Part 77

At the battle of Sedgemoor, in Somersetshire (1685), "King Monmouth," with his hastily gathered forces, was utterly routed. He himself was soon afterwards captured, hiding in a ditch. He desired to be taken to the King. His request was granted. When he entered his uncle's presence, he threw himself down and crawled to his feet, weeping and begging piteously for life--only life--on any terms, however hard.

He denied that he had issued the lying proclamation published at Lyme; he denied that he had sought the crown of his own free will; finally, in an agony of supplication, he hinted that he would even renounce Protestantism if thereby he might escape death. James told him that he should have the service of a Catholic priest, but would promise nothing more. Monmouth groveled and pleaded, but the King's heart was like marble, and he turned away in silence. Then the Duke, seeing that all his efforts were vain, rose to his feet and regained his manhood.

He was forthwith sent to the Tower, and shortly afterwards to execution. His headless body was buried under the communion table of that little chapel of St. Peter within the Tower grounds, where the remains of Anne Boleyn, Lady Jane Grey, Sir Thomas More, and many other royal victimsf, are gathered. No sadder spot exists on earth, "since there death is associated with whatever is darkest in human nature and human destiny."

Macaulay's "England."

After Monmouth's death there were no further attempts at insurrection, and the struggle at Sedgemoor remains the last encounter worthy of the name of battle fought on English soil.

487. The "Bloody Assizes" (1685).

The defeat of the insurgents who had rallied under Monmouth's flag was followed by a series of trials known, from their results, as the "Bloody Assizes" (1685). They were conducted by Judge Jeffreys, assisted by a band of soldiers under Colonel Kirke, ironically called, from their ferocity, "Kirke's Lambs." Jeffreys was by nature cruel, and enjoyed the spectacle of mental as well as bodily anguish. As he himself said, he delighted to give those who had the misfortune to appear before him "a lick with the rough side of his tongue," preparatory to roaring out the sentence of torture or death, in which he delighted still more.

All who were in the remotest way implicated in the late rebellion were now hunted down and brought to a trial which was but a mockery of justice. No one was permitted to defend himself. In fact, defense would have been useless against the blind fury of such a judge. The threshold of the court was to most that crossed it the threshold of the grave. A gentleman present at one of these scenes of slaughter, touched with pity at the condition of a trembling old man called up for sentence, ventured to put in a word in his behalf. "My Lord," said he to Jeffreys, "this poor creature is dependent on the parish." "Don't trouble yourself," cried the judge; "I will soon ease the parish of the burden," and ordered the officers to execute him at once.

Those who escaped death were often still more to be pitied. A young man was sentenced to be imprisoned for seven years, and to be whipped once a year through every market town in the county. In his despair, he petitioned the King to grant him the favor of being hanged. The petition was refused, but a partial remission of the punishment was at length gained by bribing the court; for Jeffreys, though his heart was shut against mercy, always had his pockets open for gain. Alice Lisle, an aged woman, who, out of pity, had concealed two men flying from the King's vengeance, was condemned to be burned alive; and it was with the gratest difficulty that the clergy of Winchester Cathedral succeeded in getting the sentence commuted to beheading.

As the work went on, the spirits of Jeffreys rose higher and higher. He laughed, shouted, joked, and swore like a drunken man. When the court had finished its sittings, more than a thousand persons had been brutally scourged, sold as slaves, hanged, or beheaded. The guideposts of the highways were converted into gibbets, from which the blackened corpses swung in chains, and from every church tower in Somersetshire ghastly heads looked down on those who gathered there to worship God; in fact, so many bodies were exposed that the whole air was "tainted with corruption and death."

Not satisfied with vengeance alone, Jeffreys and his friends made these trials a means of speculation. Batches of rebels were given as presents to courtiers, who sold them for a period of ten years to be worked to death or flogged to death on West India plantations; and the Queen's maids of honor extorted large sums of money for the pardon of a number of country schoolgirls who had been convicted of presenting Monmouth with a royal flag at Taunton.

On the return of Jeffreys to London after this carnival of blood, his father was so horrified at his cruelty that he forbade him to enter his house. James, on the contrary, testified his approval by making Jeffreys Lord Chancellor of the realm, at the same time mildly censuring him for not having shown greater severity!

The new Lord Chancellor testified his gratitude to his royal master by procuring the murder, by means of a packed jury, of Alderman Cornish, a prominent London Whig (S479), who was especially hated by the King on account of his support of that Exclusion Bill (S478) which was intended to shut James out from the throne. On the same day on which Cornish was executed, Jeffreys also had the satisfaction of knowing that Elizabeth Gaunt was burned alive at Tyburn, London, for having assisted one of the Rye-House conspirators, who had fought for Monmouth at Sedgemoor, to escape.

