versity of Oxford offered to melt down its plate, if he
wanted any money.

By this time the King was running about in a pitiable way, touching
people for the King's evil in one place, reviewing his troops in another,
and bleeding from the nose in a third. The young Prince was sent to
Portsmouth, Father Petre went off like a shot to France, and there was a
general and swift dispersal of all the priests and friars. One after
another, the King's most important officers and friends deserted him and
went over to the Prince. In the night, his daughter Anne fled from
Whitehall Palace; and the Bishop of London, who had once been a soldier,
rode before her with a drawn sword in his hand, and pistols at his
saddle. 'God help me,' cried the miserable King: 'my very children have
forsaken me!' In his wildness, after debating with such lords as were in
London, whether he should or should not call a Parliament, and after
naming three of them to negotiate with the Prince, he resolved to fly to
France. He had the little Prince of Wales brought back from Portsmouth;
and the child and the Queen crossed the river to Lambeth in an open boat,
on a miserable wet night, and got safely away. This was on the night of
the ninth of December.

At one o'clock on the morning of the eleventh, the King, who had, in the
meantime, received a letter from the Prince of Orange, stating his
objects, got out of bed, told LORD NORTHUMBERLAND who lay in his room not
to open the door until the usual hour in the morning, and went down the
back stairs (the same, I suppose, by which the priest in the wig and gown
had come up to his brother) and crossed the river in a small boat:
sinking the great seal of England by the way. Horses having been
provided, he rode, accompanied by SIR EDWARD HALES, to Feversham, where
he embarked in a Custom House Hoy. The master of this Hoy, wanting more
ballast, ran into the Isle of Sheppy to get it, where the fishermen and
smugglers crowded about the boat, and informed the King of their
suspicions that he was a 'hatchet-faced Jesuit.' As they took his money
and would not let him go, he told them who he was, and that the Prince of
Orange wanted to take his life; and he began to scream for a boat--and
then to cry, because he had lost a piece of wood on his ride which he
called a fragment of Our Saviour's cross. He put himself into the hands
of the Lord Lieutenant of the county, and his detention was made known to
the Princ