Personal blog of Mark Thompson. Formerly Managing Director of GCAS Design in Belfast, Northern Ireland (from 1999 - 2006) and Chairman of the Ulster-Scots Agency (from June 2005 - June 2009). Thoughts on Ulster-Scots heritage, identity, evangelical Protestant faith, music and other stuff I stumble upon.
Our children loved to watch Horrible Histories on BBC. This clip was one they really loved, and which our Charlie memorised and liked to recite. Entertaining certainly, but it masks who King Charles II really was.
He, and his brother the Duke of York, the future King James II, had been at war with Scottish Presbyterian Covenanter civilians since Charles was crowned in 1661. Battles and persecutions ensued. Charles 'prorogued' Parliament on 27 May 1679 and less than a month later on 22 June 1679 at Bothwell Brig south of Glasgow, 5000 troops were sent in to rout 6000 Presbyterian civilians. Charles prorogued Parliament again and again in the 1680s.
Just like in Scotland, the army was sent to break up open air religious services known as 'conventicles' in south west England, at places like Bristol and Salisbury. 'Whigs' in England began to protest, with localised riots and by raising petitions which were denounced by Charles II and his Lord Chief Justice as 'seditious'.
A goldsmith from Taunton in Somerset, Thomas Dare, personally confronted Charles II in London with a petition from the people - Dare was arrested for "seditious words" and sent back to Taunton for trial in April 1680. He was fined £500 and was given a three year suspended sentence. The specific words that he had dared utter were that "the King's subjects had but two ways, one by petition, the other by armes".
The crown and state against the people... .............
In the "west" we like to think that we have rights, which are in some way protected in law. This idea has been handed down to us, culturally and philosophically, through the centuries and it's now our presumed default - it's the water in which we swim. Like David Foster Wallace's proverbial fish, we're not even aware that the water is there. But this was not always the case.
King Charles II loved the idea that kings not only had privilege, but total domination, that they were in every way superior to the people, and were above the reach of common law.
In 1680 he, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, published a manuscript text which had been written during the reign of his late (executed) father, King Charles I. The author was the late Sir Robert Filmer (1588-1653), and it was entitled Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings (text online here).
In his opening salvo, Filmer utterly rejects an idea that we take for granted:
Mankind is naturally endowed and born with Freedom from all Subjection, and at liberty to chose what Form of Government it please: And that the Power which any one Man hath over others, was at first bestowed according to the discretion of the Multitude.
Filmer believed that "in a monarchy the king must of necessity be above the laws". This is the basis of "absolute monarchy', and potentially tyranny.
Filmer raged against the "Reformed Church", "Papists", "Jesuits", "zealous favourers of the Geneva Discipline". He cited John Calvin and George Buchanan, and "R. Dolman" who was a pseudonym of Robert Parsons (1546-1610) who had authored A treatise of three conversions of England from paganism to Christian religion (online here).
With Filmer resurrected, various Whigs then retaliated in print, with ideas of democracy and liberty which would echo across the Atlantic almost 100 years later – they were James Tyrrell, Algernon Sidney, and John Locke.
More to follow...
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PS: The 1689 Bill of Rights put an end to such abuses by future monarchs - for example:
Dispensing Power.
That the pretended Power of Suspending of Laws or the Execution of Laws by Regall Authority without Consent of Parlyament is illegall.
Late dispensing Power.
That the pretended Power of Dispensing with Laws or the Execution of Laws by Regall Authoritie as it hath beene assumed and exercised of late is illegall.
Right to petition.
That it is the Right of the Subjects to petition the King and all Commitments and Prosecutions for such Petitioning are Illegall.
• English Radical Whigs: Natural Law and Natural Rights by Michael Zuckert, University of Notre Dame (2011) is online here
• Presbyterianism in Devon and Cornwall in the seventeenth century thesis by Rev. J.T. Gillespie of Plymouth (1943) is online here.
At Lyme Regis, a tombstone at St Michael The Archangel Church has this inscription:
Here lieth the body of William Hewling, son of William Hewling of London, and grandson of William Kyffin, Esq., Alderman of London, who suffered martyrdom before he was full twenty years of age, engaging with the Duke of Monmouth for the Protestant religion and English liberty against Popery and slavery, September 12th, 1685.
The Hewling brothers, William and Benjamin, were followers of the Duke of Monmouth and were arrested after the failure of his rebellion. Both were executed, William at Lyme aged 19 and Benjamin at Taunton aged 22. Their sister Hannah had pleaded for their release; her intervention, and payment of a colossal £1000, saved William from being disembowelled.
• Their grandfather William Kiffin was a "Strict and Particular Baptist" pastor (see this source).
• Kiffin's autobiography Remarkable Passages In The Life of William Kiffin (1689; 1823 edition is online here). He had met with his two grandsons after their arrests. It is moving to read the grandfather's account of the boys' last days and hours.
