Baxter went to prison, and remained there two years. While these things were transacting in England, the infamous Claverhouse, with his bloodthirsty dragoons, was oppressing and murdering the Scottish Covenanters. "The story ran," says Mr. Macanlay, "that these wretched men (the dragoons) used in their revels to play at the torments of hell, and to call each other by the names of devils and damned souls. The chief of this Tophet on earth, a soldier of distinguished courage and professional skill, but rapacious and profane, of violent temper, and of obdurate heart, has left a name which, wherever the Scottish race is settled on the face of the globe, is mentioned with a peculiar energy of hatred. To recapitulate all the crimes by which this man and men like him, goaded the peasantry of the Western Lowlands into madness, would be an endless task. A few instances must suffice, and all these instances must be taken from the history of a single fortnight."-Vol. i. p. 498. After giving an affecting and eloquent account of the sufferings of some of our noble martyrs to civil and religious liberty, Mr. Macaulay indignantly adds: "Thus was Scotland governed by that prince, whom ignorant men have represented as a friend of religious liberty, whose misfortune it was to be too wise and too good for the age in which he lived! * * * While his officers were committing the murders which have just been related, he was urging the Scottish Parliament to pass a new Act, compared with which all former Acts might be called merciful."-Vol. i. p. 502. The affection of the King for William Penn, and his treatment of the Quakers form a remarkable contrast with his conduct to Dissenters. Mr. Macaulay has given a very interesting account of the singular transactions which took place between Penn and the King, and candidly confesses that it requires some courage to speak the whole truth regarding this "mythical" personage. The Society of Friends, who worship him as an apostle, must either weep over his equivocal character, or fulminate their anathemas against the discriminating, and yet, perhaps, the too flattering delineation of him by Mr. Macaulay.* The last chapter of Mr. Macaulay's first volume is occupied with the history of the rebellion in which the Earl of Argyle and the If our author wishes to retain the favor of our good friends, we would recommend him to "mend his Penn" for another edition of his work. | Duke of Monmouth fell a sacrifice to ill-judged, ill-concerted, and ill-executed schemes. Among the men whom the oppression of the Stuarts had driven from their native land, the Earl of Argyle and the Duke of Monmouth, who met the other refugees in Holland, were the most active and influential. Actuated by different motives, but impelled by the same hatred of their tyrant King, these bold men resolved to unfurl the standard of rebellion. Argyle was entrusted with the command in Scotland, subject however to the control of a committee, of which Sir Patrick Hume and Sir John Cochrane were the leaders. Argyle's force of 1800 men assembled in the isthmus of Tarbet; but the Government, who had received early intelligence of his intention, had collected the clans that were hostile to him, and sent ships of war to cruise in the Frith of Clyde. The committee thwarted him in all his plans. The provisions were insufficient for the wants hundreds, and Argyle, in place of taking a of the troops. The Highlanders deserted in position among his native mountains, was compelled, by the rash counsel of his friends, to carry the war into the Lowlands. Disaster leaders were obliged to seek for safety in followed disaster, till his troops and their flight. Argyle himself was made captive in the disguise of a peasant, and was ordered for execution, not on account of his share in the rebellion, but under the sentence which had been previously pronounced against him for refusing to sign the Test Act. This noble victim of arbitrary power exand peace of mind which faith and hope hibited, in his hour of suffering, that courage that of God, and must be triumphant. “I could alone inspire. His cause, he said was do not," he added, " take upon myself to be a prophet, but I have a strong impression on my spirit that deliverance will come very suddenly." After his last meal, which he had taken with appetite, he lay down as he was wont to do, in order that he might be in full vigor to mount the scaffold. who had probably been bred a Presbyterian, and had been seduced by interest to join in oppressing the Church of which he had once been a member, came to came to the Castle with a message from his brethren, and demanded admittance to the Earl. It was answered, that the Earl was asleep. The Privy Councillor thought that this was a subterfuge, and insisted on entering. The door of the cell was softly opened, and there lay Argyle on the bed, sleeping in his irons the placid sleep of infancy. The conscience of the renegade smote "At this time, one of the Lords of the Council, him. He