the public mind was possessed with a belief that the more conscientious a Papist was, the more likely he must be to plot against a Protestant government. It was in vain that just before the cart passed from under them, they resolutely affirmed their innocence; for the general opinion was, that a good Papist considered all lies which were serviceable to his church as not only excusable but meritorious."*

Thus much for the "wisdom of our ancestors" during the period which Sir William Blackstone, with cautious reservation, designates as that in which our constitution attained its theoretical perfection, but which Mr. Fox, with his usual nervous perspicuity, stigmatizes as "the æra of good laws and of bad governments.' It is true that the dispensing power arrogated by Charles was in full parliament declared illegal, and that the king promised he would not again attempt to exercise it. It is true that the ancient remedy of the subject against tyrannical and unjust imprisonment was, by the noble statute which we, par excellence, denominate "The Habeas Corpus Act," regulated, ensured, and rendered easily and practically available; but it is, alas! also true that judicial butcheries were perpetrated on an extensive scale, in ostensible accordance with the forms of law, in reality through the intervention of corrupt or timid juries, impanelled by partial sheriffs, and cajoled or terrified by unjust and execrable judges.

At length the opposition leaders, gorged with the blood of humbler victims, struck at higher game; dupes and deceivers uniting to set aside the ordinary course of the succession, and defeat by act of Parliament the claims of the heir presumptive to the crown.

enough to understand me!" * With all his faults and noxious prejudices however, the Duke of York was clearly heir-presumptive, and the attempt to bar his right by an Exclusion Bill was to the last degree distasteful to the king; he sent away the duke to Brussels, but his absence rather encouraged than conciliated his opponents; he proffered any other securities they could themselves devise for Protestantism, and offered to consent to restrictions which would have rendered a Catholic successor little more than a mere phantom king. The Commons probably distrusted his sincerity; they at all events refused to listen to any terms of compromise. As a last resource, the king_prorogued, and shortly afterwards dissolved, the Parliament; but their successors, who reassembled in 1680, were still more determined on the measure. The bill passed the Commons by a large majority, and even in the cabinet opinions were divided; Hyde Earl of Rochester, and brother-in-law to the duke, stood by the king; Godolphin, hoping quiet from concession, hesitated; and Sunderland, as usual, betrayed his master. Duchess of Portsmouth implored the king to give way, and save himself from destruction. Charles wavered," asked what sum the Commons would give him if he yielded," and attempted ineffectually to negociate with the leading Whigs.

The

The

"The whole nation looked with breathless anxiety to the House of Lords. The assemblage of peers was large the king himself was present. The debate was long, earnest, and occasionally furious. Some hands were laid on the pommels of swords, in a manner which revived the recollection of the stormy parliaments of Henry the Third and Richard James Duke of York, a prince of gloomy the Second. Shaftesbury and Essex were joined by temperament and feeble intellect, and-like the treacherous Sunderland, but the genius of Halimost dull bigots, pitiless, had avowed him- fax bore down all opposition. Deserted by his most important colleagues, and opposed to a crowd of self a Roman Catholic. As he perilled every-able antagonists, he defended the cause of the Duke thing, and could gain nothing by the de- of York, in a succession of speeches, which, many claration, he might perhaps be allowed the years later, were remembered as masterpieces of praise of conscientiousness, but that his life reasoning, of wit, and of eloquence. It is seldom that from youth to manhood, and from manhood to oratory changes votes; yet the attestation of contemold age, set at nought deliberately every precept poraries leaves no doubt that on this occasion votes of Christianity. Severe as is this censure, its were changed by the oratory of Halifax. justice cannot be disputed. If both brothers bishops, true to their doctrines, supported the prinwere licentious, Charles, though devoid of kingly faith and honour, a mere epicurean votary of beauty, wit, and revelry, was at least urbane, light-hearted, and good-humoured; it was alike impossible to esteem and to abhor him. James, with all the " merry monarch's" failings, possessed no one of his redeeming qualities; coldblooded, cruel, and implacable, he was faithful only to his superstitions; a vulgar debauchee in an age of graceful profligacy, who intrigued almost exclusively with ugly women. "What attractions can York find in me?" cried Catherine Sedley; "he must know as well as I do that I have no pretensions to be called a beauty; and though I have wit at will, he has not sense

*Hist. vol. i. pp. 230-238.
+ Passed 26th May, 1679.

