Brute, sub occasum Solis,
and ending:
…Ipsis
Totius terræ subditus orbis erit.
he wrote out fairly in great letters on a board nailed to the foot of my hard bed; where I could not help but learn it by heart. Our son should be named Arthur, and therefore over the head of my bed hung a great A, embroidered in gold thread upon a silken flag of St. George. In this fancifulness of my husband’s I humoured him; and with what result will presently appear.
The Barbican was a somewhat noisy street; but the schoolroom where the boys were taught lay at the back of the house, so that then-studies were not much interrupted by the cries of fish-wives, pudding-wives and sellers of brooms, the singing of balladists, or the altercation of carters and coachmen. I was now at last entrusted with the management of the household; and contented my husband, who was good enough to tell me that Trunco and I together made a good team for his plough. Despite the prodigious rise in the cost of fuel and provisions of every sort, it cost me somewhat less (proportionably to the increase in the number of the household) to keep the house in food, drink, soap, candles and firing than it had cost Jane Yates, for all her ostentatious splitting of farthings. My husband now brought me little presents of sober-coloured silk and fine linen to wear when I had finished with my child-bearing, and once, for present use within doors, a silver brooch with garnets made in the form of a sword; but never would allow me to choose anything for myself in the shops, unless it were shoes or stockings or underlinen.
The boys were very good boys and soon came to treat me almost as their mother. Henry Lawrence and Cyriack Skinner (grandson to Sir Edward Coke the lawyer) and the young Earl of Barrimore were my favourites of the dozen that we had with us. My husband taught them to be good swordsmen, and also perfected them in all the locks and gripes of wrestling, and sometimes took them out with him upon excursions to see places of interest and to exercise themselves with rowing upon the river. He was become sparing of the ferule and stick, now that he was resigned to matrimony with me. We had excellent good neighbours, chief among them being that same Earl of Bridgewater, a former President of Wales, at whose castle at Ludlow my husband’s masque of Comus had been performed; with whom dwelt his daughter, the Lady Alice Egerton, who had been the Lady in the piece, and Mr. Thomas Egerton his son; all of whom used me very civilly. And also in The Barbican, by chance, dwelt Mr. Henry Lawes the musician, who had composed the music and played the part of Thyrsis in the same masque: a gentle, considerate and well-beloved person to whom my husband about this time addressed a sonnet, “Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured song, etc.” Thus I heard much music about this time. Yet my husband would not let me be present when soft or languorous airs were played or sung: for the sake of our unborn son, said he, I must rather hear the martial Doric strains that brace the mind, than those of Lydia that enervate it. Our child would be born, as he reckoned, toward the end of July, under the sign of Leo, which favours great captains, like none other in the Heavens.
The sonnet to Mr. Lawes came too late to be included in his book of poems, when he published it at the New Year of 1646; but among the other sonnets I found one evidently addressed to Dr. Davis’s daughter (though not by name) as a virgin wise and pure who had shunned the broad green way that leads down to destruction. This piece circumspectly promised the gentlewoman not marriage but a place at the marriage-feast when the bridegroom, with his feastful friends, should pass to bliss at the mid-hour of night; so I found no fault with it. My husband, whenever he writes a sonnet (and he has written no poem of greater scope since I have been with him) keeps a superstitious custom. For first he washes himself from head to foot and puts on clean linen and his best suit, but no sword; then with a cup of clean water in his hand he goes into a room that is well swept and bare of any furniture but a chair and table; where, having locked the door and commanded absolute silence throughout the house, he makes, I suppose, a religious invocation, drinks of the water and sets to. On the door of his room is pinned a warning paper, on which, enclosed in a laurel-wreath, is written the name of the Muse Calliope to whom he owes service.
