That the Merry Monarch might be very
merry indeed, in the merry times when his people were
suffering under pestilence and fire, he drank and
gambled and flung away among his favourites the money
which the Parliament had voted for the war.
The consequence of this was that the stout-hearted
English sailors were merrily starving of want, and
dying in the streets; while the Dutch, under their
admirals DE WITT and DE RUYTER, came into the River
Thames, and up the River Medway as far as Upnor, burned
the guard-ships, silenced the weak batteries, and did
what they would to the English coast for six whole
weeks. Most of the English ships that could
have prevented them had neither powder nor shot on
board; in this merry reign, public officers made themselves
as merry as the King did with the public money; and
when it was entrusted to them to spend in national
defences or preparations, they put it into their own
pockets with the merriest grace in the world.
Lord Clarendon had, by this time,
run as long a course as is usually allotted to the
unscrupulous ministers of bad kings. He was impeached
by his political opponents, but unsuccessfully.
The King then commanded him to withdraw from England
and retire to France, which he did, after defending
himself in writing. He was no great loss at home,
and died abroad some seven years afterwards.
There then came into power a ministry
called the Cabal Ministry, because it was composed
of LORD CLIFFORD, the EARL OF ARLINGTON, the DUKE OF
BUCKINGHAM (a great rascal, and the King’s most
powerful favourite), LORD ASHLEY, and the DUKE OF
LAUDERDALE, C. A. B. A. L. As the French were making
conquests in Flanders, the first Cabal proceeding was
to make a treaty with the Dutch, for uniting with
Spain to oppose the French. It was no sooner
made than the Merry Monarch, who always wanted to get
money without being accountable to a Parliament for
his expenditure, apologised to the King of France
for having had anything to do with it, and concluded
a secret treaty with him, making himself his infamous
pensioner to the amount of two millions of livres
down, and three millions more a year; and engaging
to desert that very Spain, to make war against those
very Dutch, and to declare himself a Catholic when
a convenient time should arrive. This religious
king had lately been crying to his Catholic brother
on the subject of his strong desire to be a Catholic;
and now he merrily concluded this treasonable conspiracy
against the country he governed, by undertaking to
become one as soon as he safely could. For all
of which, though he had had ten merry heads instead
of one, he richly deserved to lose them by the headsman’s
axe.
As his one merry head might have been
far from safe, if these things had been known, they
were kept very quiet, and war was declared by France
and England against the Dutch. But, a very uncommon
man, afterwards most important to English history
and to the religion and liberty of this land, arose
among them, and for many long years defeated the whole
projects of France. This was WILLIAM OF NASSAU,
PRINCE OF ORANGE, son of the last Prince of Orange
of the same name, who married the daughter of Charles
the First of England. He was a young man at this
time, only just of age; but he was brave, cool, intrepid,
and wise. His father had been so detested that,
upon his death, the Dutch had abolished the authority
to which this son would have otherwise succeeded (Stadtholder
it was called), and placed the chief power in the
hands of JOHN DE WITT, who educated this young prince.
Now, the Prince became very popular, and John de
Witt’s brother CORNELIUS was sentenced to banishment
on a false accusation of conspiring to kill him.
John went to the prison where he was, to take him
away to exile, in his coach; and a great mob who collected
on the occasion, then and there cruelly murdered both
the brothers. This left the government in the
hands of the Prince, who was really the choice of
the nation; and from this time he exercised it with
the greatest vigour, against the whole power of France,
under its famous generals CONDE and TURENNE, and in
support of the Protestant religion. It was full
seven years before this war ended in a treaty of peace
made at Nimeguen, and its details would occupy a very
considerable space. It is enough to say that
William of Orange established a famous character with
the whole world; and that the Merry Monarch, adding
to and improving on his former baseness, bound himself
to do everything the King of France liked, and nothing
the King of France did not like, for a pension of one
hundred thousand pounds a year, which was afterwards
doubled. Besides this, the King of France, by
means of his corrupt ambassador who wrote
accounts of his proceedings in England, which are not
always to be believed, I think bought our
English members of Parliament, as he wanted them.
So, in point of fact, during a considerable portion
of this merry reign, the King of France was the real
King of this country.
But there was a better time to come,
and it was to come (though his royal uncle little
thought so) through that very William, Prince of Orange.
He came over to England, saw Mary, the elder daughter
of the Duke of York, and married her. We shall
see by-and-by what came of that marriage, and why
it is never to be forgotten.
