protesting anguish: “I will not die.”

“That you cannot decide; the manner only is in your power,” said Lord Grey calmly, and I marvelled to think that he had been a coward in open field.

“I am not the King’s son—” his Grace cried out at him, and fell across a chair sick with unavailing love of life.

Lord Grey took up a candle and turned to the door, looking at him the while.

“Will you give James Stewart this triumph?” he asked.

This seemed the one thing to brace Monmouth, for those two had always hated each other strongly; James in the old days had feared my lord’s power, been jealous that he was the elder son of the elder son, and Monmouth seemed to remember that; yet a mean thought hurried on the heels of the manly reflection.

“He would give me my life for this,” he said weakly. “My life for this secret—”

“Good night,” said Lord Grey–a strange man–and left us.

The Duke seemed not to know that he had gone or that I remained; after a little he went into the bedchamber, but not to sleep, and all night I heard him weeping … such sick and bitter womanish sobs all through that long watch I kept.…

Colonel Sidney’s son!

Who were they who did this–and they who kept silence?

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:

“God accept your imperfect repentance!”

He would not join in the prayer for the King; when they goaded him he said “Amen” with a careless air.

Knowing as I do what bitter terror he felt, what ghastly anticipations he had, what agony he had endured at the thought of the sheer moment of death, with what shivering sickness he felt the axe, with what horror he eyed the headsman, I cannot bear to write or think how they mangled him.…

And so he died; he brought much misery on the innocent and he was maybe a worthless man, yet I could weep for him even now. I am glad he did not speak; Lord Grey has been ever silent and no one else knows.

Among all those who watched that fair-haired head held up it is strange there is not one to think it showed little likeness to the dark-browed Stewart Kings.…

Here the paper is endorsed in another hand:

“If this be truth then this was a thing ironical. The writer of this rambling manuscript and the Earl of Tankerville, once Lord Grey, are dead, and there be none that know save God who knows and judges.”

A BIOGRAPHY

The Earl of Strafford

This was a man who in his own time was great and fell to dishonoured death, leaving a brilliant memory, but one neither respected nor praised; a King raised him, used him and forsook him, a people judged him, condemned him, and put him to death. Great events followed; the nation shook and changed. The King himself was swept away by that same power to which he had in vain sacrificed his minister, a greater than the King ruled England and men forgot the Earl of Strafford save to execrate his policies.

But they who come home crowned with laurel from the wars the popular heroes of an hour are not always the only saviours of their country, and they who flatter the people do not always serve them best. History is a hard, often an unreflective, judge; her verdict, dictated by the passion of a moment, lasts too often for centuries.

Judging a man by his inner spirit, his desires, the use he makes of great abilities, pitying a man for his misfortunes, his bitter death, those English born may well give a little gratitude to this Englishman who had ever England in his heart.

Thomas Wentworth was of an ancient and noble family of Yorkshire, powerful by intellect, Puritan by tradition, strong by courage and self-belief, above all things deeply desirous of rendering that service to his country which is the way that most readily appeals to a man of an active complexion of satisfying that almost unconscious yearning for glory that is the sign of a great spirit. Mere personal ambition is a proof of either meanness or madness, and the self-seeking of either insanity or vanity has never attained any but a brittle fame and a hollow achievement; if a man is to even contemplate the performance of mighty deeds, he must have some mightiness within him.

Strong enthusiasm, unless it be of the headlong useless kind, is ever joined to that tincture of melancholy which comes from viewing the contrasting apathy of the rest of mankind, and for the first years of his opening understanding Thomas Wentworth was silent, reserved in matters political, given to reflect and observe more than to speak or act.

He had the usual education of a gentleman, studied at Cambridge,