principal town of the county in which thought him drunk from morning to Monmouth had landed; and the judi- night. But in him it was not easy to cial massacre began. distinguish the madness produced by The court was hung, by order of the evil passions from the madness proChief Justice, with scarlet; and this duced by brandy. A prisoner affirmed innovation seemed to the multitude to that the witnesses who appeared against indicate a bloody purpose. It was him were not entitled to credit. One also rumoured that, when the clergy- of them, he said, was a Papist, and man who preached the assize sermon another a prostitute. "Thou impudent enforced the duty of mercy, the ferocious rebel," exclaimed the Judge, "to reflect mouth of the Judge was distorted by on the King's evidence! I see thee, an ominous grin. These things made villain, I see thee already with the men augur ill of what was to follow.* halter round thy neck." Another proMore than three hundred prisoners duced testimony that he was a good Prowere to be tried. The work seemed testant. "Protestant!" said Jeffreys; heavy; but Jeffreys had a contrivance" you mean Presbyterian. I'll hold for making it light. He let it be you a wager of it. I can smell a Presunderstood that the only chance of byterian forty miles." One wretched obtaining pardon or respite was to man moved the pity even of bitter plead guilty. Twenty-nine persons, Tories. "My Lord," they said, "this who put themselves on their country poor creature is on the parish.” "Do and were convicted, were ordered to be not trouble yourselves," said the tied up without delay. The remaining Judge, "I will ease the parish of the prisoners pleaded guilty by scores. burden." It was not only against the Two hundred and ninety-two received prisoners that his fury broke forth. sentence of death. The whole number Gentlemen and noblemen of high conhanged in Dorsetshire amounted to sideration and stainless loyalty, who seventy-four. ventured to bring to his notice any extenuating circumstances, were almost sure to receive what he called, in the coarse dialect which he had learned in the pothouses of Whitechapel, a lick with the rough side of his tongue. Lord Stawell, a Tory peer, who could not conceal his horror at the remorse-less manner in which his poor neighbours were butchered, was punished by having a corpse suspended in chains at his park gate.* In such spectacles originated many tales of terror, which were long told over the the cider by the Christmas fires of the farmers of Somersetshire. Within the last forty years, peasants, in some districts, well knew the accursed spots, and passed them unwillingly after sunset.†

From Dorchester Jeffreys proceeded to Exeter. The civil war had barely grazed the frontier of Devonshire. Here, therefore, comparatively few persons were capitally punished. Somersetshire, the chief seat of the rebellion, had been reserved for the last and most fearful vengeance. In this county two hundred and thirty three prisoners were in a few days hanged, drawn, and quartered. At every spot where two roads met, on every marketplace, on the green of every large village which had furnished Monmouth with soldiers, ironed corpses clattering in the wind, or heads and quarters stuck on poles, poisoned the air, and made the traveller sick with horror. In many parishes the peasantry could not assemble in the house of God without seeing the ghastly face of a neighbour grinning at them over the porch. The Chief Justice was all himself. His spirits rose higher and higher as the work He laughed, shouted, joked, and swore in such a way that many

went on.

VOL. I.

*Bloody Assizes.

Jeffreys boasted that he had hanged more traitors than all his predecessors together since the Conquest. It is certain that the number of persons whom he put to death in one month, and in one shire, very much exceeded the number of all the political offenders

*Locke's Western Rebellion.

This I can attest from my own childish recollections.

X

The dying

who have been put to death in our inflicted on his servants.
island since the Revolution. The re-
bellions of 1715 and 1745 were of
longer duration, of wider extent, and
of more formidable aspect than that
which was put down at Sedgemoor.
It has not been generally thought that,
either after the rebellion of 1715, or
after the rebellion of 1745, the House
of Hanover erred on the side of cle-
mency. Yet all the executions of 1715
and 1745 added together will appear to
have been few indeed when compared
with those which disgraced the Bloody
Assizes. The number of the rebels
whom Jeffreys hanged on this circuit
was three hundred and twenty.*

words of these men were noted down:
their farewell letters were kept as
treasures; and, in this way, with the
help of some invention and exaggera-
tion, was formed a copious supplement
to the Marian Martyrology.*

