ENGLAND UNDER JAMES THE SECOND
King James the Second was a man so very disagreeable, that even the
best of historians has favoured his brother Charles, as becoming, by
comparison, quite a pleasant character. The one object of his short
reign was to re-establish the Catholic religion in England; and this he
doggedly pursued with such a stupid obstinacy, that his career very
soon came to a close.
The first thing he did, was, to assure his council that he would make
it his endeavour to preserve the Government, both in Church and State,
as it was by law established; and that he would always take care to
defend and support the Church. Great public acclamations were raised
over this fair speech, and a great deal was said, from the pulpits and
elsewhere, about the word of a King which was never broken, by
credulous people who little supposed that he had formed a secret
council for Catholic affairs, of which a mischievous Jesuit, called
Father Petre, was one of the chief members. With tears of joy in his
eyes, he received, as the beginning of _his_ pension from the King of
France, five hundred thousand livres; yet, with a mixture of meanness
and arrogance that belonged to his contemptible character, he was
always jealous of making some show of being independent of the King of
France, while he pocketed his money. As—notwithstanding his publishing
two papers in favour of Popery (and not likely to do it much service, I
should think) written by the King, his brother, and found in his
strong-box; and his open display of himself attending mass—the
Parliament was very obsequious, and granted him a large sum of money,
he began his reign with a belief that he could do what he pleased, and
with a determination to do it.
Before we proceed to its principal events, let us dispose of Titus
Oates. He was tried for perjury, a fortnight after the coronation, and
besides being very heavily fined, was sentenced to stand twice in the
pillory, to be whipped from Aldgate to Newgate one day, and from
Newgate to Tyburn two days afterwards, and to stand in the pillory five
times a year as long as he lived. This fearful sentence was actually
inflicted on the rascal. Being unable to stand after his first
flogging, he was dragged on a sledge from Newgate to Tyburn, and
flogged as he was drawn along. He was so strong a villain that he did
not die under the torture, but lived to be afterwards pardoned and
rewarded, though not to be ever believed in any more. Dangerfield, the
only other one of that crew left alive, was not so fortunate. He was
almost killed by a whipping from Newgate to Tyburn, and, as if that
were not punishment enough, a ferocious barrister of Gray’s Inn gave
him a poke in the eye with his cane, which caused his death; for which
the ferocious barrister was deservedly tried and executed.
As soon as James was on the throne, Argyle and Monmouth went from
Brussels to Rotterdam, and attended a meeting of Scottish exiles held
there, to concert measures for a rising in England. It was agreed that
Argyle should effect a landing in Scotland, and Monmouth in England;
and that two Englishmen should be sent with Argyle to be in his
confidence, and two Scotchmen with the Duke of Monmouth.
Argyle was the first to act upon this contract. But, two of his men
being taken prisoners at the Orkney Islands, the Government became
aware of his intention, and was able to act against him with such
vigour as to prevent his raising more than two or three thousand
Highlanders, although he sent a fiery cross, by trusty messengers, from
clan to clan and from glen to glen, as the custom then was when those
wild people were to be excited by their chiefs. As he was moving
towards Glasgow with his small force, he was betrayed by some of his
followers, taken, and carried, with his hands tied behind his back, to
his old prison in Edinburgh Castle. James ordered him to be executed,
on his old shamefully unjust sentence, within three days; and he
appears to have been anxious that his legs should have been pounded
with his old favourite the boot. However, the boot was not applied; he
was simply beheaded, and his head was set upon the top of Edinburgh
Jail. One of those Englishmen who had been assigned to him was that old
soldier Rumbold, the master of the Rye House. He was sorely wounded,
and within a week after Argyle had suffered with great courage, was
brought up for trial, lest he should die and disappoint the King. He,
too, was executed, after defending himself with great spirit, and
saying that he did not believe that God had made the greater part of
mankind to carry saddles on their backs and bridles in their mouths,
and to be ridden by a few, booted and spurred for the purpose—in which
I thoroughly agree with Rumbold.
The Duke of Monmouth, partly through being detained and partly through
idling his time away, was five or six weeks behind his friend when he
landed at Lyme, in Dorset: having at his right hand an unlucky nobleman
called Lord Grey of Werk, who of himself would have ruined a far more
promising expedition. He immediately set up his standard in the
market-place, and proclaimed the King a tyrant, and a Popish usurper,
and I know not what else; charging him, not only with what he had done,
which was bad enough, but with what neither he nor anybody else had
done, such as setting fire to London, and poisoning the late King.
