him to undertake an enterprise
which might possibly have succeeded had it been carried out with
prudence. He landed at Lyme, in Dorset, with only one hundred and twenty
men; six thousand soon gathered round his standard; a few towns declared
in his favour; he caused himself to be proclaimed king, affirming that
he was born in wedlock, and that he possessed the proofs of the
secret marriage of Charles II and Lucy Waiters, his mother. He met the
Royalists on the battlefield, and victory seemed to be on his side, when
just at the decisive moment his ammunition ran short. Lord Gray, who
commanded the cavalry, beat a cowardly retreat, the unfortunate Monmouth
was taken prisoner, brought to London, and beheaded.

The details published in the 'Siecle de Louis XIV' as to the personal
appearance of the masked prisoner might have been taken as a description
of Monmouth, who possessed great physical beauty. Sainte-Foix had
collected every scrap of evidence in favour of his solution of the
mystery, making use even of the following passage from an anonymous
romance called 'The Loves of Charles II and James II, Kings of
England':--

"The night of the pretended execution of the Duke of Monmouth, the king,
attended by three men, came to the Tower and summoned the duke to his
presence. A kind of loose cowl was thrown over his head, and he was put
into a carriage, into which the king and his attendants also got, and
was driven away."

Sainte-Foix also referred to the alleged visit of Saunders, confessor
to James II, paid to the Duchess of Portsmouth after the death of that
monarch, when the duchess took occasion to say that she could never
forgive King James for consenting to Monmouth's execution, in spite of
the oath he had taken on the sacred elements at the deathbed of Charles
II that he would never take his natural brother's life, even in case of
rebellion. To this the priest replied quickly, "The king kept his oath."

Hume also records this solemn oath, but we cannot say that all the
historians agree on this point. 'The Universal History' by Guthrie and
Gray, and the 'Histoire d'Angleterre' by Rapin, Thoyras and de Barrow,
do not mention it.

"Further," wrote Sainte-Foix, "an English surgeon called Nelaton, who
frequented the Cafe Procope, much affected by men of letters, often
related that during the time he was senior apprentice to a surgeon who
lived near the Porte Saint-Antoine, he was once taken to the Bastille
to bleed a