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 hour 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 road
sides, 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