LETTICE'S DIARY.
_September_ 1649, _Paris_.--'Put not your trust in princes.'
"The young king hath left for Jersey; whither further, time will
show. Regret at his departure by this hollow French Court is scarce
even feigned. Walter is gone to join the gallant Marquis of
Montrose. And perilous as the enterprise is, it is a kind of relief
to us; so far greater seem to us the perils of the king's idle court
than those of the field.
"We are not made to feel so very welcome here as to make our lives a
festival. Cardinal Mazarin, who, with the Queen-Mother, ordereth all
things (the king, Louis XIV., being but a boy of eleven or twelve
years of age), lets it be seen but too plainly that they would not be
sorry to see the young king, and even the Queen Henrietta herself
(though a daughter of France), translated to any other asylum. His
Majesty but lately dismissed some Commissioners from Scotland (where
they had the grace to proclaim him in February). They were
Covenanted persons, and made so much parley as to the conditions on
which they would be subject to him, that it seemed as if their true
purpose was but to make him subject to them. The negotiations were
broken off all the more abruptly, in consequence of the over-zeal of
some followers of the gallant Marquis of Montrose, who assassinated
the Ambassador of the 'Parliament' at the Hague. This deed made the
Scottish Commissioners more stiff in their ways, so that their
Commission ended in nothing. My father, with the most zealous of the
king's followers, much misliketh these dealings with men 'whose very
Covenant (saith he) constitutes them rebels.'
"'If the Scottish people are happy enough to get their king back,' he
protests, 'after basely selling his father (of sacred memory), they
must take him as a king, not as a scholar or slave of their arrogant
preachers. Otherwise, better remain king of his faithful exiles
here, of loyal Jersey and the Isle of Man (which the noble Countess
of Derby still holds for him), and bide his time.'
"For my father liketh not subtleties, and the double ways of Courts.
The Marquis of Montrose (with his followers) he thinks well-nigh the
only Scottish man worthy the name of loyal; he who writ on his
master's death--
"'I'll sing thine obsequies with trumpet sounds,
And write thine epitaph in blood and wounds.'
"_October_ 15_th_.--Good Mr. Evelyn, who came to kiss the king and
the queen's hand (an honour few covet now), hath brought us heavy
tidings to-day of a dire massacre at Tredah in Ireland; the flower of
the Marquis of Ormond's army cut off, and such a panic struck through
the land that one stronghold after another has yielded. It was
Cromwell's doing. When will the awful career of this man of blood be
brought to an end? Not a few among us think he must be master of
some dread sorceries. How else should he cast his wicked spells
around the good men who, alas! follow him?
"Some even think there are mysterious allusions to him in the Book of
the Revelations. Certain Greek figures there, which are also
letters, being capable, if ingeniously taken to pieces and put
together again, of being made to spell the number of his name, or the
name of something belonging to him. Of this I cannot judge, not
knowing Greek. And I think it scarce wise to build too much on it,
because I understand these same figures have been diversely applied
before by various interpreters to their various enemies. And perhaps
it is better (at least for people who do not know Greek) to wait
until the prophecies are fulfilled before they thus interpret them.
It would be a pity (if we should, after all, be mistaken) to find we
had been misapplying the Holy Scriptures into a vocabulary for
calling people ill names withal. That this terrible man is, however,
indeed as a terrible 'Beast,' trampling on kings and peoples and
nations, 'dreadful and terrible and strong exceedingly, having iron
teeth, devouring and breaking in pieces, and stamping the residue
with his feet,' no Royalist can doubt.
"This loss of Tredah, good Mr. Evelyn saith, forerunneth the loss of
all Ireland. His Majesty, when he heard of it, is reported to have
said, 'Then I must go and die there too.' But these melancholic and
heroical moods, my father saith, do not last long with His Majesty.
"_Jan._ 30_th_, 1650.--A day ever to be remembered with fasting, and
weeping, and bitter lamentation.
"So I wrote this morning, and just after, sweet Madame La Mothe came
to bid me to a fête. She came into the room in a glow of kindly
animation with the pleasure she hoped to give me, but started
appalled at my robe of deep mourning (which of late, at my father's
wish, I had lightened), and the grave face which too unfeignedly
accompanied it.
"'My child,' she said, 'what new calamity? Thou shouldst have let
thy mother's old friend share it.'
"'No new calamity, madame,' I said; 'or, at least, a calamity always
new until it is expiated. This is the anniversary of the martyrdom.'
"'The fête of a martyr, my friend?' said she 'I thought your English
Church had no martyrs, or, at least, no calendar. Besides, we keep
our martyrs' days as festivals.'
"'Scarcely, madame,' I said, 'when only a year old. It is the day of
the death of our martyred king.'
"'Ah!' she said, drawing a long breath. 'Doubtless the death of the
late king of England was a was a sad tragedy. All the Courts of
Europe acknowledged it to be so. Most of them went in mourning at
the time.'
"But she was evidently much relieved.
"'It matters not, my loyal child!' she said. 'To-day you shall
devote to your pious lamentations. I will defer the little fête I
promised myself on your account till to-morrow.'
"And with an embrace she left me.
"But I think scarcely anything before has made me feel so much what
it is to be an exile. To her the sovereign for whom we have
willingly sacrificed so much, and were ready to sacrifice all, is
merely 'the late king of England;' the anniversary of his martyrdom
is no more than that of St. Pancras or St. Alban; and an ample
lamentation for his death is a Court mourning!
