[1] In this, and in the next chapter, I have very seldom thought it necessary to cite authorities: for, in these chapters, I have not detailed events minutely, or used recondite materials; and the facts which I mention are for the most part such that a person tolerably well read in English history, if not already apprised of them, will at least know where to look for evidence of them. In the subsequent chapters I shall carefully indicate the sources of my information.

[2] This is excellently put by Mr. Hallam in the first chapter of his Constitutional History.

[3] See a very curious paper which Strype believed to be in Gardiner's handwriting. Ecclesiastical Memorials, Book 1., Chap. xvii.

[4] These are Cranmer's own words. See the Appendix to Burnet's History of the Reformation, Part 1. Book III. No. 21. Question 9.

[5] The Puritan historian, Neal, after censuring the cruelty with which she treated the sect to which he belonged, concludes thus: "However, notwithstanding all these blemishes, Queen Elizabeth stands upon record as a wise and politic princess, for delivering her kingdom from the difficulties in which it was involved at her accession, for preserving the Protestant reformation against the potent attempts of the Pope, the Emperor, and King of Spain abroad, and the Queen of Scots and her Popish subjects at home.... She was the glory of the age in which she lived, and will be the admiration of posterity."--History of the Puritans, Part I. Chap. viii.

[6] On this subject, Bishop Cooper's language is remarkably clear and strong. He maintains, in his Answer to Martin Marprelate, printed in 1589, that no form of church government is divinely ordained; that Protestant communities, in establishing different forms, have only made a legitimate use of their Christian liberty; and that episcopacy is peculiarly suited to England, because the English constitution is monarchical." All those Churches," says the Bishop, "in which the Gospell, in these daies, after great darknesse, was first renewed, and the learned men whom God sent to instruct them, I doubt not but have been directed by the Spirite of God to retaine this liberty, that, in external government and other outward orders; they might choose such as they thought in wisedome and godlinesse to be most convenient for the state of their countrey and disposition of their people. Why then should this liberty that other countreys have used under anie colour be wrested from us? I think it therefore great presumption and boldnesse that some of our nation, and those, whatever they may think of themselves, not of the greatest wisedome and skill, should take upon them to controlle the whole realme, and to binde both prince and people in respect of conscience to alter the present state, and tie themselves to a certain platforme devised by some of our neighbours, which, in the judgment of many wise and godly persons, is most unfit for the state of a Kingdome."

[7] Strype's Life of Grindal, Appendix to Book II. No. xvii.

[8] Canon 55, of 1603.

[9] Joseph Hall, then dean of Worcester, and afterwards bishop of Norwich, was one of the commissioners. In his life of himself, he says: "My unworthiness was named for one of the assistants of that honourable, grave, and reverend meeting." To high churchmen this humility will seem not a little out of place.

[10] It was by the Act of Uniformity, passed after the Restoration, that persons not episcopally ordained were, for the first time, made incapable of holding benefices. No man was more zealous for this law than Clarendon. Yet he says: "This was new; for there had been many, and at present there were some, who possessed benefices with cure of souls and other ecclesiastical promotions, who had never received orders but in France or Holland; and these men must now receive new ordination, which had been always held unlawful in the Church, or by this act of parliament must be deprived of their livelihood which they enjoyed in the most flourishing and peaceable time of the Church."

[11] Peckard's Life of Ferrar; The Arminian Nunnery, or a Brief Description of the late erected monastical Place called the Arminian Nunnery, at Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire, 1641.

[12] The correspondence of Wentworth seems to me fully to bear out what I have said in the text. To transcribe all the passages which have led me to the conclusion at which I have arrived, would be impossible, nor would it be easy to make a better selection than has already been made by Mr. Hallam. I may, however direct the attention of the reader particularly to the very able paper which Wentworth drew up respecting the affairs of the Palatinate. The date is March 31, 1637.

[13] These are Wentworth's own words. See his letter to Laud, dated Dec. 16, 1634.

[14] See his report to Charles for the year 1639.

[15] See his letter to the Earl of Northumberland, dated July 30, 1638.

[16] How little compassion for the bear had to do with the matter is sufficiently proved by the following extract from a paper entitled A perfect Diurnal of some Passages of Parliament, and from other Parts of the Kingdom, from Monday July 24th, to Monday July 31st, 1643. "Upon the Queen's coming from Holland, she brought with her, besides a company of savage-like ruffians, a company of savage bears, to what purpose you may judge by the sequel. Those bears were left about Newark, and were brought into country towns constantly on the Lord's day to be baited, such is the religion those here related would settle amongst us; and, if any went about to hinder or but speak against their damnable profanations, they were presently noted as Roundheads and Puritans, and sure to be plundered for it. But some of Colonel Cromwell's forces coming by accident into Uppingham town, in Rutland, on the Lord's day, found these bears playing there in the usual manner, and, in the height of their sport, caused them to be seized upon, tied to a tree and shot." This was by no means a solitary instance. Colonel Pride, when Sheriff of Surrey, ordered the beasts in the bear garden of Southwark to be killed. He is represented by a loyal satirist as defending the act thus: "The first thing that is upon my spirits is the killing of the bears, for which the people hate me, and call me all the names in the rainbow. But did not David kill a bear? Did not the Lord Deputy Ireton kill a bear? Did not another lord of ours kill five bears?"-Last Speech and Dying Words of Thomas Pride.

[17] See Penn's New Witnesses proved Old Heretics, and Muggleton's works, passim.

[18] I am happy to say, that, since this passage was written, the territories both of the Rajah of Nagpore and of the King of Oude have been added to the British dominions. (1857.)

[19] The most sensible thing said in the House of Commons, on this subject, came from Sir William Coventry: "Our ancestors never did draw a line to circumscribe prerogative and liberty."

[20] Halifax was undoubtedly the real author of the Character of a Trimmer, which, for a time, went under the name of his kinsman, Sir William Coventry.

[21] North's Examen, 231, 574.

[22] A peer who was present has described the effect of Halifax's oratory in words which I will quote, because, though they have been long in print, they are probably known to few even of the most curious and diligent readers of history.

"Of powerful eloquence and great parts were the Duke's enemies who did assert the Bill; but a noble Lord appeared against it who, that day, in all the force of speech, in reason, in arguments of what could concern the public or the private interests of men, in honour, in conscience, in estate, did outdo himself and every other man; and in fine his conduct and his parts were both victorious, and by him all the wit and malice of that party was overthrown."

This passage is taken from a memoir of Henry Earl of Peterborough, in a volume entitled "Succinct Genealogies, by Robert Halstead," fol. 1685. The name of Halstead is fictitious. The real authors were the Earl of Peterborough himself and his chaplain. The book is extremely rare. Only twenty-four copies were printed, two of which are now in the British Museum. Of these two one belonged to George the Fourth, and the other to Mr. Grenville.

[23] This is mentioned in the curious work entitled "Ragguaglio della solenne Comparsa fatta in Roma gli otto di Gennaio, 1687, dall' illustrissimo et eccellentissimo signor Conte di Castlemaine."

[24] North's Examen, 69.

[25] Lord Preston, who was envoy at Paris, wrote thence to Halifax as follows: "I find that your Lordship lies still under the same misfortune of being no favourite to this court; and Monsieur Barillon dare not do you the honor to shine upon you, since his master frowneth. They know very well your lordship's qualifications, which make them fear and consequently hate you; and be assured, my lord, if all their strength can send you to Rufford, it shall be employed for that end. Two things, I hear, they particularly object against you, your secrecy, and your being incapable of being corrupted. Against these two things I know they have declared." The date of the letter is October 5, N. S. 1683

[26] During the interval which has elapsed since this chapter was written, England has continued to advance rapidly in material prosperity, I have left my text nearly as it originally stood; but I have added a few notes which may enable the reader to form some notion of the progress which has been made during the last nine years; and, in general, I would desire him to remember that there is scarcely a district which is not more populous, or a source of wealth which is not more productive, at present than in 1848. (1857.)

[27] Observations on the Bills of Mortality, by Captain John Graunt (Sir William Petty), chap. xi.

[28] "She doth comprehend
Full fifteen hundred thousand which do spend
Their days within.''
Great Britain's Beauty, 1671.

[29] Isaac Vossius, De Magnitudine Urbium Sinarum, 1685. Vossius, as we learn from Saint Evremond, talked on this subject oftener and longer than fashionable circles cared to listen.

[30] King's Natural and Political Observations, 1696. This valuable treatise, which ought to be read as the author wrote it, and not as garbled by Davenant, will be found in some editions of Chalmers's Estimate.

[31] Dalrymple's Appendix to Part II. Book I, The practice of reckoning the population by sects was long fashionable. Gulliver says of the King of Brobdignag; "He laughed at my odd arithmetic, as he was pleased to call it, in reckoning the numbers of our people by a computation drawn from the several sects among us in religion and politics."

[32] Preface to the Population Returns of 1831.

[33] Statutes 14 Car. II. c. 22.; 18 & 19 Car. II. c. 3., 29 & 30 Car. II. c. 2.

[34] Nicholson and Bourne, Discourse on the Ancient State of the Border, 1777.

[35] Gray's Journal of a Tour in the Lakes, Oct. 3, 1769.

[36] North's Life of Guildford; Hutchinson's History of Cumberland, Parish of Brampton.

[37] See Sir Walter Scott's Journal, Oct. 7, 1827, in his Life by Mr. Lockhart.

[38] Dalrymple, Appendix to Part II. Book I. The returns of the hearth money lead to nearly the same conclusion. The hearths in the province of York were not a sixth of the hearths of England.

[39] I do not, of course, pretend to strict accuracy here; but I believe that whoever will take the trouble to compare the last returns of hearth money in the reign of William the Third with the census of 1841, will come to a conclusion not very different from mine.

[40] There are in the Pepysian Library some ballads of that age on the chimney money. I will give a specimen or two:

"The good old dames whenever they the chimney man espied,
Unto their nooks they haste away, their pots and pipkins hide.
There is not one old dame in ten, and search the nation through,
But, if you talk of chimney men, will spare a curse or two."

Again:

"Like plundering soldiers they'd enter the door,
And make a distress on the goods of the poor.
While frighted poor children distractedly cried;
This nothing abated their insolent pride."

In the British Museum there are doggrel verses composed on the same subject and in the same spirit:

"Or, if through poverty it be not paid
For cruelty to tear away the single bed,
On which the poor man rests his weary head,
At once deprives him of his rest and bread."

I take this opportunity the first which occurs, of acknowledging most grateful the kind and liberal manner in which the Master and Vicemaster of Magdalei College, Cambridge, gave me access to the valuable collections of Pepys.

[41] My chief authorities for this financial statement will be found in the Commons' Journal, March 1, and March 20, 1688-9.

[42] See, for example, the picture of the mound at Marlborough, in Stukeley's Dinerarium Curiosum.

[43] Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684.

[44] 13 and 14 Car. II. c. 3; 15 Car. II. c. 4. Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684.

[45] Dryden, in his Cymon and Iphigenia, expressed, with his usual keenness and energy, the sentiments which had been fashionable among the sycophants of James the Second:-

"The country rings around with loud alarms,
And raw in fields the rude militia swarms;
Mouths without hands, maintained at vast expense,
In peace a charge, in war a weak defence.
Stout once a month they march, a blustering band,
And ever, but in time of need at hand.
This was the morn when, issuing on the guard,
Drawn up in rank and file, they stood prepared
Of seeming arms to make a short essay.
Then hasten to be drunk, the business of the day."

[46] Most of the materials which I have used for this account of the regular army will be found in the Historical Records of Regiments, published by command of King William the Fourth, and under the direction of the Adjutant General. See also Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684; Abridgment of the English Military Discipline, printed by especial command, 1688; Exercise of Foot, by their Majesties' command, 1690.

[47] I refer to a despatch of Bonrepaux to Seignelay, dated Feb. 8/18.1686. It was transcribed for Mr. Fox from the French archives, during the peace of Amiens, and, with the other materials brought together by that great man, was entrusted to me by the kindness of the late Lady Holland, and of the present Lord Holland. I ought to add that, even in the midst of the troubles which have lately agitated Paris, I found no difficulty in obtaining, from the liberality of the functionaries there, extracts supplying some chasms in Mr. Fox's collection. (1848.)

[48] My information respecting the condition of the navy, at this time, is chiefly derived from Pepys. His report, presented to Charles the Second in May, 1684, has never, I believe, been printed. The manuscript is at Magdalene College Cambridge. At Magdalene College is also a valuable manuscript containing a detailed account of the maritime establishments of the country in December 1684. Pepys's "Memoirs relating to the State of the Royal Navy for Ten Years determined December, 1688," and his diary and correspondence during his mission to Tangier, are in print. I have made large use of them. See also Sheffield's Memoirs, Teonge's Diary, Aubrey's Life of Monk, the Life of Sir Cloudesley Shovel, 1708, Commons' Journals, March 1 and March 20. 1688-9.

