the country. After he had gone a number of his friends formed a plot in favour of Monmouth; but, while they were arranging their plans, a band of desperate men formed another plot to murder the king and the Duke of York at the Rye House, a lonely spot in Hertfordshire. This latter plot was discovered, and the crown lawyers tried to make it appear that the Whig leaders were connected with it. They were innocent, but they knew the judges and juries would be chosen so as to convict them. Monmouth escaped to Holland, Essex killed himself, and Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney were executed. In those days a prisoner was not allowed to have a lawyer to defend him, and so Russell, aided by his devoted wife, who sat beside him at the trial and took notes, conducted his own defence.
13. Death of Charles II.—All opposition to James was now at an end, and he returned to England from Scotland where he had—been hunting down and torturing the poor Covenanters. The charters of many towns were taken away, and this put the power of life and death, and the choice of members of parliament into the hands of the officers chosen by the king. Charles was again in—the pay of Louis, and besides kept several thousand men as a standing army. The clergy preached the duty of “passive obedience”—to the king, and it seemed as if English liberty was near its end. In this hour of her great peril England was saved by the death of Charles, in 1685. When near his end he received the rites of—the Roman Catholic Church at the hands of a priest. His last words were an apology for “being so unconscionably long in—dying”, and a request not to let his favourite mistress, Nell Gwynne, starve.
So ended the reign of the “merry monarch” who
"Never said a foolish thing
And never did a wise one,"
unless we except the encouragement he gave to science by helping to found the Royal Society of England.
