James II.’s troops challenged the masses of men they saw dimly advancing through the mist, and were for a time deceived by the answering cry of “Albemarle,” the name of the Royalist commander, who was supposed to be coming to the support of Lord Feversham.
And thus the Monmouth men passed on to the Bussex Rhine, where they were simultaneously challenged and fired upon by another outpost. Dismayed by this volley at close quarters, the rebel horse, forming the advance, broke and dashed wildly back into the stolid ranks of the peasantry. It says much for the stubborn courage of those ploughmen and hedgers and ditchers who formed the bulk of the Duke’s ranks, that in this confusion they stood fast.
Then the fight began in earnest, chiefly hand-to-hand, beside the broad and stagnant Rhine, in whose noisome mud many a stout fellow met his death that night. It was not until day dawned across the moor that the last band of rustic pikemen broke and fled before the King’s battalions, pouring across the Bussex Rhine.
Hours before, under cover of the night, the rebel Duke had fled the spot with Lord Grey and thirty horsemen. It had been a better thing had he halted and been cut to pieces with his brave followers. His had then been a nobler figure in history.
He had looked with the ill-disguised contempt of an old campaigner upon his doomed rustics. Urged to make a last effort to support them, he said bitterly: “All the world cannot stop those fellows; they will run presently”—and ran himself. The shattered remnants of his raw ranks poured confusedly into Bridgwater town, soon after daylight was come. At first the townsfolk thought them but the wounded stragglers from a great victory, and shouted, with caps flying in air, for “King Monmouth.” Then the dreadful truth spread abroad from the lips of wounded and dying men, and those who had cheered for the flying leader hid themselves, or fled on their own account. Three thousand of the rebels lay slain upon the field.
Swift and terrible was the punishment meted out to the unhappy victims of Monmouth’s ill-starred rising. The moorland, the towns and villages throughout the counties of Somerset and Dorset, were made ghastly with the bodies and quarters of the rebels executed and hanged in gimmaces, or fixed on posts by the entrances to the village churches; and the shocking judicial progress of the infamous Judge Jeffreys, is aptly commemorated in the popular name of the “Bloody Assize.” The Duke of Monmouth, captured at Woodyates, was beheaded on Tower Hill, after an abject appeal for mercy had been refused, on July 15th.
Lost causes always appeal to the imagination more eloquently than those that have gained their objects, and the Monmouth Rebellion is no exception. The enthusiasm aroused by the handsome presence and gallant bearing of this gay and careless son of Charles II. and Lucy Walters, still finds an echo in the West, in the sympathy felt for his tragic end and for the temporary eclipse of the Protestant cause. This interest lends itself to the whole of the level country behind Bridgwater, the flat, dyke-intersected, alluvial plain of Sedgemoor. The Bussex Rhine, one of the original dykes, has long since been filled up, and more modern ditches cut for the better draining of the district; but the spot where the battle was fought can still be exactly identified. It lies half a mile to the north of Westonzoyland, whose rugged church tower overlooks the greater part of the moor, topping the withies, the poplars, and the apple-orchards of the village with grand effect. In that stately church five hundred of the rebels were imprisoned before trial. A little distance from the site of the Bussex Rhine is the Langmoor Rhine, and, near by, Brentsfield Bridge, where the Duke’s men crossed. The village people of Chedzoy still show the enquiring stranger that stone in the church wall on which the pikes were sharpened before the fight, and the plough even now occasionally turns up rusty sword-hilts, bullets, and other eloquent memorials of that futile struggle. But the silken banner, worked by the Fair Maids of Taunton, where is it, with its proud motto, Pro Religione et Libertate? and where the memorial that should mark this fatal field whereon so many stalwart West-countrymen laid down their lives for their faith?
CHAPTER XIV
CANNINGTON—THE QUANTOCKS—NETHER STOWEY, AND THE COLERIDGE CIRCLE
We leave Bridgwater by St. Mary’s church and the street called curiously, “Penel Orlieu,” whose name derives from a combination of Pynel Street and Orlewe Street, two thoroughfares that have long been conjoined. “Pynel,” or “Penelle,” was the name of a bygone Bridgwater family.