GEORGE JEFFREYS.[114]

George Jeffreys was a younger son of John Jeffreys, Esq., of Acton, near Wrexham, in Denbighshire, a gentleman of a respectable Welsh family, and of small fortune. His mother was a daughter of Sir Thomas Ireland, Knight, of the County Palatine of Lancaster. Never was child so unlike parents; for they were both quiet, sedate, thrifty, unambitious persons, who aspired not higher than to be well reputed in the parish in which they lived, and decently to rear their numerous offspring. Some imputed to the father a niggardly and covetous disposition; but he appears only to have exercised a becoming economy, and to have lived at home with his consort in peace and happiness till he was made more anxious than pleased by the irregular advancement of his boy George. It is said that he had an early presentiment that this son would come to a violent end; and was particularly desirous that he should be brought up to some steady trade, in which he might be secured from temptation and peril.

He was born in his father’s lowly dwelling at Acton in the year 1648. He showed, from early infancy, the lively parts, the active temperament, the outward good humor, and the overbearing disposition which distinguished him through life. He acquired an ascendancy among his companions in his native village by coaxing some and intimidating others, and making those most opposed to each other believe that he favored both. At marbles and leap-frog he was known to take undue advantages; and nevertheless, he contrived, notwithstanding secret murmurs, to be acknowledged as “master of the revels.”

While still young, he was put to the free school at the town of Shrewsbury, which was then considered a sort of metropolis for North Wales. Here he continued for two or three years; but we have no account how he demeaned himself. At the end of this time his father, though resolved to bind him apprentice to a shopkeeper in Wales, sent him for a short time to St. Paul’s School, in the city of London. The sight of the metropolis had a most extraordinary effect upon the mind of this ardent youth, and exceedingly disgusted him with the notion of returning into Denbighshire, to pass his life in a small provincial town as a mercer. On the first Sunday in every term he saw the judges and the serjeants come in grand procession to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and afterwards go to dine with the lord mayor—appearing little inferior to this great sovereign of the city in power and splendor. He heard that some of them had been poor boys like himself, who had pushed themselves on without fortune or friends; and though he was not so presumptuous as to hope, like another Whittington, to rise to be lord mayor, he was resolved that he would be lord chief justice or lord chancellor.

Now it was that he acquired whatever scholarship he ever possessed. Jeffreys applied with considerable diligence to Greek and Latin, though occasionally flogged for idleness and insolence. He at last ventured to disclose his scheme of becoming a great lawyer to his father, who violently opposed it, as wild and romantic and impossible, and who inwardly dreaded that, from involving him in want and distress, it might lead to some fatal catastrophe. He wrote back to his son, pointing out the inability of the family to give him a university education, or to maintain him at the inns of court till he should have a chance of getting into practice—his utter want of connections in London, and the hopelessness of his entering into a contest in an overstocked profession with so many who had the advantage of superior education, wealth, and patronage. Although the aspirant professed himself unconvinced by these arguments, and still tried to show the certainty of his success at the bar, he must have stood a crop-eared apprentice behind a counter in Denbigh, Ruthyn, or Flint, if it had not been for his maternal grandmother, who was pleased to see the blood of the Irelands break out, and who, having a small jointure, offered to contribute a part of it for his support. The university was still beyond their means; but it was thought this might be better dispensed with if he should be for some time at one of the great schools of royal foundation, where he might form acquaintances afterwards to be useful to him. The father reluctantly consented, in the hope that his son would soon return to his sober senses, and that the project would be abandoned with the general concurrence of the family. Meanwhile young George was transferred to Westminster School, then under the rule of the celebrated Busby.

There is reason to fear that the zeal for improvement which he had exhibited at St. Paul’s soon left him, and that he here began to acquire those habits of intemperance which afterwards proved so fatal to him. His father hearing of these had all his fears revived, and when the boy was at Acton during the holidays, again tried in vain to induce him to become a tradesman. But finding all dissuasions unavailing, the old gentleman withdrew his opposition, giving him a gentle pat on the back, accompanied by these words—“Ah, George, George, I fear thou wilt die with thy shoes and stockings on!”

Yet the wayward youth, while at Westminster, had fits of application, and carried away from thence a sufficient stock of learning to prevent him from appearing in after-life grossly deficient when any question of grammar arose. He was fond of reminding the world of the great master under whom he had studied.

His confidence in his own powers was so great, that, without conforming to ordinary rules, he expected to overcome every obstacle. Being now in the neighborhood of Westminster Hall, his ambition to be a great lawyer was inflamed by seeing the grand processions on the first day of term, and by occasionally peeping into the courts when an important trial was going forward. When he was actually lord chancellor, he used to relate that, while a boy at Westminster School, he had a dream, in which a gipsy read his fortune, foretelling “that he should be the chief scholar there, and should afterwards enrich himself by study and industry, and that he should come to be the second man in the kingdom, but in conclusion should fall into disgrace and misery.”

He was now sixteen, an age after which it was not usual to remain at school in those days. A family council was called at Acton, and as George still sanguinely adhered to the law, it was settled that, the university being quite beyond their reach, he should immediately be entered at an inn of court; that, to support him there, his grandmother should allow him forty pounds a year, and that his father should add ten pounds a year for decent clothing.

On the 19th of May, 1663, to his great joy, he was admitted a member of the Inner Temple. He got a small and gloomy chamber, in which, with much energy, he began his legal studies. He not only had a natural boldness of eloquence, but an excellent head for law. With steadiness of application he would have greatly excelled Lord Keeper Guilford, and in the mastery of this science would have rivalled Lord Hale and Lord Nottingham. But he could not long resist the temptations of bad company. Having laid in a very slender stock for a counsel or a judge, he forsook Littleton and Plowden, “moots and readings,” for the tavern, where was his chief delight. He seems to have escaped the ruinous and irreclaimable vice of gaming, but to have fallen into all others to which reckless templars were prone. Nevertheless, he had ever a keen eye to his own interest; and in these scenes of dissipation he assiduously cultivated the acquaintance of young attorneys and their clerks, who might afterwards be useful to him. When they met over a bowl of punch at the Devil tavern, or some worse place, he charmed them with songs and jokes, and took care to bring out before them, opportunely, any scrap of law which he had picked up, to impress them with the notion that, when he put on his gown and applied to business, he should be able to win all the causes in which he might be retained. He was exceedingly popular, and he had many invitations to dinner; which, to make his way in the world, he thought it better to accept than to waste his time over the midnight oil in acquiring knowledge which it might never be known that he possessed.After the first fervor of loyalty which burst out at the restoration had passed away, a malcontent party was formed, which gradually gained strength. In this, most of the aspiring young lawyers, not actually employed by the government, were ranged—finding it politic to begin in “the sedition line,” that their value might be better appreciated by the court, and a better price might be bid for them. From such reasoning, or perhaps from accidental circumstances, Jeffreys associated himself with the popular leaders, and in the hour of revelry would drink on his knees any toasts to “the good old cause,” and to “the immortal memory of old Noll.”

He was often put to great shifts from the embarrassed state of his finances, the ten pounds for “decent clothing” for a year being expended in a single suit of cut velvet, and his grandmother’s forty pounds being insufficient to pay his tavern bills. But he displayed much address in obtaining prolonged and increased credit from his tradesmen. He borrowed adroitly; and it is said that such an impression was made by his opening talents, that several wealthy men on the popular side voluntarily made him presents of money, in the hope of the important services they were speedily to receive from his support.

It is very much to be regretted that we have not from a Roger North more minute information with respect to the manner in which his character was formed, and his abilities were cultivated. He seems to have been a most precocious young man. While still in his twentieth year, he was not only familiarly acquainted with the town, and completely a man of the world, exciting confident expectations of great future eminence, but he was already received among veteran statesmen as a member of an important party in the state, consulted as to their movements, and regarded as their future leader.

After keeping all his terms, and doing all his exercises, he was regularly called to the bar on the 22d day of November, 1668—having been on the books of the society five years and six months—the requisite period of probation having been previously, by a general regulation, reduced from seven to the present period of five years.

Although he does not ever appear to have been chosen “reader” or “treasurer” of the society, yet in the year 1678, on being elected recorder of London, he was made a bencher, and he continued to be so till he took the coif, when he necessarily left it for Serjeants’ Inn.

During his early career he was involved in difficulties, which could only have been overcome by uncommon energy. Pressed by creditors, and at a loss to provide for the day that was passing over him, he had burdened himself with the expenses of a family. But this arose out of a speculation, which, in the first instance, was very prudent. Being a handsome young fellow, and capable of making himself acceptable to modest women, notwithstanding the bad company which he kept, he resolved to repair his fortunes by marrying an heiress; and he fixed upon the daughter of a country gentleman of large possessions, who, on account of his agreeable qualities, had invited him to his house. The daughter, still very young, was cautiously guarded, and almost always confined to her chamber; but Jeffreys contrived to make a confidant and friend of a poor relation of hers, who was the daughter of a country parson, and lived with her as a companion. Through this agency he had established a correspondence with the heiress, and an interest in her affections, so that on his last visit she had agreed, if her father’s consent could not be obtained, to elope with him. What was his disappointment, soon after his return to his dismal chamber in the Inner Temple, which he had hoped soon to exchange for a sumptuous manor-house, to receive a letter from the companion, informing him “that his correspondence with the heiress had been discovered by the old father, who was in such a rage, that locking up her cousin, he had instantly turned herself out of doors, and that having taken shelter in the house of an acquaintance in Holborn, she was there in a state of great destitution and distraction, afraid to return to her father, or to inform him of what had happened.” The conduct of Jeffreys on this occasion may be truly considered the brightest passage in his history. He went to her, found her in tears, and considering that he had been the means of ruining her prospects in life, (to say nothing of her being much handsomer than her rich cousin,) he offered her his hand. She consented. Her father, notwithstanding the character and circumstances of his proposed son-in-law, out of regard to his daughter’s reputation, sanctioned their union, and to the surprise of all parties, gave her a fortune of three hundred pounds.

She made an excellent wife, and I do not find any complaint of his having used her ill till near the time of her death, a few years after, when he had cast his affections upon the lady who became the second Mrs. Jeffreys. Meanwhile he left her at her father’s, occasionally visiting her; and he continued to carry on his former pursuits, and to strengthen his connections in London, with a view to his success at the bar, on which he resolutely calculated with unabated confidence.

He was not disappointed. Never had a young lawyer risen so rapidly into practice. But he cut out a new line for himself. Instead of attending in Westminster Hall to take notes in law French of the long-winded arguments of serjeants and eminent counsel, where he would have had little chance of employment, he did not go near any of the superior courts for some years, but confined himself to the Old Bailey, the London Sessions, and Hicks’s Hall. There he was soon “the cock of the walk.”

Some of his pot companions were now of great use to him in bringing him briefs, and recommending him to business. All this pushing would have been of little avail if he had not fully equalled expectation by the forensic abilities which he displayed. He had a very sweet and powerful voice, having something in its tone which immediately fixed the attention, so that his audience always were compelled to listen to him, irrespective of what he said. “He was of bold aspect, and cared not for the countenance of any man.” He was extremely voluble, but always perspicuous and forcible, making use of idiomatic, and familiar, and colloquial, and sometimes of coarse language. He never spared any assertion that was likely to serve his client. He could get up a point of law so as to argue it with great ability, and with the justices, as well as with juries, his influence was unbounded. He was particularly famous for his talent in cross-examination, indulging in ribaldry and banter to a degree which would not now be permitted. The audience being ever ready to take part with the persecuted witness, the laugh was sometimes turned against him. It is related that, about this time, beginning to cross-examine a witness in a leathern doublet, who had made out a complete case against his client, he bawled forth—“You fellow in the leathern doublet, pray what have you for swearing?” The man looked steadily at him, and “Truly, sir,” said he, “if you have no more for lying than I have for swearing, you might wear a leathern doublet as well as I.” This blunt reply got to the west end of the town, and was remembered among the courtiers against Jeffreys when he grew to be a great man.

While a trial was going on, he was devotedly earnest in it; but when it was over, he would recklessly get drunk, as if he never were to have another to conduct. Coming so much in contact with the aldermen, he ingratiated himself with them very much, and he was particularly patronized by a namesake (though no relation) of his own—Jeffreys, alderman of Bread Street Ward, who was very wealthy, a great smoker, (an accomplishment in which the lawyer could rival him, as well as in drinking,) and who had immense influence with the livery.

Pushed by him, or rising rapidly by his own buoyancy, our hero, before he had been two years and a half at the bar, and while only twenty-three years of age, was elected common serjeant of the city of London—an office which has raised a Denman as well as a Jeffreys to be chief justice of England. This first step of his elevation he obtained on the 17th of March, 1671.

But his ambition was only inflamed by this promotion, which disqualified him for a considerable part of his bar practice, and he resolved entirely to change the field of his operations, making a dash at Westminster Hall. He knew well that he could not be employed to draw declarations and pleas, or to argue demurrers or special verdicts; but he hoped his talent for examining witnesses and for speaking might avail him. At any rate, this was the only road to high distinction in his profession, and he spurned the idea of spending his life in trying petty larcenies, and dining with the city companies.

Hard drinking was again his grand resource. He could now afford to invite the great city attorneys to his house as well as carouse with them at taverns, and they were pleased with the attentions of a rising barrister as well as charmed with the pleasantry of the most jovial of companions. He likewise began to cultivate fashionable society, and to consider how he might contrive to get an introduction at court. “He put himself into all companies, for which he was qualified by using himself to drink hard.” Now was the time when men got forward in life by showing their hatred of puritanism, their devotion to church and king, and an affectation of vice, even if actually free from it.

Yet such was the versatility of Jeffreys, that for the nonce he could appear sanctimonious, and even puritanical. Thus he deceived the religious, the moral, the immaculate Sir Matthew Hale, then chief justice of the King’s Bench. Roger North, in drawing the character of this extraordinary man, says,—“Although he was very grave in his own person, he loved the most bizarre and irregular wits in the practice of the law before him most extravagantly. So Sir George Jeffreys gained as great an ascendant in practice over him as ever counsel had over a judge.”

As a King’s Bench practitioner, Jeffreys was first employed at Nisi Prius in actions for assaults and defamation; but before long the city attorneys gave him briefs in commercial causes tried at Guildhall, and though in banc he could not well stand up against regularly-bred lawyers, like Sir Francis North, Sir William Jones, Sir Creswell Levinz, and Heneage Finch, the son of the Lord Chancellor Nottingham, he was generally equal to them before a jury, and he rapidly trod upon their heels.

He anxiously asked himself how he was to climb to high office. He had started with the disaffected party, and they had been of essential use to him; but though they were growing in strength, no chance existed of their being able to make attorney generals, chief justices, or chancellors. At the same time he did not like yet to break with those who might still serve him—particularly in obtaining the recordership, which he coveted as a stepping stone to something better. He resolved so to manage as to be a favorite of both parties till he could devote himself entirely, and exclusively, and openly to the one which should be dominant; and he again succeeded.

