highest political importance, to be guarded with the utmost secrecy,
yet a valet. That valet must be Martin, now called Eustache Dauger,
and his secret can only be connected with Marsilly. It may have
been something about Arlington's negotiations through Marsilly, as
compromising Charles II. Arlington's explanations to the Foreign
Committee were certainly incomplete and disingenuous. He, if not
Charles, was more deeply engaged with Marsilly than he ventured to
report. But Marsilly himself avowed that he did not know why he was
to be executed.

Executed he was, in circumstances truly hideous. Perwich, June 5,
wrote to an unnamed correspondent in England: 'They have all his
papers, which speak much of the Triple Alliance, but I know not
whether they can lawfully hang him for this, having been naturalised
in Holland, and taken in a privileged country' (Switzerland).
Montague (Paris, June 22, 1669) writes to Arlington that Marsilly is
to die, so it has been decided, for 'a rape which he formerly
committed at Nismes,' and after the execution, on June 26, declares
that, when broken on the wheel, Marsilly 'still persisted that he
was guilty of nothing, nor did know why he was put to death.'

Like Eustache Dauger, Marsilly professed that he did not know his
own secret. The charge of a rape, long ago, at Nismes, was
obviously trumped up to cover the real reason for the extraordinary
vindictiveness with which he was pursued, illegally taken, and
barbarously slain. Mere Protestant restlessness on his part is
hardly an explanation. There was clearly no evidence for the charge
of a plot to murder Louis XIV., in which Colbert, in England, seems
to have believed. Even if the French Government believed that he
was at once an agent of Charles II., and at the same time a would-be