Earlier this year, I read The History of England from the Accession of James II, by the nineteenth-century historian Thomas Macaulay (1800-1859). Long but very readable, the five-volume work mainly treats the period ending with the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, during which the monarchy of James II was overthrown and his daughter Mary reigned jointly with her husband, the Dutchman William of Orange.James II (1633-1701) was the fourth and final king of the house of Stuart, a dynasty of Scottish kings who succeeded to the throne after the death of Elizabeth I. Succeeding his brother, Charles II, in 1685, James was a convert to Catholicism in a country where the established church of which he, as sovereign, was head, the Church of England, was Protestant, and his attempts to undermine the Anglican establishment and the parliamentary system in England began to alienate even his most loyal subjects, leading to his being deposed in 1688. A vindictive, nasty man who tried to model his own monarchy after that of the absolutist Louis XIV of France, he was an asshole in his own right, but he couldn't come up to the standards of one of his most useful henchmen, the magistrate Sir George Jeffreys, the so-called “Hanging Judge” (1645-1689), an able legal mind but also an uncouth, drunken, foul-mouthed, bigoted, cruel, vindictive, corrupt son-of-a-bitch.
It was while reading Macaulay's book that the idea came to me of writing about Jeffreys. Of the various personages in the book, he is one of the most memorable. In fact, he is the only historical figure I have ever encountered whose description made me think, “Christ, what an asshole.”
I find it amusing in myself (though perhaps, not to be over-thought too much) that I would react this way to Jeffreys but not to someone like, say, Adolf Hitler. For one thing, “asshole” is not a word that comes much to mind when reading history: usually, the characters of history seem too big and too far away to fit into such everyday vulgar language, and with figures like Hitler, the word seems scarcely appropriate or even to fit: it seems too small, too petty. And perhaps it's only Macaulay's particularly vivid portrait of Jeffreys that triggered such a spontaneous and visceral response, but he was a man whose personal unpleasantness seems utterly, seamlessly of a piece with his career, which peaked with his presiding over the Bloody Assizes of 1685. In Macaulay's pages he cuts a Snidely Whiplash-like figure, handing out sentences and penalties with a relish that would suit any good movie villain, scowling at his victims with a face that left them soiling themselves with terror, gloating over their fear and misery, cracking morbid jokes at their expense, and not caring a lick what people thought of him, provided James had his back.
Born to a family of Welsh gentry in Denbighshire, he went in for the law in 1663 at the Inner Temple in London after a year at Trinity College, Cambridge. English law courts were notoriously ferocious, and Jeffreys was in his element. As a barrister in London he examined and cross-examined scores of thieves, prostitutes, and other low criminals, honing his powers of invective, nastiness and cruelty and, quickly enough for men in his profession at the time, crossed from the bar to the bench.
Daily life in the seventeenth century was full of casual violence and brutality to an extent unimaginable to most of us: one popular spectator sport was watching bears torn apart by dogs, and far from being disinterested carryings-out of justice and statute, most criminal punishments were public spectacles designed to be as painful, humiliating and degrading as possible. For capital crimes, hanging was one form of punishment, another was hanging, drawing and quartering, in which the body was cut down, disemboweled, and then dismembered, the various parts then either parboiled or dipped in pitch and salt and stuck on poles for public display. If you were an important person, beheading was a somewhat more dignified end, but the operation might take several blows with the axe to finally separate the head from the body. For more petty crimes, there was whipping at the cart's tail until the blood flowed; sometimes the sentence called for multiple applications of this punishment, increasing the chances that you would die as a result of wounds and shock. “It is Christmas, a cold time to strip in!” Jeffreys reminded the hangman when passing this sentence on a woman convicted of prostitution. “See that you warm her shoulders thoroughly!” Or there was the pillory, where the criminal would be exposed to the fury of the public and pelted with objects of all sorts, some of which included rocks and brickbats.
Passing his sentences and verbally abusing his court officers, plaintiffs, defendants, witnesses and barristers, and spending his nights in drinking bouts with a crew of junior court officers and toadies (many of whom he would abuse from the bench the next morning, “having kept the court waiting long, and yet having but half slept off his debauch, his cheeks on fire, his eyes staring like those of a maniac”, according to Macaulay), Jeffreys also climbed the professional ladder, earning the posts first of Common Serjeant of London and later, Recorder of London. Seeking to advance his career and fortune, he cultivated contacts with the royal court.
Charles II disliked the man, saying of him, according to Macaulay, that he had “no learning, no sense, no manners, and more impudence than ten carted street-walkers”, but Jeffreys found a patron in James, who was at the time Duke of York, and he advanced further, becoming a baronet in 1681, and Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench in 1683. Jeffreys had presided at many of the trials that followed the so-called “Popish Plot”, a wild fictional conspiracy allegedly intending to kill Charles and put the Duke of York on the throne. The trials condemned innocent men on the false testimony of one Titus Oates, a defrocked Anglican priest and a former Roman Catholic who concocted wild stories of Jesuit plots to take over England for the Catholic Church. Oates' ravings fanned anti-Catholic feeling in England, and Jeffreys, a staunch Anglican and even more staunch an asshole, took even more delight in punishing Catholic priests who were implicated in the plot than he did in punishing ordinary criminals, cruelly announcing to them that they were to be cut down while still alive and to see their own bowels burned before their eyes. Nevertheless, he was useful to James in spite of his past treatment of Catholics, and he went on to prosecute Titus Oates for those same perjuries in 1685.
