MONMOUTH'S INTERVIEW WITH THE KING. (See p. [303].)

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Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys, the most diabolical judge that ever sat on the bench—now rendered furious by nightly debauch and daily commission of cruelties; in his revels hugging in mawkish and disgusting fondness his brutal companions; in his discharge of his judicial duties passing the most barbarous sentences in the most blackguard and vituperative language; in whose blazing eye, distorted visage, and bellowing voice raged the unmitigated fiend,—was sent forth by his delighted master to consummate his vengeance on the unhappy people whom the soldiers had left alive and cooped up in prison. He was already created Baron of Wem, dubbed by the people Earl of Flint, and, the Lord Keeper just now dying, he was promised the Great Seal if he shed blood enough to satisfy his ruthless king. Four other judges were associated with him, rather for form than for anything else, for Jeffreys was the hardened, daring, and unscrupulous instrument on whom James confidently relied.

Jeffreys' Bloody Assize, as it was then and always has been termed, both from its wholesale slaughter and from the troops which accompanied him throughout the circuit—a name constantly used by the unfeeling king himself—was opened at Winchester on the 27th of August, and commenced with a case of hitherto unexampled ruthlessness. Mrs. Alice Lisle—or, as she was generally called, Lady Alice, her husband, one of the judges of Charles I., having been created a lord by Cromwell—was now an infirm and aged woman, deaf and lethargic. Her husband had been murdered, as we have related, by the Royalists, as he was entering the church at Lausanne. Lady Alice was known far and wide for her benevolence. Though her husband was on the other side, she had always shown active kindness to the followers of the king during the Civil War, and on this account, after her husband's death, his estate had been granted to her. During the rebellion of Monmouth her son had served in the king's army against the invader; yet this poor old lady was now accused of having given a night's shelter to Hicks, a Nonconformist minister, and Nelthorpe, a lawyer, outlawed for his concern in the Rye House Plot. They were fugitives from Sedgemoor, and the law of treason was that he who harbours a traitor is liable to death, the punishment of a traitor. Mrs. Lisle had no counsel, and pleaded that though she knew that Hicks was a Presbyterian minister, she did not know that he and Nelthorpe were concerned in the rebellion, and there was no direct proof of the fact.

Jeffreys terrified the witnesses, and then came the turn of the jury. They retired to consult, but not coming to a speedy conclusion, for they were afraid of the judge, and yet loth to condemn the prisoner, Jeffreys sent them word that if they did not agree he would lock them up all night. They then came into court and expressed their doubts of Mrs. Lisle knowing that Hicks had been with Monmouth. Jeffreys told them that their doubt was altogether groundless, and sent them back to agree. Again they returned, unable to get rid of their doubt. Then Jeffreys thundered against them in his fiercest style, and declared that were he on the jury, he would have found her guilty had she been his own mother. At length the jury gave way and brought in a verdict of guilty. The next morning Jeffreys pronounced sentence upon her amid a storm of vituperation against the Presbyterians, to whom he supposed Mrs. Lisle belonged. He ordered her, according to the rigour of the old law of treason, to be burned alive that very afternoon.

This monstrous sentence thoroughly roused the inhabitants of the place; and the clergy of the cathedral, the staunchest supporters of the king's beloved arbitrary power, remonstrated with Jeffreys in such a manner, that he consented to a respite of five days, in order that application might be made to the king. The clergy sent a deputation to James, earnestly interceding for the life of the aged woman, on the ground of her generous conduct on all occasions to the king's friends. Ladies of high rank, amongst them the Ladies St. John and Abergavenny, pleaded tenderly for her life. Feversham, moved by a bribe of a thousand pounds, joined in the entreaty, but nothing could move that obdurate heart, and all the favour that James would grant her was that she should be beheaded instead of burnt. Her execution, accordingly, took place at Winchester on the 2nd of September, and James II. won the unenviable notoriety of being the only tyrant in England, however implacable, who had ever dyed his hands in woman's blood for the merciful deed of attempting to save the lives of the unfortunate. What made this case worse was, that neither Hicks nor Nelthorpe had yet been tried, so that the trial of Mrs. Lisle was altogether illegal, and the forcing of the jury completed one of the most diabolical instances of judicial murder on record.

