What the King said to Blood, or what Blood said to the King, as variously chronicled, may be passed over, but the net result was that Blood instead of being executed was given a post amongst the bodyguard of His Majesty, and also granted a salary of £500 a year for life. As money was then five times the value it was in 1914 and ten times the value it is in 1920, we may estimate this as a very handsome income. Several reasons have been given for Charles II’s liberality, and each may be accepted with equal caution. The wits and scandal-mongers of the time declared that the explanation of the King’s leniency was due to one of two causes. The first was that being as usual short of cash, His Majesty conceived the novel expedient of stealing his own Crown, and in a roundabout way put up Blood to execute the project. The second was more sporting than venal, and averred that the King in one of his genial after-dinner moments had declared that no one would, after the horrors of the past, deprive him of his Crown, and had backed his opinion by a bet. This, so the story went, having come to Blood’s ears, he determined to take up the bet literally and steal the actual emblems of royalty. These, though interesting explanations, may in the absence of proof be relegated to unconfirmed gossip. However, the most charitable version is little less astonishing. We are invited to believe that the King believed Blood’s fairy tale, which was that he had laid out in the reeds close to the place where the King was wont to bathe intending to shoot him, when he had assumed the primitive garb of his ancestor Adam, but that when the moment came to pull the trigger, this hardened old soldier was so overcome with the glory of the King’s royal body _in statu natura_ that his finger absolutely refused to work. Charles II, though jovial, was by no means an idiot; indeed he was one of the astutest monarchs who has sat on the throne of England. We may therefore perhaps brush aside all these interesting stories and arrive at the plain conclusion that the King, knowing from recent experience how precarious in those days was the life of a King, decided that his best policy was to take into his service a quondam and potential enemy, thereby turning a spear that threatened him into a defensive javelin. That shrewd lesson in statescraft has been followed, perhaps unwittingly, by the British Empire in its expansion. Times out of number in Asia, Africa, and America, the foes of one day have been on the next enrolled under the standards of the King of England, and alongside men of his own blood have fought the battles of the Empire.