"And I mean to be most generous to them all about it. I do not mean even to say, 'I always told you how it would end.' They will see, and that will be enough. The king will forgive every one, I am sure, he is so gracious and gentle—(he spoke to me like a father the other day, and yet with such knightly deference!)—except, perhaps, a very few, who will have to be made examples of, unless they make examples of themselves by running out of the country, which I hope they may. For having once re-asserted his rightful authority, the king will be able to be forgiving without being suspected of weakness. There need not be any more poor mistaken people set in the pillory, which really seems to do no one any good, as far as I can see, and to make every one so exceedingly angry. The Puritans (that is, those among them who have any sense) will see that it really can make no difference whether the clergyman says the prayers in a white dress or a black. Perhaps even the bishops and archbishops might own the same. Because, although it cannot be good management to give a naughty child its way for crying, if it stops crying and is good, it is quite another thing.
"And then everything would go on delightfully. The very troublesome and obstinate people (on both sides, I think) might, perhaps, all go to America, some to the north and some to the south. For the American plantations are very wide, they say, and by the time they met—say in one or two hundred years—their great-great grandchildren might have given up caring so much about the colours of the vestments and the titles of the clergymen who do the services in the church. So that by that time everything would go on delightfully in America as well as in England. And by next Christmas, from what the gentlemen and ladies about here say, I should think this might all have begun. Only just now this little unpleasant contest has to be gone through first. And I am very much afraid as to what Mr. Drayton and Roger may do, or even Olive. They are so terribly conscientious. They will pick up the smallest questions with their consciences instead of with their common sense; which seems to me like watering a daisy with a fire-engine, or weeding a flower-bed with a plough. Mistress Dorothy is the worst of them (dear, kind, old soul, I must now and then look at her sermons, in order to make it quite clear to myself I was not a hypocrite in listening to them all that time). But I do not think any of them are quite safe in this way. And yet I know, in my inmost heart, they are better than any one in the world, except my Mother, and perhaps Harry. (Of His Majesty it is not for me to speak.) And I love them better than any one in the world, which, I am afraid, they will not believe, now I am not allowed to write to them. I love them for their noble perverseness, and their heroic conscientiousness, and their terrible truthfulness, and everything that separates us. And these last months at home have been the happiest of my life. I felt growing quite good. And one thing I have resolved. I will not say one word I should mind their hearing, so that when we meet again I may have nothing to explain or to unsay. For it is only misunderstanding that will ever make any of them take the wrong side; nothing but misunderstanding. And facts will set that all right when they see how things really are. As they will, I trust, before Christmas.
"It is not so easy to be good here as at Netherby. People say so many pretty things to me. My Mother says I must not heed them; they are only Court ways of speaking, which mean nothing; and that rightly used, I might even make them means of mortification, saying every time I hear such pretty phrases, as good Dr. Taylor recommended, 'My beauty is in colour inferior to many flowers; and even a dog hath parts as well proportioned to the designs of his nature as I have; and three fits of an ague can change it into yellowness and leanness, and to hollowness and wrinkles of deformity.' But this I find not so easy. If I were a rose, I should be pleased at being a rose, and at being thought sweet and fair. And even a well-favoured dog, meseems, has some harmless delight in his good looks. And as to the ague, I see no likelihood of it. And as to becoming yellow and lean, the more I think of it, the gladder I am to think I am not. And yet there is some little flutter in my pleasure at these fair speeches which hardly seems to me quite altogether good. And I do not think my Mother quite knows what nonsense these young Cavaliers talk. Perhaps no one did ever talk nonsense to her. Or, if they did, I am sure she never liked it. And I am afraid I do sometimes a little. Else, why should it all come back into my mind at wrong times?—in the Minster or at prayers. Heigh, ho! I wish I was at Netherby. No one ever called me fair enchantress there, or my cheeks Aurora's rose-garden, or my teeth strings of pearls, or my hands lilies, or my hair imprisoned sunbeams, or my voice the music of the spheres. Sir Launcelot talked enough of that kind of poetry to me, between Netherby and Windsor, to make a book of ballads. (For my Mother was in the sedan-chair, whilst I rode most of the way with Sir Launcelot.) And yet, I think, there is more honour in Roger Drayton's telling me in his straight-forward way he thought me wrong, as he so often did, than in all Sir Launcelot's most honeyed compliments.
"Not that I think Olive just to poor Sir Launcelot. If she could have seen his debonair and courteous ways to every clown and poor wench we met, and how he flung his crowns and angels to any beggar, she must have felt there is much kindliness in him, with all his wild ways.
"And when he saw I liked not so many fair speeches, he gave them up in a measure. I must say that for him; and he has been as deferential to me ever since at the Court, as if I were one of the princesses. Only I wish he would not always see when I drop my glove or my posy: at least, I think I do. Yet it is rather pleasant, too, at times to feel there is some one who cares about one among so many strange people, and some one who is always ready to talk about poor old Netherby, and who honours the Draytons, moreover, so generously. I wish Olive knew this.
"And I wish I were like my Mother, and had 'a chapel built in my heart.' Or else that I could live at Netherby.
"Sir Launcelot admires the 'beauty of holiness' in my Mother. He says, in all times, happily, there have been these sweet exalted Saints, especially among women, bright particular stars, celestial beauties, and princesses, that all men must revere. Quite another kind of thing, he says, from the Puritan notion of calling all men to be 'saints,' or else consigning them to reprobation as among the wicked.
"Note.—I am at a loss what to call this writing of mine. It is scarcely a Diary or Journal, for I certainly shall not do anything as regular as write in it every day. It shall not be 'Annals;' for I hope to have done with it before Christmas, when I shall have met Olive and all of them again at home. 'Chronicles' are more solemn still. 'Thoughts?' where shall I find them? 'Facts?' how is one to know them, when people give such different accounts of things? 'Meditations?' worse again. 'Religious Journals,' 'Confessions,' etc., always puzzled me. I could never make out for whom they were written. Especially the prayers I have seen written out at length in them. They cannot be meant for other people to read. That would be turning the 'closet' into 'the corners of the street.' They cannot be meant for the people themselves to read. For what good could that do? It would not be praying to see how I prayed some years since. They cannot surely be meant for God to read. He is always near, and can hear, or read our hearts, which is quite another thing from reading our Diaries.
"May 30, York.—The birds begin to sing in the trees around the Minster. Our lodging is opposite. And the courtiers begin to gather once more around the king. Many lords have come these last days from London, with some faithful members of the Commons' House, and old Lord Littleton has come, with somewhat limping loyalty, they say, after the Great Seal, now in the right hand. So that this grave old town begins to look gay. Cavaliers caracolling about the streets, doffing their hats to fair faces in the windows. Troops mustering but slowly; somewhat slowly. Nor can I make out if these townspeople altogether like us and our ways. There are so many Puritans among these traders. And Sir Launcelot says they have great sport in the Puritan household where he is quartered, in making the Puritan lads learn the 'Distracted Puritan,' and other roystering Cavalier songs, and drink confusion to the Covenant; and in making the host and hostess bring out their best conserves, linen and plate, for the use of the men. Sir Launcelot told them, he said, that they should only look on it as the payment of an old debt the children of Israel had owed to the Egyptians these three thousand years. I do not think such jokes good manners in any other person's house, and I told him so. But he said their ridiculous gravity makes the temptation too strong to be resisted. If they would jest good-humouredly in return, he said, they would soon understand each other. But would they? I am not quite sure how Sir Launcelot enjoys not having the best of a joke. And I could not bear his calling the Puritans all canting, or ridiculous. He knows better. And I told him so. I felt quite indignant, and the tears were in my eyes (for I thought of them all at Netherby). He seemed penitent. Indeed, I hope it did him good.