From his well-known influence in the city he found no difficulty in making the acquaintance of Will Chiffinch, “the trusty page of the back stairs,” who, besides other employments of a still more confidential nature, was intrusted by Charles II. to get at the secrets of all men of any consequence in every department of life. “This Mr. Chiffinch,” says Roger North, “was a true secretary as well as page, for he had a lodging at the back stairs, which might have been properly termed ‘the Spy Office,’ where the king spoke with particular persons about intrigues of all kinds; and all little informers, projectors, &c., were carried to Chiffinch’s lodging. He was a most impetuous drinker, and in that capacity an admirable spy; for he let none part with him sober, if it were possible to get them drunk, and his great artifice was pushing idolatrous healths of his good master, and being always in haste; for the king is coming; which was his word. Being an Hercules well breathed at the sport himself, he commonly had the better, and so fished out many secrets, and discovered men’s characters, which the king could never have obtained the knowledge of by any other means. It is likely that Jeffreys, being a pretender to main feats with the citizens, might forward himself, and be entertained by Will Chiffinch, and that which at first was mere spying turn to acquaintance, if not friendship, such as is apt to grow up between immense drinkers, and from thence might spring recommendations of him to the king, as the most useful man that could be found to serve his majesty in London.”

Thus, while Mr. Common Serjeant was caballing in the city with Lord Shaftesbury, who had established himself in Aldersgate Street, and talked of becoming lord mayor, he had secretly got a footing at court, and by assurances of future services disposed the government to assist him in all his jobs. His opposition friends were a little startled by hearing that he had been made solicitor to the Duke of York; but he assured them that this was merely a professional employment, unconnected with politics, which, according to professional etiquette, he could not decline; and when he was knighted as a mark of royal favor, with which he was silly enough to be much tickled, he said that he was obliged reluctantly to submit to the degradation as a consequence of his employment.

By some mischance, which is not explained, he missed the office of recorder on the vacancy occasioned by the resignation of Sir John Howel, who so outraged public decency on the trial of Penn and Mead; but Sir William Dolbein, the successful candidate, being made a judge on the 22d of October, 1678, Jeffreys was then elected his successor. Upon this occasion there were three other candidates; but he was so warmly supported by both parties in politics, that they all withdrew before the day of nomination, and he is said in the city records to have been “freely and unanimously elected.”

The new recorder had hardly been sworn in, when feeling that the liberals could do nothing more for him, he utterly cast them off, becoming for the rest of his life the open, avowed, unblushing slave of the court, and the bitter, persecuting, and unappeasable enemy of the principles he had before supported, and of the men he had professed to love.

He entirely forsook Thanet House, in Aldersgate Street, and all the meetings of the Whigs in the city; and instead of secret interviews with Will Chiffinch in the “Spy Office,” he went openly to court, and with his usual address, he contrived, by constant assiduities and flatteries, to gain the good graces both of Nell Gwyn and of the Duchess of Portsmouth, who, since the fall of Lady Castlemaine, held divided empire at Whitehall, balancing the Roman Catholic and Protestant parties. To each of these ladies, it would appear from the libels of the day, his rise was attributed.

However, not long after he had openly ratted, an accident happened that had like to have spoiled all his projects; and that was the breaking out of the Popish plot. Although there is no reasonable ground for saying that it was contrived by Shaftesbury, he made such skilful and unscrupulous use of it, that suddenly, from appearing the leader of a small, declining, and despairing party, he had the city and the nation at his beck, and with a majority in both houses of Parliament, there seemed every probability that he would soon force himself upon the king, and have at his disposal all the patronage of the government. Jeffreys was for some time much disconcerted, and thought that once in his life he had made a false move. He was utterly at a loss how to conduct himself, and his craft never was put to so severe a trial.

Being called into council, he recommended that the government should profess to credit the plot, and should outvie the other side in zeal for the Protestant religion, but should contrive to make Shaftesbury answerable for the reality of the conspiracy; so that, if hereafter it should blow up, or the people should get tired of it, all that was done to punish the supposed authors of it might be laid to his account.

He immediately began diligently to work the Popish plot according to his own scheme. Coleman, Whitbread, Ireland, and all whom Oates and Bedloe accused being committed to prison, it was resolved to prosecute them for high treason in having compassed the death of the king, as well as the overthrow of the Protestant religion; and their trials were conducted by the government as state trials, partly at the bar of the Court of King’s Bench, and partly at the Old Bailey. In the former Jeffreys acted as a counsel, in the latter as a judge. It is asserted, and not improbably, that he had a real horror of Popery, which, though he could control it in the presence of the Duke of York, and when his interest required, at other times burst out with sincerity as well as fierceness.

Scroggs presided at the Old Bailey, but Jeffreys whetted his fury by telling him that the king was a thorough believer in the plot, and by echoing his expressions; as, when the chief justice said to the jury, “You have done like honest men,” he exclaimed in a stage whisper, “They have done like honest men.” As mouthpiece of the lord mayor, the head of the commission, after conviction he had the pleasing duty of passing sentence of death by the protracted tortures which the law of treason prescribed.

He had a still greater treat in passing the like sentence on Richard Langhorne, an eminent Catholic barrister, with whom he had been familiarly acquainted. He first addressed generally the whole batch of the prisoners convicted, whom he thus continues to upbraid for trying to root out “the best of religions:” “I call it the best of religions, even for your sakes; for had it not been for the sake of our religion, that teaches us not to make such requitals as yours seems to teach you, you had not had this fair, formal trial, but murder would have been returned to you for the murder you intended to commit both upon the king and most of his people. What a strange sort of religion is that whose doctrine seems to allow them to be the greatest saints in another world who have been the most impudent sinners in this! Murder and the blackest of crimes were the best means among you to get a man to be canonized a saint hereafter.” Then he comes to his brother lawyer—“There is one gentleman that stands at the bar whom I am very sorry to see, with all my heart, in this condition, because of some acquaintance I have had with him heretofore. To see that a man who hath understanding in the law, and who hath arrived at so great an eminency in that profession as this gentleman hath done, should not remember that it is not only against the rules of Christianity, but even against the rules of his profession, to attempt any injury against the person of the king! He knows it is against all the rules of law to endeavor to introduce a foreign power into this land. So that you have sinned both against your conscience and your own certain knowledge.” Last of all, he offers his friend the assistance of a Protestant divine to prepare him for a speedy departure, and, referring him to the statute whereby the ministration of a Catholic priest is made illegal, he himself, though “a layman,” gives him some “pious advice.” He had carried the sympathies of his audience along with him, for, when he had concluded with the “quartering,” he was greeted with a loud shout of applause.

Thus, by the powerful assistance of the recorder, did the government obtain popularity for prosecuting the plot, till the people at last actually did get tired of it, and Shaftesbury was prevented from deriving any fruit from it beyond the precarious tenure, for a few months, of his office of president of the council.

The recorder was equally zealous, on all other occasions, to do what he thought would be agreeable at court. With the view of repressing public discussion, he laid down for law, as he said, on the authority of all the judges, “that no person whatsoever could expose to the public knowledge any thing that concerned the affairs of the public without license from the king, or from such persons as he may think fit to intrust with that power.”

The grand jury having several times returned “ignoramus” to an indictment against one Smith for a libel, in respect of a very innocent publication, though they were sent out of court to reconsider the finding, he at last exclaimed, “God bless me from such jurymen. I will see the face of every one of them, and let others see them also.” He accordingly cleared the bar, and, calling the jurymen one by one, put the question to them, and made each of them repeat the word “ignoramus.” He then went on another tack, and addressing the defendant, said, in a coaxing tone, “Come, Mr. Smith, there are two persons besides you whom this jury have brought in ignoramus; but they have been ingenuous enough to confess, and I cannot think to fine them little enough; they shall be fined twopence for their ingenuity in confessing. Well, come, Mr. Smith, we know who hath formerly owned both printing and publishing this book.” Smith.—“Sir, my ingenuity hath sufficiently experienced the reward of your severity; and, besides, I know no law commands me to accuse myself; neither shall I; and the jury have done like true Englishmen and worthy citizens, and blessed be God for such a jury.” Jeffreys was furious, but could only vent his rage by committing the defendant till he gave security for his good behavior.

Such services were not to go unrewarded. It was the wish of the government to put the renegade Jeffreys into the office of chief justice of Chester, so often the price of political apostasy; but Sir Job Charlton, a very old gentleman, who now held it, could not be prevailed upon voluntarily to resign, for he had a considerable estate in the neighborhood, and was loath to be stripped of his dignity. Jeffreys, supported by the Duke of York, pressed the king hard, urging that “a Welshman ought not to judge his countrymen,” and a message was sent to Sir Job that he was to be removed. The old gentleman was imperfectly consoled with the place of puisne judge of the Common Pleas, which, in the reign of James II., he was subsequently allowed to exchange for his beloved Chester. Meanwhile he was succeeded by Jeffreys, “more Welshman than himself,” who was at the same time made counsel for the crown, at Ludlow, where a court was still held for Wales.

Immediately afterwards, the new chief justice was called to the degree of the coif, and made king’s serjeant, whereby he had precedence in Westminster Hall of the attorney and solicitor general. The motto on his rings, with great brevity and point, inculcated the prevailing doctrines of divine right and passive obedience—“A Deo Rex, a Rege Lex.” As a further mark of royal favor, there was conferred upon him the hereditary dignity of a baronet. He still retained the recordership of London, and had extensive practice at the bar.

The great prosperity which Jeffreys now enjoyed had not the effect which it ought to have produced upon a good disposition, by making him more courteous and kind to others. When not under the sordid dread of injuring himself by offending superiors, he was universally insolent and overbearing. Being made chief justice of Chester, he thought that all puisne judges were beneath him, and he would not behave to them with decent respect, even when practising before them. At the Kingston assizes, Baron Weston having tried to check his irregularities, he complained that he was not treated like a counsellor, being curbed in the management of his brief. Weston, B.—“Sir George, since the king has thrust his favors upon you, and made you chief justice of Chester, you think to run down every body; if you find yourself aggrieved, make your complaint; here’s nobody cares for you.” Jeffreys.—“I have not been used to make complaints, but rather to stop those that are made.” Weston, B.—“I desire, sir, that you will sit down.” He sat down, and is said to have wept with anger. His intemperate habits had so far shaken his nerves, that he shed tears very freely on any strong emotion.

We may be prepared for his playing some fantastic tricks before his countrymen at Chester, where he was subject to no control; but the description of his conduct there by Lord Delamere, (afterwards Earl of Warrington,) in denouncing it in the House of Commons, must surely be overcharged:—“The county for which I serve is Cheshire, which is a county palatine; and we have two judges peculiarly assigned us by his majesty. Our puisne judge I have nothing to say against; he is a very honest man, for aught I know; but I cannot be silent as to our chief judge; and I will name him, because what I have to say will appear more probable. His name is Sir George Jeffreys, who, I must say, behaved himself more like a jack-pudding than with that gravity which becomes a judge. He was witty upon the prisoners at the bar. He was very full of his jokes upon people that came to give evidence, not suffering them to declare what they had to say in their own way and method, but would interrupt them because they behaved themselves with more gravity than he. But I do not insist upon this, nor upon the late hours he kept up and down our city; it’s said he was every night drinking till two o’clock, or beyond that time, and that he went to his chamber drunk; but this I have only by common fame, for I was not in his company; I bless God I am not a man of his principles and behavior; but in the mornings he appeared with the symptoms of a man that overnight had taken a large cup. That which I have to say is the complaint of every man, especially of them that had any lawsuits. Our chief justice has a very arbitrary power in appointing the assize when he pleases, and this man has strained it to the highest point; for whereas we were accustomed to have two assizes, the first about April or May, the latter about September, it was this year the middle (as I remember) of August before we had any assize; and then he despatched business so well that he left half the causes untried; and, to help the matter, has resolved we shall have no more assizes this year.”

Being tired of revelling in Chester, he put a sudden end to his first assize there, that he might pay a visit to his native place; to which I am afraid he was less prompted by a pious wish to embrace his father, who had been so resolutely bent on making him a shopkeeper, and who, from the stories propagated about his conduct as a judge, still expressed some misgivings about him, as to dazzle his old companions with the splendor of his new state. Accordingly he came with such a train that the cider barrels at Acton ran very fast, and the larder was soon exhausted; whereupon the old gentleman, in a great fret, charged his son with a design to ruin him, by bringing a whole county at his heels, and warned him against again attempting the same prodigality.

But a violent political storm now arose, which threatened entirely to overwhelm our hero, and from which he did not escape unhurt. In the struggle which arose from the long delay to assemble Parliament, he had leagued himself strongly with the “Abhorrers” against the “Petitioners,” and proceedings were instituted in the House of Commons on this ground, against him along with Chief Justice Scroggs and Chief Justice North.

A petition from the city of London, very numerously signed, having been presented, complaining that the recorder had obstructed the citizens in their attempts to have Parliament assembled for the redress of grievances, a select committee was appointed, who, having heard evidence on the subject, and examined him in person, presented a report, on which the following resolutions were passed:—

“That Sir George Jeffreys, recorder of the city of London, by traducing and obstructing petitioning for the sitting of this Parliament, hath destroyed the right of the subject.“That an humble address be presented to his majesty, to remove Sir George Jeffreys out of all public offices.

“That the members of this house serving for the city of London do communicate these resolutions to the Court of Aldermen for the said city.”

The king was stanch, and returned for answer to the address the civil refusal “that he would consider of it;”[115] but Jeffreys, who, where he apprehended personal danger, was “none of the intrepids,” quailed under the charge, and, afraid of further steps being taken against him, came to an understanding that he should give up the recordership, which his enemies wished to be conferred upon their partisan, Sir George Treby. The king was much chagrined at the loss of such a valuable recorder, and said sarcastically that “he was not Parliament-proof.” But he was obliged to acquiesce, and Jeffreys, having been reprimanded on his knees at the bar, was discharged. The address of Speaker Williams was very bitter, and caused deep resentment in the mind of Jeffreys. On the 2d of December he actually did resign his office, and Treby was chosen to succeed him.

In a few days after there was exhibited one of Lord Shaftesbury’s famous Protestant processions, on the anniversary of the accession of Queen Elizabeth. In this rode a figure on horseback, to represent the ex-recorder, with his face to the tail, and a label on his back, “I am an Abhorrer.” At Temple Bar he was thrown into a bonfire, coupled with the devil; the preceding pair, who suffered the same fate, being Sir Roger L’Estrange[116] and the Pope of Rome.However, all these indignities endeared him to the court; and his pusillanimity was forgiven from the recollection of past and the hope of future services. A petition from the city being presented to the king at Hampton Court, he attended as a liveryman, though no longer the mouthpiece of the corporation, when he was treated with marked civility by Charles, and detained to dinner, while the lord mayor and aldermen and the new recorder were sent off with a reprimand.

To oblige the court, and to assist them in their criminal jobs, he accepted the appointment of chairman of the Middlesex sessions at Hicks’s Hall, although it was somewhat beneath his dignity, and it deprived him of a portion of his practice. Here the grand jury were sworn in; and as they were returned by sheriffs whom the city of London elected, and who were still of the liberal party, the problem was to have them remodelled, so that they might find bills of indictment against all whom the government wished to prosecute. With this view, Jeffreys declared that none should serve except true church of England men; and he ordered the under-sheriff to return a new panel purged of all sectarians. He had a particular spite against the Presbyterians, who had mainly contributed to his being turned out of the recordership. The under-sheriff disobeying his summons, he ordered the sheriffs to attend next day in person; but in their stead came the new recorder, who urged that, by the privileges of the city of London, they were exempted from attending at Hicks’s Hall. He overruled this claim with contempt, and fined the sheriffs one hundred pounds. It was found, however, that while the city retained the power of electing the sheriffs, all these attempts to pervert justice would be fruitless.Jeffreys remained in a state of painful anxiety during Charles’s last Westminster Parliament, and during the few days of the Oxford Parliament. The popular party had such a majority in the House of Commons, and seemed so powerful, that it is said the renegade again expressed deep regret that he had left them; but late at night, on Monday, the 28th day of March, 1681, news arrived in London, that early that morning the king had dissolved the Parliament, and had declared his firm determination never to call another. If Jeffreys was still sober, and got drunk that night, we ought to excuse him.

