First posted 20030215
trivial update 20050507

Sir George Jeffreys, Recorder of London 1678-80.
Painting by an unknown artist. (National Portrait Gallery)
Source of photo -- frontispiece of P. J. Helm, Jeffreys. We scanned the head only from a 3/4 length seated portrait.

Index

Conflicting views on the "Bloody Assizes" (1685)

The Whig view, prevalent in literature

a moderate view by Whig historian G.M. Trevelyan (1904)
ferociously partisan contemporary pamphlets

the Western Martyrology
The Merciful Assizes (heavy-handed satire)

the unabashedly partisan (but eloquent) Lord Macaulay (1848)

Revisionist views: P.J. Helm

Jeffreys, George, first Baron Jeffreys (1644-1689)
educated at St. Paul's School, at Westminster, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, was lord chief justice, 1682. He presided at the trial of Titus Oates, and is chiefly notorious for his brutality and as the judge who held the 'Bloody Assizes.' He was arrested in 1688 and died in the Tower after petitioning for a pardon.
Source: editor Sir Paul Harvey, The Oxford Companion to English Literature 4th Edition, 1967; p. 428.

From BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/northeast/guides/halloffame/historical/judge_george_jeffreys.shtml
George Jeffreys was born at Acton Park in 1648, the son of John Jeffreys and Margaret Ireland. His grandfather was a judge in North Wales and George eventually decided on a career in law much to his parents' disapproval. Educated at Shrewsbury and St Paul's Westminster and Cambridge. He began his studies in the Inner Temple in 1663 and was acting as an advocate before he was officially called to the bar. He entered Gray's Inn. He was appointed Solicitor General to the Duke of York later James II and was knighted in 1677. He became recorder of London in 1678. At the age of 33 he became Lord Chief Justice of England and a privy counsellor and two years later Lord Chancellor. In 1683 he was created Baron Jeffreys of Wem. He is known as Hanging Judge Jeffreys because of the punishment he handed out at the trials of the supporters of the Duke of Monmouth. In 1688 when James II fled the country, Jeffreys was placed in the Tower of London for his own safety. He died there the following year aged 44 of kidney disease.
--Courtesy Wrexham County Borough Council

How people saw Judge Jeffreys depended on their politics.

After the death of Oliver Cromwell (1658), Charles II was "restored" (at the invitation of a newly-elected Parliament) to the English throne in 1660. Over the 25 years of his reign (1660-1685), England's political classes gradually split into "Whigs" (reliant on parliamentary power; distrustful of the Catholic Church, the Catholic heir to the throne Charles's brother James, and Catholic tendencies in the re-established Anglican Church) and "Tories" (sympathetic to royal power and to the established Anglican Church; hostile to Protestant "dissenters," eg Presbyterians, Baptists, and Quakers). Both sides relied on mobs, biased judges, and biased juries to have their way.

The Whigs overplayed their hand in 1678-1683, encouraging the flamboyant perjurer Titus Oates to lodge conspiracy and treason charges against James and other high officials suspected of Catholic sympathies; some were falsely convicted and cruelly executed. Like U.S. President Eisenhower in the McCarthy era, Charles II soon disbelieved the conspiracy-monger (Oates) but dared not confront him openly. Instead he resisted the blood-lust quietly, waiting for the Oates faction and their mobs to discredit themselves. In 1681 he was able to dissolve a Whig parliament and rule directly, with Tory support.

In 1685, Charles II died and his Catholic brother James II succeeded to the throne. He expressed no intention to impose Catholicism on an intensely anti-Catholic England, but militant Whigs distrusted him anyways. Some supported a revolt by Charles II's illegitimate son the Duke of Monmouth (1685), but it was speedily suppressed, confined to the southwest of England. James II send Judge Jeffreys (and a couple of others) to try the defeated rebels; the resulting "Bloody Assizes," especially as written up by Macaulay (see below), would make Jeffreys's reputation in history.

James II now overplayed his hand, dismissing Parliament (1685), appointing Catholics as officials, allying himself with the cruelly despotic Louis XIV of France, dismissing Anglican clergyman who did not support his Catholic policy, and mobilizing large armies in both Ireland (largely Catholic, hence inspiring intense English distrust) and just outside London. In particular, his attack on the Anglican Church neutralized much of his support amoung "Tories."

The 1685 execution of the rebel Duke of Monmouth united Whig opinion behind the only remaining Protestant claimant to the throne, William of Orange, husband of James II's daughter Mary. In 1688, Whigs and disaffected Tories invited him to invade England, drive out James II, and assume the English throne with Queen Mary.

