XLV.

EXECUTION OF MONMOUTH.-MACAULAY.

[Charles the Second was easy, good-natured, and popular in his ways, but he was unprincipled and utterly selfish. His chief aim was to avoid trouble, so that he might pursue his pleasures unmolested. Almost from the outset he played into the hands of the French king, Louis XIV., and enabled that monarch to build up a power which proved dangerous to Europe. As Charles had no legitimate children, his lawful heir was his brother James, who was a Catholic. There were many in England who thought that a Catholic king should not be allowed to rule, and they made a determined effort to have a law enacted excluding James from the succession. But the measure failed, and, on the death of Charles, in 1683, James became king.

He was exceedingly unpopular, and his first acts made him still more so. So strong was the feeling against him that the duke of Monmouth, the eldest of Charles's illegitimate children, and a Protestant, believed that he could be dethroned by force. In 1685 Monmouth invaded the kingdom; but he had mistaken the temper of the English people. They refused to support the claim of a bastard, and the duke was defeated and captured at the battle of Sedgemoor.]

THE king cannot be blamed for determining that Monmouth should suffer death. Every man who heads a rebellion against an established government stakes his life on the event; and rebellion was the smallest part of Monmouth's crime. He had declared against his uncle a war without quarter. In the manifesto put forth at Lyme, James had been held up to execration as an incendiary, as an assassin, who had strangled one innocent man and cut the throat of another, and, lastly, as the poisoner of his own brother. To spare an enemy who had not scrupled to resort to such extremities would have been an act of rare, perhaps of blamable, generosity. But to see him and not to spare him was an outrage on humanity and decency. This outrage the king resolved to commit. The arms of the prisoner were bound behind him with a silken cord; and, thus e-red,

he was ushered into the presence of the implacable kinsman whom he had wronged.

Then Monmouth threw himself on the ground, and crawled to the king's feet. He wept. He tried to embrace his uncle's knees with his pinioned arms. He begged for life, only life, life at any price. He owned that he had been guilty of a great crime, but tried to throw the blame on others, particularly on Argyle, who would rather have put his legs into the boots than have saved his own life by such baseness. By the ties of kindred, by the memory of the late king, who had been the best and truest of brothers, the unhappy man adjured James to show some mercy. James gravely replied that this repentance was of the latest; that he was sorry for the misery which the prisoner had brought on himself; but that the case was not one for lenity. A declaration, filled with atrocious calumnies, had been put forth. The regal title had been assumed. For treasons so aggravated there could be no pardon on this side of the grave. The poor, terrified duke vowed that he had never wished to take the crown, but had been led into that fatal error by others. As to the declaration, he had not written it; he had not read it; he had signed it without looking at it; it was all the work of Ferguson, that bloody villain, Ferguson. "Do you expect me to believe," said James, with contempt but too well merited, "that you set your hand to a paper of such moment without knowing what it contained?" One depth of infamy only remained, and even to that the prisoner descended. He was pre-eminently the champion of the Protestant religion. The interest of that religion had been his plea for conspiring against the government of his father, and for bringing on his country the miseries of civil war; yet he was not ashamed to hint that he was inclined to be reconciled to the Church of Rome. The king eagerly offered him spiritual assistance, but said nothing of pardon or respite. "Is there, then, no hope?" asked Monmouth. James turned

away in silence. Then Monmouth strove to rally his courage, rose from his knees, and retired with a firmness which he had not shown since his overthrow.

The hour drew near, all hope was over, and Monmouth had passed from pusillanimous fear to the apathy of despair. His children were brought to his room that he might take leave of them, and were followed by his wife. He spoke to her kindly, but without emotion. Though she was a woman of great strength of mind, and had little cause to love him, her misery was such that none of the by-standers could refrain from weeping. He alone was unmoved.

