Immediately after Monmouth’s death, Judge Jeffreys was sent to hold his “bloody assizes” in the west. His first victim was Mrs Lisle, widow of one of the Commonwealth judges. The charge against her was that of giving shelter to two of Monmouth’s fugitives. For this, Jeffreys sentenced her to be burnt alive, and further ordered that the sentence should be executed on the very day that his foul mouth uttered it. The clergy of Winchester promptly interfered; three days’ respite were wrung from the hard-hearted judge; and the venerable matron was beheaded instead of being burnt. From Winchester this brutal being went to Dorchester, on the same murderous business. Here the court, by order of Jeffreys, was hung with scarlet; more than three hundred persons were waiting to be tried; two hundred and ninety-two received sentence of death, but only about eighty were hanged, the rest being imprisoned, severely whipped, or transported. Those that were transported were sold as slaves; and the bodies of those that were hanged were cut into quarters, and stuck up on gibbets. For this bloody work, and while he was yet at Dorchester, Jeffreys was rewarded and encouraged by his applauding and grateful sovereign, who raised him from the seat of Lord Chief-Justice to that of Lord Chancellor. Jeffreys, blushing with his new honours, now went from Dorchester to Exeter, where another red list of two hundred and forty-three prisoners was laid before him, most of whom in a few days were hanged, drawn, and quartered. At Taunton, nearly eleven hundred prisoners were arraigned for high treason. Ten hundred and forty confessed themselves guilty; only six ventured to put themselves on trial; and two hundred and thirty-nine, at the very least, were executed with astounding rapidity. To spread the terror more widely, these executions took place in not fewer than thirty-six different towns and villages. The dripping heads and gory limbs of the deceased were fixed in the most conspicuous places,—in the streets, by the highways, over town halls, and over the very churches. At every spot where two roads met, in every market-place, and on the green of every village that had furnished Monmouth with men, ironed corpses clattered in the wind, or heads and quarters of human beings, stuck on poles, poisoned the air, and made the passing traveller sick with horror. The country, for a stretch of sixty miles, from Bristol to Exeter, was studded with a new and terrible sort of sign-posts, adorned with the mangled bodies of its slaughtered inhabitants. The wretched Jeffreys boasted, when he returned to London, that in his “bloody campaign” he had hanged more men than all the judges of England had hanged since the time of William the Conqueror.