where he was presently joined by a force of his clansmen and others, numbering about twenty-five hundred men. This was the limit of his progress. Scarcely eluding the superior numbers that hemmed him in on all sides, he escaped into the Lowlands, where no reinforcements awaited him. His despairing followers fell away. His reduced force was easily defeated. He was taken. prisoner, led to Edinburgh, and there executed.

June 26.

Now was the time for the King, by a judicious clemency, or at least by a dexterous reserve, to establish his power. But happily he had not the sagacity or good temper requisite for such a course. A cruel vindictiveness was both his instinct and his policy. The inhuman proceedings of his officers, the Earl of Feversham and Colonel Kirke, after the battle of Sedgemoor, seem, through their connection with the customary horrors of war, less horrible than the wholesale murders Judicial of the judges Jeffreys and Scroggs.

66

cruelties.

Months elapsed after the dispersion of Monmouth's feeble levy before the Chief Justice came to the Western counties to hold his court,—a space of time which might have dulled the appetite for blood in men with human hearts. At Dorchester, where he held his first court, he ordered the first thirty who were convicted to immediate execution; and, of two hundred and ninety-eight who were sentenced, eighty paid the penalty of death. In this campaign" of Jeffreys, as the King named it, no fewer than two hundred and fifty miserable people perished on the gibbet. Some cases were thought to be marked with circumstances of peculiar aggravation. Lady Lisle, widow of a Commonwealth's-man of eminence, was herself of loyal principles, and had sent her sons to Sedgemoor to fight for the King. After the battle, two fugitives, unknown to her as having been concerned in the rebellion, sought concealment in her house. That she accorded it. was the extent of her crime. The jury shrank from a

verdict against her; but at length they yielded to the violence of the court, and she was sentenced and exe cuted, after great influence exerted to obtain her pardon. Jeffreys had ordered that she should be burned at the stake on the same day that the sentence was pronounced. The clergy of Winchester interfered with an application for delay, and the King was prevailed upon to change the manner of her death to beheading.

Second meeting

November 9.

The arrogant demeanor of the King towards his submissive Parliament at this important juncture confirmed the impression made by his inhumanity to his revolted subjects. The necessity of further supplies to discharge the cost of the late campaign occasioned him of Parliament. again to convene the Houses, which had been suddenly adjourned in the alarm occasioned by the landing of the Duke of Monmouth. He told them that, the late troubles having shown the militia system to be an insecure reliance, he desired they would grant him the means to keep up a standing force of well-disciplined soldiers; and that it was his intention to pursue the course on which he had entered, of giving commissions to Catholics, since he was neither disposed to do injustice to gallant gentlemen of his own persuasion, nor to deprive himself of their services in a future time of need. The House of Commons voted to grant a supNovember 16. ply of seven hundred thousand pounds, accompanying the vote with a temperate expression of their disapproval of the employment of Catholics, to which the King replied only by a harsh rebuke. The House of Lords, with unwonted spirit, named a day for taking the King's speech into consideration. But, notwithstanding that the forms necessary for making the grant of money effectual had not been gone through, he gave way to his ill-temper November 20. and prorogued the Parliament before the ar

November 18.

Prorogation of
Parliament.

1 Parliamentary History, IV. 1362–1366.

rival of the appointed day; and it was never suffered to meet again.

1598.

Revocation of

Edict of Nantes. 1685.

October 18.

A proceeding of King James's friend, the King of France, contributed to the apprehensions which thus again possessed the public mind of England. By a decree, familiarly known as the Edict of Nantes, Henry the Fourth of France had guarantied religious freedom and political security to Protestant Frenchmen. The decree had been in force nearly a century, when it was suddenly revoked the French by Louis the Fourteenth, a few weeks before that meeting of Parliament which has just been mentioned. Five hundred thousand Frenchmen, as was estimated, immediately fled to foreign countries from the persecution that impended. Not less than fifty thousand betook themselves to England. Compassion for the suf ferers stimulated the apprehensions which were naturally excited by their fate. Englishmen saw again, in what they esteemed its natural aspect, the ferocious spirit of the Church of Rome; and they asked themselves once more what security Englishmen had against the perfidy and cruelty of a Popish monarch, greater than had been possessed by those religious Frenchmen, who had now been dispossessed of their property and exiled from their homes.

