CHAP. Kirke. 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 civilised 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.* Such was the captain and such the soldiers who were now let loose on the people of Somersetshire. From Bridgewater * Pepys's Diary, kept at Tangier; Historical Records of the Second or Queen's Royal Regiment of Foot. V. Kirke marched to Taunton. He was accompanied by two CHAP. 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.* 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.t * Bloody Assizes; Burnet, i. 647.; Luttrell's Diary, July 15. 1685; Locke's Western Rebellion; Toulmin's History of Taunton, edited by Savage. Luttrell's Diary, July 15. 1685; CHAP. V. 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.+ 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 politicans 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, Oldmixon, 705.; Life and Errors of John Dunton, chap. vii. V. om this excess of wickedness was popularly imputed. CHAP. g the reaction which followed the Jacobin tyranny in ce, a very similar charge was brought against Joseph n, one of the most odious agents of the Committee of ic Safety, and, after enquiry, was admitted even by his cutors to be unfounded.* e government was dissatisfied with Kirke, not on account e barbarity with which he had treated his needy prisoners, on account of the interested lenity which he had shown ch delinquents.† He was soon recalled from the West. ess irregular and more cruel massacre was about to be petrated. The vengeance was deferred during some ks. It was thought desirable that the Western Circuit uld not begin till the other circuits had terminated. In meantime the gaols of Somersetshire and Dorsetshire e filled with thousands of captives. The chief friend and tector of these unhappy men in their extremity was one o abhorred their religious and political opinions, one whose er they hated, and to whom they had done unprovoked ong, Bishop Ken. That good prelate used all his influence soften the gaolers, and retrenched from his own episcopal te that he might be able to make some addition to the rse and scanty fare of those who had defaced his beloved thedral. His conduct on this occasion was of a piece with s whole life. His intellect was indeed darkened by many perstitions and prejudices: but his moral character, when partially reviewed, sustains a comparison with any in clesiastical history, and seems to approach, as near as human firmity permits, to the ideal perfection of Christian virtue.‡ *The silence of Whig writers so crelous and so malevolent as Oldmixon d the compilers of the Western Marrology would alone seem to me to settle he question. It also deserves to be rearked that the story of Rhynsault told by Steele in the Spectator, No. 91. Surely it is hardly possible to elieve that, if a crime exactly resemling that of Rhynsault had been comnitted within living memory in England y an officer of James the Second, Steele, who was indiscreetly and unseasonably forward to display his Whiggism, would have made no allusion to that fact. For the case of Lebon, see the Moniteur, 4 Messidor, l'an 3. Sunderland to Kirke, July 14 and 28 1685. "His Majesty," says Sun derland, "commands me to signify to I should be very glad if I could CHAP. Jeffreys sets out on the Western Circuit. Trial of Alice His labour of love was of no long duration. A rapid and effectual gaol delivery was at hand. Early in September, Jeffreys, accompanied by four other judges, set out on that circuit of which the memory will last as long as our race and language. The officers who commanded the troops in the districts through which his course lay had orders to furnish him with whatever military aid he might require. His ferocious temper needed no spur; yet a spur was applied. The health and spirits of the Lord Keeper had given way. He had been deeply mortified by the coldness of the King and by the insolence of the Chief Justice, and could find little consolation in looking back on a life, not indeed blackened by any atrocious crime, but sullied by cowardice, selfishness, and servility. So deeply was the unhappy man humbled that, when he appeared for the last time in Westminster Hall, he took with him a nosegay to hide his face, because, as he afterwards owned, he could not bear the eyes of the bar and of the audience. The prospect of his approaching end seems to have inspired him with unwonted courage. He determined to discharge his conscience, requested an audience of the King, spoke earnestly of the dangers inseparable from violent and arbitrary counsels, and condemned the lawless cruelties which the soldiers had committed in Somersetshire. He soon after retired from London to die. He breathed his last a few days after the Judges set out for the West. It was immediately notified to Jeffreys that he might expect the Great Seal as the reward of faithful and vigorous service.* At Winchester the Chief Justice first opened his commission. Hampshire had not been the theatre of war; but many of the vanquished rebels had, like their leader, fled thither. Two of them, John Hicks, a Nonconformist divine, and Richard Nelthorpe, a lawyer who had been outlawed for taking part in the Rye House plot, had sought refuge at the house of Alice, widow of John Lisle. John Lisle had sate in the Long Parliament and in the High Court of Justice, had been a Commissioner of the Great Seal in the days of the Commonwealth, and had been created a Lord by Cromwell. The titles given by the Protector had not been recognised by any government nearly to proof of an alibi. It is certain London to Bridgewater and back again was no light thing. *North's Life of Guildford, 260, 263. 273.; Mackintosh's View of the Reign of James the Second, page 16. note; Letter of Jeffreys to Sunderland, Sept. 5. 1685. |