true hope of England and of the Reformation. Thus the most respectable Protestants, with Elizabeth at their head, were forced to make common cause with the papists. In the same manner, a hundred and thirty years later, a part of the Opposition, by setting up Monmouth as a claimant of the crown, attacked the rights, not only of James, whom they justly regarded as an implacable enemy of their faith and their liberties, but also of the Prince and Princess of Orange, who were eminently marked out, both by situation and by personal qualities, as the defenders of all free governments and of all Reformed churches.

LAWRENCE HYDE, EARL OF ROCHESTER.

LAWRENCE HYDE was the second son of the Chancellor Clarendon, and was brother of the first Duchess of York. He had excellent parts, which had been improved by parlia mentary and diplomatic experience; but the infirmities of his temper detracted much from the effective strength of his abilities. Negotiator and courtier as he was, he never learned the art of governing or of concealing his emotions. When prosperous he was insolent and boastful; when he sustained a check, his undisguised mortification doubled the triumph of his enemies; very slight provocations sufficed to kindle his anger; and when he was angry, he said bitter things which he forgot as soon as he was pacified, but which others remembered for many years. His quickness and penetration would have made him a consummate man of business but for his self-sufficiency and impatience. His writings prove that he had many of the qualities of an orator, but his irritability prevented him from doing himself justice in debate; for nothing was easier than to goad him into a passion; and from the moment when he went into a passion, he was at the mercy of opponents far inferior to him in capacity.

Unlike most of the leading politicians of that generation, he was a consistent, dogged, and rancorous party man, a Cavalier of the old school, a zealous champion of the crown and of the Church, and a hater of Republicans and Nonconformists. He had, consequently, a great body of personal

adherents. The clergy especially looked on him as their own man, and extended to his foibles an indulgence of which, to say the truth, he stood in some need; for he drank deep; and when he was in a rage-and he very often was in a rage—he swore like a porter.

SIDNEY GODOLPHIN.

GODOLPHIN had been bred a page at Whitehall, and had early acquired all the flexibility and the self-possession of a veteran courtier. He was laborious, clear-headed, and profoundly versed in the details of finance. Every government, therefore, found in him a useful servant; and there was nothing in his opinions or in his character which could prevent him from serving any government. "Sidney Godolphin," said Charles, "is never in the way, and never out of the way." This pointed remark goes far to explain Godolphin's extraordinary success in life.

He acted at different times with both the great political parties, but he never shared in the passions of either. Like most men of cautious tempers and prosperous fortunes, he had a strong disposition to support whatever existed. He disliked revolutions; and, for the same reason for which he disliked revolutions, he disliked counter-revolutions. His deportment was remarkably grave and reserved, but his personal tastes were low and frivolous; and most of the time which he could save from public business was spent in racing, card-playing, and cock-fighting.

FRANCIS NORTH, LORD GUILDFORD.

THE moderate and constitutional counsels of Halifax were timidly and feebly seconded by Francis North, Lord Guildford, who had lately been made keeper of the great seal. The character of Guildford has been drawn at full length by his brother Roger North, a most intolerant Tory, a most

affected and pedantic writer, but a vigilant observer of all those minute circumstances which throw light on the dispositions of men. It is remarkable that the biographer, though he was under the influence of the strongest fraternal partiality, and though he was evidently anxious to produce a most flattering likeness, was yet unable to portray the lord keeper otherwise than as the most ignoble of mankind; yet the intellect of Guildford was clear, his industry great, his proficiency in letters and science respectable, and his legal learning more than respectable. His faults were selfishness, cowardice, and meanness. He was not insensible to the power of female beauty, nor averse from excess in wine; yet neither wine nor beauty could ever seduce the cautious and frugal libertine, even in his earliest youth, into one fit of indiscreet generosity. Though of noble descent, he rose in his profession by paying ignominious homage to all who possessed influence in the courts. He became Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and, as such, was party to some of the foulest judicial murders recorded in our history. He had sense enough to perceive from the first that Oates and Bedloe were impostors; but the Parlia ment and the country were greatly excited; the government had yielded to the pressure; and North was a man not to risk a good place for the sake of justice and humanity. Accordingly, while he was in secret drawing up a refutation of the whole romance of the Popish Plot, he declared in public that the truth of the story was as plain as the sun in heaven, and was not ashamed to browbeat, from the seat of judgment, the unfortunate Roman Catholics who were arraigned before him for their lives. He had at length reached the highest post in the law; but a lawyer who, after many years devoted to professional labor, engages in politics for the first time at an advanced period of life, seldom distinguishes himself as a statesman, and Guildford was no exception to the general rule. He was, indeed, so sensible of his deficiencies, that he never attended the meetings of his colleagues on foreign affairs. Even on questions relating to his own profession, his opinion had less weight at the council board than that of any man who has ever held the great seal. Such as his influence was, however, he used it, as far as he dared, on the side of the laws.