[49] Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684; Commons' Journals, March 1, and March 20, 1688-9. In 1833, it was determined, after full enquiry, that a hundred and seventy thousand barrels of gunpowder should constantly be kept in store.

[50] It appears from the records of the Admiralty, that Flag officers were allowed half pay in 1668, Captains of first and second rates not till 1674.

[51] Warrant in the War Office Records; dated March 26, 1678.

[52] Evelyn's Diary. Jan. 27, 1682. I have seen a privy seal, dated May 17. 1683, which confirms Evelyn's testimony.

[53] James the Second sent Envoys to Spain, Sweden, and Denmark; yet in his reign the diplomatic expenditure was little more than 30,000£. a year. See the Commons' Journals, March 20, 1688-9. Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684.

[54] Carte's Life of Ormond.

[55] Pepys's Diary, Feb. 14, 1668-9.

[56] See the Report of the Bath and Montague case, which was decided by Lord Keeper Somers, in December, 1693.

[57] During three quarters of a year, beginning from Christmas, 1689, the revenues of the see of Canterbury were received by an officer appointed by the crown. That officer's accounts are now in the British Museum. (Lansdowne MSS. 885.) The gross revenue for the three quarters was not quite four thousand pounds; and the difference between the gross and the net revenue was evidently something considerable.

[58] King's Natural and Political Conclusions. Davenant on the Balance of Trade. Sir W. Temple says, "The revenues of a House of Commons have seldom exceeded four hundred thousand pounds." Memoirs, Third Part.

[59] Langton's Conversations with Chief Justice Hale, 1672.

[60] Commons' Journals, April 27,1689; Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684.

[61] See the Travels of the Grand Duke Cosmo.

[62] King's Natural and Political Conclusions. Davenant on the Balance of Trade.

[63] See the Itinerarium Angliae, 1675, by John Ogilby, Cosmographer Royal. He describes great part of the land as wood, fen, heath on both sides, marsh on both sides. In some of his maps the roads through enclosed country are marked by lines, and the roads through unenclosed country by dots. The proportion of unenclosed country, which, if cultivated, must have been wretchedly cultivated, seems to have been very great. From Abingdon to Gloucester, for example, a distance of forty or fifty miles, there was not a single enclosure, and scarcely one enclosure between Biggleswade and Lincoln.

[64] Large copies of these highly interesting drawings are in the noble collection bequeathed by Mr. Grenville to the British Museum. See particularly the drawings of Exeter and Northampton.

[65] Evelyn's Diary, June 2, 1675.

[66] See White's Selborne; Bell's History of British Quadrupeds, Gentleman's Recreation, 1686; Aubrey's Natural History of Wiltshire, 1685; Morton's History of Northamptonshire, 1712; Willoughby's Ornithology, by Ray, 1678; Latham's General Synopsis of Birds; and Sir Thomas Browne's Account of Birds found in Norfolk.

[67] King's Natural and Political Conclusions. Davenant on the Balance of Trade.

[68] See the Almanacks of 1684 and 1685.

[69] See Mr. M'Culloch's Statistical Account of the British Empire, Part III. chap. i. sec. 6.

[70] King and Davenant as before The Duke of Newcastle on Horsemanship; Gentleman's Recreation, 1686. The "dappled Flanders mares" were marks of greatness in the time of Pope, and even later.

The vulgar proverb, that the grey mare is the better horse, originated, I suspect, in the preference generally given to the grey mares of Flanders over the finest coach horses of England.

[71] See a curious note by Tonkin, in Lord De Dunstanville's edition of Carew's Survey of Cornwall.

[72] Borlase's Natural History of Cornwall, 1758. The quantity of copper now produced, I have taken from parliamentary returns. Davenant, in 1700, estimated the annual produce of all the mines of England at between seven and eight hundred thousand pounds.

[73] Philosophical Transactions, No. 53. Nov. 1669, No. 66. Dec. 1670, No. 103. May 1674, No 156. Feb. 1683-4

[74] Yarranton, England's Improvement by Sea and Land, 1677; Porter's Progress of the Nation. See also a remarkably perspicuous history, in small compass, of the English iron works, in Mr. M'Culloch's Statistical Account of the British Empire.

[75] See Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684, 1687, Angliae, Metropolis, 1691; M'Culloch's Statistical Account of the British Empire Part III. chap. ii. (edition of 1847). In 1845 the quantity of coal brought into London appeared, by the Parliamentary returns, to be 3,460,000 tons. (1848.) In 1854 the quantity of coal brought into London amounted to 4,378,000 tons. (1857.)

[76] My notion of the country gentleman of the seventeenth century has been derived from sources too numerous to be recapitulated. I must leave my description to the judgment of those who have studied the history and the lighter literature of that age.

[77] In the eighteenth century the great increase in the value of benefices produced a change. The younger sons of the nobility were allured back to the clerical profession. Warburton in a letter to Hurd, dated the 6th of July, 1762, mentions this change. which was then recent. "Our grandees have at last found their way back into the Church. I only wonder they have been so long about it. But be assured that nothing but a new religious revolution, to sweep away the fragments that Henry the Eighth left after banqueting his courtiers, will drive them out again."

[78] See Heylin's Cyprianus Anglicus.

[79] Eachard, Causes of the Contempt of the Clergy; Oldham, Satire addressed to a Friend about to leave the University; Tatler, 255, 258. That the English clergy were a lowborn class, is remarked in the Travels of the Grand Duke Cosmo, Appendix A.

[80] "A causidico, medicastro, ipsaque artificum farragine, ecclesiae rector aut vicarius contemnitur et fit ludibrio. Gentis et familiae nitor sacris ordinibus pollutus censetur: foeminisque natalitio insignibus unicum inculcatur saepius praeceptum, ne modestiae naufragium faciant, aut, (quod idem auribus tam delicatulis sonat,) ne clerico se nuptas dari patiantur."--Angliae Notitia, by T. Wood, of New College Oxford 1686.

[81] Clarendon's Life, ii. 21.

[82] See the injunctions of 1559, In Bishop Sparrow's Collection. Jeremy Collier, in his Essay on Pride, speaks of this injunction with a bitterness which proves that his own pride had not been effectually tamed.

[83] Roger and Abigail in Fletcher's Scornful Lady, Bull and the Nurse in Vanbrugh's Relapse, Smirk and Susan in Shadwell's Lancashire Witches, are instances.

[84] Swift's Directions to Servants. In Swift's Remarks on the Clerical Residence Bill, he describes the family of an English vicar thus: "His wife is little better than a Goody, in her birth, education, or dress. . . . . His daughters shall go to service, or be sent apprentice to the sempstress of the next town."

[85] Even in Tom Jones, published two generations later. Mrs. Seagrim, the wife of a gamekeeper, and Mrs. Honour, a waitingwoman, boast of their descent from clergymen, "It is to be hoped," says Fielding, "such instances will in future ages, when some provision is made for the families of the inferior clergy, appear stranger than they can be thought at present."

[86] This distinction between country clergy and town clergy is strongly marked by Eachard, and cannot but be observed by every person who has studied the ecclesiastical history of that age.

[87] Nelson's Life of Bull. As to the extreme difficulty which the country clergy found in procuring books, see the Life of Thomas Bray, the founder of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.

[88] "I have frequently heard him (Dryden) own with pleasure, that if he had any talent for English prose it was owing to his having often read the writings of the great Archbishop Tillotson."--Congreve's Dedication of Dryden's Plays.

[89] I have taken Davenant's estimate, which is a little lower than King's.

[90] Evelvn's Diary, June 27. 1654; Pepys's Diary, June 13. 1668; Roger North's Lives of Lord Keeper Guildford, and of Sir Dudley North; Petty's Political Arithmetic. I have taken Petty's facts, but, in drawing inferences from them, I have been guided by King and Davenant, who, though not abler men than he, had the advantage of coming after him. As to the kidnapping for which Bristol was infamous, see North's Life of Guildford, 121, 216, and the harangue of Jeffreys on the subject, in the Impartial History of his Life and Death, printed with the Bloody Assizes. His style was, as usual, coarse, but I cannot reckon the reprimand which he gave to the magistrates of Bristol among his crimes.

[91] Fuller's Worthies; Evelyn's Diary, Oct. 17,1671; Journal of T. Browne, son of Sir Thomas Browne, Jan. 1663-4; Blomefield's History of Norfolk; History of the City and County of Norwich, 2 vols. 1768.

[92] The population of York appears, from the return of baptisms and burials in Drake's History, to have been about 13,000 in 1730. Exeter had only 17,000 inhabitants in 1801. The population of Worcester was numbered just before the siege in 1646. See Nash's History of Worcestershire. I have made allowance for the increase which must be supposed to have taken place in forty years. In 1740, the population of Nottingham was found, by enumeration, to be just 10,000. See Dering's History. The population of Gloucester may readily be inferred from the number of houses which King found in the returns of hearth money, and from the number of births and burials which is given in Atkyns's History. The population of Derby was 4,000 in 1712. See Wolley's MS. History, quoted in Lyson's Magna Britannia. The population of Shrewsbury was ascertained, in 1695, by actual enumeration. As to the gaieties of Shrewsbury, see Farquhar's Recruiting Officer. Farquhar's description is borne out by a ballad in the Pepysian Library, of which the burden is "Shrewsbury for me."

[93] Blome's Britannia, 1673; Aikin's Country round Manchester; Manchester Directory, 1845: Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture. The best information which I have been able to find, touching the population of Manchester in the seventeenth century is contained in a paper drawn up by the Reverend R. Parkinson, and published in the Journal of the Statistical Society for October 1842.

[94] Thoresby's Ducatus Leodensis; Whitaker's Loidis and Elmete; Wardell's Municipal History of the Borough of Leeds. (1848.) In 1851 Leeds had 172,000 Inhabitants. (1857.)

[95] Hunter's History of Hallamshire. (1848.) In 1851 the population of Sheffield had increased to 135,000. (1857.)

[96] Blome's Britannia, 1673; Dugdale's Warwickshire, North's Examen, 321; Preface to Absalom and Achitophel; Hutton's History of Birmingham; Boswell's Life of Johnson. In 1690 the burials at Birmingham were 150, the baptisms 125. I think it probable that the annual mortality was little less than one in twenty-five. In London it was considerably greater. A historian of Nottingham, half a century later, boasted of the extraordinary salubrity of his town, where the annual mortality was one in thirty. See Doring's History of Nottingham. (1848.) In 1851 the population of Birmingham had increased to 222,000. (1857.)

[97] Blome's Britannia; Gregson's Antiquities of the County Palatine and Duchy of Lancaster, Part II.; Petition from Liverpool in the Privy Council Book, May 10, 1686. In 1690 the burials at Liverpool were 151, the baptisms 120. In 1844 the net receipt of the customs at Liverpool was 4,366,526£. 1s. 8d. (1848.) In 1851 Liverpool contained 375,000 inhabitants, (1857.)

[98] Atkyne's Gloucestershire.

[99] Magna Britannia; Grose's Antiquities; New Brighthelmstone Directory.

[100] Tour in Derbyshire, by Thomas Browne, son of Sir Thomas.

[101] Memoires de Grammont; Hasted's History of Kent; Tunbridge Wells, a Comedy, 1678; Causton's Tunbridgialia, 1688; Metellus, a poem on Tunbridge Wells, 1693.

[102] See Wood's History of Bath, 1719; Evelyn's Diary, June 27,1654; Pepys's Diary, June 12, 1668; Stukeley's Itinerarium Curiosum; Collinson's Somersetshire; Dr. Peirce's History and Memoirs of the Bath, 1713, Book I. chap. viii. obs. 2, 1684. I have consulted several old maps and pictures of Bath, particularly one curious map which is surrounded by views of the principal buildings. It Dears the date of 1717.

[103] According to King 530,000. (1848.) In 1851 the population of London exceeded 2,300,000. (1857.)

[104] Macpherson's History of Commerce; Chalmers's Estimate; Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684. The tonnage of the steamers belonging to the port of London was, at the end of 1847, about 60,000 tons. The customs of the port, from 1842 to 1845, very nearly averaged 11,000,000£. (1848.) In 1854 the tonnage of the steamers of the port of London amounted to 138,000 tons, without reckoning vessels of less than fifty tons. (1857.)

[105] Lyson's Environs of London. The baptisms at Chelsea, between 1680 and 1690, were only 42 a year.

[106] Cowley, Discourse of Solitude.

[107] The fullest and most trustworthy information about the state of the buildings of London at this time is to be derived from the maps and drawings in the British Museum and in the Pepysian Library. The badness of the bricks in the old buildings of London is particularly mentioned in the Travels of the Grand Duke Cosmo. There is an account of the works at Saint Paul's in Ward's London Spy. I am almost ashamed to quote such nauseous balderdash; but I have been forced to descend even lower, if possible, in search of materials.

