"All is lost, save honour!" wrote Francis the First, from the field of Pavia. With his defeat all hope of empire, with his capture all hope of life, were lost to Monmouth. With craven fear, unworthy of his reputation, of his late proud hopes, and of the blood which flowed in his veins, he disgraced himself by futile supplications to the stern relative who never yet forgave. He begged, in piteous terms, that he might be admitted to the royal presence. There was, he said, a secret, which he could not trust to paper, and which, if he spoke that word, would secure the throne against all danger. His request granted, and his arms bound behind him by a silken cord, he flung himself upon the ground, strove with his pinioned arms to embrace his uncle's knees, crawled to his feet, wept, moaned, and entreated piteously for mercy, for life he begged ;-for life, though to be purchased by the basest degradation. In his wild agony, he protested that he had never wished to take the crown; all his manifestoes were, he said, the work of Ferguson-of that bloody villain Ferguson. As a last resort, the selfelected champion of Protestantism had the meanness to hint at apostatizing, and a reconciliation with the church of Rome. The king offered spiritual assistance, but said nothing of reprieve or pardon. "Is there no hope?" asked Monmouth. James turned away. The Duke for a moment rallied, rose from his knees and retired in silence. "He had asked grace at a graceless face." The public, and the French ambassador, astonished at his meanness, were still more disgusted with his uncle's obduracy. To have pardoned Monmouth had been an act of extreme, and-if mercy ever were impolitic-imprudent generosity; but to grant the interview, to behold the agony of his debased and grovelling kinsman, and then not to spare him, was-worthy of James the Second.

On

On the first outburst of the rebellion, Monmouth had been attainted. From the King's presence he was conducted to the tower. that same (Monday) evening he was informed that on the Wednesday morning he must die. His wife visited him; he received her coldly, and bent all his efforts to obtain a reprieve. Some Catholic divines attended; but as they could bring him no hope of pardon, he soon intimated that though he would readily have apostatized to save his life, yet, if he must die, he would as soon die without their absolution

as with it.

His last morning had arrived. He mounted the scaffold at Tower-hill amidst the sighs and tears of the surrounding multitude. "I shall say little" he exclaimed. "I have come here to die, and not to speak; and I die a Protestant of the Church of England." The attendant

and of honour. He loved her to the last, and could not die without giving utterance to his feelings." Again the prelates interposed—some altercation followed; they reminded him of the ruin he had brought upon his brave and loving followers. "I do own that," he replied; "I am sorry that it ever happened." They prayed long and fervently, Monmouth joining in their petitions, till they invoked a blessing upon James. "Do you not pray for the King with us?" Monmouth paused, hesitated, and at length exclaimed "Amen!" "I will," he added, "make no speeches. Here," turning to the executioner, "are six guineas for you; do not hack me, as you did Lord Russell." He knelt down, but Ketch, disconcerted by his admonition, struck a feeble blow. The Duke struggled, looked at the man reproachfully, and again sank down. Once more, and yet again the axe descended, but life was unextinguished, and the body moved. Yells of rage and horror burst from the spectators. The headsman flung aside his weapon. "Take up the axe, man!" cried the sheriff. " My heart fails me," replied Ketch. Fling him over the rails," roared the byestanders. Two more blows completed the butchery, but a knife was used to separate the head from the shoulders. A strong guard protected the executioner from the fury of the populace, who crowded round the scaffold to dip their handkerchiefs in their young favourite's blood. His mangled remains were interred privately beneath the communion table of the little chapel of St. Peter's, Tower-hill.

"Here death is associated, not, as in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's, with genius and virtue, with public veneration and with imperishable renown; not, as in our humblest churches and church-yards, with everything that is most endearing in social and domestic charities; but with whatever is darkest in human destiny, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame. Thither have been carried, through successive ages, by the rude hands of gaolers, without one mourner following, the bleeding relics of men who had been the captains of armies, the leaders of parties, the oracles of senates, and the ornaments of courts. Thither was borne, before the window where Jane Grey was praying, the mangled corpse of Guildford Dudley; Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, and Protector of the realm, reposes there by the brother whom he murdered. There has mouldered away the headless trunk of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester and Cardinal of Saint Vitalis, a man worthy to have lived in a better age, and to have died in a better cause. There are laid John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, Lord High Admiral, and Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, Lord High Treasurer. There, too, is another Essex, on whom nature and fortune had lavished all their bounties in vain; and whom valour, grace, genius, royal favour, popular applause, conducted to an early and ignominious doom. Not far off, sleep two chiefs of the great house of Howard, Thomas fourth Duke of Norfolk, and Philip eleventh Earl of Arundel. Here and there, among the thick

"But the battle was done, and the victory won, And all but the after-carnage done."