"The Sheriff having given his body to be buried, although it was brought from the place of execution without any notice given, yet very many of the town, to the number of about two hundred, came to accompany it. And several young women, of the best of the town, laid him in his grave, in Lyme church yard, the 18th of September, 1685."
"In the church yard, on the S. side of the church was formerly a tomb, two sides of which, with the following inscription, are preserved, in that part of the church which is under the school"
I've walked around the massive walls of the Royal Citadel many times - from the open space of Plymouth Hoe downalong Madeira Road to the Mayflower Steps and the Barbican and its array of coffee shops and quayside restaurants - but have never booked a tour of the inside - they are very infrequent as the Citadel is still a functioning military facility. The curving coastal road is a beautiful sunrise location, and the many huge international Navy memorials, with joggers and dog walkers in the morning light, make it look almost like a movie set at times.
After the arrival of William of Orange's vast armada at Torbay on 5 November 1688 - where soldiers, horses and provisions were unloaded - the ships then sailed 35 miles westwards towards Plymouth where they moored in the shelter of Plymouth Sound and wintered there. The Royal Citadel was the westernmost army garrison of King James II, and William knew that he had to take control of it, to ensure that (as Macaulay put it in his mammoth The History of England) "the invaders had now not a single enemy in their rear" for their advance eastwards towards King James II and London.
William's Declaration was read aloud to the Royal Citadel garrison who immediately defected to his cause, and the Declaration was then fastened to the Citadel gate. The irony in this is that the regiment there, the Earl of Bath's Regiment, had been raised just over three years earlier during the June 1685 Duke of Monmouth civilian rebellion, in order to crush it. Monmouth was William of Orange's cousin, and Continental battle comrade. Heads and quarters of some of the 350 executed 'rebels' had been put on public display in Plymouth. However, when faced with William's vast European army and navy, the regiment melted.
A Plymouth primary source for this is The Journal Of James Yonge, Plymouth Surgeon 1647-1721 in which he says:
"... In November this year the Prince of Orange arrived at Torbay with great fleet of men-of-war and merchant ships, and landing there, marched to Exeter, where great resort of gentlemen &c. went to him and declared for him. His declaration was also read in the Citadel and Guildhall and at length the whole nation revolted ..."
William had a lot on his plate. We've all grown up with Ireland's fixation on the Battle of the Boyne, but there was far more going on that just that. Following the naval Battle of Beachy Head on 10 July 1690, he authorised the first Royal Naval Dockyard to be built at Plymouth, in 1691, to defend the west from further French attack.
• Painting above, showing the Royal Citadel in the background, is entitled 'Plymouth in 1666' by the Dutch artist Willem Van De Velde. It is on display in The Box Arts Centre.
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A more detailed account of the events at Plymouth Citadel can be found in the Report on the Manuscripts of the late Reginald Rawden Hastings, Vol II, pages 198-199 (online here), a letter from Theophilus Hastings, the Earl of Huntingdon, to King James II. He had a regiment in Plymouth too:
"What passed on Saturday night relating to my imprisonment and the garbling of the regiment both officers and soldiers I did presume to inform your Majesty in a letter by Major Ingram.
On Monday the formal revolt of this garrison was made, when the Governor caused the Prince of Orange’s Declaration to be read in his presence to the remaining officers of the regiment and to the officers of the citadel; to which when each man had given his concurrence, the Governor then ordered it to be read at the head of the battalion to the private soldiers, to which in imitation of the officers they assented by throwing up of their hats and huzzas; upon which it was fastened publicly on the gates of the citadel. The solemnity ended by several barrels of ale as a largess to the regiment to drink success to this noble achievement.
The Governor himself hath received a commission from the Prince of Orange to command in these parts, and on Tuesday the vacancies were filled up, Hastings being made Colonel and Jacob Lieutenant-Colonel. Hatton refused to serve under any other authority than your Majesty and is dismissed and some others of the officers . .
I could have prevented my present confinement and now obtain my liberty if I would have joined in this guilty action. But those principles of honour and loyalty that hath preserved me hitherto will always direct me to make nothing the act of my will but what shall be answerable to those principles.
I am here a close prisoner, my arms taken away, having not the liberty to walk in the citadel without a guard. My whole dependence is upon your Majesty, whether you will summon the place, it being said it is kept for your Majesty, or demand me, or take in custody some relation of him here, or exchange me. I submit to your Majesty’s wisdom, humbly beseeching that if I receive any despatches from the Secretaries of State, it may be by an expressed writ all with their own hands, for a reason I have which I dare not commit to writing, most letters being opened."
• Photo below of the grand entrance to the Royal Citadel, showing the date 1670, and presumably to which the Declaration was fastened, is from Flickr here.
And, just a few hundred yards away in Plymouth's historic Barbican waterfront area is the Plymouth Gin Distillery, founded 1793, where a display in the reception and shop area credits William with introducing gin to England - "Dutch courage"!
