Still, however, those who remodelled his theology continued to profess, and doubtless to feel, profound reverence for him; and his crazy epistles were to the last received and read with respect in Quaker meetings all over the country. His death produced a sensation which was not confined to his own disciples. On the morning of the funeral a great multitude assembled round the meetinghouse in Gracechurch street. Thence the corpse was borne to the burial ground of the sect near Bunhill Fields. Several orators addressed the crowd which filled the cemetery. Penn was conspicuous among those disciples who committed the venerable corpse to the earth.

WILLIAM FULLER.

IN 1689, and in the beginning of 1690, William Fuller had rendered to the government services such as the best governments sometimes require, and such as none but the worst men ever perform. His useful treachery had been rewarded by his employers, as was meet, with money and with contempt. Their liberality enabled him to live during some months like a fine gentleman. He called himself a Colonel, hired servants, clothed them in gorgeous liveries, bought fine horses, lodged in Pall Mall, and showed his brazen forehead, overtopped by a wig worth fifty guineas, in the ante-chambers of the palace and in the stage box at the theatre. He even gave himself the airs of a favor

They endeavour all they can to make it appear that their doctrine was uniform from the beginning, and that there has been no alteration; and therefore they take upon them to defend all the writings of George Fox, and others of the first Quakers, and turn and wind them to make them (but it is impossible) agree with what they teach now at this day." (The Snake in the Grass, 3rd ed., 1698. Introduction.) Leslie was always more civil to his brother Jacobite Penn than to any other Quaker. Penn himself says of his master, "As abruptly and brokenly as sometimes his sentences would fall from him about divine things, it is well known they were often as texts to many fairer declarations." That is to say, George Fox talked nonsense, and some of his friends paraphrased it into sense.

ite of royalty, and, as if he thought that William could not live without him, followed His Majesty first to Ireland, and then to the Congress of Princes at the Hague. Fuller afterwards boasted that, at the Hague, he appeared with a retinue fit for an ambassador, that he gave ten guineas a week for an apartment, and that the worst waistcoat which he condescended to wear was of silver stuff at forty shillings the yard. Such profusion, of course, brought him to poverty. Soon after his return to England he took refuge from the bailiffs in Axe Yard, a place lying within the verge of Whitehall. His fortunes were desperate; he owed great sums: on the government he had no claim his past services had been overpaid: no future service was to be expected from him: having appeared in the witness-box as evidence for the Crown, he could no longer be of any use as a spy on the Jacobites; and by all men of virtue and honour, to whatever party they might belong, he was abhorred and shunned.

Just at this time, when he was in the frame of mind in which men are open to the worst temptations, he fell in with the worst of tempters, in truth, with the devil in human shape. Oates had obtained his liberty, his pardon, and a pension which made him a much richer man than nineteen twentieths of the members of that profession of which he was the disgrace. But he was still unsatisfied. He complained that he had now less than three hundred a year. In the golden days of the Plot he had been allowed three times as much, had been sumptuously lodged in the palace, had dined on plate and had been clothed in silk. He clamoured for an increase of his stipend. Nay, he was even imprudent enough to aspire to ecclesiastical preferment, and thought it hard that, while so many mitres were distributed, he could not get a deanery, a prebend, or even a living. He missed no opportunity of urging his pretensions. He haunted the public offices and the lobbies of the Houses of Parliament. He might be seen and heard every day, hurrying, as fast as his uneven legs would carry him, between Charing Cross and Westminster Hall, puffing with haste and self-importance, chattering about what he had done for the good cause, and reviling, in the style of the boatmen on the river, all the statesmen and divines

whom he suspected of doing him ill offices at Court, and keeping him back from a bishopric. When he found that there was no hope for him in the Established Church, he turned to the Baptists. They, at first, received him very coldly; but he gave such touching accounts of the wonderful work of grace which had been wrought in his soul, and vowed so solemnly, before Jehovah and the holy angels, to be thenceforth a burning and shining light, that it was difficult for simple and well-meaning people to think him altogether insincere. He mourned, he said, like a turtle. On one Lord's day he thought he should have died of grief at being shut out from fellowship with the saints. He was at length admitted to communion: but before he had been a year among his new friends, they discovered his true character, and solemnly cast him out as a hypocrite. Thenceforth he became the mortal enemy of the leading Baptists, and persecuted them with the same treachery, the same mendacity, the same effrontery, the same black malice which had many years before wrought the destruction of more celebrated victims. Those who had lately been edified by his account of his blessed experiences, stood aghast to hear him crying out that he would be revenged, that revenge was God's own sweet morsel, that the wretches who had excommunicated him should be ruined, that they should be forced to fly their country, that they should be stripped to the last shilling. His designs were at length frustrated by a righteous decree of the Court of Chancery, a decree which would have left a deep stain on the character of an ordinary man, but which makes no perceptible addition to the infamy of Titus Oates.* Through all changes, however, he was surrounded by a small knot of hot-headed and foul-mouthed agitators, who, abhorred and despised by every respectable Whig, yet called themselves Whigs, and thought themselves injured because they were not rewarded for scurrility and slander with the best places under the Crown.

