The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1 by Thomas Babington Macaulay (diy ebook reader .txt) π
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and
hurled from it in consequence of court intrigues or of changes in
the sentiments of the higher classes of society, the profligate
Wilkes retained his hold on the selections of a rabble whom he
pillaged and ridiculed. Politicians, who, in 1807, had sought to
curry favour with George the Third by defending Caroline of
Brunswick, were not ashamed, in 1820, to curry favour with George
the Fourth by persecuting her. But in 1820, as in 1807, the whole
body of working men was fanatically devoted to her cause. So it
was with Monmouth. In 1680, he had been adored alike by the
gentry and by the peasantry of the West. In 1685 he came again.
To the gentry he had become an object of aversion: but by the
peasantry he was still loved with a love strong as death, with a
love not to be extinguished by misfortunes or faults, by the
flight from Sedgemoor, by the letter from Ringwood, or by the
tears and abject supplications at Whitehall. The charge which may
with justice be brought against the common people is, not that
they are inconstant, but that they almost invariably choose their
favourite so ill that their constancy is a vice and not a virtue.
While the execution of Monmouth occupied the thoughts of the
Londoners, the counties which had risen against the government
were enduring all that a ferocious soldiery could inflict.
Feversham had been summoned to the court, where honours and
rewards which he little deserved awaited him. He was made a
Knight of the Garter and Captain of the first and most lucrative
troop of Life Guards: but Court and City laughed at his military
exploits; and the wit of Buckingham gave forth its last feeble
flash at the expense of the general who had won a battle in
bed.434 Feversham left in command at Bridgewater Colonel Percy
Kirke, a military adventurer whose vices had been developed by
the worst of all schools, Tangier. Kirke had during some years
commanded the garrison of that town, and had been constantly
employed in hostilities against tribes of foreign barbarians,
ignorant of the laws which regulate the warfare of civilized and
Christian nations. Within the ramparts of his fortress he was a
despotic prince. The only check on his tyranny was the fear of
being called to account by a distant and a careless government.
He might therefore safely proceed to the most audacious excesses
of rapacity, licentiousness, and cruelty. He lived with boundless
dissoluteness, and procured by extortion the means of indulgence.
No goods could be sold till Kirke had had the refusal of them. No
question of right could be decided till Kirke had been bribed.
Once, merely from a malignant whim, he staved all the wine in a
vintner's cellar. On another occasion he drove all the Jews from
Tangier. Two of them he sent to the Spanish Inquisition, which
forthwith burned them. Under this iron domination scarce a
complaint was heard; for hatred was effectually kept down by
terror. Two persons who had been refractory were found murdered;
and it was universally believed that they had been slain by
Kirke's order. When his soldiers displeased him he flogged them
with merciless severity: but he indemnified them by permitting
them to sleep on watch, to reel drunk about the streets, to rob,
beat, and insult the merchants and the labourers.
When Tangier was abandoned, Kirke returned to England. He still
continued to command his old soldiers, who were designated
sometimes as the First Tangier Regiment, and sometimes as Queen
Catharine's Regiment. As they had been levied for the purpose of
waging war on an infidel nation, they bore on their flag a
Christian emblem, the Paschal Lamb. In allusion to this device,
and with a bitterly ironical meaning, these men, the rudest and
most ferocious in the English army, were called Kirke's Lambs.
The regiment, now the second of the line, still retains this
ancient badge, which is however thrown into the shade by
decorations honourably earned in Egypt, in Spain, and in the
heart of Asia.435
Such was the captain and such the soldiers who were now let loose
on the people of Somersetshire. From Bridgewater Kirke marched to
Taunton. He was accompanied by two carts filled with wounded
rebels whose gashes had not been dressed, and by a long drove of
prisoners on foot, who were chained two and two Several of these
he hanged as soon as he reached Taunton, without the form of a
trial. They were not suffered even to take leave of their nearest
relations. The signpost of the White Hart Inn served for a
gallows. It is said that the work of death went on in sight of
the windows where the officers of the Tangier regiment were
carousing, and that at every health a wretch was turned off. When
the legs of the dying man quivered in the last agony, the colonel
ordered the drums to strike up. He would give the rebels, he said
music to their dancing. The tradition runs that one of the
captives was not even allowed the indulgence of a speedy death.
Twice he was suspended from the signpost, and twice cut down.
