In the short siege of Oxford at this time undertaken by the Army of the Captain-General, Sir Thomas Fairfax, two great misfortunes happened to my family; whereof I had no intelligence until a year later, and so can keep their discovery until my next chapter. Meanwhile, I may recount that by May 21st, 1645, the city was so straitened that no more provisions could come in; and that General Fairfax’s men built at Marston a new bridge over the Cherwell River, whereat Colonel Sir William Legge, the Governor, fearing an assault, was constrained to drown the meadows and to fire houses in the suburbs to make his defence more secure. Yet there were weak places in the circuit of works, especially to the northward, and the sentries were not so wide awake, nor the arms kept in such good order as when Sir Arthur Aston had been Governor.12 For Sir Arthur, who was a Papist, had been a very severe, vigilant officer and fined, or confined, his men for drunkenness as though they had been Roundheads, and forbade all tippling after tattoo. Moreover, the citizens, now that they were paid in promises only, not at all in money, and suffered great inconvenience from the soldiers quartered upon them, and saw that the King’s cause was tottering, grew restless and showed themselves backward and sullen in the work demanded of them.
However, in the event, the city was not put to the storm; for when General Fairfax learned, a week later, that the King had left Oxford and was gone into the North to raise the siege of Chester (where Sir Mun was hard pressed), he likewise raised the siege of Oxford and followed after him; and not long after, on June 14th, His Majesty was caught and routed at Naseby, a village near the town of Daventry, from which defeat he never afterwards recovered, though it was by no means the last battle of this war, and though Oxford held out for better than a year afterwards.
Naseby fight was a very hotly-contested one, in which the Prince Rupert totally routed General Ireton’s horse on the one wing, and General Cromwell totally routed the horse opposed to him on the other; and the main bodies charged each other with incredible fierceness, coming to blows with the butt-ends of their muskets. The battle-cry in the Parliament Army was “God our Strength”; and in the King’s it was “Queen Marie.” General Skippon was shot through the side most grievously, the bullet carrying into the wound a piece of his breast-plate and some shreds of his shirt; and General Ireton was run through the thigh with a pike and into the face with a halberd, and his horse shot under him. General Cromwell was also in great peril, being worsted in single combat with a captain of the King’s horse, who with a blow of his broad-sword cut the ribbon that secured General Cromwell’s headpiece, and then pitched it off his head and would have cloven him to the chin with a second stroke had not his party ridden to the rescue; then a trooper, in the very nick, threw him a headpiece of his own, which General Cromwell catched and clapped upon his head (though the wrong way about) and so wore it the rest of the day. The King himself managed the fight on the other side, very magnanimously and expertly, as was confessed even by his enemies, and exposed himself no less courageously than any other man upon the field; but it was not to be his luck to die in battle.
It passed wonder how few were the slain in so many hours of bitter fighting, front to front over a space of one mile, not above six hundred men of the King’s army of 7,500 nor above two hundred men of the New Model army, which was of double the size. This caused the battle to be belittled in comparison with those fought at Edgehill and Marston Moor and elsewhere, for he is generally accounted the best commander who sheds most blood; thus was Pompey styled “the Great” (a title denied to Julius Cæsar), forasmuch as Pompey in his battles had slain or lost more than two million men, Julius only a bare million. In these late wars of our own, by the bye, steel killed far more than gunpowder (though gunpowder caused the more dismay among ill-trained troops); and disease, especially the camp fever and the small-pox, more than both steel and gunpowder together.
The victory at Naseby I heard celebrated with the loud acclamations of the London populace, the ringing of church bells and the whining chant of psalms in the streets and alleys. A few days later the prisoners taken in the battle were marched through the City streets, to the number of near 4,000, with a parade of captured standards, which were afterwards hung up in Westminster Hall. I did not care to watch the rout, for my heart was sore for the poor souls and I could not have abided to hear them hissed at and derided in their passage through the streets. When they were secured in the artillery ground of Tothill Fields, Parliament granted them a safe return to their homes if they would undertake to live peaceably for the future. Yet their confidence in the King’s cause was such that by far the greater number refused to renege; they were shipped off as indentured servants to the colonies.
