He was right; it was too heavy a burden for any one man, and the burden was made still more heavy by his family afflictions. His beloved mother had left him, gone the way of all the earth, saying with her last breath, "I leave my heart with thee, dear son! a good-night!" His son-in-law, Rich, the three months’ bridegroom of his "little Frankie," was but a few weeks dead, and the Earl of Warwick, his firmest friend among the nobility, was dying. His favourite daughter, Elizabeth, was very ill, and he himself was feeling unmistakable premonitions of his dissolution. For, day by day, his soul was freeing itself from the ligaments of the body, rising into a finer air, seeing right and wrong with the eyes of immortality. But he would do his duty to the last tittle of strength,—fall battling for the right,—and as to what should come after, God would care for that. The fifteenth of May had been set for his assassination. On that day, risings were to take place in Yorkshire and Sussex; London was to be set on fire, the Protector seized and murdered, and Charles Stuart land on the southern coast. Cromwell knew all the secret plans of this conspiracy of "_The Sealed Knot_"; knew every member of it; and on the afternoon when Jane Swaffham saw him passing up London streets, so stern and scornful, he had just ordered the arrest of one hundred of them. From these he selected fifteen for trial. They were all Royalists; he would not lay his hand on his old friends, or on any who had once served the Cause. His mercy and his great heart were never so conspicuous as at this time. Only two of the fifteen were condemned to death, Doctor Hewitt, an Episcopal minister, and Sir Henry Slingsby, the uncle of Lord Fanconbridge, who was the husband of his own daughter, Mary;—Doctor Hewitt for issuing commissions in Charles Stuart’s name, and Sir Henry Slingsby for endeavouring to bribe the city of Hull to open its gates to the Stuart invaders. Against Doctor Hewitt his anger burned with unusual severity; he would listen to no intercession for him; for, he said, "The man has eat my bread, and sat on my hearth, and been a familiar friend of my family. He has been in all our confidences; he has dipped his sop in our dish, and cried ’Hail, master’ to me. Like the wickedest of traitors, he betrayed me, even while he called me friend. He shall die the death of a traitor, both to England and to myself." But though dark clouds from every side were rolling up, they were lit and edged with the fiery glory of the setting sun behind them. Cromwell’s troops, under Lockhart in France, were treading their old victorious march, and the flowers of June were wreathed for the taking of Dunkirk, where the Ironsides had stormed unbreached forts and annihilated Spanish battalions, to the amazement of Turenne, Condé and Don John.