Such havoc must have excited disgust even if the sufferers had been generally odious. But they were, for the most part, men of blameless life, and of high religious profession. They were regarded by themselves, and by a large proportion of their neighbours, not as wrongdoers, but as martyrs who sealed with blood the truth of the Protestant religion. Very few of the convicts professed any repentance for what they had done. Many, animated by the old Puritan spirit, met death, not merely with fortitude, but with exultation. It was in vain that the ministers of the Established Church lectured them on the guilt of rebellion and on the importance of priestly absolution. The claim of the King to unbounded authority in things temporal, and the claim of the clergy to the spiritual power of binding and loosing, moved the bitter scorn of the intrepid sectaries. Some of them composed hymns in the dungeon, and chaunted them on the fatal sledge. Christ, they sang while they were undressing for the butchery, would soon come to rescue Zion and to make war on Babylon, would set up his standard, would blow his trumpet, and would requite his foes tenfold for all the evil which had been

*Lord Lonsdale says seven hundred; Burnet six hundred. I have followed the list which the Judges sent to the Treasury, and which may still be seen there in the letter book of 1685. See the Bloody Assizes; Locke's Western Rebellion; the Panegyric on Lord Jeffreys; Burnet, i. 648.; Eachard, iii. 775.; Oldmixon, 705.

Holmes.

A few cases deserve special mention. Abraham Holmes, a retired Abraham officer of the parliamentary army, and one of those zealots who would own no king but King Jesus, had been taken at Sedgemoor. His arm had been frightfully mangled and shattered in the battle; and, as no surgeon was at hand, the stout old soldier amputated it himself. He was carried up to London, and examined by the King in Council, but would make no submission. "I am an aged man," he said, "and what remains to me of life is not worth a falsehood or a baseness. I have always been a republican; and I am so still." He was sent back to the West and hanged. The people remarked with awe and wonder that the beasts which were to drag him to the gallows became restive and went back. Holmes himself doubted not that the Angel of the Lord, as in the old time, stood in the way sword in hand, invisible to human eyes, but visible to the inferior animals. "Stop, gentlemen," he cried, "let me go on foot. There is more in this than you think. Remember how the ass saw him whom the prophet could not see." He walked manfully to the gallows, harangued the people with a smile, prayed fervently that God would hasten the downfall of Antichrist and the deliverance of England, and went up the ladder with an apology for mounting so awkwardly. "You see," he said, "I have but one arm."†

Not less courageously died Christopher Battiscombe, a young ChristoTemplar of good family and pher Batfortune, who, at Dorchester, an

tiscombe.

* Some of the prayers, exhortations, and hymns of the sufferers will be found in the Bloody Assizes.

Bloody Assizes; Locke's Western Rebellion; Lord Lonsdale's Memoirs; Account of the Battle of Sedgemoor in the Hardwicke Papers.

The story in the Life of James the Second, ii. 43., is not taken from the King's manuscripts, and sufficiently refutes itself.

agreeable provincial town proud of its | admittance for her. "I wish well to taste and refinement, was regarded by your suit with all my heart," he said, all as the model of a fine gentleman. as they stood together in the anteGreat interest was made to save him. chamber; "but do not flatter yourself It was believed through the West of with hopes. This marble," and he laid England that he was engaged to a his hand on the chimneypiece, "is not young lady of gentle blood, the sister harder than the King." The prediction of the Sheriff, that she threw herself at proved true. James was inexorable. the feet of Jeffreys to beg for merey, Benjamin Hewling died with dauntless and that Jeffreys drove her from him courage, amidst lamentations in which with a jest so hideous that to repeat it the soldiers who kept guard round the would be an offence against decency gallows could not refrain from joining.* and humanity. Her lover suffered at Lyme piously and courageously.*

Yet those rebels who were doomed to death were less to be pitied than A still deeper interest was excited by some of the survivors. Several priThe the fate of two gallant brothers, soners to whom Jeffreys was unable to Hewlings. William and Benjamin Hew-bring home the charge of high treason ling. They were young, handsome, were convicted of misdemeanors, and accomplished, and well connected. Their maternal grandfather was named Kiffin. He was one of the first merchants in London, and was generally considered as the head of the Baptists. The Chief Justice behaved to William Hewling on the trial with characteristic brutality. "You have a grandfather," he said, "who deserves to be hanged as richly as you." The poor lad, who was only nineteen, suffered death with so much meekness and fortitude, that an officer of the army who attended the execution, and who had made himself remarkable by rudeness and severity, was strangely melted, and said, "I do not believe that my Lord Chief Justice himself could be proof against this." Hopes were entertained that Benjamin would be pardoned. One victim of tender years was surely enough for one house to furnish. Even Jeffreys was, or pretended to be, inclined to lenity. The truth was that one of his kinsmen, from whom he had large expectations, and whom, therefore, he could not treat as he generally treated intercessors, pleaded strongly for the afflicted family. Time was allowed for a reference to London. The sister of the prisoner went to Whitehall with a petition. Many courtiers wished her success; and Churchill, among whose numerous faults cruelty had no place, obtained narrative, which will be found in the second

