John nodded. He was sorry he had spoken about those distant days at Ashe, for the memories were not shared with this younger brother of his and yet they had revived thoughts of his former friends he would rather have suppressed. Hugh Offord, for instance. Hugh’s indiscreet letter. Well, the garrison at Bristol was now under Feversham’s command. Later he would seek news of Hugh, but not now.
Monmouth must have known in his heart that he had failed and that to continue meant utter disaster. But it was not in his shallow mind, clouded by self-conceit and flattery for so many years, to face simple truth and stark ruin. Perhaps he thought to work back into the west, to take Exeter, Plymouth and the ports of Cornwall; to establish a bridgehead there, where he might consolidate his forces, find and train recruits, raise rebellion further north, through Wales and on to Scotland. He did not know that Argyll had already been defeated, taken prisoner and beheaded. He did not realise that his own retreat to the sea would prove impossible.
His troops could not understand the confused progress of the campaign. They hardly realised that they were now retreating in a wide circle below the Mendip hills, to come again to Bridgwater and the rivers flowing past the wastes of Sedgemoor. They were not only confused; they were hungry and tired. But they still had plenty of fight in them and every belief and hope in their young leader, their ‘King Monmouth.’
The Duke himself, inwardly despairing, tried to plan some move to produce at least a temporary victory. He did have partial success against the royal forces under his half-brother the Duke of Grafton, another bastard of Charles II. Boxed into a narrow lane Grafton’s men were only rescued by Churchill and Feversham, but with heavy losses on both sides.
From this point Monmouth’s army began to crumble. They might be peasants, but they were no fools. They began to understand what they were up against and moreover they now recognised where they were, nearly back to Bridgwater or at least Glastonbury.
At last they were halted near Weston Zoyland, a village on the edge of the moor. The Royal Army had also come to rest, not three miles distant, on the other side of a deep ditch called the Bussex Rhine, and nearer to the main Bridgwater to Somerton road than their opponents.
Monmouth consulted with his officers. Either they abandoned their venture at once or they made one more bid to shake off the far superior forces before them. If the latter their only hope was in a night attack. If the royal forces could be surprised, their flanks turned, they might be defeated as Grafton’s men had been. Then with another forced march they might reach Bristol, now only lightly held.
This late piece of professional planning impressed the Duke’s amateur commanders. It was indeed sound, but unbelievably risky. Nevertheless it was agreed to make the attempt and orders went out for the cation, which was set for a couple of hours after midnight.
In a black, clouded night the two small armies waited. The loyalists rested: the rebels tensed themselves for action.
Chapter Nineteen
Lord Feversham was bored. He found his small campaign an affair well beneath his dignity, both as a military man, nephew of the great Marshall Turenne, a connection he never failed to mention to new acquaintances, and as Lord Chamberlain to the dowager Queen, still living in England.
He had not started out with anything like the speed and efficiency of his second in command, Lord Churchill. But then the latter was always so full of enthusiasm for action. He himself, with his foot regiment of the Guards, had found no obstacle in marching to Salisbury and from there to Bristol. The arrival of Monmouth from the west had been expected and though there had been a slight setback later at Norton Saint Philip, still, with his army increased at Bath by Churchill’s troops, that had been overcome. Monmouth had retreated as expected and was now to all intents and purposes beaten.
Lord Feversham, deploying his forces for a final effort near Bridgwater, disposed them in correct, but uninspired, formation, near the village of Weston Zoyland. His tents were put up in a suitable position at the rear, his newly arrived guns placed, his patrols arranged, his guards mounted. The two crossings of the great ditch, Bussex Rhine, were covered.
His lordship, with his officers, ate their usual elaborate supper, after which he withdrew to his tent, went to bed, and instantly to sleep.
Lord Churchill on the other hand, though he had had a tiring day following up and harrassing the enemy forces, took a short rest but spent the early part of the night alert, fully equipped, with scouts deployed to report immediately any suspicious movement across the difficult plain beyond the royal position.
