When he had been some weeks in confinement he received a small barrel, marked "Colchester Oysters," of which, ever since his arrival in London when a boy, he had been particularly fond. Seeing it he exclaimed, "Well, I have some friends left still;" but on opening it, the gift was-a halter!

An actual serious petition was received by the Lords of the Council of England from "the widows and fatherless children in the West," beginning, "We, to the number of a thousand and more widows and fatherless children of the counties of Dorset, Somerset, and Devon; our dear husbands and tender fathers having been so tyrannously butchered and some transported; our estates sold from us, and our inheritance cut off, by the severe and brutish sentence of George Lord Jeffreys, now we understand in the Tower of London a prisoner," &c. After enumerating some of his atrocities, and particularly dwelling upon his indecent speech (which I may not copy) to a young lady who asked the life of her lover convicted before him, the petitioners thus concluded:-" These with many hundred more tyrannical acts are ready to be made appear in the said counties by honest and credible persons, and therefore your petitioners desire that the said George Jeffreys, late Lord Chancellor, the vilest of men, may be brought down to the counties aforesaid, where we the good women of the West shall be glad to see him, and give him another manner of welcome than he had there three years since."

Meanwhile, the Great Seal, the Clavis Regni, the emblem of Sovereign sway, which had been thrown into the Thames that it might never reach the Prince of Orange, was found in the net of a fisherman near Lambeth, and was delivered by him to the Lords of the Council, who were resolved to place it in the hands of the founder of the new dynasty*; and James, after revisiting the capital and enjoying a fleeting moment of popularity, [A. D. 1689.] had finally bid adieu to England and was enjoying the munificent hospitality of Louis at St. Germaine's.

The provisional government, in deference to the public voice, issued an order for the more rigorous confinement of the Ex-chan

This fishing up of the Great Seal calls forth from Sir John Dalrymple the observation," that Heaven seemed by this accident to declare that the laws, the constitution, and the sovereignty of Great Britian were not to depend on the frailty of "Dum domus Æneæ Capitoli immobile saxum Accolet, imperiumque pater Romanus habebit."

man.

Bishop Burnet represents that the Great Seal was not fished up till the following summer, his narrative displaying his usual inaccuracy and credulity. "A fisherman, between Lambeth and Vauxhall, was drawing a net pretty close to the channel; and a great weight, not without some difficulty, drawn to the shore, which, when taken up, was found to be the Great Seal of England." One would suppose from this that "the Seal" was as large and heavy as a millstone, or at least as the fish whose name it bears,-whereas the fisherman could have experienced no difficulty in pulling home his net containing it, and could not have supposed that he had caught more than a good-sized trout.

cellor in the Tower, and intimated a resolution that he should speedily be brought to trial for his misdeeds; but, amidst the stirring events which rapidly followed, he was allowed quietly to languish out the remainder of his miserable existence. While the elections were proceeding for the Convention Parliament-while the two Houses were struggling respecting the "abdication" or "desertion" of the throne-while men were occupied with discussing the “Declaration of Rights"-while preparations were making for the coronation of the new Sovereigns-while curiosity was keenly alive in watching their demeanour and while alarms were spread by the adherence of Ireland to the exiled King-the national indignation, which at first burst forth so violently against the crimes of Jeffreys, almost entirely subsided, and little desire was evinced to see him punished as he deserved.

However, considerable sensation was excited by the news that he was no more. He breathed his last in the Tower of London, on the 19th of April, 1689, at thirty-five minutes past four in the morning. Those who take a vague impression of events, without attention to dates, may suppose, from the crowded vicissitudes of his career, that he must have passed his grand climacteric, but he was still only in the forty-first year of his age. Next day many hand-bills, some in prose and some in verse, were hawked through the streets of London, pretending to give an account of his death, and of his character.*

* From the kindness of my friend, Mr. J. Payne Collier, the originals of two of these now lie before me, and I copy them for the amusement of the reader :

"A FULL AND TRUE ACCOUNT OF THE DEATH

OF

GEORGE LORD JEFFRIES,

LATE LORD CHANCELLOR OF ENGLAND,

WHO DIED IN THE TOWER OF LONDON, APRIL 18th, 1689.

