Then we began to exchange reports and rumours of the ill-behaviour of the Parliamentary soldiers as they went about the country to their musters, how they plundered houses and cottages, and desecrated churches, breaking the organs and dashing the pipes with their pole-axes, crying scoffingly, “Hark how the organs go!” and how the King’s soldiers similarly plundered cottages and houses. And my father told how a party of the King’s men had led their horses into a church (where the congregation was made up of godly precisians), and there blasphemously baptized them at the font, though without use of the cross, with such Puritanical names as “Day-of-Humiliation Esau” and “Curse-God-and-Die Job”; and how their corporal had climbed up into the pulpit and whined through his nose in a canting sermon to “all devout Horses, Mares, Jennets, Hinnies, Jack-Asses, Milch-Asses, Colts, Foals and Fillies here in faith and love assembled.”
The Lady Cary and I walked together in the garden, it being good handsome summer weather, and when we were private she stood still, and “Mistress Milton,” said she, “you will pardon my freedom, I hope; only tell me, why have you used my dear brother Mun so ill? How had you the heart to marry another so lightly? Before he went to Ireland he confessed to me that you and he had a perfect understanding together, and charged me to love you like a sister; and when I was married to Sir Thomas and settled at Cuddesdon I was to ride over often to see you, and keep you ever in mind of him, and report to him how you looked, and take from your lips any loving messages that you might wish to send him. Well, Mistress, I was prevented in that; for because of my husband’s father being imprisoned it was not until June that I came to Cuddesdon and upon the very day that you were married to this Cambridge scribbler and nobody. From a letter that came to my hand to-day I believe that my poor Mun’s heart is near broken and all the courage he can at present muster is little enough to keep him alive.”
I stood dumbfounded and asked her: “But my lady, is it not so that Captain Verney is betrothed to his cousin Doll Leke, and that lately he sent her a ring of his hair? For so your husband assured us.”
“No, no,” she cried, “the ring of hair was for his mother, and Doll Leke complained and was jealous of the gift, as I told my husband plainly. My brother Mun writes that when he was aware that you were married to Mr. Milton, he felt a faintness to seize his spirits in an extraordinary manner, so that he broke out in a cold sweat, and the distemper of his mind quite dispersed his spirit.”
My eyes began to prick and I begged her, if she pleased, to acquaint Mun with the true course of events; how I was suspected by the curate and by the whole town of being debauched by Mun, and how my life was made miserable, and how when I heard that he was to marry his cousin Leke I had despaired; and how I had consented, upon an urgent motion from my parents, to wed Mr. Milton, to whom my father owed a great sum of money upon statute-staple. “And add this,” I cried, “that I am the most miserable of women, but a maid yet—for I have come away from my husband upon a quarrel, and he has not known me.”
The Lady Cary Gardiner had in her features much that recalled Mun, though she was by no means handsome, and when she wept and pitied me it was as though she were Mun himself. She took me by the hand and pressed it, and promised to come again to see and comfort me.
I pressed her for news of Mun. She told me that he had lately been sick of a violent fever and given over to the physicians for a dead man; which, I suppose, was about the same time that I had been so melancholic with my husband. But now, she said, he was in a way to recovery and had gained about £50 by pillage from the Irish. Then she undertook to act as a go-between for Mun and me, so long only as it was nothing dishonourable that I asked her to convey to Mun; for she held matrimony sacred, however inadvisedly entered into.
I said: “Tell him that it is ‘we two’ once more, but only so long as I am reprieved from my duty to my husband, and that meanwhile we may commune in spirit only; for to meet in the flesh would be madness, even were it possible. Tell him that I love him as I have never loved any other in my life.”
She promised to write this to Mun, and kissed me and so departed.
In this same week two soldiers of the Lord Saye and Sele’s regiment had carried off some geese from our field, for which, however, my father received full satisfaction upon his bringing information against them, and the felons were made to ride the wooden horse for an hour, with muskets tied to their feet, goose feathers in their hair, and their fault written large on a paper pinned to their breasts. He took the occasion to inform the Lord Saye that the Manor of Forest Hill, with all its appurtenances, was not his own, but was leased from the Bromes, and held in mortgage by Sir Robert Pye the Elder, a famous Parliamentarian; and he desired that his Lordship’s regiment should be instructed to avoid trespass or plunder. At the same time he sent to the nearest commander of the King’s troops to inform him that, though he was himself past the age of active service, his two elder sons were engaged for the King and his own loyalty was well known. When persons came to the house notorious for their affection toward the King, then my mother was the chief speaker; but my father conversed reasonably with persons suspected of a contrary opinion, and then she held her tongue.
