Not satisfied with vengeance alone, Jeffreys and his friends made these trials a means of speculation.  Batches of rebels were given as presents to courtiers, who sold them for a period of ten years to be worked to death or flogged to death on West India plantations; and the Queen’s maids of honor extorted large sums of money for the pardon of a number of country schoolgirls who had been convicted of presenting Monmouth with a royal flag at Taunton.

On the return of Jeffreys to London after this carnival of blood, his father was so horrified at his cruelty that he forbade him to enter his house.  James, on the contrary, testified his approval by making Jeffreys Lord Chancellor of the realm, at the same time mildly censuring him for not having shown greater severity!

The new Lord Chancellor testified his gratitude to his royal master by procuring the murder, by means of a packed jury, of Alderman Cornish, a prominent London Whig (S479), who was especially hated by the King on account of his support of that Exclusion Bill (S478) which was intended to shut James out from the throne.  On the same day on which Cornish was executed, Jeffreys also had the satisfaction of knowing that Elizabeth Gaunt was burned alive at Tyburn, London, for having assisted one of the Rye-House conspirators, who had fought for Monmouth at Sedgemoor, to escape.

488.  The King makes Further Attempts to reestablish Catholicism; Second Declaration of Indulgence (1687); Oxford.

An event occurred about this time which encouraged James to make a more decided attempt to restore Catholicism.  Henry IV of France had granted the Protestants of his kingdom liberty of worship, by the Edict of Nantes (1598).  Louis XIV deliberately revoked it (1685).  By that shortsighted act the Huguenots, or French Protestants, were exposed to cruel persecution, and thousands of them fled to England and America.

James, who, like his late brother Charles II, was “the pensioned slave of the French King” (S476), resolved to profit by the example set him by Louis.  He did not expect to drive the Protestants out of Great Britain as Louis had driven them from France, but he hoped to restore the country to its allegiance to Rome (SS370, 382, 477).  He began by suspending the Test Act (S477) and putting Catholics into important offices in both Church and State.[1] He furthermore established an army of 13,000 men on Hounslow Heath, just outside London (1686), to hold the city in subjection in case it should rebel.

[1] The Dispensing Power and the Suspending Power were prerogatives by which the King claimed the right of preventing the enforcement of such laws as he deemed contrary to public good.  A packed bench of judges sustained the King in this position, but the power so to act was finally abolished by the Bill of Rights (1689).  See S497 and top of page xxxii, Article XII.

He next recalled the Protestant Duke of Ormonde, governor of Ireland, and put in his place Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel, a Catholic.  Tyrconnel had orders to recruit an Irish Roman Catholic army to aid the King in carrying out his designs (1687).  He raised some soldiers, but he also raised that famous song of “Lilli Burlero,” by which, as its author boasted, James was eventually “sung out of his kingdom."[2]