CHAPTER IV.

The very afternoon of Roger's and my return from Davenant Hall Dr. Antony came on one of his ever-welcome visits. He had, by dint of much trouble and perseverance, obtained access to Mr. Prynne, in his solitary cell at Caernarvon, and to Mr. Bastwick and Mr. Burton, in theirs, in Launceston and Lancaster Castles; and afterwards to the prisons to which they were removed, in Guernsey, Jersey, and the Scilly Islands, and also to old Mr. Alexander Leighton, in his prison, after his most cruel mutilations.

Often in the summer Dr. Antony left his patients for a season, to visit such throughout the land as were in bonds for conscience' sake, bearing them the tidings, so precious to the solitary captive, that in the rush of life outside they were not forgotten; taking them food or physic, and such poor bodily comforts as were permitted by the hard rules of their imprisonment, and bringing back messages to their friends and kinsfolk. This last year Dr. Antony himself (as we heard from others) had been somewhat impoverished by a fine of £250 sterling, to which he had been sentenced by the Star-Chamber on account of these visits of compassion; although there was no law against them.

This time he brought us grievous tidings from many quarters; and very grave was the discourse between him and my Father.

Everywhere disgrace and disaster to our country; the French Huguenots cursing our Court for encouraging them to insurrection, and then sending ships against them to Rochelle (though, thank Heaven! scarcely one of our brave sailors would bear arms against their Protestant brethren--officers and men deserting in a body when they discovered against whom they had been treacherously sold to fight); our own fisheries on the east coast sold to the Hollanders, and the capture of one of our Indiamen by Dutch ships; the Barbary corsairs landing on the coast near Plymouth, and kidnapping our countrymen and countrywomen from their village homes, to sell them as slaves to the Moors in Africa; the King of Spain, the very pillar of Popery and persecution, the sworn foe of our religion and our race from the days of the Armada, permitted to recruit for his armies in Ireland; the Government, with Wentworth (traitor to liberty) and Archbishop Laud at the head of it, weak as scorched tow to chastise our enemies abroad, yet armed with scorpions against every defender of our ancient rights at home. The decision but lately given by the judges against the brave and good Mr. Hampden as to ship money, placing our fortunes at the mercy of the Court, who chiefly valued them as meant wherewith to destroy our liberties; Justice Berkeley declaring from the judgment-seat that Lex was not Rex, but that Rex was Lex; thirty-one monopolies sold, thus making nearly every article of consumption at once dear and bad. The sweeping, steady pressure of Lord Strafford's (Mr. Wentworth) "Thorough" wrought into a vexation for every housewife in the kingdom, by the king's petty monopolies. The heavy links of Wentworth's imperious despotism, filed and twisted by Archbishop Laud's petty tyrannies into needles wherewith to torture tender consciences, and wiry ligatures wherewith to tie and bind every limb. "Regulations as to the colours and cutting of vestments, worthy (Aunt Dorothy said) of a court tailor, enforced by cruelties minute and persevering enough for a malignant witch." Dark stories, too, of private wrong, wrought by Wentworth in Ireland, worthy of the basest days of the Roman emperors; tales of royal forests arbitrarily extended from six miles to sixty, to the ruin of hundreds of gentlemen and peasants; disgraceful news of faith broken with Dutch and French refugees welcome to the heart of England since the days of Elizabeth, made secure with rights confirmed to them by James and by King Charles himself, now forbidden by Archbishop Laud to worship God in the way for which their fathers had suffered banishment and loss of all things,--driven to seek another home in Holland, and in their second exile ruining the flourishing town of Ipswich, where they had lived, and carrying over the cloth-trade which was the support of our eastern counties to our rivals the Dutch.

"You have a copy of Fox's Book of Martyrs?" Dr. Antony asked of my Father, after he had been speaking of these lamentable things.

"What good Protestant English household is without one?" exclaimed Aunt Dorothy; "least of all such as this, whose forefathers are enrolled in its lists."

"Take good care of it, then," Dr. Antony replied, "for the Primate hath forbidden another copy to be printed, under the penalties the Star-Chamber will not fail to enforce."

"The times are dark," he continued, "dark and silent. I stood this spring by the grave of Sir John Eliot, in the Church of the Tower; as brave, and loyal, and devout a gentleman as this nation ever knew, killed by inches in prison for calmly pleading the ancient rights of England in his place in Parliament, and then his body refused to his family for honourable burial among his kindred in his parish church in Cornwall, and cast like a felon's into a dishonoured grave in the precincts of the prison where he died. And I thought how it might have thrown a deeper shadow over his deathbed if he could have foreseen how, during these six years, the tyranny would be tightened, and the voice of the nation never once be heard in her lawful Parliaments."

"The voice of the nation is audible enough to those who have ears to hear," said my Father.

"Yea, verily," said Dr. Antony, "if you had journeyed through the country as I have, you would say so. When will kings learn that moans and subdued groans between set teeth are more dangerous from human lips than any torrents of passionate speech?"

"And," added my Father, "that there is a silence even more significant and perilous than these!"

"But there are two points of hope," said Dr. Antony. "One is the Puritan colony in New England, where our brethren have exchanged the vain struggle with human blindness and tyranny for the triumphant struggle with nature in her primeval forests and untrodden wilds. Four thousand good English men and women, and seventy-seven clergymen, have taken refuge there during these last twenty years. Not poor men only, for they have taken many thousand pounds of English money, or money's worth, with them, forsaking country and comfortable homes for the dear liberty to obey God rather than man. And these plantations, after the severest struggles and privations, are beginning to grow.

"What they hope and mean to be is shown by this, that two years since, while food was still hard to win from the wilderness, and roads and bridges had yet to be made, the plantation of Massachusetts voted £400 for the founding of a college. Such an act might seem more like the foresight of the fathers of a nation than the care of a little exiled band struggling for existence with the Indians, the wilderness, and a hostile Court at home.