*

By this saucy termagant James was the father of "Field-Marechal the Duke of Berwick," the friend and early patron of Cosmo Comyne Bradwardine of that ilk; nominated in 1745, "Viscount Bradwardine of Bradwardine and Tully Veolan, North Britain ;" but better known, as he was deservedly respected and beloved, as "The Baron of Bradwardine." The peerage, we believe, became extinct some sixty years since;" not so the family, at present worthily represented by Cosmo Comyne Bradwardine, Esq., great-great-grandson of "The Baron," through his heiress and only daughter, Rose Comyne Bradwardine, on whose marriage in 1746, with Edward Waverley, Bart., of Waverley Honour, and WaverWaverley, Esq., nephew and heir of Sir Everard ley-cum-Beverley, shire, the estate and principal Mansion House of Tully Veolan were, by special tailzie settled upon her second son and his heirs male, conditionally on their assuming the name and arms of Bradwardine.

* Hist. vol i., p. 259, and see pp. 239--255 for judges were, as they had long been, and as up the characters of Sir William Temple, Monmouth, Hyde Earl of Rochester, and Sunderland, with a brilliant sketch of the versatile and accomplished Halifax, "who despised the mean arts and unreasonable clamours of demagogues, and despised still more the Tory doctrines of divine right and passive obedience; sneered impartially at the bigotry of the churchman and the bigotry of the Puritan, and was equally unable to comprehend how any man should object to saints' days and surplices, and how any man should persecute any other man for objecting to them. Every faction in the day of its insolent and vindictive triumph incurred his censure; and every faction when vanquished or persecuted found in him a protector."

pleasure; the sheriffs for the most part nominated by the judges, the juries packed by the obsequious sheriffs. Whigs were now murdered judicially by the same witnesses who had recently sworn away the lives of Roman Catholics; and thus the measure they had meted out was measured unto themselves again. They had indeed for the most part sinned in ignorance; not so their rulers, who well knew that in both instances they shed the blood of innocence, with this difference only-the Roman Catholics had been victimized by deluded Protestants; the Protestants were murdered by the bloodthirsty and vindictive statesmen who a few months previously had hallooed them on to massacre their unoffending countrymen.

Parliament first appalled and then exasperated
the opposition; the firmest friends of liberty
too hastily despaired of the constitution.
"Their measures," says Sir Walter Scott, "ap-
proached rather revolution than reform." The
more unscrupulous and daring planned simul-
taneous insurrections in London, Cheshire,
Bristol, and Newcastle; schemes of which
Algernon Sydney, Essex, and Lord William
Russell, though they abstained from actively
encouraging them, were in all probability not
unconscious. With the project of a general
rising, was interwoven a sub-conspiracy to as-
sassinate the king and duke, called, from the
residence of one of its originators,
"The Rye
House Plot." This wild and wicked scheme
was, however, known but to few of the con-
federates, and carefully concealed from the Duke
of Monmouth and Lord William Russell. By
accident or treachery both plots were soon dis-
covered; Shaftesbury had fled to Holland,
Monmouth threw himself at his father's feet,
obtained his pardon, and went into voluntary
exile; the Earl of Essex committed suicide;
Russell, against whom no treason could be
proved, and Sydney, whose trial was a mere
mockery of law and justice, were beheaded.
Both died bravely; one with the gentle fortitude
of a Christian, the other with the calm com-
posure of an " antique Roman."

