Fourth, more than a hundred and forty years after the day on which the blood of Stafford was shed on Tower Hill, the tardy expiation was accomplished. A law annulling the attainder and restoring the injured family to its ancient dignities was presented to parliament by the ministers of the crown, was eagerly welcomed by public men of all parties, and was passed without one dissentient voice.*

It is now necessary that I should trace the origin and progess of that rebellion by which the deliberations of the Houses were suddenly interrupted.

*Stat. 5 Geo. IV. c. 46.

CHAPTER V.

TOWARDS the close of the reign of Charles the Second, some Whigs who had been deeply implicated in the plot so fata! to their party, and who knew themselves to be marked out for destruction, had sought an asylum in the Low Countries.

He

These refugees were in general men of fiery temper and weak judgment. They were also under the influence of that peculiar illusion which seems to belong to their situation. A politician driven into banishment by a hostile faction generally sees the society which he has quitted through a false medium. Every object is distorted and discolored by his regrets, his longings, and his resentments. Every little discontent appears to him to portend a revolution. Every riot is a rebellion cannot be convinced that his country does not pine for him as much as he pines for his country. He imagines that all his old associates, who still dwell at their homes and enjoy their estates, are tormented by the same feelings which make life a burden to himself. The longer his expatriation, the greater does this hallucination become. The lapse of time which cools the ardor of the friends whom he has left behind inflames his. Every month his impatience to revisit his native land increases; and every month his native land remembers and misses him less. This delusion becomes almost a madness

when many exiles who suffer in the same cause herd together on a foreign shore. Their chief employment is to talk of what they once were, and of what they may yet be, to goad each other into animosity against the common enemy, to feed each other with extravagant hopes of victory and revenge. Thus they become ripe for enterprises which would at once be pronounced hopeless by any man whose passions had not. deprived him of the power of calculating chances.

In this mood were many of the outlaws who had assembled on the Continent. The correspondence which they kept up with England was, for the most part, such as tended to excite their feelings and to mislead their judgment. Their informal tion concerning the temper of the public mind was chiefly

derived from the worst members of the Whig party, from men who were plotters and libellers by profession, who were pursued by the officers of justice, who were forced to skulk in disguise through back streets, and who sometimes lay hid for weeks together in cocklofts and cellars. The statesmen who had been the ornaments of the country party, the statesmen who afterwards guided the counsels of the Convention, would have given advice very different from that which was given by such men as John Wildman and Henry Danvers.

Wildman had served forty years before in the parliamentary army, but had been more distinguished there as an agitator than as a soldier, and had early quitted the profession of arms for pursuits better suited to his temper. His hatred of monarchy had induced him to engage in a long series of conspiracies, first against the Protector, and then against the Stuarts. But with Wildman's fanaticism was joined a tender care for his own safety. He had a wonderful skill in grazing the edge of treason. No man understood better how to instigate others to desperate enterprises by words which, when repeated to a jury, might seem innocent, or, at worst, ambiguous. Such was his cunning that, though always plotting, though always known to be plotting, and though long malignantly watched by a vindictive government, he eluded every danger, and died in his bed, after having seen two generations of his accomplices die on the gallows.* Danvers was a man of the same class, hot-headed, but faint-hearted, constantly urged to the brink of danger by enthusiasm, and constantly stopped on that brink by cowardice. He had considerable influence among a portion of the Baptists, had written largely in defence of their peculiar opinions, and had drawn down on himself the severe censure of the most respectable Puritans by attempting to palliate the crimes of Matthias and John of Leyden. It is probable that, had he possessed a little courage, he would have trode in the footsteps of the wretches whom he defended. He was at this time, concealing himself from the officers of justice; for warrants were out against him on account of a grossly calumnious paper of which the government had discovered him to be the author.t

Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, book xiv.; Burnet's Own Times, i. 546, 625; Wade's and Ireton's Narratives, Lansdowne MS. 1152; West's information in the Appendix to Sprat's True Account. + London Gazette, Jan. 4, 168; Ferguson MS. in Eachard's His

It is easy to imagine what kind of intelligence and counsel men, such as have been described, were likely to send to the outlaws in the Netherlands. Of the general character of those outlaws an estimate may be formed from a few samples.

