A Child's History of England

by Dickens, Charles

  waved a welcome to him from all the windows as he passed along the

  streets, flowers were strewn in his way, and every compliment and

  honour that could be devised was showered upon him. Among the

  rest, twenty young ladies came forward, in their best clothes, and

  in their brightest beauty, and gave him a Bible ornamented with

  their own fair hands, together with other presents.

  Encouraged by this homage, he proclaimed himself King, and went on

  to Bridgewater. But, here the Government troops, under the EARL OF

  FEVERSHAM, were close at hand; and he was so dispirited at finding

  that he made but few powerful friends after all, that it was a

  question whether he should disband his army and endeavour to

  escape. It was resolved, at the instance of that unlucky Lord

  Grey, to make a night attack on the King's army, as it lay encamped

  on the edge of a morass called Sedgemoor. The horsemen were

  commanded by the same unlucky lord, who was not a brave man. He

  gave up the battle almost at the first obstacle - which was a deep

  drain; and although the poor countrymen, who had turned out for

  Monmouth, fought bravely with scythes, poles, pitchforks, and such

  poor weapons as they had, they were soon dispersed by the trained

  soldiers, and fled in all directions. When the Duke of Monmouth

  himself fled, was not known in the confusion; but the unlucky Lord

  Grey was taken early next day, and then another of the party was

  taken, who confessed that he had parted from the Duke only four

  hours before. Strict search being made, he was found disguised as

  a peasant, hidden in a ditch under fern and nettles, with a few

  peas in his pocket which he had gathered in the fields to eat. The

  only other articles he had upon him were a few papers and little

  books: one of the latter being a strange jumble, in his own

  writing, of charms, songs, recipes, and prayers. He was completely

  broken. He wrote a miserable letter to the King, beseeching and

  entreating to be allowed to see him. When he was taken to London,

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  and conveyed bound into the King's presence, he crawled to him on

  his knees, and made a most degrading exhibition. As James never

  forgave or relented towards anybody, he was not likely to soften

  towards the issuer of the Lyme proclamation, so he told the

  suppliant to prepare for death.

  On the fifteenth of July, one thousand six hundred and eighty-five,

  this unfortunate favourite of the people was brought out to die on

  Tower Hill. The crowd was immense, and the tops of all the houses

  were covered with gazers. He had seen his wife, the daughter of

  the Duke of Buccleuch, in the Tower, and had talked much of a lady

  whom he loved far better - the LADY HARRIET WENTWORTH - who was one

  of the last persons he remembered in this life. Before laying down

  his head upon the block he felt the edge of the axe, and told the

  executioner that he feared it was not sharp enough, and that the

  axe was not heavy enough. On the executioner replying that it was

  of the proper kind, the Duke said, 'I pray you have a care, and do

  not use me so awkwardly as you used my Lord Russell.' The

  executioner, made nervous by this, and trembling, struck once and

  merely gashed him in the neck. Upon this, the Duke of Monmouth

  raised his head and looked the man reproachfully in the face. Then

  he struck twice, and then thrice, and then threw down the axe, and

  cried out in a voice of horror that he could not finish that work.

  The sheriffs, however, threatening him with what should be done to

  himself if he did not, he took it up again and struck a fourth time

  and a fifth time. Then the wretched head at last fell off, and

  James, Duke of Monmouth, was dead, in the thirty-sixth year of his

  age. He was a showy, graceful man, with many popular qualities,

  and had found much favour in the open hearts of the English.

  The atrocities, committed by the Government, which followed this

  Monmouth rebellion, form the blackest and most lamentable page in

  English history. The poor peasants, having been dispersed with

  great loss, and their leaders having been taken, one would think

  that the implacable King might have been satisfied. But no; he let

  loose upon them, among other intolerable monsters, a COLONEL KIRK,

  who had served against the Moors, and whose soldiers - called by

  the people Kirk's lambs, because they bore a lamb upon their flag,

  as the emblem of Christianity - were worthy of their leader. The

  atrocities committed by these demons in human shape are far too

  horrible to be related here. It is enough to say, that besides

  most ruthlessly murdering and robbing them, and ruining them by

  making them buy their pardons at the price of all they possessed,

  it was one of Kirk's favourite amusements, as he and his officers

  sat drinking after dinner, and toasting the King, to have batches

  of prisoners hanged outside the windows for the company's

  diversion; and that when their feet quivered in the convulsions of

  death, he used to swear that they should have music to their

  dancing, and would order the drums to beat and the trumpets to

  play. The detestable King informed him, as an acknowledgment of

  these services, that he was 'very well satisfied with his

  proceedings.' But the King's great delight was in the proceedings

  of Jeffreys, now a peer, who went down into the west, with four

  other judges, to try persons accused of having had any share in the

  rebellion. The King pleasantly called this 'Jeffreys's campaign.'

