The King, being foiled at Newbury, returned to Oxford, and though he knew it not he had let slip his last chance of victory: for the Londoners, being denied coals by the Earl of Newcastle (who held the North) and thus prevented from drowsing over their parlour fires with warm ale and buttered toasts, grew exceeding discontented and bestirred themselves. One of them complained in Parliament that the price of blood invaluable, so gallantly gotten, had been put into a bag with holes; what had been won was wasted by the sloth or folly of the Generals. It was as if this blood, graciously shed, had served only to manure the ground for a new crop of disasters. In this new angry mood they set about to reform their armies from top to bottom, replacing old, lukewarm and decayed commanders with young and valiant ones. What was more, Mr. Pym drove a bargain with the Scots, who agreed to come to his aid and clear the coalfields of his enemies—though only on condition that Parliament should pay them well, and should adopt the Presbyterial faith on behalf of all England and force the Covenant upon every person in authority.
That was Mr. Pym’s last act; for he died about Christmas of this year, 1643, and left Parliament leaderless. Of the other principal men none other had either his parts or his patience. Colonel Oliver Cromwell was as yet a person of little account in the Commons, being hasty-mouthed, rude, without eloquence, and a by-word because of his massacre of the Queen’s bears, which she had brought from Holland. For, finding the citizens of Uppingham in Rutlandshire baiting these bears upon the Lord’s Day, in the height of their sport he had caused the bears to be seized, tied to a tree and shot; which was poor sport indeed. His opinions at this time he cunningly enclosed in a single phrase: “I can tell you, sirs, what I would not have, though not what I would!”
In Forest Hill the names of Generals Waller and Skippon and the Earl of Essex were not of so great terror as were those of lesser officers of the Parliamentary service that were garrisoned in Aylesbury and Thame. Forest Hill lay outside the fortifications of Oxford, upon the side turned towards London, and though we had a few strong forts and garrisons covering us towards London, namely, Wallingford, Shirburn Castle, Brill Town and Boarstall House, naturally there were no works joining these places. We could never sleep secure at night, but would start and cry at every creaking of a door; for always we had the suspicion that soldiers might come stealing up under cover of darkness across the debateable land, and break in and ravish or murder us in our beds. The soldiers quartered upon us were not in the least degree vigilant; and that summer, when the barley was cut and cocked, a troop of Parliament horse came stealthily one night just before the moon rose, under the guidance (as we suppose) of Tom Messenger or some other countryman who was serving with them. They carried away, every man, a great sack of barley, cutting off the ears and leaving the straw behind, and were not discovered until half an hour after dawn, when they got clean away.
There was one Major Jecamiah Abercrombie, a Scot, and another, Colonel Crawford, who were sedulous pillagers and much feared by our defenders. Both met their deaths before the war was ended, but they were very terrible to us while they lived and cost my father a great sum of money in the wheat and barley that they carried off that year, and the sheep and cattle that they drove. They had learned the art of pillage, I believe, under the Swedish King. In payment of the soldiers billeted upon us, for whom we found lodging, drink and victuals, my father was given billeting tickets, which would be redeemed (as was promised) “when God shall enable us.” A man’s lodging was reckoned at sixpence a day, or sevenpence for a dragoon, which amounted to a very large debt when fifty men were quartered upon us for a space of months. Yet the expense was greater by far than the promised payment, for many wives had marched with their husbands, clinging to them like ticks, and these also must be somehow fed. Besides this, there was the grazing, reckoned at three shillings the week for every horse. But already the expectation of payment was so small that often £5 worth of billeting tickets was secretly offered for thirty shillings of ready money, and a year later could be bought at a mere ten shillings.
