Sicilian constitution, which was entirely destroyed only in the present century. But the tendency of power in Sicily was to the hands of the nobles. Frederick struggled hard to keep down the aristocracy, but his efforts had no permanent success: at his death the barons became omnipotent, the feudal system prevailed, and for more than a century the annals of the island are but a confused history of the rivalries of the Chiaromonte and the Vintimiglia, the Palizzi and the Alagona, the Luna and the Perolla, and many others besides. The Chiaromonte, notwithstanding their French origin,¹⁰ were the chiefs of the Italian or Latin party; they became absolute masters of Palermo, and reigned over it from the summit of their castle of Steri, whose massive masonry still exists in the heart of that city. The kings of Sicily, to obtain their support, sought the hands of their daughters; but at last the haughty patricians fell from their pinnacle of greatness, and by treason or stratagem were led to the scaffold. Distracted and weakened by discord, Sicily offered, at this time, an easy prey to Naples, had the descendants of the first Charles been the men to profit by the opportunity. But they were far from inheriting the martial energy of their great ancestor, and, in spite of circumstances frequently favourable, Sicily was never reconquered by the race of Charles of Anjou.

The concluding line of M. de St. Priest's work contains a sentiment which will doubtless find ready echo in the hearts of his countrymen, ever jealous of Great Britain's aggrandisement and territorial growth. "May Sicily" he says, "never become a second Malta." The wish, whose heartfelt sincerity cannot be doubted, points to the possibility, not to say the probability, of the event deprecated; an event which, however unwelcome to France, would, in many respects, be highly advantageous to the two parties more immediately concerned. So manifest are the benefits that it is almost impertinent to point them out. Sicily would find efficient protection, commercial advantages, a paternal and liberal government; England would obtain a storehouse and granary, and an excellent position whence to observe and check French progress in Northern Africa, should the ambition of the young republic, or of any other government that may succeed it, render interference necessary. At the present moment, when half Europe is unhinged, political speculation becomes doubly difficult; but whatever turn events take, there is little likelihood of France either abandoning her African colony or resting contented with its present extent. Doubtless, she will some day lay hold of Tunis, or at least make the attempt. It is but a short sail from Tunis to Sicily. The peace-at-all-price men, who would fain dispense with fleets and armies, and trust to the spread of philanthropy for the protection of Britain and its colonies, would have no fresh cause for their insipid and querulous grumblings in the annexation of Sicily to the British empire. It would be unnecessary to recruit an additional drummer, or man a cock-boat the more. The island Sicilians, of more hardy frame and courageous temper than their Continental neighbours, are, as they have lately shown, able to defend their liberties. They would furnish troops and mariners, who, with British discipline and direction, need be second to none in Europe. Increased advantages should of course be afforded to Sicilian produce imported into Great Britain. This would cut two ways. Whilst benefiting the Sicilian, and encouraging him to industry, it would spur the stolid and stubborn lawgivers of Spain to moderate the absurd tariff which excludes foreign manufactures from that country, save through illicit channels. Under British protection and British laws, Sicily, if she cannot hope ever to resume her ancient grandeur and prosperity, would flourish and improve to an extent impossible during her ill-assorted union with Naples.

