plot, whether by truth or falsehood, were also executed at different times; and the earl of Essex, as there is strong reason to believe, was basely murdered in the Tower, on the 13th of July (the day on which lord Russel was tried) by the duke's connivance, though it was given out that he had committed suicide to avoid his impending fate for high treason. The year 1684 was as distinguished by similar violations of law and justice as the preceding one. In February, John Hampden, esq. grandson to the patriot Hampden, was tried for a treasonable misdemeanor, and the jury declaring him guilty, agreeably to the express charge of the infamous Jefferies, (who, for his services to the court, had been made lord chief justice of the King's Bench,) who told them, that unless they condemned him, they would discredit all that had been done before;'* he was fined 10,0301. A few days afterwards, sir Samuel Barnardiston, bart. was convicted for defaming and scandalizing the government,' by writing four letters reflecting on the deaths of Russel and Sydney, &c. For this he was sentenced to a fine of 10,0001. and, on default of payment was committed to the King's Bench, where he continued till the revolution. In June, sir Thomas Armstrong, who had been implicated in the Rye-house Plot, and outlawed, was betrayed in Holland, and cruelly put to death at Tyburn; notwithstanding the statute declaring that an outlawed person coming in within the year should have a trial, if required. When Armstrong was brought before the court, after some argument, he said, he asked nothing but the law.' The brutal Jefferies replied, that you shall have, by the grace of God: you shall have it to the full: and he then ordered him to be executed within six days.'t He was drawn on a sledge to Tyburn; and, having been dismembered as a traitor, his quarters were fixed on the city gates, and his head upon Westminster-hall, between Cromwell's and Bradshaw's. In furtherance of the design of the court to overawe or ruin all the leaders of the popular party, Thomas Papillion, esq. was, in November, brought to trial before Jefferies, in the court of King's Bench, for causing, though in due course of law, a writ to be executed on the person of sir William Pritchard, when lord mayor in 1682, for not having returned him sheriff, after he had been duly elected by his fellow-citizens. Not a shadow of proof was offered that Papillion had acted illegally, yet he was condemned to pay a fine of 10,0001.; a sentence that obliged him to quit the country till the period of the Revolution. On the 6th of February, 185, the king died at Whitehall, * Bur. Hist. i. 576 + Iid. p. 579. "When Jefferies came to the king at Windsor, soon after this trial, the king took a ring of good value from his finger, and gave it him for these services: the ring thereupor was called his blood stone."-Ibid p. 580. having previously received the sacrament of the mass, and extreme unction. It was vehemently suspected that his death was occasioned by poison. CHAPTER XV. History of London during the reign of James the Second. On the 6th of February James, duke of York, was proclaimed king in London, with the accustomed ceremonies, by the title of James the Second; and, on the 23rd of April, he was crowned, with his queen, at Westminster, the usual cavalcade from the Tower being dispensed with to avoid the charges. Within two days after his accession, James went openly to mass; and notwithstanding his public declaration that he would make it his endeavour to preserve the government, both in church and state, as now by law established,' he immediately begun to betray his determination to rule arbitrarily, by ordering the continuance of the levies of the customs and additional excise of duties, though, according to the grant of parliament, those duties had expired with his brother's life. The vigour of the nation was at that time depressed, and no Hampden could be then found dauntless enough to risk the hazard of opposing this assumption of illegal authority. Mr. Brayley justly remarks that James's first object was unquestionably the establishment of an absolute monarchy: his second, the complete restoration of the Catholic hierarchy; and, to this latter design, the most obnoxious witnesses to the reality of the popish plot, by whose agency, at least, the attempt had been retarded in the late reign, were now to be traduced and punished. On the 8th and 9th of May, Titus Oates was tried by judge Jefferies, in the court of King's Bench, for perjury on two points of his evidence: his conviction had been predetermined, and he was sentenced to be stript of his canonical habits; to be fined two thousand marks; to stand five times a year in the pillory, in different parts of London and Westminster; to be closely imprisoned for life; and as a prelude to the