But in the city his partisans mustered in great force, raised a riot, and upset the pillory." They were, however, unable to rescue their favorite. It was supposed that he would try to escape the horrible doom which awaited him by swallowing poison. All that he ate and drank was therefore carefully inspected. On the following morning he was brought forth to undergo his first flogging. At an early hour an innumer able multitude filled all the streets from Aldgate to the Old Bailey. The hangman laid on the lash with such unusual severity as showed that he had received special instructions. The blood run down in rivulets. For a time the criminal showed a strange constancy: but at last his stubborn forti. tude gave way. His bellowings were frightful to hear. He swooned several times; but the scourge still continued to descend. When he was unbound, it seemed that he had borne as much as the human frame can bear without dissolution. James was entreated to remit the second flogging. His answer was short and clear. "He shall go through with it, if he has breath in his body." An attempt was made to obtain the queen's intercession; but she indignantly refused to say a word in favor of such a wretch. After an interval of only forty-eight hours, Oates was again brought out of his dungeon. He was unable to stand, and it was necessary to drag him to Tyburn on a sledge. He seemed quite insensible; and the Tories reported that he had stupefied himself with strong drink. A person who counted the stripes on the second day, said that they were seventeen hundred. The bad man escaped with life, but so narrowly that his ignorant and bigoted admirers thought his recovery miraculous, and appealed to it as a proof of his innocence. The doors of the prison closed upon him. During many months he remained ironed in the darkest hole of Newgate. It was said that in his cell he gave himself up to melancholy, and sate whole days uttering deep groans, his arms folded, and his hat pulled over his eyes. It was not in England alone that these events excited strong interest. Millions of Roman Catholics, who knew nothing of our institutions or of our factions, had heard that a persecution of singular barbarity had raged in our sland against the professors of the true faith, that many pious men had suffered martyrdom, and that Titus Oates had been the chief murderer. There was, therefore, great joy in dis * Despatch of the Dutch ambassadors, May 28, 1685. tant countries when it was known that the divine justice had overtaken him. Engravings of him, looking out from the pillory, and writhing at the cart's tail, were circulated all over Europe; and epigrammatists, in many languages, made merry with the doctoral title which he pretended to have received from the University of Salamanca, and remarked that since his forehead could not be made to blush, it was but reasonable that his back should do so. * Horrible as were the sufferings of Oates, they did not equal his crimes. The old law of England, which had been suffered to become obsolete, treated the false witness, who had caused death by means of perjury, as a murderer.t. This was wise and righteous; for such a witness is, in truth, the worst of murderers. To the guilt of shedding innocent blood he has added the guilt of violating the most solemn engagement into which man can enter with his fellow-men, and of making institutions to which it is desirable that the public should look with respect and confidence instruments of frightful wrong and objects of general distrust. The pain produced by an ordinary assassination bears no proportion to the pain produced by assassination of which the courts of justice are made the agents. The mere extinction of life is a very small part of what makes an execution horrible. The prolonged mental agony of the sufferer, the shame and misery of all connected with him, the stain abiding even to the third and fourth generation, are things far more dreadful than death itself. In gen * Evelyn's Diary, May 22, 1685; Eachard, iii. 741; Burnet, i. 637; Observator, May 27, 1685; Oates's Eixov, 89; Tom Brown's Advice to Dr. Oates. Some interesting circumstances are mentioned in a broadside, printed for A. Brooks, Charing Cross, 1685. I have seen contemporary French and Italian pamphlets containing the history of the trial and execution. A print of Titus in the pillory was published at Milan, with the following curious inscription: "Questo è il naturale ritratto di Tito Otez, o vero Oatz, Inglese, posto in berlina, uno de' principali professori della religion protestante, acerrimo persecutore de' Cattolici, e gran spergiuro." I have also seen a Dutch engraving of his punishment, with some Latin verses. of which the following are a specimen : "At Doctor fictus non fictos pertulit ictus, A tortore datos haud molli in corpore gratos, The anagram of his name, "Testis Ovat," may be found on many prints published in different countries. + Blackstone's Commentaries, Chapter of Homicide. man. eral, it may be safely affirmed that the father of a large family would rather be bereaved of all his children by accident or by disease than lose one of them by the hands of the hangMurder by false testimony is therefore the most aggravated species of murder; and Oates had been guilty of many such murders. Nevertheless the punishment which was inflicted upon him cannot be justified. In sentencing him to be stripped of his ecclesiastical habit and imprisoned for life, the judges seem to have exceeded their legal power. They were undoubtedly competent to inflict whipping, nor had the law assigned a limit to the number of stripes. But the spirit of the law clearly was, that no misdemeanor should be punished more severely than the most atrocious felonies. The worst felon could only be hanged. The judges, as they believed, sentenced Oates to be scourged to death. That the law was defective is not a sufficient excuse; for defective laws should be altered by the legislature, and not strained by the tribunals, and least of all should the law be strained for the purpose of inflicting torture and destroying life. That Oates was a bad man, is not a sufficient excuse; for the guilty are almost always the first to suffer those hardships which are afterwards used as precedents for oppressing the innocent. Thus it was in the present case. Merciless flogging soon became an ordinary punishment for political misdemeanors of no very aggravated kind. Men were sentenced for hasty words spoken against the government to pain so excruciating that they, with unfeigned earnestness, begged to be brought to trial on capital charges, and sent to the gallows. Happily the progress of this great evil was speedily stopped by the revolution, and by that article of the Bill of Rights which condemns all cruel and unusual punishments. The villany of Dangerfield had not, like that of Oates, destroyed many innocent victims; for Dangerfield had not taken up the trade of a witness till the plot had been blown upon and juries had become incredulous.