him further preferment as soon
as any opportunity should occur." So he was soon made Lord Chancellor
and raised to the peerage. Littleton had once been on the popular
side, but deserted and went over to the Court--he was sure of
preferment; and as he became more and more ready to destroy the
liberties of the People, he was made Chief Justice, and finally Lord
Chancellor in 1641. Lane was a "steady friend of the prerogative," and
so was made Attorney-General to the Prince of Wales, and thence
gradually elevated to the highest station.

Other Judicial appointments were continually made in the same spirit.
Thus when Sir Randolf Crewe was Chief Justice of the King's Bench, the
government questioned him to ascertain if he were "sound," and were
shocked to hear him declare that the King had no right to levy taxes
without consent of Parliament, or imprison his subjects without due
process of law. He was "immediately dismissed from his office,"
(1626,) and Sir Nicolas Hyde appointed in his place. By such means the
courts were filled with tools of the King or his favorites, and the
pit digged for the liberties of the People, into which at last there
fell--the head of the King!

* * * * *

Charles II. and James II., (1655-1686,) did not mend the evil, but
appointed for judges "such a pack as had never before sat in
Westminster Hall." Shaftesbury and Guildford had the highest judicial
honors. Lord Chancellor Finch, mentioned already, had been accused by
the Commons of High Treason and other misdemeanors, but escaped to the
continent, and returned after the Restoration. He was appointed one of
the Judges to try the Regicides. Thus he "who had been accused of high
treason twenty years before by a full parliament, and who by flying
from their justice saved his life, was appointed to judge some of
those who should have been his Judges."[8] He declared in Parliament
that Milton, for services rendered to the cause of liberty while Latin
Secretary to Cromwell, "deserved hanging."[9]

[Footnote 8: Ludlow, quoted in 2 Campbell, 470.]

[Footnote 9: 4 Parl. Hist. 162.]

In these reigns such men as Saunders, Wright, and Scroggs, were made
Judges, men of the vilest character, with the meanest appetites,
licentious, brutal, greedy of power and money, idiotic in the moral
sense, appointed solely that they might serve as tools for the
oppression of the People. Among these infamous men was George
Jeffreys, of