Since the Whigs won, they got to write English history. Those who had suppressed Whig rebels (eg Judge Jeffreys) now were illegitimate. Jeffreys, lodged in prison and soon dying of ill-health anyways, was also used as a convenient scapegoat by the exiled James II (still hoping for an eventual restoration), as well as James's principal advisor the Earl of Sunderland.

The Whig view, prevalent in national folklore

G.M. Trevelyan

Historian G.M. Trevelyan (England Under the Stuarts, 1904) presents a moderate Whig view:
The revenge taken by James upon his subjects went far beyond expectation and precedent. It was perhaps natural that 800 rebels should be sent to forced labour in the Barbadoes. The Cromwellians in 1648, and the House of Hanover in 1715, committed the like cruelty. Transportation was the fate which the common rebel might customarily expect if taken in arms. But death had for fifty years past been regarded as the punishment proper for the leaders alone, when James II reverted to the more barbarous methods of Elizabeth and the medieval kings. Not content with the long tale of military executions by Kirke and Feversham in the days immediately following the battle, he allowed over 300 of the peasants to be hanged by Jeffreys in the Bloody Assize. He also allowed one women, Alice Lisle, to be beheaded for exercising common charity to fugitives who implored food and shelter; and another, Elizabeth Gaunt, to be burned alive for saving one of the conspirators of the Rye House plot. In the spirit of the hour, Cornish, one of the most influential and honourable of the Whig merchants of London so bitterly hated by the Court, was singled out and murdered on a false charge of treason. These horrors appealed the more forcibly to the imagination of all, because the highways and public places in town and country were elaborately desecrated with the corpses and hewn quarters of the well-loved dead; because Jeffreys on the bench of justice shouted, swore and laughed over his victims, and because the sufferers were religious men who went to the gallows and butchery glorifying God. The analogy of the Marian persecution was the first thing to strike a generation brought up on Foxe's Book of Martyrs. The horror excited among the Tories themselves is the best comment on the conduct of Jeffreys and his master. The Bloody Assize did not shake James's throne, but it lent to the opposition, provoked by his subsequent action, the character and the enthusiam of outraged humanity in revolt. When Jeffreys, in his last dreadful days on earth, was sheltered by the walls of the Tower from a nation of men seeking to kill him with their own hands, he was hiding not from the Whig mob but from the human race.
[reprinted by Methuen & Co. 1985; pp. 414-415]

Whig pamphlets

Numerous pamphlets of the late 1600s reviled Judge Jeffreys. The two best known are:
The Western Martyrology (1689, 1705)
The final version of 1705 had this title:
The Western Martyrology or Bloody Assizes containing the Lives, Trials, and Dying-Speeches of all those Eminent Protestants that Suffer'd in the west of England, and Elsewhere From the Year 1678, to this Time Together with the Life and Death of George L. Jeffreys. The Fifth Editon. To which is now added, to make it complete, An Account of the Barbrous Whippings of Several persons in the West. Also the Trial and Case of Mr. John Tutchin (the Author of the Observator), with the Cruel Sentence pass'd upon him; and his petition to K. James to be hang'd: never before Printed. With an Alphabeltical Table to the Whole. London Printed for John Marshall at the Bible in Grace-Church-Street. MDCCV.
Source: Helm, p. 185

On Judge Jeffreys's behavior:
His dealing with 'em in not to be paralleled by any thing but the new French Dragons dragoons, or the old Cut-throats and Lord Chief Justices of the poor Albigenses... Had the Great Turk sent his Janissaries, or the Tartar his Armies among 'em they'd 'scaped better. Humanity could not offend so far to deserve such Punishment as he inflicted. A certain barbarous Joy and Pleasure grinned from his Brutal Soul through his Bloody Eyes, whenever he was sentencing any of the poor Souls to Death and Torment; so much worse than Nero, as when that Monster wisht he had never learnt to write, because forced to set his Name to Warrants for Execution of Malefactors, Jeffreys would have been glad if every letter he writ had been such a Warrant, and every Word a Sentence of death. He observed neither Humanity to the Dead, nor Civility to the Living. He made all the West an Aceldama (the "potter's field" of the Gospels, where "strangers" were buried outside Jerusalem --HSC); some places quite depopulated, and nothing to be seen in 'em but forsaken Walls, unlucky Gibbets and Ghostly Carcasses. The Trees were laden almost as thick with Quarters as Leaves. The Houses and Steeples covered as close with Heads as at other Times frequently in that Country with Crows and Ravens. Nothing could be liker Hell than all those parts, nothing so like the Devil as he. Caldrons hissing, Carcasses boyling, Pitch and Tar sparkling and glowing, Blood and Limbs boyling, and tearing, and mangling, and he the great Director of all; and in a Word, discharging his Place who sent him, the best deserving to be the late King's Chief Justice there, and Chancellor after, of any man that breathed since Cain and Judas.
Source: Helm, pp. 189-190

