King Monmouth

NEARLY sixty years ago, Mr. George Roberts, head master of the Lyme Regis Grammar School and sometime mayor of the town, published a Life of the Duke of Monmouth, a work showing much patient and intelligent research, and especially proving its author to be a local antiquary of no small distinction. The Protestant Duke’s latest biographer¹ disclaims all desire to supersede his predecessor’s work, which in many respects is likely to remain the principal authority on its subject, but seeks only to supplement it by utilizing the new material brought to light in the last half century. In tastes the two writers are in some sort akin. Mr. Allan Fea — it is pure conjecture on our part — must be a native of one of the southwestern counties, who, for love of his accustomed haunts, followed step by step the adventures of young Charles in The Flight of the King, gathering a store of traditional and pictorial illustration on the way, and has now, in the case of that engaging and graceless youth’s reputed son, continued these congenial wanderings with an equally gratifying result. He writes in a sensible, unpretentious fashion, and the new material has been faithfully collected and set forth, but he can hardly be seriously considered as an historian. Rather he is a lover of historic landmarks and relics and the tales they tell, and he has a very admirable sense of the manner in which history should be illustrated, as King Monmouth brilliantly shows. His right instinct appears even in what is excluded ; for no imaginary presentment of a dramatic or picturesque episode tempts him, even when the picture, so to speak, lies ready to his hand.

The Duke of Monmouth must have been painted nearly as often as, in shop parlance, “celebrities ” are photographed nowadays. Of the selection from these portraits given, two especially, the earliest and latest, make us in some measure conscious of the astonishing beauty, grace, and charm which Grammont describes, — Lely’s adorable boy picture, and the sketch of the head after the executioner had done his work, where death has but refined and ennobled the face in which youth yet lingers. Beside the fine Lely and Kneller portraits of the “ brown, beautiful, bold, yet insipid creature,” to quote Evelyn’s brief but sufficient summary of Lucy Walter, four pictures are reproduced from the same artists, of the two women most closely connected with Monmouth’s later life, — the heiress of Buccleuch, his wife from her childhood, and the hapless Lady Wentworth, — together with those of the men most deeply concerned in the events which led to the Rebellion of 1685 and in the lamentable tragedy of which Sedgemoor was but the first act. The last of the photogravures, which are all of the excellent quality we have learned to look for in English works of this class, is from Kneller’s Jeffreys in the National Gallery, that handsome, high-bred face which lately so enthralled a certain young writer that he unflinchingly attempted the thorough rehabilitation of the Judge of the Bloody Assize. Of course Mr. Fea has not overlooked church, manor house, or inn on the roads which were to lead his hero (using the word conventionally) to Tower Hill, nor does it appear that any relic connected therewith has escaped his attention, and from beginning to end the book has not an illustration which does not illustrate.

S. M. F.