The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1 by Thomas Babington Macaulay (diy ebook reader .txt) π
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made to
obtain the Queen's intercession; but she indignantly refused to
say a word in favour of such a wretch. After an interval of only
forty-eight hours, Oates was again brought out of his dungeon. He
was unable to stand, and it was necessary to drag him to Tyburn
on a sledge. He seemed quite insensible; and the Tories reported
that he had stupified himself with strong drink. A person who
counted the stripes on the second day said that they were
seventeen hundred. The bad man escaped with life, but so narrowly
that his ignorant and bigoted admirers thought his recovery
miraculous, and appealed to it as a proof of his innocence. The
doors of the prison closed upon him. During many months he
remained ironed in the darkest hole of Newgate. It was said that
in his cell he gave himself up to melancholy, and sate whole days
uttering deep groans, his arms folded, and his hat pulled over
his eyes. It was not in England alone that these events excited
strong interest. Millions of Roman Catholics, who knew nothing of
our institutions or of our factions. had heard that a persecution
of singular barbarity had raged in our island against the
professors of the true faith, that many pious men had suffered
martyrdom, and that Titus Oates had been the chief murderer.
There was, therefore, great joy in distant countries when it was
known that the divine justice had overtaken him. Engravings of
him, looking out from the pillory, and writhing at the cart's
tail, were circulated all over Europe; and epigrammatists, in
many languages, made merry with the doctoral title which he
pretended to have received from the University of Salamanca, and
remarked that, since his forehead could not be made to blush, it
was but reasonable that his back should do so.275
Horrible as were the sufferings of Oates, they did not equal his
crimes. The old law of England, which had been suffered to become
obsolete, treated the false witness, who had caused death by
means of perjury, as a murderer.276 This was wise and righteous;
for such a witness is, in truth, the worst of murderers. To the
guilt of shedding innocent blood he has added the guilt of
violating the most solemn engagement into which man can enter
with his fellow men, and of making institutions, to which it is
desirable that the public should look with respect and
confidence, instruments of frightful wrong and objects of general
distrust. The pain produced by ordinary murder bears no
proportion to the pain produced by murder of which the courts of
justice are made the agents. The mere extinction of life is a
very small part of what makes an execution horrible. The
prolonged mental agony of the sufferer, the shame and misery of
all connected with him, the stain abiding even to the third and
fourth generation, are things far more dreadful than death
itself. In general it may be safely affirmed that the father of a
large family would rather be bereaved of all his children by
accident or by disease than lose one of them by the hands of the
hangman. Murder by false testimony is therefore the most
aggravated species of murder; and Oates had been guilty of many
such murders. Nevertheless the punishment which was inflicted
upon him cannot be justified. In sentencing him to be stripped of
his ecclesiastical habit and imprisoned for life, the judges
exceeded their legal power. They were undoubtedly competent to
inflict whipping; nor had the law assigned a limit to the number
of stripes. But the spirit of the law clearly was that no
misdemeanour should be punished more severely than the most
atrocious felonies. The worst felon could only be hanged. The
judges, as they believed, sentenced Oates to be scourged to
death. That the law was defective is not a sufficient excuse: for
defective laws should be altered by the legislature, and not
strained by the tribunals; and least of all should the law be
strained for the purpose of inflicting torture and destroying
life. That Oates was a bad man is not a sufficient excuse; for
the guilty are almost always the first to suffer those hardships
which are afterwards used as precedents against the innocent.
Thus it was in the present case. Merciless flogging soon became
an ordinary punishment for political misdemeanours of no very
aggravated kind. Men were sentenced, for words spoken against the
government, to pains so excruciating that they, with unfeigned
earnestness, begged to be brought to trial on capital charges,
and sent to the gallows. Happily the progress of this great evil
was speedily stopped by the Revolution, and by that article of
the Bill of Rights which condemns all cruel and unusual
punishments.
The villany of Dangerfield had not, like that of Oates, destroyed
many innocent victims; for Dangerfield had not taken up the trade
of a witness till the plot had been blown upon and till juries
had become incredulous.277 He was brought to trial, not for
perjury, but for the less heinous offense of libel. He had,
during the agitation caused by the Exclusion Bill, put forth a
narrative containing some false and odious imputations on the
late and on the present King. For this publication he was now,
after the lapse of five years, suddenly taken up, brought before
the Privy Council, committed, tried, convicted, and sentenced to
be whipped from Aldgate to Newgate and from Newgate to Tyburn.
