His patrimonial mansion amid woods at Althorpe might be confiscated.

He might lie many years in a prison.

He might end his days in a foreign land a pensioner on the bounty of France.

Even this was not the worst.
Visions of an innumerable crowd covering Tower Hill and shouting with savage joy at the sight of the apostate, of a scaffold hung with black, of Burnet reading the prayer for the departing, and of Ketch leaning on the axe with which Russell and Monmouth had been mangled in so butcherly a fashion, began to haunt the unhappy statesman.

There was yet one way in which he might escape, a way more terrible to a noble spirit than a prison or a scaffold.