In the very delay which exacerbated him lay -
although he did not realize it - his only chance of avoiding the
gallows.
Easily, but for the favour of Fortune, he might have been one of
those haled, on the morrow of the battle, more or less haphazard
from the overflowing gaol at Bridgewater to be summarily hanged in
the market-place by the bloodthirsty Colonel Kirke. 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.
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