CHAPTER II.

OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.

The next morning, the 31st January, the nation awoke a Republic. The king had died "a traitor" (they said) "to the nation;" and in the space before his scaffold it had been proclaimed, that whoever presumed to call his son, Charles Stuart, king, was a traitor to the Commonwealth. It was a strange, dreary dawning. As I opened my casement and looked across the black frozen river to London Bridge, with its "Traitor's Gate" and the towers of Southwark rising above from the marshy flats beyond, to the one long cold bar of brazen light which parted the dark clouds on the horizon from the heavy vault of snowclouds above, everything seemed hard and metallic--the heavens "iron and brass," the waters steel, the earth and her living creatures motionless, rigid, as if turned to stone.

What kind of a day was this to be? The king was dead; though the remains of the Westminster Assembly, and many of the Independent ministers, and well-nigh all the Parliament had protested against his execution, and well-nigh all the nation bewailed him. The king was dead. What authority had sentenced him? and what power was to rule in his place? Half, at least, of the nation looked on his death as a murder--but there was to be no mourning; the rest, as the terrible but victorious close of a terrible conflict--but there was to be no triumph.

No funeral pomp was to darken the streets that day, as for a king slain. No triumphal procession was to make them festive, as for an enemy vanquished. It was to be a day without mark or sign; and yet since England was first one nation surely such a day had never dawned on her. "The first day of freedom, by God's blessing restored," said the Commonwealth coins; the first day of England's widowhood, said the Royalists, widowed and orphaned at one blow.

Yet there was no disorder, no interruption of employment. The sounds of day began to awake in the busy city, the cries of countrymen bringing their vegetables from the fields, the ringing of the hammer on a forge near our house, the calls of the bargemen and boatmen locked in by the ice; and then, as the day went on, all distinction of sound lost in the general hum, like the sound of many waters, which marks that a great city is awake and at work.

Looking westward, I could see the gardener sweeping the snow from the walks in the gardens behind Whitehall, as if no terrible black scaffold had that day to be taken down in front.

Yet, I suppose, in well-nigh every heart, man or woman's, in London that morning, the first conscious thought was, "the king is dead;" all the more because there were few lips that would have uttered the words.

"What are we to do to-day, Leonard?" I said, when we had breakfasted.

"Do! dear heart," quoth he; "it is not thy wont to need thy day's tasks set thee by any."

"Nay; but to-day seems like a work-day with out work, and a Sabbath without services," I said.

"There will be a service," he replied. "The great Dr. Owen is to preach before the Parliament in St. Margaret's Church."

"The Parliament!" I said; thinking pitifully of the fifty members who still bore the name.

"You scarcely recognize the Rump as the Parliament," he said, answering my tone rather than my words.

"I scarce know what to recognize or reverence," I said. "I was wont in the old days at Netherby to think I had politics of my own, and would have belonged to the country party by free choice, if all around me had deserted it. But since our own people have split and divided into so many sections, I begin to fear, after all, it was nought but a young maid's conceit in me to think I had any convictions of my own. Aunt Dorothy and the Presbyterians think the killing of the king a great crime; my father and the old Parliamentarians think the forcible purging of the Parliament a manifest tyranny; Roger and the army think these things but the necessary violence to introduce the new reign of justice and freedom. But I know not what to believe, or whom to follow. What is to come next? Who are to rule us? We must have some to honour and obey; if not the king, and if not the Parliament, then whom?"

"Sweet heart," said he, "if the government of the three kingdoms has been resting on thy shoulders, no wonder thou art cast down and weary. But thou and I are among the multitude who are to be governed, not among the few who govern. Let us be thankful, as good Mr. Baxter saith, for any government which suffers people to be as good as they are willing to be. And let us be willing to be as good as we can. That will give us enough to do."

"But," I said, "all these years we have been learning that the country is as a great mother who demands fidelity from her most insignificant child; that Liberty is no mere empty name for schoolboys to make orations about, and Law no mere confused heap of technicalities for lawyers to disentangle, but simple sacred realities mothers are to teach their children to reverence; that the glory and safety of a nation depends on their political rights being sacred household words. We have been taught to look to Jewish and Roman matrons as our examples. Are we to unlearn all this now, and go back to the old saws we have been taught to think selfish and base; that politics are to be left to rulers, and laws to lawyers, and our liberties and rights to whoever will defend or trample on them?"

"Not go back, I think," he said gently, looking a little surprised at my vehemence; "only go deeper. Some precious rights, I believe, have been won. Let us use them. That is the best way to secure them. We are free to do what good we can, to unloose what burdens, and to hear and speak what good words we will. Let us use our freedom. No one can say how long it may last. This morning I must go to visit Newgate, and other gaols, in which there has been much sickness. For although the prisons are no longer filled by the Star Chamber, or the High Commission, they are unhappily still kept too well supplied by a tyrant more ancient and more universal than these. Moreover, Olive," he added, "there is still one sect not tolerated. The number of the imprisoned Quakers is increasing; and in Newgate there is one poor Quaker maiden whom I think thou mightest succour. A few days since thou wert desiring a maiden to wait on the babe. This Quaker maiden is a composed and gentle creature, and with kind treatment, such as she would have from thee, might, I think, be led into ways which seem to us more sober and rational."

My husband's words opened a prospect of abundant work before me. Already we had four washing-women of four different unpopular persuasions.