"My father commended me for my loyal black draperies. But when Barbe
began and concluded our dinner with the meagre soup which I thought
the only fare appropriate for such a day, he looked a little
anxiously for something to follow; and when nothing came, and I
reminded him what day it was, and asked him to finish with a grace he
said a little hastily,--
"'The grace at the beginning is enough, I think, child, when the end
follows so close upon it.'
"Then when Barbe had withdrawn, he went to the window looking into
the court and whistled a cavalier tune; and then, checking himself,
threw himself into a chair, and murmured,--
"'It has a fearful effect on an English gentleman's brain to be shut
up for months in streets, like a London haberdasher. With such a
life one might sink into anything in time; a Roundhead--a
Leveller--anything! No wonder the Parliament found their adherents
in the towns.'
"Then moving uneasily again to the window, he said,--
"'Lettice, can't you get some fellow to stop that doleful
broken-nosed woman from everlastingly letting the water drop out of
her pitcher? It is enough to drive a man crazy. It is like a
perpetual rainy day, and takes away the only comfort one has left in
this den of a place, which is the weather.'
"I persuaded him to listen to a little of the 'Icon Basilike' to
soothe him. But he even took exception to His Majesty's words. At
length he cried,--
"Lettice, my child, prithee stop. It is very excellent, but it is
very dismal. I suppose His Majesty did write it all, poor gentlemen,
though how he could find it a comfort I cannot imagine. However,
there is no saying what a man may be driven to comfort himself
withal, if kept months together in one chamber. A day makes me feel
like an idiot.'
"Then I took my embroidery, and sought to tempt him to converse.
"But he only went from one melancholy topic to another--the
assassination of Dr. Dorislaus at the Hague ('a disgrace to the good
cause,' he said); the folly of listening to Covenanting Scottish men;
the incivilities of the cardinal and the French Court; the baseness
of the Spanish Court in calling the young king the Prince of Wales,
and scarce receiving his ambassadors except as private friends. The
only topic which he seemed to dwell on with any satisfaction was the
wickedness of Cromwell and the Ironsides, which he said was too bad
to be tolerated long even in such a wretched place as Puritans and
Papists had made of this world. But on this it gave me no delight to
hear him expatiate, which he noticed with some irritation, saying,--
"'Between your loyalty, and your objection to hear things said
against the rebels, Lettice, and that confounded woman who can never
get her pitcher emptied, and Cardinal Mazarin, it is really no easy
thing for a man to keep up his spirits.'
"And he paced out of the room, leaving me alone. Thereupon, I went
faithfully over the bitter steps of the 'dolorous' way trodden by
those royal feet so recently; the while I thought how good Mistress
Dorothy was doubtless keeping a Puritan fast at Kidderminster on the
same occasion; and my heart wandered involuntarily to other sorrows
of a dolorous way not yet finished, and I hugged my crosses until I
felt rather like celebrating my own martyrdom as well as the king's.
Thus I wept much, and was beginning to feel very wretched, and to
hope I was the better for it, when my father returned.
"His countenance was lightened, and he kissed me very kindly on the
cheek.
"'Poor pale child!' he said. 'Well, it can't be helped. I hope the
fasting does thee good. But it does me none. It makes me, not a
saint, but a sour old curmudgeon; as I have proved pretty forcibly to
thee, sweet heart. It never suited me when things were cheerful. I
always told your mother I could never take it up until she found some
Protestant Pope who could grant dispensations when necessary. And
now that everything is dismal, it is a great deal more than I can
bear. So, my dear, I have told Barbe to bring me the remains of that
venison pasty and a flask of Burgundy. And I feel better for the
thought of it already. The times are altogether too melancholic for
fasts, Lettice. Fasts are all very well for comfortable cardinals
like this Mazarin, who know they can dine like princes to-morrow; but
not for poor dogs of exiles, who may have to dine with Duke Humphrey
any day without getting any benefit out of it for body or soul.'
"Barbe duly appeared with the pasty and the wine, and as I sat beside
my father the words came to me, '_Be not as the hypocrites, of a sad
countenance_,' and a chill seemed to pass away from my heart. I
began to wonder whether, after all, I had been keeping the right kind
of fast; and I said something cheerful to my father.
"'Well, sweet heart,' he replied, 'the fast seems to do thee no harm.
What wast thou doing while I was away?'
"'Reading the Acts of the Martyrdom,' I said. 'Going over the king's
parting with the royal children, and his walk from St. James's to
Whitehall through the biting frost, and what he said to Bishop Juxon
on the scaffold, and his taking off the George, and all.'
"'But, dear heart,' said he, 'that is all over! To whom dost think
it does good for thee to cry over it all again? Not, of course, to
the king, who is on the other side of it; nor to the queen; nor to
the young king, who seems able enough to take consolation in one way
or another. To whom, then? Because if it is only to thyself, it
seems a great deal of pains to take. There are so many people
suffering now, whom one might perhaps comfort by weeping with them,
that life seems to me scarce long enough to weep for the sorrows of
those who weep no more.'
"'He spoke diffidently, as if on ground on which he felt his footing
doubtful. And when for a while I did not reply, he rejoined,--
"'Do not speak if it troubles thee, child. Never heed an old
Cavalier's confused thoughts. I know there are mysterious rites
which only the initiated understand.'
