I suppose that there never was an abrupt change in the government of a
nation more quietly, successfully, and bloodlessly carried through
than our great Revolution. But it is the way of the pendulum to swing
back; and it was not long before those who had been most deeply
concerned in the event began to reflect and compare, nor, as they had
before them the example of the Civil War and the subsequent
restoration besides, and were persons bred for the most part in an
atmosphere of Divine Right and passive obedience (whether they had
imbibed those doctrines or not), was it wonderful if a proportion of
them began to repent at leisure what they had done in haste. The late
King's harsh and implacable temper, and the severity with which he had
suppressed one rising, were not calculated to reassure men when they
began to doubt. The possibility of his return hung like a thick cloud
over the more timid; while the favours which the new King showered on
his Dutchmen, the degradation of the coin and of trade, and the many
disasters that attended the first years of the new government were
sufficient to shake the confidence and chill the hearts even of the
stoutest and most patriotic.
So bad was the aspect of things that it was rumoured that King William
would abdicate; and this aggravating the general uncertainty, many in
high places spent their days in a dreadful looking forward to
judgment; nor ever, I believe, slept without dreaming of Tower Hill,
the axe, and the sawdust. The result that was natural followed. While
many hastened to make a secret peace with St. Germain's, others,
either as a matter of conscience or because they felt that they had
offended too deeply, remained constant; but perceiving treachery in
the air, and being in daily fear of invasion, breathed nothing but
threats and slaughter against the seceders. This begot a period of
plots and counter-plots, of perjury and intrigue, of denunciations and
accusations real and feigned, such as I believe no other country has
ever known; the Jacobites considering a restoration certain, and the
time only doubtful; while the Whigs in their hearts were inclined to
agree with them and feared the worst.
During seven such years I lived and worked with Mr. Brome; who,
partly, I think, because he had come late to his political bearings,
and partly because the Tories and Jacobites had a newswriter in the
notorious Mr. Dyer--to whose letters Mr. Dryden, it was said, would
sometimes contribute--remained steadfast in his Whig opinions; and did
no little in the country parts to lessen the stir which the Nonjurors'
complaints created. I saw much of him and little of others; and being
honestly busy and honourably employed--not that my style made any
noise in the coffee-houses, which was scarcely to be expected, since
it passed for Mr. Brome's--I began to regard my life before I came to
London as an ugly dream. Yet it had left me with two proclivities
which are not common at the age which I had then reached; the one a
love of solitude and a retired life, which, a matter of necessity at
first, grew by-and-by into a habit; the other an averseness for women
that amounted almost to a fear of them. Mr. Brome, who was a confirmed
bachelor, did nothing to alter my views on either point, or to
reconcile me to the world; and as my life was passed between my attic
in Bride Lane and his apartment in Fleet Street, where he had a
tolerable library, few were better acquainted with public affairs or
had less experience of private, than I; or knew more intimately the
order of the signs and the aspect of the houses between the Fleet
Prison and St. Dunstan's Church.
Partly out of fear, and partly out of a desire to be done with my
former life, I made myself known to no one in Hertfordshire; but, some
five years after my arrival in London, having a sudden craving to see
my mother, I walked down one Sunday to Epping. There making cautious
enquiries of the Bishop Stortford carrier, I heard of her death, and
on the return journey burst once into a great fit of weeping at the
thought of some kind word or other she had spoken to me on a
remembered occasion. But with this tribute to nature I dismissed my
family, and even that good friend from my mind; going back to my
lodging with a contentment which this glimpse of my former life
wondrously augmented.
Of Mr. D---- or of the wicked woman who had deceived me I was not
likely to hear; but there was one, and he the only stranger who _ante
Londinium_ had shown me kindness, whose name my pen was frequently
called on to transcribe, and whose fame was even in those days in all
men's mouths. With a thrill of pleasure I heard that my Lord
Shrewsbury had been one of the seven who signed the famous invitation:
then that the King had named him one of the two Secretaries of State;
and again after two years, during which his doings filled more and
more of the public ear--so that he stood for the government--that he
had suddenly and mysteriously resigned all his offices and retired
into the country. Later still, in the same year, in the sad days which
followed the defeat of Beachy Head, when a French fleet sailed the
Channel, and in the King's absence, the most confident quailed, I
heard that he had ridden post to Kensington to place his sword and
purse at the Queen's feet; and, later still, 1694, when three years of
silence had obscured his memory, I heard with pleasure, and the world
with surprise, that he had accepted his old office, and stood higher
than ever in the King's favour.