"The other point of hope is the Greyfriars' Church in Edinburgh, where, on the 1st of last March, after long prayers and preachings, the great congregation rose, gathered from all corners of the kingdom,--nobles, gentlemen, burgesses, ministers, lifted their hands solemnly to heaven, and swore to the Covenant." Then Dr. Antony took a manuscript paper from the breast of his coat, and read: "'We abjure,' they swore, 'the Roman Antichrist,--all his tyrannous law made upon indifferent things against our Christian liberty; his erroneous doctrine against the written Word, the perfection of the law, the office of Christ, and His blessed Evangel; his cruel judgments against infants departing this life without the sacraments; his blasphemous priesthood; his canonization of men; his dedicating of kirks, altars, days, vows to creatures; his purgatory, prayers for the dead, praying or speaking in a strange language; his desperate and uncertain repentance; his general and doubtsome faith; his holy water, baptizing of bells, conjuring of spirits, crossing, saving, anointing, conjuring, hallowing of God's good creatures.' 'We, noblemen, barons, gentlemen, burgesses, ministers, and commons, considering the danger of the true Reformed religion, of the king's honour, and of the public peace of the kingdom by the manifold innovations and evils generally contained and particularly mentioned in our late supplications, complaints, and protestations, do hereby profess, and before God, his angels, and the world, solemnly declare that with our whole hearts we agree and resolve all the days of our life constantly to adhere unto and defend the foresaid true religion, and forbearing the practice of all novations already introduced in the matter of the worship of God, or approbations of the corruptions of the public government of the Kirk, till they be tried or allowed in free Assemblies and in Parliaments, to labour by all means lawful to recover the purity and liberty of the Gospel.' 'Neither do we fear the aspersions of rebellion, combination, or what else our adversaries, from their craft and malice, could put upon us, seeing what we do is well warranted, and ariseth from an unfeigned desire to maintain the true worship of God, the majesty of our king, and the peace of the kingdom, for the common happiness of ourselves and posterity. And because we cannot look for a blessing of God on our proceedings except with our subscription we gave such a life and conversation as becometh Christians who have renewed their covenant with God, we therefore promise to endeavour to be good examples to others of all godliness, soberness, and righteousness, and of every duty we owe to God and man. And we call the living God, the Searcher of hearts, to witness, as we shall answer to Jesus in that great day, under pain of God's ever-lasting wrath and of infamy; most humbly beseeching the Lord to strengthen us with his Holy Spirit for this end.' And this," added Dr. Antony, "has been sworn to not in the Greyfriars' Church alone; but by crowds, signed with their blood on parchment spread on the stones of the churchyards in Edinburgh and Glasgow; yea, in church after church, in city, village, and on hill-side, from John o'Groats' House to the Borders, from Mull to Fife, with tears, and shouts, and fervent prayers."

"And this means?" said my Father.

"It means that the Scottish nation will rather die than submit to Archbishop Laud's ceremonies and canons; but that they mean neither to die nor to submit; that every covenanted congregation will be a recruiting ground, if necessary, fora covenanted army; that the oath sworn in the Kirk they are prepared to fulfil on the battle-field."

"And a goodly army they might soon discipline," said my Father, "with the military officers they have trained under the great Gustavus."

"It means," added Dr. Antony, lowering his voice, "that they are ready to kindle a fire for religion and liberty in Scotland which will not stop at the Borders, and will find fuel enough in every county in England."

"The Court had better, for its own peace, have heeded Jenny Geddes' folding-stool," said my Father.

"For his own peace," rejoined Aunt Dorothy, "but scarcely for ours."

From that time (1638), through more than a quarter of a century, public and private life were so intertwined that no faithful history can divide them. In quieter times, while the great historical paintings are being wrought in parliament-houses and palaces, countless small family-pictures are being woven entirely independent of these in countless homes. But in times of revolution, national history and private story are interwoven into one great tapestry, from which the humblest figure cannot be detached without unravelling the whole web.

Such times are hard, but they are ennobling. Or at least they are enlarging. Faults, and ordinary virtues become crimes, or heroical virtues, by mere force of temperature and space. Principles are tested; pretences are dissolved by the fact of being pretences. Such times are ennobling, but they are also necessarily tragical. All noble lives--all lives worth living--are expanded from the small circles of everyday domestic circumstances into portions of the grand orbits of the worlds. Yet, doubtless, thereby in themselves such lives must often become fragments instead of wholes, must seem in themselves unfinished, must be in themselves inexplicable.

But, indeed, are not the histories of nations, and revolutions themselves, even the grandest, but fragments of those greater orbits of which we scarcely, even in centuries, can trace the movement? Is it any wonder then that national histories as well as personal should often seem tragical? As now, alas, to us! poor tempest-tossed fragments of the ship's company which we deemed should have brought home the argosies for ages to come, driven to these untrodden far off shores; whilst to England, instead of the golden fleece of peace and liberty, our enterprise may seem but to have brought a tyranny more cruel and a court more corrupt. Yet may there be something in the future which, to those who look back, will explain all!

For England; and perhaps even for these wild shores which we fondly call New England!

Can it be possible that we have won the Golden Fleece, and have brought it hither?

There is something, moreover, in having lived in times of storm. The temperature is raised at such times; all life is keener, colour more vivid, and growth more rapid.

A nation in revolution is, in more ways than one, like a ship in a storm. The dividing barriers of selfishness are dissolved for a time into a common passion of patriotic hope, purpose, and endeavour. We feel our common humanity in our common throbs of hope and fear, in our common efforts for deliverance. And we are (or ought to be) nobler, and more large of heart for ever afterwards. And I think the greater part are. Perhaps, in some measure, all; unless, indeed, it be the ship's cats, who, no doubt, privately pursue the ship's mice with undeviating purpose through the raging of winds and waves, and look on the strife of the elements as a providential arrangement to enable them to fulfil their mousing destinies with less interruption.

And what such times of revolution do for a nation, ought not Christianity, the great perpetual revolution, to do for us always?

The great hindrance seems to me to be, that it is so much easier to be partizans than patriots, whether in the Church or State.

If men would do for the country what they do for the party, what a country we should have!

If Christians would do for the Church what they do for their sect, what a world we should have!

