Dugdale gave testimony that the prisoner had endeavoured to engage him in the design of murdering the king. Turberville affirmed that Stafford, in his own house at Paris, had made him the same proposal. The clamour and outrage of the populace against the prisoner, were very great; he was found guilty, and condemned to be hanged and quartered; but the king changed the sentence into that of beheading. He was executed on Tower-hill, where even his persecutors could not forbear shedding tears at the serene fortitude which shone in every feature, motion, and accent, of this aged nobleman. Some other lords, who were taken up and imprisoned upon the former evidence, were tried and acquitted some time after, when the people began to recover from their phrensy.

But while these prosecutions were going forward, raised by the credulity of the people, and seconded by the artifice of the parliament, other designs equally vindictive were carried on. The lord-treasurer Danby was impeached in the house of commons by Seymour his enemy. The principal charge against him was his having written a letter to Montague, the king's`ambassador at Paris, directing him to sell the king's good offices at the treaty of Nimeguen to the king of France, for a certain sum of money; contrary to the general interests of the confederates, and even those of his own kingdom. This was a charge he could not deny; and, though the king was more culpable than the minister, yet the prosecution was carried on against him with rigour. But he had the happiness to find the king resolved to defend him. Charles assured the parliament that, as he had acted in every thing by his orders, he deemed him entirely blameless; and though he would deprive him of all his employments, yet he would positively insist on his personal safety. The lords were obliged to submit:

however, they went on to impeach him, and Danby was sent to the Tower; but no worse consequences ensued.

These furious proceedings had all been carried on by a house of commons that had now continued undissolved for above seventeen years; the king, therefore, was resolved to try a new one, which he knew could not be more unmanageable than the former. However, the new parliament did not in the least abate of the activity and obstinacy of their predecessors. The king, indeed, changed his council, by the advice of sir William Temple, and admitted into it many of both parties, by which he hoped to appease his opponents; but the antipathy to popery had taken too fast a possession of men's minds to be removed by so feeble a remedy. This house resolved to strike at the root of the evil which threatened them from a popish successor; and, after some deliberations, a bill was brought in for the total exclusion of the duke of York from the crowns of England and Ireland. It was by that intended that the sovereignty of these kingdoms, upon the king's death or resignation, should devolve to the person next in succession to the duke; and that all acts of royalty which this prince should afterwards perform should not only be void, but deemed treason. This important bill passed the lower house by a majority of seventy-nine.

Nor did their efforts rest here: the commons voted the king's standing army and guards to be illegal. They proceeded to establish limits to the king's power of imprisoning delinquents at will. It was now that the celebrated statute called the Habeas-Corpus act was passed, which confirms the subject in an absolute security from oppressive power. By this act, it was prohibited to send any one to prisons beyond the sea: no judge, under severe penalties, was to refuse to any prisoner his writ of habeas-corpus, by which the gaoler was

to produce in court the body of the prisoner, whence the writ had its name, and to certify the cause of his imprisonment and detention. If the gaol lie within twenty miles of the judge, the writ must be obeyed in three days, and so proportionably for greater distances. Every prisoner must be indicted the first term of his commitment, and brought to trial the subsequent term; and no man, after being enlarged by court, can be re-committed for the same offence.

This law alone would have been sufficient to endear the parliament that made it to posterity; and it would have been well if they had rested there. The duke of York had retired to Brussels during these troubles; but an indisposition of the king led him back to England, to be ready, in case of any sinister accident, to assert his right to the throne. After prevailing upon his brother to disgrace the duke of Monmouth, a natural son of the king, by one Mrs. Walters, and now become very popular, he himself retired to Scotland, under pretence of still quieting the apprehensions of the English nation; but, in reality, to strengthen his interests there. This session served still more to inflame the country party, who were strongly attached to the duke of Monmouth, and were resolved to support him against the duke of York. Mobs, petitions, pope-burnings, were artifices employed to keep up the terrors of popery, and alarm the court. The parliament had shown favour to the various tribes of informers, and that served to increase the number of these miscreants; but plots themselves also became more numerous. Plot was set up against plot; and the people were kept still suspended in dreadful apprehension.

The Meal-Tub Plot, as it was called, was brought forward to the public on this occasion. One Dangerfield, more infamous, if possible, than Oates and Bedloe,

a wretch who had been set in the pillory, scourged, branded, and transported, for felony and coining, hatched a plot in conjunction with a midwife, whose name was Cellier, a Roman-catholic, of abandoned character. Dangerfield began by declaring that there was a design on foot to set up a new form of government, and remove the king and the royal family. He communicated this intelligence to the king and the duke of York, who supplied him with money, and countenanced his discovery. He hid some seditious papers in the lodgings of colonel Mansel; and then conducted the custom-house officers to his apartment, to search for smuggled merchandise. The papers were found; and the council, having examined the affair, concluded they were forged by Dangerfield. They ordered all the places he frequented to be searched; and in the house of Cellier the whole scheme of the conspiracy was discovered upon paper, concealed in a meal-tub; whence the plot had its name. Dangerfield, being committed to Newgate, made an ample confession of the forgery, which, though probably entirely of his own contrivance, he ascribed to the earl of Castlemain, the countess of Powis, and the five lords in the Tower. He said that the design was to suborn witnesses to prove a charge of sodomy and perjury upon Oates, to assassinate the earl of Shaftesbury, to accuse the dukes of Monmouth and Buckingham, the earls of Essex, Halifax, and others, of having been concerned in the conspiracy against the king and his brother. Upon this information the earl of Castlemain and the countess of Powis were sent to the Tower, and the king himself was suspected of encouraging this imposture.

But it was not by plots alone the adverse parties endeavoured to supplant each other. Tumultuous petitions on the one hand, and flattering addresses on the

other, were sent up from all quarters. Wherever the country party prevailed, petitions, filled with grievances and apprehensions, were sent to the king with an air of humble insolence. Wherever the church, or the courtparty prevailed, addresses were framed, containing expressions of the highest regard to his majesty, and the deepest abhorrence of those who endeavoured to disturb the public tranquillity. Thus the nation came to be distinguished into Petitioners and Abhorrers. Whig and Tory also were first used as terms of mutual reproach at this time. The Whigs were so denominated from a cant name given to the sour Scotch conventiclers (whig being milk turned sour). The Tories were denominated from the Irish banditti so called, whose usual manner of bidding people deliver was by the Irish word toree, or give me.

As this parliament seemed even to surpass the former in jealousy and resentment, the king was induced to dissolve it; and could willingly have never applied to another. But his necessities, caused by his want of œconomy, and his numberless needy dependents, obliged him to call another. However, every change A. D. seemed only to inflame the evil; and his new 1680. parliament seemed willing to outdo even their predecessors. Every step they took betrayed that zeal with which they were animated. They voted the legality of petitioning to the king; they fell with extreme violence on the abhorrers, who, in their addresses to the crown, had expressed their disapprobation of those petitions. Great numbers of these were seized by their order, from all parts of England, and committed to close custody: and the liberty of the subject, which had been so carefully guarded by their own recent law, was every day violated by their arbitrary and capricious commitments. One Stawell of Exeter was the person that put a stop to