Chapter 38

JUDGE JEFFREYS’ CHAIR.

All the incidents in Dorchester’s history seem insignificant beside the tremendous melodrama of the ‘Bloody Assize.’ The stranger has eyes and ears for little else than the story of that terrible time, and longs to see the Court where Jeffreys sat, mad with drink and disease, and sentenced the unhappy prisoners to floggings, slavery, or death. Unhappily, that historic room has disappeared, but ‘Judge Jeffreys’ chair’ is still to be seen in the modern Town Hall, and one can approach in imagination nearer to that awful year{274} of 1685 by gazing at ‘Judge Jeffreys’ Lodgings,’ still standing in High West Street, over Dawes’ china shop.

It must have been with a ferocious satisfaction that Jeffreys arrived here to open that Assize, for Dorchester had been a ‘malignant’ town and a thorn in the side of the Royalists forty years before. A kind of wild retribution was to fall upon it now, not only for the share that this district of the West had in Monmouth’s Rebellion in this unhappy year, but for the Puritanism of a bygone generation.

Jeffreys reached here on 2nd September and the Assize was opened on the following day, lasting until the 8th. Macaulay has given a most convincing picture of it:—

‘The Court was hung, by order of the Chief Justice, with scarlet; and this innovation seemed to the multitude to indicate a bloody purpose. It was also rumoured that when the clergyman, who preached the assize sermon, enforced the duty of mercy, the ferocious mouth of the Judge was distorted by an ominous grin. These things made men augur ill of what was to follow.
GEORGE THE THIRD

‘More than three hundred prisoners were to be tried. The work seemed heavy; but Jeffreys had a contrivance for making it light. He let it be understood that the only chance of obtaining pardon or respite was to plead guilty. Twenty-nine persons who put themselves on their country, and were convicted, were ordered to be tied up without delay. The remaining prisoners pleaded guilty by scores. Two hundred and ninety-two received sentence of death. The whole{275} number hanged in Dorsetshire amounted to seventy-four.’

It is a relief to turn from such things to the less tragical coaching era. The ‘King’s Arms,’ which was formerly the great coaching hostelry of Dorchester, still keeps pride of place here, and its capacious bay-windows of old-fashioned design yet look down upon the chief street. Instead, however, of the kings and princes and the great ones of the earth who used to be driven up in fine style in their ‘chariots’ a hundred years ago, and in place of the weary coach-travellers who used to alight at the hospitable doors of the ‘King’s Arms,’ the commercial travellers of to-day are deposited here by the hotel omnibus from the railway station with little or no remains of that pomp and circumstance which accompanied arrivals in the olden time. King George the Third was well acquainted with this capacious house, for his horses were changed here on his numerous journeys through Dorchester between London, Windsor, and Weymouth. He kept a commonplace Court in the summer at Weymouth for many years, and thus made the fortune of that town, while his son, the Prince of Wales, was similarly making Brighthelmstone popular. If we are to believe the story of the Duchesse d’Abrantes, Napoleon had conceived the very theatrical idea of kidnapping the King on one of these journeys. The exploit was planned for execution in the wild and lonely country between Dorchester and Weymouth: possibly beneath the grim shadow of sullen Maumsbury, or of prehistoric Maiden Castle. The King and his escort were to have been surprised by a party{276} of secretly-landed French sailors, and his Majesty forthwith hustled on board an open boat which was then to be rowed across the Channel to Cherbourg. According to this remarkable statement, the English coastguards had been heavily bribed to assist in this affair. It was magnificent, but it was not war—nor even business. As an elaborate joke, the project has its distinctly humorous aspects, as one vividly conjures up a picture of ‘Farmer George,’ helplessly sea-sick, leaning on the gunwale of the row-boat, with the equally unhappy sailors toiling away at rowing those seventy miles of salt water. Then, too, the thought of that essentially unromantic King compelled to cut a ridiculous figure as a kind of modern travesty of the imprisoned Richard Lionheart, raises a smile. But, although Napoleon, who was not a gentleman, may very possibly have entertained this rather characteristic notion, he certainly never attempted to put it into execution, and the road to Weymouth is by so much the poorer in incident.

But to return to the ‘King’s Arms,’ which figures in Mr. Thomas Hardy’s story. Here it was, looking in with the crowd on the street, that Susan saw her long-lost husband presiding as Mayor at the banquet, the beginning of all his troubles.

Although the stranger who has no ties with Dorchester to help paint it in such glowing colours as those used by that writer, who finds it ‘one of the cleanest and prettiest towns in the West of England,’ cannot subscribe to that description, the town is of a supreme interest to the literary pilgrim, who can identify many spots hallowed by Mr. Hardy’s genius.{277}
THE ROMAN ROAD
Image unavailable: DORCHESTER.
DORCHESTER.

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There are those in Dorsetshire who bitterly resent the Tony Kytes, the Car Darches, the Bathshebas, and in especial poor Tess, who flit through his unconventional pages, and hold that he deprives the Dorset peasant of his moral character; but if you hold no brief for the natives in their relation to the Ten Commandments, why, it need matter little or nothing to you whether his characters are intended as portraitures, or are evolved wholly from a peculiar imagination. It remains only to say that they are very real characters to the reader, who can follow their loves and hatreds, their comedy and tragedy, and can trace their footsteps with a great deal more personal interest than can be stirred up over the doings of many historical personages.