[108] Evelyn's Diary, Sept. 20. 1672.

[109] Roger North's Life of Sir Dudley North.

[110] North's Examen. This amusing writer has preserved a specimen of the sublime raptures in which the Pindar of the City indulged: -

"The worshipful sir John Moor!
After age that name adore!

[111] Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684; Anglie Metropolis, 1690; Seymour's London, 1734.

[112] North's Examen, 116; Wood, Ath. Ox. Shaftesbury; The Duke of B.'s Litany.

[113] Travels of the Grand Duke Cosmo.

[114] Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684; Pennant's London; Smith's Life of Nollekens.

[115] Evelyn's Diary, Oct. 10, 1683, Jan. 19, 1685-6.

[116] Stat. 1 Jac. II. c. 22; Evelyn's Diary, Dec, 7, 1684.

[117] Old General Oglethorpe, who died in 1785, used to boast that he had shot birds here in Anne's reign. See Pennant's London, and the Gentleman's Magazine for July, 1785.

[118] The pest field will be seen in maps of London as late as the end of George the First's reign.

[119] See a very curious plan of Covent Garden made about 1690, and engraved for Smith's History of Westminster. See also Hogarth's Morning, painted while some of the houses in the Piazza were still occupied by people of fashion.

[120] London Spy, Tom Brown's comical View of London and Westminster; Turner's Propositions for the employing of the Poor, 1678; Daily Courant and Daily Journal of June 7, 1733; Case of Michael v. Allestree, in 1676, 2 Levinz, p. 172. Michael had been run over by two horses which Allestree was breaking in Lincoln's Inn Fields. The declaration set forth that the defendant "porta deux chivals ungovernable en un coach, et improvide, incante, et absque debita consideratione ineptitudinis loci la eux drive pur eux faire tractable et apt pur an coach, quels chivals, pur ceo que, per leur ferocite, ne poient estre rule, curre sur le plaintiff et le noie."

[121] Stat. 12 Geo. I. c. 25; Commons' Journals, Feb. 25, March 2, 1725-6; London Gardener, 1712; Evening Post, March, 23, 1731. I have not been able to find this number of the Evening Post; I therefore quote it on the faith of Mr. Malcolm, who mentions it in his History of London.

[122] Lettres sur les Anglois, written early in the reign of William the Third; Swift's City Shower; Gay's Trivia. Johnson used to relate a curious conversation which he had with his mother about giving and taking the wall.

[123] Oldham's Imitation of the 3d Satire of Juvenal, 1682; Shadwell's Scourers, 1690. Many other authorities will readily occur to all who are acquainted with the popular literature of that and the succeeding generation. It may be suspected that some of the Tityre Tus, like good Cavaliers, broke Milton's windows shortly after the Restoration. I am confident that he was thinking of those pests of London when he dictated the noble lines:

"And in luxurious cities, when the noise
Of riot ascends above their loftiest towers,
And injury and outrage, and when night
Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons
Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine."

[124] Seymour's London.

[125] Angliae Metropolis, 1690, Sect. 17, entitled, "Of the new lights"; Seymour's London.

[126] Stowe's Survey of London; Shadwell's Squire of Alsatia; Ward's London Spy; Stat. 8 & 9 Gul. III. cap. 27.

[127] See Sir Roger North's account of the way in which Wright was made a judge, and Clarendon's account of the way in which Sir George Savile was made a peer.

[128] The sources from which I have drawn my information about the state of the Court are too numerous to recapitulate. Among them are the Despatches of Barillon, Van Citters, Ronquillo, and Adda, the Travels of the Grand Duke Cosmo, the works of Roger North, the Diaries of Pepys, Evelyn, and Teonge, and the Memoirs of Grammont and Reresby.

[129] The chief peculiarity of this dialect was that, in a large class of words, the O was pronounced like A. Thus Lord was pronounced Lard. See Vanbrugh's Relapse. Lord Sunderland was a great master of this court tune, as Roger North calls it; and Titus Oates affected it in the hope of passing for a fine gentleman. Examen, 77, 254.

[130] Lettres sur les Anglois; Tom Brown's Tour; Ward's London Spy; The Character of a Coffee House, 1673; Rules and Orders of the Coffee House, 1674; Coffee Houses vindicated, 1675; A Satyr against Coffee; North's Examen, 138; Life of Guildford, 152; Life of Sir Dudley North, 149; Life of Dr. Radcliffe, published by Curll in 1715. The liveliest description of Will's is in the City and Country Mouse. There is a remarkable passage about the influence of the coffee house orators in Halstead's Succinct Genealogies, printed in 1685.

[131] Century of inventions, 1663, No. 68.

[132] North's Life of Guildford, 136.

[133] Thoresby's Diary Oct. 21,1680, Aug. 3, 1712.

[134] Pepys's Diary, June 12 and 16,1668.

[135] Ibid. Feb. 28, 1660.

[136] Thoresby's Diary, May 17,1695.

[137] Ibid. Dec. 27,1708.

[138] Tour in Derbyshire, by J. Browne, son of Sir Thomas Browne, 1662; Cotton's Angler, 1676.

[139] Correspondence of Henry Earl of Clarendon, Dec. 30, 1685, Jan. 1, 1686.

[140] Postlethwaite's Dictionary, Roads; History of Hawkhurst, in the Bibliotheca Topographica Britannica.

[141] Annals of Queen Anne, 1703, Appendix, No. 3.

[142] 15 Car. II. c. 1.

[143] The evils of the old system are strikingly set forth in many petitions which appear in the Commons' Journal of 172 5/6. How fierce an opposition was offered to the new system may be learned from the Gentleman's Magazine of 1749.

[144] Postlethwaite's Dict., Roads.

[145] Loidis and Elmete; Marshall's Rural Economy of England, In 1739 Roderic Random came from Scotland to Newcastle on a packhorse.

[146] Cotton's Epistle to J. Bradshaw.

[147] Anthony a Wood's Life of himself.

[148] Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684. See also the list of stage coaches and waggons at the end of the book, entitled Angliae Metropolis, 1690.

[149] John Cresset's Reasons for suppressing Stage Coaches, 1672. These reason. were afterwards inserted in a tract, entitled "The Grand Concern of England explained, 1673." Cresset's attack on stage coaches called forth some answers which I have consulted.

[150] Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684; North's Examen, 105; Evelyn's Diary, Oct. 9,10, 1671.

[151] See the London Gazette, May 14, 1677, August 4, 1687, Dec. 5, 1687. The last confession of Augustin King, who was the son of an eminent divine, and had been educated at Cambridge but was hanged at Colchester in March, 1688, is highly curious.

[152] Aimwell. Pray sir, han't I seen your face at Will's coffeehouse? Gibbet. Yes. sir, and at White's too.--Beaux' Stratagem.

[153] Gent's History of York. Another marauder of the same description, named Biss, was hanged at Salisbury in 1695. In a ballad which is in the Pepysian Library, he is represented as defending himself thus before the Judge:

"What say you now, my honoured Lord
What harm was there in this?
Rich, wealthy misers were abhorred
By brave, freehearted Biss."

[154] Pope's Memoirs of Duval, published immediately after the execution. Oates's Eikwg basilikh, Part I.

[155] See the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Harrison's Historical Description of the Island of Great Britain, and Pepys's account of his tour in the summer of 1668. The excellence of the English inns is noticed in the Travels of the Grand Duke Cosmo.

[156] Stat. 12 Car. II. c. 36; Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684; Angliae Metropolis, 1690; London Gazette, June 22, 1685, August 15, 1687.

[157] Lond. Gaz., Sept. 14, 1685.

[158] Smith's Current intelligence, March 30, and April 3, 1680.

[159] Anglias Metropolis, 1690.

[160] Commons' Journals, Sept. 4, 1660, March 1, 1688-9; Chamberlayne, 1684; Davenant on the Public Revenue, Discourse IV.

[161] I have left the text as it stood in 1848. In the year 1856 the gross receipt of the Post Office was more than 2,800,000£.; and the net receipt was about 1,200,000£. The number of letters conveyed by post was 478,000,000. (1857).

[162] London Gazette, May 5, and 17, 1680.

[163] There is a very curious, and, I should think, unique collection of these papers in the British Museum.

[164] For example, there is not a word in the Gazette about the important parliamentary proceedings of November, 1685, or about the trial and acquittal of the Seven Bishops.

[165] Roger North's Life of Dr. John North. On the subject of newsletters, see the Examen, 133.

[166] I take this opportunity of expressing my warm gratitude to the family of my dear and honoured friend Sir James Mackintosh for confiding to me the materials collected by him at a time when he meditated a work similar to that which I have undertaken. I have never seen, and I do not believe that there anywhere exists, within the same compass, so noble a collection of extracts from public and private archives. The judgment with which Sir James, in great masses of the rudest ore of history, selected what was valuable, and rejected what was worthless, can be fully appreciated only by one who has toiled after him in the same mine.

[167] Life of Thomas Gent. A complete list of all printing houses in 1724 will be found in Nichols's Literary Anecdotae of the eighteenth century. There had then been a great increase within a few years in the number of presses, and yet there were thirty-four counties in which there was no printer, one of those counties being Lancashire.

[168] Observator, Jan. 29, and 31, 1685; Calamy's Life of Baxter; Nonconformist Memorial.

[169] Cotton seems, from his Angler, to have found room for his whole library in his hall window; and Cotton was a man of letters. Even when Franklin first visited London in 1724, circulating libraries were unknown there. The crowd at the booksellers' shops in Little Britain is mentioned by Roger North in his life of his brother John.

[170] One instance will suffice. Queen Mary, the daughter of James, had excellent natural abilities, had been educated by a Bishop, was fond of history and poetry and was regarded by very eminent men as a superior woman. There is, in the library at the Hague, a superb English Bible which was delivered to her when she was crowned in Westminster Abbey. In the titlepage are these words in her own hand, " This book was given the King and I, at our crownation. Marie R."

[171] Roger North tells us that his brother John, who was Greek professor at Cambridge, complained bitterly of the general neglect of the Greek tongue among the academical clergy.

[172] Butler, in a satire of great asperity, says,

"For, though to smelter words of Greek
And Latin be the rhetorique
Of pedants counted, and vainglorious,
To smatter French is meritorious."

[173] The most offensive instance which I remember is in a poem on the coronation of Charles the Second by Dryden, who certainly could not plead poverty as an excuse for borrowing words from any foreign tongue:-

"Hither in summer evenings you repair
To taste the fraicheur of the cooler air."

[174] Jeremy Collier has censured this odious practice with his usual force and keenness.

[175] The contrast will be found in Sir Walter Scott's edition of Dryden.

[176] See the Life of Southern. by Shiels.

[177] See Rochester's Trial of the Poets.

[178] Some Account of the English Stage.

[179] Life of Southern, by Shiels.

[180] If any reader thinks my expressions too severe, I would advise him to read Dryden's Epilogue to the Duke of Guise, and to observe that it was spoken by a woman.

[181] See particularly Harrington's Oceana.

[182] See Sprat's History of the Royal Society.

[183] Cowley's Ode to the Royal Society.

[184] "Then we upon the globe's last verge shall go,
And view the ocean leaning on the sky;
From thence our rolling neighbours we shall know,
And on the lunar world secretly pry."
Annus Mirabilis, 164

[185] North's Life of Guildford.

[186] Pepys's Diary, May 30, 1667.

[187] Butler was, I think, the only man of real genius who, between the Restoration and the Revolution, showed a bitter enmity to the new philosophy, as it was then called. See the Satire on the Royal Society, and the Elephant in the Moon.

[188] The eagerness with which the agriculturists of that age tried experiments and introduced improvements is well described by Aubrey. See the Natural history of Wiltshire, 1685.

[189] Sprat's History of the Royal Society.

[190] Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting, London Gazette, May 31, 1683; North's Life of Guildford.

[191] The great prices paid to Varelst and Verrio are mentioned in Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting.

[192] Petty's Political Arithmetic.

[193] Stat 5 Eliz. c. 4; Archaeologia, vol. xi.

[194] Plain and easy Method showing how the office of Overseer of the Poor may be managed, by Richard Dunning; 1st edition, 1685; 2d edition, 1686.

[195] Cullum's History of Hawsted.

[196] Ruggles on the Poor.

[197] See, in Thurloe's State Papers, the memorandum of the Dutch Deputies dated August 2-12, 1653.

[198] The orator was Mr. John Basset, member for Barnstaple. See Smith's Memoirs of Wool, chapter lxviii.

[199] This ballad is in the British Museum. The precise year is not given; but the Imprimatur of Roger Lestrange fixes the date sufficiently for my purpose. I will quote some of the lines. The master clothier is introduced speaking as follows:

"In former ages we used to give,
So that our workfolks like farmers did live;
But the times are changed, we will make them know.

