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Title: The life-story of Charlotte de la Trémoille, Countess of Derby
Author: Mary C. Rowsell
Release date: December 28, 2023 [eBook #72524]
Language: English
Original publication: United Kingdom: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd, 1905
Credits: Susan Skinner and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE-STORY OF CHARLOTTE DE LA TRÉMOILLE, COUNTESS OF DERBY ***
The Life-Story
of
Charlotte de la Trémoille
Countess of Derby
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration:
_Charlotte de la Tremouille._
(_Countess of Derby._)
_From the painting by Vandyke._
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Life-Story
of
Charlotte de la Trémoille
Countess of Derby
By
Mary C. Rowsell
Author of
“The Friend of the People,” “Thorndyke Manor,” “Traitor or
Patriot?” “Love Loyal,” “Richard’s Play” (comedietta), etc. etc.
London
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd.
Dryden House, Gerrard Street, W.
1905
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contents
----------
CHAPTER I
PAGE
Birth. Parentage. Descent. Peaceful Times. A 1
Gallant Soldier. Huguenots and Catholics.
More Storm-clouds. A Stately Home. The Idle
Sword. A Royal Summons; and a Death
Summons. A Troubled Wife and Mother. An
Unfortunate Princess. A Doubtful Honour.
Roundhand and Ruled Paper. A Naughty Little
Girl. Sisters indeed. Happy Days. The
Rubens Portrait
CHAPTER II
At the Hague. A Dreary Court. A Marriage of 16
Convenience. A Lady-of-Honour. Home. The
Firstborn. Cloudy Sunshine
CHAPTER III
“Res Angusta Domi.” A White Elephant. 32
Gathering Clouds. Keeping a Brave Heart. A
Grand Function. Royal Gifts. Fresh
Anxieties. Baron Strange. National
Grievances. “Shortcoats.” A Contract
CHAPTER IV
Lathom House. Orm the Saxon. The Ancestry of 40
the Earls of Derby. A Family Legend. “Sans
Changer.” A Stately Old Home. The Royal
Guest, and the Fool. The Baron’s Retainers.
A Goodly “Checkrowle.” Public Troubles. The
Siege of Rochelle. “The Villain has killed
me.” National Grievances. An Earnest
Request
CHAPTER V
A Chapter of Correspondence 56
CHAPTER VI
_Otium cum Dignitate._ The New Earl. A Royal 62
Water Journey to Hampton Court. “Merrie
England.” Cavaliers and Roundheads.
“Household Words.” The New Letter-Post.
Hackney Coaches. Linen. Faithful Friends. A
Lordly Home
CHAPTER VII
Manx Land. The Son of Leir. St. Patrick. 73
Prehistoric Man. King Orry and his
Highroad. The House of Keys. Public Penance
in Manx Land. A Fortunate File. Breast Laws
and Deemsters. The Little People. A Haunted
Castle. A Thorough Bad Dog. Cats’ Tails. “A
Ship in her Ruff.” A Contested Prize. The
Three Legs. The Lord of Man
CHAPTER VIII
A Fatal Choice. Strafford and Laud. Huguenots 84
and Anglicans. Royal Prodigality. Pleasant
Hours in the Pillory. Ship-money. A
Patriot. Moderate Men. No more Peaceful
Days at Lathom. “The Red Horse of the
Lord.” Virgil under Difficulties. Edgehill.
“Come like Shadows, so Depart”
CHAPTER IX
The Fate of Kings. Only once again. The Crown 95
Jewels. A Loyal Vassal. “The Vain Shadow of
a King.” Slander. Temptation scorned. More
Ardour than Discretion
CHAPTER X
No Rest. The Queen’s Journey to Holland. A 107
Friend in Need. “Master, go on, and I will
follow Thee.” The Green-Eyed Monster astir.
Through Good Report and Ill. An Indignant
Refusal. Back at Lathom. A Boisterous
Friend
CHAPTER XI
Charlotte of Derby. A Journey to London in 114
Olden Days. Queen of her Home. Learned
Ladies. “His Reverence.” Lady Derby spells
Lancashire. A Demand, and a Refusal.
Defence, not Defiance. “A Nest of
Delinquents.” The Sermon Text. Orders to
March. Demands and Terms. Surprises. Worthy
of a Painter’s Brush. The Astute
Ecclesiastic and Roundhead Friend. More
Conditions. “Look to your own Ways.” A Day
of Rest. No Surrender
CHAPTER XII
False Move. “Do not reckon that Lathom will 133
be yours.” A Letter from the Earl.
Ineffectual Fires. At Prayers, or Asleep? A
Sad Massacre. Hospital Nurses. Unwelcome
Visitors. In the Eagle Tower. Brave
Maidens. A Change for the Worse. Threats.
The Countess’s Answer. “Long Live the
King!” A Terrible Monster, and his Ignoble
End. Rigby’s Irritation. Gleams. Good News.
Decamping. Victory! And Prince Rupert’s
Homage
CHAPTER XIII
At Castle Rushen. An Honourable Surrender. 149
The Maudlin Well. Correspondence
recommences. Disappearance of Lord Strange.
A Price on Lord Derby’s Head. Holmby House.
Miss Orpe again. A Lawsuit. Divisions among
the Parliamentarians. A Lull in the Storm.
A Noble Author. At Knowsley. The Substance
and the Shadow. The Sectaries. “A Good
Exchange”
CHAPTER XIV
An Indignant Refusal. Illness of Lady Derby. 163
The Great “Tabouret” Question. A
Misalliance. A Pitiable Story. After
Dunbar. The Fatal Fight of Worcester. The
Royal Exile. Wounded and Spent. Lord Derby
taken Prisoner. A “Court-Martial.” Farewell
Letters. A Friendly Service? Leave-takings.
_Finis Coronat Opus_
CHAPTER XV
Bearing the Burden alone. The 180
Parliamentarians demand the Isle of Man.