And I would have preferred choosing a nurse for the babe, on account of her qualities as a serving-wench, rather than as a Confessor. Moreover, what he intended to be re-assuring in his description, alarmed me rather the more. For of all fanatics, I have found gentle fanatics the most incorrigible, and of all wilful persons, these whenever "discompose" themselves, or put themselves wrong by losing their tempers, are certainly the most immovable. However, I repressed such selfish fears as quite unworthy of Leonard Antony's wife. And, accordingly, when he returned from the gaol, I was quite prepared to welcome the Quaker. And so I told him as we joined the sober throng who were going to hear Dr Owen preach at "Margaret's" before the Parliament.

A scanty Parliament indeed! No Lords, and about fifty Commons; and among them scarce one of those whose words and deeds had made its early years so strong and glorious.

Hampden lay among his forefathers in the church of Great Hampden; Pym among the kings in Westminster Abbey. Denzil Hollis and Haselrigge had been expelled from it; old Mr. Prynne, who had been liberated by its first act, had vehemently denounced its last; even the young Sir Harry Vane had for the time deserted its austere counsels.

Nevertheless the congregation was great and grave. And when Dr. Owen spoke, he led our thoughts at once to spheres compared with whose sublime chronology the length of the longest Parliament is indeed but as a moment. He came of an ancient Welsh ancestry; his bearing had a courtly grace; his tall and stately figure had the ease and vigor of one used to manly exercises; his voice was well-tuned, as the tones of one who loved music as he did should be; his eyes were dark and keen.

To the death of the king on that dreadful yesterday he barely alluded. There was neither regret nor triumph in his discourse. His exhortations were addressed not to the vanquished, but to the victorious party. If he alluded at all to the oppressions and vices of the late government, it was in order to conjure those now in power not to tread in their steps. His text was: "Let them return unto thee; but return not thou unto them. And I will make thee unto this people a fenced brazen wall: and they shall fight against thee, but they shall not prevail against thee: for I am with thee to save thee and to deliver thee, saith the Lord."

God's judgments, he said, are a flaming sword turning every way. Not in one of these ways, but in all, He resists those who resist them. "How do we spend our thoughts to extricate ourselves from our present pressures! If this hedge, this pit were passed, we should have smooth ground to walk on; not considering that God can fill our safest paths with snares and serpents. Give us peace; give us wealth; give us to be as we were, with our own, in quietness. Poor creatures! suppose all these designs were in sincerity; yet if peace were, and wealth were, and God were not, what would it avail you? In vain do you seek to stop the streams while the fountains are open; turn yourselves whither you will, bring yourselves into what condition you can, nothing but peace and reconciliation with the God of all these judgments can give you rest in the day of visitation. You see what variety of plagues are in His hand. Changing of condition will do no more to the avoiding of them, than a sick man turning himself from one side of the bed to another; during his turning he forgets his pain by striving to move; being laid down again he finds his condition the same as before.

"It was nothing new," he said, "for the instruments of God's greatest works to be the deepest objects of a professing people's cursings and revilings. _Men that under God deliver a kingdom may have the kingdom's curses for their pains_.

"Moses was rewarded for the deliverance of Israel from Korah by being told 'ye have killed the Lord's people.' Man's condemnation and God's absolution do not seldom meet on the same person for the same things. '_Bonus vir Caius Sejanus, sed malus quia Christianus_.' What precious men should many be, would they let go the work of God in their generation!

"Yet be tender towards fainters in difficult seasons. God's righteousness, His kindness, is like a great mountain easy to be seen. His judgments are like a great deep. Who can look into the bottom of the sea, or know what is done in the depths thereof? When first the confederacy was entered into by the Protestant princes against Charles V., Luther himself was bewildered.

"It is by a small handful, a few single persons--a Moses, a Samuel, two witnesses--He ofttimes opposes the rage of a hardened multitude. His judgments ofttimes are the giving up of a sinful people to a fruitless contending with their own deliverers, if ever they be delivered. God, indeed, cannot be the author of sin, for He can be the author of nothing but what hath being in itself (for He works as the fountain of beings). This sin hath not. It is an aberration. Man writes fair letters upon a wet paper, and they run all into one blot; not the skill of the scribe, but the defect in the paper, is the cause of the deformity. The first cause is the proper cause of a thing's being; but the second of its being evil." Not, I understood him to mean, that sin is natural, but that the faculties of nature are perverted.

Then he fervently warned against fear of man, covetousness, ambition; against turning to "such ways as God hath blasted before our eyes, oppression, self-seeking, persecution."

And at the close he said, "All you that are the Lord's workmen, be always prepared for a storm. Be prepared. The wind blows; a storm may come."

Opinions about the sermon were various. On the whole I think it was hardly popular. Some said it was pitiless, that the harshest of his enemies would not have grudged one generous word for the fallen king. Others deemed it half-hearted, and declared that if John Knox, or one of the mighty men of old, had been in the pulpit, they would have made all true hearts thrill, and all false hearts tremble at the sentence of terrible justice just executed.

"What was thy mind about it, Olive?" my husband asked, when he, and Roger, and I had returned to the quiet of our little garden-parlor.

"I thought Dr. Owen very wise," I said, "in that he directed his discourse to those who were there to hear. I never could see the profit of denunciations of Popery addressed to those who hate it enough already; or of arguments addressed to Arminians who are not present to be crushed; or of railing at people who will not come to church, for the edification of those who do. It set me questioning myself whether God is indeed at work among us, and praying that if He is, none of us may mistake His hand."