CRIMES AND REMARKABLE TRIALS IN SCOTLAND

KIDNAPPING – PETER WILLIAMSON'S CASE

Before entering on the personal history of a man whose adventures carried him through all the strata of social life, from the feathered savage of the Prairies to the industrious burgess in small-clothes, let us give a few incidental notices of that crime – kidnapping, or man-stealing, – his subjection to which was the opening scene of his eventful career. We can, perhaps, scarcely point to a more distinct type of feebleness in the law of any country than the frequency of this crime. In that community where the people, marked off by any distinction in race or appearance – where persons born in serfdom, or of a particular line, or speaking a peculiar language – are doomed to slavery, the laws may be unjust and barbarous in the extreme, but it does not follow that they are feeble. The slavery exists by them, not in spite of them. It is in the country where the person, free by the law, is seized, and, in defiance of the law, held in forced bondage, in obedience to the interest or the malevolence of individuals, that this characteristic of feebleness is so prominently developed. The purloiner of coin or plate can only be tracked by external incidents; there is nothing in his connexion with the property that in itself proclaims his crime. The horse and cattle-stealer have to deal with less silent commodities; but even the objects of their depredations are not placed in an unnatural position by ownership, and have no voice wherewith to proclaim their custodier's dishonesty. But the man who holds another in possession in a free country, is a criminal in the eye of every one who sees him exercise his ownership; and he carries about with him a perpetual witness and accuser, who is under the strongest inducements to be ever vigilant and ever active. The law under which common thefts are practised, is only that which does not see far into a millstone; but the law under which kidnapping may be pursued with impunity, is deaf, and blind, and, paralytic. Owing to the strong central administration of justice in England, it does not appear that this crime was ever very prevalent in the south. We find, indeed, in Whitelock's Memorials, under the date of 9th May 1645 – "An ordinance against such who are called spirits, and use to steal away and take up children, and, bereave their parents of them, and convey them away." The measure then adopted, which will be found among the ordinances of the Long Parliament, shows us that it had become customary to seize children and carry them out of the country, to be employed as slaves in the plantations, or probably to be sold to the Mediterranean pirates. The ordinance says, "Whereas, the houses of Parliament are informed that divers lewd persons do go up and down the city of London and elsewhere, and in a most barbarous and wicked manner steal away many little children, it is ordered by the Lords and Commons, in Parliament assembled, that all officers and ministers of justice be hereby straitly charged and required to be very diligent apprehending all such persons as are faulty in this kind, either in stealing, selling, buying, enveigling, purloining, conveying, or receiving children so stolen, and to keep them in safe imprisonment till they may be brought to severe and exemplary punishment. It is further ordered, that the marshals of the Admiralty and the Cinque Ports do immediately make strict and diligent search in all ships, and vessels upon the river, and at the Downs, for all such children, according to such directions as they have, or shall receive from the committee of the Admiralty and Cinque Ports." The few reports we have of English cases of kidnapping are too profusely dressed up with technicalities to permit us to see the naked facts. Shower reports the case of Lees v. Dassigny, the 34th of Charles II. An English common-law reporter never condescends to know the year of the Christian era; he knows only that of the king's reign, and if he had to mention the foundation of the Turkish empire, he would mark it as the 28th Edward I.; while the discovery of America would as undoubtedly be an event of the 8th Henry VII. When we turn to our chronological tables, we find that the 34th of Charles II. means the year 1682. How far the pleadings throw any light on the adventures of the youth who had been kidnapped and sent abroad, the reader may judge from a fair specimen: – "They sue an homine replegiando in the name of the young Turbett; and after an alias and a pluries, they get an elongatus est per quendam Philippum Dassigny infra nominatum. This was to the Sheriff of London, whereas the defender never lived in London, but at Wapping, in Middlesex," &c. The effect of the pleading, of which this is the commencement, was, that the accused might be bailed, "and on security to bring home the boy in six months, death and the perils of the seas excepted, he was discharged on bail. In Trinity term the boy came home, and being brought into court was delivered to the father; but they never proceeded." Sir Thomas Raymond gives us the further information, that the kidnapper was a merchant trading to Jamaica, and that the victim "was a scholar at Merchant Taylor's school, and a hopeful young youth."¹¹ An act of King William's reign shows that the offence was still prevalent, by imposing penalties on the masters of vessels leaving people behind in "his Majesty's plantations or elsewhere." It appears to have been almost solely for the foreign market that kidnapping was practised in England. The cultivated and populous character of the country, the power of the laws, and the perpetual vicinity of a kind of parochial municipalities, probably rendered the forcible seizure and imprisonment of individuals within the country too difficult and dangerous an operation to have been frequently accomplished by force; though the fatal facilities for confinement in lunatic asylums may have frequently made them the living tombs of those whom the rapacity, or the malignant passions of others, have doomed to imprisonment. Yet, were we to take foreign novelists as true painters of English manners, we would find in Madame Cotin's Malvina, that a French beauty having secured the affections of an English duke, his powerful relations seize her after she has become his wife, and lock her up in a turret of their private castle, where, though the neighbouring physician and the clergyman visit her, and all the world knows that she is imprisoned, no one dares to interfere in her behalf; and her fate is only balanced by that of her husband, whom the Attorney-General transports, by a writ of Habeas Corpus, to the West Indies. Somewhat similar, if our memory serves us right, are the notions of British liberty embodied in Walladmor, the story got up to pass as a Waverley novel at one of the Leipsic fairs, where, in the year 1818, the Lord Lieutenant is found committing every person with whom he quarrels to his private dungeons in his own castle.