The wretched man behaved with great effrontery during the trial;
but, when he heard his doom, he went into agonies of despair,
gave himself up for dead, and chose a text for his funeral
sermon. His forebodings were just. He was not, indeed, scourged
quite so severely as Oates had been; but he had not Oates's iron
strength of body and mind. After the execution Dangerfield was
put into a hackney coach and was taken back to prison. As he
passed the corner of Hatton Garden, a Tory gentleman of Gray's
Inn, named Francis, stopped the carriage, and cried out with
brutal levity, "Well, friend, have you had your heat this
morning?" The bleeding prisoner, maddened by this insult,
answered with a curse. Francis instantly struck him in the face
with a cane which injured the eye. Dangerfield was carried dying
into Newgate. This dastardly outrage roused the indignation of
the bystanders. They seized Francis, and were with difficulty
restrained from tearing him to pieces. The appearance of
Dangerfield's body, which had been frightfully lacerated by the
whip, inclined many to believe that his death was chiefly, if not
wholly, caused by the stripes which he had received. The
government and the Chief Justice thought it convenient to lay the
whole blame on Francis, who; though he seems to have been at
worst guilty only of aggravated manslaughter, was tried and
executed for murder. His dying speech is one of the most curious
monuments of that age. The savage spirit which had brought him to
the gallows remained with him to the last. Boasts of his loyalty
and abuse of the Whigs were mingled with the parting ejaculations
in which he commended his soul to the divine mercy. An idle
rumour had been circulated that his wife was in love with
Dangerfield, who was eminently handsome and renowned for
gallantry. The fatal blow, it was said, had been prompted by
jealousy. The dying husband, with an earnestness, half
ridiculous, half pathetic, vindicated the lady's character. She
was, he said, a virtuous woman: she came of a loyal stock, and,
if she had been inclined to break her marriage vow, would at
least have selected a Tory and a churchman for her paramour.278
About the same time a culprit, who bore very little resemblance
to Oates or Dangerfield, appeared on the floor of the Court of
King's Bench. No eminent chief of a party has ever passed through
many years of civil and religious dissension with more innocence
than Richard Baxter. He belonged to the mildest and most
temperate section of the Puritan body. He was a young man when
the civil war broke out. He thought that the right was on the
side of the Houses; and he had no scruple about acting as
chaplain to a regiment in the parliamentary army: but his clear
and somewhat sceptical understanding, and his strong sense of
justice, preserved him from all excesses. He exerted himself to
check the fanatical violence of the soldiery. He condemned the
proceedings of the High Court of Justice. In the days of the
Commonwealth he had the boldness to express, on many occasions,
and once even in Cromwell's presence, love and reverence for the
ancient institutions of the country. While the royal family was
in exile, Baxter's life was chiefly passed at Kidderminster in
the assiduous discharge of parochial duties. He heartily
concurred in the Restoration, and was sincerely desirous to bring
about an union between Episcopalians and Presbyterians. For, with
a liberty rare in his time, he considered questions of
ecclesiastical polity as of small account when compared with the
great principles of Christianity, and had never, even when
prelacy was most odious to the ruling powers, joined in the
outcry against Bishops. The attempt to reconcile the contending
factions failed. Baxter cast in his lot with his proscribed
friends, refused the mitre of Hereford, quitted the parsonage of
Kidderminster, and gave himself up almost wholly to study. His
theological writings, though too moderate to be pleasing to the
bigots of any party, had an immense reputation. Zealous Churchmen
called him a Roundhead; and many Nonconformists accused him of
Erastianism and Arminianism. But the integrity of his heart, the
purity of his life, the vigour of his faculties, and the extent
of his attainments were acknowledged by the best and wisest men
of every persuasion. His political opinions, in spite of the
oppression which he and his brethren had suffered, were moderate.
He was friendly to that small party which was hated by both Whigs
and Tories. He could not, he said, join in cursing the Trimmers,
when he remembered who it was that had blessed the
peacemakers.279
In a Commentary on the New Testament he had complained, with some
bitterness, of the persecution which the Dissenters suffered.
That men who, for not using the Prayer Book, had been driven from
their homes, stripped of their property, and locked up in
dungeons, should dare to utter a murmur, was then thought a high
crime against the State and the Church. Roger Lestrange, the
champion of the government and the oracle of the clergy, sounded
the note of war in the Observator. An information was filed.
