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those necessities under which he laboured. Great retrenchments were made in the household: even his favourite navy was neglected: Tangiers, though it had cost. great sums of money, was a few years after abandoned and demolished. The mole was entirely destroyed; and the garrison, being brought over to England, served to augment that small army which the king relied on as the solid basis of his authority. It had been happy for the nation, had Charles used his victory with justice and moderation equal to the prudence and dexterity with which he obtained it.

The first step taken by the court was the trial of Fitzharris. Doubts were raised by the jury with regard to their power of trying him, after the concluding vote of the commons: but the judges took upon them to decide the question in the affirmative, and the jury were obliged to proceed. The writing of the libel was clearly proved upon Fitzharris: the only question was with regard to his intentions. He asserted, that he was a spy of the court, and had accordingly carried the libel to the duchess of Portsmouth; and he was desirous that the jury should, in this transaction, consider him as a cheat, not as a traitor. He failed however somewhat in the proof; and was brought in guilty of treason by the jury.

Finding himself entirely in the hands of the king, he now retracted all his former impostures with regard to the popish plot, and even endeavoured to atone for them by new impostures against the country party. He affirmed, that these fictions had been extorted from him by the suggestions and artifices of Treby the recorder, and of Bethel and Cornish, the two sheriffs: this account he persisted in even at his execution; and though men knew that nothing could be depended on which came from one so corrupt, and so lost to all sense of honour, yet were they inclined, from his perseverance, to rely somewhat more on his veracity in these last asseverations. But it appears that his wife had some connexions with Mrs. Wall, the favourite maid of the duchess of Portsmouth;

and Fitzharris hoped, if he persisted in a story agreeable to the court, that some favour might, on that account, be shown to his family.

It is amusing to reflect on the several lights in which this story has been represented by the opposite factions. The country party affirmed, that Fitzharris had been employed by the court, in order to throw the odium of the libel on the exclusionists, and thereby give rise to a protestant plot: the court party maintained, that the exclusionists had found out Fitzharris, a spy of the ministers, and had set him upon this undertaking, from an intention of loading the court with the imputation of such a design upon the exclusionists. Rather than acquit their antagonists, both sides were willing to adopt an account the most intricate and incredible. It was a strange situation in which the people at this time were placed; to be every day tortured with these perplexed stories, and inflamed with such dark suspicions against their fellowcitizens. This was no less than the fifteenth false plot, or sham plot, as they were then called, with which the court, it was imagined, had endeavoured to load their adversaries *.

The country party had intended to make use of Fitzharris's evidence against the duke and the catholics; and his execution was therefore a great mortification to them. But the king and his ministers were resolved not to be contented with so slender an advantage. They were determined to pursue the victory, and to employ against the exclusionists those very offensive arms, however unfair, which that party had laid up in store against their antagonists. The whole gang of spies, witnesses, informers, suborners, who had so long been supported and encouraged by the leading patriots, finding now that the king was entirely master, turned short upon their old patrons, and offered their service to the ministers. To the disgrace of the court and of the age, they were received with hearty welcome; and their testimony, or rather perjury, made use of in order to commit legal murder e College's trial.

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upon the opposite party. With an air of triumph and derision it was asked, "Are not these men good witnesses, who have established the popish plot, upon whose testimony Stafford and so many catholics have been executed, and whom you yourselves have so long celebrated as men of credit and veracity? You have admitted them into your bosom: they are best acquainted with your treasons: they are determined in another shape to serve their king and country: and you cannot complain, that the same measure which you meted to others, should now, by a righteous doom or vengeance, be measured out to you."

It is certain that the principle of retaliation may serve in some cases as a full apology, in others as an alleviation, for a conduct which would otherwise be exposed to great blame. But these infamous arts, which poison justice in its very source, and break all the bands of human society, are so detestable and dangerous, that no pretence of retaliation can be pleaded as an apology or even an alleviation of the crime incurred by them. On the contrary, the greater indignation the king and his ministers felt, when formerly exposed to the perjuries of abandoned men, the more reluctance should they now have discovered against employing the same instruments of vengeance upon their antagonists.

The first person on whom the ministers fell was one College, a London joiner, who had become extremely noted for his zeal against popery, and was much connected with Shaftesbury and the leaders of the country party for as they relied much upon the populace, men of College's rank and station were useful to them. College had been in Oxford armed with sword and pistol during the sitting of the parliament; and this was made the foundation of his crime. It was pretended that a conspiracy had been entered into to seize the king's person, and detain him in confinement, till he should make the concessions demanded of him. The sheriffs of London were in strong opposition to the court; and it was not strange, that the grand jury named by them rejected the

bill against College. The prisoner was therefore sent to Oxford, where the treason was said to have been committed. Lord Norris, a courtier, was sheriff of the county; and the inhabitants were in general devoted to the court party. A jury was named, consisting entirely of royalists; and though they were men of credit and character, yet such was the factious rage which prevailed, that little justice could be expected by the prisoner. Some papers, containing hints and directions for his defence, were taken from him, as he was conducted to his trial: an iniquity which some pretended to justify by alleging, that a like violence had been practised against a prisoner during the fury of the popish plot. Such wild notions of retaliation were at that time propagated by the court party.

The witnesses produced against College were Dugdale, Turberville, Haynes, Smith; men who had before given evidence against the catholics, and whom the jury, for that very reason, regarded as the most perjured villains. College, though beset with so many toils, and oppressed with so many iniquities, defended himself with spirit, courage, capacity, presence of mind; and he invalidated the evidence of the crown, by convincing arguments and undoubted testimony: yet did the jury, after half an hour's deliberation, bring in a verdict against him. The inhuman spectators received the verdict with a shout of applause but the prisoner was nowise dismayed. At his execution he maintained the same manly fortitude, and still denied the crime imputed to him. His whole conduct and demeanour prove him to have been a man led astray only by the fury of the times, and to have been governed by an honest but indiscreet zeal for his country and his religion.

Thus the two parties, actuated by mutual rage, but cooped up within the narrow limits of the law, levelled with poisoned daggers the most deadly blows against each other's breast, and buried in their factious divisions all regard to truth, honour, and humanity.

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State of affairs in Ireland.

CHAPTER THE SIXTY-NINTH.

CHARLES THE SECOND.

HEN the cabal entered into the mysterious alliance with France, they took care to remove the duke of Ormond from the committee of foreign affairs; and nothing tended farther to increase the national jealousy entertained against the new measures, than to see a man of so much loyalty, as well as probity and honour, excluded from public councils. They had even so great interest with the king as to get Ormond recalled from the government of Ireland; and lord Robarts, afterwards earl of Radnor, succeeded him in that important employment. Lord Berkeley succeeded Robarts; and the earl of Essex, Berkeley. At last, in the year 1677, Charles cast his eye again upon Ormond, whom he had so long neglected; and sent him over lieutenant to Ireland. "I have done every thing," said the king, "to disoblige that man; but it is not in my power to make him my enemy." Ormond, during his disgrace, had never joined the malcontents, nor encouraged those clamours which, with too much reason, but often for bad purposes, were raised against the king's measures.

He