Now his talents were to be brought into full play. In the conflict, the ranks of the enemy being thrown into disorder, the brigade of the lawyers, who had been kept back as a reserve, was marched up to hang on their broken rear, insulting, and to sweep them from the field.

First came on the trial of Fitzharris for high treason. Jeffreys, as counsel for the crown, argued the demurrer to the plea of the pendency of the impeachment; and then, having assisted the Duchess of Portsmouth to evade the questions which were put to her for the purpose of showing that the prisoner had acted under the king’s orders, he addressed the jury with great zeal after the solicitor general, and was mainly instrumental in obtaining the conviction.

Next came the trial of Archbishop Plunkett, the Roman Catholic Primate of Ireland, in which Jeffreys was so intemperate that the attorney general was obliged to check him, that the prisoner might have some show of fair play. But it was on the trial of College, “the Protestant joiner,”[117] that he gave the earliest specimen of his characteristic ribaldry, and his talent for jesting in cases of life and death, which shone out so conspicuously when he was lord chief justice of the King’s Bench. He began with strongly justifying the act of taking from the prisoner the papers he was to use in his defence, saying, that to allow him to see them would be “assigning counsel to him with a vengeance.” A witness having stated that pistols were found in the prisoner’s holsters when he was attending the city members at Oxford, he exclaimed with a grin, “I think a chisel might have been more proper for a joiner.”

There was called as a witness, by the prisoner, one Lun, who, being a waiter at the Devil Tavern and a fanatic, had some years before been caught on his knees praying against the Cavaliers, saying, “Scatter them, good Lord! Scatter them!” from whence he had ever after borne the nickname of “Scatter’em.” Jeffreys thus begins his cross-examination: “We know you, Mr. Lun; we only ask questions about you that the jury too may know you as well as we.” Lun.—“I don’t care to give evidence of any thing but the truth. I was never on my knees before the Parliament for any thing.” Jeffreys.—“Nor I neither for much; yet you were once on your knees when you cried, ‘Scatter them, good Lord!’ Was it not so, Mr. Scatter’em?”

He had next an encounter with the famous Titus Oates, who was called by College, and who, when cross-examined by him, appealed to Sir George Jeffreys’s own knowledge of a fact about which he was inquiring. Jeffreys.—“Sir George Jeffreys does not intend to be an evidence, I assure you.” Dr. Oates.—“I do not desire Sir George Jeffreys to be an evidence for me; I had credit in Parliaments, and Sir George had disgrace in one of them.” Jeffreys.—“Your servant, doctor; you are a witty man and a philosopher.” He had his full revenge when the doctor himself was afterwards tried before him.

We may judge of the councillor’s general style of treating witnesses by his remark on the trial of Lord Grey de Werke for carrying off the Lady Henrietta Berkeley; when his objection was overruled to the competency of the young lady as a witness for the defendant, although she was not only of high rank and uncommon beauty, but undoubted veracity, he observed, “Truly, my lord, we would prevent perjury if we could.”

We now come to transactions which strikingly prove the innate baseness of his nature in the midst of his pretended openness and jolly good humor. He owed every thing in life to the corporation of the city of London. The freemen, in the exercise of their ancient privileges, had raised him from the ground by electing him common serjeant and recorder, and to the influence he was supposed to have in the Court of Common Council and in the Court of Aldermen must be ascribed his introduction to Whitehall and all his political advancement. But when, upon the failure of the prosecution against Lord Shaftesbury, the free municipal constitution of the city became so odious to the government, he heartily entered into the conspiracy to destroy it. It is said that he actually suggested the scheme of having a sheriff nominated by the lord mayor, and he certainly took a very active part in carrying it into execution. On Midsummer day, having planted Lord Chief Justice North in his house in Aldermanbury, that he might be backed by his authority, he himself appeared on the hustings in Guildhall; and when the poll was going against the court candidates, illegally advised the lord mayor to dissolve the hall, and afterwards to declare them duly elected. He did every thing in his power to push on and to assist the great quo warranto, by which the city was to be entirely disfranchised.[118]

When success had crowned these efforts, and Pilkington and Shute, the former sheriffs, with Alderman Cornish and others, were to be tried before a packed jury for a riot at the election, finding that he had the game in his hand, his insolence knew no bounds. The defendants having challenged the array, on the ground that the sheriffs who returned the panel were not lawfully appointed,[119] as soon as the challenge was read, he exclaimed, “Here’s a tale of a tub indeed!” The counsel for the defendants insisted that the challenge was good in law, and at great length argued for its validity.

Jeffreys.—“Robin Hood
Upon Greendale stood.”

Thompson, Counsel for the Defendants.—“If the challenge be not good, there must be a defect in it either in point of law or in point of fact. I pray that the crown may either demur or traverse.” Jeffreys.—“This discourse is only for discourse sake. I pray the jury may be sworn.” Lord Chief Justice Saunders.—“Ay, ay, swear the jury.” The defendants were, of course, all found guilty; and as there were among them the most eminent of Jeffreys’s old city friends, he exerted himself to the utmost not only in gaining a conviction, but in aggravating the sentence.But this was only a case of misdemeanor, in which he could ask for nothing beyond fine and imprisonment. He was soon to be engaged in prosecutions for high treason against the noblest of the land, in which his savage taste for blood might be gratified. The Ryehouse plot broke out, for which there was some foundation; and after the conviction of those who had planned it, Lord Russell was brought to trial at the Old Bailey, on the ground that he had consented to it.

Jeffreys, in the late state trials, had gradually been encroaching on the attorney and solicitor general, Sir Robert Sawyer and Sir Heneage Finch, and in Lord Russell’s case, to which the government attached such infinite importance, he almost entirely superseded them. To account for his unexampled zeal, we must remember that the office of chief justice of the King’s Bench was still vacant, Saunders having died a few months before, and Lord Keeper North having strongly opposed the appointment of Jeffreys as his successor.

These trials took place before a commission, at the head of which was placed Pemberton, chief justice of the Common Pleas, to whom a chance was thus afforded of earning a reappointment to the chief justiceship of the King’s Bench, in which he had been superseded by Saunders.

The case of Colonel Walcot was taken first; and here there was no difficulty, for he had not only joined in planning an insurrection against the government, but was privy to the design of assassinating the king and the Duke of York, and in a letter to the secretary of state he had confessed his complicity, and offered to become a witness for the crown. This trial was meant to prepare the public mind for that of Lord Russell, the great ornament of the Whig party, who had carried the exclusion bill through the House of Commons, and, attended by a great following of Whig members, had delivered it with his own hand to the lord chancellor at the bar of the House of Lords. In proportion to his virtues was the desire to wreak vengeance upon him. But the object was no less difficult than desirable, for he had been kept profoundly ignorant of the intention to offer violence to the royal brothers, from the certainty that he would have rejected it with abhorrence; and although he had been present when there were deliberations respecting the right and the expediency of resistance by force to the government after the system had been established of ruling without Parliaments, he had never concurred in the opinion that there were no longer constitutional means of redress; much less had he concerted an armed insurrection. Notwithstanding all the efforts made to return a prejudiced jury, there were serious apprehensions of an acquittal.

Pemberton, the presiding judge, seems to have been convinced that the evidence against him was insufficient; and although he did not interpose with becoming vigor, by repressing the unfair arts of Jeffreys, who was leading counsel for the crown, and although he did not stop the prosecution, as an independent judge would do in modern times, he cannot be accused of any perversion of law; and, instead of treating the prisoner with brutality, as was wished and expected, he behaved to him with courtesy and seeming kindness.

Lord Russell, on his arraignment at the sitting of the court in the morning, having prayed that the trial should be postponed till the afternoon, as a witness for him was absent, and it had been usual in such case to allow an interval between the arraignment and the trial, Pemberton said, “Why may not this trial be respited till the afternoon?” and the only answer being the insolent exclamation, “Pray call the jury,” he mildly added, “My lord, the king’s counsel think it not reasonable to put off the trial longer, and we cannot put it off without their consent in this case.”

The following dialogue then took place, which introduced the touching display of female tenderness and heroism of the celebrated Rachel, Lady Russell, assisting her martyred husband during his trial—a subject often illustrated both by the pen and the pencil.

Lord Russell.—“My lord, may I not have the use of pen, ink, and paper?” Pemberton.—“Yes, my lord.” Lord Russell.—“My lord, may I not make use of any papers I have?” Pemberton.—“Yes, by all means.” Lord Russell.—“May I have somebody write to help my memory?” Attorney General.—“Yes, a servant.” Lord Russell.—“My wife is here, my lord, to do it.” Pemberton.—“If my lady please to give herself the trouble.”

The chief justice admitted Dr. Burnet, Dr. Tillotson, and other witnesses, to speak to the good character and loyal conversation of the prisoner, and gave weight to their testimony, notwithstanding the observation of Jeffreys that “it was easy to express a regard for the king while conspiring to murder him.”

Lord Russell had certainly been present at a meeting of the conspirators, when there was a consultation about seizing the king’s guards; but he insisted that he came in accidentally, that he had taken no part in the conversation, and that he was not acquainted with their plans. The aspirant chief justice saw clearly where was the pinch of the case, and the attorney general, who was examining Colonel Rumsey, being contented with asking—“Was the prisoner at the debate?” and receiving the answer “Yes,” Jeffreys started up, took the witness into his own hands, and calling upon him to draw the inference which was for the jury, pinned the basket by this leading and highly irregular question—“Did you find him averse to it or agreeing to it?” Having got the echoing answer which he suggested, “Agreeing to it,” he looked round with exultation, and said, “If my Lord Russell now pleases to ask any questions, he may!”

Jeffreys addressed the jury in reply after the solicitor general had finished, and much outdid him in pressing the case against the prisoner, while he disclaimed with horror the endeavor to take away the life of the innocent.

The jury retired, and the courtiers present were in a state of the greatest alarm; for against Algernon Sydney, who was to be tried next, the case was still weaker; and if the two whig chiefs, who were considered already cut off, should recover their liberty, and should renew their agitation, a national cry might be got up for the summoning of Parliament, and a new effort might be made to rescue the country from a Popish successor. These fears were vain. The jury returned a verdict of guilty, and Lord Russell expiated on the scaffold the crime of trying to preserve the religion and liberties of his country.

Jeffreys had all the glory of the verdict of guilty, and as the Lord Chief Justice Pemberton had rather flinched during this trial, and the attorney and solicitor general were thought men who would cry CRAVEN, and as the next case was not less important and still more ticklish, all objections to the proposed elevation of the favorite vanished, and he became chief justice of England, as the only man fit to condemn Algernon Sydney.[120]

The new chief justice was sworn in on the 29th of September, 1683, and took his seat in the Court of King’s Bench on the first day of the following Michaelmas term.

Sydney’s case was immediately brought on before him in this court, the indictment being removed by certiorari from the Old Bailey, that it might be under his peculiar care. The prisoner wishing to plead some collateral matter, was told by the chief justice that, if overruled, sentence of death would immediately be passed upon him. Though there can be no doubt of the illegality of the conviction, the charge against Jeffreys is unfounded, that he admitted the MS. treatise on government to be read without any evidence of its having been written by the prisoner, beyond “similitude of hands.” Two witnesses, who were acquainted with his handwriting from having seen him indorse bills of exchange, swore that they believed it to be his handwriting, and they were corroborated by a third, who, with his privity, had paid notes purporting to be indorsed by him without any complaint ever being made. But the undeniable and ineffaceable atrocity of the case was the lord chief justice’s doctrine, that “scribere est agere,” and that therefore this MS. containing some abstract speculations on different forms of government written many years before, never shown to any human being, and containing nothing beyond the constitutional principles of Locke and Paley, was tantamount to the evidence of a witness to prove an overt act of high treason. “If you believe that this was Colonel Sydney’s book, writ by him, no man can doubt that it is a sufficient evidence that he is guilty of compassing and imagining the death of the king. It fixes the whole power in the Parliament and the people. The king, it says, is responsible to them; the king is but their trustee. Gentlemen, I must tell you I think I ought more than ordinarily to press this upon you, because I know the misfortune of the late unhappy rebellion, and the bringing of the late blessed king to the scaffold, was first begun with such kind of principles. They cried he had betrayed the trust that was delegated to him by the people, so that the case rests not upon two but upon greater evidence than twenty-two witnesses, if you believe this book was writ by him.”

The chief justice having had the satisfaction of pronouncing with his own lips the sentence upon Sydney, of death and mutilation, instead of leaving the task as usual to the senior puisne judge, a scene followed which is familiar to every one. Sydney.—“Then, O God! O God! I beseech thee to sanctify these sufferings unto me, and impute not my blood to the country; let no inquisition be made for it, but if any, and the shedding of blood that is innocent must be revenged, let the weight of it fall only upon those that maliciously persecute me for righteousness sake.” Lord C. J. Jeffreys.—“I pray God work in you a temper fit to go unto the other world, for I see you are not fit for this.” Sydney.—“My lord, feel my pulse [holding out his hand,] and see if I am disordered. I bless God I never was in better temper than I now am.” By order of the chief justice, the lieutenant of the tower immediately removed the prisoner.

A very few days after, and while this illustrious patriot was still lying under sentence of death, the Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys and Mr. Justice Withins, who sat as his brother judge on the trial, went to a gay city wedding, where the lord mayor and other grandees were present. Evelyn, who was of the party, tells us that the chief and the puisne both “danced with the bride and were exceeding merry.” He adds, “These great men spent the rest of the afternoon until eleven at night in drinking healths, taking tobacco, and talking much beneath the gravity of judges, who had but a day or two before condemned Mr. Algernon Sydney.”

The next exhibition in the court of King’s Bench which particularly pleased Jeffreys and horrified the public, was the condemnation of Sir Thomas Armstrong. This gentleman was outlawed while beyond the seas, and being sent from Holland within the year, sought, according to his clear right in law, to reverse the outlawry.[121] I have had occasion to reprobate the conduct of Lord Keeper North in refusing him his writ of error, and suffering his execution; but Jeffreys may be considered the executioner. When brought up to the King’s Bench bar, Armstrong was attended by his daughter, a most beautiful and interesting young woman, who, when the chief justice had illegally overruled the plea, and pronounced judgment of death under the outlawry, exclaimed, “My lord, I hope you will not murder my father.” Chief Justice Jeffreys.—“Who is this woman? Marshal, take her into custody. Why, how now? Because your relative is attainted for high treason, must you take upon you to tax the courts of justice for murder when we grant execution according to law? Take her away.” Daughter.—“God Almighty’s judgments light upon you.” Chief Justice Jeffreys.—“God Almighty’s judgments will light upon those that are guilty of high treason.” Daughter.—“Amen. I pray God.” Chief Justice Jeffreys.—“So say I. I thank God I am clamor proof.” [The daughter is committed to prison, and carried off in custody.] Sir Thomas Armstrong.—“I ought to have the benefit of the law, and I demand no more.” Chief Justice Jeffreys.—“That you shall have, by the grace of God. See that execution be done on Friday next, according to law. You shall have the full benefit of the law!” Armstrong was hanged, embowelled, beheaded, and quartered accordingly.

