Sedgemoor - England's last battle, by Tim Vicary

The last pitched land battle in England happened at Sedgemoor, just outside Bridgwater in Somerset, in 1685. And if hadn’t been for a man with a pistol, and an unexpected ditch, it might have ended quite differently.

Earl of Feversham

The two generals on either side were Louis Duras, the Earl of Feversham, and James Scott, Duke of Monmouth. In June 1685 Monmouth had landed with three ships at Lyme Regis, in Dorset, where he recruited an army mostly composed of Protestant West Country cloth workers and artisans, with whose aid he hoped to depose his Catholic uncle, King James II. The army of Louis Duras, and his second in command John Churchill (later the Duke of Marlborough), consisted entirely of professional soldiers. Their job was to crush Monmouth’s rebellion as quickly as they could.

In the three weeks between 11^th June, when he landed, and 1^st July, the date of the battle of Sedgemoor, Monmouth had done his best to equip and train his part-time soldiers. They were well armed with the latest up-to-date flintlock muskets, shiploads of which he had brought from Holland. Some pikeman had eighteen foot pikes, others had scythe blades tacked to long poles. And to their credit they had already fought two small battles, at Bridport and Philips Norton, in neither of which they had been defeated.

Monmouth’s main problem, however, was his lack of trained cavalry horses. When he landed, he was convinced that many English gentlemen and old friends from his army days – including John Churchill – would ride in to join him, bringing skilled horsemen with him. But very few did. And so his cavalry, led by his friend Ford, Lord Grey, had to make do with such horses as they could beg or steal. Not surprisingly, at their first battle in the crowded streets of Bridport, these animals panicked and bolted, carrying their riders with them. The same problem would bedevil Monmouth at Sedgemoor.

Monmouth's men moved fast. On 21st June they were in Taunton, where Monmouth was proclaimed King. On 25^th June they were outside the walls of Bristol, the second city in England. But then, instead of attacking, they retreated, trudging back towards Bridgwater which they had passed on their journey east. It seemed Monmouth had lost the initiative, suffered a fatal lack of

confidence when the promised cavalry did not arrive.

But then, in Bridgwater, he regained his courage. Standing on top of St Mary's church tower by the city walls, he could see the royal army settling down to camp on the flat marshy ground of the Somerset Levels, about five miles away. As the sun set, a mist began to rise, hiding everything from view.  And his scouts brought him hope, in the shape of a local countryman, who knew the moorland outside the town intimately.

‘I can bring you to them, my lord,’ he said. (or something very similar) ‘If your men are quiet, and don’t speak, I can bring you right into the enemy camp before anyone knows you’re there.’

To Monmouth it seemed a risk worth taking. ‘Who dares, wins,’ he might have thought to himself, as he ordered the army to prepare.  Boots and horses’ hooves were muffled with rags, buckles secured so they would not clink. And then shortly before midnight, the town gates were opened and the army filed out – a long line of men, mostly on foot, following the countryman’s lead.

It was dark, and the mist was higher than a man’s head. To avoid getting lost, men held onto their friends, sometimes clutching the jacket of the man in front. There was a scarey moment when they all had to stop, listening to the hooves of a royalist cavalry patrol crossing the road in front of them. But nothing happened, and the line of silent soldiers trudged on, first north, then turning south-east towards the enemy’s camp.

And then they came to a ford. The Somerset Levels are a wide, flat marshy area, only a few feet above sea level, drained by a network of ditches called ‘rhines’, some five feet across, some wider and deeper, like small canals or rivers. Their guide knew the best places to cross, he had assured Monmouth of that. But to some men – and horses – water can be frightening, especially at night, when it’s black, and of an unknown depth. And it was while they were crossing a ford, within a few hundred yards of the enemy camp – you can imagine the hesitations, the urgent whispers, the officer’s orders not to splash or curse or fall over, not to make a noise of any sort –that a pistol went off.

Was it an accident, or treachery? At the time, the man who fired claimed, of course, that it was an accident, and it may well have been. But much later, when he was on trial in front of Judge Jeffreys, Captain Hucker claimed he’d done it on purpose, to warn the royal troops. Jeffreys, to his credit, despised this excuse. ‘First you betray your King, then you betray your fellows,’ he said. 'There is no mercy for such as you.’ When he was sent back to prison, his fellows nearly lynched him.

Whatever the reason, the pistol shot awoke Feversham’s sentries. As Monmouth’s men waded through the ford, they heard shouts in the darkness ahead of them, and drums calling men to arms, rat-a–tat-tat! But they still had a chance.  The enemy was alarmed, confused, and only a short distance ahead; their surprise had almost worked.  And they had been practicing their drill for three weeks now, as if their lives depended on it – which they did. So under their officers’ shouted orders – no need for silence now – they deployed into lines; musket men in the middle, pikemen to right and left – and advanced to where the light of camp fires and slow match was becoming clearer in the mist.

