Still the murder of Charles and his brother was only the beginning of the end. The death of the King was to be the signal for a general rising. The city and suburbs were to be divided into twenty districts, with a captain and eight lieutenants at the head of each district; the men to be armed and ready at an hour’s notice for any raid that might be commanded. The sum of twenty thousand pounds, which had been subscribed by the disaffected, was to be distributed among the captains to expend as they thought best. The night before the return of the King from Newmarket, a body composed of two thousand men, drawn from these several districts, were to be secreted in empty houses, “as near the several gates of the city and other convenient posts as could be; the men were to be got into those houses and acquainted with the plot to take off the King at Rye House; such as refused should be clapt into the cellars, and the rest sally out at the most convenient hour, and seize and shut up the gates.[65] The moment the revolt had broken out the different captains were to muster their men and march them to the several places of rendezvous fixed upon; some were to be stationed in St. James’s Square, others in Covent Garden, others again in Southwark, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the Royal Exchange, whilst those named at Moorfields were to take possession of the arms in the Artillery Ground. A large body of cavalry was, at the same time, to be on the alert and scour the streets, so as to prevent the King’s party from embodying or the Horse Guards from doing their duty. The bridges over the Thames were to be secured, and fagots taken into the narrow streets around Eastcheap for purposes of conflagration, if necessary.[66] All these measures appeared comparatively easy of execution to the conspirators; one detail in the enterprise, however, seems greatly to have perplexed them. As long as the Tower was in the hands of the King’s guards, any rise in the city might prove a failure. To obtain possession of the Tower was therefore one of the most prominent features in the discussions held at the various hostels which the conspirators frequented. Some suggested that fagots should be heaped about the gates of the building at dead of night, and then set on fire; others that it should be bombarded from the Thames; whilst a third proposed that men should be lodged in Thames Street, and secretly fall upon the guard. “Several ways,” witnesses Robert West,[67] “were proposed to surprise and take the Tower of London. One was to send ten or twelve men armed with pistols, pocket daggers and pocket blunderbusses into the Tower under the pretence of seeing the armory; another number should go to see the lions, who, by reason of their not going into the inner gate, were not to have their swords taken from them, that the persons who went to see the armory should return into the tavern just within the gate, and there eat and