"May it but have set every heart on the same questioning!" said Roger. "How can any call those words of Dr. Owen's an uncertain sound?" he added. "To me every tone was as clear as the trumpet-signals before a battle. God has sent you deliverance, has sent you a deliverer, he seemed to me to say, as Moses to Israel in bondage, as Luther to the Church in bondage. All depends on whether we acknowledge him--not, indeed, as to the Promised Land being reached at last, but everything as to when it is reached, everything as to our reaching it at all. Events seem to me constantly saying to us, '_If ye will receive it, this is Elias which was for to come_.'"

The revenges of the Commonwealth were few. Three Royalist noblemen beheaded without torture or insult in Palace Yard. As far as Oliver Cromwell's rule extended there was not one barbarous execution. Baiting was not a sport he encouraged, whether of bulls and bears or of men.

During the ten years of the Commonwealth, the pillory, the whipping-post, the torture-chamber, were scarcely once used, and not one Englishman suffered the savage punishment awarded to traitors.

It was difficult to see what most men had to complain of. Good men of every party but one, the Royalist Episcopal, were encouraged.

Nevertheless, from every party rose murmurs of discontent. Before the king had been executed four months, General Cromwell had to subdue opposition in the Parliament, the city, among the peasantry, in the army itself.

Roger grieved sorely at what he deemed the blindness of the people.

Mr. Baxter preached and wrote against General Cromwell and his measures, at Kidderminster, to Aunt Dorothy's heart's content, propounding twenty unanswerable queries to show why none should take the "Engagement to the Commonwealth now established without King or Lords," and having in reserve twenty other queries equally unanswerable.

Colonel Hutchinson, the Republican, forbore not to exhort and rebuke him, seeing, as Mistress Lucy, his stately wife, said, how "ambition had ulcerated his heart."

Colonel Rich, Commissary Staines, and Watson, made a design on his life. The Council would have punished, but the General pardoned them. Men in general were indeed moved by such generosity. But it could not "blind" the penetrating eyes of Mistress Lucy Hutchinson, or of Mr. Baxter. If Oliver did magnanimous deeds in public, it was "to court popularity;" if little kindly acts in private, it was "to cajole weak members." If his plans succeeded, it was a "favor of fortune." If his enemies were vanquished, it was because they were "slaves or puppets," whom he, with marvelous prescience, had "tempted to oppose him for the easy glory of knocking them down." If he pleaded with almost a tearful tenderness against the coldness of old friends, it was "dissimulation;" if he sought to approve himself to good men, it was "because his own conscience was uneasy." If he disregarded their opinions, it was because he was "inflated with pride, or hardened to destruction."

Yet Roger thought much of this misapprehension would pass away. It was, he hoped, but the dimness natural to the twilight of this new dawn.

The greatest dangers to the new liberty, he thought, were from the hopes which it had created.

The first time this danger opened on me was from a conversation between Job Forster and Annis Nye.

The gentle Quaker maiden had been installed for some weeks as the nurse of baby Magdalene, who seemed to find a soothing spell in her still serene face, and quiet even voice.

As yet, no unusual or alarming symptoms had appeared in Annis, nothing to indicate her being capable of the offence for which it was said she had been cast into prison, which was that, one Sunday, she had confronted a well-known Presbyterian minister in his pulpit, at the conclusion of a sermon against "the Papal and Prelatical Antichrist" and in a calm and deliberate voice had denounced him in face of the indignant congregation as himself a "false priest," "hireling shepherd," and "minister of Antichrist."

Yet there was something in her different from any one I had yet seen. You could by no means be always sure of her responding to converse on good things; but when she did, it was like some one listening to a far-off heavenly voice and echoing it, and very beautiful often were the things she said.

Her neglect of ordinary gestures and titles of respect seemed in no way disrespectful in her. "Olive Antony" and "Leonard Antony" from her soft voice had more honour in them than titles at every breath from ordinary people, and when she called us "thou" and "thee," even the bad grammar which accompanied the custom had a kind of quaint grace from her lips. If asked her reasons for these customs she gave them. These customs were false, she said; a hollow compliance with the hollow world. The honour was rendered universally, and therefore insincerely; and to call a single person "you" was an untruth which "led to great depravation of manners." Having given these reasons, she never debated the point further; they satisfied her; if they did not satisfy you, she could not help it.

Occasionally there was inconvenience arising from the difficulty of knowing when any command might cross the non-observances she held sacred. Nevertheless, her presence had a kind of hallowing calm in it which compensated for much.

My husband had sympathy with her sect on account of their large thoughts of the love of God to mankind. And he said we ought to wait to see what portion of divine truth or church history it had been given to the Quakers to unfold, he sharing Mr. Milton's belief, that truth is found on earth but in fragments either in the world or the church. So, for the sake of my husband, and the free development of church history, and a growing love to the maid, I continued to accept from Annis such services as her conscience permitted, and to make up the deficiencies myself.

Job Forster, who, for Rachel's sake, had much reverence for feminine judgment, had frequent converse with Annis when he came to solace himself with our little Magdalene. For between him and the babe there was the fullest confidence and love, the little one never seeming more at home than in his brawny arms.