  The people down in that part of the country remember it to this day

  as The Bloody Assize.

  It began at Winchester, where a poor deaf old lady, MRS. ALICIA

  LISLE, the widow of one of the judges of Charles the First (who had

  been murdered abroad by some Royalist assassins), was charged with

  having given shelter in her house to two fugitives from Sedgemoor.

  Three times the jury refused to find her guilty, until Jeffreys

  bullied and frightened them into that false verdict. When he had

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  extorted it from them, he said, 'Gentlemen, if I had been one of

  you, and she had been my own mother, I would have found her

  guilty;' - as I dare say he would. He sentenced her to be burned

  alive, that very afternoon. The clergy of the cathedral and some

  others interfered in her favour, and she was beheaded within a

  week. As a high mark of his approbation, the King made Jeffreys

  Lord Chancellor; and he then went on to Dorchester, to Exeter, to

  Taunton, and to Wells. It is astonishing, when we read of the

  enormous injustice and barbarity of this beast, to know that no one

  struck him dead on the judgment-seat. It was enough for any man or

  woman to be accused by an enemy, before Jeffreys, to be found

  guilty of high treason. One man who pleaded not guilty, he ordered

  to be taken out of court upon the instant, and hanged; and this so

  terrified the prisoners in general that they mostly pleaded
guilty

  at once. At Dorchester alone, in the course of a few days,

  Jeffreys hanged eighty people; besides whipping, transporting,

  imprisoning, and selling as slaves, great numbers. He executed, in

  all, two hundred and fifty, or three hundred.

  These executions took place, among the neighbours and friends of

  the sentenced, in thirty-six towns and villages. Their bodies were

  mangled, steeped in caldrons of boiling pitch and tar, and hung up

  by the roadsides, in the streets, over the very churches. The

  sight and smell of heads and limbs, the hissing and bubbling of the

  infernal caldrons, and the tears and terrors of the people, were

  dreadful beyond all description. One rustic, who was forced to

  steep the remains in the black pot, was ever afterwards called 'Tom

  Boilman.' The hangman has ever since been called Jack Ketch,

  because a man of that name went hanging and hanging, all day long,

  in the train of Jeffreys. You will hear much of the horrors of the

  great French Revolution. Many and terrible they were, there is no

  doubt; but I know of nothing worse, done by the maddened people of

  France in that awful time, than was done by the highest judge in

  England, with the express approval of the King of England, in The

  Bloody Assize.

  Nor was even this all. Jeffreys was as fond of money for himself

  as of misery for others, and he sold pardons wholesale to fill his

  pockets. The King ordered, at one time, a thousand prisoners to be

  given to certain of his favourites, in order that they might

  bargain with them for their pardons. The young ladies of Taunton

  who had presented the Bible, were bestowed upon the maids of honour

  at court; and those precious ladies made very hard bargains with

  them indeed. When The Bloody Assize was at its most dismal height,

  the King was diverting himself with horse-races in the very place

  where Mrs. Lisle had been executed. When Jeffreys had done his

  worst, and came home again, he was particularly complimented in the

  Royal Gazette; and when the King heard that through drunkenness and

  raging he was very ill, his odious Majesty remarked that such

  another man could not easily be found in England. Besides all

  this, a former sheriff of London, named CORNISH, was hanged within

  sight of his own house, after an abominably conducted trial, for

  having had a share in the Rye House Plot, on evidence given by

  Rumsey, which that villain was obliged to confess was directly

  opposed to the evidence he had given on the trial of Lord Russell.

  And on the very same day, a worthy widow, named ELIZABETH GAUNT,

  was burned alive at Tyburn, for having sheltered a wretch who

  himself gave evidence against her. She settled the fuel about

  herself with her own hands, so that the flames should reach her

  quickly: and nobly said, with her last breath, that she had obeyed

  the sacred command of God, to give refuge to the outcast, and not

  to betray the wanderer.

  After all this hanging, beheading, burning, boiling, mutilating,

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  exposing, robbing, transporting, and selling into slavery, of his

  unhappy subjects, the King not unnaturally thought that he could do

  whatever he would. So, he went to work to change the religion of

  the country with all possible speed; and what he did was this.

