Monmouth Rebellion
Contents Updated: Thursday, 26 October 2006
Whigs, Tories and Kings
The cavalier (Tory) government of the Catholic king, Charles II, was unpopular among the Whigs, and they had been trying for some time to get him replaced by their own nominee. Charles was clever, was supported by Louis XIV of France, the Tories, the Church and the Army, and the Whigs were divided. He suspended Parliament in 1681 AD, undoing the work of Cromwell, the Civil War and the Commonwealth in stepping towards democracy, and ruled as an absolute monarch like Louis for the last four years of his life.
Whig Justices of the Peace were everywhere replaced by Tories. The Sheriff of London was made a Tory and he appointed all juries, so that no Whig could be safe from spurious accusations and convictions. The Whig minister, Lord Shaftesbury, fled to Holland while his colleagues Lord Russell and others were accused of plotting against the monarchy and were executed as traitors. “Church and King” mobs roamed the streets of London looking for Whigs.
In 1683 AD and 1684 AD, the Tories attacked the charters of the boroughs, the last remnant of the Commonwealth. The charter of the City of London was replaced with one that put the council in the hands of the Crown. Provincial towns were told to surrender their charters under threat, and others had them revoked by decree under absurd pretexts, like refusing to build a stage, as happened at York. The importance of this was that the borough corporations chose the MPs in these early days of modern Parliament and so the king could nominate his own MPs should he ever want to call a Parliament to rubber-stamp his decisions.
The Whig party seemed to have been destroyed almost at birth, but unfortunately for the king, the economic power of the merchants and businessmen who formed the majority of the wealthy Whigs, and their support by the poor, remained. Powerful companies were trading abroad with the colonies and with former rivals like Portugal and Spain. The Whigs therefore had money that the king, being dependent on the French monarch, Louis, had not. Above all, a despot depends upon his army and Charles could hardly pay his.
In France, Louis was proving his own despotic ways by revoking the Edict of Nantes which had allowed the Huguenots some toleration. Hundreds of thousands of them had to flee and tens of thousands came to England bringing in new and valuable skills. Their tales of Catholic atrocities strengthened the feelings of the poor masses against the king and any idea of a Catholic restoration. So it was that James came to the throne with strong feelings against him, his despotic rule and his popish plots. “Popery and wooden shoes,” was the slogan that fed the feelings of the masses—Catholicism meant the abject poverty of the French peasants.
The Duke of Monmouth
From Holland, the Whigs planned to replace James before the situation worsened. As a successor, some Whigs preferred the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s illegitimate son by Lucy Walter, and others preferred the king’s protestant daughter, Mary, and her husband, William of Orange. Monmouth was popular among the poor masses, the Levellers.
On 11 June 1685, the Duke of Monmouth, landed at Lyme Regis, the west country town now more often associated with the novel and more recently film, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, hoping to wrest the throne from James. Farm labourers, smallholders and, especially, the weavers whose woollen weaving business was in depression. met Monmouth enthusiastically. Beginning with the 81 men that Monmouth brought with him, the rebel leader soon inspired 6000 west country yokels armed with pitchforks and flagons of cider providing them with “Dutch courage,” an expression that seemed to arise at about this time.
Crowned king at Taunton, the remainder of June 1685 were the “Duking days” of excessive optimism and merriment. Monmouth was temporarily king of the west, if of nowhere else, but his rebellion was doomed because the rich Whigs wanted nothing to do with him. They favoured William of Orange who was actually sent to Britain to suppress a supporting mutiny of soldiers that had been stationed in Holland.
