Dorset was the stage on which were acted the first and one of the concluding scenes of the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685. On June 11th the inhabitants of Lyme Regis were sorely perplexed when they saw three foreign-looking ships, which bore no colours, at anchor in the bay; and their anxiety was not lessened when they saw the custom house officers, who had rowed out, as their habit was, to overhaul the cargo of any vessel arriving at the port, reach the vessels but return not again. Then from seven boats landed some eighty armed men, whose leader knelt down on the shore to offer up thanksgiving for his safe voyage, and to pray for God’s blessing on his enterprise. When it was known that this leader was the Duke of Monmouth the people welcomed him, his blue flag was set up in the market place, and Monmouth’s undignified Declaration—the composition of Ferguson—was read. That same evening the Mayor, who approved of none of these things, set off to rouse the West in the King’s favour, and from Honiton sent a letter giving information of the landing. On June 14th, the first blood was shed in a skirmish near Bridport (it was not a decisive engagement). Monmouth’s men, however, came back to Lyme, the infantry in good order, the cavalry helter-skelter; and little wonder, seeing that the horses, most of them taken from the plough, had never before heard the sound of firearms. Then Monmouth and his men pass off our stage. It is not for the local Dorset historian to trace his marches up and down Somerset, or to describe the battle that was fought in the early hours of the morning of July 6th under the light of the full moon, amid the sheet of thick mist, which clung like a pall over the swampy surface of the level stretch of Sedgemoor. Once again Dorset received Monmouth, no longer at the head of an enthusiastic and brave, though a badly armed and undisciplined multitude, but a lonely, hungry, haggard, heartbroken fugitive. On the morning of July 8th he was found in a field near Horton, which still bears the name of Monmouth’s Close, hiding in a ditch. He was brought before Anthony Etricke of Holt, the Recorder of Poole, and by him sent under escort to London, there to meet his ghastly end on Tower Hill, and to be laid to rest in what Macaulay calls the saddest spot on earth, St. Peter’s in the Tower, the last resting-place of the unsuccessfully ambitious, of those guilty of treason, and also of some whose only fault it was that they were too near akin to a fallen dynasty, and so roused the fears and jealousy of the reigning monarch.