The year 1644 was a horribly cruel, tedious year, of which I will present but a brief account. The first quarter brought nothing remarkable, except that because of the difficulties of the time, the fewness of servants, the multitude of dragoons and other soldiers quartered upon us (like idle hungry dogs continually putting themselves in our way to trip us up or with their whining or growling to annoy us), the household tasks that in the brave old days had been pleasant enough, I now found exceeding troublesome. Yet I uttered no complaint, for my mother worked as hard as any slave herself, and my sisters were in a like case with me; moreover, as I had learned, much work and much company are far better than to be idle and alone. The soldiers by negligence fired the smaller barn and a great store of mislan was burnt in it, for which no compensation was paid; and Zara began a familiarity with our Captain of dragoons, which my mother hugely misliked, knowing him to be contracted in marriage to an heiress of Worcester, but which she could not prevent because he was become as much the Lord of the Manor as my father, or more, and we were at his mercy if he cared to injure us. Zara was not openly disobedient or wanton; wherefore my father found it within his conscience to use her as an intermediary agent with the Captain, who would sometimes lend him a dozen stout men to help with his husbandry, or with his wood-mongering.
From the sale of wood my father derived extraordinary profits, because at Oxford three times as much firing was needed as ever before, and the price mounted month by month until, at the last, it was sold by the pound weight as though it were cheese, not by the cartload or faggot. He also secured a profitable contract from Sir Timothy Tyrrell to dig china clay from the ochre-pits on Shotover, which he sold in Oxford to the makers of tobacco pipes, who otherwise could obtain none of sufficient fineness.9 Yet, notwithstanding his gains, my father reckoned in the New Year of 1644 that, unless he could convert his billeting tickets into land or houses or money, he was the poorer by £1,000 than he had been a twelvemonth before.
In February the Scots, in alliance with Parliament, crossed the Border and though they stubbornly avoided encounter with the King’s armies at least they drew off a part of them that otherwise might have been used against Parliament, and they saved the Londoners their coals. In May it was resolved by the Committee of Safety, which met in London at Derby House, that Oxford was to be taken at all hazards and the person of the King thereby secured; which in this war, as in the play of chess, was a piece of final importance. The Earl of Essex and Sir William Waller were charged with this task and pushed forward with a great army, taking Reading once more and pressing upon Abingdon, a chief bulwark of Oxford, which the King’s officers now abandoned by a mistake of their orders.
When at Forest Hill, in the afternoon of May 25th, the cry went up that “Abingdon is taken by the Roundheads,” my father knew not whether to stay or fly. Our Captain of dragoons, however, began putting the Manor-house and barns in a posture of defence, breaking holes in the walls as embrasures for his guns—his men stood all night in arms, and he ordered my father to depart the place in the morning with all his household. Upon my father protesting that we were as safe in this house as anywhere else, the Captain threatened to speed him with a pistol-shot if he were obdurate. So we made our exodus on foot, with a few of our choicer possessions in one cart and three or four weeks’ provisions in another; but fearing to take the nearer way, over East Bridge, we went about by Islip and came in at the North Gate, which was a tedious trudge. Zara had fallen behind our company at Stanton St. John and slunk back to her Captain; and made herself Lady of the Manor in our absence.
Some time before this, my father had bought an old wooden house of four rooms, near New Inn Hall, which he used as a storehouse for planks and boards, with his own wood-yard adjoining. Here, after a removal of those same planks and boards, we lodged for above a fortnight; and very uncomfortably, for we had neither beds nor tables nor chairs but what we could contrive with sawn logs and pieces of board, and no more than two cooking-pots for the seventeen of us, and the chimney would not draw, but filled the room with smoke. The enemy lay close about the city, where were no more than two weeks’ provisions for a siege, and one of the Royal Council durst advise the King to surrender, saying that the game was up. The Earl of Essex forded the Isis at Sandford—where I doubt not my Uncle and Aunt Jones gave him a loving welcome—and with his whole army passed between Oxford and Forest Hill, until he came to Islip Bridge; but there was held by troops quartered in Islip itself. The King stood on Magdalen College Tower, as this army marched by, and viewed its order and motion; and from the Work at St. Clement’s Port three or four great shot were discharged at the enemy horse as they skirmished on Headington Hill. There was no soldier slain by this cannonade, but much window glass in the parish of St. Clement’s was cracked Or broken. To the westward, General Sir William Waller forced a crossing of the River Isis at Newbridge and sent his horse northward from thence to Woodstock; upon news of which the King’s guard on Islip Bridge was withdrawn and it seemed that we were caught in a bag.
