ature is dependent on the parish."
"Don't trouble yourself," cried the judge; "I will soon ease the
parish of the burden," and ordered the officers to execute him at
once.

Those who escaped death were often still more to be pitied. A young
man was sentenced to be imprisoned for seven years, and to be whipped
once a year through every market town in the county. In his despair,
he petitioned the King to grant him the favor of being hanged. The
petition was refused, but a partial remission of the punishment was at
length gained by bribing the court; for Jeffreys, though his heart was
shut against mercy, always had his pockets open for gain. Alice
Lisle, an aged woman, who, out of pity, had concealed two men flying
from the King's vengeance, was condemned to be burned alive; and it
was with the gratest difficulty that the clergy of Winchester
Cathedral succeeded in getting the sentence commuted to beheading.

As the work went on, the spirits of Jeffreys rose higher and higher.
He laughed, shouted, joked, and swore like a drunken man. When the
court had finished its sittings, more than a thousand persons had been
brutally scourged, sold as slaves, hanged, or beheaded. The
guideposts of the highways were converted into gibbets, from which the
blackened corpses swung in chains, and from every church tower in
Somersetshire ghastly heads looked down on those who gathered there to
worship God; in fact, so many bodies were exposed that the whole air
was "tainted with corruption and death."

Not satisfied with vengeance alone, Jeffreys and his friends made
these trials a means of speculation. Batches of rebels were given as
presents to courtiers, who sold them for a period of ten years to be
worked to death or flogged to death on West India plantations; and the
Queen's maids of honor extorted large sums of money for the pardon of
a number of country schoolgirls who had been convicted of presenting
Monmouth with a royal flag at Taunton.

On the return of Jeffreys to London after this carnival of blood, his
father was so horrified at his cruelty that he forbade him to enter
his house. James, on the contrary, testified his approval by making
Jeffreys Lord Chancellor of the realm, at the same time mildly
censuring him for not having shown greater severity!

The new Lord Chancellor testified his gratitude to his royal master by
procuring the murder, by means of a packed jury, of Alderman Cornish,
a prominent London Whig (