Chapter II: The Popish Plot (3)

Charles at once took advantage of this turn of affairs. He recalled the Duke of York to the Court. He received the resignation of Lord Russell as well as those of Lord Cavendish and the Earl of Essex who had at last gone over to Shaftesbury's projects "with all his heart." Temple had all but withdrawn from the Council; and public affairs were now left in the hands of Lord Sunderland and Lord Halifax, of Godolphin, a laborious financier, and of Laurence Hyde, a younger son of Lord Clarendon. Shaftesbury met the king's defiance with as bold a defiance of his own. Followed by a crowd of his adherents he attended before the Grand Jury of Middlesex to indict the Duke of York as a Catholic recusant and the king's mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, as a national nuisance, while Monmouth made a progress through the country and gained favour everywhere by his winning demeanour. Above all Shaftesbury relied on the temper of the Commons, elected as they had been in the very heat of the panic and irritated by the long delay in calling the Houses together.

[Sidenote: France and Europe.]

At this moment, however, a new and formidable opponent to Shaftesbury's plans presented himself in the Prince of Orange. The position of William had for some time been one of singular difficulty. He had been forced, and chiefly through the treacherous diplomacy of Charles the Second, to consent to the Treaty of Nimeguen which left France matchless in arms and dominant over Europe as she had never been before. Holland indeed was saved from the revenge of Lewis, but fresh spoils had been wrested from Spain, and Franche-Comté which had been restored at the close of the former war was retained at the end of this. Above all, France overawed Europe by the daring and success with which she had faced single-handed the wide coalition against her. From the moment when the war came to an end her king's arrogance became unbounded. Lorraine was turned into a subject-state. Genoa was bombarded and its Doge forced to seek pardon in the ante-chambers of Versailles. The Pope was humiliated by the march of an army upon Rome to avenge a slight offered to the French ambassador. The Empire was outraged by a shameless seizure of Imperial fiefs in Elsass and elsewhere which provoked remonstrances even from Charles. The whole Protestant world was defied by the increasing persecution of the Huguenots, a persecution which was to culminate in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

[Sidenote: William and England.]

In the mind of Lewis peace meant a series of outrages on the powers around him; but every outrage helped the cool and silent adversary who was looking on from the Hague in his task of building up that Great Alliance of all Europe from which alone he looked for any effectual check to the ambition of France. The experience of the last war had taught William that of such an alliance England must form a part, and the efforts of the Prince ever since the peace had been directed to secure her co-operation. A reconciliation of the king with his Parliament was an indispensable step towards freeing Charles from his dependence on France, and it was such a reconciliation that William at first strove to bring about; but he was for a long time foiled by the steadiness with which Charles clung to the power whose aid was needful to carry out the schemes which he was contemplating. The change of policy, however, which followed on the fall of the Cabal and the entry of Danby into power raised new hopes in William's mind, and his marriage with Mary dealt Lewis what proved to be a fatal blow. James was without a son, and the marriage with Mary would at any rate ensure William the aid of England in his great enterprise on his father-in-law's death. But it was impossible to wait for that event, and though the Prince used his new position to bring Charles round to a decided policy his efforts remained fruitless. The storm of the Popish Plot complicated his position. In the earlier stages of the Exclusion Bill, when the Parliament seemed resolved simply to pass over James and to seat Mary at once on the throne after her uncle's death, William stood apart from the struggle, doubtful of its issue though prepared to accept the good luck if it came to him. But the fatal error of Shaftesbury in advancing the claims of Monmouth forced him into action. To preserve his wife's right of succession with all the great issues which were to come of it, as well as to secure his own, no other course was left than to adopt the cause of the Duke of York. Charles too seemed at last willing to purchase the support of the Prince in England by a frank adhesion to his policy abroad. He protested against the encroachments which Lewis was making in Germany. He promised aid to Holland in case of attack. He listened with favour to William's proposal of a general alliance of the European powers, and opened negotiations for that purpose with Brandenburg and Spain. William indeed believed that the one step now needed to bring England to his side in the coming struggle with Lewis was a reconciliation between Charles and the Parliament grounded on the plan for providing Protestant securities which Charles was ready again to bring forward.

[Sidenote: William and the Exclusion.]

