large village which had
furnished Monmouth with soldiers, ironed corpses clattering in the wind,
or heads and quarters stuck on poles, poisoned the air, and made the
traveller sick with horror. In many parishes the peasantry could not
assemble in the house of God without seeing the ghastly face of a
neighbour grinning at them over the porch. The Chief Justice was all
himself. His spirits rose higher and higher as the work went on. He
laughed, shouted, joked, and swore in such a way that many thought him
drunk from morning to night. But in him it was not easy to distinguish
the madness produced by evil passions from the madness produced by
brandy. A prisoner affirmed that the witnesses who appeared against him
were not entitled to credit. One of them, he said, was a Papist, and
another a prostitute. "Thou impudent rebel," exclaimed the Judge, "to
reflect on the King's evidence! I see thee, villain, I see thee already
with the halter round thy neck." Another produced testimony that he was
a good Protestant. "Protestant!" said Jeffreys; "you mean Presbyterian.
I'll hold you a wager of it. I can smell a Presbyterian forty miles."
One wretched man moved the pity even of bitter Tories. "My Lord,"
they said, "this poor creature is on the parish." "Do not trouble
yourselves," said the Judge, "I will ease the parish of the burden." It
was not only against the prisoners that his fury broke forth. Gentlemen
and noblemen of high consideration and stainless loyalty, who ventured
to bring to his notice any extenuating circumstance, were almost sure
to receive what he called, in the coarse dialect which he had learned in
the pothouses of Whitechapel, a lick with the rough side of his tongue.
Lord Stawell, a Tory peer, who could not conceal his horror at the
remorseless manner in which his poor neighbours were butchered, was
punished by having a corpse suspended in chains at his park gate. [446]
In such spectacles originated many tales of terror, which were long told
over the cider by the Christmas fires of the farmers of Somersetshire.
Within the last forty years, peasants, in some districts, well knew the
accursed spots, and passed them unwillingly after sunset. [447]

Jeffreys boasted that he had hanged more traitors than all his
predecessors together since the Conquest. It is certain that the number
of persons whom he put to death in one month, and in one shire, very
much exceeded the number of all the political offenders who have b