and unapproached in guilt and
infamy, and whom Whigs and Tories were equally willing to leave to the
extreme rigour of the law. On that terrible day which was succeeded by
the Irish Night, the roar of a great city disappointed of its revenge
had followed Jeffreys to the drawbridge of the Tower. His imprisonment
was not strictly legal: but he at first accepted with thanks and
blessings the protection which those dark walls, made famous by so many
crimes and sorrows, afforded him against the fury of the multitude,
[409] Soon, however, he became sensible that his life was still in
imminent peril. For a time he flattered himself with the hope that a
writ of Habeas Corpus would liberate him from his confinement, and that
he should be able to steal away to some foreign country, and to hide
himself with part of his ill gotten wealth from the detestation of
mankind: but, till the government was settled, there was no Court
competent to grant a writ of Habeas Corpus; and, as soon as the
government had been settled, the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, [410]
Whether the legal guilt of murder could be brought home to Jeffreys may
be doubted. But he was morally guilty of so many murders that, if there
had been no other way of reaching his life, a retrospective Act of
Attainder would have been clamorously demanded by the whole nation.
A disposition to triumph over the fallen has never been one of the
besetting sins of Englishmen: but the hatred of which Jeffreys was
the object was without a parallel in our history, and partook but too
largely of the savageness of his own nature. The people, where he was
concerned, were as cruel as himself, and exulted in his misery as he
had been accustomed to exult in the misery of convicts listening to
the sentence of death, and of families clad in mourning. The rabble
congregated before his deserted mansion in Duke Street, and read on the
door, with shouts of laughter, the bills which announced the sale of
his property. Even delicate women, who had tears for highwaymen and
housebreakers, breathed nothing but vengeance against him. The lampoons
on him which were hawked about the town were distinguished by an
atrocity rare even in those days. Hanging would be too mild a death for
him: a grave under the gibbet too respectable a resting place: he ought
to be whipped to death at the cart's tail: he ought to be tortured like
an Indian: he ought to be devoured alive. The street poets portioned out
all his