The Pageant of British History

by Edward Parrott

Now the sun rises and the battle begins in earnest. It resolves itself into two rows of men firing at each other across a broad ditch of inky water. The Somersetshire rustics fight like veterans, but all in vain. The unequal contest is soon decided, and Monmouth, seeing that all hope has gone, turns and runs away. His deserted followers, however, make a gallant stand, but their scythes and pitchforks are useless against the swords of the king’s troopers. The arrival of the artillery brings the engagement to a speedy close. The rebel battalions waver, break, and flee, the Mendip miners alone remaining to stain the marshy ground with their blood. More than one thousand of the rebels lie dead on the field. The last battle has been fought on English ground.

But what of Monmouth? He did not draw rein until he reached Chedzoy, where he stopped a moment to mount a fresh horse and hide his blue ribbon and his George. He rode on all day towards the south-east, hoping to gain the New Forest, where he might lurk in the cabins of deer-stealers until an opportunity arrived to escape to the Continent. The night was passed in the open air; in the morning he and his companions found themselves ringed in by their foes. Monmouth changed clothes with a peasant and betook himself into a field, partly of rye, pease, and oats, partly overgrown with furze and brambles.

A woman reported that she had seen two strangers enter the field, and soldiers, stimulated by the offer of £5,000 for the capture of the duke, were told off to watch the fences while dogs were turned out among the bushes. At nightfall no capture had been made. The fugitives lay close behind a thick hedge; thirty times they ventured to look out, and thirty times they saw an armed sentinel watching for them. At sunrise the search began again, and not a yard of the field went unexamined. At length a gaunt figure in a shepherd’s dress was discovered in a dry ditch. In his pockets were some raw pease, a watch, a purse of gold, and the George which he had received from the hands of his father in the days when he was the spoiled darling of the court.

The wretched man was conveyed to London in a state of abject terror. He begged for an interview with his uncle, and what happened at that interview you already know. The scene with which this chapter opened was the sequel to his capture, the painful episode which preceded his execution.

“Woe to the vanquished!” James now wreaked such a vengeance on Monmouth’s poor, deluded followers that his name has become a byword of inhuman cruelty. A brutal soldier named Kirke was sent down to the west with his “lambs,” and the savage sport began. You may still see at Taunton the house in which he lodged. It was formerly an inn, and on its signpost he hanged scores of peasants, while his drums struck up and his trumpets sounded “so that they should have music to their dancing!” “My lord,” said the Bishop of Bath and Wells to Lord Feversham, who was equally ferocious, “this is murder, not law; the battle being over, these poor wretches should be tried.”

Then came Judge Jeffreys, a drunken, foul-mouthed, degraded wretch, with a forehead of brass and lungs of leather. Nothing more revolting than his so-called trials have ever disgraced our annals. He roared, he bullied, he blasphemed, he laughed, joked, and swore until men believed him to be drunk from morning till night. So he was—drunk with blood. When the “Bloody Assize” was concluded, Jeffreys openly boasted that he had hanged more traitors than all the Chief-justices since the Conquest. “At every spot where two roads met, and every market-place, on the green of every large village which had furnished Monmouth with soldiers, ironed corpses clattering in the wind, or heads and quarters stuck on poles, poisoned the air and made the traveller sick with horror. In many parishes the peasantry could not assemble in the house of God without seeing the ghastly face of a neighbour grinning at them over the porch.”

Perhaps the most infamous sentence of this ermined fiend was that on Alice Lisle, the widow of a man who had been one of the regicides, and had filled high posts under the Commonwealth. Her crime was that she had sheltered two fugitives from Sedgemoor. She was old and deaf; she had no counsel to defend her; and she pleaded that what she had done was simply an act of common charity. So innocent and devoid of offence did she seem that the jury were inclined to acquit her. Jeffreys turned on them with the utmost fury, and at length they brought in a craven verdict of “guilty.” “Gentlemen,” said he, “in your place I would find her guilty were she my own mother.” It was the only word of truth which fell from his lips during the trial. Then he condemned her to be burnt alive that very afternoon.

Appeals for mercy came to him on all hands and from all classes. He consented to postpone the execution for five days, during which ladies of high rank interceded with James for the poor old lady, but all in vain. The only mercy wrung from the pitiless king was to forgo the burning in favour of hanging. She went to her death with serene courage, and good men and women held up their hands in horror throughout the length and breadth of the land. Elizabeth Gaunt, a pious and charitable Baptist, was actually burnt alive at Tyburn on a like charge.

The judicial murders reached in all three hundred and twenty; the number of persons transported as slaves to the West Indies was eight hundred and forty-one. The poor wretches destined to the plantations were distributed into gangs and bestowed on courtiers, who made huge sums by this traffic in the flesh and blood of their fellow subjects. The Chief-justice traded largely in pardons, and managed to accumulate a fortune in this way. No wonder the popular name for the estate which he bought with the money was Aceldama, “the field of blood.” The ladies of the queen’s household were specially prominent in this odious work of selling pardons. The little girls who had presented the banner to Monmouth became the portion of the queen’s maids of honour. Two of them died in prison, and the rest were only released upon payment of a heavy ransom.

And now James stands triumphant; his throne seems unassailable. He is at the height of his power and prosperity, and Jeffreys is his Lord Chancellor; yet already the writing appears on the wall, and the day of his doom is fast approaching. His terrible vengeance in the west has sent a thrill of horror through the whole country, and has made men loathe his very name.