What could I say? I stayed on. Many more companies and troops of soldiers now passed into Oxford; but the trained bands of the city marched out in a contrary direction to Thame, where all the militia of Oxford were mustered by the Lord Saye and received arms from him. On the day following Michaelmas there was a riot at Carfax in Oxford between blue-coats and russet-coats: for the blue-coats continued mutinous and were bold enough to raise a cry that the King was a better paymaster than Parliament, and that if they were sent to fight him they would go over with their arms in their hands. At this the russet-coats, who were of a more disciplined and religious sort and scandalized by the blasphemies with which the blue-coats interlarded their drunken invectives, drew upon them. There was brisk play with naked swords for awhile, and some soldiers on either side had fingers sliced off, or thumbs; but none was killed. This riot put our country people into such an affright that for some days they dared not bring provisions into the city.
Then first the blue-coats and then the russet-coats were marched out of the city against the King, who was with an army at Shrewsbury; but many of them were missing at the muster and their captains and sergeants came scouring the countryside for them and gathering up the arms that they had cast away. A dozen or two of these cowards took refuge in Shotover Forest, and would creep out at night and steal our geese and poultry; but they were at last apprehended and sent back to be whipped through their companies. At a time when three thousand soldiers were billeted at Oxford in one night, there was an overflow into all the towns and villages around, and a hundred fierce-looking troopers came to Forest Hill; but when my father showed their captain his contract with Sir Robert Pye, M.P., they behaved in a docile and peaceable manner, and paid for anything that they required. Our curate also preached in a manner familiar to them, whereby they believed themselves among friends, though indeed Forest Hill stood resolutely for the King, if it stood for anything at all. What pleased them most was that every day he would rise before dawn and preach to them by candlelight, so that they would be singing their psalms before ever the cock crew: for they held an hour of candlelight worship to be worth three of sunlight in the Lord’s eyes. These troopers rode away on the fourth day, and soon the country was empty of all soldiers but a few late stragglers.
Towards the end of the month of October came confused rumours of a great battle fought on a Sunday at a place some forty miles northward from us, but how it had been decided, none could say. This was the fight of Edgehill. The King, with 14,000 men, had marched from Shrewsbury towards London and the tidings were brought to Worcester, where the Earl of Essex was leaguered; who thereupon made haste with his 10,000 men to intercept the King and bodily bar his progress. Yet the Parliament scout-master had no certain information of His Majesty’s whereabouts, and the two armies marched along roads that ran in the same direction, but twenty miles asunder; and both were alike ignorant of this circumstance during a ten days’ march. But at last in the south of Warwickshire there was a chance encounter of troopers at forage, and the Earl hastily interposed his army between the King’s army and the town of Banbury; but half his ordnance, being drawn by oxen, was a day’s march behind him which loss was much felt.
Battle was joined at Edgehill, in country which belonged partly to the Lord Brooke and partly to the Lord Saye and Sele, who both commanded regiments for Parliament. The King’s nephew, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, General of the Royal Horse at the age of twenty-three, disbanded a part of the Parliament army with a charge; but his men turned to plundering the baggage carts, and meanwhile the Parliament army rallied a little and pressed forward against the King’s foot, the most of whom had gone hungry for two days because of bad management and were without much spirit. There ensued fierce fighting for the possession of the Royal Standard, which was carried in a troop of the King’s Life Guards, composed of young noblemen and knights of such quality that their estates were reckoned to be more in value by far than those of the whole army opposed to them. Mun’s father defended the Standard very valiantly and adventured it among the enemy, using the point for a pike, and broke off the point in the body of a dragoon; then he slew many more (some say sixteen, some but two) with his sword, but alas! at the last his hand was hacked off at the wrist and the Standard taken, and he was slain. The Parliament men were thereby marvellously encouraged, and pressed forward until the King himself was in great danger from the flying pistol-bullets; and the little princes, Charles and James, who watched the battle from the windows of The Rising Sun Inn, were like to have been taken, for they were under the charge of the philosophical Dr. Harvey, the same who discovered the circulation of the blood, and whose thoughts had wandered from the battle. However, they made shift to escape on their ponies. In the same fray fell the Lord Grand Chamberlain, the Earl of Lindsey, whom the King had appointed Commander-in-Chief of his armies.