Claim of King

Released from the interference of Parliament, the King's next step was to obtain the sanction of a legal judgment for that power of dispensing with the operation of the laws, which, in respect to the Test Act, James to a dishe had already exercised, and had declared his pensing power. purpose still to use. In that unsettled state in which as yet the English constitution stood, the question was not without its difficulty. The power of exempting from the penalty of a law in single cases is generally recognized

1 Parliamentary History, IV. 1367-313-318; Dalrymple, Memorials and 1387; Reresby, Travels and Memoirs, Letters, I. 161-167.

as belonging to the executive head of a government. It is exercised in every act of pardon. It is necessarily an irresponsible and illimitable power, for the fit occasions for its exercise cannot be foreseen so as to be defined; if they could be, the law might provide for them. But if one or a few may fitly by executive discretion be relieved from the operation of a law, why not many? And if many, how many? It is impossible to define the proportion. Then why not all? It is true that, if all persons threatened by a penal law ought to be discharged from its operation by executive interference, this must be because the law is a bad one, and ought to be repealed. But the law-making power may not be of that opinion, and its dissent, though availing to keep the enactment on the statute-book, does not avail to divest the executive of its inherent attribute of mercy. Such is the special pleading on one side of the question. On the other side stands the portentous fact, that, if the dispensing power may be exercised without control, the head of the government is absolute. The law-making power cannot effectually obstruct or restrain either monarch or subject, if any and all of its enactments may be legally annulled by executive discretion. Here was presented one of those cases in which precedents and maxims derived from one state of political relations are simply absurd when applied to another. To dispense with the operation of a law in an unlimited number of cases was an unquestioned part of the royal prerogative. To dispense with the operation of a law, unless for exceptional reasons, is, in effect, to repeal it. To repeal a law is to pass a law, which English jurisprudence did not allow, nor did the King pretend, that he could do.

A collusive case was arranged, in order to obtain a formal opinion of the judges upon the King's dispensing power. The Test Act offered a reward to informers, payable by the offender. The coachman of Colonel Hales

claimed it from his master as the penalty due from him for violating the Act by receiving, while a Romanist, a commission in the army. The officer pleaded the King's dispensation. The judges, who were bound to be gov erned by ancient law and precedents, and not by considerations of public equity or policy, were not without plausible reasons for the decree which they announced. They found that a dispensing power, unlimited in its terms, however, at different times, exercised with more or less caution,—had always been claimed by Its allowance the kings of England; that there were not by the judges. wanting instances of its being expressly acknowledged by Parliament; that Parliament had never expressly called it in question; and that, when a few times disputed at law, it had been uniformly sustained by the courts. Judgment was now given accordingly for the defendant, eleven judges out of the twelve consenting; and the unlimited power of the monarch to dispense with the operation of laws was settled for the present, as the law of England. The King immediately called four Popish lords, and a Jesuit priest, Father Petre, to the Privy Council.

1686.

June 21.

July 17.

High Commis

sion Court.

July 14.

The Ecclesiastical Court of High Commission had been one of the great abuses abolished by the Long Parliament. James the Second had the boldness to Revival of the revive it. He issued a decree investing three bishops and four lay lords, of which number Jef freys, now Lord Chancellor,2 was one, with a power of judicature over the Church of England; and it was expressed in their commission, that they might execute their trust without regard to any existing statute of the

1 State Trials, XI. 1165–1199; Burnet, History of his Own Time, I. 669-671; Dalrymple, Memoirs, &c., I. 171-173.

2 Jeffreys was made Lord Chancel

lor, September 28, 1685, three weeks after Lord Guilford's death. (Lord Campbell, Lives of the Chancellors, III. 380, 424.)