"June.—The Parliament are growing more insolent every day; they dared to say in one of their ridiculous Remonstrances that 'the king is for the kingdom, not the kingdom for the king, that even the crown jewels are not His Majesty's own, but given him in trust for the regal power.' However, they will soon learn their mistake about that, for the crown-jewels are safe in Holland, and have there purchased for the Crown good store of arms and ammunition. These were all embarked in a Dutch ship called the Providence. A great Providence, my Mother says, attended her. For although she was wrecked on the coast of Yorkshire, nevertheless, all her stores have this day been safely brought into York.
"Now we shall see what gentlemen can do against tapsters, and tailors' and haberdashers' 'prentices, such as make up the wretched army they have been mustering in London! The citizens' wives actually brought their thimbles and bodkins, it is said, to pay the men; to such mean and ludicrous straits are they reduced. The Cavaliers call it 'the Thimble and Bodkin Army.'
"July 20.—Sir John Hotham is said to be wavering back to loyalty. A day or two since, a gallant little army of four thousand men rode forth hence through the Mickle Bar, to demand the surrender of that presumptuous city, Hull, and if refused, to storm it. Better they had listened to His Majesty's gentle summons with his three hundred. How gallant and brave they looked. Plumed helmets gleaming swords flashing, pennons flying, horses looking as proud of the cause as the riders. Not a cavalier among them who would not face battle as gayly as the hunting-field.
"July 22.—Those treacherous townspeople! Not a troop of them is to be relied on. Our gallant Cavaliers came back in disorder. And all because of the faithless train-bands, and those turbulent citizens of Hull. Lord Lindsay, with three thousand men, was at Beverley, and on the lighting of a fire on Beverley Minster, the gates of Hull were to be opened by some loyal men inside. But five hundred rebels within the town, hearing too soon of the intention of these loyal men, made a sortie under the command of Sir John Hotham. The true Cavaliers would have stood firm, every one says, but the Yorkshire train-bands would not draw sword against their neighbours, but ran away to Beverley, and so the whole ended in disgrace and defeat. If we could only have an army entirely composed of gentlemen, and their sons, and retainers, the Parliament could not stand a day. But the worst news that has reached us lately, is the treachery of the Earl of Warwick and the navy. They have all gone over to the Parliament, in spite of the king's offering them better pay than they ever received before. Five ships stood firm at first, but the rest overpowered them. I hope no one ever told them about their being called 'water-rats,' but there are always some malicious people who delight to make mischief by telling tales. I should think royal persons ought to be very careful about their jests.
"August.—We are on the point of leaving York to spend a few days at Nottingham, where the king's standard is to be set up.
"I am not sorry to leave this old town. I miss the pleasant walks at home. For here one dare scarce venture much out of doors. If the Cavaliers are as dangerous to their enemies as they are sometimes to their friends, the Parliament has good cause to tremble. The streets echo dismally at night with the shouts of drunken revelry. But, I suppose, all armies are alike. Only it is rather unfortunate for us that gravity and the show of piety being the badge of the Puritans, levity and a reckless dashing carriage are taken up as their badge by many of the young Cavaliers.
"I would they took example by the king. His Majesty has been riding around the country lately himself, calling his lieges to follow him. And his majestic courtesy and grace, with his loving and winning speeches, such as he made at Newark and Lincoln, showing his good intentions and desires for their liberty and welfare, must, I am sure, be worth him a mint of such money as the London citizens can coin out of their thimbles and bodkins.
"The North country is well disposed, they say; and Lancashire, where the queen hath much hold on the Catholic gentlemen of ancient lineage there; and the West country, where brave Sir Bevil Granvill lives, is full of loyalty. Mr. Hampden has done mischief in Buckinghamshire, and Mr. Cromwell (a brewer, Sir Launcelot says, rather than a country-gentleman, though not of low parentage) calls himself captain, and is disaffecting the eastern counties, already disloyal enough, with their French Huguenot weavers, and their 'Anabaptists, Atheists, and Brownists,' as His Majesty calls them.
"The towns are the worst, however. I suppose there is something in buying and selling, and tinkering and tailoring, which makes people think more of mean money considerations, than of loyalty and honour. Then there are so many Puritans in the town. Perhaps the narrow dark high streets make them naturally inclined to be gloomy and strait-laced. I think, however, the less our Cavalier soldiers are quartered in the towns, the better, till they mend their manners. It may make the citizens less pleased than ever with the Book of Sports.
"Nottingham, August 23.—This evening the king himself set up his standard on the top of the field behind the castle. There was much sounding of drums and trumpets. Several hundreds gathered around the royal party, and we watched a little way off. But, I know not how, the act did not seem as solemn as the occasion. The night was stormy; and the trumpets and drums, and then the voice of the herald reading the royal proclamation, sounded small and thin against the rush and howling of the winds. The troops have not yet answered the king's call as they should, and those present were mostly the train-bands. Then His Majesty, on the spot, made some alterations in the proclamation, which perplexed the herald, so that he blundered and stumbled in reading it. Altogether I wish I had not been there.
"The king's standard ought to be something more than a pole no higher than a May-pole with a few streamers, and a common flag at the top. And the trumpets which are to rouse a nation, ought to have a certain magnificence in them, altogether different from the trumpets they blow at the carols at Netherby at Christmas. I am sure I cannot tell how. But I always pictured it so. The words are grander than the things.
"Perhaps all our pomps and solemnities look poor and mean under the open sky. We had better keep them beneath roofs of our own making. The pomps we are used to under the open sky are the purple and crimson and gold of sunset and sunrise, great banners of storm-clouds flung across the sky. And the solemnities are the thunders, and the mighty winds, and the rushing of rivers, and the dashing of seas.
"The things are grander, infinitely, than any words wherewith we can speak of them.
"But when I said so to my Mother, she said, 'And yet, my child, one soul, and even one human voice, is grander, or more godlike than all the thunders. It is their significance, Lettice, which gives the grandeur to any solemnities of ours. If we heard those trumpets summon our countrymen by thousands to the battle, or saw that flag borne blood-stained from the field, we should not think the voice of the trumpet wanted terrible magnificence, or call the flag a common thing ever more.'
"Perhaps, after all, it was only a little inward depression that made me feel this disappointment. For only three days before, Coventry had shut her gates in the king's face, and the Earl of Essex is at hand, they say, with a great army, and so few flocking loyally to the king.
"But worst of all, I think, is this Prince Rupert. His mother's name, Elizabeth of Bohemia, has been like a sacred name in the country for years; a saint and a heroine in courage and patience. But this prince is so noisy and reckless, and takes so much upon himself, that he angers the older gentlemen and experienced soldiers sorely. My Father says he is little better than a petulant boy. Yet he has great weight with the king, his uncle, and takes the command into his own hands; so that the gallant old Earl of Lindsay deems his own command little better than nominal. And, meanwhile, the younger Cavaliers take their colour from him, and use that new low cant word of his, 'plunder,' quite as a jest, as if it meant some new sport or sword-exercise, instead of meaning, as it does, scouring all over the country, burning lonely farm-houses, robbing the inmates, and sometimes hanging the servants at the doors for refusing to betray their masters, sacking villages, and I know not what other wickednesses. In the fortnight he has been here, he has flown through Worcestershire, Nottinghamshire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire, and Cheshire. And not a night but we have seen the sky aglow with the fires of burning villages and homesteads. I should fear to hear how the people along his line of march, coming back to their ruined homes, speak of the king.
