As for the apparent cause of Charles’s stammering, that is quite impossible even to guess. It is possible that he, a naturally sensitive and refined little boy, may have been unconsciously terrified by his father’s unpleasant personal habits. At any rate, let us keep a soft spot in our hearts for the ill-fated king. Whence came the somewhat nervous strain that runs, like a brass thread, through the whole dynasty of the Stuarts, I hesitate to speculate: perhaps from Darnley, father of James I. They always make me think of a set of naughty children wedged between the great gloomy Tudors and the unpleasant Hanoverians. There was James I, who is generally held by the English to have been an egregious person; next, Charles I, who, probably, would have done better as a poet; then Charles II, who was by far the cleverest of them, but was too lazy; and lastly the gloomy and exceedingly immoral—if all tales are true—James II, who was a man too much under the influence of religion. It is said that he used to get absolution after every time that he visited his mistress. Then there was that poor, lonely, stupid Anne, who could not, for some reason, rear a single one of her numerous children. King Charles II As the best thing that we hear of the life of King Charles II is the manner of his leaving it, I confine myself to a description of his death. You will get a moderately good account of it in Bishop Burnet’s history, of which Swift was so scornful; and a recognisable account of it in Lord Macaulay, written with all the fixed ideas of the early nineteenth century colouring the ink; but the real truth appeared in an article in the _British Medical Journal_ for 1910, which again was drawn largely from Dr. Raymond Crawfurd’s _Last Days of Charles II_. As Dr. Crawfurd gives the official report of Sir Charles Scarburgh, one of the consultants in attendance at the time, probably we may take it that we have the exact details so far as the medical science of 1685 could give them.