For a quarter of a century, from the signing of the Covenant in the High Kirk of Edinburgh, the long struggle went on. Nor has it ceased yet, though the combatants have changed, and the battle-field.

The Scottish covenanted congregations grew quickly indeed into a covenanted army, and advanced to the border. The King, by Archbishop Laud's counsel, disbelieving in the Covenant, proclaimed that if within six weeks the Scotch did not renounce it, he would come and chastise them (in a fatherly way) with an army. The King and Archbishop Laud regarded the Covenant as a freak of rebellious misguided children. The Scotch regarded it as the portion of the eternal law of God which they then had to keep; and would keep, or die.

A difference not to be settled by royal proclamation.

The Scotch had the advantage of _being_ their own army, ready to fight for their Divine law; while the king had to pay his army with the coin of the realm, and never could inspire them to the end with the conviction that they were fighting for anything but coin of the realm.

The coin of the realm, moreover, lay in the keeping of those dragons called Parliaments, which his majesty had termed "vipers" at their last meeting, and in a letter to Strafford, had compared to "cats," tameable when young, "cursed" if allowed to grow old, and which he had therefore banished underground for eleven years into shadow and silence.

When, therefore, the king and the Covenanted army met on the borders, it was found that the Scotch, commanded, as my Father said, by old Gustavus Adolphus's officers; every regiment as in that old Swedish army, also a congregation, meeting morning and evening round its banner of "Christ's crown and covenant," for prayer was a rock against which the English army might vainly break; but from which, as the event proved, it preferred to ebb silently away, the pay for which only it professed to fight, being, moreover, exhausted.

The king took refuge in a treaty, promising to leave Kirk affairs in the hands of the Kirk, and to call a free assembly. Poor gentleman, his promises were still believed to have some small amount of truth in them, and a pacification was effected.

Then came the moment of hope for those who had been watching those movements with the intensest interest in England.

Of the two evils, a remonstrating Parliament in London and a fighting Kirk in Scotland, the former now appeared to the king the least. In the keeping of the Parliament, dragon-monster as it seemed to him, lay the gold. And once more, after a silence of eleven years, on the 15th of April, 1640, the Parliament was summoned; a weapon welded by the wrongs and the patience of eleven years into a temper the king had done well to heed.

Pym and Hampden were the chief spokesmen, and Mr. Cromwell sat for Huntingdon.

At the last Parliament they, and brave men like them, had wept bitter tears at the king's arbitrary measures, and at his false dealing.

At this Parliament there were no tears shed. There were no disrespectful or hasty words spoken.

It was as if in spirit they met around the grave of the martyred Sir John Eliot, and would do or say nothing to dishonour the grave to which since last they met he had been brought for liberty.

But no portion of the hoarded treasure could the king force or cajole from their grasp. The court insisted on supplies. The Parliament insisted on grievances.

And on May the 5th, the king dissolved the Parliament.

My Father's voice trembled with emotion when he heard it. "They would have saved him!" he said. "They would have saved the country and the king!"

Said Aunt Dorothy grimly, "The king prefers armies to parliaments; and no doubt he will have his choice."

A second royal army was raised by enforcing ship-money, seizing the pepper of the Indian merchants, and compelling loans, filling the towns and cities with angry men who dared not resist, and the prisons with brave men who dared. And to rouse the country further, the queen appealed publicly for aid to the Roman Catholics, whilst Archbishop Laud demanded contributions of the clergy. Earl Strafford, recalled from Ireland, was appointed commander-in-chief. The court endeavoured also to enkindle the fury of the old Border war-memories; but the Borderers were brethren in the faith, and, refusing to hate each other, combined in hating the bishops.

The second army melted like the first, after some little heartless fighting in a cause they hated; having distinguished itself mainly by shouting its sympathy with the Puritan preachers in the various towns through which it passed; by insisting on testing whether its commanders were Papists before it would follow them to the field; and by draining the king's treasury, so that he could proceed no further without once more looking to the dreaded guardians of the gold.

"They meet in a different temper from the last," my Father said, as we walked home from the village, where we had eagerly hastened to meet the flying Post, who galloped from one patriot's house to another with printed sheets and letters containing the account of the king's opening speech on the 3d of November; "as different as the sweet May days of promise during which the Little Parliament debated, from the gray fogs which creep along the Fens before our eyes to-day. Summer, and hope, and restitution brightened before that April Parliament. Over this lower winter, storms, and retribution; slow clearing of the stubble-fields of centuries, stern ploughing of the soil for better harvests, not to be reaped, perchance, by the hands that sow."

For the six months between had been ill-filled by the court party.

I remember now how one day during those months my Father's hands trembled and his voice grew low as a whisper as he read to us a letter telling how a poor reckless young drummer lad, who, when, on leave from the army in the north, had joined a wild mob of London apprentices in an attack on Lambeth Palace, had been racked and tortured in the Tower to make him confess his accomplices; and torture failing to make him base, poor boy, how he had been hanged and quartered the day after.

"They dared not torture Felton a few years since for the murder of Buckingham," my Father said, "and now they twist this boy's offence into treason, because, forsooth, a drum chanced to be sounded by the mob, that the poor misguided lad may suffer the traitor's doom, and the honour of his Holiness, their Pontifex Maximus, their Archangel, as they call him, be avenged."

(These were the things that silenced the pleadings of pity in good and merciful men when, in after years, the Archbishop was brought to the scaffold.

Now that the crime and its avenging all are past, and victim, slayer, avenger, all have met before the great Bar, it is hard to recall the passion of indignation these deeds awakened in the gentlest hearts when they were being done with little chance of ever being avenged. But is not the most inflexible judgment the offspring of outraged mercy?)

All through that summer the king, the archbishop, and Strafford went on accumulating wrongs on the nation, too surely to recoil on themselves.

There may have been many tyrannies more terrible. Never could there have been one more irritating, more ingenious in sowing discontents in every corner of the land.

The archbishop in convocation made a new canon, requiring every clergyman and every graduate of the universities to take an oath that all things necessary to salvation were contained in the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England, as distinguished from Presbyterianism and Papistry.

