There is a letter still existing, yellow now with age and very fragile at the folds, in which Sir John’s bailiff writes to him piteously concerning this disaster. “The cruell and base dealyng,” he says, “wch is now acted at Cothelstone doth astonish and amaze all people wch do either see it or heare of it; for they have now taken downe all the Leads of the house … and have already taken downe that part of the house wch is over against my Ladye’s garden.… I am very sorry that ther is occasion gyven me to make soe sadd a relation unto you.… I beseech God to send us better tymes.” It was in the eighteenth century that this restored wing of the old house passed to the Esdailes, ancestors of that Edward Esdaile who married Shelley’s daughter.
Behind the house is the church that was once the private chapel. It has some carved bench-ends and some old glass, but its special features are the two beautiful tombs in the south chapel: the finely carved figures of a fourteenth-century Stawell and his wife, with their painted shields below them, and the still more beautiful Elizabethan tomb with the effigies of marble. In a corner of the churchyard is a white stone “in sweet memory of Ianthe.”
Again we return to our high-road, and this time do not pause till we drive into the market-place of Taunton, the quiet centre of a country-town, where cabbages are bought and sold, and loitering cabmen smoke their pipes without a thought of Monmouth or of Jeffreys. Yet some of these very houses were wreathed with flowers at the coming of the foolish duke: here where the fountain is he stood and smiled while the pious maids of Taunton, made rebels by his handsome face, gave him a Bible, and a fine banner of their own working, “One would have thought the people’s wits were flown away in the flights of their joy.” Here he was proclaimed King James and called King Monmouth, and here his followers paid for their ill-placed devotion in torrents of blood. Into this market-place came Kirke and his Lambs with their victims in chains; and over there at the corner of Fore Street and High Street stood the “White Hart,” whose signpost was the gibbet. Hither came Jeffreys of the sinister face. “He breathed death like a destroying angel,” says Toulmin, “and ensanguined his very ermines with blood. The victims remained unburied; the houses and steeples were covered with their heads, and the trees laden almost as thick with quarters as with leaves.” He went in to his monstrous work through that arch with the embattled towers; and passed on through the inner entrance of yellow stone, where Henry VII.’s shield and Bishop Langton’s are above the door. Within it is the great hall, with the timbered roof and the whitewashed walls that were hung with scarlet while Jeffreys, “mostly drunk,” stormed at his victims of the Bloody Assizes. The little girl--she was hardly more than a child--who had won Monmouth’s easy smiles by her speech among the June flowers in the market-place was ransomed with her schoolfellows; but her sister had seen the Judge’s face, and died of the terror of it.