588 King James II. summons a Parliament. ever flattered itself with hope of making way against a compact and powerful government. Powerful, for the new King had not yet committed himself by crime or ostentatious bigotry. He had summoned a Parliament to help him by their advice, who were, in the meantime, the proper representatives of the nation, able to rebuke or to entreat, to sanction good or to denounce iniquity. Selfish feelings governed all these noisy sculking patriots. Not one could be compared to Algernon Sydney, for patience, dignity, high principle, or intellectual strength. They were weary of being in exile, yet would not submit and ask for pardon. They preferred to set the kingdom in a blaze. This summoning of Parliament (Sir John Trevor, Speaker) forms the subject of two Pepysian Ballads, not yet reprinted (Pepys Coll., II. 235, 234). 1.-Good News for the Nation; or, The City's Joy and the Countrie's Happiness. Plainly shewing the great satisfaction and content that all Loyal Subjects do injoy by the new Election of Members of Parliament, whom God preserve and direct, that they may Act for the good of their King and Country, and the benefit and happiness of all the English Protestants. To the Tune of, Digby's Farewel, or, Packington's Pound (see pp. 327, 457). Printed for Philip Brooksby, at the Golden Ball, in West-Smithfield. It begins, "Come all Loyal Subjects of every degree." One woodcut. With allowance. The burden is, Then let us rejoice with a loyal consent, And all for the choice of our New Parliament. 2.-The Happy Return; or, The Parliament's Welcome to London: which was adjourned till the Ninth day of November, 1685; but now sitting again at Westminster. Licensed by R. Le Strange, and Printed for C. Dennisson, at the Stationers'-Armes within Aldgate. Three woodcuts. To the Tune of, The Fair one let me in (see Vol. IV. p. 30). Begins, "Thrice noble Lords and Gentlemen." Accompts closed with William Bedloe. "And Weal to him, from crime secure, "And deems he flight from us can hide him? Or soon or late, to earth he falls! Untiring, hounding on, we go; For blood can no remorse atone! On ever-to the Shades below, And there, we grasp him, still our own!" RETRIBUTION [=The Furies. -Schiller's Die Kraniche des Ibykus; by Lord Lytton. ETRIBUTION is not the simple and superficial process that our earlier moralists considered it to be, but we cherish a belief that it is none the less a truth of profound satisfaction. The reckoning is complicated, innumerable offsets and cross-statements arise, but the balance may be safely reckoned against the wrongdoer, whose final indebtedness and punishment leaves the Providential law vindicated, here or hereafter. This, we English being by no means of forgiving natures, despite our public professions at conventicles, ought to satisfy all lovers of Justitia. The case of William Bedloe, professional cheat, vagabond, and Protestant perjurer for hire of blood-money, has been incidentally referred to already in our Volume Fourth, pp. 162 to 176, and elsewhere. Seeing that he died at Bristol on the twentieth of August, 1680, in his bed moreover, and not through a fall from a ladder or slip from a cart, as might have been reasonably expected, we were not likely to have met him again at this later date, 1685, unless in some posthumous revival of his ill-fame, by a poem on Bedloe's Ghost, with the usual woodcut, bearing a candle (or a torch, like Ratsey's Ghost, for the excellent reason mentioned on our p. 487). But the close connection existing formerly between William Bedloe and Titus Oates causes a retrospective glance to be directed to the 'Captain,' "dead and turned to clay," when we are considering the well-merited punishment which fell on the clerical rogue and bloodmoney-seeker, the "Salamanca Doctor." It seems to be worth while to add some additional particulars about the early career, marriage, and death of the aforenamed William Bedloe. So early as 1681 a memoir on The Life and Death of Captain William Bedloe had appeared, in which falsehood was mingled with 590 The Bedloes of Ireland and of Chepstow. truth, in perhaps more moderate doses than it had been in his own composition. Insomuch that some of the statements appear to be given on the authority of his own previous assertions, we may feel sure that the