488. The King makes Further Attempts to reestablish Catholicism; Second Declaration of Indulgence (1687); Oxford.

An event occurred about this time which encouraged James to make a more decided attempt to restore Catholicism. Henry IV of France had granted the Protestants of his kingdom liberty of worship, by the Edict of Nantes (1598). Louis XIV deliberately revoked it (1685). By that shortsighted act the Huguenots, or French Protestants, were exposed to cruel persecution, and thousands of them fled to England and America.

James, who, like his late brother Charles II, was "the pensioned slave of the French King" (S476), resolved to profit by the example set him by Louis. He did not expect to drive the Protestants out of Great Britain as Louis had driven them from France, but he hoped to restore the country to its allegiance to Rome (SS370, 382, 477). He began by suspending the Test Act (S477) and putting Catholics into important offices in both Church and State. He furthermore established an army of 13,000 men on Hounslow Heath, just outside London (1686), to hold the city in subjection in case it should rebel.

The Dispensing Power and the Suspending Power were prerogatives by which the King claimed the right of preventing the enforcement of such laws as he deemed contrary to public good. A packed bench of judges sustained the King in this position, but the power so to act was finally abolished by the Bill of Rights (1689). See S497 and top of page xxxii, Article XII.

He next recalled the Protestant Duke of Ormonde, governor of Ireland, and put in his place Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel, a Catholic. Tyrconnel had orders to recruit an Irish Roman Catholic army to aid the King in carrying out his designs (1687). He raised some soldiers, but he also raised that famous song of "Lilli Burlero," by which, as its author boasted, James was eventually "sung out of his kingdom."

Lord Wharton, a prominent English Whig (S479), was the author of this satirical political ballad, which, it is said, was sung and whistled from one end of England to the other, in derision of the King's policy. It undoubtably had a powerful popular influence in bringing on the Revolution of 1688. The ballad began: "Ho, Brother Teague, dost hear de decree? Lilli Burlero, bullen a-la, Dat we shall have a new deputie, Lilli Burlero, bullen a-la." The refrain, "Lilli Burlero," etc. (also written "Lillibullero"), is said to have been the watchword used by the Irish Catholics when they rose against the Protestants of Ulster in 1641. See Wilkins's "Political Songs," Vol I.

Having got the courts completely under his control through the appointment of judges in sympathy with Jeffreys (S487) and with himself, the King issued a Declaration of Indulgence similar to that which his brother Charles II had issued (S477). It suspended all penal laws against both the Roman Catholics on the one hand, and the Protestant Dissenters (S472) on the other. The latter, however, suspecting that this apparently liberal measure was simply a trick to establish Catholicism, refused to avail themselves of it, and denounced it as an open violation of the Constitution.

See Summary of Constitutional History in the Appendix, p. xxi, S23.

James next proceeded, by means of the tyrannical High Commission Court, which he had revived (S382), to bring Magdalen College, Oxford, under Catholic control. The President of that college having died, the Fellows were considering the choice of a successor. The King ordered them to elect a Catholic. The Fellows refused to obey, and elected a Protestant. James ejected the new President, and drove out the Fellows, leaving them to depend on the charity of neighboring country gentlemen for their support.

But the King, in attacking the rights of the college, had "run his head against a wall," as he soon discovered to his sorrow. His temporary success, however, emboldened him to reissue the first Declaration of Indulgence (1688). Its real object, like that of the first Declaration (S477), was to put Roman Catholics into still higher positions of trust and power.

"What building is that?" asked the Duke of Wellington of his companion, Mr. Croker, pointing, as he spoke, to Magdalen College wall, just as they entered Oxford in 1834. "That is the wall which James II ran his head against," was the reply.

489. The Petition of the Seven Bishops, 1688.

James commanded the clergy throughout the realm to read this Declaration (S488) on a given Sunday from their pulpits. The clergy were by nature conservative. They still generally upheld the theory of the "Divine Right of Kings" and of "Passive Obedience." A majority of them taught the doctrine which James I had proclaimed: "God makes the King; the King makes the law; his subjects are bound to obey the law" (SS419, 429). Now, however, nearly all of them revolted. They felt that to comply with the mandate of the King would be to strike a blow at the supremacy of the Church of England. In this crisis the Archbishop of Canterbury, accompanied by six bishops, petitioned the King to be excused from reading it from their pulpits. The King refused to consider the petition. When the day came, hardly a clergyman read the paper, and in Westminster Abbey the entire congregation rose in a body and left rather than listen to it. Furious at such an unexpected result, James ordered the refractory bishops to be sent to the Tower and kept prisoners there.

The whole country now seemed to turn against the King. By his obstinate folly James had succeeded in making enemies of all classes, not only of the Whig Roundheads (S479) who had fought against his father in the civil war, but also of the Tory Cavaliers (S479) who had fought for him, and of the clergy who had taught the duty of obedience to him.

One of the bishops sent to the Tower was Trelawney of Bristol. He was a native of Cornwall. The news of his imprisonment roused the rough, independent population of that country. From one end of it to the other the people were now heard singing: