Monmouth was very sincere in his religious professions, and it is probable that a great portion of this sad day was passed in devotion and religious discourse with the two prelates who had been sent by his majesty to assist him in his spiritual concerns.  Turner, bishop of Ely, had been with him early in the morning, and Kenn, bishop of Bath and Wells, was sent, upon the refusal of a respite, to prepare him for the stroke, which it was now irrevocably fixed he should suffer the ensuing day.  They stayed with him all night, and in the morning of the 15th were joined by Dr. Hooper, afterwards, in the reign of Anne, made bishop of Bath and Wells, and by Dr. Tennison, who succeeded Tillotson in the see of Canterbury.  This last divine is stated by Burnet to have been most acceptable to the duke, and, though he joined the others in some harsh expostulations, to have done what the right reverend historian conceives to have been his duty, in a softer and less peremptory manner.  Certain it is, that none of these holy men seem to have erred on the side of compassion or complaisance to their illustrious penitent.  Besides endeavouring to convince him of the guilt of his connection with his beloved lady Harriet, of which he could never be brought to a due sense, they seem to have repeatedly teased him with controversy, and to have been far more solicitous to make him profess what they deemed the true creed of the Church of England, than to soften or console his sorrows, or to help him to that composure of mind so necessary for his situation.  He declared himself to be a member of their Church, but, they denied that he could be so, unless he thoroughly believed the doctrine of passive obedience and non-resistance.  He repented generally of his sins, and especially of his late enterprise, but they insisted that he must repent of it in the way they prescribed to him, that he must own it to have been a wicked resistance to his lawful king, and a detestable act of rebellion.  Some historians have imputed this seemingly cruel conduct to the king’s particular instructions, who might be desirous of extracting, or rather extorting, from the lips of his dying nephew such a confession as would be matter of triumph to the royal cause.  But the character of the two prelates principally concerned, both for general uprightness and sincerity as Church of England men, makes it more candid to suppose that they did not act from motives of servile compliance, but rather from an intemperate party zeal for the honour of their Church, which they judged would be signally promoted if such a man as Monmouth, after having throughout his life acted in defiance of their favourite doctrine, could be brought in his last moments to acknowledge it as a divine truth.  It must never be forgotten, if we would understand the history of this period, that the truly orthodox members of our Church regarded monarchy not as a human, but as a divine institution, and passive obedience and non-resistance, not as political maxims, but as articles of religion.