For Death is of an hour, and after death Peace!
—Swinburne.
The news that Michael Kestyon—the hero of one of the most exciting adventures in the history of gallantry, the man who less than twenty-four hours ago had by the king's mandate obtained the titles and estates for which he had fought for over ten years—the news that he had been arrested for treason connected with the hellish Popish plot, horrified and astonished all London.
 
It seemed incredible that a man whose romantic personality had charmed all the women and even fascinated the king, could lend himself to such base treachery as to sell his country to the foreigners, and to incite others to poison the merry monarch who even at that moment had with one stroke of the pen seen that justice was done to the miserable reprobate.
 
Such is popularity! Michael, who a couple of days ago was the idol of society, the cynosure of all eyes at assemblies or in the playhouse, on whom the women smiled, and whom the men were proud to know, Michael now was naught but an abominable traitor, for whom hanging and the rack were more suitable than the block to which he was entitled by virtue of his newly acquired dignities.
 
And there was no doubt as to his villainies: the infamous blackguard had confessed, even at the time of his arrest, which no doubt had taken him wholly by surprise, and thus[393] forced on an avowal which would expedite the trial and give every one a chance of seeing the traitor's head on Tyburn gate before many days were over.
 
Excitement and terror had by this time so taken hold of the people of England that all sense of justice had gone hopelessly astray, and there was but little chance of any man—however high placed he might be, however upright and loyal had been his conduct throughout his life—escaping condemnation and death, once the army of false informers and perjurers had singled him out for attack.
 
As for Michael, everything was against him from the first. His former dissolute life, his long wanderings abroad, where he was supposed to have imbibed all the imaginary desires of the foreigners to turn England into an obedient vassal of France and Rome, also his sudden accession to wealth and the rumours anent that certain adventure, the details of which grew both in confusion, in mystery and even in horror as they were passed from mouth to mouth.
 
When the fact that the young girl-wife of the dispossessed Earl of Stowmaries would be one of the witnesses for the Crown became known, gossip became still more wild. Interest in that former adventure increased an hundred fold, and the news did of a truth give verisimilitude to the most weird conjecture. The words black magic and witchcraft were soon freely bandied about. Michael Kestyon was no longer an ordinary plotter, but the veriest anti-Christ himself, who was in league with the Pope of Rome to ruin England and to bring forth her submission by such means even as the Lord employed against the Egyptians in favour of the Israelites. Only in this case, the devil was to be the instrument whereby the ten plagues were to be hurled on this defenceless isle.
 
[394] There was to be a plague of locusts and one of rats, the waters of the Thames would turn to corroding acid and the miscreant Earl of Stowmaries had promised to give the devil the blood of every noble virgin in England as payment for his satanic help.
 
Had we not the testimony of sane-minded men and women who lived at the time, and who witnessed every phase of that amazing frenzy which swept over England during these awful years, we could not believe that the people of this country, usually so gifted with sound minds and above all with a sense of justice and of tolerance, could thus have rushed headlong into an abyss of maniacal fanaticism which hath for ever remained a blot upon the history of the seventeenth century.
 
There is a curious letter extant written by Mistress Julia Peyton in her usual almost illegible scrawl and embellished by her more............