encouraged, refused the four Bills; the Commissioners kissed hands and returned, and Charles signed the proposals of the Scots, which guaranteed the independence of their own religion, on condition of finding an army of forty thousand men for the restoration of the king. Charles was not left long in ignorance of the effect of his refusal of the Parliamentary proposals, and of the discovery of his secret treaty with the Scots. Colonel Hammond received orders to take every measure for the safe keeping of the king, and for preventing the lurking of suspicious vessels in Southampton Water, as it was known that a ship had been engaged by the queen to carry off Charles and land him at Berwick, in readiness to co-operate with the Scottish movement. Hammond dismissed Ashburnham, Legge, and Berkeley, with all other Royalists, from the island; sent away a vessel, supposed to be the very one engaged by the queen; and put the king under strict surveillance and a double guard. He was no longer an apparently free guest, but a close prisoner. This treatment only doubled his determination to escape. Ashburnham, Berkeley, and Legge, though banished from the island, kept saddle-horses on the coast ready, in case of the king's escaping from Carisbrooke; and his friends from all quarters corresponded with him, and their letters were conveyed to him by Henry Firebrace, who was in some employment in the castle, and was occasionally engaged by one of the warders to take his place before the king's chamber-door, when he put the correspondence entrusted to him through a crevice of the door. The whole island resented the incarceration of the king, and there were loud threats of rising and liberating him by force. One Captain Burley was mad enough to make the attempt. At midnight a drum was beaten. Burley put himself at the head of a rabble in Newport, without, as reported, having a single musket among them, and was speedily taken and executed.