ho might be within a hundred yards of one of William's regiments, and
a hundred miles from the nearest place where there was a single Jacobite
in arms.

It might have been expected that James, after thus denouncing vengeance
against large classes of his subjects, would at least have offered a
general amnesty to the rest. But of general amnesty he said not a
word. He did indeed promise that any offender who was not in any of the
categories of proscription, and who should by any eminent service merit
indulgence, should receive a special pardon. But, with this exception,
all the offenders, hundreds of thousands in number, were merely informed
that their fate should be decided in Parliament.

The agents of James speedily dispersed his Declaration over every part
of the kingdom, and by doing so rendered a great service to William.
The general cry was that the banished oppressor had at least given
Englishmen fair warning, and that, if, after such a warning, they
welcomed him home, they would have no pretence for complaining, though
every county town should be polluted by an assize resembling that
which Jeffreys had held at Taunton. That some hundreds of people,--the
Jacobites put the number so low as five hundred,--were to be hanged
without mercy was certain; and nobody who had concurred in the
Revolution, nobody who had fought for the new government by sea or
land, no soldier who had borne a part in the conquest of Ireland, no
Devonshire ploughman or Cornish miner who had taken arms to defend his
wife and children against Tourville, could be certain that he should
not be hanged. How abject too, how spiteful, must be the nature of a man
who, engaged in the most momentous of all undertakings, and aspiring to
the noblest of all prizes, could not refrain from proclaiming that he
thirsted for the blood of a multitude of poor fishermen, because,
more than three years before, they had pulled him about and called him
Hatchetface. If, at the very moment when he had the strongest motives
for trying to conciliate his people by the show of clemency, he could
not bring himself to hold towards them any language but that of an
implacable enemy, what was to be expected from him when he should be
again their master? So savage was his nature that, in a situation
in which all other tyrants have resorted to blandishments and fair
promises, he could utter nothing but reproaches and threats. The only
words in his Declaration which had any show o