been engaged in such enterprises. If in the skirmish the King should fall, he would fall by fair fighting and not by murder. Precisely the same reasoning was employed, after the Revolution, by James himself and by some of his most devoted followers, to justify a wicked attempt on the life of William the Third. A band of Jacobites was commissioned to attack the Prince of Orange in his winter quarters. The meaning latent under this specious phrase was that the Prince's throat was to be cut as he went in his coach from Richmond to Kensington. It may seem strange that such fallacies, the dregs of the Jesuitical casuistry, should have had power to seduce men of heroic spirit, both Whigs and Tories, into a crime on which divine and human laws have justly set a peculiar note of infamy. But no sophism is too gross to delude minds distempered by party spirit.[1]
Argyle, who survived Rumbold a few hours, left a dying testimony to the virtues of the gallant Englishman. "Poor Rumbold was a great support to me, and a brave man, and died Christianly."[2]
Ayloffe showed as much contempt of death as either Argyle or Rumbold: but his end did not, like theirs, edify pious minds. Though political sympathy had drawn him towards the Puritans, he had no religious sympathy with them, and was indeed regarded by them as little better than an atheist. He belonged to that section of the Whigs which sought for models rather among the patriots of Greece and Rome than among the prophets and judges of Israel. He was taken prisoner, and carried
- ↑ Wodrow, III. ix 10; Western Martyrology; Burnet, i. 633; Fox's History, Appendix iv. I can find no way, except that indicated in the text, of reconciling Rumbold's denial that he had ever admitted into his mind the thought of assassination with his confession that he had himself mentioned his own house as a convenient place for an attack on the royal brothers. The distinction which I suppose him to have taken was certainly taken by another Rye House conspirator, who was, like him, an old soldier of the Commonwealth, Captain Walcot. On Walcot's trial, West, the witness for the crown, said, "Captain, you did agree to be one of those that were to fight the Guards." "What, then, was the reason." asked Chief Justice Pemberton, "that he would not kill the King?" "He said," answered West, "that it was a base thing to kill a naked man, and he would not do it."
- ↑ Wodrow, III. ix. 9.
