ABSTRACT
Lord Nottingham’s life, from 1621 to 1682, embraced the years of religious and political strife leading to and following from the English Civil War. For a sense of the anguish of those years, including the middle 1650s when the country was ruled by a Christian millenarian army, let us listen to him speaking as Lord High Steward in the House of Lords on 7 December 1680. Lord Stafford had been impeached for high treason following the so-called Popish Plot. Nottingham found his part ‘a very sad one’. It was the first time he had pronounced sentence of death. Invoking a ‘general and desperate conspiracy of the papists’, he outlined Stafford’s role in the ‘demonstration of zeal… against the person of the King’ and directed to ‘the ruin of the state’, actions that were not those of one ‘interested in the preservation of government [and] so much obliged to the moderation of it’. The sentence closes with the judgment: ‘that you go to the place from whence you came; from thence you must be drawn upon a hurdle to the place of execution; when you come there, you must be hanged by the neck but not till you are dead; for you must be cut down alive, your privy members must be cut off and your bowels ript up before your face and thrown into the fire; then your head must be severed from your body and your body divided into four quarters and these must be at the disposal of the King. And God almighty be merciful to your soul.’