The minds of the English of the seventeenth century were unburdened by modern concepts such as ecumenicism, religious tolerance and church-state separation. The Church of England—founded famously by the Tudor king Henry VIII, desirous of a male heir when Cardinal Wolsey refused, in the name of the Roman Catholic Church, to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, who couldn't give him a male heir—was as much a political and state institution as a spiritual one, if not more. Henry, devoted to making England a great power and competing with other kingdoms such as France and Spain, didn't want the loyalties of the English church divided between himself and the Holy See. Considering himself a good Catholic in spite of his break with the church, and no theologian, he envisioned a sort of “independent” or “autonomous” national church, not with the Pope but the sovereign at its head. Over the reigns of Elizabeth I and her successor, the first Stuart king of England, James I (who authorized the English translation of the Bible that bears his name today) the “C of E” counted itself in the Protestant camp, but steered a middle course between the elaborate theology, liturgy, and organization of Roman Catholicism and the stripped-down, decentralized Protestantism of Luther and Calvin. In modified forms, it retained some of the liturgy and, even more importantly, the top-down ecclesiastical structure of its Roman Catholic origins while incorporating some of the theology and practices of Protestantism, most notably, the use of the vernacular instead of Latin and the rejection of the doctrine of transubstantiation.
In spite of some apprehension at having a Catholic in the line of succession, and some unsuccessful machinations designed to prevent such an event (the Rye House Plot of 1683, hatched at a fortified medieval mansion in Hertfordshire, was intended to kill Charles and the Duke of York as they rode to the races at Newmarket, included a number of conspirators and was the subject of high-profile trials resulting in many executions, imprisonments and exiles), English parliamentarians initially got on well with James on his accession. Since he had at that time no male heirs, only daughters who were raised as Protestants in accordance with the orders of Charles, Parliament seemed to hope that he would keep his Catholicism to himself and not impose it on the country. But not everyone was satisfied that he would preserve the privileges of the Church of England, and in June 1685, two rebellions, one in Scotland and one in the southwest of England, led by former Rye House conspirators who took refuge in Holland, took place that heightened tensions and brought on a new round of ominous fears of repression and Catholic absolutism.
The Scottish rebellion was led by Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll, in coordination with the English one, which was led by James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, an illegitimate son of Charles II. Both rebellions, which began with small numbers of followers and failed to attract enough troops to defeat even a small army of trained professional soldiers, were crushed handily enough by James' army, but it was James' intention to make an example of those who had had anything to do with taking up arms against the king, and he knew just the man for the job: an asshole.
Jeffreys was sent with four other judges to preside over the so-called “Bloody Assizes” (August-September 1685), a circuit court that went through the west country where Monmouth raised his army, mostly country people with crude weapons and no military experience or training, and in scaring the populace into submission to James' rule, Jeffreys did his work thoroughly.
The first notable case was that of Dame Alice Lyle (or Lisle), widow of an official of Cromwell's Commonwealth, who was accused of giving food and shelter to two fugitive rebels. This made her liable to a charge of high treason, which in English law did not distinguish between principal and accessory, and one which would in more enlightened circumstances would have been treated leniently, since she was being threatened with death by burning at the stake for no more than being kind. Even more, the two rebels in question had not yet been tried themselves. Witnesses and jury alike were reluctant to send this woman, who was generally liked and respected in the community by people of all political persuasions, to the stake, but Jeffreys was determined to make an example of her, browbeating terrified witnesses and intimidating the jury until a guilty verdict was reached. Dame Lyle was sentenced to be burned, but after appeals on her behalf to the King, the sentence was commuted to beheading. After her execution, writes Macaulay, “the judicial massacre began.”
All in all, Macaulay estimated the number of rebels executed at 320, out of some fourteen hundred accused of rebelling against the king. In the county of Somerset, Macaulay writes:
At every spot where two roads met, on every marketplace, on the green of every large village which had furnished Monmouth with soldiers, ironed corpses clattering in the wind, or heads and quarters stuck on poles, poisoned the air, and made the traveller sick with horror. In many parishes the peasantry could not assemble in the house of God without seeing the ghastly face of a neighbour grinning at them over the porch. The Chief Justice was all himself. His spirits rose higher and higher as the work went on. He laughed, shouted, joked, and swore in such a way that many thought him drunk from morning to night. But in him it was not easy to distinguish the madness produced by evil passions from the madness produced by brandy.One local peer, a Tory named Lord Stawell, found a corpse hung in chains at his park gate in retribution for his publicly expressing horror at the butchery.