Raising some four thousand men by these means, he marched on to
Taunton, where there were many Protestant dissenters who were strongly
opposed to the Catholics. Here, both the rich and poor turned out to
receive him, ladies waved a welcome to him from all the windows as he
passed along the streets, flowers were strewn in his way, and every
compliment and honour that could be devised was showered upon him.
Among the rest, twenty young ladies came forward, in their best
clothes, and in their brightest beauty, and gave him a Bible ornamented
with their own fair hands, together with other presents.
Encouraged by this homage, he proclaimed himself King, and went on to
Bridgewater. But, here the Government troops, under the Earl of
Feversham, were close at hand; and he was so dispirited at finding that
he made but few powerful friends after all, that it was a question
whether he should disband his army and endeavour to escape. It was
resolved, at the instance of that unlucky Lord Grey, to make a night
attack on the King’s army, as it lay encamped on the edge of a morass
called Sedgemoor. The horsemen were commanded by the same unlucky lord,
who was not a brave man. He gave up the battle almost at the first
obstacle—which was a deep drain; and although the poor countrymen, who
had turned out for Monmouth, fought bravely with scythes, poles,
pitchforks, and such poor weapons as they had, they were soon dispersed
by the trained soldiers, and fled in all directions. When the Duke of
Monmouth himself fled, was not known in the confusion; but the unlucky
Lord Grey was taken early next day, and then another of the party was
taken, who confessed that he had parted from the Duke only four hours
before. Strict search being made, he was found disguised as a peasant,
hidden in a ditch under fern and nettles, with a few peas in his pocket
which he had gathered in the fields to eat. The only other articles he
had upon him were a few papers and little books: one of the latter
being a strange jumble, in his own writing, of charms, songs, recipes,
and prayers. He was completely broken. He wrote a miserable letter to
the King, beseeching and entreating to be allowed to see him. When he
was taken to London, and conveyed bound into the King’s presence, he
crawled to him on his knees, and made a most degrading exhibition. As
James never forgave or relented towards anybody, he was not likely to
soften towards the issuer of the Lyme proclamation, so he told the
suppliant to prepare for death.
On the fifteenth of July, one thousand six hundred and eighty-five,
this unfortunate favourite of the people was brought out to die on
Tower Hill. The crowd was immense, and the tops of all the houses were
covered with gazers. He had seen his wife, the daughter of the Duke of
Buccleuch, in the Tower, and had talked much of a lady whom he loved
far better—the Lady Harriet Wentworth—who was one of the last persons
he remembered in this life. Before laying down his head upon the block
he felt the edge of the axe, and told the executioner that he feared it
was not sharp enough, and that the axe was not heavy enough. On the
executioner replying that it was of the proper kind, the Duke said, ‘I
pray you have a care, and do not use me so awkwardly as you used my
Lord Russell.’ The executioner, made nervous by this, and trembling,
struck once and merely gashed him in the neck. Upon this, the Duke of
Monmouth raised his head and looked the man reproachfully in the face.
Then he struck twice, and then thrice, and then threw down the axe, and
cried out in a voice of horror that he could not finish that work. The
sheriffs, however, threatening him with what should be done to himself
if he did not, he took it up again and struck a fourth time and a fifth
time. Then the wretched head at last fell off, and James, Duke of
Monmouth, was dead, in the thirty-sixth year of his age. He was a
showy, graceful man, with many popular qualities, and had found much
favour in the open hearts of the English.
The atrocities, committed by the Government, which followed this
Monmouth rebellion, form the blackest and most lamentable page in
English history. The poor peasants, having been dispersed with great
loss, and their leaders having been taken, one would think that the
implacable King might have been satisfied. But no; he let loose upon
them, among other intolerable monsters, a Colonel Kirk, who had served
against the Moors, and whose soldiers—called by the people Kirk’s
lambs, because they bore a lamb upon their flag, as the emblem of
Christianity—were worthy of their leader. The atrocities committed by
these demons in human shape are far too horrible to be related here. It
is enough to say, that besides most ruthlessly murdering and robbing
them, and ruining them by making them buy their pardons at the price of
all they possessed, it was one of Kirk’s favourite amusements, as he
and his officers sat drinking after dinner, and toasting the King, to
have batches of prisoners hanged outside the windows for the company’s
diversion; and that when their feet quivered in the convulsions of
death, he used to swear that they should have music to their dancing,
and would order the drums to beat and the trumpets to play. The
detestable King informed him, as an acknowledgment of these services,
that he was ‘very well satisfied with his proceedings.’ But the King’s
great delight was in the proceedings of Jeffreys, now a peer, who went
down into the west, with four other judges, to try persons accused of
having had any share in the rebellion. The King pleasantly called this
‘Jeffreys’s campaign.’ The people down in that part of the country
remember it to this day as The Bloody Assize.
