Great Bastards of History

by Juré Fiorillo

  ONE OF TWELVE

  His life began on April 9, 1649, in Rotterdam, Netherlands, to which his father, the future King Charles II, had taken refuge after the Puritans beheaded his father, King Charles I, in the English Civil War. Charles would be crowned on April 23, 1661, in what history calls the Restoration, the return to monarchy from the Interregnum, an eleven-year experiment in Republican government.

  The English people soon learned to call their new king “the Merrie Monarch” because he so heartily enjoyed strong drink and pretty women, lots of pretty women. Before Charles’s life and reign ended in 1685, he had fathered no fewer than twelve children out of wedlock and none at all by his wedded wife, Catherine of Braganza.

  Charles’s principal mistress in the late 1640s was Lucy Walter, described by the celebrated English diarist John Evelyn as “brown, beautiful, bold but insipid”; she was nineteen when she gave birth to James Crofts. (He would not be called James Scott until his fourteenth year.) By the time of the baby’s birth, Lucy had long since acquired a reputation as a bad girl from a good Welsh family, having been the mistress of a Roundhead (Puritan) officer, Algernon Sydney, and subsequently of his younger brother, Robert, who was a Cavalier (Royalist). It was probably Robert who introduced her to Charles. In any case, Lucy’s liaison with the future king was off and on again until the fall of 1651, when she dropped out—or was sent out—of his life, sank into obscure poverty, and died from unknown causes in Paris in 1658. She was twenty-eight.

  The Duke of Monmouth was beheaded by one John Ketch, an executioner some thought consummately sadistic and others believed simply very clumsy. In either case, the rebellious duke suffered no fewer than five and perhaps as many as eight blows of the axe before Ketch finished him off with a stroke of a butcher knife. The Beheading of the Duke of Monmouth (1649-85) at Tower Hill, 15th July 1685 (woodcut) (b/w photo), English School, (17th century) / Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library International

  James Crofts fared far better than his mother. In an era that dismissed children born out of wedlock as “bastards” and “by-blows,” Charles freely acknowledged James as his son, though not his heir, but he did create him, at age fourteen, the 1st Duke of Monmouth, which carried the subordinate titles of Earl of Doncaster and Baron Scott of Tynedale. That very year, Monmouth also acquired, by royal arrangement, a wealthy wife, Anne Scott, 4th Countess of Buccleuch, and, the day after the nuptials, yet another title—Duke of Buccleuch, the king having elevated his daughter-in-law from countess to duchess. Add to these acquisitions the surname by which James would become known to history. Until James’s marriage, he had used the family name of William Crofts, 1st Baron Crofts, to whom Charles II had entrusted his care. Once married and laden with titles, James discarded that name for his wife’s.

  IN THE RESTORATION EPOCH, GIVEN LUCK, INDULGENCE, AND SOME NATURAL ABILITY, EVEN A BASTARD COULD COME TO WIELD A GREAT DEAL OF LEGITIMATE POWER IN THE WORLD. THE ONE THING MONMOUTH COULD NOT BECOME, HOWEVER, WAS KING OF ENGLAND.

  All in all, it was a very good start for any young man, especially a bastard—and, even more, just one of a dozen illegitimate offspring. But, then, as young Monmouth himself must have understood, legitimacy was something of a relative commodity in seventeenth-century England, more a subject of interpretation than of fact. Supposedly, the nation’s kings ruled by divine right, irrevocable and absolute, but Charles I had been deposed and executed by an act of Parliament on January 30, 1649.

  From 1653 to 1658, the Parliament’s champion Oliver Cromwell wielded a relatively enlightened dictatorship as “Lord Protector” of the English realm, his rule passing to his son, Richard, who proved so weak that Charles II was invited in 1660 to return to England and in 1661 to the throne. Unlike previous English monarchs, who held religion—their religion—as absolute and immutable, Charles II unsuccessfully contended with Parliament to bring religious tolerance to England, hoping to make room for Puritans and Catholics as well as Anglicans. Later, when Charles II wanted the aid of France in the Third Dutch War, he secretly promised his cousin King Louis XIV that he would discard his Anglican faith and become a Catholic—by and by.

