Walter Besant

But the Prince of Orange had already landed.

We learned this news next day, and you may be sure that we were in the saddle again and riding to Exeter, there to join his standard.

This we did with the full consent of Madam and of Alice. Much as we had suffered already, they would not deter us, because this thing would have been approved by Sir Christopher and Dr. Eykin. Therefore we went. As all the world knows, this expedition was successful. Yet was not Barnaby made an Admiral, nor was I made a Court physician; we got, in fact, no reward at all, except that for Barnaby was procured a full pardon on account of the homicide of his late master.

My second campaign, as everybody knows, was bloodless. To begin with, we had an army, not of raw country lads armed indifferently and untrained, but of veteran troops, fifteen thousand strong, all well equipped, and with the best General in Europe at their head. At first, indeed, such was the dread in men's minds caused by Lord Jeffreys' cruelties, few came in; yet this was presently made up by what followed, when, without any fighting at all, the King's regiments melted away, his priests fled, and his friends deserted him. This was a very different business from that other, when we followed one whom I now know to have been a mere tawdry pretender, no better fitted to be a King than a vagabond actor at a fair is fit to be a Lord. Alas! what blood was wasted in that mad attempt!—of which I was myself one of the most eager promoters. I was then young, and I believed all that I was told by the conspirators in Holland; I took their list of well-wishers for insurgents already armed and waiting only for a signal; I thought that the roll of noble names set down for sturdy Protestants was that of men already pledged to the Cause; I believed that the whole nation would rise at the first opportunity to turn out the priests; I even believed in the legitimacy of the Duke, and that against the express statement of his father (if King Charles was in reality his father); and I believed what they told me of his princely virtues, his knowledge of the art of war, and his heroic valour. I say that I believed all these things and that I became a willing and zealous tool in their hands. As for what those who planned the expedition believed, I know not; nor will any one now ever learn what promises were made to the Duke, what were broken, and why he was, from the outset, save for a few days at Taunton, so dejected and disappointed. As for me, I shall always believe that the unhappy man—unwise and soft-hearted—was betrayed by those whom he trusted.

It is now an old tale, though King Monmouth will not speedily be forgotten in the West Country, nor will the memory of the Bloody Assize. The brave lads who followed him are dead and buried; some in unhonoured graves hard by the place where they were hanged, some under the burning sun of the West Indies. The Duke himself hath long since paid the penalty of his rash attempt. All is over and ended, except the memory of it.

It is now common history, known to everybody, how the Prince of Orange lingered in the West Country, his army inactive, as if he knew (doubtless he was well informed upon this particular) that the longer he remained idle the more likely was the King's Cause to fall to pieces. There are some who think that if King James had risked an action he could not but have gained, whatsoever its event—I mean that, the blood of his soldiers once roused, they would have remained steadfast to him, and would have fought for him. But this he dared not to risk; wherefore the Prince did nothing, while the King's regiments fell to pieces and his friends deserted him. It was in December when the Prince came to Windsor, and I with him, once more Chyrurgeon in a rebel army. While there I rode to London—partly with the intention of judging for myself as to the temper of the people; partly because, after so long an absence, I wished once more to visit a place where there are books and pictures; and partly because there were certain notes and herbs which I desired to communicate to the College of Physicians in Warwick Lane. It happened to be the very day when the King's first flight—that, namely, when he was taken in the Isle of Sheppey—became known. The streets in the City of London I found crowded with people hurrying to and fro, running in bands and companies, shouting and crying, as if in the presence of some great and imminent danger. It was reported and currently believed that the disbanded Irish soldiers had begun to massacre the Protestants. There was no truth at all in the report; but yet the bells were ringing from all the towers, the crowds were exhorting each other to tear down and destroy the Romish chapels, to hunt for and to hang the priests, and especially Jesuits (I know not whether they found any), and to shout for the Prince of Orange. I stood aside to let the crowds (thus religiously disposed) run past, but there seemed no end to them. Presently, however (this was in front of the new Royal Exchange), there drew near another kind of crowd. There marched six or eight sturdy fellows bearing stout cudgels and haling along a prisoner. Round them there ran, shrieking, hooting, and cursing, a mob of a hundred men and more; they continually made attacks upon the guard, fighting them with sticks and fists; but they were always thrust back. I thought at first that they had caught some poor, wretched priest whom they desired to murder. But it proved to be a prize worth many priests. As they drew nearer, I discerned the prisoner. He was dressed in the garb of a common sailor, with short petticoats (which they call slops), and a jacket; his cap had been torn off, leaving the bare skull, which showed that he was no sailor, because common sailors do not wear wigs; blood was flowing down his cheek from a fresh wound; his eyes rolled hither and thither in an extremity of terror; I could not hear what he said for the shouting of those around him, but his lips moved, and I think he was praying his guards to close in and protect him. Never, surely, was seen a more terror-stricken creature.

I knew his face. Once seen (I had seen it once) it could never be forgotten. The red and bloated cheeks, which even his fear could not make pale; the eyes, more terrible than have been given to any other human creature: these I could not forget—in dreams I see them still. I saw that face at Exeter, when the cruel Judge exulted over our misery and rejoiced over the sentence which he pronounced. Yea, he laughed when he told us how we should swing, but not till we were dead, and then the knife—delivering his sentence so that no single point of its horror should be lost to us. Yes; it was the face of Judge Jeffreys—none other—this abject wretch was that great Judge. Why, when we went back to our prison there were some who cast themselves upon the ground, and, for terror of what was to come, fell into mere dementia. And now I saw him thus humbled, thus disgraced, thus threatened, thus in the last extremity and agony of terror.

They had discovered him, thus disguised and in hiding, at a tavern in Wapping, and were dragging him to the presence of the Lord Mayor. It is a long distance from Wapping to Guildhall, and they went but slowly, because they were beset and surrounded by these wolves who howled to have his blood. And all the way he shrieked and trembled for fear!

Sure and certain is the vengeance of the Lord!

This Haman, this unjust Judge, was thus suffering, at the hands of the savage mob, pangs far worse than those endured by the poor rustics whom he had delivered to the executioner. I say worse, because I have not only read, but have myself proved, that the rich and the learned—those, that is, who live luxuriously and those who have power to imagine and to feel beforehand—do suffer far more in disease than the common, ignorant folk. The scholar dies of terror before ever he feels the surgeon's knife, while the rustic bares his limb, insensible and callous, however deep the cut or keen the pain. I make no doubt, therefore, that the great Lord Chancellor, while they haled him all the way from Wapping to Guildhall, suffered as much as fifty ploughboys flogged at the cart-tail.

Many thousands there were who desired revenge upon him—I know not what revenge would satisfy the implacable; because revenge can do no more than kill the body, but his worst enemy should be satisfied with this, his dreadful fate. Even Barnaby, who was sad because he could get no revenge on his own account (he wanted a bloody battle, with the rout of the King's armies and the pursuit of a flying enemy, such as had happened at Sedgemoor), was satisfied with the justice which was done to that miserable man. It is wonderful that he was not killed amidst so many threatening cudgels; but his guards prevented that, not from any love they bore him; but quite the contrary (more unforgiving faces one never saw); for they intended to hand him over to the Lord Mayor, and that he should be tried for all his cruelties and treacheries, and, perhaps, experience himself that punishment of hanging and disembowelling which he had inflicted on so many ignorant and misled men.

How he was committed to the Tower, where he shortly died in the greatest torture of body as well as mind, everybody knows.