Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [17]
The covert respectability of dueling was reflected in the way surviving protagonists were treated. Charles II had issued a proclamation against duelists but invariably pardoned those convicted, and a blind eye was turned throughout William’sreign. Duelists made frequent appearances in the courts but were never put to death for their crime. “I neither heard before nor after that killing a man in a fair duel was found murder,” remarked Law’s friend James Johnston, the Earl of Warriston. In his Newgate cell, Law must have concluded calmly, therefore, that there was no cause for alarm. A reprieve was certain. Over the following weeks and months his optimism began to seem misplaced.
Wilson’s cousins—the Townsend, Ash, and Windham families—were eager to avenge the death of their kinsman. All were prominent courtiers and as such “strangely prepossessed King William.” They anticipated, correctly, that Law’s supporters would try to secure a royal pardon, so they besieged the king with counterdemands. In this particularly brutal duel, they insisted, Law had shown himself a man of dishonor. Premeditated malice had been proven, therefore no mercy should be shown. Within days of the trial, a haze of subterfuge and intrigue pervaded the cabinets and corridors of Whitehall Palace. Caught in its midst, King William became uneasy and increasingly irate whenever the matter was raised.
Law’s most stalwart supporter was the Earl of Warriston. A fellow Scot, intelligent, honest, and a brilliant lawyer, Warriston had been brought up in Holland and studied law in Utrecht. His bond with King William was long-standing—Warriston had helped to set up an intelligence network before the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which had brought William to the throne. At the time of Law’s imprisonment, Warriston was Scottish Secretary, having replaced the disgraced Earl of Stair in the aftermath of the massacre of Glencoe.
How or where Law and Warriston met is not known, but the bond between them must have been close, because Warriston braved the king’s wrath more than once to help. First he accosted William at his morning levee with the claim that Wilson’s supporters had bought off the jury, and that Law was being made unjustly to “suffer for his ingenuity.” His legal expertise told him that “without Mr. Law’s confession the fact could not have been proved, for those that saw it being strangers to him when brought to prison to see him, could only swear that it was one like him.” In other words, if Law had denied his presence he would probably have escaped sentence of death.
The king’s antipathy to his Scottish subjects was immediately apparent in his scathing retort: “What . . . Scotchmen suffer for their ingenuity. Was ever such a thing known?” The more Warriston attempted to reason with him, the more the royal anger smoldered: “When I reasoned the matter . . . I was more rudely treated by him and the nation too than we ever had been upon any occasion.” The king was convinced that money lay at the root of the quarrel. “He could not but believe . . . that Mr. Laws had quarrelled with Wilson who, he said, was a known coward, in order to make him give him money.” This placed a sordid complexion on the matter, and he saw no reason for the death sentence to be lifted.
Warriston realized he would need help to overcome the king’s antagonism and enlisted the help of the dashing Duke of Shrewsbury, who at the time “had more power . . . with the King than any man alive,” and, fortunately for Law, also owed Warriston a favor. Shrewsbury cannily advised Warriston to play for time and let the king’s temper subside—“he would