  No doubt, the concept of “legitimacy” was to a remarkable degree negotiable in the Restoration epoch, and, given luck, indulgence, and some natural ability, even a bastard could come to wield a great deal of legitimate power in the world. The one thing Monmouth could not become, however, was king of England—and that stuck more and more insistently in his craw.

  MARTIAL MASTERY

  From an early age, Monmouth must have recognized that he was a very popular figure. Because Catherine of Braganza had failed to furnish a legitimate heir to the throne, Charles II was forced to acknowledge his brother James, Duke of York, as the heir apparent. Trouble was that James embraced Catholicism and was therefore scorned by the majority of English men and women, who were Protestants. This situation of instability made it all the harder for Monmouth to abandon his own evolving royal ambitions. He seems increasingly to have weighed the fact of his illegitimacy against the future of a throne that, more and more, looked to be up for grabs.

  Not that he exhibited any flair for government, but he did possess a passion for all things savoring of martial glory. Beginning in 1665, at age sixteen, Monmouth set about becoming a hero. He sailed with his uncle the Duke of York, who commanded the English fleet in a contest for supremacy in trade known as the Second Dutch War. Soon concluding that life at sea was not for him, he returned to England and was given command of a cavalry troop; however, war weariness among both the English and the Dutch, combined with the disastrous effects of the Great Plague then sweeping Europe, sent the belligerents to the negotiating table before young Monmouth saw action.

  Monmouth was one of a dozen bastards sired by Charles II, the “Merrie Monarch” whose restoration to the English throne ended the Puritan interregnum. The king is depicted here in a seventeenth-century Dutch painting by Gerrit van Honthorst. Charles II (1630-85) (oil on canvas), Honthorst, Gerrit van (1590-1656) / Ashdown House, Oxfordshire, UK / National Trust Photographic Library / John Hammond / The Bridgeman Art Library International

  Nevertheless, Monmouth knew that he had found a vocation in the army, and in 1669, when he was just nineteen, he was commissioned colonel and commanding officer of the elite King’s Life Guards. With the death of George Monck, the 1st Duke of Albermarle, the very next year, Monmouth effectively became, at twenty-one, the most senior officer in the English army (although he would not be officially named captain general of the army, commander in chief of all English land forces, until 1678). Within two years, in 1672, he also had at long last a new war to fight.

  The Third Dutch War saw an unusual alliance between England and France (based largely on Charles II’s secret promise to Louis XIV that he would turn Catholic) against the Netherlands and four other countries. Monmouth led six thousand men into battle and in June 1673 was part of a French assault on the formidable Dutch fortress town of Maastricht. After brutal siege fighting, French troops broke through to the town’s principal fort, a crescent-shaped edifice protected by a moat. They did not hold this prize for long, however, as Spanish troops drove out all but about thirty men before nightfall.

  Determined to rescue the holdouts and retake the fort in force, Monmouth made a major assault against the Spaniards defending a covered road that guarded the moat and fort. The battle was intense, but the defenders were so well protected by their positions along the covered road that the English attack soon turned suicidal, and Monmouth, always leading from the front, ordered a withdrawal after counting some three hundred of his men killed.

  With the defeat of this assault, the Dutch retook the fortification, whereupon Monmouth personally rallied his fearful, disheartened, and exhausted troops for a second try against what was now an even stronger enemy position. Inevitably, Monmouth was beaten back—it would take Louis XIV’s massed artillery to neutralize Maastricht—but he had earned renown as an inspiring, driven le
ader to whom fear was a stranger.

  GREATER GLORY

  Although Monmouth became a popular military hero, this latest war against the Dutch soon turned highly unpopular, and, prodded by Parliament, Charles II withdrew from the fray in 1674 and turned against his erstwhile ally, France.

  Monmouth took command of the Anglo-Dutch brigade that was part of the army led by Holland’s William III of Orange against Marshal Luxembourg’s Frenchmen at the Battle of Saint-Denis, near Mons (a town in what today is Belgium), on August 14 and 15, 1678. Provoked by the French four days after Louis XIV’s minister had signed the Treaty of Nijmegen but before France and Spain had made peace, the battle was a naked French attempt to grab one last prize, Mons, before the fighting ended for good. Feeling the pressure of peace, Marshal Luxembourg drove his troops to an especially bloody effort, which cost the lives of no fewer than two thousand soldiers on each side.