The King resolved to avoid check-mate by escape, which he did very prettily in a night march on June 3rd, carrying with him a great body of horse and 2,500 musketeers, of whom my brother James made one; and a train of seventy carriages. He was not discovered, because of a diversion which he contrived, sending against Abingdon a great part of his foot and all his ordnance; by which motion General Waller was deceived and enticed back from Newbridge. To be brief, His Majesty, got safely away to Worcester and drew the enemy after him so that Oxford was free again, though Abingdon remained in the hands of Parliament.
We left our scurvy lodgings on June 12th and gladly returned to Forest Hill. “Aye,” said my father, with a last look about the dirty storehouse as we went out. “So Sylvester writes:
The Angels, wonted to Heaven’s blissful Hall,
Made little stay in this unwholesome stall.”
In the blissful hall of our Manor we presently found Zara safe and sound with her Captain, who was no such great kill-cow as he had affected to be; for when he had seen the approach of the enemy he had fetched his company away to Islip. Zara had stayed behind, against his persuasion, to care for the house. She had posted a warning upon the door that the house was not to be plundered, being the property of Sir Robert Pye, M.P.; which paper was respected, and though the Parliament soldiers who passed through the place took fruit from the orchard and garden, and a little wood from the yard to build their camp fires, they did no other damage. The Captain had marched back but two days before ourselves. Thus Zara redeemed her fault in my father’s eyes; but my mother railed at her for a whore.
For the rest of that year we had peace, but for constant alarms that enemy horse were seen. There was a skirmish in Forest Hill itself on August 15th: some dragoons sent out from Abingdon by Major-General Browne, nicknamed “the Faggot-monger,” riding up suddenly through a morning mist and engaging our own dragoons. There were men hurt on either side with sword cuts, and our tenant Catcher was slain with a chance pistol shot as he fled to our house to be out of the way. He was a brutish, drunken man and no great loss, who once at the Christmas Communion drank all the wine in the cup, swearing that he would have his penny’s worth. A few days after this, Goodman Mathadee’s little child, the same who had wailed in the Church, was run down by horsemen as he played in the lane and trampled to death; which was of mischance, not barbarity.
In this year there was plague at Oxford; but the camp fever had somewhat abated.
Elsewhere the war was fought disorderly and with varying fortune. In March a part of Mun’s regiment was routed in a skirmish—I could not learn where, but I believe it was fought in Cheshire—wherein his Colonel was slain and he himself narrowly escaped with his life. Yet he brought away the greater part of his men into safety and for his good service was made a Knight; and in the same month was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Chester, which was a position of great trust and honour, whereat my heart swelled with pride on his behalf. On July 2nd, a Sunday, General Cromwell won a great victory over the army of the Earl of Newcastle. He fought this battle among the sodden cornfields of Marston Moor in Yorkshire (where 4,000 men were slain in the space of three hours), and took York, Liverpool and Lincoln that same summer, but not Chester, which Mun held stoutly, though sore straitened. The Earl of Newcastle fled overseas.
I write that General Cromwell was the victor at Marston Moor, though, as is well known, the Parliament army was commanded by the Lord Leven, a Scot; for the Lord Leven himself was driven from the field and few of his Scots did anything notable that day—it was General Cromwell who, though dazed and bewildered from a wound in his neck, yet routed the squadrons of the Prince Rupert and restored the toppling fortunes of his faction. There was this difference between the Prince Rupert’s manner of charging and General Cromwell’s, that though both held their fire until they were in among the enemy, yet the Prince Rupert rode at full gallop, to be the more terrible, but General Cromwell at a round trot, the better to rally his men, if need should be, for a second charge. To the south-west, not many weeks after this battle was fought, the King himself was victorious at Lost-withiel in Cornwall, over General Skippon, who, being deserted by the Horse, under the Earl of Essex, lost all his ordnance and 5,000 of his 6,000 foot in retreat from that inhospitable county, and all his guns and ordnance. Thus by the close of the year neither Parliament nor King could justly claim the advantage over the other.
Meanwhile in London my husband continually sharpened and shook his pen. He wrote not, as might have been expected, either against the enemies of Parliament or against any faction in Parliament, but, in the same manner as an injustice conceived personally had brought him to inveigh against the Bishops, so now, when he desired to divorce me and found that he could not do so upon any ordinary plea, he raged furiously and neither studied nor wrote upon anything, hardly, but divorce, divorce, divorce. He published four treatises before he had done; which have brought him many enemies, not only among those who love the accustomed forms of religion, but among his friends, the Presbyterians; which is how he came at last to quit his former inclinations and wheel about to his new platform of Independency.10
My husband, I believe, wrote nothing that was strangely new upon divorce—and here I may say that, though his manner of disputation was ever his own, he was seldom the original of any new argument—yet he was industrious in reviving or refurbishing certain old notions that had been long put aside or forgotten, and made them seem novel by the crackling vehemence of his oratory. Of these notions the principal one was this, that such contrariety of mind between husband and wife as will blight the peace of marriage is a just and sufficient cause not only for their separation, but for their divorce. This notion had been advanced, though somewhat diffidently, a century before by the learned Divines appointed at the Reformation of Religion to inquire into such matters. Now that there was a grand Assembly of Divines called to Westminster by Parliament, which should order decently all matters of Church Government, my husband doubted not, by casting this doctrine at their heads, to have the law amended for his own convenience and also (as he wrote) to “stroke away ten thousand tears out of the life of men.”