Licensed, April 18th.-JAMES FRASER.

"Many and great have been the expectations of the people about the event of the commitment of the late Lord Chancellor to the Tower; and their wishes have been as various as they have been affected to him. Many (who had entertained a just indignation against him for his late ill conduct of affairs) longed for his being brought to his trial, that he might receive that justice that his irregularities that he was committed for were thought to have deserved. But divine Providence has disappointed them herein by calling him to a higher bar, where he must give a just account of all his actions, and receive the just reward that is due to him for the same, unless he has prevented it by his repentance and God's infinite mercy.

"As to the manner of his death it was as followeth He has been very much tor mented with his old distemper, the stone and rheumatism, almost ever since he has been in the Tower, and there has not been any help wanting that skill or art could invent for the continuation of his life; but it has been all as ineffectual and vain as the supplications of the distressed were sometimes to him in the time of his power. For about this month last past he has been in a very languishing condition, still wasting away more and more, in which time he has hardly been in a capacity to take any thing to sustain nature, unless a little sack to revive it when it has been almost spent. About three weeks since he had a mind to a bit of salmon, which he had, but could not digest it, nor scarce any thing else, unless a poached egg. So

We have no accounts that can be implicitly relied upon, either of the manner in which he passed his time during his imprisonment, or of the immediate cause of his death. Some say that he died of a broken heart; others of repeated attacks of the stone, a disease under which he had long suffered; others, that he killed. himself by brandy*; and others, that he was visited by madness, and died like a furious wild beast. The last may be rejected as a fable, invented to please the lovers of the marvellous; and we may safely believe that he sunk under the combined effects of bodily pain, mental anguish, and habitual intemperance. It is said that he profited by the spiritual ministrations of Dr. John Scott, a pious divine, but that he never could be induced to express any contrition for his cruelties in the West,-labouring, in his dying hours, under the delusion that he was excused in the sight of God and man by the consideration, "that all the blood he had shed fell short of the King's demand."†

he continued decaying till the 18th of this instant April, 1689, when, about half an hour after three in the morning, he died, in the forty-first year of his age; after haying lived to see many ambitious designs disappointed, and their most gracious Majesties King William and Queen Mary seated on the throne: WHOM GOD LONG PRESERVE!"

AN ELEGY

ON

SIR GEORGE JEFFRIES,

WHO DIED PRISONER IN THE TOWER OF LONDON, APRIL 18th, 1689.

At the request of the Widows of the West, whose husbands were hanged without

trial by this Lord Chancellor."

* Oldmixon is the most positive as to this, representing the termination to his career as a Roman death, "He chose to save himself from a public death by large draughts of brandy, which soon despatched him."—Oldm. Hist. i. 762.

For the last part of Jeffreys' career, see Memoirs of James, Echard, Rapin,

His remains were buried privately in the Tower, where they remained quietly for some years. A warrant was afterwards signed by Queen Mary, while William was on the Continent, directed to the Governor of the Tower, "for his delivering the body of George, late Lord Jeffreys, to his friends and relations, to bury him as they think fit.” On the 2d of November, 1693, the body was disinterred, and buried a second time in a vault under the communion-table of St. Mary, Aldermanbury. In the year 1810, when the church was repaired, the coffin was inspected by the curious, and was found still fresh, with the name of "Lord Chancellor Jeffreys" inscribed upon it.

