of indefeasible hereditary right as the real Secretary of
State. He was in high favour with Lewis, at whose court he had formerly
resided, and had, since the Revolution, been intrusted by the French
government with considerable sums of money for political purposes, [639]

While Preston was consulting in the capital with the other heads of the
faction, the rustic Jacobites were laying in arms, holding musters, and
forming themselves into companies, troops, and regiments. There were
alarming symptoms in Worcestershire. In Lancashire many gentlemen had
received commissions signed by James, called themselves colonels and
captains, and made out long lists of noncommissioned officers and
privates. Letters from Yorkshire brought news that large bodies of men,
who seemed to have met for no good purpose, had been seen on the moors
near Knaresborough. Letters from Newcastle gave an account of a great
match at football which had been played in Northumberland, and was
suspected to have been a pretext for a gathering of the disaffected. In
the crowd, it was said, were a hundred and fifty horsemen well mounted
and armed, of whom many were Papists, [640]

Meantime packets of letters full of treason were constantly passing and
repassing between Kent and Picardy, and between Wales and Ireland.
Some of the messengers were honest fanatics; but others were mere
mercenaries, and trafficked in the secrets of which they were the
bearers.

Of these double traitors the most remarkable was William Fuller. This
man has himself told us that, when he was very young, he fell in with a
pamphlet which contained an account of the flagitious life and horrible
death of Dangerfield. The boy's imagination was set on fire; he devoured
the book; he almost got it by heart; and he was soon seized, and ever
after haunted, by a strange presentiment that his fate would resemble
that of the wretched adventurer whose history he had so eagerly read,
[641] It might have been supposed that the prospect of dying in Newgate,
with a back flayed and an eye knocked out, would not have seemed very
attractive. But experience proves that there are some distempered minds
for which notoriety, even when accompanied with pain and shame, has an
irresistible fascination. Animated by this loathsome ambition, Fuller
equalled, and perhaps surpassed, his model. He was bred a Roman
Catholic, and was page to Lady Melfort, when Lady Melfort shone at
Whitehall as one of the loveliest wom