CHAPTER TWENTY
My Child Is Born; and My Father Dies
On the evening of July 4th in that year, 1646, I sat sewing linen clothes for my child, with the window open to let in the cool breezes from the North. In the Barbican a ballad-singer sang a ballad that I knew well from childhood:
Richard Cœur de Lion, erst King of this land,
He the lion gored with his naked hand.
The false Duke of Austria nothing did he fear,
But his son he killed with a box on the ear.
Besides his famous acts done in the Holy Land….
The song breaking off suddenly, I looked up from my sewing and saw a cart drawn up at the next gate to ours; on which were heaped two or three trunks, a cloak-bag or two and some pieces of furniture, with a man in a soldier’s coat seated in a leathern chair, as driver. Beside it stood nine or ten other persons, most of them children, very ragged and dusty, of whom one, a young woman, wore a yellow visor-mask. This young woman was questioning the ballad-singer, who pointed to our house; whereat the driver made the horse go backwards until the cart was over against our own gate. Two men lifted the soldier down from the chair, and when I pitied him that he could not walk, suddenly my heart stopped for I recognized my brother James, and the slatternly crowd with him were the remainder of my family. Being nearsighted, I had not known them at once, because of their travel-stained and dusty apparel.
The misfortunes that had come upon my family in the second siege of Oxford, were now suddenly for the first time presented to me. For on June 3rd, 1645, in the very early morning, there had been a party of horse and foot sent out over East Bridge to surprise the Parliament Guard at Headington Hill, which they did, falling in upon them pell-mell with their swords, slaying fifty and taking nearly a hundred prisoners; but in the confusion my brother James, who was one of those who sallied forth, was shot in the base of his spine by a bullet of more than an ounce weight, which though it had lost its force to enter yet cost him the use of his legs beyond hope of recovery. And another great misfortune was this: my two brothers and my sister Zara, in the crowded lodging where they were, above a hatter’s in Penny-farthing Street, all fell sick together of the small-pox. William and Archdale were not marked by the disease beyond what is common; but Zara’s face was so fearfully ravaged that ever since she has worn a visor-mask of white or yellow gauze, to spare the eyes of her acquaintance. Once again my mother had cause to lament the dissolution of the nunneries—for what other bridegroom but the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, she asked, would be loving enough to accept as wife a woman with a face like a leper’s?
Trunco went to open the door and saluted my parents lovingly. Then she ran to my husband to announce their arrival, and “Oh, Master,” said she, “if I may make so bold—I pray you be compassionate to these poor gentlefolk, not only for God’s sake, but for that of my mistress. She is now so near her account that if you show the least hardness to her parents and kindred, though they have treated you never so ill, she may cast your child untimely, which were the greatest sorrow in the world.”
My husband, whom Trunco had found walking up and down upon the lawn in the backside, smoking his pipe and reading a book, dashed both pipe and book upon the turf, and asked: “Does your mistress know that they are here? Almost I would rather have Bridewell and Bedlam spew out their scum upon me than that this should happen. Say not a word to her, and I shall send them away quietly, if I may, without her knowledge.”
But when he ran into the house he found me already downstairs embracing my mother and weeping for sorrow of James’s plight and Zara’s, while questions were bandied to and fro like tennis balls. What else could he do then but make them welcome, and send for refreshment, and commiserate their misfortunes? After a while, when he saw their condition, he offered them an asylum until they could put their affairs into better order: for these were the school vacations and all the boys, except Ned and Johnny Phillips, were dismissed to then-parents’ homes until Michaelmas. My father had grown haggard and old in this last year, and lost a number of his teeth. He behaved to my husband like a dog who fears that he has earned a whipping, but, being rewarded with a bone instead, is unhappy and grovels along the ground. But my mother was a Moulton and kept a proud carriage. Said she: “Well, Son Milton, I acknowledge myself mightily mistaken in you. I assured my poor Dick that we had nothing to hope at your door, and that he wasted his labour and exposed us to insult by making application. Yet he counted upon your generosity, and for once he was right; and I beg your pardon sincerely that I misjudged you. For myself, I confess that had I received from any person so saucy a message as I sent you by your servant, I should never have forgiven it, no, not this side of the grave. Well, I sincerely thank you for your generous spirit and while we abide under your roof I undertake that we shall sing small and huddle away into a small compass and disturb you very little or not at all.”
