survive this horrible infliction, he was to be kept close prisoner during life. Five times every year he was to be brought forth from his dungeon and exposed on the pillory in different parts of the capital.* This rigorous sentence was rigorously executed. On the day on which Cates was pilloried in Palace Yard, he was mercilessly pelted and ran some risk of being pulled in pieces. But in the City his partisans mustered in great force, raised a riot, and upset the pillory. They were, however, unable to rescue their favourite. 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 innumerable 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 ran down in rivulets. For a time the criminal showed a strange constancy: but at last his stubborn fortitude 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 favour 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 stupified himself with strong drink. A person *The proceedings will be found at length in the Collection of State Trials. May 29. 1685. + Gazette de France, June 9. Despatch of the Dutch Ambassadors, May 19. 1685. 29 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 island 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 distant 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,* *Evelyn's Diary, May 22. 1685; Eachard, iii. 741.; Burnet, i. 637.; Observator, May 27. 1685 ; Oates's Εἰκών, 89. ; Εἰκὼν βροτολοιγοῦ, 1697; Commons' Journals of May, June, and July, 1689; 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 execu tion. 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 fictes pertulit ictus, A tortore datos haud molli in corpore gratos, Disceret ut vere scelera ob commissa rubere." 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.* 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 ordinary murder bears no proportion to the pain produced by murder 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 general 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 hangman. Murder 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 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 misdemeanour 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 may be found on many prints published in different countries. Blackstone's Commentaries, Chapter of Homicide. 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 against the innocent. Thus it was in the present case. Merciless flogging soon became an ordinary punishment for political misdemeanours of no very aggravated kind. Men were sentenced, for 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. against The villany of Dangerfield had not, like that of Oates, destroyed Proceedmany innocent victims; for ings Dangerfield had not taken up Dangerthe trade of a witness till the field. plot had been blown upon and till juries had become incredulous.* He was brought 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 decided that Dangerfield, having been previ* According to Roger North the judges ously 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 counsel, and much consultation among the judges of the different courts in Westminster Hall, Dangerfield was sworn and suffered to tell his story: but the jury very properly gave no credit to his testimony. against About the same time a culprit, who bore very little resemblance to ProceedOates or Dangerfield, appeared ing on the floor of the Court of Baxter. 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 an 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 effrontery during the trial; but, when I have selected a Tory and a churchman he heard his doom, he went into agonies for her paramour.* 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 rumour 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 character. She was, he said, a virtuous woman: she came of a loyal stock, and, if she had been inclined to break her marriage vow, would at least * Dangerfield's trial was not reported; but I have seen a concise account of it in a contemporary broadside. An abstract of the eviwill be found in the Collection of State Trials. dence against Francis, and his dying speech, See Eachard, iii. 741. Burnet's narrative contains more mistakes than lines. See also field's life in the Bloody Assizes, the ObservaNorth's Examen, 256, the sketch of Dangertor of July 29. 1685, and the poem entitled "Dangerfield's Ghost to Jeffreys." In the very rare volume entitled "Succinct Genealogies, by Robert Halstead," Lord Peterborough says that Dangerfield, with whom he had had some intercourse, was a young man behaviour, and with words that did not seem who appeared under a decent figure, a serious to proceed from a common understanding." the ruling powers, joined in the outcry | if Baxter stood on the other, the two against Bishops. The attempt to re- greatest rogues in the kingdom would concile the contending factions failed. stand together." Baxter cast in his lot with his pro- When the trial came on at Guildhall, scribed friends, refused the mitre of a crowd of those who loved and hoHereford, quitted the parsonage of noured Baxter filled the court. At his Kidderminster, and gave himself up side stood Doctor William Bates, one almost wholly to study. His theologi- of the most eminent of the Nonconforcal writings, though too moderate to be mist divines. Two Whig barristers of pleasing to the bigots of any party, great note, Pollexfen and Wallop, aphad an immense reputation. Zealous peared for the defendant. Pollexfen Churchmen called him a Roundhead; had scarcely begun his address to the and many Nonconformists accused him jury, when the Chief Justice broke of Erastianism and Arminianism. But the integrity of his heart, the purity of his life, the vigour of his faculties, and the extent of his attainments were acknowledged by the best and wisest men of every persuasion. His political opinions, in spite of the oppression which he and his brethren had suffered, were moderate. He was friendly to that small party which was hated by both Whigs and Tories. He could not, he said, join in cursing the Trimmers, when he remembered who it was that had blessed the peacemakers.