He wrote most bitterly against the unreasonableness of Canon Law, which was still in force; for though the bishops who administered it were fast in the Tower, they had not yet lost the name and dignity of their office, and indeed they remained the nominal arbiters of all questions of divorce for three years more.
A copy of the first of these new writings by my husband was procured for me. It was named The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Restored, to the Good of both Sexes, from the Bondage of Canon Law and other Mistakes, to Christian Freedom guided by the Rule of Charity; wherein also many Places of Scripture have recovered their long-lost Meaning: Seasonable to be now thought on in the Reformation intended. He had not set his name to this first book, but there was no disguising of his style and manner.
How he roared and ranted against those who would grant divorce for corporeal deficiency, but not at all for deficiency of the mind! And how he groaned against such a luckless and helpless matrimony as evidently he considered his own to be: for he wrote of two carcases chained unnaturally together, or rather a living soul bound to a dead corpse which, by a polluting sadness and perpetual distemper, would abase the mettle of his spirit and sink him to a low and vulgar pitch of endeavour in all his actions. He also wrote of me (though not directly by name) as a mute and spiritless mate, an image of earth and phlegm, who, by the unfitness and defectiveness of my unconjugal mind and the disturbance of my unhelpful and unfit society, had done violence to the reverend secret of Nature and had driven him to a worse condition than the loneliest single life.
As I read I began to pity him in my heart for the awkward stroke that he had dealt himself by his peremptory and lofty dealings with me, and by his policy of considering his own honour and pleasure with such exactness as to leave no time for any consideration of mine. Yet so painfully did he writhe in his own miseries that, unlike the reforming Divines, he showed no pity for the woman’s case, but only for the man’s; and when he proposed, as a remedy for this unnatural bond of matrimony, that no civil or earthly power whatever should prevent a man from divorcing a woman (whether she so desired or no) or from marrying another more to his liking, I could not but reckon this as ungentlemanly.
That a man indeed has this right, beyond all power of the Civil or Canon Law to annul, my husband thought to prove from the Book of Deuteronomy, where it is written: “When a man hath taken a wife and it come to pass that she find no favour in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her, then let him write a bill of divorcement, and give it into her hand and send her out of his house.” He interpreted the uncleanness as of the mind equally with the body; and held that, though it were fitting that, before a man put his wife away, there should first be a solemn ceremony performed in the presence of the minister and other grave selected elders of his congregation; yet if then the man, being admonished, should solemnly protest the matter to be of natural irreconcilability, not of malice, he should be free of the prohibition which Christ pronounced against light divorce, and the woman must go back and leave him free to marry again.
To those who might object that a man who marries without due inquiry into the disposition of his wife has none to blame but himself if so be he has caught a Tartar, and that he who marries in haste will have leisure to repent it, my husband replied in these words: “But let them know again that, for all the wariness that can be used, it may yet befall a discreet man to be mistaken in his choice, and we have plenty of examples. The soberest and best-governed men are least practised in these affairs; and who knows not that the bashful muteness of a virgin may oft-times hide all the unliveliness and natural sloth which is really unfit for conversation. Nor is there that freedom of access granted or presumed as may suffice to a perfect understanding till too late; and where any indisposition is suspected, what more usual than the persuasion of friends that acquaintance, as it increases, will amend all?” (Here I seemed to hear the good old gentleman, my father-in-law, pleading my cause.) “And, lastly, it is not strange that many who have spent their youth chastely are in some things not so quick-sighted while they haste too eagerly to light the nuptial torch: nor is it, therefore, that for a modest error a man should forfeit so great an happiness, and no charitable means to release him; since they who have lived most loosely prove most successful in their matches, because their wild affections, unsettling at will, have been as so many divorces to teach them experience.”
