FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE REVOLUTION.
THE RESTORATION OF CHARLES THE SECOND.
“_Who comes with rapture greeted, and caressed_
_With frantic love,—his kingdom to regain?_”
IT is the 29th of May, 1660, and London is a gala city. The streets are
hung with tapestry; flags and banners wave from the housetops; the
citizens in their best attire throng the streets; the mayor, aldermen,
and the gilds in all their bravery of ceremonial robes and gold chains
hie them to the city gates; every balcony is full of lords and ladies
clad in the sumptuous trappings of state; drums roll, trumpets sound,
and bells clash from the steeples. The guns of the Tower roar out a
welcome, and loud cries of “The king! the king!” are heard. His
procession approaches “with a triumph of twenty thousand horse and foot,
brandishing their swords and shouting with inexpressible joy.” Now you
see him sitting his horse with easy grace, and bowing calmly as he
responds to the acclamations of the crowd. He is tall and graceful, his
countenance somewhat swarthy and forbidding. He smiles as maidens strew
flowers in his way and men cheer until they can cheer no more. “It must
be my own fault,” he says, “that I have not come back sooner, for I find
nobody who does not tell me that he has always longed for my return.”
He passes on to Whitehall and takes possession of the palace from which
his father stepped on to the scaffold. Courtiers and sycophants, and
honest men with tears in their eyes, crowd the presence-chamber to kiss
his hands and wish him a long and happy reign, while the citizens
outside give themselves up to unrestrained joy. A special Lord Mayor’s
show is paraded as part of the festivities, and several of the pageants
represent scenes from the life of the king who has just come into his
own again.
Look at this device now passing on a great wheeled platform. It is a
scene in Boscobel Wood. In the midst is a spreading oak, and high in the
branches you see a figure representing Charles hiding from the
Commonwealth soldiers, who are searching for him below. This incident
actually happened just nine years ago, after the “crowning mercy” of
Worcester, when Cromwell thoroughly routed the Royalists and the young
prince was a hunted fugitive. Another scene in the show represents him
riding towards safety as the servant of faithful Jane Lane, who sits
behind him trembling with anxiety. The fugitive is now receiving the
obeisance of a gay, glittering throng in the palace of his sires. As he
does so he recalls the shifts and subterfuges, the hairbreadth escapes,
the privations and perils of those dark days, and bitterly contrasts the
glorious present with the long years of his shabby and penurious exile.
And now he is crowned and anointed king—hailed with enthusiasm by the
very men who overthrew his father and consented unto his death. How has
this wondrous change come about? Cromwell built his power on the sand,
and with his last breath it fell to pieces like a house of cards. His
son Richard, an easy-going country squire devoted to hawking, hunting,
and horse-racing, hated the greatness which was thrust upon him, and
within a year laid down his office. Then “Honest George” Monk, in
command of the army in Scotland, saw that the hour had arrived when his
countrymen were eager for steady and lawful government in place of the
harsh and uncertain rule of the sword. He marched south, and the
Londoners hailed him with wild shouts of delight. Like the Israelites of
old time they cried, “Give us a king to reign over us,” and Charles was
invited to return and claim his birthright.
The monarchy has been restored, and what manner of man is he who sets up
the throne anew? Nature has given him excellent parts and a good temper;
he has polite and engaging manners and a unique experience of the world;
but otherwise he is utterly selfish and utterly ungrateful, “without
desire of renown and without sensibility to reproach.” He is a cynic; he
has absolutely no faith in human nature; he believes that every man has
his price; and he values his kingship precisely for the amount of
selfish indulgence which it can afford him. The father who was sent to
the block was an angel of light compared with the son who has now been
recalled to fill the empty throne. Forthwith he tramples all that is
good as well as all that is harsh and unlovely in Puritanism under foot.
