An interval of some weeks after the scenes described, and the war, long
imminent, was on. All over England men had declared cause and taken
sides; the battle of Edgehill had been fought, and blood spilled in
various encounters elsewhere. For besides the two chief forces in the
field, every shire, almost every hundred, had its parties and partisans,
who waged _la petite guerre_ with as much vigour, and more virulence,
than the grand armies with generals commanding. Many of the country
gentry retired within the walled towns; they who did not, fortifying
their houses when there was a plausibility of being able to defend them,
and garrisoning them with their friends and retainers. The roads were
no longer safe for peaceful travellers, but the reverse. When parties
met upon them, strangers to one another, it was with the hail, "Who are
you for--King or Parliament?" If the answers were adverse, it was
swords out, and a conflict, often commencing with the cry, "No Quarter!"
to end in retreat, surrender, or death.
Looking at the allegiance of the respective shires to the two parties
that divided the nation, one cannot help observing the wonderful
similitude of their sentiments then as now--almost a parallelism. In
those centres where the cavaliers or malignants held sway, their modern
representatives--Tories and Jingoes--are still in the ascendant. With
some changes and exceptions, true; places which have themselves changed
by increase in population, wealth, refinement, and enlightenment--in
short, all the adjuncts of civilisation. And in all these, or nearly
all, the altered political sentiment has been from the bad to the
better, from the low belief in Divine rights and royal prerogatives to a
higher faith in the rights of the people, if not its highest and purest
form--Republicanism.
From this standard rather has there been retrogression since that
glorious decade when it was the Government of England. At the
Restoration its spirit, with many of its staunchest upholders, took
flight to a land beyond the Atlantic, there to breathe freely, live a
new life, call into existence and nourish a new nation, ere long
destined to dictate the policy and control the action of every other, in
the civilised world. This "sure as eggs are eggs;" unless the old
leaven of human wickedness--not inherent in man's heart, as shallow
thinkers say, but inherited from an ancestry debased by the rule of
prince and priest--unless the old weeds of this manhood's debasement
spring up again from the old seeds and roots, despite all tramplings
down and teachings to the contrary.
It may be so. The devil is still alive on the earth, busy as ever
misleading and corrupting the sons of men; in many places and countries,
alas! too triumphantly successful, even in that land _outre mer_, over
the Atlantic.
At the breaking out of our so-called, but miscalled, "Great Rebellion,"
in the belt of shires bordering Wales, the Royalists were in the
majority; perhaps not so much in numbers as in strength and authority.
The same with Wales itself; not from any natural belief in, or devotion
to, the thing called "Crown," but because this spirited people were
under the domination of certain powerful and wealthy proprietors of the
Royalist party, who controlled their action, as their political
leanings. Of this Monmouthshire offers an apt illustration, where the
Earl of Worcester, Ragland's lord, held undisputed sway to the remotest
corners of the county.
Still, Wales was not all for the King; and where such influence failed
to be exerted, as in Pembroke and Glamorgan in the south, and some
shires and districts of the north, the natural instincts of the Welsh
prompted them to declare for liberty, as they have lately done at the
polls. From any stigma that may have attached to them in the
seventeenth century they have nobly redeemed themselves in the
nineteenth.
Of the bordering counties, Salop, as might be expected, stood strong for
the King. The subserviency of its people--for centuries bowing head and
bending knee to the despotic Lords of the Marches, who held court at
Ludlow--had become part of their nature; hence an easy transfer of their
obeisance to Royalty direct.
The shire of Worcester, closely connected with Salop in trade and other
relationships, largely shared its political inclinings; the city of
Worcester itself being noted as a nest of "foul malignants," till purged
of them by the "crowning mercy."
As for Hereford county, with its semi-pastoral, semi-agricultural
population, it espoused the side natural to such; which, I need hardly
say, was not that of liberty. Throughout all ages, and in all
countries, the bucolic mind has been the most easily misled, and given
strongest support to tyranny and obstruction. But for it the slimy
Imperialism of France would never have existed, and but for the same the
slimier imitation of it in England would not have been attempted.
