In 1668, the Puritans and apprentices about Moorfields took the liberty to pull down a number of brothels, and then to say, with some significance, that having demolished the little ones they ought not to spare the great one at Whitehall. Colonel Blood, the villainous desperado, after nearly murdering Lord Ormond, and after stealing the crown of England from the Tower, was not only pardoned, but admitted into the privacy and intimacy of the court, became a personal favourite of the king, was constantly seen about the palace, and had granted to him, for his base and bloody deeds, an estate in Ireland, worth £500 a-year. In 1673 the Test Act was passed, which provided that all who refused to take the oaths, and to receive the sacrament, according to the rites of the Church of England, should be debarred from public employment. In 1677, Charles not only permitted his nephew, the Prince of Orange, to come to England, but hastily made up a marriage between the prince and his niece, Mary, the elder daughter of James, the Duke of York, by Anne Hyde,—Charles alleging that this measure was forced upon him by the jealous fears of the nation, particularly since the Duke of York had declared himself a Papist. In 1678, the year in which Samuel Wesley was sent to school in London, the popish plot of Titus Oates was developed. Titus was the son of an Anabaptist ribbon weaver. After acting as chaplain to one of Cromwell’s regiments in Scotland, he took orders in the Church of England, and obtained the living of Hastings in Sussex.[14] Whilst discharging his sacred duties, he was twice convicted of perjury. He was then appointed chaplain on board a man-of-war, but was dismissed with added infamy. Two years before the development of his plot, he was admitted into the service of the popish Duke of Norfolk, and suddenly became a Papist. He was now sent to a Jesuits’ College in Spain, from which, in a short time, he was disgracefully expelled. He recrossed the Pyrenees, and presented himself, as a mendicant, at the gate of the Jesuit College, at St Omar. Here, for a while, he lived among the students and novices, and was then cast out with shame, and was obliged to return to England without cassock and without coat. It so happened that, just at this juncture, Dr Tonge, rector of St Michael’s, in Wood Street, London, was a great Protestant alarmist. Titus obtained access to him, worked upon his fears, and, by his means, was brought before the Privy Council. Here, in a new suit of clothes and a sacerdotal gown, he alleged that, by the authority of the pope, a number of Jesuits were plotting the murder of the king, and of his brother James, the Duke of York; that these Jesuits had £60,000 a-year at their command, to assist in carrying out their murderous intentions; that repeated commissions had been given to shoot the king, and that the queen’s physician had been urged to poison him; that a wager had been laid that the king should eat no more