I had taken my two wounded officers to their homes in Bishopsgate, each of whom tried to convert me to his religious tenets, one being an Anabaptist who had a broken shoulder, and the other a rank Socinian with a festered foot. The Anabaptist told me, among other things, how many secret well-wishers to Parliament were to be found in Oxford, from the rank of Colonel downwards, who gave constant information to General Fairfax of what passed in the city. Each man would leave his letter at certain houses, thrusting it in at a hole in a glass window as he untrussed in the street; which letters were at once conveyed over the works by men in the disguise of town gardeners, to a certain stinking ditch, two miles off, where an agent of Parliament was watching to receive them. After parting company with these officers I went by water to Westminster, to the house of Sir Robert Pye, M.P., the Elder, the same who held the mortgage upon our Manor. At this house Mr. Agar waited upon me, and made much of me and rejoiced in my return, and told me that his kinsman Mr. Abraham Blackborough had a fair chamber prepared against my coming. Then, with Trunco, I went by coach to Mr. Blackborough’s, which was the same house in the Lane of St. Martin’s le Grand where my brothers and sisters were lodged three years before this; but we went after dark, because it was intended that no rumour should reach my husband that I was harboured there; and as I was forbidden to show myself at the window, so Trunco was also forbidden to reveal my true name to the servants.
Mr. Blackborough, a pleasantly satirical gentleman, told me that my husband in his daily walk Citywards in the afternoon would oftentimes stop at this house to enquire whether any new pamphlets were come in; for Mr. Blackborough had a passion for buying pamphlets and my husband found it more convenient to read them at leisure at Mr. Blackborough’s than hurriedly at the book-sellers’ of St. Paul’s Churchyard, where he might be rudely told “either buy or begone!” and where no chair nor table was provided for his comfort. If he came on the next day, as was hoped, Mr. Blackborough would encourage him with a talk of a very fair work entitled Matrimony at Pleasure and having particular reference to himself. “When your husband comes in,” said he, “if I find him in a pleasant mood, I will give you the cue by raising my voice and saying, ‘Now, sir, the pamphlet awaits your perusal!’ and then I will leave the stage to you. But, Madam, from his discourse on a hundred occasions, I judge that he has so fixed an aversion from you, which I might name a passionate disgust—for whatever small imperfections you may have he sees through a multiplying glass—that it will be no easy matter for you to achieve a reconcilement with him. However, in the very excess of his embitteration lies your opportunity: for by long brooding upon the matter he has convinced himself that you resemble the Gorgon Medusa, with snakes for hair, and vulpine features, and a cold petrifying eye; and therefore the surprise of finding you to be, in fact, altogether different from his morbid imaginings will make your task not altogether impossible.”
“How do you advise me to bear myself towards him?” I asked. “For, to deal honestly with you, I come back not because I am drawn by any great love of him, nor because I once erred and now repent of the fault, but because, to my mind, a wife’s fated place is with her husband even though he be a bad one—and Mr. Milton is a better husband, I believe, than many that there are. Besides, as I told Colonel Sir Robert Pye, I did not leave my husband of my own motion, but was sent away by him on a two-months’ vacation to my father’s house. Then, the troubles intervening, I have now these three years been prevented from returning to him, and he (as I suppose) from coming to fetch me, merely by the accidents of war.”
“That may well be your view of the case, Madam,” he answered, “but you will not find it by any means acceptable to him in his present mood. For he has been told that your father considers it a blot upon his escutcheon to have married his daughter to a ‘Roundhead traitor’; which name he much resents, from the pride that he has not only in the great Cause of Liberty, but in the handsomeness of his long hair. I counsel you therefore to salve the sores of his injured pride by as sweet a flow of repentant tears as you can pump up from the fountains of your eyes, and to abase yourself upon the floor before him as flat as any Welsh griddle-cake; and I advise you, too, to accept submissively any impositions that he may lay upon you in his stiff, pedagogical manner. For, to deal freely with you, while I admire his learning and parts beyond measure, I suspect him to be a very simpleton in domestic affair.”
“My mother has much the same opinion of him as yourself, sir,” said I, “and has given me much the same advice. I will be guided by you both, and I am sincerely grateful to you, sir, for all your kindness.”
Well, the next afternoon at about two o’clock, watching the passers-by from behind the window curtain, at last I descried my husband approaching, with his brisk step and his cane carried at the trail, like a pike. He appeared very cheerful and ran nimbly up the steps of our house to knock at the door.
