SOME men are rather more indebted for their fame to the iniquities of their enemies, than to their own virtues and eminent abilities; and, after all that has been said and written about him, and with due consideration paid to his domestic worthiness, we cannot but be of opinion that such is the case with the much-famed subject of the present memoir.

Mr., or by courtesy-Lord William Russell, was born in September, 1639, three years before the commencement of the war between Charles I. and his Parliament. His father was William, Fifth Earl of Bedford, who, however, did not succeed to the title and family estates until 1641; his mother was Lady Anne Carr, or Ker, daughter of the infamous Countess of Somerset, formerly Countess of Essex, who had instigated the foul murder of Sir Thomas Overbury in the Tower. But crime is not hereditary; and Lady Anne, like other persons descended from a bad stock, was a

gentle, virtuous, and very religious woman. According to a touching tradition, she was brought up in entire ignorance of the guilt of her parent, and her mother's sad history was mercifully and so carefully concealed from her, that she knew nothing whatever of it until she was well advanced in years, and the mother of a family. She had issue three daughters and seven sons, of whom Lord William was the third. At the first breaking out of the civil war, her husband, the Earl of Bedford, took the field against the king: he was appointed General of the Parliament's horse, and in the battle of Edge-Hill, fought on the 23rd of October, 1642, he commanded the body of reserve" with great conduct and prowess say eulogistic biographers, as a matter of course, and without bearing in mind that the Parliament's reserve was not engaged on that day, the victory of Edge-Hill having been gained by the right wing, under Sir William Balfour, and the centre, or main body of the Parliamentarians, under the Earl of Essex (the first ill-used husband of the mother of the Earl of Bedford's wife, the good Lady Anne), who this day took vengeance on the court of Charles I. for many intolerable wrongs he

had received from the court and minions of James I. But our Lord William's father, the Earl of Bedford, soon changed sides: he joined the king at Oxford in 1643, attended him to his very unfortunate siege of Gloucester, was afterwards present at the battle of Newbury, and then went again to Oxford. Neither as Parliamentarian, nor as Royalist, could the Earl of Bedford occupy a foremost place. He soon withdrew altogether from the actual contest, and lived retired and unnoticed. Like the great body, not only of the displaced Peers, but of the whole nation, the Earl heartily concurred in the restoration of Charles II., but this could give him no particular claim on royal gratitude; and Charles's gratitude appears at all times to have been an 66 absolute minimum "of that "infinitely little." Yet, in 1672, twelve years after the Restoration, when the king_was wholly in the hands of the Cabal ministry, Lord Bedford was gratified with the order of the Garter. In the

meanwhile his son William had become a conspicuous member of the Lower House, though it was not until a little later, when the country was convulsed and driven mad by the so-called "Popish Plot," that his name was much bruited out of doors.

Lord William had been educated at Cambridge: he had afterwards resided at Augsburg, and had then spent a considerable time in foreign travel, or in residing in different Protestant States of the Continent, where his hatred and fear of Popery were notably increased. At the first general election after the Restoration in 1660, he had been returned for Tavistock. In 1669 he had married Rachel Wriothesly, second daughter of the Earl of Southampton-commonly called the virtuous Earland widow of Lord Vaughan, eldest son of Lord Carbery, "a woman," says a recent writer, "distinguished for ardent and tender affection, pious, reflecting, firm, and courageous; alike exemplary in prosperity and adversity, when observed by multitudes or hidden in retirement."*

With this excellent mate Lord William passed much of his time in that domestic retirement for which he seems, by nature, to have been best fitted: for his virtues were mostly of the quiet, fire-side sort; he was not a man of action, and, though he had many amiable, he had no brilliant or commanding qualities. All this is made sufficiently apparent by his political conduct throughout, and by his behaviour on his trial, in the Tower, and on the scaffold; and nearly as much as this is admitted by his contemporary admirers and biographers. Indeed, intellectual mediocrity appears to have been the badge of all the Russells, for a good many generations : it is only in our own day that a member of that otherwise favoured family has really occupied a post at the head of a party or in the van of a ministry. Of Lord William, Bishop Burnet says-" He quickly got out of some of the disorders into which the court had drawn him; and ever after that his life was unblemished in all

