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In 1666, while Monk and Rupert rode triumphant between Urie and Schilling, and De Witt, amidst the conflagration of Brandaris, swore never to sheathe his sword till he had his revenge—an oath blown across the Channel by the very winds that hurled the Great Fire through London—Aldrich took his Bachelor's Degree; and in 1669, while Charles was meditating Rome, and Lauderdale strangling the Covenant, he became a Master.
In 1681, there was another Parliament held at Oxford, a stormy Parliament, elected in the fierce inhuman frenzy of the Popish plot, under a wild burst of excitement such as England had never before known in electioneering annals: a Parliament whose Whig members arrived in Oxford surrounded by retainers armed with staves, with ribbons of 'No Popery, no Slavery' in their hats, all sworn to exclude the Duke of York from the throne: a Parliament dissolved in the midst of rage and tumult, and hurried to its end by almost a flight of the King. It was about such a time that old Canon Speed died, an old loyalist chaplain to the Duke of York, in one of whose naval battles with the Dutch he is said to have
'Prayed like a Christian and fought like a Turk:'
and into his stall Aldrich was appointed, more interested, we may suppose, in the Duke for whom his predecessor fought, than in the Whiggery which he saw so hot and furious in its onset on that Duke's succession.
In 1683 the tide had turned, and at the moment that the new ebb swept away Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney in its revenging flood, Aldrich's University passed, in answer to