"'Father,' I said, drawing close to him, and sitting on a footstool
at his feet. 'I know no mysterious sanctuary which we cannot enter
together. We will go everywhere together, will we not? I think your
kind of fast seems the Bible kind. I am sure any fast which leaves
the head bowed down like a bulrush, cannot be the right kind. And if
we live till this day next year, I will try and find out some
sorrowful people whom our sympathy might comfort, and our bread might
feed. And that will, surely, not make either of us of a sad
countenance.'
"'He smiled, and began to tell me what he had seen in his absence.
And as he kissed me to-night, he said,--
"'Lettice, child, what didst thou mean by our going everywhere
together? I am not such a heathen as to hinder thee from being as
good as thou wilt. I lived too long with the sweetest saint on earth
for that.'
"'I meant that we will both try to be as good as we can,' I said.
"'True, true,' he said; 'but a man's goodness is one thing, and a
young maiden's another. A Cavalier's virtue is to be brave and loyal
and true, generous to foes, faithful in friendship, and (as far as
possible), in love, faithful to death to the king. For a few slips
by the way, if these things are kept to in the main, it is to be
hoped there is pardon from a merciful Heaven.'
"'And a young maiden's goodness?' I said. He hesitated,--
"'All this of course, and something pure and tender, and gentle and
heavenly, beside. Ask thine own heart, child!' he added; 'what do I
know of it?'
"'All this, father,' I said, 'and no failures by the way? Is that
the difference?'
"'Nay, saucy child, never flatter thyself,' he said. 'Thou hast
perplexed me too often by thy pretty poutings and elfish tricks and
wilful ways, that I should say that.'
"Then I ventured to say,--
"'Are the Cavalier's slips by the way forgiven if they do not ask
forgiveness, and do not try to mend?'
"'Come, come, I am no father-confessor to meet thy pretty casuistry,'
he said; and then gravely, 'Many of us do ask forgiveness. God knows
we need it. And when an honest man asks to be forgiven, no doubt he
means to do better.'
"'Then where is the difference?' I said.
"'Belike,' he said thoughtfully, 'belike there might be less! So,
good-night, child! I trow thou never forgettest thy prayers. And I
suppose there is something left in them of what thou wast wont to ask
when I used to listen to thee a babe lisping at thy mother's knee;
"Pray God bless my dear father and mother and brothers, and make us
all good, and take us to Thee when we die." That prayer is answered,
surely enough, for two of us. Try it still, child; try it still.'
"Words which made me go to rest with little temptation to be, as the
hypocrites, of a sad countenance.
"_April_.--The gallant Marquis of Montrose has landed with foreign
recruits in Caithness, to venture all for the king, in fair and open
war. The king, meanwhile, has been entertaining Commissioners from
the Covenanting party, who hate Montrose to the death; writing
secretly to assure the marquis of his favour, and openly receiving
the marquis's mortal enemies. My father is sick at heart, he and
many other of the noblest of the Cavaliers, at these courtly
double-dealings.
"_May_.--My father came in to-day sorely dispirited.
"'There,' he exclaimed bitterly. 'A letter from Walter. He is safe,
poor boy, in some desert mountain or other, among the wild deer and
wild men. But the best of us is gone; the only Scottish captain I
would have cared to serve under, Montrose, debated at Invercarron in
the Highlands, his foreign hirelings a hundred of them killed, and
the rest, with the Highlanders, scattered; the marquis himself taken
by those "loyal" Covenanters and hanged at Edinburgh!
"'He died the death of a hero,' he pursued, after a pause; 'it might
be well if we were all with him, away from these fatal clever tricks
of policy. The king's most faithful servant hanged at the Tolbooth,
and the king going to Scotland hand in glove with the canting
hypocrites who murdered him; making promises without stint, and
meantime encouraging his old followers by promising never to keep
them! How can any man know what promises he does mean to keep? A
curse on this hollow French Court, and all that comes of it! It
would take little to drive many of us back to our English homes, to
the farm and the chase, and let these Puritans and politicians hunt
each other as they please.'
"'But the brave marquis?' I said, wishing to turn him from bitter
thoughts on which I knew he would never act.
"'Deserted by his men, changing clothes with a poor country fellow;
taken in this disguise by the enemy, delivered up to General David
Lesley, dragged about from town to town, and exhibited to the people
in his mean dress, in the hope he would be insulted. But the poor
common folk jeered him not--they pitied him; so that in this Lesley's
malice was disappointed. Then taken in an open cart through
Edinburgh, his arms tied to the sides of the cart, his hat taken off
by the hangman, and so dragged in base triumph through the streets of
the city. He gave the driver money for conducting what he called his
triumphal car. Then persecuted and cursed in the form of prayers, by
ministers and men calling themselves judges, for two days, and at
last hanged on a gallows thirty feet high, with the book recording
his deeds around his neck; a more honourable decoration, he said,
than his Order of the Garter which he lost in his last battle. One
thing only of the traitor's doom was spared him. They did not
torture him, but hanged him till he was dead. His limbs were
quartered. When they threatened him with that, he said he would he
had flesh enough to be distributed through every town in Christendom,
as a testimony of the cause for which he suffered. A brave end; no
death on a victorious battle-field more worthy of a loyal gentleman!'
"'But the king will never trust himself with Montrose's murderers?' I
said.