The Merciful Assizes (a heavy-handed satire)
The many hundreds he hanged in the West, shews he was a stout Man, his Entrails Brass, and his Heart Steel; and this was necessary in the Post where the King had placed him. -- Hang, Draw and Quarter, was part of his Loyalty; and yet we may call him a Merciful Judge. For he had such respect to the Souls of men, that he scarce hanged any but those that were innocent, and of those he has more than another, 'twas in his Haste to send Whiggs to Heaven: For, hang Men first, and try 'em afterward (witness Sir Thomas Armstrong's death) was his peculiar Talent. And so his having a Hand in all the Protestant Blood, from the murder of Godfrey to the last that died in the West, shewed him a faithful servant to King James; ...
Source: Helm, p. 186

Thomas Babington Macaulay

The Whig pamphlets were distilled by Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), whose History of England Volume I (1848) gave Jeffreys a memorable character and quotes. The last I checked (2003/0130), the History of England was available on-line, and relevant parts of Volume 1, Chapters 4 and 5 could be found at URLs:
http://www.strecorsoc.org/macaulay/m04a.html#4a7
http://www.strecorsoc.org/macaulay/m05e.html#5e8
http://www.strecorsoc.org/macaulay/m05f.html

Macaulay on the character of Judge Jeffreys:

He was a man of quick and vigorous parts, but constitutionally prone to insolence and to the angry passions. When just emerging from boyhood he had risen into practice at the Old Bailey bar, a bar where advocates have always used a license of tongue unknown in Westminster Hall. Here, during many years his chief business was to examine and crossexamine the most hardened miscreants of a great capital. Daily conflicts with prostitutes and thieves called out and exercised his powers so effectually that he became the most consummate bully ever known in his profession. Tenderness for others and respect for himself were feelings alike unknown to him. He acquired a boundless command of the rhetoric in which the vulgar express hatred and contempt. The profusion of maledictions and vituperative epithets which composed his vocabulary could hardly have been rivalled in the fishmarket or the beargarden. His countenance and his voice must always have been unamiable. But these natural advantages,--for such he seems to have thought them,--he had improved to such a degree that there were few who, in his paroxysms of rage, could see or hear him without emotion. Impudence and ferocity sate upon his brow. The glare of his eyes had a fascination for the unhappy victim on whom they were fixed. Yet his brow and his eye were less terrible than the savage lines of his mouth. His yell of fury, as was said by one who had often heard it, sounded like the thunder of the judgment day. These qualifications he carried, while still a young man, from the bar to the bench. He early became Common Serjeant, and then Recorder of London. As a judge at the City sessions he exhibited the same propensities which afterwards, in a higher post, gained for him an unenviable immortality. Already might be remarked in him the most odious vice which is incident to human nature, a delight in misery merely as misery. There was a fiendish exultation in the way in which he pronounced sentence on offenders. Their weeping and imploring seemed to titillate him voluptuously; and he loved to scare them into fits by dilating with luxuriant amplification on all the details of what they were to suffer. Thus, when he had an opportunity of ordering an unlucky adventuress to be whipped at the cart's tail, "Hangman," he would exclaim, "I charge you to pay particular attention to this lady! Scourge her soundly man! Scourge her till the blood runs down! It is Christmas, a cold time for Madam to strip in! See that you warm her shoulders thoroughly!"(230) He was hardly less facetious when he passed judgment on poor Lodowick Muggleton, the drunken tailor who fancied himself a prophet. "Impudent rogue!" roared Jeffreys, "thou shalt have an easy, easy, easy punishment!" One part of this easy punishment was the pillory, in which the wretched fanatic was almost killed with brickbats.(231)

