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The meeting of Parliament on the 19th of May drew the public attention from these barbarities. Every means had been exerted to influence the elections. In the counties the reaction of Toryism, and the effects of the Rye House Plot in defeating and intimidating the Whigs, gave the Court every advantage. In the corporations the deprivation of their ancient charters made them the slaves of Government. But even with these advantages James was not satisfied. Wherever there appeared likely to be any independent spirit shown, agents were sent down to overawe the people, and to force a choice of the Government candidate. On the 22nd of May James went to the House of Lords in great state to open Parliament. He took his seat on the throne with the crown on his head, and his queen, and Anne, his daughter, Princess of Denmark, standing on the right hand of the throne. The Spanish and other Catholic ambassadors were present, and heard the Pope, the Mass, the worship of the Virgin Mary, and the saints all renounced, as the Lords took their oaths. James then produced a written speech and read it. He repeated in it what he had before declared to the Council, that he would maintain the Constitution and the Church as by law established, and added that, "Having given this assurance concerning their religion and property, they might rely on his word." Although it had been the custom to listen to the royal speech in respectful silence, at this declaration the members of both Houses broke into loud acclamations. He then informed them that he expected a revenue for life, such as they had voted his late brother. Again the expression of accord was loud and satisfactory, but what followed was not so palatable. "The inclination men have for frequent Parliaments, some may think, would be the best secured by feeding me from time to time by such proportions as they shall think convenient, and this argument, it being the first time I speak to you from the throne, I will answer once for all, that this would be a very improper method to take with me; and that the best way to engage me to meet you often is always to use me well. I expect, therefore, that you will comply with me in what I have desired, and that you will do it speedily." This agreeable assurance he followed up by announcing a rebellion to have broken out in Scotland under Argyll and other refugees from Holland.

When the Commons returned to their own House, Lord Preston entered into a high eulogium of the king, telling the House that his name spread terror over all Europe, and that the reputation of England was already beginning to rise under his rule; they had only to have full confidence in him as a prince who had never broken his word, and thus enable him to assert the dignity of England. The House went into a Committee of Supply, and voted his Majesty the same revenue that Charles had enjoyed, namely, one million two hundred thousand pounds a year for life. But when several petitions against some of the late elections were presented, a serious opposition asserted itself in a most unexpected quarter. This was from Sir Edward Seymour, of Berry Pomeroy Castle, the member for Exeter. Seymour was both a Tory and a High Churchman, proud of his descent from the Lord Protector Seymour, and who had great influence in the western counties. He was a man of indifferent moral character, but able and accomplished, and a forcible debater. He was now irritated by the Government proceedings in the elections which had interfered with his interests, and made a fierce attack on the Government pressure on the electors; denounced the removal of the charters and the conduct of the returning officers; declared that there was a design to repeal the Test and Habeas Corpus Acts, and moved that no one whose right to sit was disputed should vote till that right had been ascertained by a searching inquiry. There was no seconder to the motion, and it fell to the ground; for the whole House, including the Whigs, sat, as it were, thunderstruck. But the effect was deep and lasting, and in time did not fail of its end.

For the present, however, things went smoothly enough. The king informed the House—through Sir Dudley North, the brother of the Lord Keeper Guildford, and the person who had been elected Sheriff of London by the influence of Charles for his ready and ingenious modes of serving the royal will—that his late brother had left considerable debts, and that the naval and ordnance stores were getting low. The House promptly agreed to lay on new taxes and North induced them to tax sugar and tobacco, so that the king now had a revenue of one million nine hundred thousand pounds from England, besides his pension from France, and was strong in revenue.

The Lords were employed in doing an act of justice in calling before them Lord Danby, and rescinding the impeachment still hanging over his head, and also summoning to their bar Lords Powis, Arundel, and Bellasis, the victims of the Popish plot, and fully discharging them as well as the Earl of Tyrone. They also introduced a Bill reversing the attainder of Lord Stafford, who had been executed for treason and concern in the Popish plot, now admitting that he had been unjustly sacrificed through the perjury of Oates. The Commons were proceeding to the third reading of this Bill, when the rebellion of Monmouth was announced, and the question remained unsettled till the trial of Warren Hastings more than a century afterwards, when men of all parties declared that Oates's Popish plot was a fiction, and the attainder of Stafford was then formally reversed.

