The
Protestant Religion and Magna Charta," inscribed upon it. Several
lighted torches were stuck before her niche. Lastly, amidst a fiery
shower of squibs from every door and window, the Pope and his companions
were toppled into the huge bonfire, with shouts that reached almost to
Charing Cross.

These mischievous processions were continued till the reign of George I.
There was to have been a magnificent one on November 17, 1711, when the
Whigs were dreading the contemplated peace with the French and the
return of Marlborough. But the Tories, declaring that the Kit-Kat Club
was urging the mob to destroy the house of Harley, the Minister, and to
tear him to pieces, seized on the wax figures in Drury Lane, and forbade
the ceremony.

As early as two years after the Restoration, Sir Balthazar Gerbier, a
restless architectural quack and adventurer of those days, wrote a
pamphlet proposing a sumptuous gate at Temple Bar, and the levelling of
the Fleet Valley. After the Great Fire Charles II. himself hurried the
erection of the Bar, and promised money to carry out the work. During
the Great Fire, Temple Bar was one of the stations for constables, 100
firemen, and 30 soldiers.

The Rye-House Plot brought the first trophy to the Golgotha of the Bar,
in 1684, twelve years after its erection. Sir Thomas Armstrong was deep
in the scheme. If the discreditable witnesses examined against Lord
William Russell are to be believed, a plot had been concocted by a few
desperate men to assassinate "the Blackbird and the Goldfinch"--as the
conspirators called the King and the Duke of York--as they were in their
coach on their way from Newmarket to London. This plan seems to have
been the suggestion of Rumbold, a maltster, who lived in a lonely moated
farmhouse, called Rye House, about eighteen miles from London, near the
river Ware, close to a by-road that leads from Bishop Stortford to
Hoddesdon. Charles II. had a violent hatred to Armstrong, who had been
his Gentleman of the Horse, and was supposed to have incited his
illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, to rebellion. Sir Thomas was
hanged at Tyburn. After the body had hung half an hour, the hangman cut
it down, stripped it, lopped off the head, threw the heart into a fire,
and divided the body into four parts. The fore-quarter (after being
boiled in pitch at Newgate) was set on Temple Bar, the head was placed
on Westminster Hall, and the rest of the body was sent to Stafford,
which