164 DUTCH AND ENGLISH ON THE HUDSON

The scaffold was erected at the lower end of the
park and weeping people thronged about the vic-
tims. Leisler's dying speech, which was marked
by neither anger nor bitterness, affirmed that he
had no other aim than " to maintain against Popery
or any schism or heresy whatever the interest of
our Sovereign Lord and Lady and the Reformed
Protestant Churches" in these parts. The drop
fell, the populace rushed up to claim some relics
of their leader, the bodies were taken down, be-
headed, and buried, and so the worthless Slough-
ter thought to make an end of "a troublesome
fellow."

But the Leisler blood still flowed in the veins of
the dead man's son, who never ceased fighting till
in 1695 the attainder on the estate was removed.
This action of the English Parliament was tanta-
mount to a confession that Leisler had been un-
justly accused, tried, and hanged, and that these,
the only people ever put to death for political
reasons on the soil of New York, died as misguided
martyrs, not as criminal conspirators.