Bloody Assizes; Locke's Western Rebellion; Humble Petition of Widows and fatherless Children in the West of England; Panegyric on Lord Jeffreys.

were sentenced to scourging not less
terrible than that which Oates had un-
dergone. A woman for some idle words,
such as had been uttered by half the
women in the districts where the war
had raged, was condemned to be whipped
through all the market towns in the
county of Dorset. She suffered part of
her punishment before Jeffreys returned
to London; but, when he was no longer
in the West, the gaolers, with the hu-
mane connivance of the magistrates,
took on themselves the responsibility of
sparing her any further torture. A still
more frightful sentence was Punish-
passed on a lad named Tutchin, ment of
who was tried for seditious
words. He was, as usual, interrupted
in his defence by ribaldry and scur-
rility from the judgment seat.
are a rebel; and all your family have
been rebels since Adam. They tell me
that you are a poet. I'll cap verses
with you." The sentence was that
the boy should be imprisoned seven
years, and should, during that period,
be flogged through every market town
in Dorsetshire every year. The women
in the galleries burst into tears. The
clerk of the arraigns stood up in great
disorder. "My Lord," said he,

Tutchin.

"You

"the

As to the Hewlings, I have followed Kiffin's Memoirs, and Mr. Hewling Luson's edition of the Hughes Correspondence, vol. ii. Appendix. The accounts in Locke's Western Rebellion and in the Panegyric on Jeffreys are full of errors. Great part of the account in the Bloody Assizes was written by Kiffin, and agrees word for with his Memoirs.

average, each of them, after all charges were paid, would be worth from ten to fifteen pounds. There was therefore much angry competition for grants. Some Tories in the West conceived that they had, by their exertions and sufferings during the insurrection, earned a right to share in the profits which had been eagerly snatched up by the sycophants of Whitehall. The courtiers, however, were victorious.*

prisoner is very young. There are many | prove, were still very valuable. It was market towns in our county. The sen- estimated by Jeffreys that, on an tence amounts to whipping once a fortnight, for seven years." "If he is a young man," said Jeffreys, "he is an old rogue. Ladies, you do not know the villain as well as I do. The punishment is not half bad enough for him. All the interest in England shall not alter it." Tutchin in his despair petitioned, and probably with sincerity, that he might be hanged. Fortunately for him he was, just at this conjuncture, taken ill of the smallpox and given over. As it seemed highly improbable that the sentence would ever be executed, the Chief Justice consented to remit it, in return for a bribe which reduced the prisoner to poverty. The temper of Tutchin, not originally very mild, was exasperated to madness by what he had undergone. He lived to be known as one of the most acrimonious and pertinacious enemies of the House of Stuart and of the Tory party.*

Rebels trans

ported.

The misery of the exiles fully equalled that of the negroes who are now carried from Congo to Brazil. It appears from the best information which is at present accessible that more than one fifth of those who were shipped were flung to the sharks before the end of the voyage. The human cargoes were stowed close in the holds of small vessels. So little space was allowed that the wretches, many of whom were still tormented by unhealed wounds, could not all lie down at once without lying on one another. They were never suffered to go on deck. The hatchway was constantly watched by sentinels armed with hangers and blunderbusses. In the dungeon below all was darkness, stench, lamentation, disease, and death. Of ninety nine convicts who were carried out in one vessel, twenty two died before they reached Jamaica, although the voyage was performed with unusual speed. The survivors when they arrived at their house of bondage were mere skeletons. During some weeks coarse biscuit and fetid water had been doled out to them in such scanty measure that any one of them could easily have consumed the ration which was assigned to five. They were, therefore, in such a state that the merchant to whom they had been consigned found it expedient to fatten them before selling them.†

The number of prisoners whom Jeffreys transported was eight hundred and forty one. These men, more wretched than their associates who suffered death, were distributed into gangs, and bestowed on persons who enjoyed favour at court. The conditions of the gift were that the convicts should be carried beyond sea as slaves, that they should not be emancipated for ten years, and that the place of their banishment should be some West Indian island. This last article was studiously framed for the purpose of aggravating the misery of the exiles. In New England or New Jersey they would have found a population kindly disposed to them, and a climate not unfavourable to their health and vigour. It was therefore determined that they should be sent to colonies where a Puritan could hope to inspire little sympathy, and where a labourer born in the temperate zone could hope to enjoy little health. Such was the state of the slave market that these bondmen, long as was the pas-is to be found in a very curious narrative sage, and sickly as they were likely to

* See Tutchin's account of his own case in the Bloody Assizes.