Little remains to be said of him as a statesman or as a criminal Judge. His acts, which I have detailed, show him in both capacities to deserve reprobation such as no language could adequately express. He cannot, like his predecessors Lord Clarendon and Lord Nottingham, be accused of bigotry, for all religious creeds as well as all political opinions seem to have been really indifferent to him, and in his choice of those which he professed he was guided only by his "desire to climb." Even the strong hatred against Dissenters which he affected when he had changed sides, he could (as in Rosewell's case), to please the government, entirely lay aside or suspend. From his daring and resolute character he probably felt a genuine contempt for "a Trimmer," and having no personal antipathy to an opponent who boldly went into extremes like himself, his bile was excited by watching a struggle between conscience and convenience. The revival of the Court of High Commission is the only great unconstitutional measure which he has the credit of having originated; but there were no measures, however illegal or pernicious, proposed by Charles or James, to the execution of which he did not devotedly and recklessly abandon himself. England, happy in the integrity and mildness of her Judges in the 18th century and in our own times, during the Stuart reigns was cursed by a succession of ruffians in ermine, who, for the sake of court favour, violated the principles of law, the precepts of religion, and the dictates of humanity;-but they were all greatly outstripped by Jeffreys, and though the infamous Scroggs with whom his name is generally coupled, was next to him, there was a long interval between them.*

Buckingham, Ralph, Oldmixon, Ellis's Corresp., North's Life of Guilford, Burnet, Dalrymple, M'Pherson. Throughout the whole of this memoir I have derived great assistance from the Life of Judge Jeffreys, by Humphry W. Woolwrich. "The Merciful Assize, or a Panegyric on the late Lord Jeffreys," though clever, is so much in the taste of satire, or rather lampoon, that I have placed no reliance upon it.

The following is his ch racter by Sir John M'Pherson, which, in quaint and affected terms, expresses much truth. "A man of outrageous abilities and violent principles; bold and intrepid from a fixed disregard of the world; profligate from

As a civil Judge he was by no means without high qualifications, and in the absence of any motive to do wrong, he was willing to do right. He had a very quick perception, a vigorous and logical understanding, and an impressive eloquence. He must at the bar have severely felt his imperfect legal education and his want of experience in civil cases.* When appointed Chief Justice he was quite young enough by industry to have in a great measure supplied these defects; but, instead of sitting down to pore over the MS. treatises on Equity practice then in circulation, he spent his afternoons and evenings in intriguing against the Lord Keeper, or in carousing with bis boon companions. When he had to decide questions respecting fines and recoveries, executory devises and contingent remainders, he could not resort, as on trials for treason, to the "fasionable doctrine of supporting the King's prerogative in its full extent, and without restriction or limitation, which rendered to such as espoused it all that branch of the law called constitutional, extremely easy and simple." Though not learned in his profession, what was wanting in knowledge he made up by positiveness, and he was very imperious with his colleagues as well as with the bar.

We find a number of his common law judgments in Shower, Skinner, and 3 Modern; but law reporters give an inadequate notion of the demeanour of a Chief Justice, as they do not tell us what was furnished to him by the puisnes, and they generally suppress what falls from him that is inconsiderate. One of the best specimens of Jeffreys's judicial powers is his argument in the case of the East India Company against Sandyst, in which the question arose as to the validity of the charter giving to the plaintiffs the exclusive right of trading to all countries to the east of the Cape of Good Hope. Contrary to our notions on the subject, he insisted very elaborately and ingeniously that such a charter might be granted by the Crown, so as to create a monopoly, without any confirmation by parliament, and that the defendant by trading within the prescribed limits was liable to the action. Thus he concluded:-"The King by his charter makes the plaintiffs as it were his ambassadors to concert peace with the Indians, and Mr. Sandys has complained that he is not one of them. Because the King may pardon every offender, but will not pardon any highwayman now in Newgate, must these gaol-birds therefore think themselves injured in their liberty and property? The Company have been at the trouble of discovering places, of erecting forts, of keeping forces, of settling factories, and of mak

a contempt of virtue; fair only to those whom he feared; a tyrant to the unfortunate, and a fawning slave to the great."-M'Pherson, i. 402.

*We may judge of his reputation as a lawyer by Maynard's reply to him, when he had, with his usual brutality, told the Serjeant opposed to him in a cause, that from his great age he had forgotten his law. "Yes, Sir George, I have forgotten more than you ever learned."

† Fox's History of James II. c. 2

510 St. Tr. 519.