al privileges in security, but enabled the king,
under like pretences, and by means of like instruments, to recall anew
all those charters which at present he was pleased to grant. And every
friend to liberty must allow, that the nation, whose constitution was
thus broken in the shock of faction, had a right, by every prudent
expedient, to recover that security of which it was so unhappily
bereaved.

While so great a faction adhered to the crown, it is apparent that
resistance, however justifiable, could never be prudent; and all wise
men saw no expedient but peaceably to submit to the present grievances.
There was, however, a party of malecontents, so turbulent in their
disposition, that, even before this last iniquity, which laid the whole
constitution at the mercy of the king, they had meditated plans of
resistance; at a time when it could be as little justifiable as prudent.
In the spring of 1681,[*] a little before the Oxford parliament, the
king was seized with a fit of sickness at Windsor, which gave great
alarm to the public.

* Lord Grey's Secret History of the Rye-house Plot. This is
the most full and authentic account of all these
transactions; but is in the main confirmed by Bishop Sprat,
and even Burnet, as well as by the trials and dying
confessions of the conspirators; so that nothing can be more
unaccountable than that any one should pretend that this
conspiracy was an imposture, like the Popish plot.
Monmouth's declaration, published in the next reign,
confesses a consult for extraordinary remedies.

The duke of Monmouth, Lord Russel, Lord Grey, instigated by the restless
Shaftesbury, had agreed, in case the king's sickness should prove
mortal, to rise in arms, and to oppose the succession of the duke.
Charles recovered; but these dangerous projects were not laid aside. The
same conspirators, together with Essex and Salisbury were determined to
continue the Oxford parliament, after the king, as was daily expected,
should dissolve it; and they engaged some leaders among the commons in
the same desperate measure. They went so far as to detain several lords
in the house, under pretence of signing a protest against rejecting
Fitzharris's impeachment; but hearing that the commons had broken up
in great consternation, they were likewise obliged at last to separate.
Shaftesbury's imprisonment and trial put an end for some time to these
machinations; and it was n