BBC Radio Cambridge featured the book live in a interview with the author on the Sue Marchant Show - 9-10 pm 28th January 2009 -
Radio Lincolnshire gave the book a ‘thumbs up’ in a 15 minute live interview. Melvin Prior read the book and said that he had no idea about how hard times were in 1685.
You have to realise that the ‘Bloody Assize’ was so called because in those days purification of the soul was seen to be ‘the christian’ thing to do. The worse the punishment the better afterlife for the soul! So, as I have said many times, it maybe extremely gory but it really happened that way in 1685.
After James Scott the ‘Duke of Monmouth’ landed in Lyme Regis in June in the year of our Lord 1685, he had hoped to be supported by French troops promised to him by Louis XIV. Unbeknown to him, King James II, being a Catholic Monarch, had parlayed with Louis and an agreement had been struck - ‘promise much, deliver little’. I suppose many people imagine that he landed with a large army. He did not, in all he had 80 troops. They landed in 3 small ships. Robert Ferguson the famed ‘plotter’ of the Rye House debacle was his chaplain. James had visited England in secret the year before and had thought that an army awaited him at Lyme. All he had was a small cavalry and a band of peasants armed with pitchforks. He had also made the error of appointing Lord Grey of Wark as his Field General. Lord Grey was an ambitious coward, he fled the field of Sedgemoor in cover of darkness dressed as a peasant shepherd. He was recognised and arrested but escaped the Assize as he had been wise enough to carry enough coinage to pay for his pardon.A GIBBET
If you are feeling extremely brave then click on this ancient work of ‘art’ and then perhaps you will realise exactly what we did to our fellow man during the Bloody Assize. But PLEASE be warned! It is not pleasant.
Following the Battle of Sedgemoor, King James II appointed the 1st Baron of Wem, ‘Judge George Jeffreys’, as the overseeing magistrate to deal with the depleted army of Monmouth. Only around eighty of Monmouth’s troops were killed on the night of the battle, the rest fled, many attempting to reach ports and escape abroad. In all, 3,000 were captured by Colonel Percy Kirke and his troops, ‘Kirke’s Lambs’. These ‘troops’ were given orders of ‘martial law’, and were empowered to torture, maim - even rape. They set gibbets throughout the West Country and slaughtered hundreds of menfolk; ‘Hacking and Sacking’, or, as it was described then, ‘paying with an arm and a leg’. Carrion Crow, Rooks, Jackdaws and Magpies would feast on the still alive victims. Others were boiled in oil and nailed to trees. A dark period in our history.
Judge George Jeffreys held ‘The Bloody Assize’ in ‘The Great Hall’ at Taunton Castle. He heard 400 cases in one day. The lucky ones were deported into slavery, others were hung. Many were ‘Hung drawn and quartered’. ‘The Adventures of Michael Fane’ follows the tale of a young lieutenant who hated Percy Kirke and is determined to see the end of the Assize. Some people may think that this did not really happen!Here is how one famous Historian wrote on the ‘Bloody Assize’
Historian G.M. Trevelyan (England Under the Stuarts, 1904) presents a moderate Whig view:
The revenge taken by James upon his subjects went far beyond expectation and precedent. It was perhaps natural that 800 rebels should be sent to forced labour in the Barbadoes. The Cromwellians in 1648, and the House of Hanover in 1715, committed the like cruelty. Transportation was the fate which the common rebel might customarily expect if taken in arms. But death had for fifty years past been regarded as the punishment proper for the leaders alone, when James II reverted to the more barbarous methods of Elizabeth and the medieval kings. Not content with the long tale of military executions by Kirke and Feversham in the days immediately following the battle, he allowed over 300 of the peasants to be hanged by Jeffreys in the Bloody Assize. He also allowed one women, Alice Lisle, to be beheaded for exercising common charity to fugitives who implored food and shelter; and another, Elizabeth Gaunt, to be burned alive for saving one of the conspirators of the Rye House plot. In the spirit of the hour, Cornish, one of the most influential and honourable of the Whig merchants of London so bitterly hated by the Court, was singled out and murdered on a false charge of treason. These horrors appealed the more forcibly to the imagination of all, because the highways and public places in town and country were elaborately desecrated with the corpses and hewn quarters of the well-loved dead; because Jeffreys on the bench of justice shouted, swore and laughed over his victims, and because the sufferers were religious men who went to the gallows and butchery glorifying God. The analogy of the Marian persecution was the first thing to strike a generation brought up on Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. The horror excited among the Tories themselves is the best comment on the conduct of Jeffreys and his master. The Bloody Assize did not shake James’s throne, but it lent to the opposition, provoked by his subsequent action, the character and the enthusiam of outraged humanity in revolt. When Jeffreys, in his last dreadful days on earth, was sheltered by the walls of the Tower from a nation of men seeking to kill him with their own hands, he was hiding not from the Whig mob but from the human race.<a href=”javascript:window.location = ‘http://www.socialmarker.com/?link=’+encodeURIComponent (location.href)+’&title=’+encodeURIComponent( document.title);”><img src= “http://www.socialmarker.com/bookmark.gif” border=”0″ /></a><noscript><a href=”http://www.socialmarker.com” >Social Bookmarking</a></noscript>