whole, to stand in the pillory at Westminster Hall and at the Royal Exchange, on five successive days; on the third day to be whipt from Aldgate to Newgate; and on the fifth, to be whipt from Newgate to Tyburn. The scourging was executed with merciless severity; Rapin says, with such cruelty as was unknown to the English nation,' and Oates swooned several times with the excess of the pain, whilst tied to the cart. Dangerfield was twice pilloried and whipped from Aldgate to Tyburn, for his concern in the discovery of the Meal-tub Plot; and this led to his death, for, when on his return, in a coach, after the second whipping, he was insulted near Hatton-garden, by a barrister of Gray's-inn, who being irritated at some reproachful words used in reply, violently thrust the end of a small cane into Dangerfield's eye, which, in two hours, put a period to his life. The barrister was condemned to be hanged; and James, who, on this occasion, seems to have felt what was due to justice, refused to pardon him, though strongly solicited for that purpose; he was therefore executed according to his sentence The aged and respectable Presbyterian minister, Richard Baxter, was soon after condemned to fine and imprisonment, for his writings against the Catholic bishops. The first attempt to overthrow the despotic authority which James had now assumed, was made by the earl of Argyle and the duke of Monmouth; the former of whom landed in Scotland on the 20th of May, and the latter, at Lyme, in Dorsetshire, on the 11th of June. Fatally, however, for themselves and their adherents, they were both unsuccessful: the earl, after having been treated with extreme indignity, was beheaded at Edinburgh; and the duke, who had been attainted by parliament, suffered the like fate on Tower-hill, on the 15th of July. He fell, highly regretted by the people, with whom he had ever been a great favourite. Many of the duke's partisans were almost immediately proscribed and put to death in various parts of the kingdom, and, particularly in the western counties, under circumstances of extreme cruelty. London was the scene of several executions; and, among others, of Mrs. Elizabeth Gaunt, a benevolent woman, who had given shelter to a person that had been concerned in the late insurrection and who, with a peculiar degree of base ingratitude, secured his own pardon by betraying his humane benefactress. She suffered with great magnanimity; though, according to the then existing laws of treason, as applicable to women, it was her horrid fate to be burnt alive. She died,' says Burnet, rejoicing that God honoured her to be the first that suffered by fire in this reign, and that her suffering was a martyrdom for that religion which was all love." The next distinguished sufferer in London was Henry Cornish, an alderman of this city, who was singled out as a sacrifice to popery; for, being sheriff of London in the year 1680, he had exerted himself in an uncommon manner in the detection and prosecution of the popish plot, and inquiring into the mystery of FitzHarris's treason; wherefore the papists deemed this a very proper time to revenge themselves upon him. To which end on the 13th of October following he was apprehended and committed to Newgate, without the use of pen, ink, or paper, until Saturday noon, when he received notice of an indictment of high treason being prepared against him, on which he was to be tried the Monday following. In the interim, his children humbly petitioned the king for time for their father to prepare for his defence. James, artfully to avoid the imputation of injustice, referred their petition to the judges, who, he well knew, would run all lengths to serve him answerable to this opinion, they unjustly denied their humble and equitable request, though the unhappy prisoner knew not whether they intended to proceed against him for a crime in this or the preceding reign: besides, his most material evidence then was above an hundred and forty miles from London. And, to exult over the misfortunes of this innocent gentleman, the attorney-general told him, that he had not so well deserved of the government, as to have time allowed him, which, in plain English, is as much as if he had said, that he was to expect neither favour nor justice in the prosecution. Cornish was on the Monday following indicted for conspiring with other false traitors to raise a rebellion in the kingdom, to destroy the king, and subvert the constitution in the late reign. The only material evidence against him was colonel Rumsey, an infamous and profligate wretch; and Goodenough, the other evidence, an outlaw in the highest degree, was pardoned, and his testimony made legal, for his appearing against Cornish; and though what he deposed did not affect the prisoner, he was nevertheless condemned, and on the 23rd of the same