turned away sick at heart, ran out of the Castle, and took refuge in the dwelling of a lady of his family who lived hard by. There he flung himself on a couch, and gave himself up to an agony of remorse and shame. His kinswoman, alarmed by his looks and groans, thought that he had been taken with sudden illness, and begged him to drink a cup of sack. No, no, he said, that will do me no good.' She prayed him to tell her what had disturbed him. I have been,' he said, 'in Argyle's prison. I have seen him within an hour of eternity, sleeping as sweetly When as ever man did. But as for me, Argyle was brought to the Council-house, he was allowed pen and ink to write thus to his wife :'Dear heart, God is unchangeable. He hath always been good and gracious to me, and no place alters it. Forgive me all my faults, and now comfort thyself in Him in whom only true comfort is to be found. The Lord be with thee, bless and comfort thee, my dearest. Adieu.' When mounted on the scaffold, one of the Episcopal clergymen in attendance called out loudly-My Lord dies a Protestant.' Yes,' added, the Earl, stepping forward, and not only a Protestant, but with a heart-hatred of Popery, of Prelacy, and of all superstition.' Having embraced his friends, he knelt down, laid his head on the block of the Maiden, and gave the signal to the executioner." -Vol. i. pp. 563, 565. Before the termination of this unfortunate rebellion, Monmouth, with a stronger force, landed in the port of Lynn in 1680, having escaped the vessels of the enemy that were lying in wait for him, as well as the disasters that threatened him at sea. No sooner had he landed than he issued a manifesto full of falsehood and violence, denouncing James as a murderer and usurper, and declaring that he himself was legitimate, and King of England by right of blood. Recruits flocked to his standard, and after some skirmishes with the Royal troops under the Duke of Albemarle, he entered Taunton, where he foolishly allowed himself to be proclaimed king, on the 20th of June. On the 5th of July the Royal army pitched their tents on the plain of Sedgemoor, about three miles from Bridgewater. After surveying their position from the lofty steeple of Bridgewater Church, Monmouth resolved upon a night attack, but upon bringing his forces up to their position, he was startled at the discovery that a deep trench lay between him and the camp which he expected to surprise. He halted, and fired on the Royal infantry on the opposite bank. The battle raged for three quarters of an hour, but the other divisions of the Royal army having come up, the cavalry of the insurgents under Grey were panic-struck, and the advantage which darkness and surprise had given to the assailants was soon lost, and Monmouth himself retreated and rode from the field, leaving more than a thousand of his men lying dead on the moor. The loss of the King's army was only 300 in killed and wounded. Monmouth was taken prisoner in the New Forest, and was conveyed to Ringwood under a strong guard. Though brave in the field, the courage of Monmouth failed him in the solitude of a with a craven spirit unworthy of his name prison. He begged his life from the King, and his lineage. He implored, and obtained an interview with the King. He crawled to his uncle's feet, embraced his knees with his pinioned arms, and with tears in his eyes he confessed his crime, and endeavored to find some apology for it by throwing the blame on the noble Argyle. He would have renounced his religion for his life, but James was inexorable, and the day of his execution was fixed. The Duchess of Monmouth, with her children, visited him in prison, but he received them and parted with them without emotion. His heart had strayed from its first love, and had squandered its deepest affections upon Lady Wentworth, by means of whose wealth he had been enabled to fit out his hapless expedition. The circumstances connected with his execution are too painful to be minutely detailed. The fatal axe placed in a faltering hand refused to do its work, and Monmouth perished with difficulty amid the suppressed sympathies of thousands, and the deepest execrations of the mob against the unskillful executioner. The head and body, placed in a coffin, were buried privately under the communion table of St. Peter's Chapel, in the Tower. Beneath the same pavement, and beside Monmouth's remains, were laid within four years the remains of Jeffreys. "In truth," says Mr. Macaulay, "there is no sadder spot on the earth than that little cemetery. Death is not there consecrated 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 dearing in social and domestic charities; but church-yards, with everything that is most enwith whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny, with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, 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 man- | gled corpse of Guilford Dudley, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset and Protector of the Realm, reposes there beside the brother whom he murdered. There has mouldered away the headless trunk of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester and Cardinal of St. 