The Glorious Revolution

by Edward Vallance

  On his landing at Lyme the crowds that mobbed him, trying to kiss his hand and shouting, ‘A Monmouth! A Monmouth!, were, then, in many cases attaching themselves to the image of a popular hero, a ‘true king’ who would champion the cause of the poor. The relative youth of most of Monmouth’s followers indicates that for some this may have been seen as a romantic adventure. Monmouth’s declaration, which was read aloud after he made landfall in Dorset, might have alienated gentry opinion in giving credence to outlandish claims that the Duke of York had started the Fire of London, instigated the Popish Plot and poisoned Charles. However, when it is borne in mind that William of Orange’s declaration paid heed to the equally spurious rumour that James II’s son was not his own but had been brought into the birthing room in a warming pan, the claims made in Monmouth’s declaration appear less ridiculous.18 What really counted was that in 1688 the political elite had become almost completely alienated from the King, whereas in 1685 the country’s leadership was mostly satisfied with James’s government. Given the demoralised state of the Whig party in 1685, all Monmouth really had to play upon at this point was popular rumours and fears.

  As Monmouth marched northwards through Axminster to Chard, Ilminster and Taunton, he attracted increasing numbers of volunteers, some brought over to his side by the efforts of self-appointed recruiting agents like John Kid, the former gamekeeper of Longleat, who played on fears of a French invasion to gather supporters in Frome, Warminster and Westbury. Others joined the cause because they saw a chance to settle old scores. Several servants of Lord Weymouth who had either recently been dismissed or gone unpaid joined the cause and encouraged Monmouth’s forces to take part in a raiding party on Weymouth’s estate. Reports claimed that up to half of the Somerset militia had deserted to the rebels’ cause. The success of Monmouth in attracting support began to decline only as the reality of the consequences of taking up arms against the Crown were brought home.

  Having reached Taunton, Monmouth was faced with the choice of where to lead the rebels next and had decided to attempt to take Bristol, then Britain’s second largest city, as the best alternative to what would have been an extremely risky direct assault on London (in that it would have forced his inexperienced, mainly infantry-based army across open fields where they could easily be cut down by James’s professional army). He planned a surprise attack on the city from its eastern side, by crossing the River Avon at Keynsham. However, the King was one step ahead of him and had urged his commanders, the Earl of Feversham, John Churchill and Lieutenant-Colonel Oglethorpe, to actively prepare for the city’s defence and to send out scouting parties to ascertain the exact whereabouts of the rebel army. On one such reconnaissance mission, Oglethorpe found the main rebel forces at Keynsham and engaged them with his cavalry, losing six of his men but inflicting a dozen casualties on his opponents.

  The skirmish at Keynsham was a minor one, but it had a devastating effect on Monmouth’s morale. Prisoners captured during the fighting alleged that the King’s army was four thousand strong, thereby misleading the rebels into believing that an assault on Bristol would impossible, particularly now that Oglethorpe had discovered where the main body of the rebels would attack. Demonstrating an astonishing lack of confidence, Monmouth, rather than press on northwards to the Midlands in the slim hope of raising Whig peers such as Macclesfield, Brandon and Delamere into rising, effectively accepted defeat by choosing to retreat to Wiltshire, where there were reports that men and supplies would be provided for the rebel cause. Now the Duke’s hopes were limited to making a clean getaway before the King’s army caught up with them. Even an attempt to raise his troops’ spirits by urging the occupants of Bath to surrender as the rebels marched past its walls backfired as a lucky shot from a militiaman killed his herald. Disconsolate, Monmouth led his men to the village of Norton St Philip to camp for the night.

