hered firmly
to the principles of his youth. His enemies could not deny that his life
had been consistent, and that with the same spirit with which he had
stood up against the Stuarts he had stood up against the Cromwells.
There was but a single blemish on his fame: but that blemish, in the
opinion of the great majority of his countrymen, was one for which no
merit could compensate and which no time could efface. His name and seal
were on the death warrant of Charles the First.

After the Restoration, Ludlow found a refuge on the shores of the Lake
of Geneva. He was accompanied thither by another member of the High
Court of Justice, John Lisle, the husband of that Alice Lisle whose
death has left a lasting stain on the memory of James the Second. But
even in Switzerland the regicides were not safe. A large price was
set on their heads; and a succession of Irish adventurers, inflamed by
national and religious animosity, attempted to earn the bribe. Lisle
fell by the hand of one of these assassins. But Ludlow escaped unhurt
from all the machinations of his enemies. A small knot of vehement and
determined Whigs regarded him with a veneration, which increased as
years rolled away, and left him almost the only survivor, certainly the
most illustrious survivor, of a mighty race of men, the conquerors in
a terrible civil war, the judges of a king, the founders of a republic.
More than once he had been invited by the enemies of the House of Stuart
to leave his asylum, to become their captain, and to give the signal for
rebellion: but he had wisely refused to take any part in the desperate
enterprises which the Wildmans and Fergusons were never weary of
planning, [532]

The Revolution opened a new prospect to him. The right of the people to
resist oppression, a right which, during many years, no man could
assert without exposing himself to ecclesiastical anathemas and to civil
penalties, had been solemnly recognised by the Estates of the realm, and
had been proclaimed by Garter King at Arms on the very spot where the
memorable scaffold had been set up forty years before. James had not,
indeed, like Charles, died the death of a traitor. Yet the punishment of
the son might seem to differ from the punishment of the father rather in
degree than in principle. Those who had recently waged war on a tyrant,
who had turned him out of his palace, who had frightened him out of his
country, who had deprived him of his crown, might perhaps