The dissolution scattered the opposition as a gust of wind the leaves of a tree in autumn. Shaftesbury in vain attempted to hold the Houses together. His followers in the Lords remained for an hour under pretence of signing a protest, while messengers were dispatched urging the Commons to fulfil their promises. But they were too much cowed by the stroke. They feared “if they did not disperse, the king would come and pull them out by the ears.” Presently they fled. In a quarter of an hour the price of coaches in the town doubled. Oxford had the appearance of a surrendered city disgorging its garrison.[451] And with their flight the history of the Popish Plot comes to an end. On that the Whigs had staked all, and they had lost. The country was alienated by their violence and rapacity and fearful of the horrors of civil war. Once deprived of their means of action in Parliament they could do nothing but go whither the king drove them, to plot frank rebellion without the shadow of legality. Up to this point Shaftesbury had led a bold attack, not without good hope of success. Now he was left to sustain the defence, stubborn and keen, but in the end incapable of avoiding ruin. The tide had at last turned, and Charles, who since the first appearance of Oates had borne with unexampled equanimity a series of the most fierce assaults, found himself upon a pinnacle of triumph, his enemies lying crushed beneath his throne until he should goad them to complete disaster. Had he struck twelve months sooner the country would in all likelihood have been on their side; but he had gauged the temper of his people correctly and knew now that they would be with him. The history of these years is in brief the history of Charles II’s reign, the history of a long struggle for the power of the crown. In the panic of the Popish Plot and the wild agitation of the Exclusion bill that struggle, exasperated by the Dover treaty and the Catholic intrigues, came to a head. Its consequence was the Rye House Plot, the perfection of Whig failure. In that struggle too the conflicting principles found their absolute exponents in the two wittiest and two of the most able statesmen in English history, each gifted with a supreme political genius, each exclusive of the other, each fighting for personal ascendency no less than for an idea, for principle no less than for power, Charles II and the Earl of Shaftesbury. Without a grasp of this the history of the times cannot be understood, and for this reason some historians have found in them, and more have left, a mere tangle of helpless chaos. Of the two Charles had the better fortune in his life, Shaftesbury after death. For Shaftesbury, ruined, disappointed, embittered at the loss of all his hopes, was yet the father of the Revolution: all that Charles had gained was thrown away by his less worthy brother. But the personal triumph of the king was unique. While to the world he seemed a genial debauchee,