1643 was the year in which the camp fever came to Oxford, which put us in great affright. This was a sort of plague and very contagious, but with spots in the place of carbuncles, and for sturdy men and women a greater hope of recovery; yet it was a very wasting disease, and in some parishes swept away all old and infirm people as with a broom. The air of Oxford, being reckoned healthy in general, was not to blame; but great crowds of soldiers were lodged in the city, lying twenty or thirty in one room, who filled all the houses with nastiness and filth and stinking odours; for it is not the custom of soldiers to wash themselves or shift their apparel. These men everywhere fell sick together, as it were, by files and companies, and many died, who might otherwise have lived, for want of anyone to attend to their needs; and by the height of the summer the city was more like a lazar-house than a garrison. Sir William Pennyman, the Governor, himself perished of the sickness. The contagion was carried to Forest Hill, with great mortality among the soldiers, and among our servants and tenants; but none of my family fell sick, for Trunco medicined us daily.
Three times in this year the Lady Cary Gardiner rode over to visit us. The first time she was in great distress, for Sir Thomas, her husband, was thought to be slain; but he proved to be alive and a prisoner in Windsor Castle, whence he was enlarged by the good offices of her brother, Sir Ralph Verney, M.P., and was soon exchanged against an officer of the opposing army. However, it went against Sir Ralph’s conscience to swear to the Covenant, and as he had offended Mun and all his other kin by opposing the King, so now he offended his new friends in Parliament; and, resigning his seat, he went into exile in France.
The second time that the Lady Cary came, she showed me a letter from Mun in Ireland, in which he wrote that he was in arrears of pay, £600 or £700, and that his soldiers scarce knew how to put bread in their mouths; and pillage there was none, for the country was frightfully wasted. But he was lately promoted a major, and his health was good, he thanked God.
The third time that she came, it was to tell me that, since a general cessation of arms for a year had been agreed in Ireland, Mun was come home.
“I knew it well,” said I, “and throughout the Friday and Saturday of this past week I felt near suffocated by reason of his closeness; and dreamed of him every night; and by day continually thrust my head out of the window to see whether he came not riding in at the gate. But now I think he is gone farther from me again.”
“You were right,” said she, “though I had not meant to discover the fact to you. My brother came to Oxford on Friday last and waited upon his Majesty, who gave him a gracious welcome, and he is to be a lieutenant-colonel in a good regiment and to serve on the Welsh Border. But knowing how you were circumstanced, he could not in honesty come to this house, though the longing to come was so grievous that he could not sleep, and therefore upon the Sunday he rode away again.”
I saw the Queen once or twice while she was lodged in Merton College at Oxford, which was not many months; for presently she sailed to France, with an infant daughter that was born to her at Exeter on the way, and thereafter left the King to manage his own affairs. The King I saw often in and about Oxford, but had no speech with him, except once when, riding alone, he met me in the coppices of Shotover Forest and asked me, stammering, which way the hounds had run. His dearest delight was in hunting; and had he been one-quarter part so bold and thorough in the chase of his enemies as he was in the chase of buck, he would have swept them out of the Kingdom within a week or two.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I Am Persuaded to Return to My Husband
The year 1644 was a horribly cruel, tedious year, of which I will present but a brief account. The first quarter brought nothing remarkable, except that because of the difficulties of the time, the fewness of servants, the multitude of dragoons and other soldiers quartered upon us (like idle hungry dogs continually putting themselves in our way to trip us up or with their whining or growling to a
nnoy us), the household tasks that in the brave old days had been pleasant enough, I now found exceeding troublesome. Yet I uttered no complaint, for my mother worked as hard as any slave herself, and my sisters were in a like case with me; moreover, as I had learned, much work and much company are far better than to be idle and alone. The soldiers by negligence fired the smaller barn and a great store of mislan was burnt in it, for which no compensation was paid; and Zara began a familiarity with our Captain of dragoons, which my mother hugely misliked, knowing him to be contracted in marriage to an heiress of Worcester, but which she could not prevent because he was become as much the Lord of the Manor as my father, or more, and we were at his mercy if he cared to injure us. Zara was not openly disobedient or wanton; wherefore my father found it within his conscience to use her as an intermediary agent with the Captain, who would sometimes lend him a dozen stout men to help with his husbandry, or with his wood-mongering.