My husband made no reply, but merely ordered Trunco to sweep the rooms and fetch water for the travellers. Presently he excused himself and returned to his book and pipe. During the three years of my absence from him, he had grown to be a rank smoker. Without tobacco he could not settle himself to his writing and if none of the better sorts—as Bermudas, Providentia, Shallow-Congo and the like—could be procured from the shops, he would be content with an infernal Mundungo; and if even Mundungo failed he would fain, I believe, have cut strands of hemp from a bell-rope and smoked that. He excused the nasty practice on the ground that tobacconing settled the stomach better than any cordial julep of anise, or infusion of lime flowers, that I offered him instead. Yet it was a very dear medicine to take, when Bermudas stood at sevenpence an ounce, which was a husbandman’s daily wage.
I was overjoyed that I would have my mother by me at my lying-in, for if my husband had any intention then of exposing me to some extreme trial of hardihood, she would prevent him. I truly believed him capable to send me out on a cart into the fields by Highgate or among the windmills of Hampstead, when the first pains came upon me, to be delivered without any midwife’s aid under a hedge or in a ditch of stinging nettles—and this not from any unkindness to me, but all for the discipline of his martial son. He had told me one day that the ancient Latins were wont to harden their children when they were young by laying their heads in cold running streams, whereof the weaker ones perished. “Well, sir,” said Trunco, who overheard him, “let foreigners do as they please, I care not. But in England I warrant that would be adjudged wilful murder, at any crowner’s inquest.” And at another time he said to me, offhand, eyeing my belly: “There is a beast in the Riphaean Mountains beyond Russia, called the rossomakka, whose female brings forth by passing between two trees grown close together, and so presses her womb to a disburdening.” What? Would he make a rossomakka of me?
I remember that I had a great longing for honey and sugar-works and such-like, and one day I told my husband: “It is ill to refuse a breeding woman, who has a pica, lest she miscarry.” But he laughed at that for an old wives’ tale, and I must continue on my common soldier’s ration of one pound of bread and a quarter of a pound of cheese, with salads in season and a few cherries. Yet he allowed me plentiful milk, so that I should have abundance for the child when I came to suckle him; and Trunco secretly brought me a parcel of candied green citron to nibble, which was the sweetmeat that I loved above all others.
My husband promised me, as a glorious thing, that so soon as ever our son was born he would make my name famous to all posterity in a tailed sonnet. The honour of a poem he had already conferred upon three women, who were these: an Italian singer, Leonora Baroni of Mantua, with whom, it seems, he had fallen in love for her voice during his tour in Italy; and Mrs. Catherine Thomson, an old devout gentlewoman, who, when he had dismissed Jane Yates, kept house for him awhile, accepting no reward, from admiration of his writings and pity of his case; and the Lady Margaret Ley, wife to one Captain Hobson and daughter to the Earl of Marlborough, a witty woman a few years older
than himself, at whose house he was constantly entertained during my absence from him. It was the Lady Margaret who had persuaded him (by her wise management of Captain Hobson) that a woman could rule a shallowling husband without unseemliness; and who by her liberality of friendship, when he stood in most need of friends, had constrained him to put off all his contentious scorns and open his heart to her like a flower of the sun. He and she would have made a pretty wedded couple, but that she was the elder by an inconvenient number of years. After my return she was cooled of her affection for my husband, saying that he had returned like the dog to his vomit, and abused him roundly that he valued her earnest warnings and dehortations not a chip.
