Here the conspirators, assembled to the number of fifty, hoped to make short work of the Royal brothers, in the darkness of night and the confusion of the sudden stoppage, and would in all probability have been successful had it not been for the fire of March 22nd, which burnt half the town of Newmarket and put the Court there to such inconvenience that the King hurriedly decided to return to London some days before he was expected back. Rumbold and his men were unprepared and the plot miscarried. The unforeseen had happened, and all their extensive armament was useless. We must spare a little admiration for the thoroughness of their equipment, which included six blunderbusses, twenty muskets, and between twenty and thirty pairs of pistols. These deadly articles were afterwards found to be referred to in the conspirators’ correspondence under the innocent pseudonyms of quills, goosequills, and crowquills. Powder was “ink,” and bullets “sand.” That inevitable feature of every plot, the informer, was soon in evidence, and the greater number of the conspirators, constitutional and otherwise, were seized. After an unfair trial, Sidney and Russell, among the constitutionalists, were executed; Lord Howard of Escrick had turned evidence and so escaped punishment, the Earl of Essex committed suicide in prison, Shaftesbury had prudently, at an early stage, fled abroad, and Hampden was fined £44,000. The physical-force men were hanged. Rumbold escaped for awhile to Holland, but incautiously joined a later insurrection under the Duke of Argyle in the north, and was wounded and taken prisoner at the same time as his leader. It was the desire of the Government that, as one of the principals of the plot, he should be brought to England for execution, but it was feared that he would not survive the journey, and he was executed, under circumstances of revolting barbarity, at Edinburgh, being hoisted up by a pulley and hanged awhile, and then, still alive, let down, his heart torn out and carried on the point of a bayonet by the hangman. Bishop Sprat, in his “True Account of the Horrid Conspiracy,” says Rumbold made a statement that he and some of his friends had resolved to cut off the King and his brother on their way to or from Newmarket, more than ten years earlier, and had lain some time in ambush for that purpose: “but his Majesty and his Royal Brother went the other way through the Forest; which, as the Wretch himself could not but observe, they have seldom or never done, before or since.”