"Moreover, it is said, the rebel troops are strictly forbidden to take anything without paying for it, a contrast worth them much.
"August 24.—This morning, before I rose, my Mother's waiting gentlewoman brought dismal news. The royal standard, said she, has been blown down in the night, and lies a wreck along the hill.
"My Mother says it is heathenish to talk of omens and auguries. And my Father says these foreigners are the worst omen, and all would be well enough if they would leave Englishmen to fight out their own quarrels, like neighbours, who exchange blows and are friends again, instead of like wretched hired Lanzknechts or Free Companions.
"But Sir Launcelot laughs, and says it is a good thing to give the whining Puritans something to cry for at last. And Harry sighs, and says he supposes it is necessary to make the rebels see we are in earnest.
"Altogether, we do not seem in very good humour with each other just now. However, a few victories will no doubt set us all right again. There can be no reasonable doubt that the king will bring these rebels to their senses sooner or later; in a few months at latest.
"Only I had not understood at all how very melancholy war is. I thought of it as concerning no one but the soldiers. And men must incur danger one way or another. And there is the glory, and the excitement, and the exercise of noble courage, making such men as nothing but such trials can make.
"But the battles seem but a small part of the misery; the misery without glory to any one.
"On our way hither from York, my Mother was faint and tired, and we stopped at a little farm-house with an orchard. It was evening, and the woman had just finished milking the cows by the door, and she gave my Mother a cup of new milk while she rested on the settle in the clean little kitchen. There were two little children playing about, and the father was at work in the orchard, and one of the children called him, and he brought my Father a cup of cider. And there was a Bible on the table with wood-cuts; and I found the eldest child knew the meaning of them. He said his father had told him. They were very kind and pleasant to us.
"And a few days since Harry told me they had passed a little farm with an orchard, and the man was surly and a Puritan, and refused to tell the way some fugitives had fled; and Prince Rupert had him hanged on his own threshold, and drove off the cows for plunder.
"And from what Harry says I feel sure it is the same.
"And I have scarcely slept since, thinking of that poor man, and the silent voice that will never any more explain the wood-cuts in the old Bible, and the poor hands that will never show their willing hospitality again.
"But it is only one, Harry says, among hundreds; and such things must be, and I must not think of it.
"But every one of the hundreds is just that terrible only one, which leaves the world all lonely to some poor mourner!
"Those gentlemen in Parliament have dreadful things to answer for.
"Why did not Mr. Hampden pay a thousand times his miserable ship-money rather than lead the country on to such horrors?
"For the king cannot have his commands disobeyed. If he did, how could he be a king?
"I do wish he could be more a king with his own troops; I am sure he hates this ravaging and marauding. But so many of the gentlemen serve, and, indeed, keep their regiments at their own cost, which makes them difficult to control.
"October.—Prince Rupert has been driven from Worcester. If it were only a lesson in reverence and modesty for the prince, it would not so much matter, some think, that he left twenty good and true men dead there. The Earl of Essex occupies the city. He has been there a fortnight doing nothing. Some remnants of loyalty, we think, hinder him from coming to open collision. But what the use of collecting an army can be unless it is to fight, it is hard to see. The truth is, perhaps, that he begins to feel the peril of setting his haberdashers and grocers' 'prentices, commanded by a forsworn peer, against gentlemen's sons fighting under their king! Meantime, our army is gathering at last, and only too eager, they say, to give the rebels a lesson. Once for all, God grant it be a lesson once for all. Although the battles do not seem to me half so dreadful as these 'plunderings.' But perhaps that is because I never came near a battle; nor, indeed, can the oldest man in England remember any one that ever did on English soil."
OLIVE DRAYTON'S RECOLLECTIONS.
All through the summer the armies were gathering. In our seven eastern counties—Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Lincoln, Huntingdonshire, and Hertfordshire—called the associated counties, because bound by Mr. Hampden and Mr. Cromwell into an association for mutual defence, the King's Commission of Array and the Parliament's Ordinance of Militia clashed less than elsewhere. In August Mr. Cromwell seized a magazine of arms and ammunition at Cambridge. The stronghold of the Puritans was in these eastern regions; and except where a few Royalist gentlemen, like the Davenants, led off their retainers, the Parliament had, amongst us, mostly its own way. All the more reason, my Father said, for our men to risk their persons, since our homes were safer than elsewhere.
My Father, from his old military experience, had much to do with training and drilling the men. Strange sounds of clanging arms and sharp words of command echoed from the old court of the Manor. Old arms, the very stories belonging to which were well-nigh forgotten, were taken down; arms which had hung on the walls of manor-house and farm-house since the Wars of the Roses. The newest weapon we had at Netherby which had seen service in England was a short jewel-hilted sword the Drayton of the day had worn at the Battle of Bosworth Field, fighting, by a rare piece of good luck for us, under Henry VII., on the winning side. Since then the Reformation had revolutionized the Church, and gunpowder had revolutionized the art of war; so that instead of the sturdy bow-men, each provided with his weapon and ready trained to the use of it, whom his ancestors brought to the field, my Father could only muster a few labourers and servants, without weapons and without training, with no further preparation for war than hands used to labour, wits ready to learn, and hearts ready to dare.
My Father did not mean to lead his own men. Having had experience of engineering in the German wars, he was employed here and there as his directions were needed. Roger and those who went from Netherby served from the first with Mr. Cromwell's Ironsides; my Father, as his contribution, providing the armour, which, like that of Haselrigge's Lobsters, was complete and costly. Other bands passed and repassed often, and shared the hospitalities of the Manor, to join Lord Brook's purple-coats, Lord Say and Lord Mandeville's bluecoats. Hollis' red-coats were London men, and Mr. Hampden's green-coats all from his own county, Buckinghamshire; while the badge of all was the orange scarf round the arm—the family colours of Lord Essex, the general. Each regiment had its own motto—Hampden's, "Vestigia nulla retrorsum;" Essex's (pointing many a cavalier jest, if seen in plunder or retreat), "Cave adsum." On the reverse of each banner was the common motto of all, "God with us"—the watch-word of so many a battle.
Money was not stinted; the city of London heading the contributions in January with £50,000, and the Merchants' Companies with nigh as large a sum (then intended to avenge the Irish massacre); whilst Mr. Hampden gave £1000, and his cousin, Mr. Cromwell, £500.
Women brought their rings and jewels; cherished old family plate was not held back. We in our sober Puritan household had few jewels to bring, but such as we had were disinterred from their caskets, and the few silver drinking-cups which distinguished our table from any farmers round were packed up by Aunt Dorothy's own hands, and despatched to the London Guildhall, not without sighs, but without hesitation, with all the money that could be spared.
Cousin Placidia also offered what she called her "mite," when she heard that the poor citizens' wives in London had even offered their thimbles and bodkins.
"I am but a poor parson's wife," said she, "but I am thankful they will receive even such poor offerings as I can bring."