When Jeffreys came to the king at Windsor soon after this trial, “the king took a ring of good value from his finger and gave it to him for these services. The ring upon that was called his blood stone.”[122] In the reign of William and Mary, Armstrong’s attainder was reversed. Jeffreys was then out of reach of process, but for the share which Sir Robert Sawyer had in it as attorney general, he was expelled the House of Commons.

Jeffreys had now the satisfaction of causing an information to be filed against Sir William Williams for having, as Speaker of the House of Commons, under the orders of the House, directed the printing of “Dangerfield’s Narrative,”[123] the vengeful tyrant thus dealing a blow at once to an old enemy who had reprimanded him on his knees, and to the privileges of the House, equally the object of his detestation. He was in hopes of deciding the case himself, but he left it as a legacy to his successor, Chief Justice Herbert, who, under his auspices, at once overruled the plea, and fined the defendant ten thousand pounds.

Not only was Jeffreys a privy councillor, but he had become a member of the cabinet, where, from his superior boldness and energy, as well as his more agreeable manners, he had gained a complete victory over Lord Keeper North, whom he denounced as a “trimmer,” and the great seal seemed almost within his grasp.[124] To secure it, he still strove to do every thing he could devise to please the court, as if hitherto nothing base had been done by him. When, to his great joy, final judgment was entered up against the city of London on the quo warranto, he undertook to get all the considerable towns in England to surrender their charters on the threat of similar proceedings; and with this view, in the autumn of 1684, he made a “campaign in the north,” which was almost as fatal to corporations as that “in the West,” the following year, proved to the lives of men. To show to the public the special credit he enjoyed at court, the London Gazette, just before he set out, in reference to the gift bestowed upon him for the judgment against Sir Thomas Armstrong, announced “that his majesty, as a mark of his royal favor, had taken a ring from his own finger and placed it on that of Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys.” In consequence, although when on the circuit he forgot the caution against hard drinking, with which the gift had been accompanied, he carried every thing before him, “charters fell like the walls of Jericho,” and he returned laden with his hyperborean spoils.I have already related the clutch at the great seal which he then made, and his temporary disappointment.[125] He was contented to “bide his time.” There were only two other occasions when he had it in his power to pervert the law, for the purpose of pleasing the court, during the present reign. The first was on the trial of Hampden, the grandson of the great Hampden, for a trifling misdemeanor. Although this young gentleman was only heir apparent to a moderate estate, and not in possession of any property, he was sentenced to pay a fine of forty thousand pounds—Jeffreys saying that the clause in Magna Charta, “Liber homo non amercietur pro magno delicto nisi salvo contenemento suo,” does not apply to fines imposed by the king’s judges. The other was the inquisition in the action of scan. mag. brought by the Duke of York against Titus Oates, in which the jury, under his direction, awarded one hundred thousand pounds damages.

Ever since the disfranchisement of the city of London, the ex-recorder had ruled it with a rod of iron. He set up a nominal lord mayor and nominal aldermen; but, as they were entirely dependent upon him, he treated them with continual insolence.

On the sudden death of Charles II., Jeffreys no doubt thought the period was arrived when he must be rewarded for the peculiar zeal with which he had abandoned himself to the service of the successor; but he was at first disappointed, and he had still to “wade through slaughter” to the seat he so much coveted.

Not dismayed, he resolved to act on two principles: 1st, If possible, to outdo himself in pleasing his master, whose arbitrary and cruel disposition became more apparent from the hour that he mounted the throne. 2dly, To leave no effort untried to discredit, disgrace, disgust, and break the heart of the man who stood between him and his object.

Being confirmed in the office of chief justice of the King’s Bench, he began with the trial for perjury of Titus Oates, whose veracity he had often maintained, but with whom he had a personal quarrel, and whom he now held up to reprobation—depriving him of all chance of acquittal. The defendant was found guilty on two indictments, and the verdict on both was probably correct; but what is to be said for the sentence—“To pay on each indictment a fine of one thousand marks; to be stript of all his canonical habits; to be imprisoned for life; to stand in the pillory on the following Monday, with a paper over his head, declaring his crime; next day to stand in the pillory at the Royal Exchange, with the same inscription; on the Wednesday to be whipped from Aldgate to Newgate; on the Friday to be whipped from Newgate to Tyburn; upon the 25th of April in every year, during life, to stand in the pillory at Tyburn, opposite the gallows; on the 9th of August in every year to stand in the pillory opposite Westminster Hall gate; on the 10th of August in every year to stand in the pillory at Charing Cross; and the like on the following day at Temple Bar; and the like on the 2d of September, every year, at the Royal Exchange;”—the court expressing deep regret that they could not do more, as they would “not have been unwilling to have given judgment of death upon him.”[126]Next came the trial of Richard Baxter, the pious and learned Presbyterian divine, who had actually said, and adhered to the saying, “Nolo episcopari,” and who was now prosecuted for a libel, because in a book on church government he had reflected on the church of Rome in words which might possibly be applied to the bishops of the church of England. No such reference was intended by him; and he was known not only to be of exemplary private character, but to be warmly attached to monarchy, and always inclined to moderate measures in the differences between the established church and those of his own persuasion.[127] Yet, when he pleaded not guilty, and prayed on account of ill health that his trial might be postponed, Jeffreys exclaimed, “Not a minute more to save his life. We have had to do with other sort of persons, but now we have a saint to deal with; and I know how to deal with saints as well as sinners. Yonder stands Oates in the pillory, [Oates was at that moment suffering part of his sentence in Palace Yard, outside the great gate of Westminster Hall,] and he says he suffers for the truth; and so says Baxter; but if Baxter did but stand on the outside of the pillory with him, I would say two of the greatest rogues and rascals in the kingdom stood there together.” Having silenced the defendant’s counsel by almost incredible rudeness, the defendant himself wished to speak, when the chief justice burst out, “Richard, Richard, thou art an old fellow and an old knave; thou hast written books enough to load a cart; every one is as full of sedition, I might say treason, as an egg is full of meat; hadst thou been whipt out of thy writing trade forty years ago, it had been happy. Thou pretendest to be a preacher of the gospel of peace, and thou hast one foot in the grave; it is time for thee to begin to think what account thou intendest to give; but leave thee to thyself, and I see thou wilt go on as thou hast begun; but, by the grace of God, I’ll look after thee. Gentlemen of the jury, he is now modest enough; but time was when no man was so ready at bind your kings in chains and your nobles in fetters of iron, crying, To your tents, O Israel! Gentlemen, for God’s sake do not let us be gulled twice in an age.” The defendant was, of course, found guilty, and thought himself lucky to escape with a fine of five hundred pounds, and giving security for his good behavior for seven years.[128]The lord chief justice, for his own demerits, and to thrust a thorn into the side of Lord Keeper Guilford, was now raised to the peerage by the title of “Baron Jeffreys of Wem”—the preamble of his patent narrating his former promotions—averring that they were the reward of virtue, and after the statement of his being appointed to preside in the Court of King’s Bench, adding, “Where at this very time he is faithfully and boldly doing justice and affording protection to our subjects, according to law, in consequence of which virtues we have thought him fit to be raised to the peerage of this realm.”[129]

He took his seat in the House of Lords on the first day of the meeting of James’s only Parliament, along with nineteen others either raised in the peerage or newly created since the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament—the junior being John Lord Churchill, afterwards Duke of Marlborough. The journals show that Lord Jeffreys was very regular in his attendance during the session, and as the house sat daily and still met at the same early hour as the courts of law, he must generally have left the business of the King’s Bench to be transacted by the other judges. He was now occupied day and night with plans for pushing the already disgraced lord keeper from the woolsack.I have already, in the life of Lord Guilford, related how these plans were conducted in the cabinet, in the royal circle at Whitehall, and in the House of Lords—particularly the savage treatment which the “staggering statesman” received on the reversal of his decree in Howard v. Duke of Norfolk, after which he never held up his head more.[130] The probability is, that although he clung to office so pusillanimously in the midst of all sorts of slights and indignities, he would now have been forcibly ejected if his death had not appeared to be near at hand, and if there had not been a demand for the services of “Judge Jeffreys” in a scene very different from the drowsy tranquillity of the Court of Chancery.

By the month of July, Monmouth’s rebellion had been put down, and he himself had been executed upon his parliamentary attainder without the trouble of a trial: but all the jails in the West of England were crowded with his adherents, and, instead of Colonel Kirke doing military execution on more of them than had already suffered from his “lambs,” it was resolved that they should all perish by the flaming sword of justice—which, on such an occasion, there was only one man fit to wield.

No assizes had been held this summer on the western circuit; but for all the counties upon it a special commission to try criminals was now appointed, at the head of which Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys was put; and by a second commission, he, singly, was invested with the authority of commander-in-chief over all his majesty’s forces within the same limits.

On entering Hampshire he was met by a brigade of soldiers, by whom he was guarded to Winchester. During the rest of his progress he never moved without a military escort; he daily gave the word; orders for going the rounds, and for the general disposal of the troops, were dictated by him—sentinels mounting guard at his lodgings, and the officers on duty sending him their reports.

I desire at once to save my readers from the apprehension that I am about to shock their humane feelings by a detailed statement of the atrocities of this bloody campaign in the west, the character of which is familiar to every Englishman. But, as a specimen of it, I must present a short account of the treatment experienced by Lady Lisle, with whose murder it commenced.

She was the widow of Major Lisle, who had sat in judgment on Charles I., had been a lord commissioner of the great seal under Cromwell, and, flying on the restoration, had been assassinated at Lausanne. She remained in England, and was remarkable for her loyalty as well as piety. Jeffreys’s malignant spite against her is wholly inexplicable; for he had never had any personal quarrel with her, she did not stand in the way of his promotion, and the circumstance of her being the widow of a regicide cannot account for his vindictiveness. Perhaps without any personal dislike to the individual, he merely wished to strike terror into the west by his first operation.

The charge against her, which was laid capitally, was that after the battle of Sedgemoor she had harbored in her house one Hickes, who had been in arms with the Duke of Monmouth—she knowing of his treason. In truth she had received him into her house, thinking merely that he was persecuted as a non-conformist minister, and the moment she knew whence he came, she (conveying to him a hint that he should escape) sent her servant to a justice of peace to give information concerning him. There was the greatest difficulty even to show that Hickes had been in the rebellion, and the judge was worked up to a pitch of fury by being obliged himself to cross-examine a Presbyterian witness, who had showed a leaning against the prosecution. But the principal traitor had not been convicted, and there was not a particle of evidence to show the scienter, i. e., that the supposed accomplice, at the time of the harboring was acquainted with the treason. Not allowed the benefit of counsel, she herself, prompted by natural good sense, took the legal objection that the principal traitor ought first to have been convicted, “because, peradventure, he might afterwards be acquitted as innocent after she had been condemned for harboring him;” and she urged with great force to the jury, “that at the time of the alleged offence she had been entirely ignorant of any suspicion of Hickes having participated in the rebellion; that she had strongly disapproved of it, and that she had sent her only son into the field to fight under the royal banner to suppress it.”

It is said by almost all the contemporary authorities, that thrice did the jury refuse to find a verdict of guilty, and thrice did Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys send them back to reconsider their verdict. In the account of the proceeding in the State Trials, which has the appearance of having been taken in short hand, and of being authentic, the repeated sending back of the jury is not mentioned; but enough appears to stamp eternal infamy on Jeffreys, if there were nothing more extant against him. After a most furious summing up, “the jury withdrew, and staying out a while, the Lord Jeffreys expressed a great deal of impatience, and said he wondered that in so plain a case they would go from the bar, and would have sent for them, with an intimation that, if they did not come quickly, he would adjourn, and let them lie by it all night; but, after about half an hour’s stay, the jury returned, and the foreman addressed himself to the court thus: ‘My lord, we have one thing to beg of your lordship some directions in before we can give our verdict: we have some doubt whether there be sufficient evidence that she knew Hickes to have been in the army.’ L. C. J.—‘There is as full proof as proof can be; but you are judges of the proof; for my part, I thought there was no difficulty in it.’ Foreman.—‘My lord, we are in some doubt of it.’ L. C. J.—‘I cannot help your doubts; was there not proved a discourse of the battle and the army at supper time?’ Foreman.—‘But, my lord, we are not satisfied that she had notice that Hickes was in the army.’ L. C. J.—‘I cannot tell what would satisfy you. Did she not inquire of Dunne whether Hickes had been in the army? and when he told her he did not know, she did not say she would refuse him if he had been there, but ordered him to come by night, by which it is evident she suspected it.... But if there was no such proof, the circumstances and management of the thing is as full a proof as can be. I wonder what it is you doubt of.’ Lady Lisle.—‘My lord, I hope——.’ L. C. J.—‘You must not speak now.’ The jury laid their heads together near a quarter of an hour, and then pronounced a verdict of guilty. L. C. J.—‘Gentlemen, I did not think I should have had any occasion to speak after your verdict; but finding some hesitancy and doubt among you, I cannot but say I wonder it should come about; for I think in my conscience the evidence was as full and plain as could be, and if I had been among you, and she had been my own mother, I should have found her guilty.’”

He passed sentence upon her with great sang froid, and, I really believe, would have done the same had she been the mother that bore him—“That you be conveyed from hence to the place from whence you came, and from thence you are to be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution, where your body is to be burnt alive till you be dead. And the Lord have mercy on your soul.”

The king refused the most earnest applications to save her life, saying that he had promised Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys not to pardon her; but, by a mild exercise of the prerogative, he changed the punishment of burning into that of beheading, which she actually underwent. After the Revolution, her attainder was reversed by act of Parliament, on the ground that “the verdict was injuriously extorted by the menaces and violence and other illegal practices of George Lord Jeffreys, Baron of Wem, then lord chief justice of the King’s Bench.”

From Winchester, the “lord general judge” proceeded to Salisbury, where he was obliged to content himself with whippings and imprisonments for indiscreet words, the Wiltshire men not having actually joined in the insurrection. But when he got into Dorsetshire, the county in which Monmouth had landed, and where many had joined his standard, he was fatigued, if not satiated, with shedding blood. Great alarm was excited, and not without reason, by his being seen to laugh in church, both during the prayers and sermon which preceded the commencement of business in the hall—his smile being construed into a sign that he was about “to breathe death like a destroying angel, and to sanguine his very ermine in blood.” His charge to the grand jury threw the whole county into a state of consternation; for he said he was determined to exercise the utmost rigor of the law, not only against principal traitors, but all aiders and abettors, who, by any expression, had encouraged the rebellion, or had favored the escape of any engaged in it, however nearly related to them, unless it were the harboring of a husband by a wife, which the wisdom of our ancestors permitted, because she had sworn to obey him.