This daughter was a Protestant, but
her mother died a Catholic. She and her sister
ANNE, also a Protestant, were the only survivors of
eight children. Anne afterwards married GEORGE,
PRINCE OF DENMARK, brother to the King of that country.
Lest you should do the Merry Monarch
the injustice of supposing that he was even good humoured
(except when he had everything his own way), or that
he was high spirited and honourable, I will mention
here what was done to a member of the House of Commons,
SIR JOHN COVENTRY. He made a remark in a debate
about taxing the theatres, which gave the King offence.
The King agreed with his illegitimate son, who had
been born abroad, and whom he had made DUKE OF MONMOUTH,
to take the following merry vengeance. To waylay
him at night, fifteen armed men to one, and to slit
his nose with a penknife. Like master, like man.
The King’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham,
was strongly suspected of setting on an assassin to
murder the DUKE OF ORMOND as he was returning home
from a dinner; and that Duke’s spirited son,
LORD OSSORY, was so persuaded of his guilt, that he
said to him at Court, even as he stood beside the
King, ’My lord, I know very well that you are
at the bottom of this late attempt upon my father.
But I give you warning, if he ever come to a violent
end, his blood shall be upon you, and wherever I meet
you I will pistol you! I will do so, though
I find you standing behind the King’s chair;
and I tell you this in his Majesty’s presence,
that you may be quite sure of my doing what I threaten.’
Those were merry times indeed.
There was a fellow named BLOOD, who
was seized for making, with two companions, an audacious
attempt to steal the crown, the globe, and sceptre,
from the place where the jewels were kept in the Tower.
This robber, who was a swaggering ruffian, being
taken, declared that he was the man who had endeavoured
to kill the Duke of Ormond, and that he had meant
to kill the King too, but was overawed by the majesty
of his appearance, when he might otherwise have done
it, as he was bathing at Battersea. The King
being but an ill-looking fellow, I don’t believe
a word of this. Whether he was flattered, or
whether he knew that Buckingham had really set Blood
on to murder the Duke, is uncertain. But it
is quite certain that he pardoned this thief, gave
him an estate of five hundred a year in Ireland (which
had had the honour of giving him birth), and presented
him at Court to the debauched lords and the shameless
ladies, who made a great deal of him as
I have no doubt they would have made of the Devil
himself, if the King had introduced him.
Infamously pensioned as he was, the
King still wanted money, and consequently was obliged
to call Parliaments. In these, the great object
of the Protestants was to thwart the Catholic Duke
of York, who married a second time; his new wife being
a young lady only fifteen years old, the Catholic
sister of the DUKE OF MODENA. In this they were
seconded by the Protestant Dissenters, though to their
own disadvantage: since, to exclude Catholics
from power, they were even willing to exclude themselves.
The King’s object was to pretend to be a Protestant,
while he was really a Catholic; to swear to the bishops
that he was devoutly attached to the English Church,
while he knew he had bargained it away to the King
of France; and by cheating and deceiving them, and
all who were attached to royalty, to become despotic
and be powerful enough to confess what a rascal he
was. Meantime, the King of France, knowing his
merry pensioner well, intrigued with the King’s
opponents in Parliament, as well as with the King
and his friends.
The fears that the country had of
the Catholic religion being restored, if the Duke
of York should come to the throne, and the low cunning
of the King in pretending to share their alarms, led
to some very terrible results. A certain DR.
TONGE, a dull clergyman in the City, fell into the
hands of a certain TITUS OATES, a most infamous character,
who pretended to have acquired among the Jesuits abroad
a knowledge of a great plot for the murder of the
King, and the re-establishment if the Catholic religion.
Titus Oates, being produced by this unlucky Dr. Tonge
and solemnly examined before the council, contradicted
himself in a thousand ways, told the most ridiculous
and improbable stories, and implicated COLEMAN, the
Secretary of the Duchess of York. Now, although
what he charged against Coleman was not true, and although
you and I know very well that the real dangerous Catholic
plot was that one with the King of France of which
the Merry Monarch was himself the head, there happened
to be found among Coleman’s papers, some letters,
in which he did praise the days of Bloody Queen Mary,
and abuse the Protestant religion. This was
great good fortune for Titus, as it seemed to confirm
him; but better still was in store. SIR EDMUNDBURY
GODFREY, the magistrate who had first examined him,
being unexpectedly found dead near Primrose Hill,
was confidently believed to have been killed by the
Catholics. I think there is no doubt that he
had been melancholy mad, and that he killed himself;
but he had a great Protestant funeral, and Titus was
called the Saver of the Nation, and received a pension
of twelve hundred pounds a year.