Presently I heard his foot on the stair, and his remembered voice and rolling discourse sounded from the adjoining room. He was, I think, upon a new scheme, which filled his mind at this time, for the founding of novel military academies where the well-born youth should be trained in all arts and useful sciences as rulers of the yeomanly and proletarian parts of the nation. I overheard him when he shouted and said that the Universities were nurseries of superstition and idleness, almost beyond hope of reformation. Mr. Blackborough was humouring him with “You are right, sir!” and “Very true, sir!” and it came to me that doubtless what my husband had meant, when he wrote of his need for a wife of fit and matchable conversation, was that I had never given him his “You are right, Husband,” and “Very true, Husband!” when he expatiated to me at tedious length upon such subjects as these.
While now I waited for my cue, I dwelt in my mind upon all the saddest things that I could recall from histories and plays, as the death of Hector and the blinding of King Lear, to put me artificially into the necessary frame of spirit; but none would serve my purpose, until I remembered my little white spaniel bitch, named Blanche, which was given me on my seventh birthday—how by a carelessness of my own in playing with her she had broke her leg and whined piteously; and how my brother James had put her out of pain by the discharge of his fowling-piece. At this my eyes began to prick and the tears to flow. Then the door opened seasonably and Mr. Blackborough cried out: “Now, sir, the pamphlet awaits your perusal. I hope you will read it with joy; and, what is more, I warrant the pages to be still uncut.”
I advanced, with faltering steps, weeping, and with my hands clasped upon my bosom. My husband gazed at me with astonishment, taking an eager step towards me, but then bethought himself and recoiled in dismay. I knelt down submissively upon the mat and abased my head, so that my hood tumbled off and showed him my hair. I began to sob persuasively and to mutter broken words, especially “Oh, forgive, forgive me!” which were, indeed, the very ones I had used to my poor whining Blanche. Then, all together in a knot, in came old Mr. Milton, and my sister-in-law, Mrs. Agar, and the Widow Webber, mother to Mr. Christopher Milton’s wife. They had waited together in another room, and now unanimously pleaded with my husband, begging him to forgive me who was so young, so fair, and so contrite. Only Mr. Blackborough stood a little apart from the rest, with a sour-sweet grin as he watched the scene played out. The old gentleman begged my husband not to take it ill that I had left the promised portion behind me; for this was no fault of mine, and if he dealt honestly with me, he might be sure that my father would in the event deal honestly with him.
My husband stood amazed and irresolute, but they all wept with me, even the old gentleman, and he could not harden his heart when his father wept. He raised me up from the floor and took me in his arms to comfort me, but did not yet kiss me. Then the company stole away, on their tip-toes for silence, one by one, and left us together.
I begged my husband to assure me that he had forgiven me, and I put the whole blame for my frowardness upon my mother, as she had desired me to do, and continued with my facile weeping until he said at last: “It is God’s will that I should forgive you. It comes not easily, so enormous is the wrong that you have done me, so hateful your ingratitude. Yet who can stand against the commandment of God? Therefore: Woman, I forgive you!’”
“You will receive me back as your wife?” I asked in low, choking voice. “I am still a maid, and have learned my lesson, and will render you every obedience from this time forward for the remainder of my life.”
He answered, recovering himself: “I will take you back presently; but not yet, for I must have time to make proper preparation, and to be assured that you are sincere in your repentance, and that you are not come here maliciously to father on me the brat of some licorish Cavalier captain or sergeant-major.”
“I am content to wait,” said I, drying my tears with my handkerchief. “I will wait twenty years, if only you will receive me back at the last.”
Then he set upon my lips a kiss of love and hate intermingled, and recalled his kinsfolk and told them of his reconcilement with me. They rejoiced and praised his wisdom and magnanimity, and took their leave of us in marvellous contentment. I was astonished at my own facility for play-acting, and hated myself as an abject, a wretch, a plain liar, and shrank conscientially from the grave, ironical congratulations of the good Mr. Blackborough.
My husband told me that he had lately undertaken the education of seven more boys, besides the five that he already taught (and not the small fry of the parish, neither, but the sons of noblemen and gentlemen of merit) who would lodge with him. Wherefore, since he was resolved to have his bedchamber to himself and only to admit me into it upon occasion, there would for a while be no room for me in his house. However, he said that he had already found a house more suitable to his purposes, namely one of twelve rooms situate in the Barbican, a street that leads out of Aldersgate, where he proposed to settle at Michaelmas. He commanded me to wait patiently for three months, and undertook that if I pleased him by my demeanour, and if the Widow Webber (with whom I should lodge in the meanwhile at her house in St. Clement’s Churchyard, off the Strand) gave him a good report of me, then he would sign an Act of Oblivion, and enter into a firm treaty of peace with me.
