Bridget Lisle – Cotton Mather & Samuel Sewall: the 1685 Monmouth Rebellion & the 1689 Boston Revolt

Bridget Lisle's life is hard to fathom – her father was shot dead by order of one king, her mother was beheaded by order of the next king...

In August 1664, Sir John Lisle was shot dead in Switzerland by an assassin sent to do the job by King Charles II.

His widow Lady Alice Lisle was left to raise their seven children. Their daughter Bridget emigrated to New England, where in 1672 she married the President of Harvard College, Leonard Hoar, and became a prominent figure in Massachusetts society. Leonard died in 1675, and Bridget remarried, to the wealthy Boston bookseller Hezekiah Usher junior.

A decade passed; King Charles II died and was succeeded by his brother, James...

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1. COTTON MATHER, 25 SEPTEMBER 1685

News of the failed double rebellion against the new King James II in June & July 1685, by the Earl of Argyll and the Duke of Monmouth, eventually reached New England. There were no newspapers there at the time, but a few important diaries and letters still exist which capture some of the details. On 25 September 1685, the renowned Cotton Mather wrote this letter to his uncle, Rev John Cotton of Plymouth, Massachussetts (I have put it through an AI tool to modernise it into present-day language):

My ever-honored Uncle,

Now some people will hang their harps upon the willows. The great God has given them the wine of astonishment to drink. The news which was so fresh at your departure hence was a grievous abuse put upon the silly doves.

First, a vessel comes in from England, which, lying at the Isle of Wight and at Falmouth, received certain intelligence that the Duke of Monmouth is utterly routed, taken prisoner, and on the 15th of July beheaded on Tower Hill, undergoing his death with much magnanimity, refusing to make any answers to what was asked him on the scaffold, saying that he came there not to speak but to die. He never had much above ten thousand men, most unarmed; had once beaten the King’s forces, but the second time, through the ill-management of the Lord Grey, he was overpowered—though he himself, it is said, fought in his own person with incredible valour till he lost the day. It is suspected that Grey was treacherous; for he and one or two more are reserved for discoverers of all that had any hand, and so much as a little finger, in the conspiracy—rather for his great estate, which upon his death would have gone to his brother.

And what use is now made of this attempt to ruin all Protestants is obvious to any considerate person, nor is it to be thought on without bleeding lamentations. But since, there comes in another vessel from Scotland which brings hither some of Argyle’s men to be sold for slaves, and they inform us that the Earl landed in a place where he could never get much above a thousand men, the forces of the kingdom being raised against him before he came ashore and intercepting all passages, so that they who had promised him their assistance failed him. He had a little brush or two with his enemies—once overnight—but their hearts were so taken from them, that before morning they every one went to shift for himself. Argyle was taken in the disguise of a grazier, and on the last of June he was beheaded at Edinburgh. Some that are come over were present at his execution. We have here a copy of his speech, which does abundantly justify and augment the opinion that we had of him. I am sorry I cannot get a copy of it to send you; but in due time expect it. His death had this odd circumstance in it, that after his head was off, he rose up on his feet and had like to have gone off the scaffold if they had not prevented it.

A standing army is that by which both kingdoms are now kept in subjection. Colonel Kirk is at Taunton; and there, in cold blood, has butchered five hundred people in that fanatic town.

You know what to think of these things, and you are no doubt so much of a Protestant as to make this use of the hideous calamities which these things will occasion to all Protestants: that you will quicken the importunate, groaning prayers of your own people, and those that are in the neighbour towns, with due privacy and discretion. Lift up prayers—he that does not now arise and call upon God and cry mightily is one of those sleepy sinners who make the times perilous. But you need not me for your monitor.

Remember me with my due services to my aunt and respect to my cousins, and to all friends that inquire after my welfare—especially to the good aged Simeon, your elder, to whom tell my wishes, that he may not think of departing until his eyes have seen the salvation of God.

I am

Your observant kinsman,

C. Mather

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2. SAMUEL SEWALL, 13 NOVEMBER 1685

When writing the letter, Cotton Mather would not have known that in the aftermath of the rebellion Lady Alice Lisle had already become the first of over 300 people to be publicly executed - she was a high-profile start to King James II's Bloody Assizes. Aged 68 and with failing eyesight, she was beheaded in the street in Winchester by order of King James II's infamous Judge George Jeffreys on 2 September 1685.