Bills of indictment for high treason were found by the hundred, often without evidence, the grand jury being afraid that, if they were at all scrupulous, they themselves might be brought in “aiders and abettors.” It happened, curiously enough, that as he was about to arraign the prisoners, he received news, by express, that the Lord Keeper Guilford had breathed his last at Wroxton, in Oxfordshire. He had little doubt that he should himself be the successor, and very soon after, by a messenger from Windsor, he received assurances to that effect, with orders “to finish the king’s business in the west.” Although he had no ground for serious misgivings, he could not but feel a little uneasy at the thought of the intrigues which in his absence might spring up against him in a corrupt court, and he was impatient to take possession of his new dignity. But what a prospect before him, if all the prisoners against whom there might be indictments, here and at other places, should plead not guilty, and seriatim take their trials! He resorted to an expedient worthy of his genius by openly proclaiming, in terms of vague promise but certain denunciation, that “if any of those indicted would relent from their conspiracies, and plead guilty, they should find him to be a merciful judge; but that those who put themselves on their trials, (which the law mercifully gave them all in strictness a right to do,) if found guilty, would have very little time to live; and, therefore, that such as were conscious they had no defence, had better spare him the trouble of trying them.”He was at first disappointed. The prisoners knew the sternness of the judge, and had some hope from the mercy of their countrymen on the jury. The result of this boldness is soon told. He began on a Saturday morning, with a batch of thirty. Of these, only one was acquitted for want of evidence, and the same evening he signed a warrant to hang thirteen of those convicted on the Monday morning, and the rest the following day. An impressive defence was made by the constable of Chardstock, charged with supplying the Duke of Monmouth’s soldiers with money; whereas they had actually robbed him of a considerable sum which he had in his hands for the use of the militia. The prisoner having objected to the competency of a witness called against him, “Villain! rebel!” exclaimed the judge, “methinks I see thee already with a halter about thy neck.” And he was specially ordered to be hanged the first, my lord jeeringly declaring “that if any with a knowledge of the law came in his way, he should take care to prefer them!”

On the Monday morning, the court sitting rather late on account of the executions, the judge, on taking his place, found many applications to withdraw the plea of not guilty, and the prisoners pleaded guilty in great numbers; but his ire was kindled, and he would not even affect any semblance of mercy. Two hundred and ninety-two more received judgment to die, and of these seventy-four actually suffered—some being sent to be executed in every town, and almost in every village, for many miles round. While the whole county was covered with the gibbeted quarters of human beings, the towns resounded with the cries of men, and even of women and children, who were cruelly whipped for sedition, on the ground that by words or looks they had favored the insurrection.Jeffreys next proceeded to Exeter, where one John Foweracres, the first prisoner arraigned, had the temerity to plead not guilty, and being speedily convicted, was sent to instant execution. This had the desired effect; for all the others confessed, and his lordship was saved the trouble of trying them. Only thirty-seven suffered capitally in the county of Devon, the rest of the two hundred and forty-three against whom indictments were found being transported, whipped, or imprisoned.

Somersetshire afforded a much finer field for indulging the propensities of the chief justice, as in this county there had not only been a considerable rising of armed men for Monmouth, but processions, in which women and children had joined, carrying ribbons, boughs, and garlands to his honor. There were five hundred prisoners for trial at Taunton alone. Jeffreys said in his charge to the grand jury, “it would not be his fault if he did not purify the place.” The first person tried before him here was Simon Hamling, a dissenter of a class to whom the judge bore a particular enmity. In reality, the accused had only come to Taunton, during the rebellion, to warn his son, who resided there, to remain neuter. Conscious of his innocence, he insisted on pleading not guilty; he called witnesses, and made a resolute defence, which was considered great presumption. The committing magistrate, who was sitting on the bench, at last interposed and said, “There must certainly be some mistake about the individual.” Jeffreys.—“You have brought him here, and, if he be innocent, his blood be upon your head.” The prisoner was found guilty, and ordered for execution next morning. Few afterwards gave his lordship the trouble of trying them, and one hundred and forty-three are said here to have been ordered for execution, and two hundred and eighty-four to have been sentenced to transportation for life. He particularly piqued himself upon his bon mot in passing sentence on one Hucher, who pleaded, in mitigation, that, though he had joined the Duke of Monmouth, he had sent important information to the king’s general, the Earl of Feversham. “You deserve a double death,” said the impartial judge; “one for rebelling against your sovereign, and the other for betraying your friends.”

He showed great ingenuity in revenging himself upon such as betrayed any disapprobation of his severities. Among these was Lord Stawell, who was so much shocked with what he had heard of the chief justice, that he refused to see him. Immediately after, there came forth an order that Colonel Bovet, of Taunton, a friend to whom this cavalier nobleman had been much attached, should be executed at Cotheleston, close by the house where he and Lady Stawell and his children then resided.

A considerable harvest here arose from compositions levied upon the friends of twenty-six young virgins who presented the invader with colors, which they had embroidered with their own hands. The fund was ostensibly for the benefit of “the queen’s maids of honor,” but a strong suspicion arose that the chief justice participated in bribes for these as well as other pardons. He thought that his peculium was encroached upon by a letter from Lord Sunderland, informing him of “the king’s pleasure to bestow one thousand convicts on several courtiers, and one hundred on a favorite of the queen—security being given that the prisoners should be enslaved for ten years in some West India island.” In his remonstrance he said that “these convicts would be worth ten or fifteen pounds apiece,” and, with a view to his own claim, returned thanks for his majesty’s gracious acceptance of his services. However, he was obliged to submit to the royal distribution of the spoil.

Where the king did not personally interfere, Jeffreys was generally inexorable if he did not himself receive the bribe for a pardon. Kiffin, a Nonconformist merchant, had agreed to give three thousand pounds to a courtier for the pardon of two youths, his grandsons, who had been in Monmouth’s army; but the chief justice would listen to no circumstances of mitigation, as another was to pocket the price of mercy. Yet, to a buffoon who attended him on the circuit and made sport by his mimicry, in an hour of revelry at Taunton, he tossed the pardon of a rich culprit, expressing a hope “that it might turn to good account.”

The jails at Taunton being incapable of containing all the prisoners, it was necessary to adjourn the commission to Wells, where the same horrible scenes were again acted, notwithstanding the humane exertions of that most honorable man, Bishop Ken, who afterwards, having been one of the seven bishops prosecuted by King James, resigned his see at the Revolution, rather than sign the new tests.

The Cornishmen had all remained loyal, and the city of Bristol[131] only remained to be visited by the commission. There were not many cases of treason here, but Jeffreys had a particular spite against the corporation magistrates, because they were supposed to favor dissenters, and he had them very much in his power by a discovery he made, that they had been in the habit of having in turn assigned to them prisoners charged with felony, whom they sold for their own benefit to be transported to Barbadoes. In addressing the grand jury, (while he complained of a fit of the stone, and was seemingly under the excitement of liquor,) he said,—

“I find a special commission is an unusual thing here, and relishes very ill; nay, the very women storm at it, for fear we should take the upper hand of them too; for by-the-bye, gentlemen, I hear it is much in fashion in this city for the women to govern and bear sway.” Having praised the mild and paternal rule of King James, he thus proceeded: “On the other hand, up starts a puppet prince, who seduces the mobile into rebellion, into which they are easily bewitched; for I say rebellion is like the sin of witchcraft. This man, who had as little title to the crown as the least of you, (for I hope you are all legitimate,) being overtaken by justice, and by the goodness of his prince brought to the scaffold, he has the confidence, (good God, that men should be so impudent!) to say that God Almighty did know with what joyfulness he did die, (a traitor!) Great God of heaven and earth! what reason have men to rebel? But, as I told you, rebellion is like the sin of witchcraft: Fear God and honor the king is rejected for no other reason, as I can find, but that it is written in St. Peter. Gentlemen, I must tell you I am afraid that this city hath too many of these people in it, and it is your duty to find them out. Gentlemen, I shall not stand complimenting with you; I shall talk with some of you before you and I part, I tell you; I tell you I have brought a besom, and I will sweep every man’s door, whether great or small. Certainly, here are a great many of those men whom they call Trimmers; a Whig is but a mere fool to those; for a Whig is some sort of a subject in comparison of these; for a Trimmer is but a cowardly and base-spirited Whig; for the Whig is but the journeyman prentice that is hired and set over the rebellion, whilst the Trimmer is afraid to appear in the cause.” He then opens his charge against the aldermen for the sale of convicts, and thus continues: “Good God! where am I?—in Bristol? This city it seems claims the privilege of hanging and drawing among themselves. I find you have more need of a special commission once a month at least. The very magistrates, that should be the ministers of justice, fall out with one another to that degree they will scarcely dine together; yet I find they can agree for their interest if there be but a kid in the case; for I hear the trade of kidnapping is much in request in this city. You can discharge a felon or a traitor, provided they will go to Mr. Alderman’s plantation in the West Indies. Come, come, I find you stink for want of rubbing. It seems the dissenters and fanatics fare well amongst you, by reason of the favor of the magistrates; for example, if a dissenter who is a notorious and obstinate offender comes before them, one alderman or another stands up and says, He is a good man, (though three parts a rebel.) Well, then, for the sake of Mr. Alderman, he shall be fined but five shillings. Then comes another, and up stands another goodman alderman, and says, I know him to be an honest man, (though rather worse than the former.) Well, for Mr. Alderman’s sake, he shall be fined but half a crown; so manus manum fricat; you play the knave for me now, and I will play the knave for you by and by. I am ashamed of these things; but, by God’s grace, I will mend them; for, as I have told you, I have brought a brush in my pocket, and I shall be sure to rub the dirt wherever it is, or on whomsoever it sticks.” “Thereupon,” says Roger North, “he turns to the mayor, accoutred with his scarlet and furs, and gave him all the ill names that scolding eloquence could supply; and so, with rating and staring, as his way was, never left till he made him quit the bench and go down to the criminal’s post at the bar; and there he pleaded for himself as a common rogue or thief must have done; and when the mayor hesitated a little, or slackened his pace, he bawled at him, and stamping, called for his guards, for he was still general by commission. Thus the citizens saw their scarlet chief magistrate at the bar, to their infinite terror and amazement.”

Only three were executed for treason at Bristol; but Jeffreys looking at the end of his campaign to the returns of the enemy killed, had the satisfaction to find that they amounted to three hundred and thirty, besides eight hundred prisoners ordered to be transported.[132]

He now hastened homewards to pounce upon the great seal. In his way through Somersetshire, with a regiment of dragoons as his life-guards, the mayor took the liberty to say that there were two Spokes who had been convicted, and that one of these left for execution was not the one intended to suffer, the other having contrived to make his escape, and that favor might perhaps still be shown to him whom it was intended to pardon. “No!” said the general-judge; “his family owe a life; he shall die for his namesake!” To render such narratives credible, we must recollect that his mind was often greatly disturbed by fits of the stone, and still more by intemperance. Burnet, speaking of his behavior at this time, says, “He was perpetually either drunk or in a rage, liker a fury than the zeal of a judge.”

I shall conclude my sketch of Jeffreys as a criminal judge with his treatment of a prisoner whom he was eager to hang, but who escaped with life. This was Prideaux, a gentleman of fortune in the west of England, who had been apprehended on the landing of Monmouth, for no other reason than that his father had been attorney general under Cromwell. A reward of five hundred pounds, with a free pardon, was offered to any witnesses who would give evidence against him; but none could be found, and he was discharged. Afterwards, two convicts were prevailed upon to say that they had seen him take some part in the insurrection, and he was again cast into prison. His friends, alarmed for his safety, though convinced of his innocence, tried to procure a pardon for him, when they were told “that nothing could be done for him, as the king had given him to the chief justice,” (the familiar phrase for the grant of an estate about to be forfeited.) A negotiation was then opened with Jennings, the avowed agent of Jeffreys for the sale of pardons, and the sum of fifteen thousand pounds was actually paid to him by a banker for the deliverance of a man whose destruction could not be effected by any perversion of the formalities of law.[133]

There is to be found only one defender of these atrocities. “I have indeed sometimes thought,” says the author of A Caveat against the Whigs, “that in Jeffreys’s western circuit justice went too far before mercy was remembered, though there was not above a fourth part executed of what were convicted. But when I consider in what manner several of those lives then spared were afterwards spent, I cannot but think a little more hemp might have been usefully employed upon that occasion.”[134]

A great controversy has arisen, “who is chiefly to be blamed—Jeffreys or James?” Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, declares that “the king never forgave the cruelty of the judge in executing such multitudes in the west against his express orders.” And reliance is placed by Hume on the assertion of Roger North, that his brother, the lord keeper, going to the king and moving him “to put a stop to the fury which was in no respect for his service, and would be counted a carnage, not law or justice, orders went to mitigate the proceedings.”

I have already demonstrated that this last assertion is a mere invention,[135] and though it is easy to fix deep guilt on the judge, it is impossible to exculpate the monarch. Burnet says that James “had a particular account of his proceedings writ to him every day, and he took pleasure to relate them in the drawing-room to foreign ministers, and at his table, calling it Jeffreys’s campaign; speaking of all he had done in a style that neither became the majesty nor the mercifulness of a great prince.” Jeffreys himself, (certainly a very suspicious witness,) when in the Tower, declared to Tutchin that “his instructions were much more severe than the execution of them; and that at his return he was snubbed at court for being too merciful.” And to Dr. Scott, the divine who attended him on his death bed, he said, “Whatever I did then I did by express orders; and I have this further to say for myself, that I was not half bloody enough for him who sent me thither.” We certainly know from a letter written to him by the Earl of Sunderland at Dorchester, that “the king approved entirely of all his proceedings.” And though we cannot believe that he stopped short of any severity which he thought would be of service to himself, there seems no reason to doubt (if that be any palliation) that throughout the whole of these proceedings his object was to please his master, whose disposition was now most vindictive, and who thought that, by such terrible examples, he should secure to himself a long and quiet reign.[136]The two were equally criminal,[137] and both had their reward. But in the first instance, and till the consequences of such wickedness and folly began to appear, they met each other with mutual joy and congratulations. Jeffreys returning from the west, by royal command stopped at Windsor Castle. He arrived there on the 28th of September; and after a most gracious reception, the great seal was immediately delivered to him with the title of lord chancellor.

We learn from Evelyn that it had been three weeks in the king’s personal custody. “About six o’clock came Sir Dudley North and his brother Roger North, and brought the great seal from my lord keeper, who died the day before. The king went immediately to council, every body guessing who was most likely to succeed this great officer; most believed it would be no other than Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys, who had so rigorously prosecuted the late rebels, and was now gone the western circuit to punish the rest that were secured in the several counties, and was now near upon his return.”

The London Gazette of October 1, 1685, contains the following notice:

“Windsor, Sept. 28.

“His majesty taking into his royal consideration the many eminent and faithful services which the Right Honorable George Lord Jeffreys, of Wem, lord chief justice of England, has rendered the crown, as well in the reign of the late king, of ever blessed memory, as since his majesty’s accession to the throne, was pleased this day to commit to him the custody of the great seal of England, with the title of lord chancellor.”

The new lord chancellor, having brought the great seal with him from Windsor to London, had near a month to prepare for the business of the term.

He had had only a very slender acquaintance with Chancery proceedings, and he was by no means thoroughly grounded in common-law learning; but he now fell to the study of equity pleading and practice, and though exceedingly inferior to his two immediate predecessors in legal acquirements, his natural shrewdness was such that, when entirely sober, he contrived to gloss over his ignorance of technicalities, and to arrive at a right decision. He was seldom led into temptation by the occurrence of cases in which the interests of political parties, or religious sects, were concerned; and, as an equity judge, the multitude rather regarded him with favor.

