JAMES THE SECOND.

59

stroying life. That Oates was a bad man is not a sufficient ex- c ^ p -cuse; for the guilty are almost always the first to sufier those jess,hardships which are afterwards used as precedents foroppress-ing the innocent. Thus it was in the present case. Mercilessflogging soon became an ordinary punishment forpolitical mis-demeanours of no very aggravated kind. Men were sentenced,for hasty words spoken against the government, to pain so ex-cruciating that they, with unfeigned earnestness, begged to bebrought to trial on capital charges, and sent to the gallows.Happily the progress ol this great evil was speedily stopped bythe Revolution, and by that article of the Bill of Rights whichcondemns all cruel and unusual punishments.

The villany of Dangerfield had not, like that of Oates, proceed,destroyed many innocent victims; for Dangerfield had not againsttaken up the trade of a witness till the plot had been blown HeT"upon and till juries had become incredulous.* He was broughtto trial, not for perjury, but for the less heinous offence oflibel. He had, during the agitation caused by the ExclusionBill, put forth a narrative containing some false and odiousimputations on the late and on the present King. For thispublication he was now, after the lapse of five years, suddenlytaken up, brought before the Privy Council, committed,tried, convicted, and sentenced to be whipped from Aldgateto Newgate and from Newgate to Tyburn. The wretchedman behaved with great effrontery during the trial; but, whenhe heard his doom, he went into agonies of despair, gavehimself up for dead, and chose a text for his funeral sermon.

His forebodings were just. He was not, indeed, scourged

* According to Roger North the judges decided that Dangerfield,having been previously convicted of perjury, was incompetent to he awitness of the plot. Rut this is one among many instances of Roger’sinaccuracy. It appears, from the report of the trial of Lord Castelmainein June 1680, that, after much altercation between counsel, and muchconsultation among the judges of the different courts in WestminsterHall, Dangerfield was sworn, and suffered to tell his story: but the juryvery properly refused to believe him.