Abraham Holmes

The Last Republican

​Monmouth's Rebellion of 1685 lasted less than a month, from the Duke of Monmouth’s landing at Lyme Bay on 11 June to his defeat at the battle of Sedgemoor on 6 July. But for one officer in the rebels' ranks, that summer's brief rebellion had been forty years in the making.

The Bloody Assizes of September 1685 put an emphatic end to Monmouth's Rebellion against King James II. Under the aegis of lord chief justice Jeffreys, 320 suspected supporters of the rebel duke were tried and sentenced to death across the West Country. In most cases, those found guilty were hung, drawn and quartered. A further 800 prisoners were transported. Among the hundreds condemned for treason was Abraham Holmes. Holmes was found guilty at the assizes in Dorchester and then conveyed to Lyme Regis, to be executed at the place where he had landed in England with Monmouth in order to overthrow the Catholic King James. Elderly and infirm (one of his arms had recently been amputated), Holmes presented a pathetic sight as he attempted to mount the scaffold. He humbly apologised to the presiding sheriff: “you see I am imperfect, [with] only one Arm, I shall want assistance to help me up on this Tragical Stage”. Given a hand to steady him, Holmes proceeded to climb calmly to his death.

Surprising though it might be that this aged man had taken up arms against the Crown, Holmes had in fact been in rebellion against the Stuart kings for much of his life. The treasonable act for which he was executed in 1685 had begun in the Civil Wars, forty years before.
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​Civil War Service

Nothing definite is known about Holmes's early life, although he seems to have been born in County Durham. He first appears as a lieutenant in Robert Lilburne's regiment of Parliament's northern forces in 1644. By early 1646 he was serving in the south of England, having followed Lilburne into the 'new model' army. By 1647 Holmes (who was reputedly a Baptist by faith) had became prominent in army politics. He was an 'agitator', or political spokesman, for his regiment and he signed 'The Vindication of the Army', which asserted the rights of Parliament's soldiers against the moderate MPs at Westminster.

After August 1648 he returned north and served in the garrisons at Newcastle and Tynemouth. In June 1650 his foot company formed part of a new regiment under George Monck that would evolve, in the fullness of time, into the Coldstream Guards. Holmes served as the regiment's major and fought at Dunbar. He remained under Monk in Scotland as part of the occupying English forces after 1651, and was appointed as a justice of the peace in Edinburgh.

Holmes’s radical politics were widely known when, in 1654, he was approached by the ringleaders of what would become known as the Overton plot - a design by English republicans to remove Cromwell as Protector. Holmes however refused their request to stir up rebellion among English troops quartered in Scotland, either because of his own convictions or his belief that such a revolt was unlikely to succeed. However, in 1659, following the demise of Richard Cromwell’s Protectorship, Holmes’s political radicalism put him in good stead with the newly restored Rump, who promoted him to lieutenant colonel. In May that year he signed a petition to parliament, calling for energetic steps to be taken to countenance godliness and secure the rights and liberties of the people. In December 1659, he anticipated Monck’s purge of pro-Rump officers and fruitlessly attempted to hold Ayr in support of the army in England. Holmes was formally dismissed from the army in early 1660.

Ciphers & Conspiracies

Holmes’s Baptist faith meant that he fell foul of the newly restored monarchy and religious conformity it demanded. It is not surprising that we see Holmes associating with republican insurgents after 1660. By 1662, still referred to as ‘Major Abraham Holmes’, he was officially labelled as “a person of dangerous consequence”. In 1664 he was arrested for suspected sedition and was imprisoned in Windsor Castle. He was released three years later, after successfully petitioning that he, and others with whom he was imprisoned, had “never heard of any particular crime objected against them”.

The exact date of Holmes’s release is not known, but fourteen years elapse until he again surfaces as an ally of the Whigs. In 1681 he helped shelter the fugitive Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll, who had absconded from Edinburgh Castle. Argyll had been found guilty of treason after objecting to the wording of the Scottish Test Act, which required Scottish subjects to swear to uphold the Presbyterian church whilst at the same time declaring loyalty to the King – himself head of the Anglican church and harbouring Catholic leanings. Suspecting that his execution was imminent, Argyll promptly escaped from Edinburgh Castle dressed as his stepdaughter’s manservant. He then made his way to London where Holmes accommodated him until he could escape to the safety of the Netherlands.

​From this time Holmes became embroiled in plots to bring down the British monarch and his supporters. In 1683 he was Argyll’s agent, resident at the Cock & Bottle in Aldersgate, helping to pass correspondence between Argyll and London's Whig conspirators as they finalised the details of the Rye House Plot – the attempted murder of King Charles and James, Duke of York, as they travelled from London to the Newmarket races.
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Satirical playing cards (c.1685) depicting the events of Monmouth's Rebellion, including [right] the interrogation of Holmes and other rebels.

