And then, one Sunday morning of late winter, we heard from the pulpit
of Drayton Parish Church how the King was dead, when was read to the
congregation there assembled the speech to his Council of the new
King, James, in which he did fairly promise to uphold the laws, and
in especial to respect the rights of the Church of which he was the
head, though no member. And my father was cheered, and Emmet was
sombrely downcast, and the country people murmured of King Monmouth
under the breath. Later came the news of the late King's apostasy in
the very article of death. If these things were true of Charles,
whom in some sort they had contrived to love, what should be looked
for, said Emmet and those of his kidney, from him who, as Duke of
York, was but lately the most hated and hateful of all in the three
kingdoms?
And then came the rumors of the late King's doing to death by his
brother now on the throne. The truth, grave as it was, would not
content our more turbulent and hot-headed spirits of the west, but
they must even mix falsehood, none being too scandalous, to
overseason a dish already too heavy for stomachs unused to high fare.
And so there followed an indigestion--I mean the mad and wicked
insurrection of the Duke of Monmouth. To this day I cannot think,
and much less write, of the summer and autumn that followed the death
of King Charles II. without some return upon my spirits of the horror
and gloom that the doings of those days engendered. So I will pass
over our share in these things as quickly as may be.
When we heard of the Duke's landing at Lyme Regis, in the county of
Dorset, and not more than twenty good miles from our little village
of Drayton, it was already late on the eleventh day of June; yet that
very night did my father set himself to the task of getting at once
under arms his small company of the yellow-coated Somerset
train-bands. Receiving the next morning instructions from Sir
William Portman, the colonel of that force and a near friend of his
own, he was enabled to despatch them out of hand on their road to
join with the red-coated militia of Dorset at Bridport, saying that
thus the poor hinds might at least die cleanly, if die they must;
while staying at home they had, like enough, taken the rebel
infection and ended on a gallows. His old wound and other
infirmities, to my great joy, kept him with me at Drayton. But, not
content with what was already done, he made during the week that
followed a visitation of the neighborhood, exhorting all and sundry
to loyalty, and with so good result that our Drayton folk suffered
less in the cruel days so near at hand than any other village for
forty miles round.
And these cruel days came upon us but too quickly. In the latter end
of June Simon Emmet did one day make off, and we had great fear that
he was gone to join the rebel mob that of its friends was flattered
with the name of army. On the seventh day of July came the news of
the battle fought at Sedgemoor, near the town of Bridgewater; and
then of the great slaughter on that field, to be followed day by day
with yet more grisly tales of the cruelty of the royal troops, in
especial those of wicked Colonel Kirke and his regiment of soldiers
from Tangier, as wicked and ruthless as himself. This bad man, whose
later service in a nobler cause I can never hold as atoning for his
acts at this time among us, began, after some days of butchery in the
town of Taunton, to send out small bodies of soldiers to spread his
horrid work in the smaller towns and villages in the southern parts
of the county. And then there came in a party of the militiamen on
their way home, having passed through Taunton, with word that some of
Kirke's Lambs would next day visit Drayton, having with them a batch
of prisoners belonging to our part, in order to hanging them, with
all customary foulness of detail, on their own village-green, the
better to encourage the loyalty of those on whom no faintest breath
of suspicion could be raised.
It is said that when Will Blundell, the young gentleman that had in
my father's stead taken our company of the militia to Bridport, had
begged Colonel Kirke to give our village at least, as untainted in
its loyalty, the go-by, that coarse and evil-minded man had replied,
with many foul words and blasphemous oaths: "Are we then so loyal in
Drayton? God's blood! I will keep them so, if a few bleeding heads
and mouldering quarters may in Somerset do so hard a thing. And if
my lads hang a few beyond the number they take with them, why," he
said, "'t will but physic the land to a better habit."
Now Simon Emmet had in the village a son, Peter, who was by trade a
blacksmith, and by custom a prudent fellow that kept to his anvil and
never vexed his head in these ill times to fever heat by opening too
wide his mouth. And this Peter had a daughter, Prudence, the
prettiest maid of the village, and afterward, as you are to hear, my
handmaid, and, indeed, my very dear friend. These two (for her
mother was dead) had all that day a sore time of it, fearing that
Simon was one of those who should be brought and put to death. Well,
the party of soldiers came in that night with their three prisoners,
but too late of a clouded evening, as the ensign in command did say,
with a most vile levity, "for the good and loyal folk of Drayton
fitly to enjoy the sight of six traitor legs performing a saraband
upon nothing."
And so they quartered themselves upon the village, and their victims
in a barn, "until," said this same worthy follower of Kirke, "on the
morrow they should be quartered for good and all." Moreover, with a
more exquisite touch of that cruelty in which they were so skilled,
they had concealed the faces of these three poor fellows from the
public gaze, in the hope that anxiety for the morrow should be the
more widely spread over the sleepless pillows of the village.
Now during that night, when few slept, but terror reigned more silent
than sleep, a strange thing happened. For many a year after, the
matter was known in full to few but myself, and to me not till little
Prudence Emmet had come to trust and confide in her new mistress. So
much narrative I have of my own to unwind, that I will waste little
space upon hers, telling but in brief that the third of these men,
taken in arms and condemned without judge or jury, was indeed her
grandfather; that she and her father had come to know it; that in the
dead of night she had contrived with liquor and flattery, and mayhap
by implicit proffer of kindness she purposed never to grant, to keep
the sentry busy, and even a little to draw him off, while her father,
after forced and secret entry at the hinder part of the barn, had
privily withdrawn that old hothead Simon (now like to pay so dear for
his besotted enthusiasm) from his prison, and had carried him upon
his great shoulders, an inglorious Anchises concealed in a sack, five
miles across country, and there fairly buried him alive in a secret
cave or hole in the hillside by well-nigh walling up the mouth
thereof, and bodily transplanting a young tree to conceal all signs
of his labors. Yet was he back in his cottage before the ensign and
his men had slept off the fumes of their wine.
