According to reports, the whole company of horsemen who rode with the Duke into Chester did not exceed 150, most of them being noted Dissenters. They came shouting, with a company of rabble on foot, whom they had induced to join them by providing drink. The bells rang, except at the Cathedral and St. Peter’s; and there were some bonfires. The Duke went first to the Mayor’s house, where he lodged; and, after a short stay there, he repaired to an inn, where he and his companions sat down at the ordinary, the chaplain being Dr. Fogg, one of the prebendaries. The Duke proceeded to the Cathedral, where he heard a sermon not very pleasant to him or to his associates. The same writer complains of the rabble making a riot, breaking into the Church of St. Peter’s, forcing open the steeple door, and ringing the bells, amongst the rest the fire bell. “Another company,” he adds, “at a bonfire, made by a great Presbyterian, broke the glass windows of an honest Churchman opposite.” Two or three days later, after accustomed healths, such as “Confusion to Popery, and to those that would not be enemies to the Duke of York,” Monmouth’s party expressed great displeasure at a sermon preached before His Grace, in the choir of the Cathedral; and, in general, uttered loud exclamations against the clergy. Having, it is said, spit their venom that way, without one syllable of opposition, they fell to magnifying the last Parliament, and to commending their votes.[104] At such times as I am describing, people exist who are possessed by an inordinate love of writing, and of publishing what they write, and whose pens resemble the sting of wasps, and of other still more ignoble insects. Pamphleteers of this kind wrote against Dissenters, some whose malignity was greater than their wit, some whose wit kept pace with their malignity. Sir Roger L’Estrange, perhaps, may be reckoned as the most gifted, the most formidable, the most unscrupulous, and the most fierce of this tribe of tormentors. He had narrowly escaped being executed as a spy during the Civil Wars,--he had been shut up in Newgate for several years; and now the memory of his sufferings made him perfectly savage in his attacks upon those whom he identified with his former enemies. He perpetually rang changes upon the miseries of the year ’41, which he accused the popular party of having determined to revive. In his _Foxes and Firebrands_, and in his _Citt and Bumkin_, he vilified and lampooned all men of liberal opinions, whether those opinions happened to be ecclesiastical or political. Nonconformists were fools and rebels, and their toleration was inconsistent with order and peace. By abuse of one kind, he sought to force them into the Church, and then, when they had entered, he by another kind of abuse endeavoured to drive them out. Outside they were traitors, inside they were trimmers, so that it was impossible such people as L’Estrange could ever be pleased, let the conduct of Nonconformists be what it might.