Christmas was forbidden by Parliament to be kept in London for mince-pies and plum-porridge and holly-boughs were considered papistical idols; and my husband himself was content to let the feast pass by, for he said it was a great interrupter of study and business. Ah, but what a cold New Year led in 1646! On December 8th, at the new moon, it began to freeze and continued bitterly cold until the next new moon, the ice being of a wonderful thickness and no water running in the pipes, so that we had to buy water by the bucket at a high price; and for three weeks we were without coals and would have been without wood, too, but that the Earl of Bridgewater gave my husband leave to root up an old decayed elm from his garden; which, as a wood-monger’s daughter, I showed the boys how to reduce to billet wood with saw, beetle and wedge. Then day by day it thawed and by night it froze again, and the roads were terribly glancy for a month or more, so that it was a danger to walk; yet my husband bade me not to fear, so that our son should be born hardy. On the third day of February he took me out to hear martial music played at some muster of troops in St. Martin’s Fields, but I got no further than the gate of our house and then I slipped upon the ice and fell, and could not rise. I was in great fear lest I should miscarry, for a miscarriage, they say, brings no less painful a labour than a birth, and with nothing to show for it after; but this I was spared, though there were shudderings in my belly, and I suffered no greater visible hurt than a swollen ankle. My husband would not let me lie abed, but bade me wrap my ankle in cold, wet rags and so hobble about until I could walk again; which was to instruct our son in fortitude.
This third day of February was the day that Mun for lack of provisions, and of powder for his ordnance, was constrained to yield Chester, after a brave defence and upon honourable conditions. He marched his garrison out with colours flying, drums beating, matches alight, bullets in the soldiers’ mouths and bandoleers filled with powder. He was permitted to sail for Ireland, to join with the Lord Lieutenant, the Marquis of Ormonde, to whom the King had entrusted the task of combining the Confederate Papists in his interest against Parliament.
In England the war drew to a close with the surrender in March of Sir Ralph Hopton’s Cornish Army. Already in many parts of the country one verily might have believed himself in Ireland, the war had so impoverished the people. The King’s soldiers had almost starved those with whom they quartered and were half starved themselves for want of pay. They were become desperate, and raged about the country, breaking and robbing houses and passengers, and driving away cattle before the owners’ faces. Even their officers became abominable plunderers, and one who deserted to Parliament gave as his reason that when complaints came he was ashamed to look an honest man in the face: for it was truly as bad to him as a bullet. The Parliament soldiers, being by comparison well paid, seldom resorted to knavery, and therefore their cause was the more highly esteemed by the country people and prospered accordingly.
The King began once more to negotiate with the Westminster Parliament; but his demands were great and unacceptable. It was already debated by the Commons what rewards in rank and money should be given to the leaders who had brought them the victory; for only a few castles and garrisons remained still in the King’s hands. In April came Mr. Christopher Milton and his wife from Exeter, which was at last surrendered to Parliament. He had lost all his fortune except a house in Ludgate of an annual value of £40 per annum, for which he compounded, and went to live at the Widow Webber’s, my husband supplying him with a little necessary money until he could support himself by his exercise of the Law. In May, when I was in the seventh month of my account, came news that Woodstock Manor-house was stormed and the King fled from Oxford, in disguise as the servant of one of his gentlemen and that he was gone into Scotland, there to place himself at the disposal of the Scottish Parliament. With his loving Scots, he said, he had no quarrel that could no
t be patched.
Then Oxford was again closely besieged and in June the King wrote from Newcastle, permitting the Governor to yield on honourable terms: for he feared for the safety of the young Duke of York and his nephews the Prince Rupert (whom he had forgiven for his loss of Bristol) and the Prince Maurice. But Sir Thomas Glemham, the Governor, remained obdurate. General Skippon was charged with the construction of a stronger work on Headington Hill, and other works were raised all about the city. At first there was firing of great shot on both sides, of which several from Oxford fell in and about Forest Hill, and one killed Mr. Robert Hicks, a Nottinghamshire gentleman, as he rolled bowls upon our Manor-house green. But presently it was agreed to refrain from such dangerous work, lest the ancient churches and colleges of Oxford should suffer injury, and antiquity be slighted.
