proportionate to the real offence. Brutal Judge Jeffries was its mouthpiece, and he sentenced him to be unfrocked and pilloried in Palace yard, to be led round Westminster Hall, with an inscription declaring his infamy over his head; to be pilloried in front of the Royal Exchange, to be whipped from Aldgate to Newgate, and after an interval of two days to be whipped from Newgate to Tyburn. He was to be imprisoned for life, and every year to be brought from his dungeon and exposed in different parts of the capital. When on the pillory he was mercilessly pelted, and nearly torn to pieces. His first flogging was executed rigorously in the presence of a vast crowd, and Oates, a man of strong frame, long stood the lash without a murmur. “But at last his stubborn fortitude gave way. His bellowings were frightful to hear. He swooned several times; but the scourge still continued to descend. When he was unbound it seemed he had borne as much as the human frame could bear without dissolution.... After an interval of forty-eight hours Oates was again brought out from his dungeon. He seemed unable to stand, and it was necessary to drag him to Tyburn on a sledge.” He was again flogged, although insensible, and a person present counted the stripes as seventeen hundred. “The doors of the prison closed upon him. During many months he remained ironed in the darkest hole in Newgate.” A contemporary account written by one of his own side declares he received “upwards of two thousand lashes--such a thing was never inflicted by any Jew, Turk, or heathen but Jeffries.... Had they hanged him they had been more merciful; had they flayed him alive it is a question whether it would have been so much torture.”[83] Dangerfield, another informer of the Oates type, but of lesser guilt, was also convicted and sentenced to be similarly flogged from Aldgate to Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn. “When he heard his doom he went into agonies of despair, gave himself up for dead, and chose a text for his funeral. His forebodings were just. He was not indeed scourged quite so severely as Oates had been; but he had not Oates’s iron strength of body and mind.” On his way back to prison he was assaulted by Mr. Francis, a Tory gentleman of Gray’s Inn, who struck him across the face with a cane and injured his eye. “Dangerfield was carried dying into Newgate. This dastardly outrage roused the indignation of the bystanders. They seized Francis, and were with difficulty restrained from tearing him in pieces. The appearance of Dangerfield’s body, which had been frightfully lacerated by the whip, inclined many to believe that his death was chiefly if not wholly caused by the stripes which he had received.” The Government laid all the blame on Francis, who was tried and executed for murder. Religion and politics still continued to supply their quota of inmates. The law was still cruelly harsh to Roman Catholics, Quakers, and all Nonconformists.