A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon / For the Use of Schools and Colleges

by John Lord

But all this enthusiasm was soon to end. The Duke of Albemarle—the son of General Monk, who restored Charles II.—advanced against him with the militia of the country, and Monmouth was supported only by the vulgar, the weak, and the credulous. Not a single nobleman joined his standard, and but few of the gentry. He made innumerable blunders. He lost time by vain attempts to drill the peasants and farmers who followed his fortunes. He slowly advanced to the west of England, where he hoped to be joined by the body of the people. But all men of station and influence stood aloof. Discouraged and dismayed, he reached Wells, and pushed forward to capture Bristol, then the second city in the kingdom. He was again disappointed. He was forced, from unexpected calamities, to abandon the enterprise. He then turned his eye to Wilts; but when he arrived at the borders of the county, he found that none of the bodies on which he had calculated had made their appearance. At Phillips Norton was a slight skirmish, which ended favorably to Monmouth, in which the young Duke of Grafton, natural son of Charles II., distinguished himself against his half brother; but Monmouth was discouraged, and fell back to Bridgewater. Meanwhile the royal army approached, and encamped at Battle of Sedgemoor. Sedgemoor. Here was fought a decisive battle, which was fatal to the rebels, "the last deserving the name of battle, that has been fought on English ground." Monmouth, when all was lost, fled from the field, and hastened to the British Channel, hoping to gain the Continent. He was found near the New Forest, hidden in a ditch, exhausted by hunger and fatigue. He was sent, under a strong guard, to Ringwood; and all that was left him was, to prepare to meet the death of a rebel. But he clung to life, so justly forfeited, with singular tenacity. He abjectly and meanly sued for pardon from that inexorable tyrant who never forgot or forgave the slightest resistance from a friend, when even that resistance was lawful, much less rebellion from a man he both hated and despised. He was transferred to London, lodged in the Tower, and Death of Monmouth. executed in a bungling manner by "Jack Ketch"—the name given for several centuries to the public executioner. He was buried under St. Peter's Chapel, in the Tower, where reposed the headless bodies of so many noted saints and political martyrs—the great Somerset, and the still greater Northumberland, the two Earls of Essex, and the fourth Duke of Norfolk, and other great men who figured in the reigns of the Plantagenets and the Tudors.

Monmouth's rebellion was completely suppressed, and a most signal vengeance was inflicted on all who were concerned in it. No mercy was shown, on the part of government, to any party or person.

Of the agents of James in punishing all concerned in the rebellion, there were two, preëminently, whose names are consigned to an infamous immortality. The records of English history contain no two names so loathsome and hateful as Colonel Kirke and Judge Jeffreys.

The former was left, by Feversham, in command of the royal forces at Bridgewater, after the battle of Sedgemoor. He had already gained an unenviable notoriety, as governor of Tangier, where he displayed the worst vices of a tyrant and a sensualist; and his regiment had imitated him in his disgraceful brutality. But this leader and these troops were now let loose on the people of Somersetshire. One hundred captives were put to death during the week which succeeded the battle. His irregular butcheries, however, were not according to the taste of the king. A more systematic slaughter, under the sanctions of the law, was devised, and Jeffreys was sent into the Western Circuit, to try the numerous persons who were immured in the jails of the western counties.

Sir George Jeffreys, Chief Justice of the Court of the King's Bench, was not deficient in talent, but was constitutionally the victim of violent passions. He first attracted notice as an insolent barrister at the Old Bailey Court, who had a rare tact in cross-examining criminals and browbeating witnesses. According to Macaulay, "impudence and ferocity sat upon his brow, while all tenderness for the feelings of others, all self-respect, all sense of the becoming, were obliterated from his mind. He acquired a boundless command of the rhetoric in which the vulgar express hatred and contempt. The profusion of his maledictions could hardly be rivalled in the Fish Market or Bear Garden. His yell of fury sounded, as one who often heard it said, like the thunder of the judgment day. He early became common serjeant, and then recorder of London. As soon as he obtained all the city could give, he made haste to sell his forehead of brass and his tongue of venom to the court." He was just the man whom Charles II. wanted as a tool. He was made chief justice of the highest court of criminal law in the realm, and discharged its duties entirely to the satisfaction of a king resolved on the subjection of the English nation. His violence, at all times, was frightful; but when he was drunk, it was terrific: and he was generally intoxicated. His first exploit was the judicial murder of Algernon Sydney. On the death of Charles, he obtained from James a peerage, and a seat in the Cabinet, a signal mark of royal approbation. In prospect of yet greater honors, he was ready to do whatever James required. James wished the most summary vengeance inflicted on the rebels, and Jeffreys, with his tiger ferocity, was ready to execute his will.

