It made a great noise directly, and the
Merry Monarch — strongly suspected of having
goaded the Scottish people on, that he plight
have an excuse for a greater army than the
Parliament were willing to give him — sent
down his son, the Duke of Monmouth, as
commander-in-chief, with instructions to
attack the Scottish rebels, or Whigs as they
were called, whenever he came up with them.
Marching with ten thousand men from
Edinburgh, he found them, in number four
or five thousand, drawn up at Bothwell
Bridge, by the Clyde. They were soon
dispersed, and Monmouth showed a more humane
character towards them than he had shown
towards that Member of Parliament whose
nose he had caused to be slit with a
penknife. But the Duke of Lauderdale was
their bitter foe, and sent Claverhouse to finish
them.

As the Duke of York became more and more
unpopular, the Duke of Monmouth became
more and more popular. It would have been
decent in the latter not to have voted in
favour of the renewed bill for the exclusion of
James from the throne; but he did so, much
to the King's amusement, who used to sit in
the House of Lords by the fire, hearing the
debates, which he said were as good as a play.
The House of Commons passed the bill by a
large majority, and it was carried up to the
House of Lords by LORD RUSSELL, one of the
best of the leaders on the Protestant side.
It was rejected there, chiefly because the
bishops helped the King to get rid of it; and
the fear of Catholic plots revived again.
There had been another got up, by a fellow out
of Newgate, named DANGERFIELD, which is
more famous than it deserves to be, under
the name of the MEAL-TUB PLOT. This jailbird
having been got out of Newgate by a
MRS, CELLIER, a Catholic nurse, had turned
Catholic himself, and pretended that he knew
of a plot among the Presbyterians against the
King's life. This was very pleasant to the
Duke of York, who hated the Presbyterians,
who returned the compliment. He gave
Dangerfield twenty guineas, and sent him to
the King his brother. But Dangerfield
breaking down altogether in his charge, and
being sent back to Newgate, almost astonished
the Duke out of his five senses by suddenly
swearing that the Catholic nurse had put
that false design into his head, and that what
he really knew about, was, a Catholic plot
against the King, the evidence of which
would be found in some papers, concealed in
a meal-tub in Mrs. Cellier's house. There
they were, of course, as he had put them
there himself; and so the tub gave the name
to the plot. But, the nurse was acquitted on
her trial, and it came to nothing.

Lord Ashley, of the Cabal, was now Lord
Shaftesbury, and was strong against the
succession of the Duke of York. The House of
Commons, aggravated to the utmost extent,
as we may well suppose, by suspicions of
the King's conspiracy with the King of
France, made a desperate point of the exclusion
still, and were bitter against the
Catholics generally. So unjustly bitter were
they, I grieve to say, that they impeached the
venerable Lord Stafford, a Catholic nobleman
seventy years old, of a design to kill the King.
The witnesses were that atrocious Oates and
two other birds of the same feather. He was
found guilty on evidence quite as foolish as it
was false, and was beheaded on Tower Hill.
The people were opposed to him when he first
appeared upon the scaffold, but, when he had
addressed them and shown them how
innocent he was, and how wickedly he was sent
there, their better nature was aroused, and
they said, "We believe you, my Lord. God
bless you, my Lord!"

The House of Commons refused to let the
King have any money until he should
consent to the Exclusion Bill; but, as he could
get it and did get it from his master the
King of France, he could afford to hold them
very cheap. He called a Parliament at
Oxford, to which he went down with a great
show of being armed and protected as if he
were in danger of his life, and to which the
opposition members also went armed and
protected, alleging that they were in fear of
the Papists, who were numerous among the
King's guards. However, they went on with
the Exclusion Bill, and were so earnest upon
it that they would have carried it again, if
the King had not popped his crown and
state robes into a sedan chair, bundled himself
into it along with them, hurried down to
the Chamber where the House of Lords met,
and dissolved the Parliament. After which
he scampered home, and the members of
Parliament scampered home too, as fast as
their legs could carry them.

The Duke of York, then residing in
Scotland, had, under the law which excluded
Catholics from public trust, no right whatever
to public employment. Nevertheless,
he was openly employed as the King's
representative in Scotland, and there gratified
his sullen and cruel nature to his heart's
content by directing the dreadful cruelties
against the Covenanters. There were two
ministers named CARGILL and CAMERON, who
had escaped from the battle of Bothwell
Bridge, and who returned to Scotland and
raised the miserable but still brave and
unsubdued Covenanters afresh, under the name
of Cameronians. As Cameron publicly posted
a declaration that the King was a forsworn
tyrant, no mercy was shown to his unhappy
followers after he was slain in battle. The
Duke of York, who was particularly fond of
the Boot and derived great pleasure from
having it applied, offered their lives to some
of these people, if they would cry on the
scaffold "God save the King!" But their
relations, friends, and countrymen, had been
so barbarously tortured and murdered in this
merry reign, that they preferred to die, and