"'He will go with them immediately,' was his reply, 'accepting all
their conditions, spite of all that Mr. Hyde and other counsellors,
who love him and love truth, can say. Not one of his old friends and
counsellors permitted to be with him, nor one who fought for his
father against the Parliament, without taking the Covenant. And he
is to take the Covenant himself. How is it he cannot see (as Mr.
Hyde says), that "to be a king but in name _in his own kingdom_, is a
far lower degradation than to be a king but in name anywhere else?"
How is it he cannot see, that promises made to be broken, ruin the
soul in making and the cause in breaking? But it is all the Queen
Mother's doing, and those hollow French Papistical ways. Tossed to
and fro between Papists and Covenanters, what can a sanguine and
good-natured young king of twenty do?'
"Thus having relieved himself by some hearty abuse of the French
politicians and the Scottish preachers, my father's loyalty began to
blaze bright again, and he concluded,--
"'And we shall have to go to him, and get him out of his Covenanting
jailers' hands as best we may.'
"So His Majesty has landed in Cromarty, having to sign the Covenant
before they would suffer him to tread on Scottish ground. He is
being led about listening to sermons containing invectives on his
father's tyranny, his mother's idolatry, and his own malignity;
rebuked by preachers on their knees, in humble postures, but in very
plain terms.
"_July_.--A letter from Mistress Dorothy, full of hopeful
expectation, rejoicing that the best hopes are entertained of His
Majesty's salvation, temporal and eternal. She understands that he
is desirous of being instructed in the ways of the Lord, listens with
marvellous earnestness to gospel sermons in which he and his are not
spared, and has already signed the Solemn League and Covenant. The
only thing to be wished, saith she, is that the instructions could
have preceded the signing. Marvellous, she thinks, are the ways of
the Almighty; that 'out of the ashes, as it were, of the late king,
who, whatever his excellences, it could not be denied had prelatical
predilections and prejudices strongly opposed to the Covenant, should
spring a young monarch of so docile a disposition and so hopeful a
piety, for the everlasting sanctification and benediction of the
three kingdoms.'
"My father gave a low significant whistle when I read him this
passage.
"'Poor Mistress Dorothy!' he said; 'and poor young king!'
"_July_ 3.--Another letter from Mistress Dorothy, in a strain unusual
with her, speaking of increasing infirmity, and hinting that she may
not be able to write often again to me. It is only me, saith she, to
whom she does write. By my father's permission I have written to
tell Olive.
"_August_ 14.--Oliver Cromwell is on his way to Scotland. There will
be fighting. The king and the Covenanted Scottish Puritans against
the Ironsides and the uncovenanted English Puritans! A strange
jumble! My father is set on going, to take his share of the
fighting. He is to leave me under the care of Madame la Mothe, who
has designs of making me acquainted with some of her friends of Port
Royal.
"_August_ 16.--My father has left to-day.
"'Don't turn Puritan or Papist, Lettice,' he said, 'and do not forget
thy old father in thy prayers.'
"'Nor you me, father,' I whispered, 'in yours.'
"'The men the fighting, and the women the praying, is an old
soldier's rule,' he said.
"'But not ours, father,' I said, half afraid to say so. 'There must
be quiet times before the and after them.'
"'Not very quiet,' he said, 'where Oliver is. However, there is
always quiet enough for old Sir Jacob Astley's prayer--or the
publican's;' he added reverently.
"And with a kiss, and a blessing in a faltering voice, he was gone.
"Never so entirely bound to each other as the moment before parting;
never so free from heart-barriers as when time and space are about to
interpose their impenetrable barriers between us.
"This feeling must be a promise, not a terrible mockery. Surely it
must mean that the barriers are made of corruptible things, the bonds
of the incorruptible."
OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.
When we came back to London from Netherby, my husband and I, Maidie
and the babe and Annis Nye, on the 31st May 1650, the whole city was
awake and astir with the triumphal welcome of Oliver Cromwell on his
way home from the Irish war. In Hyde Park the Train-bands and
salvoes of artillery; through the streets eager crowds thronging
around him, shouting welcomes, as he rode to the royal lodgings the
nation had assigned him in "the Cockpit" at Whitehall, whither
Mistress Cromwell and her daughters had moved (not very willingly,
some said) a few weeks before.
In a short time Roger came into the house.
"At last the nation acknowledges him, Roger!" I said; "and now, we
may trust, the wars are over, and we may begin to reap the fruit."
"Always hoping still, Olive!" he replied, with a quiet smile.
"Always thinking we are getting out of the Book of Judges into the
Book of Ruth; out of the 'Book of the wars of the Lord,' into the
greetings of the reapers and the welcome of the gleaners. Not yet, I
am afraid. The Scottish Covenanters are even now making ready to
welcome their Stuart king; and that matter will have to be settled
before there is peace."
"But, meantime," I said, "it must cheer the Lord-Lieutenant's heart
to be thus received."
"I am not sure, Olive," he said. "I just heard that a person said to
him, thinking to please him, 'What a crowd to see your lordship's
triumph!' but that he replied, 'There would be a greater crowd to see
me hanged.'"
"I do not believe that, Roger," said I. "I do not believe his is a
heart not to be stirred by a people's welcome."
"Perhaps it was stirred, Olive; only a little more deeply than to a
ripple of pleasure. Perhaps he thought of the poor peasants trying
to till the Millennium in on the Surrey hills, and the poor soldiers
trying to fight it in at Burford, and of the mutiny in Bishopsgate
Street among his bravest troopers, and of the many who began the
struggle at his side now in deadly opposition to him; and of that
ancient crowd whose hosannas and palm-branches were so quickly
changed."
