orce a way into it, the red way of war. Blood should
flow, ruin and misery desolate the land, but in the end he would go to
Paris to negotiate a peace, and that should be his opportunity. Other
reasons there may have been, but none so dominant, none that could
not have been removed by negotiation. The pretexted casus belli was the
matter of the Protestants of La Rochelle, who were in rebellion against
their king.

To their aid sailed Buckingham with an English expedition. Disaster
and defeat awaited it. Its shattered remnant crept back in disgrace to
England, and the Duke found himself more detested by the people than he
had been already--which is saying much. He went off to seek comfort at
the hands of the two persons who really loved him--his doting King and
his splendid wife.

But the defeat had neither lessened his resolve nor chastened his
insolence. He prepared a second expedition in the very teeth of a
long-suffering nation's hostility, indifferent to the mutinies and
mutterings about him. What signified to him the will of a nation? He
desired to win to the woman whom he loved, and to accomplish that he
nothing recked that he should set Europe in a blaze, nothing recked what
blood should be poured out, what treasure dissipated.

Hatred of him by now was so widespread and vocal, that his friends,
fearing that soon it would pass from words to deeds, urged him to take
precautions, advised the wearing of a shirt of mail for greater safety.

But he laughed sneeringly, ever arrogant and scornful.

"It needs not. There are no Roman spirits left," was his contemptuous
answer.

He was mistaken. One morning after breakfast, as he was leaving
the house in the High Street, Portsmouth, where he lodged whilst
superintending the final preparations for that unpopular expedition,
John Felton, a self-appointed instrument of national vengeance, drove a
knife to the hilt into the Duke's breast.

"May the Lord have mercy on your soul!" was the pious exclamation with
which the slayer struck home. And, in all the circumstances, there seems
to have been occasion for the prayer.

IX. THE PATH OF EXILE

The Fall of Lord Clarendon

Tight-wrapped in his cloak against the icy whips of the black winter's
night, a portly gentleman, well advanced in years, picked his way
carefully down the wet, slippery steps of the jetty by the light of
a lanthorn, whose rays gleamed lividly on crushed brown seaweed and
trailing gree