XCIX. CHAP. tifying the act of taking from the prisoner the papers he was to use in his defence, saying, that to allow him to see them A. D. 1682. would be "assigning counsel to him with a vengeance." A witness having stated that pistols were found in the prisoner's holsters when he was attending the city members at Oxford, he exclaimed with a grin, "I think a chisel might have been more proper for a joiner." His treatment of There was called as a witness by the prisoner, one Lun, who being a waiter at the Devil Tavern and a fanatic, had some years before been caught on his knees praying against the Cavaliers, saying, "Scatter them, good Lord! Scatter them!"- from whence he had ever after borne the nick-name of "SCATTER'EM." Jeffreys thus begins his cross-examination. "We know you, Mr. Lun; we only ask questions about you that the jury too may know you as well as we."Lun. "I don't care to give evidence of any thing but the truth. I was never on my knees before the parliament for any thing."— Jeffreys. "Nor I neither for much, yet you were once on your knees when you cried, Scatter them, good Lord! Was it not so, Mr. Scatter'em?" He had next an encounter with the famous Titus Oates, who was called by College, and who, when cross-examined by him, appealed to Sir George Jeffreys's own knowledge of a fact, about which he was inquiring. —Jeffreys. "Sir George Jeffreys does not intend to be on evidence, I assure you.” — Dr. Oates. "I do not desire Sir George Jeffreys to be an evidence for me; I had credit in parliaments, and Sir George had disgrace in one of them." -Jeffreys. "Your servant, Doctor; you are a witty man and a philosopher.”* — He had his full revenge when the Doctor himself was afterwards tried before him. We may judge of the Councillor's general style of treatwitnesses. ing witnesses by his remark on the trial of Lord Grey de Werke for carrying off the Lady Henrietta Berkeley; when his objection was overruled to the competency of the young lady as a witness for the defendant, although she was not only of high rank and uncommon beauty, but undoubted veracity, he observed, "Truly, my Lord, we would prevent CHAP. perjury if we could."* XCIX. We now come to transactions which strikingly prove the A. D. 1682. innate baseness of his nature in the midst of his pretended treachery Jeffreys's openness and jolly good humour. He owed every thing in to the City life to the Corporation of the City of London. The freemen, of London. in the exercise of their ancient privileges, had raised him from the ground by electing him Common Serjeant and Recorder, and to the influence he was supposed to have in the Court of Common Council and in the Court of Aldermen must be ascribed his introduction to Whitehall, and all his political advancement. But when, upon the failure of the prosecution against Lord Shaftesbury, the free municipal constitution of the City became so odious to the government, he heartily entered into the conspiracy to destroy it. It is said, that he actually suggested the scheme of having a sheriff nominated by the Lord Mayor, and he certainly took a very active part in carrying it into execution. On Midsummer day, having planted Lord Chief Justice North in his house in Aldermanbury that he might be backed by his authority, he himself appeared on the hustings in Guildhall, and when the poll was going against the Court candidates, illegally advised the Lord Mayor to dissolve the Hall, and afterwards to declare them duly elected. He did every thing in his power to push on and to assist the great Quo Warranto, by which the City was to be entirely disfranchised. When success had crowned these efforts, and Pilkington and Shute, the former sheriffs, with Alderman Cornish and others, were to be tried before a packed jury for a riot at the election, finding that he had the game in his hand, his insolence knew no bounds. The defendants having challenged the array, on the ground that the sheriffs who returned the panel were not lawfully appointed, as soon as the challenge was read, he exclaimed, "Here's a tale of a tub indeed!" The counsel for the defendants insisted that the challenge was good in law, and at great length argued for its validity. His insohe had succeeded in ing the liberties of the City. lence when extinguish CHAP. Ryehouse plot, July 13. 1683. July, 1683. Conduct of Jeffreys on the trial of Lord Russell. Jeffreys. "Robin Hood Upon Greendale stood!" Thompson, Counsel for the Defendants. "If the challenge be not good, there must be a defect in it either in point of law or in point of fact. I pray that the Crown may either demur or traverse." -Jeffreys. "This discourse is only for discourse sake. I pray the jury may be sworn."-Lord Chief Justice Saunders. "Ay, ay, swear the jury." The defendants were, of course, all found guilty, and as there were among them the most eminent of Jeffreys's old city friends, he exerted himself to the utmost not only in gaining a conviction, but in aggravating the sentence.