  From this slaughter, two heroes emerged: William himself and the Duke of Monmouth, who was seen wading valiantly into the melee just as it became a hand-to-hand contest of pikes and swords.

  Monmouth returned to England after Saint-Denis and the very next year led an army that had been mustered to quell the rebellion of the Covenanters, rebels who championed the Scottish people’s desire for Presbyterian government of their national church as opposed to the Episcopal church government imposed by the English crown. To his credit, Monmouth marched into Scotland with the intention of leavening military might (though at only five thousand men, his army was just barely mighty) with offers of leniency, tolerance, and outright amnesty. Negotiations broke down, however, when Robert Hamilton, commanding the Covenanters, refused to order his men to surrender their arms, as Monmouth demanded.

  The refusal was a tragic decision. Hamilton failed to back his personal defiance with adequate preparation for a major battle. Indeed, by the morning of June 22, 1679, with Monmouth’s five thousand troops formed in perfectly disciplined ranks on the north bank of the River Clyde at Bothwell Bridge, the Covenanters, who assembled on the south bank, had dwindled from the nearly seven thousand who had gathered on the river two weeks earlier to a mere four thousand.

  This battle scene is believed to be a depiction of the 1st Duke of Monmouth at the heroically doomed Siege of Maastricht, 1673. Outnumbered, his men reeling from catastrophic casualties, Monmouth refused to give up, stood always at the head of his troops, and thereby earned renown as an inspiring martial leader who knew no fear. A Battle Scene: possibly James Scott, Duke of Monmouth at the Siege of Maastricht in 1673 (oil on canvas), Wyck, Jan (1640-1700) / © Victoria Art Gallery, Bath and North East Somerset Council / The Bridgeman Art Library International

  Worse, they were poorly armed—many bearing nothing more lethal than pitchforks and other farm implements—and badly positioned, some deployed on the edge of a moor near the bridge and others stationed just outside of the town of Hamilton. Robert Hamilton had assigned the smallest number, just three hundred men, to defend the bridge, which was, of course, the critical prize of battle. Small though the party was, it was armed with muskets as well as a modest brass cannon.

  Monmouth commenced the attack with an artillery barrage aimed at the crude wooden stockades the Covenanters had erected to protect their position at the bridgehead. They returned fire with their single cannon—which, astoundingly, was sufficient to send Monmouth’s artillerymen running for cover. Had Hamilton been a far better captain, he would have seized the moment either to turn the abandoned English cannon against the attackers or to spike the barrels of the weapons, rendering them useless. Instead, he ordered a stand-up fight, during which his unprepared army exhausted all its ammunition and powder within two hours.

  For his part, Monmouth wasted no time, but rode his horse through the ranks, rallying his infantry and personally leading his shaken artillerists back to their weapons. They resumed the barrage—with devastating effect.

  As the Covenanters’ return fire died away, Monmouth tugged sharply on the reins of his horse, rearing it back. Drawing his sword, he pointed toward Bothwell Bridge, over which he led his army across the Clyde.

  Confronted by Monmouth’s force at close quarters, the Covenanters panicked and thereby gave themselves up to slaughter. When it was over, at about ten o’clock, four hundred of them lay dead and another twelve hundred had become prisoners of war. The rest scattered, with Hamilton (in the words of the Reverend John Blackadder, an eyewitness) “among the foremost that fled.”

  Yet again, the Duke of Monmouth was hailed by the English people, and it was increasingly clear that the masses, in the absence of a legitimate heir born to Charles II and Catherine of Braganza, far preferred that Monmouth be anointed successor to the throne than the king’s Catholic brother James.

  THE PLEASURES OF EXILE

  Unlike Catherine, Monmouth’s father’s wife, Anne Scott was anything but barren. When her husband was not occupied with war, he was engaged in procreation, Anne giving the Duke of Monmouth seven children, four of whom would live to adulthood. With his mistress, the dark-haired, ivory-skinned Eleanor Needham, daughter of Sir Robert Needham of Lambeth and reputed to have on occasion shared the bed of none other than Charles II, the duke had three illegitimate children; a son, James Crofts, who became a major general, and two daughters, one of whom lived to marry well and the other who died in youth.