But he still remained in an attitude of reserve when the Parliament at last met in October. The temper of the Commons was as bitter as Shaftesbury had hoped. It was in vain that Charles informed them of his negotiations for an European alliance and called on them to support him by reason and moderation. The House was too full of the sense of danger at home to heed dangers abroad. Its first act was to vote that its care should be "to suppress Popery and prevent a Popish successor." Rumours of a Catholic plot in Ireland were hardly needed to set aside all schemes of Protestant securities, and to push the Exclusion Bill through the Commons without a division. So strong had Monmouth's party become that a proposal to affirm the rights of Mary and William by name in the Bill was evaded and put aside. From this moment the course of the Prince became clear. So resolute was the temper of the Lower House that even Temple and Essex now gave their adhesion to the Exclusion Bill as a necessity, and Sunderland himself wavered towards accepting it. But Halifax, whose ability and eloquence had now brought him fairly to the front, opposed it resolutely and successfully in the Lords; and Halifax was but the mouthpiece of William. "My Lord Halifax is entirely in the interest of the Prince of Orange," the French ambassador, Barillon, wrote to his master, "and what he seems to be doing for the Duke of York is really in order to make an opening for a compromise by which the Prince of Orange may benefit." The Exclusion Bill once rejected, Halifax followed up the blow by bringing forward a plan of Protestant securities which would have taken from James on his accession the right of veto on any bill passed by the two Houses, the right of negotiating with foreign states, or of appointing either civil or military officers save with the consent of Parliament. This plan, like his opposition to the Exclusion, was no doubt prompted by the Prince of Orange; and the States of Holland supported it by pressing Charles to come to an accommodation with his subjects which would enable them to check the perpetual aggressions which France was making on her neighbours.

[Sidenote: Trial of Lord Stafford.]

But if the Lords would have no Exclusion Bill the Commons with as good reason would have no Securities Bill. They felt--as one of the members for London fairly put it--that such securities would break down at the very moment they were needed. A Catholic king, should he ever come to the throne, would have other forces besides those in England to back him. "The Duke rules over Scotland; the Irish and the English Papists will follow him; he will be obeyed by the officials of high and low rank whom the king has appointed; he will be just such a king as he thinks good." Shaftesbury, however, was far from resting in a merely negative position. He made a despairing effort to do the work of exclusion by a Bill of Divorce, which would have enabled Charles to put away his queen on the ground of barrenness and by a fresh marriage to give a Protestant heir to the throne. The Earl's course shows that he felt the weakness of Monmouth's cause; and perhaps that he was already sensible of a change in public feeling. This, however, Shaftesbury resolved to check and turn by a great public impeachment which would revive and establish the general belief in the Plot. Lord Stafford, who from his age and rank was looked on as the leader of the Catholic party, had lain a prisoner in the Tower since the first outburst of popular frenzy. He was now solemnly impeached; and his trial in December 1680 mustered the whole staff of informers to prove the truth of a Catholic conspiracy against the king and the realm. The evidence was worthless; but the trial revived, as Shaftesbury had hoped, much of the old panic, and the condemnation of the prisoner by a majority of his peers was followed by his death on the scaffold. The blow produced its effect on all but Charles. Sunderland again pressed the king to give way. But deserted as he was by his ministers and even by his mistress, for the Duchess of Portsmouth had been cowed into supporting the Exclusion by the threats of Shaftesbury, Charles was determined to resist. On the coupling of a grant of supplies with demands for a voice in the appointment of officers of the royal garrisons he prorogued the Parliament.

[Sidenote: Charles turns again to France.]

William's policy had failed to bring the Commons round to the king's plans and Charles sullenly turned again to France. All dreams of heading Europe in her strife against Lewis were set aside. Charles became deaf to the projects of the Prince of Orange, and listened to the remonstrances which James addressed to him through his favourite Churchill in favour of an alliance with the Catholic king. With characteristic subtlety, however, he dissolved the existing Parliament and called a new one to meet in March 1681. The act was a mere blind. The king's aim was to frighten the country into reaction by the dread of civil strife; and his summons of the Parliament to Oxford was an appeal to the country against the disloyalty of the capital, and an adroit means of reviving the memories of the Civil War. With the same end he ordered his guards to accompany him on the pretext of anticipated disorder; and Shaftesbury, himself terrified at the projects of the Court, aided the king's designs by appearing with his followers in arms on the plea of self-protection. The violence of the Earl's party only strengthened the resolution of the king. Monmouth renewed his progresses through the country, and was met by deputations and addresses in every town he visited. London was so restless that riots broke out in its streets. Revolt seemed at hand, and Charles hastened to conclude his secret negotiations with France. Lewis was as ready for an agreement as Charles. The one king verbally pledged himself to a policy of peace, in other words to withdrawal from any share in the Grand Alliance which William was building up. The other promised a small subsidy which with the natural growth of the Royal revenue sufficed to render Charles, if he remained at peace, independent of Parliamentary aids.