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 and whom valor, grace, genius, Royal favor and 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 graves of unquiet and aspiring statesmen, lie more delicate sufferers; Margaret of Salisbury, the last of the proud name of Plantagenet, and those two fair Queens, who perished by the jealous rage of Henry. Such was the dust with which the dust of Monmouth mingled."--Vol. i. pp. 628, 629. fortune had lavished all their bounties in vain, The The week which followed the battle of Sedgemoor was marked in the annals of the West with cruelties that disgrace the reign and the age in which they were committed. A ferocious colonel, of the name of Kirke, butchered an hundred captives, without even the form of trial. The rich purchased their lives for thirty or forty pounds, while the poor captives were executed amid the mockery and carousals of a brutal soldiery. sign-post of the White Hart Inn of Taunton, served for a gallows, and on the spot where the bodies were quartered, "the executioner stood ankle deep in blood." Military execution was speedily followed by civil murder, wearing the mask of law. A ferocious judge, more brutal still than the brutal soldier, stimulated by a King as brutal as himself, stalked in ermine through the West with the stake and the gallows in his train, to complete the desolation of an already desolate land. Jeffreys presided at the bloody assize, and reaped his harvest of seventy-four lives in Dorsetshire, and two hundred and thirtythree in Somersetshire. The history and fate of the most interesting of the unhappy victims has been beautifully related by Mr. Macaulay. We can only notice the story of Lady Alice Lisle, the widow of John Lisle, who had been raised to the peerage by Cromwell, and who was assasinated by three Irish ruffians at Lausanne. She had given food and a resting-place to two outlaws, John Hickes, a non-conformist divine, and Richard Nelthorpe, a lawyer, who had been concerned in the Rye-house Plot. By brow beating the witnesses, and threatening the jury, the judicial hyæna obtained a verdict against female humanity, that noble quality which even uncivilized woman has a prescriptive right to exercise. Her sentence, to be burnt alive on the same day, was commuted to beheading, and she met her fate heroically in the market-place of Winchester. But neither the Hyæna Judge, nor his congener the Royal Tiger, were satisfied with blood. Even the carnivorous appetite delights in a change of food. The goblet of red wine may derive some zest even from the cup of fetid water; and when the axe is too sharp to give pain, and the hempen coil too quick to kill, torture may be prolonged by the scourge, and agony made ductile by imprisonment and exile. In these varieties of revenge the bloodthirsty Court wantonly indulged. Several of the rebels were sentenced to scourging not less terrible than that which Oates had undergone, and women who had merely spoken some idle words, were condemned to be whipped through all the market-towns in Dorsetshire. A youth, named Tulchen, was condemned to be imprisoned for seven years, and to be flogged every year through every town in the country. Upwards of 840 prisoners were ordered to be transported as slaves for ten years to some West India Islands. Onefifth of these wretched exiles perished on the voyage, and so narrow was the space in which the living were confined, that there was not space for them to lie down. The men who survived these calamities were reduced by starvation to the state of skeletons, and the persons to whom they were consigned were obliged to fatten them previous to their sale. In many cases life was spared not from mercy but from avarice. Jeffreys accumulated a fortune from the ransom money for which he bartered the lives of the higher class of Whigs;* and the parasites who assisted him were allowed to appropriate to themselves the price of pardons. Nor was this variety of life insurance confined to Jeffreys and his minions. The name of the Queen, of Mary of Modena, however honored it may be by fortitude in adversity, has received a stain which no stoical virtues can efface. The ladies of her household, encouraged not only by her approbation but by her example, did not scruple to wring money out of the parents of the young women who had walked in the procession which presented * Edmund Prideaux paid the Chief Justice £15,000 for his liberation. the standard to Monmouth at Taunton. When Sir F. Warre refused to assist in this ignoble extortion, William Penn accepted and executed the commission! The Queen had never saved or tried to save the life of a sin gle victim of her husband's cruelty. "The only request," says Mr. Macaulay, "which she is known to have preferred, touching the rebels, was