Yet I believed that it irked him to abandon his grand design of marriage with Dr. Davis’s daughter (who was pointed out to me in the street one day, and was, I own, far handsomer of feature than I), and the more so because she flouted him—for he hated to be flouted or crossed; however, abandon it he did, and resigned himself to a renewal of marriage with me.
Thereafter he wrote no more upon divorce, declaring that he had written enough to serve his purpose, and wished to be remembered by posterity for other books, not for these only. Instead, he busied himself with his History of England from the Earliest Times, written after the pithy model of Tacitus’s histories, and with the collecting of his poems, in English, Italian, Greek, and Latin, for their publication. It was wonderful how jealous he seemed that no verse that he had ever written should be forgotten, not even his two or three college exercises on the theme of Gunpowder Plot, and the two elegies on dead bishops of which Mr. Pory had spoken, and the rhymed translations he had made, while yet a schoolboy, of the Psalms of David. Yet upon the title-page, when the book was printed, appeared a modest quotation from an Eclogue of Virgil’s:
Bind me the green field-spikenard on my brow,
Lest ill tongues hurt the bard who is to be!
His meaning was, that the spikenard should be stop-gap until he had earned the laurel or green ivy by his grand dramatic poetry.
To Trunco he was land. Some months before my return to him, he had found Jane Yates to be treacherous and a petty thief of pewter and linen, and when he learned that she had sold some of the books from his library to a bookseller in Little Britain he suddenly dismissed her, though upon the old gentleman’s plea for mercy he did not have her committed for trial. Then, after one Mrs. Catherine Thomson had managed awhile for him, not very well but honestly at least, he employed Trunco in his kitchen, and at a good wage when he found how much money she saved him every month by her wise management, and how much relish she gave even to simple meats by her judicious dressing of them. For before she came, the hardiest of his pupils had dared to complain openly of the victuals set before them.
The Widow Webber treated me no less affectionately than if I had been Thomasine Milton, her daughter, who since Reading was taken by Parliament had gone with her husband to live at Exeter. Mr. Christopher was then a Commissioner of the King to sequester estates of Parliamentarians; and the widow herself secretly favoured His Majesty, which was a prime cause of her showing kindness to me, for she knew that my family were of her opinion. By my husband’s desire, she kept me pretty close in the house, not allowing me to go out by myself even so far as the baker’s shop that lay four doors away—yet she contrived always to give me pleasant employment, so that I should not brood, and when I went out walking with her she took me often into the houses of her friends, who were livelier company than I had hoped to meet. They all consented that London was become horribly dull: no theatres, no horse-racing, no bear-baiting, no masques, even the suburban maypoles pulled down, the churches made as gloomy as jails, the mercers’ and drapers’ shops in mourning, hardly a chaise to be seen in all Hyde Park, the whole Town dead after nine o’clock at night. Money I had none, and it irked me not to have so much as sixpence to lay out upon coloured ribbons which the pedlar with a stealthy glance about him (because of the Ban and Anathema put by the Church upon all pretty toys) drew out from his pack to tempt me withal.
My husband came to the house almost every day and usually brought books suitable for my reading, and discoursed with me pleasantly; but never passed a night with me in my chamber. I found him far less severe than before in his notions of how a husband should rule his wife. “The wife,” said he, “is not to be held as a servant, but to be received graciously into her husband’s empire; though not equally; yet largely, as his own image and glory.” And, in a book, he had even written that where the wife exceeds her husband in prudence and dexterity, and he contentedly acknowledges the same, why then, let the wiser govern the less wise, as is natural!
While I was with the widow I had the sad intelligence that Captain Sir Thomas Gardiner, the Lady Cary’s husband, was slain in a skirmish near Aylesbury. She was then with child, and great hopes were held that she would bear a boy to perpetuate the line; but it proved a girl, and the poor Lady Cary is ever since slighted and despised by the Gardiners as having failed them.