[Sidenote: The Parliament at Oxford.]

It was with this arrangement already concluded that Charles met his Parliament at Oxford. The members of the House of Commons were the same as those who had been returned to the Parliaments he had just dissolved, and their temper was naturally embittered by the two dissolutions. But their violence simply played into the king's hands. William's party still had hopes of bringing about a compromise; but the rejection of a new Limitation Bill brought forward by Halifax, which while conceding to James the title of king would have vested the actual functions of government in the Prince and Princess of Orange during his reign, alienated the more moderate and sensible of the Country party. They were alienated still more by a bold appeal of Shaftesbury to Charles himself to recognize Monmouth as his successor. The attempt of the Lower House to revive the panic by impeaching an informer named Fitzharris before the House of Lords, in defiance of the constitutional rule which entitled him as a commoner to a trial by his peers in the course of common law, did still more to throw public opinion on the side of the Crown. Shaftesbury's course, in fact, went wholly on a belief that the penury of the Treasury left Charles at his mercy, and that a refusal of supplies must wring from the king his assent to the Exclusion. But the gold of France had freed the king from his thraldom. He had used the Parliament simply to exhibit himself as a sovereign whose patience and conciliatory temper were rewarded with insult and violence; and now that his end was accomplished he no sooner saw the Exclusion Bill reintroduced into the Commons than he suddenly dissolved the Houses after but a month's sitting and appealed in a royal declaration to the justice of the nation at large.

[Sidenote: Dryden.]

The appeal was met by an almost universal burst of loyalty. The Church rallied to the king; his declaration was read from every pulpit; and the Universities solemnly decided that "no religion, no law, no fault, no forfeiture" could avail to bar the sacred right of hereditary succession. The arrest of Shaftesbury on a charge of suborning false witnesses to the Plot marked the new strength of the Crown. The answer of the nation at large was uttered in the first great poem of John Dryden. Born in 1631 of a good Northamptonshire family, Dryden had grown up amidst the tumult of the civil wars in a Puritan household. His grandfather, Sir Erasmus Dryden, had gone to prison at seventy rather than contribute to a forced loan. His father had been a committee-man and sequestrator under the Commonwealth. He entered life under the protection of a cousin, Sir Gilbert Pickering, who sate as one of the judges at the king's trial. Much of this early training lived in Dryden to the last. He never freed himself from the Puritan sense of religion, from the Puritan love for theological discussion and ecclesiastical controversy. Two of his greatest poems, the "Religio Laici," and the "Hind and Panther," are simply theological treatises in verse. Nor did the Commonwealth's man ever die in him. "All good subjects," he could say boldly in an hour of royal triumph, "abhor arbitrary power whether in one or in many"; and no writer has embodied in more pregnant words the highest claim of a people's right, that

"right supreme
To make their kings, for kings are made for them."

Dryden grew up too amidst the last echoes of the Elizabethan verse. Jonson and Massinger, Webster and Shirley, were still living men in his childhood. The lyrics of Herrick, the sweet fancies of George Herbert, were fresh in men's ears as he grew to manhood. Even when he entered into the new world of the Restoration some veterans of this nobler school, like Denham and Waller, were still lingering on the stage. The fulness and imaginative freedom of Elizabethan prose lived on till 1677 in Jeremy Taylor, while Clarendon preserved to yet later years the grandeur and stateliness of its march. Above all Milton still sate musing on the "Paradise Lost" in the tapestried chamber of his house in Bunhill Fields.

[Sidenote: Dryden and the Critical Poets.]

