Shorter Notice
Judge Jeffreys. By H. Montgomery Hyde. (Butterworth. 21s.) THE re-issue of this admirable biography—" a book not only of great fascination but of permanent value, too," as Sir Norman Birkett characterises it in his equally admirable Foreword—is very much to be welcomed. George Jeffreys, who after holding the offices of Lord Chief Justice and Lord Chancellor of England died a prisoner in the Tower at the age of 43, was a remarkable personality, and his character well deserves the dispassionate analysis to which Mr. Montgomery Hyde subjects it. With all his brutality and coarseness he was no mean lawyer, and though he will always be remembered with just execration for his part in the Bloody Assize after Sedge- moor Mr. Hyde is careful to point out that there could be no doubt about the guilt of Lady Alice Lisle, and that for her crime—treason —there could be no penalty but death ; and that the number of people actually executed as the result of Jeffreys' sentences was probably about two hundred, a figure very much lower than most contemporary and subsequent estimates. The text of this edition could not be revised, for reasons not clearly explained (since it appears not to have been printed from the original type or plates), with the result that we read the melancholy assertion regarding the Temple Church organ, whose builder owtd his appointment to an adjudication by Jeffreys between him and a competitor, that "Smith's organ has ably withstood the further test of time, and still discourses fine music in the Temple Church."
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