sign a declaration that his father told him he was never married to his mother:  and then said, he was sorry indeed for his misfortunes; but his crime was of too great a consequence to be left unpunished, and he must of necessity suffer for it.  The queen is said to have insulted him in a very arrogant and unmerciful manner.  So that when the duke saw there was nothing designed by this interview but to satisfy the queen’s revenge, he rose up from his majesty’s feet with a new air of bravery, and was carried back to the Tower.”

The topics used by Monmouth are such as he might naturally have employed, and the demeanour attributed to him, upon finding the king inexorable, is consistent enough with general probability, and his particular character; but that the king took care to extract from him a confession of Charles’s declaration with respect to his illegitimacy, before he announced his final refusal of mercy, and that the queen was present for the purpose of reviling and insulting him, are circumstances too atrocious to merit belief, without some more certain evidence.  It must be remarked also, that Burnet, whose general prejudices would not lead him to doubt any imputations against the queen, does not mention her majesty’s being present.  Monmouth’s offer of changing religion is mentioned by him, but no authority quoted; and no hint of the kind appears either in James’s Letters, or in the extract from his “Memoirs.”

From Whitehall Monmouth was at night carried to the Tower, where, no longer uncertain as to his fate, he seems to have collected his mind, and to have resumed his wonted fortitude.  The bill of attainder that had lately passed having superseded the necessity of a legal trial, his execution was fixed for the next day but one after his commitment.  This interval appeared too short even for the worldly business which he wished to transact, and he wrote again to the king on the 14th, desiring some short respite, which was peremptorily refused.  The difficulty of obtaining any certainty concerning facts, even in instances where there has not been any apparent motive for disguising them, is nowhere more striking than in the few remaining hours of this unfortunate man’s life.  According to King James’s statement in his “Memoirs,” he refused to see his wife, while other accounts assert positively that she refused to see him, unless in presence of witnesses.  Burnet, who was not likely to be mistaken in a fact of this kind, says they did meet, and parted very coldly, a circumstance which, if true, gives us no very favourable idea of the lady’s character.  There is also mention of a third letter written by him to the king, which being entrusted to a perfidious officer of the name of Scott, never reached its destination; but for this there is no foundation.  What seems most certain is, that in the Tower, and not in the closet, he signed a paper, renouncing his pretensions to the crown, the same which he afterwards delivered on the scaffold; and that he was inclined to make this declaration, not by any vain hope of life, but by his affection for his children, whose situation he rightly judged would be safer and better under the reigning monarch and his successors, when it should be evident that they could no longer be competitors for the throne.