Ogilby in 1675, when the first edition of his _Britannia_ was published, mapped out the road to Newmarket as part of the Old North Road as far as Puckeridge, and thence took it to Barley, Whittlesford, and Pampisford; yet Charles II. is not found travelling that way. He occasionally went by Epping, but chiefly through Waltham Cross and Hoddesdon, and thence by an obscure route past the Rye House, Hunsdon Street, Widford, Much Hadham, Hadham Ford, Patmore Heath, Stocking Pelham, Berden, Rickling Church End, and into Newport by a lane still known locally as “London Lane.” A house at Newport now known as “Nell Gwynne’s House,” and once the “Horns” inn, was at that time a halting-place often used by Nell, the Duke of York, the Duke of Buckingham, and the Earl of Rochester on their way to or from Newmarket races. The very remoteness and obscurity of this route gave the conspirators of the Rye House Plot of 1683 their opportunity. Those plotters were not the thorough-paced scoundrels historians would have us believe, but men who, with a passionate hatred of Popish doctrines, and with a keen recollection of the approximation to civil and religious liberty enjoyed under the Commonwealth of more than twenty years earlier, viewed the growing absolutism of Charles’s rule and the advances of Popery with fear and rage. The King as a man, with his romantic story, his airy wit, his genial cynicism and lack of affectation, has always commanded affection, but as a ruler deserved hatred and contempt. The original conspiracy was comparatively harmless, and cherished the idea of a constitutional revolution. With dreamy eyes fixed upon the ideal of a Utopian Republic, it included such visionaries as Algernon Sidney, Lord William Russell, the Earls of Essex and Shaftesbury, John Hampden (grandson of the patriot), and Lord Howard of Escrick. But an inner circle of less distinguished but more desperate men formed within this movement had other, and secret, designs. It was their intention to place the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, Charles’s natural son, upon the throne, and, as a preliminary, to “remove” the King. “No one would kill me to make you king,” Charles had once said to his brother James, Duke of York; but the intention of the Rye House conspirators was to assassinate both. These physical-force men worked long and silently, without the knowledge of the others. At their head was one Rumbold, a maltster, a colonel in Cromwell’s army, and with him Walcot, a brother officer in those old times. Rumbold was the occupier of a farm, the Rye House, an ancient building whose walls ranged with the narrow lane, miscalled a road, which ran—and still runs, as a lane—along the sloppy valley of the river Lea. The house had been built by a certain Andrew Ogard, who in the reign of Henry VI. had been licensed to construct a fortified dwelling here. The beautiful Gatehouse, in red brick, with picturesquely twisted chimneys and a fine oriel window, yet remains.