He sets the nation a shameless example of licence and frivolity, and his
subjects are not slow to imitate it. His court is filled with every kind
of open wickedness; religion is scoffed at; morality, honour,
steadfastness, and justice are fit subjects for the ribald jests of
reckless roysterers. The pendulum has swung to the other extreme with a
vengeance. Never before has national virtue been at so low an ebb.
The reign of Charles was one long reaction in Church, State, and
national life. The efficiency of old Noll’s day became a thing of the
past. The king wasted huge sums of money on his follies and vices, and
the services were shamefully starved. Only fourteen years ago the Dutch
were forced to acknowledge England as mistress of the seas; and now they
entered the Thames, destroyed Sheerness, sailed up the Medway to
Chatham, and burnt eight men of war, while the navy, paralyzed by
corruption and mismanagement, was powerless to chastise them. At this
humiliation the anger of the nation knew no bounds. “Then at length
tardy justice was done to the memory of Oliver. Everywhere men magnified
his valour, genius, and patriotism. Everywhere it was remembered how,
when he ruled, all foreign powers had trembled at the name of England;
how the States General, now so haughty, had crouched at his feet; and
how, when it was known that he was no more, Amsterdam was lighted up as
for a great deliverance, and children ran along the canals shouting for
joy that the devil was dead! Even Royalists exclaimed that the State
could be saved only by calling the old soldiers of the Commonwealth to
arms. . . . Tilbury Fort, the place where Elizabeth had, with manly
spirit, hurled foul scorn at Parma and Spain, was insulted by the
invaders. The roar of foreign guns was heard, for the first and last
time, by the citizens of London.”
While this ignominious war was raging, London suffered two disasters of
such a terrible character that men openly spoke of them as the
well-deserved scourges of Almighty God. Turn to the diary of Samuel
Pepys, the Admiralty clerk who so faithfully mirrored the loose,
careless life of the time, and read the entry of July 7, 1665: “This
day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses
marked with a red cross upon the doors and ‘Lord, have mercy upon us’
writ there, which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind
that to my remembrance I ever saw.” The Great Plague had arrived. Those
who were stricken with the disease began to shiver; then they had
headaches and were light-headed. On the third or fourth day they fainted
suddenly, and spots broke out on the breast. As soon as these appeared,
all hope was gone; the poor victim was dead within an hour.
As we follow Pepys’s pages we see alarm spreading, the clergy taking
flight to the country, the stoppage of all work and trading, grass
growing in the deserted streets, the bells tolling all day long,
searchers going about to discover infected houses, dreaded death-carts
rumbling over the stones to the mournful cry of “Bring out your dead;”
then the last scene of all—the carts shooting their contents into huge
pits dug at St. Martin’s in the Fields and at Mile-End. It is a terrible
picture, and we shudder as we realize it.
All infected houses become prisons, with watchers at the doors so that
none might come out or go in. Pepys tells us that a complaint was
brought against a man for taking a child from an infected house, and the
case was inquired into by the magistrates. They discovered that the
child was the little daughter of a saddler. All his other children had
died of the plague, and the saddler and his wife were shut up in their
house, never expecting to leave it alive. They had one only wish in
their despair, and that was to save the life of their little girl. At
last they managed to communicate with a friend, who promised to take her
away from London. The child was handed down from the window stark naked,
and the friend, having dressed it in fresh clothes, took it to
Greenwich, where, when the story was known, it was permitted to remain.
In all, the death-roll of that terrible year reached nearly 100,000, or
about one-fifth of the total population. The worst time of all was in
the first fortnight of September, when the deaths were over a thousand a
day. As the summer passed, and the cold, high winds of winter blew, the
plague gradually passed away.
Scarcely, however, had the dead-cart ceased to go its rounds when fire
laid well-nigh the whole city in ruins. It broke out at one o’clock on
Sunday morning, September 2, 1666, at the house of a baker in Pudding
Lane, not far from the Monument which now commemorates the visitation.
