After Sedgemoor - Butchery and horror against the civilian population, by King James II - England 1685, Ireland 1689

The 340th anniversary of the Battle of Sedgemoor in Somerset was last weekend. It was the "last stand" of the rebellion against the new King James II, led by the Duke of Monmouth in June 1685. We visited the excellent After Sedgemoor exhibition at the Museum of Somerset, a few weeks ago. (You can see ITV news coverage of the exhibition and commemorative events here)

It is often described as "the last pitched battle on English soil" - that terminology is historically correct, but it's a merely technical description which misses the emotive big picture narrative.

The Battle of Sedgemoor was the bridgehead for the Glorious Revolution - it was a failure in itself, but the lessons learned, intelligence gathered, popular support, and what its aftermath revealed about James II as an "absolute monarch" were essential elements for the massive liberation of 1688.

After Sedgemoor, King James II's dragoons - under Percy Kirke (see previous post here) - enacted a lawless and ruthless subjugation of the civilian population for 7 weeks through Dorset, Somerset and Devon. Summary "justice" resulted in public executions.

In late August, King James II decided that the indiscriminate slaughter needed a gloss of legal justification, so he sent Lord Chief Justice George Jeffreys and some other judges into the area to hold fast-tracked mass trials known as the 'Bloody Assizes'. Jeffreys infamously said he could smell a Presbyterian 40 miles away.

For the hundreds who were executed in the weeks and months after the battle, being hanged in the town street (maybe from the sign of the local pub in front of your family and neighbours) before being drawn and quartered and your remains boiled and tarred for public display - it made no difference to you whether Percy Kirke had decided to do it himself, or a judge had approved him doing it. 

The Battle of Sedgemoor had ended on 6 July. The dragoons wasted no time. They began rounding people up and butchered 19 in Taunton alone on the 9th July.  And after the judge turned up, after due legal process was observed, another 22 were butchered the same way in September.

The horrors in England were meticulously recorded by many contemporary writers, there are extensive corroborating primary sources for the violent and murderous rampage of James II's troops. 

What of Ireland?

Here is a 1693 source from our side of the water - King James II's huge army had arrived at Kinsale in March 1689, the Siege of Derry began in April, and the events below are from May. The description is horrifically similar to what James's dragoons had done in south west England in 1685:

"The Lord Galmoy was likewise sent with forces to guard the passages between the north of Ireland, and those parts of Munster and Connaught that adjoined to Ulster, to prevent the south and western Protestants from joining, who being a malicious and bloody Papist, first drew blood there, causing two gentlemen who had taken arms for their own defence, under Colonel Sandason, to be hanged on a signpost at Belnahatty, and their heads being cut off, were kicked about the streets by his soldiers, like foot-balls;

at Omagh he took two others upon the same pretence, and caused the son first to hang his father, and carry his head on a pole through the streets, crying, ‘This is the head of a traitor;’ and then the young man himself was hanged. It was also reported, that some of his dragoons meeting with a clergyman's wife, whose husband had fled northward, several of them, one after another, ravished her, and then ripped up her belly, and exposed her with a dead man upon her.

At Tipperary, an English gentleman seeing some dragoons marching towards his house, shut up his doors (it being late in the evening), as if they were gone to bed; but sixteen of them coming thither, and not being quickly admitted, they forced open his doors, calling him traitor for shutting them against the King's forces; and having pillaged all things of value, they then deflowered his daughter and only child before his face; all sixteen lay with her, and three of them (as was affirmed by his family) after she was actually dead. These were the beginnings of the villainies which the Protestants suffered from these execrable wretches."

- from The History of the Kingdom of Ireland by Richard Burton [Nathaniel Crouch] (1693)

Below: a 1684 book by Richard Burton / Nathaniel Crouch

"... James the Second, inherited all the diabolical spirit of his whole house; was a person that no experience could teach wisdom, laws make honest, nor oaths bind; and therefore the whole nation united, as one man, to exclude him, and his detested race, from the crown of these realms for ever ..."

- from 'An Historical Essay on the English Constitution'

by Obadiah Hulme / Holmes (London, 1771)

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"... if you now grow up to be free men in a free land, privileged to think or to pray as your consciences shall direct, you may thank God that you are reaping the harvest which your fathers sowed in blood and suffering when the Stuarts were on the throne ..."

- from Micah Clarke by Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle (1889)

his debut novel, about the Monmouth Rebellion

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Even in Rev John Graham's landmark A history of the siege of Londonderry and defence of Enniskillen, in 1688 and 1689 (first published in 1823) he begins with European liberty, and a notorious reference to the failed Monmouth Rebellion:

"... As Ireland was doomed to be the arena upon which the fate of the liberty of the West of Europe was to be decided, so was it from this Island that James II received the first intelligence of the Prince of Orange's designs against him. The Earl of Tyrconnel obtained the earliest account of the preparations in Holland, by a ship which arrived in the bay of Dublin, and he lost no time in transmitting his report of it to the King.

It was received with the utmost scorn and derision by the English Court; the Secretary ridiculed it in his reply to the Viceroy, who, nevertheless, was observed to lower his tone towards the Protestants, and to talk of his impartiality in such a way as to indicate his desire to secure the confidence and intercession of some of them, in his apprehension of a reverse of fortune.

Chief Justice Nugent, however, echoed the bolder sentiments of the Romish party, in his charge to a Grand Jury, in which he promised the Prince of Orange the fate of the Duke of Monmouth, and declared his conviction that the Protestant rebels of England would, before the expiration of one short month, be seen hanging in all parts of it like bunches of onions..." 

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