man he
both hated and despised. He was transferred to London, lodged in the
Tower, and executed in a bungling manner by "Jack Ketch"--the name
given for several centuries to the public executioner. He was buried
under St. Peter's Chapel, in the Tower, where reposed the headless
bodies of so many noted saints and political martyrs--the great
Somerset, and the still greater Northumberland, the two Earls of
Essex, and the fourth Duke of Norfolk, and other great men who figured
in the reigns of the Plantagenets and the Tudors.

Monmouth's rebellion was completely suppressed, and a most signal
vengeance was inflicted on all who were concerned in it. No mercy was
shown, on the part of government, to any party or person.

Of the agents of James in punishing all concerned in the rebellion,
there were two, preeminently, whose names are consigned to an infamous
immortality. The records of English history contain no two names so
loathsome and hateful as Colonel Kirke and Judge Jeffreys.

The former was left, by Feversham, in command of the royal forces at
Bridgewater, after the battle of Sedgemoor. He had already gained an
unenviable notoriety, as governor of Tangier, where he displayed the
worst vices of a tyrant and a sensualist; and his regiment had
imitated him in his disgraceful brutality. But this leader and these
troops were now let loose on the people of Somersetshire. One hundred
captives were put to death during the week which succeeded the battle.
His irregular butcheries, however, were not according to the taste of
the king. A more systematic slaughter, under the sanctions of the law,
was devised, and Jeffreys was sent into the Western Circuit, to try
the numerous persons who were immured in the jails of the western
counties.

Sir George Jeffreys, Chief Justice of the Court of the King's Bench,
was not deficient in talent, but was constitutionally the victim of
violent passions. He first attracted notice as an insolent barrister
at the Old Bailey Court, who had a rare tact in cross-examining
criminals and browbeating witnesses. According to Macaulay, "impudence
and ferocity sat upon his brow, while all tenderness for the feelings
of others, all self-respect, all sense of the becoming, were
obliterated from his mind. He acquired a boundless command of the
rhetoric in which the vulgar express hatred and contempt. The
profusion of his maledictions could hardly be rivalled in the Fish
Market or Bear Garden. His yell o