"Roger," I said, "you and General Cromwell have been wanting us and
_home_! It is not like you to look in this melancholic way on
things."
And I took him into the nursery to see Maidie and the babe; a sight
which, my husband used to say, I superstitiously thought a charm
against well-nigh any despondencies.
Maidie had forgotten him, and went through a number of pretty, shy,
feminine tricks, before she would be coaxed to come near him. The
plain Ironsides' armour was not so attractive to her as would have
been the Cavalier plumes and tassels. Her approval, however, once
won, she became completely at her ease, subjecting Roger entirely to
her petty tyrannies, and making the room ring with her merry little
voice; while the babe looked on, serious and amazed, expressing her
sympathy in the festivities by senselessly crowing, and by vainly
endeavouring to embrace her own rosy toes, as if she had been a
benighted baby of the Dark Ages, instead of an enlightened infant of
the Commonwealth.
So we talked no more politics that evening. And in the morning,
Roger's views of the world seemed to me more hopeful. Indeed, there
was work to be done, and so no more time for despondency; a bitter
root which needs leisure to make it grow.
In June, General Cromwell was appointed Captain-General of the Forces
instead of General Fairfax, and set off at once with his troops for
Scotland, Roger and Job Forster among them.
My husband also accompanied them.
My father soon afterwards took Aunt Gretel to pay a visit they had
been desiring to make to Germany ever since the Thirty Years' War had
ended (in 1648); two years before.
Early in August, a letter came from Lettice Davenant, telling me
that, from a letter she had received, she thought ill of Aunt
Dorothy's health, and deemed that she stood in need of succour and
sympathy, which, rigid to her vow, and all its consequences, she
would never ask.
If this was true, there was no time to be lost, Nor was there
anything to detain me from Aunt Dorothy. The old house at Netherby
was, for the time, deserted, and London just then, in the sweet
summer time, seemed to me a wilderness and solitary place.
Moreover, our departure was made all the easier, in that it gave me
an opportunity of doing a kindness to one of my husband's prison
friends, good Dr. Rich, an ancient clergyman whom Leonard had found
in gaol on account of his having given aid to the Royalists, and to
whom, being now liberated but deprived of his benefice, our house
might offer a welcome asylum. Dr. Rich was a sober, devout, and
learned gentleman; a man who dwelt much in the past, and was more
interested in the present as illustrating the past, than for its own
sake.
Nothing gave him more satisfaction than tracing the pedigree of
doctrines, heterodox or orthodox, to the primitive centuries, in
which he assured us were to be found the parents, or the parallels,
of all the heretics and sectaries of our own day, from the monks to
the Quakers; including the Fifth Monarchy men, who, he declared, were
nothing but a resuscitation of certain deluded persons called
Chiliasts, who had been convincingly refuted by I know not how many
Fathers.
Meantime (the fifth of the revenue of his benefice, allowed to
deprived ministers by the Parliament, being but irregularly paid),
Dr. Rich, Mistress Rich, and his eleven children found a parallel in
their own circumstances to the primitive poverty of the earliest
centuries too obvious to be pleasant; and it was a delight to be able
to offer them a home under the guise of taking care of our house in
our absence.
He was a man at all times pleasantly easy to practise upon with
little friendly devices, having little more knowledge than the birds
of the air as to the storehouse or barn whence his table was
supplied, and being always diverted by a little subtlety from the
perplexing cares of the present to the perplexed questions of a
thousand years ago.
Accordingly, with little parley, or preparation, Dr. Rich and his
family were lodged in our house, and we were ready to depart. If
Aunt Dorothy's stronghold was to be entered, it must be by surprise
or storm; surrender was not in her dictionary, much less entreaties
for succour.
We set off, under the care of our serving-man, Annis and I with
Maidie and the babe, our cavalcade consisting of three horses, one
carrying Annis on a pillow behind the serving-man; the other (a sober
old roadster) bearing the babes in panniers, and me enthroned between
them; the third, a pack-horse, with our luggage and provender for the
way.
This mode of travelling was neither swift nor exciting. It left me
much leisure to meditate by what subtleties I might avoid encounters
between Annis and Aunt Dorothy, should Aunt Dorothy be sufficiently
well for her orthodoxy to be in full force.
To forewarn Annis was only to bring on the conflict I dreaded with
more speed and certainty; to tell her a road was dangerous being the
first step towards convincing her it was right.
To forewarn Aunt Dorothy, on the other hand, was equally perilous.
So I came to the conclusion that I could only let things take their
course.
For without Annis I could not have come at all. Her care of the
babes was pleasant. Her quiet, firm will, her stillness, and her
sweet even voice kept them serene. They were as content with her as
with me. She seemed to grudge no weariness or toil for them, and her
temper was never ruffled. Her dainty neatness and cleanliness were
like perpetual fresh air around them; and, moreover, my heart was
tender to the orphan maiden with a heart so womanly, and a belief so
perilous, in the midst of a rude world, which might crush her
delicate frame to dust, yet never bend her will a hair's breadth.
The points at which she and her sect came into antagonism with the
rest of the world were scattered all over the surface of every-day
social life; and to her every one of these became, when assailed, no
mere outwork, but the very citadel of her most central convictions,
in which, for the time, all the forces of her mind and heart were
gathered, and which she could no more voluntarily yield than could
voluntarily cease to breathe.
