“There are no apples in the house, either sweet or rough-tasted,” said I, bending down to pull off his boots. “Would you eat a medlar?”
“A medlar!” he shouted. “A medlar! Are you indeed such a puddinghead? Are you ignorant that of all fruits the medlar alone is no friend to the bowels, but contrariwise, is costive in the extreme? An apple, I said; I will have an apple or nothing!”
“Mercy on us,” cried I, “is it so with you, indeed? Here are merry lines to enliven your Comedy of Paradise:
Adam: I will eat an apple, bring me a rough-tasted apple!
Eve: Husband, you know full well that God hath forbidden us apples. Will you not eat a medlar instead?
Adam: A medlar, a medlar, puddinghead! Are you ignorant that medlars are costive in the extreme? An apple, I said, I will have an apple or nothing; though I be damned for’t. Am I not master here? There is nothing in all the world so good for a weak stomach as a rough-tasted apple.
Eve: Be damned then, greedy guts, and pluck one yourself, though it prove a Sodom apple.
Adam snatches an apple from the tree. A horrid thunder. Enter an Angel with a drawn sword.
Adam: Oh, pardon, good your worship, it was no fault of mine. This woman tempted me.
Come, Husband, why do you stand and gape? Here are now your worsted slippers. Must I draw them on for you as though you were a child?”
He mastered himself and played mum-budget, refraining from a back answer; but in such a scornful haughty manner as I scarce ever saw the like. Then shuffling his feet into the slippers he went off to read in his study. I could judge from his gait that he would punish my sauciness by perfect silence for three days and three nights.
Now I might again be private. Yet this had been so smart a return to my dirty life of cat and dog, that my afternoon’s meeting with Mun seemed like a dream—and not in a manner of speaking only, for I sincerely doubted whether a dream it were—a mere shining dew-hung cobweb of my fancy. I confess that I had fallen into a pleasant custom of forging imaginary dialogues between Mun and myself, and knew not whether this was likewise forged. What proof had I that I had indeed met him by the bowling-green? “Oh,” I cried, “who cares for what is real or what is unreal? These are but words.” There was a student of Trinity College at Oxford who disputed with a learned Doctor upon a point of logic touching the reality of appearances. The Doctor said: “The fox wagging his tail and seeing its shadow upon a wall, held that it was a horn: was that a real horn or no?” This positive student replied: “Aye, a real horn it was.” Then the Doctor fell into a little passion and cried: “Well, if it be a horn, a real horn, then toot it, you fool, you!” “Sir,” replied the student, “if I were the fox, so I would, I warrant you, and make a great noise, and cause your head to ache withal.”
Mun was come from Ireland some months before this upon the Articles of Peace signed between the Marquis of Ormonde and Parliament. For the Marquis had yielded up to Parliament the towns and castles that he held in Ireland, rather than entrust them to the native Irish Papists, with whom he was at variance; fearing lest they might call in Spanish or French soldiers to garrison these strongholds, to the lasting injury of our country. The Marquis was now arrived in France, whither Mun also went after he had seen me; but presently, upon a motion of the Confederate Catholics, as these Irish were styled, he returned to Ireland from France to conclude a firm alliance between them and the King’s party of Protestant Prelatists. Sir Mun sailed in the same ship, which sailed too late: for when at last they were able to land at Cork, in September, 1648, they could no longer assist in prosecuting the design intended by the King, which was to levy war against the English Army, from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland at one and the same time.
Indeed, the Second Civil War was already over and done with. There had been riots and tumults in the streets of London, with the roaring cry of “For God and King Charles,” and the discharge of muskets, which put me into great fear; but the troops that were quartered in Whitehall and about Charing Cross proved equal to their task of suppression. More than this, the Kentish rebellion was bloodily subdued by General Fairfax, and the Welsh rebellion at Pembroke by General Cromwell; the Scottish army of Presbyterians, invited across the Border by their English fellows, was defeated in a three-days’ battle at Preston by Generals Cromwell and Lambert; and Colchester, in Essex, the last English town to hold out for the King, was surrendered before the end of August. Nevertheless, when the King was already a close prisoner of the Army, and brought from the Isle of Wight to Windsor Castle, whence he would find it hard to escape, the sword was rashly drawn in Ireland, for a Cause already ruined.
