Master Marfleet in his "Diurnal" hides in his prolixities some
particulars interesting to us. Thus we learn incidentally from some
reflections on the wickedness of the great, that while the King
reigned in Oxford--to Master Marfleet he is always the "Man of Blood"
when he is not Nebuchadnezzar--Lady Brilliana Harby was in such favor
at the court and with the Queen as to obtain patents of knighthood
for two neighbors of hers, one Paul Hungerford and one Peter Rainham.
We further learn that Brilliana accompanied the Queen--in whom Mr.
Marfleet traces a remarkable likeness to Jezebel--to France in 1644,
after which "flight of kites, crows, and other carrion fowl"--the
words are Mr. Marfleet's--the estate of Harby came, through the good
offices of General Cromwell, into the hands of Colonel Evander Cloud,
much to Mr. Marfleet's satisfaction, a satisfaction which the
school-master did not live long enough to lose.
Of Colonel Cloud's honorable military career we find a
brief but eminently satisfactory account in Corporal
Blow-the-Trumpet-against-Jericho Pring's pamphlet--now more
than scarce--entitled "The Roll-Call of the Regiments of Zion."
From a letter of Colonel Cloud's, preserved in the Perrington Papers
(_Historical Manuscripts Commission_, vol. XCIX., B), we learn that
after Naseby the writer found among the dying the person of Sir Rufus
Quaryll.
"As God may forgive me," he writes, "I had sought for this man in
encounter after encounter, with black thoughts of vengeance in my
bosom. But as he lay there I felt constrained by divine impulse to
forgive him, though he made me no answer but to curse horribly at me
and at the fool who took my place; and so passed away, as I fear,
very impenitent."
After the surrender of the King by the Scots, and the end, as it
seemed, of the civil war, Colonel Cloud, with the permission of his
great chief, retired from active affairs and made his way to France,
to Paris, where, in the early spring of 1647, he was married to Lady
Brilliana Harby. Some of the French writers of the time make rather
merry over this romantic union and the five years fidelity of squire
and dame--Strephon and Chloe, as they are pleased to call them. But
the laugh is rather on the wrong side of the face, for it is well
known that there was bitter disappointment in the hearts and on the
lips of many French gallants who had tried their best to win the
beautiful English girl, and greatly resented her reservation for this
solemn gentleman. One or two efforts, however, to make this
resentment plain to the English soldier resulting uncomfortably,
after a brisk morning's work, in the temporary disablement of one
aggressor and the repeated disarming of another, in the end the
"homme à Cromwell" was left to wed in peace. Oddly enough, his best
man was his old acquaintance Sir Blaise Mickleton, who, having
realized his property in good time, had settled in Paris since 1644
and had almost forgotten his native tongue, which he spoke, when he
did speak, with a little broken French accent, very pretty to hear.
He had once tried to renew his pretensions to the hand of Brilliana,
and had been so startlingly rebuffed that he never repeated the
effort and was content to remain her very good friend. Evander was in
England once or twice during the years 1647 and 1648, but after the
death of the King, against which he vainly protested, with his famous
friend he settled down in France, in the Loire country, for many
happy years.
After the Restoration, Harby Hall passed by mutual arrangement into
the hands of Sir Randolph Harby, who had cheerfully ruined himself in
the service of his King. Through him the name still persists in
Maryland, in America. Harby itself was destroyed by fire early in the
eighteenth century. It was not rebuilt; the moat was filled up, and
no trace of Loyalty House remains to-day. In Harby church-yard there
is an ancient stone, set there by Brilliana's order. It bears the
name of Halfman, the date of his death, and after that date the
words, "I did hear you speak, far above singing."