Read the History Behind the Fiction: A Guest Post from Philippa Gregory, Author of Dawnlands

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It should have been a triumph. Charles II’s jubilant return to his executed father’s throne, promised forgiveness, tolerance and peace. A notoriously promiscuous bachelor with two illegitimate sons, Charles was about to marry and confident that he would provide a stable line of succession and quell the growing religious unrest.

Dawnlands, the third novel in the Fairmile series opens with Alinor, her daughter Alys and brother Ned yet again caught up in the chaos of the Stuarts. With no legitimate male heir, Charles II was forced to name his unpopular Catholic brother James as the next King of England though openly favouring his eldest but illegitimate son James, Duke of Monmouth.

Acknowledged as Charles’s son but abandoned by him, Monmouth’s childhood was chaotic. Subject to repeated kidnapping attempts, used as leverage by his mother and moved so often that he never learned to read and write properly, Monmouth learned to survive on his wits. Finally joining his father as a twelve year old and created the Duke of Monmouth, he quickly won the adoration and indulgence of the king and the royal court. 

Spoilt, rich and handsome but with immense charm, Monmouth fought for his country and his father initially in the navy and then as a commander in the English army, acknowledged as one of Britain’s finest soldiers. His popularity was enhanced by the fact that he quickly fathered four sons and two daughters with his wife Anne – the fabulously wealthy Scots heiress – in addition to his three illegitimate children. Becoming estranged from his wife, Monmouth fell passionately in love with Lady Henrietta Wentworth, causing a scandal when she ended her betrothal and sacrificed her position to publicly live as his mistress.

Worse than this popularity of the ‘wrong’ heir was the increasingly heated question of religion. Charles, the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, sworn to support the national church was secretly a Roman Catholic. Though he had promised religious freedom when he was restored to the English throne, his choice of a Roman Catholic Portuguese princess as a wife and his close connections with other Catholic monarchs were met by public and parliament with huge suspicion. With no legitimate children, Charles was bound to name his nearest male relative – his brother James – as his heir. James was a committed Roman Catholic and his second marriage to the devout Roman Catholic Mary of Modena only heightened public mistrust in him. 

In 1677 a fictious ‘Popish Plot’ said to be a plan to murder Charles and crown James as king was revealed and anti-Catholic sentiment reached a crescendo. Members of Parliament demanded the Exclusion Bill to bar James from the throne. To save the Stuart line, Charles repeatedly closed Parliament to prevent the bill passing and ordered James out of England.

Meanwhile, the charming and ambitious Duke of Monmouth was gaining popularity as the ‘Protestant Duke’ as a focus for anti-Catholic factions determined to prevent a Catholic King of England. Bowing to James’ demands, Charles then banished Monmouth from the kingdom and Monmouth began to conspire for the throne. 

In 1683 the Rye House Plot burst onto a horrified public. The plan was to ambush and kill both Charles and James on their return from Newmarket races and make Monmouth king but a fire in the town sent Charles and his heir home early in safety. The revelation of the plot three months later led to an outpouring of sympathy for Charles and James and the arrest, execution, imprisonment or exile of some of their most influential opponents. Monmouth was pardoned for his involvement but exiled to the Netherlands and James reassured that he would succeed to the throne. Lucky timing perhaps or maybe there was more to it. This helpfully timed plot may have been fabricated by the Stuarts to gain the support of the country and remove their most powerful opposition and alternative Protestant heir. 

When Charles II died, his brother James ascended the throne as planned and despite the English fears of a Catholic monarch, the succession was peaceful and straightforward. But an overseas Pretender is always a danger for a King – especially a Pretender as dashing, heroic and ambitious as the Duke of Monmouth. Now aged 36 and in exile in the Netherlands with his mistress Henrietta Wentworth, popular at the Protestant court of James II’s daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange, the Duke of Monmouth was recruiting support and planning his next steps.

When it came, Monmouth’s move was swift and daring. A two-pronged joint invasion in the summer of 1685 with Archibald Campbell, the Earl of Argyll. The chief of Clan Campbell, the largest and most powerful of the Scottish Clans, Argyll was a plotter and a known rebel, previously accused of treason and sentenced to death on trumped up charges in an attempt to break the Campbell’s hold. Disguised, Argyll escaped to Holland to join the Rye House plotters and the Duke of Monmouth. It was Argyll who suggested the joint invasion – he would raise Protestant Scotland at the same time as Monmouth invaded England. Promising his support for Monmouth on the condition that he never declared himself king.

Argyll set sail first but his invasion was plagued with bad luck – poor weather, reluctant Scots and a mutiny. With deserting troops and damp munitions, Argyll was captured and later executed but died knowing that despite the failure of his invasion, he had bought Monmouth valuable time.

Monmouth in the Netherlands recruited many of the exiled Rye House plotters, scraped together the money to hire three small ships and buy muskets and field guns and set sail from Amsterdam with 83 men. His crossing was long and slow but after nearly two weeks sailing, his ships landed at Lyme Regis in Dorset with a plan to march on Bristol and then on to seize London, recruiting men as he went. Unaware of the failure of Argyll’s Scottish invasion, the small band of rebels were confident.

News of the arrival of the popular Duke soon spread and local men flocked from all over the South-West to join his cause, within four days Monmouth had recruited over 3,000 men. Taking control of small towns and recruiting more supporters as he travelled north in Somerset, Monmouth entered Taunton like a king and despite his previous promises allowed himself to be crowned King Monmouth in front of large crowds at the Market Cross. Marching to Bridgwater and then towards Bristol, Monmouth recruited enthusiastic supporters, nearly 7,000 labourers, artisans and farm workers. But he lacked support from the nobility and gentry and was short on weapons and money.

