and Taunton. To the last Jeffreys continued to repeat that those who thought him cruel did not know what his orders were, that he deserved praise instead of blame, and that his clemency had drawn on him the extreme displeasure of his master.[1]
Disease, assisted by strong drink and by misery, did its work fast. The patient's stomach rejected all nourishment. He dwindled in a few weeks from a portly and even corpulent man to a skeleton. On the eighteenth of April he died, in the forty-first year of his age. He had been Chief Justice of the King's Bench at thirty-five, and Lord Chancellor at thirty-seven. In the whole history of the English bar there is no other instance of so rapid an elevation, or of so terrible a fall. The emaciated corpse was laid, with all privacy, next to the corpse of Monmouth in the chapel of the Tower.[2]
The fall of this man, once so great and so much dreaded, the horror with which he was regarded by all the respectable members of his own party, the manner in which the least respectable members of that party renounced fellowship with him in his distress, and threw on him the whole blame of crimes
- ↑ See the Life of Archbishop Sharp by his son. What passed between Scott and Jeffreys was related by Scott to Sir Joseph Jekyl. See Tindal's History; Echard, iii. 932. Echard's informant, who is not named, but who seems to have had good opportunities of knowing the truth, said that Jeffreys died, not, as the vulgar believed, of drink, but of the stone. The distinction seems to be of little importance. It is certain that Jeffreys was grossly intemperate; and his malady was one which intemperance notoriously tends to aggravate.
- ↑ See a Full and True Account of the Death of George Lord Jeffreys, licensed on the day of his death. The wretched Le Noble was never weary of repeating that Jeffreys was poisoned by the usurper. I will give a short passage as a specimen of the calumnies of which William was the object. "Il envoya," says Pasquin "ce fin ragoût de champignons au Chancelier Jeffreys, prisonnier dans la Tour, qui les trouva du même goust, et du même assaisonnement que furent les derniers dont Agrippine regala le bon-homme Claudius son époux, et que Neron appella depuis la viande des Dieux." Marforio asks: "Le Chancelier est donc mort dans la Tour?" Pasquin answers: "Il estoit trop fidèle à son Roi légitime, et trop habile dans les loix du royaume, pour échapper à l'Usurpateur qu'il ne vouloit point reconnoistre. Guillemot prit soin de faire publier que ce malheureux prisonnier estoit attaqué d'une fievre maligne; mais, à parler franchement, il vivroit peut-estre encore s'il n'avoit rien mangé que de la main de ses anciens cuisiniers." — Le Festin de Guillemot, 1689. Dangeau (May 7.) mentions a report that Jeffreys had poisoned himself. In 1693 the corpse of Jeffreys was, by the royal permission, removed from the chapel of the Tower, and laid in the Church of St. Mary Aldermary.