Lady Derby a Prisoner. Cast on Cromwell’s
Mercy. Fair-haired William and his Fate.
The Tide turns. “I must depart.” The King
has his own again. Marriages, and Giving in
Marriage. Peaceful Times at Knowsley.
“Swift to its Close ebbs out Life’s Little
Day.” Court Fairness. The Last Letter. An
Honoured Memory
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Life-Story of
Charlotte de la Trémoille
Countess of Derby
----------
CHAPTER I
BIRTH. PARENTAGE. DESCENT. PEACEFUL TIMES. A GALLANT SOLDIER. HUGUENOTS
AND CATHOLICS. MORE STORM-CLOUDS. A STATELY HOME. THE IDLE SWORD. A
ROYAL SUMMONS; AND A DEATH SUMMONS. A TROUBLED WIFE AND MOTHER. AN
UNFORTUNATE PRINCESS. A DOUBTFUL HONOUR. ROUND-HAND AND RULED PAPER.
A NAUGHTY LITTLE GIRL. SISTERS INDEED. HAPPY DAYS. THE RUBENS
PORTRAIT
Charlotte de la Trémoille was born at Thonars in Poitou in 1601. The
fine old château[1] in which the first days of her eventful life dawned
upon her was the heritage of her ancestors, and now by right of birth
belonged to her father, Claude de la Trémoille. The château is
beautifully situated upon a hill, around whose base the river Thone runs
so far as to give it the appearance of an island.
Footnote 1:
Now the Mairie.
Charlotte was the second child of her parents, whose style and title are
thus described in their contract of marriage signed at Chatelhéraut in
1598:—
_Claude de la Trémoille, Duke de Thonars, peer of France, Prince
de Tarente and de Talmont, with the very noble and gracious Dame
Charlotte Brabantine de Nassau, daughter of William the Silent,
Prince of Orange, and of his third wife, Charlotte de Bourbon
Montpensier._
Thus the noblest blood of France and of Nassau ran in the veins of the
child who was destined to play such an heroic part in the land of her
adoption, and whose romantic story stands enshrined in England’s
historic annals.
She was born in days of comparative peace: the Wars of the League were
at an end, the accession of Henri IV. to the crown of France had
silenced the clash of martial strife. Catholic and Calvinist no longer
fought at the sword’s point. The Edict of Nantes, extending liberty of
conscience and civil rights to the Protestants, had brought at least
outward tranquillity. The act of Henri IV. in abjuring the Reformed
faith and entering the Roman Communion had justified the hopes of all
moderate minds. The Reformed party, with Henri’s lifelong friend and
good genius—the minister Sully—at its head, had seconded the wishes of
the Catholics, and advised him to the change.
The effect was magical, restoring tranquillity to distracted France. The
ravaged fields and hillsides were once more clothed with growing grain
and vines. “Husbandry and pastures,” said Sully, “were the true
treasures of Peru, and the paps which nourished the kingdom.”
Claude de la Trémoille, a Huguenot by birth, had always concerned
himself less about politics and polemics than fealty to his royal
master. A certain sturdy, loyal singleness of mind seems to have been a
distinguishing characteristic of his race. The Duke was a born soldier.
From the moment he could wield a sword, it had been employed for France
and the King. Henri had need of his valiant subject, and did not forget
to reward his services. It was after his brave fighting at
Fontaine-Française, 1595, that the King raised the territory of Thonars
to the rank of a peerage; and three years later, Claude de la Trémoille
married the daughter of William the Silent.
Still, though peace and prosperity once more smiled upon the face of the
country, the bitterness of religious difference rankled. Mutual jealousy
further aggravated the soreness. The Catholics were arrogant in their
triumph, and never lost sight of the fact that it was Henri’s policy
which had drawn him into their ranks. The Protestants, on the other
hand, lost their inspiration when the King became a Catholic. Their
allegiance to the sovereign remained; but their devotion to the man
cooled. Theoretically, civil prerogative might be extended to them; but
practically, their advice in the guidance of the State was not sought.
The Court party was not slow to let them understand this fact, in
defiance of the King’s goodwill and affection which he never lost for
his old co-religionists. Already the clouds of the sad and troubled
future were beginning to gather for the Huguenots. Sullen and
disappointed, their leaders retired from the Court, and with them went
the Duke de Thonars, to occupy himself exclusively with the affairs of
his own estate and the interests of his family.
He had four children—two sons and two daughters. He lived in great state
at Thonars; and when Monsieur de Rosny, the Duke de Sully, came to
Poitou to assume the governorship of the province, he received him with
great magnificence.
Still, though he had hung up his sword, the Duke regarded it longingly,
and at the smallest incitement was ready to take it down. The chance
came before a very few years had passed. The great Protestant leader,
the Duke de Bouillon, who, by his second marriage with a daughter of
William the Silent, was the brother-in-law of the Duke de Thonars, had
compromised himself in the matter of the Maréchal Biron’s treasonable
correspondence with Spain; and Biron’s consequent disgrace with the King
sorely troubled the peace of the family at Thonars.
The minister Sully, as full of goodwill towards de Thonars as of a
desire to secure the services of so brave and tried a soldier, sent de
Thonars a message to come to Paris. “The King,” he wrote, “contemplates
war, and has need of you to fight against the Spaniards.”
De Thonars, who was still a young man of barely thirty-eight, had let
fall to Sully a few words of dissatisfaction at his enforced inactivity,
when the minister had been his guest at Thonars; and Sully now reminded
him of these expressions. “Henri,” he wrote, “liked to see his
Protestant servants about him, and objected to such powerful lords
remaining long at a time in their own provinces. They might be lending
themselves to the hatching of plots.”
Monsieur du Plessis Mornay, the great Huguenot leader and governor of
Saumur, of which he had made a powerful Protestant stronghold, did his
utmost to dissuade de la Trémoille from going to Court. “Excepting,” he
said, “for those words which escaped you, I see no reason for your
going.”