Twice he was asked if he repented of his treason, and twice he
replied that, if the thing were to do again, he would do it. Then
he was tied up for the last time. So many dead bodies were
quartered that the executioner stood ankle deep in blood. He was
assisted by a poor man whose loyalty was suspected, and who was
compelled to ransom his own life by seething the remains of his
friends in pitch. The peasant who had consented to perform this
hideous office afterwards returned to his plough. But a mark like
that of Cain was upon him. He was known through his village by
the horrible name of Tom Boilman. The rustics long continued to
relate that, though he had, by his sinful and shameful deed,
saved himself from the vengeance of the Lambs, he had not escaped
the vengeance of a higher power. In a great storm he fled for
shelter under an oak, and was there struck dead by lightning.436
The number of those who were thus butchered cannot now be
ascertained. Nine were entered in the parish registers of
Taunton: but those registers contained the names of such only as
had Christian burial. Those who were hanged in chains, and those
whose heads and limbs were sent to the neighbouring villages,
must have been much more numerous. It was believed in London, at
the time, that Kirke put a hundred captives to death during the
week which followed the battle.437
Cruelty, however, was not this man's only passion. He loved
money; and was no novice in the arts of extortion. A safe conduct
might be bought of him for thirty or forty pounds; and such a
safe conduct, though of no value in law, enabled the purchaser to
pass the post of the Lambs without molestation, to reach a
seaport, and to fly to a foreign country. The ships which were
bound for New England were crowded at this juncture with so many
fugitives from Sedgemoor that there was great danger lest the
water and provisions should fail.438
Kirke was also, in his own coarse and ferocious way, a man of
pleasure; and nothing is more probable than that he employed his
power for the purpose of gratifying his licentious appetites. It
was reported that he conquered the virtue of a beautiful woman by
promising to spare the life of one to whom she was strongly
attached, and that, after she had yielded, he showed her
suspended on the gallows the lifeless remains of him for whose
sake she had sacrificed her honour. This tale an impartial judge
must reject. It is unsupported by proof. The earliest authority
for it is a poem written by Pomfret. The respectable historians
of that age, while they speak with just severity of the crimes of
Kirke, either omit all mention of this most atrocious crime, or
mention it as a thing rumoured but not proved. Those who tell the
story tell it with such variations as deprive it of all title to
credit. Some lay the scene at Taunton, some at Exeter. Some make
the heroine of the tale a maiden, some a married woman. The
relation for whom the shameful ransom was paid is described by
some as her father, by some as her brother, and by some as her
husband. Lastly the story is one which, long before Kirke was
born, had been told of many other oppressors, and had become a
favourite theme of novelists and dramatists. Two politicians of
the fifteenth century, Rhynsault, the favourite of Charles the
Bold of Burgundy, and Oliver le Dain, the favourite of Lewis the
Eleventh of France, had been accused of the same crime. Cintio
had taken it for the subject of a romance. Whetstone had made out
of Cintio's narrative the rude play of Promos and Cassandra; and
Shakspeare had borrowed from Whetstone the plot of the noble
tragicomedy of Measure for Measure. As Kirke was not the first so
he was not the last, to whom this excess of wickedness was
popularly imputed. During the reaction which followed the Jacobin
tyranny in France, a very similar charge was brought against
Joseph Lebon, one of the most odious agents of the Committee of
Public Safety, and, after enquiry, was admitted even by his
prosecutors to be unfounded.439
The government was dissatisfied with Kirke, not on account of the
barbarity with which he had treated his needy prisoners, but on
account of the interested lenity which he had shown to rich
delinquents.440 He was soon recalled from the West. A less
irregular and more cruel massacre was about to be perpetrated.
The vengeance was deferred during some weeks. It was thought
desirable that the Western Circuit should not begin till the
other circuits had terminated. In the meantime the gaols of
Somersetshire and Dorsetshire were filled with thousands of
captives. The chief friend and protector of these unhappy men in
their extremity was one who abhorred their religious and
political opinions, one whose order they hated, and to whom they
had done unprovoked wrong, Bishop Ken. That good prelate used all
his influence to soften the gaolers, and retrenched from his own
episcopal state that he might be able to make some addition to
the coarse and scanty fare of those who had defaced his beloved
Cathedral. His conduct on this occasion was of a piece with his
whole life. His intellect was indeed darkened by many
superstitions and prejudices: but his moral character, when
impartially reviewed, sustains a comparison with any in
ecclesiastical history, and seems to approach, as near as human
infirmity permits, to the ideal perfection of Christian
virtue.441
His labour of
hurled from it in consequence of court intrigues or of changes in
the sentiments of the higher classes of society, the profligate
Wilkes retained his hold on the selections of a rabble whom he
pillaged and ridiculed. Politicians, who, in 1807, had sought to
curry favour with George the Third by defending Caroline of
Brunswick, were not ashamed, in 1820, to curry favour with George
the Fourth by persecuting her. But in 1820, as in 1807, the whole
body of working men was fanatically devoted to her cause. So it
was with Monmouth. In 1680, he had been adored alike by the
gentry and by the peasantry of the West. In 1685 he came again.