This is amazing stuff - John Coad, the "Godfearing carpenter" of Stoford in Somerset, was recruited as a soldier in King James II's army, but in June 1685 he defected to the Duke of Monmouth, was captured, was sentenced to be sent to Jamaica as a plantation slave, was freed at the Glorious Revolution and eventually returned to England in 1690.
His surviving manuscript of his life was published in 1849, entitled A Memorandum of the Wonderful Providences of God to a Poor Unworthy Creature: During the Time of the Duke of Monmouth's Rebellion and to the Revolution in 1688.
Coad was one of over 800 men who were shipped off to the Caribbean plantations as slaves; and who were plausibly the inspiration for their fellow Monmouth 'rebel' Daniel Defoe for his world famous novel Robinson Crusoe (1719) - a link recognised by Tom Paulin in his 2001 essay in the London Review of Books, entitled 'Fugitive Crusoe' (subscription required).
Percy Kirk / Kirke is best known to history for his involvement in the 1689 Siege of Derry. However, given his past brutalities during the 1685 "Bloody Assizes" of King James II, many were utterly incredulous that William of Orange had recruited Kirk / Kirke. Here's why:
"... Nor was Judge Jeffreys the only person who was thought to execute the King's orders ; but Colonel Kirk, a soldier of fortune, a man of boldness and looseness, did also act a considerable part in these unhappy tragedies:
after the Duke (of Monmouth)'s defeat, he caused ninety wounded men to be hang'd at Taunton, not only without permitting their relations to speak with them, but with pipes playing, drums beating, trumpets founding, and all other military pomp and joy.
At another town he invited his officers to dinner, near the place where some of the condemned rebels were to be executed, and order 'd ten of them to be turn'd off with a health to the King, ten in a health to the Queen, and ten more in a health to the Lord Jeffreys. These Cruelties he afterwards endeavour'd to palliate, by pretending, that he did nothing but by express order from the King, and his General.
But he was charged with one action that could proceed only from his own brutal inclination to lust and blood, and that was, the drawing in a poor maiden to prostitute her self to him, with the promise of saving her brother's life, and nevertheless causing him to be hang'd on the sign-post of the same house, and out of the window presenting the credulous abused damsel with that barbarous spectacle of his treachery and cruelty..."
My Head upon the Bridge must surely stand, Because I was a Traytor to my Land: Upon the Gates they'l set my Quarters too, For doing what I was forbid to do.
William Disney- seemingly a "barrister at law" of the "Citty of West Minister" - was charged with high treason. He was hanged, drawn and quartered on Kennington Common in London on 29 June 1685. His head and quarters were displayed on one of London's city gates.
Why? His home, and business premises, had been raided by King James II's troops on 15 June where they found a printing press, along with 750 partially complete copies of the Duke of Monmouth's Declaration, and five which were fully complete. These were all burned before the Royal Exchange, apart from one copy which is shown below (it's from the Lansdowne MSS in the British Museum.)
When Monmouth and his rebels first landed at Lyme Regis on 11 June, his Declaration was publicly read at the market cross, at Taunton on 20 June ("where he suffered himself to be proclaimed king") and probably at numerous other places too during his six week rebellion in south west England.
Disney had form. Around 1680 he had gone to some lengths to prove that Monmouth, who was the first born son of King Charles II, to Lucy Walter, was in fact legitimate and was therefore the rightful heir to the throne. Disney had been implicated in the failed 1683 "Rye House Plot" to kill King Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York, who became King James II.
The real King? The Declaration refused to acknowledge that King James II was king at all, referring to him by his prior title of Duke of York and denouncing him as a usurper.
One of Disney's colleagues in the printing operation was printer John Bringhurst (article here) who managed to escape to the Netherlands. Another was Henry Danvers (Wikipedia here). The project seems to have been masterminded by "W. C." of Paternoster Row, a prolific London printer of the era.
• The Declaration of James, Duke of Monmouthis online here.
• An analysis of the 1685 Declaration of James, Duke of Monmouth, and how it compares with the 1688 Declaration of William Prince of Orangeis online here.
For some in our part of the world, sectarianism is their identity, and they almost wallow in how they choose to apply it to themselves. It has not always been this way.
“In 1788 and 1789 there were important centenary anniversary commemorations.
In early December 1788 the closing of the gates was remembered by special church services in both the cathedral and a Presbyterian church, followed by a civic procession, a military parade and the burning of Lundy.
It also involved a special dinner, attended by town dignitaries as well as Catholic clergy.
In August 1789 commemoration of the breaking of the boom and the relief of the city included a sizeable procession to the cathedral which involved not only the members of the corporation but the Catholic bishop and his clergy, as well as the Presbyterian clergy and elders.
On both these occasions the siege was commemorated as a great blow against tyranny which brought liberty to people of all Christian denominations…
In the atmosphere of late eighteenth-century Ireland, with the rise of a tolerant Irish patriotism, events of 1688-9 were seen as part of the Glorious Revolution with its constitutional benefits for all, embracing Presbyterians and members of the Church of Ireland, and Protestants and Catholics”.
