BRIDGWATER—ADMIRAL BLAKE—THE MONMOUTH REBELLION
THE ancient town of Bridgwater can now produce few evidences of its
antiquity. The siege of 1645, various conflagrations, and the very
considerable modern prosperity of the place have all been contributory
causes toward this—to the tourist—somewhat desolating result. The town
straddles on either side of the Parret, the hither side named
appropriately and inevitably “Eastover.” It is the less considerable and
important portion, the chief buildings of the place being on the left
bank of the river. A dull, undistinguished, heavy Georgian appearance
characterised the town until quite recently, but a great deal of
building activity has of late been manifested here, with results perhaps
as yet a little too recent for criticism. At any rate, the old
outstanding features remain; the large parish church, with curiously
squat tower and elongated spire, forming with the Corn Exchange and Town
Hall, the one striking group that alone stands in pictures recognisably
for Bridgwater.
A great deal of argument has been expended upon the name of Bridgwater.
The name is apparently of the most obvious and elementary derivation,
for here is the “water” (largely impregnated, it is true, with mud) in
the river Parret, and here is the bridge, the modern representative of
others of different degrees of antiquity, erected at the lowest place
down the estuary where it was possible to fling a bridge across. It is
evident, then, that it must ever have been impossible to enter or leave
the town in an easterly or westerly direction without crossing a bridge
or ferry at this point. Other place-names in the district, those of
Highbridge and Boroughbridge, for example, prove the word “bridge” to
have been used in the ordinary way, when necessary, as an integral, and
indeed scarcely avoidable, part of a name. Yet the derivation of
“Bridgwater” has nothing to do, explicitly, with water, although
“Brugge,” _i.e._ Bridge, the name of the place at the time of the
Conquest, certainly implies water beneath. The manor was given, after
the Conquest, to one of the Conqueror’s Norman barons, Walter of Douai,
and became therefrom known as “Brugie of Walter” and by degrees, by a
natural elision of letters readily dropped in ordinary speech, what it
is now.
[Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF ADMIRAL BLAKE]
Of the Castle of Bridgwater, once a strong fortress, both by virtue of
its own stout walls, and by reason of the fine position it held at the
crossing of the Parret, nothing is left, except portions of the Water
Gate, on the West Quay, and the cellars of what is now the Custom House.
The last occasion of its appearance in history was the shameful
surrender of it to a besieging army under Fairfax, on July 23rd, 1645,
after a two days’ assault. It had been so generally considered
impregnable that the wealthy Royalists of the countryside, afraid for
the safety of their jewellery and other valuables, had sent them hither
from what they thought to be the insecurity of their own houses. Thus
the taking of the impregnable castle and the surrender of the invincible
garrison resulted in exceptionally heavy spoils, amounting to £100,000
value.
Bridgwater boasts one famous son; Robert Blake, the great Admiral, or
rather, General-at-Sea, of the Commonwealth, who taught foreign nations
in general, and the Dutch in particular, who wanted the lesson badly,
the respect due to England. His birthplace is still standing in this his
native town, in a quiet byway, where tall, staid eighteenth-century
merchants’ residences look down, as it were with a certain
condescension, upon the less imposing house in which the hero was first
introduced to a troubled world, in 1599. It is a comfortable, rather
than a stately, house; but it was built to last. It is the oldest house
now remaining in the town, and was probably built in the early years of
the sixteenth century, the interior disclosing a greater antiquity than
would be suspected from the frontage. Huge, roughly squared oak timbers
frame the walls and cross the ceilings with immense rafters. They had
been all carefully covered up some generations ago, and their existence
hidden by plaster and wall-papering; but recent repairs of the house
have resulted in all this honest construction being again disclosed; and
very noble, in the rugged old way, it looks. During the progress of
these repairs and alterations, the plaster on the walls of an upper room
was found to have been liberally scratched and otherwise drawn upon at a
period contemporary with Admiral Blake. Sketches of ships were prominent
among these rough _sgraffiti_: ships built and rigged in a manner
characteristic of the seventeenth century, and the words “Rex Carolus”
appeared among them. It was necessary, for the repair of the walls, to
cover up most of these sketches, but the best have been carefully
preserved.
Robert Blake’s father was a merchant, with more children (a round dozen
of them) than business. His mother came of an old landed family; the
Williamses of Planesfield. Robert himself was sent to Oxford and was in
residence there, chiefly at Wadham College, fifteen years, wishful of
becoming a Fellow, but finally balked of that ambition for an easeful
life. It is curious to contemplate that old possibility of this stout
man of war having ever become a cloistral butt of futile learning, of
the peculiar brand of futility affected by Oxford.
His father died, leaving but an insignificant sum to be divided among
his many children, and Robert, with strong Republican views, was
returned to Parliament for his native town of Bridgwater. Events were
moving rapidly towards Civil War, and in the outbreak of that momentous
struggle many men found at last their vocation. Among them was Blake,
whose great defence of Taunton town against the Royalist siege in 1645
was one of the most dogged and successful incidents of that time.
Encompassed by ten thousand men and his ammunition all shot away, food
exhausted, and a breach actually made in the walls and the enemy
swarming through it; still he would not yield, and declared he would eat
his boots first. Fortunately the rumour of Fairfax’s relieving army at
that moment spread among the besiegers, and the siege was raised, else
Blake would have had a full and an unappetising meal before him, as any
one who contemplates his statue here, and the great thigh-boots he is
wearing, may judge for himself.
At the establishment of the Commonwealth, Blake was given high command
at sea: a military man afloat as Admiral; a thing in our own highly
specialised times unthinkable. His complete success in that new
environment is a part of our history that need not be recounted here.