Job thought Annis "a woman of an understanding heart," and had hopes of reclaiming her from the error of her way. He did not for a long time discover that Annis was the most patient of listeners to his arguments simply as the Cornish cliffs are patient with the beat of the waves; and that when she "dealt softly" with him, it was not because she was convinced by his reasoning, but because she compassionated his blindness.

It was, therefore, with some surprise that I found him one April evening in 1649 listening with indignant gesticulations to Annis, as she stood, with clasped hands and eyes looking dreamily forward, repeating in a low monotonous voice, like a chant, the words,--

"Woe unto those that build with untempered mortar! Woe unto those that would build the temple of the Lord with the dust of the battle-field! Woe to those who run to and fro and cry, Lo here! and Lo there! The kingdom of God cometh not with observation, not with observation. The kingdom of God is within you, within you, within!"

Her voice died away into a sigh, and I confess it moved me not a little.

But Job, on whom the words came in the heat of debate, was by no means calmed thereby.

"It is no fair fight, Mistress Olive," he said, appealing to me; "she does not know when she is beaten. Only yesterday, she quite gave in, and had never a word to say, and to-day it's all to be begun over again. It's them poor honest fellows down in Surrey she means, and it's a sin to cast up all those Bible texts at them as if they were blinded persecutors, instead of poor true men striving to hasten the coming of the Kingdom. Mistress Annis," he concluded, for there was something in her which compelled from others the titles she refused to any, "did I not give you chapter and verse until you had never a word to gainsay? Is it not written so plain, that he who runs may read, that the Jews are to go in and possess the land, and did I not show thee that the Saxons are the lost tribes, the descendants of the Jews?"

But Annis had meekly resumed her knitting, and simply said,--

"A concern was upon my spirit regarding thee. I have spoken; the rest belongs not to me. There is the Power and the Anointing. But these are not with me." And she relapsed into silence.

"That is her way, Mistress Olive," exclaimed Job, much ruffled. "You shall be judge if any rational discourse can proceed on such principles. You bring forth Scripture enough to silence a council of rabbis--to say nothing of reasons. She listens as patient as a lamb, has not a word to answer--and this is the end."

Annis made no defence, she only said,--

"I had hopes, Job Forster, thee had been reached. But it seemeth otherwise."

For if Annis heeded not the arguments of others, neither did she rely on her own. Her confidence was not on the power of her words, but on the Power in and with them. But this Job did not perceive.

"Reached!" he exclaimed, looking hopelessly at me. "She speaks of me as if I were a babe in swaddling-clothes; and I old enough to be her grandfather."

"What was the matter in debate?" I asked.

"There was no debate!" said Job, still agitated. "Debates are only possible with people who are amenable to Scripture and reason. I was but speaking of the peasants at St. Margaret's Hill in Surrey, and the great work they are beginning there."

"What great work? Is there some great preacher risen among them?" I asked, thinking he meant some great work of conversion.

"There is a prophet among them, mistress," said Job solemnly, "by name Everard, once in the army. The work may seem small to the eye of flesh. As yet they are but thirty. But the Apostles were but twelve. And soon they may be thousands."

"But what is the work?" I said.

"Simple work enough," he replied mysteriously. "They began with digging the ground, and sowing beans therein."

"Surely none will gainsay them," I said, "if it is their own ground they are digging. But what is to come of beans except the bean-stalks?"

"It is not exactly their own ground," Job replied; "it is common-ground. And they invite all men to come and help them to make the barren land fruitful, and to restore the ancient community of the fruits of the earth, to distribute to the poor and needy, and to clothe the naked. Gospel words, Mistress Olive, and gospel deeds, let the Justices say what they may."

"The Justices interfered, then?" I said.

"Doubtless," he replied. "Justices do, in all the books of the martyrs I ever read. Justices are a stiff-necked race."

"And so it ended?" I said.

"So it began, Mistress Olive," Job replied mysteriously. "The country-people also were blinded, and two troops of horse were sent against them. They were brought before General Fairfax. Master Everard spoke up to him like a lion, and told him how the Saxon people were of the race of the Jews, how all the liberties of the people were lost by the coming of William the Conqueror, and how, ever since, the people of God had lived under tyranny worse than their forefathers in Egypt. But that now the time of deliverance was come, and there had appeared to him a vision, saying, Arise, dig and plough the earth, and receive the fruits thereof, and restore the creation to its state before the curse."

"What does General Cromwell say?" I asked.

"He has not yet got the light," replied Job. "But his eyes will be opened, for he is of them that sigh and cry for the iniquities of the land. The light must be flashed a little stronger in his face, and he will see."

"But the General is taking away oppression; he has destroyed slavery," I said. "And there are so many curses, Job, besides the thistles and thorns. Yet even our Lord took them not away. How can these thirty countrymen hope to do it by sowing beans in the Surrey commons? Our Lord did not take hard things away. He changed them into blessings. The sweat of the brow, the thistles and all; even death."

"That is what I was trying to explain to Mistress Annis," replied Job. "There are the Two Kingdoms. One cometh not with observation; the other cometh like the lightning which lighteneth from one end of heaven to the other."

"But I do not see how digging up the Surrey sand-hills is like either," I said.

