parts. It was Assize time; the Judges had
arrived the day before. Wagstaff seizes the Judges in their
beds, seizes the High Sheriff, and otherwise makes night
hideous;--proposes on the morrow to hang the Judges, as a
useful warning; but is overruled by Penruddock and the rest.
He orders the High Sheriff to proclaim King Charles; High
Sheriff will not, not though you hang him; Town-crier will
not, not even though you hang him. The Insurrection does not
spread in Salisbury, it would seem. The Insurrection quits
Salisbury on Monday night, marches with all speed towards
Cornwall, hoping for better luck there. Marches;--but
Captain Unton Crook marches also in the rear of it; marches
swiftly, fiercely; overtakes it at South Molton in
Devonshire, "on Wednesday about ten at night," and there, in
a few minutes, put an end to it. We took Penruddock, Grove,
and long lists of others; Wagstaff unluckily escaped ... and
this Royalist conflagration, which should have blazed all
over England, is entirely damped out. Indeed so prompt and
complete is the extinction, thankless people begin to say
there had never been anything considerable to extinguish.
Had they stood in the middle of it,--had they seen the
nocturnal rendezvous at Marston Moor, seen what Shrewsbury,
what Rufford Abbey, what North Wales in general, would have
grown to on the morrow,--in that case, thinks the Lord
Protector, not without some indignation, they had
known!--Carlyle's 'Cromwell,' vol. iv. pp. 129, 130.

If Carlyle had been more heedful he might have taken the hint furnished
by those 'thankless people.' Men are not usually thankless if preserved
from a real and obvious danger. Carlyle, however, thought that he knew
more about those transactions than the men who might have witnessed
them; and so we will accept his somewhat incautious invitation, and our
readers, if they choose to do so, shall perceive, perhaps, 'not without
some indignation,' what the Lord Protector 'had known' about the
insurrection of March 1655; they shall, to a certain extent at least,
regard that event from his point of view. And to enable them to do so
as promptly as possible, they may be at once informed, that the
Protector himself admitted the Earl of Rochester, Sir John Wagstaff, and
their associates into England, in order that they might, in his behalf,
play the