* Penny Cyclopædia. Art., Russell, Lord William.

respects. He had from his first education an inclination to favour the nonconformists, and wished the laws could have been made easier to them, or they more pliant to the law. He was a slow man and of little discourse; but he had a true judgment when he considered things at his own leisure. His understanding was not defective; but his virtues were so eminent that they would have more than balanced real defects, if any had been found in the other."

The principal men of the party with whom Lord William acted in the House of Commons were, Lord Cavendish, Sir William Coventry, Colonel Birch, Mr. Powle, and Mr. Littleton, who were all eager to close Charles's second Dutch war, (which had been begun from no higher motive than that of gratifying France, whose pensioner our king then was ;) to check the high-flying papistry of James Duke of York, and to put limits to the wasteful extravagance and daring licentiousness of the court. By steady, persevering attacks, and by their constant appeals to that strongest passion of the people, the dread of Popery, they carried the Test Act, which drove the Duke of York from his post of Lord High Admiral, and disqualified all Catholics for State employments, or service in army or navy; they stopped the supplies for the unpopular Dutch war; they forced the king to perjure his soul by vows and declarations that he had no secret treaties with Louis XIV., and that he was anxious, above all things, for the preservation of the Protestant Church; and, finally, towards the close of the year 1673, they drove the Cabal ministry from power, enlisting, shortly afterwards, in their own opposition ranks, the Duke of Buckingham and the Earl of Shaftesbury, who had formed the main strength and had been the real heads of the Cabal. From this moment the versatile, plotting, unscrupulous, and indefatigable Shaftesbury led the opposition-and rugged and most foul, filthy and foul with human blood, were many of the roads and by-paths into which he conducted them. The Danby cabinet, which immediately succeeded the Cabal, was, in many respects, more infamous than its predecessor. After seeing the flag of England shamefully humbled at sea,

these new ministers made a hurried and hollow peace with the Dutch, at the same time engaging to seize the earliest opportunity for playing into the hands of Louis XIV., who was aiming at the conquest of Holland, and taking earnest-money from him, for the use of their spendthrift master. Shaftesbury, Buckingham, and the whole phalanx of opposition (of whom not a few are said to have been animated by timely donations of Dutch money), grew loud in their denunciations of this Danby ministry: and as Shaftesbury conceived that the nation could be roused from its indifference or lethargy only by its religious fears, ominous hints were let drop of Popish conspiracies and designs more desperate than the Gunpowder Plot; days of fasting and prayer were called for in Parliament, and, out of doors, recourse was had to nearly every possible means for creating a panic and an irresistible popular fury. Some of the parts had been distributed, and some of the instruments tuned before; but this in the year 1674-was the real overture to the horrible drama of the Popish Plot' which began to be played in 1678, and which did not finish until 1681. Nothing more certain than that the fear and fanaticism of the popular masses were thoroughly sincere, and based on an entire conviction that the Catholics were plotting the destruction of their religion, laws, liberties, lives: nothing more probable than that even but few members of the opposition, though acting with him, and being frequently closeted with him, were admitted into the Machiavellian arcana of the subtle Shaftesbury, or were induced to believe or even to suspect that he had invented and created the stupendous bugbear merely for political, if not for mere party, purposes. No doubt the great majority of those men who voted away lives in Parliament, or on juries, shared in the popular terror and the general conviction. When the

monster was fully established in his pride of place, erect, on a broad and lofty pedestal, which had its roots in the very hearts of the people, there was disgrace, there was danger in questioning whence he came, and what was his real nature. The king, who was never for a single moment deceived by its grim and bloody aspect, durst not,