The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1, Thomas Babington Macaulay [ebook pc reader txt] 📗

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