throne, under the title of James II., in the spring of 1685. On the very first Sunday after his accession he went to mass with all the ensigns of royalty. While he was a subject, James was in the habit of hearing mass, with closed doors, in a small oratory which had been fitted up for his popish wife; but now that he was king, he ordered the doors to be thrown wide open, so that all who came to pay him homage might see the superstitious ceremonial. Soon, also, a new pulpit was erected in the palace, and, during Lent, sermons were preached there by popish divines, to the great disgust of zealous Protestants.

One of the first acts of James was to throw open the prisons of England, and to set at liberty thousands of Dissenters and Papists, who had been enduring a horrible captivity for conscience' sake.

Two months after James's coronation, the Earl of Argyle and the Duke of Monmouth, by previous concert, invaded Scotland and England with a small force from Holland; the former to reestablish the Covenant, and the latter to secure the Protestant religion, and to deliver the country from the tyranny of its enthroned monarch. Argyle sent the fiery cross from hill to hill in Scotland, and from clan to clan, until he got 2500 Highlanders to join him. In a few days he was betrayed by his guides, and was made a prisoner. His hands were tied behind him, and, with his head bare, and the headsman marching before him, he was carried to his old cell in Edinburgh Castle, and, on June 30, was beheaded. Monmouth, in England, met with a much more general welcome than Argyle found in Scotland. All classes of the people welcomed him as a deliverer sent from heaven. The poor rent the air with their joyful acclamations, and the rich opened their houses and supplied his army with meat and drink. His path was strewn with flowers; and windows, as he passed through towns, were crowded with ladies waving their handkerchiefs. On the 20th of June, at Taunton, he took the title of king; but, after marching through several parts of the West of England, his army was scattered, and he was ignominiously captured in a ditch, disguised as a peasant, with a few peas in his pocket, and himself half buried among ferns and nettles. With almost abject meanness, he implored pardon at the hands of James his uncle, but without effect, for, fifteen days after Argyle was beheaded in Edinburgh, Monmouth was decapitated on Tower Hill.

Immediately after Monmouth's death, Judge Jeffreys was sent to hold his "bloody assizes" in the west. His first victim was Mrs Lisle, widow of one of the Commonwealth judges. The charge against her was that of giving shelter to two of Monmouth's fugitives. For this, Jeffreys sentenced her to be burnt alive, and further ordered that the sentence should be executed on the very day that his foul mouth uttered it. The clergy of Winchester promptly interfered; three days' respite were wrung from the hard-hearted judge; and the venerable matron was beheaded instead of being burnt. From Winchester this brutal being went to Dorchester, on the same murderous business. Here the court, by order of Jeffreys, was hung with scarlet; more than three hundred persons were waiting to be tried; two hundred and ninety-two received sentence of death, but only about eighty were hanged, the rest being imprisoned, severely whipped, or transported. Those that were transported were sold as slaves; and the bodies of those that were hanged were cut into quarters, and stuck up on gibbets. For this bloody work, and while he was yet at Dorchester, Jeffreys was rewarded and encouraged by his applauding and grateful sovereign, who raised him from the seat of Lord Chief-Justice to that of Lord Chancellor. Jeffreys, blushing with his new honours, now went from Dorchester to Exeter, where another red list of two hundred and forty-three prisoners was laid before him, most of whom in a few days were hanged, drawn, and quartered. At Taunton, nearly eleven hundred prisoners were arraigned for high treason. Ten hundred and forty confessed themselves guilty; only six ventured to put themselves on trial; and two hundred and thirty-nine, at the very least, were executed with astounding rapidity. To spread the terror more widely, these executions took place in not fewer than thirty-six different towns and villages. The dripping heads and gory limbs of the deceased were fixed in the most conspicuous places, in the streets, by the highways, over town halls, and over the very churches. At every spot where two roads met, in every market-place, and on the green of every village that had furnished Monmouth with men, ironed corpses clattered in the wind, or heads and quarters of human beings, stuck on poles, poisoned the air, and made the passing traveller sick with horror. The country, for a stretch of sixty miles, from Bristol to Exeter, was studded with a new and terrible sort of sign-posts, adorned with

the mangled bodies of its slaughtered inhabitants. The wretched Jeffreys boasted, when he returned to London, that in his "bloody campaign" he had hanged more men than all the judges of England had hanged since the time of William the Conqueror.

