Respecting in its identity
and history, from its removal from the rebel duke's pocket down to its
production at the Royal Irish Academy, Dr. Anster showed that after
Monmouth was beheaded--which he was on Tower Hill, by the too-celebrated
John Ketch, on the 15th July, 1685--the articles found on his person
were given to the king. At James's deposition, three years afterwards,
all his manuscripts, including those that had belonged to Monmouth, were
carried into France, where they remained till the Revolution in that
country a century afterwards. Dr. Anster, in exhibiting the book,
showed that the remains of silver clasps had been destroyed, and a part
of the leather of the covers at each side torn away, seemingly for the
purpose of removing some name on a coat of arms with which it had been
once marked; and this he accounted for by the belief that at the period
of the French Revolution the persons in whose custody they were, being
fearful of the suspicions likely to arise from their possession of books
with royal arms on them, tore off the covers, and sent the books to St.
Omer's. The after-fate of the larger books was, that they were burned;
some small ones, we are distinctly told, were saved from this fate, but
seem to have been disregarded, and all trace of them lost. The Abbe
Waters--a collateral descendant of Lucy Waters, the Duke of Monmouth's
mother--was the person with whom George IV. negotiated for the Stuart
papers, and from whom the volumes which have since appeared as Clark's
_Life of James the Second_ were obtained; and it is from the Abbe Waters
we have the account of the destruction of King James's autograph papers.
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