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The Bloody Assizes Purdue University Purdue e-Pubs Department of History Faculty Publications Department of History 1995 The loB ody Assizes: Whig Martyrdom and Memory after the Glorious Revolution Melinda S. Zook Purdue University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/histpubs Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation “The loodyB Assizes: Whig Martyrdom and Memory after the Glorious Revolution,” Albion, 27 (Fall 1995): 373-96. This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact [email protected] for additional information. "TheBloody Assizes:"Whig Martyrdomand Memory after the GloriousRevolution* Melinda Zook Revolutionariesof modem times often imagine themselves not only as creators of a new future, but also as constructorsof a new past. They seek to reinterpret events, rewrite texts, desacralize old idols and icons, and institute new heroes, heroines and martyrsfor the cause newly victorious.They hope to recast popular memory to justify the new order.Historians might easily associate such attempts to reconstructhistory and manipulatememory with the violent context of the FrenchRevolution. Recent work in Frenchcultural history has providedscholars with a fuller awareness of the functions of revolutionary propaganda,from iconographyto ritual.'Investigations into festival, street literature,rhetoric, read- ing, audience, and memory have given the revolutionaryexperience in France a cultural history that England's still lacks.2 England's Glorious Revolution particularly lacks such a cultural history. Traditionally, 1688/89 has been portrayedas a rather tame event over which little blood was spilt for little actual change.3Yet, among contemporariesof the Earlier versions of this essay were given at the North American Conference on British Studies in Montreal,October 1993, and at the American Society for Legal History in WashingtonDC., October 1994. I would like to thank Lois Schwoerer, Daniel Woolf, James Farr, and Marcus Rediker for their comments. IMauriceAgulhon, Marianneinto Battle, trans.Janet Lloyd (Cambridge,1981); Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984); Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); Vivian Cameron, "Political Exposures: Sexuality and Caricaturein the French Revolution," in Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed. Lynn Hunt (Baltimore, 1991), pp. 90-107; also Fictions of the French Revolution,ed. BernadetteFort (Evanston,Ill., 1991), which contains, Fran,ois Furet, 'The Tyranny of Revolutionary Memory," pp. 151-60. For pre-Revolution France: Robert Darnton, "Reading, Writing, Publishing in Eighteenth-CenturyFrance," Daedalus (Winter 1971): 214-56, and his The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1985). 2Groundbreaking works of English culturalhistory include: Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971), David Underdown, Revel4 Riot and Rebellion (Oxford, 1986), and Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge, 1991). On the dynamics be- tween propagandaand political culture:Lois G. Schwoerer,"Propaganda and the Glorious Revolu- tion," American Historical Review 82 (1977): 843-74, and Tim Harris,London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restorationuntil the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge, 1987). 3Conservativeinterpretations of the Revolution are found in J. R. Jones, The Revolution of 1688 in England (New York, 1972); J. P. Kenyon, RevolutionPrinciples: The Politics of Party, 1689-1720 (Cambridge, 1977); J. R. Western, Monarchyand Revolution: the English State in the 1680s (Lon- don, 1972). For a moderate interpretation,see W. A. Speck, ReluctantRevolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688 (Oxford, 1988). The conservative view has come under attack in the Albion27, 3 (Fall 1995): 373-396. C)North AmericanConference on BritishStudies 1996. All Rights Reserved. This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Wed, 19 Nov 2014 16:32:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 374 Melinda Zook Revolution there were those who saw the triumphof the Prince of Orange and the exodus of James II as the final justification of a great quantityof blood that had been spilt by their brethrenover the previous decade. Such individuals took the opportunityafforded by the Revolution to reconstructthe past and mold the memory of the reading public. The focus of this essay is on post-Revolution Whig polemic as it explores the interplay between memory, radical propaganda, and reader expectations among two audiences, contemporariesand their historians. It argues that the Whig martyrologiespublished in 1689, 1693, and 1705 created a history of the 1680s that legitimized radical Whig activity