Thus it was not till near upon noon that they discovered their loss,
whereat the greatness of the ensign's fury passes any power of
description that is in my pen. He said the two remaining should hang
twice or thrice ere they died, to make of the spectacle as good
entertainment as he had promised to the folk of that most loyal
village of Drayton; but, proceeding to the execution of this cruelty,
and having, to the enhancement of his wrath, but a small band of
spectators, the most part keeping their houses in fear and sorrow,
before he had ordered the hapless men, already in the agony of death,
to be cut down the first time, his evil work was interrupted by the
coming of that soldier who had on the previous evening been so
cunningly cajoled by Mistress Prue and her cozening flatteries. This
man had been threatened with the anger of Colonel Kirke and the most
terrible military punishments unless he succeeded in discovering his
escaped prisoner. Failing in this, he had, on encountering Prudence
in a back passage leading to her father's forge, thought at least to
display his zeal in hauling her by the hair before his officer, there
to denounce her as his seducer from duty. In so doing he gave those
two poor rebels a quick and easy death of their first hanging, while
Prue shortly found, to the great altering of my after-life, a
champion with a strong hand--no other, indeed, than him of whom is my
book and my thought while I live.
Two days before this time Mr. Edward Royston was about leaving Oxford
to visit Lady Mary at her house in London, when he was apprised of
the sufferings of our western folk subsequent to the battle of
Sedgemoor. Being now of a man's estate (for his entrance at the
College of Corpus Christi was at an age much beyond the common) and
of a nature graver than his years, he was impelled by his love for
his people of Royston, and his pity of the dangers their misleading
might bring upon them, without delay to set out for his home in
Somerset, resolved to do what he might to order things fitly.
Warning his mother by letter of his purpose, he took the road by
Reading and Salisbury, in which city, arrived late at night, he heard
what did but increase his desire to be at Royston, so that with
moonrise he was again in the saddle, riding all that night alone; for
his servant's horse had reached Salisbury clean foundered, and, nags
being mighty scarce from the needs of two armies lately in the field
at no great distance, he was forced to leave the man behind until he
could be mounted. Thus it was that he came riding through Drayton
village just in the last struggles of those two poor rebels, and amid
the lamentable cries of Prudence in the rough grasp of her outwitted
redcoat.
Of what here immediately followed I have received no account of that
fulness which would enable me to give a narrative in detail. For
Prudence was so mortally in fear, she says, that she remembers little
but a quarrel and the noise of a great blow, from the moment of her
seizure until she found herself coming again to her wits from a fit
of fainting, in her father's arms and cottage. And Ned, when at
length the occasion for talking of the matter could be had, did show
a reluctance so great to speak of that which he has called the most
painful spot in his memory, that even for the purpose of this book I
forbear to question him with any particularity. But this much is
sure, that in the winking of an eye Mr. Royston was off his horse,
the frightened and brutal musketeer was stretched in the dust, and
Prudence freed from his clutch only to be seized, with a coarse jest,
into a lewd embrace by the officer of the party. There is little
reason to doubt that he would shortly, in his anger and with his
power at the moment so unbridled, have brought my life's joy to an
end by the shooting or hanging of the gallant lad for his resistance
to the military authority. But poor Ned's passion, so terrible, as I
have said, in certain moments of just anger, was in a moment out of
the cage where it had slumbered, and, before the vile words were well
cooled upon the wicked lips, the handle of a heavy riding-whip had
cut short the sentence with the life of the speaker. It must indeed
have been a blow of fearful force (for in those days Ned's strength
was growing great even beyond his own knowledge of it), and, falling
as it did on the right temple, no other was needed. It was more than
an hour before they had sure knowledge that the man was dead, and in
the meantime all was confusion; for Ned, seeing Prudence borne off in
the arms of her father, leapt upon his horse, and clattered down the
village street. Three harmless musket-shots were discharged after
him, of which indeed we heard the report up at the house, and then
followed a babel of questions and oaths. Some demanded horses,
others the name of the miscreant and rebel that had stricken their
officer. Now "young master of Royston," as they did use to call him,
was as well loved as known in Drayton village; yet on this day there
was found, of those that saw his deed, no man, woman, or child that
could put a name to him. Nay, I am wrong, for two indeed there were
did name him, but so diversely both from each other and from the
truth that little was gained, even when, for the better convincing
the sergeant, they came to blows over the difference. And on this
matter of the death of that poor young ensign, hot, as it were, from
his sins, I will say at once that you should have searched our west
country for ten years and never found a man to blame his slayer. I
am no Papist, nor do I know if this be sound in any theology, but
certain it is that in our eyes to this day the blood of one of
Kirke's Lambs upon his hands was held fit to wash many a sin from a
man's soul.
Now, knowing his life not worth a hoof's paring if he fell into their
hands, and unwilling to lead those men of blood to Royston, Ned did
lie all that day in some deep woodland near Crewkerne, trusting his
knowledge of the roads should give him by night the greater advantage
over his pursuers, and hoping to obtain privily a fresh horse, when
the sun was well set, for his journey to the coast.