in disgust and prudent men in fear, the class of
fanatical knaves. Violent, malignant, regardless of truth, insensible
to shame, insatiable of notoriety, delighting in intrigue, in tumult,
in mischief for its own sake, he toiled during many years in the darkest
mines of faction. He lived among libellers and false witnesses. He
was the keeper of a secret purse from which agents too vile to be
acknowledged received hire, and the director of a secret press whence
pamphlets, bearing no name, were daily issued. He boasted that he had
contrived to scatter lampoons about the terrace of Windsor, and even to
lay them under the royal pillow. In this way of life he was put to
many shifts, was forced to assume many names, and at one time had four
different lodgings in different corners of London. He was deeply engaged
in the Rye House plot. There is, indeed, reason to believe that he was
the original author of those sanguinary schemes which brought so much
discredit on the whole Whig party. When the conspiracy was detected and
his associates were in dismay, he bade them farewell with a laugh,
and told them that they were novices, that he had been used to flight,
concealment and disguise, and that he should never leave off plotting
while he lived. He escaped to the Continent. But it seemed that even on
the Continent he was not secure. The English envoys at foreign courts
were directed to be on the watch for him. The French government offered
a reward of five hundred pistoles to any who would seize him. Nor was it
easy for him to escape notice; for his broad Scotch accent, his tall and
lean figure, his lantern jaws, the gleam of his sharp eyes which were
always overhung by his wig, his cheeks inflamed by an eruption, his
shoulders deformed by a stoop, and his gait distinguished from that
of other men by a peculiar shuffle, made him remarkable wherever he
appeared. But, though he was, as it seemed, pursued with peculiar
animosity, it was whispered that this animosity was feigned, and that
the officers of justice had secret orders not to see him. That he was
really a bitter malecontent can scarcely be doubted. But there is strong
reason to believe that he provided for his own safety by pretending at
Whitehall to be a spy on the Whigs, and by furnishing the government
with just so much information as sufficed to keep up his credit.
This hypothesis furnishes a simple explanation of what seemed to his
associates to be his unnatural reckles