Most of the city was then built of wood, and as a high wind was blowing
at the time the flames spread rapidly. The citizens could do nothing to
stop the fire, and before long the city from the Tower to the Temple,
and from the river to Smithfield, was one sheet of flame. A great terror
seized the people, but as soon as they recovered from their fright they
endeavoured to save what they could from the flames. Five, ten, and even
fifty pounds were given for a cart, and the barges and boats on the
river were laden to the gunwale with fugitives and their belongings. The
fields round London were full of furniture and of people camping out
amidst the pitiful remnants of property which they had saved. On Monday
night the streets were as light as noonday, and the flames had reached
St. Paul’s.
John Evelyn tells us in his diary that the stones flew like bombs,
melting lead ran down the streets in streams, and the very pavements
were red hot. “God grant,” says he, “my eyes may never behold the like.
I now saw about ten thousand houses all in one flame. The noise and
cracking and thunder of the flames, the shrieking of women and children,
the hurry of the people, the fall of towers, houses, and churches, was
like an awful storm. The air was so hot that at last men were not able
to approach the fire, and were forced to stand still and let the flames
burn on, which they did for nearly two miles in length and one in
breadth. The clouds of smoke were dismal, and reached nearly fifty-six
miles in length. London was, but is no more!”
At last the fire was checked by blowing up a number of houses with
gunpowder. The wind fell, and on Wednesday morning the fire ceased, “as
it were by a command from Heaven.” It began at Pudding Lane, and it
ended at Pie Corner in Giltspur Street. Actually 13,000 houses and 89
churches were burnt down, but only fourteen persons were killed. Every
dwelling and building over an area of 436 acres was destroyed. The fire,
however, was a blessing in disguise, for it swept away the foul courts
and alleys and destroyed the plague germs lingering in the soil. Wider
and more open streets were built, and new and stately churches arose.
The genius of Sir Christopher Wren was afforded a unique opportunity. He
re-created St. Paul’s, his chief monument, and erected fifty-four
churches, each with its own special features, yet all in harmony with
the great mother-church of the city.
The restoration of Charles was a triumph for the Church of England, and
marked the downfall of that religious toleration which Cromwell had
established. At the instigation of Clarendon, the only man of real zeal
and probity about the king, the Cavalier Parliament passed a series of
spiteful Acts against the Puritans, or Nonconformists, as they may now
be called. Henceforth all mayors, aldermen, councillors, and other
borough officers must renounce the Solemn League and Covenant, deny the
lawfulness of taking up arms against the king, and receive the sacrament
according to the rites of the Church of England. This harsh and unfair
Act was a great blow to the Nonconformists, and it practically drove
them out of local government. They were next excluded from the Church by
the Act of Uniformity; and then the expelled ministers began to form
congregations outside the pale. But a new Act of Parliament forbidding
the holding of all religious services except those of the Church of
England, under pain of fine and imprisonment, was speedily passed to
keep them forcibly within the fold. This shocking law actually made
family worship a crime if more than five persons not belonging to the
family were present. Then came another Act which forbade ministers
expelled under the Act of Uniformity from teaching in a school or living
within five miles of a city or corporate town. Thus the Church system
which Laud had lost his head in trying to establish in the reign of
Charles the First became the law of the land by the will of the people
in the reign of his indifferent and cynical son.
The author of these cruel Acts was not long to sit high in the king’s
favour. He was a grave, ponderous man, with the utmost scorn for the
idle triflers and wicked spendthrifts amongst whom the king wasted his
days. Frequently he took Charles to task for his misdemeanours, and by
his importunity goaded him into keeping his promises. “He often said it
was the making those promises which had brought the king home, and the
keeping of them must keep him at home.” The king’s friends hated the
solemn, long-winded Polonius, and one of them used to whisper in
Charles’s ear, “There goes your schoolmaster.”