“But if I can be employed?” rejoined the more than willing de la
Trémoille.
Du Plessis replied only by a stern, half-scornful silence, and went back
to his château at Bonmoy near Saumur; but hardly had he arrived there,
than he received a letter from Madame de la Trémoille, informing him
that her husband had been seized with gout in the arm, and praying that
if there should be no speedy improvement in his condition, du Plessis
would come to him. On the following night, she further wrote that if he
desired to see his friend alive, he must come quickly.
Du Plessis immediately hastened to Thonars, to find Monsieur de la
Trémoille exhausted with fever, and gasping with semi-suffocation. He,
however, rallied sufficiently to evince great pleasure at the sight of
Monsieur du Plessis, “uttering with effort a few words, in which he
displayed all his ordinary sense and judgment.” He was further able to
recommend to his friend’s care his wife and four children, who were thus
losing him while still so young. But the distractions of this life were
fast slipping away from the dying man, and it was chiefly upon his
soul’s welfare that Du Plessis conversed with him.
“It is not for me,” said de la Trémoille, “to speak of anything but
that”; and, unheeding all else, he mustered his remaining strength and
speech to discuss the life to come—replying always with words that
showed his courage in the face of death, the assurance of his faith in
Christ, and displaying the sound judgment which had distinguished him in
the days of his health.
While de la Trémoille was thus struggling in the agonies of death, his
daughter Charlotte lay ill with an attack of smallpox; and the
distracted Duchess only left her husband’s bedside to tend the suffering
child.
In the midst of all this trouble a message was brought her that her
sister-in-law, the Princess de Condé, desired to speak with her. The
Princess, she was told, had met with a mishap in the breaking-down of
her coach upon the road near Thonars, and she asked her sister-in-law
for the loan of her carriage. Little cordiality existed at this time
between the Princess and her brother. Damaging reports of her had
recently circulated. She was suspected in the first place of having
poisoned her husband. She had, moreover, found difficulty in
establishing proofs of the legitimacy of the son born to her after the
Prince’s death. In addition to this, she had forsworn the Reformed
faith, and given up her son, the little Prince de Condé, into the hands
of the King to be reared in the Catholic creed.
Whether the Princess really wanted the coach in order to proceed on her
journey, or whether she magnified the accident for the reason of the
opportunity it afforded her of becoming reconciled to her brother,
probably she alone knew; but in any case her visit was too late for
that. Monsieur de la Trémoille was already speechless. “I cannot see
her,” cried the Duchess, and she piteously entreated Monsieur du Plessis
not to allow the Princess to enter the château. Du Plessis hesitated. He
knew that the poor wife’s hopes that her husband might recover were
vain. He thought it possible that the solemnity of the scene of her
brother’s death-bed might exercise a salutary effect upon his sister’s
mind; but the distress of the Duchess conquered him; and he wrote a
respectful letter to the Princess begging her to defer her visit.
Thus Madame de Condé continued her journey to Paris without coming to
Thonars; but she laid the blame of the refusal on Monsieur du Plessis,
who found some difficulty in clearing himself with the King, for the
affront that she considered she had received.
In the meantime, the Duke expired, aged only thirty-eight years. He left
his wife and children under the guardianship of the Elector-palatine, of
Prince Maurice of Nassau, of the Duke de Bouillon, and of Monsieur du
Plessis. He desired on his death-bed that his children should be brought
up in the Reformed faith.
Scarcely was he in his grave than the fulfilment of these dying wishes
was gravely imperilled. The Huguenots had sunk into almost complete
disfavour at Court. Death and disaffection had played sore havoc with
the leaders of their party. Du Plessis was in disgrace; one reason for
this, among others, being his close friendship with de Thonars, who, in
his turn, was a connection of the Duke de Bouillon, still in rebellion.
Why, demanded the Court party, did he mix himself up with such persons?
On the other hand, the disquiet of the Protestants increased when the
King gave orders for the little Duke de Thonars to be brought to Court,
so that he might be educated with the Dauphin.
This was a great blow to Madame de la Trémoille; the child was only five
years old, and she had just lost her daughter Elizabeth. To part with
the boy now, was to lose him for ever. He would be severed alike from
every domestic tie, as entirely as he would be estranged from
Protestantism. She would sooner see him laid in his coffin than this.
Monsieur du Plessis bestirred himself to resist the project. He
represented to the King that its carrying out would create a real
grievance for the Protestants. Already the Prince de Condé had been
taken from them, and was it worth while, for the mere sake of having the
boy about the Court, to irritate the Huguenots further?
Henri yielded the point, and the child was allowed to remain at Thonars,
under his mother’s care. At the end of her first year of widowhood,
however, Madame de la Trémoille, in obedience to the repeated commands
of the King, repaired to Paris, leaving her children at Thonars.
The mother’s heart was doubtless not a little cheered during this
enforced separation by the letters which reached her from her little
daughter, who was now about six years old. “In the midst,” says her
biographer, “of grave family documents relating to the family of de la
Trémoille—side by side with parchments filled with pompous titles, or
lengthy enumerations of estates and seignorial rights—one feels a
curious stirring of the heart at sight of the big round-hand characters,
written on ruled paper, which commemorate the first attempts of a child
destined to do great deeds.”
Here is one of the letters:—
“MADAME,—Since you have been gone, I have become very good, God
be thanked. You will also find that I know a great deal. I know
seventeen Psalms, all Pibrac’s quatrains, and the verses of
Zamariel: and more than that, I can talk Latin. My little
brother[2] is so pretty, that he could not be more so; and when
people see him, they are able to talk of nothing else but of
him. It seems a long time since we had the honour of seeing you.
Madame, I pray you to love me. Monsieur de Saint Christophe
tells me that you are well, for which I have thanked God. I pray
heartily to God for you. I humbly kiss the hands of my good
aunt, and of my little cousins.