month hanged, drawn, and quartered, at the end of King-street, Cheapside, fronting his own house. Had the aforesaid iniquitous judges granted the reasonable and moving requests set forth in the petition of Cornish's children, his innocence would soon have appeared, from Rumsey's former depositions, as it was soon after his death clearly evinced, insomuch that it is said, that the king not only regretted his unfortunate end, but likewise restored his estate to his family, and the witnesses were lodged in remote prisons during their lives. The year 1686 became memorable from a measure that threatened destruction to the church of England, this was, the proposed exemption from all penal laws in respect to religion, which James wished the Dissenters to believe was for their benefit, but which, in fact, was intended as the means of rendering Popery paramount to Protestantism. Such an innovation excited the strictures of the most eminent divines, who united their abilities in the endeavour to counteract it; of these none were more assiduous than Dr. John Sharp, rector of St. Giles' in the Fields, and afterwards Archbishop of York. This divine had a peculiar talent of reading his sermons with much life and zeal.' Such a man, therefore, could not escape the notice and animadversion of James and his courtiers; and a particular sermon which he had preached at his parish church, upon some points of the controversy then existing, gave so much offence, that the king ordered a mandatory letter to be sent to Dr. Compton, bishop of London, requiring him immediately to suspend Sharp, and examine the matter.' The bishop declined proceeding in such a summary way, but requested Sharp to abstain from offi ciating till the charge was investigated. By this mild conduct that prelate, who had already rendered himself particularly obnoxious to the court, gave such high offence, that he was now marked as an eminent example for severity; but as there was no law by which he could be punished, the king, by the advice of Jefferies, revived the high commission court, under the new name of a court of delegates for ecclesiastical affairs. Before this court, which was empowered to proceed in a summary and arbitrary way, without any legal rule to govern its proceedings, and constituted as it was, in defiance of the express words of the act of parliament by which the high commission court had been abolished in 1640, bishop Compton was arraigned for contumacy, in nct suspending Dr. Sharp, and was himself suspended from exercising his episcopal functions. Dr. Sharp, who had expressed his sorrow for having excited his sovereign's displeasure, was eventually dismissed with a gentle repri mand only, and suffered to return to the exercise of his clerical duties.* The protection given to the papists, at this period, was so undisguised and decided, that the host was carried in procession through the streets of London, and " monks," says Rapin, "appeared in the habits of their order at Whitehall and St. James's, and scrupled not to tell the protestants, that they hoped, in a little time, to walk in procession through Cheapside.'"+ A camp of 15,000 men was also formed upon Hounslow-heath, in which the king had a small chapel, wherein mass was daily celebrated. All vacant preferments were likewise given to the papists; and in many instances, protestant incumbents were deprived of their benefices to make room for catholic priests. A premature embassy was also sent to the court of Rome, for the purpose of reconciling" the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, to the Holy See," but the pontiff, Innocent XI. having more discrimination than to be the dupe of such a visionary scheme, treated the English ambassador with so much incivility, bordering on rudeness, that the latter, considering himself insulted, returned to England without having accomplished any material object of his mission.§ On the 22d of April, 1688, the king's second declaration of Liberty of Conscience was promulgated; and an order of council was forthwith issued, "enjoining the bishops to cause it to be sent and distributed throughout their dioceses, to be read at the • Brayley's London, i. 470. Rap. Hist. vol. ii. p. 755. § Whenever the earl of Castlemain, ames's ambassador, had an audience of the Pope, and had begun to enter upon his mission, the holy father was instantly seized with a fit of coughing, which always broke off the interview. At length, the earl threatened to return VOL.. home, unless he was permitted to proceed to the business of his embassy; and this being reported to the pontiff, the latter coldly observed, "Well, let him go; and tell him it were fit he rise early in the morning that he may rest himself at noon; for in this country it is dangerous to travel in the heat of the day."- Welwood's Mem. p. 186. 2 H |