After the second Dutch War, in which England was covered with disgrace,
Clarendon was a convenient scapegoat, and Charles dismissed him without
a shade of regret and no single mark of gratitude for the long and
faithful service which the deposed chancellor had rendered him both in
exile and after the Restoration. Clarendon’s fall was the signal for
great rejoicing amongst the shameless crew which surrounded the king. As
he left Whitehall, disgraced and abandoned, a courtier assured Charles
“that this was the first time he could ever call him King of England,
being freed from this great man.”
And now, “freed from this great man,” Charles began to descend deeper
and deeper into the mire. He formed a ministry of his friends, and laid
deep plans for ruling as an absolute king, but without running any undue
risks. Hitherto he had laughed at religion; now, when sick and serious,
he turned to the Church of Rome, and desired to re-establish it in his
land, but again without running undue risks. On one principle and one
principle alone Charles was absolutely fixed—he would never go on his
travels again. Then he perpetrated his last and foullest piece of
infamy—he sold himself to Lewis of France for a miserable £200,000 a
year. Henceforth he was the pensioner of the French king and a secret
traitor to his own subjects.
No king so absolute as Charles when suddenly he was stricken with
apoplexy. On his deathbed he was openly received into the Roman Catholic
Church, to which he had long secretly belonged. He lingered until
Friday, February 6, 1685. As the morning light began to peep through the
windows he apologized to those who had watched him through the night for
all the trouble which he had caused them. “He had been,” he said, “a
most unconscionable time dying, but he hoped they would excuse it.”
So passes Charles. One of his friends had previously suggested this
epitaph:—
“Here lies our sovereign lord the king,
Whose word no man relies on;
Who never said a foolish thing,
And never did a wise one.”
There was, however, another and a better side to Charles’s character. He
frequented the society of the most learned men of his time, founded the
Royal Society, and attended its meetings. He had undeniable talents and
a taste for arts and sciences, but his talents only served to bring into
high relief his grovelling vices and sordid treasons.
[Illustration: =JANE LANE HELPING PRINCE CHARLES TO ESCAPE.=
(_From the fresco by C. W. Cope, R.A., in the Houses of Parliament._)]
[Illustration: =RESCUED FROM THE PLAGUE, LONDON, 1665.=
(_From the picture by Frank W. W. Topham, R.I. By permission of the
Artist._)]
[Illustration: =The Fall of Clarendon.=
(_From the picture by E. M. Ward, R.A., in the National Gallery of
British Art._)]
[Illustration]
JAMES, DUKE OF MONMOUTH.
“_Step by step, and word by word: who is ruled may read,_
_Suffer not the old kings—for we know the breed._”
Once more the scene is laid in Whitehall. James, the brother of Charles,
is king, and he is now about to grant an audience to a nephew who has
unsuccessfully rebelled against him and lies under sentence of death.
Look at the king’s face. You see at once that he is a slow, narrow man,
singularly obstinate, harsh, and implacable. His heart is as hard as the
marble chimney-pieces of his own palace. He never forgets and he never
forgives an injury. As you glance at his hard, cruel face you feel that
he will be deaf to every cry of mercy and relentless to every touch of
pity. Now the door of an antechamber is thrown open and the Duke of
Monmouth, a handsome man, pale as death, is ushered in. His arms are
bound behind him with a silken cord. At once he throws himself on the
ground, and in an agony of weeping crawls to the king’s feet. He
begs—oh, how passionately he begs—for life, only life—life at any
price. In frenzied tones he beseeches his uncle to show him mercy for
the sake of the late king, his father. If he is spared, he will never,
never offend again.
“I am sorry for you,” says the king in icy tones, “but you have brought
all this upon yourself. You have called yourself king, you have raised
rebellion, and foully aspersed me in your Declaration. Your treasons are
black and many. There is no hope of pardon for you this side the grave.”
At once the wretched prisoner cries out that he signed the Declaration
without reading it; that it was the work of a villain.