* * * * * * * * * *

"We will make them to work hard for sixpence a day,
Though a shilling they deserve if they had their just pay;
If at all they murmur and say 'tis too small,
We bid them choose whether they'll work at all.
And thus we forgain all our wealth and estate,
By many poor men that work early and late.
Then hey for the clothing trade! It goes on brave;
We scorn for to toyl and moyl, nor yet to slave.
Our workmen do work hard, but we live at ease,
We go when we will, and we come when we please."

[200] Chamberlayne's State of England; Petty's Political Arithmetic, chapter viii.; Dunning's Plain and Easy Method; Firmin's Proposition for the Employing of the Poor. It ought to be observed that Firmin was an eminent philanthropist.

[201] King in his Natural and Political Conclusions roughly estimated the common people of England at 880,000 families. Of these families 440,000, according to him, ate animal food twice a week. The remaining 440,000 ate it not at all, or at most not oftener than once a week.

[202] Fourteenth Report of the Poor Law Commissioners, Appendix B. No. 2, Appendix C. No 1, 1848. Of the two estimates of the poor rate mentioned in the text one was formed by Arthur Moore, the other, some years later, by Richard Dunning. Moore's estimate will be found in Davenant's Essay on Ways and Means; Dunning's in Sir Frederic Eden's valuable work on the poor. King and Davenant estimate the paupers and beggars in 1696, at the incredible number of 1,330,000 out of a population of 5,500,000. In 1846 the number of persons who received relief appears from the official returns to have been only 1,332,089 out of a population of about 17,000,000. It ought also to be observed that, in those returns, a pauper must very often be reckoned more than once.

I would advise the reader to consult De Foe's pamphlet entitled "Giving Alms no Charity," and the Greenwich tables which will be found in Mr. M'Culloch's Commercial Dictionary under the head Prices.

[203] The deaths were 23,222. Petty's Political Arithmetic.

[204] Burnet, i. 560.

[205] Muggleton's Acts of the Witnesses of the Spirit.

[206] Tom Brown describes such a scene in lines which I do not venture to quote.

[207] Ward's London Spy.

[208] Pepys's Diary, Dec. 28, 1663, Sept. 2, 1667.

[209] Burnet, i, 606; Spectator, No. 462; Lords' Journals, October 28, 1678; Cibber's Apology.

[210] Burnet, i. 605, 606, Welwood, North's Life of Guildford, 251.

[211] I may take this opportunity of mentioning that whenever I give only one date, I follow the old style, which was, in the seventeenth century, the style of England; but I reckon the year from the first of January.

[212] Saint Everemond, passim; Saint Real, Memoires de la Duchesse de Mazarin; Rochester's Farewell; Evelyn's Diary, Sept. 6, 1676, June 11, 1699.

[213] Evelyn's Diary, Jan. 28, 1684-5, Saint Evremond's Letter to Dery.

[214] Id., February 4, 1684-5.

[215] Roger North's Life of Sir Dudley North, 170; The true Patriot vindicated, or a Justification of his Excellency the E---- of R----; Burnet, i. 605. The Treasury Books prove that Burnet had good intelligence.

[216] Evelyn's Diary, Jan. 24, 1681-2, Oct. 4, 1683.

[217] Dugdale's Correspondence.

[218] Hawkins's Life of Ken, 1713.

[219] See the London Gazette of Nov. 21, 1678. Barillon and Burnet say that Huddleston was excepted out of all the Acts of Parliament made against priests; but this is a mistake.

[220] Clark's Life of James the Second, i, 746. Orig. Mem.; Barillon's Despatch of Feb. 1-18, 1685; Van Citters's Despatches of Feb. 3-13 and Feb. 1-16. Huddleston's Narrative; Letters of Philip, second Earl of Chesterfield, 277; Sir H. Ellis's Original Letters, First Series. iii. 333: Second Series, iv 74; Chaillot MS.; Burnet, i. 606: Evelyn's Diary, Feb. 4. 1684-5: Welwood's Memoires 140; North's Life of Guildford. 252; Examen, 648; Hawkins's Life of Ken; Dryden's Threnodia Augustalis; Sir H. Halford's Essay on Deaths of Eminent Persons. See also a fragment of a letter written by the Earl of Ailesbury, which is printed in the European Magazine for April, 1795. Ailesbury calls Burnet an impostor. Yet his own narrative and Burnet's will not, to any candid and sensible reader, appear to contradict each other. I have seen in the British Museum, and also in the Library of the Royal Institution, a curious broadside containing an account of the death of Charles. It will be found in the Somers Collections. The author was evidently a zealous Roman Catholic, and must have had access to good sources of information. I strongly suspect that he had been in communication, directly or indirectly, with James himself. No name is given at length; but the initials are perfectly intelligible, except in one place. It is said that the D. of Y. was reminded of the duty which he owed to his brother by P.M.A.C.F. I must own myself quite unable to decipher the last five letters. It is some consolation that Sir Walter Scott was equally unsuccessful. (1848.) Since the first edition of this work was published, several ingenious conjectures touching these mysterious letters have been communicated to me, but I am convinced that the true solution has not yet been suggested. (1850.) I still greatly doubt whether the riddle has been solved. But the most plausible interpretation is one which, with some variations, occurred, almost at the same time, to myself and to several other persons; I am inclined to read "Pere Mansuete A Cordelier Friar." Mansuete, a Cordelier, was then James's confessor. To Mansuete therefore it peculiarly belonged to remind James of a sacred duty which had been culpably neglected. The writer of the broadside must have been unwilling to inform the world that a soul which many devout Roman Catholics had left to perish had been snatched from destruction by the courageous charity of a woman of loose character. It is therefore not unlikely that he would prefer a fiction, at once probable and edifying, to a truth which could not fail to give scandal. (1856.)

It should seem that no transactions in history ought to be more accurately known to us than those which took place round the deathbed of Charles the Second. We have several relations written by persons who were actually in his room. We have several relations written by persons who, though not themselves eyewitnesses, had the best opportunity of obtaining information from eyewitnesses. Yet whoever attempts to digest this vast mass of materials into a consistent narrative will find the task a difficult one. Indeed James and his wife, when they told the story to the nuns of Chaillot, could not agree as to some circumstances. The Queen said that, after Charles had received the last sacraments the Protestant Bishops renewed their exhortations. The King said that nothing of the kind took place. "Surely," said the Queen, "you told me so yourself." "It is impossible that I have told you so," said the King, "for nothing of the sort happened."

It is much to be regretted that Sir Henry Halford should have taken so little trouble to ascertain the facts on which he pronounced judgment. He does not seem to have been aware of the existence of the narrative of James, Barillon, and Huddleston.

As this is the first occasion on which I cite the correspondence of the Dutch ministers at the English court, I ought here to mention that a series of their despatches, from the accession of James the Second to his flight, forms one of the most valuable parts of the Mackintosh collection. The subsequent despatches, down to the settlement of the government in February, 1689, I procured from the Hague. The Dutch archives have been far too little explored. They abound with information interesting in the highest degree to every Englishman. They are admirably arranged and they are in the charge of gentlemen whose courtesy, liberality and zeal for the interests of literature, cannot be too highly praised. I wish to acknowledge, in the strongest manner, my own obligations to Mr. De Jonge and to Mr. Van Zwanne.

[221] Clarendon mentions this calumny with just scorn. "According to the charity of the time towards Cromwell, very many would have it believed to be by poison, of which there was no appearance, nor any proof ever after made."--Book xiv.

[222] Welwood, 139 Burnet, i. 609; Sheffield's Character of Charles the Second; North's Life of Guildford, 252; Examen, 648; Revolution Politics; Higgons on Burnet. What North says of the embarrassment and vacillation of the physicians is confirmed by the despatches of Van Citters. I have been much perplexed by the strange story about Short's suspicions. I was, at one time, inclined to adopt North's solution. But, though I attach little weight to the authority of Welwood and Burnet in such a case, I cannot reject the testimony of so well informed and so unwilling a witness as Sheffield.

[223] London Gazette, Feb. 9. 1684-5; Clarke's Life of James the Second, ii. 3; Barillon, Feb. 9-19: Evelyn's Diary, Feb. 6.

[224] See the authorities cited in the last note. See also the Examen, 647; Burnet, i. 620; Higgons on Burnet.

[225] London Gazette, Feb. 14, 1684-5; Evelyn's Diary of the same day; Burnet, i. 610: The Hind let loose.

[226] Burnet, i. 628; Lestrange, Observator, Feb. 11, 1684.

[227] The letters which passed between Rochester and Ormond on this subject will be found in the Clarendon Correspondence.

[228] The ministerial changes are announced in the London Gazette, Feb. 19, 1684-5. See Burnet, i. 621; Barillon, Feb. 9-19, 16-26; and Feb. 19,/Mar. 1.

[229] Carte's Life of Ormond; Secret Consults of the Romish Party in Ireland, 1690; Memoirs of Ireland, 1716.

[230] Christmas Sessions Paper of 1678.

[231] The Acts of the Witnesses of the Spirit, part v chapter v. In this work Lodowick, after his fashion, revenges himself on the "bawling devil," as he calls Jeffreys, by a string of curses which Ernulphus, or Jeffreys himself, might have envied. The trial was in January, 1677.

[232] This saying is to be found in many contemporary pamphlets. Titus Oates was never tired of quoting it. See his Eikwg Basilikh.

[233] The chief sources of information concerning Jeffreys are the State Trials and North's Life of Lord Guildford. Some touches of minor importance I owe to contemporary pamphlets in verse and prose. Such are the Bloody Assizes the life and Death of George Lord Jeffreys, the Panegyric on the late Lord Jeffreys, the Letter to the Lord Chancellor, Jeffreys's Elegy. See also Evelyn's Diary, Dec. 5, 1683, Oct. 31. 1685. I scarcely need advise every reader to consult Lord Campbell's excellent Life of Jeffreys.

[234] London Gazette, Feb. 12, 1684-5. North's Life of Guildford, 254.

[235] The chief authority for these transactions is Barillon's despatch of February 9-19, 1685. It will he found in the Appendix to Mr. Fox's History. See also Preston's Letter to James, dated April 18-28, 1685, in Dalrymple.

[236] Lewis to Barillon, Feb. 16-26, 1685.

[237] Barillon, Feb. 16-26, 1685.

[238] Barillon, Feb. 18-28, 1685.

[239] Swift who hated Marlborough, and who was little disposed to allow any merit to those whom he hated, says, in the famous letter to Crassus, "You are no ill orator in the Senate."

[240] Dartmouth's note on Burnet, i. 264. Chesterfield's Letters, Nov., 18, 1748. Chesterfield is an unexceptional witness; for the annuity was a charge on the estate of his grandfather, Halifax. I believe that there is no foundation for a disgraceful addition to the story which may be found in Pope:

"The gallant too, to whom she paid it down,
Lived to refuse his mistress half a crown."

Curll calls this a piece of travelling scandal.

[241] Pope in Spence's Anecdotes.

[242] See the Historical Records of the first or Royal Dragoons. The appointment of Churchill to the command of this regiment was ridiculed as an instance of absurd partiality. One lampoon of that time which I do not remember to have seen in print, but of which a manuscript copy is in the British Museum, contains these lines:

"Let's cut our meat with spoons:
The sense is as good
As that Churchill should
Be put to command the dragoons."

[243] Barillon, Feb. 16-26, 1685.

[244] Barillon, April 6-16; Lewis to Barillon, April 14-24.

[245] I might transcribe half Barillon's correspondence in proof of this proposition, but I will quote only one passage, in which the policy of the French government towards England is exhibited concisely and with perfect clearness.

"On peut tenir pour un maxime indubitable que l'accord du Roy d'Angleterre avec son parlement, en quelque maniere qu'il se fasse, n'est pas conforme aux interets de V. M. Je me contente de penser cela sane m'en ouvrir a personne, et je cache avec soin mes sentimens a cet egard."--Barillon to Lewis, Feb. 28,/Mar. 1687. That this was the real secret of the whole policy of Lewis towards our country was perfectly understood at Vienna. The Emperor Leopold wrote thus to James, March 30,/April 9, 1689: "Galli id unum agebant, ut, perpetuas inter Serenitatem vestram et ejusdem populos fovendo simultates, reliquæ Christianæ Europe tanto securius insultarent."

[246] "Que sea unido con su reyno, yen todo buena intelligencia con el parlamenyo." Despatch from the King of Spain to Don Pedro Ronquillo, March 16-26, 1685. This despatch is in the archives of Samancas, which contain a great mass of papers relating to English affairs. Copies of the most interesting of those papers are in the possession of M. Guizot, and were by him lent to me. It is with peculiar pleasure that at this time, I acknowledge this mark of the friendship of so great a man. (1848.)

[247] Few English readers will be desirous to go deep into the history of this quarrel. Summaries will be found in Cardinal Bausset's Life of Bossuet, and in Voltaire's Age of Lewis XIV.