Macaulay offers immortal quotes from Judge Jeffreys:
This [the trial of Alice Lisle for aiding a fugitive traitor] was the first case of treason on the circuit; and there seemed to be a strong probability that his prey would escape him [Judge Jeffries]. He stormed, cursed, and swore in language which no wellbred man would have used at a race or a cockfight. One witness named Dunne, partly from concern for Lady Alice, and partly from fright at the threats and maledictions of the Chief Justice, entirely lost his head, and at last stood silent.
"Oh how hard the truth is," said Jeffreys, "to come out of a lying Presbyterian knave."
The witness, after a pause of some minutes, stammered a few unmeaning words.
"Was there ever," exclaimed the judge, with an oath, "was there ever such a villain on the face of the earth? Dost thou believe that there is a God? Dost thou believe in hell fire. Of all the witnesses that I ever met with I never saw thy fellow."
Still the poor man, scared out of his senses, remained mute;
and again Jeffreys burst forth. "I hope, gentlemen of the jury, that you take notice of the horrible carriage of this fellow. How can one help abhorring both these men and their religion? A Turk is a saint to such a fellow as this. A Pagan would be ashamed of such villany. Oh blessed Jesus! What a generation of vipers do we live among!"
"I cannot tell what to say, my Lord," faltered Dunne.
The judge again broke forth into a volley of oaths. "Was there ever," he cried, "such an impudent rascal? Hold the candle to him that we may see his brazen face. You, gentlemen, that are of counsel for the crown, see that an information for perjury be preferred against this fellow."

[...]

A prisoner affirmed that the witnesses who appeared against him were not entitled to credit. One of them, he said, was a Papist, and another a prostitute.
"Thou impudent rebel," exclaimed the Judge, "to reflect on the King's evidence! I see thee, villain, I see thee already with the halter round thy neck."

Another produced testimony that he was a good Protestant.
"Protestant! " said Jeffreys; "you mean Presbyterian. I'll hold you a wager of it. I can smell a Presbyterian forty miles."

One wretched man moved the pity even of bitter Tories. "My Lord," they said, "this poor creature is on the parish."
"Do not trouble yourselves," said the Judge, "I will ease the parish of the burden."

[...]

A still more frightful sentence was passed on a lad named Tutchin, who was tried for seditious words.
He was, as usual, interrupted in his defence by ribaldry and scurrility from the judgment seat. "You are a rebel; and all your family have been rebels since Adam. They tell me that you are a poet. I'll cap verses with you." The sentence was that the boy should be imprisoned seven years, and should, during that period, be flogged through every market town in Dorsetshire every year.
The women in the galleries burst into tears. The clerk of the arraigns stood up in great disorder. "My Lord," said he, "the prisoner is very young. There are many market towns in our county. The sentence amounts to whipping once a fortnight for seven years."
"If he is a young man," said Jeffreys, "he is an old rogue. Ladies, you do not know the villain as well as I do. The punishment is not half bad enough for him. All the interest in England shall not alter it."
As it turned out, however, Tutchin came down with smallpox, which caused his sentence to be postponed. It was ultimately remitted "in return for a bribe which reduced the prisoner to poverty.]

Revisionist Views

P. J. Helm

Reference:
P.J. Helm, Jeffreys, Robert Hale, London, 1966.

P.J. Helm argues that Jeffreys was no worse than other judges of his time.

(1) While Jeffreys was a loud-mouthed bully, such qualities were essential for good judges dealing with the conditions he had to face:
routine perjury,
The seventeenth-century judge was compelled by important differences in legal procedure to play what seems at first sight an improperly large part in many trials. In actions for treason and for felony the accused was not allowed counsel. He could himself cross-examine witnesses if he wished, and he might make a statement, but not on oath. In these circumstances the judge had to keep an eye on the prosecution, supervise the defence, and himself examine with the greatest severity any witnesses whom he suspected of committing perjury. It was his duty to excavate the facts and present his discoveries to the jury.
Helm, pp. 16-17.

and courts that were tumultuous echo-chambers.
The great courts carried the same names (as now): King's Bench, common Pleas, Chancery. In the seventeenth century, though, the judges all sat in the same room, Westminster Hall, two hundred and fifty feet long and seventy feet wide. At the upper end was King's Bench, where the Attorney-General prosecuted in the great cases of treason, murder and felony. On the right hand of the entrance was Common Pleas, where civil cases were decided, and in the south-east corner was Chancery, presided over by the Lord Chancellor, the apex of the whole Judicial system, the 'keeper of the King's conscience'.