* * But this was only a case of misdemeanour, in which he could ask for nothing beyond fine and imprisonment. He was soon to be engaged in prosecutions for high treason against the noblest of the land, in which his savage taste for blood might be gratified. The Ryehouse plot broke out, for which there was some foundation, and after the conviction of those who had planned it, Lord Russell was brought to trial at the Old Bailey, on the ground that he had consented to it. Jeffreys, in the late state trials, had gradually been encroaching on the Attorney and Solicitor General, Sir Robert Sawyer and Sir Heneage Finch, and in Lord Russell's case, to which the government attached such infinite importance, he almost entirely superseded them. To account for his unexampled zeal, we must remember that the office of Chief Justice of the King's Bench was still vacant, Saunders having died a few months before, and Lord Keeper North having strongly opposed the appointment of Jeffreys as his successor. Lord Russell had certainly been present at a meeting of the conspirators, when there was a consultation about seizing the King's guards; but he insisted that he came in accidentally, that he had taken no part in the conversation, and that he was not acquainted with their plans. The aspirant Chief Justice saw clearly where was the pinch of the case, and the Attorney General, who was examining Colonel Rumsey, being contented with asking "Was the prisoner * 9 St. Tr. 187. СНАР. XCIX. at the bar present at the debate?" and receiving the answer "Yes," — Jeffreys started up, took the witness into his own hands,—and calling upon him to draw the inference which was A. D. 1683. for the jury,- pinned the basket by this leading and highly irregular question,-"Did you find him averse to it or agreeing to it?" Having got the echoing answer which he suggested," agreeing to it," he looked round with exultation, and said,—"If my Lord Russell now pleases to ask any questions, he may." He addressed the jury in reply after the Solicitor General had finished, and greatly outdid him in pressing the case against the prisoner, while he disclaimed with horror the endeavour to take away the life of the innocent.* He thus concluded: "You have a Prince, and a merciful one too. Consider the life of your Prince, the life of his posterity, the consequences that would have attended if this villany had taken effect. What would have become of your lives and religion? What would have become of that religion we have been so fond of preserving? Gentlemen, I must put these things home upon your consciences. I know you will remember the horrid murder of the most pious Prince, the Martyr, King Charles I. Let not the greatness of any man corrupt you, but discharge your consciences both to God and the King, and to your posterity."† Jeffreys had all the glory of the verdict of Guilty, and as the Lord Chief Justice Pemberton had rather flinched during this trial, and the Attorney and Solicitor General were thought men who would cry CRAVEN, and as the next case was not less important and still more ticklish, all objections to the proposed elevation of the favourite vanished, and he became Chief Justice of England, as the only man fit to condemn Algernon Sydney.‡ "Jefferies would show his zeal and speak after him, but it was only an insolent declamation, such as all his were, full of fury and indecent invectives.". Burnet, ii. 216. +9 St. Tr. 654. Evelyn, Oct. 4. 1683. "Sir Geo. Jefferies was advanced, reputed to be most ignorant, but most daring." This is the day on which he saw "the Duchess of Portsmouth in her dressing-room within her bed-chamber in her morning loose garment, her maids combing her, newly out of bed, his Majesty He is rewith the office of warded Chief Jus tice of the King's Bench. CHAPTER C. CONTINUATION OF THE LIFE OF LORD CHANCELLOR JEFFREYS TILL CHAP. Sworn in tice. Nov. 7. 1683. His con duct on the trial of Sydney. THE new Chief Justice was sworn in on the 29th of September, 1683, and took his seat in the Court of King's Bench on the first day of the following Michaelmas term.* Sydney's case was immediately brought on before him in this Court, the indictment being removed by certiorari from the Old Bailey, that it might be under his peculiar care. The prisoner wishing to plead some collateral matter, was told by the Chief Justice, that, if overruled, sentence of death would immediately be passed upon him. Though there can be no doubt of the illegality of the conviction, the charge against Jeffreys is unfounded, that he admitted the MS. treatise on government to be read without any evidence of its having been written by the prisoner, beyond "similitude of hands." Two witnesses, who were acquainted with his handwriting from having seen him indorse bills of exchange, swore that they believed it to be his handwriting, and they were corroborated by a third, who, with his privity, had paid notes purporting to be indorsed by him without any complaint ever being made. But the undeniable and ineffaceable atrocity of the case was the Lord Chief Justice's doctrine, that "scribere est agere," and that therefore this MS. containing some abstract speculations on different forms of government written many years before, never shown to any human being, and containing nothing beyond the constitutional principles of Locke and Paley, was tantamount to the evidence of a witness to prove an overt * We learn from Burnet the impression made by this appointment on the public mind. "All people were apprehensive of very black designs, when they saw Jefferies made Lord Chief Justice, who was scandalously vicious and was drunk every day; besides a drunkenness of fury in his temper that looked like enthusiasm. He did not consider the decencies of his post; nor did he so much as affect to seem impartial as became a Judge; but ran out upon all occasious into declamations that did not become the bar, much less the bench."— Own Times, ii. 231. |