It seems strange,—and to many who lived at the time it appeared incredible,—that life should not only have been endurable to the people of the Western Counties that autumn, but that it had satisfactions,—even joys of its own, which made appear to old and young who survived it the most heavenly season of their whole existence. Those whose hearts it was intended to break—those whose spirit it was needful to subdue—disappointed the King, and his councillors and his judges, by proving themselves beyond the reach of tyranny. This could not be true of all, nor of most: but the oppressors felt the vexation as keenly as if their tortures had ceased to give pain. Among the four hundred families who contributed victims to the scaffold, or to the impromptu gibbets, there were doubtless many who underwent keen agony of mind, and whose afterlives were darkened by the events of the Assize of September, 1685; but the King and his tools could scarcely enjoy the pain, while there were some who did not shrink, nor supplicate, nor even mourn. The King and his priests said the time was out of joint, when punishment could not humble and alarm. The Bishops said the time was out of joint, when the Church of the Reformation was despised and deserted in high places in the very home of the Reformation, where Papists and schismatics were evidently tending to mutual toleration, in a common enmity to the Church. The Puritans could not but think the time out of joint, when, a century after the Reformation, the Lord’s people found the kingdom one great prison
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