Footnote 2:
The Count de Laval.
“I am, Madame, your very humble and very obedient and good
daughter,
“CHARLOTTE DE LA TRÉMOILLE.”
In learning the Psalms by heart, Charlotte was taught to follow the
custom of all Protestant families of the time. For her Latin attainments
she had doubtless to thank the still older custom of teaching the
language to quite young children, in order that they should be able to
follow the celebration of the Mass and the other services of the Roman
Church; and though for young Huguenots the knowledge for this purpose
was not necessary, Latin was still regarded as indispensable to the
polite education of both sexes.
The children of Madame de la Trémoille occasionally accompanied her in
her frequent absences from Thonars at this time, but generally they
remained at home when she resided at Court or visited her relations in
Holland. Yet, although separated from them, she took care to be informed
of all their doings, so that she knew about their faults as well as the
progress they made; for when she is at the Hague, in 1609, her daughter,
then no more than eight years old, writes to her as follows:—
“MADAME,—I am exceedingly sorry to have disobeyed you; but I
hope henceforth you will not have occasion to complain of me,
although hitherto I have not been too good: but I hope in future
to be so very much so, that you will have reason to be
satisfied, and that my Grandmama and my uncles will not find me
ungrateful any more, as I hope to be obedient, and mindful of
them. They have shown me their great kindness in having given me
some beautiful New Year’s presents: that is to say, Madame (the
Princess of Orange) has given me a carcanet of diamonds and
rubies; the Princess of Orange, a pair of earrings; his
Excellency, three dozen pearl and ruby buttons. My Uncle has
given me a gown of cloth of silver. Monsieur Suart has done what
you wished him to do.
“I beg you to love me always, and I shall all my life remain,
Madame, your very humble and very obedient daughter and servant,
“CHARLOTTE DE LA TRÉMOILLE.”
In 1609 Charlotte and her mother were together again, without being
separated for any length of time for the next ten years. During this
period, all the letters extant are written to the Duke de la Trémoille,
her brother, who was generally absent from his family.
The young Duke was not such a good correspondent as his sister; and to
the great annoyance of his mother, frequently delegated the writing of
his letters home to some good-natured friend. He married his cousin,
Marie de la Tour d’Auvergne, the daughter of the Duke de Bouillon and of
Elizabeth of Nassau. In the young wife Charlotte found a true sister,
and their mutual affection lasted through life.
Charlotte remained with her brother and sister-in-law at Thonars, and
Monsieur du Plessis paid them occasional visits from his château of
Forêt-sur-Sèvres. Although by nature and from circumstance a reserved
and somewhat stern-mannered man, he seems to have been regarded with
affection as well as with reverence by the family of his old friend.
Charlotte, when about nineteen years old, does not appear to have been
strong in health. Her spirit, even in girlhood as throughout her life,
was stronger than the flesh. It is unfortunate that her zeal as a
correspondent frequently outruns her caligraphic powers, since her
voluminous letters to her mother are full of interesting gossip; so much
of them, that is to say, as are decipherable. The paper however, is no
longer ruled, and the writing is not, as heretofore, done under the eyes
of “Ma Mie,” the careful governess. Equally without heed to writing and
spelling, she pours forth details of neighbouring doings, tells who
comes to and from the château, and of what Monsieur du Plessis has said.
Always a very woman, the liking for dress occupies a prominent place in
her mind—if its expression on paper does not belie her. Madame de la
Trémoille’s mind’s eye is treated with word-pictures, infinite in detail
and variety, of her daughter’s gowns “of cloth of silver, trimmed with
gold fringe.” Mademoiselle’s jeweller and mantua-maker are important
members of the household at sumptuous Thonars; and the young Duke de la
Trémoille is no whit behind his sister in his taste for magnificence.
A portrait by Rubens of Charlotte, painted at the time of her marriage,
shows us a bright, graceful girl. She wears a bodice of scarlet satin,
and her hat is adorned with white plumes; she is looking over her
shoulder with an arch smile.
The letters to her mother, though written in terms of the formal respect
which the times exacted, are full of gaiety and lively sallies, and show
that she enjoyed existence, sweetened as it was by close intercourse
with her brother’s wife, who still, when the sea divided them, and the
clouds of Charlotte de la Trémoille’s stormy life grew dense and almost
without a ray of hope, remained the recipient of her confidences, till
death severed the sisterly tie.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER II
AT THE HAGUE. A DREARY COURT. A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE. A LADY OF
HONOUR. HOME. THE FIRSTBORN. CLOUDY SUNSHINE
In 1626 Charlotte de la Trémoille was present with her mother at the
Hague, the Court, at that time, of Prince Fréderic-Henri of Nassau, her
great-uncle.
In the only letter preserved at this time, Charlotte expresses a great
dislike to Holland. She finds the Court very “triste,” and already the
conviction that “the world is a very troublesome place to live in”
forces itself upon her.
Meanwhile, negotiations for her marriage were being speedily concluded,
and in the month of July of the same year (1626) Charlotte de la
Trémoille was married at the Hague to James Stanley, Lord Strange,
eldest son of the Earl of Derby and Elizabeth de Vere, daughter of the
Earl of Oxford.
The Earl of Derby, the representative of one of the most illustrious
families of the English nobility, was lord paramount of the counties of
Cheshire and Lancashire, and hereditary sovereign of the Isle of Man.
His eldest son, who took the title of Lord Strange, was only twenty
years of age at the time of his marriage. Handsome, high-minded, brave,
intellectual, he was worthy of the wife who shared so faithfully in the
fortunes of his troubled existence. A marriage less of choice than of
convenience, it was to prove a union that could put to shame many a love
match; but the passing of the years was to test its value.