funeral wreath is so far a crown of Lie-lies. We are told, and his inordinate conceit makes it credible, howsoever unsafe was the practice, that "he always kept a Diary of his most remarkable Adventures for the space of ten years together, which was the duration of the scene in which he acted most of his cheats." He professed to have held possession of manuscripts that were written by his paternal grandfather, Major George Bedloe, a younger brother of an old Irish family, a valiant soldier and skilful versifier: as William reported. George arrived in England in 1633, married a merchant's widow in London, had one son and two daughters. He and his wife died in 1641, leaving property to the son Isaac Bedloe, who took the Royal side as a soldier in the civil-war (he could have been little beyond boyhood, but dates are conveniently tampered with by this sort of Diarists), and bore nine wounds, having gone to Ragland, then governed by the Marquis of Worcester. After the surrender (August, 1646), he fell ill of fever at Chepstow, and disguised his name as Beddoe. He is said to have been jocose and skilled in music. On St. David's Day, 1649 (probably 164, not 168, left uncertain), he married a young lady of Chepstow, by whom he had three sons, William being the eldest, born at midday on 28th of May, 1650; the others were named Charles and James. Alice and Mary were their two sisters. Charles was shipwrecked and drowned in the Baltic: William, destined to a drier death on shore (high in air, it might be expected), was not drowned. Alice is reported to have married Lord Duncannon's eldest son, and to have died from a surfeit of sweetmeats. Mary remained a spinster, dwelling with her widowed mother at Chepstow, who, twelve years after losing her husband Isaac, married one Taynton, who had trailed a pike in Chepstow Castle under the command of Captain Thomas Nanfan. Taynton, a contriver of clocks, by trade a cobler, taught the mysteries of Crispin to his step-son William. Did not the Irish Bedloes know Your Grandsire's wit and learning too, Nor the nine loyal wounds your valiant father wore ? William asserted himself to have obtained proficiency in Latin, heraldry, mathematics, etc., at twelve years old. Father Lewis the Jesuit favoured and tried to convert him. This was David Lewis, who was afterwards executed at Usk in Monmouthshire, 27th August, 1679. In 1670 William travelled to London "with a hundred pounds in his pocket," whose property it was he did not mention, but dwelt near two Jesuits, Father Harman and Johnson. They usually dined at Locket's ordinary, and Bedloe adjourned to Mother Cresswell's (on whom see our p. 338, note 18). Particulars of William Bedloe's Marriage. 591 After living as a sharper in London, he went to Dunkirk, and was recommended by the Lady Abbess to Sir John Warner, who sent him to Father Harcourt. With letters in charge he went to Rome, to Flanders, to Spain, etc.; by his own account copying these letters, and retaining them, but delivering his own forgeries. He bore many an alias. Thus, as Captain Williams' he cheated the Prince of Orange, and obtained by fraud a Captain's commission from him. He spent five years avowedly in the service of the Plotters, doing business as a swindler and Bagnio "Apple-squire" or bully on his own account meanwhile, before he had quite made up his mind to risk the investigations of Justice by making revelations as a professional Informer. He found that Titus Oates had anticipated him; or, probably, the successful villainy of the arch traitor stirred him to emulation in hopes of sharing the gains. Writing from Newbury, he confessed that he had "once been an ill man, but desired to be so no more." He afterwards chose to declare that Danby tried to stifle his evidence, assuring him that he would be supported in whatever country he chose, if he would suppress his testimony. This was probably Bedloe's downright lying. Dr. Jones, the King's chemist, deposed that Mr. Smith, a papist, had tried to make him poison Bedloe with a pill (20 March 1673). The Counsellor Nathaniel Reading was convicted of attempting to influence Bedloe, and was sentenced to pay a thousand pounds fine, with an hour's exposure in the pillory, and imprisonment for a year. This was in April, 1679. (See Vol. IV. p. 175.) He was now profiting