For Sedgemoor was not an easy field for any battle. It was wild, uneven scrubland, intersected by three main ditches, or rhines, leading into the River Parret, that ran through Bridgwater to the sea. Churchill knew Monmouth well in their battles together in France; he had been close to the man in action of various kinds; he was aware of his personal courage, his shallow judgement, his almost total lack of responsibility. The expected action now, unless Monmouth called a retreat to better ground, was bound to fail, unless a night attack came as a surprise.
With Churchill watching, cool, careful and thorough as always, there was no surprise. The scouts began to scramble in at two in the morning. Monmouth’s forces had begun to move; they had crossed the Black Ditch, making very little noise and apparently led by local guides.
‘My Lord Feversham sleeps sound,’ John told his aides. ‘I think we need not disturb his lordship at present.’
His officers laughed. They were in the habit of joking over the Frenchman’s bad accent, his greed for food and drink, his military incompetence. But Churchill stopped them.
‘My Lord Feversham may be French and hath never learned our language. But he is a naturalised Englishman, sirs, and as such must command our respect. Moreover he is and has been for twenty years a close friend of our new King. He serves her Majesty, the dowager Queen. We fight under the Lord Feversham’s command. But in his absence at this moment from the field I propose—’
He smiled a grim little smile that would have raised a cheer had he not waved his officers down before their mouths were fully open. They listened to their orders, then dispersed to fulfil them.
The battle took its inevitable course. With a few well-trained troops, without Churchill on the other side, Monmouth might have broken past the King’s army, enclosed it, paralysed it, rushed away north again, to Bristol. It was unlikely a victory at Sedgemoor would have led on to total victory, that the north-west would have risen, since Argyll in Scotland was already dead and that country crushed. But the campaign would have been extended and the popular will against a Papist crown might have prevailed sooner than it did.
But Monmouth lost the battle of Sedgemoor and even before it was over and his front broken his untrained peasant forces had begun to melt away as the militia units had done already. They threw down their useless arms and rushed back to their farms and homesteads, to hide or, if bold enough, to take up their former work as if they had never joined the standard of their romantic, handsome young betrayer.
But the rebel attack began successfully as planned. Churchill’s scouts were right. Monmouth’s best trained musketeers, his stubborn puritanical stalwarts, did cross the Black Ditch and shortly afterwards the Langmoor Rhine. But then they became confused, for with the first approach of dawn a mist had risen from the watery ground, hiding even those features they had been able to recognise quite close at hand – certainly blotting out that picture their chief guide had tried to fix in his mind from his stand the evening before on the tower of Chadzoy Church.
Churchill moved to and fro along the opposing front, also cursing the mist, which was freezing his nose and forehead in spite of his wide plumed hat and making him cough and blink the water from his dripping eyelashes. He did not propose to send to the Earl of Feversham until the battle was joined; interference from that quarter would be dangerous. On the other hand if he neglected altogether to inform his superior he might well suffer for it afterwards. It w
as a delicate situation, he decided, but no worse than very many others he had endured over the last gruelling years of the late King’s reign. And after all this was the work, the task he loved best in life. To hell with the French bastard! No, not bastard, that was the enemy and the noble Duke of Grafton, God help them both! Feversham, not that it made any difference, poor foreign devil, had been born in wedlock of chiefly noble parentage.
A splash quite near at hand brought Churchill to a halt, his small party of attendant Dragoons halting also, with trained promptness, controlling the jingle of their harness with their hands. Throwing his reins to the man beside him John slipped to the ground and crept forward, at the same time loosening and priming his pistol. He knew he was near the bank of the Bussex Rhine because the mist was thicker than ever here and seemed to rise from the earth rather than float above it.
The splash was not repeated, but water rippled and flowed, or so it seemed. A few seconds later the mist before him thickened, parted, disgorged three dripping forms. Of these two turned about and disappeared, while a third stood, sabre in hand, seeming to cover his companions’ retreat. It was a figure, a stance, that John recognised with a pang of horror. His pistol arm dropped to his side, he took a long step forward.