Difference doesn't have to lead to division, but it will if we want it to. In the first 15 minutes of this recent podcast, Jimmy Dore talks from a US perspective about how social cultural division is inflamed by power élites for their own ends.
Here is director and film producer Terry McMahon delivering a speech at March for Justice in Dublin back on 18 September, on the suppression and subversion of free speech in the Republic of Ireland - it used to be the Church that did this, now it's secular government, lobbyists, NGOs and global technology giants. It's still the "establishment" that's shutting down speech.
And below is KeyWest's song Dreamstealers, slicing through the illusions of prosperity and growth, showing the vast disconnect between my GenX world and the GenZ of my children. "What's the cost of this so-called progress?".
So, this is interesting. In the dual Referenda in March 2024, the entire Republic of Ireland 'establishment' campaigned and lobbied the population for a "Yes" vote. But the people thought otherwise and returned a landslide 67.69% "No" vote. The shockwaves were enormous, so much so that the immediate aftermath the government postponed its proposed, and controversial, "Hate Speech" legislation.
But, here we are about six months later in October, and with various crises around the world, and a likely election in the next few weeks, guess what? Two days ago, this happens.
Five Bills were considered and passed in the Dáil in under six hours, a process that normally takes weeks. The most contentious was the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill which was amended because of a groundswell of opposition that turned into a backbench revolt, after it had been passed in the Dáil.
The Bill that was passed at speed was amended from the original version, rightly separating "hate crime" from "hate speech", but it has all happened so suddenly that no-one seems to have got into the detail yet. Once the election is over, something closer to the original version will probably be back on the table again.
People - and politicians and political journalists - in Northern Ireland who obsess over the prospect of a "United Ireland" and fill up our heads with identity and nationality as a subject, would be much better to actually scrutinise the substance of the sort of Ireland - and also the sort of UK for that matter - that has developed.
The pathetic Brexit excitement about "blue passports", or chatter about what would the flag be like in a future United Ireland, are exactly the types of cosmetic nonsense that are used to distract populations while the politicians strip their liberty away.
I spoke with an octogenarian, extremely wealthy, Dublin man a few days ago. He likes coming up to Belfast, but openly said to me "in 1921 the unionists were right to go for partition. Who would want to live in the repressive Ireland that I grew up in? I went to London, I went to America".
The Ulster Covenant of 1912 stated that it was right to be concerned that a new Home Rule Ireland would be "subversive of our civil and religious freedom". Whatever the Parliament, in Dublin or London or Belfast, it remains right to prioritise freedom.
The Belfast "Good Friday" Agreement created space for dual nationality. The real issue is liberty, for all people, of all cultures, in all nations.
20 years ago today I was invited to consider becoming the “post Lord Laird” chair of the Ulster-Scots Agency. A senior NIO official came to the boardroom of my workplace, GCAS, and we talked for nearly two hours.
Many people told me to not take the role. But I did accept it, and did what I could for a four year term, from June 2005 - June 2009, squeezed in around my day job and family and all sorts of "real life" stuff.
I didn't get paid for doing it, the few hundred pounds a month for the role was paid directly to GCAS for the inconvenience. Some people from those years are still friends and I thank them all for working with me, and together we did some positive things. But nowhere near enough.
Ireland is an island of cultural variety. Some are still struggling to accept that.
I will always believe that rooted, authentic, community-led heritage and culture is of critical importance to us all.
Without culture, we’re all just consumers or constituents, pawns in the bigger game of finance and politics. We are all more than what we buy, and how we vote.
Wareham on the south Dorset coast has an ancient Saxon era earthwork wall that surrounds the town. On its West Walls is a section known as the "Bloody Bank" because it was where, after the "Bloody Assizes" of King James II and Judge George Jeffreys,at least five men were hung drawn and quartered on 22 September 1685.
"There can have been few villages in Dorset and Somerset, west of a line drawn from Bath to Wareham, which did not contain folk who had seen their friends' flesh displayed in public, or heard of the price paid for a kinsman's living body for toil in the plantations, or for a girl sold to a Court lady for a servant. Jeffreys' chair and a spike on which a rebel's head was set are still preserved at Dorchester in the museum opposite his house: it can hardly have been accident that has distinguished and kept them. Local memories show how deep and intimate was the touch of his work. One man ("Burn-guts") sold furze to the authorities for burning rebel entrails: his horses one by one pined and died. A woman said it did her eyes good to see a very old man called Larke hanged. She lost her sight within a short time.
One man of Wareham, Thomas Delacourt, was present at the final stage in this horrible drama. Quarters of some of the victims were exposed on Bloody Bank at Wareham the place gets its name there from. Delacourt and some friends stole the remains and buried them.
Delacourt was one of the first to join William of Orange, and went to London in his train: and it fell to him to be made sentry over Jeffreys when the judge, in the year of that more successful Revolution, was cast into the Tower, where he died".
