crying, "Make way for the Duke of Ormond," and shortly after the Duke's coach passed by. Fifteen minutes later the five men paid their reckoning and rode off, still smoking, toward the Hay Market or Pall Mall, leaving behind some wine, which the boy duly drank. Beside this, a certain Michael Beresford, clerk or parson of Hopton, Suffolk, testified that on the same evening, somewhat earlier it would appear than the incident at the Bull, he had met in the "Piattza," Covent Garden, a man formerly known to him as a footman in the service of the regicide, Sir Michael Livesey. This man, Allen by name, appeared much disturbed, and after some conversation in which he hinted at "great designs" on foot, was called away by a page, who told him the horses were ready. The principal piece of evidence, however, was a sword, belt and pistol, marked "T. H." found at the scene of the struggle and identified as the property of one Hunt, who had been arrested in the preceding August under suspicion of highway robbery, but released for lack of evidence against him. Three horses were also found, one of which corresponded to the description of the animal ridden by the leader of the five men at the Bull. In addition to this there was the usual mass of more or less irrelevant informations, rumours, arrests, witnesses and worthless testimony which such a case always produces. After much deliberation the committee finally drew up a bill against three men, Thomas Hunt, Richard Halliwell, and one Thomas Allen, also called Allett, Aleck and Ayloffe. These were summoned to render themselves "by a short day" or stand convicted of the assault. The bill was duly passed by both houses and fully vindicated the dignity of the Lords. But it had no further result. The men did not render themselves by any day, short or long, the government agents failed to find them and there the matter rested.

The result and indeed the whole procedure was thoroughly unsatisfactory to many in authority. At the outset of the investigation Justice Morton of London, the far-famed terror of highwaymen, was asked by Ormond to look into the matter and was furnished with the names of certain suspects. He reported on Hunt and his career, and went on to say that Moore and Blood, concerning whom his Grace had enquired, were in or about London. A month later, Lord Arlington, the Secretary of State, who had charge of the secret service, reported to the Lords' committee that of the men suspected, "Jones, who wrote Mene Tekel,[2] Blood, called Allen, Allec, etc., young Blood, his son, called Hunt, under which name he was indicted last year, Halliwell, Moore and Simons, were desperate characters sheltering themselves under the name of Fifth Monarchy men." "Would not this exposing of their names by act of Parliament," he asked, "make them hide themselves in the country, whereas the Nonconformists with whom they met, and who abhorred their crime would otherwise be glad to bring them to justice?" Apparently not, in the opinion of the Lords, and the result was what we have seen. Neither Arlington's advice nor the men were taken. And though in the minds of Ormond, Morton and Arlington, apparently little doubt existed as to the authors of the outrage, no way was found to put their opinions into effect. It needed another and even more daring exploit to demonstrate the truth of their conjecture and bring the criminal into custody. And it was not long until just such a circumstance confirmed their surmise that the man guilty of the assault was the most famous outlaw of his day, long known and much wanted, many times proclaimed, and on whose head a price had often been set. He was, in short, Thomas Blood, courtesy-colonel of conspiracy, plotter, desperado, and now, at last, highwayman, a man not much known to the world at large, but a source of long standing anxiety to the government.

Who was he and what was the motive of this apparently foolhardy and purposeless piece of bravado? The answer to that question lies deep in the history of the time, for Blood was no common rascal. Unlike the ordinary criminal he was not merely an individual lawbreaker. He was at once a leader and a type of an element in the state, and the part that he and his fellows played in affairs was not merely important in itself and in its generation, but even at this distance it has an interest little dimmed by two centuries of neglect. The story of his life, in so far as it can be pieced out from the materials at our command, is as follows:

In the reign of James I, that is to say, in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, there lived at an obscure place called Sarney, County Meath, Ireland, a man named Blood. He was by trade a blacksmith and ironworker and seems to have been possessed of some little property, including an iron works. He was not a native Irishman but one of those north English or Scotch Presbyterians, colonized in that unhappy island according to the policy which had been pursued by the English government. Of him we know little more save this. About 1618 there was born to him a son, christened Thomas, who grew to young manhood unmarked by any noteworthy achievements or qualities of which any record remains. But if the circumstances of his own life were of no great importance, the times in which he lived were stirring enough, and remote as he was from the center of English political life, he could hardly have failed to know something of the great issues then agitating public affairs, and be moved by events far outside his own little circle. When he was ten years old, the long struggle between the English king and Parliament blazed up in the Petition of Right, by which the Commons strove to check the power of the Crown. Thereafter for eleven years no Parliament sat in England. There, supported by royal prerogative, the Archbishop Laud sought to force conformity to the Anglican ritual on multitudes of unwilling men and women, while the Attorney-General, Noy, and the Treasurer, Weston, revived long-lapsed statutes and privileges and stretched the technicalities of the law to extort unparliamentary revenue. Then it was that the Great Emigration poured thousands of settlers into the New World and established finally and beyond question the success of the struggling Puritan colonies oversea. Such matters touched the boy in the Irish village little. But when the greatest of the Royalists, Thomas Wentworth, Earl Strafford to be, was transferred from the presidency of the English Council of the North to rule Ireland, Blood, like all others in that troubled province, was brought face to face with the issues of the time. He, like others, saw in that administration the theory and practice of the enlightened despotism which English Parliamentarians said it was the aim of this man and his master to force upon England when English liberties should have been crushed with the Irish army then forming.

Whether young Blood enlisted in that army we do not know, but it is not improbable. In any event, when the Civil War finally broke out, the Blood family seem to have been in the thick of it. Years afterward Prince Rupert said that he remembered the young man as a bold and dashing soldier in his command. And, later still, Blood himself wrote King Charles II, in behalf of his uncle Neptune, for thirty years dean of Kilfernora, noting among his virtues that he had been with Charles I at Oxford. Thus it would appear that the Bloods first sided with the royal cause. Beside this we know that, in the year before the execution of the King, Blood married a Miss Holcroft of Holcroft in Lancashire. And we know further that then or thereafter, like many another stout soldier, like the stoutest of them all, General Monk[3] himself, the young Royalist changed sides, for