MANY VILLAINS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 19933, 18 October 1934, Page 13

MANY VILLAINS

THE GREATEST IN HISTORY MARAT TO JEFFREYS Rasputin is the most notorious and amazing figure in the Rogues’ Progress of recent years. We are still too near his times to appreciate properly his Satanic character, writes Gordon Williams in the Melbourne ‘Argus.” Men of his stamp have traced their way indelibly through history in the blood of their victims. There springs to mind that grim rascal. Judge Jeffreys, and his Bloody Assize, in which butchery, corruption, and travesty of justice were mingled. We come across an ominous procession, in the summer of 1685, trotting out of London. There are five Judges, headed by Jeffreys, a band of barristers, and, at the back, Jack Ketch and his crowd of assistants. Rightly or wrongly, the picture that has come down to us of Jeffreys is that of an alehouse lawyer, rascally and perverted—“a twisty-minded, sansconscience butcher of the law." The task allotted to him In the extermination of rebels was undoubtedly to his liking. On the first night of his presidency at the Bloody Assize he sits down to record in his diary: “This day I began the trial of rebels, and have disratched ninety-eight.” We are told that prisoners were thrust from the dock to the gallows outside — “The trees were loaden almost as thick with quarters as with leaves. The houses and steeples were covered with heads as close as other times with avens. Nothing could be more like Inferno than all those parts .. . . carcasses boyling, pitch sparkling and glowing, bodies tearing and searing Perpetual Whipping. One victim was sentenced to perpetual whipping through the market towns of England, and it is a grim commentary on Jeffery’s judgments that the poor fellow —a mere boy—pleaded that his sentence be “reduced to death.” Jeffreys netted on his own showing £30,000 out of his assize—he was wont to speak of the convicts as “the booty.” Hundreds of these sentenced were handed to courtiers for sale into slavery, and probably the Judge stood in the background to take his pay. For £IOOO relatives of the executed were permitted to inter the poor remains, and traffic in pardons was a custom, with fees ranging from £lO to £IO,OOO.

Jeffreys came to an ignominous end. After the revolution he was taken at Wapping, disguised as a sailor, and shut up in the Tower, where the cowardice that always lurked behind his inhumanity and braggadacio found full expression. Faced with the gallows, he degenerated into a snivelling, whining creature, abject and paltry, but he cheated the noose by dying of an old organic ailment. Many a romance has been woven about the poisoners of the Middle Ages The trade became so extensive that tasters were employed by the nobility, and charms of all kinds were adopted as antidoes. Even in England Elizabeth was hedged about by “samplers,” whose duty it was to taste all her food. How necessary these precautions were may be gauged from the fact that the infamous Toffano alone poisoned more than 600 people in Naples and Rome.

Medici Madness. In Venice, it is recorded, John of Ragusa officially offered the Council of Ten a selection of poisons and expressed his readiness to remove any person the council thought objectionable. The council accepted his offer, and decided to experiment first on the Emperor Maximilian. John even submitted a scale of prices, which ranged from 500 ducats for the Great Sultan to 60 ducats for the Duke of Milan. Possibly no more consistent record of tyranny and general evil is offered than that provided by the Medici, those great Florentine rulers who held their power—often, incongrouously, a beneficent power—through generations despite the machinations of their enemies. Splendid patrons of the arts, the Medici gained eminence in more than one avenue. Their family included statesmen, financiers, high religious dignitaries, and students of renown—queer, but brilliant manifestations of a queer but brilliant family. An exploit of one of their number, Lorenzo the Magnificent, may serve to illustrate some of the family tendencies. Lorenzi’s palace was at once the seat of art and learning, and the scene of indescribable debauchery. Following an attempt on his life, he caused one of the main conspirators to be hacked to pieces and dragged through the streets; the other suspects were sent into exile, the chief conspirators were hanged from the palace windows, and no less a hand than Botticelli’s was deputed to paint their writhing figures. But it remained for a woman to perpetrate the foulest crime in the Medici annals. Catherine de Medici, direct descendant of Lorenzo, inspired the ruling monarch, her son, to authorise the horrible massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, wherein 50.000 people were butchered. In the end justice overtook the family, their star waned, they became the prey of a vicious clergy and depraved aristocracy, and ended despised and execrated. Often Arrested. The courts of Europe provide their rogues Augustus the fitrong, of Saxony, as an instance, a man of gusty tastes and gargantuan appetites; and Christian VII, of Denmark, an eighteenth century Capone, who headed a gang of ruffians and terrorised the good folk of Copenhagen. Christian was so often arrested by his own police, who did not recognise the royal ruffian, that the chief of the gendarmes had to issue an order that no more street arrests be made lest the king be apprehended so often that his regal patience tire, and his wrath be visited on hapless officialdom. In the end insanity born of his depravity overtook him, and for thirty-six years he lived in shadowy monarchy. Nearer our times we find Marat, the “People’s Friend.” an insatiable seeker of heads during the red days of France’s revolution. Marat boasted that he would not be content until 100,000 “bridegrooms” had been wed to Madame la Guillotine.

A sadist, one upon whose head lay the guilt of the infamous September massacres, one reads his tale even now with bated breath and the revulsion of horror. He met his death at the hands of the beautiful Charlotte Corday, who horrified by the excesses of those who had destroyed one tyranny to create another, decided to murder the monster as a protest. Death of a Rascal. Charlotte engrossed his attention with false tales of traitorous plots, while he listened—“dwarfish, pallid, venomous, his eyes tigerish and the lust of blood upon him. and his froglike mouth working feverishly.” Even

as he noted the names of those supposedly implicated, Charlotte’s knife fell. Carlyle wrote her epitaph: “History will look fixedly at this apparition of a Charlotte Corday, will note whither Charlotte moves, how the little life burns forth so brilliantly, then vanishes, swallowed of the night.” In our own day we have had rogues of the Kreuger-Stavisky genre. There has been Panchenko, the Russian doctor. who set out to murder one by one the wealthy relatives of the intended wife of an Irishman named Lacey, and who brought about death by the Injection of diptheria bacteria. There is Madeleine de Brinvilliers, who. for the sake of her lover, killed husband, father, and frwo brothers, and who tried her ’prentice hand on the inmates of hospitals which she visited in the guise of a lady bountiful. There are the Borgias, about whom there is strange historic conflict. The rogues troop down in their evil cavalcade since the day of Cain. Their ill-deeds are all documented.