was not more a king than the present master. To give the last stroke to this resemblance, fortune did her part; and the same fate, of division amongst themselves, ruined both those councils which were contriving their king's destruction. The Duke of Mayenne and his adherents, who were much the most honest of the Leaguers, were not only for a king, but for a king of the royal line, in case that duke could not cause the election to fall on himself, which was impossible, because he was already married The rest were, some for this man, some for another, and all in a lump for the daughter of Spain; this disunited them, and in the end ruined their conspiracy. In our Council of Six, some were for murdering, and some for securing of the king; some for a rising in the west, and some for an insurrection of the Brisk Boys of Wapping: in short, some were for a mongrel kind of kingship, to the exclusion of the royal line, but the greater part for a bare-faced commonwealth. This raised a division in their council; that division was fomented into a mutual hatred of each other; and the conclusion was, that instead of one conspiracy, the machines played double, and produced two, which were carried on at the same time. A kind of spread eagle plot was hatched, with two heads growing out of the same body: such twin treasons are apt to struggle like Esau and Jacob in the womb, and both endeavouring to be first born, the younger pulls back the elder by the heel.

I promised to observe no order, and am performing my word before I was aware. After the barricades, and at many other times, the Duke of Guise, and Council of Sixteen, amongst the rest of the articles, demanded of the king to cashier his guards of the forty-five gentlemen, as unknown in the times of his predecessors, and unlawful; as al

so, to remove his surest friends from about his person, and from their places, both military and civil. I leave any man to judge, whether our conspirators did not play the second part to the same tune; whether his majesty's guards were not alleged to be unlawful, and a grievance to the subjects; and whether frequent votes did not pass in the House of Commons at several times, for removing and turning out of office those, who, on all occasions, behaved themselves most loyally to the king, without so much as giving any other reason of their misdemeanors than public fame; that is to say, reports forged and spread by their own faction, or without allowing them the common justice of vindicating themselves from those calumnies and aspersions.

I omit the many illegal imprisonments of freeborn men, by their own representatives, who, from a jury, erected themselves into judges; because I find nothing resembling it in the worst and most seditious times of France. But let the history be searched, and I believe Bussy Le Clerc never committed more outrages in pillaging of houses, than Waller in pretending to search for Popish relics: * Neither do I remember that the French Leaguers ever took the evidence of a Jew, as ours did of Fa

* Jean Le Clerc, otherwise called Bussy, once a procureur before the parliament of Paris; being a bold, active, and ferocious man, he was created governor of the Bastile by the Duke of Guise, and employed in seizing the persons of the President Harlai, and other counsellors of parliament, and exercising severities on all those suspected of disaffection to the cause of the League. Dryden compares him to Waller, whom the Catholics accused of pillaging their houses, under pretence of searching for relics during the times of the plot. See him described under the character of Arod in "Absalom and Achitophel," pp. 11. 335; and the note, p. 381, Vol. IX.

ria.* But this I wonder at the less, considering what Christian witnesses have been used, if at least the chief of them was ever christened. Bussy Le Clerc, it is true, turned out a whole parliament together, and brought them prisoners to the Bastile; and Bussy Oates was for garbling too, when he informed against a worthy and loyal member, whom he caused to be expelled the House, and sent prisoner to the Tower: But that which was then accounted a disgrace to him, will make him be remembered with honour to posterity.

I will trouble the reader but with one observation more, and that shall be to show how dully and pedantically they have copied even the false steps of the League in politics, and those very maxims which ruined the heads of it. The Duke of Guise was always ostentatious of his power in the states, where he carried all things in opposition to the king: but, by relying too much on the power he had there, and not using arms when he had them in his hand, I mean by not prosecuting his victory to the uttermost, when he had the king enclosed

* Francisco de Faria, who designed himself interpreter and secretary of languages to Gaspar de Abreu de Freitas, ambassador from the crown of Portugal, was one of the witnesses concerning the popish plot. He pretended he had been employed by the Portuguese ambassador to assassinate Oates, Bedlow, and Shaftesbury. His narrative was licenced for publication on 19th November, 1680; and concludes with an impudent affectation of admiring the Divine Providence, which had brought him, from almost the utmost parts of the far distant habitable world, to be an instrument, in England, to detect, or at least more convincingly to prove the truth of these horrid treasons and conspiracies." Faria was a native of Fernambuco, in Brazil, and apparently a Portuguese Jew.

+ Sir Robert Peyton was expelled the House, and committed to the Tower, on account of expressing some hesitation as to the credibuty of Oates,

in the Louvre, he missed his opportunity, and fortune never gave it him again.

The late Earl of Shaftesbury, who was the undoubted head and soul of that party, went upon thè same maxims; being (as we may reasonably conclude) fearful of hazarding his fortunes, and observing, that the late rebellion, under the former king, though successful in war, yet ended in the restoration of his present majesty, his aim was to have excluded his royal highness by an act of parliament; and to have forced such concessions from the king, by pressing the chimerical dangers of a popish plot, as would not only have destroyed the succession, but have subverted the monarchy; for he presumed he ventured nothing, if he could have executed his design by form of law, and in a parliamentary way. In the mean time, he made notorious mistakes: first, in imagining that his pretensions would have passed in the House of Peers, and afterwards by the king. When the death of Sir Edmondbury Godfrey had fermented the people; when the city had taken the alarm of a popish plot, and the government of it was in fanatic hands; when a body of White Boys was already appearing in the west, and many other counties waited but the word to rise-then was the time to have pushed his business: but Almighty God, who had otherwise disposed of the event, infatuated his counsels, and made him slip his opportunity; which he himself observed too late, and would have redressed by an insurrection, which was to have be

White was the dress affected by those who crowded to see Monmouth in his western tour. See Vol. VII. p. 257. Mr Trenchard undertook to raise 1500 men in and about Taunton alone. See Lord Grey's Account of the Rye-house Plot, p. 18.; where the plan of the city insurrection is also distinctly detailed.-Pp. 32---40.

gun at Wapping, after the king had been murdered at the Rye.

And now, it will be but justice, before I conclude, to say a word or two of my author.* He was formerly a jesuit. He has, amongst others of his works, written the history of Arianism, of Lutheranism, of Calvinism, the Holy War, and the Fall of the Western Empire. In all his writings, he has supported the temporal power of sovereigns, and especially of his master the French king, against the usurpations and encroachments of the papacy. For which reason, being in disgrace at Rome, he was in a manner forced to quit his order, and, from Father Maimbourg, is now become Monsieur Maimbourg. The great king, his patron, has provided plentifully for him by a large salary, and indeed he has deserved it from him. As for his style, it is rather Ciceronian, copious, florid, and figurative, than succinct: He is esteemed in the French court equal to their best writers, which has procured him the envy of some who set up for critics. Being a professed enemy of the Calvinists, he is particularly hated by them; so that their testimonies against him stand suspected of prejudice. This History of the League is generally allowed to

Louis Maimbourg was born at Nanci, in 1610, and became a jesuit in 1626. But he was degraded from that order by the General, because he espoused, in some of his writings, the cause of the Gallican church against the claims of the Roman see. He retired to the Abbey of St Victor, where he died 1686. His historical writings, which are numerous, are now held in little esteem, being all composed in the spirit of a partizan, and without even the affectation of impartiality. They are, however, lively and interesting during the perusal; which led an Italian to say, that Maimbourg was among the historians, what Momus was among the deities.