42

HISTORY OH ENGLAND.

CHAP.

XVIII.

161 ) 2 .

Effect

produced

hyjames’s

Declara-

tion.

Holt down to Ketch. Then vengeance was denounced against■ all spies and all informers who had divulged to the usurpers thedesigns of the Court of Saint Germains. All justices of the peacewho should not declare for their rightful Sovereign the momentthat they heard of his landing, all gaolers who should not in-stantly set political prisoners at liberty, were to be left to theextreme rigour of the law. No exception was made in favour ofa justice or of a gaoler who might be within a hundred yards ofone of William’s regiments, and a hundred miles from thenearest place where there was a single Jacobite in arms.

It might have been expected that James, after thus denoun-cing vengeance against large classes of his subjects, would atleast have offered a general amnesty to the rest. But of generalamnesty he said not a word. He did indeed promise that anyoffender who was not in any of the categories of proscription,and w'ho should by any eminent service merit indulgence, shouldreceive a special pardon. But, with this exception, all theoffenders, hundreds of thousands in number, w r ere merely in-formed that their fate should be decided in Parliament.

The agents of James speedily dispersed his Declaration overevery part of the kingdom, and by doing so rendered a greatservice to William. The general cry was that the banished op-pressor had at least given Englishmen fair warning, and that,if, after such a warning, they welcomed him home, they wouldhave no pretence for complaining, though every county towmshould be polluted by an assize resembling that which Jeffreyshad held at Taunton. That some hundreds of people, — theJacobites put the number so low 7 as five hundred, — were to behanged without mercy w 7 as certain; and nobody who had con-curred in the Revolution, nobody who had fought for the newgovernment by sea or land, no soldier who had borne a part inthe conquest of Ireland, no Devonshire ploughman or Cornishminer who had taken arms to defend his w'ife and children