Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (67 page)

The hopes of Protestant England were increasingly focused on the handsome figure of a very different James from the Catholic Duke of York. James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, was acknowledged by Charles II as the eldest of his bastard sons – although there is considerable doubt as to whether Charles was Monmouth’s real father. Doubt also surrounds the status of Monmouth’s mother, a Welshwoman named Lucy Walters, as notoriously promiscuous as Charles himself (she was dead of syphilis before she was thirty). The rumours that she married Charles in a secret ceremony in The Hague may well be true. Even if Monmouth privately did not believe the reports that his parents were lawfully wed, he certainly encouraged them.

Ambitious, and malleable to the machinations of more ruthless men, Monmouth was encouraged by the Protestant opposition to bid for the Crown – to the point where he became involved in the Rye House Plot to do away with his father and the uncle who stood in his way. After the plot’s failure, Monmouth fled back to the Netherlands – and when Charles died in February 1685 and was succeeded by James, Monmouth claimed that his uncle had poisoned the king. In exile, he attracted a following of Protestant malcontents and assembled a trio of ships, landing at Lyme Regis in Dorset in June with a small group of eighty-two rebels to stake his claim to the throne.

Some 6,000 of the West Country’s sturdy Protestant peasantry joined Monmouth’s motley army, which defeated the local county militia in a couple of skirmishes as he moved inland into Somerset. Ominously, however, the aristocracy held aloof, and after the failure of a parallel Protestant revolt in Scotland, Monmouth retired into the Somerset Levels – a boggy marshland criss-crossed by deep drainage ditches known as ‘Rhines’. Ominously, too, one of the greatest soldiers in history was now hot on his tail.

John Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough, was an exact contemporary of Monmouth. From a family of West Country Cavaliers who had lost their fortune in the Civil Wars, Churchill, like Monmouth, had drawn King Charles’s indulgent eye. As a poor young courtier, Churchill had shared with the king the favours of his most insatiable mistress, Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland. Charles had even caught the impoverished young blade naked in Barbara’s bedchamber, but said he forgave him, ‘for he only did it for his bread’. Churchill’s soldiering ability had brought him the field command of the professional royal army now closing on Monmouth’s ill-trained
ploughboys, and though the nominal command was in the hands of a French-born veteran, Lord Feversham, the organising brain was Churchill’s.

The royal army caught up with the duke outside Bridgewater on 2 July 1685. In the brief pitched battle that followed on Sedgemoor – the first of John Churchill’s many victories – Monmouth’s army was shattered. As his men fell or fled, the duke took horse and with his friend Lord Grey de Warke (as we have seen, a notable escaper from the Tower) made for the south coast. Separated from his friends and starving, Monmouth was caught a couple of days later sleeping in a ditch under an ash tree on the edge of the New Forest, his pockets filled with raw peas foraged from the field where he was hiding. Taken to a house in nearby Ringwood, the duke wrote the first of many abject pleas for mercy to his uncle King James.

Desperate to save his skin, Monmouth sought a personal interview with the uncle whom he had accused of murdering his father. He offered to betray his confederates, and swore that he would be the king’s loyal subject in future. He wasted his breath. The cold-hearted James was set on destroying his nephew – and since he had been attainted for his treason, could do so legally without the tiresome formality of a trial. Hoping to gather information about Monmouth’s fellow plotters, he granted Monmouth’s request for a personal interview, but used it only to gloat at his nephew’s humiliation.

Taken to see James in Whitehall Palace as soon as he arrived in London, his arms bound tightly behind his back with a silken cord, Monmouth lost what little dignity he retained. Throwing himself on the floor, he wept and begged for mercy – in vain. James wrote icily to his son-in-law William of Orange, ruler of the Netherlands, where Monmouth had sought refuge:

The Duke of Monmouth seemed more concerned and desirous to live, and did not behave himself as well as I expected, nor as one ought to have expected from one who had taken upon him to be King. I have signed the warrant for his execution tomorrow.

Not for nothing did John Churchill compare James’s heart to a marble mantelpiece. But little did the cold-hearted king think that William, the man to whom his sneering report was addressed, would, in three years, succeed where Monmouth had failed – and take James’s throne after another invasion of the West Country launched from the Netherlands.

