1 Modern historians reject the traditional date of 1643.
2 These were rue, agrimony, wormwood, celandine, sage, balsam, mugwort, snapdragon, pimpernel, marigold, feverfew, burnet and sorrel; also wood-betony, scabious, brown may-weed, mint, avence, tormentil and the benedict thistle—a like weight of all of these, but of rosemary twice as much, and of elicampane-root half as much only. You mingle them all together, shred small; then you steep them in a good white wine three days and three nights, stirring them once or twice a day; then they are distilled in a common still. This water is held a certain prophylactic against the plague, and an indifferent good cure for the same.
3 Esquire Bushell was also rewarded for this day’s entertainment by being appointed warden and master-worker at a silver mint at Aberystwyth in Wales.
4 Once a clever Greek, knowing that a certain racecourse had in ancient times been stepped out, for a thousand paces, by the demi-god Hercules, calculated the length of a single pace and, from that, the stature of Hercules: which, by the way, was less than that either of Goegmagog or of Goliath.
5 Sir Thomas Gardiner, the Elder, who had been the King’s candidate for the office of Speaker in the House of Commons, was complained against to the House that he had put obstructions in the way of persons signing a petition, which was for the removal from Parliament of Bishops and Popish Lords; he was committed to the Tower by the Lords and thereafter impeached for opposing Parliament in the matter of the Militia, and for saying that it was “a dangerous thing to anger a King.” Yet now he was a free man again and a perfect martyr in the eyes of all the countryside.
6 I have two little sisters of the same name, Elizabeth. The second was so christened when the first, the elder by four years, was on that very day pronounced by the physician to be stone dead; nevertheless, she awoke from her trance and lived.
7Their text was drawn from the Book of Judges: “‘Curse ye Meroz,’ said the angel of the Lord, ‘curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof, because they came not to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty.’” It was used to stir the laggards and neuters by the zealous ministers of both factions.
8 This impediment had been pleaded against the Earl of Essex by his two wives successively, and they had been set free; which occasioned many sharp jests at Court and made him the more ready to show his manly valour in battle on the side of Parliament.
9 These pits put me in mind of a confection that we made at Easter time, of sweet pastes and conserves laid one upon the other in layers: for first came the turf, then a reddish earth, then a blue clay, then a yellow sand, then this white pipe-clay, then an iron stone, then (I think) a reddish maum, then a green fat clay, then a thin grey rubble, then the green fat clay again, and last of all the yellow ochre.
10 This Independency, a notion that each smallest congregation is sufficient to judge of its own spiritual needs, without admonition or dictation from others, was a heresy first bred at Cambridge University in King James’s reign; thence cast opprobriously out and exiled to Holland and Northern America; now brought back and daily getting head.
11 The Earl of Essex died of a distemper about a year later, in his house at London.
12 Colonel Legge had taken Sir Arthur Aston’s place after that Sir Arthur, curvetting upon Bullingdon Green to show some ladies his horsemanship, had tumbled off and broke his thighbone and lost his leg by amputation. There was a jest upon this, that when country people coming to market with their wares asked the sentries at the gate, “Good men, who is now your Governor?” and they answered, “One Legge,” the country people cried: “Why, is it still he? We had heard that the old whoreson was gone from you.”
13 Not Mr. John Rous, the librarian of Oxford, to whom my husband at this time wrote a Latin ode.
14 Yet the Welsh prisoners taken at Pembroke were sold by General Cromwell at but one shilling the head; which was strange in a man of Welsh descent, to value the Scots as having each man the worth of five Welshmen.
15 He was the first to impose ship-money as a tax upon inland towns.
16 My husband could call Mr. Bradshaw “cousin”, his mother having been of that family—or else another of the same name.
17 The Levellers, of whom the chief was one Lieutenant-Colonel John Lilburne, were dissatisfied with the new Government, which they considered too tender and forbearing of old evils: they held that every Jack was as good as his master, and would have swept away all privileges of rank and wealth whatsoever. The same Lilburne wrote a book entitled England’s Old and New Chains, in which he contended that the Army Grandees, as Generals Cromwell, Ireton and the rest, had broken the old chains of monarchy indeed, yet fettered England with new and stronger ones. He raised a mutiny in the Army, but General Cromwell put it down, shooting one of the Levellers as a scarecrow to the rest.
18 Marie; not Katherine or Elizabeth. [R. G.]
19 This should be 1674. [R. G.]
20 A pun. Sir Edward Powell was his cousin.