And she brought those embroidered Cordova gloves, the search for which had so incensed Aunt Dorothy.
"It is remarkable," she observed, "that I always said one never knew what use anything might be in a poor parson's household; and now I have found the use."
"What use, my dear," said Aunt Dorothy; "do you think the Parliament soldiers will fight in embroidered gloves?"
"Spanish leather is dear," replied Placidia, "and things will always sell. It is only a poor mite I know, but so is a thimble. The Parliament soldiers cannot, of course, fight in thimbles any more than in gloves, and the widow's mite was accepted."
"A mite and the 'widow's mite,' are some way apart, my dear," said Aunt Dorothy; "your 'widow's mite,' I suppose, might be the parsonage and the glebe, and those cows in your uncle's park and meadow. Take care what you offer to the Lord. He sometimes takes us at our word. And there are plunderers abroad who take their own estimate of people's mites, widows' and others."
Said Placidia, never taken aback—
"Aunt Dorothy, Mr. Nicholls and I regard the glebe as a sacred trust, of which we feel we must on no account relinquish the smallest fraction. And as to the cows Uncle Drayton gave me, I wonder you can suspect me of such ingratitude as to give them up to any one."
"I did not, my dear," said Aunt Dorothy, quietly. "What shall I label your Cordova gloves? A parson's mite? You know I cannot exactly say 'widow's.'"
"An orphan's perhaps, Aunt Dorothy."
"Very well, my dear," said Aunt Dorothy; "I should think that would affect the Parliament very much. It may even get into history."
With which this little passage at arms closed.
Happily for the popular cause, the common interpretation of acceptable 'mites' differed from Placidia's, so that in a short time a considerable army was levied.
The navy ever remained true to the Parliament; irritated, some foolish persons said, by a report that the king had called them "water-rats." As well say the whole Parliament stood firm, because the king once compared them to cats. The navy had its own watchwords, better pointed than by the sting of a sorry jest. English seamen were not likely to trust too implicitly to the promises of the Sovereign who had tried to sell them to aid in the destruction of the brave little band of beleaguered Protestants at Rochelle.
All through the summer the armies were being levied, and the breach was silently widening.
In July an incident showed, my Father said, as much as anything could, how entirely the king's mind was unchanged, and how "thorough" would have been the tyranny established in his hands, though Laud, and Strafford, and the Queen, and every violent councillor, had been removed. My old friend, Dr. Bastwick, the physician, was seized by the royal forces at Worcester while engaged in levying men for the Parliament, under Earl Stamford, who retreated. It was with the greatest difficulty that one of the judges restrained the king from having him hanged on the spot although there could be no reason why he should have been sentenced with this exceptional severity except the fact that he had already been scourged, pilloried, and maimed by the cruelty of the Star-Chamber.
The deep distrust which such indications of the king's true mind produced, cost him more than many lost battles.
They tended to inspire such resistances as that made a few weeks afterwards by the brave commoners of Coventry, when, without garrison, without engineers, with no defence but their feeble ancient walls, they shut their gates in the Sovereign's face, defied the royal forces, and when the breach was made by artillery in the old tottering walls, barricaded the streets with barrows and carts, made a sally, carried the nearest lines, seized the guns, and turned them against the besiegers, compelling them at last to retire baffled.
But it was Prince Rupert, "the Prince Robber," who, perhaps, more than any, turned the hearts of the people against the Sovereign who could use such an instrument. Trained in the cruel school of the Palatinate wars, he had read its terrible lessons the wrong way; having learned from the sufferings of his father's subjects not pity, but a savage recklessness of suffering. He brought home to hundreds of burning villages and plundered lonely farms, which no Parliamentary remonstrances or declarations would have reached, the conviction that the king looked on his people, not as a flock, but as mere live-stock on an estate, to be kept up if profitable and manageable, and if not to be sacrificed to any system of management which gave less trouble and brought in more profit.
"Whose own the sheep ore not," was written in the ashes of every home ruined by Prince Rupert in the king's service.
With these deeds the people contrasted the well-kept orders of the Parliament to Lord Essex. "You shall carefully restrain all impieties, profaneness, and disorders, violence, insolence, and plundering in your soldiers, as well by strict and severe punishment of such offences as by all others means which you in your wisdom shall think fit."
And we grew to think that whoever the true shepherd and king of the people might be, it was scarcely one who employed the wolf for a sheepdog.
It was but slowly and reluctantly that this conviction grew on the nation. Those who look back on the king's life, hallowed by the shadow of his death, little know how slowly and reluctantly. We would fain have trusted him if he would have let us. The nation tried it again and again, and only too much was sacrificed before they would believe it was in vain. Still there had been no battle. The Earl of Essex, after following the Prince from Worcester, lingered there three weeks, doing nothing. No battle worth the name for nearly a hundred and seventy years, until Sunday the 23d of October, 1642.
Then came the first great shock. All that Sunday afternoon our countrymen, husbands, brothers, fathers, sons of the women left in the quiet villages at home, were fighting in the desperate struggle for life and death, until at night four thousand Englishmen lay dead on the slopes of Edgehill, or dying in the villages around—the day before as tranquil and peaceful as ours.
I remember there was a peculiar quiet about that Sunday at Netherby. So many of the men of the village had gone to the war. Roger had been away many weeks, and my Father had left some days before to join Lord Essex at Worcester. In all our household there were no men left except Bob the herdsman. The church was strangely deserted. The Hall pew empty. Scarcely one deep manly voice in response or psalm. On the benches in the village a few old men had an unwonted monopoly of talk, and the lads on anything like the verge of manhood strode heavily about with a new sense of importance. One asked another for news. But there was none, save rumours of mysterious marchings and counter-marchings of troops, without any aim that we knew, or the echo of some far-off foray of Prince Rupert's. There was a dreamy stillness all around. Tib's voice came up alone from the kitchen as she moved about some Sabbath work of necessity, and sung rather uncertainly snatches of the psalm we had sung at prayers in the morning. From the slope where the house stood (which gave us that wide range over the levels which I miss everywhere else), I saw the cattle feeding far off in the marshy lands, too far for any sound of their voices to reach me. The harvest was over on the nearer slopes, so that there was no music of the wind rustling through the corn. The land lay half slumbering in its autumn rest, like Roger's faithful Lion in his Sunday afternoon sleep on the terrace below. But, I knew not why, there seemed to me a kind of expectancy in this calm. A waiting and listening seemed to palpitate through this stillness of the land such as pervaded Lion's slumbers as he couched, quivering at every sound, vainly waiting for Roger's voice to summon him as usual at this hour for a walk in the fields.
The feeling grew on me, till all this quiet seemed not as the rest after a calm, but the calm before a storm; and the silence excited in me as if it were the breathless hush of thousands of beating hearts.
Then I thought of Rachel Forster in her lonely home. And it was a relief to rise at once and go to her. Her door was open. She was sitting before the old Bible. It was open, but she was not reading. Her hands were clashed on her knees. There was a stillness on her face as great as that over the country. But in this calm there was something that calmed me.
It seemed to me conscious and victorious, not dreamlike, and liable at any moment to a terrible waking.
I told her the restlessness I had been feeling.
"Can we wonder, Mistress Olive?" said she. "Do we not know what we might be giving them up for?"
"This quietness of the world seems awful to me to-day, Rachel," said I, "but in you there is something that quiets me. You find peace in prayer Rachel," said I. "Is it not that?"
