“Woe to the vanquished!” James now wreaked such a vengeance on Monmouth’s poor, deluded followers that his name has become a byword of inhuman cruelty. A brutal soldier named Kirke was sent down to the west with his “lambs,” and the savage sport began. You may still see at Taunton the house in which he lodged. It was formerly an inn, and on its signpost he hanged scores of peasants, while his drums struck up and his trumpets sounded “so that they should have music to their dancing!” “My lord,” said the Bishop of Bath and Wells to Lord Feversham, who was equally ferocious, “this is murder, not law; the battle being over, these poor wretches should be tried.” Then came Judge Jeffreys, a drunken, foul-mouthed, degraded wretch, with a forehead of brass and lungs of leather. Nothing more revolting than his so-called trials have ever disgraced our annals. He roared, he bullied, he blasphemed, he laughed, joked, and swore until men believed him to be drunk from morning till night. So he was—drunk with blood. When the “Bloody Assize” was concluded, Jeffreys openly boasted that he had hanged more traitors than all the Chief-justices since the Conquest. “At every spot where two roads met, and every market-place, on the green of every large village which had furnished Monmouth with soldiers, ironed corpses clattering in the wind, or heads and quarters stuck on poles, poisoned the air and made the traveller sick with horror. In many parishes the peasantry could not assemble in the house of God without seeing the ghastly face of a neighbour grinning at them over the porch.” Perhaps the most infamous sentence of this ermined fiend was that on Alice Lisle, the widow of a man who had been one of the regicides, and had filled high posts under the Commonwealth. Her crime was that she had sheltered two fugitives from Sedgemoor. She was old and deaf; she had no counsel to defend her; and she pleaded that what she had done was simply an act of common charity. So innocent and devoid of offence did she seem that the jury were inclined to acquit her. Jeffreys turned on them with the utmost fury, and at length they brought in a craven verdict of “guilty.” “Gentlemen,” said he, “in your place I would find her guilty were she my own mother.” It was the only word of truth which fell from his lips during the trial. Then he condemned her to be burnt alive that very afternoon. Appeals for mercy came to him on all hands and from all classes. He consented to postpone the execution for five days, during which ladies of high rank interceded with James for the poor old lady, but all in vain. The only mercy wrung from the pitiless king was to forgo the burning in favour of hanging. She went to her death with serene courage, and good men and women held up their hands in horror throughout the length and breadth of the land. Elizabeth Gaunt, a pious and charitable Baptist, was actually burnt alive at Tyburn on a like charge.