With his George and Garter they hurried to the King. He received the news with genuine feeling as one that had lost a father. All that he owed to the stout heart that was still seemed to rush upon him like a loud warning from Heaven, and for a moment to rouse the magnanimity in which Monk had always believed. As though he could never reward enough the ungrudging service of his most faithful subject, he immediately despatched his Garter to Christopher, and announced that he should personally arrange the funeral. It was conducted in almost royal magnificence. After lying in state for some weeks in his armour as Captain-General, with his golden truncheon in his hand, his body was escorted to Westminster by the King in person in the midst of a procession which for splendour had only been rivalled at his own coronation, and there in Henry the Seventh's chapel it was laid with the bones of kings. And that no touch might be omitted to mark the exalted pedestal the majestic figure should occupy, the humblest of the great ones who were permitted to grace his last parade was the man on whom his cloak was to fall, the greatest of English generals, Ensign John Churchill.[16]
But there it all ended. No monument rose to mark the spot where the hero lay. The King was too poor, the new duke too profligate, and the homely duchess died with broken heart while her lord still lay in state. Nor have any been found since save distant kinsmen even to show posterity where he lies. Neither the splendid regiment he founded, nor the army he inspired, nor the country to whom at so slight a cost he restored the priceless boon of monarchy, have thought him worthy of the tribute that has been lavished on so many not more deserving. So the memory of the man the King delighted to honour has fallen a victim to the execration of the visionaries he crushed, to the reproaches of the Puritans he restrained, to the rancour of the unjust stewards he exposed, to the abjectness of the servile historiographers with whom half his career was a subject tabooed, and to the jibes of the profligates with whom he would not sin.
For a biographer to sum up a character so lovable and so misunderstood is almost impossible without falling into exaggeration. It is better that his story should close with a tribute dropped unwittingly from the most unwilling hand that could have penned it. On October 24th, 1667, for the last time the House awarded the sturdy old patriot their thanks for his service; "Which is a strange act," wrote Pepys; "but, I know not how, the blockhead Albemarle hath strange luck to be loved, though he be (and every man must know it) the heaviest man in the world, but stout and honest to his country."
In the sermon that was delivered at his funeral in Westminster Abbey we have the opinion of a great dignitary of the Church who was fully alive to his faults. Careful as he was that he should pronounce no idle panegyric, he blessed him altogether, "He was the best father in the world," said the Bishop of Exeter. "He was certainly the best husband in the world, and he received the requital of faithfulness and love. They twain were loving in their lives and in death they were not divided.... He was the favourite of Parliament, the darling of the Houses. They confided in him. They loved and revered him." And of the King's affection he had as high a testimony to give.
Such abiding popularity as his is a thing not lightly won. It is not for long that a great nation will honour a man unworthy of its devotion. Through ten years of doubt and danger and shifting party-strife he was the idol of the people of England, and if it is asked why we should endorse the verdict of his contemporaries, the answer is plain; he wound up the English Revolution. At the high tide of profit he struck a balance and closed the account. Elsewhere, under stars less fortunate than our own, no liquidator has arisen to do the work which only a man of Monk's inflexible integrity and splendid self-control can accomplish, and there we have seen Revolution drag on a bankrupt existence with ever accumulating loss. From that Monk saved us. It was what Cromwell strove to do and failed, for the hour was not yet ripe. With an exactness which it is impossible to account for or ignore Monk marked the hour when it came, gripped it with confident decision, and the fate of the sovereign who tried to set at nought the English Revolution proves the dull soldier was right.
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