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THE MONTHLY

proved.” James II. found Jefferies a fit instrument for his arbitrary purposes. After the defeat of the duke of Monmouth in the west, he employed the most sanguinary miscreants, and Jefferies among the rest, to wreak his vengeance on the deluded people. Bishop Burnet says, that Jefferies' behaviour was brutally disgusting, beyond any thing that was ever heard of in a civilized ration; "he was perpetually either drank or in a rage, liker a fury than the zeal of a judge." He required the prisoners to plead guilty, on pretence of showing them favour; but he afterwards showed them no mercy, hanging many immediately. He hanged in several places about six hundred persons. The king had a daily account of Jefferies' proceedings, which he took pleasure to relate in the drawing room to foreign ministers, and at his table he called it Jefferies' campaign. Upon Jefferies' return, he created him a peer of England, by the title of Earl of Flint. During these “bloody assizes,” the lady Lisle, a noble woman of exemplary character, whose husband had been murdered by the Stuart party, was tried for entertaining two gentlemen of the duke of Monmouth's army; and thought the jury twice brought her in not guilty, Jefferies sent them out again and again, until, upon his threatening to attaint them of treason, they pronounced her guilty. Jefferies, before he tried this lady, got the king to promise that he would not pardon her, and the only favour she obtained was the change of her sentence from burning to beheading. Mrs Gaunt, a widow, near Wapping, who was a Baptist, and spent her time in acts of charity, was tried