The next year Queen Mary died. This, as it left only the King's life
between the Jacobites and a Restoration, increased as well their
activity as the precautions of the government; whose most difficult
task lay in sifting the wheat from the chaff and discerning between
the fictions of a crowd of false witnesses (who thronged the
Secretary's office and lived by this new trade) and the genuine
disclosures of their own spies and informers. In the precarious
position in which the government stood, ministers dared neglect
nothing, nor even stand on scruples. In moments of alarm, therefore,
it was no uncommon thing to close the gates and prosecute a house to
house search for Jacobites; the most notorious being seized and the
addresses of the less dangerous taken. One of these searches which
surprised the city in the month of December, '95, had for me results
so important that I may make it the beginning of a consecutive
narrative.
I happened to be sitting in my attic that evening over a little coal
fire, putting into shape some Whig reflections on the Coinage Bill;
our newsletter tending more and more to take the form of a pamphlet. A
frugal supper, long postponed, stood at my elbow, and the first I knew
of the search that was afoot, a man without warning opened my door,
which was on the latch, and thrust in his head.
Naturally I rose in alarm; and we stared at one another by the light
of my one candle. Only the intruder's head and shoulders were in the
room, but I could see that he wore bands and a cassock, and a great
bird's nest wig, which overhung a beak-like nose and bright eyes.
"Sir," said he after a moment's pause, during which the eyes leaving
me glittered to every part of the room, "I see you are alone, and have
a very handy curtain there."
I gasped, but to so strange an exordium had nothing to say. The
stranger nodded at that as if satisfied, and slowly edging his body
into the room, disclosed to my sight the tallest and most uncouth
figure imaginable. A long face ending in a tapering chin added much to
the grotesque ugliness of his aspect; in spite of which his features
wore a smirk of importance, and though he breathed quickly, like a man
pressed and in haste, it was impossible not to see that he was master
of himself.
And of me; for when I went to ask his meaning, he shot out his great
under-lip at me, and showed me the long barrel of a horse pistol that
he carried under his cassock. I recoiled.
"Good sir," he said, with an ugly grin, "'tis an argument I thought
would have weight with you. To be short, I have to ask your
hospitality. There is a search for Jacobites; at any moment the
messengers may be here. I live opposite to you and am a Nonjuring
clergyman liable to suspicion; you are a friend to Mr. Timothy Brome,
who is known to stand well with the government. I propose therefore to
hide behind the curtain of your bed. Your room will not be searched,
nor shall I be found if you play your part. If you fail to play
it--then I shall be taken; but you, my dear friend, will not see it."
He said the last words with another of his hideous grins, and tapped
the barrel of his pistol with so much meaning that I felt the blood
leave my cheeks. He took this for a proof of his prowess; and nodding,
as well content, he stood a moment in the middle of the floor, and
listened with the tail of his eye on me.
He had no reason to watch me, however, for I was unarmed and cowed;
nor had we stood many seconds before a noise of voices and weapons
with the trampling of feet broke out on the stairs, and at once
confirmed his story and proved the urgency of his need. Apparently he
was aware of the course things would take and that the constables and
messengers would first search the lower floors; for instead of
betaking himself forthwith to his place of hiding--as seemed
natural--he looked cunningly round the chamber, and bade me sit down
to my papers. "Do you say at once that you are Mr. Brome's writer," he
continued with an oath, "and mark me well, my man. Betray me by a word
or sign, and I strew your brains on the floor!"
After that threat, and though he went then, and hid his hateful
face--which already filled me with fear and repugnance beyond
words--behind the curtain, where between bed and wall, there was a
slender space, I had much ado to keep my seat and my self-control. In
the silence which filled the room I could hear his breathing; and I
felt sure that the searchers must hear it also when they entered.