The political refugees who had fled to Holland and sought protection from Prince William were numerous, and some of them of considerable distinction. Monmouth and the Earl of Argyll were severally looked up to as the heads of the English and Scottish exiles. The furious persecution against the Covenanters in Scotland and the Whigs in England had not only swelled these bands of refugees, but rendered them at once ardent for revenge and restoration. Amongst them Ford; Lord Grey of Wark; Ferguson, who had been conspicuous among the Whig plotters; Wildman and Danvers, of the same party; Ayloffe and Wade, Whig lawyers and plotters; Goodenough, formerly Sheriff of London, who gave evidence against the Papists; Rumbold, the Rye House maltster, and others, were incessantly endeavouring to excite Monmouth to avail himself of his popularity, and the hatred of Popery which existed, to rebel against his uncle and strike for the crown. Monmouth, however, for some time betrayed no desire for so hazardous an undertaking. On the death of Charles he had returned from the Hague, to avoid giving cause of jealousy to James, and led the life of an English gentleman at Brussels. William of Orange strongly advised him to take a command in the war of Austria against the Turks, where he might win honour and a rank worthy of his birth; but Monmouth would not listen to it. He had left his wife, the great heiress of Buccleuch, to whom he had been married almost as a boy from royal policy, and had attached himself to Lady Henrietta Wentworth, Baroness Wentworth of Nettlestede. The attachment, though illicit, appeared to be mutual and ardent. Monmouth confessed that Lady Henrietta, who was beautiful, amiable, and accomplished, had weaned him from a vicious life, and had their connection been lawful, nothing could have been more fortunate for Monmouth. In her society he seemed to have grown indifferent to ambition and the life of courts. But he was beset by both Grey and Ferguson, and, unfortunately for him, they won over Lady Wentworth to their views. She encouraged Monmouth, and offered him her income and her jewels to furnish him with immediate funds. With such an advocate, Grey and Ferguson at length succeeded. Grey was a man of blemished character. He had run off with his wife's sister, a daughter of the Earl of Berkeley, and was a poor and desperate adventurer, notoriously cowardly on the field of battle. Ferguson was a fiery demagogue and zealot of insurrection. He had been a preacher and schoolmaster amongst the Dissenters, then a clergyman of the Church, and finally had become a most untiring intriguer, and was deep in the Rye House Plot. Under all this fire of rebellion, however, there was more than a suspected foul smoke of espionage. He was shrewdly believed, though not by his dupes, to be in the pay of Government, and employed to betray its enemies to ruin.

Monmouth having consented to take the lead in an invasion, though with much reluctance and many misgivings, a communication was opened with Argyll and the Scottish malcontents. We have seen that Argyll, after his father had been inveigled from his mountains and beheaded, had himself nearly suffered the same fate from James when in Scotland. He had been imprisoned and condemned to death on the most arbitrary grounds, and had only managed to escape in disguise. He had purchased an estate at Leeuwarden, in Friesland, where the great Mac Cailean More, as he was called by the Highlanders, lived in much seclusion. He was now drawn from it once more to revisit his native country at the head of an invading force. But the views of the refugees were so different, and their means so small, that it was some time before they could agree upon a common plan of action. It was at length arranged that a descent should be made simultaneously on Scotland and England—the Scottish expedition headed by Argyll, that on England by Monmouth. But to maintain a correspondence and a sort of unison, two Englishmen, Ayloffe and Rumbold the maltster, were to accompany the Scots, and two Scotsmen, Fletcher of Saltoun and Ferguson, the English force. Monmouth was sworn not to claim any rank or reward on the success of the enterprise, except such as should be awarded him by a free Parliament; and Argyll was compelled, although he had the nominal command of the army, to submit to hold it only as one of a committee of twelve, of whom Sir Patrick Hume of Polwarth was to be president.

In fact, Argyll at the outset displayed a fatal want of knowledge of human nature or firmness of resolution, in consenting to accept a command on so impossible a basis. To expect success as a military leader when hampered with the conflicting opinions of a dozen men of ultra views in religion and politics, and of domineering wills, was the height of folly. Hume, who took the lead in the committee, was a man of enormous conceit, a great talker, and a very dilatory actor. Next to him was Sir John Cochrane, the second son of Lord Dundonald, who was almost equally self-willed and jealous of the power of Argyll. With their Republican notions, they endeavoured to impose such restrictions on the power of the earl as were certain to insure the ruin of the attempt, in which everything must depend on the independent action of a single mind.

We have already noticed the character of Ferguson, one of the twain selected to accompany Monmouth. Fletcher of Saltoun, the other, was a far different man—a man of high talent, fine taste, and finished education. At the head of a popular senate he would have shone as an orator and statesman; but he had those qualities of lofty pride and headstrong will which made him by no means a desirable officer in an army of adventurers, although his military skill was undoubted. What was worse, from the very first he foreboded no good result from the expedition, and accompanied it only because he would not seem to desert his more sanguine countrymen. When Wildman and Danvers sent from London flaming accounts of the ripeness of England for revolt, and said that just two hundred years before the Earl of Richmond landed in England with a mere handful of men, and wrested the Crown from Richard, Fletcher coolly replied that there was all the difference between the fifteenth century and the seventeenth.

These men, Wildman and Danvers, represented the country as so prepared to receive Monmouth, that he had only to show his standard for whole counties to flock to it. They promised also six thousand pounds in aid of the preparations. But the fact was that little or no money came, and James and his ministers were duly informed of the measures of the insurgents, and were at once using every means with the Dutch Government to prevent the sailing of the armaments, and taking steps for the defence of the Scottish and English coasts. We may first follow the fortunes of Argyll and his associates, who sailed first. He put out from the coast of Holland on the 2nd of May, and after a prosperous voyage, sighted Kirkwall, in Orkney, on the 6th. There he very unwisely anchored, and suffered two followers to go on shore to collect intelligence. The object of his armament then became known, and was sure to reach the English Government in a little time. The Bishop of Orkney boldly ordered the two insurgents to be secured, and refused to give them up. After three days lost in endeavouring to obtain their release, they seized some gentlemen living on the coast, and offered them in exchange. The bishop paid no regard to their proposal or their menaces, and they were compelled to pursue their voyage.