- from The Soul of Dorset by F.J. Harvey Darton (1922)
• At the first show trial of the "Bloody Assizes", held at Dorchester on 27 August, Jeffreys had described the people of the south west of England as "lying, snivelling Presbyterian Rescals". Later generations of Delacourts in Wareham belonged to the United Reformed Church in the town, which tends to be the name given in England for Presbyterian.
• Here is a pic of the Old Meeting House in Church Street (formerly Meeting House Lane) in the town - a datestone on the front of the building says "Founded 1662".
• At Dorchester, Jeffreys condemned 251 people to death
The original 1768 Paul Revere Bowl is in the collection of the MFA in Boston. And here is yet another example of pre-Revolution America pointing to the ancient liberties of their ancestral British Isles, through Magna Carta and King William III and Queen Mary II's Bill of Rights of 1689.
The Liberty Bowl honoured ninety-two members of the Massachusetts House of Representatives who refused to rescind a letter sent throughout the colonies protesting the Townshend Acts (1767), which taxed tea, paper, glass, and other commodities imported from England. This act of civil disobedience by the "Glorious Ninety-Two" was a major step leading to the American Revolution. The bowl was commissioned by fifteen members of the Sons of Liberty, a secret, revolutionary organization to which Revere belonged; their names are engraved on the bowl as are references to Englishman John Wilkes, whose writing in defence of liberty inspired American patriots
Last week I was in England, and visited the Museum of Somerset. It is in the superbly restored Taunton Castle, which was one of the locations in 1685 of imprisonment, fast-tracked show trials, and horrific public executions of those suspected of involvement in the Duke of Monmouth's failed rebellion. We had just missed a two hour walking tour of the town, all about the 1685 rebellion. One of the tour guides was keen to point out to us a cauldron from the era, and she speculated that it may even have been one of those which were used to boil quartered human remains.
A blood-red exhibition about the 1685 Bloody Assizes:
• Queen Mary and John Locke Also in the Museum of Somerset is an original portrait of the future Queen Mary, and one of Somerset-born political theorist John Locke. Locke is said to have been "a comrade of Monmouth" but had fled to the Netherlands in 1683. The Netherlands made sense as a destination – Dutch-born Monmouth and Dutchman William Prince of Orange were cousins (they were both grandsons of the late King Charles I), they were war hero compatriots defending the Netherlands from French invasion. Here's an engraving of them together from the Rijksmuseum - captioned as:
“Large representation of the Battle of St. Denis on 14 August 1678. On the left in the foreground Prince William III beside the Duke of Monmouth on horseback with other members of his staff.”
They were in the Netherlands together on 8 February 1685, when news reached them of the death of Monmouth's father, and William's uncle – King Charles I. The French Ambassador at The Hague wrote that:
"the letters from England arrived yesterday ... they brought the sad news of the death of the King of England ... the Duke of Monmouth was also there, then retired to his home, and did not return to the Prince of Orange until ten o'clock in the evening. They remained locked up alone until midnight".
Undoubtedly Monmouth and William were mourning, but also plausibly making plans to try to stop the late King's ambitious brother James' accession to become King James II. Monmouth's summer 1685 rebellion failed and the reprisals were butchery and slavery. During the months of executions which followed 'Bloody Assizes', on 20 November 1685 James suspended or 'prorogued' Parliament and ruled the nation by himself.
William's revolution, which began in November 1688 succeeded. On 13 February 1689, John Locke accompanied William's wife, the future Queen Mary II, from the Netherlands back to her native London, on board this shallop boat. Mary and Locke arrived at Greenwich where she and William were offered the Crown, as joint monarchs, and a draft of a new Bill of Rights for the people which had been prepared by a 'Convention Parliament'.
Locke's writings shaped the philosophy of the Glorious Revolution of Mary and her husband William Prince of Orange, and then in turn inspired the ideas of the 1776 American Revolution. The wording of the Bill of Rights would also impact the future United States.
So, let's criss-cross the Atlantic...
• From Declaration to Constitution to Bill of Rights Like the American 1776 Declaration of Independence, the first edition of the United States Constitution was also printed by the Ulsterman John Dunlap. An earlier version, called the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, had been printed by another Ulsterman, Francis Bailey.
In the years that followed, various amendments to the Constitution were proposed, some by County Antrim born William Findley. Thesewere then captured in an additional document, the name of which was another direct reference back to King William III’s and Queen Mary II’s first act of Parliament at their coronation. The new, American, Bill of Rights was ratified in December 1791.
• The Eighth Amendment: "Cruel and Unjust Punishments" The Eighth Amendment of the American Bill of Rights “has long been treated as an enigma”*. It states:
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
The wording of this has baffled later American writers, not realising that it was directly lifted from King William III and Queen Mary II’s original 1689 Bill of Rights:
That excessive Baile ought not to be required nor excessive Fines imposed nor cruell and unusuall Punishments inflicted.