Nothing is more memorable than those "bloody assizes" which he held in those counties through which Monmouth had passed. Nothing is remembered with more execration. Nothing ever equalled the Brutality of Jeffreys. brutal cruelty of the judge. His fury seemed to be directed with peculiar violence upon the Dissenters. "Show me," said he, "a Presbyterian, and I will show thee a lying knave. Presbyterianism has all manner of villany in it. There is not one of those lying, snivelling, canting Presbyterians, but, one way or another, has had a hand in the rebellion." He sentenced nearly all who were accused, to be hanged or burned; and the excess of his barbarities called forth pity and indignation even from devoted loyalists. He boasted that he had hanged more traitors than all his predecessors together since the Conquest. On a single circuit, he hanged three hundred and fifty; some of these were people of great worth, and many of them were innocent; while many whom he spared from an ignominious death, were sentenced to the most cruel punishments—to the lash of the pillory, to imprisonment in the foulest jails, to mutilation, to banishment, and to heavy fines.

King James watched the conduct of the inhuman Jeffreys with delight, and rewarded him with the Great Seal. The Old Bailey lawyer had now climbed to the greatest height to which a subject could aspire. He was Lord Chancellor of England—the confidential friend and agent of the king, and his unscrupulous instrument in imposing the yoke of bondage on an insulted nation.

At this period, the condition of the Puritans was deplorable. At no previous time was Persecution of the Dissenters. persecution more inveterate, not even under the administration of Laud and Strafford. The persecution commenced soon after the restoration of Charles II., and increased in malignity until the elevation of Jeffreys to the chancellorship. The sufferings of no class of sectaries bore any proportion to theirs. They found it difficult to meet together for prayer or exhortation even in the smallest assemblies. Their ministers were introduced in disguise. Their houses were searched. They were fined, imprisoned, and banished. Among the ministers who were deprived of their livings, were Gilpin, Bates, Howe, Owen, Baxter, Calamy, Poole, Charnock, and Flavel, who still, after a lapse of one hundred and fifty years, enjoy a wide-spread reputation as standard writers on theological subjects. These great lights of the seventeenth century were doomed to privation and poverty, with thousands of their brethren, most of whom had been educated at the Universities, and were among the best men in the kingdom. All the Stuart kings hated the Dissenters, but none hated them more than Charles II. and James II. Under their sanction, complying parliaments passed repeated acts of injustice and cruelty. The laws which were enacted during Queen Elizabeth's reign were reënacted and enforced. The Act of Uniformity, in one day, ejected two thousand ministers from their parishes, because they refused to conform to the standard of the Established Church. The Conventicle Act ordained that if any person, above sixteen years of age, should be present at any religious meeting, in any other manner than allowed by the Church of England, he should suffer three months' imprisonment, or pay a fine of five pounds, that six months imprisonment and ten pounds fine should be inflicted as a penalty for the second offence, and banishment for the third. Married women taken at "conventicles," were sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment. It is calculated that twenty-five thousand Dissenters were immured in gloomy prisons, and that four thousand of the sect of the Quakers died during their imprisonment in consequence of the filth and malaria of the jails, added to cruel treatment.

Among the illustrious men who suffered most unjustly, was Richard Baxter, the glory of the Presbyterian party. He was minister at Kidderminster, where he was content to labor in an humble sphere, having refused a bishopric. He had written one hundred and forty-five distinct treatises, in two hundred volumes, which were characterized for learning and talent. But neither his age, nor piety, nor commanding virtues could screen him from the cruelties of Jeffreys; and, in fifteen years, he was five times imprisoned. His sufferings drew tears from Sir Matthew Hale, with whose friendship he had been honored. "But he who had enjoyed the confidence of the best of judges, was cruelly insulted by the worst." When he wished to plead his cause, the drunken chief justice replied, "O Richard, Richard, thou art an old fellow and an old knave. Thou hast written books enough to load a cart, every one of which is as full of sedition as an egg is full of meat. I know that thou hast a mighty party, and I see a great many of the brotherhood in corners, and a doctor of divinity at your elbow; but, by the grace of God, I will crush you all."

Entirely a different man was John Bunyan, not so influential or learned, but equally worthy. He belonged to the sect of the Baptists, and stands at the head of all unlettered men of genius—the most successful writer of allegory that any age has seen. The Pilgrim's Progress is the most popular religious work ever published, full of genius and beauty, and a complete exhibition of the Calvinistic theology, and the experiences of the Christian life. This book shows the triumph of genius over learning, and the people's appreciation of exalted merit. Its author, an illiterate tinker, a travelling preacher, who spent the best part of his life between the houses of the poor and the county jails, the object of reproach and ignominy, now, however, takes a proud place, in the world's estimation, with the master minds of all nations—with Dante, Shakspeare, and Milton. He has arisen above the prejudices of the great and fashionable; and the learned and aristocratic Southey has sought to be the biographer of his sorrows and the expounder of his visions. The proud bishops who disdained him, the haughty judges who condemned him, are now chiefly known as his persecutors, while he continues to be more honored and extolled with every succeeding generation.