Baxter begged that he might be allowed some time to prepare for
his defence. It was on the day on which Oates was pilloried in
Palace Yard that the illustrious chief of the Puritans, oppressed
by
obtain the Queen's intercession; but she indignantly refused to
say a word in favour of such a wretch. After an interval of only
forty-eight hours, Oates was again brought out of his dungeon. He
was unable to stand, and it was necessary to drag him to Tyburn
on a sledge. He seemed quite insensible; and the Tories reported
that he had stupified himself with strong drink. A person who
counted the stripes on the second day said that they were
seventeen hundred. The bad man escaped with life, but so narrowly
that his ignorant and bigoted admirers thought his recovery
miraculous, and appealed to it as a proof of his innocence. The
doors of the prison closed upon him. During many months he
remained ironed in the darkest hole of Newgate. It was said that
in his cell he gave himself up to melancholy, and sate whole days
uttering deep groans, his arms folded, and his hat pulled over
his eyes. It was not in England alone that these events excited
strong interest. Millions of Roman Catholics, who knew nothing of
our institutions or of our factions. had heard that a persecution
of singular barbarity had raged in our island against the
professors of the true faith, that many pious men had suffered
martyrdom, and that Titus Oates had been the chief murderer.
There was, therefore, great joy in distant countries when it was
known that the divine justice had overtaken him. Engravings of
him, looking out from the pillory, and writhing at the cart's
tail, were circulated all over Europe; and epigrammatists, in
many languages, made merry with the doctoral title which he
pretended to have received from the University of Salamanca, and
remarked that, since his forehead could not be made to blush, it
was but reasonable that his back should do so.275
Horrible as were the sufferings of Oates, they did not equal his
crimes. The old law of England, which had been suffered to become
obsolete, treated the false witness, who had caused death by
means of perjury, as a murderer.276 This was wise and righteous;
for such a witness is, in truth, the worst of murderers. To the
guilt of shedding innocent blood he has added the guilt of
violating the most solemn engagement into which man can enter
with his fellow men, and of making institutions, to which it is
desirable that the public should look with respect and
confidence, instruments of frightful wrong and objects of general
distrust. The pain produced by ordinary murder bears no
proportion to the pain produced by murder of which the courts of
justice are made the agents. The mere extinction of life is a
very small part of what makes an execution horrible. The
prolonged mental agony of the sufferer, the shame and misery of
all connected with him, the stain abiding even to the third and
fourth generation, are things far more dreadful than death
itself. In general it may be safely affirmed that the father of a
large family would rather be bereaved of all his children by
accident or by disease than lose one of them by the hands of the
hangman. Murder by false testimony is therefore the most
aggravated species of murder; and Oates had been guilty of many
such murders. Nevertheless the punishment which was inflicted
upon him cannot be justified. In sentencing him to be stripped of
his ecclesiastical habit and imprisoned for life, the judges
exceeded their legal power. They were undoubtedly competent to
inflict whipping; nor had the law assigned a limit to the number
of stripes. But the spirit of the law clearly was that no
misdemeanour should be punished more severely than the most
atrocious felonies. The worst felon could only be hanged. The
judges, as they believed, sentenced Oates to be scourged to
death. That the law was defective is not a sufficient excuse: for
defective laws should be altered by the legislature, and not
strained by the tribunals; and least of all should the law be
strained for the purpose of inflicting torture and destroying
life. That Oates was a bad man is not a sufficient excuse; for
the guilty are almost always the first to suffer those hardships
which are afterwards used as precedents against the innocent.
Thus it was in the present case. Merciless flogging soon became
an ordinary punishment for political misdemeanours of no very
aggravated kind. Men were sentenced, for words spoken against the
government, to pains so excruciating that they, with unfeigned
earnestness, begged to be brought to trial on capital charges,
and sent to the gallows. Happily the progress of this great evil
was speedily stopped by the Revolution, and by that article of
the Bill of Rights which condemns all cruel and unusual
punishments.
The villany of Dangerfield had not, like that of Oates, destroyed
many innocent victims; for Dangerfield had not taken up the trade
of a witness till the plot had been blown upon and till juries
had become incredulous.277 He was brought to trial, not for
perjury, but for the less heinous offense of libel. He had,
during the agitation caused by the Exclusion Bill, put forth a
narrative containing some false and odious imputations on the
late and on the present King. For this publication he was now,
after the lapse of five years, suddenly taken up, brought before
the Privy Council, committed, tried, convicted, and sentenced to
be whipped from Aldgate to Newgate and from Newgate to Tyburn.