[248] Burnet, i. 661, and Letter from Rome, Dodd's Church History, part viii. book i. art. 1.

[249] Consultations of the Spanish Council of State on April 2-12 and April 16-26, In the Archives of Simancas.

[250] Lewis to Barillon, May 22,/June 1, 1685; Burnet, i. 623.

[251] Life of James the Second, i. 5. Barillon, Feb. 19,/Mar. 1, 1685; Evelyn's Diary, March 5, 1685.

[252] "To those that ask boons
He swears by God's oons
And chides them as if they came there to steal spoons."

[] Lamentable Lory, a ballad, 1684.

[253] Barillon, April 20-30. 1685.

[254] From Adda's despatch of Jan. 22,/Feb. 1, 1686, and from the expressions of the Pere d'Orleans (Histoire des Revolutions d'Angleterre, liv. xi.), it is clear that rigid Catholics thought the King's conduct indefensible.

[255] London Gazette, Gazette de France; Life of James the Second, ii. 10; History of the Coronation of King James the Second and Queen Mary, by Francis Sandford, Lancaster Herald, fol. 1687; Evelyn's Diary, May, 21, 1685; Despatch of the Dutch Ambassadors, April 10-20, 1685; Burnet, i. 628; Eachard, iii. 734; A sermon preached before their Majesties King James the Second and Queen Mary at their Coronation in Westminster Abbey, April 23, 1695, by Francis Lord Bishop of Ely, and Lord Almoner. I have seen an Italian account of the Coronation which was published at Modena, and which is chiefly remarkable for the skill with which the writer sinks the fact that the prayers and psalms were in English, and that the Bishops were heretics.

[256] See the London Gazette during the months of February, March, and April, 1685.

[257] It would be easy to fill a volume with what Whig historians and pamphleteers have written on this subject. I will cite only one witness, a churchman and a Tory. "Elections," says Evelyn, "were thought to be very indecently carried on in most places. God give a better issue of it than some expect!" May 10, 1685. Again he says, "The truth is there were many of the new members whose elections and returns were universally condemned." May 22.

[258] This fact I learned from a newsletter in the library of the Royal Institution. Van Citters mentions the strength of the Whig party in Bedfordshire.

[259] Bramston's Memoirs.

[260] Reflections on a Remonstrance and Protestation of all the good Protestants of this Kingdom, 1689; Dialogue between Two Friends, 1689.

[261] Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Marquess of Wharton, 1715.

[262] See the Guardian, No. 67; an exquisite specimen of Addison's peculiar manner. It would be difficult to find in the works of any other writer such an instance of benevolence delicately flavoured with contempt.

[263] The Observator, April 4, 1685.

[264] Despatch of the Dutch Ambasadors, April 10-20, 1685.

[265] Burnet, i. 626.

[266] A faithful account of the Sickness, Death, and Burial of Captain Bedlow, 1680; Narrative of Lord Chief Justice North.

[267] Smith's Intrigues of the Popish Plot, 1685.

[268] Burnet, i. 439.

[269] See the proceedings in the Collection of State Trials.

[270] Evelyn's Diary, May 7, 1685.

[271] There remain many pictures of Oates. The most striking descriptions of his person are in North's Examen, 225, in Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, and In a broadside entitled, A Hue and Cry after T. O.

[272] The proceedings will be found at length in the Collection of State Trials.

[273] Gazette de France May 29,/June 9, 1685.

[274] Despatch of the Dutch Ambassadors, May 19-29, 1685.

[275] Evelyn's Diary, May 22, 1685; Eachard, iii. 741; Burnet, i. 637; Observator, May 27, 1685; Oates's Eikvn, 89; Eikwn Brotoloigon, 1697; Commons' Journals of May, June, and July, 1689; Tom Brown's advice to Dr. Oates. Some interesting circumstances are mentioned in a broadside, printed for A. Brooks, Charing Cross, 1685. I have seen contemporary French and Italian pamphlets containing the history of the trial and execution. A print of Titus in the pillory was published at Milan, with the following curious inscription: "Questo e il naturale ritratto di Tito Otez, o vero Oatz, Inglese, posto in berlina, uno de' principali professor della religion protestante, acerrimo persecutore de' Cattolici, e gran spergiuro." I have also seen a Dutch engraving of his punishment, with some Latin verses, of which the following are a specimen:

"At Doctor fictus non fictos pertulit ictus
A tortore datos haud molli in corpore gratos,
Disceret ut vere scelera ob commissa rubere."

The anagram of his name, "Testis Ovat," may be found on many prints published in different countries.

[276] Blackstone's Commentaries, Chapter of Homicide.

[277] According to Roger North the judges decided that Dangerfield, having been previously convicted of perjury, was incompetent to be a witness of the plot. But this is one among many instances of Roger's inaccuracy. It appears, from the report of the trial of Lord Castlemaine in June 1680, that, after much altercation between counsel, and much consultation among the judges of the different courts in Westminster Hall, Dangerfield was sworn and suffered to tell his story; but the jury very properly gave no credit to his testimony.

[278] Dangerfield's trial was not reported; but I have seen a concise account of it in a contemporary broadside. An abstract of the evidence against Francis, and his dying speech, will be found in the Collection of State Trials. See Eachard, iii. 741. Burnet's narrative contains more mistakes than lines. See also North's Examen, 256, the sketch of Dangerfield's life in the Bloody Assizes, the Observator of July 29, 1685, and the poem entitled "Dangerfield's Ghost to Jeffreys." In the very rare volume entitled "Succinct Genealogies, by Robert Halstead," Lord Peterbough says that Dangerfield, with whom he had had some intercourse, was "a young man who appeared under a decent figure, a serious behaviour, and with words that did not seem to proceed from a common understanding."

[279] Baxter's preface to Sir Mathew Hale's Judgment of the Nature of True Religion, 1684.

[280] See the Observator of February 28, 1685, the information in the Collection of State Trials, the account of what passed in court given by Calamy, Life of Baxter, chap. xiv., and the very curious extracts from the Baxter MSS. in the Life, by Orme, published in 1830.

[281] Baxter MS. cited by Orme.

[282] Act Parl. Car. II. March 29,1661, Jac. VII. April 28, 1685, and May 13, 1685.

[283] Act Parl. Jac. VII. May 8, 1685, Observator, June 20, 1685; Lestrange evidently wished to see the precedent followed in England.

[284] His own words reported by himself. Life of James the Second, i. 666. Orig. Mem.

[285] Act Parl. Car. II. August 31, 1681.

[286] Burnet, i. 583; Wodrow, III. v. 2. Unfortunately the Acta of the Scottish Privy Council during almost the whole administration of the Duke of York are wanting. (1848.) This assertion has been met by a direct contradiction. But the fact is exactly as I have stated it. There is in the Acta of the Scottish Privy Council a hiatus extending from August 1678 to August 1682. The Duke of York began to reside in Scotland in December 1679. He left Scotland, never to return in May 1682. (1857.)

[287] Wodrow, III. ix. 6.

[288] Wodrow, III. ix. 6. The editor of the Oxford edition of Burnet attempts to excuse this act by alleging that Claverhouse was then employed to intercept all communication between Argyle and Monmouth, and by supposing that John Brown may have been detected in conveying intelligence between the rebel camps. Unfortunately for this hypothesis John Brown was shot on the first of May, when both Argyle and Monmouth were in Holland, and when there was no insurrection in any part of our island.

[289] Wodrow, III. ix, 6.

[290] Wodrow, III. ix. 6. It has been confidently asserted, by persons who have not taken the trouble to look at the authority to which I have referred, that I have grossly calumniated these unfortunate men; that I do not understand the Calvinistic theology; and that it is impossible that members of the Church of Scotland can have refused to pray for any man on the ground that he was not one of the elect.

I can only refer to the narrative which Wodrow has inserted in his history, and which he justly calls plain and natural. That narrative is signed by two eyewitnesses, and Wodrow, before he published it, submitted it to a third eyewitness, who pronounced it strictly accurate. From that narrative I will extract the only words which bear on the point in question: "When all the three were taken, the officers consulted among themselves, and, withdrawing to the west side of the town, questioned the prisoners, particularly if they would pray for King James VII. They answered, they would pray for all within the election of grace. Balfour said Do you question the King's election? They answered, sometimes they questioned their own. Upon which he swore dreadfully, and said they should die presently, because they would not pray for Christ's vicegerent, and so without one word more, commanded Thomas Cook to go to his prayers, for he should die.

In this narrative Wodrow saw nothing improbable; and I shall not easily be convinced that any writer now living understands the feelings and opinions of the Covenanters better than Wodrow did. (1857.)

[291] Wodrow, III. ix. 6. Cloud of Witnesses.

[292] Wodrow, III. ix. 6. The epitaph of Margaret Wilson, in the churchyard at Wigton, is printed in the Appendix to the Cloud of Witnesses;

"Murdered for owning Christ supreme
Head of his church, and no more crime,
But her not owning Prelacy.
And not abjuring Presbytery,
Within the sea, tied to a stake,
She suffered for Christ Jesus' sake."

[293] See the letter to King Charles II. prefixed to Barclay's Apology.

[294] Sewel's History of the Quakers, book x.

[295] Minutes of Yearly Meetings, 1689, 1690.

[296] Clarkson on Quakerism; Peculiar Customs, chapter v.

[297] After this passage was written, I found in the British Museum, a manuscript (Harl. MS. 7506) entitled, "An Account of the Seizures, Sequestrations, great Spoil and Havock made upon the Estates of the several Protestant Dissenters called Quakers, upon Prosecution of old Statutes made against Papist and Popish Recusants." The manuscript is marked as having belonged to James, and appears to have been given by his confidential servant, Colonel Graham, to Lord Oxford. This circumstance appears to me to confirm the view which I have taken of the King's conduct towards the Quakers.

[298] Penn's visits to Whitehall, and levees at Kensington, are described with great vivacity, though in very bad Latin, by Gerard Croese. "Sumebat," he says, "rex sæpe secretum, non horarium, vero horarum plurium, in quo de variis rebus cum Penno serio sermonem conferebat, et interim differebat audire præcipuorum nobilium ordinem, qui hoc interim spatio in proc¦tone, in proximo, regem conventum præsto erant." Of the crowd of suitors at Penn's house. Croese says, "Visi quandoquo de hoc genere hominum non minus bis centum."--Historia Quakeriana, lib. ii. 1695.

[299] "Twenty thousand into my pocket; and a hundred thousand into my province." Penn's Letter to Popple.

[300] These orders, signed by Sunderland, will be found in Sewel's History. They bear date April 18, 1685. They are written in a style singularly obscure and intricate: but I think that I have exhibited the meaning correctly. I have not been able to find any proof that any person, not a Roman Catholic or a Quaker, regained his freedom under these orders. See Neal's History of the Puritans, vol. ii. chap. ii.; Gerard Croese, lib. ii. Croese estimates the number of Quakers liberated at fourteen hundred and sixty.

[301] Barillon, May 28,/June 7, 1685. Observator, May 27, 1685; Sir J. Reresby's Memoirs.

[302] Lewis wrote to Barillon about this class of Exclusionists as follows: "L'interet qu'ils auront a effacer cette tache par des services considerables les portera, selons toutes les apparences, a le servir plus utilement que ne pourraient faire ceux qui ont toujours ete les plus attaches a sa personne." May 15-25,1685.

[303] Barillon, May 4-14, 1685; Sir John Reresby's Memoirs.

[304] Burnet, i. 626; Evelyn's Diary, May, 22, 1685.

[305] Roger North's Life of Guildford, 218; Bramston's Memoirs.

[306] North's Life of Guildford, 228; News from Westminster.

[307] Burnet, i. 382; Letter from Lord Conway to Sir George Rawdon, Dec. 28, 1677. in the Rawdon Papers.

[308] London Gazette, May 25, 1685; Evelyn's Diary, May 22, 1685.

[309] North's Life of Guildford, 256.

[310] Burnet, i. 639; Evelyn's Diary, May 22, 1685; Barillon, May 23,/June 2, and May 25,/June 4, 1685 The silence of the journals perplexed Mr. Fox ; but it is explained by the circumstance that Seymour's motion was not seconded.

[311] Journals, May 22. Stat. Jac. II. i. 1.

[312] Journals, May 26, 27. Sir J. Reresby's Memoirs.

[313] Commons' Journals, May 27, 1685.

[314] Roger North's Life of Sir Dudley North; Life of Lord GuiIford, 166; Mr M'Cullough's Literature of Political Economy.

[315] Life of Dudley North, 176, Lonsdale's Memoirs, Van Citters, June 12-22, 1685.

[316] Commons' Journals, March 1, 1689.

[317] Lords' Journals, March 18, 19, 1679, May 22, 1685.

[318] Stat. 5 Geo. IV. c. 46.

[319] 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.