The public and the profession were much shocked to see such a man at the head of the law; but as soon as he was installed in his office, there were plenty ready enough to gather round him, and, suppressing their real feelings, to load him with flattery and to solicit him for favors.Evelyn, who upon his appointment as chief justice, describes him as “most ignorant, but most daring,” now assiduously cultivated his notice; and, having succeeded in getting an invitation to dine with him, thus speaks of him:

“31st Oct., 1685.

“I dined at our great Lord Chancellor Jeffreys’s, who used me with much respect. This was the late chief justice, who had newly been the western circuit to try the Monmouth conspirators, and had formerly done such severe justice amongst the obnoxious in Westminster Hall, for which his majesty dignified him by creating him first a baron, and now lord chancellor; is of an assured and undaunted spirit, and has served the court interest on all hardiest occasions; is of nature civil, and a slave of the court.”

The very first measure which James proposed to his new chancellor was, literally, the hanging of an alderman. He was still afraid of the mutinous spirit of the city, which, without some fresh terrors, might again break out, although the charters were destroyed; and no sufficient atonement had yet been made for the hostility constantly manifested by the metropolis to the policy of his family for half a century. His majesty proposed that Alderman Clayton, a very troublesome agitator, should be selected as the victim. The chancellor agreed that “it was very fit an example should be made, as his majesty had graciously proposed; but if it were the same thing to his majesty, he would venture to suggest a different choice. Alderman Clayton was a bad subject, but Alderman Cornish was still more troublesome, and more dangerous.” The king readily acquiesced, and Alderman Cornish was immediately brought to trial before a packed jury, and executed on a gibbet erected in Cheapside, on pretence that some years before he had been concerned in the Ryehouse plot. The apologists of Jeffreys say (and as it is the only alleged instance of his gratitude I have met with, I have great pleasure in recording it) that he was induced to save Sir Robert Clayton from recollecting that this alderman had been his pot companion, and had greatly assisted him in obtaining the office of common serjeant.

Monmouth’s rebellion in England, and Argyle’s in Scotland, being put down, and the city of London reduced to subjection, James expressed an opinion, in which the chancellor concurred, that there was no longer any occasion to disguise the plan of governing by military force, and of violating at pleasure the solemn acts of the legislature. Parliament reassembled on the 9th of November, when Jeffreys took his seat on the woolsack. The king alone (as had been concerted) addressed the two houses, and plainly told them that he could rely upon “nothing but a good force of well disciplined troops in constant pay,” and that he was determined to employ “officers in the army, not qualified by the late tests, for their employments.”

When the king had withdrawn, Lord Halifax rose, and said, sarcastically, “They had now more reason than ever to give thanks to his majesty, since he had dealt so plainly with them, and discovered what he would be at.”

This the chancellor thought fit to take as a serious motion, and immediately put the question, as proposed by a noble lord, “that an humble address be presented to his majesty to thank him for his gracious speech from the throne.” No one ventured to offer any remark, and it was immediately carried, nemine dissentiente. The king returned a grave answer to the address, “That he was much satisfied to find their lordships were so well pleased with what he said, and that he would never offer any thing to their house that he should not be convinced was for the true interest of the kingdom.”

But the lords very soon discovered the false position in which they had placed themselves, and the bishops were particularly scandalized at the thought that they were supposed to have thanked the king for announcing a principle upon which Papists and Dissenters might be introduced into every civil office, and even into ecclesiastical benefices.

Accordingly, Compton, Bishop of London, moved “that a day might be appointed for taking his majesty’s speech into consideration,” and said “that he spoke the united sentiments of the Episcopal bench when he pronounced the test act the chief security of the established church.” This raised a very long and most animated debate, at which King James, to his great mortification, was present. Sunderland, and the popishly inclined ministers, objected to the regularity of the proceeding, urging that, having given thanks for the speech, they must be taken to have already considered it, and precluded themselves from finding fault with any part of it. The lords Halifax, Nottingham, and Mordaunt, on the other side, treated with scorn the notion that the constitution was to be sacrificed to a point of form, and, entering into the merits of the question, showed that if the power which the sovereign now, for the first time, had openly claimed were conceded to him, the rights, privileges, and property of the nation lay at his mercy.

At last the lord chancellor left the woolsack, and not only bitterly attacked the regularity of the motion after a unanimous vote of thanks to the king for his speech, but gallantly insisted on the legality and expediency of the power of the sovereign to dispense with laws for the safety and benefit of the state. No lord chancellor ever made such an unfortunate exhibition. He assumed the same arrogant and overbearing tone with which he had been accustomed from the bench to browbeat juries, counsel, witnesses, and prisoners, and he launched out into the most indecent personalities against his opponents. He was soon taught to know his place, and that frowns, noise, and menaces would not pass for arguments there. While he spoke he was heard with marked disgust by all parts of the house; when he sat down, being required to retract his words by those whom he had assailed, and finding all the sympathies of the House against him, he made to each of them an abject apology, “and he proved by his behavior that insolence, when checked, naturally sinks into meanness and cowardice.”

The ministerialists being afraid to divide the House, Monday following, the 23d of November, was fixed for taking the king’s speech into consideration. But a similar disposition having been shown by the other House, before that day Parliament was prorogued, and no other national council met till the Convention Parliament, after the landing of King William.

James, far from abandoning his plans, was more resolute to carry them into effect. The Earl of Rochester, his own brother-in-law, and others who had hitherto stood by him, having in vain remonstrated against his madness, resigned their offices; but Jeffreys still recklessly pushed him forward in his headlong career. In open violation of the test act, four Catholic lords were introduced into the cabinet, and one of them, Lord Bellasis, was placed at the head of the treasury in the room of the Protestant Earl of Rochester. Among such colleagues the lord chancellor was contented to sit in council, and the wonder is that he did not follow the example of Sunderland and other renegades, who at this time, to please the king, professed to change their religion, and were reconciled to the church of Rome. Perhaps, with his peculiar sagacity, Jeffreys thought it would be a greater sacrifice in the king’s eyes to appear to be daily wounding his conscience by submitting to measures which he must be supposed inwardly to condemn.

As a grand coup d’État, he undertook to obtain a solemn decision of the judges in favor of the dispensing power,[138] and for this purpose a fictitious action was brought against Sir Edward Hales, the lieutenant of the Tower, an avowed Roman Catholic, in the name of his coachman, for holding an office in the army without having taken the oath of supremacy, or received the sacrament according to the rites of the church of England, or signed the declaration against transubstantiation. Jeffreys had put the great seal to letters patent, authorizing him to hold the office without these tests, “non obstante” the act of Parliament. This dispensation was pleaded in bar of the action, and upon a demurrer to the plea, after a sham argument by counsel, all the judges except one (Baron Street) held the plea to be sufficient, and pronounced judgment for the defendant. It was now proclaimed at court that the law was not any longer an obstacle to any scheme that might be thought advisable.The Earl of Castlemaine was sent to Rome, regularly commissioned as ambassador to his holiness the pope, a papal nuncio being reciprocally received at St. James’s. But assuming that religion was not embraced in the negotiations between the two courts, however impolitic the proceeding might be, I do not think that the king and the chancellor are liable to be blamed, as they have been by recent historians, for having in this instance violated acts of Parliament. If all those are examined which had passed from the commencement of the reformation down to the “Bill of Rights,” it will probably be found that none of them can be applied to a mere diplomatic intercourse with the pope, however stringent their provisions may be against receiving bulls or doing any thing in derogation of the king’s supremacy.[139]

There can be no doubt of the illegality of the next measure of the king and the chancellor. The Court of High Commission was revived with some slight modification, although it had been abolished in the reign of Charles I. by an act of Parliament, which forbade the erection of any similar court; and Jeffreys, having deliberately put the great seal to the patent creating this new arbitrary tribunal, undertook to preside in it. The commissioners were vested with unlimited jurisdiction over the church of England, and were empowered, even in cases of suspicion, to proceed inquisitorially, like the abolished court, “notwithstanding any law or statute to the contrary.” The object was to have all ecclesiastics under complete control, lest any of them should oppose the intended innovations in religion.[140]

Jeffreys selected as his first victims, Sharp, rector of St. Giles’s, called the “railing parson,” who had made himself very obnoxious to the government by inveighing against the errors of Popery—and Compton, Bishop of London, his diocesan, who had raised the storm against the dispensing power in the House of Lords. A mandate was issued to the bishop to suspend the rector, and this being declined on the ground that no man can be lawfully condemned till he has been heard in his defence, both were summoned before the high commission.

The bishop appearing, and being asked by the chancellor why he had not obeyed the king’s orders by suspending Dr. Sharp, prayed time to prepare his defence, as his counsel were on the circuit, and he begged to have a copy of the commission. A week’s time was given; but as to the commission, he was told “all the coffee-houses had it for a penny.” On the eighth day the business was resumed; but the bishop still said he was unprepared, having great difficulty to procure a copy of the commission; when the chancellor made him a bantering apology. “My lord, in telling you our commission was to be seen in every coffee-house, I did not speak with any design to reflect on your lordship, as if you were a haunter of coffee-houses. I abhor the thoughts of it!” A further indulgence of a fortnight was granted.

At the day appointed, the bishop again appeared with four doctors of the civil law, who were so frightened, that they hardly dared to say a word for him; but he himself firmly, though mildly, argued, “that he had acted jurisperitorum consilio, and could not have had any bad motive; that he should not have been justified in obeying an illegal order; that he had privately recommended to Dr. Sharp not to preach; that this advice had been followed, so that the king’s wish was complied with; and that if he had committed any fault, he ought to be tried for it before his archbishop and brother bishops.”

Several of the commissioners were inclined to let him off with an admonition; but Jeffreys obtained and pronounced sentence of suspension during the king’s pleasure, both on the bishop and the rector.[141]

There was another political trial where justice was done to the accused, although Jeffreys presided at it. A charge was brought against Lord Delamere, the head of an ancient family in Cheshire, that he had tried to excite an insurrection in that county in aid of Monmouth’s rebellion. An indictment for high treason being found against him, he was brought to trial upon it before Jeffreys, as lord high steward, and thirty peers-triers. The king was present, and was very desirous of a conviction, as Lord Delamere, when a member of the House of Commons, had taken an active part in supporting the exclusion bill.

Jeffreys did his best to gratify this wish. According to the habit he had lately acquired in the west, he at first tried to induce the noble prisoner to confess, in the hope of pardon “from the king’s known clemency.” “My lord,” said he, “if you are conscious to yourself that you are guilty of this heinous crime, give glory to God, make amends to his vicegerent the king, by a plain and full discovery of your guilt, and do not, by an obstinate persisting in the denial of it, provoke the just indignation of your prince, who has made it appear to the world that his inclinations are rather to show mercy than inflict punishment.”

Lord Delamere, to ease his mind from the anxiety to know whether the man who so spoke was to pronounce upon his guilt or innocence, said, “I beg your grace would please to satisfy me whether your grace be one of my judges in concurrence with the rest of the lords.” L. H. Steward.—“No, my lord, I am judge of the court, but I am none of your triers.”[142]

A plea to the jurisdiction being put in, Lord Delamere requested his grace to advise with the other peers upon it, as it was a matter of privilege. L. H. Steward.—“Good my lord, I hope you that are a prisoner at the bar are not to give me direction who I should advise with, or how I should demean myself here.”

This plea was properly overruled, and not guilty pleaded, when his grace, to prejudice the peers-triers against the noble prisoner as a notorious exclusionist, delivered an inflammatory address to them before any evidence was given.To create a further prejudice, poor Lord Howard was called to repeat once more his oft-told tale of the ryehouse plot, with which it was not pretended that the prisoner had any connection. The charge in the indictment was only supported by one witness, who himself had been in the rebellion, and who swore that Lord Delamere, at a time and place which he specified, had sent a message by him to Monmouth, asking a supply of money to maintain ten thousand men to be levied in Cheshire against King James. An alibi was clearly proved. Yet his grace summed up for a conviction, and took pains, “for the sake of the numerous and great auditory, that a mistake in point of law might not go unrectified, which seemed to be urged with some earnestness by the noble lord at the bar, that there is a necessity there should be two positive witnesses to convict a man of treason.”

To the honor of the peerage of England, there was a unanimous verdict of acquittal. James himself even allowed this to be right, wreaking all his vengeance on the witness for not having given better evidence, and swearing that he would have him first convicted of perjury, and then hanged for treason. Jeffreys seems to have struggled hard to behave with moderation on this trial; but his habitual arrogance from time to time broke out, and must have created a disgust among the peers-triers very favorable to the prisoner.

Jeffreys, still pretending to be a strong Protestant, eagerly assisted the king in his mad attempt to open the church and the universities to the intrusion of the Catholics. The fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford, having disobeyed the royal mandate to elect, as head of their college, Anthony Farmer, who was not qualified by the statutes, and was a man of infamous character, and having chosen the pious and learned Hough, were summoned before the Court of Ecclesiastical Commission. Jeffreys observed that Dr. Fairfax, one of their number, had not signed the answer of the college to the charge of disregarding the king’s recommendation. Fairfax asking leave to explain his reasons for declining to sign the answer, Jeffreys thought that he was willing to conform, and exclaimed, “Ay, this looks like a man of sense, and a good subject. Let’s hear what he will say.” Fairfax.—“I don’t object to the answer, because it is the vindication of my college: I go further; and as, according to the rules of the ecclesiastical courts, a libel is given to the party that he may know the grounds of his accusation, I demand that libel; for I do not know otherwise wherefore I am called here, and besides, this affair should be discussed in Westminster Hall.” Jeffreys.—“You are a doctor of divinity, not of law.” Fairfax.—“By what authority do you sit here?” Jeffreys.—“Pray, what commission have you to be so impudent in court? This man ought to be kept in a dark room. Why do you suffer him without a guardian? Why did you not bring him to me? Pray let my officers seize him.”

Three members of the ecclesiastical commission were sent to Oxford to represent that formidable body, and they annulled the election of Hough, expelled the refractory fellows, and made Magdalen College, for a time, a Popish establishment—the court in London, under the presidency of Jeffreys, confirming all their proceedings.

The lord chancellor next involved the king in the prosecution of the seven bishops, which, more than any other act of misrule during his reign, led to his downfall.[143] On the 25th of April, 1688, a new “declaration of indulgence” came out under the great seal; and, that it might be the more generally known and obeyed, an order was sent from the council to all bishops in England, enjoining that it should be read by the clergy in all churches and chapels within their dioceses during divine service. A petition, signed by Sancroft, the archbishop, and six other prelates, was laid before the king, praying in respectful language that the clergy might be excused from reading the declaration; not because they were wanting in duty to the sovereign, or in tenderness to the dissenters, but because it was founded upon the dispensing power, which had often been declared illegal in Parliament, and on that account they could not, in prudence, honor, or conscience, be such parties to it as the reading of it in the church would imply.

Even the Earl of Sunderland and Father Peter represented to the king the danger of arraying the whole church of England against the authority of the crown, and advised him that the bishops should merely be admonished to be more compliant. But with the concurrence of Jeffreys he resolved to visit them with condign punishment, and they were ordered to appear before the council, with a view to obtain evidence against them, as the petition had been privately presented to the king. When they entered the council chamber, Jeffreys said to them, “Do you own the petition?” After some hesitation, the archbishop confessed that he wrote it, and the bishops, that they signed it. Jeffreys.—“Did you publish it?” They, thinking he referred to the printing of it, of which the king had loudly complained, denied this very resolutely; but they admitted that they had delivered it to the king at Whitehall palace, in the county of Middlesex. This was considered enough to fix them with a publication, in point of law, of the supposed libel; and Jeffreys, after lecturing them on their disloyalty, required them to enter into a recognizance to appear before the Court of King’s Bench, and answer the high misdemeanor of which they were guilty. They insisted that, according to the privileges of the House of Peers, of which they were members, they could not lawfully be committed, and were not bound to enter into the required recognizance. Jeffreys threatened to commit them to the Tower as public delinquents. Archbishop.—“We are ready to go whithersoever his majesty may be pleased to send us. We hope the King of kings will be our protector and our judge. We fear nought from man; and having acted according to law and our consciences, no punishment shall ever be able to shake our resolutions.”