• England 1685: Over 300 victims of "cruel and unusual punishments"
The Fordham Law Review periodical (Volume 47, issue 5, 1979) made the connection crystal clear:
The phrase itself, "cruel and unusual punishments" first appeared in the English Bill of Rights of 1689 which prohibited such sanctions. Historians generally have perceived the prohibition to be a reaction to the treason trials of 1685 - the "Bloody Assize" caused by the abortive rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth. The penalty for treason involved hanging by the neck, being cut down while still alive, and then being disembowelled, beheaded, and quartered. (I omit some of the more grisly details.) That the methods of punishment employed by the English then and later were cruel and barbarous by today's standards is quite apparent.
The way that the 1688 Revolution era is presented in England is different than Ireland's highly tribalised and sectarianised version. They are less focussed on King James II's Catholicism, and far more on his tyranny. The carnage of 1685 is critical context.
The 1689 Bill of Rights was directly crafted in response to the extreme brutality of 1685. It was the bloody experience of "absolute monarchy" and tyranny in the British Isles that fuelled the desire for liberty in the 13 British Colonies of America.
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Further Reading:
• The Duke of Monmouth's veteran John Oldmixon wrote up a detailed account of the Monmouth & Prince of Orange collaborations in The Secret History Of Europe : Part II: Treating Of The Following Particulars: Of The Duke Of Monmouth's Reception At The Hague By The States, And The Prince Of Orange, which was published in 1713. It's refreshingly complex in its account - Online here.
• * "A Century in the Making: The Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, and the Origins of the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment" in William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal Volume 27 (May 2019) online here
• "Cruel and Unusual Punishments: The Proportionality Rule" in Fordham Law Review Volume 47 (1979) online here
• "Glorious Revolution to American Revolution: The English Origin of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms" by Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in Notre Dame Law Review Volume 95 (2019) online here
• In his 2007 book Our First Revolution, Michael Barone gives a fuller account of the similarities between the two Bill of Rights, listing the Third Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the Sixth Amendment, as well as the Eighth Amendment, saying:
“as an affirmative statement of individual rights, however limited, the Bill of Rights broke new ground, ground that would be extended in the New World”.
Ballad sheet below from the English Broadside Ballad Archive (online here):
This painting, of the failed summer 1685 Duke of Monmouth 'Pitchfork Rebellion', is entitled The Morning of Sedgemoor and was painted by Edgar Bundy in 1905. It shows a group of Somerset farmers, to invert a Biblical figure of speech, "forging their ploughshares into swords", preparing to face King James II's army at the Battle of Sedgemoor - often referred to as England's Last Battle - on 6 July 1685.
The leader of the 500 'scythemen' at Sedgmoor was William Thompson, who was described as "an officer and linnen draper of London". Two of the customised scythes that were found after the battle are in the collection of the Royal Armouries.
Monmouth had already begun plans to expand his rebellion into Ireland, at Carrickfergus and also other garrisons in the south, but the disastrous defeat at Sedgemoor ended the rebellion. King James II reigned on, and his brutal "Bloody Assizes" reprisals began. 1400 arrests, about 350 public executions.
Little wonder that when William Prince of Orange arrived at Brixham on 5 November 1688, the Devon population flocked to him - William's diarist recorded that the people said 'If this should fail, we are all undone' They told me about the invasion of Monmouth, when many people were hanged in Plymouth and elsewhere'. They had lived through it before, and saw hundreds of their friends and neighbours chopped up in public.
The following spring, the men that Henry Hunter would gather around east Down and Killyleagh for his "insurrection" against King James II's army would have been much the same as these Sedgmoor men - armed mostly with modified farm implements. Courageous to the end.
PS: Numerically, the opposing forces at the Battle of Sedgemoor, and the Break of Killyleagh, were the same. At each, King James II's army numbered 3000 soldiers. Against them, at Sedgemoor, a civilian militia of 4000 had been assembled. At Killyleagh, the highest reported estimate was 3000-4000 civilians.
"most of the Founders, in contrast to Jefferson, were horrified by the secularism of the French Revolution, and did not see it as the successor to the American one" (go to 1:04:00)
There's an irresistible simplicity in saying that all of the late 1700s revolutions - America, France and Ireland - were in some way inspired by each other. On closer scrutiny that's not quite the case. Video below is a recent conference from the American Enterprise Institute.
In 1795, William Drennan wrote:
"...You will be told , that the people in the North of Ireland are deeply infected with what are called French principles ... I do believe them most obstinately attached to the principles of Locke, as put in practice at the (Glorious) revolution... ... the very same principles of Locke were illustrated in the plains of America..."
One of the things I discussed in my October 2004 "interview" conversation with a very senior civil servant, ahead of accepting the offer to become Chair of the Ulster-Scots Agency, was the tantalising prospect of an Ulster-Scots Academy which would have some kind of university affiliation(s) and would be tasked to deliver a generation of projects at the very highest level of scholarship. Unsurprisingly it never happened. 20 years of vital work has not been done. But perhaps that was always the real plan...
