utive authority. Lady Lisle, who, though she had sent her son to
fight against Monmouth, had concealed two rebels in her house, was
executed; another rebel, having been honourable enough to declare that
an Anabaptist female had given him shelter, was pardoned, and the woman
was burned alive. Kirke, on another occasion, gave a town to understand
that he knew its principles to be republican, by hanging nineteen
burgesses. These reprisals were certainly legitimate, for it must be
remembered that, under Cromwell, they cut off the noses and ears of the
stone saints in the churches. James II., who had had the sense to choose
Jeffreys and Kirke, was a prince imbued with true religion; he practised
mortification in the ugliness of his mistresses; he listened to le Pere
la Colombiere, a preacher almost as unctuous as le Pere Cheminais, but
with more fire, who had the glory of being, during the first part of his
life, the counsellor of James II., and, during the latter, the inspirer
of Mary Alcock. It was, thanks to this strong religious nourishment,
that, later on, James II. was enabled to bear exile with dignity, and to
exhibit, in his retirement at Saint Germain, the spectacle of a king
rising superior to adversity, calmly touching for king's evil, and
conversing with Jesuits.

It will be readily understood that such a king would trouble himself to
a certain extent about such a rebel as Lord Linnaeus Clancharlie.
Hereditary peerages have a certain hold on the future, and it was
evident that if any precautions were necessary with regard to that lord,
James II. was not the man to hesitate.

CHAPTER II.

LORD DAVID DIRRY-MOIR.

I.

Lord Linnaeus Clancharlie had not always been old and proscribed; he had
had his phase of youth and passion. We know from Harrison and Pride that
Cromwell, when young, loved women and pleasure, a taste which, at times
(another reading of the text "Woman"), betrays a seditious man. Distrust
the loosely-clasped girdle. _Male proecinctam juvenem cavete_. Lord
Clancharlie, like Cromwell, had had his wild hours and his
irregularities. He was known to have had a natural child, a son. This
son was born in England in the last days of the republic, just as his
father was going into exile. Hence he had never seen his father. This
bastard of Lord Clancharlie had grown up as page at the court of Charles
II. He was styled Lord David Dirry-Moir: he was a lord by courtesy, his
mother being a woman of qu