“Do you expect me to believe,” says James with contempt, “that you set
your hand to a paper of such moment without knowing what it contained?”
Now Monmouth makes his final and most abject appeal. He who has been the
champion of Protestantism, and has called men to arms against a Catholic
king, now offers to be reconciled with the Church of Rome! The king,
always eager to make converts, immediately offers his spiritual
assistance, but not a word does he say of pardon or respite.
“Is there no hope?” asks Monmouth.
The king turns away in silence, and the prisoner rises from his knees.
The bitterness of death is past; his craven weakness has gone; he leaves
the room with a firm step. In the Tower he takes farewell of his
children and of the brave wife who has reclaimed him from a life of
vice. Then he goes to the block, and his head is hacked off by an
executioner whose nerve has failed him.
Let the story of the ill-starred rising be told. Monmouth was the son of
King Charles and Lucy Walters, the daughter of a Welsh Royalist. In his
thirty-first year he was probably the most popular man in England,
extremely handsome, and gifted with the most charming manners. His
father had conferred all possible honours on him, and as there was a
movement to exclude his Roman Catholic uncle James from the succession
he had come to regard himself as heir to the throne. He had proved
himself no mean soldier on battlefields in the Netherlands and in
Scotland, where he had shown mercy to the vanquished. He neglected no
opportunity of making himself popular with the people. “He stood
godfather to the children of the peasantry, mingled in every rustic
sport, wrestled, played at quarter-staff, and won foot races in his
boots against fleet runners in shoes.”
His great claim, however, to the sympathy of the people was his staunch
Protestantism. As a matter of fact, he had no settled religious
opinions. His private life was bad, and his Protestantism was but a
means to an end. He had taken part in a reckless plot towards the close
of his father’s reign, and had been obliged to take refuge in the
Netherlands, with a sentence of death hanging over his head. On his
deathbed, when Charles blessed his children, his eldest and best-loved
son was an exile and a wanderer. The dying king never mentioned his
name.
James began his reign by promising to “preserve the government both in
Church and State as by law established.” There was no opposition to him;
men were ready to rely upon “the word of a king who was never worse than
his word.” They remembered his good work at the Admiralty and praised
his personal courage, while they hated and feared his religion. Really,
James was a stronger and better man than Charles; but while the late
king was witty, gracious, good-natured, and easy-going, James was dull,
suspicious, sullen, and silent. A contemporary said, “Charles could have
been a great king if he would, and James would have been a great king if
he could.” While Charles cared nothing for religion, and would risk
nothing for the Church which he favoured, James was a zealous Roman
Catholic, and was prepared to risk his crown for the sake of his Church.
The Protestantism of the nation was soon alarmed. The king openly heard
mass, and a week or two later the rites of the Church of Rome, after an
interval of a hundred and twenty-seven years, were once more performed
at Westminster. Then came a proclamation suspending the penal laws
against Nonconformists, and thousands of prisoners, including the author
of “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” were released. Parliament showed no anger;
it was packed with the king’s friends. They granted James a most liberal
income, which almost made him independent of further Parliamentary
grants.
Meanwhile, Monmouth in Holland was busy hatching a plot to oust James
and secure the throne for himself. His fellow-conspirator was Archibald
Campbell, Earl of Argyll, the leader of the Covenanters who had suffered
persecutions many and sore during the last reign. Two years after the
Restoration Episcopacy had been re-established in Scotland, and more
than three hundred ministers had given up their livings rather than
conform. Severe fines were inflicted on all who dared to abstain from
public worship in the parish churches, and troopers rode about the
country cursing and swearing, harrying and plundering, wounding and
killing to their hearts’ content. Many of the ejected ministers
continued to preach in the open air, and their flocks, greatly daring,
attended their secret ministrations. “Conventicles” increased daily in
number. With a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other, the
blue-bonneted Covenanters gathered on lonely hillsides for worship,
while scouts kept watch for the coming of the dreaded troopers.