At first, the separation from the home and the scenes of her childhood
and girlhood was very grievously felt by the young wife. The civil
dissensions in France, scotched only, not destroyed, were beginning to
regain their old virulence; and travelling, apart from its ordinary
difficulties and perils at that period, was rendered almost impossible
for women. In England a similar state of things was rapidly developing;
and so it came about that Charlotte, now Lady Strange, never again set
foot in her native country, or beheld the loved face of her more than
sister, the Duchess de Thonars.
After the conclusion of the wedding festivities, Madame de la Trémoille
accompanied her daughter to England, to see her duly installed in her
new home.
For a very short time Lady Strange now appeared at Court, in the
capacity of lady-of-honour to Queen Henrietta Maria, sister of the
French King, herself but the wife of a year to King Charles I. Twelve
months later, in the month of August, Lord and Lady Strange were
established at Lathom House.
Lathom House was situated in Lancashire, about three miles north-east of
Ormskirk, and eight from the sea-coast. The ground on which it stood, as
well as its outlying territories and neighbourhood, had been in the
possession of the Earls of Derby, and of the de Lathoms and Ferrars
(from whom the Stanleys had descended) before them, from Saxon times.
Orm, the Saxon lord of Halton, which is one of the thirty-eight manors
mentioned in Domesday Book, married Alice, the daughter of a Norman
nobleman; obtaining, thereby, large estates in the county. Orm appears
to have founded the church which was co-existent with the name of
Ormskirk in the reign of Richard I., when Robert, son of Henry de
Tarbosh and Lathom—who is supposed to be a descendant of Orm—founded the
priory[3] which was for long the burial-place of the Earls of Derby. The
mansion, which was very ancient, moated and walled, and built for the
defiance and self-defence which those turbulent and unsettled feudal
days demanded, came into possession of the Stanleys by the marriage of
Isabella de Lathom with Sir James Stanley in the reign of Henry IV.
Footnote 3:
Baines.
The Earl of Derby of the earlier years of Charles’s reign presented
Lathom House to his eldest son and heir, James, Lord Strange, the Earl
himself making his home at Chester. Concerning her father-in-law, Lady
Strange writes to her mother in the following terms—after premising that
her epistle is merely the replica of one previously written, but which
had gone astray in transit; a matter of far from infrequent occurrence
in those days, when postal facilities were only in the first throes of
being:—
“I informed you Madame, that I had been to see my father-in-law
at Chester, the capital city of Cheshire, where he has always
lived, in preference to any of his other residences, for these
three or four years past. He speaks French; and conversed with
me in very agreeable terms, calling me lady and mistress of the
house; that he wished to have no other woman but myself (_sic_,
for daughter-in-law?), and that I was to have full authority. We
were well received by the townspeople, although our visit was
not expected. Many came out to conduct us. I also told you,
Madame, how greatly I found Lathom House to my liking; and that
I have to thank God and you for placing me so excellently. I do
not question Madame, that you will do all in your power about my
money. I am waiting to hear from you regarding it. Truly Madame,
necessity constrains me to be more importunate than I ought; but
your kindness gives me courage. Indeed, my happiness a little
depends upon it, in order to shut the mouths of certain persons
who do not love foreigners; although, thank God, the best among
them wish me no harm. Your son (in law) is well, I am thankful
to say, and feels no return of his disorder. He almost lives out
of doors, finding the air very good for him.”
At this point however, Lord Strange must have come indoors; for the
postscript is in his handwriting, which is of a sort preferable to his
wife’s, both in penmanship and spelling.
“MADAME” (runs this post-scriptum),—“I cannot let my wife’s
letter go without myself thanking you for the honour you do me.
If I were able to speak with you, I should rejoice in constantly
assuring you that I can never be other, Madame, than your very
humble and obedient son and servant—J. STRANGE.”
In the autumn of this year, the first child of Lady Strange was born.
The home was complete; but domestic peace and content were destined to
be lost like a beautiful dream, in the gloom of the times. Charles had
not reigned twelve months before the first signs of the coming struggle
took form and shape; if even already, in marrying the Roman Catholic
Henrietta Maria, he had not hopelessly offended his subjects. Marriage
with French princesses has almost invariably brought disaster on our
English kings, and violent death in some form; the union of Henry V.
with the Princess Catherine of France being one of the exceptions
proving the rule. Even in his domestic affections the evil destiny of
the Stuarts thus attended Charles; and truly his fate was an ill one
indeed which placed him at the head of a kingdom at such an epoch in its
history. The times were out of joint; and the vacillating, arbitrary
Charles was not the man to set them right at this crisis, when the very
strength of the divinity hedging a king was being questioned and tested
by that sense of the rights of individual and collective humanity which
was beginning to quicken on every side.
The state of England however, on Charles’s accession, was but the effect
of causes which had been at work for many a generation past. Looking
back no farther than to the Wars of the Roses, we see the resistance of
a proud and jealous nobility to supreme kingly power, and its subjection
by the ruthless Henry VIII., who suffered no mortal to live, from
loftiest to lowliest, who attempted to cross his path or to thwart his
will. Henry’s despotism, inherent in Queen Mary, and carefully nourished
by her bigoted husband, Philip of Spain, was in Elizabeth softened by
the chastening experiences of early life, and throughout her long reign
kept in check by prudent counsellors. During the time that she was on
the throne moreover, the new religion was on its probation. In its form
of “Church of England, as by law established,” it had still to approve
itself to the nation. But long before her successor James I. took her
place, Episcopalianism had been accepted by the English people from Tyne
to Thames. By Roman Catholics it might be regarded as a hollow pretence,
and by nonconformists as a popishly tainted compromise; but by the bulk
of the community it was recognised as an ark of safety, spiritual and
temporal, whose bulwarks warded off the shafts of Rome as effectually as
her course ran clear of the shoals and whirlpools of the sectaries. The
Church of England, risen purified from the ashes of Romanism, was, or at
least was accepted as, the reproduction of the church of the early
Christians. It contained the ideal scheme of a perfect law of
liberty—religious, social, and political; and allowed a range of thought
and of speculation not to be found in any other formulated expression of
Christian belief whatever. Only of papistry the Church of England was
intolerant. Pains and penalties, in countless instances not one degree
less cruel than “Bloody Mary” inflicted on the Protestant martyrs, did
“good Queen Bess” and her successor, “gentle King Jamie,” inflict on the
confessors of the older creed. To all other Christians, the Church of
England extended sympathy. While her sanctuaries, retaining much of the
pomp and ceremonial of Roman ritual, were served by consecrated bishop,
priest, and deacon, the crypts beneath them afforded places for the
simple and austere public worship of refugee Huguenots and Calvinists.