"No," said Job, shaking his head pitifully; "I daresay not, Mistress Olive. Others must do their part of the work first. There are the 'men as trees walking' and there is the 'shining more and more.' But I did think Mistress Annis would have had understanding. For these country folk were like to those she calls Friends. They would not take arms to defend themselves against the powers that be, but would wait and submit. And when asked why they did not take off their hats to General Fairfax, they said, Because he was their fellow-creature."

But not even this orthodoxy as to "hat-honour" moved Annis.

"Not with observation," she said; "not in bean fields, nor battle-fields, nor in king's palaces. Within you--within!"

Job rose, and gently laying little Magdalene in my arms, took his hat, and went away without further farewell.

"She will not see the Two Kingdoms," he murmured. "This generation will have to be roused by louder voices. The foxes must be hunted with beagles of other make. Those who will not wake at the lark's singing will be startled when the trumpet peals. Five Monarchies," he added, turning to us from the threshold; "Two Kingdoms and Five Monarchies. Four have been, and are not. One is yet to come; cut out of the mountain without hands--to crush the remnants of the four and fill the world. Take heed that ye fail not of the signs of its coming."

Job's words made me uneasy. They seemed to betray a subterranean fire of wild hopes, and wild distrusts, and tumultuous purposes, which might burst up beneath our feet any day anywhere is a volcano of wilder deeds.

"What does Job mean," I said to my husband afterwards, "by his Fifth Monarchy and his Kingdom coming like the lightning, and his 'beagles to hunt foxes'?"

"He means precisely what is endangering the Commonwealth most of all at this moment," my husband said. "So many evils have been removed, that sanguine men think it is nothing but faint-heartedness in the leaders which suffers any to remain. Now that the Star Chamber and the persecutions are suppressed, they seem to think it is only Cromwell's half-heartedness that prevents the devil being suppressed also, instantly, with all his works. Now that fines and persecutions are swept away, and the laws which sanctioned them, and the men who made the laws; what, they think, is to hinder poverty being swept away, and unaccountable inequalities of station, and avarice, and luxury, and waste, and want, and all the old tangle of too much toil for some and too much idleness for others? But we must see after this. There are mischief-makers abroad. 'Free-born John Lilburn' is scattering fire-brands from his prison in the Tower, about England's 'new chains;' and we must not suffer Job Forster to be among his victims. To-morrow we will tell Roger of the danger, that he may counsel Job."

But on the morrow it was too late. In the night (the 23th of April) there was much stir in the city; sudden sharp alarms of trumpet and drum, and galloping to and fro of horsemen, not on parade.

A troop of Whalley's regiment, quartered at the Bull Inn, Bishopsgate mutinied; why, it was not clear, but with some vague intention of bringing in swiftly the thousand years of liberty and universal happiness.

General Cromwell and Lord Fairfax extinguished the fire for the time. Five ringleaders were seized and condemned, and out of them one, Sergeant Lockyer, was shot the next day in St. Paul's Churchyard.

They were practical times. It mattered very much what people's opinions were about prophecy, when they expressed them by insurrections and mutinies.

But, naturally, executions did not alter the convictions of the people who believed the prophets.

Of all the assemblies the old church and the houses round the churchyard had witnessed, I think there had scarce been a sadder than when young Trooper Lockyer was led out there to die. No crime was laid to his charge, but this unpardonable military crime of mutiny. He was but twenty-three. At sixteen he had joined the army of freedom, and had fought bravely in it seven years. Blameless and brave, all the fervour of his early manhood had burnt pure in aspirations for a Kingdom of God on earth, a free and holy nation, where the poor and needy should be judged and saved, and deceit and violence should cease, and the oppressor should be broken in pieces. And thousands with him had prayed for it by the camp fires at night, and had fought for it on many battle-fields by day for seven years. And the poor and needy had been saved, and deceit and violence avenged, and many oppressors broken in pieces. The Bible had promised it, and with prayers and strong right arms they, the army of freedom, had done it. But the Bible promised more. One set of workers after another had been set aside, they thought, "as doing the work of the Lord deceitfully." They were prepared to do it thoroughly--to pray and fight on till every wrong in England was redressed, and every chain, new and old, was broken, till every valley should be exalted, and every mountain and hill should be laid low, when avarice with its base hoards of gold, and ambition with its lordly palaces, should vanish, and every home in England should be a home of plenty and of well-rewarded toil; the praises of God going up from every holy city and happy hill-side through the land, till the whole earth stopped to listen, and the thousand years of the better Eden began.

And for hopes such as these young Trooper Lockyer was led out to die; for carrying out a little too swiftly what all Christian men hoped to see; for "doing the Lord's work," "not deceitfully," but too hastily, at the wrong time, and not altogether in the right way.

There was nothing new to him in facing death. He stood to receive the fatal volley; and when he fell, the great crowd of men and women broke into bitter weeping and bewailed him.

That Saturday and Sunday were sad days in the city. There was a sense of hushed murmurs and tears all around us among the people. We knew the corpse was being solemnly watched night and day with prayers weeping in the city. The death of the king, alone and gray-haired, had smitten the people with awe; the execution of this brave young soldier touched them with a passionate reverence and pity.

Nothing was to be seen of Job during those days. Roger had seen him once; but he looked gloomy, and would be drawn into no discourse. He was among the watchers over the dead, nursing wild hopes of the Fifth Kingdom, and bitter distrusts of those who hindered its coming.

On Monday the feeling of the people manifested itself in a solemn procession passing through the city to Westminster.

