or woody stems, and their limbs are in an extremely reduced condition.
SAWTREY, WILLIAM (d. 1401), English Lollard, was a
priest at Lynn who was summoned before the bishop of Norwich
for heresy in 1399. He does not appear at this time to have been
seriously punished, and at the beginning of 1401 he is found in
London, where his preaching again attracted the notice of the
ecclesiastical authorities. The statute De heretic comburendo
had just been introduced for the purpose of stamping out heresy,
but it had not become law when Sawtrey was summoned to
St Paul's and was charged with denying transubstantiation,
with refusing to adore the cross except as a symbol, and with six
other heresies. He defended himself ably against Archbishop
Thomas Arundel, but in February he was condemned and was
degraded from the priesthood. Being the first Lollard to be put
to death he was burned at St Paul's Cross in March 1401.
SAWYER, SIR ROBERT (1633–1692), English lawyer, a
younger son of Sir Edmund Sawyer, auditor of the city of London,
was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he distinguished
himself in classical learning, being the first Craven
Scholar in 1648. He acquired a good practice at the bar, and in
1673 he was elected to the House of Commons, where for a short
time in 1678 he was speaker. He inclined to the side of the
court in politics, but was a strong opponent of concession to the
Roman Catholics, and was one of the draftsmen of the Exclusion
Bill. About the same time he began to appear as counsel in
important state trials; he prosecuted Sir George Wakeman
and others accused of complicity in the Popish plot in 1679;
in 1681, having been in that year appointed attorney-general,
he appeared for the crown in the prosecutions of Stephen
College and Lord Shaftesbury; in the following year in the
proceedings against the charter of the city of London; and in
1683 against Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney for complicity
in the Rye House plot; and he conducted the case against Titus
Oates for perjury in 1685. Although James II. retained him as
attorney-general, he proved himself by no means a complacent
instrument of the royal prerogative; he advised the king against
the legality of the dispensing power, and objected to signing the
patents appointing Roman Catholics to office from which they
were excluded by law. He was dismissed from the attorney-generalship
in 1687, and in the following year he appeared
as leading counsel for the defence of the seven bishops, whose
acquittal he secured. On the flight of James II., Sawyer maintained
that the throne had thereby been abdicated, and took a
prominent part in the debates on the constitutional questions
then brought to the front. Owing to an attack upon him in
1690 in relation to his conduct in the case of Sir Thomas Armstrong
in 1684, Sawyer was expelled from the House of Commons,
but was returned again for Cambridge University shortly afterwards.
He died on the 30th of July 1692. Sawyer's only
daughter married Thomas Herbert, 8th earl of Pembroke.
See State Trials, vols. vii.-xii.; Laurence Eachard, History of England (3 vols., London, 1707–1718), especially for Sawyer's defence of the seven bishops; Narcissus Luttrell, Brief Relation of State Affairs, 1678–1714 (Oxford, 1857); Gilbert Burnet, History of His Own Times (6 vols., Oxford, 1833); and the Histories of England by Hallam and Lord Macaulay.
SAX, ANTOINE JOSEPH, known as Adolphe (1814–1894),
maker of musical instruments, was born at Dinant in Belgium
on the 6th of November 1814 and died in Paris in 1894. In
1835 he perfected a bass clarinet superior to any that had
preceded it. He came to Paris in 1842 and succeeded in interesting
many eminent men, including Berlioz and Halévy. He set
up a workshop in the Rue St Georges and studied acoustics,
discovering a new principle in the manufacture of wind instruments,
viz. that it is the proportions given to a column of air
vibrating in a sonorous tube, and these alone, that determine
the character of the timbre produced: the material of the walls
of the tube is not of the slightest importance so long as it offers
enough resistance. Together with his genius for mechanical
invention Sax seems to have combined a knowledge of
self-advertisement, and his name was often prefixed to successful
types of instrument for the invention of which he was not
primarily responsible. In 1845 he patented his saxhorn and a
family of cylinder instruments called saxotrombas. On the
22nd of June 1846 he registered the saxophone. He also effected
various improvements in piston instruments, of which the most
important was the substitution of a single ascending piston for
a number of descending ones.
See J. P. O. Cornettant, Histoire d'un inventeur (1860); C. Pilard, Les Inventions Sax (1869).
SAXE, JOHN GODFREY (1816–1887), American poet, was
born at Highgate, Vermont, on the 2nd of June 1816. He
graduated at Middlebury College in 1839, and was admitted to
the bar at St Albans, Vermont, in 1843. From 1850 to 1856 he
edited the Burlington (Vermont) Sentinel, in 1859 and in 1860 was
the candidate of the Democratic party for governor of Vermont,
in 1860 removed to New York, and after 1872 edited the Evening
Journal at Albany, New York, where he died on the 31st of
March 1887. He was best known as a writer of humorous verse
and a lecturer. His travesties and satires found many readers
or listeners, and some of his love lyrics and other poems combine
sparkle with real feeling. His “ Rhyme of the Rail,” “ The
Proud Miss McBride,” “ I'm Growing Old ” and “ Treasures
in Heaven ” were once very popular. Among his published
collections are Humorous and Satirical Poems (1850), The Times,
The Telegraph, and other Poems (1865), and Leisure Day Rhymes
(1875).
SAXE, MAURICE, Comte De (1696–1750), marshal of France, was the natural son of Augustus II. of Saxony and the countess Aurora Königsmark, and was born at Goslar on the 28th of October 1696. In 1698 the countess sent him to Warsaw to his father, who had been elected king of Poland in the previous year, but on account of the unsettled condition of the country the greater part of his youth was spent outside its limits. This separation from his father made him independent of control and had an important effect on his future career. At the age of twelve he was present, with the army of Eugène, at the sieges of Tournay and Mons and the battle of Malplaquet, but the achievements ascribed to. him in this campaign are chiefly fabulous. A proposal to send him at the close of it to a Jesuit college at Brussels was relinquished on account of the protests of his mother; and, returning to the camp of the allies in the beginning of 1710, he displayed a courage so impetuous as to call forth from Eugène the friendly admonition not to confound rashness with valour. He next served under Peter the Great against the Swedes. After receiving in 1711 formal recognition from his father, with the rank of count, he accompanied him to Pomerania, and in 1712 he took part in the siege of Stralsund. In manhood he bore a strong resemblance to his father, both in person and character. His grasp was so powerful that he could bend a horse-shoe with his hand, and to the last his energy and endurance were scarcely subdued by the illnesses resulting from his many excesses. In 1714 a marriage was arranged between him and one of the richest of his father's subjects, Johanna Victoria, Countess von Loeben, but he dissipated her fortune so rapidly that he was soon heavily in debt, and, having given her more serious grounds of complaint against him, he consented to an annulment of the marriage in 1721. Meantime, after serving in a campaign against the Turks in 1717, he had in 1719 gone to Paris to study mathematics, and in 1720 obtained a commission as maréchal de camp. In 1725 negotiations were entered into for his election as duke of Courland, at the instance of the duchess Anna Ivanovna, who offered him her hand. He was chosen duke in 1726, but declining marriage with the duchess found it impossible to resist her opposition to his claims, although, with the assistance of £30,000 lent him by the French actress Adrienne Lecouvreur, whose story forms the subject of Scribe and Legouvé's tragedy, he raised a force by which he maintained his authority till 1727, when he withdrew and took up his residence in Paris. On the outbreak of the war in 1734 he served under Marshal Berwick, and for a brilliant exploit at the siege at Philippsburg he was in August named lieutenant-general. On the opening of the Austrian Succession War in 1741, he took command of a division of the army sent to invade Austria, and
