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,
Page 244
Dickens, Charles – A Child’s History of England
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