If you tied a knot in the thread of English history every time somebody led a rebellion, you’d make a mess of your sewing. So let’s skip the knots–they weren’t my best idea–and talk about the Monmouth Rebellion, which was led by (no points for guessing this one) Monmouth, the Duke of.

Okay, half a point if you got the Duke part right.

Like everything else of its time (1685) and place (England), the rebellion only makes sense when you paint in the background: the wrestling match between Catholics, Protestants, and super-Protestants for the soul–and more importantly, the throne–of England. 

Can a wrestling match have three contestants or does that make it a free-for-all? Does a contest involving three people take place between them or among them? Does anyone care about the answers to these questions?

Probably not. 

We’ll start our tale in (for no good reason) the present tense at a time when King Nobody (the first and last of that name) wears England’s crown. Cromwell and some of the super-Protestants are in power. The last king’s dead. The country’s kingless. The super-Protestants lack superpowers, though. They get their name (from me; no one else calls them that) because they’re further along the Protestant spectrum than the more moderate Church of England Protestants. 

That lack of superpowers explains why–

But I’m getting ahead of our story. Cromwell’s in power and Charles II, son of the now-beheaded Charles I, is in exile. 

 

What does Charles get up to while he’s in exile?

Some regal hanky-panky, and the fairly predictable result of that is a son, James.

Time rolls on, as time will. Everybody involved gets older. Cromwell dies. The super-Protestants don’t find a way to continue a kingless government. (See above: lack of superpowers.) Charles comes back to England as king, becoming Charles II. If you’ve seen portraits of the Charleses, he’s the one who looks like an aging and particularly dissolute Bob Dylan. The thought of anyone being or ever having been in bed with him–

No, let’s put that out of our minds.

Charles may be the king, but he doesn’t have superpowers either. All around him are forces pushing to lock the Church of England into place and edge both Catholics and nonconforming Protestants to the furthest corners of the national picture.

It’s in this context that he flirts dangerously with both Catholicism and Europe’s Catholic powers, and it’s also in this context that he and his wife fail to produce–forget a son, they don’t have any kids at all. So his brother is next in line for the throne and he’s–gasp, wheeze–a Catholic convert.

It’s easy to think this is all intolerant and silly, but the country has just emerged from a time when people killed each other in the name of religion, and even now, when things have settled down a bit, which religion you’d committed to decides what earthly doors are open or closed to you. So everyone has solid material reasons not to want Those People from the Other Religion(s) in power. 

That’s in addition to whatever religious reasons they have.

 

Yeah, but what about little James?

Well, James gets knocked around a bit. Before he’s ten, he’s kidnapped, jailed, exiled, and kidnapped again, this time by his father’s agents, who dump him into the household of his father’s gentleman of the bedchamber, where he’s barely educated. 

Gentleman of the bedchamber? It’s not a lascivious as it sounds. He dresses the king, waits on him when he eats alone, and generally hangs out with him. 

At some point, Charles wakes up, says, “Didn’t I have a kid around here somewhere?” and brings him to court, where he becomes a favorite and is turned into a Duke and given a bunch of other titles that if you’re not used to British traditions sound like something JK Rowling made up. He also has a variety of income streams arranged for him. When he’s older, he fights for the king here and there and gains quite the reputation as a soldier. He joins the privy council.

So far, he barely justifies a footnote to history, but the thing is, James is a Protestant and a king’s son, even if he wasn’t born with the right paperwork.

But hold on a minute. His mother (who’s now conveniently dead) always claimed that she’d been married to Charles, and since marriage records haven’t been computerized yet, no one can prove she wasn’t, even if, equally, no one can prove she was. That makes it possible to build a case that he should be the next–safely Protestant–king. So schemes to set James on the throne buzz around him like flies around roadkill.

Eventually he gets involved in a conspiracy, the Rye House Plot (it would’ve involved killing the king and his brother). After a bit of back and forth James goes to live in the Netherlands.

 

And doesn’t live happily ever after

Instead, when Charles dies, James–

But let’s call him Monmouth from here on. It’ll help us remember who’s the king (James, Charles’s brother) and who’s the wannabe (also James, Charles’s son a.k.a. Monmouth). 

So Charles dies and Monmoth launches a full-scale rebellion–or invasion if you prefer–that’s coordinated with an anti-Catholic Scottish rebellion in the highlands.

Why the Scots? Well, England and Scotland are two separate countries, but they have a single king, and if you think that’s confusing try to explain the pronunciation of Worcestershire to someone who learned to read English using phonics. 

The Scottish rising fails while Monmouth’s still crossing the Channel, though, leaving him and 82 men to land in Lyme Regis (that’s in Dorset, in the southwest) without anything to distract the government’s attention. 

Why such a small force? Monmouth’s counting on the country to rise in his support, and initially that seems to work. He’s popular in the southwest, and he gathers an army of 3,000, which is a nice number, trailing an appealing collection of zeroes. The problem with them is that none of them come from the gentry–the people with some soldierly training. He has an army of enthusiastic amateurs without much in the way of weaponry. 

By another count, his army is uphill of 1,000.  How far uphill? Will you stop splitting hairs? We’ll never get out of here. 

Monmouth’s not exactly claiming the throne at this point, just saying he has a right to it but will only take it with Parliament’s agreement. Let’s not split hairs, though. A lot of his followers call him King Monmouth, and they have time to defeat a few county militias before the king’s army arrives. Commoners and the poor flock to his banner, and in Taunton he’s proclaimed king. By now, he has some 6,000 soldiers. 

We’ll skip the back and forth. Monmouth’s and the king’s armies meet at Sedgemoor and Monmouth loses badly. After the battle, his soldiers are hunted down and killed on the spot. (They were commoners anyway, and you can do that to commoners and still sleep at night.) Some 200 who are caught later are tried before being killed. Another 2,000 are transported to the West Indies to work–in a weird and little-known footnote to history–to work alongside slaves from Africa.

Or by that other count, 320 executed and 800 transported. By a third, it’s 333 and 860. Let’s treat the numbers as rough guesses. 

Men, women, and children with remote connections to the rebellion are flogged. Monmouth is captured and executed. 

David Horspool, whose book The English Rebel I rely on whenever I write about rebellions (and I’m a sucker for a good rebellion), thinks Monmouth’s failure was a result of rushing into his rebellion instead of waiting for James to discredit himself. 

 

What happens then?

James discredits himself. He interprets Monmouth’s defeat to mean that the country values stability above everything else and overestimates their tolerance for religious tolerance. He appoints Catholics to important positions, most controversially to positions in the military. He grants for all religions more leeway than they’ve had. And when I say “all religions” here, we do seem to be talking about all religions, including Jews, Muslims, and dissenting Christians. As far as I know, that’s the limit of England’s religious population at this point.  He When judges, justices of the peace, and lords lieutenant resist his moves, he fires them and he comes into conflict with Parliament–nothing new for kings, but the whiff of Catholic incense hanging over the conflict supercharges the reaction he gets.  

Is he genuinely trying to build a state that tolerates multiple religions or is he making sneaky moves toward a Catholic state? I don’t know, but a lot of powerful Church of England Protestants think they do. They believe he’s favoring Catholics and setting the building blocks of a Catholic state in place. 

There’s something very contemporary about that fear, don’t you think? Just slot a more modern into place and the rhetoric’s the same. Immigrants, Muslims, Black people, whoever. There’s a lot of it going around. I know you’ve heard it.

 

Why does any of this matter?

Because it sets up the Glorious Revolution, which hits the Eject button that’s been quietly installed on James’s throne, replacing him with a Protestant monarchy. 

But that’s a story for another time.