The new Parliament was of course found by Charles to be no better than any of its predecessors, and when it was a week old he jumped into a sedan chair, had the crown put under the seat, and the sceptre slung across the back, when, in reply to the chairman's inquiry, "Where to, your honour?" the sovereign with a dignified voice, directed that he might be run down to the place where Parliament was sitting. This was the morning of the 28th of March, and Charles, bursting into the hall where the Lords had met, dissolved the fifth and the last of his Parliaments.
This proceeding, which, in the days of a monarchy's decline, would have been exclaimed against as highly unconstitutional, was hailed as a piece of vigour at a time when royalty, having been recently maltreated, united in its favour the general sympathies. Charles, finding that courage was likely to tell, became very liberal of its exercise, and began to abuse the opponents of his policy with more than common energy. "There is nothing like taking the bull by the horns," Charles would say to his intimate friends, "and John Bull especially should be taken by the horns, to prevent his making unpleasant use of them."
Shortly after the dissolution, Charles brought out for general perusal a justification of the course he had thought proper to pursue; for, like many other people in the world, he first took a step, and then began to look for the reasons of his having taken it. The opposition brought out a reply, written by Messrs. Somers, Sydney, and Jones, but it did not sell, and as these gentlemen could not afford to give it away, it had very little influence. Charles managed to get a number of addresses presented to him, congratulating him on his deliverance from the republicans, but the Lord Mayor and Common Council having come down to Windsor with an address of a different kind, were told that the king was not at home, but they had better go to Hampton Court. On their arriving at the latter address there was a great deal of whispering among the royal servants, who would give no other information than the words "Yes, yes; it's all right!" At length, upon a signal from above, a domestic exclaimed, "Now, then, gentlemen, you may walk up;" and on going into a room on the first floor, they found the Lord Chancellor sitting there, looking as black as thunder. His lordship, putting on a voice to match his countenance, began asking them how they dared to come with anything like a remonstrance to their sovereign; and the Lord Mayor, with the Common Council, slinking timidly out of the room, made the best of their way back to the point they had started from.
A few more plots of an insignificant character were got up against the Government, but met with no success; and the Bye-House conspiracy, so called perhaps from the wry faces the parties put on when they were found out, stands out from among the rest, which have been long ago buried under their own insignificance. Some have suggested that the Bye-House plot was a name invented as a kind of sequel to the notion of Oates, and the conspiracy of the Meal-Tub; but the hypothesis is far too trifling for us to dwell upon. As it has taken a position of some importance in history, we must furnish a few particulars of this Bye-House plot, which in the old nursery song, * taking for its theme the domestic arrangements of royalty, seems to have had a slight foreshadowing.
* "Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye."
On the 12th of June, 1683, one Josiah Keyling, who had formerly been a red-hot Whig, and was by trade a salter, was seized with the infamous idea of applying his skill in business to the affairs of his country, which he resolved to put, if he could, into a precious pickle. He went to Lord Dartmouth, for the purpose of revealing a conspiracy that had been formed to take away the king's life; and he declared one Burton, a decayed cheesemonger, Thompson, a carver, who had been trying to carve his own fortunes in vain, and Barber, an instrument-maker, as his accomplices in the intended act of regicide. They were all to have gone down to the house of one Bumbold, a maltster, at a place called the Bye, where they were to have taken a chop, and cut off the king and his brother on their return from Newmarket. They were to have purchased blunderbusses, but, perhaps by some blunder, missing the 'bus, the London conspirators never left town, and did not arrive at the "little place" of Bumbold the maltster. The disclosures made by Keyling included, at first, a few names only; but, as a brother historian * has well and playfully suggested, "he subsequently went into a regular crescendo movement," and indulged in an ad libitum, introducing several new accompaniments to the strain he had originally adopted, besides adding new circumstances and dragging in new persons into his accusation, without the slightest regard to harmony of detail. He at length went off into a largo of such wide and unmeasured scope, that he included William Lord Russell in the charges made, and his lordship was committed to the Tower.
* Macfarlane's Cabinet History of England, vol. xiii., p.
142.
Lord Grey, who was also accused, was rather more fortunate; for, having been taken in the first instance to the home of the jailor, he had the satisfaction of finding that official reeling about in a state of helpless drunkenness. Lord Grey, perceiving that the functionary who had charge of him was not in a situation to appreciate any consideration that might be shown to him, quietly walked out at the door-way of the serjeant's house, and jumping into a boat on the Thames, hailed a ship for Holland. Lord Howard of Escrick, another of the alleged conspirators, was pulled neck and heels down a chimney, into which he had climbed for concealment, in his house at Knights-bridge. His character has been blackened almost as much as his dress, by this ignoble act, for it is recorded of him that when pulled out from the grate, he looked fearfully little. He trembled, sobbed, and wept, or in other words, had a regular good cry, and the tears forming channels through the soot, rendered his aspect exceedingly ludicrous. He at once confessed that he did not come out of the affair with clean hands, but he was guilty of the very dirty trick of implicating many of his own friends and kindred by his pusillanimous confession.