Then the fight began in earnest, chiefly hand-to-hand, beside the broad and stagnant Rhine, in whose noisome mud many a stout fellow met his death that night. It was not until day dawned across the moor that the last band of rustic pikemen broke and fled before the King’s battalions, pouring across the Bussex Rhine. Hours before, under cover of the night, the rebel Duke had fled the spot with Lord Grey and thirty horsemen. It had been a better thing had he halted and been cut to pieces with his brave followers. His had then been a nobler figure in history. He had looked with the ill-disguised contempt of an old campaigner upon his doomed rustics. Urged to make a last effort to support them, he said bitterly: “All the world cannot stop those fellows; they will run presently”—and ran himself. The shattered remnants of his raw ranks poured confusedly into Bridgwater town, soon after daylight was come. At first the townsfolk thought them but the wounded stragglers from a great victory, and shouted, with caps flying in air, for “King Monmouth.” Then the dreadful truth spread abroad from the lips of wounded and dying men, and those who had cheered for the flying leader hid themselves, or fled on their own account. Three thousand of the rebels lay slain upon the field. Swift and terrible was the punishment meted out to the unhappy victims of Monmouth’s ill-starred rising. The moorland, the towns and villages throughout the counties of Somerset and Dorset, were made ghastly with the bodies and quarters of the rebels executed and hanged in gimmaces, or fixed on posts by the entrances to the village churches; and the shocking judicial progress of the infamous Judge Jeffreys, is aptly commemorated in the popular name of the “Bloody Assize.” The Duke of Monmouth, captured at Woodyates, was beheaded on Tower Hill, after an abject appeal for mercy had been refused, on July 15th.