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 (, Examen, p. 100), the Oxford parliament was dissolved, and the reaction promptly set in. The protestant joiner, who in his dying speech represented himself as a kind of detective commissioned by Monmouth, was sacrificed, and Shaftesbury was put on trial for his life. Monmouth, like others, visited him on the night of his arrest (, i. 106); but the tories still hoped to separate Absalom and Achitophel, as is shown by the mitigations introduced by Dryden into the second (December) edition of his great satire (published November 1681, and itself tender towards Monmouth). Part of this year was spent by Monmouth at Tunbridge Wells (ib. i. 111, 118); in October he threw up his Scottish offices, rather than submit to a parliamentary test; in November, returning from a visit to Gloucestershire, he became one of Shaftesbury's bail (ib. pp. 143, 147), whereby he incurred the renewed displeasure of the king, who appointed the Dukes of Richmond and Grafton to vacant appointments formerly held by their half-brother (, p. 225;, i. 150). Monmouth continued to maintain his attitude of resistance, thereby causing great uneasiness to his father, who for a time even feared that the murder of Monmouth's intimate friend, Thomas Thynne, would be popularly construed as a design upon the duke's own life (, pp. 225, 228). On the other hand, the university of Cambridge obeyed the royal injunction to deprive Monmouth of the chancellorship (April 1682), and burnt his portrait in the schools. His tenure of office had been chiefly signalised by his letter to the university, in reproof of the secular apparel which the clergy and scholars were beginning to wear (, Life of Ken, i. 48 note). Monmouth himself seems in May to have been willing to submit; but he contrived to insult Halifax as having thwarted him in council, and was consequently severely reprimanded, and excluded from association with the king's servants (, pp. 250–1; cf., i. 189, and Hist. MSS. Comm. 7th Rep. App. p. 352). Yet in August it was once more rumoured that the king intended to take him back into favour (, i. 215).

But Monmouth was not his own master. According to Lord Grey (Secret History, p. 15 seqq.) an insurrection had been mooted between Shaftesbury and Monmouth early in 1681, when the king was again ill at Windsor; in 1682, immediately after the election of tory sheriffs in July, Shaftesbury strongly urged the necessity of a rising, and it was with this view that a number of meetings were held in the autumn (at one of which Monmouth and Russell agreed in rejecting the ‘detestable’ and ‘popish’ proposal to massacre the guards in cold blood; Life of Lord Russell, ii. 117), and that in September Monmouth went on a second progress in the west. On his return the insurrection was to be finally arranged, Sir John Trenchard [q. v.] having been engaged by him to raise at least fifteen hundred men in and about Taunton (, p. 18). Monmouth was met by multitudes at Daventry and Coventry (ib. i. 219), and he passed by way of Trentham to Nantwich and Chester, where enthusiasm reached its height, and he presented the plate won by him at Wallasey races to the mayor's daughter, his god-child, ‘Heneretta’ (Hist. MSS. Comm. 7th Rep. App. p. 533). The progress ended by his arrest by the king's order in the county town of Staffordshire, of which he was lord-lieutenant. He arrived in London in the company of the serjeant-at-arms (23 Sept.), and, though he bore himself high under examination by the secretary of state, he was after some delay (Hist. MSS. Comm. 7th Rep. App. p. 359), bailed out by his political friends ({sc|Luttrell}}, i. 222; see ‘The Duke of Monmouth's Case,’ in Somers Tracts, viii. 403–5).

Shaftesbury bitterly inveighed against Monmouth's irresolution, and urged him on his release to return to Cheshire and begin the rebellion. He declined, but took part in the ‘cabals’ of Russell, Essex, and Sidney, who were hatching the plot for the murder of the king and the Duke of York. According to the most probable version of these obscure transactions, Monmouth knew of the design to take the king's life on his return from Newmarket in October. But he protested against it (cf. Life of Lord Russell, ii. 51), and fell in with Ferguson's device of preventing it by keeping up preparations for a general insurrection, and by diverting money from the murder scheme. Monmouth appeared in the city on the night of the king's return, having at the same time prepared everything for escape should it prove necessary (Ferguson the Plotter, p. 77 seqq.) After the breakdown of the first Rye House scheme Shaftesbury, who was in hiding, continued to press for a rising, while Monmouth continued to maintain a consenting but dilatory attitude. At the end of October or beginning of November were held the two fatal meetings at Shephard's house in Abchurch Lane, at both of which Ferguson and Rumsey were present, as well as Monmouth and his friends [see ]. At the earlier of these meetings the night of Sunday, 19 Nov., was fixed for the rising in London, and Monmouth's house was appointed as one of the meeting-