It began at Winchester, where a poor deaf old lady, Mrs. Alicia Lisle,
the widow of one of the judges of Charles the First (who had been
murdered abroad by some Royalist assassins), was charged with having
given shelter in her house to two fugitives from Sedgemoor. Three times
the jury refused to find her guilty, until Jeffreys bullied and
frightened them into that false verdict. When he had extorted it from
them, he said, ‘Gentlemen, if I had been one of you, and she had been
my own mother, I would have found her guilty;’—as I dare say he would.
He sentenced her to be burned alive, that very afternoon. The clergy of
the cathedral and some others interfered in her favour, and she was
beheaded within a week. As a high mark of his approbation, the King
made Jeffreys Lord Chancellor; and he then went on to Dorchester, to
Exeter, to Taunton, and to Wells. It is astonishing, when we read of
the enormous injustice and barbarity of this beast, to know that no one
struck him dead on the judgment-seat. It was enough for any man or
woman to be accused by an enemy, before Jeffreys, to be found guilty of
high treason. One man who pleaded not guilty, he ordered to be taken
out of court upon the instant, and hanged; and this so terrified the
prisoners in general that they mostly pleaded guilty at once. At
Dorchester alone, in the course of a few days, Jeffreys hanged eighty
people; besides whipping, transporting, imprisoning, and selling as
slaves, great numbers. He executed, in all, two hundred and fifty, or
three hundred.
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,
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
endeavoured to make Catholics of the Protestants about him. He held
private interviews, which he called ‘closetings,’ with those Members of
Parliament who held offices, to persuade them to consent to the design
he had in view. When they did not consent, they were removed, or
resigned of themselves, and their places were given to Catholics. He
displaced Protestant officers from the army, by every means in his
power, and got Catholics into their places too. He tried the same thing
with the corporations, and also (though not so successfully) with the
Lord Lieutenants of counties. To terrify the people into the endurance
of all these measures, he kept an army of fifteen thousand men encamped
on Hounslow Heath, where mass was openly performed in the General’s
tent, and where priests went among the soldiers endeavouring to
persuade them to become Catholics. For circulating a paper among those
men advising them to be true to their religion, a Protestant clergyman,
named Johnson, the chaplain of the late Lord Russell, was actually
sentenced to stand three times in the pillory, and was actually whipped
from Newgate to Tyburn. He dismissed his own brother-in-law from his
Council because he was a Protestant, and made a Privy Councillor of the
before-mentioned Father Petre. He handed Ireland over to Richard
Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell, a worthless, dissolute knave, who played
the same game there for his master, and who played the deeper game for
himself of one day putting it under the protection of the French King.
In going to these extremities, every man of sense and judgment among
the Catholics, from the Pope to a porter, knew that the King was a mere
bigoted fool, who would undo himself and the cause he sought to
advance; but he was deaf to all reason, and, happily for England ever
afterwards, went tumbling off his throne in his own blind way.
A spirit began to arise in the country, which the besotted blunderer
little expected. He first found it out in the University of Cambridge.
Having made a Catholic a dean at Oxford without any opposition, he
tried to make a monk a master of arts at Cambridge: which attempt the
University resisted, and defeated him. He then went back to his
favourite Oxford. On the death of the President of Magdalen College, he
commanded that there should be elected to succeed him, one Mr. Anthony
Farmer, whose only recommendation was, that he was of the King’s
religion. The University plucked up courage at last, and refused. The
King substituted another man, and it still refused, resolving to stand
by its own election of a Mr. Hough. The dull tyrant, upon this,
punished Mr. Hough, and five-and-twenty more, by causing them to be
expelled and declared incapable of holding any church preferment; then
he proceeded to what he supposed to be his highest step, but to what
was, in fact, his last plunge head-foremost in his tumble off his
throne.