We need no writers of romance to find instances of kidnapping in Scotland before the Union. The vast solitudes which frequently separated inhabited districts from each other, the feudal fortalices scattered hither and thither, the weakness of the crown, the judicial powers possessed by many of the barons; and we may add to this, the spirit of clanship, which surrounded every Highland chief with an army of retainers, as faithful to the preservation of his secrets as they were relentless in avenging his feuds – all conspired to render it too easy for a powerful individual to adopt such a form of outrage against his enemy. Not that the practice was pursued in the manner of a sordid trade, as we have found it followed in England, and as we shall find that at a later period it was adopted among ourselves. The Scots had no colonies to be supplied with this species of living merchandise; and in truth the human animal has seldom been with us so valuable a commodity in the home market, as greatly to raise the cupidity of his neighbour.

Those who ventured on kidnapping flew at high game. A young or a superannuated king requiring the aid of able counsellors, nay, sometimes a monarch in the vigour of his power, would be the object of such an attempt. Among lesser personages, statesmen offensively powerful, dignified churchmen about to issue ecclesiastical censures, and judges of the Court of Session prepared to give adverse decisions, were in great request, and eagerly sought after. Alexander Gibson of Durie, for some time a principal clerk of session, and afterwards a judge in that court – lawyers know him as the author of a folio volume of reports of more than average unreadability – was a special victim, having been twice successfully spirited away. In 1604, George Meldrum, younger of Dumbreck, was tried for several acts of this description, of one of which Durie, then "ane of the clerks of our sovereign Lord's Council and Session," was a victim. Among those whom the kidnapper took to his assistance were – "John Johnston, called Swyne-foot," and some other worthies, comprehensively described as "ane company of common and notorious thieves, brigands, and murderers," who assembled "with swords, hagbuts, and pistolets." Durie was residing in St Andrews, and it appears that his enemy employed "ane fellow called Craik, the said George Meldrum's own man," to watch his motions. He was riding, as it would appear, on the bank of the Firth of Tay, opposite to Dundee, accompanied by a brother barrister and his servant, when the ambuscade "treasonably put violent hands on their persons," and "took them captives and prisoners." Their captor "reft fra them their purses, with certain gold and silver being therein, extending to the quantity of three hundred merks or thereby" – an act which the indictment reproachfully mentions as specially unworthy of "ane landed man." Meldrum proceeded with his captive through Fifeshire to Kinghorn, on the Forth; thence, crossing over to Leith, he marched through Edinburgh, "passing the palace gate of Holyroodhouse" – a circumstance to which the indictment alludes as a powerful illustration of the audacity of the transaction. The party then proceeded through Lothian and Tweeddale across the Border "unto England, to George Ratcliff's house, where they detained him captive and prisoner for the space of eight days or thereby."¹² Thus was this high official conveyed a distance of about a hundred miles, not only through the most populous and fertile part of the kingdom, but through the centre of the metropolis, under the very shadow of the throne; and that not by any of the great barons who could command an army of followers, but by a petty country gentleman, aided by a few Border freebooters.