By this time, King James’s army and commanders had reached the south-west. Stationing themselves at Bristol and Chard, they ordered the Navy to seize Monmouth’s ships anchored at Lyme Regis to prevent his escape back across the channel. There were several skirmishes between Monmouth’s army and the royalist troops around Bristol and fearing a much larger royal army, Monmouth decided to avoid Bristol and head towards Bath and then Frome.

It was at Frome that news reached the rebels of the failure of Argyll’s Rising in Scotland, hugely damaging morale as they realised that not only would they not be reinforced by a conquering Protestant force from the North but having dealt with Argyll, the remainder of James’ forces would now be en-route to encircle Monmouth. Changing direction several times in an attempt to recruit more fighters, Monmouth’s army was cornered at Bridgwater by recently reinforced royalist troops.

In a daring piece of strategy, the Duke of Monmouth decided to stage an attack at night on the royalist troops, taking his untrained and ill-equipped army of farmworkers and labourers in the dark across the open moorland of Sedgemoor, criss-crossed with deep, steep-sided drainage ditches called rhynes. Unfortunately for Monmouth, the first men to cross the rhyne startled an unsuspecting royalist patrol who managed to escape and raise the alarm. Without the element of surprise they had been counting on, the untrained rebels were quickly defeated by the professional well-equipped royalist army. James’ troops suffered less than a hundred casualties whilst over a thousand of the rebels were killed – many executed in cold blood after the actual battle as the royalist leaders reportedly murdered surviving rebels and buried the wounded with the dead. The surviving rebels fled, pursued and hunted down by the royalists and hanged without trial.

With his army completely destroyed, the Duke of Monmouth fled, swapping clothes with a local shepherd in an attempt to disguise himself. He was captured two days later and taken to the Tower of London. His uncle, James II refusing all pleas for mercy, even those made by the Dowager Queen Catherine, the widow of Monmouth’s father Charles II declared him a traitor. Sentenced to death, Monmouth was taken to Tower Hill on the 15^th July 1685 and beheaded.

Monmouth’s followers did not receive such quick justice. Those that had escaped execution on the battlefield or hanging in the immediate aftermath were held in terrible conditions in makeshift prisons and those in hiding were ruthlessly pursued. Local constables were forced to provide lists of all the men in their areas absent from home at the time of the rebellion and therefore suspect. These 2,611 men – ‘The Monmouth Roll’ – were rounded up to be tried for treason alongside the other prisoners.

The trials of these thousands of suspected rebels were conducted by a visiting court of senior judges (an assize) which travelled between towns in the South West led by the infamously brutal and cold-hearted Lord Chief Justice of England, Judge Jeffreys. Keen to complete the mass trials as swiftly as possible to prevent the opportunity for further rebellion, Jeffreys told prisoners that the only chance of pardon was by pleading ‘guilty’. Prisoners pleading ‘not guilty’ would face certain execution.

A considerable number of rebels did receive pardons but this was a corrupt process unconnected to any actual evidence of innocence or guilt. Wealthy prisoners and their families could take the opportunity to pay charges of anywhere from £60 up to £500 or more for a pardon or to have their death sentence reduced to transportation. Bribery and fraud were rife at every stage of the process but the considerable profits were passed onto the King, Queen and their favourites.

There was national disgust at such a cold-hearted and disproportionate response to a very localised rebellion supported mainly by low paid and low educated labourers and it soon became known as the ‘Bloody Assizes’ in reflection of the extraordinary death toll. Over 250 prisoners were executed – hung, drawn and quartered with their hearts thrown on a fire and their body parts boiled in pitch and hung in public places around the county as a warning. A further 890 prisoners were sentenced to be transported to the West Indies, where they were sold on the quayside to spend 10 years as indentured convicts (unpaid labourers) alongside African slaves in the sugar plantations.

The Monmouth rebels were not the first English convicts to be transported abroad for commercial gain. In the early C17^th transportation sent convicted criminals into exile abroad. But as the Colonies grew in both size and influence, they insisted that prisoners were not free exiles but indentured as servants who would contribute to the economy through unpaid labour for a period of time before they could claim their freedom. The Sugar Islands of the West Indies were a particularly popular destination for transportation as the plantation owners were always looking for new labour. During the English Civil Wars and Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, over 50,000 Scottish and Irish prisoners were sold to Barbados as indentured servants and became known as ‘Redlegs’ due to their permanent state of sunburn. 

Indentured servants would receive a small plot of land or passage home when their indenture was completed – if they survived that long. Over 20% of all indentured prisoners would die on the voyage from England. Of those that survived the journey, the majority would die before the end of their indenture period. Their death from illness, injury or exhaustion would come after 4-7 years of backbreaking work in intense heat and horrific working conditions. Transportation to a sugar plantation was soon seen as a fate worse than a death sentence. The easy supply of cheap labour allowed the plantation owners to believe it to be more economic to just replace their dead exiles with new ones, rather than improving conditions. The treatment of enslaved people from Africa was even worse.

James II’s increasingly confident imposition of Roman Catholicism on the people of England put him in open conflict with the Church of England bishops and the secular lords who invited his Protestant daughter Queen Mary and her husband William of Orange into England in 1688. They took the throne in the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ and three years later they issued a pardon to all those supporters of Monmouth who had been transported to the plantations. Of those rebels still alive, many were refused freedom by their plantation owners and few could afford the cost of the passage home. Of the 800 hundred or so rebels transported, less than a quarter ever returned to their homes. 

There is no record of how many free indentured prisoners remained trapped in the West Indies long after their pardon, but they are remembered by the small communities on the Sugar Islands such as Barbados who trace their ancestry directly back to these prisoners. And in some cases, even further back, to a nights march across Sedgemoor and to the charm and deadly ambition of James, Duke of Monmouth.