Ceremonial, funereal or festive, was so foreign to our Puritan people, that the few occasions on which the irrepressible feeling burst forth into such manifestation had a terrible reality.

A soldier's funeral is heart-stirring enough at any time; but to me, scarce any procession, before or since, seemed so moving as this which bore Trooper Lockyer to his grave in Westminster Churchyard.

There were none of the rich or great among them. First, a hundred men, five or six in file. Then the corpse of the poor brave youth, with the sword he had long used so well, stained now with blood, and beside it bundles of rosemary, also dipped in blood. Then the horse he had ridden to many battle-fields, moving uneasily under his heavy mourning draperies, and beside it six men pealing on six trumpets the soldier's knell. Behind, thousands of men, marching slow and silent in order like soldiers. And after all a crowd of mourning women; all, men and women, with bunches of black or sea-green ribbon on their hats and breasts.

At Westminster they were met by thousands more, "of the better sort," it was said. And so the young man died, for trying to fulfil men's best hopes at a wrong time and in a impracticable way, and was buried, not without honour.

The crime was not one which moved men to vengeance. The doom was one which moved men much to pity.

So the fire went on spreading in the army. On May the 9th, the mutinous sea-green ribbons appeared among the soldiers at a review in Hyde Park.

General Cromwell with one of those speeches of his which critical gentlemen pronounced so confused, but which those to whom they were addressed found so plain, made the men in general understand that to be a soldier meant to obey commands. If they declined to obey, they should receive arrears of pay and be dismissed. If they decided still to be soldiers, they must obey, or suffer the penalties of martial law, under which they had put themselves.

I suppose his words told, as usual, for the sea-green ribbons disappeared, and no further mutiny followed in London.

Meantime Mr. John Lilburn, for whom General Cromwell had once pleaded with so vehement a passion when he was Mr. Prynne's servant in danger of the pillory and the whipping-posts, continued to disperse his incendiary pamphlets from the cell to which he had been committed in the Tower. And at length the news came that the conflagration had burst out in the army in three places at once, two hundred mutineers at Banbury, at Salisbury a thousand, in Gloucestershire more.

Job Forster had gone westward within those weeks with scarce a word of farewell to any. With a grave and glooming countenance, and avoiding all discourse. We feared sorely to hear that he was among the mutineers.

On Sunday, May the 14th, Roger called to bid us farewell, ready booted and spurred to ride off with Fairfax and Cromwell and their troops for Salisbury, to quell the mutiny there.

It was an uneasy Sabbath for us who were left behind. John Lilburn was in the Tower, and somewhere around the Tower were dwelling the thousands of grave and determined men who had borne Trooper Lockyer to his grave scarce a fortnight before. And the only voice which seemed able to command the stormy waves was out of hearing, heartening his men on their rapid march through Hampshire towards Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire; as they tracked the mutineers northward till they came on them at midnight taking uneasy rest at Burford.

But London remained quiet, to all outward seeming. Whatever vows were being made in homes where the "Eikon Basilike" was being read secretly, with a passionate devotion, together with the proscribed liturgy, the hopes cherished were of a "blessed restoration" and "vengeance on bloody usurpers;" or, on the other hand, in homes where Trooper Lockyer was the martyr, and the hopes were of a speedy millennium with vengeance on all who hindered it,--they did not disturb the quiet of that Sabbath. Leonard and I went to the morning exercise in "Margaret's," and the preaching in the abbey, and Annis to her obscure meeting of Friends. And little Magdalene welcomed us back with crowings "significant" (we thought, as my Diary records), "of a remarkable vivacity of intelligence." And as in the evening we looked on the Lent-lilies and primroses Aunt Gretel had sent from Netherby, making the little garden behind the house faintly represent the woods and fields, it seemed to us that the city had even more than its usual Sabbath stillness, while we listened to the evening family psalm rising from the open lattices of many houses around us.

Yet all through that Sabbath-day those who were keeping the peace with their good swords for us, were chasing the mutineers from county to county and from town to town, making meanwhile such Sabbath melodies in their hearts as best they might.

The story of the pursuit I heard afterwards from Job. All through the Monday the chase went on.

"We thought to cross into Oxfordshire at Newbridge, and join our fellows at Banbury," said Job. "But they had been before us? the bridge was guarded. We had to double and swim the river. By this time it grew dusk, and when we reached the little town of Burford on Monday evening it grew dark. At the entrance of the street we made a halt. Little welcome had we found at town or village. The name of him who was chasing us had been our shield and boast too long not to weight against us now.

"For the first time these two days since first they came nigh us, we missed the tramp of the horse in pursuit. Some of us hoped they were off the scent. Others knew better than to think the General was to be baffled so. We knew his ways too well. But be that as it might we were fain to stay. The horses stumbled and would not be spurred further. We had to cross fifty miles of country that day, to say nothing of doublings. We turned the poor brutes out to grass in the meadows by the river, and, wet and weary as we were, turned in to get such sleep as we might.

"Running away is work that breaks the heart of man and beast, and Oliver had not used us to it.

"But as midnight boomed out from the tall old steeple, we found what the silence of the pursuers had meant.