I remember that canon especially, because it brought Roger home from Oxford, where he had been studying during the past two years, and was about to take his degree, and led to results, sad indeed for us, though not exactly among the miseries to be set down to the archbishop. Roger would not swear, he said, against the religion of half the kingdom, at least without understanding it better.

From Northamptonshire, Kent, Devonshire,--old conservative Kent and the loyal West,--came up indignant petitions against this canon. London was exasperated by the committal of four aldermen who refused to set before the king the names of those persons within their wards who were able to lend his majesty money; every borough in the kingdom was aroused by the presence of its members ignominiously dismissed from the dissolved Parliament; nine boroughs were still more deeply moved by the absence of their members, imprisoned the day after the dissolution in the Tower. Every day brought reports of some fresh victim fined in the Star-Chamber on account of the odious ship-money. Especial complaints came from the North, which Strafford was grinding with the steady pressure of his presence in the council at York.

And meantime the friendly Scots were practically inculcating Presbyterianism and the advantages of armed resistance in the four counties beyond the Tees, where they had been left in possession until they received the price wherewith the king had paid them for rebellion.

There was much stir and movement in the land all through those months. Netherby lay close to the high road, and we had many visitors. Mr. Cromwell once, on his way to Cambridge (for which place he then sate in Parliament), brief in speech and to the point, hearty in look, and word, and gesture, and also at times in laughter. Mr. Hampden, dignified and courtly as any nobleman of the king's court. Mr. Pym, with firm, close-set lips and grave eyes. He came more than once on horseback, and put up for the night, on one of the many rides he took at that time around the country to stir up the patriots to act together. My father also was often absent attending meetings of the country party at Broughton Hall, the Lord Brooks' mansion, near Oxford, where Roger, being at the university, sometimes met him.

So the summer passed on, its perishable things fading, and its enduring things ripening into autumn. Crop after crop of royal promises budded and bloomed and bore no fruit, until the people grew sorrowfully to understand that royal words, like flowers cultivated into barrenness in royal gardens, were never purposed to bear fruit, but only to attract with empty show of blossom. The nobles petitioned for a Parliament; ten thousand citizens of London, in spite of threats, petitioned for parliament; and at last once more the king summoned it.

A month afterwards, early in December, my Father called the household around the great hall fire to hear a letter from Dr. Antony:

"_To my very loving friend,_ "_Roger Drayton, Esq.,_ "_November_ 28_th._

"_Present these._

"HONOURED SIR,--Let us rejoice and praise God together. My occupation is gone. The prisons bid fair to be cleared of all save their rightful tenants. Parish after parish will welcome back faithful ministers, undone and imprisoned by Star-Chamber and High Commission. Heaven send that prison and persecution have made their voices strong and gentle, and not bitter and shrill; for I have found the devil not locked out by prison-bolts. And too surely also he will find his way into triumphal processions such as we have had in London to-day, on behalf of Mistress Olive's old friends, Mr. Prynne, Mr. Bastwick, and Mr. Burton. But let me set my narrative in order.

"A fortnight before the Parliament was opened two thousand rioters had torn down the benches in St. Paul's, where the cruel High Commission were sitting, shouting that they would have no bishop, no High Commission. Now these disorders cease. Once more the gag is off the lips of every borough and county in Old England; and the bitter helpless moans and wild inarticulate cries which have vainly filled the land these eleven years give place to calm and temperate speech. Petitions and remonstrances pour in from north, south, east and west; some brought by troops of horsemen. The calmest voices are heard more clearly.

"'He is a great stranger in Israel,' said Lord Falkland, 'who knoweth not that this kingdom hath long laboured under great oppression both in religion and liberty. Under pretence of uniformity they have brought in superstition and scandal; under the titles of reverence and decency they have defiled our Church by adorning our churches. They have made the conforming to ceremonies more important than the conforming to Christianity.'

"Said Sir Edward Deering, in attacking the High Commission Court,--

"'A Pope at Rome will do me less hurt than a patriarch at Lambeth.'

"Said Sir Benjamin Rudyard,--

"'We have seen ministers, their wives, and families, undone against law, against conscience, about not dancing on Sundays. They have brought it so to pass, that under the name of Puritans all our religion is branded. Whosoever squares his actions by any rule divine or human, he is a Puritan; whosoever would be governed by the king's laws, he is a Puritan; he that will not do whatsoever other men will have him do, he is a Puritan.'

"The Commons had not sate four days when, on the 7th of November, by warrant of the house, they sent for Mr. Prynne, Mr. Bastwick, and Mr. Burton, from their prisons beyond the seas, to certify by whose authority they had been mutilated, branded, and imprisoned.

"And now after three weeks these three gentlemen, freed from their sea-washed dungeons in Jersey, Guernsey, and the Scilly Islands, have this day arrived in the city. All the way from the coast they have been eagerly welcomed, escorted by troops of friends with songs and garlands, from town to town.

"Five thousand citizens of condition rode forth on horseback to meet them, among them many a citizen's wife, and all with bay and rosemary in their hats and caps, to do honour to those their enemies had vainly sought to shame. I trow brave Mrs. Bastwick, who stood tearless by her husband at the pillory, and who hath not been suffered to see him in his prison since, thought it no shame to unman him by shedding tears of joy to-day. Old gray-haired Mr. Leighton, moreover, bent with imprisonment and torture, and young John Lilburn, for whom Mr. Cromwell so fervently pleaded, were there to share the triumph, all marked with honourable scars from the Star-Chamber. This outside the city. And within, at Westminster, another victory--not a triumph but a victory--not festive, but solemn and tragical, as victories on battle-fields are wont to be.

"This day at the bar of the House of Peers, about three of the clock in the afternoon, Mr. Pym, in the name of all the Commons of England, impeached Thomas, Earl of Strafford, of high treason. And this night Lord Strafford lodges in the Tower.

"He is too stately a cedar that there should not be something great in his fall.