It was a serious responsibility to have the charge of a person, every
one of whose minutest convictions was to her essential as the
distinctive conviction of each sect to its members, and whose
convictions crossed those of the rest of the world, not only in what
they profess in church on Sunday, but in what they practise at home
every hour of every day.
Nor was this all. If Annis's resistance had been merely passive,
there might still have been hope of escape.
But not only did all the world believe the Quakers wrong; they
believed all the world wrong. Nor only this. They believed
themselves commanded jointly and severally to set all the world
right, a conviction which, under no conceivable form of government,
is likely to lead to a tranquil life. We could never tell at what
moment Annis might feel moved to tell any peaceful Presbyterian
minister, in the gentlest tones, that he was "a minister of
Antichrist;" or any strict Precisian matron, who would no more have
indulged in a feather than in an idol-feast, that she was "swallowed
up with the false and heathen customs of the world," in calling a
single person you; or in "idolatrously naming the second or third day
after the hosts of heaven."
However, the duty had been assigned me by my husband, and was bound
fast on me by the pity and love I felt for Annis. This did not
hinder her being a far more anxious charge to me than my babes.
On the occasion, however, we owed a brotherly welcome to her.
We were benighted on the Surrey hills, to which we had turned aside
with a view of lodging at a friend's house.
The babes began to mewl and be weary. The place was solitary, sandy,
with sweeps of barren heath. It was St. George's Hill, and I began
to recall wild stories of the poor peasants "called Saxons, but
believing themselves Jews, and inheritors of the earth," who had
tried to dig the wild moors into millennial fertility a few months
before, and had threatened park palings;--so that I should have half
feared to ask shelter had any human dwelling appeared. Yet to camp
on the wilds, with two young fretting babes, even on an August night,
was unwelcome.
As I was plodding on, seeking to soothe the infant in my arms, and
singing soft songs to Maidie, a wild figure issued forth from a
hollow tree, at sight of whom my heart stood still. He was clad in
leather from top to toe.
But his carriage was grave, not like a plunderer, and he accosted me
soberly, though without any titles (as Mistress or Madam), calling me
"friend" and "thou."
At once Annis recognized him, calling him "George," and greeting him
as one she honoured.
After a brief conference with her, he came and bade me be of good
cheer, there were some of the Children of Light dwelling not far off,
to whom he would take us for shelter.
In a few minutes we came to a humble cot in a hollow of the downs,
where, without many words, we found kindness and hospitality worthy
of any mansion; the good woman preparing food and fire, so that the
babes were soon quiet and asleep, while far into the night they
entertained us with heavenly discourse, which was more restful than
sleep. The goodman told us how, "when after Everard and Winstanley
and their promised millennium had failed, he had gone back hopeless
and dispirited to his old toils for a froward master, working early
and late taking rest, knocked about by his master for an idle knave,
jeered at by his mates for a lunatic, earning with all his toil
scarce enough to still the hungry cries of his babes; the world, dark
enough before, made dark as night by the putting out of the glory of
the kingdom, which was so soon to have made it day. ("And," said the
good-wife with moist eyes, "too oft with a sour word from me.") How
then, when he was feeling like one forsaken of God and man, George
Fox, the man in leather, from among the woods where he passed much
time in solitude with his Bible, but lately battered and bruised by a
mob in a market-place, where he had exhorted the people against false
weights, had come to him like Elijah from the wilderness, and had
told him of the universal free grace of God to all mankind, of the
_kingdom within_, and the Light within, and the Spirit within, and
the one Priesthood of the Eternal Intercessor, and the way of
stillness and simplicity by the rivers of the valleys, and the true
language of Thou and Thee, and the sin of war, and of all false words
and looks; and how, at last, looking for the Lord within his heart,
he had found in Him both the kingdom and the garden, and rivers of
water in a dry place."
After him spoke George Fox himself. He could not have been more than
six-and-twenty; but I confess his discourse came to me with
marvellous power.
The words were sometimes confused, as if they were burst and
shattered with the fulness of the thought within them. Something of
the same kind we had noticed of old in Oliver Cromwell.
He seemed like one looking into depths into which he himself only saw
a little way, and by glimpses; like one listening to a far-off voice,
which reached his spirit but in broken cadences, and our spirits
still more faintly, through the echo of his voice. Yet he inspired
me with the conviction that these depths exist, and this music is
going on; a conviction worth something.
He spoke somewhat of his early life--of his father, Christopher Fox,
a weaver of Drayton-in-the-Clay in Leicestershire, whom the
neighbours called Righteous Christer; of his mother, an upright
woman, and "of the stock of the martyrs;" of the "gravity and
staidness of mind" he had when very young. How he sought to act
faithfully inwardly to God and outwardly to man, and to keep to yea
and nay in all things. And how men said, "If George says Verily,
there is no altering him."
He felt himself "a stranger in the world," and when others were
keeping Christmas with jollity he kept it by giving what he had to
some poor widows whom he visited.
Yet in his youth "strong temptations came on him to despair." He
went to various ministers (he called them "priests"). But none
helped him. One "ancient priest" reasoning with him about the ground
of hie despair, bid him "take tobacco and sing psalms." But "tobacco
he did not love, and psalms he was not in a state to sing."
