householder.) Besides all this, both men and women went armed
continually--the men with the "Protestants' flails," and ladies with
little pistols hidden in their muffs. Workmen, too, were set to search
and dig everywhere for "Tewkesbury mustard-balls," as they were
called--or fire-balls, with which it was thought that the Catholics
would set London a-fire, as Oates had said they would--or vast treasures
which the Jesuits were thought to have buried in the Savoy and other
places. Folks took alarm at the leastest matters; once my Lord Treasurer
himself rode into London crying that the French army was already landed,
when all that he had seen were some horses in the mist; once it was
thought, from the noise of digging that some fat-head heard, that the
Papists were mining to blow up Westminster. The King, whom I dared not
go to see in all this uproar, and who did not send for me, went to and
fro even in Whitehall, guarded everywhere--in private, as I heard,
pouring scorn upon the plot, yet in public concealing his opinion; and
upon the ninth of November he made a speech in the House of Lords,
confirming all my fears, thanking his subjects for their devotion, and
urging them to deal effectually with the Popish recusants that were such
a danger to the kingdom! In October, too, five Catholic Lords--the Earl
of Powis, Viscount Stafford, my Lord Petre, my Lord Arundell of Wardour,
and my Lord Bellasis were committed to the Tower on a charge of treason.

I saw Dr. Oates more than once during these days, coming out of
Whitehall with the guards that were given to protect him, carrying
himself very high, in his minister's dress; and no wonder, for the man
was the darling of the nation and was called its "Saviour," and had had
a great pension voted to him of twelve hundred pounds a year. He did not
think then, I warrant, of the day when he would be whipped from Newgate
to Tyburn at a cart's tail; and again, laid upon a sled and whipped
again through the City, for that he could not stand by reason of his