* forth: "Pollexfen, I know you well. I will set a mark on you. You are the patron of the faction. This is an old rogue, a schismatical knave, a hypocritical villain. He hates the Liturgy. He would have nothing but longwinded cant without book:" and then his Lordship turned up his eyes, clasped his hands, and began to sing through his nose, in imitation of what he supposed to be Baxter's style of praying, "Lord, we are thy people, thy peculiar people, thy dear people." Pollexfen gently reminded the court that his late Majesty In a Commentary on the New Testa- had thought Baxter deserving of a biment he had complained, with some shopric. "And what ailed the old bitterness, of the persecution which the blockhead then," cried Jeffreys, "that Dissenters suffered. That men who, he did not take it?" His fury now rose for not using the Prayer Book, had almost to madness. He called Baxter been driven from their homes, stripped a dog, and swore that it would be no of their property, and locked up in dun-more than justice to whip such a villain geons, should dare to utter a murmur, through the whole City. ought to be ashamed to assist such factious knaves." The advocate made another attempt to obtain a hearing, but to no purpose. "If you do not know your duty," said Jeffreys, "I will teach it you." was then thought a high crime against Wallop interposed, but fared no better the State and the Church. Roger Le-than his leader. "You are in all these strange, the champion of the govern-dirty causes, Mr. Wallop," said the ment and the oracle of the clergy, Judge. "Gentlemen of the long robe sounded the note of war in the Observator. An information was filed. Baxter begged that he might be allowed some time to prepare for his defence. It was on the day on which Oates was pilloried in Palace Yard that the illustrious chief of the Puritans, oppressed by age and infirmities, came to Westminster Hall to make this request. Jeffreys burst into a storm of rage. "Not a minute," he cried, "to save his life. I can deal with saints as well as with sinners. There stands Oates on one side of the pillory; and, * Baxter's preface to Sir Matthew Hale's Judgment of the Nature of True Religion, 1684. Wallop sate down; and Baxter himself attempted to put in a word. But the Chief Justice drowned all expostulation in a torrent of ribaldry and invective, mingled with scraps of Hudibras. "My Lord," said the old man, "I have been much blamed by Dissenters for speaking respectfully of bishops." "Baxter for bishops!" cried the Judge, "that's a merry conceit indeed. I know what you mean by bishops, rascals like your self, Kidderminster bishops, factious, | The sentence was, for those times, a snivelling Presbyterians!" Again Bax- lenient one. What passed in conference ter essayed to speak, and again Jeffreys among the judges cannot be certainly bellowed, "Richard, Richard, dost thou known. It was believed among the think we will let thee poison the court? Nonconformists, and is highly probable, Richard, thou art an old knave. Thou that the Chief Justice was overruled hast written books enough to load a by his three brethren. He proposed, cart, and every book as full of sedition it is said, that Baxter should be whipped as an egg is full of meat. By the grace through London at the cart's tail. The of God, I'll look after thee. I see a majority thought that an eminent digreat many of your brotherhood wait- vine, who, a quarter of a century before, ing to know what will befall their had been offered a mitre, and who was mighty Don. And there," he continued, now in his seventieth year, would be fixing his savage eye on Bates, "there sufficiently punished for a few sharp is a Doctor of the party at your elbow. words by fine and imprisonment.* But, by the grace of God Almighty, I will crush you all." Baxter held his peace. But one of the junior counsel for the defence made a last effort, and undertook to show that the words of which complaint was made would not bear the construction put on them by the information. With this view he began to read the context. In a moment he was roared down. "You sha'n't turn the court into a conventicle." The noise of weeping was heard from some of those who surrounded Baxter. 66 Snivelling calves!" said the Judge. the Par The manner in which Baxter was treated by a judge who was a Meeting of member of the cabinet and a liament of favourite of the Sovereign indi- Scotland. cated, in a manner not to be mistaken, the feeling with which the government at this time regarded the Protestant Nonconformists. But already that feeling had been indicated by still stronger and more terrible signs. The Parliament of Scotland had met. James had purposely hastened the session of this body, and had postponed the session of the English Houses, in the hope that the example set at Edinburgh would produce a good effect at Westminster. For the legislature of his northern kingdom was as obsequious as those provincial Estates which Lewis the Fourteenth still suffered to play at some of their ancient functions in Britanny and Burgundy. None but an Episcopalian could sit in the Scottish Parliament, or could even vote for a member; and in Scotland an Episcopalian was always a Tory or a time-server. From an assembly thus constituted little opposition to the royal wishes was to be apprehended; and even the assembly thus constituted could pass no law which had not been previously approved by a committee of courtiers. Witnesses to character were in attendance, and among them were several clergymen of the Established Church. But the Chief Justice would hear nothing. "Does your Lordship think,' said Baxter, “that any jury will convict a man on such a trial as this?" "I warrant you, Mr. Baxter," said Jeffreys: "don't trouble yourself about that." Jeffreys was right. The Sheriffs were the tools of the government. The jurymen, selected by the Sheriffs from among the fiercest zealots of the Tory party, conferred for a moment, and returned a verdict of Guilty. "My Lord," said Baxter, as he left the court, "there was once a Chief Justice who would have treated me very differently." He alluded All that the government asked was to his learned and virtuous friend, Sir readily granted. In a financial point Matthew Hale. "There is not an of view, indeed, the liberality of the honest man in England," answered Jef- Scottish Estates was of little consefreys, "but looks on thee as a knave."*quence. They gave, however, what * See the Observator of February 25. 1685, the information in the Collection of State Trials, the account of what passed in court given by Calamy, Life of Baxter, chap. xiv., and the very curious extracts from the Baxter MSS. in the Life, by Orme, published in 1830. * Baxter MS. cited by Orme. |