Assured that the Sancrofts and Kens, and the honest but misguided folk
who followed them, did not carry pistols, I gave no credit to his
statement that he was a Nonjuring parson; but deemed him some
desperate highwayman or plotter, whose presence in my room, should he
be discovered and should I by good luck escape his malice, would
land me at the best in Bridewell or the Marshalsea. By-and-by the
candle-wick grew long, and terrified at the prospect of being left in
the dark with him, I went to snuff it. With a savage word he whispered
me to let it be; after which I had no choice but to sit in fear and
semi-darkness, listening to the banging of doors below, and the
alternate rising and falling of voices, as the search party entered or
issued from the successive rooms.
In my chamber with its four whitewashed walls and few sticks of
furniture there was only one place where a man could stand and be
unseen; and that was behind the curtain. There, I thought, the most
heedless messenger must search; and as I listened to the steps
ascending the last flight I was in an agony. I foresaw the moment when
the constable would carelessly and perfunctorily draw the curtain--and
then the flash, the report, the cry, the mad struggle up and down the
room, which would follow.
So strong was this impression, that though I had been waiting minutes
when the summons came and a hand struck my door, I could not at once
find voice to speak. The latch was up, and the door half open when I
cried "Enter!" and rose.
In the doorway appeared three or four faces, a couple of lanthorns,
held high, and a gleam of pike-heads. "Richard Price, servant to Mr.
Brome, the newswriter," cried one of the visitors, reading in a
sonorous voice from a paper.
"Well affected," answered a second--evidently the person in command.
"Brome is a good man. I know him. No one hidden here?"
"No," I said, with a loudness and boldness that surprised me.
"No lodger, my man?"
"None!"
"Right!" he answered. "Good-night, and God save King William!"
"Amen!" quoth I; and then, and not before, my knees began to shake.
However, it no longer mattered, for before I could believe that the
danger was over they were gone and had closed the door; and I caught a
sniggering laugh behind the curtain. Still they had gone no farther
than the stairs; I heard them knock on the opposite door and troop in
there, and I caught the tones of a woman's voice, young and fresh,
answering them. But in a minute they came out again, apparently
satisfied, and crowded down stairs; whereon the man behind the curtain
laughed again, and swaggering out, Bobadil-like, shook his fist with
furious gestures after them.
"Damn your King William, and you too!" he cried in ferocious triumph.
"One of these days God will squeeze him like the rotten orange he is;
and if God will not, I will! I, Robert Ferguson! Trot, for the set of
pudding-headed blind-eyed moles that you are! Call yourselves
constables! Bah! But as for you, my friend," he continued, turning to
me and throwing his pistol with a crash on the table, "you have more
spunk than I thought you had, and spoke up like a gentleman of mettle.
There is my hand on it!"
My throat was so dry that I could not speak, but I gave him my hand.
He gripped it and threw it from him with a boastful gesture, and
stalking to the farther side of the room and back again, "There!"
cried he. "Now you can say that you have touched hands with Ferguson,
the famous Ferguson, the Ferguson on whose head a thousand guineas
have been set! Ferguson the Kingmaker, who defied three Kings and made
three Kings and will yet make a fourth! Fire and furies, do a set of
boozing tipstaves think to take the man who outwitted Jeffreys and
slipped through Kirke's lambs?"
[Illustration: "DAMN YOUR KING WILLIAM, AND YOU TOO!" HE CRIED]
Hearing who he was, I stared at him in astonishment; but in
astonishment largely leavened with fear and hatred; for I knew the
reputation he enjoyed, and both what he had done, and of what he was
suspected. That in all his adventures and intrigues he had borne a
charmed life; and where Sidney and Russell, Argyle and Monmouth,
Rumbold and Ayloffe had suffered on the scaffold, he had escaped scot
free was one thing and certain; but that men accounted for this in
strange ways was another scarcely less assured. While his friends
maintained that he owed his immunity to a singular skill in disguise,
his enemies, and men who were only so far his enemies as they were the
enemies of all that was most base in human nature, asserted that this
had little to do with it, but went so far as to say that in all his
plots, with Russell and with Monmouth, with Argyle and with Ayloffe,
he had played booty, and played the traitor: and tempting men, and
inviting men to the gibbet, had taken good care to go one step
farther--and by betraying them to secure his own neck from peril!