onwealth's men. The flight of Shaftesbury, whose bustling and
politic brain had rendered him the sole channel of communication
betwixt these parties, as well as the means of uniting them in one
common design, threw loose all connection between them; so that
each, after his retreat, seems to have acted independantly of, and
often in contradiction to the other.

7. The reader may judge, whether some distant and obscure allusion to
the trimming politics of Halifax, to whom the Duke of York, our
author's patron, was hostile, may not be here insinuated. During
the stormy session of his two last parliaments, Charles was much
guided by his temporising and camelion-like policy.

8. That is by fire. See next note.

9. The allegory of the one-eyed Archer, and the fire arising betwixt
him and Albion, will be made evident by the following extracts from
Sprat's history of the Conspiracy. In enumerating the persons
engaged in the Rye-house plot, he mentions "Richard Rumbold,
maltster, an old army officer, a desperate and bloody Ravaillac."
After agitating several schemes for assassinating Charles, the
Rye-house was fixed upon as a spot which the king must necessarily
pass in his journey trom Newmarket, and which, being a solitary
moated house, in the actual occupation of Rumbold, afforded the
conspirators facility of previous concealment and subsequent
defence. "All other propositions, as subject to far more casualties
and hazards, soon gave place to that of the Rye, in Herefordshire,
a house then inhabited by the foresaid Richard Rumbold, who
proposed that to be the seat of the action, offering himself to
command the party, that was to do the work. Him, therefore, as the
most daring captain, and by reason of a blemish in one of his eyes,
they were afterwards wont, in common discourse, to call Hannibal;
often drinking healths to _Hannibal and his boys_, meaning Rumbold
and his _hellish crew_.

"Immediately upon the coaches coming within the gates and hedges
about the house, the conspirators were to divide into several
parties; some before, in the habit of labourers, were to overthrow
a cart in the narrowest passage, so as to prevent all possibility
of escape: others were to fight the guards, Walcot chusing that
part upon a punctilio of honour; others were to shoot at the
coachman, postillion, and horses; others to aim only at his