--Profligacy of the court.--The three duchesses.--The
king is taken ill.--The capital in consternation.--Dr. Ken
questions his majesty.--A Benedictine monk sent for.--Charles
professes catholicity and receives the Sacraments.--Farewell to
all.--His last night on earth.--Daybreak and death.--He rests in
peace.
His majesty's habits changed but little with the flight of time,
To the end of his reign the court continued brilliant and
profligate. Wits, courtezans, and adventurers crowded the royal
drawing-rooms, and conversed without restraint; the monarch
pursued his pleasures with unsatiated zest, taking to himself two
new mistresses, Lady Shannon and Catherine Peg, who respectively
bore him a daughter and a son, duly created Countess of Yarmouth
and Earl of Plymouth. For a while, indeed, a shadow fell upon
the life of the merry monarch, when, in 1683, he was roused to a
sense of danger by discovery of the Rye House conspiracy.
This foul plot, entered into by the Whigs on failure of the
Exclusion Bill, had for its object the murder of his majesty and
of the Duke of York. Before arriving at maturity its existence
and intentions were revealed by one of the conspirators, when
William Lord Russell, the Earl of Essex, and Algernon Sidney,
second son of the Earl of Leicester, were arrested and charged
with high treason. My Lord Essex died in the Tower by his own
hand; Lord Russell was condemned on testimony of one witness, and
duly executed; as was likewise Algernon Sidney, whose writings on
Republicanism were used as evidence against him.
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