g for the crown, and I considered it no harm to recover it
by the crown.' He then told his majesty how he had resolved to
assassinate him: how he had stood among the reeds in Battersea-fields
with this design; how then, a sudden awe had come over him: and Charles
was weak enough to admire Blood's fearless bearing and to pardon his
attempt. Well might the Earl of Rochester write of Charles--

'Here lies my sovereign lord the king,
Whose word no man relies on;
Who never said a foolish thing,
And never did a wise one.'

Notwithstanding Blood's outrages--the slightest penalty for which in
our days would have been penal servitude for life--Evelyn met him, not
long afterwards, at Lord Clifford's, at dinner, when De Grammont and
other French noblemen were entertained. 'The man,' says Evelyn, 'had not
only a daring, but a villanous, unmerciful look, a false countenance;
but very well-spoken, and dangerously insinuating.'

Early in 1662, the Duke of Buckingham had been engaged in practices
against the court: he had disguised deep designs by affecting the mere
man of pleasure. Never was there such splendour as at Wallingford
House--such wit and gallantry; such perfect good breeding; such
apparently openhanded hospitality. At those splendid banquets, John
Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, 'a man whom the Muses were fond to inspire,
but ashamed to avow,' showed his 'beautiful face,' as it was called; and
chimed in with that wit for which the age was famous. The frequenters at
Wallingford House gloried in their indelicacy. 'One is amazed,' Horace
Walpole observes, 'at hearing the age of Charles II. called polite. The
Puritans have affected to call everything by a Scripture' name; the new
comers affected to call everything by its right name;

'As if preposterously they would confess
A forced hypocrisy in wickedness.'

Walpole compares the age of Charles II. to that of Aristophanes--'which
called its own grossness polite.' How bitterly he decries the stale
poems of the time as 'a heap of senseless ribaldry;' how truly he shows
that licentiousness weakens as well as depraves the judgment. 'When
Satyrs are brought to court,' he observes, 'no wonder the Graces would
not trust themselves there.'

The Cabal is said, however, to have been concocted, not at Wallingford
House, but at Ham House, near Kingston-on-Thames.

In this stately old manor-house, the abode of the Tollemache family, the
memory of Charles