Yet, terrible as was the position of this entirely innocent man, he had cause for thankfulness on two counts.

The first of these was that he should have been brought to trial at all; the second, that his trial took place on the date named, and not a day earlier.

In the very delay which exacerbated him lay--although he did not realize it--his only chance of avoiding the gallows.
Easily, but for the favour of Fortune, he might have been one of those haled, on the morrow of the battle, more or less haphazard from the overflowing gaol at Bridgewater to be summarily hanged in the market-place by the bloodthirsty Colonel Kirke.

There was about the Colonel of the Tangiers Regiment a deadly despatch which might have disposed in like fashion of all those prisoners, numerous as they were, but for the vigorous intervention of Bishop Mews, which put an end to the drumhead courts-martial.
Even so, in that first week after Sedgemoor, Kirke and Feversham contrived between them to put to death over a hundred men after a trial so summary as to be no trial at all.

They required human freights for the gibbets with which they were planting the countryside, and they little cared how they procured them or what innocent lives they took.
What, after all, was the life of a clod?
The executioners were kept busy with rope and chopper and cauldrons of pitch.