As soon as Oates’s wickedness
had met with this success, up started another villain,
named WILLIAM BEDLOE, who, attracted by a reward of
five hundred pounds offered for the apprehension of
the murderers of Godfrey, came forward and charged
two Jesuits and some other persons with having committed
it at the Queen’s desire. Oates, going
into partnership with this new informer, had the audacity
to accuse the poor Queen herself of high treason.
Then appeared a third informer, as bad as either of
the two, and accused a Catholic banker named STAYLEY
of having said that the King was the greatest rogue
in the world (which would not have been far from the
truth), and that he would kill him with his own hand.
This banker, being at once tried and executed, Coleman
and two others were tried and executed. Then,
a miserable wretch named PRANCE, a Catholic silversmith,
being accused by Bedloe, was tortured into confessing
that he had taken part in Godfrey’s murder,
and into accusing three other men of having committed
it. Then, five Jesuits were accused by Oates,
Bedloe, and Prance together, and were all found guilty,
and executed on the same kind of contradictory and
absurd evidence. The Queen’s physician
and three monks were next put on their trial; but Oates
and Bedloe had for the time gone far enough and these
four were acquitted. The public mind, however,
was so full of a Catholic plot, and so strong against
the Duke of York, that James consented to obey a written
order from his brother, and to go with his family
to Brussels, provided that his rights should never
be sacrificed in his absence to the Duke of Monmouth.
The House of Commons, not satisfied with this as the
King hoped, passed a bill to exclude the Duke from
ever succeeding to the throne. In return, the
King dissolved the Parliament. He had deserted
his old favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, who was
now in the opposition.
To give any sufficient idea of the
miseries of Scotland in this merry reign, would occupy
a hundred pages. Because the people would not
have bishops, and were resolved to stand by their
solemn League and Covenant, such cruelties were inflicted
upon them as make the blood run cold. Ferocious
dragoons galloped through the country to punish the
peasants for deserting the churches; sons were hanged
up at their fathers’ doors for refusing to disclose
where their fathers were concealed; wives were tortured
to death for not betraying their husbands; people were
taken out of their fields and gardens, and shot on
the public roads without trial; lighted matches were
tied to the fingers of prisoners, and a most horrible
torment called the Boot was invented, and constantly
applied, which ground and mashed the victims’
legs with iron wedges. Witnesses were tortured
as well as prisoners. All the prisons were full;
all the gibbets were heavy with bodies; murder and
plunder devastated the whole country. In spite
of all, the Covenanters were by no means to be dragged
into the churches, and persisted in worshipping God
as they thought right. A body of ferocious Highlanders,
turned upon them from the mountains of their own country,
had no greater effect than the English dragoons under
GRAHAME OF CLAVERHOUSE, the most cruel and rapacious
of all their enemies, whose name will ever be cursed
through the length and breadth of Scotland.
Archbishop Sharp had ever aided and abetted all these
outrages. But he fell at last; for, when the
injuries of the Scottish people were at their height,
he was seen, in his coach-and-six coming across a
moor, by a body of men, headed by one JOHN BALFOUR,
who were waiting for another of their oppressors.
Upon this they cried out that Heaven had delivered
him into their hands, and killed him with many wounds.
If ever a man deserved such a death, I think Archbishop
Sharp did.
It made a great noise directly, and
the Merry Monarch strongly suspected of
having goaded the Scottish people on, that he might
have an excuse for a greater army than the Parliament
were willing to give him sent down his
son, the Duke of Monmouth, as commander-in-chief, with
instructions to attack the Scottish rebels, or Whigs
as they were called, whenever he came up with them.
Marching with ten thousand men from Edinburgh, he
found them, in number four or five thousand, drawn
up at Bothwell Bridge, by the Clyde. They were
soon dispersed; and Monmouth showed a more humane
character towards them, than he had shown towards that
Member of Parliament whose nose he had caused to be
slit with a penknife. But the Duke of Lauderdale
was their bitter foe, and sent Claverhouse to finish
them.
As the Duke of York became more and
more unpopular, the Duke of Monmouth became more and
more popular. It would have been decent in the
latter not to have voted in favour of the renewed
bill for the exclusion of James from the throne; but
he did so, much to the King’s amusement, who
used to sit in the House of Lords by the fire, hearing
the debates, which he said were as good as a play.