My brother James was one of those scholars of Oxford who, together with the privileged men of the University, were called up by Dr. Pinke, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, to be trained under his eye, for the defence of Oxford; for soldiers of the Parliament were continually passing through the county in two’s and three’s and in whole companies, and Dr. Pinke feared that an attempt would be made by them upon Banbury, by which Oxford would be endangered. There were a few old weapons in the colleges, with which the scholars were armed: and one day in the middle of August the whole muster, over three hundred men in all, marched from the Schools along the High Street until they came to Christ Church, where they were put into battle array and exercised in their postures, until it began to rain a little, when they marched back again. James was provided with a pike, the troops being divided into two companies of musketeers, one of halberdiers and one of pikemen. He marched shoulder to shoulder with a Doctor of Law on his right hand and a Divine on his left, and ahead of them went the Drums and Standard of the Company of Cooks to the University. There was another muster three days later and more than four hundred men came together at the Schools. After being instructed in the words of command and in their postures, they skirmished together for a few hours; but the muskets were all refuse stuff and unserviceable except for false fires, some even having no touch-holes.
On the next day, which was Sunday, came James to droll with us upon the martial madness that had overcome the University. We asked him how it was that the Town had not also trained that day, as had been commanded. He answered that the burgesses had privily forbidden the citizens to muster, lest they should seem to do it for the King. I asked him, drolling, too, did he not think it glorious to manage a pike, this being the most honourable of weapons in common estimation? and he laughed. He held that when serviceable muskets and carbines and pistols had been distributed to the armies, the pike was a very ill weapon indeed, which he would think it no honour to wield. Said he: “Pikes against pistols and carbines which can kill and sink at a hundred and twenty yards off and more—that is a very unequal contest. I would desire to know whether there is any wisdom or glory to stand with pikes only against leaden bullets? Nor is there one pikeman in twenty who with his utmost skill and strength can wound a man mortally who wears a steel corselet, or even a buff coat. In an uproar in the Low Countries, as Mun Verney lately told me—the quarrel arising from a game of cards in which a Switzer accused an Englishman of cheating him of a few halfpence—the true value of pikes was appraised. For a division of Switzers stood with pikes charged, and there came against them two buff-coated soldiers of Colonel Barclay’s regiment, armed only with swords, who forced their way into the midst of the body and lopped off a dozen pike-heads and came out again unscathed, with three or four pike-heads held in their hands, which they threw am
ong the Switzers with great derision, crying: “Oh, do us no harm, good men!”
But it would have made an old pig laugh to see what ancient rusty arms were distributed to the soldiers at this time—brown-bills and lances that were relics of the Civil Wars of the Roses, with breastplates, gorgets and pots that seemed relics of the Crusades. My father, in appointing a guard for our town against marauders, bade every man use the weapon that was handiest to him: the labourers, their mattocks and pitchforks and hedging-hooks; the woodmen, their axes; the coopers, their hammers. For he said that there was no excellent virtue in a halberd or pike unless a man were long habituated in its use. And sure it was that, towards Shotover, one of our shepherds, being threatened by a rude soldier with a brown-bill, ran at him with a pair of shears and would have clipped great pieces off him had the soldier not incontinently dropped his weapon and run off.
On August 24th came news that Sir Edmund Verney had raised the King’s Standard at Nottingham, on the field behind the Castle. This Standard had a flag hung on top of it with the King’s arms and a hand pointing to the Crown, and this motto, Give Cæsar his due. In accepting the charge, Sir Edmund had sworn that, by the Grace of God, they that would wrest that Standard from his hand must first wrest his soul from his body. However, as we heard, the weather was unseasonable and when the Standard had stood for awhile it was blown down by a strong and unruly wind and could not be raised again that day; which was taken as an evil presage by the King’s friends. Nor had there been any great conflux of people to the ceremony: but few soldiers and fewer arms.
It was wonderful to me that though nine men of every ten throughout the country were opposed to the war, and would rather sit still than fight, yet that remaining one-tenth of vicious and heated hare-brains could preach or curse or goad the rest into warlike action. To honest, quiet people it seemed a war directed by drunken and profane Publicans and Sinners on the one hand and by hypocritical Scribes and Pharisees on the other; and because of this general unwillingness to fight it was conducted irregularly, sluggishly and (until there were revenges to be exacted) in a humane and gentlemanly manner except by a few insensate, barbarous rogues of either party, or by old soldiers who had learned to be cruel and base in the German wars.
Now the talk at Forest Hill was all of stones taken up to the top of Magdalen tower at Oxford, to be cast down upon any who attempted an assault upon the College, and how the highway by the East bridge, not far off, over which we passed into Oxford, was blocked with great logs. This obstruction was a great inconvenience to the country people, for every time a cart passed over the bridge with victuals or anything else, a kind of timber gate must be lifted up by chain and pulley. There was a very strict guard kept here by night; as also at the crooked trench which they dug across the entrance to the city between Wadham College and St. John’s College Walks; and at Penniless Bench at Carfax. However, my brother James told us that all this was but vain show and pretence, for the Town was on the contrary side to the Gown, and when the Gownsmen began, for the greater security of the city, to pull down the stone bridge over the stream at Osney, the Townsmen in great numbers marched out and made them leave off. Dr. Pinke feared that if the Lord Saye and Sele came against him in force, the city could not be held for more than half an hour—for besides his scholars and privileged men he had with him only 150 indifferent troops who had ridden in under the command of Sir John Byron—and that the halls and colleges would be sacked and set afire. He therefore rode off one day to deprecate for himself to his Lordship at Aylesbury, and report that the troopers were to be sent away, and the scholars disarmed, so that Oxford would he wide open and inoffensive. Yet the Lord Saye was not there, and his lieutenants gave Dr. Pinke no welcome, but called him a perjured malignant and sent him off to prison in London.