When he was twenty-two (in 1645), as he approached the gate of
Coventry, "a consideration arose in him that all Christians are
believers, both Protestants and Papists," and that "if all were
believers then they were all born of God, and passed from death to
life, and that none were believers but such; and that being bred at
Oxford or Cambridge was not enough to qualify men to be ministers of
Christ."
The "darkness and covetousness of professors" troubled him sorely in
London and elsewhere.
Then (said he), it was "opened in him," that "God dwelleth not in
temples made with hands; but in people's hearts."
This seemed at first to him "a strange word," because both priests
and people call their churches "holy ground" and "dreadful places,"
and temples of God.
He ceased to go near the priests, and wandered about night and day,
in "the chase," in the open fields, and woods, and orchards with his
Bible; until finding no help in man, at last he heard a voice which
said, _There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy
condition_." "_He on whom the sins of the whole had been laid; He
who hath the key, and openeth the door of light and life_." There
were "two thirsts in him, after the creature and after the Lord, the
Creator." At length, "his thirst was stilled in God," his soul was
"wrapped up in the love of God," and when storms came again, "his
still, secret belief was stayed firm; and hope underneath held him as
an anchor in the bottom of the sea, and anchored his immortal soul to
Christ its Bishop, causing it to swim above the sea (the world),
where all raging waves, foul weather, tempests, and temptations are."
He "found that his inward distresses had come from his selfish
earthly will, which could not give up to the will of God," and that
"the only true liberty is the liberty of subjection in the spirit to
God;" and "his sorrows wore off, and he could have wept night and day
with tears of joy to the Lord, in humility and brokenness of heart."
As I listened to him, my thoughts ebbed and flowed within me. At one
time he seemed a daring self-willed youth, setting his judgment
against the world; at another, as a simple lowly child who had
_listened to God_, and must obey Him and none else; again, as one who
might have been a poet, or a discoverer of great secrets of
nature--so inward and penetrating seemed his glimpse into the heart
of things; and again, as a reformer to break in pieces the empire of
lies throughout the world.
"I saw," said he, "that there was an ocean of darkness and death; but
_an infinite ocean of light and love which flowed over the ocean of
darkness_."
Again, "one morning as I was sitting by the fire, a great cloud came
over me, and a temptation beset me; but I sate still. And it was
said, '_all things come by nature_,' and the elements and stars came
over me, so that I was in a manner quite clouded with it. But as I
sate still under it, and let it alone, a living hope arose in me, and
a true voice, which said, _There is a living God who made all
things_. And immediately the cloud and temptation vanished away, and
life rose over it all; my heart was glad, and I praised the living
God. After some time I met with some people who had a notion that
there is no God, but that all things come by nature. I had a dispute
with them, and made some of them confess there is a living God. Then
I saw it was good I had gone through that exercise."
His search into the reality of people's beliefs led him among strange
people, some who held that "women have no more soul than a goose,"
whom he answered in the words of Mary, "My soul doth magnify the
Lord;" others (Ranters) whom he went to visit in prison, who
blasphemously held themselves to be God.
"Now," said he, "after a time was I come up in spirit into the
Paradise of God. All things were new; and all the creation gave
another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. The
creation was opened unto me, and it was showed me how all things had
their names given them according to their nature and virtue."
Again, "while I was in the Vale of Beavor, the Lord opened to me
three things, in relation to those three great professions in the
world, physic, divinity (so called), and law. He showed me that the
physicians were out of the wisdom of God, by which the creatures were
made, and so knew not their virtues; that the priests were out of the
true faith which purifies and gives victory, and gives access to God;
that the lawyers were out of the true equity. I felt the power of
the Lord went forth unto all, by which all might be reformed; if they
would bow to it. The priests might be brought to the true faith,
which is the gift of God; the lawyers unto the true law, which brings
to love one's neighbour as oneself, and lets man see if he wrongs his
neighbour he wrongs himself; the physicians unto the wisdom of God,
the Word of Wisdom, by which all things were made and are upheld.
For as all believe in the light, and walk in the light, which Christ
hath enlightened every man that cometh into the world withal, and so
become Children of the Light and of the Day of Christ;--in His Day
all things are seen, visible and invisible, by the divine light of
Christ, the spiritual heavenly Man by whom all things were created."
Very strange words those seemed to me for so young a man. At first I
felt disposed to turn from him as one full of an amazing
self-conceit, lifting himself up above all in church and the world;
but I remembered what my husband always said about trying to find the
real meaning of all men. And as I sate still, and thought, a strange
depth opened in those words. Something true, real, and eternal (I
thought he meant), some divine meaning lay at the root of all human
works, and states, and callings. By this they stand, and live; By
departing from this they become hollow, and at last crumble away, by
returning to this they are reformed.
He spoke also of the whole of nature and history as being repeated in
the wonderful world within us. How the spirit has its Egypts and its
Sodom, and its wildernesses and its Red Seas; its Paradise and its
mountains of the Lord's House; its Cains, and Esaus, and Judases.
"Some men," said he, "have the nature of swine wallowing in the mire.
Some the nature of dogs, to bite both the sheep and one another.
Some of lions and of wolves, to tear, devour, and destroy; some of
serpents, to sting, envenom, and poison; some of horses, to prance
and vapour in their strength, and be swift in doing evil; some of
tall sturdy oaks to flourish and spread in wisdom and strength. Thus
the evil is one in all, but worketh many ways; therefore take heed of
the enemy and keep in the faith of Christ."
These thoughts in him were no mere visionary meditations, revolving
on themselves. The strange thing in him was the blending of
far-reaching mystical thought with direct and most practical action.