It took ten weeks for news of this to reach Boston; Samuel Sewall recorded it in his diary of 13 November 1685:

"... Friday, Novr. 13. Barington arrives, brings word of the beheading of my Lady Lisle, Mrs. Hez. Usher’s Mother, at Winchester. Four executed at London, Mr Jenkins’s Son, Alderm Hayes Son, and two more, and whipping the Taunton Maids. Capt. Jolls dead in London.

To which he added a glimmer of hope:

"... Is a Rumor that the Government will be Changed, this Fall or Winter, by some Person sent over, or a Comission to some here..."

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3. JOHN WINSLOW AND THE BOSTON REVOLT, 18 APRIL 1689

The cruelties of King James II of course would lead to the Boston Revolt of 18 April 1689, which was inspired by the news that William, Prince of Orange had arrived in England with a vast European army. A copy of William's Declaration had been brought ashore at Boston Harbour by John Winslow a few weeks earlier on 4th April. The Memorial History of Boston (published 1881) says this:

"(the Revolt) was a desperate venture, since the continuance of the rule of King James would have brought a speedy and terrible punishment upon the malcontents. The inhabitants of Boston in 1689 were fully aware of the scenes which followed Monmouth's failure. Some refugees indeed had found shelter here, and the daughter of that most noted victim, Lady Lisle, had recently been living here as the wife of President Leonard Hoar (of Harvard University)"

And the above-mentioned diarist, Samuel Sewall, wrote about it all (see previous post here)

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Maybe somebody has already assembled these incredible jigsaw pieces. The picture they reveal is one of 'absolute monarch' tyranny. It's a compelling picture, telling a transatlantic story, and of people who refused to bow the knee.

• A detailed biography of Bridget Lisle / Hoar / Usher is here on page 321–324 in the journal of Worcester Historical Society, Volume 1, Number 6, April 1933 edition

(The painting above of Alice Lisle being arrested in her home in 1685 was painted by Edward Matthew Ward in 1857 and is in the UK Parliament art collection). Alice Lisle was posthumously pardoned by King William III and Queen Mary II upon their accession to the crown in 1689.

Thomas Jefferson's Music - "The music of Scotland may almost be called the national music of Virginia"

 This is a superb article, from Slate magazine in 2012:

"... In 1838, his spunky granddaughter Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge wrote in her travel diary that “The music of Scotland may almost be called the national music of Virginia. The simple, plaintive or sprightly airs which every body knows and every body sings are Scotch. … This music is natural, intelligible, comes home to every body’s business and bosom.”

America also borrowed from the Scotch and Irish the fiddle tune. Though Jefferson himself didn’t do much fiddling at Monticello, others did. Isaac Jefferson Granger, one of his slaves, said that Randolph Jefferson, Thomas’ little brother, “used to come out among the black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night.” The sons of Sally Hemings played frequently when Jefferson’s daughters and granddaughters wanted dance music. According to Jefferson’s granddaughter, “On Saturday next the youngsters of Monticello intend to adjourn to the South-Pavilion and dance after Beverley [Hemings’] music.”..."

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Ellen was 30 years old when her grandfather Thomas died in 1826, and she wrote the above account twelve years later. That the music of Scotland was so prominent is no surprise – the Jefferson homeplace at Monticello outside Charlottesville was in the flat, plantation-ready plains – sweeping down from the Appalachian mountains, which had of course been so heavily settled by Ulster-Scots. Thomas Jefferson would later write of "the wild Irish who had gotten possession of the valley between the blue ridge and North mountain".

And the first published collection of fiddle tunes, George P. Knauff's Virginia Reels was published just a year after Ellen's diary entry, in 1839 - a collection described by Paul Wells in 2012 as 'strongly Scottish' (previous post here).

"It is most certain that all Men, as they are the Sons of Adam, are Coheirs; and have equal Right unto Liberty, and all other outward Comforts of Life." - Samuel Sewall, Boston, 1700

Samuel Sewall was in England at the time of the Boston Revolt of April 1689 – his Diary (online here) shows that he had set sail from Boston Harbour on 22 November 1688 and arrived at the Isle of Wight on 10 January 1689 into an England where the Prince of 'Aurang' [Orange] had taken charge. Sewall stayed for most of 1689, sailing back to America from Plymouth on 10 October 1689.

Sewall co-authored the publication The Revolution in New England Justified, and the People there Vindicated (printed by Samuel Green for Joseph Brunning in 1691; online here) in which Sewall defended the Boston Revolt, stating that King James II's governor Edmund Andros had "made laws destructive of the liberty of the people".

