A curious commingling of motives, sordid and lovable, ambition, some little love, some touch of self-sacrifice.… I felt compassion for King Charles, who had had no deeper feeling in all his spoilt life than this affection for what was not his.…
I put the wasting candles out and sat in the dark; I lifted the curtain and saw the sun rise over Sedgemoor.
Six thousand men to fight against hopeless odds to-morrow for him they deemed a King, the blood of Bourbon and Stewart, the heir of Tudor and Plantagenet.…
And in my ears was the thick sobbing of a mere Englishman of a stock that scarce boasted gentility, who could not face the end of his masquerade nor fit the robe of greatness he had assumed.
So here is the secret revealed at length to the dumb and innocent paper; God knoweth it is, as Lawrence Hyde saith, a great while ago; for the rest, the world knows how the Duke rode out to Sedgemoor with such a look in his face the very children knew he was marked for doom, and how he fled, leaving his men to gain great honour after he had forsaken them. Also how he was found in peasant’s dress, so changed they did not know him till the George of diamonds flashed out on his tattered garments as he fainted in his captor’s clutch. Lord Grey was taken with him; they stayed at Ringwood two days and from there his Grace wrote frantically to the King and to Lord Rochester.
It is very clear he meant to buy his life with his wretched secret, though I think my lord Grey must have been ever urging him to die with a decent carriage.
So they brought him to London and he was taken before his Majesty, swordless and with his hands tied behind him.
What passed no man knoweth but James Stewart; he has spoken often of it, and I know those to whom he has told of Monmouth’s ignoble desperate pleadings for life at any cost, of his casting himself down and imploring mercy.
Yet he must have been spurred by something in the demeanour of his ancient enemy, for he never told his secret, and he left the presence with anger and dignity, resolving, it must be, to cheat the King of that last satisfaction. Yet afterwards he fell again into unmanly misery that was the wonder of all, and then into a strange mood that was neither the apathy of despair, or, as some said, an exalted enthusiasm. I wondered then and now where his proofs were: not found on him with the other poor trifles I had seen at Bridgewater Castle–destroyed, perhaps. And so he died, hurried reluctant from life, without either religion or repentance, sorry for the blood shed in the West, firm in his love for Lady Harriet, indifferent to the clergyman who cried out on the scaffold: