As usual, there was great bungling.  On the one hand, Thurloe’s means of intelligence being still wonderfully goods, if only because the Royalist traitor Sir Richard Willis still maintained with him the curious compact made with Cromwell, and Thurloe’s information being at the disposal of the Rump Government, there had been time for some precautions on their part, Through the whole of July 30 and July 31 the Council, with Whitlocke for President, were busy with examinations.  On the other hand, and chiefly through the agency of Willis himself, doubts and hesitations had already arisen among the confederates.  It had all along been Willis’s good-natured policy to balance his treachery in revealing the Royalist plans by preventing his friends from running upon ruin by executing those plans; and this policy he had again been pursuing.  Now, though Charles had by this time been made aware of Sir Richard’s long course of treachery, and had privately informed Mordaunt of the extraordinary discovery, the fact had been too little divulged to destroy the effects of Sir Richard’s counsels of wariness and delay, agreeable as these naturally were to men fearing for their lives and estates and remembering the failure of all previous insurrections.  In short, whatever was the cause, August 1, which had been the day fixed for a simultaneous rising in many places, passed with far less demonstration than had been promised.  Mordaunt and a few of his friends tried a rendezvous in Surrey, only to find it useless; in several other places those who straggled together dispersed themselves at once; in Gloucestershire, where Major-General Massey, Lord Herbert, and their associates, did appear more openly, the affair ended in the arrest or surrender of the leaders, Massey escaping after having been taken.  Only in Cheshire, where Sir George Booth was the leader, did a considerable body rise in arms.  Booth, the Earl of Derby, Colonel Egerton, and a number of others, having met at Warrington, issued a proclamation in which no mention was made of the King, but it was merely declared that certain “Lords, Gentlemen, and Citizens, Freeholders and Yeomen, in this once happy nation,” tired of the existing anarchy and tyranny, had resolved to do what they could to recover liberty and free Parliamentary Government.  Hundreds and hundreds flocking to their standard, they marched on Chester and took the city without opposition, though the castle held out.  The agitation then extended itself into Flintshire, where the aged Sir Thomas Middleton distinguished himself by brandishing his sword in the market-place of Wrexham and proclaiming the King.  Various castles and garrisons in the two counties fell in, and Presbyterian Lancashire was also in commotion.  Sir George Booth found himself at the head of between 4000 and 5000 men, and it remained to be seen whether the movement he had begun so boldly in Cheshire, Flintshire, and Lancashire, might not spread itself northwards, eastwards, and southwards, and so do the work of the universal rising originally projected.  It was hoped that his Majesty himself, instead of landing in the south of England, as had been proposed, would appear soon in the district that had so happily taken the initiative.[1]