that the young man should die, and his ‘surpassing self-wilfulness’ drove his councillors to a decision, though not without a long and stormy debate. The case was tried in the court of king's bench on 27 June, before the lord chancellor (Lord Audley of Walden), ‘sitting that day as high steward of England.’ Lord Dacre at first pleaded ‘not guilty;’ but, ‘overpersuaded by the courtiers, who gaped after his estate, to confess the fact’ (Camden, Elizabeth, ap. Kennett, ii. 580), he pleaded guilty, and ‘cast himself on the king's mercy, as the only way to save his own and his servant's life.’ A capital conviction necessarily followed. The judges thereupon used their influence with the king to obtain mercy. The king, however, was determined, and Dacre was ordered to be executed next day, 29 June, at 11 A.M., on Tower Hill. The execution was stayed by an order from the king, but carried out the same afternoon at Tyburn. Dacre was buried in St. Sepulchre's Church on Snow Hill. The popular compassion was deeply moved. Seven of his companions besides himself were indicted. Four of them were acquitted, and three shared his fate. The case has ever since been referred to as a notable precedent (Hall, Pleas of the Crown, i. 439; second part by Jacob, i. 47). Lord Dacre, by his wife Mary, daughter of George Neville, lord Abergavenny, left two sons, Thomas, who died, aged 15, in 1553, and Gregory [q. v.], who was restored to his honours in 1558, and a daughter, Margaret, who married Sampson Lennard, esq., of Chevening, Kent, and on the death of her brother without issue inherited his entailed estates, and was declared Baroness Dacre in 1604.
[Hall's Chronicle, p. 841; Holinshed's Chronicles, iii. 821; Froude's Hist. of England, iv. 120–2; Camden's Elizabeth, sub anno 1594; Hayley MSS. Brit. Mus. i. 743.]
FIENNES, WILLIAM, first Viscount Saye and Sele (1582–1662), son of Richard Fiennes, lord Saye and Sele, and Constance, daughter of Sir William Kingsmill, was born 28 May 1582, entered at New College as a fellow-commoner in 1596, was admitted a fellow in 1600, and succeeded his father in April 1613 (Doyle, Official Baronage, iii. 271; Wood, Athenæ Oxon. ed. Bliss, iii. 546). Clarendon characterises Saye as ‘a man of a close and reserved nature, of a mean and narrow fortune, of great parts and of the highest ambition, but whose ambition would not be satisfied with offices and preferment without some condescensions and alterations in ecclesiastical matters’ (Rebellion, iii. 26). During the latter part of James I's reign Saye was one of the most prominent opponents of the court. In 1621 he was active against Bacon, and urged that he should be degraded from the peerage (Gardiner, Hist. of England, iv. 102). In 1622 he opposed the benevolence levied by the king, saying that he knew no law besides parliament to persuade men to give away their own goods (Court and Times of James I, ii. 312). For this offence he was imprisoned for six months in the Fleet, and confined for some time afterwards to his own house (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1619–23, p. 487, ib. 1623–5, pp. 31, 168). When Buckingham returned from Spain and proposed to make himself popular by breaking the Spanish match, ‘he resolved to embrace the friendship of the Lord Saye, who was as solicitous to climb by that ladder’ (Clarendon, Rebellion, vi. 409). The promotion of Saye to the rank of viscount (6 July 1624) may be regarded as the fruit of this temporary friendship. It also helps to account for the extreme bitterness with which Saye prosecuted the attack on Cranfield, urging, for instance, that he should be fined 80,000l., the highest sum suggested during the discussion (Lords' Debates during 1624 and 1626, Camden Society, pp. 81–90). In the parliament of 1626 Saye was again in opposition; he defended the privileges of the peerage against the king in the cases of Bristol and Arundel, and intervened on behalf of Digges when Buckingham accused him of speaking treason (ib. pp. 127, 135, 139, 197). In the autumn of the same year he was among those who refused to pay the forced loan (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1625–6, p. 485). In the parliament of 1628, during the discussions on the king's claim to commit to prison without showing cause, he proved himself an able debater and skilful tactician, suggesting before the division ‘that all of them that would so ignobly stand against the most legal and ancient liberty of the subject should, together with their name, subscribe their reason to the vote, to remain upon record unto posterity, which motion daunted them all with a lively sense of their ignominy’ (Court and Times of Charles I, i. 349). He employed with great success the right of peers to protest, the value of which as a weapon of parliamentary warfare he seems to have been the first to discover. In the debates on the Petition of Right he opposed the reservations and amendments by which the court party sought to nullify it (Gardiner, Hist. of England). During the eleven years' intermission of parliaments Saye devoted his energies to schemes of colonisation partly to better his fortunes, but mainly from religious and political motives. In 1630 he established, in conjunction with Lord