  Meanwhile Feversham set off in pursuit of the Duke, already embarrassed by his gaffes in initially defending the wrong side of Bristol and fearful of the security of his position after his failure to take seriously the King’s advice that Monmouth had his sights on the city. When an initial cavalry foray from Bath failed to find the rebels, the Earl ordered Percy Kirke, a hardened professional soldier whose Tangier garrison had experienced brutal combat with North African Arabs, and the Duke of Grafton, Monmouth’s half-brother, to take a force of five hundred men to Norton St Philip to see if the rebels were still camped there. Monmouth, however, had barricaded the entrance to the village and had been alerted to the royal army’s presence by the activities of Feversham’s cavalry. Grafton, against the advice of the experienced Kirke, rushed down the barricaded lane in the hope of making a surprise attack but immediately came under fire and suffered heavy losses. It was only after an hour’s shooting that his men were able to escape. There followed a long and fruitless artillery engagement between Feversham’s forces and Monmouth’s. In the end, with heavy rain turning the fields into a quagmire, there was no chance of the rebels pressing their advantage in a direct attack and the royal troops were able to retreat to dry quarters. In contrast, Monmouth’s men stayed in the field until late at night, fearful of being cut down by cavalry if they left their defensive positions. Eventually they left Norton St Philip, leaving fires burning to deceive enemy scouts, and marched through the night to Frome.

  The battle had proved a stalemate. Feversham had lost perhaps a hundred men, either killed or wounded by the rebels. He had again demonstrated his incompetence to the King, though he shifted the blame to Grafton. The engagement at Norton St Philip did, however, provoke a change of strategy. Feversham was now resolved not to engage the enemy directly, at least not until the army had received tents that would allow them to camp in the open, and would instead shadow Monmouth’s army and billet his men in nearby villages at night. Monmouth and his men were filled with despair. Already forced into a retreat, the Duke was facing the fact that in the north there would be no rebellion inspired by Whig earls and in London the crowd remained loyal to the King. Even the promised men and supplies in Wiltshire had not materialised. The members of the Axminster Independent church, whose Old Testament rhetoric had espoused the justness of the Duke’s cause, now found their eulogies turning into jeremiads, and deserted the rebellion. Furthermore, Norton St Philip, though scarcely a defeat for the rebels, had demonstrated the willingness of the King’s army to fire on their own countrymen. In a pitched battle Monmouth knew that the superior training and equipment of James’s forces would always win the day. At this point he was ready to throw in the towel and encourage his men to seek the benefit of the King’s pardon, while he and other officers fled from the nearest seaport. Monmouth was only turned from this course of action by Lord Grey, who urged that to desert the cause now would be to the utter discredit of his honour and reputation.

  The inadequacy of the county militias as a defence force nonetheless allowed Monmouth to retreat to Bridgwater by 3 July. The failure of the Devonshire militia to hold the town convinced Feversham that he needed the King to send regiments of professional soldiers over from Holland to crush the rebels. However, on the same day that the rebels reached Bridgwater, the King’s army had arrived in Somerton, now equipped with tents and light artillery. Monmouth now planned to turn north again in the hope that he could reach the West Midlands and the north-west and raise men there. Meanwhile he hoped to mislead the royal army tracking him, and instructed his troops to bring soldiers, corn and cattle into Bridgwater, as if he planned to fortify it. At the last minute the plan was abandoned as the Duke was brought news that Feversham had pitched camp at the village of Weston Zoyland, just three miles away. Only open moorland lay between the royal army and the rebels and it seemed as if Feversham might have committed his final blunder in leaving his men open to a surprise attack.

  However, what Monmouth was not told, and what he could not see, even when he viewed the prospective battlefield from Bridgwater church, was that Feversham’s forces were not as open to attack
as at first it had seemed. On the Bridgwater side of the village of Middlezoy, they were protected from a direct assault by a deep ditch, the Bussex rhine, which offered a real obstacle to an infantry advance and limited cavalry operations to two crossings at northern and southern ends of the village. Feversham, though, still had no inkling of what the Duke was planning, believing that he was bent on retreat, and consequently he had posted few scouts or patrols to cover the village from assault. Monmouth’s plan required a great deal of discipline from his army of volunteers. They would have to march over five miles at night in complete silence, in either single or double file, to get to the battlefield. Once there they would have to reorganise themselves into deeper columns in the dark before advancing on the royal camp. Monmouth’s cavalry, led by Lord Grey, would attack first from the north, driving the royalist troops out of their tents, while Monmouth’s infantry would push forward and engage them in hand-to-hand fighting, where the superior training and discipline of the King’s army would count for less.