"Scorning the Commons' message, with a proud-glooming countenance the earl made towards his place at the head of the board. But at once many bade him void the house. Sullenly he had to move to the door till he was called. There he, at whose door so many vainly waited, had to wait till he was summoned. Loftily he stood to hear the sentence of the House. He was commanded to kneel, and on his knees he was committed prisoner to the Keeper of the Black Rod. He would have spoken, but he who had silenced England for eleven years was sternly silenced now, and had to go without a word. In the outer room they demanded his sword. The carl cried to his serving-man with a loud voice to take my Lord-Lieutenant's sword. A crowd thronged the doors of the House as he stepped out to his coach. No fellow capped to him before whom yesterday not a noble in England would have stood uncovered with impunity. One cried to another, 'What is the matter?' 'A small matter, I warrant you,' quoth the earl. Coming to where he had left his coach he found it not, and had to walk back again through the gazing, gaping crowd. He was not suffered to enter his own coach, but was carried away a prisoner in that of the Keeper of the Black Rod.

"And this night he lodges--scarce, I trow, rests or sleeps--in the Tower. Will the memory of his old companion in the days before he turned traitor to England and liberty, our noble murdered patriot Eliot, haunt his memory there? From his ghost the earl is safe enough. Such ghosts are in other keeping and other company. And for the earl's memory, darker recollections than that of Eliot with all his wrongs may well haunt it, if report speaks truth; recollections which the Old Tower itself, with all its chambers of death, can scarce outgloom.

"But Lord Strafford is not a man to dream while there is work to be done, or to look back when life may hang on his wisdom in looking forward.

"The first stroke is struck, but the cedar is not felled yet. Nor can any surmise what it may bring down with it if it falls.

"Your faithful servant and loving friend.

"LEONARD ANTONY.

"Roger will like to hear that his friend Mr. Cromwell presented the petition for poor John Lilburn, (some time writer for Mr. Prynne) that was scourged from Westminster to the Fleet prison. And also that he hath warmly espoused the cause of certain poor countrymen whom he knows near St. Ives, robbed of their ancient pasture-rights on a common tyrannously enclosed by one of the queen's servants.

"Mr. Cromwell seemed to take these poor men's wrongs sorely to heart, and spoke with a flushed face and much vehement eloquence concerning them, in a voice which certain courtiers thought loud and untunable, clad in a coat and band they thought unhandsome and made by an 'ill country-tailor,' and in a hat without a hatband. But the Parliament hearkened to him with much regard, and gave great heed to what he counselled."

Roger's eye kindled.

"Mr. Cromwell will never forget the old friends for the new," said my Father, "nor pass by little duties in hurrying to great ends."

Then our household broke into twos and threes debating the news.

Aunt Dorothy shook her head. "I do mourn over it," said she. "Mr. Cromwell might do great things. And here are the Church and State all on fire, and the Almighty sending His lightnings on the cedars of Lebanon and the oaks of Bashan, while Mr. Cromwell keeps harping on these petty worldly things; on the wrongs of an insignificant servant of Mr. Prynne's, which no doubt would get set right of themselves when once the great battle is fought; and on whether some poor clodpoles near St. Ives get a few acres more or less to feed their sheep on. And, meanwhile, the sheep of the Lord's pasture wandering on the mountains without pasture or shepherd! I do think it a pity, too, that Mr. Cromwell does not change his tailor; we ought to provide things honest in the sight of all men. Not but that I will say," she concluded, "Mrs. Cromwell and the maidens might take some of these matters on herself."

I remember that night asking Aunt Gretel if she thought it would be wrong to put Earl Strafford's name into my prayers. He was not exactly an enemy of mine, or there would be a command to do so; and he certainly was not a friend, nor, now, any longer "one in authority." But it went to my heart to think how in a moment all his glory seemed turned to dishonor, the crowd gaping on him, and no man capping to him.

"What wouldst thou pray for, Olive?" said Aunt Gretel. "Certainly not that he may have power again, and set up the Star-Chamber, and send the three gentlemen to the pillory once more."

"Would he do that if he got out of the Tower?" said I.

"The wise and good men think so, or they would not have him sent there," said she.

"But might he not be better always afterwards?" I asked.

"The people cannot trust that he would," she said. "Even if he promised ever so much and intended it, they could not at once trust him."

"Is it too late then for him to be forgiven?" I said.

"Too late, it seems, for men to forgive him," said she, very gravely.

"But never too late for God?" I said.

"No, never too late for God," said she, slowly. "Because God knows when we really intend to give up sinning, even when we can do nothing to show it to men. So it is never too late for Him to take His prodigals home to his bosom."

"Then I can ask for that," said I. And I did. But that night there sank down on my heart for the first time (the first time of so many in the solemn years that, followed) the terrible words, "Too late;" the terrible sense that an hour may come when, if repentance towards God is still possible, reparation to man and mercy from man are possible no longer.

This fervour of patriotic life which animated us all at Netherby made us rather hard, I am afraid, on Cousin Placidia.

Throughout the year, after our sojourn at Davenant Hall, she had tried Roger and me (and I believe also secretly Aunt Dorothy) very seriously by becoming in her way exceedingly religious. One winter morning when Roger and I were busy with my father about our Italian lessons at one end of the hall, the following discussion took place between Placidia and Aunt Dorothy over their spinning near the hearth. Placidia had seen, she informed Aunt Dorothy, the vanity of all things under the sun, the folly of pride, and the wickedness of all worldly pomp, and she washed decidedly to take her place "on the Lord's side," to work out betimes her own salvation, and to secure for herself an abundant entrance into the kingdom. Aunt Dorothy spoke of the heart being deceitful, and hoped Placidia would make sure of her foundation. Placidia rejoined with some slight resentment as to any doubts of her orthodoxy, that she humbly trusted she knew as well as any one, that every one's heart was indeed deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, that is, every ungodly person's; indeed one only needed to look around in any direction to see it. Aunt Dorothy replied that, for her part, she found her own heart still very ingenious in deceiving her, and in need of a great deal of daily watching.