Horrible was that "after-carnage." Marlborough, whose calm intrepidity and military skill had won the victory, all of whose crimes were perpetrated coolly and on calculation, and who never squandered treasure or spilt blood unnecessarily, was absent;-and Feversham, a foreigner, at once cruel, frivolous, and incapable, commanded. The day after the battle, gained in his name by his renowned subordinate, the road from Bridgwater to Western Zoyland was marked by a long line of gibbets, and on each gibbet hung a prisoner.* Satiated with slaughter, Feversham returned to Court, where honours and rewards he little merited, and ridicule and contempt which he well deserved, awaited him. He left, however, as his deputy at Bridgewater, Colonel Kirke, a military adventurer from Tangier, before whose brutalities his own, and possibly all save those of Jeffreys, "pale their ineffectual fires." This ruffian, pitiless, licentious, and rapacious, commanded a regiment noted as the rudest and most ferocious in the service, who bore upon their colours as a device the Paschal Lamb, and in ironical allusion to their standard and their bloody-minded leader, were ordinarily denominated "Kirke's Lambs."+

"Such was the captain and such the soldiers who were now let loose upon the people of Somersetshire. From Bridgewater Kirke marched to Taunton; he was accompanied by two carts filled with wounded rebels, whose gashes had not been dressed, and by a long drove of prisoners on foot, who were chained two and two. Several of these he hanged as soon as he reached Taunton, without the form of a trial. They were not suffered even to take leave of their nearest relations. The sign-post of the White Hart Inn served for a gallows. It is said that the work of death went on in sight of the win

Among the captives was a youth famous for his speed; hopes were held out to him that his life would be spared, if he could run a race with one of the colts of the marsh. The space through which the man kept up with the horse is still marked by well known bounds in the moor, and is about three quarters of a mile. Feversham was not ashamed, after seeing the performance, to send the wretched prisoner to the gallows."-Hist. vol. i., p. 615.

This regiment, the second of the line, still bears its ancient cognomen; but its soldiers, now commanded by Lord Saltoun, K.C.B., are as much distinguished for their gallantry and good behaviour as their predecessors, under Kirke, were notorious for their evil discipline and brutality.

dows where the officers of the Tangier regiment were carousing, and that at every health a wretch was turned off. When the legs of the dying men quivered in the last agony, the colonel ordered the drums to strike up. He would give the rebels, he said, music to their dancing. The tradition runs that one of of a speedy death. Twice he was suspended from the captives was not even allowed the indulgence the sign-post, and twice cut down. Twice he was asked if he repented of his treason; and twice he replied, that if the thing were to do again he would do it. Then he was tied up for the last time. So many bodies were quartered that the executioner stood ancle-deep in blood: he was assisted by a poor man, whose loyalty was suspected, and who was compelled to ransom his own life by seething the remains of his friends in pitch. The peasant who had consented to perform this hideous office afterwards returned to his plough. But a mark like that of Cain was upon him. He was known through the village by the name of Tom Boilman. The rustics long continued to relate that, though he had by his sinful and shameful deed saved himself from the vengeance of the Lambs, he had not escaped the vengeance of a higher power. In a great storm he fled for shelter under an oak, and was there struck by lightning."

Horrible as was Kirke's barbarity, he was not brutal enough to please the Court. Rapa cious as cruel, he not unfrequently sold "“safe conducts" to his prisoners, enabling them to pass his outposts, reach a sea-port, and flee to a foreign country. "His Majesty," wrote Sunderland, "commands me to signify to you his dislike of these proceedings, and desires you to take care that no person concerned in the rebellion be at large." Meantime, the Lord Keeper's health failed, and as he felt his end approaching, he closed his career of meanness, selfishness, and servility, by a solitary though unavailing act of duty. "He went directly to the King, and moved him to put a stop to the but in many respects just the contrary. For fury, which was in no respect for his service; though the executions were by law just, yet never were the deluded people all capitally punished; and it would be accounted a carnage, and not law or justice."

North sued, remonstrated, and argued, but in vain, the gaols of Somersetshire and Dorsetshire were filled with prisoners, and Jeffreys about to lead "the bloody circuit." The first victim was the widow of John Lisle, the regi cide, an aged lady, who, after the battle of Sedgmoor, had sheltered two fugitives, who were seized in her dwelling-house. Neither had, however, been convicted of high treason, nor was there evidence that she knew they had been rebels. The jury hesitated; Jeffreys stormed, cursed and swore, bullied the witnesses, browbeat the prisoner; and with extreme difficulty obtained a verdict-" guilty.”

