2 - The Damning of King Monmouth: Pulpit Toryism in the Reign of James II

Summary

On the field of Sedgemoor in Somerset in July 1685 the rebel army of James, duke of Monmouth, illegitimate but protestant son of Charles II, was destroyed by the professional army of the new king, James II. Monmouth was captured and executed, and those of his followers who were not butchered on the battlefield were hanged or transported into servitude by Judge Jeffreys in ‘the Bloody Assize’. In later times, the Monmouth rebels have commanded a deep fund of sympathy. Harsh though judgments have been upon the duke's folly in landing with just 80 men and naive hopes of a spontaneous national uprising, his cause, and that of the artisans and farmers who rallied to his standard, has accrued three centuries of admiration. Eighteenth-century whigs, nineteenth-century nonconformists, and twentieth-century socialists all celebrated the rebels as popular heroes, a pitchfork army of commoners who rose in defence of civil and religious liberty. The rebels' fate became a byword for despotic cruelty. In the 1935 film adaptation of Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood (1922), one of many novels spawned by Monmouth's forlorn cause, the haughty tyrant James sends his captured nephew to the executioner's block, the duke grovelling on the floor begging for his life, a scene borrowed from Victorian genre paintings. In the long historiographical tradition of English radicalism, the rebellion was characterized as the last stand of the Good Old Cause, part of a lineage that stretched from the Levellers to the Chartists. Pro-Monmouth ballads are still sung by West Country folk groups.