Placidia admitted the necessity. Indeed, she said, that on a review of her life she felt that, although she had been mercifully preserved from many infirmities which beset other people, (her temper being naturally even, and her tastes sober,) still no doubt she shared in the universal depravity. But she had, like Jacob at Bethel, she said, made a solemn covenant with God, promising to give Him henceforth His due portion of her affections and substance; she had signed and sealed it on her knees, and she believed she was accepted, that she was on the Lord's side, and that, as with Jacob, He would henceforth be on hers.

Aunt Dorothy's spinning-wheel flew with ominous rapidity, but some moments passed before she replied. Then she said,--

"My dear, I trust that you know the difference between a _covenant_ and a _bargain_. The patriarch Jacob, on the whole, no doubt meant well, but I never much liked his 'ifs' and 'thens' with the Almighty. The best kind of covenants, I think, are those which begin on the other side. As when the Lord said to Abraham, 'Fear not, Abraham, I am thy shield and thy exceeding great reward.' Or, 'I am the Almighty God, walk before me and be thou perfect.' Then follow the promises, lavish as His riches, which fill heaven and earth; free as the air He gives us to breathe. When God gives there is no limit, no reserve, no condition. But, on the other hand, neither is there reserve, or condition, or limit when He demands. It is not so much for so much, but _all_ surrendered in absolute trust. It is, 'Be thou perfect;' it is, 'Leave thy country, and thy kindred, and thy father's house;' it is, 'Give me thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest.' Is this what you mean by a covenant with God? Think well, for He 'is not mocked.' His hand is larger than ours, as the sea is larger than a drinking-cup; but He will not accept our hands half full."

Said Placidia,--

"Aunt Dorothy, I have no intention whatever of being half for the world and half for God. I have no opinion at all of the religion which can dance round May-poles on the week-day, and attend the worship of God on Sundays; or fast and pray on Fridays, wear mourning in Lent, and be decked out in curls, and laces, and jewels, on feast-days. I have made up my mind never to wear a feather, or a trinket, or a bit of lace to my band, or a laced stomacher, nor to use crisping-tongs, nor to indulge in any kind of 'dissoluteness in hair,' nor ever to sport any gayer colour in mantle or wimple than gray, or at the most 'liver colour.' I have not the least intention, Aunt Dorothy, of trying to serve two masters. I know in that way we gain nothing. But I do believe that those that honour Him He will honour, and that godliness hath promise of the life that now is as well as of that which is to come."

"The Lord's honours are not often like King Ahasuerus's," said Aunt Dorothy, gravely; "the Crowns of those He delighted to honour have sometimes been of fire, and their royal apparel of sack-cloth. There is such a thing," she continued, her wheel whirling like a whirlwind, "as serving only one master, yet that not the right one, though taking His name. And we are near the brink of that precipice whenever we seek any reward from the Master beyond His 'Well done.' '_I_ am thy shield,'" she concluded, "'_I, the Lord Himself;_' not what He promises or what He gives, though it were to be the half of His kingdom."

By this time my Father's attention had been aroused to the discussion, and rising from the table and approaching the spinners, he said,--

"What you say, sister Dorothy, reminds me of some words I heard lately in a letter of Mr. Cromwell's. 'Truly no creature hath more cause,' he wrote, 'to put himself forth in the cause of his God than I. I have had plentiful wages beforehand, and I am sure I shall never earn the least mite.'"

"Yea, verily," said Aunt Dorothy, "Mr. Cromwell may waste too much thought on draining and dyking; but he is a godly gentleman, and he under stands the Covenant."

Cousin Placidia, however, pursued her course, and continued a living rebuke to Roger and me if we indulged in too noisy merriment, and to any of the maids who were tempted into a gayer kirtle or ribbon than ordinary. On Sunday she was never known to smile, nor on any other day to laugh, except in a mild moderate manner, as a polite concession to any one who expected it in response to a facetious remark.

Her conversation meantime became remarkably scriptural. She did not allow herself an indulgence which she did not justify by a text; if her dresses wore longer than usual, so as to spare her purse, she looked on it as a proof that she had been marvellously helped with wisdom in the choice. If she escaped the various accidents which not unfrequently brought me into disgrace, and my clothes to premature ruin, she regarded it as an interference of Providence, like to that which watched over the Israelites in the wilderness.

Indeed, it seemed to Roger and me that Placidia's primary meaning of being "on the Lord's side" was, that in a general way the Almighty should do what she liked; and that in particular the weather should be arranged with considerate reference as to whether she had on her new taffetas or her old woolsey. Great therefore was our relief, although great also our astonishment, when Aunt Dorothy announced to us one day that Cousin Placidia was about to be married to Mr. Nicholls, the vicar of Netherby.

"Are you not surprised?" I ventured to ask of my Father. "Cousin Placidia is such a Precisian, as they call it, and Mr. Nicholls thinks so much of Archbishop Laud."

"Not much surprised, Olive," he said. "I think Placidia's religion and Mr. Nicholls' are a little alike. Both have a great deal to do with the colour and shape of clothes, and with the places and times at which things are done, and the way in which they are said. And both are prudent persons, desirous of taking a respectable place in the world in a religious way. I should think they would agree very well."

Aunt Dorothy was at once indignant and consoled.

"I never quite trusted Placidia's professions," said she; "but this, I confess, goes beyond my fears. A person who never passes what he calls the altar without making obeisances such as the old heathens made to the sun and the moon, and who, not six months ago, defiled the house of God with Popish incense!"

But Cousin Placidia had explanations which were quite satisfactory to herself.

"She had had so many providential intimations," she said (one of the habits of Placidia that always most exasperated Roger was her way of always doing what she wished, because, she said, some one else wished it; and since she had become religious, she usually threw the responsibility on the Highest Quarter)--"intimations so plain, that she could not disregard them without disobedience. Mr. Nicholls' coming to Netherby at all was the consequence of a series of most remarkable circumstances, entirely beyond his own control. The way in which the prejudice against each other, with which they began, had by degrees changed into esteem, and then into something more, was also very remarkable. And what was most remarkable of all was, that on the very morning of the day when he proposed to her, she had--quite by chance, as it might seem, but that there was no such thing as chance--opened the Bible on the passage, 'Get thee out from thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, into a land that I will shew thee: and I will bless thee.'"

