of Dorchester and Taunton. To the last
Jeffreys continued to repeat that those who thought him cruel did not
know what his orders were, that he deserved praise instead of blame,
and that his clemency had drawn on him the extreme displeasure of his
master, [414]

Disease, assisted by strong drink and by misery, did its work fast. The
patient's stomach rejected all nourishment. He dwindled in a few weeks
from a portly and even corpulent man to a skeleton. On the eighteenth
of April he died, in the forty-first year of his age. He had been Chief
Justice of the King's Bench at thirty-five, and Lord Chancellor at
thirty-seven. In the whole history of the English bar there is no
other instance of so rapid an elevation, or of so terrible a fall.
The emaciated corpse was laid, with all privacy, next to the corpse of
Monmouth in the chapel of the Tower, [415]

The fall of this man, once so great and so much dreaded, the horror with
which he was regarded by all the respectable members of his own
party, the manner in which the least respectable members of that party
renounced fellowship with him in his distress, and threw on him the
whole blame of crimes which they had encouraged him to commit, ought
to have been a lesson to those intemperate friends of liberty who were
clamouring for a new proscription. But it was a lesson which too many of
them disregarded. The King had, at the very commencement of his reign,
displeased them by appointing a few Tories and Trimmers to high offices;
and the discontent excited by these appointments had been inflamed by
his attempt to obtain a general amnesty for the vanquished. He was
in truth not a man to be popular with the vindictive zealots of any
faction. For among his peculiarities was a certain ungracious humanity
which rarely conciliated his foes, which often provoked his adherents,
but in which he doggedly persisted, without troubling himself either
about the thanklessness of those whom he had saved from destruction, or
about the rage of those whom he had disappointed of their revenge. Some
of the Whigs now spoke of him as bitterly as they had ever spoken of
either of his uncles. He was a Stuart after all, and was not a Stuart
for nothing. Like the rest of the race, he loved arbitrary power.
In Holland, he had succeeded in making himself, under the forms of a
republican polity, scarcely less absolute than the old hereditary Counts
had been. In consequence of a strange combination of circu