General Percy Kirke and the later Stuart army

摘要

John Childs's impressive study of the life and role of Percy Kirke in the armies of Charles Ⅱ and James Ⅱ brings to light one of the key figure in three major military events in the late seventeenth century. Kirke, descended from a royalist family, was a senior officer in the Tangier garrison and the city's last governor in the 1670s, a colonel during the Monmouth rebellion who distinguished himself by his bloody reprisals in Somerset and a key figure in the siege of Londonderry in 1689. Kirke's reputation has been comprehensively damaged by the accounts of Samuel Pepys and Thomas Ken during his time in Tangier. Both Pepys and Ken saw Kirke's behaviour at first hand and regarded him with abhorrence. After the battle of Sedgemoor, Kirke's ironically named 'lambs' - hardened troops he had commanded in Tangier - terrorised Somerset so seriously that Kirke was recalled to London. Childs himself had hardly a better view of Kirke, writing of Kirke's treatment of a fellow colonel before the battle of Sedgemoor, that he 'always favoured indirect, underhand, snide methods to achieve his ends' (p. 85).