From Winchester Jeffreys proceeded to Dorchester. He came surrounded by still more troops, and, in fact, rather like a general to take bloody vengeance, than as a judge to make a just example of the guilty, mingled with mercy, on account of the ignorance of the offenders. The ferocious tyrant was rendered more ferocious, from his temper being exasperated by the agonies of the stone which his drunken habits had inflicted on him. He had the court hung with scarlet, as if to announce his sanguinary determination. When the clergyman who preached before him recommended mercy in his sermon, he was seen to make a horrible grimace, expressive of his savage disdain of such a sentiment. It was whilst preparing to judge the three hundred prisoners collected there, that he received the news of his elevation to the woolsack. He had received orders from James to make effectual work with the rebels, and he now adopted a mode of despatching the unhappy wretches in wholesale style. As it would be a very tedious work to try all that number one by one, he devised a more expeditious plan. He sent two officers to them into the prison, offering them mercy or certain death. All who chose to make confession of their guilt should be treated with clemency, all who refused should be led to immediate execution. His clemency amounted to a respite of a day or two—he hanged them all the same. Writing to Sunderland, Jeffreys said on the 16th of September:—"This day I began with the rebels, and have despatched ninety-eight." Of the three hundred, two hundred and ninety-two received sentence of death. Eighty only were hanged, the rest were, for the most part, sent to the Plantations as slaves.

From Dorchester he went to Exeter, where two hundred and forty-three prisoners awaited their doom. He proceeded in the same way, and condemned the whole body in a batch, and as they saved him much trouble, he did not hang so many of them. Taunton, the capital of Somersetshire, the county where the rebellion was the strongest, presented him with no fewer than a thousand prisoners. Here he perfectly revelled in his bloody task. The work seemed to have the effect of brandy or champagne upon him. He grew every day more exuberant and riotous. He was in such a state of excitement from morning to night, that many thought him drunk the whole time. He laughed like a maniac, bellowed, scolded, cut his filthy jokes on the astounded prisoners, and was more like an exulting demon than a man. There were two hundred and thirty-three prisoners hanged, drawn, and quartered in a few days. The whole number hanged in this bloody campaign has been variously stated at from three to seven hundred. Probably the medium is the most correct. But so many were hung in chains, or their jointed quarters and limbs displayed on the highways, village greens, and in the market-places, that the whole country was infected with the intolerable stench. Some of their heads were nailed on the porches of parish churches; the whole district was a perfect Golgotha. It was in vain that the most distinguished people endeavoured to check the infuriated judge's rage; he only turned his evil diatribes on them, and gave them what he called "a lick with the rough side of his tongue." Because Lord Stowell, a Royalist, complained of the remorseless butchery of the poor people of his neighbourhood, he gibbeted a corpse at his park gate.

The fate of the transported prisoners was worse than death itself. They were eight hundred and forty in number, and were granted as favours to the courtiers. Jeffreys estimated that they were, on an average, worth from ten pounds to fifteen pounds apiece to the grantee. They were not to be shipped to New England or New Jersey, because the Puritan inhabitants might have a sympathy with them on account of their religion, and mitigate the hardship of their lot. They were to go to the West Indies, where they were to be slaves, and not acquire their freedom for ten years. They were transported in small vessels with all the horrors of the slave trade. They were crowded so that they had not room for lying down all at once; were never allowed to go on deck; and in darkness, starvation, and pestiferous stench, they died daily in such quantities that the loss of one-fifth of them was calculated on. The rest reached the Plantations, ghastly, emaciated, and all but lifeless. Even the innocent school girls, many under ten years of age, at Taunton, who had gone in procession to present a banner to Monmouth, at the command of their mistress, were not excused. The queen, who had never preferred a single prayer to her husband for mercy to the victims of this unprecedented proscription, was eager to participate in the profit, and had a hundred sentenced men awarded to her, the profit on which was calculated at one thousand pounds. Her maids of honour solicited a share of this blood-money, and had a fine of seven thousand pounds on these poor girls assigned to them.

The only persons who escaped from this sea of blood were Grey, Sir John Cochrane, who had been in Argyll's expedition, Storey, who had been commissary to Monmouth's army, Wade, Goodenough, and Ferguson. All these owed their escape to money or their secret services in giving information against their old friends, except Ferguson, who by some means escaped to the Continent. On the other hand, Bateman, the surgeon who had bled Oates in Newgate after his scourging, and by his attentions saved his life, was, for a mere duty of his profession, arrested, tried, hanged, and quartered.