Nothing is more memorable than those "bloody assizes" which he held in those counties through which Monmouth had passed. Nothing is remembered with more execration. Nothing ever equalled the brutal cruelty of the judge. His fury seemed to be directed with peculiar violence upon the Dissenters. "Show me," said he, "a Presbyterian, and I will show thee a lying knave. Presbyterianism has all manner of villany in it. There is not one of those lying, snivelling, canting Presbyterians, but, one way or another, has had a hand in the rebellion." He sentenced nearly all who were accused, to be hanged or burned; and the excess of his barbarities called forth pity and indignation even from devoted loyalists. He boasted that he had hanged more traitors than all his predecessors together since the Conquest. On a single circuit, he hanged three hundred and fifty; some of these were people of great worth, and many of them were innocent; while many whom he spared from an ignominious death, were sentenced to the most cruel punishments--to the lash of the pillory, to imprisonment in the foulest jails, to mutilation, to banishment, and to heavy fines.
King James watched the conduct of the inhuman Jeffreys with delight, and rewarded him with the Great Seal. The Old Bailey lawyer had now climbed to the greatest height to which a subject could aspire. He was Lord Chancellor of England--the confidential friend and agent of the king, and his unscrupulous instrument in imposing the yoke of bondage on an insulted nation.
[Sidenote: Persecution of the Dissenters.]
At this period, the condition of the Puritans was deplorable. At no previous time was persecution more inveterate, not even under the administration of Laud and Strafford. The persecution commenced soon after the restoration of Charles II., and increased in malignity until the elevation of Jeffreys to the chancellorship. The sufferings of no class of sectaries bore any proportion to theirs. They found it difficult to meet together for prayer or exhortation even in the smallest assemblies. Their ministers were introduced in disguise. Their houses were searched. They were fined, imprisoned, and banished. Among the ministers who were deprived of their livings, were Gilpin, Bates, Howe, Owen, Baxter, Calamy, Poole, Charnock, and Flavel, who still, after a lapse of one hundred and fifty years, enjoy a wide-spread reputation as standard writers on theological subjects. These great lights of the seventeenth century were doomed to privation and poverty, with thousands of their brethren, most of whom had been educated at the Universities, and were among the best men in the kingdom. All the Stuart kings hated the Dissenters, but none hated them more than Charles II. and James II. Under their sanction, complying parliaments passed repeated acts of injustice and cruelty. The laws which were enacted during Queen Elizabeth's reign were reënacted and enforced. The Act of Uniformity, in one day, ejected two thousand ministers from their parishes, because they refused to conform to the standard of the Established Church. The Conventicle Act ordained that if any person, above sixteen years of age, should be present at any religious meeting, in any other manner than allowed by the Church of England, he should suffer three months' imprisonment, or pay a fine of five pounds, that six months imprisonment and ten pounds fine should be inflicted as a penalty for the second offence, and banishment for the third. Married women taken at "conventicles," were sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment. It is calculated that twenty-five thousand Dissenters were immured in gloomy prisons, and that four thousand of the sect of the Quakers died during their imprisonment in consequence of the filth and malaria of the jails, added to cruel treatment.