"They had been lying quiet in ambush outside the town. On they came, clattering into the narrow streets, with the old cries we had joined in with them so long. It was enough to make any man's heart fail to have to go against the old watchwords, to which we had charged and rallied scores of times together. But worse than all was Oliver's voice. Few of us could stand that. It had been more than a thousand trumpets to us for years. A few desperate shots were fired, and all was over. We were caught and clapped up together to await the sentence. We went to sleep thinking we might yet be the Lord's handful to bring in the Millennium. We woke up and found we were nothing better than a lot of traitorous mutineers.

"Two days of waiting followed, and they finished the work for most of us. Some still braved it out, and talked of martyrdom, and of paving the way to the Kingdom with our corpses. But the greater part were downcast and heart-stricken, and in sore bewilderment of soul. We minded Oliver's prayers before so many battles, and the cheer of his voice in the fight, and his thanksgivings afterwards; and how he had praised the Lord and praised us, and made as though he owed all to us, while we felt we owed all under God to him. We minded how he had never thought it beneath him to write up to Parliament to claim reward for any faithful service of any among us, and had never claimed honor or reward for himself. More than one among us minded how a glance from his eye singled us out, and had made our hearts swell like a public triumph, though not a soul saw it besides; how it had been enough reward for any toil to know that the General knew we had done our best. All of us had heard his cheery voice joining in joke and laugh, and more than one had heard it in low tones beside the dying, breathing words which could make a man brave to face the last enemy of all.

"And now his eyes had rested on us in grave displeasure, and grieved disappointment. He had thought we knew him, his sorrowful eyes had said; he had thought we could have trusted him to do the good work, and would have helped him in it.

"The Royalists hated him, good Mr. Baxter and the Presbyterians distrusted him, but he had thought we knew him!

"And so we did! And before those two days were over, there were many among us who would have asked no better from him or from Heaven than that we might have one chance of following him to the field, and showing how faithful we could be to him again.

"So we came to the Thursday. The court-martial sat and gave sentence. Ten out of every hundred of us were doomed to die. We were taken up to a flat place on the roof of the old church to see our comrades shot in the church-yard and to abide our turn. Cornet Thompson came; he and his brother had been at the bottom of it, and he had no hope of pardon. But he spoke out bravely, and said that what befell him was just; God did not own the ways he went; he had offended the General; he asked the people to pray for him; he told the men who stood ready with loaded guns, when he should hold out his hands to do their duty. I suppose he gave the sign. I was too sick at heart to look. But the volley came and he fell. Next came two corporals--made no sign of fear, said no word of repentance, looked the men in the face till they gave fire, and fell. Then came Cornet Dean--confessed he had done wrong, after a short pause received pardon from the generals. And so we, standing sentenced on the roof of the old church, waited what would befall us next.

"The shooting was over. Oliver had us called into the church. There he preached us a sermon none of us are like to forget. Not long nor under many heads, but home to every heart. Some say the General is blundering in speech, and no man knows what he would say. We always knew. And all I knew of the sermon that day, is that blundering or not, he made us all feel we had blundered sorely as to the Almighty's purposes--blundered as to him. There were silence enough in the old church that day, but for the weeping. The sobs of men like some of ours are catching to listen to; Oliver's Ironsides are not too easily moved. But that day I believe we all wept together like children. We had lost our lives and we had them given back to us; we had lost our way in the wilderness and we had found it again. We had lost our leader and we had found him, and it will be hard if any noisy talker, free-born John Lilburn or other, tempt us to leave his lead again. We Ironsides are not going to use our Captain as the children of Israel used their Moses. Thank God, we have another chance given us, and we are ready to follow him to Ireland, or to the world's end.

"The General is breaking the chains fast enough, and opening the prisons, and breaking in pieces the oppressors. And God forbid we should hinder him again. And as to the millennium, the Lord must bring it about in His own way, and in His own time. I for one will never try to hurry the Almighty again, nor the General."

The Surrey labourers went home to sow beans in their master's fields. The army Levellers, after being sent for a while to the Devizes, were restored to their own regiments, and were eager to prove their fidelity to General Cromwell by following him to the new campaign in Ireland.

It rejoiced me to hear that Dr. John Owen was going to Ireland as General Cromwell's chaplain. His strong calm words were such as were able to move and to quiet men like the Ironsides, who were not to be stirred with zephyrs, or quieted with sweet murmurs as of a lady's lute;--words plain and strong as their own armour. The sound of a trumpet was in them, Job said, and the voice of words.

Often and often his words echoed back to me as we heard them before the Parliament in St. Margaret's, on the day of humiliation, the 28th of February.

"How is it that Jesus is in Ireland only as a lion, staining all His garments with the blood of His enemies, and none to hold Him out as a lamb sprinkled with His own blood to His friends? Is it the sovereignty and interest of England that is alone to be there transacted? For my part, I see no further into the mystery of these things, but that I could heartily rejoice that, innocent blood being expiated, the Irish might enjoy Ireland so long as the moon endureth, so that Jesus Christ might possess the Irish. In this to deal faithfully with the Lord Jesus--call Him out to the battle, and then keep away His crown? God hath been faithful in doing great things for you; be faithful in this one, do your utmost for the preaching of the gospel in Ireland."*

* "On the sinfulness of Staggering at the Promises."

And again in the great sermon on the shaking of heaven and earth, on the 19th of April.

"The Lord requireth that in the great things He hath to accomplish in this generation all His should close with Him; that we be not sinfully bewildered in our own cares, fears, and follies, but that we may follow hard after God, and be upright in our generation.