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​Government sources learned of the plot by intercepting letters addressed to a ‘Master West’ and delivered to Mr. Staple’s Southwark Coffee House in Bartholomew Lane, half-a-mile from St Paul’s. When questioned by the authorities, Leonard Staples, the coffee house’s proprietor explained that he accepted the delivery of the letters, which Holmes ‘constantly called for and paid for’. He claimed never to have seen Mr West, the addressee. This is hardly surprising, as Mr West was an alias employed by Holmes. Another of Holmes’s identities was “Peter Harvie”, a supposed linen weaver, whose letters (actually from the Countess of Argyll) were addressed to a cider seller in Bow Churchyard and passed on to the Netherlands in a similar manner. Holmes job was to collect these letters and then sent them on to other agents of Argyll and Monmouth in the Low Countries. The correspondence was written using a simple cipher, with letters and words substituted for numbers. These ciphers were further disguised through pseudonyms: ‘brand’ stood for Scotland, ‘birch’ England, and there were disguised references to dubious ‘parcels of goods’ which were hoped would ‘please the merchants’.

Holmes was arrested and subjected to lengthy interrogation in which the King himself (who had come very close to being assassinated) took a close interest: “You know this business concerns me and the safety of my three kingdoms,” the King told Holmes, “I am resolved to carry it on very vigorously, therefore say the truth.” Under examination, Holmes freely divulged much of the information contained in the letters (although he must have suspected that the alphabetic cipher had already been worked-out – both the letters and the keys to decipher them had been in his possession). Holmes admitted that the letters were conveyed to and from the Netherlands aboard the Success, a merchant ship out of Colchester, and confessed that he was engaged Argyll's scheme to raise £10,000 in England to pay for weapons to use in armed rebellion. He acknowledged that the ‘parcel of goods’ referred to were political writings, aimed at stirring sedition among the King’s subjects. Holmes however refused to reveal the identities of any persons referred to in the letters who had donated money to Argyll’s cause.

Holmes was committed to the Gatehouse prison for high treason. Whilst there, he divulged more information to the authorities, including the use of his alias ‘Harvie’. Whether such admissions softened the Crown’s attitude toward him is unclear. It is possible they thought Holmes was more useful to them if he were free to act as Argyll’s agent, sending and receiving correspondence which they were confident they could intercept and decipher. It is still uncertain whether Holmes was released or if he effected an escape, but by 1684 he was in the Netherlands, where he was joined from London by his son, Blake, and they became part of the group of dissenters and Whigs that had gathered around Argyll and Monmouth.
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​The Road to Sedgemoor

Following the failure of the Rye House Plot, plans were discussed to forcibly overthrow James II (who had by now succeeded his brother) through armed rebellion, led by Argyll in Scotland and Monmouth in England. Monmouth's small force landed at Lyme on 11 June 1685, and over the next few days he was able to gather local support from the south-west counties while a government force was sent from London to oppose the rebels. Holmes received a commission from Monmouth as commander of the Green Regiment of foot, with Blake made a captain. However, in the first contact with leading elements of government forces at Norton St Philip on 27 June, Blake was killed and Holmes severely wounded in the arm.

Despite his wound, Holmes continued in Monmouth's service. On the night of 5 July, hemmed in by closing government forces, Monmouth's men attempted to break out of Bridgewater and attack the government camp under cover of darkness. Among the enemy troops facing Holmes's Green Regiment was the Coldstream Guards, in which Holmes had served when it was Monck's Regiment at the Battle of Dunbar, thirty-five years before. Government troops were alerted to the rebel advance, however, and in the ensuing battle on Sedgemoor the rebel army was annihilated. Holmes, in the forefront of the infantry attack, had his horse shot from under him and was captured. When Lieutenant-Colonel Churchill (later the Duke of Marlborough) demanded to know his identity, Holmes grimly replied that he was in no condition to tell. Holmes was stripped and escorted to the nearby house of a local JP, where he remedied his now festering wound by amputating his own arm with a kitchen knife.

Holmes was sent to London for interrogation before James II. Holmes gave little away and was stoically resigned to his fate. He showed no remorse for his actions, refusing to demonstrate any loyalty to the Crown and reportedly saying: 'I am an aged man, and what remains to me of life is not worth a falsehood or baseness. I have always been a republican, and I am one still.' Little more should have been expected from a man who had spent forty years fighting for his political and religious freedom.

Subsequent Whig histories did much to mythologise the fate of Holmes and his fellow rebels, and doubtless embellished the account of his execution. It is reported that Holmes sat at the foot of the gallows and regaled the spectators with reasons why he had rallied to Monmouth's cause. He believed, he said, that 'the protestant religion was bleeding,' and that while God had not graced his cause with victory he 'doubted not but that God would make use of others that should meet with better success'.

Robert Hodkinson
July 2019

Sources:
Cobbett, W. State Trials, vol. 9
Green, M. A. E. (ed.) Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles II
Holmes, R. Marlborough (London: HarperCollins, 2008)
Zook, M. 'Holmes, Abraham (d.1685', in: The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [online]. available: https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/13588. accessed 06/08/2019
Zoyland Heritage Fund, 'The Battle of Sedgemoor', zoylandheritgae.co.uk [online]. available: 
http://www.zoylandheritage.co.uk/the_battle.htm. accessed 06/07/2019
'Monmouth's Rebellion Playing Cards (c.1685)', The Stuart Successions Project [online]. available: http://stuarts.exeter.ac.uk/education/objects/monmouth-rebellion-playing-cards-c-1685/. accessed 06/07/2019