  Later, Monmouth also managed an affair with Henrietta, Baroness Wentworth, who, unlike his wife, his mistress, and his progeny, both legitimate and non, faithfully followed him into his self-imposed exile in the Netherlands (then called the Dutch United Provinces) after he was implicated in an abortive 1683 conspiracy known as the Rye House Plot to assassinate both Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York. It remains unclear whether Monmouth was actually involved in the Rye House Plot or even whether any such plot actually existed. Many historians believe the conspiracy was largely fabricated by Charles and his loyalists as the pretext for a political purge, which included the bastard son who, in the eyes of Charles II, was becoming far too popular with the English people.

  Not that the duke suffered in Holland. In fact, he occupied his hours most agreeably in company with Henrietta as he patiently awaited the passing of his father—who, in his fifties, was hardly a young man by seventeenth-century standards—whereupon he intended to rely on his popularity and Protestant credentials to elevate him peacefully to the throne, bastard though he was.

  Yet when Charles II’s death came on February 6, 1685, four days after an “apoplectic fit,” it was instantly clear to Monmouth that, unless he sought the throne by force of arms, the people would not of their own volition demand that he be crowned, and therefore James II would rule. Monmouth turned for support to his former comrade at arms, William III of Orange, who swallowed hard and explained to his friend that, loath as he was to see a Catholic ascend the English throne, he was treaty-bound to James and could therefore offer no support to one who would challenge him. Believing that no good would come of any attempt to contest the throne by force, William counseled Monmouth to forget England and throw himself instead into the glory of distant battle as a commander in the Holy Roman army of Austria’s Leopold to fight against the infidel Turks.

  Monmouth pondered this. But he was hardly the only Englishman who had been touched by the Rye House Plot, and the small, tight-knit exile community in Holland spoke in a voice that drowned out the counsel of William of Orange. They urged a fight for the crown.

  MONMOUTH LAUNCHES HIS REBELLION

  In Holland, Monmouth and his supporters managed to hire three small vessels, purchase a cache of fifteen hundred muskets and four small field cannons, and recruit an “army” of eighty-two men. Monmouth’s friends assured him that his presence in England would instantly produce a military force more than sufficient to enable him to seize the throne. To hedge this bet, Monmouth decided to make his landing at Lyme Regis, a West Dorset town on the southwest coast of England known for two things: the Cobb—a walled harbor tha
t made for a safe landing—and a population of zealous Protestants.

  Monmouth sailed in May 1685 and landed at Lyme Regis on June 11. There was no army waiting for him, but he was able to recruit about three hundred willing supporters right away, and, believing his arrival to be unknown beyond Dorset, he assumed that he could march to London unopposed, picking up more followers en route. Soon learning, however, that a pair of local customs officials, who owed their livelihoods to the king, had galloped to London to warn James II of his arrival, Monmouth decided to delay his assault on London and advance instead into Somerset, where he could win over the West Country and grow his army.

  On June 14, at Bridport, a Dorset town down the coast from Lyme Regis, famous for producing the rope that royal executioners traditionally used for hangings, Monmouth encountered the Dorset militia and fought a short, sharp exchange that won over many militiamen to his cause. The next day, at the Devonshire carpet-making town of Axminster, Monmouth brushed aside another force of militiamen—and picked up even more recruits. In the space of just four days, his army had grown to six thousand. The militia deserters had brought their own firearms, and Monmouth distributed the fifteen hundred muskets he carried. This left at least four thousand of his followers armed with nothing better than pitchforks and other farm implements—the very weapons the Covenanters had wielded against him in 1679 at Bothwell Bridge.

  At Chard, a Somerset town on the Devonshire border, Monmouth briefly paused to pick up another 160 followers and crown himself king of England, introducing himself as “James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth and the son of His Royal Majesty Charles II.” Apparently willing to regard truth the way he regarded legitimacy, as subject to pragmatic interpretation, Monmouth went on to brand James II as guilty of both fratricide and regicide: “All those who join me in my quest against the Catholic Usurper, James Duke of York, my father’s brother and his murderer, will gain Royal favour when I take my rightful place as England’s Ruler.”