My husband exulted mightily at the victory at Preston, where 8,000 English Sectaries had routed three times their number of Scottish Presbyterians, who had come (as they declared) to “put down that impious Toleration settled by Parliament contrary to the Covenant”: for he said that the shame of the two Bishops’ Wars was at last wiped out, and proof given that, whereas perfect Liberty of Conscience enables soldiers to fight with intelligence and comradely love, the coercive discipline of presbyters confines, imbecilitates and stultifies even the most martial spirit. And he told me that the Scots on the even of the battle had weakened their forces by a purge of all officers whose imperfect orthodoxy might, as was feared, bring down God’s judgment upon the whole array, among whom were their most capable and resolute commanders.
The Scottish prisoners were brought to London and there sold as slaves to the agents of the Barbadoes planters, at five shillings the head.14 My mother laughed heartily when she saw the poor, naked, scabby creatures marched through the streets of the City: for those who had sold their own King into slavery, she said, deserved no better themselves. My brother James pitied them; yet he held that the Barbadoes planters would be found better masters than ever their own mad Lords and ministers had been: for so strictly had the planters abstained from any fratricidal discords during the late troubles that for a man to call another “Cavalier” or “Roundhead” was an offence, and he was bound in satisfaction to give a dinner of pork and turkey to all who had been within hearing.
(Yet even this island Paradise has lately been set by the ears, many young English Royalists flocking there, and two Devonshire gentlemen making themselves masters of all the islands in the King’s name; so that Parliament has been obliged to send a fleet to recover them. Some men will never learn when they are well off, nor what a marvellous great consumer of public treasure and pestilent breeder of domestic miseries is Civil War.)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I Watch the King’s Execution
My husband addressed a commendatory sonnet to the Lord General Fairfax, in which he prayed him, when he had concluded the war and crushed the hydra-heads of new rebellion, to set his hand to the task of reforming the government of England, and of so clearing our public faith from the shameful brand of public fraud that no new occasions for rebellion should arise. But this sonnet and his metrical Psalms were all the poems that he now wrote, and his grand design of Adam Unparadised was still laid aside. One day I asked him what was the reason that he did not take it up again, since he had hoped to make it the instrument of his immortality. He would not answer for a while until I twitted him, saying: “With that poem, husband, you are like St. George—always in the saddle, never on your way!”
Then indeed he broke out hotly: “A divine poem such as this can be penned only in times of civic grandeur, and by a poet who is domestically at ease. How can I write while rogues prate in Parliament, while beneficed wretches bellow nonsense from their Presbyterial pulpits, and while God yet curses me with so unhelpful and brawling a mate as yourself? Almost it is enough some days to turn me Atheist, for I cannot think but that I have deserved better of God.”
“Ay, Husband,” said I, “you are a very nonsuch of patience, a perfect Job; and like Job, I hope, you will one day be rewarded for your fidelity and healed of your grievous boils. Yet you may thank God for one thing, that y
ou have no child dancing morrices in your belly, such as I have.”
For these were miserable times for me, with constant keckings and vomitings throughout the spring and summer, which continued until the beginning of October. It was a very lively child, whereas Nan had lain torpid.
My husband, being daunted by the failure of his first attempt to beget a great captain, had abandoned the project; yet now he was encouraged by a nativity that he had drawn (according to the rules and practice of Cornelius Agrippa, with the additions of one Valentine Naibod) and set for the night when he ceremoniously lay with me. He expected that this time he would verily beget a son who would be a famous diviner, a mathematical Merlin. He therefore ornamented my chamber with the signs of the Zodiac and of the planets, and with curious mathematical figures whereof I understood nothing but which, he said, it was not needful that I should understand forasmuch as they would work upon my son through the medium of my eyes. On this single work he spent a month or more, until he had it settled to his satisfaction, putting aside his other tasks the while. He also altered my diet, commanding me to eat watercresses, as much as I could stomach; for in an old poem watercresses had been written of as the food of Merlin, and also (I know not why) I was to eat fish and eggs in place of beef and bacon.