[320] London Gazette, January, 4, 1684-5; Ferguson MS. in Eachard's History, iii. 764; Grey's Narratives; Sprat's True Account, Danvers's Treatise on Baptism; Danvers's Innocency and Truth vindicated; Crosby's History of the English Baptists.

[321] Sprat's True Account; Burnet, i. 634; Wade's Confession, Earl. 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 whatever.

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

[323] Sprat's True Account and Appendix, passim.

[324] Sprat's True Account and Appendix, Proceedings against Rumbold in the Collection of State Trials; Burnet's Own Times, i. 633; Appendix to Fox's History, No. IV.

[325] Grey's narrative; his trial in the Collection of State Trials; Sprat's True Account.

[326] In the Pepysian Collection is a print representing one of the balls which About this time William and Mary gave in the Oranje Zaal.

[327] Avaux Neg. January 25, 1685. Letter from James to the Princess of Orange dated January 1684-5, among Birch's Extracts in the British Museum.

[328] Grey's Narrative; Wade's Confession, Lansdowne MS. 1152.

[329] Burnet, i. 542; Wood, Ath. Ox. under the name of Owen; Absalom and Achtophel, part ii.; Eachard, iii. 682, 697; Sprat's True Account, passim; Lond. Gaz. Aug. 6,1683; Nonconformist's Memorial; North's Examen, 399.

[330] Wade's Confession, Harl. MS. 6845.

[331] Avaux Neg. Feb. 20, 22, 1685; Monmouth's letter to James from Ringwood.

[332] Boyer's History of King William the Third, 2d edition, 1703, vol. i 160.

[333] Welwood's Memoirs, App. xv.; Burnet, i. 530. Grey told a somewhat different story, but he told it to save his life. The Spanish ambassador at the English court, Don Pedro de Ronquillo, in a letter to the governor of the Low Countries written about this time, sneers at Monmouth for living on the bounty of a fond woman, and hints a very unfounded suspicion that the Duke's passion was altogether interested. "Hallandose hoy tan falto de medios que ha menester trasformarse en Amor con Miledi en vista de la necesidad de poder subsistir."--Ronquillo to Grana. Mar. 30,/Apr. 9, 1685.

[334] Proceedings against Argyle in the Collection of State Trials, Burnet, i 521; A True and Plain Account of the Discoveries made in Scotland, 1684, The Scotch Mist Cleared; Sir George Mackenzie's Vindication, Lord Fountainhall's Chronological Notes.

[335] Information of Robert Smith in the Appendix to Sprat's True Account.

[336] True and Plain Account of the Discoveries made in Scotland.

[337] Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio, lib. ii. cap. 33.

[338] See Sir Patrick Hume's Narrative, passim.

[339] Grey's Narrative; Wade's Confession, Harl. MS. 6845.

[340] Burnet, i. 631.

[341] Grey's Narrative.

[342] Le Clerc's Life of Locke; Lord King's Life of Locke; Lord Grenville's Oxford and Locke. Locke must not be confounded with the Anabapist Nicholas Look, whose name was spelled Locke in Grey's Confession, and who is mentioned in the Lansdowne MS. 1152, and in the Buccleuch narrative appended to Mr. Rose's dissertation. I should hardly think it necessary to make this remark, but that the similarity of the two names appears to have misled a man so well acquainted with the history of those times as Speaker Onslow. See his note on Burnet, i, 629.

[343] Wodrow, book iii. chap. ix; London Gazette, May 11, 1685; Barillon, May 11-21.

[344] Register of the Proceedings of the States General, May 5-15, 1685.

[345] This is mentioned in his credentials, dated on the 16th of March, 1684-5.

[346] Bonrepaux to Seignelay, February 4-14, 1686.

[347] Avaux Neg. April 30,/May 10, May 1-11, May 5-15, 1685; Sir Patrick Hume's Narrative; Letter from The Admiralty of Amsterdam to the States General, dated June 20, 1685; Memorial of Skelton, delivered to the States General, May 10, 1685.

[348] If any person is inclined to suspect that I have exaggerated the absurdity and ferocity of these men, I would advise him to read two books, which will convince him that I have rather softened than overcharged the portrait, the Hind Let Loose, and Faithful Contendings Displayed.

[349] A few words which were in the first five editions have been omitted in this place. Here and in another passage I had, as Mr. Aytoun has observed, mistaken the City Guards, which were commanded by an officer named Graham, for the Dragoons of Graham of Claverhouse.

[350] The authors from whom I have taken the history of Argyle's expedition are Sir Patrick Hume, who was an eyewitness of what he related, and Wodrow, who had access to materials of the greatest value, among which were the Earl's own papers. Wherever there is a question of veracity between Argyle and Hume, I have no doubt that Argyle's narrative ought to be followed.

See also Burnet, i. 631, and the life of Bresson, published by Dr. Mac Crie. The account of the Scotch rebellion in the Life of James the Second, is a ridiculous romance, not written by the King himself, nor derived from his papers, but composed by a Jacobite who did not even take the trouble to look at a map of the seat of war.

[351] Wodrow, III. ix 10; Western Martyrology; Burnet, i. 633; Fox's History, Appendix iv. I can find no way, except that indicated in the text, of reconciling Rumbold's denial that he had ever admitted into his mind the thought of assassination with his confession that he had himself mentioned his own house as a convenient place for an attack on the royal brothers. The distinction which I suppose him to have taken was certainly taken by another Rye House conspirator, who was, like him, an old soldier of the Commonwealth, Captain Walcot. On Walcot's trial, West, the witness for the crown, said, "Captain, you did agree to be one of those that were to fight the Guards." "What, then, was the reason." asked Chief Justice Pemberton, "that he would not kill the King?" "He said," answered West, "that it was a base thing to kill a naked man, and he would not do it."

[352] Wodrow, III. ix. 9.

[353] Wade's narrative, Harl, MS. 6845; Burnet, i. 634; Van Citters's Despatch of Oct. 30,/Nov. 9, 1685; Luttrell's Diary of the same date.

[354] Wodrow, III, ix. 4, and III. ix. 10. Wodrow gives from the Acts of Council the names of all the prisoners who were transported, mutilated or branded.

[355] Skelton's letter is dated the 7-17th of May 1686. It will be found, together with a letter of the Schout or High Bailiff of Amsterdam, in a little volume published a few months later, and entitled, "Histoire des Evenemens Tragiques d'Angleterre." The documents inserted in that work are, as far as I have examined them, given exactly from the Dutch archives, except that Skelton's French, which was not the purest, is slightly corrected. See also Grey's Narrative.

Goodenough, on his examination after the battle of Sedgemoor, said, "The Schout of Amsterdam was a particular friend to this last design." Lansdowne MS. 1152.

It is not worth while to refute those writers who represent the Prince of Orange as an accomplice in Monmouth's enterprise. The circumstance on which they chiefly rely is that the authorities of Amsterdam took no effectual steps for preventing the expedition from sailing. This circumstance is in truth the strongest proof that the expedition was not favoured by William. No person, not profoundly ignorant of the institutions and politics of Holland, would hold the Stadtholder answerable for the proceedings of the heads of the Loevestein party.

[356] Avaux Neg. June 7-17, 8-18, 14-24, 1685, Letter of the Prince of Orange to Lord Rochester, June 9, 1685.

[357] Van Citters, June 9-19, June 12-22,1685. The correspondence of Skelton with the States General and with the Admiralty of Amsterdam is in the archives at the Hague. Some pieces will be found in the Evenemens Tragiques d'Angleterre. See also Burnet, i. 640.

[358] Wade's Confession in the Hardwicke Papers; Harl. MS. 6845.

[359] See Buyse's evidence against Monmouth and Fletcher in the Collection of State Trials.

[360] Journals of the House of Commons, June 13, 1685; Harl. MS. 6845; Lansdowne MS. 1152.

[361] Burnet, i. 641, Goodenough's confession in the Lansdowne MS. 1152. Copies of the Declaration, as originally printed, are very rare; but there is one in the British Museum.

[362] Historical Account of the Life and magnanimous Actions of the most illustrious Protestant Prince James, Duke of Monmouth, 1683.

[363] Wade's Confession, Hardwicke Papers; Axe Papers; Harl. MS. 6845.

[364] Harl. MS. 6845.

[365] Buyse's evidence in the Collection of State Trials; Burnet i 642; Ferguson's MS. quoted by Eachard.

[366] London Gazette, June 18, 1685; Wade's Confession, Hardwicke Papers.

[367] Lords' Journals, June 13,1685.

[368] Wade's Confession; Ferguson MS.; Axe Papers, Harl. MS. 6845, Oldmixon, 701, 702. Oldmixon, who was then a boy, lived very near the scene of these events.

[369] London Gazette, June 18, 1685; Lords' and Commons' Journals, June 13 and 15; Dutch Despatch, 16-26.

[370] Oldmixon is wrong in saying that Fenwick carried up the bill. It was carried up, as appears from the Journals, by Lord Ancram. See Delamere's Observations on the Attainder of the Late Duke of Monmouth.

[371] Commons' Journals of June 17, 18, and 19, 1685; Reresby's Memoirs.

[372] Commons' Journals, June 19, 29, 1685; Lord Lonsdale's Memoirs, 8, 9, Burnet, i. 639. The bill, as amended by the committee, will be found in Mr. Fox's historical work. Appendix iii. If Burnet's account be correct, the offences which, by the amended bill, were made punishable only with civil incapacities were, by the original bill, made capital.

[373] 1 Jac. II. c. 7; Lords' Journals, July 2, 1685.

[374] Lords' and Commons' Journals, July 2, 1685.

[375] Savage's edition of Toulmin's History of Taunton.

[376] Sprat's true Account; Toulmin's History of Taunton.

[377] Life and Death of Joseph Alleine, 1672; Nonconformists' Memorial.

[378] Harl. MS. 7006; Oldmixon. 702; Eachard, iii. 763.

[379] Wade's Confession; Goodenough's Confession, Harl. MS. 1152, Oldmixon, 702. Ferguson's denial is quite undeserving of credit. A copy of the proclamation is in the Harl. MS. 7006.

[380] Copies of the last three proclamations are in the British Museum; Harl. MS. 7006. The first I have never seen; but it is mentioned by Wado.

[381] Grey's Narrative; Ferguson's MS., Eachard, iii. 754.

[382] Persecution Exposed, by John Whiting.

[383] Harl. MS. 6845.

[384] One of these weapons may still be seen in the tower.

[385] Grey's Narrative; Paschall's Narrative in the Appendix to Heywood's Vindication.

[386] Oldmixon, 702.

[387] North's Life of Guildford, 132. Accounts of Beaufort's progress through Wales and the neighbouring counties are in the London Gazettes of July 1684. Letter of Beaufort to Clarendon, June 19, 1685.

[388] Bishop Fell to Clarendon, June 20; Abingdon to Clarendon, June 20, 25, 26, 1685; Lansdowne MS. 846.

[389] Avaux, July 5-15, 6-16, 1685.

[390] Van Citters, June 30,/July 10, July 3-13, 21-31,1685; Avaux Neg. July 5-15, London Gazette, July 6.

[391] Barillon, July 6-16, 1685; Scott's preface to Albion and Albanius.

[392] Abingdon to Clarendon, June 29,1685; Life of Philip Henry, by Bates.

[393] London Gazette, June 22, and June 25,1685; Wade's Confession; Oldmixon, 703; Harl. MS. 6845.

[394] Wade's Confession.

[395] Wade's Confession; Oldmixon, 703; Harl. MS. 6845; Charge of Jeffreys to the grand jury of Bristol, Sept. 21, 1685.

[396] London Gazette, June 29, 1685; Wade's Confession.

[397] Wade's Confession.

[398] London Gazette, July 2,1685; Barillon, July 6-16; Wade's Confession.

[399] London Gazette, June 29,1685; Van Citters, June 30,/July 10,

[400] Harl. MS. 6845; Wade's Confession.

[401] Wade's Confession; Eachard, iii. 766.

[402] Wade's Confession.

[403] London Gazette, July 6, 1685; Van Citters, July 3-13, Oldmixon, 703.

[404] Wade's Confession.

[405] Matt. West. Flor. Hist., A. D. 788; MS. Chronicle quoted by Mr. Sharon Turner in the History of the Anglo-Saxons, book IV. chap. xix; Drayton's Polyolbion, iii; Leland's Itinerary; Oldmixon, 703. Oldmixon was then at Bridgewater, and probably saw the Duke on the church tower. The dish mentioned in the text is the property of Mr. Stradling, who has taken laudable pains to preserve the relics and traditions of the Western insurrection.

[406] Oldmixon, 703.

[407] Churchill to Clarendon, July 4, 1685.

[408] Oldmixon, 703; Observator, Aug. 1, 1685.

[409] Paschall's Narrative in Heywood's Appendix.

