executed on Tower Hill, on the seventh of
December, one thousand six hundred and eighty-
three. He died a hero, and died, in his own
words, " For that good old cause in which he
had been engaged from his youth, and for which
God had so often and so wonderfully declared
himself."
The Duke of Monmouth had been making
his uncle, the Duke of York, very jealous, by
going about the country in a royal sort of way,
playing at the people's games, becoming god-
father to their children, and even touching for
the King's evil, or stroking the faces of the sick
to cure them — though, for the matter of that, 1
should say he did them about as much good as
any crowned king could have done. His fathei
had got him to write a letter, confessing his
having had a part in the conspiracy, for which
Lord Russell had been beheaded ; but he was
ever a weak man, and as soon as he had written
it, he was ashamed of it and got it back again.
For this, he was banished to the Netherlands ;
but he soon returned and had an interview with
his father, unknown to his uncle. It would seem
that he was coming into the Merry Mona:
favour again, and that the Duke of York was
sliding out of it, when Death appeared to the
merry galleries at Whitehall, and astonished the
debauched lords and gentlemen, and the shame-
less ladies, very considerably.
On Monday, the second of February, one
thousand six hundred and eighty-five, the merry
pensioner and servant of the King of France
fell down in a fit of apoplexy. By the Wednes-
day his case was hopeless, and on the Thursday
he was told so. As he made a difficulty about
taking the sacrament from the Protestant Bishop
of Bath, the Duke of York got all Avho were pre-
sent away from the bed, and asked his brother,
in a whisper, if he should send for a Catholi<
priest? The King replied, "For God's sake
brother, do !" The Duke smuggled in, up the
JAMES THE SECOND.
1*3
back stairs, disguised in a wig and gown, a priest
named Huddlkston, who had saved the King's
life after the battle of Worcester : telling him
that this worthy man in the wig had once
saved his body, and was now come to save his
soul.
The Merry Monarch lived through that night,
and died before noon on the next day, which
was Friday, the sixth. Two of the last things
he said were of a human sort, and your remem-
brance will give him the full benefit of them.
When the Queen sent to say she was too unwell
to attend him and to ask his pardon, he said,
" Alas ! poor woman, she beg my pardon ! I
beg hers with all my heart. Take back that
answer to her." And he also said, in refer-
ence to Nell Gwyn, " Do not let poor Nelly
starve."
He died in the fifty-fifth year of his age, and
the twenty-fifth of his reign.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
ENGLAND UNDER JAMES THE SECOND.
ING JAMES THE SECOND was
a man so very disagreeable, that
even the best of historians has
favoured his brother Charles, as
becoming, by comparison, quite a
pleasant character. The one object
of his short reign was to re-establish the
§gg£/ Catholic religion in England ; and this
he doggedly pursued with such a stupid obsti-
nacy, that his career very soon came to a
close.
The first thing he did, was, to assure his
council that he would make it his endeavour to
preserve the Government, both in Church and
State, as it was by law established ; and that he
would always take care to defend and support
the Church. Great public acclamations were
raised over this fair speech, and a great deal
was said, from the pulpits and elsewhere, about
the word of a King which was never broken, by
credulous people who little supposed that he
had formed a secret council for Catholic affairs,
of which a mischievous Jesuit, called Father
Petre, was one of the chief members. With
tears of joy in his eyes, he received, as the be-
ginning of his pension from the King of France,
five hundred thousand livres ; yet, with a mixture
of meanness and arrogance that belonged to his
contemptible character, he was always jealous of
making some show of being independent of the
King of France, while he pocketed his money.
As — notwithstanding his publishing two papers
in favour of Popery (and not likely to do it much
service, I should think) written by the King, his
brother, and found in his strong-box; and his
open display of himself attending mass — the Par-
liament was very obsequious, and granted him
a large sum of money, he began his reign with
a belief that he could do what he pleased, and
with a determination to do it.
Before we proceed to its principal events, let
us dispose of Titus Oates. He was tried for
perjury, a fortnight after the coronation, and be-
sides being very heavily fined, was sentenced to
stand twice in the pillory, to be whipped from
Aldgate to Newgate one day, and from Newgate
to Tyburn two days afterwards, and to stand in
the pillory five times a year as long as he lived.
This fearful sentence was actually inflicted on
the rascal. Being unable to stand after his first
flogging, he was dragged on a sledge from New-
gate to Tyburn, and flogged as he was drawn
along. He was so strong a villain that he did
not die under the torture, but lived to be after-
wards pardoned and rewarded, though not to be
ever believed in any more. Dangerfield, the
only other one of that crew left alive, was not so
fortunate. He was almost killed by a whipping
from Newgate to Tyburn, and, as if that were
not punishment enough, a ferocious barrister of
Gray's Inn gave him a poke in the eye with his
cane, which caused his death ; for which the
ferocious barrister was deservedly tried and exe-
cuted.