and ideology. The martyrologies used the authorityof the scaffold speech and the spectacle of the public execu- tion to dramatize the righteousness of the pre-Revolution Whig cause and to justify basic radicalWhig tenets, in particular,the legitimacy of active resistance against the supreme powers. What began as polemic, however, blended with memory to serve as history. The martyrologies' most lasting success at shaping conceptions of the strug- gles of the 1680s, particularlythe aftermathof Monmouth's Rebellion, came in the centuries to follow. The Whig martyrologiesbecame a leading source for historians describing the "bloody assizes" in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and to a lesser degree, the twentieth centuries. Their atrocity stories helped justify the Revolution of 1688/89, making it all the more glorious in its relative bloodless- ness. The radical messages of the martyrologies faded away and the colorful and theatrical nature of their portrayals of spectacular executions and dying men's last words became their lasting legacy. The martyrologies gave the "bloody assizes" their premier place within the English historical tradition. Radical Whigs created the Whig martyrologies.4In the pre-Revolution era, these individuals were part of the most politically active and actively hostile faction of their party to the government of Charles II in its last years and that of James II. As a whole, these radicals had undoubtedlysuffered the greatest in their struggle against what they understood as the growth of popery and last decade. For a neo-Whig vision of the Revolution, see Lois G. Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights, 1689 (Baltimore, 1981); Gary De Krey, Fractured Society: The Politics of London in the First Age of Party, 1688-1715 (Oxford, 1985); RichardAshcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises of Government(Princeton, N.J., 1986). 4I describe as "radical"those Whigs who were willing to use violence against the Crown or whose propagandapromoted or justified active resistanceto the government.These men have been referred to by historiansas the "firstWhigs," or as "ShaftesburyWAhigs," or more recently, as "trueWhigs." See J. R. Jones, The First Whigs: The Politics of the Exclusion Crisis (Oxford, 1961); Mark Goldie, "The Roots of True Whiggism, 1688-94," History of Political Thought 1 (1980): 195-236. 51 am completing a monograph on the most radical propagandistsand conspiratorsof the 1680s and 1690s, entitled, "ConspiratorialPolitics, Radical Whig Ideology and Revolution Culturein Late StuartEngland." At present, the best monographson the topic are Ashcraft, RevolutionaryPolitics, and Richard L. Greaves, Secrets of the Kingdom: British Radicals from the Popish Plot to the Revolution of 1688-89 (Stanford, 1992). This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Wed, 19 Nov 2014 16:32:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions "TheBloody Assizes" 375 arbitrarygovernment. They had propagatedTitus Oates's popish plot tales; stri- dently championed the efforts to exclude the Catholic duke of York (the future James II) from the throne; suffered exile or execution following the disclosure of the Rye House Plot; and supported with money and manpower the futile invasions in 1685 of the earl of Argyle in Scotland and the duke of Monmouth in western England. Argyle's and Monmouth's failures brought radical Whig activity to a near standstill from the summer of 1685 to the spring of 1688. William of Orange's successful invasion in November 1688 turned the tide of Whig fortunes.Those radicalslurking about Holland,such as the infamous"plot- ter" Robert Ferguson, returned; those sitting in jail cells, like the Whig polemicist, the Reverend Samuel Johnson, were released. In the spring of 1689, Parliamentbegan the process of reversing the sentences against the Rye House Whigs, compensating families and rewardingthe living for their promotion of and suffering for the Protestantcause. The winter and spring of 1689 also witnessed the publicationof six collections of the dying speeches of those executed in the previous decade for their defense of Protestantismand English liberties.6These pamphletswere, for the most part, simply compilations of previously published scaffold speeches, execution ac- counts and fmal words. The first appearedin January.The Protestant Martyrs or The Bloody Assizes was a slim, cheaply printed pamphlet which contained a narrativeof "the life and death of James, duke of Monmouth";a reprinted account of Monmouth's execution and his pathetic apology to James II; the dying words of five rebels executed in 1685; and a list of all the rebels executed during the western assizes that followed
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