Simon Dale by Antonio Hope

It pleased his Grace the Duke of Monmouth so to do all things that men should heed his doing of them. Even in those days, and notwithstanding certain transactions hereinbefore related, I was not altogether a fool, and I had not been long about him before I detected this propensity and, as I thought, the intention underlying it. To set it down boldly and plainly, the more the Duke of Monmouth was in the eye of the nation, the better the nation accustomed itself to regard him as the king's son; the more it fell into the habit of counting him the king's son, the less astonished and unwilling would it be if fate should place him on the king's seat. Where birth is beyond reproach, dignity may be above display; a defect in the first demands an ample exhibition of the second. It was a small matter, this journey to Dover, yet, that he might not go in the train of his father and the Duke of York, but make men talk of his own going, he chose to start beforehand and alone; lest even thus he should not win his meed of notice, he set all the inns and all the hamlets on the road a-gossiping, by accomplishing the journey from London to Canterbury, in his coach-and-six, between sunrise and sunset of a single day. To this end it was needful that the coach should be light; Lord Carford, now his Grace's inseparable companion, alone sat with him, while the rest of us rode on horseback, and the Post supplied us with relays where we were in want of them. Thus we went down gallantly and in very high style, with his Grace much delighted at being told that never had king or subject made such pace in his travelling since the memory of man began. Here was reward enough for all the jolting, the flogging of horses, and the pain of yokels pressed unwillingly into pushing the coach with their shoulders through miry places.

As I rode, I had many things to think of. My woe I held at arm's length. Of what remained, the intimacy between his Grace and my Lord Carford, who were there in the coach together, occupied my mind most constantly. For by now I had moved about in the world a little, and had learnt that many counted Carford no better than a secret Papist, that he was held in private favour, but not honoured in public, by the Duke of York, and that communications passed freely between him and Arlington by the hand of the secretary's good servant and my good friend Mr Darrell. Therefore I wondered greatly at my lord's friendship with Monmouth, and at his showing an attachment to the Duke which, as I had seen at Whitehall, appeared to keep in check even the natural jealousy and resentment of a lover. But at Court a man went wrong if he held a thing unlikely because there was dishonour in it. There men were not ashamed to be spies themselves, nor to use their wives in the same office. There to see no evil was to shut your eyes. I determined to keep mine open in the interests of my new patron, of an older friend, and perhaps of myself also, for Carford's present civility scarcely masked his dislike.