In 1691, Titus, in order to be near the focal point of political intrigue and faction, had taken a house within

* North's Examen; Ward's London Spy; Crosby's English Baptists, vol. iii. chap. 2.

the precinct of Whitehall. To this house Fuller, who lived hard by, found admission. The evil work which had been begun in him, when he was still a child, by the memoirs of Dangerfield, was now completed by the conversation of Oates. The Salamanca Doctor was, as a witness, no longer formidable; but he was impelled, partly by the savage malignity which he felt towards all whom he considered as his enemies, and partly by mere monkey-like restlessness and love of mischief, to do, through the instrumentality of others, what he could no longer do in person. In Fuller he had found the corrupt heart, the ready tongue, and the unabashed front, which are the first qualifications for the office of a false accuser. A friendship, if that word may be so used, sprang up between the pair. Oates opened his house and even his purse to Fuller. The veteran sinner, both directly and through the agency of his dependents, intimated to the novice that nothing made a man so important as the discovering of a plot, and that these were times when a young fellow who would stick at nothing and fear nobody might do wonders. The Revolution, such was the language constantly held by Titus, and his parasites,—had produced little good. The brisk boys of Shaftesbury had not been recompensed according to their merits. Even the Doctor, such was the ingratitude of men, was looked on coldly at the new Court. Tory rogues sate at the council board, and were admitted to the royal closet. It would be a noble feat to bring their necks to the block. Above all, it would be delightful to see Nottingham's long solemn face on Tower Hill. For the hatred with which these bad men regarded Nottingham had no bounds, and was probably excited less by his political opinions, in which there was doubtless much to condemn, than by his moral character, in which the closest scrutiny will detect little that is not deserving of approbation. Oates, with the authority which experience and success entitle a preceptor to assume, read his pupil a lecture on the art of bearing false witness. "You ought," he said, with many oaths and curses, "to have made more, much more, out of what you heard and saw at Saint Germains. Never was there a finer foundation for a plot. But you are a fool: you are a coxcomb: I could beat you:

I would not have done so. I used to go to Charles and tell him his own. I called Lauderdale rogue to his face. I made King, Ministers, Lords, Commons, afraid of me. But you young men have no spirit." Fuller was greatly edified by these exhortations. It was, however, hinted to him by some of his associates that, if he meant to take up the trade of swearing away lives, he would do well not to show himself so often at coffee-houses in the company of Titus. "The Doctor," said one of the gang, "is an excellent person, and has done great things in his time: but many people are prejudiced against him; and, if you are really going to discover a plot, the less you are seen with him the better." Fuller accordingly ceased to frequent Oates's house, but still continued to receive his great master's instructions in private.

To do Fuller justice, he seems not to have taken up the trade of a false witness till he could no longer support himself by begging or swindling. He lived for a time on the charity of the Queen. He then levied contributions by pretending to be one of the noble family of Sidney. He wheedled Tillotson out of some money, and requited the good Archbishop's kindness by passing himself off as His Grace's favourite nephew. But in the autumn of 1691 all these shifts were exhausted. After lying in several spunging houses, Fuller was at length lodged in the King's Bench prison, and he now thought it time to announce that he had discovered a plot.*

He addressed himself first to Tillotson and Portland: but both Tillotson and Portland soon perceived that he was lying. What he said was, however, reported to the King, who, as might have been expected, treated the information and the informant with cold contempt. All that remained was to try whether a flame could be raised in the Parliament.

Soon after the Houses met, Fuller petitioned the Commons to hear what he had to say, and promised to make wonderful disclosures. He was brought from his prison to the bar of the House; and he there repeated a long ro

The history of this part of Fuller's Life I have taken from his own narrative.