Immediately after the return of Charles II. in the month of May 1660, the trials and executions of the late King’s judges began. The first of the regicides to be sent to the Tower was Major-General Thomas Harrison, who was committed for high treason on 19th May, and on the 11th of the following October, drawn on a hurdle to Charing Cross, and there hanged and quartered. Harrison, who was the son of a Nantwich butcher, and had been bred for the law, had been useful to the Protector in keeping down the Presbyterian faction. He died stoutly asserting the righteousness of the cause for which he suffered. The same fate befell Gregory Clement and Colonel John James, both members of the High Court of Justice which had condemned Charles I. Clement had succeeded in hiding himself in a house near Gray’s Inn, but was discovered and brought before the Commissioners of the Militia, to whom, however, he was not known by sight. He would probably have escaped, when it chanced that a blind man came into the room as Clement was quitting it, and recognised him by his voice, upon which Clement was arrested and sent to the Tower (Ludlow’s “Memoirs”). Among the other regicides confined within the Tower during that summer were Colonel Bamfield, Colonel Hunks, Colonel Phair, Francis Corker, Captain Hewlet, and John Cook, the last of whom had conducted the prosecution against the King. Hewlet was accused of having been one of the masked executioners at Whitehall, but this was never proved. James Harrington, the author of the political romance called “The Commonwealth of Oceana,” was imprisoned in the Tower early in this reign. He became insane, and was transferred from prison to prison. His book, by which he was made famous, laid down a plea for a lasting republic, the government of which was to be maintained by rotation. This unhappy author died in 1677, and was laid near Sir Walter Raleigh in St Margaret’s, Westminster. In the same summer of Charles’s restoration, the Marquis of Argyll, who was shortly afterwards beheaded at Edinburgh, was a prisoner in the Tower charged with high treason, and with having sided with Cromwell; with him was the Marquis of Antrim. The Laird of Swinton was another prisoner of this year, being imprisoned upon various charges, one of which was that he intended to kill the King whilst pretending to be touched by Charles for “the evil”—_i.e._ scrofula; and also for deserting the army at the Battle of Dunbar.