The enemy were in a state of shock and panic – they still weren’t ready. Whereas Monmouth’s men had been visualizing this moment all evening, ever since they left the town. And unlike Feversham’s men, they had modern flintlock muskets, which they had fired in anger several times already.

But then, as they advanced towards the enemy, they saw the rhine.

It wasn't as wide or deep as the river Rhine in Germany, of course not, but it might was well have been. Right there between themselves and the men they were about to attack there was another unexpected drainage ditch. No-one had warned them about this. It was full of black water maybe fifteen yard wide, and who knows how deep? Their officers urged them to cross it, some going down into the water themselves, but somehow, the thought of wading across that black unknown depth while the enemy soldiers stood on the far bank firing down into them was just … too much.

They couldn’t do it.

And so, instead, they stood on their own bank and fired back.  They fired well, for a while, their new flintlock muskets performing as well or better than the matchlocks of their enemy. But the element of surprise was gone; and with it, all their advantage.

Feversham’s men, now they were awake, had two deadly advantages. Firstly, their cavalry. Monmouth’s cavalry had no more success than the infantry at crossing the rhine. They tried to urge their half-trained farm horses into the water and failed. They searched for a ford but had no idea where it was. So they trotted up and down uselessly in the darkness, until Feversham’s cavalry – who’d found the ford in daylight – rode across and chased them away.

canister of grapeshot

The other advantage was artillery. Monmouth had dragged a few small field guns through the mist and darkness to the battlefield, but Feversham had far more. That was why it had been vital for Monmouth’s men to cross the rhine and get into the enemy camp straight away: so that they could capture the enemy guns and either spike them or turn them against their own men. But instead, here they were, still standing on their own side of the rhine, a sitting target for enemy’ field guns. Guns loaded with grapeshot, which could tear through a file of soldiers, killing five or ten men at a time.

And so they lost. They stood there until they could take it no more, and then they fled, some running, some marching grimly down the road to Bridgwater. Monmouth fled on horseback, to be found hiding a field a few days later. The last battle on English soil had been won and lost.

But if Captain Hucker hadn't fired that pistol, and Monmouth's men had dared to cross the rhine – who knows? History can turn on very small moments. 

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Tim Vicary's novel of the rebellion, The Monmouth Summer, is available as paperback and ebook on Amazon US and Amazon UK. See also his website and blog 

The Bloody Assizes: Justice and Cruelty in 1685

by Tim Vicary

The first person brought before the court was a woman. She was seventy years old, partially deaf, and possibly senile. The charge was high treason, for which the penalty was death. Her name was Alice Lyle.

The judge was the Lord Chief Justice of England, the newly ennobled George, First Baron Jeffreys of Wem. In 1685 Jeffreys was 40 years old and had been England’s top judge for 2 years. He was a highly intelligent, ambitious man, renowned for his energy, hatred of criminals, and ferocious skill in cross-examination. He was also a sick man, suffering from a kidney stone. He frequently sipped what was thought to be brandy during trials, leading to accusations that he was drunk. This may have been true, but if so the brandy was probably medicinal, to dull the extreme pain he was suffering. And like most people in chronic pain, he was often in a filthy temper, searching for a scapegoat to vent his fury on.

If that was so, he had been given the perfect opportunity.  Earlier that year, James II succeeded to the throne, and his nephew James Scott, duke of Monmouth, rose in rebellion against him. Monmouth landed at Lyme Regis, in Dorset, and gathered an army of Protestant rebels to depose King James, his Catholic uncle. But the rebels were defeated at Sedgemoor (the last battle on English soil) Monmouth was captured and beheaded, and King James sent Judge Jeffreys to the West Country to teach the rebels a lesson they would never forget.

The charge against Alice Lyle was that she had hidden a rebel fugitive named Hicks in a priest’s hole at her home.  Her defence (she was a wealthy widow, able to hire a lawyer) rested on two points:

a)      Hicks hadn’t even been tried yet, let alone convicted, so there was no proof that he actually was a rebel;

b)      She was too old and doddery to know anything about Monmouth’s rebellion; she thought he was a priest

Jeffreys was having none of it. Point a) – which would certainly have stopped the trial in its tracks today – he brushed aside as irrelevant; of course Hicks was a rebel, everyone knew he had been with Monmouth’s army, he said. For point b) the prosecution produced two witnesses, a man called Barter and a man called Dunne. Barter said he’d seen Dame Alice with Dunne about ‘the business’ by which he meant the rebellion. When Dunne refused to confirm this Jeffreys launched into a terrifying cross-examination.  Part of it went like this:

Jeffreys:  Come now and tell us, what business was that?