* He was brought According to Roger North the judges decided that Dangerfield, having been previously convicted of perjury, was incompetent to be a witness of the plot. But this is one among many instances of Roger's inaccuracy. It appears from the report of the trial of Lord Castlemaine in June, 1680, that, after much altercation between counsei, and much consultation among the judges of the different courts in Westminster Hall, Dangerfield was sworn, and suffered to tell his story, out the jury very properly refused to believe him to trial, not for perjury, but for the less heinous offence of libel. He had, during the agitation caused by the Exclusion Bill, put forth a narrative containing some false and odious imputations on the late and on the present king. For this publication he was now, after the lapse of five years, suddenly taken up, brought before the Privy Council, committed, tried, convicted, and sentenced to be whipped from Aldgate to Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn. The wretched man behaved with great effrontery during the trial; but when he heard his doom, he went into agonies of despair, gave himself up for dead, and chose a text for his funeral sermon. His forebodings were just. He was not, indeed, scourged quite so severely as Oates had been; but he had not Oates's iron strength of body and mind. After the execution, Dangerfield was put into a hackney coach and was taken back to prison. As he passed the corner of Hatton Garden, a Tory gentleman of Gray's Inn, named Francis, stopped the carriage, and cried out with brutal levity, "Well, friend, have you had your heat this morning?" The bleeding prisoner, maddened by this insult, answered with a curse. Francis instantly struck him in the face with a cane, which injured the eye. Dangerfield was carried dying into Newgate. This dastardly outrage roused the indignation of the bystanders. They seized Francis, and were with difficulty restrained from tearing him to pieces. The appearance of Dangerfield's body, which had been frightfully lacerated by the whip, inclined many to believe that his death was chiefly, if not wholly, caused by the stripes which he had received. The government and the Chief Justice thought it convenient to lay the whole blame on Francis, who, though he seems to have been at worst guilty only of aggravated manslaughter, was tried and executed for murder. His dying speech is one of the most curious monuments of that age. The savage spirit which had brought him to the gallows remained with him to the last. Boasts of his loyalty and abuse of the Whigs were mingled with the parting ejaculations in which he commended his soul to the divine mercy. An idle rumor had been circulated that his wife was in love with Dangerfield, who was eminently handsome and renowned for gallantry. The fatal blow, it was said, had been prompted by jealousy. The dying husband, with an earnestness half ridiculous, half pathetic, vindicated the lady's char acter. She was, he said, a virtuous woman; she came of a loyal stock, and, if she had been inclined to break her mar riage vow, would at least have selected a Tory and a Church man for her paramour.* About the same time a culprit, who bore very little resem blance to Oates or Dangerfield, appeared on the floor of the Court of King's Bench. No eminent chief of a party has ever passed through many years of civil and religious dissension with more innocence than Richard Baxter. He belonged to the mildest and most temperate section of the Puritan body. He was a young man when the civil war broke out. He thought that the right was on the side of the Houses; and he had no scruple about acting as chaplain to a regiment in the parliamentary army. But his clear and somewhat sceptical understanding, and his strong sense of justice, preserved him from all excesses. He exerted himself to check the fanatical violence of the soldiery. He condemned the proceedings of the High Court of Justice. In the days of the Commonwealth, he had the boldness to express, on many occasions, and once even in Cromwell's presence, love and reverence for the ancient institutions of the country. While the royal family was in exile, Baxter's life was chiefly passed at Kidderminster in the assiduous discharge of parochial duties. He heartily concurred in the Restoration, and was sincerely desirous to bring about a union between Episcopalians and Presbyterians. For, with a liberality rare in his time, he considered questions of ecclesiastical polity as of small account when compared with the great principles of Christianity, and had never, even when prelacy was most odious to the ruling powers, joined in the outcry against bishops. The attempt to reconcile the contending factions failed. Baxter cast in his lot with his proscribed friends, refused the mitre of Hereford, quitted the parsonage of Kidderminster, and gave himself up almost wholly to study. His theological writings, though too moder * Dangerfield's trial was not reported, but I have seen a concise account of it in a contemporary broadside. An abstract of the evidence against Francis, and his dying speech, will be found in the Collection of State Trials. See Eachard, iii. 741. Burnet's narrative contains more mistakes than lines. See also North's Examen, 256, the sketch of Dangerfield's Life in the Bloody Assizes, and the Observator of July 29, 1685. In the very rare volume entitled "Succinct Genealogies, by Robert Halstead," Lord Peterborough says that Dangerfield, with whom he had some intercourse, was "a young man who appeared under a decent figure, a serious behavior, and with words that did not seem to proceed from a common under tanding" |