A Fatal Start to the 1685 Monmouth Rebellion - Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, and Thomas Jefferson

On 11 June I was in Devon and Dorset, so to mark the date I went to Monmouth Beach at Lyme Regis. Somewhere along here was where the Duke of Monmouth landed on Thursday 11 June 1685, with three ships of varying sizes and 80 men, to begin the ill-fated Monmouth Rebellion. The coastline has changed a lot over the intervening centuries (the cliff erosion regularly uncovers impressive fossils, Monmouth Beach is littered with ammonites and fossil hunters with small hammers, splitting rocks).

One of the most powerful visual records of the time were illustrated playing cards, so I brought my reprint set with me to mark the 340th anniversary.

Two of the men who sailed from the Texel in the Netherlands with Monmouth were Thomas Dare (paymaster) and Andrew Fletcher (cavalry commander). Initially things were going well, within 48 hours nearly 1500 local men had joined them and were organised into four regiments.

However on Saturday 13 June 1685, in a disastrous incident, Fletcher and Dare fell into a disagreement, Fletcher pulled a pistol and shot Dare dead.  It was fatal for Dare, and fatal for the rebellion enterprise. Fletcher was arrested and imprisoned onboard one of the ships, the Helderenberg. He then fled to Spain, then to Hungary, and then back to the Netherlands. In November 1688 Fletcher sailed with Monmouth's cousin, William Prince of Orange, in the vast international "go big or go home" re-run of the Monmouth attempt.

Fletcher was from Saltoun in Scotland (Wikipedia here); his writings outlived him and are still in print. Over a century later, and a continent away, Thomas Jefferson wrote of Fletcher that –

"The political principles of that patriot were worthy of the purest periods of the British constitution. They are those which were in vigour at the epoch of the American emigration. Our ancestors brought them here, and they needed little strengthening to make us what we are."

It's another brilliant example of how the revolution in our islands and continental Europe in the 1680s, would inform and echo into the American Revolution a century later - of ideas that were forged here and handed down through the generations. 

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• Fletcher had travelled in his younger years, returning to Scotland in 1678 where, as a landholder member of the Convention of Estates of Scotland he was one of 39 to oppose the government of King Charles II using the army to suppress Presbyterian field-meetings / conventicles - "Among the thirty-nine was Fletcher, who thus, from the outset of his public life, took his stand against the arbitrary system on which Scotland was governed until the Revolution".    

• In this recent Joe Rogan podcast, renowned documentary filmmaker Ken Burns leaves the impression that American independence was conceived out of thin air in Philadelphia in 1776. Not true. Even the editor of the Belfast News-Letter, Henry Joy, knew the real story - see previous post here).

Divide and Conquer? - The Fall of the Stuarts; and Western Europe 1678-1697

Divide and conquer is a well-known strategy. The more I read the more I realise that the true 'big picture' story of the 1688 Revolution has, over the past century or so, been divided and diminished, its events detached from one another and told as broken pieces which took place solely within the various parts of our islands. The cords have been broken. Even today's 'unionists' don't think in a truly joined-up way, most are content to have stories which are limited to their own 'home nation'. But, leaving aside the politics of competing nationalisms, these stories don't make sense separately, they belong together.

To escape the present you have to read from the past. This 1889 book - The Fall of the Stuarts; and Western Europe 1678-1697 (online here) was written by Rev Edward 'Badger' Hale, the assistant master of Eton College. International in scope, easy to read, a glimpse of how the pieces of the jigsaw once fitted together to create a far bigger story - the end of 'Stuart' tyranny of Charles II and James II, and the confounding of the 'superpower' plan of Louis XIV.

Since this book was published in 1889 there's been a lot of political division, upheaval and change on these islands, never mind the two world wars. Our context is different now.

But in present-day England, the telling of this story is remarkably free of the overtly tribal obsessions in Ireland - of course there's a religious dimension to it, but it's nothing like how it's told on our side of the water.  I'm just back from Somerset where I saw afresh how the 1685 Monmouth Rebellion is told there. More to follow.

Hugh Williamson, 'The Plea of the Colonies' 1775

"... The second position which your Lordship has endeavoured to establish is, that the Americans do not wish for peace, they would not be satisfied with relief from particular grievances; they aim at independence, and would throw off their subjection to the crown of Great Britain. As this very charge is circulated through every part of the kingdom by those who would justify the oppressor by casting a darker shade on the oppressed, I have taken much pains to discover the evidence on which it is founded; but after all my researches I cannot find any better reason for supposing that the Americans desire to be independent, than their own uniform declarations that they do not desire it..."

1881 Language Map of Great Britain and Ireland

This 1881 map is pretty consistent with the orthodox understanding of the language question on the 1911 Census of Ireland and the "scoring out" of thousands in demographically predominantly Ulster-Scots regions who had self-completed their census forms wrongly. Some activist types have (bizarrely) claimed this was not the correcting of errors, but some kind of widespread state suppression. The narrowing of the once-understood diverse possibilities of what the term 'Irish' can mean has corroded our society. There are various previous posts here about it - here's one example.