sel, Essex, Howard, Algernon Sidney, and John Hampden, grandson to the great man of that name.

2. Such, together with the duke of Argyle, were the leaders of this conspiracy. But there was also a set of subordinate conspirators, who frequently met together and carried on projects quite unknown to Monmouth and his council. Among these men were colonel Rumsey, an old republican officer, together with lieutenant-colonel Walcot, of the same stamp; Goodenough, under-sheriff of London, a zealous and noted party-man; Ferguson, an independent minister; and several attorneys, merchants, and tradesmen of London. 3. But colonel Rumsey and Ferguson were the only persons that had access to the great leaders of the conspiracy. These men in their meetings embraced the most desperate resolutions. They proposed to assassinate the king on his way to Newmarket; Rumbal, one of the party, possessed a farm upon that road called the Rye-house, and from thence the conspiracy was denominated the Ryehouse plot. 4. They deliberated upon a scheme of stopping the king's coach, by overturning a cart on the highway at this place, and shooting him through the hedges. The house in which the king lived at Newmarket took fire accidentally, and he was obliged to leave Newmarket eight days sooner than was expected, to which circumstance his safety was ascribed.

5. Among the conspirators was one Keiling, who finding himself in danger of a prosecution for arresting the lordmayor of London, resolved to earn his pardon by discovering this plot to the ministry. Colonel Rumsey, and West, a lawyer, no sooner understood that this man had informed against them, than they agreed to save themselves by turning king's evidence, and they surrendered themselves accordingly. 6. Monmouth absconded; Russel was sent to the Tower; Grey escaped; Howard was taken, concealed in a chimney; Essex, Sidney, and Hampden were soon after arrested, and had the mortification to find lord Howard an evidence against them.

7. Walcot was first brought to trial and condemned, together with Hone and Rouse, two associates in the conspiracy, upon the evidence of Rumsey, West, and Sheppard. They died penitent, acknowledging the justness of the sentence by which they were executed. A much greater sacrifice was shortly after to follow. This was the lord Russel, son of the earl of Bedford, a nobleman of num

berless good qualities, and led into this conspiracy from a conviction of the duke of York's intention to restore popery. 8. He was liberal, popular, humane, and brave. All his virtues were so many crimes in the present suspicious disposition of the court. The chief evidence against him was lord Howard, a man of very bad character, one of the conspirators, who was now contented to take life upon such terms, and to accept of infamous safety. 9. This witness swore that Russel was engaged in the design of an insurrection; but he acquitted him, as he did also Rumsey and West, of being privy to the assassination. The jury, who were zealous royalists, after a short deliberation, brought the prisoner in guilty, and he was condemned to suffer beheading. The scaffold for his execution was erected in Lincoln-inn-fields; he laid his head on the block without the least change of countenance, and at two strokes it was severed from his body.

10. The celebrated Algernon Sidney, son to the earl of Leicester, was next brought to his trial. He had been formerly engaged in the parliamentary army against the late king, and was even named on the high court of justice that tried him, but he had not taken his seat among the judges. 11. He had ever opposed Cromwell's usurpation, and went into voluntary banishment on the restoration. His affairs, however, requiring his return, he applied to the king for a pardon, and obtained his request. But all his hopes and all his reasonings were formed upon republican principles. For his adored republic he had written and fought, and went into banishment and ventured to return. 12. It may easily be conceived how obnoxious a man of such principles was to a court that now was not even content to be without limitations to its power. They went so far as to take illegal methods to procure his condemnation. The only witness that deposed against Sidney was lord Howard, and the law required two. 13. In order, therefore, to make out a second witness, they had recourse to a very extraordinary expedient. In ransacking his closet, some discourses on government were found in his own handwriting, containing principles favourable to liberty, and in themselves no way subversive of a limited government. By overstraining, some of these were construed into treason. 14. It was in vain he alleged that papers were no evidence; that it could not be proved they were written by him; that, if proved, the papers themselves contained nothing criminal. His defence

was overruled; the violent and inhuman Jefferies, who was now chief-justice, easily prevailed on a partial jury to bring him in guilty, and his execution followed soon after. 15. One can scarce contemplate the transactions of this reign without horror. Such a picture of factious guilt on each side; a court at once immersed in sensuality and blood, a people armed against each other with the most deadly animosity, and no single party to be found with sense enough to stem the general torrent of rancour and factious suspicion.

Sir

Hampden was tried soon after, and as there was nothing to affect his life, he was fined forty thousand pounds. Holloway, a merchant of Bristol, who had fled to the West Indies, was brought over, condemned, and executed. Thomas Armstrong also, who had fled to Holland, was brought over, and shared the same fate. 17. Lord Essex, who had been imprisoned in the Tower, was found in an apartment with his throat cut; but whether he was guilty of suicide, or whether the bigotry of the times might not have induced some assassin to commit the crime, cannot now be known.

This was the last blood that was shed for an imputation of plots or conspiracies, which continued during the greatest part of this reign.

18. At this period the government of Charles was as absolute as that of any monarch in Europe; but, happily for mankind, his tyranny was but of short duration. The king was seized with a sudden fit, which resembled an apoplexy; and although he was recovered by bleeding, yet he languished only for a few days, and then expired, in the fifty-fifth year of his age, and twenty-fifth of his reign. During his illness some clergymen of the church of England attended him, to whom he discovered a total indifference. Catholic priests were brought to his bedside, and from their hands he received the rites of their communion.

SECTION I.

1. (A.D. 1685.) THE duke of York, who succeeded his brother by the title of king James the second, had been bred a papist by his mother, and was strongly bigoted to his principles. He went openly to mass with all the ensigns of his dignity, and even sent one Caryl as his agent to Rome.

to make submission to the pope, and to pave the way for the readmission of England into the bosom of the catholic church.

2. A conspiracy, set on foot by the duke of Monmouth, was the first disturbance in this reign. He had, since his last conspiracy, been pardoned, but was ordered to depart the kingdom, and had retired to Holland. Being dismissed from thence by the prince of Orange, upon James's accession he went to Brussels, where finding himself still pursued by the king's severity, he resolved to retaliate, and make an attempt upon the kingdom. 3. He had ever been the darling of the people, and some averred that Charles had married his mother, and owned Monmouth's legitimacy at his death. The duke of Argyle seconded his views in Scotland, and they formed the scheme of a double insurrection; so that, while Monmouth should attempt to make a rising in the west, Argyle was also to try his endeavours in the north.

4. Argyle was the first who landed in Scotland, where he published his manifestos, put himself at the head of two thousand five hundred men, and strove to influence the people in his cause. But a formidable body of the king's forces coming against him, his army fell away, and he himself, after being wounded in attempting to escape, was taken prisoner by a peasant, who found him standing up to his neck in a pool of water. He was from thence carried to Edinburgh, where, after enduring many indignities with a gallant spirit, he was publicly executed.

5. Meanwhile Monmouth was by this time landed in Dorsetshire, with scarcely a hundred followers. However, his name was so popular, and so great was the hatred of the people both for the person and religion of James, that in four days he had assembled a body of above two thousand

men.

6. Being advanced to Taunton, his numbers had increased to six thousand men; and he was obliged every day, for want of arms, to dismiss numbers who crowded to his standard. He entered Bridgewater, Wells, and Frome, and was proclaimed in all those places; but he lost the hour of action in receiving and claiming these empty honours.

7. The king was not a little alarmed at his invasion; but still more so at the success of an undertaking that at first appeared desperate. Six regiments of British troops were recalled from Holland, and a body of regulars, to the num