The wretched man behaved with great effrontery during the trial;
but, when he heard his doom, he went into agonies of despair,
gave himself up for dead, and chose a text for his funeral
sermon. His forebodings were just. He was not, indeed, scourged
quite so severely as Oates had been; but he had not Oates's iron
strength of body and mind. After the execution Dangerfield was
put into a hackney coach and was taken back to prison. As he
passed the corner of Hatton Garden, a Tory gentleman of Gray's
Inn, named Francis, stopped the carriage, and cried out with
brutal levity, "Well, friend, have you had your heat this
morning?" The bleeding prisoner, maddened by this insult,
answered with a curse. Francis instantly struck him in the face
with a cane which injured the eye. Dangerfield was carried dying
into Newgate. This dastardly outrage roused the indignation of
the bystanders. They seized Francis, and were with difficulty
restrained from tearing him to pieces. The appearance of
Dangerfield's body, which had been frightfully lacerated by the
whip, inclined many to believe that his death was chiefly, if not
wholly, caused by the stripes which he had received. The
government and the Chief Justice thought it convenient to lay the
whole blame on Francis, who; though he seems to have been at
worst guilty only of aggravated manslaughter, was tried and
executed for murder. His dying speech is one of the most curious
monuments of that age. The savage spirit which had brought him to
the gallows remained with him to the last. Boasts of his loyalty
and abuse of the Whigs were mingled with the parting ejaculations
in which he commended his soul to the divine mercy. An idle
rumour had been circulated that his wife was in love with
Dangerfield, who was eminently handsome and renowned for
gallantry. The fatal blow, it was said, had been prompted by
jealousy. The dying husband, with an earnestness, half
ridiculous, half pathetic, vindicated the lady's character. She
was, he said, a virtuous woman: she came of a loyal stock, and,
if she had been inclined to break her marriage vow, would at
least have selected a Tory and a churchman for her paramour.278
About the same time a culprit, who bore very little resemblance
to Oates or Dangerfield, appeared on the floor of the Court of
King's Bench. No eminent chief of a party has ever passed through
many years of civil and religious dissension with more innocence
than Richard Baxter. He belonged to the mildest and most
temperate section of the Puritan body. He was a young man when
the civil war broke out. He thought that the right was on the
side of the Houses; and he had no scruple about acting as
chaplain to a regiment in the parliamentary army: but his clear
and somewhat sceptical understanding, and his strong sense of
justice, preserved him from all excesses. He exerted himself to
check the fanatical violence of the soldiery. He condemned the
proceedings of the High Court of Justice. In the days of the
Commonwealth he had the boldness to express, on many occasions,
and once even in Cromwell's presence, love and reverence for the
ancient institutions of the country. While the royal family was
in exile, Baxter's life was chiefly passed at Kidderminster in
the assiduous discharge of parochial duties. He heartily
concurred in the Restoration, and was sincerely desirous to bring
about an union between Episcopalians and Presbyterians. For, with
a liberty rare in his time, he considered questions of
ecclesiastical polity as of small account when compared with the
great principles of Christianity, and had never, even when
prelacy was most odious to the ruling powers, joined in the
outcry against Bishops. The attempt to reconcile the contending
factions failed. Baxter cast in his lot with his proscribed
friends, refused the mitre of Hereford, quitted the parsonage of
Kidderminster, and gave himself up almost wholly to study. His
theological writings, though too moderate to be pleasing to the
bigots of any party, had an immense reputation. Zealous Churchmen
called him a Roundhead; and many Nonconformists accused him of
Erastianism and Arminianism. But the integrity of his heart, the
purity of his life, the vigour of his faculties, and the extent
of his attainments were acknowledged by the best and wisest men
of every persuasion. His political opinions, in spite of the
oppression which he and his brethren had suffered, were moderate.
He was friendly to that small party which was hated by both Whigs
and Tories. He could not, he said, join in cursing the Trimmers,
when he remembered who it was that had blessed the
peacemakers.279
In a Commentary on the New Testament he had complained, with some
bitterness, of the persecution which the Dissenters suffered.
That men who, for not using the Prayer Book, had been driven from
their homes, stripped of their property, and locked up in
dungeons, should dare to utter a murmur, was then thought a high
crime against the State and the Church. Roger Lestrange, the
champion of the government and the oracle of the clergy, sounded
the note of war in the Observator. An information was filed.
Baxter begged that he might be allowed some time to prepare for
his defence. It was on the day on which Oates was pilloried in
Palace Yard that the illustrious chief of the Puritans, oppressed
by
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