the king, by adjourning parliament, of having interrupted the necessary business of the nation. After much contention and delay, in the hope that the city would voluntarily lay itself at the feet of the monarch, judgment was pronounced that "the city of London should be taken and seized with the king's hands." When the authorities prayed the non-carrying out of the sentence, the lord chancellor North candidly avowed the real object of the proceeding. That the king was re-solved to put an end to the opposition of the city, by having a veto on the appointment of the lord mayor and sheriffs. That he did not wish to interfere in their affairs or liberties further, but this power he was determined to possess, and therefore the judgment was confirmed June 20th, 1683, and London was reduced to an absolute slavery to the king's will. It was equally determined to proceed by the same means of a quo warranto to suppress the charters of the other corporations in the kingdom.
Shaftesbury had seen the progress of this enormous change with the deepest alarm. He retired to his house in Aldersgate Street, and not feeling himself secure there, hid himself successively in different parts of the city, striving, through his agents, to move Monmouth, Essex, and Grey to rise, and break this progress of despotism. He boasted that he had ten thousand link-boys yet in the city, who would rise at the lifting of his finger. It was proposed by Monmouth that he should engage the lords Macclesfield, Brandon, and Delamere to rise in Cheshire and Lancashire. Lord Russell corresponded with Sir Francis Drake in the west of England, Trenchard engaged to raise the people of Taunton. But Monmouth had more than half betrayed the scheme to the king, and the progress of events in the city grew formidable. Shaftesbury at length was struck with despair, and sought safety by flight. He escaped to Harwich in the guise of a presbyterian minister, and got thence over to Holland. He took up his residence at Amsterdam, where he was visited by Oates and Waller; but his mortification at the failure of his grand scheme of "walking the king leisurely out of his dominions, and making the duke of York a vagabond like Cain on the face of the earth," broke his spirits and his constitution. The gout fixed itself in his stomach, and on the 21st of January, l683, he expired, only two months after his quitting England.
The fall of this extraordinary man and of his cause is a grand lesson in history. His cause was the best in the world—that of maintaining the liberties of England against the designs of one of the most profligate and despotic courts that ever existed. But, by following crooked by-paths and dishonest schemes, and by employing the most villainous of mankind for accomplishing his object, he ruined it. Had he and his fellows, who had more or less of genuine patriotism in them, combined to rouse their country by high, direct, and honourable means, they would have won the confidence of their country, and saved it, or have perished with honour. As it was, the great national achievement was reserved for others.
The flight and death of Shaftesbury struck a terror into the whig party; many gave up the cause in despair, others of a timid nature went over to the enemy, and others, spurred on by their indignation, rushed forward into more rash and fatal projects; and at this moment one of the extraordinary revelations took place, which rapidly brought to the gallows and the block nearly the whole of Shaftesbury's agents, coadjutors, and colleagues, including lord William Russell and Algernon Sidney.
That Shaftesbury and his party had been seriously contemplating an insurrection to compel Charles to adopt the measures for securing a protestant succession that they could not persuade him to, we have seen, and the consultations of the arch-agitator with his agents. West, Ferguson, Rouse, Rumsey, Walcot, and others, to rouse the nobles of the whig party to action, which proved abortive, and induced Shaftesbury to fly. Unfortunately, the royal party being now in the full tide of retribution, the more contemptible portion of those who had been most active in carrying on the whig aggressions, began to consider what was to be gained by betraying their associates. On the 1st of June a Scotchman was arrested on suspicion at Newcastle, and on him was found a letter, which indicated a concert betwixt the opposition parties in Scotland and England. A quick inquiry was set on foot after further traces of the alarming facts; and on the 12th, the very day on which judgment was pronounced against the city, Josiah Keeling, a man who had been extremely prominent in the late contest about the sheriffs, and who had displayed his zeal by actually laying hands on the lord mayor Moore, for his support of the government, now waited on lord Dartmouth, the duke of York's close friend, and informed him of particulars of the late schemes, as if they were yet actively in operation against the king's life. Dartmouth took the informer to Sir Leoline Jenkins, secretary of state, who had been extremely active in the late proceedings against the city. The story which Keeling laid before Sir Leoline was to the following appalling purport:—That in the month of March last, when the king and duke of York were about to proceed to Newmarket, to the races, Goodenough, the late under sheriff, one of Shaftesbury's most busy men in the city, lamenting the slavery to which the city was fast being reduced, asked him how many men he could engage to kill the king and the duke too. That ho had repeated the same question to him whilst the king and the duke were there, and that he then consented to join the plot, and to endeavour to procure accomplices. Accordingly, he engaged Burton, a cheese-monger, Thompson, a carver, and Barber, an instrument maker of Wapping. They then met with one Rumbold, a maltster at the Mitre Tavern, without Aldgate, where it was settled to go down to a house that Rumbold had, called the Rye House, on the river Lee, near Hoddesden, in Hertfordshire, and there execute their design. That this house lay conveniently by the wayside, and a number of men concealed under a fence could easily shoot down the king's postilion and horses, and then kill him and the duke, and the four guards with them. If they failed to stop the carriage, a man placed with a cart and horse in a cross lane a few paces further, was to run his horse and cart athwart the road, and there stop it, till they had completed their design. From this circumstance the plot obtained the name of the Rye House Plot.
At a subsequent meeting at the Dolphin, behind the Exchange, there was a disagreement as to the time when the