When night fell, five thousand carcases of men lay dead upon the field, of which each party acknowledged but one thousand as its own, yielding the four thousand to the other. The Earl of Essex lost the Standard so hardly won, for a Papist who was a captain of the King’s Guard, disguising himself with a deep-yellow, or orange-coloured, Essex scarf taken from one of the slain, insinuated himself among the Parliamentarians; where he boldly accosted his Lordship’s secretary (in whose charge the Standard then was) claiming to have taken it himself, and was indignant that a mere penman should be confided with so rich a booty. By the loudness of his outcry he forced the secretary to yield the Standard, and in the darkness ran back to the King’s army and laid it at His Majesty’s feet. Then, though neither side could justly claim the victory, both presumed to do so; but the King had the greatest advantage, for the Earl of Essex withdrew his battalions to Warwick, and the King possessed himself of Banbury and the Lord Saye and Sele’s own castle, and marched on towards London; and upon the 29th of October he came riding in by the North gate of Oxford, at the head of his foot, with sixty or seventy Parliamentary colours borne before him, which had been taken in battle, and the drums playing dub-a-dub, and the men exulting. After the foot came a train of great guns and ordnance, twenty-seven pieces in all, which were driven into Magdalen College grove.
The Mayor and Aldermen of Oxford waited upon the King at Carfax, and as they had presented wine to the Parliamentary troopers, so now they presented a gift of money to His Majesty. He lodged at Christ Church with his nephews, the Princes Rupert and Maurice, and the little Princes his sons. The Royal troops were billeted in Oxford and the country about, of whom a company came to Forest Hill, very riotous, and stole poultry and pigs. These rabble heroes also mocked at the curate when he read the service in Church, and were indecently familiar with the women; and some there were who would not pay their score at the inn, alleging that they defended us from the fury of the rebels and deserved to drink free.
Then came regiments of the King’s horse, riding through Oxford, but did not stay: they continued towards Abingdon and Reading and London. The arms that had been presented to the Townsmen of Oxford in the muster at Thame were now taken away by order of the King; which were presented to the Gownsmen, so that my brother James had a pike again and marched with the King in the Earl of Dover’s Regiment. My brother Richard, together with other gentlemen of the Inns of Court, served in a troop of horse under the Lord Keeper; but an equal number of his fellow-lawyers were briefed by the other parties in the case and entered themselves as Life Guards to the Earl of Essex. My imagination pictured how it would be when my two brothers came to exchange blows with my husband; for I made no doubt but that he would stand with pike charged in the great battle that must be fought in defence of London, whither the Parliament army was now returning by way of Northampton.
After the King had taken Reading, we took heart from news that Parliament was ready to treat with His Majesty and that negotiations were already begun; it was confidently expected that the war would soon be ended. The dreadful slaughter at Edgehill, where both armies had proved their valour honourably and beyond d
ispute, was by most men accounted a sufficient blood-letting for the nation’s sickness, that proceeded from too much grease and store of blood—that is to say, from too long and careless a prosperity. Then came news that Prince Rupert had advanced again and taken Brentford, even while the peacemakers were still at work together, and that all the trained bands of London had marched out to Turnham Green to oppose him, under command of the Right Worshipful Major-General Skippon. These trained bands presented so martial an aspect that the King would not allow the Prince to make an infall upon them; he drew his army back again to Colnbrook, and resumed his negotiations with Parliament (but to no purpose) and presently retired thence to Reading and thence again to Oxford; for it was now the end of November, the time when all honest armies go into winter quarters and sleep like dormice until the spring. Oxford he girdled around with a chain of outposts, at ten or twelve miles distance from it, and raised new works in place of those that the Lord Saye had demolished.
