One troop of the ROYAL DRAGOONS was ordered to Winchester to escort the Duke of Monmouth and other prisoners to London; on its arrival this troop was quartered in the Borough of Southwark, and it was under arms when the Duke was beheaded on Tower Hill on the 15th of July. Two other troops were ordered to Salisbury to mount guard over the prisoners there, and were subsequently directed to attend Judge Jeffries during the trial and execution of the captured rebels; in which painful service the troopers were spectators of numerous acts of barbarity perpetrated by the remorseless Judge, who sacrificed the lives of upwards of two hundred persons in these "bloody assizes," as historians have denominated them. After the suppression of this rebellion the establishment of the ROYAL REGIMENT OF DRAGOONS was reduced to eight troops, of forty private men per troop; and the supernumerary troops were embodied into a regiment of dragoons, which was commanded by the Duke of Somerset, and is now the third light dragoons. On the 1st of August Lord Churchill was appointed colonel of the third troop of life guards, and the colonelcy of the ROYAL DRAGOONS was conferred on Lieutenant-Colonel Viscount Cornbury. The two troops of the regiment having returned from Carlisle, the whole were stationed in London in October, and subsequently marched into quarters in Devonshire. [Sidenote: 1686] [Sidenote: 1687] [Sidenote: 1688] King James II., being a Roman Catholic, adopted measures calculated to effect the subversion of the Protestant church; and, with the view of overawing his subjects, he doubled the numbers of the regular army, and had large bodies of troops encamped, from time to time, on Hounslow Heath, where he frequently attended in person and witnessed the exercise of the troops. The ROYAL REGIMENT OF DRAGOONS formed part of the force at these encampments in the summer of 1686, again in 1687, and in 1688. At this period many noblemen and gentlemen, resolving to preserve the nation from papal domination, solicited the Prince of Orange to come to England with a Dutch force to assist them in opposing the proceedings of the King, and the Prince provided an armament for that purpose. The colonel of the ROYAL DRAGOONS appears to have been a zealous Protestant, and to have entered warmly into the measures taken to resist the proceedings of the Papists who surrounded the court. In November, 1688, when the Prince of Orange had landed, VISCOUNT CORNBURY, having marched with his regiment to Salisbury,[23] where the King's army was ordered to assemble, and where the blues and eighth horse had already arrived, resolved, in connexion with Lieut.-Colonel Langston, of the eighth horse, and several officers of the blues, to endeavour to take these three regiments over to the Prince, in the following manner:--