Throughout his life something of the spirit of the age which he was the last to touch lived on in Dryden. He loved and studied Chaucer and Spenser even while he was copying Molière and Corneille. His noblest panegyric was pronounced over Shakspere. At the time when Rymer, the accepted critic of the Restoration, declared "our poetry of the last age as rude as our architecture," and sneered at "that Paradise Lost of Milton's which some are pleased to call a poem," Dryden saw in it "one of the greatest, most noble and sublime poems which either this age or nation hath produced." But whether in mind or in life Dryden was as unlike the Elizabethans as he was in his earlier years unlike the men of the poetic school which followed him. Of that school, the critical school as it has been called of English poetry, he was indeed the founder. He is the first of our great poets in whom "fancy is but the feather of the pen." Whether he would or no Dryden's temper was always intellectual. He was a poet, for if dead to the subtler and more delicate forms of imaginative delight he loved grandeur, and his amazing natural force enabled him to realize in great part the grandeur which he loved. But beneath all his poetry lay a solid bottom of reason. His wildest outbursts of passion are broken by long passages of cool argument. His heroes talk to his heroines in a serried dialectic. Every problem of morals, of religion, of politics, forces itself into his verse, and is treated there in the same spirit of critical inquiry.

[Sidenote: His Tragedies.]

In other words Dryden was the poet of his day. But he was the poet of a time of transition, and his temper is transitional. It was only by slow and uncertain steps that he advanced to the full rationalism of the Critical school. His first little poem, some verses written in 1659 on the death of Lord Hastings, is a mass of grotesque extravagances in the worst style of Donne. The dramas of his early work after the Restoration are crowded with the bombastic images, the affected conceits, the far-fetched metaphors which it is the merit of the critical school to have got rid of. In his tragedies indeed the tradition of a freer and larger time jarred against the unities and the critical rules with which he strove to bind himself. If he imitated the foreign stage he could not be blind to the fact that the Elizabethan playwrights possessed "a more masculine fancy and a greater spirit in the writing than there is in any of the French." He followed Corneille but he was haunted by memories of "the divine Shakspere." His failure indeed sprang from the very truth of his poetic ideal. He could not be imaginative in the highest dramatic sense, but the need of imaginativeness pressed on him while it was ceasing to press on his brother playwrights. He could not reach the sublime, but neither could he content himself as they did with the prosaic; he rants, fumes, and talks wild bombast in the vain effort after sublimity.

[Sidenote: His Comedies.]

Dryden failed in Comedy as he failed in Tragedy, but here the failure sprang from the very force and vigour of his mind. He flung himself like the men of his day into the reaction against Puritanism. His life was that of a libertine; and his marriage with a woman of fashion who was yet more dissolute than himself only gave a new spur to his debaucheries. Large as was his income from the stage, and it equalled for many years the income of a country squire, he was always in debt and forced to squeeze gifts from patrons by fulsome adulation. Like the rest of the fine gentlemen about him he aired his Hobbism in sneers at the follies of religion and the squabbles of creeds. The grossness of his comedies rivalled that of Wycherley himself. But it is the very extravagance of his coarseness which shows how alien it was to the real temper of the man. A keen French critic has contrasted the libertinism of England under the Restoration with the libertinism of France, and has ruthlessly pointed out how the gaiety, the grace, the naturalness of the one disappears in the forced, hard, brutal brilliancy of the other. The contrast is a just one. The vice of the English libertine was hard and unnatural just because his real nature took little share in it. In sheer revolt against the past he was playing a part which was not his own and which he played badly, which he forced and exaggerated, just because it was not his own. Dryden scoffs at priests and creeds, but his greater poetry is coloured throughout with religion. He plays the rake, but the two pictures which he has painted with all his heart are the pictures of the honest country squire and the poor country parson. He passes his rivals in the grossness of his comedies, he flings himself recklessly into the evil about him because it is the fashion and because it pays. But he cannot sport lightly and gaily with what is foul. He is driven if he is coarse at all to be brutally coarse. His freedom of tone, to borrow Scott's fine remark, is like the forced impudence of a timid man.

[Sidenote: The New Criticism.]

Slowly but ceaselessly, however, the critical taste of his time told on Dryden. The poetry of good sense, as it proudly called itself, triumphed in Boileau, and the rules of taste and form which Boileau laid down were accepted as the law of letters on the one side of the Channel as well as on the other. Andrew Marvell, in whom the older imaginative beauty still found a worshipper, stood alone in his laughter at the degradation of poetry into prose. Fancy was set aside for reason, "that substantial useful part which gains the head, while Fancy wins the heart." It was the head and not the heart that poetry now cared to gain. But with all its prose the new criticism did a healthy work in insisting on clearness, simplicity, and good sense. In his "Rehearsal" Buckingham quizzed fairly enough the fume and bombast of Dryden's tragedies. But Dryden was already echoing his critics' prayer for a year "of prose and sense." He was tired of being "the Sisyphus of the stage, to roll up a stone with endless labour, which is perpetually falling down again." "To the stage," he owned, "my genius never much inclined me," and he had long had dreams, stirred no doubt by his admiration for Milton, of undertaking some epic story. But need held him to the boards and years passed by, and Dryden still stood in the second rank of English poetry, outdone in comedy by men like Etherege and rivalled in tragedy by men like Settle. Only in a single poem, that of the "Annus Mirabilis," in 1671, had he given any true indications of his surpassing powers.

