In a few days after there was exhibited one of Lord Shaftesbury’s famous Protestant processions, on the anniversary of the accession of Queen Elizabeth. In this rode a figure on horseback, to represent the ex-recorder, with his face to the tail, and a label on his back, “I am an Abhorrer.” At Temple Bar he was thrown into a bonfire, coupled with the devil; the preceding pair, who suffered the same fate, being Sir Roger L’Estrange[116] and the Pope of Rome.
However, all these indignities endeared him to the court; and his pusillanimity was forgiven from the recollection of past and the hope of future services. A petition from the city being presented to the king at Hampton Court, he attended as a liveryman, though no longer the mouthpiece of the corporation, when he was treated with marked civility by Charles, and detained to dinner, while the lord mayor and aldermen and the new recorder were sent off with a reprimand.
To oblige the court, and to assist them in their criminal jobs, he accepted the appointment of chairman of the Middlesex sessions at Hicks’s Hall, although it was somewhat beneath his dignity, and it deprived him of a portion of his practice. Here the grand jury were sworn in; and as they were returned by sheriffs whom the city of London elected, and who were still of the liberal party, the problem was to have them remodelled, so that they might find bills of indictment against all whom the government wished to prosecute. With this view, Jeffreys declared that none should serve except true church of England men; and he ordered the under-sheriff to return a new panel purged of all sectarians. He had a particular spite against the Presbyterians, who had mainly contributed to his being turned out of the recordership. The under-sheriff disobeying his summons, he ordered the sheriffs to attend next day in person; but in their stead came the new recorder, who urged that, by the privileges of the city of London, they were exempted from attending at Hicks’s Hall. He overruled this claim with contempt, and fined the sheriffs one hundred pounds. It was found, however, that while the city retained the power of electing the sheriffs, all these attempts to pervert justice would be fruitless.
Jeffreys remained in a state of painful anxiety during Charles’s last Westminster Parliament, and during the few days of the Oxford Parliament. The popular party had such a majority in the House of Commons, and seemed so powerful, that it is said the renegade again expressed deep regret that he had left them; but late at night, on Monday, the 28th day of March, 1681, news arrived in London, that early that morning the king had dissolved the Parliament, and had declared his firm determination never to call another. If Jeffreys was still sober, and got drunk that night, we ought to excuse him.
Now his talents were to be brought into full play. In the conflict, the ranks of the enemy being thrown into disorder, the brigade of the lawyers, who had been kept back as a reserve, was marched up to hang on their broken rear, insulting, and to sweep them from the field.
First came on the trial of Fitzharris for high treason. Jeffreys, as counsel for the crown, argued the demurrer to the plea of the pendency of the impeachment; and then, having assisted the Duchess of Portsmouth to evade the questions which were put to her for the purpose of showing that the prisoner had acted under the king’s orders, he addressed the jury with great zeal after the solicitor general, and was mainly instrumental in obtaining the conviction.
Next came the trial of Archbishop Plunkett, the Roman Catholic Primate of Ireland, in which Jeffreys was so intemperate that the attorney general was obliged to check him, that the prisoner might have some show of fair play. But it was on the trial of College, “the Protestant joiner,”[117] that he gave the earliest specimen of his characteristic ribaldry, and his talent for jesting in cases of life and death, which shone out so conspicuously when he was lord chief justice of the King’s Bench. He began with strongly justifying the act of taking from the prisoner the papers he was to use in his defence, saying, that to allow him to see them would be “assigning counsel to him with a vengeance.” A witness having stated that pistols were found in the prisoner’s holsters when he was attending the city members at Oxford, he exclaimed with a grin, “I think a chisel might have been more proper for a joiner.”
There was called as a witness, by the prisoner, one Lun, who, being a waiter at the Devil Tavern and a fanatic, had some years before been caught on his knees praying against the Cavaliers, saying, “Scatter them, good Lord! Scatter them!” from whence he had ever after borne the nickname of “Scatter’em.” Jeffreys thus begins his cross-examination: “We know you, Mr. Lun; we only ask questions about you that the jury too may know you as well as we.” Lun.—“I don’t care to give evidence of any thing but the truth. I was never on my knees before the Parliament for any thing.” Jeffreys.—“Nor I neither for much; yet you were once on your knees when you cried, ‘Scatter them, good Lord!’ Was it not so, Mr. Scatter’em?”
He had next an encounter with the famous Titus Oates, who was called by College, and who, when cross-examined by him, appealed to Sir George Jeffreys’s own knowledge of a fact about which he was inquiring. Jeffreys.—“Sir George Jeffreys does not intend to be an evidence, I assure you.” Dr. Oates.—“I do not desire Sir George Jeffreys to be an evidence for me; I had credit in Parliaments, and Sir George had disgrace in one of them.” Jeffreys.—“Your servant, doctor; you are a witty man and a philosopher.” He had his full revenge when the doctor himself was afterwards tried before him.
We may judge of the councillor’s general style of treating witnesses by his remark on the trial of Lord Grey de Werke for carrying off the Lady Henrietta Berkeley; when his objection was overruled to the competency of the young lady as a witness for the defendant, although she was not only of high rank and uncommon beauty, but undoubted veracity, he observed, “Truly, my lord, we would prevent perjury if we could.”