Chester was again besieged, after an intermission of some months, but Sir Mun held it steadfastly for the King. In September the Prince Rupert surrended the city of Bristol to General Fairfax, a little too easily, which earned him the King’s severe displeasure. In the same month his Majesty, going up to the relief of Chester, was routed before the walls with sad loss. Then, though the garrison was much dismayed for lack of powder and provisions, yet Sir Mun would not yield, and there was much praise given him by the Widow and her acquaintances for his staunchness. At last I heard it confidently reported by a young gentlewoman that Sir Mun was lately married; but who his wife might be she knew not. This news struck me with a dull pain, yet somewhat reconciled me to my condition. I supposed the wife to be Doll Leke.
I dreamed of Mun, on the last night before I was taken to my husband’s new house in the Barbican. He was lying alone in his bed, and looked very sorrowfully at me, and asked me: “How, sweetheart, can you hope for happiness now? Or how can I? Yet one day we shall meet again, in spite of all, and be happy together.”
I will make no particular account of my bridal night, except to say that my husband omitted none of the concomitant pleasures prepared for me on the former occasion, not even the gold dust upon the coverlet; and that my mother was right, perhaps, when she denied hevirgins the right to wed any but widows. However, he had his will of me and I did nothing to displease him, and so great was his self-love that he could remark no absence of love in me while I was submissive to him. He commanded me to keep silence while he caressed me, lest by any loose or unlucky word I might break the spell and profane the sacred rite of which himself was priest and I the willing sacrifice.
Enough of this. He got me with child soon enough, and then caressed me no more, but made me sleep apart from him. He required me, for love of him, to accept a strange new course of life. I must lie at night upon a mattress of straw, not upon feathers, and eat coarse food, and wash myself only in cold water, and read no books but such as told of battles and dangerous enterprises. He also made an armoury of my bedchamber, bringing in swords and pikes and pistols, the walls he hung with red and pinned over with many escutcheons; and he took me often to watch the exercises in the Artillery Garden and in St. Martin’s Fields. This was not from any unkindness in him, but from a maggot that he had. For he hoped by these artificial means to beget a son, renowned for his hardiness, who would become a great Captain-General; and that thus an old prophecy might be fulfilled, which was translated from Greek into Latin by one Gildas, in the time of Claudius Cæsar, to the effect that all the world should be subdued at last by the British race. This prophecy, beginning;
Brute, sub occasum Solis,
and ending:
…Ipsis
Totius terræ subditus orbis erit.
he wrote out fairly in great letters on a board nailed to the foot of my hard bed; where I could not help but learn it by heart. Our son should be named Arthur, and therefore over the head of my bed hung a great A, embroidered in gold thread upon a silken flag of St. George. In this fancifulness of my husband’s I humoured him; and with what result will presently appear.
The Barbican was a somewhat noisy street; but the schoolroom where the boys were taught lay at the back of the house, so that then-studies were not much interrupted by the cries of fish-wives, pudding-wives and sellers of brooms, the singing of balladists, or the altercation of carters and coachmen. I was now at last entrusted with the management of the household; and contented my husband, who was good enough to tell me that Trunco and I together made a good team for his plough. Despite the prodigious rise in the cost of fuel and provisions of every sort, it cost me somewhat less (proportionably to the increase in the number of the household) to keep the house in food, drink, soap, candles and firing than it had cost Jane Yates, for all her ostentatious splitting of farthings. My husband now brought me little presents of sober-coloured silk and fine linen to wear when I had finished with my child-bearing, and once, for present use within doors, a silver brooch with garnets made in the form of a sword; but never would allow me to choose anything for myself in the shops, unless it were shoes or stockings or underlinen.
The boys were very good boys and soon came to treat me almost as their mother. Henry Lawrence and Cyriack Skinner (grandson to Sir Edward Coke the lawyer) and the young Earl of Barrimore were my favourites of the dozen that we had with us. My husband taught them to be good swordsmen, and also perfected them in all the locks and gripes of wrestling, and sometimes took them out with him upon excursions to see places of interest and to exercise themselves with rowing upon the river. He was become sparing of the ferule and stick, now that he was resigned to matrimony with me. We had excellent good neighbours, chief among them being that same Earl of Bridgewater, a former President of Wales, at whose castle at Ludlow my husband’s masque of Comus had been performed; with whom dwelt his daughter, the Lady Alice Egerton, who had been the Lady in the piece, and Mr. Thomas Egerton his son; all of whom used me very civilly. And also in The Barbican, by chance, dwelt Mr. Henry Lawes the musician, who had composed the music and played the part of Thyrsis in the same masque: a gentle, considerate and well-beloved person to whom my husband about this time addressed a sonnet, “Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured song, etc.” Thus I heard much music about this time. Yet my husband would not let me be present when soft or languorous airs were played or sung: for the sake of our unborn son, said he, I must rather hear the martial Doric strains that brace the mind, than those of Lydia that enervate it. Our child would be born, as he reckoned, toward the end of July, under the sign of Leo, which favours great captains, like none other in the Heavens.