To come to the matter of my lying-in: I was long in labour, near three days, and my husband was distracted, fearing lest the child should die; but born it was at last, on July 29th, which was the monthly fast, at about half an hour after six o’clock in the evening; and it was a girl. My husband was not so mad as to put any blame on me for this error (holding that a child’s soul and sex is conveyed in semine patris), but was utterly disconsolate for the space of near a month and did not write me my sonnet after all. The child was christened Ann, after my mother and also after his sister Mrs. Agar, and so the letter A that hung above my bed was justified, though not perhaps the laurels. Nan seemed a brave child and prodigious like my husband in feature (which likeness has persisted); but presently I found that she had one leg shorter than the other by an inch or two. This deformity I attributed to my fall upon the ice, and Trunco was of opinion that had my husband allowed me to lie abed for awhile, rather than force me to go on my swollen ankle, the child would have been born straight-limbed. But neither of us durst say a word on the matter to my husband, who never looked kindly upon the child. He would not allow me to be ceremoniously churched after my lying-in, and even on the day that the child was born he refused the midwife to say her formal prayer, but commanded me instead to give humble thanks to God in my heart that I was preserved for His uses. Nor would he suffer my child to be baptized: for, he said that, having diligently searched the Scriptures through, he could find in them no ground at all for the practice of infant baptism, and that except he were convinced for the warrant of such an act by the word of God, why, he held it downright sin to perform it. Upon my objection that a child that was unbaptized was regarded by the common people as unlucky and as a certain prey for the Devil, he answered that what vulgar fools might prate together was unworthy of a wise man’s attention. Wherefore the child remains unbaptized to this day.
When I was up and about again, my husband required that other lodgings should be found for such of my brothers and sisters as could shift for themselves: for their comings and goings disturbed his studies. So this was done.
My brother Richard, being a lawyer, was easily settled, for never within memory had so many petitions been drafted, or particulars drawn up, or certificates sworn, or lawsuits set on foot; and old Mr. Milton kindly put him in the way of business. James was uninstructed in any trade or profession, his education having been interrupted by the wars, but Mr. Blackborough gave him employment in his library for a small wage, to put the books and pamphlets into order that were jumbled and tumbled together in heaps, and prepare a catalogue of them; and afterwards James worked for a book-seller, reading the manuscripts brought to the shop and advising him upon their merit. James never complained of his misfortune, but was reserved in speech, and could in no wise be reconciled to my marriage, my husband and he being so antipathetic. My brother Archdale was taken in by my Uncle Cyprian Archdale, while John and William, being then sixteen and fifteen years of age and sturdy boys, decided to follow the profession of arms. About Christmas they enlisted in the Parliamentary cavalry, Mr. Agar then recommending them to his friend General Ireton, whose esteem they soon won, and were promoted by him to be inferior officers. My sweet sister Ann was sent for by my Aunt Jones to Sandford, and I saw no more of her until her marriage, not long since, with a gentleman named Kinaston. Zara remained in the house and cared for the three remaining children, Bess, Betty and George; she had turned very devout and I hardly knew her, for her thoughts were all upon Heaven—I believed her to be a secret Papist, for so her Captain had been, who was slain in the siege of Oxford by the wind of a cannon bullet.
Now here I must tell how my father attempted to settle his debts with my husband, whom he favoured above all his other debtors. He confessed a present inability to pay him my marriage portion, but did not repudiate the obligation, and promised to pay a part when the goods unlawfully seized from him by Mr. Appletree should be restored. He also sent off my brothers John and William to Forest Hill, to recover the silver buried under the clove-pinks in the garden, which, while Farre slept, they dug up and brought home safe. This silver he sold privately in Cheapside, excepting only my christening silver, which I had again for my own, and gave the money to my husband. He also gave him a sum of money, lately paid him by a Berkshire gentleman, for a great quantity of hurdles sold him before the war; as also some Parliamentary billeting tickets and grazing tickets which could be redeemed; so that of the £500 debt there was but £320 left owing.
My father then drew up a paper, giving particulars of the estate remaining to him, which he sent in to the Committee for Compositions, sitting at Goldsmiths’ Hall, and desired to compound; and he said that when the matter was settled and he had paid the fine, which could not well be large, then my husband could enter upon the Wheatley freehold, now worth £80 a year, and so recover his £320 within four years. However, he dared not reveal that this land had also been mortgaged to Mr. Ashworth on a ninety-nine years’ lease, and that this mortgage was elder by nine years than the one given to my husband; and that though the principal sum lent by Mr. Ashworth had been repaid in 1642, to defeat the demise, yet the arrears of interest unpaid amounted to £400 or thereabouts.
