Intro: In the Constantijn Huygens Jr diary I posted about recently, there's an account of the public reaction to the arrival of 'King Billy' in the south west of England in 1688. At Newton Abbot, where William Prince of Orange's Declaration was first read aloud (previous post here), the people were simultaneously joyful and fearful. Why?
Because in the very same region just over three years earlier in May 1685 another Dutch-born soldier hero had already tried to overthrow King James II, but failed. The reprisals were horrific. 1300 people rounded up - hundreds publicly hanged, drawn and quartered by King James II's rigged courts and the royal army, their remains and body parts displayed as grotesque warnings to their surviving families and neighbours.
Huygens 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.
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The 'bastard' Dutchman in 1685 was James Scott Fitzroy Crofts, the eldest of at least 14 illegitimate children of the previous king, Charles II. James's mother was Lucy Walter. Charles had gone to Holland to hang out with his sister Mary and met Lucy when he was there. Some claimed that they had actually married, and that the marriage contract had been hidden in a long-lost 'black box'. James was born in Rotterdam in 1649 and raised in Paris by the Crofts family.
"Mr Crofts the King's Bastard" was how he was described by another diarist, Samuel Pepys. The full reference is this – "Here I also saw Madam Castlemaine, and, which pleased me most, Mr. Crofts, the King’s bastard, a most pretty spark of about 15 years old, who, I perceive, do hang much upon my Lady Castlemaine, and is always with her; and, I hear, the Queens both of them are mighty kind to him". Here is a 1929 biography which adopted that as its title.
He became a celebrated military man on the continent and had the title Duke of Monmouth. He had even been heroically depicted on a white horse. Look familiar?
He was sent to Scotland to defeat the Covenanters at Bothwell Brig in 1679 - and he had probably been invited to do so by his uncle James, the Duke of York, whose regime there was encapsulated in his statement that “there would never be peace in the country until the whole south of Scotland had been turned into a hunting field” – not hunting deer or grouse, but Covenanter Presbyterians, during 'The Killing Times'.
A vacant throne. Two ambitious Dukes. One crown.
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The dead King's brother moved first and was crowned on 23 April 1685.
The dead King's illegitimate son, Monmouth, was in Holland. He sailed from Amsterdam with three ships and around 300 men, and landed at Lyme Regis in Dorset on 11 June 1685 - the location today is called Monmouth Beach, a fossil hunters haven. According to the biography above, these ships bore blue ensign banners with the slogan 'Pro Religione et Libertate' (yes THAT slogan again), and Monmouth published a declaration - its full title "Declaration for the defence and vindication of the protestant religion and of the laws, rights and privileges of England from the invasion made upon them, and for delivering the Kingdom from the usurpation and tyranny of us by the name of James, Duke of York". It had probably been written by Scottish minister Robert Ferguson.
So, Monmouth declared his uncle to be 'the present usurper, James, Duke of York' and himself to be the rightful king, and there was even a coronation among his supporters outside the White Hart Inn in Taunton on 20 June 1685. But on 6 July his small force was crushed at Sedgemoor near Bristol and he was arrested two days later. He was publicly beheaded in London on 15 July. It took quite a few chops. Grisly stuff. Jump to 6min on the video below:
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Even worse were the merciless reprisals across Dorset, Devon and Somerset. King James II started to round up hundreds of his opponents, exactly as he had done in Scotland with the Covenanters when he was the Duke of York. In Scotland, James made a point of being present for the torture sessions -
"he not only came to Council when the torture was to be inflicted, but watched the agonies of the sufferers with that sort of interest and complacency with which men observe a curious experiment in science."
Nobles could pay a fine to get off, however the 'lower orders' suffered violent death or exile to a place where they were likely to die. The rigged court proceedings were overseen by five judges led by Lord Chief Justice George Jeffreys, and were known as the 'Bloody Assizes'.
Symbolically, one of the places where he set up shop for his pop-up courtroom was at the White Hart Inn in Taunton where Monmouth's coronation had taken place. The pub sign-board was taken down and 'rebels' were hanged on it:
"... The sign-board of the inn where they took up their abode, in Taunton, swung on hinges between two posts, exhibiting on its face a white hart. These posts, after removing the sign, he made to support a gallows, and on it he hung victim after victim, calling their struggles, when in the agony of death,dancing, and mockingly ordering suitable music for such an exercise.
One of the rebels, being known to feel more than ordinary affection for his leader, the duke, was suspended by the neck, and when his struggles became indicative of the last agony, he was barbarously cut down and mocked with a show of mercy, then, when a little recovered, again hung up; then cut down a second time, and asked if he repented going to fight against the king? Firmly and bravely he replied, "No!" Then followed immediately the final drop. Several were hanged and quartered, others, beside that, seethed in pitch..."