Sir Robert Pye the Elder sent an urgent message to my father, desiring him for his own advantage to leave the Manor-house and take refuge in Oxford before the siege should begin. For if that were done, then his son, the Colonel, might take possession of the Manor, by the terms of the mortgage; and this he had a right to do, seeing that the arrears of interest were not yet paid nor the principal sum returned. Thus the estate would not be sequestered by the Parliamentary Commissioners (as it would otherwise be); and Sir Robert undertook to act as a good neighbour to my father, and secure all the goods in and about the house and to yield all back to him, so soon as ever the times changed. Upon a distant noise of cannon, my father withdrew in a great hurry from the house and left the keys to be given to Colonel Pye, and fled to Oxford with all his household; where they lodged in an open cattle-shed in Beef Lane, for want of better accommodation, until, towards the end of June, the Governor was persuaded to surrender the city.
The terms allowed by General Fairfax were mighty generous, the garrison to the number of 7,000 men being suffered to march out with arms and baggage; and though the estates of all the Cavaliers taken in the city were to be sequestered, yet the owners were permitted to compound with Parliament; that is to say, by paying a fine not to exceed two years’ revenue of an estate, it might be restored to them, and meanwhile they might live there as tenants of Parliament, so long as they behaved peaceably.
However, my poor father had little profit of this generosity. On Sunday, June 28th, a week after the articles of surrender were signed, he rode out of Oxford and came to the door of the Manor-house and knocked for admittance. An old blowsy-faced man put his head out of a window and with pistol cocked and levelled, demanded his business.
“I am Justice Richard Powell and this is my house,” said my father. “Pray, who are you?”
“I am Lawrence Farre, servant to Sir Robert Pye the Elder,” he answered, “and this is his house, it is not yours.”
“Has no message been left for me either by Sir Robert the Elder or by his son the Colonel? Or by Mr. John Pye?”
“None, sir,” he answered. “The young Sir Robert passed this way on the 15th day of this month, for he was in the church at Halton that day when Colonel Ireton married the daughter of General Oliver Cromwell; but he gave me no instructions except to guard the place against thieves and intruders. Now he is ridden off with his regiment again.”
“I trust that you have proved worthy of his confidence in you,” said my father.
“I trust I have,” replied Farre, “for not a soul has come in but four persons, with a warrant from the Committee for Sequestrations in the County of Oxfordshire, sitting at Woodstock; three of whom were but clerks who made out the inventory and put a price upon your goods; but the fourth was a gentleman, a member of the Committee itself, and he oftentimes complained that they had put too high a price upon some piece, and then they brought it down low for him. He had a brother outside, whom I would not admit because he had no warrant, though he was the true purchaser of the goods and took them off—”
My poor father cried in a faltering voice: “Oh, what is this you say, good man? There were goods purchased and taken off?”
“Oh yes, indeed, Sir,” said Farre merrily. “They have stripped the place clean; and I thought it great pity that my master Sir Robert were not here to bid, for it all went dog-cheap, there being only the one bidder, namely Mr. Thomas Appletree on behalf of his brother. Nay, I would allow none else inside the house, for those were my orders, to admit none without a warrant. Sir Robert would no doubt have liked to buy the carpets and chairs, the tables, the bed-steads, chests, court-cupboards and standing-presses at the price they fetched, or double: for then he might have rented the house at a better advantage. And the linen he might well have bought for his own use.”
“They took all, you say?” my father asked, as one stupefied. “Oh, the buzzards! How was it conveyed away?”
“Why, Sir, upon four carts of yours that were also bought, and your great wain, and your two old coaches. They also drove off the pigs and sheep and cattle and some poultry from the backside, and took away the grain and the hops and some parcels of boards; but they had no conveyance for the timber, for which they will come again. The price agreed upon, I recall, was £335, for which Mr. Appletree the brother paid twenty shillings of earnest-money to the chief clerk.”