If this struggle could have been foreseen, even Jeffreys would have shrunk from the monstrous impolicy of sending these men to jail, on what would be considered the charge of temperately exercising a constitutional right in defence of the Protestant faith, so dear to the great bulk of the nation; but he thought it was too late to resile. He therefore, with his own hand, drew a warrant for their commitment, which he signed, and handed round the board. It was signed by all the councillors present, except Father Peter, whose signature the king excused, to avoid the awkward appearance of Protestant bishops being sent to jail by a Jesuit.

An account of their trial will be found in the next chapter; but there are some circumstances connected with their acquittal in which Jeffreys personally appears.

Seeing how he had acquired such immense favor, there were other lawyers who tried to undermine him by his own arts. One of the most formidable of these was Sir John Trevor, master of the rolls, who, some authors say, certainly would have got the great seal had James remained longer on the throne, but whom Jeffreys had hitherto kept down by reversing his decrees. The chancellor’s alarm was now excited by a report that Sir William Williams (who, from being Speaker of the last Westminster Parliament, and fined ten thousand pounds on the prosecution of the Duke of York, was become the caressed solicitor general to James II.) had a positive promise of the great seal if he could obtain a conviction of the seven bishops.[144] His brutal conduct to them during the whole trial, which was no doubt reported to Jeffreys, would confirm the rumor and increase his apprehensions. The jury having sat up all night without food, fire, or candle, to consider of their verdict, the lord chancellor had, while they were still enclosed, come down to Westminster Hall next morning, and taken his seat in court. When he heard the immense shout arise which soon made the king tremble on Hounslow Heath, he smiled and hid his face in his nosegay, “as much,” observes the relater of the anecdote, “as to say, Mr. Solicitor, I keep my seal.”

However, the part he had taken in sending the bishops to the Tower had caused such scandal, that the University of Oxford would not have him for their chancellor, although, in the prospect of a vacancy, he had received many promises of support. The moment the news arrived of the death of the old Duke of Ormond, his grandson was elected to succeed him; and next day a mandate coming from court to elect Lord Jeffreys, an answer was returned that an election had already taken place, which could not be revoked.

Suspecting that things were now taking an unfavorable turn, he began privately to censure the measures of the court, and to insinuate that the king had acted against his advice, saying, “It will be found that I have done the part of an honest man, but as for the judges they are most of them rogues.”

About this time he was present at an event which was considered more than a counterpoise to recent discomfitures, but which greatly precipitated the crisis by taking away the hope of relief by the rightful succession of a Protestant heir. Being suddenly summoned to Whitehall, he immediately repaired thither, and found that the queen had been taken in labor. Other councillors and many ladies of quality soon arrived, and they were all admitted into her bedchamber. Her majesty seems to have been much annoyed by the presence of the lord chancellor. The king calling for him, he came forward and stood on the step of the bed to show that he was there. She then begged her consort to cover her face with his head and periwig; for she declared “she could not be brought to bed, and have so many men look on her.” However, the fright may have shortened her sufferings; for James III., or “the old pretender,” very speedily made his appearance, and the midwife having made the concerted signal that the child was of the wished-for sex, the company retreated.

Considering the surmises which had been propagated ever since the queen’s pregnancy was announced, that it was feigned, and that a suppositious child was to be palmed upon the world, Jeffreys was lamentably deficient in duty to the king in not having recommended steps to convince the public from the beginning, beyond all possibility of controversy, of the genuineness of the birth. When the story of the “warming-pan” had taken hold of the public mind, many witnesses were examined before the Privy Council to disprove it, but it continued an article of faith with thorough anti-Jacobites during the two succeeding reigns.[145]

The birth of a son, which the king had so ardently longed for, led to his speedy overthrow. Instead of the intrigues between the discontented at home and the Prince and Princess of Orange, hitherto regarded as his successors, being put an end to, they immediately assumed a far more formidable aspect. William, who had hoped in the course of a few years to wield the energies of Britain against the dangerous ambition of Louis XIV., saw that if he remained quiet he should with difficulty even retain the circumscribed power of Stadtholder of the United Provinces. He therefore gladly listened to the representations of those who had fled to Holland to escape from the tyranny exercised in their native country, or who sent secret emissaries to implore his aid; and he boldly resolved to come to England—not as a military conqueror, but for their deliverance, and to obtain the crown with the assent of the nation. That he and his adherents might be protected against any sudden effort to crush them, a formidable fleet was equipped in the Dutch ports, and a considerable army, which had been assembled professedly for a different purpose, was ready on a short notice to be embarked in it.

James, who had been amusing himself by making the pope godfather to his son, and had listened with absolute incredulity to the rumors of the coming invasion, suddenly became sensible of his danger, and to avert it was willing to make any sacrifice to please his people. The slender merit of the tardy, forced, and ineffectual concessions which were offered is claimed respectively by the apologists of the king, of Jeffreys, and of the Earl of Sunderland, but seems due to the last of the three. James’s infatuation was so transcendent,—he was so struck with judicial blindness,—being doomed to destruction, he was so demented,—that, if let alone, he probably would have trusted with confidence to his divine right and the protection of the Virgin, even when William had landed at Torbay. As far as I can discover, from the time when Jeffreys received the great seal, he never originated any measures, wise or wicked, and without remonstrance, he heartily coÖperated in all those suggested by the king, however illegal or mischievous they might be. I do not find the slightest foundation for the assertion that, with all his faults, he had a regard for the Protestant religion, which made him stand up in its defence. The “Declaration of Indulgence,” to which he put the great seal, might be imputed to a love of toleration, (to which he was a stranger,) but what can be said of the active part he took in the High Commission Court, and in introducing Roman Catholics into the universities and into the church? The Earl of Sunderland, though utterly unprincipled, was a man of great discernment and courage; he could speak boldly to the king, and he had joined in objecting to the precipitate measures for giving ascendancy to his new religion, which had produced this crisis. His seemingly forced removal from office he himself probably suggested, along with the other steps now taken to appease the people.

Whoever might first propose the altered policy, Jeffreys was the instrument for carrying it into effect, and thereby it lost all its grace and virtue. He took off the suspension of the Bishop of London, and, by a supersedeas under the great seal, abolished the High Commission Court. He annulled all the proceedings respecting Magdalen College, and issued the necessary process for reinstating Dr. Hough and the Protestant fellows. He put the great seal to a general pardon.

But the reaction was hoped for, above all, from the restoration of the city charters. On the 2d of October he sent a flattering message to the mayor and aldermen to come to Whitehall in the evening, that they might be presented at court by “their old recorder.” Here the king told them that he was mightily concerned for the welfare of their body, and that at a time when invasion threatened the kingdom, he was determined to show them his confidence in their loyalty by restoring the rights of the city to the state in which they were before the unfortunate quo warranto proceedings had been instituted in the late reign. Accordingly, on the following day a meeting of the Common Council was called at Guildhall, and the lord chancellor proceeded thither in his state carriage, attended by his purse-bearer, mace-bearer, and other officers, and after a florid speech, delivered them letters patent under the great seal, which waived all forfeitures, revived all charters, and confirmed all liberties the city had ever enjoyed under the king or any of his ancestors. Great joy was manifested; but the citizens could not refrain from showing their abhorrence of the man who brought these glad tidings, and on his return they hissed him and hooted him, and gave him a foretaste of the violence he was soon to experience from an English mob.

The forfeited and surrendered charters were likewise restored to the other corporations in England. These popular acts, however, were generally ascribed to fear, and the coalition of all parties, including the preachers of passive obedience, to obtain a permanent redress of grievances by force, continued resolute and unshaken.

When William landed, the frightful severities of Jeffreys in the west had the effect of preventing the populace from flocking to his standard, but he met with no opposition, and soon persons of great consideration and influence sent in their adhesion to him.

When we read in history of civil commotions and foreign invasions, we are apt to suppose that all the ordinary business of life was suspended. But on inquiry, we find that it went on pretty much as usual, unless where interrupted by actual violence. While the Prince of Orange was advancing to the capital, and James was marching out to give him battle, if his army would have stood true, the Court of Chancery sat regularly to hear “exceptions” and “motions for time to plead;” and on the very day on which the Princess Anne fled to Nottingham, and her unhappy father exclaimed, in the extremity of his agony, “God help me! my own children have forsaken me,” the lord chancellor decided that “if an administrator pays a debt due by bond before a debt due by a decree in equity, he is still liable to pay the debt due by the decree.”[146]Change of dynasty was not yet talked of, and the cry was for “a free Parliament.” To meet this, the king resolved to call one in his own name; and the last use which Jeffreys made of the great seal was by sealing writs for the election of members of the House of Commons, who were ordered to meet on the 15th of January following.

This movement only infused fresh vigor into the Prince of Orange, who now resolved to bring matters to a crisis; and James, finding himself almost universally deserted, as the most effectual way, in his judgment, of annoying his enemies, very conveniently for them, determined to leave the kingdom. Preparatory to this, he had a parting interview with Jeffreys, to whom he did not confide his secret; but he obtained from him all the parliamentary writs which had not been issued to the sheriffs, amounting to a considerable number, and these, with his own hand, he threw into the fire, so that a lawful Parliament might not be assembled when he was gone. To increase the confusion, he required Jeffreys to surrender the great seal to him,—having laid the plan of destroying it,—in the belief that without it the government could not be conducted.

All things being prepared, and Father Peter and the Earl of Melfort having been informed of his intentions, which he still concealed from Jeffreys, on the night of the 10th of December, James, disguised, left Whitehall, accompanied by Sir Edward Hales, whom he afterwards created Earl of Tenterden. London Bridge (which they durst not cross) being the only one then over the Thames, they drove in a hackney-coach to the Horse Ferry, Westminster, and as they crossed the river with a pair of oars, the king threw the great seal into the water, and thought he had sunk with it forever the fortunes of the Prince of Orange. At Vauxhall they found horses in readiness for them, and they rode swiftly to Feversham, where they embarked for France.

Instead of narrating the adventures of the monarch, when he was intercepted at Feversham, we must confine ourselves to what befell the unhappy ex-chancellor. He heard early next morning of the royal flight, and was thrown into a state of the greatest consternation. He was afraid of punishment from the new government which was now to be established, and being asked by a courtier if he had heard “what the heads of the Prince’s declaration were,” he answered, “I am sure that my head is one, whatever the rest may be.” He dreaded still more the fury of the mob, of which the most alarming accounts were soon brought him. In the existing state of anarchy, almost the whole population of the metropolis crowded into the streets in quest of intelligence; the excitement was unexampled; there was an eager desire to prevent the king’s evil councillors from escaping along with him; and many bad characters, under a pretence of a regard for the Protestant religion, took the opportunity to gratify their love of violence and plunder.

The first object of vengeance was Father Peter; but it was found that, in consequence of the information of the king’s intentions conveyed to him and the Earl of Melfort, they had secretly withdrawn the day before, and were now in safety. The pope’s nuncio was rescued from imminent peril by the interposition of the lords of the Council, who had met, and, exercising temporarily the powers of government, were striving to preserve the public tranquillity.

The next victim demanded was Jeffreys, who (no one knowing that the great seal had been taken from him) still went by the name of “the chancellor,” and who, of all professing Protestants, was the most obnoxious to the multitude. He retired early in the day from his house in Duke Street to the obscure dwelling of a dependent in Westminster, near the river side, and here, lying concealed, he caused preparations to be made for his escape from the kingdom. It was arranged that a coal ship which had delivered her cargo should clear out at the custom house as for her return to Newcastle, and should land him at Hamburg.

To avoid, as he thought, all chance of being recognised by those who had seen him in ermine or gold-embroidered robes, with a long white band under the chin, his collar of S. S. round his neck, and on his head a full-bottom wig, which had recently become the attribute of judicial dignity, instead of the old-fashioned coif or black velvet cap,—he cut off his bushy eyebrows, wont to inspire such terror, he put on the worn-out dress of a common sailor, and he covered his head with an old tarred hat that seemed to have weathered many a blast.

Thus disguised, as soon as it was dusk he got into a boat; and the state of the tide enabling him to shoot London Bridge without danger, he safely reached the coal ship lying off Wapping. Here he was introduced to the captain and the mate, on whose secrecy he was told he might rely; but, as they could not sail till next day, when he had examined his berth, he went on board another vessel that lay at a little distance, there to pass the night. If he had not taken this precaution, he would have been almost immediately in the power of his enemies. The mate, without waiting to see what became of him, hurried on shore, and treacherously gave information to some persons who had been in pursuit of him, that he was concealed in the Newcastle collier. They applied to justices of the peace in the neighborhood for a warrant to arrest him, which was refused, on the ground that no specific charge was sworn against him. They then went to the lords of the council, whom they found sitting, and who actually gave them a warrant to apprehend him for high treason, under the belief that the safety of the state required his detention. Armed with this, they returned to the coal ship in which he had taken his passage, but he was not there, and the captain, a man of honor, baffled all their inquiries.

He slept securely in the vessel in which he had sought refuge; and had it not been for the most extraordinary imprudence, leading to the belief that he was fated speedily to expiate his crimes, he might have effected his escape. Probably with a view of indulging more freely his habit of intemperance, he next morning came ashore, and made his appearance at a little alehouse bearing the sign of “The Red Cow,” in Anchor and Hope Alley, near King Edward’s Stairs, Wapping, and called for a pot of ale. When he had nearly finished it, still wearing his sailor’s attire, with his hat on his head, he was so rashly confident as to put his head out from an open window to look at the passengers in the street.

I must prepare my readers for the scene which follows by relating, in the words of Roger North, an anecdote of the behavior of Jeffreys to a suitor in the heyday of his power and arrogance. “There was a scrivener of Wapping brought to hearing for relief against a bummery bond.[147] The contingency of losing all being showed, the bill was going to be dismissed;[148] but one of the plaintiff’s counsel said that the scrivener was a strange fellow, and sometimes went to church, sometimes to conventicles, and none could tell what to make of him; and it was thought he was a trimmer. At that the chancellor fired; and ‘A trimmer!’ said he; ‘I have heard much of that monster, but never saw one. Come forth, Mr. Trimmer, turn you round, and let us see your shape,’ and at that rate talked so long that the poor fellow was ready to drop under him; but at last the bill was dismissed with costs, and he went his way. In the hall one of his friends asked him how he came off. ‘Came off’ said he; ‘I am escaped from the terrors of that man’s face, which I would scarce undergo again to save my life, and I shall certainly have the frightful impression of it as long as I live.’”[149]

It happened, by a most extraordinary coincidence, that this very scrivener was then walking through Anchor and Hope Alley on the opposite side of the way, and immediately looking towards “The Red Cow,” thought he recollected the features of the sailor who was gazing across towards him. The conviction then flashed upon his mind that this could be no other than the lord chancellor who had so frightened him out of his wits before pronouncing a decree in his favor about the “bummery bond.” But hardly believing his own senses, he entered the tap-room of the alehouse to examine the countenance more deliberately. Upon his entrance, Jeffreys must have recognized the “trimmer,” for he coughed, turned to the wall, and put the quart pot before his face. An immense multitude of persons were in a few minutes collected round the door by the proclamation of the scrivener that the pretended sailor was indeed the wicked Lord Chancellor Jeffreys. He was now in the greatest jeopardy, for, unlike the usual character of the English mob, who are by no means given to cruelty, the persons here assembled were disposed at first to tear him limb from limb, and he was only saved by the interposition of some of the more considerate, who suggested that the proper course would be to take him before the lord mayor.

