While so great a faction adhered to the crown, it is apparent that resistance, however justifiable, could never be prudent; and all wise men saw no expedient but peaceably to submit to the present grievances. There was, however, a party of malecontents, so turbulent in their disposition, that, even before this last iniquity, which laid the whole constitution at the mercy of the king, they had meditated plans of resistance; at a time when it could be as little justifiable as prudent. In the spring of 1681,[*] a little before the Oxford parliament, the king was seized with a fit of sickness at Windsor, which gave great alarm to the public. * Lord Grey’s Secret History of the Rye-house Plot. This is the most full and authentic account of all these transactions; but is in the main confirmed by Bishop Sprat, and even Burnet, as well as by the trials and dying confessions of the conspirators; so that nothing can be more unaccountable than that any one should pretend that this conspiracy was an imposture, like the Popish plot. Monmouth’s declaration, published in the next reign, confesses a consult for extraordinary remedies. The duke of Monmouth, Lord Russel, Lord Grey, instigated by the restless Shaftesbury, had agreed, in case the king’s sickness should prove mortal, to rise in arms, and to oppose the succession of the duke. Charles recovered; but these dangerous projects were not laid aside. The same conspirators, together with Essex and Salisbury were determined to continue the Oxford parliament, after the king, as was daily expected, should dissolve it; and they engaged some leaders among the commons in the same desperate measure. They went so far as to detain several lords in the house, under pretence of signing a protest against rejecting Fitzharris’s impeachment; but hearing that the commons had broken up in great consternation, they were likewise obliged at last to separate. Shaftesbury’s imprisonment and trial put an end for some time to these machinations; and it was not till the new sheriffs were imposed on the city that they were revived. The leaders of the country party began then to apprehend themselves in imminent danger; and they were well pleased to find that the citizens were struck with the same terror, and were thence inclined to undertake the most perilous enterprises. Besides the city, the gentry and nobility in several counties of England were solicited to rise in arms. Monmouth engaged the earl of Macclesfield, Lord Brandon, Sir Gilbert Gerrard, and other gentlemen in Cheshire; Lord Russel fixed a correspondence with Sir William Courtney, Sir Francis Rowles, Sir Francis Drake, who promised to raise the west; and Trenchard in particular, who had interest in the disaffected town of Taunton, assured him of considerable assistance from that neighborhood. Shaftesbury and his emissary Ferguson, an Independent clergyman and a