should prevent the succession of the Popish Duke. After this
double-faced beginning, it established an oath which no human being
could understand, but which everybody was to take, as a proof that
his religion was the lawful religion. The Earl of Argyle, taking
it with the explanation that he did not consider it to prevent him
from favouring any alteration either in the Church or State which
was not inconsistent with the Protestant religion or with his
loyalty, was tried for high treason before a Scottish jury of which
the MARQUIS OF MONTROSE was foreman, and was found guilty. He
escaped the scaffold, for that time, by getting away, in the
disguise of a page, in the train of his daughter, LADY SOPHIA
LINDSAY. It was absolutely proposed, by certain members of the
Scottish Council, that this lady should be whipped through the
streets of Edinburgh. But this was too much even for the Duke, who
had the manliness then (he had very little at most times) to remark
that Englishmen were not accustomed to treat ladies in that manner.
In those merry times nothing could equal the brutal servility of
the Scottish fawners, but the conduct of similar degraded beings in
England.
After the settlement of these little affairs, the Duke returned to
England, and soon resumed his place at the Council, and his office
of High Admiral – all this by his brother’s favour, and in open
defiance of the law. It would have been no loss to the country, if
he had been drowned when his ship, in going to Scotland to fetch
his family, struck on a sand-bank, and was lost with two hundred
souls on board. But he escaped in a boat with some friends; and
the sailors were so brave and unselfish, that, when they saw him
rowing away, they gave three cheers, while they themselves were
going down for ever.
The Merry Monarch, having got rid of his Parliament, went to work
to make himself despotic, with all speed. Having had the villainy
to order the execution of OLIVER PLUNKET, BISHOP OF ARMAGH, falsely
accused of a plot to establish Popery in that country by means of a
French army – the very thing this royal traitor was himself trying
to do at home – and having tried to ruin Lord Shaftesbury, and
failed – he turned his hand to controlling the corporations all
over the country; because, if he could only do that, he could get
what juries he chose, to bring in perjured verdicts, and could get
what members he chose returned to Parliament. These merry times
produced, and made Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, a
drunken ruffian of the name of JEFFREYS; a red-faced, swollen,
bloated, horrible creature, with a bullying, roaring voice, and a
more savage nature perhaps than was ever lodged in any human
breast. This monster was the Merry Monarch’s especial favourite,
and he testified his admiration of him by giving him a ring from
his own finger, which the people used to call Judge Jeffreys’s
Bloodstone. Him the King employed to go about and bully the
corporations, beginning with London; or, as Jeffreys himself
elegantly called it, ‘to give them a lick with the rough side of
his tongue.’ And he did it so thoroughly, that they soon became
the basest and most sycophantic bodies in the kingdom – except the
University of Oxford, which, in that respect, was quite pre-eminent
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Dickens, Charles – A Child’s History of England
and unapproachable.
Lord Shaftesbury (who died soon after the King’s failure against
him), LORD WILLIAM RUSSELL, the Duke of Monmouth, LORD HOWARD, LORD
JERSEY, ALGERNON SIDNEY, JOHN HAMPDEN (grandson of the great
Hampden), and some others, used to hold a council together after
the dissolution of the Parliament, arranging what it might be
necessary to do, if the King carried his Popish plot to the utmost
height. Lord Shaftesbury having been much the most violent of this
party, brought two violent men into their secrets – RUMSEY, who had
been a soldier in the Republican army; and WEST, a lawyer. These
two knew an old officer of CROMWELL’S, called RUMBOLD, who had
married a maltster’s widow, and so had come into possession of a