  The plan was still just about executable, even with Monmouth still unaware of the obstacle of the Bussex rhine awaiting them. However, two incidents lost the rebels the element of surprise. First, Lieutenant-Colonel Oglethorpe, again demonstrating a presence of mind that his superior officer clearly lacked, had chosen to take his cavalry troop to Bridgwater to check whether the rebels were still camped there. Pretending to be followers of Monmouth, they gleaned from the few remaining sentries in the town that the Duke and his army had left to attack Feversham’s forces at Sedgemoor. Even so, Oglethorpe would still have taken time to rouse the King’s army to the danger approaching them. But a more direct warning came from a loose shot fired by a nervous rebel trooper, alerting the royalists to the presence of Monmouth’s army so close to them. The Duke was now forced to change his plan. He decided to deploy his forces so as to attack the royalists as quickly as possible, before, he hoped, they would have time to organise themselves. Grey was ordered to strike with his cavalry, which would be followed up by the three small cannons, offering them raking fire. The Duke then attempted to bring up his foot battalions, even though it was too late for them to be effectively organised into a concentrated battle formation.

  Grey’s men managed to find one of the crossing points across the rhine, but were held back by a royalist cavalry troop led by Sir Francis Compton that had been stationed to watch the Bridgwater–Glastonbury road. The rebel cavalry was split into two and in the dark failed to regroup. The portion that remained under Grey’s control fatefully made a wrong turn and found themselves running across the main royal encampment, where they came under heavy musket fire. Monmouth’s infantry, having been deployed in such haste, was now strung out and lines of communication between the different battalions broke down. Finally, as they approached the enemy’s tents and soldiers, the discipline of the rebel soldiers slipped and they began firing at the royal camp from a distance at which their shots were highly unlikely to find a target. Reports of the battle recorded that many of the rebel infantry stood and fired like this for two hours, but without crossing the rhine they could do little real harm to their opponents. The majority of royalist casualties from the battle were the result of shots from the three small cannons fired by Monmouth’s Dutch gunner, one of the few professional soldiers in his army. The pieces were too small, however, to do significant damage and by dawn the royalist troops had regrouped and were ready for a counterattack. Seeing no sign of the rebel cavalry, Feversham ordered his horse, led by Oglethorpe, to attack and pushed his infantry forward to engage Monmouth’s infantry. When Oglethorpe broke the rebel line, the forward battalions of the rebel forces disintegrated into a disorganised retreat, leaving the rear of the Duke’s forces exposed. Caught unawares in open moorland in full sunlight, they proved easy meat for the royalist troops and cavalry and about a thousand of them (just under a third of Monmouth’s army) were cut down. Those who escaped did not get far, caught by a boggy ditch which separated the moor from Chedzoy cornfield. As they tried to scramble up its banks, away from their pursuers, it became a turkey shoot for the royalist dragoons and cavalry. The rout of the rebels was complete within one hour of the royalists’ counterattack. Monmouth managed to escape but was discovered three days after the battle, on 8 July, hiding in a ditch, exhausted and half-starved, with nothing more to live on than some green peas in his pocket. He was sent to the tower on 12 July.19 Three days later he was executed on Tower Hill. Monmouth gave no speech on the scaffold but submitted a written paper in which he disclaimed all title to the throne, denied that Charles and his mother had ever been married and asked the King to show kindness to his wife and children.

  So ended the Duke of Monmouth’s challenge to the English throne. What followed, in the summary executions of the rebels, the mass hanging and quartering of Monmouth’s followers, tried at the Bloody Assizes, and the transportation of hundreds of others to the West Indies to work as indentured servants, soon entered the mythology of the arbitrary rule of James II manufactured by Whig polemicists and historians. The truth of what happened after Sedgemoor was only slightly less grisly than the image of the southwest turned into a field of blood perpetuated by writers like John Tutchin in the 1680s.

