TRIALS OF REBELS.

When the king passed the land-tax bill, which was ushered in with a very extraordinary preamble, he informed both houses of the pretender’s flight from Scotland. In the beginning of April a commission for trying the rebels met in the court of common-pleas, when bills of high treason were found against Mr. Forster, Mackintosh, and twenty of their confederates. Forster escaped from Newgate, and reached the continent in safety; the rest pleaded not guilty, and were indulged with time to prepare for their trials. The judges appointed to try the rebels at Liverpool, found a considerable number guilty of high treason. Two-and-twenty were executed at Preston and Manchester; about a thousand prisoners submitted to the king’s mercy, and petitioned for transportation. Pitts, the keeper of Newgate, being suspected of having connived at Forster’s escape, was tried for his life at the Old-Bailey, and acquitted. Notwithstanding this prosecution, which ought to have redoubled the vigilance of the jailors, brigadier Mackintosh, and several other prisoners, broke from Newgate, after having mastered the keeper and turnkey, and disarmed the sentinel. The court proceeded with the trials of those that remained, and a great number were found guilty; four or five were hanged, drawn, and quartered, at Tyburn; and among these was one William Paul, a clergyman, who, in his last speech, professed himself a true and sincere member of the church of England, but not of the revolution schismatical church, whose bishops had abandoned the king, and shamefully given up their ecclesiastical rights, by submitting to the unlawful, invalid, lay-deprivations authorized by the prince of Orange.