The flight of James II. from England, and practically his abdication of authority, December 22, 1688, finished the house of Stuart. When a king runs away from his subjects, and stupidly flings down a magnificent inheritance, he has a bad chance of being called back again, particularly when by a course of exasperating and illegal conduct he has forfeited general esteem. Yet, from the date of that fatal flight there were successive plots by Jacobite adherents to bring back the Stuarts to the throne. Throughout the reign of William III. and of Queen Anne, the plottings were of a comparatively obscure character. On the death of Anne in 1714, and the installation of George I. under a parliamentary Act of Settlement, came the crisis. The rebellion of 1715 broke out, and being quenched at Preston, the fierce dissensions of Jacobites and Whigs arose. Dr Doran commences his narrative with the death of Anne, but scarcely awakes to his subject till the droves of rebels from Preston enter London and are dispersed through the various prisons, the more noble of them being conducted to the Tower. While preserving the forms of law, the government did not put off time in the examination and trials of the captured rebels. The pulpits rang with sermons condemnatory of their crimes. Joseph Addison, in his paper the _Freeholder_, railed upon them with indecent subserviency. There was no want of evidence to convict the leading spirits in the insurrection; but matters were considerably simplified by the voluntarily proffered testimony of the Rev. Robert Patten, who had been formerly a curate at Preston, and acted as chaplain to the rebel forces. Clapped into prison with his associates, Patten pondered on the best means of escaping the gallows; and the longer he thought of it, he became the more firmly convinced that his best plan was to become king’s evidence. His testimony was accepted; and at the cost of being branded throughout all time as a rascal, he daily stood up in court and told every particular requisite to convict the unhappy noblemen and gentlemen with whom he had been associated, and whose bread he had eaten. Very much through the testimony of this wretch, the prisons were gradually cleared by the exit of batches of convicts on hurdles to Tyburn. The Tower was similarly relieved of two of its noble inmates, Derwentwater and Kenmure, who perished on the scaffold; and there would have been more of them, but for the escape of the Earl of Nithsdale disguised in his wife’s clothes, and for the fortunate reprieve of the Lords Widdrington, Nairn, and Carnwath. On the evening of the day on which the Earl of Derwentwater was beheaded (24th February 1716), London was thrown into a state of commotion by the appearance in the sky of an extraordinary Aurora, in which there were fancied resemblances of armies, flaming swords, and fire-breathing dragons—the Jacobites accepting the phenomenon as a token of the indignation of