  Debate has raged as to how many of the rebels were dispatched without trial after the battle but there can be little doubt that such summary executions did take place and that they were ordered by the Crown. Before the battle itself, the Earl of Sutherland had written to the Duke of Albemarle on the King’s behalf that ‘having consulted the most able in the law they say that such rogues as those of Kerton [Kenton] who proclaimed the late Duke of Monmouth King may be hanged without bringing them to formal trial’. He went on to state that the King left it to Albemarle’s discretion as to how to proceed ‘but would have some of them made an example for terror to the rest’.20 After the battle Monmouth’s Dutch gunner was hanged without trial, along with a royalist soldier who had deserted to Monmouth. On 6 July six rebels were executed outside the White Hart inn at Glastonbury.21 On 7 July Feversham ordered Colonel Kirke to hang ‘twenty of the most notorious rebels’ at Weston Zoyland, of whom four were to be hanged in chains (so that their bodies could not be taken down by relatives and would instead serve as a reminder of the penalties for treason). Ten more were ordered to be hanged at Bridgwater and another twenty at Taunton. Here it appears some mercy prevailed, for through the intervention of Peter Mews, the Bishop of Winchester, Kirke’s hand was stayed. Mews protested that this was ‘murder in the Law … Now the Battel is over, these poor Rogues must be tried before they can be put to death.’ Kirke and his troops, given the ironic label ‘Kirke’s lambs’, had a well-deserved reputation for brutality. During the toasts following a raucous dinner party to celebrate the regiment’s recall to London on 31 August, Kirke or his officers shot three rebels as part of the entertainment. However, commanders other than Kirke ordered or permitted the summary execution of prisoners or captured rebels. John Churchill, who would rise to become Duke of Marlborough under William III, had a Yeovil man executed on 26 June because he had acted ‘obstinately and impertinately’. Overall, it has been estimated, about fifty rebels were killed without trial in Somerset.22

  The man in charge of the judicial proceedings against the rebels, Lord Chief Justice George Jeffreys, has entered into popular memory as the epitome of the hanging judge. Appointed Lord Chief Justice by Charles II, he demonstrated his worth as legal bully-boy for the monarchy in the trials of the Rye House Plotters. At the succession of James II his influence grew, the new King raising him to the peerage.23 The records of the Axminster Congregational church described Jeffreys as a ‘man of violence and blood’.24 Later martyrologies of the rebels attributed to him long-winded and vituperative speeches which he was said to have directed at condemned men and women but which he almost certainly, given the pressures of prosecuting so many cases, would not have had an opportunity to deliver. That said, the Bloody Assizes hardly represented a triumph for judicial
fairness and, as in most treason trials of this period, Jeffreys saw his task as being to defend the person and authority of the monarch rather than worry too much about legal due process. James’s comment to William of Orange that Jeffreys was ‘making his campaign in the west’ and the judge’s own words to his royal master that he would pawn his ‘life and loyalty that Taunton and Bristol and the county of Somerset too shall know their duty before I leave them’ hardly give the impression that maintaining impartiality was a central concern for the Lord Chief Justice.25 Jeffreys’s temper was not cooled by the fact that he was suffering from acutely painful kidney stones at the time of the trials.

  The government faced the problem of how to convict the many rebels who had not been caught in arms at Sedgemoor. The narrative of Henry Pitman, a doctor who had attended Monmouth’s army, reveals the tactics employed by the authorities to gain confessions from prisoners. According to Pitman, agents of the king would call the prisoners forward one by one and tell them that ‘the King was very gracious and merciful and would cause none to be executed but such as had been Officers or capital offenders: and therefore if we would render ourselves fit objects of the King’s grace and favour, our only way was to give them an account where we went into the Duke’s army and in what capacity we served him’. If they did not do this, they were told that they would certainly be punished as ‘wilful and obstinate offenders’. This was enough to bring a bill against them at Grand Jury but not enough to secure a conviction on its own, so Jeffreys called up first twenty-eight that he had most evidence against and ordered them to be executed the same afternoon. The agents of the King then approached the remaining prisoners, again making grand promises concerning James’s mercy if they would plead guilty – ‘For the Lord Chief Justice told us that “if we would acknowledge our crimes, by pleading Guilty to our Indictment, the King, who was almost all mercy, would be as ready to forgive us as we were to rebel against him.”’ Instead, those who confessed were condemned to be hung, drawn and quartered.26