One of the most conspicuous among them was John Ayloffe, a lawyer connected by affinity with the Hydes, and, through the Hydes, with James. Ayloffe had early made himself remarkable by offering a whimsical insult to the government. At a time when the ascendency of the Court of Versailles had excited general uneasiness, he had contrived to put a wooden shoe, the established type, among the English, of French tyranny, into the chair of the House of Commons. He had subsequently been concerned in the Whig Plot; but there is no reason to believe that he was a party to the design of assassinating the royal brothers. He was a man of parts and courage; but his moral character did not stand high. The Puritan divines whispered that he was a careless Gallio or something worse, and that, whatever zeal he might profess for civil liberty, the saints would do well to avoid all connection with him.*

Nathaniel Wade was, like Ayloffe, a lawyer. He had long resided at Bristol, and had been celebrated in his own neighborhood as a vehement republican. At one time he had formed a project of emigrating to New Jersey, where he expected to find institutions better suited to his taste than those of England. His activity in electioneering had introduced him to the notice of some Whig nobles. They had employed him professionally, and had, at length, admitted him to their most secret counsels. He had been deeply concerned in the scheme of insurrection, and had undertaken to head a rising in his own city. He had also been privy to the more odious plot against the lives of Charles and James. But he always declared that, though privy to it, he had abhorred it, and had

tory, iii. 764; Grey's Narrative; Sprat's True Account; Danvers's Treatise on Baptism; Danvers's Innocency and Truth vindicated; Crosby's History of the English Baptists.

Sprat's True Account; Burnet, i. 634; Wade's Confession, Harl. MS. 6845.

Lord Howard of Escrick accused Ayloffe of proposing to assassinate the Duke of York; but Lord Howard was an abject liar; and this story was not part of his original confession, but was added afterwards by way of supplement, and therefore deserves no credit what

ever.

attempted to dissuade his associates from carrying their design into effect. For a man bred to civil pursuits, Wade seems to have had, in an unusual degree, that sort of ability and that sort of nerve which make a good soldier. Unhappily his principles and his courage proved to be not of sufficient force to support him when the fight was over, and when, in prison, he had to choose between death and infamy.*

Another fugitive was Richard Goodenough, who had formerly been Under Sheriff of London. On this man is party had long relied for services of no honorable kind, and espe cially for the selection of jurymen not likely to be troubled with scruples in political cases. He had been deeply concerned in those dark and atrocious parts of the Whig Plot which had been carefully concealed from the most respectable Whigs. Nor is it possible to plead, in extenuation of his guilt, that he was misled by inordinate zeal for the public good. For it will be seen that, after having disgraced a noble cause by his crimes, he betrayed it in order to escape from his well-merited punishment.t

Very different was the character of Richard Rumbold. He had held a commission in Cromwell's own regiment, had guarded the scaffold before the Banqueting House on the day of the great execution, had fought at Dunbar and Worcester, and had always shown in the highest degree the qualities which distinguished the invincible army in which he served, courage of the truest temper, fiery enthusiasm, both political and religious, and with that enthusiasm all the power of selfgovernment which is characteristic of men trained in welldisciplined camps to command and to obey. When the republican troops were disbanded, Rumbold became a maltster, and carried on his trade near Hoddesdon, in that building from which the Rye House Plot derives its name. It had been suggested, though not absolutely determined, in the conferences of the most violent and unscrupulous of the malcontents, that armed men should be stationed in the Rye House to attack the guards who were to escort Charles and James from Newmarket to London. In these conferences Rumbold had borne a part from which he would have shrunk with horror if his

*Wade's Confession, Harl. MS. 6845; Lansdowne MS. 1152; Holloway's narrative in the Appendix to Sprat's Truc Account. Wade owned that Holloway had told nothing but truth.

Sprat's True Account and Appendix, passim.