[Sidenote: Dryden and the Plot.]

It was in this mood of failure and disappointment that the Popish Plot found him. Of its reality he made no question; "a plot," he says emphatically, "there was." But his cool good sense saw how the truth had been "dashed and brewed with lies." What stirred him more was, as he believed, the return of anarchy. Puritan as his training had been he had grown up like the bulk of the men about him with a horror of the social and religious disorders which the civil war had brought in its train. He clung to authority as a security against revolution. It was this that drove him from the Puritanism of his youth to the Anglican dogmatism of the "Religio Laici," and from thence to the tempered Catholicism of the "Hind and Panther." It was this which made him sing by turns the praises of Cromwell and the praises of the king whom Cromwell had hunted from one refuge to another. No man denounced the opponents of the Crown with more ruthless invective. No man humbled himself before the throne with more fulsome adulation. Some of this no doubt was mere flattery, but not all of it. Dryden like his age was conscious that new currents of feeling and opinion were sweeping him from the old moorings of mankind. But he shrank in terror from the wide ocean over whose waters he drifted. In religion he was a rationalist, a sceptic, whether he would or no; but he recoiled from the maze of "anxious thoughts" which spread before him, of thoughts "that in endless circles roll without a centre where to fix the soul," and clung to the Church that would give him, if not peace, at least quiet. In politics he was as much a rationalist as in religion, but he turned horrorstruck from the sight of a "state drawn to the dregs of a democracy," and in the crisis of the Popish Plot he struck blindly for the Crown.

[Sidenote: "Absalom and Achitophel."]

Dryden like the Royalists generally believed that the arrest of Shaftesbury had alone saved England from civil war, and from that worst of civil wars where a son fights against his father's throne. In his "Absalom and Achitophel" the poet told the story of the threatened strife under the thin veil of the revolt against David. Charles was the Hebrew king, Monmouth was Absalom, Shaftesbury was the wily Achitophel who drew him into revolt. The "Absalom" was a satire, and it was the first great English satire, for the satires of Marston and Hall were already forgotten. It is in ages indeed like the Restoration that satire naturally comes to the front. In the reaction after a time of high ideals and lofty efforts the sense of contrast between the aims and the powers of man, between his hopes and their fulfilment, takes form whether in the kindly pitifulness of humour or in the bitter revulsion of satire. And mingled with this in Dryden was an honest indignation at the hypocrisy around him. The men he attacks are not real men but actors. Buckingham and Shaftesbury, the infidel leader of the Independents and the deistical leader of the Presbyterians, were alike playing a part. But the largeness and fairness of his temper saved Dryden's satire from the vicious malignity of that of Pope. He has an artistic love of picturesque contrast, he has a great writer's pride in the consciousness of power. But he has no love of giving pain for the mere pain's sake, and he has a hatred of unfairness. Even in his contempt for the man he is just to Buckingham, and his anger does not blind him to the great qualities of Shaftesbury.

[Sidenote: Progress of the Reaction.]

The even and effortless force of the poem, the disappearance of inequalities and faults of taste, showed that Dryden was at last master of his powers. But it was not this nervous strength alone which suddenly brought him to the forefront of English letters. It was the general sense that his "Absalom" was the opening of a new literary developement. Its verse, free from the old poetic merits as from the old poetic faults, clear, nervous, condensed, argumentative, proclaimed the final triumph of the "poetry of good sense." Its series of portraits showed the new interest in human character which had been stirred by the Civil War, and which was deepening with the growing indifference to larger thoughts of nature and the growing concentration of man's thoughts on man. They led the way to that delight in the analysis of character in its lowest as in its highest forms which produced the essayists and the novel. Above all the "Absalom" was the first work in which literature became a great political power. In it Dryden showed himself the precursor of Swift and of Bolingbroke, of Burke and of Cobbett. The poem was bought eagerly, and it undoubtedly helped to bring about that triumph of the king with the prophecy of which it closed. But prisoner as Shaftesbury was, the struggle with him was not yet over. London was still true to him; only a few days after the appearance of the "Absalom and Achitophel" the Middlesex Grand Jury ignored the bill of his indictment, and his discharge from the Tower was welcomed in every street with bonfires and ringing of bells. But a fresh impulse was given to the loyal enthusiasm of the country at large by the publication of a plan said to have been found among his papers, the plan of a secret association for the furtherance of the Exclusion whose members bound themselves to obey the orders of Parliament even after its prorogation or dissolution by the Crown. So general was the reaction that Halifax, who had now become the most conspicuous member of the royal Council, though scared by the Whig threats of impeachment, advised the calling of a new Parliament in the belief that it would be a loyal one. William of Orange too visited England to take advantage of the turn of affairs to pin Charles to the policy of the Alliance.

