William the Rebel

All Saints' Church, Culmstock, Devon (2002), where a
William Tapscott married Mary Bronsford, 10 Aug 1654.

Following the Battle of Sedgemoor on 6 Jul 1685, the jails of Somerset and Dorset were filled with thousands of captives, many of whom had been chased to the ground by Colonel Percy Kirke and his regiment of “Kirke’s Lambs.” One of the captured Monmouth rebels was William Tapscott, a “sergeweaver” from Culmstock in Devon, possibly the William Tapscott who had married Mary Bronsford three decades earlier on 10 Aug 1654 at Culmstock’s All Saints’ Church. Starting 25 Aug 1685, southwest England saw a series of prosecutions, the “Bloody Assizes,” conducted by the ruthless Chief Justice George Jeffries, a succession of trials that reached the town of Taunton in Somerset, on 18 and 19 Sep 1685. There in the Great Hall of Taunton Castle, William the Rebel was hauled before the Court of Oyer and Terminer and charged with waging war against the King. He was sentenced to be transported to the Americas, and was lucky for that judgement. At Taunton Sir Jeffreys condemned five hundred Monmouth rebels to death. Vicious, cruel, and abusive, not only to prisoners, but to witnesses, attorneys, and jurymen, Jeffreys took delight in dealing out punishment and was particularly happy when watching a woman being flogged or a man swinging at the end of a rope. Even Charles II had despised him stating "That man has no learning, no sense, no manners, and more impudence than ten carted street-walkers." Jeffries was appointed Lord Chancellor by King James as an award for his cruel work.

Judge Jeffries presiding over the "Bloody Assizes."
(John Tutchin, James Blackwood & Co., 1873.)

Mary Bronsford, were she the wife of William the Rebel, would not have been spared. By putting pressure on local landowners, not only were the men who joined Monmouth vigorously suppressed, their wives and children were hounded for months, being turned out of their homes, compelled to hand over their meager possessions, and forced to make payments to the King out of any earnings.

Shipped out to Barbados, Jamaica, and the Leeward Islands to be sold to plantation owners, most transported rebels never saw their homes again. They were kept below decks for the whole of their journeys and were only given the scantiest of coarse biscuits and fetid water. One fifth died on the voyage and so emaciated were the remainder that a slave merchant who handled their sales decided he would have to fatten them up first. One of a hundred prisoners sold for the benefit of Sir Christopher Musgrave, a member of Parliament, William Tapscott was conveyed with thirty-four fellow rebels from Weymouth on the ship Jamaica Merchant, arriving in Jamaica by 12 Mar 1686 (Gregorian Calendar).

[As a side note: Some claim that William’s ship, Jamaica Merchant, had belonged to the pirate Henry Morgan. But Morgan’s ship of that name sank a decade earlier, on 25 Feb 1676. William Tapscott traveled on another vessel of the same name.]

Bill of lading for 35 convicted rebels, including William Tapscott, 30 Nov 1685.

William Tapscott, who cost “Twenty two peeces of Eight” for passage, and other transported prisoners were sentenced to ten years’ service. During that time they could be bought and sold like African slaves, and were forbidden to marry. Heavily dependent on forced labor for its sugar plantations, Jamaica welcomed the captives.

When evicted from Jamaica by the British in 1655, the Spanish had freed the then African slaves, who fled to the mountains. For decades the liberated “Maroons” harassed the British colonists, who, nevertheless, continued importing slaves until, by the time William arrived, Blacks outnumbered whites. It is just possible that William and a slave (or "Maroon") woman founded a Jamaican mixed-race line. In 2013 a 67-marker yDNA test showed a striking two-step genetic match between a descendant of John Ford, a man of color born in Jamaica around 1753, and your author, sixth great grandson of Henry Tapscott, the Immigrant. (Another Tapscott, living in England, shows a yDNA genetic distance from the Ford descendant of only 1 for 67 markers.) Was John Ford a descendant of William Tapscott, the Rebel? If so, William and Henry had a common male predecessor; they were possibly even father and son. But only “possibly.” One must be very careful when drawing conclusions from y-DNA results where there is a surname difference, but the matches are decidedly close.

In 1689, following the Glorious Revolution, which drove James II from Britain, Mary, his daughter, and her husband, William of Orange, ascended to the throne. In 1689 the vicious Judge Jeffreys died of kidney disease in the Tower of London. In 1691 Colonel Kirke passed away in Brussels, redeemed by his military support of William's revolution. In 1701 James II perished in exile in France.

And what became of William Tapscott, the Rebel? In Feb 1690 William and other transported prisoners were pardoned by the new King and released, though in some cases with delay. West Indies Governors and plantation owners were not pleased to lose free labor. Most pardoned rebels lacked the money needed or possibly the inclination to leave Jamaica, where jobs were abundant and wages were good. But opportunities were greatly reduced with the destruction of Port Royal by the 1692 earthquake, after which many of the rebels are believed to have left the colony, often heading to the North American mainland. William Tapscott may have been one of those. And that is the subject of our next posting.