After sentence was pronounced, the city applied in an humble manner to the king; and he agreed to restore their charter, but in return they were obliged to submit to the following regulations that no mayor, sheriff, recorder, common serjeant, town clerk, or coroner, should be admitted to the exercise of his office without his majesty's approbation: that if the king disapprove twice of the mayor or sheriffs elected, he may by commission appoint these magistrates: that the mayor and court of aldermen may, with his majesty's leave, displace any magistrate: and that no alderman, in case of a vacancy, shall be elected without consent of the court of aldermen, who, if they disapprove twice of the choice, may fill the vacancy.
All the corporations in England, having the example of London before their eyes, saw how vain it would prove to contend with the court, and were, most of them, successively induced to surrender their charters into the king's hands.

Considerable sums were exacted for restoring the charters; and all offices of power and profit were left at the disposal of the crown.

It seems strange that the independent royalists, who never meant to make the crown absolute, should yet be so elated with the victory obtained over their adversaries, as to approve of a precedent which left no national privileges in security, but enabled the king, under like pretences, and by means of like instruments, to recall anew all those charters which at present he was pleased to grant.

And every friend to liberty must allow, that the nation, whose constitution was thus broken in the shock of faction, had a right, by every prudent expedient, to recover that security of which it was so unhappily bereaved.
While so great a faction adhered to the crown, it is apparent that resistance, however justifiable, could never be prudent; and all wise men saw no expedient but peaceably to submit to the present grievances.
There was, however, a party of malecontents, so turbulent in their disposition, that, even before this last iniquity, which laid the whole constitution at the mercy of the king, they had meditated plans of resistance; at a time when it could be as little justifiable as prudent.
In the spring of 1681,[*] a little before the Oxford parliament, the king was seized with a fit of sickness at Windsor, which gave great alarm to the public.
* Lord Grey's Secret History of the Rye-house Plot.

This is the most full and authentic account of all these transactions; but is in the main confirmed by Bishop Sprat, and even Burnet, as well as by the trials and dying confessions of the conspirators; so that nothing can be more unaccountable than that any one should pretend that this conspiracy was an imposture, like the Popish plot.
Monmouth's declaration, published in the next reign, confesses a consult for extraordinary remedies.
The duke of Monmouth, Lord Russel, Lord Grey, instigated by the restless Shaftesbury, had agreed, in case the king's sickness should prove mortal, to rise in arms, and to oppose the succession of the duke.
Charles recovered; but these dangerous projects were not laid aside.