“Oh, but when was this forced sale?” asked my father. “Upon what day?”
“Why, upon the Monday of last week,” he answered, “the twenty-second day of June.”
“But that was after the signing of the Articles of Surrender,” cried my father, “when by General Fairfax’s conditions these goods could not be lawfully sequestered, unless I refused to compound.”
“That is no fault of mine,” said Farre. “I had my orders and my orders I obeyed, and the gentleman, Mr. Appletree, was very civil to me and gave me ten shillings as a gift despite my severity towards his brother. Now, sir, begone, for I have nothing for you here. The house is empty but for my own bed and cooking-pot, and if you would make complaint, you have your redress at Law, I dare say.”
Now the value of the goods thus sold in hugger-mugger was, with the high prices then ruling, at least £900. Yet there was worse news to follow. For in my father’s absence the Parliamentary soldiers had pastured their horses, some three hundred in number, in our two great hay-fields and about the very time that they should have been mown; and all was eaten up by these horses, and Farre had not accepted the grazing-tickets honestly offered him by the officers, declaring that it was none of his business; and now the regiment was ridden away.
Our Wheatley lease-lands were sequestered also, which put my father in a dreadful fear lest his careless dealings in regard to them should come to the light. Here I must tell what I have lately learned about these lands, the lease of which (as I wrote before) my father had lately pledged to his cousin Sir Edward Powell, for a loan of £300. The lease was held from All Souls College since 1626, the year of my birth; and in 1634 my father had renewed the lease, but without surrendering to the College the paper thereby voided; and four years after that, he had assigned the new lease to one Richard Bateman, in return for £200; and in the year following, being at his wits’ end for money, he had assigned the old and voided lease to one George Hearne for a term of thirty-one years, in return for £340, and Mr. Hearne had also kindly rented him the land at £40 a year. This was not honestly contrived, but he had hoped soon to pay back Mr. Hearne the money and so wipe out the fraud. Two years later yet, thinking that he might as well be hanged for stealing a sheep as for a lamb, he went again to All Souls College (which has a long purse and a short memory) and there bribed a clerk of accounts to shuffle the College papers for him; after which, making no mention of the lease that had been renewed for him in 1634, nor of his dealing either with Mr. Bateman or Mr. Hearne, he brought back to the College the old and voided lease (which he still held) made in 1626, and prayed for a renewal of it, which, on the payment of a small fine, the new Warden cheerfully gave him; not knowing that the lease had already been renewed in 1634. It was this quite worthless paper that he pledged again to his kinsman Sir Edward Powe
ll in return for £300; so that, in all, he had profited £840 from a parcel of land that was never his own, besides its natural yield in produce.
As for the other freehold land at Wheatley, this was sequestered too; and here lay further trouble. For my father had not revealed to my husband (who had a prior claim upon it from the old debt upon statute-staple) that it was mortgaged to one Ashworth upon a ninety-nine years lease. Worse still, all the timber lying in the yard at Forest Hill, in value £500, being that which the brothers Appletree had bought but not yet removed, and also a great deal more lying in the coppices of the Forest and in Stow Wood, was robbed from my father by Parliament itself. For a humble petition was made by the inhabitants of Banbury, who complained that one half of their town was burned and part of the church and steeple pulled down, and “there being some timber and boards at one Mr. Powell’s house, a malignant, near Oxford, they desire they may have these materials assigned them for the repair of their church and town.”
This petition was at once granted. Thus my father was stripped bare, and having quarrelled with my Uncle Jones, and the Archdales and Moultons being all either slain or dissettled and ruined by the war, he had no friend to whom he might turn; and reckoned his position as desperate. There was nothing for it: his belly cried “cupboard” and therefore he must come to London and eat dirt-porridge at the Barbican.
Wife to Mr. Milton Page 34