Meanwhile the real king calmly assembled his professional soldiers under their commanders, John Churchill and Patrick Sarsfield. The rebel army marched to Bristol but retired to Bridgewater in the face of the king’s army which encamped at Sedgemoor. On a moonlight night on 5 July, 1685, the rebels tried a surprise attack on the king’s Sedgemoor camp. The cannons of the royal army blasted the yokels and weaver’s lads across the river Cary. The cider fortified rustics filled with their Dutch courage drunkenly yelled across to the kings men:
Come over here and fight, you cowards!The untrained, ill-armed and badly led rebels were massacred, decimated by the cannon fire, and in no fit state or adequately armed to fight hand to hand. They fought with incredible courage against the odds but eventually broke and were hunted down by the Royalist Cavalry. Monmouth fled in terror and was captured in the mopping up operation three days later hiding in a ditch, some say at Ringwood in the New Forest and some say at Horton in Dorset. Most of the rebels were rounded up. One fugitive fled and hid near his home but when the king’s men arrived to question his wife, she let the dog loose and it ran straight to the master’s hiding place and betrayed him. The horrified wife snatched up the dog and jumped into Locking’s Well, which is still said to be haunted by the woman and her dog.
The Hanging Judge
James II appointed Judge Jeffreys to try the rebels, and he was so brutal that he became known as the hanging judge. The trials were held at several places but the main centre was Taunton where the rebel army had assembled. Jeffreys sentenced 200 to hanging and another 800 to transportation to the West Indies. Monmouth himself was beheaded on Tower Hill in London on 15 July.
The sound of running feet and horses’ hooves is regularly heard at Westzoyland. Supposedly, a farm lad with a reputation as a runner was made to race a horse for his life from a standing start. The boy is said to have won the race over a short distance but was hanged anyway. This sounds rather mythical and might be a much older story modernized at the time. A Celtic goddess is supposed to have raced a horse and won.
At Moyles Court at Ellingham in Hampshire, a 70 year old dowager was accused of hiding two fugitives from Sedgemoor, and Jeffreys condemned her despite her age. Her sentence was to be burned to death, suggesting that Jeffreys took her to be a witch. In fact, the sentence was commuted to beheading and she is now one of the many headless ghosts of Britain.
Frome was associated with the Orange Rebellion because the Duke of Monmouth is said to have stayed at a house in Cork Street now called Monmouth House. And locals found guilty by Jeffreys passing through Frome for his “bloody assizes” were supposed to have been hung, drawn and quartered at Gore Hedge, just past the top of what is now Bath Street, but then was Rook Lane. There might be some doubt about this name, however, since a “gore” is an ancient name for a triangular field.
Ghosts and Gasps
Judge Jeffreys attended many of the hangings in person, and his ghost is said to haunt several west country locations as well as his own home at Walton on Thames. He used to dine and drink at the Prospect of Whitby public house at Wapping in London. This old pub famously has staging over the river and is still a pleasant place to sit in summer, but Jeffreys liked to watch the executions of criminals across the river at “Execution Dock.” Condemned pirates were hung over the river at low tide, and were not cut down until they had been washed by three tides. This is reminiscent of the ancient fertility ritual of the Jack in the Green, who was paraded in a decorated basket before being lowered into a river or lake on May Day.
Several towns had gallows trees for the victims including Croscombe in Devon. Twelve People were hung at Lyme Regis where Jeffreys dined in the Great House in Broad Street, a spot still troubled by his ghost even though the original house is long gone. He is said also to haunt a house in Lydford in Devon and a house in the centre of Dorchester. It is said that the sound of choking men rather than the ghost of the Judge is heard in some places. People have reported the sound of horrific gasping on quiet nights in Bath Street and the approaches to Gore Hedge in Frome.
James carried on with his plans to turn Britain back to Catholicism, but the rich Whigs still had William of Orange waiting in Holland. With much more money and provisions, William succeeded where Monmouth had earlier failed, landing on 5 November 1688 AD at Torbay. John Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough and ancestor of Winston, deserted to the rebels and this time it was James who fled. William and Mary were made rulers in February 1689, but the Whigs made sure that Parliament, not the king had control of the army and the judges, and that the king had no right to suspend or dispense with Parliament’s laws. Furthermore, Parliament controlled the exchequer. The Whigs became monarchists when the monarch had to be a Whig.
Moses and Exodus
