During this short interval of public liberty, those ministers that were not for episcopacy, Liturgy, and ceremonies, were represented as seditious, and loaded with calumnies and reproaches. Many of them were imprisoned, together with some sober gentlemen, in several counties, under pretence of their plotting against the government. Particularly a plot was hatched in Worcestershire. A packet was pretended to be found under a hedge, left there by a Scotch pedlar. In it there were letters from several ministers; and among the rest, one from Mr. Baxter; intimating, that he had provided a considerable body of men well armed, which should be ready against the time appointed. And indeed where men were taken up and imprisoned in distant counties, it was said to be for Baxter's plot. The noise of these plots in so many counties, paved the way for the Act of Uniformity, which gave all the ministers who could not conform no longer time than till Bartholomew day, 1662, when they were all cast out. Mr. Baxter preached his last sermon in public on the 25th of May before, at Black-friars. The reason of his forbearing preaching so soon, was partly because the lawyers did interpret a doubtful clause in the Act of Uniformity, as putting an end to the liberty of lecturers at that time; and partly because he would let all the ministers in the nation understand in time what his intentions were, lest any might be influenced to a compliance, upon a supposition that he intended to conform. After this, if the ejected ministers did but meet to pray together it was a seditious conventicle. Dr. Bates and Mr. Baxter were desired to pray at a friend's house, for his wife that was sick of a fever, and had they been there they had been apprehended by a warrant from two justices. Finding therefore his public service at an end, he retired to Acton, in Middlesex; where he went every Lord's day to the public church, and spent the rest of the day with his family, and a few poor neighbours that came in to him. In the time of the plague, in 1665, he went to Mr. Hampden's, in Buckinghamshire; and returned back again to Acton when it was over. He stayed there as long as the Act against Conventicles was in force, and when it was expired, he had so many came to hear him, that he wanted room. Hereupon he by a warrant of two justices, was committed to New-Prison gaol for six months. But he got a Habeas Corpus, and was released; and removed to Totteridge, near Barnet. While he was there, Duke Lauderdale going into Scotland, signified to him a purpose there was of taking off the oath of canonical obedience, and all impositions of conformity, save only that it should be necessary to sit in presbyteries and synods with the bishops and moderators; and that he had the king's consent to offer him what place in Scotland he would choose, either a church, or a college, or a bishopric. But he excused himself from his weakness and indisposition, and the circumstances of his family.