ke. There was about the
Colonel of the Tangiers Regiment a deadly despatch which might have
disposed in like fashion of all those prisoners, numerous as they were,
but for the vigorous intervention of Bishop Mews, which put an end to
the drumhead courts-martial.

Even so, in that first week after Sedgemoor, Kirke and Feversham
contrived between them to put to death over a hundred men after a trial
so summary as to be no trial at all. They required human freights for
the gibbets with which they were planting the countryside, and they
little cared how they procured them or what innocent lives they took.
What, after all, was the life of a clod? The executioners were kept busy
with rope and chopper and cauldrons of pitch. I spare you the details of
that nauseating picture. It is, after all, with the fate of Peter Blood
that we are concerned rather than with that of the Monmouth rebels.

He survived to be included in one of those melancholy droves of
prisoners who, chained in pairs, were marched from Bridgewater to
Taunton. Those who were too sorely wounded to march were conveyed in
carts, into which they were brutally crowded, their wounds undressed and
festering. Many were fortunate enough to die upon the way. When Blood
insisted upon his right to exercise his art so as to relieve some of
this suffering, he was accounted importunate and threatened with a
flogging. If he had one regret now it was that he had not been out with
Monmouth. That, of course, was illogical; but you can hardly expect
logic from a man in his position.

His chain companion on that dreadful march was the same Jeremy Pitt who
had been the agent of his present misfortunes. The young shipmaster
had remained his close companion after their common arrest. Hence,
fortuitously, had they been chained together in the crowded prison,
where they were almost suffocated by the heat and the stench during
those days of July, August, and September.

Scraps of news filtered into the gaol from the outside world. Some may
have been deliberately allowed to penetrate. Of these was the tale of
Monmouth's execution. It created profoundest dismay amongst those men
who were suffering for the Duke and for the religious cause he had
professed to champion. Many refused utterly to believe it. A wild story
began to circulate that a man resembling Monmouth had offered himself up
in the Duke's stead, and that Monmouth survived to come again in glory
to deliver Zion and make war