Out of the West
THE MONMOUTH EPISODE. By Bryan Little. (Werner Laurie, 25s.) Tins is in many respects an excellent book. Mr. Little knows his West Country intimately, and he has combed the local and central archives for material relating to those summer months in 1685 when the lower orders of. the south-western counties rose in revolt under Charles II's bastard. With a wealth of detail he shows the Joyous influx of local recruits to join the pathetic four score who landed at Lyme Regis; the isolation of the local gentry and town oligarchies; the rapid and confident advance along the sunny lanes towards Bristol. Then the weather broke; and slowly the royal forces, under a French general, outmanoeuvred the untrained and Ill-equipped volunteers, hemmed them in, and finally—by sheer superiority of training and discipline—defeated the daringly con- ceived night attack at Sedgemoor. Mr. Little brilliantly evokes the landscape and architecture of the seventeenth century, the detailed local relationships and squabbles which caused men to take sides.
But something is lacking. The fact that Monmouth intended to lead a national revolt is obscured by the local emphasis. There Is little analysis of the political reasons which made men revolt. We are vaguely told that'nonconformists and artisans and yeomen farmers formed the backbone of Monmouth's recruits. But what proportion of which sects supported him is not discussed at all. Even the presence of an alleged Quaker as recruiting sergeant for Monmouth seems to Mr. Little to call for none of the explanations he would have demanded if one of his sources had reversed the course of a stream. Monmouth's manifestoes are dismissed as tedious,' with no serious analysis of what they said. Least suc- cessful of all is Mr. Little's attempt to whitewash the villainous Judge Jeffreys. It will hardly do to defend Jeffreys from the charge of browbeating defendants by saying that since he tried over 500 a day he had no time for such self-indulgence. This is as good a book as could be written about Monmouth's rising with the Politics left out.
CHRISTOPHER HILL
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