or woman to be
accused by an enemy, before Jeffreys, to be found guilty of high treason.
One man who pleaded not guilty, he ordered to be taken out of court upon
the instant, and hanged; and this so terrified the prisoners in general
that they mostly pleaded guilty at once. At Dorchester alone, in the
course of a few days, Jeffreys hanged eighty people; besides whipping,
transporting, imprisoning, and selling as slaves, great numbers. He
executed, in all, two hundred and fifty, or three hundred.

These executions took place, among the neighbours and friends of the
sentenced, in thirty-six towns and villages. Their bodies were mangled,
steeped in caldrons of boiling pitch and tar, and hung up by the
roadsides, in the streets, over the very churches. The sight and smell
of heads and limbs, the hissing and bubbling of the infernal caldrons,
and the tears and terrors of the people, were dreadful beyond all
description. One rustic, who was forced to steep the remains in the
black pot, was ever afterwards called 'Tom Boilman.' The hangman has
ever since been called Jack Ketch, because a man of that name went
hanging and hanging, all day long, in the train of Jeffreys. You will
hear much of the horrors of the great French Revolution. Many and
terrible they were, there is no doubt; but I know of nothing worse, done
by the maddened people of France in that awful time, than was done by the
highest judge in England, with the express approval of the King of
England, in The Bloody Assize.

Nor was even this all. Jeffreys was as fond of money for himself as of
misery for others, and he sold pardons wholesale to fill his pockets. The
King ordered, at one time, a thousand prisoners to be given to certain of
his favourites, in order that they might bargain with them for their
pardons. The young ladies of Taunton who had presented the Bible, were
bestowed upon the maids of honour at court; and those precious ladies
made very hard bargains with them indeed. When The Bloody Assize was at
its most dismal height, the King was diverting himself with horse-races
in the very place where Mrs. Lisle had been executed. When Jeffreys had
done his worst, and came home again, he was particularly complimented in
the Royal Gazette; and when the King heard that through drunkenness and
raging he was very ill, his odious Majesty remarked that such another man
could not easily be found in England. Besides all this, a former sheriff
of London