These words of my husband’s, when I read them, brought me into a very lively remembrance of him, after that I had put him out of my mind for weeks and months past. Being now older by two years than when he had married me, and having gained a better conceit of myself, I was ill-content that he should portray me as an image of earth and phlegm, and as of a perpetually dismal and sullen temper. In my mind I fancied myself back again in his company and answering his vehement accusations of my earthiness with smiling wit and pithy sayings. And always the same thought returned: “Yet, however loud he may rail and lament, he is still my husband and he and I are indissolubly married with a golden ring, as he knows as well as I; and neither of us may by Law ever marry again in the lifetime of the other. I would to God that this were not so, for since Mun’s father is slain, Mun may follow his own inclinations; who is already an officer of note in the King’s Army, with just expectations of high preferment. Were it not for this impediment of my marriage, he would assuredly have ridden up from Oxford the other day and asked leave to marry me, and my father would have yielded me to him very cheerfully. Nor am I to be deceived as to my husband’s affections: for, I doubt not, he loves me passionately and knows in his own heart how sadly he has mistreated me, yet is too proud to acknowledge his error. He sent me away for two months to punish me; not for two years to punish himself. And I dare swear that no other woman but myself will ever please him; for, however fair of face or rational in conversations she may be, his soul is yet ensnared in the tresses of my hair, and until he has lain with me and had his whole desire of me he must continue like the unquiet spirit, spoken of in the parable, who walked abroad seeking rest, but found none.”
This doctrine of my husband’s, though (as I say) no new one, was beyond expression distasteful to the Westminster Assembly. When an Extraordinary Day of Humiliation was appointed in London, because of the King’s victories in Cornwall, and when upon that day a learned Presbyterian, Mr. Herbert Palmer, was called upon to preach before the two Houses of Parliament, Mr. Palmer singled out my husband’s book as the most impudent of any that year published and the most deserving to be burned. In this sermon, preached against Toleration and Liberty of Conscience, my husband was ranked among polygamists and advocates of doctrines so monstrous that no sane person could embrace them.
When this sermon was published, with other tracts, among them one of Mr. Prynne’s, charging my husband with libertinism, lawlessness, heresy and atheism, he defended himself very fiercely in his Tetrachordon and his Colasterion, shooting out his quills like a royal porpentine. Then, when the Stationers’ Company complained against him to the Parliament that his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce had been published contrary to the Parliamentary Ordinance which required that no book should be published without a licence, then he turned in rage against this new infringement of his liberty and addressed Parliament with a book called Areopagitica, pleading for the liberation of the Press. For my husband was ever conscious of his superior learning and detested that the judgment of his own books, as being either good or bad, should be in the hands of unlearned men of common capacity, with liberty to strangle them at birth after a hasty view.
So I pass on to the New Year of 1645, a year memorable to me on many sad accounts, and a strange one; one which began publicly with the beheading of Archbishop Laud, after a trial for treason that had lasted for four years. That year brought the early stirrings of a third power which, presently, intervening in the dispute between a Prelatical King and his Presbyterial Parliaments of Westminster and Edinburgh, first broke the power of the King and then by threats and main force broke the power of the Presbyterians, too, both in England and Scotland, and ruled in their stead. This power was resident in the English Army of the New Model, which was first formed in the winter of 1644–5, and which in Oxford the wits drolled against as the “New Noddle,” consisting of 14,000 foot in coats of Venice red and 7,600 buff-coated horse, and a serviceable train of artillery. As I have already told, it had been resolved in London that the King could not be brought to reason unless the command of the forces of Parliament were taken from the hands of sick, old or irresolute persons, how worthy so ever, and entrusted to the young, healthy and resolute. It was resolved, too, that reliance must be put not in levies compelled to serve for a season, whose only thought was a speedy return to the shop or the plough, but in soldiers of all the year round who would voluntarily make war their profession; and that three ill-clothed, ill-armed and disorderly armies must be reduced into one which should suffer from none of these defects, but might be counted upon to give a good account of itself against any force that the King might bring together.
The Earl of Essex11 having lost the confidence of Parliament by his unkind desertion of General Skippon’s army in Cornwall, the young Sir Thomas Fairfax, son of the Lord Fairfax, was appointed Captain-General, and General Skippon his Major-General of Foot. There was no officer appointed at first to be Lieutenant-General of Horse, but presently this appointment fell to General Cromwell, as the person fittest to command, though by the Self-Denying Ordinance all Members of Parliament had been required to relinquish their commissions in the service.
General Skippon assisted Sir Thomas Fairfax when he scrutinized the list of officers for their fitness to command. When a choice was made from those of the former armies, a very great number, most of them Scots, who had done long service in foreign parts were set on the shelf; and commissions were renewed to no more than a dozen such. Whereat, when a very great outcry and complaint was raised, General Skippon answered that the Dutch and Swedish services were ill schools for this present war, and that veteran officers were in general without zeal in the service, neglectful of their soldiers, inclined to the abuse and plunder of inoffensive country people, inadvertent of the enemy’s motions, and either unwilling or unable to learn that an English war, if it were ever to have an end, must be waged decently in an English fashion. And he said that the fifteen hundred or more veteran officers who served in the Royal Army were so many thorns in the King’s flesh or pebbles in his shoe.