[410] Kennet, ed. 1719, iii. 432. I am forced to believe that this lamentable story is true. The Bishop declares that it was communicated to him in the year 1718 by a brave officer of the Blues, who had fought at Sedgemoor, and who had himself seen the poor girl depart in an agony of distress.

[411] Narrative of an officer of the Horse Guards in Kennet, ed. 1718, iii. 432; MS. Journal of the Western Rebellion, kept by Mr. Edward Dummer, Dryden's Hind and Panther, part II. The lines of Dryden are remarkable:

"Such were the pleasing triumphs of the sky
For James's late nocturnal victory.
The fireworks which his angels made above.
The pledge of his almighty patron's love,
I saw myself the lambent easy light
Gild the brown horror and dispel the night.
The messenger with speed the tidings bore.
News which three labouring nations did restore;
But heaven's own Nuntius was arrived before."

[412] It has been said by several writers, and among them by Pennant, that the district in London called Soho derived its name from the watchword of Monmouth's army at Sedgemoor. Mention of Soho Fields will be found in many books printed before the Western insurrection; for example, in Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684.

[413] There is a warrant of James directing that forty pounds should be paid to Sergeant Weems, of Dumbarton's regiment, "for good service in the action at Sedgemoor in firing the great guns against the rebels." Historical Record of the First or Royal Regiment of Foot.

[414] James the Second's account of the battle of Sedgemoor in Lord Hardwicke's State Papers; Wade's Confession; Ferguson's MS. Narrative in Eachard, iii. 768; Narrative of an Officer of the Horse Guards in Kennet, ed. 1719, iii. 432, London Gazette, July 9, 1685; Oldmixon, 703; Paschall's Narrative; Burnet, i. 643; Evelyn's Diary, July 8; Van Citters, .July 7-17; Barillon, July 9-19; Reresby's Memoirs; the Duke of Buckingham's battle of Sedgemoor, a Farce; MS. Journal of the Western Rebellion, kept by Mr. Edward Dummer, then serving in the train of artillery employed by His Majesty for the suppression of the same. The last mentioned manuscript is in the Pepysian library, and is of the greatest value, not on account of the narrative, which contains little that is remarkable, but on account of the plans, which exhibit the battle in four or five different stages.

"The history of a battle," says the greatest of living generals, "is not unlike the history of a ball. Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost, but no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value or importance . . . . . Just to show you how little reliance can be placed even on what are supposed the best accounts of a battle, I mention that there are some circumstances mentioned in General -----'s account which did not occur as he relates them. It is impossible to say when each important occurrence took place, or in what order."--Wellington Papers, Aug. 8, and 17, 1815.

The battle concerning which the Duke of Wellington wrote thus was that of Waterloo, fought only a few weeks before, by broad day, under his own vigilant and experienced eye. What then must be the difficulty of compiling from twelve or thirteen narratives an account of a battle fought more than a hundred and sixty years ago in such darkness that not a man of those engaged could see fifty paces before him? The difficulty is aggravated by the circumstance that those witnesses who had the best opportunity of knowing the truth were by no means inclined to tell it. The paper which I have placed at the head of my list of authorities was evidently drawn up with extreme partiality to Feversham. Wade was writing under the dread of the halter. Ferguson, who was seldom scrupulous about the truth of his assertions, lied on this occasion like Bobadil or Parolles. Oldmixon, who was a boy at Bridgewater when the battle was fought, and passed a great part of his subsequent life there, was so much under the influence of local passions that his local information was useless to him. His desire to magnify the valour of the Somersetshire peasants, a valour which their enemies acknowledged and which did not need to be set off by exaggeration and fiction, led him to compose an absurd romance. The eulogy which Barillon, a Frenchman accustomed to despise raw levies, pronounced on the vanquished army, is of much more value, "Son infanterie fit fort bien. On eut de la peine a les rompre, et les soldats combattoient avec les crosses de mousquet et les scies qu'ils avoient au bout de grands bastons au lieu de picques."

Little is now to be learned by visiting the field of battle; for the face of the country has been greatly changed; and the old Bussex Rhine on the banks of which the great struggle took place, has long disappeared. The rhine now called by that name is of later date, and takes a different course.

I have derived much assistance from Mr. Roberts's account of the battle. Life of Monmouth, chap. xxii. His narrative is in the main confirmed by Dummer's plans.

[415] I learned these things from persons living close to Sedgemoor.

[416] Oldmixon, 704.

[417] Locke's Western Rebellion Stradling's Chilton Priory.

[418] Locke's Western Rebellion Stradling's Chilton Priory; Oldmixon, 704.

[419] Aubrey's Natural History of Wiltshire, 1691.

[420] Account of the manner of taking the late Duke of Monmouth, published by his Majesty's command; Gazette de France, July 18-28, 1688; Eachard, iii. 770; Burnet, i. 664, and Dartmouth's note: Van Citters, July 10-20,1688.

[421] The letter to the King was printed at the time by authority; that to the Queen Dowager will be found in Sir H. Ellis's Original Letters; that to Rochester in the Clarendon Correspondence.

[422] "On trouve," he wrote, "fort a redire icy qu'il ayt fait une chose si peu ordinaire aux Anglois." July 13-23, 1685.

[423] Account of the manner of taking the Duke of Monmouth; Gazette, July 16, 1685; Van Citters, July 14-24,

[424] Barillon was evidently much shocked. "Ill se vient," he says, "de passer icy, une chose bien extraordinaire et fort opposee a l'usage ordinaire des autres nations" 13-23, 1685.

[425] Burnet. i. 644; Evelyn's Diary, July 15; Sir J. Bramston's Memoirs; Reresby's Memoirs; James to the Prince of Orange, July 14, 1685; Barillon, July 16-26; Bucclench MS.

[426] James to the Prince of Orange, July 14, 1685, Dutch Despatch of the same date, Dartmouth's note on Burnet, i. 646; Narcissus Luttrell's Diary. (1848.) A copy of this diary, from July 1685 to Sept. 1690, is among the Mackintosh papers. To the rest I was allowed access by the kindness of the Warden of All Souls' College, where the original MS. is deposited. The delegates of the Press of the University of Oxford have since published the whole in six substantial volumes, which will, I am afraid, find little favour with readers who seek only for amusement, but which will always be useful as materials for history. (1857.)

[427] Buccleuch MS; Life of James the Second, ii. 37, Orig. Mem., Van Citters, July 14-24, 1685; Gazette de France, August 1-11.

[428] Buccleuch MS.; Life of James the Second, ii. 37, 38, Orig. Mem., Burnet, i. 645; Tenison's account in Kennet, iii. 432, ed. 1719.

[429] Buccleuch MS.

[430] The name of Ketch was often associated with that of Jeffreys in the lampoons of those days.

"While Jeffreys on the bench, Ketch on the gibbet sits,''

says one poet. In the year which followed Monmouth's execution Ketch was turned out of his office for insulting one of the Sheriffs, and was succeeded by a butcher named Rose. But in four months Rose himself was hanged at Tyburn, and Ketch was reinstated. Luttrell's Diary, January 20, and May 28, 1686. See a curious note by Dr, Grey, on Hudibras, part iii. canto ii. line 1534.

[431] Account of the execution of Monmouth, signed by the divines who attended him; Buccleuch MS; Burnet, i. 646; Van Citters, July 17-27,1685, Luttrell's Diary; Evelyn's Diary, July 15; Barillon, July 19-29.

[432] I cannot refrain from expressing my disgust at the barbarous stupidity which has transformed this most interesting little church into the likeness of a meetinghouse in a manufacturing town.

[433] Observator, August 1, 1685; Gazette de France, Nov. 2, 1686; Letter from Humphrey Wanley, dated Aug. 25, 1698, in the Aubrey Collection; Voltaire, Dict. Phil. There are, in the Pepysian Collection, several ballads written after Monmouth's death which represent him as living, and predict his speedy return. I will give two specimens.

"Though this is a dismal story
Of the fall of my design,
Yet I'll come again in glory,
If I live till eighty-nine:
For I'll have a stronger army
And of ammunition store."

Again;

"Then shall Monmouth in his glories
Unto his English friends appear,
And will stifle all such stories
As are vended everywhere.
"They'll see I was not so degraded,
To be taken gathering pease,
Or in a cock of hay up braided.
What strange stories now are these!"

[434] London Gazette, August 3, 1685; the Battle of Sedgemoor, a Farce.

[435] Pepys's Diary, kept at Tangier; Historical Records of the Second or Queen's Royal Regiment of Foot.

[436] Bloody Assizes, Burnet, i. 647; Luttrell's Diary, July 15, 1685; Locke's Western Rebellion; Toulmin's History of Taunton, edited by Savage.

[437] Luttrell's Diary, July 15, 1685; Toulmin's Hist. of Taunton.

[438] Oldmixon, 705; Life and Errors of John Dunton, chap. vii.

[439] The silence of Whig writers so credulous and so malevolent as Oldmixon and the compilers of the Western Martyrology would alone seem to me to settle the question. It also deserves to be remarked that the story of Rhynsault is told by Steele in the Spectator, No. 491. Surely it is hardly possible to believe that, if a crime exactly resembling that of Rhynsault had been committed within living memory in England by an officer of James the Second, Steele, who was indiscreetly and unseasonably forward to display his Whiggism, would have made no allusion to that fact. For the case of Lebon, see the Moniteur, 4 Messidor, l'an 3.

[440] Sunderland to Kirke, July 14 and 28, 1685. "His Majesty," says Sunderland, "commands me to signify to you his dislike of these proceedings, and desires you to take care that no person concerned in the rebellion be at large." It is but just to add that, in the same letter, Kirke is blamed for allowing his soldiers to live at free quarter.

[441] I should be very glad if I could give credit to the popular story that Ken, immediately after the battle of Sedgemoor, represented to the chiefs of the royal army the illegality of military executions. He would, I doubt not, have exerted all his influence on the side of law and of mercy, if he had been present. But there is no trustworthy evidence that he was then in the West at all. Indeed what we know about his proceedings at this time amounts very nearly to proof of an alibi. It is certain from the Journals of the House of Lords that, on the Thursday before the battle, he was at Westminster, it is equally certain that, on the Monday after the battle, he was with Monmouth in the Tower; and, in that age, a journey from London to Bridgewater and back again was no light thing.

[442] North's Life of Guildford, 260, 263, 273; Mackintosh's View of the Reign of James the Second, page 16, note; Letter of Jeffreys to Sunderland, Sept. 5, 1685.

[443] See the preamble of the Act of Parliament reversing her attainder.

[444] Trial of Alice Lisle in the Collection of State Trials; Act of the First of William and Mary for annulling and making void the Attainder of Alice Lisle widow; Burnet, i. 649; Caveat against the Whigs.

[445] Bloody Assizes.

[446] Locke's Western Rebellion.

[447] This I can attest from my own childish recollections.

[448] Lord Lonsdale says seven hundred; Burnet six hundred. I have followed the list which the Judges sent to the Treasury, and which may still be seen there in the letter book of 1685. See the Bloody Assizes, Locke's Western Rebellion; the Panegyric on Lord Jeffreys; Burnet, i. 648; Eachard, iii. 775; Oldmixon, 705.

[449] Some of the prayers, exhortations, and hymns of the sufferers will be found in the Bloody Assizes.

[450] Bloody Assizes; Locke's Western Rebellion; Lord Lonsdale's Memoirs; Account of the Battle of Sedgemoor in the Hardwicke Papers. The story in the Life of James the Second, ii. 43; is not taken from the King's manuscripts, and sufficiently refutes itself.

[451] Bloody Assizes; Locke's Western Rebellion, Humble Petition of Widows and Fatherless Children in the West of England; Panegyric on Lord Jeffreys.

[452] As to the Hewlings, I have followed Kiffin's Memoirs, and Mr. Hewling Luson's narrative, which will be found in the second edition of the Hughes Correspondence, vol. ii. Appendix. The accounts in Locke's Western Rebellion and in the Panegyric on Jeffreys are full of errors. Great part of the account in the Bloody Assizes was written by Kiffin, and agrees word for word with his Memoirs.

[453] See Tutchin's account of his own case in the Bloody Assizes.

[454] Sunderland to Jeffreys, Sept. 14, 1685; Jeffreys to the King, Sept. 19, 1685, in the State Paper Office.

[455] The best account of the sufferings of those rebels who were sentenced to transportation is to be found in a very curious narrative written by John Coad, an honest, Godfearing carpenter who joined Monmouth, was badly wounded at Philip's Norton, was tried by Jeffreys, and was sent to Jamaica. The original manuscript was kindly lent to me by Mr. Phippard, to whom it belongs.

[456] In the Treasury records of the autumn of 1685 are several letters directing search to be made for trifles of this sort.

[457] Commons' Journals, Oct. 9, Nov. 10, Dec 26, 1690; Oldmixon, 706. Panegyrie on Jeffreys.

[458] Life and Death of Lord Jeffreys; Panegyric on Jeffreys; Kiffin's Memoirs.