"... The uprising against Andros certainly bears the signs of a popular movement, not based upon any knowledge of the success of the revolution in England, and for that reason not probably the work of any of the citizens of position and wealth. It was a desperate venture, since the continuance of the rule of King James would have brought a speedy and terrible punishment upon the malcontents. The inhabitants of Boston in 1689 were fully aware of the scenes which followed Monmouth's failure. Some refugees indeed had found shelter here, and the daughter of that most noted victim, Lady Lisle, had recently been living here as the wife of President Leonard Hoar (of Harvard University), and later of Hezekiah Usher ..." - from The Memorial History of Boston (online here)

Almost a decade later Sewall turned his pen to challenge aspects of slavery. In 1700 he published The Selling of Joseph; A Memorial which was written regarding the high-profile case of a man called Adam who was enslaved by Boston merchant John Saffin. Sewall drew parallels with the Biblical enslavement of Joseph in Egypt –

"... Originally, and Naturally, there is no such thing as Slavery. Joseph was rightfully no more a Slave to his Brethren, then they were to him ...

... Tis pity there should be more Caution used in buying a Horse, or a little lifeless dust; than there is in purchasing Men and Women: Whereas they are the Offspring of GOD, and their Liberty is 'auro pretiosior omni' (more precious than gold)... 

... It is likewise most lamentable to think, how in taking Negros out of Africa, and Selling of them here, That which GOD has joyned together men do boldly rend asunder; Men from their Country, Husbands from their Wives, Parents from their Children. How horrible is the Uncleanness, Mortality, if not Murder, that the Ships are guilty of that bring great Crouds of these miserable Men, and Women. Methinks, when we are bemoaning the barbarous Usage of our Friends and Kinsfolk in Africa ..."

However, Sewall appears to have also sold African slaves. Humans are a mess of hypocrisies and contradictions. In every culture, in every era, the desperate and poorest and weakest have always been fuel for the indulgences of the comfortable classes – from William Blake's "dark Satanic mills" to Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est", to the deadly coalmines of Lanarkshire, Yorkshire, and Appalachia.

I wonder which unthinkable inhumanities our era turns a blind eye too, to preserve our comforts and pleasures? The sweat shops where designer brands make incredible fortunes out of vanity, and where the shiny device you are reading this on is made by tech companies who have nets around their buildings to try to stop staff "unaliving" themselves.

Ursula K LeGuin's short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is worth a (harrowing) read. 

As Sewall wrote in 1700, "It is most certain that all Men, as they are the Sons of Adam, are Coheirs; and have equal Right unto Liberty, and all other outward Comforts of Life."

• Thomas Hutchinson's account of the Boston Revolt is in his History of Massachussetts (online here, from page 332). His grandfather Elisha Hutchinson had been a merchant in Boston at the time of the 1688 Glorious Revolution. 

"The Revolution in New England Justified, and the People there Vindicated" - 1688 & 1776 again

Another superb source! Following the Boston Revolt of April 1689 (when, following the arrival of copies of William Prince of Orange's Declaration, colonists rose up to overthrow the colonial government of King James II and his Governor Edmund Andros) two accounts of the Revolt were published.

• The first was by lawyer John Palmer (bio here) who had been one of those seized and imprisoned by the 'rebels'. While imprisoned, he wrote his An Impartial Account of the State of New England, or the late Government there vindicated - it circulated in manuscript form and was printed in London in 1690 (online here).

• The second account, a response/rebuttal of Palmer entitled The Revolution in New England Justified, and the People there Vindicated was written in 1691 by Edward Rawson (Wikipedia here) and Samuel Sewall (Wikipedia here). Their preface explained what a liberty-oriented 'limited monarchy' was:

"but there are a sort of men, who call those that are for English liberties, and that rejoice in the government of their majesties, king William and queen Mary, by the name of republicans, and represent all such as enemies of monarchy and of the church. It is not our single opinion only, but we can speak it on the behalf of the generality of their majesties subjects in New-England; that they believe (without any diminution to the glory of our former princes) the English nation was never so happy in a king, or in a queen, as at this day. And the God of heaven, who has set them on the throne of these kingdoms, grant them long and prosperously to reign"

and the introduction:

"THE doctrine of passive obedience and non-resistance, which a sort of men did of late, when they thought the world would never change, cry up as divine truth, is by means of the happy revolution in these nations, exploded, and the assertors of it become ridiculous." 

It included an appendix entitled A Narrative of the Proceedings of Sir Edmund Androsse and his Accomplices who acted by an Illegal and Arbitrary Commission from the late King James, during his Government in New England - written by five gentlemen who had served under Andros (Wikipedia here). But few revolutions are truly complete, and Andros was made Governor of Virginia by William III and Mary II.

