We have the whole ecclesiastical
jurisprudence of Charles and James Stuart put before us in that single
satirical sentence. But, powerful as Bunyan's whole picture of Judge
Hate-good's court is, it is a tame and a poor picture compared with what
all the historians tell us of the injustice and cruelty of the court of
Judge Jeffreys. Macaulay's portrait of the Lord Chief Justice of England
for ferocity and fiendishness beats out of sight Bunyan's picture of that
judge who keeps Satan's own seal in Bunyan's Book. Jeffreys was bred for
his future work at the bar of the Old Bailey, a bar already proverbial
for the licence of its tongue and for the coarseness of its cases.
Jeffreys served his apprenticeship for the service that our two last
Stuarts had in reserve for him so well, that he soon became, so his
beggared biographer describes him, the most consummate bully that ever
disgraced an English bench. The boldest impudence when he was a young
advocate, and the most brutal ferocity when he was an old judge, sat
equally secure on the brazen forehead of George Jeffreys.
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