"I scarce know whether it is prayer, Mistress Olive. It is nothing but going to the Rock that is higher than I, and taking all that is precious to me there, and staying there. It is just creeping to the foot of the Cross, and keeping there."
"You feel, then, as if something terrible were coming, Rachel," I said.
"I know something terrible must come," she said, with a tremulousness in her voice which was more from enthusiasm than from fear. "To-day, or to-morrow, or some day. For the Day of Vengeance is come; and the year of His redeemed is at hand."
"Oh, Rachel," I said, "I cannot silently rest as you do. I want words, entreaties for Roger, for my Father, for Job, and also for the good men who, if the battle comes, must die on the wrong side, and for the king; the king who, if he would but be true, might set all right again."
And she knelt down and prayed in words brief and burning, like the prayers in the Bible.
"You do not feel it too lonely here, Rachel?" I said as I left, "Why not come up to us? Your presence would be like a strong wall and fortress to me."
"I am less lonesome here, Mistress Olive," said she. "Job made so many little plans to spare me trouble before he went. I see his hand everywhere. There is the pile of wood close to the fire, and the little pipe carrying the water to the very door. It would seem like making light of his work not to use it all. And besides," she added, "there's a few poor tried folk who used to look to Job for a good word and a good turn, and now some of them look to me. And I could not fail them for the world."
As I wished her good-bye, and walked home and thought of her, a glorious new sense came on me of the strength there is in waiting on God, of the possibility of the feeblest who lean on him being not only sustained, but becoming themselves strong to sustain others.
When I went to see Rachel, the whole solid world had seemed to me, in my anxiety for the precious lives I could do nothing to preserve, but as some treacherous and quaking ground among our marshes, ready to sink down and overwhelm, us, beneath the weight of our passing footsteps.
As I returned, the world, though in itself as transitory and uncertain as ever, was once more a solid pathway to me, because underneath it stood the foundation of an Almighty love, one word from whom was stronger and more enduring than all the worlds.
So we sang our evening psalm, and slept quietly that night at Netherby, knowing nothing of the four thousand pale and rigid corpses that lay stretched on the blood-stained battle-slopes at Edgehill, while Lord Essex encamped on the silent battle-field, and the king's watch-fires were kindled on the hill above, where he began the day, and no ground was gained on either side; only the lives of four thousand men lost.
If we may say "lost" of any life yielded up to duty, and called back to God!
In the tongues of men, we speak of lives lost on battle-fields: perhaps in the tongue of angels they speak of lives lost in easy and luxurious homes.
CHAPTER VIII.
OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.
It was not till mid-day on Monday the 24th of October 1642, that the first tidings reached us of Keinton Fight, or, as some call it, the Battle of Edgehill. Tidings indeed they scarcely were, only rumours, as of far-off thunder faintly moaning through the heat and stillness of a summer's noon, mysterious, uncertain, scarcely louder than the hum of insects in the sunshine, yet almost more awful than the crash of the thunder-peal overhead. "Wars and rumours of wars." Until that Monday I had no conception of the significance of that word "rumours." I had anticipated the sudden shocks, the ruthless desolations of war; I had not thought of its terrible uncertainties, its heart-sickening suspenses.
At noon, when the few men left in the village were all away in the fields at work, a travelling tinker passed by who that morning about daybreak had done some work at a farm where the swineherd keeping his swine the evening before, on the edge of a beech-forest some miles to the south, had heard the sounds far off in the south-west, in the direction of Oxford, like the thunder of great guns, and the sharp cracking of musketry.
The tinker did what tinkering was needed in the village, in the absence of Job the village smith, and went on his way. Just after he left, Aunt Gretel and I went to take broken meat and broth to two or three sick and aged people, and we found all the women gathered around the black and silent forge, or rather around Rachel, while she sat quietly patching in the porch of the cottage; the latticed, narrow cottage-windows letting in too little light for any work that required to be neatly done.
An eager excited crowd it was, the scanty measure of the text only furnishing wider margin for the commentary. Rachel, meanwhile, sat quietly in the middle, like a mother among a number of eager chattering children.
As we reached the group, poor Margery, Dickon's young wife, with her child in her arms, half-sobbed,—
"I wonder, Rachel, thee can bear to go on stitch, stitch. Since the news came I have been all of a tremble thinking of my goodman, who went off with yourn. I couldn't bring my fingers together to hold a needle, do what I would."
"I don't know that I could well bear it without the stitching, neighbour," said Rachel, softly. "When trouble is come, we may well sit still and weep. The Lord calls us to it. But in the waiting-times I see nought for it but to brace up the heart and work."
When we came, all turned to tell us of the dread rumour. Aunt Gretel brought one or two cheering stories of providence and deliverance out of the eventful histories of her youth; and then we went on our errands, Aunt Gretel thinking we should do more to soothe and quiet these agitated hearts by the example of steadily pursuing our task, than by the wisest talking in the world.
"For," said she, "the true tidings have yet to come; and they are like to be sad enough to some. And how will they bear it, if all the strength is wasted before-hand in vain and mournful guesses?"
The result proved her right, for when our baskets were emptied, and Aunt Gretel returned home, while I went to see Rachel again, the village was stirring as usual with quiet sounds of labour in house after house, and the excited group around the porch had dispersed. Only poor Margery lingered, Rachel having found her occupation in lighting the fire and preparing supper, to save her returning to her lonely cottage; while the baby crowed and kicked on the ground at Rachel's feet.
"But, Rachel," I said, "would it not have quieted the neighbours to pray together, you with them?"
"Maybe, sweetheart," she said. "But I did not feel I could. If the news is true, the fight is over. It's over hours since. The dead are lying cold, out of the reach of our prayers. And the living are saved and are giving thanks; and the wounded are writhing in their anguish, and we know not who is dead, or wounded, or whole. And when we look to the earth to think, it comes over us like a rush of dark waters when the dykes are pierced. So I can but look to heaven and work. It's light and not dark where He sitteth. And beyond the thunders and the lightnings He is caring for us in the great calm of the upper sky. Caring for us, sweetheart, as the poor mother cares for this babe; not sitting on a throne and smiling like the king in the picture, with both hands full of his sceptre and his bauble; but with both hands free, to help and to uphold. So I try to do the bit of work He sets me, and to look up to Him and feel, 'There is no fear but that Thou wilt do the work Thou hast set Thyself; and that is, to care for us all.' And I told the neighbours they had best try the same."
The words were scarcely out of her lips, when a horseman came clattering down the village and stopped at Job's well-known forge.
"What news?" asked a score of voices one after another, as the women crowded round him.
"Dismal news enough for some, and glorious for others," he said. "The king's army and Lord Essex's met yesterday. Lord Essex below in the Vale of the Red Horse, and the king on Edgehill above. Prince Rupert charged down on the Parliament horse, under Commissary-General Ramsay, broke them in a trice, and pursued them to Keinton, killing and plundering. I heard it from one of the routed horsemen who escaped. Everything is lost, he said, for Lord Essex, and I hasten to carry the news to one who loves the king."
Hastily draining Rachel's can of home-brewed ale, he was off in a minute, and out of sight.
