of Darnley, of Murray, of Sharpe, are conspicuous instances.  The royalists who murdered Lisle in Switzerland were Irishmen; the royalists who murdered Ascham at Madrid were Irishmen; the royalists who murdered Dorislaus at the Hague were Scotchmen.  In England, as soon as such a design ceases to be a secret hidden in the recesses of one gloomy and ulcerated heart, the risk of detection and failure becomes extreme.  Felton and Bellingham reposed trust in no human being; and they were therefore able to accomplish their evil purposes.  But Babington’s conspiracy against Elizabeth, Fawkes’s conspiracy against James, Gerard’s conspiracy against Cromwell, the Rye House conspiracy, the Cato Street conspiracy, were all discovered, frustrated and punished.  In truth such a conspiracy is here exposed to equal danger from the good and from the bad qualities of the conspirators.  Scarcely any Englishman, not utterly destitute of conscience and honour, will engage in a plot for slaying an unsuspecting fellow creature; and a wretch who has neither conscience nor honour is likely to think much on the danger which he incurs by being true to his associates, and on the rewards which he may obtain by betraying them.  There are, it is true, persons in whom religious or political fanaticism has destroyed all moral sensibility on one particular point, and yet has left that sensibility generally unimpaired.  Such a person was Digby.  He had no scruple about blowing King, Lords and Commons into the air.  Yet to his accomplices he was religiously and chivalrously faithful; nor could even the fear of the rack extort from him one word to their prejudice.  But this union of depravity and heroism is very rare.  The vast majority of men are either not vicious enough or not virtuous enough to be loyal and devoted members of treacherous and cruel confederacies; and, if a single member should want either the necessary vice or the necessary virtue, the whole confederacy is in danger.  To bring together in one body forty Englishmen, all hardened cutthroats, and yet all so upright and generous that neither the hope of opulence nor the dread of the gallows can tempt any one of them to be false to the rest, has hitherto been found, and will, it is to be hoped, always be found impossible.

There were among Barclay’s followers both men too bad and men too good to be trusted with such a secret as his.  The first whose heart failed him was Fisher.  Even before the time and place of the crime had been fixed, he obtained an audience of Portland, and told that lord that a design was forming against the King’s life.  Some days later Fisher came again with more precise intelligence.  But his character was not such as entitled him to much credit; and the knavery of Fuller, of Young, of Whitney and of Taffe, had made men of sense slow to believe stories of plots.  Portland, therefore, though in general very easily alarmed where the safety of his master and friend was concerned, seems to have