This popular fear of agitators who might disturb the rule of the Merry Monarch chimed in very well with the feelings of the old cavaliers, who felt that heavy amends were due to them for the sorrows and hardships of the last twenty years, and no doom could be too awful for the murderers who had laid sacrilegious hands upon the sacred person of the king.  With relentless activity they hunted down the audacious rebels who had dared to send Charles the First to the scaffold, and few were so fortunate as to escape the fate decreed for a regicide.