It was ten o'clock. The coach of the lieutenant of the Tower was ready. Monmouth requested his spiritual advisers to accompany him to the place of execution, and they consented; but they told him that, in their judgment, he was about to die in a perilous state of mind, and that, if they attended him, it would be their duty to exhort him to the last. As he passed along the ranks of the guards he saluted them with a smile; and he mounted the scaffold with a firm tread. Tower Hill was crowded, up to the chimney-tops, with an innumerable multitude of gazers, who, in awful silence, broken only by sighs and the noise of weeping, listened for the last accents of the darling of the people. “I shall say little,” he began. "I come here not to speak, but to die. I die a Protestant of the Church of England." The bishops interrupted him, and told him that, unless he acknowledged resistance to be sinful, he was no member of their Church. He went on to speak of his Henrietta.* She was, he said, a young lady of virtue and honor. He loved her to the last, and he could not die without giving utterance to his feelings.

The bishops again interfered, and begged him not to use such language. Some altercation followed. The divines have been accused of dealing harshly with the dying man.

*Henrietta, Baroness Wentworth, had followed Monmouth to Holland, and had sacrificed her jewels to provide funds for his expedition.

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But they appear to have only discharged what, in their view, was a sacred duty. Monmouth knew their principles, and, if he wished to avoid their importunity, should have dispensed with their attendance. Their general arguments against resistance had no effect on him. But when they reminded him of the ruin which he had brought on his brave and loving followers, of the blood which had been shed, of the souls which had been sent unprepared to the great account, he was touched, and said, in a softened voice, "I do own that. I am sorry that it ever happened." They prayed with him long and fervently; and he joined in their petitions till they invoked a blessing on the king. He remained silent. “Sir," said one of the bishops, "do you not pray for the king with us?" Monmouth paused some time, and, after an internal struggle, exclaimed, Amen." But it was in vain that the prelates implored him to address to the soldiers and to the people a few words on the duty of obedience to the government. "I will make no speeches," he exclaimed. "Only ten words, my lord." He turned away, called his servant, and put into the man's hand a tooth-pick case, the last token of ill-starred love. "Give it," he said, "to that person." He then accosted John Ketch, the executioner, a wretch who had butchered many brave and noble victims, and whose name has, during a century and a half, been vulgarly given to all who have succeeded him in his odious office. "Here," said the duke, "are six guineas for you. Do not hack me as you did my Lord Russell. I have heard that you struck him three or four times. My servant will give you some more gold if you do the work well." He then undressed, felt the edge of the ax, expressed some fear that it was not sharp enough, and laid his head on the block. The divines in the meantime continued to ejaculate with great energy: "God accept your repentance! God accept your imperfect repentance!"

The hangman addressed himself to his office; but he had been disconcerted by what the duke had said. The first

blow inflicted only a slight wound. The duke struggled, rose from the block, and looked reproachfully at the executioner. The head sank down once more. The stroke was repeated again and again; but still the neck was not severed, and the body continued to move. Yells of rage and horror rose from the crowd. Ketch flung down the ax with a curse. "I cannot do it," he said; "my heart fails me." "Take up the ax, man," cried the sheriff. "Fling him over the rails!" roared the mob. At length the ax was taken up. Two more blows extinguished the last remains of life; but a knife was used to separate the head from the shoulders. The crowd was wrought up to such an ecstasy of rage that the executioner was in danger of being torn in pieces, and was conveyed away under a strong guard.

In the mean time many handkerchiefs were dipped in the duke's blood; for, by a large part of the multitude, he was regarded as a martyr who had died for the Protestant religion. The head and body were placed in a coffin covered with black velvet, and were laid privately under the communion table of St. Peter's Chapel, in the Tower. Within four years the pavement of the chancel was again disturbed, and hard by the remains of Monmouth were laid the remains of Jeffreys. In truth, there is no sadder spot on earth than that little cemetery. Death is there associated, not, as in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's, with genius and virtue, with public veneration and imperishable renown; not, as in our humblest churches and church-yards, with every thing that is most endearing in social and domestic charities; but with whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny, with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame. Thither have been carried, through successive ages, by the rude hands of jailers, without one mourner following, the bleeding relics of men who had been the captains of armies, the leaders of parties,