In the October of 1642 there came to Cambridge a man from over-seas.
He was travelling backward, after the interval of a generation,
through the stages of his youth. From his landing at the port whence
he had sailed so many years before in chase of fortune he came to
London, where he had bustled and thundered as a stage-player. Here
he found a new drama playing in a theatre that took a capital city
for its cockpit. He observed, sinister and diverted, for a while,
and, being an adaptable man, shifted his southern-colored garments,
over-blue, over-red, over-yellow in their seafaring way, for the
sombre gray surcharged with solemn black. A translated man, if not
a changed man, he journeyed to the university town of his stormy
student hours, and there the black in his habit deepened at the
expense of the gray. In the quadrangle of Sidney Sussex College he
meditated much on the changes that had come about since the days when
Sidney Sussex had expelled him, very peremptorily, from her gates.
The college herself had altered greatly since his day. The fair court
that Ralph Symons had constructed had now its complement in the fair
new court of Francis Clerke. The enlargement of his mother-college
was not so marvellous to him, however, as the enlargement of one
among her sons. A fellow-commoner of his time had, like himself, come
again to Cambridge, arriving thither by a different road. This
fellow-commoner was now the member in Parliament for Cambridge, had
buckled a soldier's baldric over a farmer's coat, had carried things
with a high hand in the ancient collegiate city, had made himself
greatly liked by these, greatly disliked by those.
Musing philosophically, but also observing shrewdly and inquiring as
pertinaciously as dexterously, our traveller made himself familiar
with places of public resort, sat in taverns where he tasted ale more
soberly than was his use or his pleasure, listened, patently devout,
to godly exhortations, and implicated himself by an interested
silence in strenuous political opinions. From all this he learned
much that amazed, much that amused him, but what interested him most
of all had to do with the third stage of his retrospective
pilgrimage. If he had not been bound for Harby eventually, what came
to his ears by chance would have spurred him thither, ever keen as he
was to behold the vivid, the theatrical in life. Women had always
delighted him, if they had often damned him, and there was a woman's
name on rumor's many tongues when rumor talked of Harby. So it came
to be that he rode sooner than he had proposed, and far harder than
he had proposed, through green, level Cambridgeshire, through green,
hilly Oxfordshire, with Harby for his goal. Chameleon-like, he
changed hues on the way, shifting, with the help of his wallet, back
into a gaudier garb less likely to be frowned on in regions kindly to
the King.
I