Dunne:  (After a long silence) Does your lordship ask what that business was?

Jeffreys: Yes. It is a plain question. What was the business that the lady asked thee, whether the other men knew?

Another long silence.

Jeffreys: He is studying and musing how he shall prevaricate ... But thou hadst better tell the truth, friend ... Now I would know what that business was.

Dunne: I cannot mind it, my lord.

Jeffreys: Oh, how hard the truth is, to come out of a lying Presbyterian rogue!

Dunne: I cannot give you an account of it, my lord.

Jeffreys: Oh blessed God! Was there ever such a villain upon the face of the Earth?

And so on, over half an hour. Very effective cross-examination, you might think, from a prosecution barrister.  But Jeffreys wasn’t the prosecution, he was the judge, whom we think of today as impartial. But that wasn’t how Judge Jeffreys saw his role, not at all. He was there to get convictions, as quickly and efficiently as possible, and that was what he did.

Alice Lyle was convicted and sentenced to be burnt alive. There was no appeal on legal grounds, as there would be today. The only appeal was to the King, for mercy. And King James was merciful, sort of.  Alice wasn’t burnt alive; she was beheaded.

Hers was just the first case in the Bloody Assizes; Jeffreys had well over a thousand more to deal with.  In Dorchester he found 300 prisoners crammed into a small jail, mostly men charged with fighting in Monmouth’s army. Clearly it would take months to try them all individually, but Jeffreys had a better idea. Dispensing with a Grand Jury, he sent his clerk into the jail to offer them mercy if they would confess (and inform on their friends) He repeated this in court:

‘If you will plead guilty, the King, who is almost all mercy, will be as ready to forgive you as you were to rebel against him, yea as ready to pardon you as you are to ask it of him.’

Does that sound familiar? It should: it is the basis of the ‘plea bargain’ which is, unfortunately, practised daily by district attorneys across the United States, and, slightly more discreetly, by the Crown Prosecution Service in England. In 1685 the main differences were:

a) it was the judge who was making a direct offer to the accused, rather than a deal being struck between prosecution and defence lawyers (but then few, if any, of the rebels had defence lawyers) and

b) the punishments the rebels were facing were much more extreme.

The choice was between being transported as indentured slaves to the West Indies, or being hanged.   A cruel punishment indeed, but Jeffreys was able to joke about it.  When Christopher Battiscombe was convicted, his mistress bravely pleaded with the judge to hand over his body, unmutilated, for her to bury after death. ‘Certainly, madam,’ Jeffreys laughed. ‘You shall have part of the body. I know what part you love best and will direct the Sherriff accordingly.’

In fact, of course, the men were not just hanged, but drawn and quartered too.  They were half hanged, then cut down and disembowelled while still alive, and chopped into four pieces. Captain John Kidd was the last of twelve men to be executed like this on the beach at Lyme Regis; he suffered the unimaginable horror of watching this happen to eleven of his friends before him. The courage of such men, many of whom met their deaths while singing a psalm, is as humbling as the cruelty of the executioners is appalling.
Jeffreys ordered all this, but he was not the only monster of cruelty around. At least he acted within the law. James Kirke, the colonel of ‘Kirke’s Lambs’ a royal regiment who wore white coats, was said to have hanged over a hundred rebels without any trial at all. When a pretty young woman begged him in floods of tears to save her father’s life, Kirke agreed on one condition: that she would spent the night in his bed, which she did. When she got up next morning and walked to the window, she saw her father, hanging from the signpost outside the inn.

Such stories, and the fact that the rebels’ arms, legs and heads of rebels were boiled, tarred, and publically displayed in towns and villages all around the West Country, had a terrifying effect. Judge Jeffreys’ Bloody Assizes didn’t make anyone love the King, but they surely made people fear him.

For the next three years, at least.  

Then, in 1688, King William of Orange sailed to England with a much larger army, and chased King James away. James fled abroad, but Jeffreys – now Lord Chancellor - was captured, thrown into prison, and died of kidney disease in the Tower of London.  In the West Country, his death was greeted with understandable delight.

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Tim Vicary’s novel about 1685, The Monmouth Summer, which touches only briefly on the cruelties described here, was listed as one of the 10 top history books of 2012 by Samantha J. Morris ‘Lady Hertford’ in her blog ‘Loyaltybindsme’. It is available on Amazon UK and Amazon US.