The sonnet to Mr. Lawes came too late to be included in his book of poems, when he published it at the New Year of 1646; but among the other sonnets I found one evidently addressed to Dr. Davis’s daughter (though not by name) as a virgin wise and pure who had shunned the broad green way that leads down to destruction. This piece circumspectly promised the gentlewoman not marriage but a place at the marriage-feast when the bridegroom, with his feastful friends, should pass to bliss at the mid-hour of night; so I found no fault with it. My husband, whenever he writes a sonnet (and he has written no poem of greater scope since I have been with him) keeps a superstitious custom. For first he washes himself from head to foot and puts on clean linen and his best suit, but no sword; then with a cup of clean water in his hand he goes into a room that is well swept and bare of any furniture but a chair and table; where, having locked the door and commanded absolute silence throughout the house, he makes, I suppose, a religious invocation, drinks of the water and sets to. On the door of his room is pinned a warning paper, on which, enclosed in a laurel-wreath, is written the name of the Muse Calliope to whom he owes service.
Christmas was forbidden by Parliament to be kept in London for mince-pies and plum-porridge and holly-boughs were considered papistical idols; and my husband himself was content to let the feast pass by, for he said it was a great interrupter of study and business. Ah, but what a cold New Year led in 1646! On December 8th, at the new moon, it began to freeze and continued bitterly cold until the next new moon, the ice being of a wonderful thickness and no water running in the pipes, so that we had to buy water by the bucket at a high price; and for three weeks we were without coals and would have been without wood, too, but that the Earl of Bridgewater gave my husband leave to root up an old decayed elm from his garden; which, as a wood-monger’s daughter, I showed the boys how to reduce to billet wood with saw, beetle and wedge. Then day by day it thawed and by night it froze again, and the roads were terribly glancy for a month or more, so that it was a danger to walk; yet my husband bade me not to fear, so that our son should be born hardy. On the third day of February he took me out to hear martial music played at some muster of troops in St. Martin’s Fields, but I got no further than the gate of our house and then I slipped upon the ice and fell, and could not rise. I was in great fear lest I should miscarry, for a miscarriage, they say, brings no less painful a labour than a birth, and with nothing to show for it after; but this I was spared, though there were shudderings in my belly, and I suffered no greater visible hurt than a swollen ankle. My husband would not let me lie abed, but bade me wrap my ankle in cold, wet rags and so hobble about until I could walk again; which was to instruct our son in fortitude.
This third day of February was the day that Mun for lack of provisions, and of powder for his ordnance, was constrained to yield Chester, after a brave defence and upon honourable conditions. He marched his garrison out with colours flying, drums beating, matches alight, bullets in the soldiers’ mouths and bandoleers filled with powder. He was permitted to sail for Ireland, to join with the Lord Lieutenant, the Marquis of Ormonde, to whom the King had entrusted the task of combining the Confederate Papists in his interest against Parliament.
In England the war drew to a close with the surrender in March of Sir Ralph Hopton’s Cornish Army. Already in many parts of the country one verily might have believed himself in Ireland, the war had so impoverished the people. The King’s soldiers had almost starved those with whom they quartered and were half starved themselves for want of pay. They were become desperate, and raged about the country, breaking and robbing houses and passengers, and driving away cattle before the owners’ faces. Even their officers became abominable plunderers, and one who deserted to Parliament gave as his reason that when complaints came he was ashamed to look an honest man in the face: for it was truly as bad to him as a bullet. The Parliament soldiers, being by comparison well paid, seldom resorted to knavery, and therefore their cause was the more highly esteemed by the country people and prospered accordingly.
The King began once more to negotiate with the Westminster Parliament; but his demands were great and unacceptable. It was already debated by the Commons what rewards in rank and money should be given to the leaders who had brought them the victory; for only a few castles and garrisons remained still in the King’s hands. In April came Mr. Christopher Milton and his wife from Exeter, which was at last surrendered to Parliament. He had lost all his fortune except a house in Ludgate of an annual value of £40 per annum, for which he compounded, and went to live at the Widow Webber’s, my husband supplying him with a little necessary money until he could support himself by his exercise of the Law. In May, when I was in the seventh month of my account, came news that Woodstock Manor-house was stormed and the King fled from Oxford, in disguise as the servant of one of his gentlemen and that he was gone into Scotland, there to place himself at the disposal of the Scottish Parliament. With his loving Scots, he said, he had no quarrel that could not be patched.