He had issued a declaration that there should be no religious tests or
penal laws, in order to let in the Catholics more easily; but the
Protestant dissenters, unmindful of themselves, had gallantly joined
the regular church in opposing it tooth and nail. The King and Father
Petre now resolved to have this read, on a certain Sunday, in all the
churches, and to order it to be circulated for that purpose by the
bishops. The latter took counsel with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who
was in disgrace; and they resolved that the declaration should not be
read, and that they would petition the King against it. The Archbishop
himself wrote out the petition, and six bishops went into the King’s
bedchamber the same night to present it, to his infinite astonishment.
Next day was the Sunday fixed for the reading, and it was only read by
two hundred clergymen out of ten thousand. The King resolved against
all advice to prosecute the bishops in the Court of King’s Bench, and
within three weeks they were summoned before the Privy Council, and
committed to the Tower. As the six bishops were taken to that dismal
place, by water, the people who were assembled in immense numbers fell
upon their knees, and wept for them, and prayed for them. When they got
to the Tower, the officers and soldiers on guard besought them for
their blessing. While they were confined there, the soldiers every day
drank to their release with loud shouts. When they were brought up to
the Court of King’s Bench for their trial, which the Attorney-General
said was for the high offence of censuring the Government, and giving
their opinion about affairs of state, they were attended by similar
multitudes, and surrounded by a throng of noblemen and gentlemen. When
the jury went out at seven o’clock at night to consider of their
verdict, everybody (except the King) knew that they would rather starve
than yield to the King’s brewer, who was one of them, and wanted a
verdict for his customer. When they came into court next morning, after
resisting the brewer all night, and gave a verdict of not guilty, such
a shout rose up in Westminster Hall as it had never heard before; and
it was passed on among the people away to Temple Bar, and away again to
the Tower. It did not pass only to the east, but passed to the west
too, until it reached the camp at Hounslow, where the fifteen thousand
soldiers took it up and echoed it. And still, when the dull King, who
was then with Lord Feversham, heard the mighty roar, asked in alarm
what it was, and was told that it was ‘nothing but the acquittal of the
bishops,’ he said, in his dogged way, ‘Call you that nothing? It is so
much the worse for them.’
Between the petition and the trial, the Queen had given birth to a son,
which Father Petre rather thought was owing to Saint Winifred. But I
doubt if Saint Winifred had much to do with it as the King’s friend,
inasmuch as the entirely new prospect of a Catholic successor (for both
the King’s daughters were Protestants) determined the Earls of
Shrewsbury, Danby, and Devonshire, Lord Lumley, the Bishop of London,
Admiral Russell, and Colonel Sidney, to invite the Prince of Orange
over to England. The Royal Mole, seeing his danger at last, made, in
his fright, many great concessions, besides raising an army of forty
thousand men; but the Prince of Orange was not a man for James the
Second to cope with. His preparations were extraordinarily vigorous,
and his mind was resolved.
For a fortnight after the Prince was ready to sail for England, a great
wind from the west prevented the departure of his fleet. Even when the
wind lulled, and it did sail, it was dispersed by a storm, and was
obliged to put back to refit. At last, on the first of November, one
thousand six hundred and eighty-eight, the Protestant east wind, as it
was long called, began to blow; and on the third, the people of Dover
and the people of Calais saw a fleet twenty miles long sailing
gallantly by, between the two places. On Monday, the fifth, it anchored
at Torbay in Devonshire, and the Prince, with a splendid retinue of
officers and men, marched into Exeter. But the people in that western
part of the country had suffered so much in The Bloody Assize, that
they had lost heart. Few people joined him; and he began to think of
returning, and publishing the invitation he had received from those
lords, as his justification for having come at all. At this crisis,
some of the gentry joined him; the Royal army began to falter; an
engagement was signed, by which all who set their hand to it declared
that they would support one another in defence of the laws and
liberties of the three Kingdoms, of the Protestant religion, and of the
Prince of Orange. From that time, the cause received no check; the
greatest towns in England began, one after another, to declare for the
Prince; and he knew that it was all safe with him when the University
of Oxford offered to melt down its plate, if he wanted any money.
By this time the King was running about in a pitiable way, touching
people for the King’s evil in one place, reviewing his troops in
another, and bleeding from the nose in a third. The young Prince was
sent to Portsmouth, Father Petre went off like a shot to France, and
there was a general and swift dispersal of all the priests and friars.
