“What are we going on?” he said. “We are not such fools as to think we can prevail now.… I saw Dumbarton’s Scots yonder on Sedgemoor.… I know how they can fight … they were under me at Bothwell Brig.…” He pressed his handkerchief to his lips and he was trembling like a sick maid.
They saw in his eyes that he considered them, as the play saith, on “the edge of doom,” and as he had given them leave for ignoble thoughts, so each took advantage of it and bethought him of his own sad condition.
“We have but a rabble,” said one. “And there is yet a chance to get over seas—”
“I cannot fall into the hands of James Stewart,” muttered Monmouth; “for I have done that which cannot be forgiven.” And there was such pusillanimous fear in his wretched look of shivered dread that it passed like a panic through all that they too had done what could not be forgiven; nor was James Stewart a merciful man. One voiced the general terror:
“We could get to the coast before any guessed we had left Bridgewater–in flight lies our only chance.”
Then my lord Grey made this speech.
“There are six thousand people have left their homes to follow you–would you, my lord, abandon them to that fate ye cannot face yourself?”
Monmouth looked at him; maybe he thought it strange that the man that had been a proved coward under fire should speak so intrepidly in the council, yet he was too unnerved for a retort or an answer.
“Oh, you,” added Lord Grey, with a flick of a scorn in his tone, “who took the title of a King, and are a King’s son, cannot you make a more seemly show of it than this?”
“It is my life,” said the Duke in a piteous agitation. “Five thousand pounds on my head … to die as Russell did.…”