Forlorn Hope
A. L. Rowse
The Protestant Duke: A Life of Monmouth Violet Wyndham (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £4.95)
Many years ago I was lucky enough to penetrate the most exquisite house in Somerset, Brympton D'Evercy, before it was denuded of its treasures. The remarkable chcitelaine, Mrs Clive, told me that Monmouth had spent a night here before Sedgemoor, and showed me a portrait of the handsome Protestant Duke. The house belonged then to a regicide family. Uncompromising and unreconstructed Cromwellians provided officers for Monmouth's forlorn hope of an army, the Puritan—or by this time, Nonconformist—West Country peasantry provided the rank-and-file. •
What silly idiots they were to fight for such a type, or indeed to fight at all! In history I have no patience with people fighting for forlorn hopes, on whatever side. They merely damage the cause they are fighting for. The Catholic Pilgrimage of Grace enabled Henry VIII to go forward to the suppression of the greater monasteries, after the lesser. Similarly the suppression of Monmouth's Rebellion encouraged James II to go on with his Catholicising policy.
It would have been a different matter if there had been any thance of Monmouth's succeeding. But there never was. His best chance was to put himself at the disposal of that great man, William of Orange, for the day when James's well-known foolery lost the throne for him in England. With the Revolution of 1688 Monmouth would have been safe in harbour; his military talent might even have been turned to good purpose. But he was a gambler, with no political judgment.
Of course, Monmouth was spoiled by everybody, beginning with his father, Charles II. The boy was madly beautiful; when he grew up, he was well-calculated-or perhaps I should say, well-equipped—to seduce every lady's heart, and proceeded to do so. He must have been very good in bed —children, legitimate and bastard, in every direction.
I rather think that he has penetrated this lady-author's heart. She would like to think that he was legitimate (the thought used to perturb George VI a little), and gives him the benefit of every doubt. His noseslitting of a political opponent, his murder of a poor parish beadle, may be regarded as the expression of youthful high spirits on the part of Restoration blades after the rigours of the Rule of the Saints. But this kind of behaviour was hardly compatible with the religious rOle of the Protestant Hope. What a hope!—political humbug, of course.
That great man, Lord Clarendon, saw clearly that Charles II was only storing UP trouble for himself by creating his bastards dukes, and from the first advised against Monmouth being made one. Miss WYO.' ham comments that this reveals 'how much he must have bored the King by his prudent ideas'. No doubt. But Clarendon was right all the same; the silly Stuarts owed everYthing to their faithful minister. How they could continue to be so silly after the close shaves they had had, the lessons they had been taught, passes belief—except that humans in general are like that. A brave enough soldier, Monmouth's whole conduct shows that he was unfit for anything else. His shocking propaganda assertions against Uncle James--blaming him for the Fire of London, among other things—sealed Monmouth's fate in that quarter. It was enough that Uncle was a fool, unfit for a throne. The silly Nephew should have waited a short while, until a really able man, William, gave Uncle (and father-in-law, to boot), the Boot.
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