All these murderous proceedings of Judge Jeffreys had the approbation of King James, and he continued to be one of the king's principal advisers in all the oppressions and arbitrary measures of his despotic reign. Four years after his legalised massacres in the West of England, Jeffreys wished to steal away to a foreign country, there to hide himself and his ill-gotten wealth from the detestation of mankind; but before he could fulfil his purpose, he was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. The rabble gathered before his deserted mansion, and read on the door, with shouts of laughter, the bills which announced the sale of his property. Even delicate women, who had tears for highwaymen and housebreakers, breathed nothing but vengeance against him. The street poets portioned out all his joints with cannibal ferocity, and computed how many pounds of steaks might be cut from his well-fattened carcase. He was exhorted to hang himself with his garters, and to cut his throat with his razor. His spirit, as mean in adversity as it had been insolent and inhuman in prosperity, sunk under the load of public abhorrence. His constitution, originally bad and much impaired by drunkenness, was completely broken by distress and by anxiety. He was tortured by a cruel internal disease, which baffled the doctors' skill. One-only one solace was left to him-brandy. Disease, assisted by strong drink and by misery, did its work with great rapidity. The poor wretch dwindled, in a few weeks, from a portly and even corpulent man to a skeleton; and on the 10th of April 1689, he died at the early age of forty-one.*

But to return. It is a striking coincidence, that about the time when Judge Jeffreys was holding his "bloody assizes" in the West of England, King Louis of France was revoking the tolerant edict of Nantes, and driving thousands of his Huguenot subjects to England and other lands of exile. Other curious and important events happened in James's short reign, which our space permits to be only mentioned. For instance, Dryden, the greatest writer of the day, turned Catholic, perhaps to please the royal Papist sitting on the throne; but Jeffreys refused to do so, on the ground that, when * Macaulay.

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he was in Africa, he promised the Emperor of Morocco that, if he ever changed his religion, he would become a Turk. Another pro-papistical act was this,-King James, asserting a repealing power over all laws and Acts of Parliament, took upon himself not only to dismiss Protestants from the highest civil and military offices, but to put Papists into their places. He likewise gave the revenues of the Church in Ireland, to a great extent, to popish bishops and priests, and not merely permitted, but commanded them to wear their canonicals in public. He cashiered four thousand Protestant soldiers, stripped them of their uniforms, and left them to wander hungry and half-naked through the land; their officers, for the most part, retiring into Holland, and rallying round the Prince of Orange there.

All this excited anxiety, and, at length, the pulpits, even of High Churchmen, and despite the dogma of passive obedience, began to resound with warnings and denunciations. James now suspended Compton, Bishop of London; attempted to convert his daughter, the Princess Anne, to the popish religion; and tried to deprive his daughter Mary, the Princess of Orange, of her right to the succession. He endeavoured to obtain the control of the public seminaries, schools, and colleges; and to appoint Papists to be their officers. Four popish bishops were publicly consecrated in the Chapel Royal,-were sent to their dioceses with the titles of vicars apostolical; their pastoral letters being also licensed, printed, and dispersed throughout the kingdom. James likewise issued letters mandatory to the bishops of England, prohibiting the clergy to preach upon points of controversy, and establishing an ecclesiastical commission with more power than had been possessed by the abominable court over which Laud presided.

At the beginning of 1687, a declaration of indulgence was issued by proclamation at Edinburgh, "We, by our sovereign authority, prerogative royal, and absolute power, do hereby give and grant our royal toleration. We allow and tolerate the moderate Presbyterians to meet in their private houses, and to hear such ministers as have been, or are willing to accept of our indulgence, but they are not to build meeting-houses, but to exercise in houses. We tolerate Quakers to meet in their form in any place, or places, appointed for their worship: and we, by our sovereign authority, suspend, stop, and disable, all laws or Acts of Parliament made or executed against any of our Roman Catholic sub

jects, so that they shall be free to exercise their religion and to enjoy all; but they are to exercise in houses or chapels and we cass, annul, and discharge all oaths by which our subjects are disabled from holding offices."*

On the 4th of April, 1687, "a declaration for liberty of conscience," came out in the Gazette, by which all the penal laws against Protestant Nonconformists, as well as Catholics, were to be suspended. The declaration gave leave to all men to meet and serve God after their own manner, publicly as well as privately; it denounced the royal displeasure, and the vengeance of the laws against all who should disturb any religious worship; and it granted a free pardon to all the king's loving subjects from penalties, forfeitures, and disabilities incurred on account of religion and the penal laws.

About the same time, King James went to Oxford, and, in the exercise of his popish inclinations and despotic principles, made the disgraceful exhibition of himself, in Magdalen College, which was witnessed by Samuel Wesley, and which is related in Chapter IV.

Twelve months after, on April 27, 1688, he published another declaration of indulgence, in substance the same as the two above mentioned; but which went a step farther, for not only was the declaration published, but all the clergy were commanded to read it in their churches. This was the spark that set fire to the train, which had been accumulating for many months.

National patience was exhausted. These indulgences were right enough in principle; but there were two great objections to their being published. First, it was a most unconstitutional and outrageous stretch of royal authority to pretend, "by virtue of our sovereign authority, prerogative royal, and absolute power," to "suspend, stop, and disable laws and Acts of Parliament," without parliamentary consent. And, secondly, it was well known that, in publishing these unconstitutional declarations, James was not actuated with the least wish to do justice to Protestant Nonconformists; but chiefly, if not exclusively, desired the toleration of his own sect, the Papists; and hoped that this might be a preparatory step to the triumphant establishment of the Popish Church. James's conduct in Scotland, where he had hacked to pieces so many Protestants, could not be forgotten, but spoke far

* Knight's Pictorial History