[Sidenote: Shaftesbury's Death.]

The king met both counsels with evasion. He kept his own secret. Hyde was the only one of his ministers whom he had trusted with the knowledge of his French negotiations, and they remained as unknown to William as to Halifax. But their effect was seen in the new vigour which Lewis gave to his policy at home and abroad. He was resolved to bring about national unity by crushing the French Protestants, to gain a strong frontier to the East, and to be ready to seize the Spanish heritage on the death of Charles the Fourth. The agreement was no sooner made with Charles than persecution fell heavy on the Huguenots; and the seizure of Strassburg and Casale, the keys of Germany and Italy, with that of Luxemburg, the key of the United Provinces, brought Europe to the verge of war. Charles, indeed, was anxious to avoid war and he was as anxious to avoid Parliaments whose assembly war would certainly force upon him as Lewis himself. The tide of loyal reaction was mounting in fact higher every day. The king secured the adhesion of the Church by a renewed persecution of the Nonconformists, which drove Penn from England and thus brought about the settlement of Pennsylvania as a refuge for his fellow-Quakers. He was soon strong enough to call back James to Court and to arrest Monmouth, who had resumed his almost royal progresses as a means of again stirring opinion in his favour. London alone remained firm for the Whigs; but the friendship of a Tory mayor secured the nomination of Tory sheriffs in the summer of 1682, and the juries they packed left the life of every Exclusionist at the mercy of the Crown. Shaftesbury saw himself threatened with ruin. It was in vain that he offered to waive his plans of exclusion and to fall in with the king's older proposals of a limited monarchy in the case of James's accession. The loss of London left him without a shelter, and drove him to wild conspiracies with a handful of adventurers who were as desperate as himself. He hid himself in the City where he boasted that ten thousand "brisk boys" were ready to appear at his call. From his hiding-place he urged his friends to rise in arms. But their delays drove him to flight; and in January 1683, two months after his arrival in Holland, the soul of the great leader, great from his immense energy and the wonderful versatility of his genius, but whose genius and energy had ended in wrecking for the time the fortunes of English freedom and in associating the noblest of causes with the vilest of crimes, found its first quiet in death.

[Sidenote: The Rye-House Plot.]

The flight of Shaftesbury proclaimed the triumph of the king. His marvellous sagacity had told him when the struggle was over and further resistance useless. But the country leaders who had delayed to answer the Earl's call still believed opposition possible, and looked for support to the discontent of the Nonconformists at the revival of the penal laws. Monmouth, with Lord Essex, Lord Howard of Escrick, Lord Russell, Hampden, and Algernon Sidney, held meetings with the view of founding an association whose agitation should force on the king the assembly of a Parliament. The more desperate spirits who had clustered round Shaftesbury as he lay hidden in the City took refuge in plots of assassination, and in a plan for murdering Charles and his brother as they passed the Rye-House on the road from London to Newmarket. Both projects were betrayed, and though they were wholly distinct from one another the cruel ingenuity of the Crown lawyers blended them into one. Lord Essex saved himself from a traitor's death by suicide in the Tower. Lord Russell, convicted on a charge of sharing in the Rye-House plot, was beheaded on the 21st of July 1683, in front of his father the Earl of Bedford's house in Lincoln's Inn Fields. The same fate awaited Algernon Sidney. Monmouth fled in terror over sea, and his flight was followed by a series of prosecutions for sedition directed against his followers.

END OF VOL. VI

* * * * * *

Transcriber's Notes:

The following words appear with and without hyphens. They have
been left as in the original.

Franche-Comté Franche Comté
good-will goodwill

Ellipses match the original.