Monmouth was taken straight from the king to the Tower. His stay was brief. Within forty hours of him being rowed under Traitor’s Gate on the
evening of 13 July, he was dead. Poignantly, awaiting him were his wife and children, who had been rounded up as a precaution by the king when Monmouth had landed in England. The Monmouths’ marriage had been a loveless match arranged in childhood by their parents. Nevertheless, he and his wife Anna produced seven children, of whom three survivors – James, eleven; Henry, eight; and Anne, five – received their father in the Tower. The couple had not met since Monmouth’s flight into exile in 1683, and the duke’s heart now belonged firmly to his mistress, Lady Henrietta Wentworth.

Anna reproached him for his passionate liaision with Henrietta, and for his recent rebellion. Monmouth dutifully expressed his contrition for the latter, but not for his love for Lady Wentworth. The painful interview with his family over, he appealed to a cousin of his wife, Colonel Scott, commander of the Tower’s guard. Still hoping to save his life, the duke asked Scott to carry a secret letter to the king. Scott claimed that he had orders from James to remain with Monmouth until his execution, but suggested one of his captains as a substitute postman. This officer carried out his mission, but was intercepted by Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, the king’s Secretary of State.

Sunderland was a slippery trimmer who had first supported excluding James from the succession, before converting to Catholicism and becoming a fervent advocate of royal absolutism. He was, however, strongly suspected of having kept in touch with Monmouth in case his rebellion succeeded. Monmouth’s letter may well have concerned this delicate subject. At all events, Sunderland confiscated it from Scott’s captain, promising to give it to the king. Needless to say, it was never seen again and Monmouth’s last slim hope of saving his life vanished with it. Sunderland, true to his turncoat form, secretly supported William of Orange’s ‘Glorious Revolution’, deserting James and reconverting to Protestantism when he judged it safe to do so. He served William as ably as he had done his predecessor.

On St Swithin’s Day, 15 July – the date on which a soothsayer had told him he would either die or go on to great things – Monmouth met a bevy of clerics in his cell. They implored him to renounce his impious love for Lady Wentworth, but Monmouth, recovering some shreds of spirit now that he had but two hours to live, firmly refused. In a last statement he affirmed that his father had told him that he had never married his mother – but declined to say whether he believed that to be the truth. He also declared that he died a ‘martyr for the people’ and a true son of the
Protestant faith, while expressing sorrow for ‘the blood that was shed on his account’.

Monmouth dressed carefully for his final appearance in clean shirt and stockings, a sober grey suit lined with black, and a long black periwig. In an emotional and tearful farewell with his wife, he begged Anna’s forgiveness for his infidelities and failings as a husband. He told his children, who clung weeping to him, to obey their mother – and the king. At 10 a.m. the doomed duke climbed into a coach for the short journey up Tower Hill. He was accompanied by Thomas Ken, the Bishop of Bath and Wells – ironically the churches whose stained-glass images and ‘Popish’ decor Monmouth’s iconoclastic troops had trashed during their progress through the West Country. Ken, author of some of England’s best-loved hymns, including ‘All People That On Earth Do Dwell’, struggled vainly to persuade the duke to repent of his ‘sin’ in rebelling. But Monmouth’s mind was now on other things.

The black-draped scaffold was surrounded by a double row of armed guards. The king knew how popular the handsome ‘Protestant Duke’ was and was taking no chances. Monmouth climbed the steps nonchalantly, smiling and waving to the crowd, like an actor putting on a final command performance. Catching his first sight of the executioner, a ruffian called Jack Ketch, Monmouth blanched. This was the man who had botched the beheading of his friend and fellow Rye House plotter Lord William Russell, taking three strokes to sever his head. ‘Do your work well,’ Monmouth told Ketch grimly, ‘and do not use me as I hear you hacked my poor Lord Russell.’

A huge crowd, said by some to equal or exceed that which had watched Strafford die, had assembled to greet their hero. The prelates continued to pester him to make public penance for his rebellion, but Monmouth only responded that he was sorry for all his sins. His mind was still with his lover, declaring that what had passed between him and Lady Wentworth was innocent in the sight of God. He refused to make any further speeches and began to prepare for the ordeal ahead, removing his coat and ruff. He tipped Ketch with a generous six guineas, begging him to strike true; and doubtfully felt the edge of the axe, wondering aloud if it was sharp enough.