Most of the accused rebels not executed were sentenced to transportation for their crimes. The conditions of their sentence were that they were to be sold as slaves, that they were not to be emancipated for ten years, and that they were to be shipped, not to North America, but to the West Indies. The exiles were shipped over in the same manner as African slaves: packed below decks in extremely close quarters, never allowed on deck, and fed on small rations of water and ship-biscuit. Many of the prisoners died during the voyage of disease and starvation. Jeffreys distributed the rights to profit from their sale to members of James' court, and James' wife got the right to one hundred of the newly-enslaved rebels, and reportedly profited to the tune of at least a thousand guineas.
According to the law, the property of a man convicted of treason was forfeit, and the government of James II enforced this law, according to Macaulay, “with a rigour at once cruel and ludicrous. The brokenhearted widows and destitute orphans of the labouring men whose corpses hung at the cross roads were called upon by the agents of the Treasury to explain what had become of a basket, of a goose, of a flitch of bacon, of a keg of cider, of a sack of beans, of a truss of hay.” Meanwhile, Jeffreys and his cronies also connived to profit from the better-off among the accused by doing a brisk trade in pardons and bribes. He himself received fifteen thousand pounds (an immense fortune in those days) from one Edmund Prideaux, who it was certain had never taken up arms against the king, and against whom some prisoners had been convinced to bear evidence in exchange for mercy, and used it to purchase an estate, which the locals called, in reference to the field Judas Iscariot is supposed to have bought with his thirty silver pieces, Aceldama. In addition, some of the most central figures of the Monmouth rebellion who would have been more fit to be punished according to the law than most of the ill-armed peasants whose heads and quarters were moldering all over the West Country, escaped retribution entirely, usually because they were financially worth more to James alive than dead.
When Jeffreys returned to London, he was rewarded by James with the political post of Lord Chancellor, was elevated to a peerage, becoming 1st Baron Jeffreys of Wem, and given a seat on the Privy Council. But with his new honors came a decrease, despite his best efforts, in his usefulness to James: as a newly-created peer, he now sat in the House of Lords, no longer surrounded by toadies who owed him their jobs and defendants who owed him their necks, but by nobles who owed him nothing, and who were well aware that he was a coarse, brutal man, a dedicated hatchet-man for an increasingly unpopular king, and an asshole.
During the night of December 10, 1688, as William's troops approached London, James and his wife fled, and Jeffreys remained behind as the highest legal authority, but rioting broke out in the city, and Jeffreys attempted to flee and follow James. On December 12 he was spotted in a public house in Wapping by a man who had been in his court, been scared out of his wits and never forgot that asshole's face, even though he was now dressed as a sailor with his eyebrows shaved and his clothing covered in coal-dust. The public house was soon surrounded by an angry populace armed with cudgels, and Jeffreys was dragged by an armed guard first to the Lord Mayor, then, on his earnest pleading, to the Tower, where he could be safe from the mob.
Jeffreys had long suffered from painful kidney and bladder ailments, probably aggravated by his heavy drinking (it has been long speculated that his savage temper was probably aggravated both by the pain of his illnesses and his alcoholism), and he died of his kidney ailments while still in custody in the Tower, on April 18, 1689, aged 43. His remains were first interred in the chapel at the Tower, and then moved three years later, to the church of St. Mary Aldermanbury. All traces of Jeffreys' tomb were destroyed when the church was gutted by a German air raid during the Blitz (the remains of the church itself were later re-erected in, of all places, Fulton, Missouri, in the United States).
News of the Bloody Assizes horrified the public and did much damage to what was left of James' reputation among his subjects. James ended up fleeing to France, where Louis XIV settled a pension on him and set him up in one of his palaces at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where he lived to a ripe old age. Predictably, James protested that Jeffreys went far further than he had intended, while Jeffreys said in the Tower that he actually didn't go nearly as far as James wanted. James' son, James Francis Edward Stuart (1688-1766), went on to lead an unsuccessful uprising in Scotland in 1715, and his grandson Charles Edward Stuart (1720-1788), remembered as "Bonnie Prince Charlie", led a similarly unsuccessful rising in 1745. The last legitimate heir to James was Charlie's brother Henry Benedict Stuart (1725-1807), who publicly claimed the throne of James but made no effort to seize it, preferring instead to live in the Papal States and pursue a career in the Catholic Church, becoming Dean of the College of Cardinals and the longest-serving cardinal in the Church's history. After his death, the relatives of the Stuart family sort of let all the claims to the throne go.
While Jeffreys' reputation and his deeds live on in history and legend, his male line and his peerage both became extinct within a generation: he had one son, John, who acceded to his father's title, but John Jeffreys and his wife had no male children, though there were descendants through the female line. According to Macaulay, one of these, the Duchess of Pomfret, Jeffreys' granddaughter, found that she could not travel through the West Country where the elder Jeffreys had held the Bloody Assizes without insults and physical danger from the populace.
Judge Jeffreys' reputation as an asshole lives on in fiction and literature, where he, characters inspired by him, or references to him, abound in novels and short stories by Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rafael Sabatini, Victor Hugo, Bram Stoker, M. R. James, Peter S. Beagle, and Neal Stephenson, among others.
The History of England from the Accession of James II can be found in full here at Project Gutenberg, in plain-text, HTML, EPUB and other electronic formats, all freely downloadable and in the public domain.
No comments:
Post a Comment