Hugh Offord, too, lowered his weapon. He also had recognised his friend, perhaps earlier than Churchill. Perhaps that was why he stayed, John thought. But to what purpose? Fear? That was not like Hugh. Remorse for his gross disloyalty, breaking his oath of allegiance? With blistering insight John understood his own indifference to Hugh’s fault.
They stood and stared at one another, not moving, not speaking. Then John lifted his right arm to warn the other away. The gesture brought the pistol up, but Hugh continued to stare. Only when John, with a wave of his left hand, made his meaning plain did the other turn to slide silently down the side of the ditch and vanish.
The day lightened slowly and as the mist rose Monmouth’s forces were revealed, still on the far side of the Ditch, and now in a state of some confusion. The Duke tried to use his small troop of cavalry to force the pace, but the horses were not trained for welfare; some were even too old and weak for it. Churchill’s Dragoons rode them down; the flanks of the royal army were never in danger. Monmouth’s planned pincer movement never had a chance of succeeding.
For a time the rebel artillery, consisting of four or five guns, did cause some havoc in the camp, especially among the officers’ tents. The cannonade roused General Feversham at last, though he dressed with care and ate a French breakfast of rolls and coffee before emerging to direct a battle that had begun some five hours before.
It was Churchill’s cavalry that crossed the Bussex Rhine by one of its two plungeons or connecting links. They spiked Monmouth’s guns and killed the gunners, while supporting foot troops followed to secure the land where they had stood.
By this time the Duke must have known the battle was irretrievably lost. At any rate with his friends and immediate followers he left the field, attempting to reach some port where he could find a ship and escape to the continent. Behind him the stalwarts, still fired by religious zeal and native stubborn courage, fought on. Though their guns had been lost they still disputed their ground until Charles Churchill’s artillery came into action, pounding and tearing the ground to shreds until the last of them still alive had fled or lay wounded and dying.
The cruel pursuit was followed with the utmost ruthlessness. Colonel Kirke, only recently arrived in England from Tangier with his men trained in Muslim ways of exterminating their enemies, found English farmers and tradesmen easy game. In Africa they had worn a Christian emblem of the Lamb of God in their battles against the followers of Mahomet. They wore them still, so that Kirke’s Lambs came to be known as devils from hell, with which to frighten children for generations to come.
Lord Feversham too, with his French disregard for all peasantry, as he considered Monmouth’s poor army, was determined to make an example of the rebels. All prisoners taken on the field were to be hanged forthwith. As soon as possible a special court was to be set up to deal with disaffection throughout the western counties.
The Lord Chief Justice, Judge Jeffreys, was appointed, and under his brutal, blood-thirsty jurisdiction, as unjust and terrifying as anything that had taken place during the reign of Titus Oates, the nick-named Bloody Assize marked for ever the real iniquity of James II’s short occupation of the throne.
As before, a wealthy man could buy his acquittal. As before, the poor, the honest, the deeply religious believer, suffered. Many were hanged, many sent as slaves to the distant plantations. The Catholic King’s firm intention was still to bring England back to the Pope.
He considered the total defeat of Monmouth as an early, triumphant step in that direction.
Lord Churchill naturally had to seal the success in battle with the retreat of the enemy and the end of his resistence. He knew that Lord Feversham had at last risen from his bed to approve and follow up his second in command’s victory. But no direct orders came to Churchill. Feversham’s indolence was such that he made only a general suggestion that the royal army would secure Taunton and Bridgwater and flush out any remaining rebels in the two towns.
John, riding into an undefended Taunton, found the notables in a state of abject terror, swearing that they had closed the town to Monmouth and diverted his fleeing soldiers to the west and south. Lord Churchill accepted this statement but left a considerable garrison in charge. Then, with a few personal friends among his junior officers, his young brother Charles among them, he went back to the moor, ostensibly to deal with looters, who must now be moving into action.
