How nice it was for me to discover that I am not alone in writing about the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685
These two books are also available via Amazon and hopefully Anita and I will be sharing notes on our research.
The lovely Anita Davison has also kindly linked her blog to this site. I have pleasure in reciprocating.
Note from The Author – Anita Davison
Born in London, the city’s colourful history has always been part of my life. At one time I haunted the National Portrait Gallery, where a painting of James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, caught my attention.
Fascinated by the tragedy of this illegitimate son of Charles II, I chose it as a backdrop to a story about an Exeter girl and her family, caught up in the Rebellion of 1685. The story changed over the years, as did the characters and their location, but essentially, it stayed with me.
When I decided to find out if I could actually write, I joined the Historical Fiction Critique Group, who encouraged me to submit her embryo novel to an independent publisher. The group moderator, Anne Whitfield, a wonderful author herself, told me I had a good story, I simply had to learn how to write it.
Slowly, the novel went through an evolutionary process and Anne was right, the original story now benefits from some intensive polish and reads like a proper novel! Now I can’t stop writing.
Blurb For Duking Days Rebellion
Helena Woulfe, the daughter of a wealthy Exeter nobleman leads a privileged life. However, as King Charles II’s reign comes to an end, so does her innocence.
Rebellion sweeps the West Country and when her family is caught in its grip, she finds herself on the road searching for her missing Rebel father and brother after Monmouth’s bloody defeat in battle at Sedgemoor.
Her life is further torn apart when soldiers ransack her home and the family estate is confiscated by the crown. Helena and her younger brother Henry, seek refuge with a kind family who take them in, but King James wants revenge on those who opposed him and danger is never far away.
Feeling bereft and abandoned, they go to London. Helena hopes the city will overlook their past and she can make a new life for herself, and perhaps find love. Only, there are others lurking, willing to do harm to a traitor’s daughter.
Before she can find happiness with Guy, the man who offers her the security and respectability she seeks, she learns her family’s allegiances can snatch away her safety at any time.
The sequel, Duking Days Revolution, was released in May 2008 and takes Helena and her family through the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and into the reign of William and Mary.
www.anitadavison.co.uk, AnitaDavison.bebo.com
anitadavison.blogspot.com
The Western Rising
James Scott, Duke of Monmouth was born in Rotterdam in 1649 to Lucy Walter, when her lover, King Charles II, was living in exile. Many, including James Scott himself, claimed they were married, and the mystery of the ‘Black Box’ purported to contain their marriage certificate persisted until the 18th Century.
Monmouth married Anne Scott, countess of Buccleuch, and adopted her name. He was created a duke at the age of fourteen and became captain-general of the armed forces in 1678, before he was thirty.
Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, was determined to prevent the succession of the King’s Roman Catholic brother, the Duke of York, and pressed Charles to divorce his barren wife and remarry, or to legitimize the Duke of Monmouth. He founded the infamous Green Ribbon Club, but in 1682 he was tried for treason. Although he was acquitted, he fled to Holland after the discovery of The Rye House Plot and died there the following year.
Monmouth was banished from Court for his involvement in the Rye House Plot, which planned the murder of Charles II and James Duke of York.
In February 1685, Charles II died and his brother was proclaimed James II.
On June 11th, 1685, Monmouth landed his forces on the Beach near the Cobb at Lyme Regis and local recruits joined his army as it traveled through Somerset on its way to London.
The Kings forces were led by Louis Duras, Earl Feversham a Huguenot. His second in command was John Churchill, (later 1st Duke of Marlborough). After several minor skirmishes, the two forces finally met at midnight on 5th/6th July at Sedgemoor, near the village of Weston Zoyland in Somerset. In the last battle to be fought on English soil, the Rebels were soundly defeated.
Monmouth fled from the battlefield in the company of Lord Grey hoping to get to the coast at Poole, and a ship to the continent. Disguised as a shepherd, he was discovered shivering in a ditch, under a hedge at Horton. He might have got away with it except for the fact he carried the badge of the Order of the Garter.
He was taken to London and subjected to a humiliating interview with his uncle, James II, who refused clemency. There was no trial as Monmouth had already been condemend to death by Act of Attainder. On 15th July, he was executed for treason on Tower Hill. The executioner, Jack Ketch, took several blows of the axe, and before a dismayed and murmuring crowd, Monmouth’s head left his body with the assistance of a knife. He was buried in an upright position, beneath the altar in St Peter ad Vincular Church in the Tower, between that of Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard.
The bodies of the Duke of Somerset, Duke of Northumberland, Lady Jane Grey and Lord Guildford Dudley, are also buried there.
To exact his revenge on the West Country for their disloyalty, James II dispatched the Lord Chief Justice, George Jeffreys, Baron Jeffreys of Wem, who orchestrated what came to be known as The Bloody Assize from Dorchester. Approximately 200 people were condemned to death and about 800 transported to the West Indes.
Three years later, in December 1688, the Catholic King James II was forced to flee the country to be replaced by William and Mary. George Jeffreys was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London where he later died.
The Green Ribbon Club
The Green Ribbon Club served both as a debating society and an intelligence department for the Whig faction and for promoting the Exclusion Bill and the pretensions of the Duke of Monmouth. They met at the King’s Head Tavern at Chancery Lane End, so was also known as the King’s Head Club.
Founded around 1675, it was a resort for members of the political party hostile to the court. The Duke of Monmouth was a frequent visitor and the members wore a bow, or bob of green ribbon in their hats as a distinguishing badge, useful for the purpose of mutual recognition in street brawls.
The frequenters of the club were the extreme faction of the country party, the men who supported Titus Oates, and who were concerned in the Rye House Plot and Monmouth’s rebellion.
Statesmen like Halifax, Shaftesbury, Buckingham, Macclesfield, Cavendish, Bedford, Grey of Warke, and Herbert of Cherbury, were members, together with third-rate writers such as Scroop, Mulgrave and Shadwell, with remnants of the Cromwellian régime like Falconbridge, Henry Ireton and Claypole, with such profligates as Lord Howard of Escrick, Sir Henry Blount, Dangerfield and Oates.
The club members went about in silk armour, supposed to be bullet proof, in which any man dressed up was as safe as a house, ‘for it was impossible to strike him for laughing’, while in their pockets they carried the weapon of offence invented by Stephen College and known as the Protestant Flail.
In the general election of January and February 1679, the Whig interest in England was managed and controlled by a committee sitting at the club in Chancery Lane. The petitions were prepared in London and sent down to every part of the country, where paid canvassers took them from house to house-collecting signatures with an air of authority that made refusal difficult.
The great pope-burning processions in 1680 and 1681, on the anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s accession, were also organized by the club. They ended by the lighting of a huge bonfire in front of the club windows; and proved an effective means of inflaming the religious passions of the populace.
The failure to carry the Exclusion Bill, one of the favourite projects of the faction, resulted in the club’s decline after the flight of Shaftesbury, the confiscation of the city of London’s charter, and the discovery of the Rye House Plot, in which many of its members were implicated.
In 1685 John Ayloffe, a green-ribbon man, was executed in front of the Kings Head Tavern on the spot where the pope-burning bonfires had been kindled; and although the tavern was still in existence in the time of Queen Anne, the Green Ribbon Club which made it famous did not survive the accession of James II.
The precise situation of the King’s Head Tavern, was over against the Inner Temple Gate, at the corner of Fleet Street and Chancery Lane, on the east side of the latter thoroughfare.
