people for the King’s evil in one place, reviewing his troops in
another, and bleeding from the nose in a third. The young Prince
was sent to Portsmouth, Father Petre went off like a shot to
France, and there was a general and swift dispersal of all the
priests and friars. One after another, the King’s most important
officers and friends deserted him and went over to the Prince. In
the night, his daughter Anne fled from Whitehall Palace; and the
Bishop of London, who had once been a soldier, rode before her with
a drawn sword in his hand, and pistols at his saddle. ‘God help
me,’ cried the miserable King: ‘my very children have forsaken
me!’ In his wildness, after debating with such lords as were in
London, whether he should or should not call a Parliament, and
after naming three of them to negotiate with the Prince, he
resolved to fly to France. He had the little Prince of Wales
brought back from Portsmouth; and the child and the Queen crossed
the river to Lambeth in an open boat, on a miserable wet night, and
got safely away. This was on the night of the ninth of December.
At one o’clock on the morning of the eleventh, the King, who had,
in the meantime, received a letter from the Prince of Orange,
stating his objects, got out of bed, told LORD NORTHUMBERLAND who
lay in his room not to open the door until the usual hour in the
morning, and went down the back stairs (the same, I suppose, by
which the priest in the wig and gown had come up to his brother)
and crossed the river in a small boat: sinking the great seal of
England by the way. Horses having been provided, he rode,
accompanied by SIR EDWARD HALES, to Feversham, where he embarked in
a Custom House Hoy. The master of this Hoy, wanting more ballast,
ran into the Isle of Sheppy to get it, where the fishermen and
smugglers crowded about the boat, and informed the King of their
suspicions that he was a ‘hatchet-faced Jesuit.’ As they took his
money and would not let him go, he told them who he was, and that
the Prince of Orange wanted to take his life; and he began to
scream for a boat – and then to cry, because he had lost a piece of
wood on his ride which he called a fragment of Our Saviour’s cross.
He put himself into the hands of the Lord Lieutenant of the county,
and his detention was made known to the Prince of Orange at Windsor
– who, only wanting to get rid of him, and not caring where he
went, so that he went away, was very much disconcerted that they
did not let him go. However, there was nothing for it but to have
him brought back, with some state in the way of Life Guards, to
Whitehall. And as soon as he got there, in his infatuation, he
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heard mass, and set a Jesuit to say grace at his public dinner.
The people had been thrown into the strangest state of confusion by
his flight, and had taken it into their heads that the Irish part
of the army were going to murder the Protestants. Therefore, they
set the bells a ringing, and lighted watch-fires, and burned
Catholic Chapels, and looked about in all directions for Father
Petre and the Jesuits, while the Pope’s ambassador was running away
in the dress of a footman. They found no Jesuits; but a man, who
had once been a frightened witness before Jeffreys in court, saw a
swollen, drunken face looking through a window down at Wapping,
which he well remembered. The face was in a sailor’s dress, but he
knew it to be the face of that accursed judge, and he seized him.
The people, to their lasting honour, did not tear him to pieces.
After knocking him about a little, they took him, in the basest
agonies of terror, to the Lord Mayor, who sent him, at his own
shrieking petition, to the Tower for safety. There, he died.