Regardless of the many failures of 'the system', community volunteers and enthusiasts have reassembled and unearthed a lot of important material. Being immersed in the local historical literature helps to join the dots. Even a rank amateur like me, through enough reading, can find some good stuff.
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John Young (1826-1915) of Galgorm was one of the Mid Antrim representatives at the Ulster Unionist Convention of 1892, along with other many other members of the family. Over 20 years later he was one of six signatories to the Ulster Proclamation of 24 September 1913 (see previous post here).
The Young family were also funders and supporters of Mid Antrim Ulster-Scots poetry:
• The Given Brothers' guarantors and subscribers for their 1900 Poems from College and Country included the Right Hon John Young PC, DL, Galgorm Castle and also his son William Young JP Fenaghy.
• Adam Lynn's 1911 Random Rhymes frae Cullybackey was dedicated to "Mrs Young, Fenaghy House, Cullybackey".
• Agnes Kerr's 1914 Poems from Ahoghill subscribers list included Mrs Wm Young, Galgorm Castle and also Mr G C G Young of Galgorm Castle.
• David Herbison's poetry also includes two addressed to members of the Young family
The Young family had various cultural interests. This recent BBC TV programme highlighted the photography of Mary Alice Young. Rose Maud Young is renowned for her interest in Gaelic language and culture. The 1892 Ulster Unionist Convention which the Youngs took part in is usually only ever talked about these days for its (apparently surprising) use of the Gaelic Irish slogan "Erin Go Bragh", but it was a slogan which was entirely mainstream and was also used by Adam Lynn within his Ulster-Scots poetry.
The Youngs, like their contemporaries the Milligans that I have mentioned here before, were comfortably multi-faceted in their cultural interests. It was an era long before our present-day divisions.
"A corporation, or a government department isn't a conscious being, but it is an artificial intelligence. It has the capability to take decisions which are completely distinct from the intentions of any of the people who compose it. And under stressful conditions, it can go stark raving mad..."
I had a text last week to ask me to do an interview. I was busy. This subsequent article and a tv broadcast appeared. The Ulster-Scots Agency - which I attempted to Chair from June '05 - June '09 - issued a statement, saying something like 'Ulster-Scots is always the poor cousin'. This is correct. It was October 2004 (coming up on 20 years ago) when I was approached to become the Chair of the Agency. I still have some correspondence from that time, and lots of thoughts on that. Maybe a subject for a future post here.
This 2 minute clip from Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, formerly of the New York Times, is pretty remarkable on the circus of the US election and the ruling class. "Our political class does not govern, it entertains. It plays its assigned role in our fictitious democracy, howling with outrage to constituents and selling them out".
Check this out. The authorities reported a sighting of James Scott, the Duke of Monmouth, near Dublin in 1683, and wanted him to be apprehended. "they knew by his pretty black brows that it was the Duke of Monmouth, he had seen his pretty sweet face fourty times on the picture on horseback". The Duke and William were a similar age, they were first cousins, with the same grandfather, King Charles I. How history could have been different.
What was 'the picture on horseback'? Below is a 1675 painting of Monmouth, showing him during the 1673 Siege of Maastricht. From the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.
I was in Devon last weekend and went to Lyme Regis where, in June 1685, the ill-fated James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, rebellion began. I walked along Monmouth Beach, marvelling at the huge ammonite fossils that can be seen there at low tide.
Lyme Regis Museum has a small display about the story, including a wooden panel from the bed that Monmouth slept in (pic above).
In many ways Monmouth's attempt was the exact precursor to what his cousin, William Prince of Orange, would succeed with just over three years later in winter 1688. Monmouth was the bastard son of King Charles II, and was something of a megastar of his era, who believed that he should be the next King. However, the King's brother - James - got to the crown first. So Monmouth tried to oust him, and for a few days that June it looked like the plan just might work.
During the rebellion, he planned to open a new front in Ireland - Monmouth sent two of his key men, Venner and Parsons, back to Holland to organise boatloads of arms to equip an invasion of Carrickfergus which were to be landed there by a John Waltere. The army forts at Cork, Kinsale, Limerick and Dublin were all ready to rise in mutiny. But it all failed.
"... J. Tillier, in his examination, stated that Colonel Venner and Major Parsons ... were sent by Ferguson, Major Wade, Captain Tyley, and others, to Amsterdam, to buy arms and ammunition to send to England.
John Waltere, pilot to the Duke of Monmouth's ship, was to pilot those ships that were to carry the arms for Ireland, and to land near Carrickfergus, and there to take a castle. Waltere said there would be men to receive the arms.
Some Cromwellian officers were to take the forts of Cork and Kinsale and the city of Limerick by treachery; and if his Majesty drew his forces from Scotland, they would rise in Cheshire; and if the King sent his forces to Ireland, London would rise.