by his trade of infamy, receiving ten pounds a week from the Royal allowance, but living at the rate of two thousand a year. Our Vol. IV. p. 165 gives An Epithalamium upon the Marriage of Captain William Bedloe (from the Roxburghe Collection, III. 835), written by Richard Duke, M.A., but we could not there add her name. She was "Madam Anna Purifoy, daughter of one Colonel Purifoy, a gentleman of an ancient family and of good repute in Ireland." She was the elder of two sisters, joint-heiresses to "at least six hundred pounds per annum." After his marriage Bedloe continued not many months resident in London; which may have been getting too warm for him; but removed to the city of western slave-holders, Bristol, where he lived for half a year in a well-furnished house on Stonie-Hill. Thence he was recalled to London in the middle of July, 1680. A letter from his wife, Anne Bedloe, dated 1st of August, the same year, summoned him back hurriedly to Bristol. He fell ill at once, "having broke his gall by too violent riding, and his distemper was not curable by any human art" (Life and Death of Capt. W. Bedloe, p. 119). On the 16th of August Sir Francis North, Chief-Justice of the Common-Pleas, visited him, having been sent for, while at Bristol for the commencement of Assizes. 592 Bedloe's life of fraud ending in death-bed perjury. For reasons that are sufficiently clear, viz. the obtaining of money on the application of his like-minded surviving brother James, William persisted in his declaration of former depositions having been true, though he pretended to have farther revelations to make. His wife, soon to be his widow, seems to have been kind to him, and may have remained his dupe to the last. Scowling and brutally overbearing he looks, in the copper-plate portrait which we possess, prefixed to A Narrative and impartial Discovery of the Horrid Popish Plot carried on for the Burning and Destroying the Cities of London and Westminster, with their Suburbs, etc., issued by himself in 1679. He must have assumed some air of polish and refinement, being a shifty and ingenious rascal, in his early intercourse with noblemen and gentry, as their valet or courier, when travelling through Europe; and women were imposed on by his affectation of courtly manners, tempered with the bluntness of a pretended soldier, though his Captaincy was as apocryphal as his religion. He and his brother James had shared the adventures in travels and plots; they "acted by turns as the master and the man, and both concurred to impose on those whom they cheated." Thus in the summer of 1677, when William was at Ghent, he assumed the rank of Lord Newport. He passed into Spain, taking the name of Lord Gerald at Bilboa, thence to Valladolid, Santiago, to Corunna, and embarked for England. Whatever other title seemed likely to serve his turn he adopted without scruple. Death took him swiftly, at last, before his knaveries were fully known, on the 20th of August. There were some persons, of doubtful sanity or reputation, who affected to deplore his end (unsatisfactory we may all admit it to have been). An Elegie on the Death of Captain William Bedloe begins thus:-" Could Bedlow fall so softly to his tomb, without a comet to foretell his doom?" Another pamphlet is entitled, The Righteous Evidence witnessing the Truth; being an Account of the sickness and death-bed Expressions of Mr. William Bedlow; who deceased at Bristol, the 20th of August, 1680. With his Attestation which he left in writing for the good of this Nation, concerning the late Damnable Plot, contrived by the Papists. With his two Last Prayers. London, printed for Philip Brooksby, 1680. Yet another pamphlet on the subject is entitled, Truth made Manifest; or, The Dead Man's Testimony to the Living. Being a Compendium of the Last Sayings, etc., of Capt. W. Bedlow (same publisher and date): with Thomas Palmer's Sermon. This was on the text Romans xiv. 12, 13, preached after the funeral. Bedloe's body had lain exposed, in a sort of state, in Merchant Taylors' Hall, Bristol, on Sunday. It was at 6 P.M. buried in the Mayor's Chapel, called the Gaunts. The farrago of dramatic rubbish bearing his name (but said to have been written by one Thomas Walter, of Jesus College, Oxford) is entitled The Excommunicated Prince; or, The False Relique, ▲ |