I knew nothing at that time of the
dangers and sorrows of those who live in the world and are mixed in its
affairs.
Yet it was a time of public peril, and not a few who dwelt in the quiet
corners of the earth found themselves embroiled suddenly in great
matters of state. For when the Duke of Monmouth landed in Dorsetshire it
was not the dwellers in great cities or the intriguers of the Court that
followed him chiefly to their undoing; it was the peasant who left his
plough and the cloth-worker his loom. Men who could neither read nor
write were caught up by the cry of a Protestant leader, and went after
him to their ruin.
The prince to whose standard they flocked was, for all his sweet and
taking manners, but a profligate at best; he had no true religion in his
heart--nothing but a desire, indeed, for his own aggrandisement,
whatever he might say to the unhappy maid that handed a Bible to him at
Taunton. But of this the people were ignorant, and so it came to pass
that they were led to destruction in a fruitless cause.
[Sidenote: French Leave]
But there were, besides the men that died nobly in a mistaken struggle
for religious freedom, others that joined the army from mean and ignoble
motives, and others again that had not the courage to go through with
that which they had begun, but turned coward and traitor at the last.
Of one of them I am now to write, and I will say of him no more evil
than must be.
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