Mr. Hooke was sent for this purpose; and all the prisoners were to be set at liberty, and to assist in setting up a commonwealth. They looked to have all the arms and ammunition in the storehouse at Dublin. There was a plan about blowing up a magazine. John Cragg was to kill the King at Windsor, or at the Lord Mayor's show, and have for doing the deed 1000l. from Ferguson..."
After the rebellion failed, the unimaginable cruelties of King James II’s army in 1685 sent a clear message to continental Europe that James had to be deposed. Some of those cruelties were inflicted by renowned figures who would eventually defect to William of Orange, such as Percy Kirke:
"... But they were so called some time before Kirke's cruelties in the west. When Jeffreys opened his bloody commission at Taunton, this regiment composed his guards, and was cantoned on the piece of ground west of the castle, which has, ever since, been called Tangier, from the name of this regiment.
The colonel, one day, invited his officers to an entertainment, and, after dinner, commanded thirty men to be executed, by ten at a time, while the glass went round in three healths; one to the king, the second to the queen, and the third to judge Jeffreys, of whom news was just then received, that he was to try the rebels. When, in the last agonies of departing life, the feet of the dying were observed to shake, he would cry out, “They shall have music to their dancing" and commanded the trumpets to sound, and the drums to beat, surrounded by the soldiers, with colours flying." "This," observes bishop Burnet, "was both so illegal and inhuman, that it might have been expected that some notice would have been taken of it ;" whereas Kirke was only chid for it.
But the most shocking outrage against all decency, generosity, and humanity, with which, if it be true, the character of colonel Kirke is blackened, is his conduct to a beautiful young woman, whom he is said to have decoyed to his embraces, with the promise of sparing the life of a person, endeared to her by blood or affection, and to have conducted, in the morning, to see the person, for whom she had made the sacrifice of her virtue, hanging on the sign-post of the inn, where he had glutted his brutal lust. Shame, remorse, and distraction are said to have seized the unhappy, injured fair one, and she died within a few days…
… One writer says, that the young woman yielded herself to Kirke's desires, for the sake of her husband, another for her father, and a third for her brother; and though jealousy might have urged the execution of a husband, yet, in case the person were a father or a brother, it is not to be conceived what end his death would have answered: that it is incredible, that a man who could have committed such an inhuman action, such a wanton barbarity, could afterwards have been consulted with the Sidneys and the Cavendishes, on the plan for the revolution; or that the glorious William could have armed such a wretch in the cause of LIBERTY ..."
Even though a failure, the Duke of Monmouth provided a template to show King James’s son-in-law, William Prince of Orange, what he needed to do to succeed in 1688. William arrived three years later, just a few miles along the same coastline, with a similar flag, and a similar Declaration, and the same intent – but with the biggest Armada ever assembled.
As Tony Robinson says in the video below:
"... Such brutal retribution did little more than prove everyone's worst fears about the tyrant James II... Monmouth's mistake was to rebel to early. Instead, he laid the stage for the real winners of this whole saga, his cousins, William and Mary... the joint monarchs were crowned in 1689 and swiftly signed the Bill of Rights. The Glorious Revolution had occurred... enshrined the notion that never again could the monarch rule without the will of its people ... I believe that, above all, they followed the Duke because they wanted to see a Britain that was ruled by Parliament, not by an absolute monarch. And in that respect their legacy is very great indeed..."
This story caught my notice recently, it's my own local Council, but it was the concept rather than the geography or even the specific issue that I found interesting. The Council - made up of elected representatives voted for by local people - made a decision which it (correctly) thought would be controversial, and so therefore it also took a policy position to not disclose which councillors had voted for it. Undoubtedly they were navigated through these waters by senior staff.
For a few days there was a minor media kerfuffle about it, but that seems to have fizzled out now.
However, Northern Ireland's obsession with politics makes us all think that politicians run the place, but they don't. Northern Ireland is mostly run by public sector 'officials', not unlike the colonial era British Raj which my father-in-law was born under in Lahore in 1942.
My (limited) experience of years interacting with the public sector here is that - when it deems it necessary - it specialises in anonymity, making decisions and issuing directions - but redacting and camouflaging the names of the individuals who did so. I have seen numerous examples of this.
Over the years, senior civil servants have openly told me how incapable they think most politicians here are. And no surprise – particularly at even a small local council like ours - the idea that 40 elected councillors (all of whom already have proper full time day jobs) can in their spare evenings somehow manage the labyrinthine policies and decisions and activities of say 900 full-time salaried staff is lunacy.
The local councillors that I know, and also those whose social media I follow, seem to spend most of their time as an interface between the public and 'the system' - roads, bins, environmental improvements, etc - a lot of the time expending their energies trying to get the people within 'the system' to do the jobs that they are already salaried to do.
James Burnham wrote about The Managerial Revolution in 1941. This is our world. The politics is a sideshow.
PS: The German-American writer Hannah Arendt's superb definition of bureaucracy was "rule by nobody".
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