In England, popular feeling against the king was at fever heat. His illegitimate Protestant nephew—putative son of Charles II—the Duke of Monmouth, who had been exiled, returned to England and organized a rebellion against him. This ill-starred movement culminated at Sedgemoor, in Somersetshire, in the summer of 1685. A battle was fought there between the unorganized English peasants, under “King Monmouth,” as they called him, and the royal army, under the Earl of Feversham. The rebels fought with commendable courage, but were badly commanded and suffered an overwhelming defeat. Monmouth escaped from the field, but was captured soon afterward, tried, found guilty, and beheaded on Tower Hill, of bloody memory, July 15, 1685. He had appealed in vain to James for mercy, and appealed in a manner so craven and undignified that he aroused the disgust of his stern uncle. But the blood of the vanquished did not cease to flow when Monmouth died. The “Bloody Assizes,” conducted by Jeffreys, the “great crimson toad,” as Dickens describes him, and four assistant judges, spread death and terror throughout the English districts recently in revolt. This period of English history bore a striking resemblance to the 1798 period in Ireland, when other “great crimson toads” hanged the hapless peasantry, and some of higher rank, by the hundred and thousand. All this butchery made James unpopular with a vast majority of the English people, but, as he had no male heir, the nation hesitated to rise against him, especially as Monmouth himself had been the aggressor. But James, while Duke of York, had married a young wife, the Princess Mary, sister of the Duke of Modena, who bore him a son—afterward called by the Hanoverian faction the Pretender—in June, 1688. This altered the whole aspect of affairs and a revolution became imminent immediately. Mary of Modena, although an intelligent and amiable woman, was of a haughty and somewhat punctilious disposition at times. This made her almost as unpopular with the English people as was her husband. Sir Walter Scott relates that, while Duchess of York, she accompanied her husband to Scotland, whither he went at the behest of his brother, King Charles. James got along very well with the Scotch, particularly the Highlanders, who adored him, and whose loyalty to his family remained unshaken until after Culloden. He invited an old Continental veteran, Sir Thomas Dalzell, to dine with him. The duchess had the bad taste to object to the company of a commoner. “Make yourself easy on that head, madam,” remarked Sir Thomas; “I have sat at a table where your father might have stood behind my chair!” He alluded to a dinner given him and others by the Emperor of Austria, who was the suzerain of the Duke of Modena. The latter, if called upon by the emperor, would have had to act in the capacity of an honorary waiter. All students of history are, doubtless, familiar with the romantic chivalry displayed by Edward the Black Prince, when he