After many inconclusive duels with the Dutch, who, under Van Tromp,
disputed the sovereignty of the seas, and after brilliant services
abroad, Blake died while yet in what may be termed the prime of life, of
an intermittent fever, and probably also from an exhaustion induced by
old wounds, on board his flagship, off Plymouth, in 1657. With his death
disappeared one of the few entirely honest Republicans of that time: a
man that England could then ill spare, as the nation was to find but ten
years later, when the Dutch fully revenged themselves for former
reverses by their historic raid up the Medway and destruction of English
ships off Chatham.
After many years, Bridgwater has at last honoured itself and the memory
of this great man with a statue, placed prominently in front of the Corn
Exchange. He is represented in the military costume of the time, with a
short, wind-blown cloak flying from his shoulders, pointing into space.
It is a pose admirably chosen, and every line of this fine bronze figure
expresses the courage, zeal, and bull-dog determination characteristic
of the man. Bronze panels in relief on the plinth represent Blake’s
fleet off Portland, February 1653; the capture of Santa Cruz, April
20th, 1657; and Blake’s body brought into Plymouth Sound, August 7th,
1657. This appropriate couplet from Spenser is added:
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormy seas,
Ease after war, death after life, doth greatly please.
Bridgwater church has its place in history, for it was from the
battlements of this tower that the ill-fated Monmouth looked forth upon
the plain of Sedgemoor, just before the battle that was to decide his
fortunes.
Nothing in the long story of the West so stirs the blood as the
incidents of the disastrous expedition captained by this handsome,
ambitious, and well-liked son of Charles II. It was a generous
enterprise—if at the same time not without its great personal reward, if
successful—to attempt the saving of England from the domination of
Popery that again threatened her; and it deserved a better conclusion
than that recorded by history.
[Illustration: BRIDGWATER: ST. MARY’S CHURCH, AND CORN EXCHANGE.]
It was three weeks after the landing of Monmouth at Lyme Regis, on the
coast of Dorset, that he arrived at Bridgwater. Three thousand men had
flocked to him on his landing, and by the time he had reached Taunton,
the enthusiasm was such that his forces were more than doubled, and
numbered seven thousand. But his was an undisciplined and untrained mob,
rather than an army, and a fiery religious fervour, ready to dare
anything for Protestantism, was an ill equipment with which to contend
against the trained troops of James the Second, hastening down to oppose
their march. This was essentially a popular rebellion, for the
influential gentry of the West, although ill-affected towards the
reactionary rule of King James and willing enough to end his reign,
hesitated to join, and by their cowardice lost the day. While they
timorously waited on events, the peasantry showed a bolder front, and
chiefly through their sturdy conduct, Monmouth’s advance through Dorset
and Somerset had been by no means without incident in the warlike sort.
His rustics, badly armed though they were, and largely with agricultural
implements instead of weapons of offence, gave with their billhooks,
their pikes, and scythes, an excellent account of themselves against the
Royalist regulars commanded by Lord Feversham in the hotly contested
skirmish at Norton St. Philip on June 26th.
It was, perhaps, in some measure the unaccustomed weapons used by
Monmouth’s countrymen that alarmed Feversham’s soldiers and gained that
day for the rebel Duke, for even men trained to arms lose much of their
courage when confronted with strange, even though, it may be, inferior
weapons. But it was still more the valour of the Somerset rustics that
won the day on that occasion for Faith and Freedom.
Had Monmouth followed up his advantage, the wavering sympathies of the
West of England gentry might have thrown fresh levies into the field for
his cause; but he retired upon the then defenceless town of Bridgwater,
and remained inactive.
[Illustration: WESTONZOYLAND.]
Now, there is nothing that more disheartens untrained men than a check
in their forward march. Countermarching to them appears but the
forerunner of defeat, and the flow of ardour in any cause once hindered
is difficult to recover. With regular troops the chances and changes
incidental to campaigning inure them to disappointments, and the retreat
of to-day they know often to be but the prelude of to-morrow’s advance.
But with Monmouth’s men, their leader’s plan once altered, their
fortunes seemed irretrievably clouded. Monmouth himself grew gloomy at
the delay the vacillations of himself and his lieutenants had caused,
and when on the afternoon of Sunday, July 5th, he ascended to this point
to reconnoitre the position his opponents had taken up in the midst of
the moor, his heart sank. He saw the glint of their arms, the colours of
the regiments drawn up beneath the shadow of the tall tower of
Westonzoyland, and he well knew that a conflict between them and his
brave, but untaught, peasants could only prove fatal to his ambitions.
He had, some years before, led those very soldiers to victory. “I know
those men,” said he to his officers, leaning over these parapets of St.
Mary’s; “they will fight!”
By a circuitous route, his army left the town of Bridgwater when night
was come and darkness had shrouded the moor. By narrow and rugged lanes
they went, past Chedzoy, towards the Polden Hills. Here they turned,
and, led by a guide, essayed to thread the maze of deep ditches called,
in the parlance of the West Country, “Rhines.”
It was not until two o’clock in the morning that they had reached within
striking distance of the Royal troops, crossing safely the Black Ditch,
and moving along the outer side of the Langmoor Rhine, in search of a
passage, when a pistol was fired, either by accident or treachery. “A
Dark night,” says one who was present, “and Thick Fogg covering the
Moore.” The darkness and the sudden alarm caused by the pistol-shot
threw Monmouth’s men into confusion, and the Royal forces were at the
same time aroused. The night attack had failed.
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?
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