The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1, Thomas Babington Macaulay [ebook pc reader txt] 📗

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