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• Nearly a century later with a new revolution in the air, in April 1773 the 24 year old Boston printer, and member of the Sons of Liberty movement, Isaiah Thomas (Wikipedia here) dusted down the Rawson and Sewell book and reprinted it, to remind the city's readership that there had been a justified revolution before. The Sons of Liberty would occasionally hold meetings in his print shop, and perhaps they imbibed the contents of 1689. Thomas advertised his reprint in the 8 April 1773 edition of his seditious newspaper The Massachussetts Spy or Thomas's Boston Journal.

And just eight months later, tea was floating in Boston Harbour....

• The 1773 Thomas edition is on Archive.org here

• Text is online here

"the three strands of political thought that shaped America’s founding - Lockean liberalism, classic republicanism, and Protestant Christianity"

This 2022 article by Kevin DeYoung on World News Group is worth a read...

The founders' emphasis on liberty was not a rejection of Christianity but based on Christian ideas about the sanctity of the conscience and the corruptibility of too much power in the hands of too few persons.

Professor David Armitage on the 1688 & 1776 connections - "move beyond nationalist paradigms"

I saw this Zoom broadcast, hosted by the National Army Museum in London, back in April of this year. Professor David Armitage (Harvard webpage here) makes a number of critical points here. I've lifted these from the YouTube transcript, but do listen to the whole for proper context.

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From 3:00 –

"... it's very useful indeed and very important historically to reconsider the war of independence as a Civil War and I think that's for three reasons - I'm sure my fellow panelists will have others to add to these.

The first is that it returns the War of Independence to its full British transatlantic and imperial context by thinking of the commonalities on both sides of the Atlantic and indeed around the Atlantic that framed and shaped the course of the War of Independence;

secondly it liberates the War of Independence from a nationalist teleology that was imposed back upon those events particularly from the 19th century making it an event in the history of the United States even before the United States existed, but more importantly in this context, it restores the very deep divisions that characterise the war itself within North America but also again within the British Empire and in Britain itself, and also reminds us of the often terrible violence that took place during the war of independence something that later nationalist accounts tended to gloss over;

and thirdly and finally I think it's historically important to rethink it rethink the War of Independence as a civil war because that those are exactly the terms that contemporaries used to describe it, for example the very first Declaration from the Second Continental Congress in July 1775 the Declaration on taking up arms said that the American cause was not to declare independence but rather to save the Empire from the calamities of Civil War and very similarly the official British government response to the Declaration of Independence accused the Americans themselves of fomenting Civil War ..."

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From 14:16 –

"... the overall way to think about this is again not in the terms of the nationalist narrative which effectively tells the story of the American Revolution as a crisis of disintegration - as it were proto Americans discovering their own identity attached themselves to a certain set of values which then they put into practice against the predatory invasions of Ministry, Parliament and the Crown - we should think of it in in fact in the exactly the opposite way, as a crisis of integration. By the 1760s and 1770s most of the white colonists in the 13 colonies and indeed the other British colonies on the western side of the Atlantic thought of themselves as more British in their mores in their attachment to common law in the way in which they organised property relations but also in the ways in which they were for example bound together by the fruits of a modernising consumer revolution ..."

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From 48:00 –

“... this is also relevant to the ideological context for the colonies going all the way back to the attachment of Britons, the common attachment of Britons as Britons, to what they saw as their peculiar inheritance of civil liberty guaranteed by the Revolutionary settlement of 1688 to 1689 - so as well as expanding our geographical range to see the American crisis in a global context we also need to pull out the temporal context and take it all the way back to 1688-89 to see how debates about civil liberty, the definitions of those, how they're related to conceptions of consent, of representation of parliament ..."

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The 1689 London Baptist Confession, and the aftermath of King James II's 1685 'Bloody Assizes'

Above: the 50 locations of 315 public executions during King James II's 'Bloody Assizes', August - December 1685.

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This article, in the Baptist Quarterly, January 1930 edition, is worth a look. Baptists were one of the 'non-conformist' denominations in England who were persecuted under the 'absolute monarch' regimes of Charles II and then James II, from 1661-1688. G.M. Trevelyan, in his England Under the Stuarts (1904; online here), described these as 'The Reigns of Terror'.

State power was unleashed upon the civilian populations who believed that no King was head of the church. Persecuting 'Clarendon Code' laws targeted them. 2000 non-conformist ministers ejected in England alone. John James was executed. Benjamin Keach persecuted. John Bunyan imprisoned. Isaac Watts senior* imprisoned twice. Richard Baxter put on trial... men whose writings are revered in theological circles today, but whose sufferings are almost forgotten.