Yet once more only the initial letter could be saved of this nativity: on October 25th, 1648, which also was a fast day, in the morning at about 1 o’clock, was born not Merlin, but my second daughter, Mary, who is so much myself in repetition that almost the birth might have been parthenogenous. Mary is brisk, headstrong and agile, a very Turk to her playmates; and now at the age of three, when I write this, promises to grow a head of hair the equal of mine. My husband took the birth of a second daughter very ill. He could find no fault with her except that she was of the female sex; nevertheless, he accused me of a settled determination to oppose his wishes and interests.
About this time he was overcome by a new maggot. For he had seen how in Europe such scholars as Vossius, Grotius, Heinsius and Salmasius were courted and flattered by potentates and cities as worshipfully as poets had been in the time of Petrarch. Pricked by a grand ambition, namely, for Miltonus to be accounted the greatest scholar of his day, he was writing at the one time three several books of huge labour and erudition.
As for the tide of public affairs, this flowed to his liking. He was exceedingly content with the manner in which the Independents of the Army had settled their accounts with the Presbyterians in Parliament. For on December 6th of this same year Colonel Pryde (who had been a drayman before he was promoted to be an officer), coming one day into the House of Commons at the head of his soldiers, with a list in his hand, extruded all the members who were Presbyterians or otherwise displeasing to the Army. Where was then the National Covenant that the whole country had been obliged to swear for the sake of the Scots? It was cast away like an out-of-date almanac. Among members extruded were Sir Robert Pye the Elder, Sir William Waller (once the hero of the Army and styled “William the Conqueror”), General Massey the defender of Gloucester, Mr. Prynne the crop-eared martyr, and others of the same quality; these were haggling with the King upon the articles of a new treaty (spoken of as the Treaty of Newport) and would still concede to him what no single regiment of the Army counted him worthy to receive. In the Army, where victory had worked upon the soldiers like bottled ale, it was now openly affirmed that “whosoever has drawn his sword against his King must fling his scabbard into the fire.” Then the remaining members, nicknamed the Stump or the Rump, who were Independents and favourably disposed to the Army, proceeded in their hardy project. They would convert England into a Republic and, to this end, dare bring the King to trial on a charge of conspiring against his own subjects. Yet General Cromwell so ordered the matter that every member felt himself conscientially absolved of his allegiance to the King. He stood up and told them that any man who moved this business of his own design was the greatest traitor imaginable; yet since Providence and Necessity cast it upon them all, Almighty God, he hoped, would bless their counsels. The day upon which the King’s trial was ordered was the very day whereon, seven years before, he had come to this same Parliament to demand the five members who had defied him.
“Aye,” said my mother, bringing me the news from Westminster—she would call upon me in the afternoon while my husband was out walking—“for Parliaments are perishable commodities: after a year or two they turn sour and begin to stink. Here is a Parliament that stinks to high Heaven.”
This 1648 had been a strange, sad year. January had passed without any frost hardly, or any wind, but with a flattering sun smiling down continually, so that fruit trees and hedges budded out and the gooseberry trees in our garden had little leaves to them. “That is pretty to admiration,” said Trunco to me, “yet for this we shall pay later, or I am no weather-wise farmer’s daughter.” The spring entered pleasantly enough, but suddenly at the latter end of April came terrible frosts that nipped the trusting shoots and blackened them. In the countryside the rye was blasted when it was already in the ear, and much other grain with it. Summer was wonderful wet, with rain almost every day, which sometimes fell in deluges and rotted the hay and laid the corn flat. What grain could be cut would not dry, but sprouted in the shocks, and what could not be cut grew rank and would not ripen and was choked with weeds and either smutted or mildewed. Summer glided into winter, with but a short interlude of autumn sunshine, such fruits as had survived the frost again rotting dismally upon the trees. I was glad for my poor father that he had been spared the cares and distresses of this season. By Christmastide provisions in our market had risen to double or more the customary prices: beef stood at fourpence a pound, butter at eightpence, cheese at fivepence, wheat at eight shillings the bushel, sugar not to be had.
