Lord Clarendon's account of the plot is confused and scanty', but we are enabled to follow the course of events with tolerable accuracy. Waller seems to have promised to use his influence to collect the Neuters into a body strong enough to paralyze the extreme party, and deliver the city into the King's hands. He made a proselyte of a gentleman named Tompkins, who had married his sister, and Alexander Hampden, a royalist, although of the popular family, actively espoused the same cause. The Earl of Portland was doubtless with them2, and Lord Conway too; whether the great Earl of Northumberland actually pledged himself is matter of doubt. Tompkins, under Waller's direction, made a kind of census of the city trained bands, and counted up malcontents that could be trusted in every parish and ward. Finally, as far as we can gather through the mist of conflicting evidence, Lady Daubigny had been sent forth from Oxford, two months earlier, with a

1 There can be little doubt that his relations with Portland induced Clarendon to be purposely vague in dealing with this portion of his subject.

2 Prof. S. R. Gardiner has discovered an unprinted letter from Waller to Portland which seems to prove, beyond all doubt, that the latter lied when he asseverated his ignorance of the plot. He was one of those with whom Waller had been seen only too rashly whispering.

special pass, and carrying innocently in her bosom a commission from the King to various persons in London giving them command over the civic forces of London.

There were various accounts of the way in which the plot was discovered. One was that Waller's sister, not Mrs Tompkins, but a Mrs Price,— was led to relieve her conscience by revealing the whole story to her chaplain, a strong presbyterian. Another was, that a man-servant of Tompkins', like a Puritan Polonius, hid behind the arras until he had heard enough to compromise the leaders. But the genuine one now appears from the D'Ewes MSS. to be that Lord Dover from Oxford wrote a rash letter to his wife, warning her to leave London, and that, a day or two later, a certain Hassel boasted that London would very shortly be in flames. At any rate, the mode of the disclosure of the plot was startling and almost theatrical. The parliamentarians were collected at morningprayers on a solemn fast-day, May the 31st, in the church of St Margaret's, Westminster. A message was brought in from the Speaker, summoning all members to a special session of the House; there was much whispering and agitation, and most of those addressed left the church. D'Ewes, indeed, thought lightly of it, and would

not go. But rumours of the most exaggerated description spread at once through London; Waller and Tompkins were arrested before nightfall, and a sketch of their plot was published by the House of Commons to allay popular alarm1.

Waller's conduct under this sudden calamity was deplorable. He lost all presence of mind, all decency, all manliness. He confessed everything, and finding that all the others denied complicity, he overwhelmed the whole circle of his acquaintance in universal denunciation. He seems to have hoped to escape punishment by including half of England in his fault. He who had been so gallant, such a champion of beauty, in his mortal terror was poltroon enough to accuse a number of great ladies and to charge them with inciting him to this rebellion. His fright, to be sure, was only too well grounded. The Parliament was in no temper to be trifled with. A short way was made with poor Tompkins. He had a handsome house in Holborn; a gallows was promptly raised in the street in front of it, and there Tompkins was hanged. A like fate befell others far less deeply implicated than Waller, and the luxurious poet felt a terrible

1 This pamphlet, which it would be interesting to possess, appears to have totally disappeared. Even Prof. Gardiner has never come across it.

sensation, no doubt, in the region of his neck. He was within a hair's breadth of being hanged, as it was; but his amazing cleverness and duplicity dragged him through. He professed to be so overwhelmed with remorse, that his judges allowed his case to be postponed till his frantic paroxysms of grief should have subsided.

When at last he did appear, July 4th, he claimed his right to be heard in the House of Commons1. He appeared in Westminster in a

1 I am able to print, for the first time, an account of this extraordinary scene from an eye-witness. In the MS. Diary of Sir Symeon D'Ewes, under the date "July 4, Tuesday 1643," I find this account of Waller's appearance at the bar of the House:

"He was all clothed in mourning as if he had been going to execution itself, his demeanour was also composed to a despairing dejectedness, and when he came to the Bar he kneeled down, and so continued kneeling, until myself and some others who stood near to the Bar bade him stand up. For his great fear that he should be executed for this conspiracy (which he much more deserved than Mr Tompkins his brother-in-law, who had already suffered, although he had been merely drawn into the same by the said Mr Waller whose sister he had married) did almost compel him to say or do anything, and certainly he would have deserved and would have found much more pity than he did, had he not a little before his coming to the House basely accused Algernon Earl of Northumberland to have been privy to this conspiracy, whom upon his first examination he had cleared, and yet divers of the House seeing his sad and dejected condition at the Bar whom they had formerly heard speak in public with so much applause, could not forbear shedding of tears. One thing was most remarkable,

costume of the deepest mourning, in an attitude of utter despair; he seemed about to sink into the earth, and in accents of the profoundest humility he delivered a speech to the eloquence of which, as Clarendon has aptly said, he owed the keeping of his head as much as Catiline owed the loss of his to that of Cicero. He urged on the parliament the unwisdom of allowing the soldiers to try any member of that great House, "however unworthy and monstrous," and endeavoured to persuade them to take him under their own jurisdiction and to spare him. The accounts of this speech are not

that he did look exceeding well, the reason of which was easily guessed at by those who had heard of his secret actions, for, having been a widower many years, he was so extremely addicted and given to the use of strange women as it did for the most part alter his very countenance, and make him look as if his face had been parboiled, being naturally of a very pleasing and well-tempered complexion." D'Ewes goes on to say that six or seven years before Waller had been attacked by a fever, of which he was like to die, and that his aunt, Lady Scudamore, took the opportunity to speak to him very gravely about his profligate habits, whereupon Waller, with tears and great show of penitence, said that if his life were spared, he would turn over a new leaf. However, on getting well, he returned at once to his old ways, and on Lady Scudamore's expostulating with him, he told her, with great jocularity, that she ought to have known better than to trust to sick men's vows. Whereupon she warned him that calamity would fall upon him, and when the plot was discovered, she did not fail to visit him in prison and to point the moral. Waller's character does not improve as we turn upon it more and more the bull's eye of history. The reference to D'Ewes' words is Harl. MSS. 165, fol. 144.