Persecution at last drove them to arms. After a victory at Drumclog,
they were utterly defeated at Bothwell Bridge, and a terribly cruel time
of shooting and hanging, torture and transportation set in.
Argyll’s father had been leader of the Covenanters in the days of
Charles the First, and after the Restoration he lost his head. The son,
Monmouth’s fellow-conspirator, refused to take the oath of the Scottish
Test Act without adding a statement that thereby he was not precluded
from trying to amend both Church and State. For this he was brought to
trial, and on evidence that would not hang a dog condemned to death.
Fortunately, however, he escaped in disguise, and found a refuge in
Amsterdam, where the leading English and Scottish exiles were assembled.
Though there was not much sympathy between Monmouth and Argyll, they
joined hands, and arranged that the great MacCallum More should rouse
his clansmen and head a rising in Scotland. This was to be promptly
followed by Monmouth’s descent on England.
The Scottish expedition was doomed to failure from the first, because it
was commanded, not by a single general, but by a committee, which
disputed and quarrelled on every possible occasion. The expedition
reached Campbeltown, on the coast of Kintyre, and here Argyll issued a
proclamation declaring that King James had murdered King Charles, and
that Monmouth was the rightful king. His clansmen flocked to him; but
the Lowland leaders despised them, and endeavoured to raise the
Cameronians of Ayrshire, who showed not the slightest disposition to
take up arms. Soon the committee was at loggerheads, and all was
confusion and despondency. Food ran short, and the Highlanders deserted
in hundreds. Argyll now yielded to the committeemen, who urged him to
march into the Lowlands. Ere a battle could be fought his army had
melted away, and his only safety lay in flight.
Argyll disguised himself as a peasant, and pretended to be the guide of
Major Fullarton. The friends journeyed through Renfrewshire until they
reached the junction of the Black Cart and the White Cart. Here they
found that the only practicable ford was held by a party of militia. The
travellers were challenged, their answers were evasive, and an attempt
was made to seize the supposed guide. He broke loose and sprang into the
water, where for a short time he held his own against five assailants.
His pistols, however, had been wetted and were useless. Struck down with
a broadsword, he was easily overcome, and his captors learnt to their
dismay that the champion of the Protestant religion, the heir of a great
and honoured name in Scotland, was in their hands.
On June 20, 1685, Argyll was dragged through the streets of Edinburgh
bareheaded, his hands tied behind his back, guards surrounding him, and
the hangman walking in front. Up the Canongate and the High Street he
passed, and when the castle was reached he was put in irons and informed
that he had but a few days to live. No new trial was necessary; he was
to be executed on his old sentence. He heard his fate with majestic
resignation, for he did not fear death. Torture was threatened, but the
threat did not move him, and not a word would he say to betray a friend.
He composed his own epitaph, and spent the short remaining hours in
devotion.
On the very day on which he was to die he dined well, and according to
his wont, lay down for a short slumber after the meal. A Lord of the
Council who came with a message insisted on seeing him. He was told that
the earl was asleep, but could not believe that such was the case. The
door of the cell was softly opened, “and there lay Argyll on his bed,
sleeping in his irons the placid sleep of infancy.” In his last hour he
wrote a most loving and cheering letter to his wife, and at the call of
his jailers mounted the scaffold with undaunted courage. He made a short
speech to the people, declaring that he died “not only a Protestant, but
with a heart-hatred of Popery, of Prelacy, and of all superstition.” He
then embraced his friends, gave them tokens of remembrance, prayed a few
moments, and the axe fell.
