Three times the jury refused to find her guilty,until Jeffreys bullied and frightened them into that false verdict.When he had extorted it from them,he said,'Gentlemen,if I had been one of you,and she had been my own mother,I would have found her guilty;'-as I dare say he would.He sentenced her to be burned alive,that very afternoon.The clergy of the cathedral and some others interfered in her favour,and she was beheaded within a week.As a high mark of his approbation,the King made Jeffreys Lord Chancellor;and he then went on to Dorchester,to Exeter,to Taunton,and to Wells.It is astonishing,when we read of the enormous injustice and barbarity of this beast,to know that no one struck him dead on the judgment-seat.It was enough for any man or woman to be accused by an enemy,before Jeffreys,to be found guilty of high treason.One man who pleaded not guilty,he ordered to be taken out of court upon the instant,and hanged;and this so terrified the prisoners in general that they mostly pleaded guilty at once.At Dorchester alone,in the course of a few days,Jeffreys hanged eighty people;besides whipping,transporting,imprisoning,and selling as slaves,great numbers.He executed,in all,two hundred and fifty,or three hundred.
These executions took place,among the neighbours and friends of the sentenced,in thirty-six towns and villages.Their bodies were mangled,steeped in caldrons of boiling pitch and tar,and hung up by the roadsides,in the streets,over the very churches.The sight and smell of heads and limbs,the hissing and bubbling of the infernal caldrons,and the tears and terrors of the people,were dreadful beyond all deion.One rustic,who was forced to steep the remains in the black pot,was ever afterwards called 'Tom Boilman.'The hangman has ever since been called Jack Ketch,because a man of that name went hanging and hanging,all day long,in the train of Jeffreys.You will hear much of the horrors of the great French Revolution.Many and terrible they were,there is no doubt;but I know of nothing worse,done by the maddened people of France in that awful time,than was done by the highest judge in England,with the express approval of the King of England,in The Bloody Assize.
Nor was even this all.Jeffreys was as fond of money for himself as of misery for others,and he sold pardons wholesale to fill his pockets.The King ordered,at one time,a thousand prisoners to be given to certain of his favourites,in order that they might bargain with them for their pardons.The young ladies of Taunton who had presented the Bible,were bestowed upon the maids of honour at court;and those precious ladies made very hard bargains with them indeed.When The Bloody Assize was at its most dismal height,the King was diverting himself with horse-races in the very place where Mrs.Lisle had been executed.When Jeffreys had done his worst,and came home again,he was particularly complimented in the Royal Gazette;and when the King heard that through drunkenness and raging he was very ill,his odious Majesty remarked that such another man could not easily be found in England.Besides all this,a former sheriff of London,named CORNISH,was hanged within sight of his own house,after an abominably conducted trial,for having had a share in the Rye House Plot,on evidence given by Rumsey,which that villain was obliged to confess was directly opposed to the evidence he had given on the trial of Lord Russell.
And on the very same day,a worthy widow,named ELIZABETH GAUNT,was burned alive at Tyburn,for having sheltered a wretch who himself gave evidence against her.She settled the fuel about herself with her own hands,so that the flames should reach her quickly:and nobly said,with her last breath,that she had obeyed the sacred command of God,to give refuge to the outcast,and not to betray the wanderer.
After all this hanging,beheading,burning,boiling,mutilating,exposing,robbing,transporting,and selling into slavery,of his unhappy subjects,the King not unnaturally thought that he could do whatever he would.So,he went to work to change the religion of the country with all possible speed;and what he did was this.
He first of all tried to get rid of what was called the Test Act-which prevented the Catholics from holding public employments-by his own power of dispensing with the penalties.He tried it in one case,and,eleven of the twelve judges deciding in his favour,he exercised it in three others,being those of three dignitaries of University College,Oxford,who had become Papists,and whom he kept in their places and sanctioned.He revived the hated Ecclesiastical Commission,to get rid of COMPTON,Bishop of London,who manfully opposed him.He solicited the Pope to favour England with an ambassador,which the Pope (who was a sensible man then)
rather unwillingly did.He flourished Father Petre before the eyes of the people on all possible occasions.He favoured the establishment of convents in several parts of London.He was delighted to have the streets,and even the court itself,filled with Monks and Friars in the habits of their orders.He constantly endeavoured to make Catholics of the Protestants about him.He held private interviews,which he called 'closetings,'with those Members of Parliament who held offices,to persuade them to consent to the design he had in view.When they did not consent,they were removed,or resigned of themselves,and their places were given to Catholics.He displaced Protestant officers from the army,by every means in his power,and got Catholics into their places too.