  He first of all tried to get rid of what was called the Test Act -

  which prevented the Catholics from holding public employments - by

  his own power of dispensing with the penalties. He tried it in one

  case, and, eleven of the twelve judges deciding in his favour, he

  exercised it in three others, being those of three dignitaries of

  University College, Oxford, who had become Papists, and whom he

  kept in their places and sanctioned. He revived the hated

  Ecclesiastical Commission, to get rid of COMPTON, Bishop of London,

  who manfully opposed him. He solicited the Pope to favour England

  with an ambassador, which the Pope (who was a sensible man then)

  rather unwillingly did. He flourished Father Petre before the eyes

  of the people on all possible occasions. He favoured the

  establishment of convents in several parts of London. He was

  delighted to have the streets, and even the court itself, filled

  with Monks and Friars in the habits of their orders. He constantly

  endeavoured to make Catholics of the Protestants about him. He

  held private interviews, which he called 'closetings,' with those

  Members of Parliament who held offices, to persuade them to consent

  to the design he had in view. When they did not consent, they were

  removed, or resigned of themselves, and their places were given to

  Catholics. He displaced Protestant officers from the army, by

  every means in his power, and got Catholics into their places too.

  He tried the same thing with the corporations, and also (though not

  so successfully) with the Lord Lieutenants of counties. To terrify

  the people into the endurance of all these measures, he kept an

  army of fifteen thousand men encamped on Hounslow Heath, where mass

  was openly performed in the General's tent, and where priests went

  among the soldiers endeavouring to persuade them to become

  Catholics. For circulating a paper among those men advising them

  to be true to their religion, a Protestant clergyman, named

  JOHNSON, the chaplain of the late Lord Russell, was actually

  sentenced to stand three times in the pillory, and was actually

  whipped from Newgate to Tyburn. He dismissed his own brother-inlaw

  from his Council because he was a Protestant, and made a Privy

  Councillor of the before-mentioned Father Petre. He handed Ireland

  over to RICHARD TALBOT, EARL OF TYRCONNELL, a worthless, dissolute

  knave, who played the same game there for his master, and who

  played the deeper game for himself of one day putting it under the

  protection of the French King. In going to these extremities,

  every man of sense and judgment among the Catholics, from the Pope

  to a porter, knew that the King was a mere bigoted fool, who would

  undo himself and the cause he sought to advance; but he was deaf to

  all reason, and, happily for England ever afterwards, went tumbling

  off his throne in his own blind way.

  A spirit began to arise in the country, which the besotted

  blunderer little expected. He first found it out in the University

  of Cambridge. Having made a Catholic a dean at Oxford without any

  opposition, he tried to make a monk a master of arts at Cambridge:

  which attempt the University resisted, and defeated him. He then

  went back to his favourite Oxford. On the death of the President

  of Magdalen College, he commanded that there should be elected to

  succeed him, one MR. ANTHONY FARMER, whose only recommendation was,

  that he was of the King's religion. The University plucked up

  courage at last, and refused. The King substituted another man,

  and it still refused, resolving to stand by its own election of a

  MR. HOUGH. The dull tyrant, upon this, punished Mr. Hough, and

  five-and-twenty more,
by causing them to be expelled and declared

  incapable of holding any church preferment; then he proceeded to

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  what he supposed to be his highest step, but to what was, in fact,

  his last plunge head-foremost in his tumble off his throne.

  He had issued a declaration that there should be no religious tests

  or penal laws, in order to let in the Catholics more easily; but

  the Protestant dissenters, unmindful of themselves, had gallantly

  joined the regular church in opposing it tooth and nail. The King

  and Father Petre now resolved to have this read, on a certain

  Sunday, in all the churches, and to order it to be circulated for

  that purpose by the bishops. The latter took counsel with the

  Archbishop of Canterbury, who was in disgrace; and they resolved

  that the declaration should not be read, and that they would

  petition the King against it. The Archbishop himself wrote out the

  petition, and six bishops went into the King's bedchamber the same

  night to present it, to his infinite astonishment. Next day was

  the Sunday fixed for the reading, and it was only read by two

  hundred clergymen out of ten thousand. The King resolved against

  all advice to prosecute the bishops in the Court of King's Bench,

  and within three weeks they were summoned before the Privy Council,

  and committed to the Tower. As the six bishops were taken to that

  dismal place, by water, the people who were assembled in immense

  numbers fell upon their knees, and wept for them, and prayed for

  them. When they got to the Tower, the officers and soldiers on

  guard besought them for their blessing. While they were confined

  there, the soldiers every day drank to their release with loud

  shouts. When they were brought up to the Court of King's Bench for

  their trial, which the Attorney-General said was for the high

  offence of censuring the Government, and giving their opinion about

  affairs of state, they were attended by similar multitudes, and

  surrounded by a throng of noblemen and gentlemen. When the jury

  went out at seven o'clock at night to consider of their verdict,

  everybody (except the King) knew that they would rather starve than

  yield to the King's brewer, who was one of them, and wanted a

  verdict for his customer. When they came into court next morning,