The House of Commons passed the bill by a large majority,
and it was carried up to the House of Lords by LORD
RUSSELL, one of the best of the leaders on the Protestant
side. It was rejected there, chiefly because
the bishops helped the King to get rid of it; and
the fear of Catholic plots revived again. There
had been another got up, by a fellow out of Newgate,
named DANGERFIELD, which is more famous than it deserves
to be, under the name of the MEAL-TUB PLOT. This
jail-bird having been got out of Newgate by a MRS.
CELLIER, a Catholic nurse, had turned Catholic
himself, and pretended that he knew of a plot among
the Presbyterians against the King’s life.
This was very pleasant to the Duke of York, who hated
the Presbyterians, who returned the compliment.
He gave Dangerfield twenty guineas, and sent him to
the King his brother. But Dangerfield, breaking
down altogether in his charge, and being sent back
to Newgate, almost astonished the Duke out of his
five senses by suddenly swearing that the Catholic
nurse had put that false design into his head, and
that what he really knew about, was, a Catholic plot
against the King; the evidence of which would be found
in some papers, concealed in a meal-tub in Mrs. Cellier’s
house. There they were, of course for
he had put them there himself and so the
tub gave the name to the plot. But, the nurse
was acquitted on her trial, and it came to nothing.
Lord Ashley, of the Cabal, was now
Lord Shaftesbury, and was strong against the succession
of the Duke of York. The House of Commons, aggravated
to the utmost extent, as we may well suppose, by suspicions
of the King’s conspiracy with the King of France,
made a desperate point of the exclusion, still, and
were bitter against the Catholics generally.
So unjustly bitter were they, I grieve to say, that
they impeached the venerable Lord Stafford, a Catholic
nobleman seventy years old, of a design to kill the
King. The witnesses were that atrocious Oates
and two other birds of the same feather. He
was found guilty, on evidence quite as foolish as
it was false, and was beheaded on Tower Hill.
The people were opposed to him when he first appeared
upon the scaffold; but, when he had addressed them
and shown them how innocent he was and how wickedly
he was sent there, their better nature was aroused,
and they said, ’We believe you, my Lord.
God bless you, my Lord!’
The House of Commons refused to let
the King have any money until he should consent to
the Exclusion Bill; but, as he could get it and did
get it from his master the King of France, he could
afford to hold them very cheap. He called a
Parliament at Oxford, to which he went down with a
great show of being armed and protected as if he were
in danger of his life, and to which the opposition
members also went armed and protected, alleging that
they were in fear of the Papists, who were numerous
among the King’s guards. However, they
went on with the Exclusion Bill, and were so earnest
upon it that they would have carried it again, if the
King had not popped his crown and state robes into
a sedan-chair, bundled himself into it along with
them, hurried down to the chamber where the House
of Lords met, and dissolved the Parliament. After
which he scampered home, and the members of Parliament
scampered home too, as fast as their legs could carry
them.
The Duke of York, then residing in
Scotland, had, under the law which excluded Catholics
from public trust, no right whatever to public employment.
Nevertheless, he was openly employed as the King’s
representative in Scotland, and there gratified his
sullen and cruel nature to his heart’s content
by directing the dreadful cruelties against the Covenanters.
There were two ministers named CARGILL and CAMERON
who had escaped from the battle of Bothwell Bridge,
and who returned to Scotland, and raised the miserable
but still brave and unsubdued Covenanters afresh,
under the name of Cameronians. As Cameron publicly
posted a declaration that the King was a forsworn tyrant,
no mercy was shown to his unhappy followers after
he was slain in battle. The Duke of York, who
was particularly fond of the Boot and derived great
pleasure from having it applied, offered their lives
to some of these people, if they would cry on the
scaffold ‘God save the King!’ But their
relations, friends, and countrymen, had been so barbarously
tortured and murdered in this merry reign, that they
preferred to die, and did die. The Duke then
obtained his merry brother’s permission to hold
a Parliament in Scotland, which first, with most shameless
deceit, confirmed the laws for securing the Protestant
religion against Popery, and then declared that nothing
must or should prevent the succession of the Popish
Duke. After this double-faced beginning, it
established an oath which no human being could understand,
but which everybody was to take, as a proof that his
religion was the lawful religion. The Earl of
Argyle, taking it with the explanation that he did
not consider it to prevent him from favouring any
alteration either in the Church or State which was
not inconsistent with the Protestant religion or with
his loyalty, was tried for high treason before a Scottish
jury of which the MARQUIS OF MONTROSE was foreman,
and was found guilty. He escaped the scaffold,
for that time, by getting away, in the disguise of
a page, in the train of his daughter, LADY SOPHIA
LINDSAY. It was absolutely proposed, by certain
members of the Scottish Council, that this lady should
be whipped through the streets of Edinburgh.
