struck dead by
lightning. [436]

The number of those who were thus butchered cannot now be ascertained.
Nine were entered in the parish registers of Taunton: but those
registers contained the names of such only as had Christian burial.
Those who were hanged in chains, and those whose heads and limbs were
sent to the neighbouring villages, must have been much more numerous. It
was believed in London, at the time, that Kirke put a hundred captives
to death during the week which followed the battle. [437]

Cruelty, however, was not this man's only passion. He loved money; and
was no novice in the arts of extortion. A safe conduct might be bought
of him for thirty or forty pounds; and such a safe conduct, though of
no value in law, enabled the purchaser to pass the post of the Lambs
without molestation, to reach a seaport, and to fly to a foreign
country. The ships which were bound for New England were crowded at
this juncture with so many fugitives from Sedgemoor that there was great
danger lest the water and provisions should fail. [438]

Kirke was also, in his own coarse and ferocious way, a man of pleasure;
and nothing is more probable than that he employed his power for the
purpose of gratifying his licentious appetites. It was reported that he
conquered the virtue of a beautiful woman by promising to spare the
life of one to whom she was strongly attached, and that, after she had
yielded, he showed her suspended on the gallows the lifeless remains of
him for whose sake she had sacrificed her honour. This tale an impartial
judge must reject. It is unsupported by proof. The earliest authority
for it is a poem written by Pomfret. The respectable historians of that
age, while they speak with just severity of the crimes of Kirke, either
omit all mention of this most atrocious crime, or mention it as a thing
rumoured but not proved. Those who tell the story tell it with such
variations as deprive it of all title to credit. Some lay the scene at
Taunton, some at Exeter. Some make the heroine of the tale a maiden,
some a married woman. The relation for whom the shameful ransom was paid
is described by some as her father, by some as her brother, and by some
as her husband. Lastly the story is one which, long before Kirke was
born, had been told of many other oppressors, and had become a favourite
theme of novelists and dramatists. Two politicians of the fifteenth
century, Rhynsault, the favourite of Charles the Bold of Burgu