Then Oxford was again closely besieged and in June the King wrote from Newcastle, permitting the Governor to yield on honourable terms: for he feared for the safety of the young Duke of York and his nephews the Prince Rupert (whom he had forgiven for his loss of Bristol) and the Prince Maurice. But Sir Thomas Glemham, the Governor, remained obdurate. General Skippon was charged with the construction of a stronger work on Headington Hill, and other works were raised all about the city. At first there was firing of great shot on both sides, of which several from Oxford fell in and about Forest Hill, and one killed Mr. Robert Hicks, a Nottinghamshire gentleman, as he rolled bowls upon our Manor-house green. But presently it was agreed to refrain from such dangerous work, lest the ancient churches and colleges of Oxford should suffer injury, and antiquity be slighted.
Sir Robert Pye the Elder sent an urgent message to my father, desiring him for his own advantage to leave the Manor-house and take refuge in Oxford before the siege should begin. For if that were done, then his son, the Colonel, might take possession of the Manor, by the terms of the mortgage; and this he had a right to do, seeing that the arrears of interest were not yet paid nor the principal sum returned. Thus the estate would not be sequestered by the Parliamentary Commissioners (as it would otherwise be); and Sir Robert undertook to act as a good neighbour to my father, and secure all the goods in and about the house and to yield all back to him, so soon as ever the times changed. Upon a distant noise of cannon, my father withdrew in a great hurry from the house and left the keys to be given to Colonel Pye, and fled to Oxford with all his household; where they lodged in an open cattle-shed in Beef Lane, for want of better accommodation, until, towards the end of June, the Governor was persuaded to surrender the city.
The terms allowed by General Fairfax were mighty generous, the garrison to the number of 7,000 men being suffered to march out with arms and baggage; and though the estates of all the Cavaliers taken in the city were to be sequestered, yet the owners were permitted to compound with Parliament; that is to say, by paying a fine not to exceed two years’ revenue of an estate, it might be restored to them, and meanwhile they might live there as tenants of Parliament, so long as they behaved peaceably.
However, my poor father had little profit of this generosity. On Sunday, June 28th, a week after the articles of surrender were signed, he rode out of Oxford and came to the door of the Manor-house and knocked for admittance. An old blowsy-faced man put his head out of a window and with pistol cocked and levelled, demanded his business.
“I am Justice Richard Powell and this is my house,” said my father. “Pray, who are you?”
“I am Lawrence Farre, servant to Sir Robert Pye the Elder,” he answered, “and this is his house, it is not yours.”
“Has no message been left for me either by Sir Robert the Elder or by his son the Colonel? Or by Mr. John Pye?”
“None, sir,” he answered. “The young Sir Robert passed this way on the 15th day of this month, for he was in the church at Halton that day when Colonel Ireton married the daughter of General Oliver Cromwell; but he gave me no instructions except to guard the place against thieves and intruders. Now he is ridden off with his regiment again.”
“I trust that you have proved worthy of his confidence in you,” said my father.
“I trust I have,” replied Farre, “for not a soul has come in but four persons, with a warrant from the Committee for Sequestrations in the County of Oxfordshire, sitting at Woodstock; three of whom were but clerks who made out the inventory and put a price upon your goods; but the fourth was a gentleman, a member of the Committee itself, and he oftentimes complained that they had put too high a price upon some piece, and then they brought it down low for him. He had a brother outside, whom I would not admit because he had no warrant, though he was the true purchaser of the goods and took them off—”
My poor father cried in a faltering voice: “Oh, what is this you say, good man? There were goods purchased and taken off?”
“Oh yes, indeed, Sir,” said Farre merrily. “They have stripped the place clean; and I thought it great pity that my master Sir Robert were not here to bid, for it all went dog-cheap, there being only the one bidder, namely Mr. Thomas Appletree on behalf of his brother. Nay, I would allow none else inside the house, for those were my orders, to admit none without a warrant. Sir Robert would no doubt have liked to buy the carpets and chairs, the tables, the bed-steads, chests, court-cupboards and standing-presses at the price they fetched, or double: for then he might have rented the house at a better advantage. And the linen he might well have bought for his own use.”
