whom Gerard
shot. It shows how common was assassination in those times, and how
loose was public morality, that Louis XIV. was a party to at least two
of the plots that were formed for taking William's life,--that of
Grandval and that of Barclay, the latter known in English history as the
Assassination Plot _par excellence_, and which would have succeeded, had
two or three of the parties to it been left out. James II., William's
father-in-law, was also concerned in both these plots; and his
illegitimate son, the Duke of Berwick, a man of the highest personal
integrity, was aware of what Barclay was about. Since William's time
English sovereigns have had but little trouble from assassins, and that
little has proceeded from insane creatures. George III. was struck at by
a crazy woman, one Peg Nicholson, and fired at, in a theatre, by a crazy
man named Hadfield. We can recollect three persons firing at Queen
Victoria, none of whom were executed, though they all richly deserved
hanging.

Englishmen of note have been assassinated from time to time. Becket's
death was an act of assassination. Two Dukes of Gloucester, of the blood
royal, were assassinated in prison,--one in the reign of Richard II.,
and the other in that of Henry VI. Not a few eminent persons in England
were "done to death" by the abuse of judicial proceedings, which were in
fact acts of assassination. Most of Henry VIII.'s great victims perished
by means fouler than any of those to which Richard III. is accused of
having had resort; and the manner in which his father, Henry VII.,
murdered the Earl of Warwick, last of the male Plantagenets, and only
because he was a Plantagenet, was a deed worthy of a devil. Elizabeth,
unless she is much libelled, would have avoided the execution of Mary
Stuart by resort to assassination, only that her instruments were found
scrupulous. The first Duke of Buckingham of the Villiers family was
assassinated by John Felton, in Charles I.'s reign. Harley, afterward
Earl of Oxford, was stabbed by a Frenchman, named Guiscard, Harley being
then Chancellor of the Exchequer, in Anne's reign. Mr. Perceval, First
Lord of-the Treasury, was shot by a lunatic named John Bellingham, in
1812, the scene being the lobby of the House of Commons. In 1819 the
Cato-Street Conspiracy was formed by Arthur Thistlewood and others. It
was meant to kill the British Ministers, and the mode in which it was
finally resolved to proceed was to attack them when