ORGY OF EXECUTION

Evening Star, Issue 19197, 13 March 1926, Page 13

ORGY OF EXECUTION

RQGUE IN THE WOOLSACK A “ blustering and bloody-minded rogue, convertible upon a shift of fortune into a fawning coward.” That is how Lord Birkenhead describes the Right Honorable George, Baron Jeffreys of Wcm, one of his predecessors on the Woolsack, whom every schoolboy knows as “Judge” Jeffreys. Born of decent folk of good slock near Wrexham in 1648, and leaving Cambridge without a degree, Judge Jeffreys was called to the Bar at the age of twenty. From that point his career was meteoric. At the unprecedentedly early age of twenty-three ho became Co mm on Serjeant, the second judge in the city. Ho was advanced Recorder of London at the age of thirty-one, and Chief Justice at thirty-live, being the first holder of that office to bo created a peer in 168 b. That year saw .him conducting the terrible Bloody Assizes in the west after Monmouth's rebellion, and bis elevation to the Woolsack. Six towns were visited by the judges in the autumn of 168 b, and no fewer than 1.381 people wore convicted or pleaded guilty. Nobody will ever know how many were executed, but Lord Birkenhead in bis book ‘Fourteen English Judges,’ Just published, thinks that let) is probably an over-estimate. FROZE THE BLOOD. In any case, some shocking things were done, for execution was not the worst* Sparing the lives of the others was not really mercy, for the courtiers struggled with one another for the disposal of the prisoners, who were sob] into servitude in the West Indies ami American plantations, and thus underwent such hardships and privations that made almost humane. The biggest blot in the whole Assizes was tho execution of Lady Alice Lisle, widow of one of Cromwell’s Commissioners of the Red Seal. The King was mainly responsible. But Jeff.eys’s cross-examination of the witnesses in this case showed a horrible instinct for slow torture. Indeed, some of his humorous remarks “ froze the blood of his spectators.” After the “ Blooclv Assizes” he had but three more years, for England could not tolerate the Stuarts any longer, and sent to Holland for Dutch William.

DISGUISED AS SEAMAN. When the eras]) to the Crown came, | Jeffreys disguised himself as a seaman ' and went aboard a ship at the Port of London, but oven then Ins weaknesses came back, and he went ashore , at Wapping for a drink at the Red j Cow, in Anchor and Hope Valley. It; proved anything but an anchor and! hopo for him, for ho was recognised by an attorney whom he nad once castigated. He was sent to the Tower, where he remained in a fever of apprehen-1 sion lest he should fall into the hands of the wrathful populace, and he is said to have petitioned "William for pardom But there was no need for that, for his mental anxiety and his vicious habits brought about an illness which led him to his grave a, few months, later in his forty-first rear, a”d after : all his climbing, his title became exfmet by the death of his onlv son. His memory, however, is anything but extinct, for, like most had men, be has achieved an infamous immortality.