Two Rascals and a Dupe
Moan than thirty years ago Mr. H. B. Irving attempted a eulogy, which was also some sort of an apologia, for Judge Jeffreys. It was no good. Not all the ingenious whitewash in the world can disguise the spots on that dark figure, and indeed Mr. Irving's defence left Jeffreys a neutral-coloured being and almost an insipidity. That emphatically he was not. He was full of flavour as an open and unabashed rascal should be, and the relishing pen of Judge Parry (if he will forgive the use of a title by which he is best known) gives full value to it. Quite frankly His Honour acknowledges to a liking for history taken dramatically, and in Judge Jeffreys, in Titus Oates and the sorry rogues who circled round him, and in the poor weak libertine whom all Puritan England delighted to honour as the Protestant Duke, he has an admirable oppor- tunity of which he has admirably availed himself. He makes the dirty, intriguing, cruel, bloody past live again, and his story of the two arch-rogues and of the skittish good-looking fribble, Monmouth, who was made the unhappy tool of powerful forces which eventually brought him to the block, is told with skill and verve, and is absorbingly interesting.
Oates was, of course, a rascal, but a low-comedy ruffian with a stout heart, and with (so the author thinks) "some sort of sincerity and conviction in his blackguard mind." Of Popery he had a real hatred, as had Jeffreys for dissenters (" We know very well," said his lordship once, " you snivelling saints can lie ") ; and it was the envenomed passions excited by the perjuries of the first, aided by the almost paranoiac lust for cruelty which, aggravated by drink and vice, ever burnt in the heart of the judicial rogue, that led up to the black tragedy of the Bloody Assize. Most people will agree that there is evidence for the existence of a sort of vaguely formed Popish conspiracy against the political liberties and religion of late seventeenth century England. Oates had got hold of some facts supporting the view and, like the forger Pigott of more recent fame, was more than willing to invent any quantity of others as required. Oates fell in due course, but his anti-Catholic revelations, genuine or perjured, added to the foul murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, had inflamed Pro. testant feeling to a fierce pitch, and it was that, along with the covert papalizing of Charles and his brother's open pro- fession, which led to Monmouth's luckless rebellion in the West. The West, too, had brought itself to believe that the Duke was Charles's legitimate son, though Monmouth's own mother, the " brown, beautiful, bold but insipid " Lucy Walter, had even denied that Charles was the father of her son at all.
A lively and stirring account of the futile campaign that ended with Sedgemoor and the savage military executions perpetrated by Kirke's Lambs sets the stage for the final tragedy of Jeffreys' swoop upon the West. Monmouth,. in Evelyn's words, had ".failed and perished," and now the reckoning had to be paid. Jeffreys was just the man to exact the uttermost farthing. A successful legal gladiator who was subserviently devoted to the Court (and who shared in many of its nasty pleasures), he loathed dissenters ; he was suffering from stone, which no doubt exacerbated his naturally fierce and brutal temper—a temper that revelled voluptuously in cruelty and " delighted in misery merely as misery." Every circumstance made him the fitting instrument for wreaking the King's purpose of vengeance on the simple West country- men who had struck a blow for King Monmouth and the Protestant religion. Even nowadays our blood runs cold, as we read again the story of Jeffreys' judicial ferocity. Bare figures tell part of that story vividly enough. The Special Commission, over which the Lord Chief Justice presided, executed 881 alleged rebels, transported 840 (including 25 school-girls) to the plantations, and whipped or fined 33 others. Well might Jeffreys observe in his charge to the Grand Jury at Dorchester that he was come to " breathe death like a destroying angel and to sanguine his very ermine in blood "—a fitting attitude of mind for one who had just sen- tenced Titus Oates to 1,700 lashes. " Jesus God ! that ever we should have had such a generation of vipers among us 1 ", " lying, sneaking, canting knaves," " bell-wethers of rebellion " —such were some of the flowers of loyal rhetoric with which the learned judge browbeat and terrorized witnesses. At Dorchester a contemporary account speaks of this ruffian as more like " a Romish inquisitor than a Protestant judge," and yet even an inquisitor would not have bawled to an untried prisoner, "Thou villain ! Methinks I see thee already with a halter about thy neck." Or, again, of another who was on the alms list of the parish : " Do not trouble yourselves ; I will ease the parish of that burden "—a remark which we can hear greeted with obsequious laughter. Need we follow further the wretch's career ? We can leave him with the words of a chronicler of the time who wrote, after the future Lord Chancellor had finished his " campaign " : " Jeffreys made all the West an Aceldama. Nothing could be liker hell than all those parts ; nothing so like the devil as he. Caldrons hizzing, carkases boyling, pitch and tar sparkling and glowing, blood and limbs boyling and tearing and mangling, and he the great director of all." Such were the results of what the decaying Stuart dynasty approved of as strong government.
Sir. Edward has told his story well, and we gratefully acknowledge our debt to him. At the same time we would deprecate his somewhat sweeping historical judgments. He inveighs against James II. much in the manner of a Hyde Park orator on May Day ; his opinion that Shaftesbury was " one of the few honest statesmen of the time " will not command universal agreement ; while to call Dryden " that prince of hack-writers " speaks little for his appreciation of good letters. And to style Feversham " a typical dud general " is true, no doubt, in fact, but scarcely in keeping with the dignity even of picturesque history. But it would take more than all this to discount the value of a very lively book.
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