dgemoor. The surprise failed; and the brave peasants and miners
who followed the Duke, checked in their advance by a deep drain which
crossed the moor, were broken after a short but desperate resistance by
the royal horse. Their leader fled from the field, and after a vain
effort to escape from the realm was captured and sent pitilessly to the
block.

[Sidenote: The Bloody Circuit.]

Never had England shown a firmer loyalty; but its loyalty was changed
into horror by the terrible measures of repression which followed on the
victory of Sedgemoor. Even North, the Lord Keeper, a servile tool of the
Crown, protested against the license and bloodshed in which the troops
were suffered to indulge after the battle. His protest however was
disregarded, and he withdrew broken-hearted from the Court to die. James
was in fact resolved on a far more terrible vengeance; and the
Chief-Justice Jeffreys, a man of great natural powers but of violent
temper, was sent to earn the Seals by a series of judicial murders which
have left his name a byword for cruelty. Three hundred and fifty rebels
were hanged in what has ever since, been known as the "Bloody Circuit,"
while Jeffreys made his way through Dorset and Somerset. More than eight
hundred were sold into slavery beyond sea. A yet larger number were
whipped and imprisoned. The Queen, the maids of honour, the courtiers,
even the Judge himself, made shameless profit from the sale of pardons.
What roused pity above all were the cruelties wreaked upon women. Some
were scourged from market-town to market-town. Mrs. Lisle, the wife of
one of the Regicides, was sent to the block at Winchester for harbouring
a rebel. Elizabeth Gaunt for the same act of womanly charity was burned
at Tyburn. Pity turned into horror when it was found that cruelty such
as this was avowed and sanctioned by the king. Even the cold heart of
General Churchill, to whose energy the victory at Sedgemoor had mainly
been owing, revolted at the ruthlessness with which James turned away
from all appeals for mercy. "This marble," he cried as he struck the
chimney-piece on which he leant, "is not harder than the king's heart."

[Sidenote: James and France.]

But it was soon plain that the terror which this butchery was meant to
strike into the people was part of a larger purpose. The revolt was made
a pretext for a vast increase of the standing army. Charles, as we have
seen, had silently and cautiously raised it to nearly t