But this was too much even for the Duke, who had the
manliness then (he had very little at most times) to
remark that Englishmen were not accustomed to treat
ladies in that manner. In those merry times
nothing could equal the brutal servility of the Scottish
fawners, but the conduct of similar degraded beings
in England.
After the settlement of these little
affairs, the Duke returned to England, and soon resumed
his place at the Council, and his office of High Admiral all
this by his brother’s favour, and in open defiance
of the law. It would have been no loss to the
country, if he had been drowned when his ship, in
going to Scotland to fetch his family, struck on a
sand-bank, and was lost with two hundred souls on board.
But he escaped in a boat with some friends; and the
sailors were so brave and unselfish, that, when they
saw him rowing away, they gave three cheers, while
they themselves were going down for ever.
The Merry Monarch, having got rid
of his Parliament, went to work to make himself despotic,
with all speed. Having had the villainy to order
the execution of OLIVER PLUNKET, BISHOP OF ARMAGH,
falsely accused of a plot to establish Popery in that
country by means of a French army the very
thing this royal traitor was himself trying to do at
home and having tried to ruin Lord Shaftesbury,
and failed he turned his hand to controlling
the corporations all over the country; because, if
he could only do that, he could get what juries he
chose, to bring in perjured verdicts, and could get
what members he chose returned to Parliament.
These merry times produced, and made Chief Justice
of the Court of King’s Bench, a drunken ruffian
of the name of JEFFREYS; a red-faced, swollen, bloated,
horrible creature, with a bullying, roaring voice,
and a more savage nature perhaps than was ever lodged
in any human breast. This monster was the Merry
Monarch’s especial favourite, and he testified
his admiration of him by giving him a ring from his
own finger, which the people used to call Judge Jeffreys’s
Bloodstone. Him the King employed to go about
and bully the corporations, beginning with London;
or, as Jeffreys himself elegantly called it, ’to
give them a lick with the rough side of his tongue.’
And he did it so thoroughly, that they soon became
the basest and most sycophantic bodies in the kingdom except
the University of Oxford, which, in that respect,
was quite pre-eminent and unapproachable.
Lord Shaftesbury (who died soon after
the King’s failure against him), LORD WILLIAM
RUSSELL, the Duke of Monmouth, LORD HOWARD, LORD JERSEY,
ALGERNON SIDNEY, JOHN HAMPDEN (grandson of the great
Hampden), and some others, used to hold a council
together after the dissolution of the Parliament,
arranging what it might be necessary to do, if the
King carried his Popish plot to the utmost height.
Lord Shaftesbury having been much the most violent
of this party, brought two violent men into their
secrets RUMSEY, who had been a soldier in
the Republican army; and WEST, a lawyer. These
two knew an old officer of CROMWELL’S, called
RUMBOLD, who had married a maltster’s widow,
and so had come into possession of a solitary dwelling
called the Rye House, near Hoddesdon, in Hertfordshire.
Rumbold said to them what a capital place this house
of his would be from which to shoot at the King, who
often passed there going to and fro from Newmarket.
They liked the idea, and entertained it. But,
one of their body gave information; and they, together
with SHEPHERD a wine merchant, Lord Russell, Algernon
Sidney, LORD ESSEX, LORD HOWARD, and Hampden, were
all arrested.
Lord Russell might have easily escaped,
but scorned to do so, being innocent of any wrong;
Lord Essex might have easily escaped, but scorned
to do so, lest his flight should prejudice Lord Russell.
But it weighed upon his mind that he had brought
into their council, Lord Howard who now
turned a miserable traitor against a great
dislike Lord Russell had always had of him.
He could not bear the reflection, and destroyed himself
before Lord Russell was brought to trial at the Old
Bailey.
