One is Malice Defeated, or a brief relation of the accusation and deliverance of Elizabeth Cellier. The authoress was implicated in the Dangerfield conspiracy, and, having been indicted for plotting to kill the King and to reintroduce Popery, was sentenced at the Old Bailey to be imprisoned till she had paid a fine of £1,000, to stand three times in the pillory, and to have her books burnt by the hangman. I do not suppose that, in her case, literature incurred any loss.
The other is the translation of Claude's Plaintes des Protestants, burnt at the Exchange on May 5th, 1686. After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, people like Sir Roger l'Estrange were well paid to write denials of any cruelties as connected with that measure in France; much as in our own day people wrote denials of the Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria. The famous Huguenot minister's book proved of course abundantly the falsity of this denial; but, as Evelyn says, so great a power in the English Court had then the French ambassador, "who was doubtless in great indignation at the pious and truly generous charity of all the nation for the relief of those miserable sufferers who came over for shelter," that, in deference to his wishes, the Government of James II. condemned the truth to the flames. Nothing in that monarch's reign proves more conclusively the depth of degradation to which his foreign policy and that of his brother had caused his country to fall.
FOOTNOTES:
[122:1] In Kennet's Register, 189.
[122:2] Lamont's Diary, 159.
[127:1] Scobell's Collection of Acts, II. 8.