Contrary to what has been alleged by the King’s party, the officers nominated for the New Model were for the most part noblemen or gentlemen of good birth and attainments; nevertheless, Generals Fairfax and Skippon did not scruple to entrust the command of regiments to men of low birth if they were the fittest for his purpose—as to Colonels Okey, Pryde and Ewer, whose trades had been ship’s-chandler, drayman and servingman, but who had done experimental service and shown their martial skill in a multiplicity of battles and sieges and skirmishes. General Fairfax would not take the commission that was offered him by Parliament, until it were amended: for it ran like all the others “…for the Defence of the King’s Person….” This he accounted hypocrisy, because a bullet could not distinguish between King and commoner; and that clause was therefore omitted from all the other commissions.
In this Army, which was well-managed, well-paid and victorious in almost every battle that it fought, there sprang up so great an esteem of soldierly qualities, as courage, endurance, cleanliness, comradely love and the like, that uniformity of religious doctrine was no longer considered a matter of chief importance; and when the Presbyterial ministers who had marched with the armies now forsook the military life, as too arduous, and betook themselves to a quieter way, the troops were left to the ministrations of four or five bolder spirits, all of them Secretaries, as Peters, Dell, Saltmarsh, “Doomsday” Sedgwick and the rest, who cared nothing for the smoke of powder or the hum of bullets, and themselves dealt death in battle.
As the martial discipline was severe and regular, and the officers forbade all riot and licentiousness as unworthy of good soldiers, so it was natural that a relaxation and vent of their confined spirits should be found in religious speculation and visions over the camp-fire at night, and in occasional drum-head preachments of the most fanciful extravagance, by sergeants and corporals and common soldiers; where-unto, if they stopped short of plain atheism and disowned Popery and Prelaty, such toleration was accorded that, in the same troop of one hundred horse, one might number sectaries of thirty different schisms, such as Anabaptists, Old Brownists, Traskites, Anti-Scripturists, Familists, Soul-Sleepers, Questionists, Seekers, Chiliasts, Sebaptists, and even Divorcers of the sect of John Milton. Strange it was then that a soldier might with impunity address God the Father in so familiar a fashion that it would make any ordinary man sweat cold and his skin rise into goose-flesh; yet if he were but half so bold with the Lieutenant of his troop or company he would be cashiered by order of a court-martial and have his tongue bored clean through with a red-hot needle.
Some regiments of foot stood fast by their presbyterial opinions (as did their Scottish allies, who tig-tagged about the country under colour of making war); but the horse, who were the glory of the Army, for their hardiness and boldness, were almost every man of Independent judgment and jested against the Presbyters as “Priest-biters” and against the Scots as “Sots” who were always in the rearward in any enterprise. The National Covenant they scorned as a thing imposed upon our nation by these same Sots, and asked sneeringly: “Was the Holy Ghost indeed conveyed from Edinburgh to London in a cloak-bag?” The Assembly of Presbyterial Divines at Westminster was the butt of their sharpest scorns—against “Dry-Vines” and “Dissembly Men.”
This new-fangled army came against Oxford in the Spring of 1645, from Windsor where it had mustered; with great store of cannons, shells, hand-grenades, gunpowder, spades, pickaxes and scaling ladders. But first General Cromwell, riding out from Watlington upon St. George’s Day (which happened to be a market-day at Oxford) with 1,500 horse, made an assault upon the Earl of Northampton’s regiment, that lay at Islip. He came up by way of Wheatley and passed through Forest Hill in the evening, his troopers armed only with pistols and swords, and wearing high-crowned felt hats, buff coats, great loose cloaks, breeches of grey cloth, and calves-leather boots. At the first alarm our dragoons jumbled away from the town—for their stomachs would not serve them to stand it out—and galloped to Islip to warn the Earl. My father was in Oxford at the market with Zara and two of my young brothers, William and Archdale. In his absence, my mother stood at the gate of the house to answer any question that might be asked; but it seems that the Parliament soldiers who had been quartered on us in the first year of the war had given a good report of us, and there was no plundering or other mischief done us.