Singing boys still chanted psalm and antiphon; and in the private chapel
of Elizabeth, the “morning star of the Reformation,” the retention of
the lighted candles on the altar betokened the belief in the reality of
Christ’s presence in the sacramental bread and wine. The
transubstantiation of Romanism—the consubstantiation of Lutheranism—the
spiritual presence only of Christ in the elements of Calvinism—the
unchanged condition of the bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper of
Nonconformity and of Dissent generally, were alike set aside by the
Established Church. The answer quoted by Elizabeth when questioned as to
her conception of the manner of the divine presence in the Sacrament of
the Lord’s Supper:—
“Christ’s was the Word that spake it;
He took the bread, and brake it.
And what that Word doth make it,
That I believe, and take it”—
was signally characteristic of the teaching of the Church of England,
which claimed primitive Catholicity and unbroken Apostolical succession.
The assertion was at once pious and safe, and eminently illustrates the
temper of the communion which has embraced within its fold such children
as Jeremy Taylor, Burnet, Nicholas Ferrar and his ascetic following,
Sherlock, Laud, Stanley, Pusey, the Wilberforces; and whose rebuke to a
Sacheverell was administered mainly on the score of good breeding, and,
if it lost a Wesley, is not careful to cry _mea culpa_.
For a generation or two the interest attaching to the new-old teaching
of the Church of England, and its general adopting, pretty well absorbed
the attention of all classes, more especially of the upper and middle
ranks; but the more the doctrines were assimilated, the more they
nourished a sense of the need of temporal freedom, and roused
speculation in thoughtful minds as to what was most needed and wholesome
for the social well-being of the State. The old dogma of kingly
supremacy had become, to say the least, unpalatable since the days of
the despotic Henry VIII. The English nation had no mind to endure
tyranny from the new dynasty; and many had looked with suspicion upon
James Stuart, not forgetful that the blood of the papist and haughty
Guises ran in his veins, and that he held with marvellous tenacity to
the dogma, if in his case one might not call it the hobby, of kingly
supremacy. Fond of scribbling, and endowed in his own estimation with
surpassing argumentative and theological faculties, he sustained and
comforted his bodily and mental timidity by pompous assertion and
spiritual aphorism concerning the right of kingly control over
everything the sun shone upon within his realm. The dogma of the
infallibility of the Pope, James I. matched by his postulate that the
king could not merely do no wrong, but that everything he did and willed
was to be applauded and obeyed. The difficulty was to impose this view
upon a sufficient number of his influential subjects to make it work
satisfactorily; those wise and moderate counsellors of Elizabeth’s
reign, who survived into James’ time, kept him in check, and their
experience of feminine weaknesses and short-comings in Elizabeth’s
vigorous mind was further widened by an acquaintance with the depths of
folly and of childish self-conceit into which an anointed king could
fall. Such men as Lord Chancellor Cecil and John Hampden had troublesome
conviction of this; and King James I., whom Sully dubbed the wisest fool
that ever lived, and Henri IV. relegated to the grades of “Captain of
Arts and Bachelor of Arms,” however strong himself in the comfortable
doctrines of the divine right of kings, failed in arresting the growth
of the life of political liberty.
With much pompous declaration however, and long-winded argument, James
did his best. Warfare of words was better suited to the man who, it is
said, was apt to swoon at sight of a naked sword; and when all other
argument and precept failed to produce the desired impression, he took
refuge in citing the example of his brother monarchs of France and of
Spain. “The King of England,” said James, by the mouth of his ministers
to the Commons, “cannot appear of meaner importance than his equals.”
And in this creed he caused his son to be reared. An early death took
the elder and promising Prince Henry from the coming troubles, and the
sensitive, proud, obstinate, vacillating Charles was left to struggle
with the coil of cruel circumstance already so rapidly beginning to
tangle up.
As if to strengthen the effect of this mental sustenance with which
Charles had been fed as regularly as he had partaken of daily material
food, James sent the young prince—or at least allowed him to go—to Spain
with the gay, extravagant, thoughtless Duke of Buckingham. “Baby
Charles” and “Steenie,” as the King called the two, travelled
_incognito_ upon this romantic pilgrimage, stopping by the way in Paris,
to sow the seeds of future mischief at the Court of Louis XIII. in the
Duke’s thinly veiled admiration for Anne of Austria. The journey to
Madrid however, which was originated for the end of marrying Charles to
the Infanta, defeated its own object; but Charles returned to England
perfected by what he had seen in his travels—in his lesson of kingcraft.