that 100 of those who were sentenced to transportation might be given to her! The profit which she cleared on the cargo, after making large allowance for those who died of hunger and fever during the passage, cannot be estimated at less than a thousand guineas." Towards the close of 1685, James had reached the climax of his prosperity and power, that giddy height to which Providence raises tyrants in order to magnify their fall. It is when the meteor shoots from the zenith that we can best contrast the brightness of its flash with the rapidity of its descent, and the extinction of its splendor. The Whigs were shorn of their power. The clergy were the King's worshippers-the corporations his creatures, and the judges his tools. He meditated the repeal of the Habeas Corpus and Test Acts, and the formation of a standing army; and forgetting that he had been the pensioner and vassal of Louis, he was willing to place himself at the head of a confederacy which should limit the too formidable power of France. In all these schemes James was doomed to disappointment. The Habeas Corpus Act was as dear to the Tories as to the Whigs who passed it. A standing army, associated with the events of the Protectorship, and incompatible with the militia force, which was officered by the gentry, was highly unpopular, and the admission of Catholics to civil and military office was equally adverse to the feelings and the principles of the whole Protestant community. Roman Catholic divines had argued in their writings in favor of equivocation, mental reservation, perjury, and even assassination; and Catholics of acknowledged pi When Jeffreys returned from his Western campaign, as the King styled it, leaving the country strewed with the heads and limbs of the rebels, a Peerage and the Great Seal of England were his rewards. Another campaign in the city of London was arranged and carried out. The rich Whig merchants proved a noble quarry for the Royal Sportsman and his Gamekeeper. To them the gold in their purse was of more value than the flesh on their bones, and it was possible, too, that the double prey might be secured. The aggressions against the wealthy traders, however, were not equal in atrocity to the execution of Elizabeth Gaunt, an old Anabaptist lady, who was distinguished by her acts of benevolence to the needy of all denominations. A wretch of the name of Bur-ety did not scruple to defend the massacre of ton, one of the Rye-house plotters, had received money and assistance from this lady, to enable him to save his life by escaping to Holland. He returned with Monmouth, and fought at Sedgemoor, and when pursued by the Government, who had offered £100 for his apprehension, he obtained shelter in the house of one John Fernley, a barber. This honest man, though besieged by creditors, was faithful to the stranger under his roof. Burton, however, surrendered himself, and saved his life by giving information, and appearing as the principal witness, against his two benefactors. They were both tried and both convicted. Fernley perished by the gallows, and Elizabeth Gaunt was burned alive at Tyburn. At her dying hour she forgave her enemies, leaving them "to the judgment of the King of kings." During this, the foulest of judicial murders, an awful tempest broke forth, destroying ships and dwellings, as if Heaven were lifting its voice and its arm against the workers of iniquity.* «Since that terrible day," says Mr. Macaulay, no woman has suffered death in England for any political offence." St. Bartholomew and the Gunpowder Plot. Popery was therefore justly dreaded by every friend of Protestantism. Nor was this dread confined to the populace and to the intolerant among the clergy. Tillotson warned the House of Commons "against the propagation of a religion more mischievous than irreligion itself;" and declared that the idolatrous Pagans were better members of civil society than men who had imbibed the principles of the Popish casuists; while Locke contended that the Church which taught that faith should not be kept with heretics, had no claim to toleration. In place of removing these feelings by moderate and constitutional proceedings, James gave them a new and irresistible force by the most illegal exertions of his power. In opposition to law, many Roman Catholics held commissions in the army, and he was determined to increase their number. Halifax, though unsupported by his colleagues, was bold enough to express in the Cabinet his disgust and alarm; and the dismissed him from his service. A section of King, after trying in vain to corrupt him, the Tories was animated with the same feel Mr. Macaulay has drawn a powerful picture of the virtues and vices of the Jesuits. We enumerate their merits when we mention their eloquence in the pulpit, their genius in science, their acquirements in literature, and their powers of instruction. We enumerate their virtues when we admit their heroism in deeds of mercy, and their self-devotion in missionary labor. Their vices are thus embalmed in Mr. Macaulay's eloquence.