My mother sighingly exclaimed to me, when she saw the good order in which the soldiers rode, that she reckoned one troop of those plain prick-eared rascals to be worth a whole squadron of the lace-coated Royal horse; and she was justified in this, for the next day in an encounter at Islip, of which we heard the confused roar carried down the wind, a great slaughter was made of the Earl of Northampton’s regiment in a chase of four miles, and about 500 horses taken and 200 prisoners and the Queen’s Standard. Moreover, Bletchingdon House was seized, and without bloodshed, because of the ladies come there on a visit to the young wife of Colonel Windebank, its commander (who was the same gentleman who had brought me from London): for General Cromwell had threatened to grant no quarter if the house were put to storm.
Colonel Windebank, being set at large, returned to Oxford, where he was tried by a court-martial and found guilty of faint-heartedness and shot to death in Merton College, dying very bravely; I think that had the Queen been at the King’s side she would have constrained him to reprieve the Colonel, forasmuch as what he had done was for the honour of the ladies, fearing the deep barbarousness of General Cromwell’s mind. Yet, the Parliamentarians in general used their prisoners civilly, as being fellow-Englishmen and Englishwomen, and abstained from unnecessary plunder; whereas, many of the King’s officers and soldiers, notably those commanded by the Prince Rupert, used indiscriminate barbarities learned in the German wars. They would strip a man to his skin before they slew him; and when Bolton in Lancashire was taken, there was massacre, ravishment, and horrid cruelties, the like of which had never before been seen in England since pagan times.
This was a new thing, that rebels should be the orderly ones, and the King’s men a rabble; in the days of Wat Tyler and Jack Cade it had been clean contrariwise. And some of the Parliament men even-denied that they were “soldiers,” forasmuch as this word expresses a man who serves for pay and is content merely to obey his Prince or governor. And they would by no means be considered as mere machines, or as having forfeited all right to an opinion of their own upon the better governing of their country. They were not hireling troops, they said, nor yet forced men, but volunteers; mostly freeholders and burghers, not lavishly paid, and often with great arrears owing, yet content to continue staunchly in the service wherein they had engaged upon matter of conscience. They were generally of opinion that the duration of Parliaments ought to be limited, but that Parliament should be regularly summoned; that elections ought to be better regulated, the representation better distributed; improper privileges and the coercive power of Bishops to be removed (though the Bishops might remain, for all they cared); the King, of whom they still spoke with tender, dutiful sorrow, to be restored to his rights, but with safeguards set upon his abuse of them; the laws to be simplified and legal expenses lessened; monopolies to be set aside; tithes commuted, etc., etc. I could not hate them, nor could I even laugh at them for Roundheads, because a great part of them wore their hair long, especially the horse.
My father with his carts and wains was forbidden to cross East Bridge from Oxford to come back to Forest Hill; and my mother was sorely distressed for his safety and in two minds whether to ask for a safe-conduct to go down to him in Oxford (which would have been granted her, I believe), or whether to hold her ground. Now, in the October before this, a soldier of the Oxford garrison, roasting a stolen pig in a hovel in Thames Street, near to the Cornmarket, had set the building a-fire; and the wind blowing strong from the north, all the wooden houses on the western side of the Cornmarket from Brocardo, or the North Gate, to Carfax were burned down. Among these was the store-house that had been our refuge in the year before; and all my father’s timber was burned with it. Knowing therefore that in Oxford we had no longer any place to call our own, and that lodgings were hardly to be found, except at excessive charges, my mother decided to remain in Forest Hill. Yet there was danger here also, for we were within range of the great guns of St. Clement’s Port; and one day, as I worked in the upper dairy-house, a cannon bullet of nine pounds weight came hissing quite over the roof and fell in the great meadow beyond.
Colonel Sir Robert Pye, the Younger, who commanded a regiment of horse in the Parliamentary service and who in the year before had reduced Taunton to obedience, called upon my mother one day soon after. He drank wine with us in the little parlour and undertook that no harm should come either to our house or our people. With him came one of his captains, formerly a barrister of the Middle Temple and since become famous, by name Henry Ireton.
Sir Robert had been grievously complained against by the Lady Cary Gardiner, when she had last visited us, for it was he who had assaulted and burned down Hillesden House in Buckinghamshire, the residence of her uncle, Sir Alexander Denton. This was the same house where Mun had been received charitably after his disgrace at Oxford University. My mother, who held Sir Alexander in great esteem, could not readily forgive Sir Robert and, so soon as courtesy permitted, withdrew from his presence upon some household excuse. However, Sir Robert did not at once take his leave, but remained in the parlour, and began to discourse with me upon the subject of my marriage. He was no less a Presbyterian now than when, on Twelfth Night, five years before, my Godmother Moulton had required from him a speech in praise of Bishops.
