It is an absolute mystery why Charles II sent for him forthwith, and not only pardoned him, but conferred a pension of £500 a year on him and certain Irish estates. Evelyn, in his diary, expresses his amazement. Some think that Charles, wanting money, had commissioned Blood to steal the treasures and pawn or sell them in Holland, and divide the spoil with him; others suppose that Blood knew some awkward secrets about the king and threatened to reveal them. He often appeared at Court, and returned kindness which the Duke of Buckingham had shown him by a peculiarly atrocious attempt to blackmail him, for which he was fined £10,000. He died in Bowling Street, Westminster, August 24, 1680. His likeness in the National Portrait Gallery quite confirms Evelyn’s description of him, “a villainous unmerciful face, a false countenance.” Yet even his rascality grows dim beside that of Titus Oates, whose horrible concoction of lies concerning a pretended Popish plot sent nearly forty men to the scaffold. The execution of William Lord Stafford on Tower Hill, December 29, 1680, on the charge sworn to by Oates that he planned to kill the king and place the Duke of York on the throne, was the turning-point in the agitation. When it began Oates was half deified by the excited populace as the deliverer of the country; but as time went on men shook their heads, doubtfully at first, then strongly. Lord Stafford on the scaffold declared his absolute innocence, and the spectators cried out with tears, “We believe your lordship.” Oates had made too rich a harvest to give up his devilish business, but after this he found no more believers. But that there was good reason to expect an endeavour to restore the Roman faith no one doubted. As far back as 1670 the Duke of York had given his adhesion to it, and therefore the “country party,” as it was called, were eager to prevent his accession to the throne. The struggles over the Exclusion Bill need not detain us here; but the failure of that Bill, owing to the “trimming” of some of its chief supporters who loved the favour of royalty, led to a secret project of the earnest Whigs to avert what they held to be a calamity. The leader of this party had been Anthony Ashley, first Earl of Shaftesbury. “Of these the false Ahithophel was first,” wrote Dryden in his great satire. He was joined by Lord William Russell, the Duke of Monmouth, Algernon Sidney, the Earl of Essex, son of Lord Capel, who was beheaded in the early days of the Commonwealth, John Hampden, grandson of the great Parliamentary leader, and Lord Howard. Shaftesbury had been sent to the Tower in 1677 for agitating against the king’s high-handed proceedings against the Corporation of London, but had been released on submission. He now protested against the king holding a Parliament at Oxford and was again lodged in the Tower, but the Whig grand jury threw out the charge. But he soon found that his friends would