All through the afternoon confused and contradictory news continued to drop in from one and another. But it was not till the next day (Tuesday) that we could collect anything like a true account of the battle,—how for hours, all through the noon-tide of that autumn Sunday, the two armies had couched, like two terrible beasts of prey, watching each other; the king on the height, and Essex in the plain—as if loth to break with the murderous roar of cannon our England's two centuries of peace.
Prayers, no doubt, there were, many and deep, breaking that silence, to the ear of God; but few, perhaps, better than that of gallant Sir Jacob Ashley, one of the king's major-generals: "Lord, Thou knowest I must be busy this day; if I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me."
Who began the fight at last, we could not well make out. The most part said Lord Essex, directing a sally up the hill, which Prince Rupert answered by dashing down like a torrent, from the royal vantage-ground to the plain, on the left wing of the Parliament army. The men fell or fled on all sides before his furious charge; and he pursued them to the village of Keinton, where Lord Essex had encamped the day before. Deeming the day won, his men gave themselves up to plundering the baggage, and slaughtering the wagoners and unarmed labourers. But meantime Sir William Balfour, on the right wing, charged the king's left, broke it, seized and spiked many of the king's guns, took the royal standard after a struggle which left sixty brave men dead in sixty yards around it, and drove nearly the whole royal army to their morning's position up the hill. There they rallied. Prince Rupert returned, laden with his blood-stained plunder, to find the king's army in confusion. But darkness was setting in; it is said the Parliament gun-powder began to fail; so no further pursuit was made, and on Sunday night again both armies encamped on the ground where they had begun the battle. The king's camp-fires blazed on the hill, and the Parliament's in the Vale of the Red Horse. But between them lay four thousand dead Englishmen,—that Sabbath morning full of life and courage, now lying stiff and helpless on the quiet slopes where they had fallen in the tumult of the mortal conflict.
It is said, most of those who fell on the king's side fell standing firm, and of ours running away; which means, I suppose, that they lost their bravest, and we our cowards.
I found my Father, and many of the soldiers I know, always loth to speak much of the battle-field after a battle. My Father and Roger would discuss by the hour the handling of troops and the strategy of the commanders, and all which related to war as an art or a science, and regarded the troops as pieces on a board. But of the after-misery, when the terrible excitement and the skillful manœuvres of the day were over, and the troops and regiments had again become only men, wounded, weary, dead, I never heard them to speak save in a few broken words.
The difference of language served a little to veil the common humanity in the German wars, my Father said; but to hear the fallen entreating for quarter, or the dying calling on God and on dear familiar names, or the wounded praying for help which, in the rush of the battle, could not be given, in the old mother-tongue, was enough, he said, to take all the pomp and glory out of war, and to leave it nothing but its agony and its horror.
Both sides claimed the victory,—Lord Essex by right of encamping on the field, and the king (some said) by the weight of Prince Rupert's plunder.
However that might be, neither side pursued the advantage they both boasted to have gained.
The king, who was between the Parliament army and London, to the great anxiety of the city, did not advance, but retired on Oxford,—the Parliament garrison of Banbury, however, surrendering to him without a struggle.
Lord Essex made no pursuit, but withdrawing to London, left the country open to Prince Rupert's foragers.
But victory or defeat were scarcely the chief questions to us women that day at Netherby.
Margery's anxieties were the first relieved. Her husband Dickon being in the king's army, sent her an orange scarf taken from a Parliament horseman at Keinton, in token of his safety.
Then, on Wednesday, poor Tim, Gammer Grindle's half-witted grandson, who would, in spite of all that could be said, follow Roger to the war, came limping into the village, emaciated and footsore, with his arm bound up in a sling. He stopped at Rachel Forster's door, and began stammering a confused account of Master Roger and Job lying wounded at Keinton, and the prince's men murdering some of the wounded, and carrying off Roger and Job, pinioned, in a cart to gaol, and Tim's trying to follow on foot, and having his arm broken by a musket-shot, and his leg wounded, and so, being left behind, having limped home to tell Mistress Olive.
But where the gaol was, or how severe Roger's wound was, or Job's, could in no way be extracted from poor Tim's confused brain and tongue! "Poor Tim!" he said, apologising with broken words, as a faithful dog might with wistful looks, for having escaped without his master, "Poor Tim tried hard to follow Master Roger—tried hard! Master Roger knows Tim did not wish to leave him; Master Roger knows. Master Roger said, 'Tim, you've done all you could. Go home. And tell them Master Roger's all right.'" When first he saw Rachel, he said, "Poor Job said, 'Take care!'" And then clenching his hand, with a smile, "Poor Tim took care!" But he never repeated or explained it. It was quite useless to question him. That one purpose of obeying Roger possessed the whole of his poor brain. The poor creature was faint from pain and weariness, and loss of blood. Rachel would have made him a bed in the cottage, and not one of us at Netherby but would have counted it an honour to have nursed him for his love to Roger; but he shook his head: 'Master Roger said, 'Tim, you've done all you could. Go home.'" And nothing would satisfy him but to go on to the hovel by the Mere, were his grandmother lived.
Gammer Grindle was a poor, wizened, old woman, soured by much trouble and by the constant fretting of a sharp temper against poverty and wrong, until few in the village liked to venture near her. Indeed, there were dark suspicious afloat about her. Many a labouring-man would have gone a mile round rather than pass her door after dusk, and many a yeoman-farmer and goodwife who had lost an unusual number of sheep or poultry would propitiate her by the present of a lamb or a fat pullet. And, in general, in the neighbourhood she was spoken of with a reverent terror much akin to that of the man who, after hastily using the name of the devil, crossed himself, and said, "May he pardon me for taking his holy name in vain."
But Roger and I happened to have come across her on another and very different side. In our fishing expeditions on the Mere her grandson Tim had often followed us with the fish-basket or tackle; and the rare contrast of Roger's kindly tones and words with the jeerings of the rough boys in the village, had won him in Tim's heart an affection intense, absorbing, disinterested, and entirely free from demand of return or hope of reward; more like that of a faithful dog than of a human being with purposes and interests of his own.
This had given us access to his grandmother's hovel, and many a time she had saved me from the consequences of Aunt Dorothy's just wrath by kindling up her poor embers of fire to dry my soaked shoes, and cleaning the mud from my clothes. Simple easy services, but such as made it altogether impossible for Roger and me to regard the poor, kind, shrivelled hands that had rendered them as having signed a compact with Satan. Besides, did we not see how good she was, with all her scoldings, to Tim, and know from broken words which had dropped now and then how she had loved her only daughter, the mother of Cicely and Tim, and how sore her heart was for the poor, lost girl, and what a power of wronged and disappointed love lay seething and fermenting beneath the sour sharp words she spoke?
Roger and I knew that Gammer Grindle was no outlaw from the pale of humanity by seeing it; and Rachel Forster knew it, I believe, by seeing Him at whose feet so many outcasts from human sympathy found a welcome. And so it happened, that of all the village no one but Rachel, Roger and I sought access, or would have had it, to Gammer Grindle's hovel, so that Rachel that day accompanied Tim home, and was permitted to share his grandmother's watch that night.
For Tim's exhaustion soon changed to delirious fever, as his wound began to be inflamed, and it was as much as both the women could do to keep him from rushing out of the hovel to "follow Master Roger."
All the time, they noticed he kept the hand of his unwounded arm firmly clenched over something. But no coaxing or commands, even from his grandmother's voice, which he was so used to obey, would induce him to unclasp his hand or let it go.