The second private captivity of Durie was accomplished on the principle on which an elector is sometimes abstracted. It was for the purpose of defeating his adverse vote on the bench in a cause then before the court. Sir Walter Scott mentions the incident in the notes to the "Border Minstrelsy;" and the reader who remembers his picturesque and spirited narrative may perhaps be amused by seeing how the same event appears in the sober garb of a reporter of decisions. Forbes, in his "Journal of the Session," says —

"Some party in a considerable action before the session, finding the Lord Durie could not be persuaded to think his plea good, fell upon a stratagem to prevent the influence and weight that his lordship might have to his prejudice, by causing some strong masked men kidnap him in the Links of Leith at his diversion on a Saturday afternoon, and transport him to some blind and obscure room in the country, where he was detained captive without the benefit of daylight a matter of three months – though otherwise civilly and well entertained – during which time his lady and children went in mourning for him as dead. But after the cause aforesaid was decided, the Lord Durie was carried back by incognitoes, and dropped in the same place where he had been taken up."¹³

During the civil wars of the seventeenth century, the victorious party frequently found it difficult to dispose of their captives. In England many of them were sent to the plantations; and perhaps the idea which this practice communicated to the public, of the value of captives transported to the colonies, may have first instigated those acts of kidnapping against which we have found the Long Parliament protesting. Scotland had no such means of disposing of her prisoners, whose numbers were frequently very inconvenient. Many of them were sent abroad to be soldiers under those continental leaders who were considered on the same side with the victorious party at home; others were subjected to a sort of slavery in this country; but wherever their lot might be cast, their captivity would be very apt to be abbreviated by some revolution in the fortunes of war. A person who preserved accurate notes of political events as they passed under his eye, kept the following very business-like account of the distribution of the common soldiers taken in the battle in which Montrose was made prisoner: —

"Tuesday, 21st May [1650]. – This day the two hundred and eighty-one common soldiers taken at Kerbester, that were in the Canongate prison – the house ordains forty of them, being forced from Orkney, and have wife and children, to be dismissed. The house gives six of them, being fishers, to the lieutenant-general; also other six fishers of them, given by the parliament to the Marquis of Argyle; and six of them being lusty fellows, given to Sir James Hope, to his lead-mines. The remnant of them the house gives to the Lord Angus and Sir Robert Murray, to recruit the French regiments with, to be transported out of the country to France."¹⁴

It may be questioned if these gifts were very valuable to their receivers, or if the coerced labour they inferred was worth possessing. Certainly so little valuable was the mere human being to the community, some thirty years afterwards, that the liberal and patriotic Fletcher of Saltoun pleaded hard for the establishment of slavery in Scotland, not as a privilege to the aristocracy, but as a boon to "so many thousands of our people who are, at this day, dying for want of bread." He saw that sheep and oxen, being property, were cared for and kept alive, and, by a process of reasoning which he seemed to consider a very natural one, he thought that he had but to convert his fellow beings into property, to let them be also cared for. Yet, like all men who conceive social paradoxes, he was haunted by the shadow, cast before, of the revulsion of common sense against his proposal, and thus anticipated the obloquy it would incur. "I doubt not that what I have said will meet, not only with all the misconstruction and obloquy, but all the disdain, fury, and outcries, of which either ignorant magistrates or proud lazy people are capable. Would I bring back slavery into the world? Shall men of immortal souls, and by nature equal to any, be sold as beasts? Shall they and their posterity be for ever subjected to the most miserable of all conditions, the inhuman barbarity of masters, who may beat, mutilate, torture, starve, or kill, so great a number of mankind at pleasure? Shall the far greater part of the commonwealth be slaves, not that the rest may be free, but tyrants over them? With what face can we oppose the tyranny of princes, and recommend such tyranny as the highest virtue, if we make ourselves tyrants over the greatest part of mankind? Can any man, from whom such a thing has escaped, ever offer to speak for liberty? But they must pardon me if I tell them, that I regard not names but things; and that the misapplication of names has confounded every thing."¹⁵