"God does not care to set His people to work in the dark. They are the children of light, and they are no deeds of darkness which they have to do. He suits their light to their labour. The light of every age is the forerunner of the work of every age.

"Every age hath its peculiar work, hath its peculiar light. The peculiar light of this generation is the discovery which the Lord hath made to His people of the mystery of civil and ecclesiastical tyranny.

"The works of God are vocal-speaking works. They may be heard, and read, and understood. Now what, I pray, are the works He is bringing forth upon the earth? What is He doing in our own and the neighbouring nations? Show me the potentate on earth that hath a peaceable molehill to build a habitation upon. Are not all the controversies, or most of them, that are now disputed in letters of blood among the nations somewhat of a distinct constitution from those formerly under debate? those tending thereof to the power and splendour of single persons, and these to the interest of the many. Is not the hand of the Lord in all this? Is not the voice of Christ in the midst of all this tumult? What speedy issue all this will be driven to, I know not: so much is to be done as requires a long space. Though a tower may be pulled down faster than it was set up, yet that which hath been building a thousand years is not like to go down in a thousand days.

"Let the professing people that are among us look well to themselves. 'The day is coming that will burn like an oven.' Dross will not stand this day. We have many a hypocrite yet to be uncased. Try and search your hearts; force not the Lord to lay you open to all.

"Be loose from all shaken things. You see the clouds return after the rain; one storm on the neck of another. 'Seeing that all these things must be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation?' Let your eyes be upwards, and your hearts be upwards, and your hands be upwards, that you be not moved at the passing away of shaken things. I could encourage you by the glorious issue of all these shakings, whose foretaste might be as marrow to your bones, though they should be appointed to consumption before the accomplishment of it.

"See the vanity and folly of such as labour to oppose the bringing of the kingdom of the Lord Jesus! Canst thou hinder the rain from falling? Canst thou stop the sun from rising? Surely with far more ease mayest thou stop the current and course of nature than the bringing in of the kingdom of Christ in righteousness and peace. Some are angry, some are troubled, some are in the dark, some full of revenge; but the truth is, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear, Babylon shall fall, and all the glory of the earth be stained, and the kingdoms become the kingdoms of our Lord Jesus Christ."*

* "On the Shaking of Heaven and Earth."

On the 7th of June, Dr. Owen preached again at "Margaret's" before the Parliament, on the great thanksgiving day, when the city feasted the Parliament, and distributed £100 to feast the poor.

Aunt Gretel and my father, who had come up from Netherby, heard him, with us. About the same time, Annis Nye returned from one of the two "threshing-floors,"* where the "Friends" had been suffered publicly, by "searching words," to sift the chaff from the wheat; and a "prelatical" friend of ours came in to tell us of his having joined in the ancient Common Prayer at St. Peter's Church on Paul's wharf, and heard good Archbishop Ussher preach.

* These two threshing floors are first spoken of a few years later, in 1655.

Whereon Aunt Gretel, who (believing far more in the power of light than in that of darkness) was ever wont to be seeing the clouds breaking, before others could, remarked to me,--

"Surely, sweet heart, the years of peace are already in sight. Quakers, Prelatists, and Puritans free to do what good they can in their different ways, what is that but the lion lying down with the lamb?"

"Ah, sister Gretel," said my father, "lions and lambs have lain down together in cages, with the keeper's eye on them, many a time before now, when they were well fed, and could not help it. It remains to be seen what they will do when the keeper's eye is removed. General Cromwell saith all sects cry for liberty when they are oppressed, but he never yet met with any that would allow it to any one else when they were in power."

And as we passed the kitchen door on our way upstairs, we heard sounds of scarcely millennial debate.

I am afraid Annis Nye had been taking a feminine advantage of the failure of her antagonist's cause to remind him how she had forewarned him. For Job was saying,--

"Convinced we are not to look for the Fifth Monarchy because we poor soldiers blundered about the ways and the times! As little as a man would be convinced the sun was never to rise because some idle watch-dog waked him up too soon by baying at the moon. Moved from the error of my ways! Moved at farthest from the First of Thessalonians to the Second. Not a whit farther. But that folks should call themselves Friends of Truth, who are not to be brought round by chapter and verse, is a marvel. General Cromwell knows what he is about in letting such have their 'threshing-floors.' There are those that think another sort of threshing-floor might be best to sift such chaff away. Eden is before us, Mistress Annis; before as well as behind. And the best Paradise is to come."

"The lion and the lamb are scarcely at peace yet, sister Gretel!" said my father.

But when we were all seated together in the parlour that evening, my father said,--

"How many hearts, like Job Forster's, have believed they saw the breaking of the dawn, which was to usher in the golden age, when it was only the breaking forth of the moon from the clouds, or perhaps only the deepening of the darkness, which they thought must be the darkest hour preceding the dawn. The Thessalonians of old; the early Church in her persecutions; Gregory the Great at the breaking up of the Empire; the Middle Ages in the year One Thousand, with a trembling expectation which led men, not indeed to sow beans on commons to make the whole earth fruitful, but to sow nothing, believing that earth's last harvest was at hand."

"Yet were they far wrong?" said my husband. "The moonlight and the morning both draw their light from the sun. The dawn shows that he is coming, but all light worth the name testifies that he is. In the moon, which dimly lights our night, it is already day. So that the moonlight, in truth, is as sure a promise of the day as the dawn."