Endowed with a graceful presence, and, despite a certain coldness and
reserve, with winning manners, he had a scholarly and thoughtful mind;
but both nature and rearing had made him a man only of his day, or, more
truly, of the time preceding it. He had no gifts of penetration or of
prescience. He could not look into the future, any more than he was able
to read the existing signs of the times. He had been to Spain. His eyes
had been dazzled by the glitter of spoil from the New World, the
splendour and pomp and punctilio of the Court of Madrid, and the
magnificence of the Spanish grandees. He had seen with his own eyes the
success of Loyola’s scheme of religious and political orthodoxy, and its
supreme power of snuffing out obnoxious speculation, theological and
scientific; but he could not discern beneath the rich embroidery of the
veil its rotten foundation, which in two or three generations was to
crumble like the cerements of the grave in the pure light of day, and
disclose the corruption and festering beneath. He had witnessed the
brilliancy of the afterglow which the memory of the adored soldier Henri
Quatre had left, and it was small wonder if his mind’s eye failed to
reach across the gulf of coming years to that time when _lettres de
cachet_ would make fuel for burning the Bastille, and the yellow
_sanbenitos_ of heretics should be changed for _bonnets rouges_ and
_carmagnoles_. The guillotine was to reek with the blood, not alone of
aristocrats, but of the sons and daughters themselves, of Liberty,
Equality, and Fraternity. “The Revolution,” said one of its noblest
victims, “is devouring its own children”; and the contagion of hatred
against kings and queens and all their tribe spread over Europe till
confusion grew worse confounded.
Looking back to those early days of Charles’s reign, the question hardly
fails to suggest itself, how far the troubles of the time would have
been even aggravated had he married the Infanta of Spain instead of the
French princess. Protestantism in Spain had been stifled at the birth;
but in France it still had healthy breathing-room, tempering the
atmosphere of Romanist belief, and influencing even the most devoted and
uncompromising of Rome’s adherents. Neighboured by Switzerland, Holland,
and Germany, the philosophy of Erasmus, the humanitarianism of Arminius,
the teaching of Luther and of Calvin, all mingled with the stream of
orthodox theological speculation, till, overflowing into fresh channels,
it verged so closely and so frequently on theories of Catholic reform,
that Pope Urban made a vigorous attempt to stem the tide by his bull
Unigenitus, ostensibly directed against the Jansenists only. Thus, in
France, thought and religious speculation were kept not merely from
stagnating, but in active ferment; while in Spain, the repressive Jesuit
system froze and fossilised religion. Outside passive obedience to
dogma, said the disciples of Loyola, could be no salvation; but in
France, such cast-iron ruling was gone for ever in Church and State. The
white plume in the cap of the Huguenot-reared hero of Ivry brought loyal
subjects rallying round him, as entirely as the little leaden images of
Our Lady and the saints, with which the bigoted Louis XI. decorated his
hat-brims, had repelled his people.
The growing Puritanic spirit in England however, which had but scanty
affection for Episcopalianism itself, was not likely to draw fine
distinctions. In the popular acceptation of the term, “Catholic” was
identical with papist and Romanist; for, with a singular indifference,
the papists had been permitted to appropriate the term. The young Queen
was a Roman Catholic, greatly attached to the forms and ceremonial of
her Church; bringing with her from France a train of Romanist priests
and followers. Charles himself was the grandson of the woman who had
died kissing the crucifix with her last breath. None of these
considerations were lost sight of when the King began to ask subsidies
of his faithful Commons, and showed generally a disposition to rule with
a high hand.
He met with a strong resistance; and fearing the influence of Buckingham
over him, the flame of accusations which had long smouldered, was fanned
against the Duke, until his removal was brought about. Thus the Commons
triumphed; but Parliament was dissolved.
These events took place a year after Charles’s accession; and about that
time Lady Strange arriving in England, entered upon her post of
lady-of-honour to the Queen. The coveted position has, before and since
that time, been found to have its drawbacks, as rosebuds have their
crumpled leaves; and Lady Strange seems to have relinquished her part in
the Court pageantry as soon as might be, retiring to the home which one
day she was so bravely to defend—Lathom House, in Lancashire.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER III
“RES ANGUSTA DOMI.” A WHITE ELEPHANT. GATHERING CLOUDS. KEEPING A BRAVE
HEART. A GRAND FUNCTION. ROYAL GIFTS. FRESH ANXIETIES. BARON STRANGE.
NATIONAL GRIEVANCES. “SHORTCOATS.” A CONTRACT.
Established at Lathom, Lady Strange sent intelligence to her mother of
the hope that ere long a child would be born to her; adding:—
“The length of our sojourn here is not decided upon, but if the twenty
thousand crowns do not come, it will not be easy to leave the place.
Your son-in-law is well, thank God, and joins frequently in the chase.
On Monday, a great number of people were here, and for several days my
husband has had to entertain many gentlemen. He shows me great
affection; and God bestows upon us the blessing of living in great
contentment and tranquillity of mind. We have some trouble with the Isle
of Man; and if Château-Neuf were here, we should have offered him the
charge of it. The appointment is worth a thousand francs: and that in a
place where one can live for next to nothing.”
Pecuniary cares, which harassed Lady Strange all the rest of her life,
were setting in. With the adoption of the Romanist faith by Henri IV.,
the prospects of the Huguenots darkened. The League took possession of
the towns and castles belonging to the Duke de la Trémoille; the
agricultural prosperity of France was again blighted by renewed civil
warfare, and the tenant-farmers were in arrears with their rents and
payments. The Duke was not able to sell his acres of arable and pasture
land, and consequently could not send his sister the money which was
hers by right. The Earl of Derby was likewise impoverished by the loss
of certain moneys which, hitherto appertaining to the male heirs of his
family, had now become alienated and divided: yet upon these reduced
incomings the Earl was expected still to maintain all the old state and
magnificence of the house of Stanley.
The Isle of Man was, moreover, a possession of exceedingly doubtful
value to its suzerain lords. The people were turbulent, and difficult to
rule and to please. As a separate and independent kingdom, they claimed
certain rights and privileges, and it required an Act of Parliament to
settle their differences. Lady Strange’s dower would have been
incalculably useful towards the settlement of all these troubles, and
about the close of the year 1627 she writes:—
“I am not without anxiety on many accounts; but God of His goodness will
provide.” She goes on to say that her husband is much pressed for money,
and how great her satisfaction would be if she were able to help him
with her own dower.
“I am assured Madame, that you will understand better than I do myself
the need for this; and also what a happiness it will be to me to afford
consolation and help to those to whom I have been hitherto but a
burden.”