Either it was blunt or Ketch, unnerved by the murmuring crowd and his own sympathy for Monmouth, again bungled the job. Refusing a blindfold, Monmouth knelt at the block having removed his wig and waistcoat. Ketch, visibly shaking, raised the heavy axe as the priests chanted around him. The first blow merely gashed the duke’s neck, at which he raised his head and looked reproachfully at his killer. Ketch’s second blow
made a deeper gash – but still Monmouth’s head remained attached to his shoulders, a movement of the legs the only sign of the agony he was enduring. As the crowd began to roar their disapproval, Ketch lost it. He flung the bloodied axe aside, crying, ‘God damn me, I can do no more, my heart fails me. I cannot do it.’ Mr Gostlin, the Sheriff of London, sternly ordered the headsman to pick up the axe, get a grip, and finish his bloody work. Three more blows were needed to kill Monmouth, but his head still dangled, obstinately adhering by a piece of skin, which Ketch was obliged to cut with a butcher’s knife hanging at his belt. Never had an execution been more mangled, and Ketch was lucky to escape the scene with his life, such was the anger of the enraged crowd.

Monmouth’s head, handsome and calm in death, despite his agonisingly protracted end, was placed alongside his body in a coffin and trundled back to the Tower; there to be sewn back on his neck and painted by the court artist Godfrey Kneller. After this macabre posthumous ‘sitting’ the much abused body of the duke was finally laid to rest beneath the flagstones of St Peter ad Vincula.

Agonising as it was, Monmouth’s end was more enviable than that of hundreds of his humbler followers, who were executed or transported as slaves to the colonies for their roles in his rebellion. King James appointed the merciless Lord Chief Justice, George Jeffreys, to conduct a purge through the West Country that became known as the ‘Bloody Assize’. Jeffreys was a sadistic brute who took delight in his victims’ sufferings. His apologists have pointed to the painful kidney disease that eventually killed him in the Tower as an excuse for the judge’s obscene behaviour, but he was a vindictive bully by nature.

Jeffreys and his subordinate judges moved through the West Country towns like an avenging whirlwind, trying and sentencing those involved in Monmouth’s rising with brutal dispatch. Wherever they went – Winchester, Salisbury, Dorchester, Exeter, Taunton and Wells – they left a trail of hanged and eviscerated bodies and unlucky wretches shuffling in chains towards a grim future as slaves in the New World. Jeffreys delighted in browbeating his victims from the bench, and even watched executions while enjoying his dinner. He sentenced some 333 souls to death – including the aged Lady Alice Lisle, who was condemned to be burned alive for merely harbouring two rebels overnight. Her sentence was commuted to beheading. Executioner Jack Ketch was able to wield
his butcher’s knife again as he carried out the full gruesome rite on the bodies of convicted traitors. At the end of the Bloody Assize, a grateful King James rewarded Jeffreys by making him Lord Chancellor.

The brutal repression that followed Monmouth’s rising fatally increased James’s unpopularity. And when in June 1688 the king’s equally fervently Catholic Italian second wife, Mary of Modena, gave birth to a male heir, Prince James Edward, the growing opposition acted. The king already had two adult daughters by his first marriage: Mary, wife of William of Orange, the
stadtholder
or ruler of the Netherlands; and Anne, who was married to Prince George of Denmark but lived in London. Both women were fervent Protestants who deeply disapproved of their father’s Catholicism. The birth of their infant half-brother persuaded them, and the powerful Whig lords, that James had to go. If he stayed, the prospect of a Catholic heir completing England’s reconversion to Rome was inevitable – and intolerable. James brought his house tumbling down in the same month when he issued a so-called ‘Declaration of Indulgence’, removing the remaining discrimination against Catholics and Dissenters, and ordered it to be read from the pulpits of all Anglican churches. Seven Anglican bishops – headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and including Thomas Ken – refused the order, and were sent to the Tower for their temerity.

For once, the whole range of Protestant opinion united behind the Anglican clerics. London was thick with crowds demonstrating their support, so they had to be brought to the Tower by boat to forestall a rescue attempt. Arriving at the Tower’s wharf, people rushed forwards to touch the hems of their vestments, and the guards who admitted them to the fortress drank toasts to their health. Only the Tower’s lieutenant, Sir Edward Hales, who had cynically followed the king’s conversion to Catholicism to aid his career, treated the clerics – according to diarist John Evelyn, who visited them in the Tower – ‘very surlily’. Even the Tower’s chaplain, ordered to read the Declaration of Indulgence from his pulpit, refused – and was dismissed.