"The Lord," said he, "commanded me to go abroad unto the world, which
was like a briery thorny wilderness; and when I came in the Lord's
mighty power with the word of life into the world, the world swelled
and made a noise like the great raging waves of the sea. Priests and
professors, magistrates and people, were all like the sea when I came
to proclaim the day of the Lord among them, and to preach repentance
to them."
His preaching places were no secluded chambers, or conventional
religious assemblies, but the market-place, the "sitting of justices
to hire servants," schools, firesides, sea-shores where wreckers
watched, and, at times, the very "steeple-houses" where the "false
priests" seemed to him "a lump of clay set up in the pulpit above a
dead fallow ground."
By preaching repentance he did not mean crying out in general that
sin was evil. He meant, like him who preached in the Desert of old,
pointing out to each man, and class of men, their particular sins,
telling magistrates to judge justly, tradesmen to have no false
weights and measures, Cornish wreckers to save wrecked ships and
shelter wrecked men, masters not to oppress servants, servants to
serve honestly, soldiers to do violence to no man, excisemen to make
no inequitable demands, "priests" to speak the truth.
And the results of his preaching were two-fold: everywhere priests,
excisemen, soldiers, masters, tradesmen, and magistrates were
enraged, seized him, beat and bruised and trampled on him, threw him
into prisons; and everywhere some ministers, soldiers, tradesmen, and
magistrates, and even his jailers listened, gave up their false
weights, or unjust dealings, and sought to live uprightly before God.
After this discourse there was silent prayer, and the good couple
insisted on yielding up their own bed in the upper chamber to Annie
and me, and the babes. But it was far on in the night before I could
sleep. And in my sleep I had strange confused dreams of John the
Baptist in the wilderness; of a madhouse, full of Quakers clothed in
camels' hair with leathern girdles; and of the world shining in a
wondrous light, neither of sun nor moon, which made it like Paradise.
In the morning the poor people of the house set us on our way with
great loving-kindness, and I had much ado to make them take any
recompense. And I have always been thankful that through this
interview I learned to distinguish those whom many confound--the
Ranters, Fifth Monarchy men, and other lawless fanatics--from the
true Quakers, or (as they would be called) "Friends of truth."
After that we had no adventures until we reached Kidderminster.
Our way lay past many ruins of unroofed cottages, with their
blackened walls deserted and bare; gardens of herbs running wild, and
orchards still flourishing, and overhanging with pleasant fruit; the
open and broken casements of the charred and ruined homestead; here
and there a stately castle or mansion battered and breached by
cannon, while choice flowers still bloomed in patches on the trampled
terraces or round the broken fountains, where fair hands had tended
them.
In the heat of the day we rested. But wondrous pleasant were the
sights we saw and the sounds we heard as we journeyed through the
land through those summer morns and eves; the pleasant old country,
well-watered everywhere with broad still rivers among the meadows,
and little talking brooks among the woods, orchards, and corn-fields;
and soft waving sweeps of hill and valley, all smooth and green, as
if the waters of the great sin-flood of old had never torn and
convulsed them, but only gently heaved and rippled over them. And as
we neared Kidderminster, far off on either side rose two ranges of
hills, with blue peaks pointing to the sky like church-roofs, the
Malverns and the hills of Wales.
Again and again, now, as I read godly Mr. Bunyan's Pilgrim's
Progress, pictures of what I saw on that journey in old England rise
before me--the "river with the green trees on its banks;" the "meadow
curiously beautified with lilies, and green all the year long;" the
"tempting stile into Bypath Meadow;" the "hills with gardens and
orchards and fountains of waters;" the "delicate plain called Ease;"
the valley of humiliation, "green through the summer; fat ground,
consisting much in meadows," with its "pleasant air;" the
"fruit-trees, with their mellow fruit, which shot over the garden
walls;" the Delectable Mountains, not too high and savage for the
shepherds to fold their flocks thereon. I can remember, also, many a
Hill Difficulty, up which our horses slowly toiled, and Sloughs of
Despond through which they struggled. But the "valley of the shadow
of death" had nothing outward in that pleasant land to picture it.
Out of the dark and rugged depths of his own despair, John Bunyan
created a landscape he never could have seen.
I was the sole observer of these things among our little band: the
babe saw little but me; Maidie saw nothing of hills and woods, the
wild roses and honeysuckles we gathered for her were the channels
through which the beauty of the world stole into her heart, as it
did, making her clap her hands and laugh with delight as we rode; the
serving-man, being a Londoner, thought scorn of the woods and lanes
as very barbarous and ill-made places compared with Cheapside with
its wares and signs; and Annis, if she saw the outward world at all,
beheld it but as the mystical mirror of the world within, the waters
of quietness and trees of healing among which her spirit dwelt.
And so at last, on the seventh day after leaving home, we came to a
valley on the slopes of which rise the houses of Kidderminster, on
each side of the river Stour--"the church on the brow above the
water," as they say the name signifies in the old tongues, British
and Saxon, which were spoken when first men began to make houses
there.
Rich old English names; every name (like the old minsters of our
land) in itself a poem, with histories imbedded in every syllable!
Fondly we transfer the familiar old words to new places in this New
World. But here alas, as yet, they are no living, growing
words,--only poor pathetic relics or arbitrary symbols; at least,
until generations to come shall have breathed into them the new
significances of a new human history.