“They took all, you say?” my father asked, as one stupefied. “Oh, the buzzards! How was it conveyed away?”
“Why, Sir, upon four carts of yours that were also bought, and your great wain, and your two old coaches. They also drove off the pigs and sheep and cattle and some poultry from the backside, and took away the grain and the hops and some parcels of boards; but they had no conveyance for the timber, for which they will come again. The price agreed upon, I recall, was £335, for which Mr. Appletree the brother paid twenty shillings of earnest-money to the chief clerk.”
“Oh, but when was this forced sale?” asked my father. “Upon what day?”
“Why, upon the Monday of last week,” he answered, “the twenty-second day of June.”
“But that was after the signing of the Articles of Surrender,” cried my father, “when by General Fairfax’s conditions these goods could not be lawfully sequestered, unless I refused to compound.”
“That is no fault of mine,” said Farre. “I had my orders and my orders I obeyed, and the gentleman, Mr. Appletree, was very civil to me and gave me ten shillings as a gift despite my severity towards his brother. Now, sir, begone, for I have nothing for you here. The house is empty but for my own bed and cooking-pot, and if you would make complaint, you have your redress at Law, I dare say.”
Now the value of the goods thus sold in hugger-mugger was, with the high prices then ruling, at least £900. Yet there was worse news to follow. For in my father’s absence the Parliamentary soldiers had pastured their horses, some three hundred in number, in our two great hay-fields and about the very time that they should have been mown; and all was eaten up by these horses, and Farre had not accepted the grazing-tickets honestly offered him by the officers, declaring that it was none of his business; and now the regiment was ridden away.
Our Wheatley lease-lands were sequestered also, which put my father in a dreadful fear lest his careless dealings in regard to them should come to the light. Here I must tell what I have lately learned about these lands, the lease of which (as I wrote before) my father had lately pledged to his cousin Sir Edward Powell, for a loan of £300. The lease was held from All Souls College since 1626, the year of my birth; and in 1634 my father had renewed the lease, but without surrendering to the College the paper thereby voided; and four years after that, he had assigned the new lease to one Richard Bateman, in return for £200; and in the year following, being at his wits’ end for money, he had assigned the old and voided lease to one George Hearne for a term of thirty-one years, in return for £340, and Mr. Hearne had also kindly rented him the land at £40 a year. This was not honestly contrived, but he had hoped soon to pay back Mr. Hearne the money and so wipe out the fraud. Two years later yet, thinking that he might as well be hanged for stealing a sheep as for a lamb, he went again to All Souls College (which has a long purse and a short memory) and there bribed a clerk of accounts to shuffle the College papers for him; after which, making no mention of the lease that had been renewed for him in 1634, nor of his dealing either with Mr. Bateman or Mr. Hearne, he brought back to the College the old and voided lease (which he still held) made in 1626, and prayed for a renewal of it, which, on the payment of a small fine, the new Warden cheerfully gave him; not knowing that the lease had already been renewed in 1634. It was this quite worthless paper that he pledged again to his kinsman Sir Edward Powell in return for £300; so that, in all, he had profited £840 from a parcel of land that was never his own, besides its natural yield in produce.
As for the other freehold land at Wheatley, this was sequestered too; and here lay further trouble. For my father had not revealed to my husband (who had a prior claim upon it from the old debt upon statute-staple) that it was mortgaged to one Ashworth upon a ninety-nine years lease. Worse still, all the timber lying in the yard at Forest Hill, in value £500, being that which the brothers Appletree had bought but not yet removed, and also a great deal more lying in the coppices of the Forest and in Stow Wood, was robbed from my father by Parliament itself. For a humble petition was made by the inhabitants of Banbury, who complained that one half of their town was burned and part of the church and steeple pulled down, and “there being some timber and boards at one Mr. Powell’s house, a malignant, near Oxford, they desire they may have these materials assigned them for the repair of their church and town.”
This petition was at once granted. Thus my father was stripped bare, and having quarrelled with my Uncle Jones, and the Archdales and Moultons being all either slain or dissettled and ruined by the war, he had no friend to whom he might turn; and reckoned his position as desperate. There was nothing for it: his belly cried “cupboard” and therefore he must come to London and eat dirt-porridge at the Barbican.