5.  The atrocious and blasphemous sentiment in the text was actually
   used by the fanatics who murdered Sharpe, the archbishop of St
   Andrews.  When they unexpectedly met him during their search for
   another person, they exclaimed, that “the Lord had delivered him
   into their hands.”

6.  It is easy to believe, that, whatever was the, nature of the
   schemes nourished by Monmouth, Russel, and Essex, they could have
   no concern with the low and sanguinary cabal of Ramsay, Walcot, and
   Rumbold, who were all of them old republican officers and
   commonwealth’s men.  The flight of Shaftesbury, whose bustling and
   politic brain had rendered him the sole channel of communication
   betwixt these parties, as well as the means of uniting them in one
   common design, threw loose all connection between them; so that
   each, after his retreat, seems to have acted independantly of, and
   often in contradiction to the other.

7.  The reader may judge, whether some distant and obscure allusion to
   the trimming politics of Halifax, to whom the Duke of York, our
   author’s patron, was hostile, may not be here insinuated.  During
   the stormy session of his two last parliaments, Charles was much
   guided by his temporising and camelion-like policy.

8.  That is by fire.  See next note.

9.  The allegory of the one-eyed Archer, and the fire arising betwixt
   him and Albion, will be made evident by the following extracts from
   Sprat’s history of the Conspiracy.  In enumerating the persons
   engaged in the Rye-house plot, he mentions “Richard Rumbold,
   maltster, an old army officer, a desperate and bloody Ravaillac.” 
   After agitating several schemes for assassinating Charles, the
   Rye-house was fixed upon as a spot which the king must necessarily
   pass in his journey trom Newmarket, and which, being a solitary
   moated house, in the actual occupation of Rumbold, afforded the
   conspirators facility of previous concealment and subsequent
   defence.  “All other propositions, as subject to far more casualties
   and hazards, soon gave place to that of the Rye, in Herefordshire,
   a house then inhabited by the foresaid Richard Rumbold, who
   proposed that to be the seat of the action, offering himself to
   command the party, that was to do the work.  Him, therefore, as the
   most daring captain, and by reason of a blemish in one of his eyes,
   they were afterwards wont, in common discourse, to call Hannibal;
   often drinking healths to Hannibal and his boys, meaning Rumbold
   and his hellish crew.