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It was hard for him to die, but he composed himself to enter eternity "with the piety becoming a Christian, and the resolution becoming a king;" as his brother narrates. About ten o'clock on Friday morning, February 6th, 1685, he found relief in unconsciousness; before midday chimed he was dead. He had reached the fifty-fifth year of his life, and the twenty-fifth year of his reign.
Sainte-Foix was, however, not acquainted with the letter of Barbezieux, dated the 13th August 1691, to which we have already referred, as a proof that the prisoner was not the Comte de Vermandois; it is equally a proof that he was not the Duke of Monmouth, as Sainte-Foix maintained; for sentence was passed on the Duke of Monmouth in 1685, so that it could not be of him either that Barbezieux wrote in 1691, "The prisoner whom you have had in charge for twenty years."
The regular army which was kept up in England at the beginning of the year 1685 consisted, all ranks included, of about seven thousand foot, and about seventeen hundred cavalry and dragoons. The whole charge amounted to about two hundred and ninety thousand pounds a year, less then a tenth part of what the military establishment of France then cost in time of peace.
But on this subject Lowther harangued in vain. Whigs and Tories were equally fixed in the opinion that the liberality of Parliaments had been the chief cause of the disasters of the last thirty years; that to the liberality of the Parliament of 1660 was to be ascribed the misgovernment of the Cabal; that to the liberality of the Parliament of 1685 was to be ascribed the Declaration of Indulgence, and that the Parliament of 1690 would be inexcusable if it did not profit by a long, a painful, an unvarying experience.
The death of Charles II in February, 1685, postponed action in England, and in Massachusetts the government went on as usual, the elections taking place and deputies meeting, though with manifest half-heartedness.
"There have been sixty thousand conversions in the jurisdiction of Bordeaux, and twenty thousand in that of Montauban," wrote Louvois to his father in the first part of September, 1685; "the rapidity with which this goes on is such, that, before the end of the month, there will not remain ten thousand religionists in the district of Bordeaux, in which there were a hundred and fifty thousand on the 15th of last month."
The engravings bear different dates between 1685 and thirty years later, and were executed at Rome. August 4th. We ascended our tower yesterday afternoon to see the sunset. In my first sketch of the Val d' Arno I said that the Arno seemed to hold its course near the bases of the hills.
But his nature, at once ferocious and ignoble, showed itself in every line that he penned. When the first Observators appeared there was some excuse for his acrimony. The Whigs were then powerful; and he had to contend against numerous adversaries, whose unscrupulous violence might seem to justify unsparing retaliation. But in 1685 all the opposition had been crushed.
In 1671 the population, according to a census of that year, numbered less than four hundred and fifty. This was presently increased by sixty new colonists from France. By 1685 this population had more than doubled and the tiny settlements appeared to be thriving. But after 1690 war again racked the land.
Unfortunately the population of England in 1685, cannot be ascertained with perfect accuracy. For no great state had then adopted the wise course of periodically numbering the people. All men were left to conjecture for themselves; and, as they generally conjectured without examining facts, and under the influence of strong passions and prejudices, their guesses were often ludicrously absurd.
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