*Sunderland to Jeffreys, Sept. 14. 1685; Jeffreys to the King, Sept. 19. 1685, in the State Paper Office.

†The best account of the sufferings of those rebels who were sentenced to transportation

written by John Coad, an honest, Godfearing carpenter, who joined Monmouth, was badly wounded at Philip's Norton, was tried by Jeffreys, and was sent to Jamaica. The ori

Confisca

were in the habit of drinking and laughing with him. The office of these men was to drive hard bargains with convicts under the strong terrors of death, and with parents trembling for the lives of children. A portion of the spoil was abandoned by Jeffreys to his agents. To one of his boon companions, it is said, he tossed a pardon for a rich traitor across the table during a revel. It was not safe to have recourse to any

tures; for he guarded his profitable monopoly of mercy with jealous care. It was even suspected that he sent some persons to the gibbet solely because they had applied for the royal clemency through channels independent of him.*

Rapacity

Queen and

ladies.

Meanwhile the property both of the rebels who had suffered death, tion and and of those more unfortunate extortion. men who were withering under the tropical sun, was fought for and torn in pieces by a crowd of greedy informers. By law a subject attainted of treason forfeits all his substance; and this law was enforced after the Bloody Assizes with a rigour at once cruel and ludicrous. The brokenhearted widows and destitute orphans intercession except that of his creaof the labouring men whose corpses hung at the cross roads were called upon by the agents of the Treasury to explain what had become of a basket, of a goose, of a flitch of bacon, of a keg of cider, of a sack of beans, of a truss of hay. While the humbler retainers of the government were pillaging the Some courtiers nevertheless contrived families of the slaughtered peasants, to obtain a small share of this the Chief Justice was fast accumulating traffic. The ladies of the of the a fortune out of the plunder of a higher Queen's household distin- of her class of Whigs. He traded largely in guished themselves preemipardons. His most lucrative transac-nently by rapacity and hardheartedness. tion of this kind was with a gentleman Part of the disgrace which they incurred named Edmund Prideaux. It is certain falls on their mistress: for it was solely that Prideaux had not been in arms on account of the relation in which they against the government; and it is pro- stood to her that they were able to bable that his only crime was the wealth enrich themselves by so odious a trade; which he had inherited from his father, and there can be no question that she an eminent lawyer who had been high might with a word or a look have rein office under the Protector. No exer- strained them. But in truth she entions were spared to make out a case couraged them by her evil example, if for the crown. Mercy was offered to not by her express approbation. She some prisoners on condition that they seems to have been one of that large class would bear evidence against Prideaux. of persons who bear adversity better than The unfortunate man lay long in gaol, prosperity. While her husband was and at length, overcome by fear of the a subject and an exile, shut out from gallows, consented to pay fifteen thou- public employment, and in imminent sand pounds for his liberation. This danger of being deprived of his birthgreat sum was received by Jeffreys. He right, the suavity and humility of her bought with it an estate, to which the manners conciliated the kindness even people gave the name of Aceldama, of those who most abhorred her religion. from that accursed field which was But when her good fortune came her purchased with the price of innocent good nature disappeared. The meek blood.† and affable Duchess turned out an ungracious and haughty Queen.† The misfortunes which she subsequently endured have made her an object of some

He was ably assisted in the work of extortion by the crew of parasites who

ginal manuscript was kindly lent to me by Mr. Phippard, to whom it belongs.

In the Treasury records of the autumn of 1685 are several letters directing search to be made for trifles of this sort.

Commons' Journals, Oct. 9., Nov. 10., Dec. 26. 1690; Oldmixon, 706.; Panegyric on Jeffreys.

*Life and Death of Lord Jeffreys; Panegyric on Jeffreys; Kiffin's Memoirs.

Burnet, i. 368.; Evelyn's Diary, Feb. 4. 168, July 13. 1686. In one of the satires of that time are these lines:

"When Duchess, she was gentle, mild, and civil;

When Queen, she proved a raging furious devii."