“Madam,” said he, “your husband, Mr. Milton, in a book he has written touching the doctrine and discipline of divorce has scandalized many; and has led many astray. Among them, to my own knowledge, is the woman-preacher, Mrs. Attaway, a lace-woman, who has for some time past exercised a marvellous influence over the multitude who visit her conventicle in Coleman Street. Well, this woman has been persuaded by your husband’s book, and being married to an unsanctified husband who ‘does not walk in the way of Sion, nor speak the tongue of Canaan,’ as she says, but is an honest soldier in our army—she, then, courts a fellow-preacher, one William Jenney, a married man, who falls in love with her. He likewise, finding his wife not of a matchable conversation with him, divorces her in the manner recommended by your husband, and leaves her great with child, and without a penny of money, to feed and clothe her poor children as best she can. Then Mrs. Attaway and the said Jenney declare themselves man and wife before God, and say that ‘Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.’ Now they account themselves free to stain Sergeant Attaway’s bed with adulterous sweats; thus two households are ruined, and two souls almost irrecoverably lost. Oh, the beasts, were they rightly served they should be whipped home into their right wits!”
“I am truly sorry to hear of this, your Worship,” said I. “But though my husband has assured me that, being of one flesh with him, I may in no wise escape damnation if he be damned, yet I cannot in conscience find myself answerable to God for what he may write in his books.”
“Not directly answerable perhaps,” he replied. “Yet I believe you to be the procatarctical cause—I mean that extrinsic cause which, though unwittingly, excites the principal cause to action. For had you not removed from your husband upon a quarrel, as the common report is, and been here environed by the sons of Mars, he would never have brooded upon these matters, nor would his wits have turned to almost an atheistical frenzy.”
“Common report is here more than commonly at fault, your Worship,” I answered, “if I be accused of removing from my husband upon a froward impulse. For, though I confess that my husband had fault to find with my Forest Hill manner of guitar-playing, yet upon my word, I did not quarrel with him (as he will himself assure you) but was sent peaceably back to this house for the summer holidays. Then the war ensuing, and my husband being by the King held a traitor, he could not venture to Forest Hill to fetch me back; and my father was unwilling to hazard my chastity between the armies. So at Forest Hill perforce I remain.”
“I am glad to hear this account from you,” said he, “which I cannot reject for untrue. But what now hinders your return?”
“Two things,” I replied. “My father’s absence in Oxford, and my husband’s insistence that the £1,000 portion promised him in his marriage contract be paid him right down on the nail at the same time when I return to him.”
“As to the first hindrance,” said he, “though it may seem unkind in you to depart suddenly without a farewell to your father, yet consider this. Your first duty is to your husband, from whom you have been separated by the accident of war: you must now go to him as speedily as possible, lest you incur the charge of wilful desertion, and in this I undertake to assist you. Nay, more, if you are unwilling, I will even command and constrain you to go to him. As for the money, your father is not here, and evidently therefore he cannot send it; and your husband must wait until such time as we take Oxford and fetch your father home. To be sure, I think it unlikely that your father’s estate, being caught, as it were, between the upper and the nether millstone, will yield even a small part of the marriage portion agreed upon; however, that fault lies not at your door.”
I thanked Sir Robert for his solicitude and kindness but answered: “Your Worship, what you say is true, beyond denial. But I would have you remember that my husband is a very proud, choleric man, and if I were to come to London it is likely enough that he would not receive me again, and then I am utterly undone. For I believe that the small fault that he found in me has ulcerated in his mind and I am become to him a sort of monster, rather to run at with a charged pike than to salute with affectionate kisses.”
Then for the first time Captain Ireton spoke. He was a reserved, saturnine gentleman, with a small face like a cat’s, and known to my father from the time that he was a Bachelor of Arts at Oxford University, and used to course game with him. When I looked upon Captain Ireton he put me in mind of the old adage, “The cat knows well whose beard he licks”; yet I did not mistrust him on that account, but only wondered why Sir Robert had discoursed before him so freely upon a private matter. Said he: “You will pardon my boldness, Mrs. Milton, but it was I who brought Sir Robert here, not he me. My friend Mr. Agar, who married your husband’s sister and whose step-sons (I learn) are taught by Mr. Milton, is greatly concerned in this matter. For Mr. Agar is a God-fearing man and admires your husband in almost every particular except only as touching his new doctrine of divorce, which he detests. It seems now that your husband has written in a book, called Tetrachordon, published a few weeks since, that if the Law will not yield him that right of divorce which he pants after, why then he gives fair warning of his intention to follow his own conscience: he declares that the Law, not he, must bear the censure of the consequences.”
“That is a very petulant decision,” said I, “and will do him no good.”
