hose who surrounded Baxter.
"Snivelling calves!" said the Judge.

Witnesses to character were in attendance, and among them were several
clergymen of the Established Church. But the Chief Justice would hear
nothing. "Does your Lordship think," said Baxter, "that any jury will
convict a man on such a trial as this?" "I warrant you, Mr. Baxter,"
said Jeffreys: "don't trouble yourself about that." Jeffreys was right.
The Sheriffs were the tools of the government. The jurymen, selected
by the Sheriffs from among the fiercest zealots of the Tory party,
conferred for a moment, and returned a verdict of Guilty. "My Lord,"
said Baxter, as he left the court, "there was once a Chief Justice who
would have treated me very differently." He alluded to his learned
and virtuous friend Sir Matthew Hale. "There is not an honest man in
England," answered Jeffreys, "but looks on thee as a knave." [280]

The sentence was, for those times, a lenient one. What passed in
conference among the judges cannot be certainly known. It was believed
among the Nonconformists, and is highly probable, that the Chief Justice
was overruled by his three brethren. He proposed, it is said, that
Baxter should be whipped through London at the cart's tail. The majority
thought that an eminent divine, who, a quarter of a century before, had
been offered a mitre, and who was now in his seventieth year, would be
sufficiently punished for a few sharp words by fine and imprisonment.
[281]

The manner in which Baxter was treated by a judge, who was a member of
the cabinet and a favourite of the Sovereign, indicated, in a manner
not to be mistaken, the feeling with which the government at this time
regarded the Protestant Nonconformists. But already that feeling had
been indicated by still stronger and more terrible signs. The Parliament
of Scotland had met. James had purposely hastened the session of this
body, and had postponed the session of the English Houses, in the
hope that the example set at Edinburgh would produce a good effect
at Westminster. For the legislature of his northern kingdom was as
obsequious as those provincial Estates which Lewis the Fourteenth still
suffered to play at some of their ancient functions in Britanny and
Burgundy. None but an Episcopalian could sit in the Scottish Parliament,
or could even vote for a member, and in Scotland an Episcopalian was
always a Tory or a timeserver. From an assembly thus constituted, little
opposition to t