Now, having seen a noble man pay the price of failure, let us turn to
the progress of Monmouth. On the morning of June 11, 1685, a week before
the capture of Argyll, three ships appeared off the little port of Lyme
Regis, in Dorsetshire. The inhabitants from the cliffs saw eighty
well-armed men land on the shore, kneel down, and pray for a blessing on
their venture. Then they saw a gallant figure draw his sword and lead
his men over the cliffs into the little town. His name and the character
of his mission were soon known, and there was great excitement in the
place. The fishermen flocked to him shouting, “A Monmouth! a Monmouth!
the Protestant religion!” Meanwhile a blue flag had been set up in the
market-place, and now Monmouth’s Declaration was read. It was full of
wild charges against James, and accused him of burning London and
poisoning the late king, his brother. James was denounced as a tyrant,
murderer, and usurper. Monmouth said that he had come as captain-general
of the English Protestants in arms against tyranny and Popery.
The news of his coming spread like wildfire through the West Country.
Many of the people were Dissenters, who had suffered all kinds of petty
persecution, and they hailed the advent of Monmouth with the utmost
eagerness. They remembered how he had endeared himself to them when he
made his progress through the country five years before, and they rushed
to his banner with alacrity. By the time he reached Exeter nearly all
Devonshire had flocked to him, and nine hundred young men in white
uniform marched before him into the city. Recruits came in by hundreds
daily; there were not enough clerks to take down their names. Arming and
drilling went on all day, and everything promised well.
On June 18, Monmouth reached the pleasant and prosperous town of
Taunton, which gave him a right royal welcome. The children of the men
who had helped Blake to hold out against the Cavaliers now welcomed
Monmouth with unrestrained joy. Every door and window was adorned with
wreaths of flowers, and no man appeared in the streets without the badge
of the popular cause in his hat. Damsels of the best families in the
town wove colours for the rebels. One flag in particular was embroidered
with the royal arms, and was offered to Monmouth by a party of
school-girls. Their school-mistress presented the duke with a small
Bible of great price. He took it with a show of reverence. “I come,” he
said, “to defend the truths contained in this book, and to seal them, if
it must be so, with my blood.”
Now let us hasten on to the final scene. It is Sunday morning, July 5,
1685, and “King” Monmouth is standing on the lofty tower of Bridgwater
parish church, looking out over an expanse of fertile and well-wooded
country, with the Mendip Hills to the north-east and the Quantocks to
the south-west. He turns his eyes anxiously towards the south-east,
where there is a wide extent of dreary morass known as Sedgemoor. In the
villages round the moor the royal troops are encamped, and are rapidly
drinking themselves drunk with Somerset cider. Monmouth is in a
despondent mood; his heart has failed him, and he has already meditated
flight. The trainbands of the surrounding counties and the life-guards
of the king are closing in upon him in overwhelming force, and if
victory is to be secured a battle must be fought without delay. He
forthwith determines to march that very night, under cover of the
darkness, and fall on the surprised enemy before dawn.
As the clock strikes eleven, Monmouth and his men march out of Taunton,
the moon shining brightly and the northern streamers flashing in the
sky. By one o’clock his half-armed rabble is on the moor, where the
marsh-fog lies so thick that nothing can be seen fifty paces away.
Between him and the enemy are three broad ditches or rhines full of mud
and water. Monmouth knows of two of these ditches, and has planned the
advance so as to cross them by the causeways. He is, however, ignorant
of the third, and when his army reaches its brink it is powerless to
cross and attack the king’s troops, only a few paces away. A random
pistol-shot has already aroused the Royalists; their drums beat to arms,
and the cavalry and foot, scrambling into order, advance towards the
rhine which separates them from the enemy. “For whom are you?” shouts an
officer of foot-guards. “For the king,” is the reply from the rebel
ranks. “For which king?” is then demanded. The answer is a loud shout of
“King Monmouth! God be with us!” The royal troops fire; the rebel
horsemen flee, and the drivers of the ammunition wagons hasten after
them with the powder and ball.
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.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: =The Last Sleep of Argyll.=
(_From the fresco by E. M. Ward., in Westminster Palace._)]
[Illustration: =The Arrest of Alice Lisle.=
(_From the picture by E. M. Ward, R.A._)]
[Illustration]