He took to his bed in September, being in great distress of mind, because every day he expected his unlawful dealings to come to light, and the disgrace to overwhelm his children as well as himself. In December the Committee, reckoning his estate as still comprising not only the goods at Forest Hill stolen away by the brothers Appletree, but also the timber bestowed by Parliament itself as a free gift upon the citizens of Banbury, and taking no cognizance of his just debts, fined him in the sum of £180; and unless this were paid, they would seize all the goods remaining to him. Whereat he finally lost heart. He refused food and pined away before our eyes, lying in bed all day, in a feverish distemper, with violent sweatings. When I went to his bedside he appeared uneasy in my company, and wept often, accusing himself of having used me unkindly, and would not believe me when I assured him that I had no grudge or complaint against him.
What troubled his conscience more than anything, I believe, was that he had been obliged to take the National Covenant as a Presbyterian before he was permitted to compound. It appeared now clearly that he was a Papist still at heart; for on the day after Christmas, when my mother and husband were both out of the house, my sister Zara smuggled in a disguised priest to perform some rite over him, which I suppose to have been the sacrament of extreme unction, for he appeared most wonderfully comforted. His fever abated, and though he found himself every day grown weaker, yet he was not exceeding sick and died very peaceably a little after midnight in the morning of New Year’s Day, 1647.
My father left a will bequeathing to my brother Richard the Manor-house of Forest Hill (though it were no longer his own) with all the household stuff and goods and timber there remaining, and the houses and lands at Wheatley, freehold and leased (the charges upon which were four or five times their value, though he did not confess this, neither)—“besides,” as he wrote, “all the other of my real estate in the Kingdom of England and Dominion of Wales” (which was mere fantasy). From this grand legacy my brother Richard should first satisfy my mother in the matter of her jointure, before he paid the other various debts, among which mention was made of my marriage portion. For it now p
roved that the eldest claim of all upon the estate concerned my mother’s jointure of £2,000, which my father at his marriage received from my grand-uncle Archdale, and undertook by bond to lay out in lands for her, that were to be of the yearly value of at least £100 per annum; yet this he had neglected to do. As for the lands at Forest Hill (which also were no longer his), these he bequeathed to be divided among his children, namely, one-half to my brother Richard and the rest equally among the rest of us. He appointed Richard to be his executor, but if he shrank from it, then my mother was to undertake the charge; and he earnestly desired them not to have any difference concerning this will. To Sir Robert Pye the Elder he left twenty shillings to buy a mourning ring as a token of love.
When my father was buried, my husband could no longer allow my mother and Zara and the three children to remain in our house, for he said that they stunned him with their noise. Well, I could not blame him, for it was his house, not theirs. But, because of the burning of so many towns and villages, London was crowded with fugitives and lodgings were hardly to be found except at an exceeding high price, especially for poor widows with young children. Yet my mother found two dirty rooms at last in a mean house and street of Westminster, which was sadly distant from Aldersgate, and I feared that I should seldom see my family thereafter. They departed our house on January 30th.
This was the very day that the Scots, upon a promise of £200,000 and the present payment of an equal amount in coin, withdrew their army from England, and freely surrendered the person of King Charles to Parliament, though he was their King no less than he was ours. The securing of the King’s person was the prelude to an open quarrel between Parliament and the Army. For now that the Members of Parliament, being for the most part Presbyterians, had secured their object, they were minded to disband the Army, or at least whatever part of the Army was not of the same way of thinking with themselves, for they needed yet a few regiments of horse and foot for service in Ireland. But the soldiers, now that they were victorious, desired the fruits of their victory and refused barren laurels. Their demands were these following. First, the securing of their arrears of pay, and due provision for such of their comrades as had been disabled in the war, and for the widows and children of such as had been slain or had otherwise died in the service. This was no great thing to ask, forasmuch as the pay of the common soldier for his hard and perilous service was but a penny a day more than the least of my father’s husbandmen; and though Parliament was a better paymaster than the King, yet a common soldier was sometimes owed £5 or £6, or as much as £10. Next, in religious matters, the Army demanded such perfect liberty of conscience that if any man wished to worship the sun or moon, like the Persians, or the very pewter-pot from which he drank his beer, none should prevent him—for this liberty was the single religious tenet by which all were united. Lastly, the greater part of them desired the abolishment of the House of Lords, and for England to be governed by a single House of Representers, which should be elected by the whole people, and not by the burgesses or potwallopers of a few boroughs only.
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