Captain Ireton said again: “I would not have you think, Mistress, that I am evilly disposed against your husband or would turn your heart against him. I confess that I agree with him in this matter of free consciences, and am no Presbyterian, as is Sir Robert here; nevertheless I am always vexed when I see an honest man, for his conscience’s sake, performing any act of plain folly. Well, I will deal freely with you, Madam: your husband has won the admiration of a Doctor Davis, a Welsh physician, who has a daughter famed for her wit and beauty and who is ready to bestow her upon your husband, after he shall have cast you off by a private bill of divorcement; and though the gentlewoman herself is averse to the motion, she must obey her father blindly, just as you obeyed yours when he married you to Mr. Milton. This is very true that I tell you; God knows I lie not. Now, I am not one to bandy idle compliments, but this lady is not so fair as you are by one-half, and as for wit, I judge you to be a woman of spirit and discernment in no way her inferior. To be brief: Mr. Agar has begged me, if I pass this way, to warn you of what liquor is brewing in your vat, and to urge your return before your husband commits a rash act (matching old Lamech, who was the prime bigamist and corruptor of marriage) and drags a very honest, pretty gentlewoman into the mire with him. Nor is Mr. Agar disinterested in this: for clearly if your husband brings into his house, as its mistress, a woman who is no more his wife than the Queen is mine, it will be to Mr. Agar’s sorrow and scandal, and he will be obliged to remove his two step-sons, your nephews, from your husband’s charge.”
While Captain Ireton was yet speaking my mother returned, and I said to her very calmly: “Madam, these two officers are come to warn me of my husband’s intention to discard me and take another wife, and have chalked out the way I should go. Colonel Pye has been good enough to offer his services in the matter of conducting me safely to London, and will take no refusal. Since, then, I have no wish to be publicly whored, and since I find no impediment to my returning, except only that no marriage-portion can go with me, return I will—by your leave—for I conceive that my duty obliges me to it. Moreover, I can say before these officers what I could not say before our friends of the contrary party: this, that whether King or Parliament be in the right concerns me not, being but a woman, but certain it is that the Army of Parliament is by far the better ordered, the better clothed, the better mounted, and the better disciplined, and cannot but prevail over the King’s. I foresee therefore that my father will never recover the money wrung and screwed from him under the name of loans, nor yet the great sum owed to him for the billeting of troops and for the wood sold to the King’s Quarter-Master-General; for the receipts that he holds will be worthless paper if the King be defeated. Yet he can hope for no remission of the private debts owed by him—as the great debt he owes to Sir Robert Pye, the Elder—and therefore he will be ruined. If now I return to my husband and contrive to please him, I shall be able, I trust, to provide shelter and food for you if ever you be cast adrift by the King’s defeat.”
My mother at first made many objections, but at last saw the justice of my reasoning. She gave her consent, upon Sir Robert’s solemn assurance that no harm would come to me and that, if my husband rejected me, he would have me brought safe home again. I asked Captain Ireton where I should lodge in London while Mr. Agar prepared a reconciliation between myself and my husband, and he undertook that Mr. Agar would see me well lodged. Then I asked when might I be convoyed to London, and Colonel Pye told me: “To-morrow morning, if you wish, for I am sending two wounded officers to their homes and you shall dress their wounds for them on the way in payment of your fare.”
“At your service, sir,” said I, cheerfully, but in truth with a sinking heart: for what Captain Ireton had told me about Dr. Davis’s daughter put me in a perplexity. It seemed that I would be forced now to pretend more love for my husband than in truth I felt, if I wished to be his wife again; and to do so went against my womanly conscience. Yet I was faced with Hobson’s choice: “this or nothing.”
When the two officers had departed the house, my mother used me very kindly. “Marie,” said she, “you are a better daughter to me than ever I supposed. Go, with my blessing, to that mad dog your husband—who cares not how he bites, nor whom—and let me see whether you cannot charm him back into sanity with good words. I give you leave to tell him that your frowardness in not returning with that sour woman of his, when he commanded you, was forced upon you by myself, and that you now repent grievously, being overcome by the godly suasions of Colonel Pye. My advice to you is this: abase yourself before him; go on your belly like the serpent; eat dust; assuage his wrath with guile. But so soon as ever he has broken his contract with Dr. Davis and has received you to his bosom at last, why then you are at liberty to rise up again, springing upon his shoulders and making bloody his sides with your spurs.”
“And may our maid Trunco go with me, Madam?” I asked.
She answered: “With all my heart, though in taking Trunco from me, you rob me again of the cheerfullest and best woman that ever I had.”
So I gathered together my ends and awls and packed them in my coffer: everything I possessed except my vellum book, which I left in my mother’s charge, but took the key with me. Once more it was good-bye to merry sweet Forest Hill, where I was born, and ho! for that nasty, musty, fusty, dusty, rusty City of London, the birth-place of my husband, which I must learn to love, even against my natural inclination!