COLONEL BLOOD'S ATTACK UPON THE GREAT DUKE OF ORMOND, IN ST. JAMES'S STREET.

THE adventures of the notorious Colonel Thomas Blood form one of the most curious and entertaining chapters in the strange history of the period in which he lived. This extraordinary man appears to have been of respectable family, and was at one time in the commission of the peace. In 1663, the Act of Settlement in Ireland and the consequent proceedings, having seriously affected his fortunes, he from that time nourished an inveterate animosity to the Duke of Ormond, then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, whom he considered as the originator of the measures from which he suffered. To To revenge himself upon the Duke, he entered into a conspiracy with a number of other malcontents for exciting a general insurrection, and, as a preliminary step, for the surprisal of the Castle of Dublin. The plot was discovered, and some of the conspirators apprehended about twelve hours before the appointed time for its execution. Blood, however,

escaped, and lived to make a more desperate attempt upon his old enemy, the great Duke, in the public streets of London. His object in this daring undertaking has been variously interpreted. By some it is conceived to have been the extortion of advantages by the detention of the Duke; by others he is supposed to have been actuated by a deep feeling of revenge, which he determined to gratify by hanging the Duke at Tyburn! Whatever his purpose, it is plain, from Carte's account of this incredible outrage, that he was within an ace of accomplishing it :

"The Prince of Orange came this year (1670) into

England, and being invited, on December 6, to an entertainment in the city of London, his Grace attended him thither. As he was returning homewards on a dark night, and going up St. James's Street, at the end of which, facing the Palace, stood Clarendon House, where he then lived, he was attacked by Blood and five of his accomplices. The Duke always used to go attended with six footmen..... These six footmen used to walk three on each side of the street, over against the coach; but, by some contrivance or other, they were all stopped, and out of the way when the Duke was taken out of his coach by Blood and his son, and mounted on horseback behind one of the horsemen in his company. The coachman drove on to Clarendon House and told the porter that the Duke had been seized by two men who had carried him down Piccadilly. The porter immediately ran that way, and Mr. James Clarke, chancing to be at that time in the court of the house, followed with all possible haste, having first alarmed the family, and ordered the servants to come after him as fast as they could. Blood, it seems, either to gratify the humour of his patron, who had set him upon this work, or to glut his own revenge by putting his Grace to the same ignominious death which his accomplices in the treasonable design upon Dublin Castle had suffered, had taken a strong fancy into his head to hang the Duke at Tyburn.

"Nothing could have saved his Grace's life but that extravagant imagination and passion of the villain, who, leaving the Duke, mounted and buckled, to one of his comrades, rode on before, and (as is said) actually tied a rope to the gallows, and then rode back to see what was become of his accomplices, whom he met

riding off in a great hurry. The horseman to whom the Duke was tied was a person of great strength; but, being embarrassed by his Grace's struggling, could not advance as fast as he desired. He was, however, got a good way beyond Berkeley (now Devonshire) House, towards Knightsbridge, when the Duke, having got his foot under the man's, unhorsed him, and they both fell down together in the mud, where they were struggling when the porter and Mr. Clarke came up. ... The King, when he heard of this intended assassination of the Duke of Ormond, expressed a great resentment on that occasion, and issued out a proclamation for the discovery and apprehension of the miscreants concerned in the attempt."

THE HEROIC LADY FANSHAWE.

IN Portugal Row, the south side of Lincoln's Inn Fields, sometime lived, in the reign of Charles II., Sir Richard Fanshawe, an accomplished person, a scholar, and "in whose quaint translation of the Camoens," says Leigh Hunt, "there is occasionally more genuine poetry than in the less unequal version of Mickle." He was recalled from an embassy in Spain for having signed a treaty without authority ; but his wife suspected him to have been sacrificed to make way for Lord Sandwich, as his successor. Lady Fanshawe was a very frank and cordial woman, and wrote an interesting memoir of her husband, who died on the intended day of his return to England, of a violent fever, not improbably caused by this awkward close of his mission. Lady Fanshawe was also a courageous

woman.

During a former voyage with her husband to Spain, the vessel was attacked by a Turkish galley, well manned; and, she writes, "we believed we should be all carried away slaves, for this man had so laden his ship with goods from Spain, that his guns were useless, though the ship carried sixty guns; he called for brandy, and after he had well drunken, and all his men, which were near two hundred, he called for arms, and cleared the deck as well as he could, resolving to fight rather than lose his ship, which was worth thirty thousand pounds; this was sad for us passengers, but my husband bid us be sure to keep in the cabin, and not appear-the women-which would make the Turks think we were a man-of-war, but if they saw women they would take us for merchants and board us. He went upon the deck, and took a gun and bandoliers, and sword, and, with the rest of the ship's company, stood upon deck, expecting the arrival of the Turkish man-of-war. This beast, the captain, had locked me up in the cabin; I knocked and called long to no purpose, until at length the cabinboy came and opened the door; I, all in tears, desired him to be so good as to give me his blue thrum cap he wore, and his tarred coat, which he did, and I gave him half-a-crown, and putting them on, and flinging away my night-clothes, I crept up softly, and stood upon the deck by my husband's side, as free from sickness and fear, as, I confess, from discretion; but it was the effect of that passion which I could never master." However, after some parley, the Turk's man-of-war tacked about, and the other continued its course. But, when Sir Richard Fanshawe saw it convenient to retreat, looking upon his wife, he blessed himself, and

snatched her up in his arms, saying, "Good God, that love can make this change!" and though he seemingly chid her, he would laugh at it as often as he remembered that voyage.

On Lady Fanshawe's return to England, she took a house in Holborn Row (the north side of Lincoln's Inn Fields), where she must have looked upon the houses opposite with many a pang of grief. She returned in a sea of troubles, which she bore with submission to the Divine will. "I had not," she writes, "God is my witness, above twenty-five doubloons by me at my husband's death, to bring home a family of threescore servants, but was forced to sell one thousand pounds worth of our own plate, and to spend the Queen's present of two thousand doubloons in my journey to England, not owing nor leaving one shilling debt in Spain, I thank God; nor did my husband leave any debt at home, which every ambassador cannot say. Neither did these circumstances following prevail to mend my condition; much less found I that compassion I expected upon the view of myself, that had lost at once my husband, and fortune in him; with my son, but twelve months old, in my arms; four daughters, the eldest but thirteen years of age; with the body of my dear husband daily in my sight for near six months together, and a distressed family, all to be by me in honour and honesty provided for; and, to add to my afflictions, neither persons sent to conduct me, nor pass, nor ship, nor money to carry me one thousand miles, but some few letters of compliment from the chief ministers, bidding 'God help me!' as they do to beggars, and they might have added, they had nothing for me,' with great truth. But God did hear, and see, and help