Skip to content

Judge Jeffreys (Alan Sinder)

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

Stephensonia

The Judge has made an enemy of the smarter brother of Half-cocked Jack - Churchill's man Bob Shaftoe.

Authored entries

Judge George Jeffreys

grabbed from various sources in Wikipedia

jj1.jpg
Judge Jeffreys
Seems Neal had the bit about the eyebrows right

In 1686 Judge George Jeffreys toured the Western Circuit in a series of trials that became known as the “Bloody Assizes.” James II instructed Jeffreys to provide transportable criminals to individuals, including the queen to whom the king had allotted prisoners taken in the Monmouth rebellion in 1685 in batches of one hundred. Although angered by the favoritism displayed by the order and the treatment of the rebels, Jeffreys condemned 841 rebels to Barbados to serve terms not less than 10 years. The queen’s profits alone on the Monmouth rebels amounted to not less than 1,000 guineas. When considered in the context of the total numbers of servants, convicts and political prisoners represent a relatively small proportion. Sugar demanded labour and this poured into Barbados in increasingly large numbers, quickly making the island not only the most populated of England's overseas colonies, but also one of the most densely populated places in the world. Initially whites from Britain were brought in, either as indentured servants or prisoners. For example, after the Somerset uprising, many West Country men were exiled or "barbadosed" by Judge Jeffreys.

Being thus conspicuously identified with the most tyrannical measures of James II, Jeffreys found himself in a desperate plight when on the 11th of December 1688 the king fled from the country on the approach to London of William of Orange. The lord chancellor attempted to escape like his master; but in spite of his disguise as a common seaman he was recognized in a tavern at Wapping possibly, as Roger North relates, by an attorney whom Jeffreys had terrified on some occasion in the court of chancery and was arrested and conveyed to the Tower for his own safety. The kidney disease from which he had long suffered had recently made fatal progress, and he died in the Tower on the 18th of April 1689.

Quotes:

"The portrait of Judge Hate-good in The Pilgrim’s Progress is but a poor replica, as our artists say, of the portrait of Judge Jeffreys in our English history books. ... " 1

An Extract from Gilbert Burnett's The History of my Own Times speaking of Judge Jeffreys: "His behaviour was beyond anything that was ever heard of in a civilized nation. He was perpetually either drunk or in a rage, liker a fury that the zeal of a judge. He required the prisoners to plead guilty. And in that case he gave them some hope of favour, if they gave him no trouble; otherwise he told them, he would execute the letter of the law upon them in its utmost severity.

This made many plead guilty, who had a great defence in law. But he shewed no mercy. He ordered a great many to be hanged up immediately without allowing them a minute's time to say their prayers. He hanged, in several places, about six hundred persons. The greatest part of these were of the meanest sort, and no distinction. The impieties with which he treated them, and his behaviour towards some of the nobility and gentry that were well affected, but came and pleaded in favour of some prisoners, would have amazed one, if done by a bashaw in Turkey. England had never known anything like it.

But that which brought all his excesses to be impured to the king himself, was, that the king had a particular account of all his proceedings writ to him every day. And he took pleasure to relate them in the drawing room to foreign ministers, and at his table, calling it Jeffrey's campaign, speaking of all he had done in a style that neither became the majesty nor the mercifulness of a great prince.

And upon Jeffreys coming back, he was created a baron and peer of England, a dignity which, though anciently some judges were raised to it, yet in these latter ages, as there was no example of it, so it was though inconsistent with the character of a judge."