All that night and the next day the two women watched by the poor lad, bathing his head, and trying vainly to keep him still. But towards evening his strength began to fail, and it was plain that the fever, having done its work, was relinquishing its hold to the cold grasp of Another stronger than it.
The poor lad's delirious entreaties ceased, and he lay so still, that Rachel could hear the cold ripples of the Mere outside plashing softly among the rushes, stirred by the night wind; and they sounded to her like the slow waters of the river of Death.
Only now and then he said, in a low voice, like a child crooning to itself, "Poor Tim, Master Roger knows. Master Roger said, you have done all you could. Go home."
Once also his eye brightened, and he said, "Cicely, sister Cicely! Tell her to come soon—soon. I have watched for her so long!"
Rachel tried to speak to him about Jesus, the loving Master of us all; he did not object, but whether he understood or not, she could not tell. He did not alter the words which had been so engraven on his poor faithful heart. Only they grew fainter and fainter, and fewer and more broken, until, with one sigh, "Master—home," the poor feeble spirit departed, and the poor feeble body was at rest.
But Rachel said it seemed to her as if the blessed Lord would most surely not fail to understand the poor lad who could not understand about Him, yet had served so faithfully the best he knew. And she almost thought she heard a voice from heaven saying, "Poor Tim! the Master knows. You have done the best you could. Come home!"
It was not until the poor lad was dead that they found what he had been so tightly clasping in his hand.
It was a fragment of paper containing a few words written by Job Forster, of which Tim had indeed "taken care," as the clasp of the lifeless hand proved too well.
The words were,—
"Rachel, be of good cheer, as I am. I am hurt on the shoulder, but not so bad. They are taking me with Roger to Oxford goal. His wound is in the side, painful at first, but Dr. Antony got the ball out, and says he will do well. Thee must not fret, nor try to come to us. It would hurt thee and do us no good. The Lord careth."
Rachel read this letter, with every word made emphatic, by her certainty that Job would make as light as possible of any trouble, by her knowledge that his pen was not that of a ready writer, and by her sense of what she would have done herself in similar circumstances.
"Rachel!"—the word, she knew, had taken him a minute or two to spell out, and it meant a whole volume of esteem and love; and by the same measure, "hurt" meant "disabled;" and "not so bad," simply not in immediate peril of life; and "thee must not come," to her heart meant "come if thou canst, though I dare not bid thee."
It was not Rachel's way to let trouble make her helpless, or even prevent her being helpful where she was needed. God, she was sure, had not meant it for that. She lived at the door of the House of the Lord, and therefore, at this sudden alarm, she did not need a long pilgrimage by an untrodden path to reach the sanctuary. A moment to lay down the burden and enter the open door, and lift up the heart there within; and then to the duty in hand. She remained, therefore, with Gammer Grindle until they had laid the poor faithful lad in his shroud; then she gave all the needful orders for the burial, so that it was not till dusk she was seated in her own cottage, with leisure to plan how she should carry out what, from the moment she had first glanced at her husband's letter, she had determined to do.
Half an hour sufficed her for thinking, or "taking counsel," as she called it; half an hour more for making preparations and coming across to us at Netherby, with her mind made up and all her arrangements settled.
Arrived in the Hall, she handed Job's letter to Aunt Dorothy.
"What can be done?" said Aunt Dorothy. "How can it be that we have not heard from my brother or Dr. Antony? The king's forces must be between us and Oxford, and the letters must have been seized. But never fear, Rachel," she added, in a consoling tone. "At first they talked of treating all the Parliament prisoners as traitors; but that will never be. A ransom or an exchange is certain. Stay here to-night; it will be less lonely for you. We can take counsel together; and to morrow we will think what to do."
"I have been thinking, Mistress Dorothy; and I have taken counsel. I am going at day-break to-morrow to Oxford; and I came to ask if I could do aught for you, or take any message to Master Roger."
"How?" said Aunt Dorothy. "And who will go with you? Who will venture within the grasp of those plunderers?"
"I have not asked any one, Mistress Dorothy. I am going alone on our own old farm-horse."
"You travel scores of miles alone, and into the midst of the king's army, Rachel!" said Aunt Dorothy.
"I have taken counsel, Mistress Dorothy," said Rachel calmly, and, looking up, Aunt Dorothy met that in Rachel's quiet eyes which she understood, and she made no further remonstrance.
"We will write letters to Roger," she said, after a pause.
In a short time they were ready, with one from me to Lettice Davenant.
Neither my Aunts nor I slept much that night. We were revolving various plans for helping Rachel, each unknown to the other.
I had thought of a letter to a friend of my Father's who lived half-way between us and Oxford, and rising softly in the night, without telling any one, I wrote it. For I had removed to Roger's chamber while he was away; it seemed to bring me nearer to him.
Then, before daybreak, feeling sure Rachel would be watching for the first streaks of light, I crept out of our house to hers.
She was dressed, and was quietly packing up the great Bible which lay always on the table, and laying it in the cupboard.
"Happy Rachel!" I said, kissing her; "to be old enough to dare to go."
"There is always some work, sweetheart," said she, "for every season, not to be done before or after. That is why we need never be afraid of growing old."
I gave her my letter. She took it gratefully; but she said—
"Too fine folks for a plain body like me, Mistress Olive. God bless you for the thought. But in one village I must pass there is a humble godly man who has oft tarried with us for a night, and has expounded the word to us, and no doubt he will give me a token to another. And if not, the seven thousand are always known to the Lord. The prophet Elijah, indeed, did not know; but after he was told about it once for all, none of us ought ever to say again, 'I only am left alone.'"
"But how will you manage when you get to Oxford?" I said.
"God forbid I should presume to say, sweet-heart," said she. "Oxford is many steps off. And the Lord has only shown me the next step. Job is wounded and in prison and wants me, and will my God, and his, fail to show me how to get to him?"
As she spoke these last words, the force of repressed passion, and of faith contending in them, gave her voice an unwonted depth, which made it sound to me like another voice answering her.
At that moment Aunt Gretel arrived, laden with a small basket containing spiced cordials and preserved meats for Rachel's journey.
And not a quarter of an hour afterwards, Aunt Dorothy, on horseback, bent on protecting Rachel through some portion of her way.
And then Margery and the babe, who had come at Rachel's request.
Before mounting her horse, Rachel said,—
"You will have thought of being at poor Tim's burying, Mistress Olive?"
We promise all to be there.
And Rachel from the mounting-steps climbed up on the patient old horse, and was gone, only turning back once to smile at us as we watched her.
She was not a woman for after-thoughts, or last lingering words. She had always said what she wanted before the last.
She had left us the heavy key of the cottage-door, that we might give away the little stores which she had divided the night before into various portions for her poor neighbours. She had intended committing them to Margery, but as we were there first, we undertook the charge. How simply and how unheralded events come which hallow our common tables and chambers with the tender solemnity as of places of worship or of burial. The sound of Rachel's horse-hoofs was scarcely out of hearing when the empty cottage had become to us as a sacred place. The little packets her neat hands had arranged so thoughtfully were no common loaves, or meat, but sacred relics hallowed by her loving touch. And it was hard to look at the firewood Job had piled by the fire for her, and the little stone channel he had made to bring the water near the door, without tears.
LETTICE DAVENANT'S DIARY.
