being beside itself with fear of the Catholics, no charge against them seemed too strange to be true, and for a while people were as ready to believe as Oates to invent. This impudent vagabond had been a clergyman, but was dismissed from his office for 5 gross wickedness. Then he became a Catholic, and did as little credit to his new profession as he had done to the old. Appearing before the Council, he declared that he only joined the Papists in order to discover their secrets. They had plotted, he said, to murder the king, overthrow the government, massacre many of the Protestants, and establish the Catholic religion. There can be no doubt that his story was lies from end to end, but some colour was given to it by the wild talk in which the Catholics had indulged since the Duke of York, the future king, had openly joined them.

Charles had no faith in the plot from the first, but seeing Parliament and people ready to accept it, he let things take their course. The House of Commons greedily devoured the tales of Oates, and richly rewarded him. His success created imitators, so that there were plenty of witnesses to swear away the lives of innocent men. Judge and jury, in their anxiety to stamp out the conspiracy, did not examine the evidence carefully, nor take the trouble to see whether one day's story agreed with that of the day before, and a large number of persons were sent to undeserved death.

After a while the popular passion began to abate, and at length the tide of feeling turned, so that when Viscount Stafford protested his innocence upon the scaffold, the crowd shouted, "God bless you, my lord! We believe you, my lord!"

Ten years after he revealed the pretended plot Oates was tried for 7 perjury, found guilty, and sentenced to a fearful punishment.

1 Lewis, in French, Louis. 2 brothe James Duke of York, the heir to the throne. 4 3 impudent, without shame. vagabond, a wanderer. 5 gross, very great. 6 profession, what one professes -here a religion. 7 perjury, false swearing.

THE RYE HOUSE PLOT.

WHILE the trials of the Papists were going on Charles dissolved the Cavalier Parliament, and summoned another. The new House of Commons, elected when the national religion was believed to be in danger, proved strongly Protestant. It wanted to exclude the Duke of York from the throne because he was a Catholic, and consequently the king dissolved it. The next Parliament, and the next were of a like mind, and met a like end.

After this Charles did not call a Parliament, and his government grew very tyrannical. A number of the lords and gentlemen who had supported the 2 Exclusion Bill therefore began to talk about compelling him to rule according to law. A number of other men of lower rank formed a plan for murdering the king and his brother, as, on their way to London, they were passing Rye House, in Hertfordshire. The leaders of the first party knew nothing of the intentions of the second, but Charles, seeing an opportunity for punishing those who had opposed him, resolved that all should be tried for treason; and in those days, when judges might be dismissed if they displeased the king, when juries were not fairly selected, and when prisoners were not allowed the assistance of counsel, to be tried for treason almost certainly meant to be found guilty.

The first to meet his fate was Lord William Russell. He was a pure-minded patriot, in an age when most

public men were far more mindful of their own interests than of their country's; he was a loving husband, in an age when loving husbands were looked upon as unfashionable. At the trial his noble wife sat beside him, taking notes of the evidence, and assisting him with her advice. When he took leave of her before his execution he cried, "The bitterness of death is passed."

Another patriot who suffered was Algernon Sidney. He defended himself with great courage and skill, and the sentence against him was certainly unlawful. He faced his doom with perfect calmness.

Fourteen months later Charles was seized with an illness which carried him off in a few days. Though during his life he professed to be a Protestant, upon his death-bed he declared himself a Catholic. He was succeeded by his brother James, who, at any rate, was what he seemed to be in the matter of religion.

1 Cavalier Parliament, the Parliament summoned in 1661, the year after the restoration of Charles. It is also called the Pension Parliament. 2 Exclusion Bill, the bill for excluding the Duke of York from the throne.

THE REVOLUTION OF 1688.

JAMES II. had most of the vices of his brother, but was without his good temper and ready wit. He was a stupid man, and too obstinate to follow the advice of those wiser than himself. Charles had betrayed the Church, and broken the laws of his country; at the beginning of his reign the new king announced that he meant to uphold the Church and respect the laws. It is true that he did not keep his word, but the promise was warmly welcomed at the time.

As long as the people believed that James was going to govern well they were ready to support him, and he soon found the value of their support. Charles II. had left an unlawful son called the Duke of Monmouth. He was a worthless young fellow, but handsome in person and pleasing in manners. He was much liked

by the common people, who regarded him as the champion of Protestantism. A plot to set him on the throne was formed by the discontented gentlemen who had

fled to Holland in the later days of Charles. Four months after the accession of James, the Duke landed with a hundred and fifty followers at Lyme, in Dorsetshire. The farmers, shopkeepers, and labourers of the west flocked to him, but the gentry sided with the king. The royal army met the rebels at Sedgemoor, in Somerset, and, after a severe fight, scattered them.

James, having triumphed, would have acted at once nobly and wisely in pardoning the poor ill-informed peasantry who formed the bulk of Monmouth's force, but he had a heart which pity could not touch, and resolved to 1 exact a fierce revenge from all who had taken part in the rising. He found a fitting tool in George Jeffreys, the vilest judge who ever sat upon the English bench,a man of low, brutal passions, who raved like a lunatic at prisoners and witnesses, and felt a keen delight in causing pain. The jails were crowded with rebels, and Jeffreys was sent to try them. The first person that came before him was an aged lady charged with sheltering two men who, after the battle of Sedgemoor, were fleeing for their lives. She had given refuge to two men, but she did not know that they had been concerned in the rising, she thought they were merely Nonconformist preachers. She was condemned to be burnt to death, and it was only with much difficulty that the king was persuaded to alter her sentence to beheading. On returning to London Jeffreys was able to report that, as the result of his "Bloody Assize," 320 persons had been executed, and 841 sent to slavery in the West Indies. The grateful king rewarded his services by making him Lord Chancellor.

Notwithstanding his promise at the beginning of the reign James made a determined attempt to overthrow the Protestant Church and re-establish Catholicism.

BOOK III.

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