"The feeling which makes the most loyal subject shrink from the thought of giving up to a shameful

North's Life of Guildford, vol. ii., p. 125.Some slight discrepancy in dates has confused historians, but that Roger's statement is true in substance cannot be doubted.-B.

|

death the rebel who, vanquished, hunted down, and in mortal agony begs for a morsel of bread and a cup of water, may be a weaknes; but it is surely a weakness very nearly allied to virtue-a weakness which, constituted as human beings are, we can hardly eradicate from the mind without eradicating many noble and benevolent sentiments. A wise and good ruler may not think it right to sanction this weakness; but he will generally connive at it, or punish it very tenderly. In no case will he treat it as a crime of the blackest dye. Whether Flora Macdonald was justified in concealing the attainted heir of the Stuarts, whether a brave soldier of our own time was justified in assisting the escape of Lavalette, are questions on which casuists may differ; but to class such actions with the crimes of Guy Faux and Fieschi is an outrage to humanity and common sense. Such, however, is the classification of our law. It is evident that nothing but a lenient administration could make such a state of the law endurable. And it is just to say that, during many generations, no English government, save one, has treated with rigour persons guilty merely of harbouring defeated and flying insurgents. To women especially has been granted, by a kind of tacit prescription, the right of indulging, in the midst of havoc and vengeance, that compassion | which is the most endearing of all their charms. Since the beginning of the great civil war, numerous rebels, some of them far more important than Hickes or Nelthorpe, have been protected against the severity of victorious governments by female adroitness and generosity. But no English ruler who has been thus baffled, the savage and implacable James alone excepted, has had the barbarity even to think of putting a lady to a cruel and shameful death for so venial and amiable a transgression."

Late at night, the verdict was extorted from the jury, and Jeffreys next morning sentenced Lady Alice to be burnt alive that afternoon. This barbarity aroused the indignation even of the hottest Tories. The clergy of the cathedral remonstrated, and the execution was deferred for five days. Ladies of the highest rank, with Feversham and Clarendon, interceded. Obdurate as usual, James refused to spare his victim, but commuted her punishment from burning to decapitation.

At Dorchester, three hundred captives waited their trial. Jeffries made short work with them, intimating that the only chance of respite was to plead guilty. Twenty-nine who put themselves on their country were convicted, and tied up instanter. Two hundred and ninety-two received sentence of death, and seventy-four in all were hanged in Dorsetshire.

"In Somersetshire, two hundred and thirty-three prisoners were, in a few days, hanged, drawn, and quartered. At every spot where two roads met, on every market-place, on the green of every village which had furnished Monmouth with soldiers, ironed corpses, clattering in the wind, or heads and quarters stuck on poles, poisoned the air, and made the traveller sick with horror. In many parishes the

peasantry could not assemble in the house of God without seeing the ghastly face of a neighbour grinning at them over the porch. The chief justice was all himself. His spirits rose higher and higher He laughed, shouted, joked, and swore in such a way that many thought him

as the work went on.

drunk from morning to night. But in him it was not easy to distinguish the madness produced by evil passions from the madness produced by brandy. * Gentlemen and noblemen of high consideration and stainless loyalty, who ventured to bring to his notice any extenuating circumstance, were almost sure to receive what he called, in the coarse dialect which he had learned in the pothouses of Whitechapel, a lick with the rough side of his tongue. Lord Stawell, a Tory peer, who could not conceal his horror at the remorseless manner in which his poor neighbours were butchered, was punished by having a corpse suspended in chains at his park gate. Such havoc must have excited disgust, even if the sufferers had been generally odious; but they were, for the most part, men of blameless life, and of high religious profession. They were regarded by themselves, and by a large proportion of their neighbours, not as wrong-doers, but as martyrs, who sealed with blood the truth of the Protestant religion. Very few of the convicts professed any repentance for what they had done. Many, animated by the old Puritan spirit, met death, not merely with fortitude, but with exultation. It was in vain that the ministers of the Established Church lectured them on the guilt of rebellion, and on the importance of priestly absolution. The claim of the king to unbounded authority in things temporal, and the claim of the clergy to the spiritual power of binding and losing, moved the bitter scorn of the intrepid sectaries. Some of them composed hymns in the dungeon, and chaunted them on the fatal sledge. Christ, they sang while they were undressing for the butchery, would soon come to rescue Zion and to make war on Babylon, would set up his standard, would blow his trumpet, and would requite his foes tenfold for all the evil which had been inflicted on his servants. The dying words of these men were noted down, their farewell letters were kept as treasures; and in this way, with the help of some invention and exaggeration, was formed a copious supplement to the Marian martyrology."

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Time and space would alike fail us, were we to recapitulate all the cruelties of Jeffreys; his brutal facetiousness was, if possible, more re. volting than his severity. A young lady, whose lover had been condemned to death, flung herself at the ruffian's feet to implore his mercy. "Jeffreys drove her from him with a jest so hideous, that to repeat it would be an offence against decency and humanity." Two youthful brothers, William and Benjamin Hewling, the grandsons of a wealthy London merchant, a leader among the Baptists, were tried by Jeffreys. "You have," said he to William, a grandfather, who deserves to be hanged as richly as you do." The poor lad suffered with such gentle fortitude, that an attending officer, remarkable for his own harshness, cried, "I do not believe that my Lord Chief Justice himself could be proof against this." Strong interest was made for the surviving brother; even Jeffreys was, or affected to be, inclined to lenity. Churchill introduced the prisoner's sister at Whitehall. "Madam," said he, "I wish well to your suit with all my heart, but do not flatter yourself with hopes; this marble," and he laid his hand upon the chimney-piece, "is not harder than the king."