ent. At a time when the ascendancy of the court
of Versailles had excited general uneasiness, he had contrived to put a
wooden shoe, the established type, among the English, of French tyranny,
into the chair of the House of Commons. He had subsequently been
concerned in the Whig plot; but there is no reason to believe that he
was a party to the design of assassinating the royal brothers. He was
a man of parts and courage; but his moral character did not stand high.
The Puritan divines whispered that he was a careless Gallio or something
worse, and that, whatever zeal he might profess for civil liberty, the
Saints would do well to avoid all connection with him. [321]

Nathaniel Wade was, like Ayloffe, a lawyer. He had long resided at
Bristol, and had been celebrated in his own neighbourhood as a vehement
republican. At one time he had formed a project of emigrating to New
Jersey, where he expected to find institutions better suited to
his taste than those of England. His activity in electioneering had
introduced him to the notice of some Whig nobles. They had employed him
professionally, and had, at length, admitted him to their most secret
counsels. He had been deeply concerned in the scheme of insurrection,
and had undertaken to head a rising in his own city. He had also been
privy to the more odious plot against the lives of Charles and James.
But he always declared that, though privy to it, he had abhorred it, and
had attempted to dissuade his associates from carrying their design into
effect. For a man bred to civil pursuits, Wade seems to have had, in an
unusual degree, that sort of ability and that sort of nerve which make a
good soldier. Unhappily his principles and his courage proved to be not
of sufficient force to support him when the fight was over, and when in
a prison, he had to choose between death and infamy. [322]

Another fugitive was Richard Goodenough, who had formerly been Under
Sheriff of London. On this man his party had long relied for services
of no honourable kind, and especially for the selection of jurymen not
likely to be troubled with scruples in political cases. He had been
deeply concerned in those dark and atrocious parts of the Whig plot
which had been carefully concealed from the most respectable Whigs. Nor
is it possible to plead, in extenuation of his guilt, that he was misled
by inordinate zeal for the public good. For it will be seen that after
having disgraced a noble cause by his