All were at work simultaneously, their courts marked out by low partitions, and the open space between them was thronged with people: idle spectators or interested parties, 'humming' their disapproval or cheering a popular verdict; students from the Inns of Court, busily taking notes; pampleteers, composing accounts, more or less inaccurate, in one of the newly constructed forms of shorthand; 'straw-men' waiting to destroy a man with their perjured evidence; solicitors, clerks and gaolers; men selling everything that might be wanted, from ink to food. All of them talking, jostling, clattering in and out. And over all, the stink of disease and unwashed bodies, so that the judges carried herbs to clear the air they breathed.

To control these courts successfully one had to combine the qualities and activities of leading actor, producer -- and sergeant-major. There was no other way.
Helm, pp. 15-16

(2) What sounds like gloating today was expected of judges in those days, eg when Jeffreys was "Recorder" in 1678:
At that time, it was the custom for those found guilty to be brought back at the end of the Sessions and sentenced in groups, when they would be reminded of the enormity of their crimes and urged to repent. The was the Recorder's duty.
(Helm, p. 30)

(3) He did his king's bidding, but judicial independence was a value only gradually emerging in the seventeenth century. (Helm, p. 16)

(4) Many of the worst accounts of him are unreliable and partisan.

Helm makes a point of refuting some of the more memorable anecdotes Macaulay told against Jeffreys.
The "adventuress" (habitual thief) whom Jeffreys sentenced to be whipped:
Helm claims Macaulay edited the actual transcript to exaggerate "fiendish exultation." (Helm, pp. 30-31)

The "prophet" Lodowick Muggleton:
Helm points out that (1) Jeffreys, the lower-ranking "recorder," was simply transmitting the sentence named by his judicial superiors. (2) There is no record of what Jeffreys actually said, except from a highly dubious pamphlet by Muggleton himself. (Helm, pp. 24-26)

The trial of Alice Lisle:
Helm points out that the witness Dunne was obviously lying (trying to withhold evidence that would incriminate the defendant), and it was Jeffreys's duty (under legal standards of the time) to browbeat him into telling the truth.
Helm also points out the Jeffreys seems to have encouraged the defendant to petition for mercy after conviction; that did at least save her from being burned alive. Jeffreys had nothing to do with the case of Elizabeth Gaunt, who was burned alive. (Helm, pp. 134-138)

The case of John Tutchin :
Macaulay's account mirrors that of John Tutchin (1661-1707) himself, one of the three biased authors (the others were Titus Oates and John Dunton) of the Western Martyrology. Helms claims the records show that Tutchin had been sentenced to no more than 5 marks fine (3 1/3 pounds, about $17 in gold, or maybe $250 in the currency of 2003) or imprisonment, and one whipping, never delivered.

Helm also makes the point that the toll of the Bloody Assizes was not seriously out of line with English practice of the time, only gradually becoming more humane. (Helm, pp. 199-201)

date	description of revolt	Number of rebels	number executed	number transported
1569	Northern counties against Elizabeth I	9000 max.	600-800
mid 1600s	Scots vs. Cromwell	?	hundreds starved to death in Durham Cathedral	1800
1685	Whigs against James II	?	250-320	800
1715	Jacobites	?	-	1000
1745-46	Jacobites -- Scottish Highlands	?	80	1500




For men, execution for treason was customarily by the torture of "drawing and quartering." It was not as lengthy as the ancient tortures of the boats (old Persia), crucifixion (ancient Rome), or the 600 cuts (old China), but its impact on involuntary spectators was disgusting.
Women convicted of treason were burned alive, like convicted "witches." In that historical context, Sir Charles Napier may have sounded a bit smug 150 years later, refusing the plea of some Brahmins of Sindh to allow suttee: "It is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and hang them."

English savagery toward defeated rebels worked over time: their communities were afraid of further hideous reprisals, and in any case were economically devastated by plundering armies and ruinous fines; many of their people would emigrate. The terrorization of Whig rebels in 1685 was an exception because its results were reversed only 3 years later, soon enough for their families and friends to retain their hatreds and place them in the national memory.

From a pragmatic viewpoint, Helm suggests that James II blundered by sending Jeffreys and other "hanging judges" to punish captured rebels, rather than letting his victorious commanders in the field do the dirty work quickly and take the blame. (Helm, pp. 132-133, 144-145). One is put in mind of Machiavelli's advice, :


Severities ... may be called properly used, if of evil it is lawful to speak well, that are applied at one blow and are necessary to one's security, and that are not persisted in afterwards unless they can be turned to the advantage of the subjects. The badly employed are those which, notwithstanding they may be few in the commencement, multiply with time rather than decrease.
--Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter 8 "Concerning Those Who Have Obtained A Principality By Wickedness"