assembled a medley of people, among whom the Quakers were most eminent for number; and within the house a controversy Was whether the ceremony of a hearse-cloth should be cast over his coffin; but, the major part, being Quakers, not assenting, the coffin was about five o’clock in the evening brought forth into the street.  At its coming out, there stood a man on purpose to cast a velvet hearse-cloth over the coffin, and he endeavoured to do it; but, the crowd of Quakers not permitting it and having gotten the body on their shoulders, they carried it away without further ceremony, and the whole company conducted it into Moorfields, and thence into the new churchyard adjoining to Bedlam, where it lieth interred.”  Lilburne at his death was but thirty-nine years of age.  He was popular to the last with the Londoners, and there were notices of him, comic and serio-comic, long after his death.  By order of Council, Nov. 4, his Highness himself present, payment of the arrears of an allowance he had of 40_s._ a week, with continuation of the same allowance thenceforward, was granted to his wife, Elizabeth.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Sewel’s History of the Quakers.  I. 160-163 (where, however, there is an error as to the date of Lilburne’s death); Wood’s Ath.  III. 357; Cromwelliana, 168; Council Order Books of Nov. 4, 1657.]

When the subdued Lilburne thus went to his grave among the Quakers, his unsubdued successor in the trade of Anti-Cromwellian conspiracy, the Anabaptist ex-Colonel Sexby, was in the Tower, waiting his doom.  He had been arrested, July 24, in a mean disguise and with a great over-grown beard, on board a ship that was to carry him back to Flanders after one of his visits to London on his desperate design of an assassination of Cromwell, to be followed by a Spanish-Stuartist invasion.  What would have been his doom can be but guessed.  He became insane in the Tower, and died there in that state Jan. 13, 1657-8.  He had previously confessed to Barkstead, the Lieutenant of the Tower, that he had been the real mover of the Sindercombe Plot, that he had been in the pay of Spain, and also, apparently, that he was the author of Killing no Murder.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Merc.  Pol. of dates, as quoted in Cromwelliana, 167-170.]

So quiet and even was the course of home-affairs through the first seven months of the new Protectorate that such glimpses and anecdotes of particular persons have to suggest the general history.  Yet one more of the sort.

In the parish register of Bolton Percy in Yorkshire there is this entry:  “George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and Mary, the daughter of Thomas, Lord Fairfax, Baron of Cameron, of Nunappleton within this Parish of Bolton Percy, were married the 15th day of September anno Dom. 1657.”  This was, in fact, the marriage of the great Fairfax’s only child, Marvell’s former pupil, now nineteen years of age, to the Royalist Duke of Buckingham,