From the sale of wood my father derived extraordinary profits, because at Oxford three times as much firing was needed as ever before, and the price mounted month by month until, at the last, it was sold by the pound weight as though it were cheese, not by the cartload or faggot. He also secured a profitable contract from Sir Timothy Tyrrell to dig china clay from the ochre-pits on Shotover, which he sold in Oxford to the makers of tobacco pipes, who otherwise could obtain none of sufficient fineness.9 Yet, notwithstanding his gains, my father reckoned in the New Year of 1644 that, unless he could convert his billeting tickets into land or houses or money, he was the poorer by £1,000 than he had been a twelvemonth before.
In February the Scots, in alliance with Parliament, crossed the Border and though they stubbornly avoided encounter with the King’s armies at least they drew off a part of them that otherwise might have been used against Parliament, and they saved the Londoners their coals. In May it was resolved by the Committee of Safety, which met in London at Derby House, that Oxford was to be taken at all hazards and the person of the King thereby secured; which in this war, as in the play of chess, was a piece of final importance. The Earl of Essex and Sir William Waller were charged with this task and pushed forward with a great army, taking Reading once more and pressing upon Abingdon, a chief bulwark of Oxford, which the King’s officers now abandoned by a mistake of their orders.
When at Forest Hill, in the afternoon of May 25th, the cry went up that “Abingdon is taken by the Roundheads,” my father knew not whether to stay or fly. Our Captain of dragoons, however, began putting the Manor-house and barns in a posture of defence, breaking holes in the walls as embrasures for his guns—his men stood all night in arms, and he ordered my father to depart the place in the morning with all his household. Upon my father protesting that we were as safe in this house as anywhere else, the Captain threatened to speed him with a pistol-shot if he were obdurate. So we made our exodus on foot, with a few of our choicer possessions in one cart and three or four weeks’ provisions in another; but fearing to take the nearer way, over East Bridge, we went about by Islip and came in at the North Gate, which was a tedious trudge. Zara had fallen behind our company at Stanton St. John and slunk back to her Captain; and made herself Lady of the Manor in our absence.
Some time before this, my father had bought an old wooden house of four rooms, near New Inn Hall, which he used as a storehouse for planks and boards, with his own wood-yard adjoining. Here, after a removal of those same planks and boards, we lodged for above a fortnight; and very uncomfortably, for we had neither beds nor tables nor chairs but what we could contrive with sawn logs and pieces of board, and no more than two cooking-pots for the seventeen of us, and the chimney would not draw, but filled the room with smoke. The enemy lay close about the city, where were no more than two weeks’ provisions for a siege, and one of the Royal Council durst advise the King to surrender, saying that the game was up. The Earl of Essex forded the Isis at Sandford—where I doubt not my Uncle and Aunt Jones gave him a loving welcome—and with his whole army passed between Oxford and Forest Hill, until he came to Islip Bridge; but there was held by troops quartered in Islip itself. The King stood on Magdalen College Tower, as this army marched by, and viewed its order and motion; and from the Work at St. Clement’s Port three or four great shot were discharged at the enemy horse as they skirmished on Headington Hill. There was no soldier slain by this cannonade, but much window glass in the parish of St. Clement’s was cracked Or broken. To the westward, General Sir William Waller forced a crossing of the River Isis at Newbridge and sent his horse northward from thence to Woodstock; upon news of which the King’s guard on Islip Bridge was withdrawn and it seemed that we were caught in a bag.
The King resolved to avoid check-mate by escape, which he did very prettily in a night march on June 3rd, carrying with him a great body of horse and 2,500 musketeers, of whom my brother James made one; and a train of seventy carriages. He was not discovered, because of a diversion which he contrived, sending against Abingdon a great part of his foot and all his ordnance; by which motion General Waller was deceived and enticed back from Newbridge. To be brief, His Majesty, got safely away to Worcester and drew the enemy after him so that Oxford was free again, though Abingdon remained in the hands of Parliament.