One after another, the King’s most important officers and friends
deserted him and went over to the Prince. In the night, his daughter
Anne fled from Whitehall Palace; and the Bishop of London, who had once
been a soldier, rode before her with a drawn sword in his hand, and
pistols at his saddle. ‘God help me,’ cried the miserable King: ‘my
very children have forsaken me!’ In his wildness, after debating with
such lords as were in London, whether he should or should not call a
Parliament, and after naming three of them to negotiate with the
Prince, he resolved to fly to France. He had the little Prince of Wales
brought back from Portsmouth; and the child and the Queen crossed the
river to Lambeth in an open boat, on a miserable wet night, and got
safely away. This was on the night of the ninth of December.
At one o’clock on the morning of the eleventh, the King, who had, in
the meantime, received a letter from the Prince of Orange, stating his
objects, got out of bed, told Lord Northumberland who lay in his room
not to open the door until the usual hour in the morning, and went down
the back stairs (the same, I suppose, by which the priest in the wig
and gown had come up to his brother) and crossed the river in a small
boat: sinking the great seal of England by the way. Horses having been
provided, he rode, accompanied by Sir Edward Hales, to Feversham, where
he embarked in a Custom House Hoy. The master of this Hoy, wanting more
ballast, ran into the Isle of Sheppy to get it, where the fishermen and
smugglers crowded about the boat, and informed the King of their
suspicions that he was a ‘hatchet-faced Jesuit.’ As they took his money
and would not let him go, he told them who he was, and that the Prince
of Orange wanted to take his life; and he began to scream for a
boat—and then to cry, because he had lost a piece of wood on his ride
which he called a fragment of Our Saviour’s cross. He put himself into
the hands of the Lord Lieutenant of the county, and his detention was
made known to the Prince of Orange at Windsor—who, only wanting to get
rid of him, and not caring where he went, so that he went away, was
very much disconcerted that they did not let him go. However, there was
nothing for it but to have him brought back, with some state in the way
of Life Guards, to Whitehall. And as soon as he got there, in his
infatuation, he heard mass, and set a Jesuit to say grace at his public
dinner.
The people had been thrown into the strangest state of confusion by his
flight, and had taken it into their heads that the Irish part of the
army were going to murder the Protestants. Therefore, they set the
bells a ringing, and lighted watch-fires, and burned Catholic Chapels,
and looked about in all directions for Father Petre and the Jesuits,
while the Pope’s ambassador was running away in the dress of a footman.
They found no Jesuits; but a man, who had once been a frightened
witness before Jeffreys in court, saw a swollen, drunken face looking
through a window down at Wapping, which he well remembered. The face
was in a sailor’s dress, but he knew it to be the face of that accursed
judge, and he seized him. The people, to their lasting honour, did not
tear him to pieces. After knocking him about a little, they took him,
in the basest agonies of terror, to the Lord Mayor, who sent him, at
his own shrieking petition, to the Tower for safety. There, he died.
Their bewilderment continuing, the people now lighted bonfires and made
rejoicings, as if they had any reason to be glad to have the King back
again. But, his stay was very short, for the English guards were
removed from Whitehall, Dutch guards were marched up to it, and he was
told by one of his late ministers that the Prince would enter London,
next day, and he had better go to Ham. He said, Ham was a cold, damp
place, and he would rather go to Rochester. He thought himself very
cunning in this, as he meant to escape from Rochester to France. The
Prince of Orange and his friends knew that, perfectly well, and desired
nothing more. So, he went to Gravesend, in his royal barge, attended by
certain lords, and watched by Dutch troops, and pitied by the generous
people, who were far more forgiving than he had ever been, when they
saw him in his humiliation. On the night of the twenty-third of
December, not even then understanding that everybody wanted to get rid
of him, he went out, absurdly, through his Rochester garden, down to
the Medway, and got away to France, where he rejoined the Queen.
There had been a council in his absence, of the lords, and the
authorities of London. When the Prince came, on the day after the
King’s departure, he summoned the Lords to meet him, and soon
afterwards, all those who had served in any of the Parliaments of King
Charles the Second. It was finally resolved by these authorities that
the throne was vacant by the conduct of King James the Second; that it
was inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this Protestant
kingdom, to be governed by a Popish prince; that the Prince and
Princess of Orange should be King and Queen during their lives and the
life of the survivor of them; and that their children should succeed
them, if they had any. That if they had none, the Princess Anne and her
children should succeed; that if she had none, the heirs of the Prince
of Orange should succeed.
On the thirteenth of January, one thousand six hundred and eighty-nine,
the Prince and Princess, sitting on a throne in Whitehall, bound
themselves to these conditions. The Protestant religion was established
in England, and England’s great and glorious Revolution was complete.