The Taunton Assizes: The work of legal slaughter

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part Nine

Micah betrayed and arrested. He is warned by soldiers that his fate will be determined by civil rather than military law. "They have a lawyer coming from London whose wig is more to be feared than our helmets. He will slay more men in a day than a troop in a ten mile chase."

The Taunton Assizes: trials merely formalities where prisoners were "hauled before a judge and insulted before being dragged to the gibbet."

Chief Justice Jeffreys: "he raved like a demoniac and his black eyes shown with a vivid vindictive brightness that was scarce human. The jury shrank from him as from a venomous thing when be turned his baleful glance upon them. At times, as I have been told, his sternness have way to an even more terrible merriment, and he would lean back in his seat of justice until the tears hopped down upon his ermine. Nearly a hundred were either executed or condemned to death on that opening day."

The streets of Taunton lined with the rotting corpses of rebels. Micah sees "the limbs of former companions dangling in the wind, and their heads grinning at us from the tops of poles and pikes."

Use of kettledrums at military executions "to drown out any last words that would fall from the sufferers and bear fruit in the breasts of those who heard them."

Rather than facing execution, Micah and fifty other prisoners sold as slaves for overseas Plantations as James' way of rewarding his loyalists.

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