As soon as James was ,011 the throne, Argyle
and Monmouth went from Brussels to Rotter-
dam, and attended a meeting of Scottish exiles
held there, to concert measures for a rising in
England. It was agreed that Argyle should
effect a landing in Scotland, and Monmouth
in England ; and that two Englishmen should
be sent with Argyle to be in his confidence,
and two Scotchmen with the Duke of Mon-
mouth.
Argyle was the first to act upon this contract.
But, two of his men being taken prisoners at the
Orkney Islands, the Government became aware
of his intention, and was able to act against him
with such vigour as to prevent his raising more
than two or three thousand Highlanders, although
he sent a fiery cross, by trusty messengers, from
clan to clan and from glen to glen, as the custom
then was when those wild people were to be
excited by their chiefs. As he was moving
towards Glasgow with his small force, he was
betrayed by some of his followers, taken, and
1 84
A CHILD 'S HISTOR Y OF ENGLAND.
carried, with his hands tied behind his back, to
his old prison in Edinburgh Castle. James
ordered him to be executed, on his old shame-
fully unjust sentence, within three days ; and he
appears to have been anxious that his legs
should have been pounded with his old favourite
the boot. However, the boot was not applied ;
he was simply beheaded, and his head was set
upon the top of Edinburgh Jail. One of those
Englishmen who had been assigned to him was
that old soldier Rumbold, the master of the
Rye House. He was sorely wounded, and
within a week after Argyle had suffered with
great courage, was brought up for trial, lest he
should die and disappoint the King. He, too,
was executed, after defending himself with great
spirit, and saying that he did not believe that
God had made the greater part of mankind to
carry saddles on their backs and bridles in their
mouths, and to be ridden by a few, booted and
spurred for the purpose — in which I thoroughly
agree with Rumbold.
The Duke of Monmouth, partly through being
detained and partly through idling his time
away, was five or six weeks behind his friend
when he landed at Lyme, in Dorset : hav-
ing at his right hand an unlucky nobleman
called Lord Grey of Werk, who of himself
would have ruined a far more promising expedi-
tion. He immediately set up his standard in
the market-place, and proclaimed the King a
tyrant, and a Popish usurper, and I know not
what else ; charging him not only with what he
had done, which was bad enough, but with what
neither he nor anybody else had done, such as
setting fire to London, and poisoning the late
King. Raising some' four thousand men by
these means, he marched on to Taunton, where
there were many Protestant dissenters who were
strongly opposed to the Catholics. Here, both
the rich and poor turned out to receive him,
ladies 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
m their brightest beauty, and gave him a Bible
ornamented with their own fair hands, together
with other presents.
Kncouraged 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
iqwerful friends after all, that it was a question
whether he should disband his army and endea-
vour 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 Mon-
mouth himself fled, was not known in the con-
fusion; 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,
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 fa-
vourite 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 execu-
tioner 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
JAMES THE SECOND.
185
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, how-
ever, 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 Eng-
lish 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 de-
mons 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 pro-
ceedings 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 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 cathe-
dral 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 exe-
cuted, 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 hang-
man 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
1 86
A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
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 bar-
gains 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 Rum-
sey, 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 Avretch who himself gave
evidence against her. She settled the fuel
about herself with her own hands, so that the
flames should reach her quickly; and nobly
said, with her last breath, that she had obeyed
the sacred command of God, to give refuge
to the outcast, and not to betray the wanderer.
After all this hanging, beheading, burning,
boiling, mutilating, exposing, robbing, trans-
porting, 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 penal-
ties. 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
litaries of University College, Oxford, who
hail become Papists, and whom he kept in their
places and sanctioned. He revived the hated
Ecclesiastical Commission, to get rid of Comp-
ton, Bishop of London, who manfully opposed
him. Pie 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 seve-
ral 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 dis-
placed 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 endur-
ance 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-in-law 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, Avho played the same game there for his
master, and who played the deeper game for
himself of one day putting it under the protec-
tion 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 after-
wards, 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 die President of Magdalen College, lie
commanded that there should be elected to
JAMES THE SECOND.
187
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 substi-
tuted 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
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 Pro-
testant 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 re-
solved that the declaration should not be read,
and that they would petition the King against
it. The Archbishop himself wrote out the peti-
tion, and six bishops went into the King's bed-
chamber 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 prose-
cute 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 bless-
ing. 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 cen-
suring 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