Then ensued a very disagreeable black New Year, made horrible by the trial of the King. From this awful undertaking many leaders of the nation hung back: all the noblemen who still attended the House of Lords; and the Lord General Fairfax; and of the Commons, even after Colonel Pryde’s Purge, not a few, among whom were Alderman Pennington and General Skippon and other brave commanders of the late wars. However, General Cromwell, with Ireton his son-in-law and Mr. Serjeant Bradshaw and fifty or sixty other resolute men continued with the settlement of this matter, though there were no precedent in English history for the judicial trial of a King upon any charge, let alone the capital charge of High Treason.
General Ireton came to our house on the day following the Purge, namely December 10th, and pleasantly asked my husband what writings he had in hand. My husband replied that he was engaged upon one great work, already oftentimes interrupted, namely the History of England from the Earliest Times; and upon another, a grand collection of Latin words, with a record of their occurrence in the best authors, to constitute a Complete Dictionary; and upon a third, the compiling of a Body of Divinity or Methodical Digest of Christian Doctrine.
“These are huge, deep, exceeding important and most honourable works,” said General Ireton, “and I wish you a favourable issue to your industrious labours. Yet cannot you lay them aside for a few weeks to attend to an immediate matter? We who are in power have need of your pen, which is the firmest and boldest in England, to justify the resolution we have taken to bring Charles Stuart to trial for his life. If you serve us well, I undertake that you will be honoured according to your deserts: for it is a very noble and necessary task that we shall set you.”
“I write to no man’s dictation,” answered my husband, “yet if you have need of a pamphlet upon the tenure of Kings and Magistrates, showing how they are accountable to the people over whom they are called to sit in judgment, why, I shall be as rejoiced to write it as I hope you will be to read it. For I believe, with you, that it is lawful for any who have the power, to call to account a wicked King and, after due trial, to depose him or put him to death. This can be learned from the Scriptures, from the cases of Ehud and Eglon; of Samuel and Agag; of Jehu and Jehoram. Ty
rannicide also among the Greeks and Romans was an open doctrine and a deed of heroic virtue performed in a hundred cases. What more flagrant names are preserved among the Greek records than those of Harmodius and Aristogiton, or among the Romans than those of the two Brutuses? To be sure, Julius Cæsar, whom the second Brutus slew, was less tyrannical than any of his successors in the Imperial line and deserving of mercy on many accounts, yet he was a tyrant for all that, and Brutus was commendable for his act, and the more so because Julius was dear to him, a second father. To come to our own history, beginning with the historian Gildas—”
Here General Ireton, who was pressed for time, encouraged my husband and told him clearly there was no need to persuade or tempt him to a task which he was so capable and ready to accomplish. “But,” said he, “let the work be put speedily in hand, for I can assure you that this trial will not be protracted like those of the Earl of Strafford and Archbishop Laud.”
So my husband worked at the pamphlet very assiduously, putting his other writings wholly aside until he had perfected it; and took it to the printers on that fatal day, January 29th, 1649, when the sentence was pronounced by the King’s judges.
The King had been wonderfully surprised when he was brought to trial at Whitehall and at first seemed to take a light view of the matter, and would not remove his hat in token of respect of his judges’. He argued ironically with Mr. Serjeant Bradshaw, the Lord President of the Court (which met in the Painted Chamber), that it was absurd for a King to be tried by his subjects; and when Mr. Bradshaw asked, did he plead guilty or not guilty, he replied that before he could answer he must have law and reason quoted for his appearance before this novel court of justice. He proved so stubborn that the Lord President ordered the Sergeant “to take away the prisoner”; and the King was led out, disputing still. He rested his case, it was said, upon the Law and Custom of England, as also upon the words of the prophet Ecclesiastes, “Where the word of a King is, there is power; and who may say unto him, what dost thou?”
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