tumult on Saturday the 15th of May.  They were to attack the guard at St. Paul’s, seize the Lord Mayor, raise a conflagration near the Tower, &c.  The hour had come, and the conspirators were in the Mermaid Tavern for their final arrangements, when lo! the trainbands on the alert all round them and Barkstead riding through the streets with a train of five small cannon.  A good many were arrested, thirty of them London prentices.  Six of the principals were condemned July 2, of whom one was hanged, two were hanged, drawn, and quartered, and three were reprieved.  For the prentices there was all clemency.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Clarendon, 869-870; Godwin, IV. 508-527; Merc.  Pol, May 13-20, 1658, quoted in Cromwelliana, 171-172; Thurloe, VII. 25, 65-69, 88-90, 100, and 147-8; Whitlocke, IV. 334.]

Though the prosecutions of the Royalist plotters were not concluded till the beginning of July, all real danger from the plot itself had been over in March or April, when Ormond was back in Bruges with the report that his mission had been abortive and that Cromwell was too strong.  We must go back, therefore, for the other threads of our narrative.

The death of Mr. Robert Rich, Cromwell’s son-in-law since the preceding November, had occurred Feb. 16, 1657-8, only twelve days after the dissolution of the Parliament.  Cromwell, saddened by the event himself, had found time even then to write letters of condolence and comfort to the young man’s grandfather, the Earl of Warwick.  The Earl’s reply, dated March 11, is extant.  “My pen and my heart,” it begins, “were ever your Lordship’s servants; now they are become your debtors.  This paper cannot enough confess my obligation, and much less discharge it, for your seasonable and sympathising letters, which, besides the value they deserve from so worthy a hand, express such faithful affections, and administer such Christian advice, as renders them beyond measure welcome and dear to me.”  Then, after pious expression at once of his grief and of his resignation, he concludes with words that have a historical value.  “My Lord,” he says, “all this is but a broken echo of your pious counsel, which gives such ease to my oppressed mind that I can scarce forbid my pen being tedious.  Only it remembers your Lordship’s many weighty and noble employments, which, together with your prudent, heroic, and honourable managery of them, I do here congratulate as well as my grief will give me leave.  Others’ goodness is their own; yours is a whole country’s, yea three kingdoms’—­for which you justly possess interest and renown with wise and good men:  virtue is a thousand escutcheons.  Go on, my Lord; go on happily, to love Religion, to exemplify it.  May your Lordship long continue an instrument of use, a pattern of virtue, and a precedent of glory!” On the 19th of April 1658, or not six weeks after the letter was written, the old Earl himself died.  By that time the louring appearances had rolled away, and Cromwell’s “prudent, heroic, and honourable managery” had again been widely confessed.[1]