Our most illustrious living poet has comme-
morated these martyr-champions-
"How like a Roman Sydney bowed his head,

The first victim was Stephen College, the "Protestant joiner," and inventor of the Protestant flail" this man was tried at Oxford, and convicted on the testimony of the same wretches who had so recently sworn away the life of Stafford. Sir Francis North, the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, presided, and had the effrontery to deprive the prisoner of several of the papers and memoranda prepared by counsel for his defence, under the pretence that they contained statements which were seditious, and reflected on the government. The verdict of guilty was received "with a roar of exultation as barbarous as that which College and his friends had been in the habit of raising when innocent Papists were doomed to the gallows. His execution was the beginning of a new judicial massacre, not less atrocious than that in which he had himself borne a share.” Shaftesbury was next assailed; but this arch traitor escaped the vengeance which crushed his ignoble tools. The facts "Of that sweet saint who sat by Russell's side," charged against him were alleged to have been committed in the metropolis; the sheriff's of and with a spirit worthy of the high-souled Lucy London and their grand jurymen were at this Hutchinson, counselled her lord to risk and time zealous Whigs, and saved their champion freely forfeit life, so that he might preserve his by ignoring his indictment. This was the honour stainless, and secure his friend. They Ignoramus" virulently assailed by Tory and died, and left us an ensample." Nor was it in factiously commended by Whig scribblers, at England only that the laws were daily violated, and long subsequent to this disgraceful æra. and the rights of freemen trampled on and sysShaftesbury, in fact, escaped from every punish-tematically defied. The government of Scotland ment save that which he well deserved and little heeded-infamy; but Dryden's satire gibbeted him in "The Medal," as it had already “damned him to everlasting fame," in "Absalom and Achitophel."*

66

Meanwhile, the dissolution of the Oxford

Achitophel, grown weary to possess A lawful fame and lazy happiness, Disdained the golden fruit to gather free, And lent the crowd his arm to shake the tree; Held up the buckler of the people's cause Against the crown, and skulked behind the laws." This medal, which bore on one side a representation of the City of London, and on the other a portraiture of Shaftesbury, with the date of the Ignoramus (24th November, 1681) and the motto, "Lætamur," gave rise to Dryden's satire, a poem scarcely inferior for severity of invective and harmony of versification to the immortal "Absalom and Achitophel."

And Russell's milder blood the scaffold wet."* while his friend, the "Bard of Memory," has done justice to the conjugal affection

had been for some years past confided to the savage and remorseless Lauderdale, who harassed and oppressed the people as if-and such in all probability was the case-it had been his deliberate purpose to force them into a rebellion.

James Sharpe, a leading Presbyterian minister, had been deputed soon after the Restoration to plead the cause of his community before the king, and bribed with the archbishopric of St. Andrew's to betray his trust. "You will be primate of Scotland," cried an ancient colleague, Robert Douglas; "take it, then, and take the curse of God along with it." Sharpe, with his new confederates, the debauched and profligate Rothes, Middleton, and Lauderdale, resolved to force episcopacy on Scotland; the pastors, loved and trusted by the people, were expelled their

* Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Part iii., No. 10.

house and Dalzell upon Bothwell-Brigg. The
Duke of York, excluded from any post of public
trust in England by the "Test Act," came
down to act as viceroy into Scotland,
sinking into the grave.
"where the savage old tyrant Lauderdale was
Even Lauderdale was now

outdone. The adininistration of James was marked

by odious laws, by barbarous punishments, and by judgments to the iniquity of which even that age furnished no parallel. The Scottish privy council had power to put state prisoners to the question. But the sight was so dreadful, that as soon as the boot appeared, even the most servile and hard

churches, amid the wailings of their devoted" the hill-folk," quenched in blood by Claver congregations, and driven to officiate in private houses, barns, and at length even in the open fields. Sharpe, with an apostate's bitter hatred, obtained from the civil power severe enactments against field preaching and conventicles, and denounced all those who refused to attend his newly-appointed ministers. "Their cruel measures drove the people not only to despair, but madness;" repeated partial insurrections were put down with unrelenting cruelty, no quarter shown to vanquished Cameronians; or if prisoners were for a few moments spared, it was but to consign them to the tender mercies of the privy council, and the agonies of the rack or boot. Foremost in these atrocities was the universally-detested primate, his inquisitorial instincts quickened by revenge and fear. Attempts were made repeatedly to assassinate him; and at length, in 1679, a party of proscribed sectarians, on the watch for one of the inferior agents of his tyranny, met Sharpe himself by accident on Magus-Muir; and, under the firm | persuasion that "the Lord had delivered him into their hands," executed what Lord Bacon calls "wild justice" upon the apostate persecutor." §

