Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/539

] Rochester was to have a large sum out of it if he was allowed to live, and this saved him. "The earl of Rochester," says Burnet, "had sixteen thousand pounds of him, others had smaller shares. He was likewise obliged to tell all he knew, and to be a witness in order to the conviction of others, but with this assistance, that nobody was to die upon his evidence."

Whilst these things were going on in London, the unfortunate people in the west were suffering a dreadful penalty for their adherence to Monmouth. Feversham was called to town, and covered with honours and rewards, though it was notorious that he had done nothing towards the victory. Buckingham even declared that he had won the battle of Sedgemoor in bed. In his place was left one of the most ferocious and unprincipled monsters that ever disgraced the name of soldier. This was colonel Kirke, who had been governor of Tangier until it was abandoned, and now practised the cruelties that he had learned in his unrestrained command there. In that settlement, left to do his licentious will on those in, his power, he has left a name for arbitrary, oppressive, and dissolute conduct, which in ordinary times would have insured his death. He here commanded the demoralised soldiers that he had brought back with him, and who, whilst they were capable of every atrocity, were called Kirke’s lambs, because, as a Christian regiment sent against the heathen, they bore on their banner the desecrated sign of the lamb. His debauched myrmidons were let loose on the, inhabitants of Somersetshire, and such as they could not extort money from, they accused on the evidence of the most abandoned miscreants, and hanged and quartered, boiling the quarters in pitch, to make them longer endure the weather on their gibbets. The most horrible traditions! still remain of Kirke and his lambs. He and his officers are said to have caused the unhappy wretches brought in, who were not able to pay a heavy ransom, to be hanged on the sign post of the inn where they messed, and to have caused the drums to boat as they were in the agonies of death, saying they would give them music to their dancing. To prolong their sufferings, Kirke would occasionally have them cut down alive and then hung up again; and such numbers were quartered, that the miserable peasants compelled to do that revolting work, were said to stand ankle deep in blood. All this was duly reported to the king in London, who directed lord Sunderland to assure Kirke that "he was very well satisfied with his proceedings." It was asserted in London that in the single week following the battle, Kirke butchered a hundred of his victims, besides pocketing large sums for the ransom of others, yet he declared that he had not gone to the lengths which he was ordered to do. On the 10th of August he was sent for to court, to state personally the condition of the west, James being apprehensive that he had let the rich delinquents escape for money, and the system of butchery was left to colonel Trelawny, who continued it without intermission, soldiers pillaging the wretched inhabitants, or dragging them away to execution under the forms of martial law. But a still more sweeping and systematic slaughter was speedily initiated under a different class of exterminators—butchers in ermine.

Lord chief justice Jeffreys, the most diabolical judge that ever sate on the bench, now rendered furious by nightly debauch and daily commission of cruelties, in his revels hugging in mawkish and disgusting fondness his brutal companions, in his discharge of his judicial duties passing the most barbarous sentences in the most blackguard and vituperative language, in whose blazing eye, distorted visage, and bellowing voice raged the unmitigated fiend, was now sent forth by his delighted master to consummate his vengeance on the unhappy people whom the soldiers had left alive and cooped up in prison. He was already created baron of Wem, dubbed by the people earl of Flint, and, the lord-keeper just now dying, he was promised the great seal if he shed blood enough to satisfy his ruthless king. Four other judges, Montague, the chief baron, Levinz, Watkins, and Wight, were associated with him, rather for form than for anything else, for Jeffreys was the hardened, daring, and unscrupulous instrument on whom James confidently relied. Amid the scenes of horror already enacted, and the still worse to come, we must do two men the justice to testify that they dared to raise their voices against the wickedness and barbarity of this blood-thirsty king. Poor old lord-keeper Guildford, brow-beaten, thwarted, and insulted by Jeffreys, before retiring from his office to die, dared to speak out to James on the illegality and monstrosity of the proceedings of the soldiery in Somersetshire; and bishop Ken, though the rebels had stripped the lead from his cathedral at Wells, and grievously defaced its shrines and images, yet notwithstanding he rendered the last hours of Monmouth bitter by his religious zeal, did all in his power to obtain mercy for, and to mitigate the sufferings of the outraged people in his diocese.

Jeffreys' bloody campaign, as it was then and always has been termed, both from its wholesale slaughter and from the troops which accompanied him throughout the circuit—a name constantly used by the unfeeling king himself—was opened at Winchester on the 27th of August, and commenced with a case of hitherto unexampled ruthlessness. Mrs. Alice Lisle, or, as she was generally called, lady Alice, her husband, one of the judges of Charles I., having been created a lord by Cromwell, was now an infirm and aged woman, deaf, and lethargic. Her husband had been murdered, as we have related, by the royalists, as he was entering the church at Lausanne. Lady Alice was known far and wide for her benevolence. Though her husband was on the other side, she had always shown active kindness to the followers of the king during the civil war, and on this account, after her husband's death, his estate had been granted to her. During the rebellion of Monmouth her son had served in the king's army against the invader; yet this poor old lady was now accused of having given a night's shelter to Hicks, a nonconformist minister, and Nelthorpe, a lawyer, outlawed for his concern in the Rye House plot. They were fugitives from Sedgemoor, and the law of treason was, and it appears yet is, that he who harbours a traitor is liable to death, the punishment of a traitor. Mrs. Lisle had no counsel, and pleaded that though she knew that Hicks was a presbyterian minister, she did not know that they were concerned in the rebellion, and there was no direct proof of the fact. The jury was exceedingly unwilling to condemn a woman of such known kindness of heart, who was merely accused of showing the same favour to these men that she