* ings as the Whigs. Even the Bishops ex- | ued the Established religion, and were anxious pressed the sentiment, that there were prin- that discreet and moderate counsels should ciples higher than loyalty; and the very prevail. A knot of Roman Catholics, of chiefs of the army gave utterance to their broken fortune and licentious character, howdissatisfaction. The obsequious Churchill ever, headed by the Earls of Castlemaine and ventured to insinuate that the King was go- Tyrconnel, opposed themselves to the Proing too far, and the bloodthirsty Kirke, who testant policy of England, and were impatient had pledged his word to the Emperor of to fill the highest offices of the State. The Morocco, that if he changed his religion at Court was thus divided into two hostile facall he would become a Mussulman, swore tions-the Protestant Ministers supported by that he would stand by the Protestant faith. the most respectable Catholic nobles and These feelings were greatly strengthened gentlemen, the ambassadors of Spain, Ausby the persecution of the Huguenots in tria, and the States General, and even by the France, and the revocation of the Edict of Pontiff himself; and the violent Catholics, Nantes. Massacres and executions had pre- supported by the French King and the whole ceded this act, and cruelties unheard of fol- influence of the mighty order of Jesus. lowed in its train. Fifty thousand of the best French families quitted the kingdom for ever, carrying with them to foreign lands their skill in science and literature, in arts, and in arms. These events, which became known immediately before the meeting of Parliament in November, 1685, foreshadowed to the English mind the consequences of a standing army officered by Roman Catholics. James applied to the Commons for a large supply to increase the regular army; and he intimated to them his resolution not to part with the Roman Catholic officers whom he had illegally employed. The House voted the supply for making the militia more efficient, which was equivalent to a declaration against a standing army; and they agreed to an Address reminding the King that he could not legally employ officers who had not taken the statutory test. To this Address the King returned a cold and sullen reprimand; and when it was proposed that his Majesty's answer should be taken into consideration by the House, John Coke, in seconding the motion, said, I hope that we are all English-emy of freedom, and in others the most dangerous men, and shall not be frightened by a few high words." The words were taken down, and Coke was sent to the Tower. The spirit of opposition spread to the Lords, and even to the Episcopal bench. The Earl of Devonshire and Viscount Halifax boldly took the lead, and Dr. Compton, Bishop of London, a prelate of noble blood, declared in the name of his brethren, that the Constitution of the realm, civil and ecclesiastical, was in danger. An early day was fixed for considering the King's speech, but James dreading the result, came down the next morning and prorogued the Parliament, dismissing from office all who had voted against the Court. These violent proceedings created alarm even in the minds of his Ministers. They had seen how highly the gentry of England val “But with the admirable energy, disinterestedness, and self-devotion, which were characteristic of the society, great vices were mingled. It was alleged, and not without foundation, that the ardent public spirit which made the Jesuit regardless of his ease, of his liberty, and of his life, made him also regardless of truth and of mercy; that no means which could promote the interest of his religion seemed to him unlawful; and that by the terest of his society. It was alleged that, in the most atrocious plots recorded in history, his agency could be distinctly traced; that, constant only in attachment to the fraternity to which he belonged, he was in some countries the most dangerous en interest of his religion he too often meant the in enemy of order. The mighty victories which he boasted that he had achieved in the cause of the Church were, in the judgment of many illustrious members of that Church, rather apparent than real. He had, indeed, labored with a wonderful show of success to reduce the world under her laws; but he had done so by relaxing her laws to suit the temper of the world. Instead of toiling to elevate human nature to the noble standard fixed the standard till it was beneath the average level by divine precept and example, he had lowered of human nature. He gloried in multitudes of converts who had been baptized in the remote regions of the East; but it was reported that from some of those converts the facts on which the whole theology of the Gospel depends had been cunningly concealed, and that others were permitted to * See our review of Pascal's Writings, vol. i. pp. 313-316, for an earlier account of the Jesuits, by a Roman Catholic. |