The cry was raised, “To the lord mayor’s!” but before he could be secured in a carriage to be conveyed thither, they assaulted and pelted him, and might have proceeded to greater extremities if a party of the train-bands had not rescued him from their fury. They still pursued him all the way with whips, and halters, and cries of “Vengeance! justice! justice!” Although he lay back in the coach, he could still be discovered in his blue jacket, and with his sailor’s hat flapped down upon his face. The lord mayor, Sir John Chapman, a nervous, timid man, who had stood in tremendous awe of the lord chancellor, could not now see him, disguised as a sailor, without trepidation; and instead of ordering him to stand at the bar of his justice room, with much bowing and scraping, and many apologies for the liberty he was using, requested that his lordship would do him the honor to dine with him, as, it being now past twelve o’clock, he and the lady mayoress were about to sit down to dinner. Jeffreys, though probably with little appetite, was going to accept the invitation, when a gentleman in the room exclaimed, “The lord chancellor is the lord mayor’s prisoner, not his guest, and now to harbor him is treason, for which any one, however high, may have to answer with his own blood.” The lord mayor swooned away, and died (it is said of apoplexy) soon after.

The numbers and violence of the mob had greatly increased from the delay in examining the culprit, and they loudly threatened to take the law into their own hand. Some were for examining him before an alderman, and leading him out by a back way for that purpose; but he himself showed most prudence by advising that, without any previous examination, he should be committed to the Tower for safe custody, and that two other regiments of the train-bands should be ordered up to conduct him thither. In the confusion, he offered to draw the warrant for his own commitment. This course was followed, but was by no means free from danger, the mob defying the matchlocks and pikes of the soldiers, and pressing round the coach in which the noble prisoner was carried, still flourishing the whips and halters, and expressing their determined resolution to execute summary justice upon him for the many murders he had committed. Seeing the imminent danger to which he was exposed, and possibly conscience struck when he thought he was so near his end, he lost all sense of dignity and all presence of mind. He held up his imploring hands, sometimes on one side of the coach, and sometimes on the other, exclaiming, “For the Lord’s sake, keep them off! For the Lord’s sake, keep them off!” Oldmixon, who was an eye-witness of this procession, and makes loud professions of compassion for malefactors, declares that he saw these agonizing alarms without pity.

The difficulty was greatest in passing the open space on Tower Hill. But at length the carriage passed the drawbridge, and the portcullis descended. Within all was still. Jeffreys was courteously received by Lord Lucas, recently appointed lieutenant, and in a gloomy apartment, which he never more left, he reflected in solitude on the procession which had just terminated, so different from those to which he had been accustomed for some years on the first day of each returning term, when, attended by the judges and all the grandees of the law, he had moved in state to Westminster Hall, the envy and admiration of all beholders.

A regular warrant for his commitment was the same night made out by the lords of the Council, and the next day a deputation from their body, consisting of Lords North, Grey, Chandos and Ossulston, attended to examine him at the Tower. Four questions were asked him. 1. “What he had done with the great seal of England.” He answered “that he had delivered it to the king on the Saturday before at Mr. Cheffnel’s, no person being present, and that he had not seen it since.” He was next asked, 2. “Whether he had sealed all the writs for the Parliament, and what he had done with them.” “To the best of his remembrance,” he said, “the writs were all sealed and delivered to the king,” (suppressing that he had seen the king throw a great many of them in the fire.) 3. “Had he sealed the several patents for the then ensuing year?” He declared “that he had sealed several patents for the new sheriffs, but that he could not charge his memory with the particulars.” Lastly, he was asked “whether he had a license to go out of the kingdom.” And to this he replied, “that he had several licenses to go beyond sea, which were all delivered to Sir John Friend.” He subscribed these answers with an affirmation that “they were true upon his honor,” and the lords withdrew.

But no sympathy did he meet with from any quarter, and he was now reproachfully spoken of even by the king. The news of the outbreak against him coming speedily to Feversham, the fugitive monarch, who then meditated an attempt to remount his throne, thought that his chancellor might possibly be accepted by the nation as a scape-goat, and laid upon him the great errors of his reign. It happened, strangely enough, that the inn to which James had been carried when captured off Sheerness, was kept by a man on whom Jeffreys, for some supposed contempt of court, had imposed a very heavy fine, which had not yet been levied. Complaining of this arbitrary act to his royal guest,—who had admitted him to his presence, and had asked him, in royal fashion, “his name, his age, and his history,”—James desired him to draw a discharge as ample as he chose; and, establishing a precedent, which has been often followed since, for writing in a seemingly private and confidential document what is intended afterwards to be communicated to the public, he subjoined to his signature these remarkable words, which were immediately proclaimed in Feversham and transmitted to London: “I am sensible that my lord chancellor hath been a very ill man, and hath done very ill things.”

Jeffreys was assailed by the press in a manner which showed how his cruelties had brutalized the public mind. A poetical letter, addressed to him, advising him to cut his own throat, thus concluded: “I am your lordship’s obedient servant in any thing of this nature. From the little house over against Tyburn, where the people are almost dead with expectation of you.”

This was followed by “a letter from hell from Lord Ch——r Jeffreys to L—— C—— B—— W——d.” His “confession,” hawked about the streets, contained an exaggerated statement of all the bad measures of the latter part of the preceding and of the present reign. Then came his “last will and testament,” commencing, “In the name of Ambition, the only god of our setting and worshipping, together with Cruelty, Perjury, Pride, Insolence, &c., I, George Jeffreys, being in sound and perfect memory, of high commissions, quo warrantos, dispensations, pillorizations, floggations, gibitations, barbarity, butchery, &c., do make my last will,” &c. Here is the concluding legacy: “Item, I order an ell and a half of fine cambric to be cut into handkerchiefs for drying up all the wet eyes at my funeral; together with half a pint of burnt claret for all the mourners in the kingdom.”

When he had been some weeks in confinement, he received a small barrel, marked “Colchester oysters,” of which, ever since his arrival in London when a boy, he had been particularly fond. Seeing it, he exclaimed—“Well, I have some friends left still;” but on opening it, the gift was—a halter!

An actual serious petition was received by the lords of the council of England from “the widows and fatherless children in the west,” beginning, “We, to the number of a thousand and more widows and fatherless children of the counties of Dorset, Somerset, and Devon; our dear husbands and tender fathers having been so tyrannously butchered and some transported; our estates sold from us, and our inheritance cut off, by the severe and brutish sentence of George Lord Jeffreys, now we understand in the Tower of London, a prisoner,” &c. After enumerating some of his atrocities, and particularly dwelling upon his indecent speech (which I may not copy) to a young lady who asked the life of her lover, convicted before him, the petitioners thus concluded:—“These, with many hundred more tyrannical acts, are ready to be made appear in the said counties by honest and credible persons, and therefore your petitioners desire that the said George Jeffreys, late lord chancellor, the vilest of men, may be brought down to the counties aforesaid, where we the good women of the west shall be glad to see him, and give him another manner of welcome than he had there three years since.”

Meanwhile, the great seal, the clavis regni, the emblem of sovereign sway, which had been thrown into the Thames that it might never reach the Prince of Orange, was found in the net of a fisherman near Lambeth, and was delivered by him to the lords of the council, who were resolved to place it in the hands of the founder of the new dynasty; and James, after revisiting the capital and enjoying a fleeting moment of popularity, had finally bid adieu to England, and was enjoying the munificent hospitality of Louis at St. Germaine’s.

The provisional government, in deference to the public voice, issued an order for the more rigorous confinement of the ex-chancellor in the Tower, and intimated a resolution that he should speedily be brought to trial for his misdeeds; but, amidst the stirring events which rapidly followed, he was allowed quietly to languish out the remainder of his miserable existence. While the elections were proceeding for the Convention Parliament—while the two houses were struggling respecting the “abdication” or “desertion” of the throne—while men were occupied with discussing the “declaration of rights”—while preparations were making for the coronation of the new sovereigns—while curiosity was keenly alive in watching their demeanor, and while alarms were spread by the adherence of Ireland to the exiled king—the national indignation, which at first burst forth so violently against the crimes of Jeffreys, almost entirely subsided, and little desire was evinced to see him punished as he deserved.

However, considerable sensation was excited by the news that he was no more. He breathed his last in the Tower of London, on the 19th of April, 1689, at thirty-five minutes past four in the morning. Those who take a vague impression of events, without attention to dates, may suppose, from the crowded vicissitudes of his career, that he must have passed his grand climacteric, but he was still only in the forty-first year of his age.

On the meeting of the Convention Parliament, attempts were made to attaint the late Chancellor Jeffreys, to prevent his heirs from sitting in Parliament, and to charge his estates with compensation to those whom he had injured; but they all failed, and no mark of public censure was set upon his memory beyond excepting him, with some other judges, from the act of indemnity passed at the commencement of the new reign.

We have no very distinct account of him in domestic life. Having lost his first wife, whom he had espoused so generously, within three months from her death he again entered the married state. The object of his choice was the widow of a Montgomeryshire gentleman, and daughter of Sir Thomas Bludworth, who had been lord mayor of London, and for many years one of the city representatives. I am sorry to say there was much scandal about the second Lady Jeffreys, and she presented him prematurely with a full-grown child. It is related that he was once disagreeably reminded of this mistake: when cross-examining a flippant female, he said to her, “Madam, you are very quick in your answers.” “Quick as I am, Sir George,” cried she, “I was not so quick as your lady.” Even after the marriage she is still said to have encouraged Sir John Trevor, M. R., and other lovers, while her husband was indulging in his cups.

He had children by both his wives; but of these only one son grew up to manhood, and survived him. This was John, the second Lord Jeffreys, who has acquired celebrity only by having rivalled his father in the power of drinking, and for having, when in a state of intoxication, interrupted the funeral of Dryden, the poet. He was married, as we have seen, to the daughter of the Earl of Pembroke, but dying in 1703, without male issue, the title of Jeffreys happily became extinct. He soon dissipated large estates, which his father, by such unjustifiable means, had acquired in Shropshire, Buckinghamshire, and Leicestershire.

In his person Jeffreys was rather above the middle stature, his complexion (before it was bloated by intemperance) inclining to fair, and he was of a comely appearance. There was great animation in his eye, with a twinkle which might breed a suspicion of insincerity and lurking malice. His brow was commanding, and he managed it with wonderful effect, whether he wished to terrify or to conciliate. There are many portraits of him, all, from his marked features, bearing a great resemblance to each other, and, it may be presumed, to the original.

“He had a set of banterers for the most part near him, as in old time great men kept fools to make them merry. And these fellows, abusing one another and their betters, were a regale to him.” But there can be no doubt that he circulated in good society. He was not only much at court, but he exchanged visits with the nobility and persons of distinction in different walks of life. In the social circle, being entirely free from hypocrisy and affectation, from haughtiness and ill-nature, laughing at principle, courting a reputation for profligacy, talking with the utmost freedom of all parties and all men—he disarmed the censure of the world, and, by the fascination of his manners, while he was present, he threw an oblivion over his vices and his crimes.

On one occasion, dining in the city with Alderman Duncomb, the lord treasurer and other great courtiers being of the party, they worked themselves up to such a pitch of loyalty by bumpers to “confusion to the Whigs,” that they all stripped to their shirts, and were about to get upon a signpost to drink the king’s health, when they were accidentally diverted from their purpose, and the lord chancellor escaped the fate which befell Sir Charles Sedley, of being indicted for indecently exposing his person in the public streets. But this frolic brought upon him a violent fit of the stone, which nearly cost him his life.

As a civil judge he was by no means without high qualifications, and in the absence of any motive to do wrong, he was willing to do right. He had a very quick perception, a vigorous and logical understanding, and an impressive eloquence.

When quite sober, he was particularly good as a Nisi Prius judge. His summing up, in what is called “the Lady Ivy’s case”—an ejectment between her and the dean and chapter of St. Paul’s to recover a large estate at Shadwell—is most masterly. The evidence was exceedingly complicated, and he gives a beautiful sketch of the whole, both documentary and parol; and, without taking the case from the jury, he makes some admirable observations on certain deeds produced by the Lady Ivy, which led to the conclusion that they were forged, and to a verdict for the dean and chapter.[150]

Considering the systematic form which equity jurisprudence had assumed under his two immediate predecessors, Jeffreys must have been very poorly furnished for presiding in chancery. He had practised little before these judges, and none of their decisions were yet in print; so that if he had been so inclined, he had not the opportunity to make himself familiar with the established practice and doctrines of the court.

Although he must often have betrayed his ignorance, yet with his characteristic boldness and energy he contrived to get through the business without any signal disgrace, and among all the invectives, satires, and lampoons by which his memory is blackened, I find little said against his decrees. He did not promulgate any body of new orders according to recent custom; but, while he held the great seal, he issued separate orders from time to time, some of which were very useful. He first put an end to a very oppressive practice, by which a plaintiff, having filed a frivolous and vexatious bill, might dismiss it on paying merely twenty shillings costs, and he directed that the defendant should be allowed all the costs he had incurred, to be properly ascertained by an officer of the court. He then checked the abuse of staying actions at law for the examination of witnesses abroad, by requiring, before a commission to examine them issued, an affidavit specifying the names of the witnesses, and the facts they were expected to prove. By subsequent orders which he framed, vexatious applications for re-hearings were guarded against, and an attempt was made to get rid of what has ever been the opprobrium of the court—controversies about settling the minutes of a decree after it has been pronounced.

I have discovered one benevolent opinion of this cruel judge, and strange to say, it is at variance with that of the humane magistrates who have adorned Westminster Hall in the nineteenth century. “The prisoner’s convict bill” was condemned and opposed by almost all the judges in the reign of William IV., yet even Jeffreys was struck with the injustice and inequality of the law, which, allowing the accused to defend himself by counsel “for a two-penny trespass,” refuses that aid “where life, estate, honor, and all are concerned,” and lamented its existence, while he declared himself bound to adhere to it.[151] The venerable sages who apprehended such multiplied evils from altering the practice must have been greatly relieved by finding that their objections have proved as unfounded as those which were urged against the abolition of “peine forte et dure;” and the alarming innovation, so long resisted, of allowing witnesses for the prisoner to be examined under the sanction of an oath.

He has been so much abused, that I began my critical examination of his history in the hope and belief that I should find that his misdeeds had been exaggerated, and that I might be able to rescue his memory from some portion of the obloquy under which it labors; but I am sorry to say, that in my matured opinion, although he appears to have been a man of high talents, of singularly agreeable manners, and entirely free from hypocrisy, his cruelty and his political profligacy have not been sufficiently exposed or reprobated; and that he was not redeemed from his vices by one single solid virtue.