A few days later, about nine o’clock in the morning, came the rumour to our Manor that a great body of Parliament horse was riding along the road from Thame towards Oxford; and our harvesters left the fields, though the carrying-in of the harvest was much behind-hand because of the tempestuous weather of August, and ran to watch the array. They did not return to the field that day—to my father’s great loss, forasmuch as on the next day it rained, and again on the night following. It was generally feared that these men would do great harm to Oxford, plundering the colleges and showing no respect for the painted windows or the libraries; but since the scholars had laid down their arms and Sir John Byron’s troopers were gone away, little trouble ensued. The Lord Saye coming into the city, in a carriage with six horses, gave order for the fortifications to be demolished. He sent men to search the colleges for hidden plate and arms, and found plate hidden behind the wainscote at Christ Church and seized it. No college plate was seized that was not hidden, but the heads of colleges were constrained to promise not to employ it against Parliament. His Lordship lodged at the Star Inn, and there was a bonfire, heaped in the street before this inn of a few popish books and pictures taken out of churches and colleges. No harm was done to the fine painted windows at Christ Church and elsewhere, which the troopers wondered at as shamefully idolatrous; but a London trooper, a stark precisian, as he rode by St. Mary’s Church in the High Street, discharged a bullet at the stone image of Our Lady over the porch, and at one shot struck off her head and that of the child held in her arms. Another tried his pistol against the image of our Saviour over the gate of All Souls College, but he missed his aim and an alderman came running up and entreated him to husband his powder and shot; so he refrained from a further essay.
Then a regiment of London blue-coats marched into Oxford, and another of russet-coats; they were all terrible inexpert in the handling of their arms and mutinous in demanding the pay promised them, which was five shillings by the month for every man, besides their bread and cheese; but the Lord Saye clapped the loudest-mouthed of them into prison and pacified the rest with promises.
This was a few days before Michaelmas, and all this time I had been so busy in my household tasks and so content to be at home again that the weeks had flown like days. Now I went to my father and asked him point blank what his intentions were, whether to send me back with the money, or without, or not at all. He answered that he had no money in hand, nor if he had would he be fool enough to send any great sum in coin to London, which assuredly would be seized by the soldiers on the way; nor would he have me go to London without it, lest my husband should refuse to accept me, and so cast me adrift. Said he: “My dear, be ruled by me. Sit you still and do nothing, and if your husband write us a letter, answer it not, for neither will I; it is common knowledge that all letters are now stopped and opened by the way and that many are kept back. Mr. Milton will have no proof that his letter has come to your hand. Then let us watch in what manner the war goes, and be guided in our actions. If the King gain an outright victory, as is promised him before Christmas, and march to London and over-awe it, then your husband is likely to be apprehended and lose his ears and be branded of both cheeks and rot in a jail, and it were better not to be married to such a one.”
“But if the King be defeated, sir?” I asked.
“Why, that will be grievous,” said he, “but at least you will have a good home ready to receive you; for your husband, with his gift for writing in the Parliamentary interest, is likely to become one of their chief men. Nay, he cannot deny that he is lawfully married to you, and when I plead that I have lost all my wealth in forced contributions to the losing cause, he will have no honourable course left but to take you back without the promised portion.”
“It will be unkind not to answer his letters if they are honestly written,” said I, “for I believe that he loves me too well rather than not well enough. Indeed, I judge him to be guilty of the sin against which Dr. John Donne inveighed in a sermon, that of loving his wife as hotly as if she were his mistress. His austerity towards me, which some would call cruelty, is turned towards himself also; so that I cannot bring myself to hate him. Moreover, if he be irrevocably bound to me
by the vows he made in our Church porch, why, so am I to him by the vows that I made him in that very place.”
“This sentiment bespeaks a good spirit in you, dear heart,” my father said. “Yet for the present nothing can be done, I swear it cannot. I am now poorer by a great deal than before you were married; my Welsh estate is but a figure of speech naughtily intruded by your mother into my bargaining with Mr. Milton, when he was obdurate and stuck upon his demand for a great sum of money; and, as you know, this year’s harvest is so miserable that I cannot expect my tenants to pay me their agreed rents, nor will I fill my own barns above one-third full.”
Wife to Mr. Milton Page 27