you call what I now say preaching: "-then continued without confusion.

The poor

When his devotions were ended, Claverhouse commanded him to bid good-night to his wife and children. Brown turned towards them, and, taking his wife by the hand, told her that the hour was come which he had spoken of when he first asked her consent to marry him. woman answered firmly," In this cause I am willing to resign you." "Then have I nothing to do save to die," he replied; "and I thank God I have been in a frame to meet death for many years." He was shot dead by a party of soldiers at the end of his own house; and although his wife was of a nervous habit, and used to become sick at the sight of blood, she had on this occasion strength enough to support the dreadful scene without fainting or confusion, only her eyes dazzled when the carabines were fired. While her husband's dead body lay stretched before him, Claverhouse asked her what she thought of her husband now. "I ever thought much of him," she replied, "and now more than ever." "It were but justice," said Claverhouse, "to lay thee beside him." "I doubt not," she replied, "that if you were permitted, your cruelty would carry you that length. But how will you answer for this morning's work?" "To man I can be answerable," said Claverhouse, "and Heaven I will take in my own hand." He then mounted his horse and marched, and left her with the corpse of her husband lying beside her, and her fatherless infant in her arms. "She placed the child on the ground," says the narrative with scriptural simplicity, "tied up the corpse's head, and straightened the limbs, and covered him with her plaid, and sat down and wept over him."

V.

THE POPISH PLOT.

MACAULAY.

He

[While he was thus persecuting the dissenters from the National Church, the steady aim of Charles the Second was to set the crown free from all restraint of law or Parliament and to establish a despotism. This he hoped to do by the aid of France, and with this view he again and again betrayed the interests of England by secret treaties with the French king. Nor was he truer to the Church than to the nation. He was in heart a Catholic; and he looked forward to the ruin of Protestantism, because its spirit was averse from arbitrary power. shrank indeed from avowing his faith; but his brother, James, Duke of York, and many of the leading statesmen and nobles of the time became Catholics. Meanwhile, suspicions of the king's dealings with France stole abroad; and in the general excitement men listened to the lies of Titus Oates, an impostor who pretended to have discovered a Popish plot for the destruction of the king and the nation. The country went mad with panic; and many foolish and cruel things were done.]

THE nation, awaking from its rapturous trance found itself sold to a foreign, a despotic, a Popish court, defeated on its own seas and rivers by a state of far inferior resources, and placed under the rule of panders and buffoons. Our ancestors saw the best and ablest divines of the age turned out of their benefices by hundreds. They saw the prisons filled with men guilty of no other crime than that of worshipping God according to the fashion generally

1 The Dutch had defeated the English fleet, and sailed in triumph up the Thames.

prevailing throughout Protestant Europe. They saw a Popish queen on the throne, and a Popish heir 2 on the steps of the throne. They saw unjust aggression followed by feeble war, and feeble war ending in disgraceful peace. They saw a Dutch fleet riding triumphant in the Thames. They saw the triple alliance broken, the Exchequer shut up, the public credit shaken, the arms of England employed, in shameful subordination to France, against a country 5 which seemed to be the last asylum of civil and religious liberty. They saw Ireland discontented, and Scotland in rebellion. They saw, meantime, Whitehall swarming with sharpers and courtesans. They saw harlot after harlot, and bastard after bastard, not only raised to the highest honours of the peerage, but supplied out of the spoils of the honest, industrious, and ruined public creditor, with ample means of supporting the new dignity. The government became more odious every day. Even in the bosom of that very House of Commons which had been elected by the nation in the ecstasy of its penitence, of its joy and of its hope, an opposition sprang up and became powerful. Loyalty which had been proof against all the disasters of the civil war, which had survived the routs of Naseby and Worcester, which had never flinched from sequestration and exile, which the Protector could never intimidate or seduce, began to fail in this last and hardest trial. The storm had long been gathering. At length it burst with a fury which threatened the whole frame of society with dissolution.

It was natural that there should be a panic; and it was natural that the people should, in a panic, be unreasonable and credulous. Oates was a bad man; but the spies and 3 The

2 The King's brother James, Duke of York. alliance of England, Holland, and Sweden, against the aggres sion of France. 4 At the opening of the war with the Dutch. 5 Charles joined France in its attack upon Holland.

deserters by whom governments are informed of conspiracies are generally bad men. His story was strange and romantic ; but it was not more strange or romantic than a wellauthenticated Popish plot which some few people then living might remember, the gunpowder treason. Oates's account of the burning of London was in itself not more improbable than the project of blowing up King, Lords, and Commons, a project which had not only been entertained by very distinguished Catholics, but which had very narrowly missed of success. As to the design on the King's person, all the world knew that, within a century, two Kings of France and a prince of Orange had been murdered by Catholics, purely from religious enthusiasm, that Elizabeth had been in constant danger of a similar fate, and that such attempts, to say the least, had not been discouraged by the highest authority of the Church of Rome. The characters. of some of the accused persons stood high; but so did that of Anthony Babington, and that of Everard Digby. Those who suffered denied their guilt to the last; but no persons versed in criminal proceedings would attach any importance to this circumstance. It was well known also that the most distinguished Catholic casuists had written largely in defence of regicide, of mental reservation, and of equivocation. It was not quite impossible that men whose minds had been nourished with the writings of such casuists might think themselves justified in denying a charge which, if acknowledged, would bring great scandal on the Church. The trials of the accused Catholics were exactly like all the state trials of those days; that is to say, as infamous as they could be. They were neither fairer nor less fair than those of Algernon Sydney, of Rosewell, of Cornish, of all the unhappy men, in short, whom a predominant party

Babington took part in a plot for murdering Queen Elizabeth. Digby was one of the leaders in the Gunpowder Plot.

brought to what was then facetiously called justice. Till the revolution purified our institutions and our manners, a state-trial was merely a murder preceded by the uttering of certain gibberish and the performance of certain mummeries.

The Opposition had now the great body of the nation with them. Thrice the King dissolved the Parliament; and thrice the constituent body sent him back representatives fully determined to keep strict watch on all his measures, and to exclude his brother from the throne. Had the character of Charles resembled that of his father, this intestine discord would infallibly have ended in civil war. Obstinacy and passion would have been his ruin. His levity and apathy were his security. He resembled one of those light Indian boats which are safe because they are pliant, which yield to the impact of every wave, and which therefore bound without danger through a surf in which a vessel ribbed with heart of oak would inevitably perish. The only thing about which his mind was unalterably made up was that, to use his own phrase, he would not go on his travels again for anybody or for anything. His easy, indolent behaviour produced all the effects of the most artful policy. He suffered things to take their course; and if Achitophel had been at one of his ears, and Machiavel at the other, they could have given him no better advice than to let things take their course. He gave way to the violence of the movement, and waited for the corresponding violence of the rebound. He exhibited himself to his subjects in the interesting character of an oppressed king, who was ready to do anything to please them, and who asked of them, in return, only some consideration for his conscientious scruples and for his feelings of natural affection, who was ready to accept any ministers, to grant any guarantees to public liberty, but who could not find it in his heart to take away his brother's birthright. Nothing more