Monmouth for a time found brighter fortune. His popularity in the West was great, and though the gentry held aloof when he landed at Lyme and demanded an effective parliamentary government as well as freedom of worship for Protestant Nonconformists, the farmers and traders of Devonshire and Dorset flocked to his standard. The clothier-towns of Somerset were true to the Whig cause, as they had been true to the cause of the Long Parliament; and on the entrance of the Duke into Taunton the popular enthusiasm showed itself in the flowers which wreathed every door, as well as in a train of young girls who presented Monmouth with a Bible and a flag. His forces now amounted to six thousand men, but whatever chance of success he might have had was lost by his assumption of the title of king, his right to which he had pledged himself hitherto to leave for decision to a free Parliament. The two Houses offered to support James with their lives and fortunes, and passed a bill of attainder against the Duke. The gentry, still true to the cause of Mary and of William, held stubbornly aloof; while the Guards and the regiments from Tangier hurried to the scene of the revolt and the militia gathered to the royal standard. Foiled in an attempt on Bristol and Bath, Monmouth fell back on Bridgewater, and flung himself in the night of the 6th of July on the king's forces as they lay encamped hard by on Sedgemoor. The surprise failed; and the brave peasants and miners who followed the Duke, checked in their advance by a deep drain which crossed the moor, were broken after a short but desperate resistance by the royal horse. Their leader fled from the field, and after a vain effort to escape from the realm was captured and sent pitilessly to the block.
The Bloody Circuit.
Never had England shown a firmer loyalty; but its loyalty was changed into horror by the terrible measures of repression which followed on the victory of Sedgemoor. Even North, the Lord Keeper, a servile tool of the Crown, protested against the license and bloodshed in which the troops were suffered to indulge after the battle. His protest however was disregarded, and he withdrew broken-hearted from the Court to die. James was in fact resolved on a far more terrible vengeance; and the Chief-Justice Jeffreys, a man of great natural powers but of violent temper, was sent to earn the Seals by a series of judicial murders which have left his name a byword for cruelty. Three hundred and fifty rebels were hanged in what has ever since, been known as the "Bloody Circuit," while Jeffreys made his way through Dorset and Somerset. More than eight hundred were sold into slavery beyond sea. A yet larger number were whipped and imprisoned. The Queen, the maids of honour, the courtiers, even the Judge himself, made shameless profit from the sale of pardons. What roused pity above all were the cruelties wreaked upon women. Some were scourged from market-town to market-town. Mrs. Lisle, the wife of one of the Regicides, was sent to the block at Winchester for harbouring a rebel. Elizabeth Gaunt for the same act of womanly charity was burned at Tyburn. Pity turned into horror when it was found that cruelty such as this was avowed and sanctioned by the king. Even the cold heart of General Churchill, to whose energy the victory at Sedgemoor had mainly been owing, revolted at the ruthlessness with which James turned away from all appeals for mercy. "This marble," he cried as he struck the chimney-piece on which he leant, "is not harder than the king's heart."
James and France.
But it was soon plain that the terror which this butchery was meant to strike into the people was part of a larger purpose. The revolt was made a pretext for a vast increase of the standing army. Charles, as we have seen, had silently and cautiously raised it to nearly ten thousand men; James raised it at one swoop to twenty thousand. The employment of this force was to be at home, not abroad, for the hope of an English policy in foreign affairs had already faded away. In the designs which James had at heart he could look for no consent from Parliament; and however his pride revolted against a dependence on France, it was only by French gold and French soldiers that he could hope to hold the Parliament permanently at bay. A week therefore after his accession he assured Lewis that his gratitude and devotion to him equalled that of Charles himself. "Tell your master," he said to the French ambassador, "that without his protection I can do nothing. He has a right to be consulted, and it is my wish to consult him, about everything." The pledge of subservience was rewarded with the promise of a subsidy, and the promise was received with the strongest expressions of delight and servility. The hopes which the Prince of Orange had conceived from his father-in-law's more warlike temper were nipped by a refusal to allow him to visit England. All the caution and reserve of Charles the Second in his dealings with France was set aside. Sunderland, the favourite Minister of the new king as he had been of the old, not only promised during the session to avoid the connection with Spain and Holland which the Parliament was known to desire, but "to throw aside the mask and openly break with them as soon as the royal revenue is secured." The support indeed which James needed was a far closer and firmer support than his brother had sought for. Lewis on the other hand trusted him as he could never trust Charles. His own bigotry understood the bigotry of the new sovereign. "The confirmation of the King's authority and the establishment of religion," he wrote, "are our common interest"; and he promised that James should "find in his friendship all the resources which he can expect."
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
Never had the secret league with France seemed so full of danger to English religion. Europe had long been trembling at the ambition of Lewis; it was trembling now at his bigotry. He had proclaimed warfare against civil liberty in his attack upon Holland; he declared war at this moment upon religious freedom by revoking the Edict of Nantes, the measure by which Henry the Fourth after his abandonment of Protestantism secured toleration and the free exercise of their worship for his Protestant subjects. It had been respected by Richelieu even in his victory over the Huguenots, and only lightly tampered with by Mazarin. But from the beginning of his reign Lewis had resolved to set aside its provisions, and his revocation of it at the end of 1685 was only the natural close of a progressive system of persecution. The revocation was followed by outrages more cruel than even the bloodshed of Alva. Dragoons were quartered on Protestant families, women were flung from their sick-beds into the streets, children were torn from their mothers' arms to be brought up in Catholicism, ministers were sent to the galleys. In spite of the royal edicts which forbade even flight to the victims of these horrible atrocities a hundred thousand Protestants fled over the borders, and Holland, Switzerland, the Palatinate, were filled with French exiles. Thousands found refuge in England, and their industry established in the fields east of London the silk trade of Spitalfields.
James and the Parliament.
But while Englishmen were looking with horror on these events in France James was taking advantage of the position in which as he believed they placed him. The news of the revocation drew from James expressions of delight. The rapid increase of the conversions to Catholicism which followed on the "dragonnades" raised in him hopes of as general an apostasy in his own dominions. His tone took a new haughtiness and decision. He admitted more Catholic officers into his fresh regiments. He dismissed Halifax from the Privy Council on his refusal to consent to a plan for repealing the Test Act. He met the Parliament on its reassembling in November with a haughty declaration that whether legal or no his grant of commissions to Catholics must not be questioned, and with a demand of supplies for his new troops. Loyal as was the temper of the Houses, their alarm for the Church, their dread of a standing army, was yet stronger than their loyalty. The Commons by the majority of a single vote deferred the grant of supplies till grievances were redressed, and demanded in their address the recall of the illegal commissions on the ground that the continuance of the Catholic officers in their posts "may be taken to be a dispensing with that law without Act of Parliament." The Lords took a bolder tone; and the protest of the bishops against any infringement of the Test Act expressed by Bishop Compton of London was backed by the eloquence of Halifax. Their desire for conciliation indeed was shown in an offer to confirm the existing officers in their posts by Act of Parliament, and even to allow fresh nominations of Catholics by the king under the same security. But James had no wish for such a compromise, and the Houses were at once prorogued.
The Test set aside.