‘My Lord Feversham will think me zealous in the search for prisoners that he may gratify himself by instant hanging,’ he confided to Charles. ‘So let him. My general purpose is to discourage those fiends who will plunder the dead and dying. But above all to seek news of Hugh Offord if there be any to be gleaned near the Ditch, where we stood face to face before dawn this day.’
The distance was not great and there certainly were looters about, some of whom Lord Churchill’s friends cut down as they crouched above their victims, some they flushed and hunted until they fell exhausted and were despatched where they lay.
And so the brothers reached the Bussex Rhine again and the place of the rebels’ last stand. And John was right again, for he found Hugh Offord lying in a heap of bodies, gravely wounded, but not yet dead.
His left leg had been severed just below the knee by a cannon ball; he had wounds from sabre cuts about both arms and the right side of the chest. His face was drawn and grey, with eyes closed But he opened them when John spoke his name and tried to speak but his mouth was too dry and his strength too low.
John put his own flask to Hugh’s lips and when the dying man had drunk a little he was able to whisper with a last effort of defiance, ‘I knew I was lost when we met. I knew then for sure I was on the losing side, the village side. You will always win, John.’
‘I would not have had thee lose, Hugh,’ John said brokenly. He meant it, thinking chiefly of the old days of their battles at Ashe, but as well knowing he himself was in a trap from which he must force a way in the end. With tears filling his eyes he said, What can I do to help you, friend? I dare not try for a rescue. The orders are that all rebels must hang. They would take you from me.’
‘Have no fear. I am too near the end already.’
He struggled to unfasten his bloodstained tunic, but failed and collapsed. John thought he had died, but he recovered a little and in the end confided to his friend a ring, a locket with a picture of his wife in it and a letter, enclosed in a packet for her father, that he had written to her a few days before, when the battle at Norton Saint Philip had been lost.
‘If they discover her and my sons they will destroy them, too,’ he struggled to whisper. ‘Keep them and give them to her if you can, but secretly.’
‘I swear upon my honour she shall have them,’ John said, kneeling and
laying his right hand across his breast. Then, looking up to heaven he continued, ‘And may the Lord our God, thine and mine, my dear friend, bless thee and keep thee forever.’
Charles, who had knelt beside his brother, echoed the final ‘Amen’, but when they looked down the grey face had relaxed and Hugh Offord was dead.
Together the two Churchills stripped off Hugh’s uniform, his old uniform with the new Monmouth badge, and sank it in the ditch, together with his hand arms, belt and boots.
The body was indistinguishable now from the others about him, many of which had been ravaged in like manner and the proceeds taken for grain. Then they rode away to find the others of their group and all went back to Taunton for that night.
Lord Churchill took no further part in the aftermath of the battle of Sedgemoor. He had been sickened by the immediate excesses of the victory. He was horrified by the long extension of them under Judge Jeffreys. For days he was unapproachable, correct, polite as always, receiving congratulations upon his successes with an impassive face and cold eyes.
Lord Feversham, as John had foretold, received the greater part of the honour and of additional wealth. But since Churchill had shown the good sense never to mock him for his poor English accent nor for winning Sedgemoor from his bed, as all his other officers had done and continued to do, Lord Feversham persuaded the King to bestow a suitable reward upon his second in command also. Churchill gained higher, more lucrative commands in both the Dragoons and the Guards.
But he accepted these honours with a heavy heart. Though he continued in the King’s service, appeared at Court, stood near the sovereign at public functions as he had done for more than twenty years, he knew now that the old intimacy was dead, that his position was utterly false, that his heart’s allegiance lay with Hugh Offord’s corpse in a common grave on Sedgemoor Field. Even his revulsion from James after the wreck of the ‘Gloucester’ did not approach his present feeling. He told no one, not even his beloved Sarah, of the discovery of that dying childhood’s friend. He hid away Hugh’s tokens and the letter to his wife until such time as he could deliver them without danger to her and her family. Or to himself, he was honest enough to acknowledge. But the burden of concealment was heavy upon him, especially when Sarah tried to find out the main cause of his continued depression.
A Question of Loyalties Page 20