"Oxford, November 1, 1642.—Victoria! The first step is gained; the first lesson given, though at some cost of noble lives to us and to the king. Lord Essex is fain to retreat to London to console the affrighted citizens, leaving the whole country open to the king. Yet my Father saith privately to us, this victory of Edgehill might have been far more complete had it not been for Prince Rupert's rashness. Indeed, after the fight there had well-nigh been a duel in the king's presence between the prince and a gentleman who expressed his mind pretty freely on the matter. The prince, after pursuing the rebels to Keinton, lingered there, plundering the baggage, and returned with his horses laden with the spoils to find the royal army not in such order as it might have been had his troops kept with it. 'We can give a good account of the enemy's horse, your Majesty,' he said. 'Yes,' said this gentleman standing by, 'and of their carts too.' For which jest the haughty hot-blooded prince would have had severe revenge, had not the king with much ado brought them to an accommodation.
"Note.—The young Princes Charles and James, of but ten or twelve years old, had a narrow escape. Their governor, Dr. Harvey, a learned man, was sitting quietly with them on the grass reading his book, and never perceived anything was amiss until the bullets came whizziug round him. I wonder royal persons should be trusted to the care of people whose wits are always at the ends of the earth, like philosophers. Who knows how different things might have been in the world if Dr. Harvey and the young princes had sat there a few minutes longer!
"However, the best fruits of victory are beginning to appear. Gentlemen, whose loyalty had been somewhat wavering, are riding in from all quarters, well accoutred, abundantly attended, finely mounted, to offer their services to His Majesty.
"This grave and stately old city is gorgeous with warlike array, and echoing with warlike music.
"My Father, Mother, and I are lodged in Lincoln College. A distant cousin of ours, Sir William Davenant, who hath writ many plays and farces, and now fights in the army, being of this college, and also others of our kindred from the north country. I feel quite at home in the rooms with their thick walls, and high narrow arched windows like those in the turret-chamber at the Hall, more at home than the old quadrangles and walls themselves can be with all this clamour and trumpeting to arms.
"Not that there is much to be seen in the great inner court on which my chamber-window looks. An ancient vine climbs up one side of the walls, encircling the entrance arch, and its leaves, brown and crimson with the autumn, stirred with the breeze, are making a pleasant quiet country music as I write. This vine is held in high honour in the college, having illustrated the text of the sermon, 'Look on this vine,' which inspired good Bishop de Rotheram, more than two hundred years since, to become the second Founder of the College.
"Through this entrance-arch I look beyond its shadow to the sunny street, crossed now and then by the flash of arms, and gay Cavaliers' mantles, or the prancings of a troop of horse. That is all the glimpse I have of the outer world. But I think my Mother were content to live in such a place for ever. Every day she resorts more than once to a quiet corner of the new Chapel to pay her orisons, taking delight in the stillness, and in the brilliant colours of the painted windows Bishop Williams (once the antagonist of Archbishop Laud, and now with him in the Tower) had brought but a few years since from Italy.
"Outside this chapel there is a garden, where we walk, and discourse of the prospects of the kingdom, and of those friends at Netherby from whom we are now so sadly parted.
"For Roger and Mr. Drayton are in the rebel army—alas! there is no longer doubt of it—and any day their hands and those of my seven brothers, all in the king's army, may be against each other.
"November 8th.—The king and the army are away at Reading, with my Father and my brothers; and the city is quiet enough without them.
"Sir Launcelot is now on service about the Castle. I would he were on the field, and one of my brothers here. However, I am not like to see much of him at present. He will scarce venture to come after what I had to say to him this morning.
"He came in laughing, saying he had just seen an encounter between an old rebel woman at the gate and four of Prince Rupert's plunderers. 'She was contending with them for the possession of a sober Puritanical-looking old horse,' said he. 'They claimed it for the king's service. She said 'that might be, but in that case she chose to give it up herself unto the care of one of His Majesty's court, to whom she had a letter.'
"'Did you not give her a helping word?' said I.
"'I am scarcely such a knight errant as that, Mistress Lettice,' said he; 'I should have enough to do, in good sooth. Moreover, the godly generally make good fight for their carnal goods, and in this instance the woman seemed as likely as not to have the best of the debate, to say nothing of her being wrinkled and toothless.'
"That made me flash up, as speaking lightly of aged women always does. 'Poor chivalry,' said I, 'which has not recollection enough of a mother to lend a helping hand to the old and wrinkled. We shall be wrinkled and toothless in a few years, sir, and our imagination is not so weak but that we can fore-date a little while, and transfer all such heartless jests to ourselves. I have been used to higher chivalry than that among the Puritans.
"He laughed, and made a pretty pathetic deprecation. His mother had died (quoth he) when he was too young to remember. Some little excuse, perchance. However, Roger Drayton's mother also died when he was in infancy. But be that as it might, I was in no mood to listen. And as we were speaking, a serving-man came to tell me a poor woman from Netherby was in the ante-room craving to see me or my Mother.
"It was Rachel Forster.
"Her neat Puritan hood, so dainty, I think around her pale worn-looking face, was rather ruffled, and although her eyes had the wonted quiet in them, (only a little loftier than usual,) she was trembling, and willingly took the chair I offered her.
"'You did not find it easy coming through the royal lines,' I said.
"'Nothing but a few rude jests at the gate, Mistress Lettice,' said she; 'but I am not used to them, or to going about the world alone. But I have been taken good care of. And I am here,' she added, fervently; 'which is all I asked.'
"'Did they try to take your horse from you?' I said.
"'They took him,' she said. 'But that matters little. He was a faithful beast, and I am feared how they may use him. But the beasts have only now, neither fore nor after, which saves them much.' Then without more words she gave me a letter from Olive.
"From this I found that Roger is a prisoner in the Castle here, with Job Forster.
"I went into the other chamber, and asked Sir Launcelot had he known of this.
"'I learned it a day or two since,' he replied, hesitating, 'but I did not tell you or Lady Lucy, because you are so pitiful, I feared to pain you uselessly.'
"'We might have judged whether it was uselessly or not, Sir Launcelot!' said I.
"'Can I do anything for you?' he asked, in confusion.
"'Nothing,' said I. 'You might have helped an aged woman, a friend of mine, whom you found in difficulties at the gate this morning. But now, excuse me, I have no time to spare—I must go to my Mother.' And I withdrew to the inner room, to bring my Mother out at once to see what could be done; leaving him to retire through the ante-room, where Rachel Forster sat.
"I trow he will not be in a hurry to visit us again.
"My Mother and Rachel had always been friends. They both live a good deal at the height where the party-colours blend in the one sunlight; and they neither of them ever speak half as much as they feel about religion.
"There was not much to say, therefore, when my Mother understood her errand. My Mother's word had weight, and in a few hours she had procured a permit for Rachel to see her husband, provided the interview was in her presence.
"It was a noisome place, she said—many persons crowded together like cattle in dungeons, with scant light or air, and none to wait on them but each other. Job was on some straw in a corner, looking sorely altered—his strong limbs limp and emaciated, and his eye languid. But it was wonderful how his face lighted up when he saw Rachel.
"'I thought thee would come', said he, 'though I bid thee not. I knew thee had learned how "all things are possible."'
"My Mother's intercessions procured for them the great favour of a cell, which, though narrow, low, damp, and underground, they were to have to themselves. And before she left, Rachel's neat hands had made the straw and matting look like a proper sick-bed, while her presence had lighted the cell into a home.