[459] Burnet, i 368; Evelyn's Diary, Feb. 4, 1684-5, July 13, 1686. In one of the satires of that time are these lines:

"When Duchess, she was gentle, mild, and civil;
When Queen, she proved a raging furious devil."

[460] Sunderland to Jeffreys, Sept. 14, 1685.

[461] Locke's Western Rebellion; Toulmin's History of Taunton, edited by Savage, Letter of the Duke of Somerset to Sir F. Warre; Letter of Sunderland to Penn, Feb. 13, 1685-6, from the State Paper Office, in the Mackintosh Collection. (1848.)

The letter of Sunderland is as follows:-

"Whitehall, Feb. 13, 1685-6.

"Mr. Penne,

"Her Majesty's Maids of Honour having acquainted me that they design to employ you and Mr. Walden in making a composition with the Relations of the Maids of Taunton for the high Misdemeanour they have been guilty of, I do at their request hereby let you know that His Majesty has been pleased to give their Fines to the said Maids of Honour, and therefore recommend it to Mr. Walden and you to make the most advantageous composition you can in their behalf."

I am, Sir,

"Your humble servant,

"SUNDERLAND."

That the person to whom this letter was addressed was William Penn the Quaker was not doubted by Sir James Mackintosh who first brought it to light, or, as far as I am aware, by any other person, till after the publication of the first part of this History. It has since been confidently asserted that the letter was addressed to a certain George Penne, who appears from an old accountbook lately discovered to have been concerned in a negotiation for the ransom of one of Monmouth's followers, named Azariah Pinney.

If I thought that I had committed an error, I should, I hope, have the honesty to acknowledge it. But, after full consideration, I am satisfied that Sunderland's letter was addressed to William Penn.

Much has been said about the way in which the name is spelt. The Quaker, we are told, was not Mr. Penne, but Mr. Penn. I feel assured that no person conversant with the books and manuscripts of the seventeenth century will attach any importance to this argument. It is notorious that a proper name was then thought to be well spelt if the sound were preserved. To go no further than the persons, who, in Penn's time, held the Great Seal, one of them is sometimes Hyde and sometimes Hide: another is Jefferies, Jeffries, Jeffereys, and Jeffreys: a third is Somers, Sommers, and Summers: a fourth is Wright and Wrighte; and a fifth is Cowper and Cooper. The Quaker's name was spelt in three ways. He, and his father the Admiral before him, invariably, as far as I have observed, spelt it Penn; but most people spelt it Pen; and there were some who adhered to the ancient form, Penne. For example. William the father is Penne in a letter from Disbrowe to Thurloe, dated on the 7th of December, 1654; and William the son is Penne in a newsletter of the 22nd of September, 1688, printed in the Ellis Correspondence. In Richard Ward's Life and Letters of Henry More, printed in 1710, the name of the Quaker will be found spelt in all the three ways, Penn in the index, Pen in page 197, and Penne in page 311. The name is Penne in the Commission which the Admiral carried out with him on his expedition to the West Indies. Burchett, who became Secretary to the Admiralty soon after the Revolution, and remained in office long after the accession of the House of Hannover, always, in his Naval History, wrote the name Penne. Surely it cannot be thought strange that an old-fashioned spelling, in which the Secretary of the Admiralty persisted so late as 1720, should have been used at the office of the Secretary of State in 1686. I am quite confident that, if the letter which we are considering had been of a different kind, if Mr. Penne had been informed that, in consequence of his earnest intercession, the King had been graciously pleased to grant a free pardon to the Taunton girls, and if I had attempted to deprive the Quaker of the credit of that intercession on the ground that his name was not Penne, the very persons who now complain so bitterly that I am unjust to his memory would have complained quite as bitterly, and, I must say, with much more reason.

I think myself, therefore perfectly justified in considering the names, Penn and Penne, as the same. To which, then, of the two persons who bore that name, George or William, is it probable that the letter of the Secretary of State was addressed?

George was evidently an adventurer of a very low class. All that we learn about him from the papers of the Pinney family is that he was employed in the purchase of a pardon for the younger son of a dissenting minister. The whole sum which appears to have passed through George's hands on this occasion was sixty-five pounds. His commission on the transaction must therefore have been small. The only other information which we have about him, is that he, some time later, applied to the government for a favour which was very far from being an honour. In England the Groom Porter of the Palace had a jurisdiction over games of chance, and made some very dirty gain by issuing lottery tickets and licensing hazard tables. George appears to have petitioned for a similar privilege in the American colonies.

William Penn was, during the reign of James the Second, the most active and powerful solicitor about the Court. I will quote the words of his admirer Crose. "Quum autem Pennus tanta gratia plurinum apud regem valeret, et per id perplures sibi amicos acquireret, illum omnes, etiam qui modo aliqua notitia erant conjuncti, quoties aliquid a rege postulandum agendumve apud regem esset, adire, ambire, orare, ut eos apud regem adjuvaret." He was overwhelmed by business of this kind, "obrutus negotiationibus curationibusque." His house and the approaches to it were every day blocked up by crowds of persons who came to request his good offices; "domus ac vestibula quotidie referta clientium et suppliccantium." From the Fountainhall papers it appears that his influence was felt even in the highlands of Scotland. We learn from himself that, at this time, he was always toiling for others, that he was a daily suitor at Whitehall, and that, if he had chosen to sell his influence, he could, in little more than three, years, have put twenty thousand pounds into his pocket, and obtained a hundred thousand more for the improvement of the colony of which he was proprietor.

Such was the position of these two men. Which of them, then, was the more likely to be employed in the matter to which Sunderland's letter related? Was it George or William, an agent of the lowest or of the highest class? The persons interested were ladies of rank and fashion, resident at the palace. where George would hardly have been admitted into an outer room, but where William was every day in the presence chamber and was frequently called into the closet. The greatest nobles in the kingdom were zealous and active in the cause of their fair friends, nobles with whom William lived in habits of familiar intercourse, but who would hardly have thought George fit company for their grooms. The sum in question was seven thousand pounds, a sum not large when compared with the masses of wealth with which William had constantly to deal, but more than a hundred times as large as the only ransom which is known to have passed through the hands of George. These considerations would suffice to raise a strong presumption that Sunderland's letter was addressed to William, and not to George: but there is a still stronger argument behind.

It is most important to observe that the person to whom this letter was addressed was not the first person whom the Maids of Honour had requested to act for them. They applied to him because another person to whom they had previously applied, had, after some correspondence, declined the office. From their first application we learn with certainty what sort of person they wished to employ. If their first application had been made to some obscure pettifogger or needy gambler, we should be warranted in believing that the Penne to whom their second application was made was George. If, on the other hand, their first application was made to a gentleman of the highest consideration, we can hardly be wrong in saying that the Penne to whom their second application was made must have been William. To whom, then, was their first application made? It was to Sir Francis Warre of Hestercombe, a Baronet and a Member of Parliament. The letters are still extant in which the Duke of Somerset, the proud Duke, not a man very likely to have corresponded with George Penne, pressed Sir Francis to undertake the commission. The latest of those letters is dated about three weeks before Sunderland's letter to Mr. Penne. Somerset tells Sir Francis that the town clerk of Bridgewater, whose name, I may remark in passing, is spelt sometimes Bird and sometimes Birde, had offered his services, but that those services had been declined. It is clear, therefore, that the Maids of Honour were desirous to have an agent of high station and character. And they were right. For the sum which they demanded was so large that no ordinary jobber could safely be entrusted with the care of their interests.

As Sir Francis Warre excused himself from undertaking the negotiation, it became necessary for the Maids of Honour and their advisers to choose somebody who might supply his place; and they chose Penne. Which of the two Pennes, then, must have been their choice, George, a petty broker to whom a percentage on sixty-five pounds was an object, and whose highest ambition was to derive an infamous livelihood from cards and dice, or William, not inferior in social position to any commoner in the kingdom? Is it possible to believe that the ladies, who, in January, employed the Duke of Somerset to procure for them an agent in the first rank of the English gentry, and who did not think an attorney, though occupying a respectable post in a respectable corporation, good enough for their purpose, would, in February, have resolved to trust everything to a fellow who was as much below Bird as Bird was below Warre?

But, it is said, Sunderland's letter is dry and distant; and he never would have written in such a style to William Penn with whom he was on friendly terms. Can it be necessary for me to reply that the official communications which a Minister of State makes to his dearest friends and nearest relations are as cold and formal as those which he makes to strangers? Will it be contended that the General Wellesley to whom the Marquis Wellesley, when Governor of India, addressed so many letters beginning with "Sir," and ending with "I have the honour to be your obedient servant,'' cannot possibly have been his Lordship's brother Arthur?

But, it is said, Oldmixon tells a different story. According to him, a Popish lawyer named Brent, and a subordinate jobber, named Crane, were the agents in the matter of the Taunton girls. Now it is notorious that of all our historians Oldmixon is the least trustworthy. His most positive assertion would be of no value when opposed to such evidence as is furnished by Sunderland's letter, But Oldmixon asserts nothing positively. Not only does he not assert positively that Brent and Crane acted for the Maids of Honour; but he does not even assert positively that the Maids of Honour were at all concerned. He goes no further than "It was said," and "It was reported." It is plain, therefore, that he was very imperfectly informed. I do not think it impossible, however, that there may have been some foundation for the rumour which he mentions. We have seen that one busy lawyer, named Bird, volunteered to look after the interest of the Maids of Honour, and that they were forced to tell him that they did not want his services. Other persons, and among them the two whom Oldmixon names, may have tried to thrust themselves into so lucrative a job, and may, by pretending to interest at Court, have succeeded in obtaining a little money from terrified families. But nothing can be more clear than that the authorised agent of the Maids of Honour was the Mr. Penne, to whom the Secretary of State wrote; and I firmly believe that Mr. Penne to have been William the Quaker.

If it be said that it is incredible that so good a man would have been concerned in so bad an affair, I can only answer that this affair was very far indeed from being the worst in which he was concerned.

For those reasons I leave the text, and shall leave it exactly as it originally stood. (1857.)

[462] Burnet, i. 646, and Speaker Onslow's note; Clarendon to Rochester, May 8, 1686.

[463] Burnet, i. 634.

[464] Calamy's Memoirs; Commons' Journals, December 26,1690; Sunderland to Jeffreys, September 14, 1685; Privy Council Book, February 26, 1685-6.

[465] Lansdowne MS. 1152; Harl. MS. 6845; London Gazette, July 20, 1685.

[466] Many writers have asserted, without the slightest foundation, that a pardon was granted to Ferguson by James. Some have been so absurd as to cite this imaginary pardon, which, if it were real would prove only that Ferguson was a court spy, in proof of the magnanimity and benignity of the prince who beheaded Alice Lisle and burned Elizabeth Gaunt. Ferguson was not only not specially pardoned, but was excluded by name from the general pardon published in the following spring. (London Gazette, March 15, 1685-6.) If, as the public suspected and as seems probable, indulgence was shown to him; it was indulgence of which James was, not without reason, ashamed, and which was, as far as possible, kept secret. The reports which were current in London at the time are mentioned in the Observator, Aug. 1,1685.

Sir John Reresby, who ought to have been well informed, positively affirms that Ferguson was taken three days after the battle of Sedgemoor. But Sir John was certainly wrong as to the date, and may therefore have been wrong as to the whole story. From the London Gazette, and from Goodenough's confession (Lansdowne MS. 1152), it is clear that, a fortnight after the battle, Ferguson had not been caught, and was supposed to be still lurking in England.

[467] Granger's Biographical History.

[468] Burnet, i. 648; James to the Prince of Orange, Sept. 10, and 24, 1685; Lord Lonadale's Memoirs; London Gazette, Oct. 1, 1685.

[469] Trial of Cornish in the Collection of State Trials, Sir J. Hawles's Remarks on Mr. Cornish's Trial; Burnet, i. 651; Bloody Assizes; Stat. 1 Gul. and Mar.

[470] Trials of Fernley and Elizabeth Gaunt, in the Collection of State Trials Burnet, i. 649; Bloody Assizes; Sir J. Bramston's Memoirs; Luttrell's Diary, Oct. 23, 1685.

[471] Bateman's Trial in the Collection of State Trials; Sir John Hawles's Remarks. It is worth while to compare Thomas Lee's evidence on this occasion with his confession previously published by authority.

[472] Van Citters, Oct. 13-23, 1685.

[473] Neal's History of the Puritans, Calamy's Account of the ejected Ministers and the Nonconformists' Memorial contain abundant proofs of the severity of this persecution. Howe's farewell letter to his flock will be found in the interesting life of that great man, by Mr. Rogers. Howe complains that he could not venture to show himself in the streets of London, and that his health had suffered from want of air and exercise. But the most vivid picture of the distress of the Nonconformists is furnished by their deadly enemy, Lestrange, in the Observators of September and October, 1685.