The death of Sharpe gave the signal for a general but ill-organized insurrection among

*"It did not content the congregation to weep all of them, but they howled with a loud voice, weeping with the weeping of Jazer, as when a besieged city is sacked. Then Middleton began to curse and swear, what would these mad fellows do," &c. Kirkton's Church History; Scott's Miscellaneous Works, vol. xix. p. 251.

+ Ibid. p. 273. "The privy council was accustomed to extort confessions by torture; that grim divan of bishops, lawyers, and peers, sucking in the groans of each undaunted enthusiast, in hope that some imperfect avowal might lead to the sacrifice of other victims, or at least warrant the execution of the present." Hallam's Cons. His. vol. iii. p. 436. This " Christian hope" was, however, very seldom realized, the "boots," and even that hellish instrument of torture called the "thumbikins," failed to subdue the spirits of these undaunted sufferers, who, as John Bunyan would have expressed it, "played the men," and like his own "Valiant-for-the-truth," ever "found most courage when the blood flowed through their fingers."

§ We shall not, we trust, be so far mistaken by our readers, as to be supposed capable of applauding the assassination of this wicked man; we "forbear to judge." The executioners and their victim have long since passed before the tribunal of "him who judgeth righteously." Our own feelings relative to the death of Sharpe coincide, so far as we can analyze them, with those expressed by "honest Davie Lyndsay," when Cardinal Beaton was put to death in 1547, under circumstances precisely

similar

hearted courtiers hastened out of the chamber. The

board was sometimes quite deserted; and it was at
members should keep their seats on such occasions.
length found necessary to make an order that the
The Duke of York, it was remarked, seemed to
take pleasure in the spectacle, which some of the
worst men then living were unable to contemplate
without pity and horror. He not only came to
council when the torture was to be inflicted, but
watched the agonies of the sufferers with that sort
of interest and complacency with which men ob-
serve a curious experiment in science. Thus he
conflict between the Court and the Whigs was no
employed himself at Edinburgh till the event of the
longer doubtful; he then returned to England, and
nation had patience to endure alme
when it appeared from a succession of trials 1+de
thing that

the government had courage to do, Charles ventured
to dispense with the law in his brother's favour.
The Duke again took his seat in the Council, and
resumed the direction of naval affairs."*

and meanness, profusion, tyranny, licentious Yet a few years longer, sensuality, hypocrisy, ness, and misrule, bore sway in England. At length, and fearfully unexpected was the summons, the king was called " to stand before the living God," before the all-seeing Deity, “who is no respecter of persons." We cannot insert entire, and will not presume to shorten, Mr. Macaulay's eloquent description of the gorgeous banquetings and splendid galleries of Whitehall, -the last licentious revels-the sudden deathstroke--the wild confusion in the palace—the fearful agonies of the expiring voluptuary-the awakened conscience of his favourite concubine

his final reconciliation with the Church of Rome-his unflinching fortitude, and the constitutional good-nature; which under happier auspices, or in a private station, had made Charles the Second a better-nay, perhaps an estimable man;-which in his last moments prompted him to recommend the Duchess of Portsmouth and her infant to his successor, and to beg him "not to let poor Nelly starve; his exchange of farewell and forgiveness with his queen." She ask my pardon, poor woman! I ask hers with all my heart;" and to crown all, the "exquisite urbanity" which dictated his apology to his attendants;-"he had been," he said, a most unconscionable time a dying, but he hoped they would excuse it.” With a brief extract from "Evelyn's Diary," we close the

scene

Hist. vol. i. p. 271.