Some Baptists turned their farming implements into weapons and joined the Duke of Monmouth's Rebellion of summer 1685, forging their ploughshares into swords. The rebellion failed.

The lists of the 850 'rebels' who were sold as slaves, and of the 315 more who were publicly executed, still exist. The Baptist Quarterly article picks up on those sources –

These lists deserve close attention from the secretaries of the Somerset and Dorset Baptist churches, which contributed scores, if not hundreds, to the ranks of the insurgents.

The Lyme Regis church was foremost, and it is not surprising to see the pastor, Sampson Lark, with John Holloway, the tobacconist, amongst the earliest who paid forfeit.

Other Dorset names well known in Baptist circles are Bevis, Collier, Cox, Elliot, Sprake, Waldron. Colonel Abraham Holmes and Will Hewling were Baptist, but had landed with Monmouth.

Benjamin Hewling was convicted at Taunton; the story is well known how his grandfather, (William) Kiffin of London interceded but could only obtain that he should not be quartered, but buried whole...

The grave losses sustained by our churches in Somerset and Dorset, still affected them four years later, and so when the churches of all England were represented at London in 1689, the West did not give its usual lead, which it only recovered after ten years. Some real harm was done, the effects of which persisted for nearly a century.

We commend to some Baptist antiquary in the Taunton district, that he take the official lists in the Calendar of State Papers, and try to trace his spiritual ancestors who fought against James as their fathers against his father.

 

Above: a photo I took of Lyme Regis Baptist Church back in 2016. Local pastor, Sampson Larke, was one of twelve who were hanged, drawn and quartered on the beach on 12 September 1685; another of them was William Hewling referred to above. When visiting Lyme Regis earlier this year I went to the churchyard of St Michael the Archangel Parish Church, where William Hewling's remains had been buried. His gravestone had been taken away some time in the early 1900s - see previous post here. The significantly-named Monmouth Street is directly opposite the church.

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In November 1688 King James II was of course overthrown by a European-wide alliance headed by William, Prince of Orange, who, in 1689, with his wife Queen Mary II jointly signed into law a new Bill of Rights for the people.

From 3rd - 11th "of the seventh month" of 1689 (back then the seventh month of the year was not July, but September) an assembly of 37 Baptist pastors gathered in London, and published the 1689 Baptist Confession. This dedicated website contains the full text, and also lists all of the local pastors who were signatories.

• Those who were from the ravaged south west - Samuel Buttall of Plymouth, William Phipps of Exeter, John Ball of Tiverton (where the local congregational pastor was beheaded, and his head then displayed on the market cross), James Hitt of Dalwood, Thomas Winnel of Taunton, Toby Willes of Bridgwater, Andrew Gifford of Bristol and James Webb of Devizes - must have brought horrific tales to the liberated capital. 

• Among the 37 was William Kiffin, the pastor of Devonshire Square Baptist Church in London, whose nephews William and Benjamin Hewling had been publicly executed at Lyme Regis and Taunton respectively. Decades before, Kiffin had been one of the authors of the 1644 Baptist Confession of Faith. The 1823 edition of Remarkable passages in the life of William Kiffin is online here.

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* The hymnwriter Isaac Watts (1674-1748), perhaps reflecting on his Southampton childhood memory of the persecutions under Charles II and James II (men were hanged drawn and quartered at Wareham in 1685 - see previous post here), wrote these words:

“Must I be carried to the skies, On flowery beds of ease?
While others fought to win their prize, And sailed through bloody seas?”

Above: The 1689 Baptist Confession was reprinted in the USA, by Benjamin Franklin in 1743 and later reprinted by John Dunlap in 1773. They would of course collaborate in the publishing of the Declaration of Independence on 4th July 1776.

It's almost a century since that Baptist Quarterly article highlighted the need for further research, perhaps that still needs to be done.

Above: the locations of the 37 pastors named in the 1689 Baptist Confession

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• Connected with all of this is the remarkable Daniel Defoe. This superb analysis of his most famous work Robinson Crusoe, by Tom Paulin in the London Review of Books in 2001, is a masterclass. As Paulin shows, the executed William and Benjamin Hewling had been schoolfriends of Defoe when they attended Cornwall-born Charles Morton's Dissenting Academy at Newington Green in London. Morton left England for America in 1686, where he became Vice-President of Harvard.

Above: tattoo of Joe Thorn's hand (online here).