He knew very well that he had nothing
to hope, having always been manful in the Protestant
cause against the two false brothers, the one on the
throne, and the other standing next to it. He
had a wife, one of the noblest and best of women,
who acted as his secretary on his trial, who comforted
him in his prison, who supped with him on the night
before he died, and whose love and virtue and devotion
have made her name imperishable. Of course,
he was found guilty, and was sentenced to be beheaded
in Lincoln’s Inn-fields, not many yards from
his own house. When he had parted from his children
on the evening before his death, his wife still stayed
with him until ten o’clock at night; and when
their final separation in this world was over, and
he had kissed her many times, he still sat for a long
while in his prison, talking of her goodness.
Hearing the rain fall fast at that time, he calmly
said, ’Such a rain to-morrow will spoil a great
show, which is a dull thing on a rainy day.’
At midnight he went to bed, and slept till four;
even when his servant called him, he fell asleep again
while his clothes were being made ready. He rode
to the scaffold in his own carriage, attended by two
famous clergymen, TILLOTSON and BURNET, and sang a
psalm to himself very softly, as he went along.
He was as quiet and as steady as if he had been going
out for an ordinary ride. After saying that he
was surprised to see so great a crowd, he laid down
his head upon the block, as if upon the pillow of
his bed, and had it struck off at the second blow.
His noble wife was busy for him even then; for that
true-hearted lady printed and widely circulated his
last words, of which he had given her a copy.
They made the blood of all the honest men in England
boil.
The University of Oxford distinguished
itself on the very same day by pretending to believe
that the accusation against Lord Russell was true,
and by calling the King, in a written paper, the Breath
of their Nostrils and the Anointed of the Lord.
This paper the Parliament afterwards caused to be
burned by the common hangman; which I am sorry for,
as I wish it had been framed and glazed and hung up
in some public place, as a monument of baseness for
the scorn of mankind.
Next, came the trial of Algernon Sidney,
at which Jeffreys presided, like a great crimson toad,
sweltering and swelling with rage. ’I pray
God, Mr. Sidney,’ said this Chief Justice of
a merry reign, after passing sentence, ’to work
in you a temper fit to go to the other world, for I
see you are not fit for this.’ ‘My
lord,’ said the prisoner, composedly holding
out his arm, ’feel my pulse, and see if I be
disordered. I thank Heaven I never was in better
temper than I am now.’ Algernon Sidney
was executed on Tower Hill, on the seventh of December,
one thousand six hundred and eighty-three. He
died a hero, and died, in his own words, ’For
that good old cause in which he had been engaged from
his youth, and for which God had so often and so wonderfully
declared himself.’
The Duke of Monmouth had been making
his uncle, the Duke of York, very jealous, by going
about the country in a royal sort of way, playing at
the people’s games, becoming godfather to their
children, and even touching for the King’s evil,
or stroking the faces of the sick to cure them though,
for the matter of that, I should say he did them about
as much good as any crowned king could have done.
His father had got him to write a letter, confessing
his having had a part in the conspiracy, for which
Lord Russell had been beheaded; but he was ever a weak
man, and as soon as he had written it, he was ashamed
of it and got it back again. For this, he was
banished to the Netherlands; but he soon returned and
had an interview with his father, unknown to his uncle.
It would seem that he was coming into the Merry Monarch’s
favour again, and that the Duke of York was sliding
out of it, when Death appeared to the merry galleries
at Whitehall, and astonished the debauched lords and
gentlemen, and the shameless ladies, very considerably.
On Monday, the second of February,
one thousand six hundred and eighty-five, the merry
pensioner and servant of the King of France fell down
in a fit of apoplexy. By the Wednesday his case
was hopeless, and on the Thursday he was told so.
As he made a difficulty about taking the sacrament
from the Protestant Bishop of Bath, the Duke of York
got all who were present away from the bed, and asked
his brother, in a whisper, if he should send for a
Catholic priest? The King replied, ’For
God’s sake, brother, do!’ The Duke smuggled
in, up the back stairs, disguised in a wig and gown,
a priest named HUDDLESTON, who had saved the King’s
life after the battle of Worcester: telling him
that this worthy man in the wig had once saved his
body, and was now come to save his soul.
The Merry Monarch lived through that
night, and died before noon on the next day, which
was Friday, the sixth. Two of the last things
he said were of a human sort, and your remembrance
will give him the full benefit of them. When
the Queen sent to say she was too unwell to attend
him and to ask his pardon, he said, ’Alas! poor
woman, she beg my pardon! I beg
hers with all my heart. Take back that answer
to her.’ And he also said, in reference
to Nell Gwyn, ‘Do not let poor Nelly starve.’
He died in the fifty-fifth year of
his age, and the twenty-fifth of his reign.