Stats vary, but not by much. 1300 people were found guilty of treason, in mass court hearings - 500 people in two days at Taunton, 540 in one day at the town of Wells. 800 sent to the plantations of Barbados where the life expectancy of Europeans was measured in months. Some say that King James II's wife, Mary of Modena, made a profit from shipping them off. 320 people were publicly hanged at various towns and villages across the region, with disembowelled quartered bodies and pickled heads put on display.
"... Jeffreys made all the West an Aceldama ('field of blood'); some places quite depopulated and nothing to be seen in them but forsaken walls, unlucky gibbets and ghostly carcasses. The trees were loaden almost as thick with quarters as leaves; the houses and steeples covered as close with heads as at other times with crows or ravens. Nothing could be liker hell than all those parts; nothing so like the devil as he. Caldrons hissing, carcasses boiling, pitch and tar sparkling and glowing, blood and limbs boiling and tearing and mangling, and he the great director of all ..." (from 'A New Martyrology' by John Tutchin, 1689)
Here is Jeffreys' written instruction to the Sheriff of Somerset on 16 November 1685:
"These are, therefore, to will and require of you, immediately on sight hereof, to erect a gallows in the most public place to hang the said traitors on, and that you provide halters to hang them with, a sufficient number of faggots to bum the bowells, and a furnace or cauldron to boil their heads and quarters, and salt to boil them with, half a bushell to each traitor, and tar to tar them with, and a sufficient number of spears and poles to fix and place their heads and quarters, and that you warn the owners of four oxen to be ready with dray and wain, and the said four oxen, at the time hereafter mentioned for execution, and you yourselves, together with a guard of forty able men at the least, to be present by eight o'clock of the morning to be aiding and assisting me or my deputy to see the said rebels executed. You are also to provide an axe and a cleaver for the quartering the said rebels."
That quote is from this book. The first was the 71 year old widow Alice Lisle who was thought to have harboured fugitives, she was sentenced to be burned at the stake but was instead beheaded, on 2 September 1685, at the Old Market House in Winchester. Among her final words were these –
I dye in expectation of the pardon of all my sins, and of acceptance with God the Father, by the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ, he being the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believes
A group of young girls were scooped up - known as the Taunton Virgins - who had greeted Monmouth and gifted him with an embroidered banner. One of them was just 8 years old when she died in custody.
Daniel Defoe was a supporter of Monmouth, but he escaped arrest by hiding in a graveyard, behind a gravestone of a man called Robinson Crusoe, which inspired the famous novel which was eventually published in 1719.
The executions continued to the end of 1685. Many of those executed had their biographies and final words published in the years that followed, as a body of 'martyrology' booklets and pamphlets. This 1929 book has a chapter entitled 'The Reign of Terror', an appalling summary of these events
With all of this going on, across the channel in France, King James II's cousin, Louis XIV of France, revoked the religious tolerance of the Edict of Nantes and unleashed hell on the Huguenots...
• A primary source, The Western Martyrology or Bloody Assizes is online here.
• This website is an excellent resource, listing all of the executions.
• This book names all of those executed.
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1685 becomes 1688
The utter barbarity of these events showed Europe that whoever might be thinking about deposing King James II in future was going to need unprecedented military might, a network of high level political influence, and massive public support. King James II's nephew had failed to do the job, with just three ships and very little resources.
Three years later, King James II's son-in-law, William Prince of Orange, would almost follow Monmouth's template, but he would bring the biggest invasion force England had ever seen - 450 ships, a vast army twice as big as the Spanish Armada. He also sailed from Holland, landed further along the same coastline, and under the same slogan.
As the people of Newton Abbot said to Huygens when William arrived in their town – 'If this should fail, we are all undone'.
I'll be back in Devon soon. More to discover.
"... The execution of Monmouth had this of good, that it left his cause in the hands of William of Orange, a far more worthy champion, and towards the end of 1088, the career of James II., as King of England, was closing fast ..." - from this book
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PS: (Of course this often all gets reduced to the usual shorthand of being a Protestant v Catholic thing, but some say that King James II, and his cousin Louis XIV of France, weren't technically Catholic at all - they were both in fact Gallican [Wikipedia here] because they wanted to be independent from the authority of the Pope. Which is why William of Orange had such extensive support from mainstream Catholic Europe.)
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* King Charles II's actions in Scotland against the Coventanter Presbyterians are well known. In England, his 'Act of Uniformity' ejected an astonishing 2,000 Puritan ministers from the Church of England, and the package of laws known as 'The Clarendon Code' saw almost 15,000 non-conformists imprisoned between 1660-85. See John Coffey's book Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1588–1689.
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