I need not have quailed at the thought of being widowed by my brothers, for my husband, as afterwards I learned, was not even in the march to Turnham Green. Though courageous by nature and remembering how the noble tragedian Æschylus had fought in defence of Athens, his native city, against the Persians, my husband had lately fallen out with the Captain of his company, a hosier by trade, whom he considered a mean-spirited fellow, and would serve under him no longer. Then, having once grounded his pike, he bethought himself that there was less honour and greater danger by far in modern warfare than in the ancient. Æschylus, in service as a pikeman, was doubtless quick to catch or turn away the Persian arrows that were shot at him, using the shield strapped upon his left arm. Yet in these modern days were not many brave and valiant men shot down from behind hedges by cowardly musketeers who would never dare look them in the face? And what man lived of such incredible dexterity that he could turn aside a pistol bullet with the cheek of his pike? Thereupon, considering discretion the better part of valour, he resolved not to adventure his life in battle: for, were he slain, who would be found to complete the divine tragedy Adam Unparadised that lay half-finished upon his table? A poet’s life, he contended, was more precious than that of a hundred thousand husbandmen or artisans, and it would be ungracious to God to spill it wastefully in battle. And if, as the scripture says, a live dog is better than a dead lion, a live lion is better than anything; let the dogs die in his stead!
He therefore continued in his accustomed mode of life, except that he no longer performed exercises in the Artillery Garden, and if he perfected himself in the postures of the pike, this he did in the privacy of his garden and for the instruction of his nephews, who, like all children in time of war, longed to be soldiers.
Then came the alarm at the approach of the King’s Army to Brentford; and the Lord Saye in a speech at the Guildhall roused up the whole City with: “There is no danger but in sitting still. Let every man shut up his shop and take a weapon in his hand! Up and be doing, for the Lord will be with you!” At this my husband yielded up his pike to a serving-man who stood in need of one; and he wrote a sonnet, which he pinned up as a protection upon the door of his house—being sadly assured that the trained bands, who were officered by such base tradesmen as his hosier-captain, would not stand their ground against men of quality, but would break at the first discharge of muskets and save themselves by their good footmanship. Thus, he argued, the City would be left without defence, except for what might be done by a few desperate men in the guard-houses erected here and there in the streets, with posts, bars and chains; which resistance would encourage the Cavaliers to greater fury, and so the whole assembly of two hundred thousand souls or more would be given up to spoliation and rape.
In the aforesaid sonnet he addressed whatever Cavalier captain or colonel or lesser officer might happen upon his house, and besought his protection against the outrages of the rude soldiery, promising perpetual glory for this act of mercy. “Lift not thy spear against the Muses’ bower,” he wrote, and recalled how Alexander, the great Macedonian, had, at the sack of Thebes, spared the house of the poet Pindar (though he was long dead) and how on another occasion the Spartans, for the sake of the poet Euripides, had refrained from destroying the whole city of Athens.
The assault intended to London was not delivered and my husband took down the paper; and when a neighbour, Mr. Jokay Matthews, drolled to him about it he was greatly offended and determined to prove himself no coward, by entering the Parliamentary service. Nor would he be shaken from his new resolve by the news that the valiant Lord Brooke, with whom he was familiarly acquainted and who was also a writer of anti-prelatic books, was slain by a chance shot discharged from the roof of Lichfield Cathedral. Therefore when the Spring came, and when Sir William Waller was appointed to command a Parliamentary army in the West Country; and when every preacher in London cursed Meroz7 from his pulpit—why, then my husband went boldly to Alderman Isaac Pennington, M.P., who was the Lord Mayor of London and Colonel of the White Regiment, and who held him in great esteem, and proposed himself to be recommended for Adjutant-General in Sir William’s army!
