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.