To the gentry he had become an object of aversion: but by the
peasantry he was still loved with a love strong as death, with a
love not to be extinguished by misfortunes or faults, by the
flight from Sedgemoor, by the letter from Ringwood, or by the
tears and abject supplications at Whitehall. The charge which may
with justice be brought against the common people is, not that
they are inconstant, but that they almost invariably choose their
favourite so ill that their constancy is a vice and not a virtue.
While the execution of Monmouth occupied the thoughts of the
Londoners, the counties which had risen against the government
were enduring all that a ferocious soldiery could inflict.
Feversham had been summoned to the court, where honours and
rewards which he little deserved awaited him. He was made a
Knight of the Garter and Captain of the first and most lucrative
troop of Life Guards: but Court and City laughed at his military
exploits; and the wit of Buckingham gave forth its last feeble
flash at the expense of the general who had won a battle in
bed.434 Feversham left in command at Bridgewater Colonel Percy
Kirke, a military adventurer whose vices had been developed by
the worst of all schools, Tangier. Kirke had during some years
commanded the garrison of that town, and had been constantly
employed in hostilities against tribes of foreign barbarians,
ignorant of the laws which regulate the warfare of civilized and
Christian nations. Within the ramparts of his fortress he was a
despotic prince. The only check on his tyranny was the fear of
being called to account by a distant and a careless government.
He might therefore safely proceed to the most audacious excesses
of rapacity, licentiousness, and cruelty. He lived with boundless
dissoluteness, and procured by extortion the means of indulgence.
No goods could be sold till Kirke had had the refusal of them. No
question of right could be decided till Kirke had been bribed.
Once, merely from a malignant whim, he staved all the wine in a
vintner's cellar. On another occasion he drove all the Jews from
Tangier. Two of them he sent to the Spanish Inquisition, which
forthwith burned them. Under this iron domination scarce a
complaint was heard; for hatred was effectually kept down by
terror. Two persons who had been refractory were found murdered;
and it was universally believed that they had been slain by
Kirke's order. When his soldiers displeased him he flogged them
with merciless severity: but he indemnified them by permitting
them to sleep on watch, to reel drunk about the streets, to rob,
beat, and insult the merchants and the labourers.
When Tangier was abandoned, Kirke returned to England. He still
continued to command his old soldiers, who were designated
sometimes as the First Tangier Regiment, and sometimes as Queen
Catharine's Regiment. As they had been levied for the purpose of
waging war on an infidel nation, they bore on their flag a
Christian emblem, the Paschal Lamb. In allusion to this device,
and with a bitterly ironical meaning, these men, the rudest and
most ferocious in the English army, were called Kirke's Lambs.
The regiment, now the second of the line, still retains this
ancient badge, which is however thrown into the shade by
decorations honourably earned in Egypt, in Spain, and in the
heart of Asia.435
Such was the captain and such the soldiers who were now let loose
on the people of Somersetshire. From Bridgewater Kirke marched to
Taunton. He was accompanied by two carts filled with wounded
rebels whose gashes had not been dressed, and by a long drove of
prisoners on foot, who were chained two and two Several of these
he hanged as soon as he reached Taunton, without the form of a
trial. They were not suffered even to take leave of their nearest
relations. The signpost of the White Hart Inn served for a
gallows. It is said that the work of death went on in sight of
the windows where the officers of the Tangier regiment were
carousing, and that at every health a wretch was turned off. When
the legs of the dying man quivered in the last agony, the colonel
ordered the drums to strike up. He would give the rebels, he said
music to their dancing. The tradition runs that one of the
captives was not even allowed the indulgence of a speedy death.
Twice he was suspended from the signpost, and twice cut down.