"But, my dear," remarked Aunt Gretel, to whom, Aunt Dorothy being unapproachable, Placidia had made this explanation--"my dear, you are not going to leave your country, are you? and you do know the land to which you are going."

"Of course," said Placidia, "there are always differences. But the application was certainly very remarkable. Mr. Nicholls quite agreed with me, when I told him of it."

"No doubt, my dear, no doubt," said Aunt Gretel, retreating. "But there does seem a little difference in your opinions."

"Uncle Drayton says we should look on the things in which we agree, more than on those in which we differ," said Placidia. "Besides, if Aunt Dorothy would only see it, I really trust I have been already useful to Mr. Nicholls. He said, only yesterday, he thought there was a good deal to be said in favour of some late ordinances of the Parliament against too close approach to Papistical ceremonies. Mr. Nicholls had never any propension towards the Pope; and he thinks now that, it may be, his canonical obedience to Archbishop Laud led him to some unwise compliances. But the powers that be, he says, must always have their due honour. The great point is, to ascertain which powers be, and which only seem to be. And now that the Parliament has impeached Archbishop Laud, and sent him to the Tower, this is really an exceedingly difficult question for a conscientious clergyman, who is also a good subject, to determine."

Aunt Gretel did not pursue the subject, she being always in fear of losing her way, and straying into wildernesses, when English politics or rubrics came into question.

And in due time Placidia became Mistress Nicholls, and removed to the parsonage, with a generous dowry from my Father, and everything that by the most liberal interpretation could in any way be construed into belonging to her, down to a pair of perfumed Cordova gloves which had been given her by some gay kinswoman, and, having been thrown aside in a closet as useless vanities, cost Aunt Dorothy a long and indignant search. Everything might be of use, said Placidia, in their humble housekeeping. And she had always remembered a saying she had once heard Aunt Gretel quote from Dr. Luther,--"that what the husband makes by earning, the wife multiplies by sparing."

"An invaluable maxim," she remarked, "for people in narrow circumstances, who had married from pure godly affection, without passion or ambition, despising all worldly considerations, like herself and Mr. Nicholls."

It was a strange Christmas to many in England, that first in the stormy life of the Long Parliament. Earl Stratford had been in the Tower since the 28th of November. A week before Christmas day Archbishop Laud had been impeached and committed to custody. There was no thought of the Parliament dispersing. Mr. Pym and others of the patriot members were occupied with preparing for Lord Strafford's trial, which did not begin until the 22nd of the following March.

On the other hand, faithful voices, long silent in prisons, were heard again in many pulpits throughout the land.

Judge Berkeley, who had given the unjust decision in favour of ship-money, was seized on the bench in his ermine, and taken to prison like a common felon.

The great thunder-cloud of Star-chamber and High Commission Court had dispersed. The Puritans and Patriots breathed once more, and the great voice of the nation, speaking at Westminster the words which were deeds, while it quieted the cries and groans of the oppressed country, set men's tongues free for earnest and determined speech by every hall hearth, and every blacksmith's forge, and ale-house, and village-green, and place of public or social talk throughout the country.

The blacksmith's forge in Netherby village was indeed a place well known to Roger and me. Job Forster, the smith, a brave, simple-hearted giant from Cornwall (given to despising our inland peasants, who had never seen the sea, and suspected of being the mainstay of a little band of sectaries in the neighborhood), having always been Roger's chief friend; while Rachel, his gentle, sickly, saintly little wife (whom he cherished with a kind of timorous tenderness, like something almost too small and delicate for him to meddle with), had always given me the child's place in her motherly heart, which no child had been given to their house to fill. Whenever we were missed in childhood, it was commonly at Job Forster's forge we were sought and found. And by this means we learned a great deal of politics from Job's point of view, as well as many marvellous stories of God's providence by sea and land, which seemed to us to show that God was as near to those who trust Him now, as to the Israelites of old, which, also, Job and Rachel most surely believed.

But, meantime, while the clouds over England seemed scattering, a heavy cloud gathered over us at Netherby.

The Davenant family had come to the Hall for the Christmas festivities. We met often during the time they were there, more than ever before. The ties of friendship and of neighbourhood seemed to prevail over the party strife which had so long kept us apart.

Hope there was also that those party conflicts at last might cease with the disgrace of the hated Lord-Lieutenant.

His sudden abandonment of the patriot side, his rapid rise, and his lofty, imperious temper, had not failed to make enemies even among those of his own party. Sir Walter Davenant said he had no liking for turn-coats. They always over-acted their new part, and commonly did more to injure the party they joined than the party they betrayed. The haughty earl once out of the way, the king would listen to truer men and better servants.

The Lady Lucy held in detestation the earl's private character. The king, she said, was a high-minded gentleman, an affectionate husband and father, his presence and life had done much to reform the court; the earl was a man of commanding ability, but his hands were not pure enough to defend so lofty a cause. Better men, she thought, if in themselves weaker, would yet form stronger stays for the throne of the anointed of God. If Lord Strafford were displaced, she thought, the best men of all parties would unite; would understand each other, would understand their king, and all might yet go well. My Father, though less sanguine, was not without hope, although on rather different grounds. While Lady Lucy believed that Lord Strafford's violence and evil life were a weakness to the cause she deemed in itself sacred, my Father thought that Lord Strafford's power of character and mind were a fatal strength to the cause he deemed in itself evil. The earl once gone, he believed the king would never find such another prop for his arbitrary measures, the lesser tyrant would fall like an arch with the key-stone out, and the king would yield, perforce, to the just demands of the nation.

However, for the time, Lord Strafford's imprisonment formed a bond of sympathy between the two families, to Roger's and my great content. Much friendly rivalry there was in the Christmas adornment of the two transepts with wreaths of ivy and holly, ending in a free confession of defeat on our part, as our somewhat clumsy bunches of evergreen stood out in contrast with the graceful wreaths and festoons with which Lettice had made the memory of the Davenants green.