We left our scurvy lodgings on June 12th and gladly returned to Forest Hill. “Aye,” said my father, with a last look about the dirty storehouse as we went out. “So Sylvester writes:
The Angels, wonted to Heaven’s blissful Hall,
Made little stay in this unwholesome stall.”
In the blissful hall of our Manor we presently found Zara safe and sound with her Captain, who was no such great kill-cow as he had affected to be; for when he had seen the approach of the enemy he had fetched his company away to Islip. Zara had stayed behind, against his persuasion, to care for the house. She had posted a warning upon the door that the house was not to be plundered, being the property of Sir Robert Pye, M.P.; which paper was respected, and though the Parliament soldiers who passed through the place took fruit from the orchard and garden, and a little wood from the yard to build their camp fires, they did no other damage. The Captain had marched back but two days before ourselves. Thus Zara redeemed her fault in my father’s eyes; but my mother railed at her for a whore.
For the rest of that year we had peace, but for constant alarms that enemy horse were seen. There was a skirmish in Forest Hill itself on August 15th: some dragoons sent out from Abingdon by Major-General Browne, nicknamed “the Faggot-monger,” riding up suddenly through a morning mist and engaging our own dragoons. There were men hurt on either side with sword cuts, and our tenant Catcher was slain with a chance pistol shot as he fled to our house to be out of the way. He was a brutish, drunken man and no great loss, who once at the Christmas Communion drank all the wine in the cup, swearing that he would have his penny’s worth. A few days after this, Goodman Mathadee’s little child, the same who had wailed in the Church, was run down by horsemen as he played in the lane and trampled to death; which was of mischance, not barbarity.
In this year there was plague at Oxford; but the camp fever had somewhat abated.
Elsewhere the war was fought disorderly and with varying fortune. In March a part of Mun’s regiment was routed in a skirmish—I could not learn where, but I believe it was fought in Cheshire—wherein his Colonel was slain and he himself narrowly escaped with his life. Yet he brought away the greater part of his men into safety and for his good service was made a Knight; and in the same month was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Chester, which was a position of great trust and honour, whereat my heart swelled with pride on his behalf. On July 2nd, a Sunday, General Cromwell won a great victory over the army of the Earl of Newcastle. He fought this battle among the sodden cornfields of Marston Moor in Yorkshire (where 4,000 men were slain in the space of three hours), and took York, Liverpool and Lincoln that same summer, but not Chester, which Mun held stoutly, though sore straitened. The Earl of Newcastle fled overseas.
I write that Gene
ral Cromwell was the victor at Marston Moor, though, as is well known, the Parliament army was commanded by the Lord Leven, a Scot; for the Lord Leven himself was driven from the field and few of his Scots did anything notable that day—it was General Cromwell who, though dazed and bewildered from a wound in his neck, yet routed the squadrons of the Prince Rupert and restored the toppling fortunes of his faction. There was this difference between the Prince Rupert’s manner of charging and General Cromwell’s, that though both held their fire until they were in among the enemy, yet the Prince Rupert rode at full gallop, to be the more terrible, but General Cromwell at a round trot, the better to rally his men, if need should be, for a second charge. To the south-west, not many weeks after this battle was fought, the King himself was victorious at Lost-withiel in Cornwall, over General Skippon, who, being deserted by the Horse, under the Earl of Essex, lost all his ordnance and 5,000 of his 6,000 foot in retreat from that inhospitable county, and all his guns and ordnance. Thus by the close of the year neither Parliament nor King could justly claim the advantage over the other.
Meanwhile in London my husband continually sharpened and shook his pen. He wrote not, as might have been expected, either against the enemies of Parliament or against any faction in Parliament, but, in the same manner as an injustice conceived personally had brought him to inveigh against the Bishops, so now, when he desired to divorce me and found that he could not do so upon any ordinary plea, he raged furiously and neither studied nor wrote upon anything, hardly, but divorce, divorce, divorce. He published four treatises before he had done; which have brought him many enemies, not only among those who love the accustomed forms of religion, but among his friends, the Presbyterians; which is how he came at last to quit his former inclinations and wheel about to his new platform of Independency.10
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