VOL. III.-26

JUDGE JEFFREYS.

THE great seal was left in Guildford's custody; but a marked indignity was at the same time offered to him. It was determined that another lawyer of more vigor and audacity should be called to assist in the administration. The person selected was Sir George Jeffreys, Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench. The depravity of this man has passed into a proverb. Both the great English parties have attacked his memory with emulous violence; for the Whigs considered him as their most barbarous enemy, and the Tories found it convenient to throw on him the blame of all the crimes which had sullied their triumph. A diligent and candid inquiry will show that some frightful stories which have been told concerning him are false or exagger ated; yet the dispassionate historian will be able to make very little deduction from the vast mass of infamy with which the memory of the wicked judge has been loaded.

He was a man of quick and vigorous parts, but constitutionally prone to insolence and to the angry passions. When just emerging from boyhood, he had risen into practice at the Old Bailey bar, a bar where advocates have always used a license of tongue unknown in Westminster Hall. Here, during many years, his chief business was to examine and cross-examine the most hardened miscreants of a great capital. Daily conflicts with prostitutes and thieves called out and exercised his powers so effectually that he became the most consummate bully ever known in his profession. All tenderness for the feelings of others, all self-respect, all sense of the becoming, were obliterated from his mind. He acquired a boundless command of the rhetoric in which the vulgar express hatred and contempt. The profusion of maledictions and vituperative epithets which composed his vocabulary, could hardly have been rivalled in the fish-market or the bear-garden. His countenance and his voice must always have been unamiable; but these natural advantages-for such he seems to have thought them-he had improved to such a degree that there were few who, in his paroxysms of rage, could see or hear him without emotion. Impudence and ferocity sat upon

his brow. The glare of his eyes had a fascination for the unhappy victim on whom they were fixed; yet his brow and eye were said to be less terrible than the savage lines of his mouth. His yell of fury, as was said by one who had often heard it, sounded like the thunder of the judgment day. These qualifications he carried, while still a young man, from the bar to the bench. He early became common sergeant, and then recorder of London. As judge at the city sessions he exhibited the same propensities which afterwards, in a higher post, gained for him an unenviable immortality. Already might be remarked in him the most. odious vice which is incident to human nature, a delight in misery merely as misery. There was a fiendish exultation in the way in which he pronounced sentence on offenders. Their weeping and imploring seemed to titillate him voluptuously; and he loved to scare them into fits by dilating with luxuriant amplification on all the details of what they were to suffer. Thus, when he had an opportunity of ordering an unlucky adventuress to be whipped at the cart's tail, "Hangman," he would exclaim, "I charge you to pay par ticular attention to this lady! Scourge her soundly, man! Scourge her till the blood runs down! It is Christmas; a cold time for madam to strip in! See that you warm her shoulders thoroughly!"* He was hardly less facetious when he passed judgment on Ludowick Muggleton, the drunken tailor who fancied himself a prophet. "Impudent rogue!" roared Jeffreys, "thou shalt have an easy, easy, easy punishment!" One part of this easy punishment was the pillory, in which the wretched fanatic was almost killed with brickbats. †

By this time the nature of Jeffreys had been hardened to that temper which tyrants require in their worst implements. He had hitherto looked for professional advancement to the corporation of London. He had therefore professed himself a Roundhead, and had always appeared to be in a high state of exhilaration when he explained to popish priests that they were to be cut down alive, and were to see their own bodies burned, than when he passed ordinary sentences of death. But, as soon as he had got all that the city could give him, he made haste to sell his forehead of

Christmas Sessions Paper of 1768.

↑ The Acts of the Witnesses of the Spirit, Part V., chapter v. In this work, Ludowick, after his fashion, revenges himself on the "bawling devil," as he calls Jeffreys, by a string of curses which Ernulphus might have envied. The trial was in January, 1677.