For a moment she enjoyed her triumph, and then begging permission to make a little change in our arrangements, with that quick perception of hers, and those fairy fingers which never could touch anything without weaving something of their own grace into it, in an hour or two she had made the massive columns and heavy arches of our ancestral chapel light and graceful as the most decorated monument of the Davenants, with traceries of glossy leaves and berries.

Lettice's birthday was on Twelfth Night. She was fifteen, nearly two years younger than I was, and three than Roger.

There was great merry-making at the Hall that day. In the morning distributings of garments to all the maidens in the parish of Lettice's age, by her own hands. She had some kindly or merry word for every one, and throughout the day was the soul of all the festivities. There was such a fullness of life and enjoyment in her; such a power of going out of herself altogether into the pleasures or wants of others. She seemed to me the centre of all, just as the sun is, by sending her sunbeams everywhere. While every one else was full of the thought of her, she was full only of shining into every neglected corner and shy blossom, making every one feel glad and cared for, down to Gammer Grindle's idiot boy.

It was a wonderful joy for me to be Lettice's friend. I had almost as much delight in her as Sir Walter, who watched her with such pride, or Lady Lucy, whose eyes so oft moistened as they rested on her. She would have it that Roger and I must be at her right hand in everything.

In the afternoon Harry Davenant came with Sir Launcelot Trevor. Harry looked rather grave, I thought, but he was naturally that; and Lettice's gaiety soon infected him so that he became foremost in the games, which lasted until the sun went down, and the servants and villagers dispersed to kindle up the twelve bonfires. But Sir Launcelot looked sorely out of temper. His heavy brows quite lowered over his keen, dark eyes, so that they flashed out beneath like the stormy light under a thunder cloud. He scarcely bent to my Father or to any of us; and although he was lavish as ever of compliments to Lady Lucy and Lettice, his brow scarcely relaxed to correspond with the lip-smiles with which he accompanied them.

When the sun was fairly set, the twelve fires were kindled, this time on the field in front of the Hall, in honour of Lettice, instead of as usual on the village green.

We waited to see them kindle up, and then we left. Roger stayed behind us. There was to be songs and dances round the fires, and then feasting in the Hall late into the night. But Roger only intended to remain a little while to see the merriment begin.

I remember looking back for a last glimpse of the fires as they leapt and sank, one moment lighting up every battlement of the turrets, and all the carving of the windows with lurid light, and flashing back from the glass like carbuncles; the next substituting for the reality their own fantastic light and goblin shadows, so that not a corner or gable of the old building looked like itself. And I remember afterwards that close by one of the fires were standing Roger and Lettice, and Sir Launcelot, near each other; Roger piling wood on the fire at Lettice's direction, and Sir Launcelot standing a little apart with folded arms watching them. His face looked red and angry. I thought it was perhaps because of the angry glare of the flames. Yet something made me long to turn back and bring Roger away with us. It was impossible. But involuntarily I looked back once more: the flames leapt up at the moment, and then I saw Sir Launcelot and Roger as clearly as in daylight, apparently in eager debate.

I lingered to watch them, but just then the fitful flames fell, I could see no more, and I had to hasten on to follow my Father and Aunt Gretel home.

Before we reached home the clouds, which had been threatening all day, began to fall in showers of hail. We had not been in an hour when, as we were sitting over the hall fire, talking cheerily over the doings of the day, Roger suddenly entered, his face ashen-white, his eyes like burning coals, and, in a low voice, called my Father out to speak to him outside. For a few minutes, which seemed to me hours, we sat in suspense, Aunt Gretel's knitting falling on her lap, in entire disregard of consequence to the stitches--Aunt Dorothy's spinning-wheel whirling as if driven by the Furies. Then my Father returned alone, as pale as Roger.

He seated himself again, with his arms on his knees and his hands over his face--an attitude I had never seen him in before. It made him look like an old man; and I remember noticing for the first that his hair was growing gray.

No one asked any questions.

At length, in a calm, low voice, my Father said,--

"Roger and Sir Launcelot Trevor have quarrelled. Roger struck Sir Launcelot, and he fell against one of the great logs of the bonfires. He is wounded severely, and Roger is going to ride to Cambridge for a physician."

"In such a night!" said Aunt Gretel; "not a star; and the hail has been driving against the panes this half hour!"

"It is the best thing Roger can do," said my Father, quietly.

The next minute we heard the ring of a horse's hoofs on the pavement of the court, and then the sound of a long gallop dying slowly away on the road amidst the howling of the wind and the clattering of the hail.

But no one spoke until the household were gathered for family prayer.

There was no variation in the chapter read or in the usual words of prayer; only a tremulous depth in my Father's voice as he asked for blessings on the son and daughter of the house.

And afterwards, as I wished him good-night, he leant his hand on my head, and said--

"Watch and pray, Olive--watch and pray, my child, lest ye enter into temptation."

Then I knelt down, and hid my face on his knee, and said--

"O Father, Roger must have been sorely provoked--I am sure he was. I am sure it was not Roger's fault--I am sure; so sure! Sir Launcelot is so wicked, and I will never forgive him."

"Roger said it was his fault, my poor little Olive," replied my Father, very tenderly, "and that he will never forgive _himself_. And whatever Sir Launcelot said or did, you must forgive him, and pray that God may forgive him; for he is very seriously hurt, and may die."

"Roger would be sure to say that," I said. "He is always ready to blame himself and excuse every one else. But, O Father, God will not let Sir Launcelot die! What can we do?"

"Pray! Olive," he said in a trembling voice--"pray!" and he went to his own room.

But all night long, whenever I woke from fitful snatches of sleep, and went to the window to look if the storm had passed, and if Roger were coming, I saw the light burning in my Father's window.

The last time Aunt Gretel crept up softly behind me, and throwing her large wimple over me, drew me gently away.

"I have kept such a poor watch for Roger!" I said; "and see! my Father's lamp is burning still. He has been watching all night."

"There is Another watching, Olive," she said, softly, "night and day. The Intercessor slumbers not, nor sleeps. It is never dark now in the Holiest Place, for he is ever there; and never silent, for He is ever interceding."