Luckily, on this side of the English Channel there is not so much of the
base material as on the other. When the Jew of Hughenden travestied
country squire, patronising and bestowing prize smock-frocks on poor old
Dick Robinson, he mistook the voting influence of Dick's farmer-master.
It no longer controls the destinies of this land, and will never more do
so if the Parliament now in power but acts up to the spirit which has so
placed it. _Nous verrons_!
Returning to the times of England's greatest glory, and the shire of
Hereford, this, though strongly Royalist, was not wholly so. Many of
the common people, especially on the Gloucester shire side, were
otherwise disposed, and among the gentry were several noble exceptions,
as the Kyrles, Powells, and Hoptons; and noblest of all. Sir Robert
Harley, of Brampton Bryan--relentless iconoclast. If the name of Sir
Richard Walwyn be not found in the illustrious list, it is because the
writer of romance has thought fit to bestow upon this valiant knight a
fictitious _nom de guerre_.
But the western shire entitled to highest honours for its action in this
grand throe of the nation's troubles was undoubtedly Gloucester--
glorious Gloucester. When the lamp of liberty was burning dim and low
elsewhere over the land, it still shone bright upon the Severn's banks;
a very blaze in its two chief cities, Gloucester and Bristol. In both
it was a beacon, holding out hope to the friends of freedom, near and
afar, struggling against its foes, in danger of being whelmed, as
mariners by the maddened ocean.
To the latter city, as a seaport, the simile may be more appropriate,
though the former is equally entitled to a share in its credit. But
Bristol most claims our attention now, as it was in 1642, under the
mayoralty of Aldworth. A main _entrepot_ and emporium of commerce with
the outside world, it was naturally emancipated from the narrow-minded
views and prejudices of our insular nationality; not a few of its
citizens having so far become enlightened as to believe the world had
not been created solely for the delectation of royal sybarites, and the
suffering of their subjects and slaves. Indeed, something more than the
majority of the citizens of Bristol held this belief; and, as a
consequence, showed their preference for the Parliament at the earliest
hour that preferences came to be declared. So, when Colonel Essex, son
of the Earl of like name--Lord General of the Parliamentary army--was
sent thither commissioned as its military governor, no one offered to
dispute his authority; instead, he was received with open arms.
But ere long the free-thinking Bristolians made a discovery, which not
only surprised but alarmed them. Neither more nor less than that the
man deputed by the Parliament to protect and guard their interests
showed rather the disposition to betray them. If living in these days,
Colonel Essex would have been a Whig, with a leaning towards Toryism.
As Governor of Bristol in 1642 he inclined so far to Cavalierism as to
make boast of not being a Crophead, while further favouring those who
wore their locks long and prated scornfully of Puritans and Quakers. At
the time there was a host of these long-haired gentry in Bristol,
prisoners whom Stamford had taken at Hereford, under _parole_, and the
indulgent colonel not only kept their company, but joined them over
their cups in sneers at the plebeian Roundheads, who lacked the
gentility of blackguardism.
Luckily for the good cause, the tongue of this semi-renegade outran his
prudence; his talk proving too loud to escape being heard by the
Parliament, whose ears it soon reached, with the result that one fine
evening, while in carousal with some of his Cavalier friends, he was
summoned to the door, to see standing there a man of stern mien, who
said,--
"Colonel Essex! 'Tis my disagreeable duty to place you under arrest."
"Place me under arrest!" echoed the military governor of Bristol, his
eyes in amazement swelling up in their sockets. "What madman are you,
sirrah?"
"Not so much madman as you may be supposing. Of my name, as also reason
for intruding upon you so inopportunely, I take it this will be
sufficient explanation."
At which the stern man handed him a piece of folded parchment, stamped
with a grand seal--not the King's, but one bearing the insignia of the
Parliament.