Alderman Pennington asked my husband whether, though a skilled pikeman and well-versed in the writings of such Latin military authors as Ælian, Polyænus and Frontinus, he had experience of modern warfare? For without, he could not be recommended for so honourable an appointment, the payment of which was eighteen shillings a day, while there were zealous officers in Sir William Waller’s army who had distinguished themselves in the famous Swedish service, yet held no higher rank than captain, some of them, with payment of ten shillings. For the Adjutant-General’s place in an army, though below all colonels, is above all lieutenant-colonels. My husband contentiously denied such experience of warfare to be needful; for the Adjutant-General’s office, he said, is not to command, but to be sent abroad for the conveying and speeding of the General’s command to the rest of the army; he is chosen for his fearlessness, his good address, his eloquent tongue, his keen discretion and his copious memory; he must also be one who can manage a horse well, show skill in swordsmanship and command instant obedience.
The Lord Mayor undertook (a little doubtfully, I suppose) to speak with Sir William Waller in the matter; but it seems that Sir William Waller, who had a difference with the Lord Mayor on some article of religion—the Lord Mayor being the less precise in his Presbyterial opinions—was not to be persuaded of my husband’s ability, or already was suited. Then my husband, since he could not obtain a position worthy of his ambitions (for, esteeming himself inferior to nobody in anything he undertook, he had hoped from Adjutant-General to rise speedily to Commissary-General, or to Major-General) disdained the humble post that was offered him of adjutant in the White Regiment, and returned to the Muses’ bower, or Meroz, until such time as the men in authority should come themselves to seek his services.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
My Husband Sends for Me
It is not my purpose to write a history of the skirmishes, battles and sieges of the late wars (the memory of which is dismally fresh in the public mind): I shall strive to make mention of them only in so far as my own life and those of my friends and kinsfolk were affected and altered by them.
The King lay at Oxford throughout the winter of 1642–1643, and made it his headquarters, as being the nearest place to London that was commodious enough for his purposes. This proved a great inconvenience to the Gownsmen, who were turned out from their customary lodgings to make room for the officers of the King’s Court and Army. The Court of Chancery was held at the Schools, some parts of which were also used as a magazine for corn; the Court of Requests was held at the Natural Philosophy School; the chief magazine for arms and gunpowder was in New College; the magazine for cloth, to be sewn into soldiers’ apparel and coats, was in the Schools of Astronomy and Music; and the Rhetoric School was a carpenter’s shop where were manufactured drawbridges for the new fortifications.
The passage of public coaches and carriers’ wagons
between London and Oxford was suspended, and all letters seized and examined. I cannot therefore certainly say how many of the messages which my husband sent to my father, enquiring the reason of my continued absence, reached our house; but from something which my father let fall I guess that one at least reached him. For I overheard that he told my Uncle Jones: “If Mr. Milton is so solicitous for my daughter’s safe return, why comes he not himself to fetch her back, as a bold and loving husband ought to do?”
My Uncle Jones answered: “Brother, how can he adventure himself upon the journey, when he has written in so sharp a manner against the Bishops? He would be apprehended for certain and cast into prison, and then his case would be a hundred times worse; for, as I have heard, Provost-Marshal Smith, the greedy prison-keeper at Oxford, exercises insufferable cruelties upon those who are committed to his charge.”
“Well,” cried my father, “if my wife Nan were to run off to London, then though I had published a hundred scandalous libels against the Parliament and though the guards on the road were never so vigilant, yet should I make shift to seek her out and carry her back with me or lose my life in the hazard.”
To which my Uncle Jones coldly replied: “You could do no less, Brother, being a man of honour. For your wife’s guardian, her Uncle Abraham Archdale, punctually paid you the £2,000 agreed upon in your marriage contract, which twenty years ago I witnessed, and afterwards there was her legacy of £1,000, which also dropped into your lap. But it seems that Mr. Milton has not yet received from you a penny of the sum promised him in your daughter’s marriage-contract, which also I witnessed.”
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