ies, blood, and more
blood, and still more blood had flowed. Every great explosion and every
great recoil of public feeling had been accompanied by severities which,
at the time, the predominant faction loudly applauded, but which, on a
calm review, history and posterity have condemned. No wise and humane
man, whatever may be his political opinions, now mentions without
reprehension the death either of Laud or of Vane, either of Stafford or
of Russell. Of the alternate butcheries the last and the worst is that
which is inseparably associated with the names of James and Jeffreys.
But it assuredly would not have been the last, perhaps it might not
have been the worst, if William had not had the virtue and the firmness
resolutely to withstand the importunity of his most zealous adherents.
These men were bent on exacting a terrible retribution for all they had
undergone during seven disastrous years. The scaffold of Sidney, the
gibbet of Cornish, the stake at which Elizabeth Gaunt had perished in
the flames for the crime of harbouring a fugitive, the porches of the
Somersetshire churches surmounted by the skulls and quarters of murdered
peasants, the holds of those Jamaica ships from which every day the
carcass of some prisoner dead of thirst and foul air had been flung to
the sharks, all these things were fresh in the memory of the party which
the Revolution had made, for a time, dominant in the State. Some chiefs
of that party had redeemed their necks by paying heavy ransom. Others
had languished long in Newgate. Others had starved and shivered, winter
after winter, in the garrets of Amsterdam. It was natural that in the
day of their power and prosperity they should wish to inflict some part
of what they had suffered. During a whole year they pursued their scheme
of revenge. They succeeded in defeating Indemnity Bill after Indemnity
Bill. Nothing stood between them and their victims, but William's
immutable resolution that the glory of the great deliverance which he
had wrought should not be sullied by cruelty. His clemency was peculiar
to himself. It was not the clemency of an ostentatious man, or of
a sentimental man, or of an easy tempered man. It was cold,
unconciliating, inflexible. It produced no fine stage effects. It drew
on him the savage invectives of those whose malevolent passions he
refused to satisfy. It won for him no gratitude from those who owed to
him fortune, liberty and life. While the violent Whigs rail