owed their roofs still standing, gave thanks. But to this woman
prostrate through the hours on the floor of the forsaken House on the
Wall, all that night was one long prayer and thanksgiving. For she had
passed through the fire, the smell of the singeing was on her garments,
and yet she was saved.

HUNT, THE OWLER

(1696)

Something more than two centuries ago--and just two years after Queen
Mary's death--when William the Third had been eight years on the throne,
and the pendulum of public sentiment, accelerated by the brusqueness of
his manners and no longer retarded by his consort's good nature, was
swinging surely and steadily to the Stuart side, the discovery of a
Jacobite plot to assassinate the King on his return from hunting set
back the balance with a shock which endured to the end of his reign.

It was the King's habit to go on Saturdays in his coach to Richmond
Park, returning to Kensington in the evening; and the scheme, laid bare,
was to fall upon him in a narrow lane leading from the river to Turnham
Green, where the miry nature of the ground rendered his progress slow.
For complicity in this plot nine persons, differing much in rank, from
Sir John Fenwick, who had been Colonel of King Charles's Life Guards, to
Keyes, a private in the Blues, suffered on the scaffold; and for a time
all England rang with it. The informers, Porter and Goodman, were viewed
with an abhorrence hardly less than that which the plot itself excited
in honest circles; and in this odium a man shared in some small degree,
who, though he had not been a party to the plot, had stooped, under the
stress of confinement and the fear of death, to give some evidence.

This was James Hunt, the Owler, or smuggler, a name forgotten now,
famous then. For years his house, in a lonely situation in the dreariest
part of Romney Marsh, had been the favourite house of call for Jacobites
bound for St. Germains or returning thence. At regular intervals, if
wind and tide served, a packet-boat ran between it and the French coast,
and between whiles the hiding-places in his rambling old house, which
had been originally contrived to hold runlets of Nantz and bales of
Lyons, lodged men whose faces were known in the Mall and St. James's,
and whose titles were not less real because for the nonce they wore
them, with their stars, in their pockets. Naturally, in the general
break-up consequent on the discovery of the Turnham Green plot, these
practic