Twice he was asked if he repented of his treason, and twice he
replied that, if the thing were to do again, he would do it. Then
he was tied up for the last time. So many dead bodies were
quartered that the executioner stood ankle deep in blood. He was
assisted by a poor man whose loyalty was suspected, and who was
compelled to ransom his own life by seething the remains of his
friends in pitch. The peasant who had consented to perform this
hideous office afterwards returned to his plough. But a mark like
that of Cain was upon him. He was known through his village by
the horrible name of Tom Boilman. The rustics long continued to
relate that, though he had, by his sinful and shameful deed,
saved himself from the vengeance of the Lambs, he had not escaped
the vengeance of a higher power. In a great storm he fled for
shelter under an oak, and was there struck dead by lightning.436
The number of those who were thus butchered cannot now be
ascertained. Nine were entered in the parish registers of
Taunton: but those registers contained the names of such only as
had Christian burial. Those who were hanged in chains, and those
whose heads and limbs were sent to the neighbouring villages,
must have been much more numerous. It was believed in London, at
the time, that Kirke put a hundred captives to death during the
week which followed the battle.437
Cruelty, however, was not this man's only passion. He loved
money; and was no novice in the arts of extortion. A safe conduct
might be bought of him for thirty or forty pounds; and such a
safe conduct, though of no value in law, enabled the purchaser to
pass the post of the Lambs without molestation, to reach a
seaport, and to fly to a foreign country. The ships which were
bound for New England were crowded at this juncture with so many
fugitives from Sedgemoor that there was great danger lest the
water and provisions should fail.438
Kirke was also, in his own coarse and ferocious way, a man of
pleasure; and nothing is more probable than that he employed his
power for the purpose of gratifying his licentious appetites. It
was reported that he conquered the virtue of a beautiful woman by
promising to spare the life of one to whom she was strongly
attached, and that, after she had yielded, he showed her
suspended on the gallows the lifeless remains of him for whose
sake she had sacrificed her honour. This tale an impartial judge
must reject. It is unsupported by proof. The earliest authority
for it is a poem written by Pomfret. The respectable historians
of that age, while they speak with just severity of the crimes of
Kirke, either omit all mention of this most atrocious crime, or
mention it as a thing rumoured but not proved. Those who tell the
story tell it with such variations as deprive it of all title to
credit. Some lay the scene at Taunton, some at Exeter. Some make
the heroine of the tale a maiden, some a married woman. The
relation for whom the shameful ransom was paid is described by
some as her father, by some as her brother, and by some as her
husband. Lastly the story is one which, long before Kirke was
born, had been told of many other oppressors, and had become a
favourite theme of novelists and dramatists. Two politicians of
the fifteenth century, Rhynsault, the favourite of Charles the
Bold of Burgundy, and Oliver le Dain, the favourite of Lewis the
Eleventh of France, had been accused of the same crime. Cintio
had taken it for the subject of a romance. Whetstone had made out
of Cintio's narrative the rude play of Promos and Cassandra; and
Shakspeare had borrowed from Whetstone the plot of the noble
tragicomedy of Measure for Measure. As Kirke was not the first so
he was not the last, to whom this excess of wickedness was
popularly imputed. During the reaction which followed the Jacobin
tyranny in France, a very similar charge was brought against
Joseph Lebon, one of the most odious agents of the Committee of
Public Safety, and, after enquiry, was admitted even by his
prosecutors to be unfounded.439
The government was dissatisfied with Kirke, not on account of the
barbarity with which he had treated his needy prisoners, but on
account of the interested lenity which he had shown to rich
delinquents.440 He was soon recalled from the West. A less
irregular and more cruel massacre was about to be perpetrated.
The vengeance was deferred during some weeks. It was thought
desirable that the Western Circuit should not begin till the
other circuits had terminated. In the meantime the gaols of
Somersetshire and Dorsetshire were filled with thousands of
captives. The chief friend and protector of these unhappy men in
their extremity was one who abhorred their religious and
political opinions, one whose order they hated, and to whom they
had done unprovoked wrong, Bishop Ken. That good prelate used all
his influence to soften the gaolers, and retrenched from his own
episcopal state that he might be able to make some addition to
the coarse and scanty fare of those who had defaced his beloved
Cathedral. His conduct on this occasion was of a piece with his
whole life. His intellect was indeed darkened by many
superstitions and prejudices: but his moral character, when
impartially reviewed, sustains a comparison with any in
ecclesiastical history, and seems to approach, as near as human
infirmity permits, to the ideal perfection of Christian
virtue.441
His labour of
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