Still, however, no money came, and Charlotte writes later on:—
“I should be glad to know that my fortune existed not only in words, but
in fact. It causes me great grief and anxiety.”
A letter, written to Madame de la Trémoille by Lady Strange on the eve
of her accouchement, is strikingly characteristic of the brave and
spirited, but wholly tender and womanly nature of the Lady of Lathom.
Expressing constantly a deep longing to see peace established between
England and France, and greatly desiring the general welfare of both her
native and adopted country, feminine and domestic interests chiefly
occupy her mind. Far from her own people, Lady Strange had hoped to have
her mother with her during her hour of trial; but the coming of the
Duchess was found to be impracticable, and Charlotte thus writes to her
sister-in-law in the December of 1627:—
“For the journey of Madame (the Dowager-Duchess), I see, dear heart, the
same objections to it as you do; and though I have passionately desired
her coming, I dread the discomfort and dangers to which she would be
exposed; and for myself, I trust in God that He will not forsake me,
although I am alone and inexperienced. But there, my dear one, I will
think no more about it, trusting in God. I know, dear heart (_mon
cœur_), that you remember me in your prayers, and how rejoiced you are
for me in thinking of the hopes I cherish. Also you are assured that the
blessing which Heaven may bestow upon us will be always at your
service.”
At the end of January 1628, Lord Strange informs the Duchess of the
birth of a son; and again, a month later, Lady Strange, writing in more
detail of the important event, is critical upon the English mode of baby
treatment.
“I forgot,” she says, “to tell you that he (Baby) is dark. I wish you
could see the manner in which children are swaddled in this country. It
is deplorable.”
Since the time of Lady Strange, custom in such matters must have
considerably changed, for in these days it is the tight swathing and
impeding garments of Continental babies which challenges the compassion
of English mothers for the small, cramped-up bodies.
“My husband,” continues Lady Strange, “would have written to you, but he
does not express himself in any language but his own. He is none the
less your very humble servant.”
On the 17th April she again writes:—
“I have informed Madame of the baptism of your nephew, whom God
thus graciously received on Sunday, 30th March.[4] He was
carried by my sister-in-law, and attended by the ladies of four
gentlemen of rank of this country. I had him dressed in white,
after the French fashion, for here they dress them in colours,
which I do not like. The Bishop of Chester baptized him in our
private chapel, and, as you know, by the King’s name only.
Afterwards, sweetmeats were served; and at supper, the roast
joints were brought to table by gentlemen of this neighbourhood,
as also upon several preceding and succeeding days. The King has
presented him with two gold mugs, which is his custom with those
upon whom he bestows the honour of his christian name. In
addition to this however, he has sent me a very beautiful
present which cost two thousand crowns; the diamonds ornamenting
it are very fine, and all faceted. I did not expect to receive
it. The Duchess of Richmond, his godmother, has given him a
large bowl and a gilded enamel knife, such as is used to remove
the rolls and pieces of bread with from the table before the
fruit is brought in; and to me she has given a turquoise
bracelet.”
Footnote 4:
Old style. The Gregorian calendar was not used in England.
Previous to the birth of his eldest son, the young father, who was only
twenty-two, was called to take his seat in the House of Lords, under the
title of Baron Strange. This arose out of error. The fact had been
overlooked that the barony of Strange formed one of the titles fallen
into disheritage at the death of Ferdinand, Earl of Derby. The error led
to the creation of a new peerage, which went to the house of Athol, and
for several years Lord Strange sat in the Upper House, during the
lifetime of his father, the Earl of Derby.
A new Parliament was now summoned; and Sir Robert Cotton, the mildest
and most temperate among the prominent men of the popular party, was
called to the King’s counsel table. He spoke there with wisdom and
frankness, setting forth the just grievances of the nation; and in order
to win its due support, impressing the necessity for redress. Sir Robert
recalled those words of Lord Burleigh to Queen Elizabeth:—
“Win their hearts, and their purses and their arms will be yours.”
Concerning her husband’s summons to town, Lady Strange writes on 18th
May 1628:—
“I write under much anxiety; for I believe my husband goes the
day after to-morrow to London. This is the more grievous, as the
air there does not suit him; but God of His goodness will
preserve him. As for our little one, he is very well, Heaven be
thanked. I have already in two of my letters asked you for
frocks for him, for he is very big for his age; and they are
needed the more that in this country children are short-clothed
at a month or six weeks old. I am considered out of my senses
that he is not yet short-coated. I also asked you to send hoods.
I hope that all may arrive together.
“God grant that all that Parliament decides be for His glory,
and for the good of the King and of the nation.”
Lord Strange did not however, go to London at this time.
“My husband,” writes Lady Strange a little later, “has not been summoned
to London (June 1628). There are great disturbances there. One day all
is confusion, the next everything goes well.”
It is small wonder that, to such a state of things, Lord Strange
preferred the tranquillity and domestic happiness of his ancestral home.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IV
LATHOM HOUSE. ORM THE SAXON. THE ANCESTRY OF THE EARLS OF DERBY. A
FAMILY LEGEND. “SANS CHANGER.” A STATELY OLD HOME. THE ROYAL GUEST,
AND THE FOOL. THE BARON’S RETAINERS. A GOODLY “CHECKROWLE.” PUBLIC
TROUBLES. THE SIEGE OF ROCHELLE. “THE VILLAIN HAS KILLED ME.”
NATIONAL GRIEVANCES. AN EARNEST REQUEST.
The family of Stanley takes its surname from the lordship of Stonleigh
or Stanleigh in the moorlands of Staffordshire. The appertaining house
and estates had originally belonged to the de Lathoms.
Robert Fitz-Henry appears to have been the first representative of the
family of Lathom. In the reign of Richard I. this Robert founded the
Priory of Burscough for Black Canons, whose scanty ruins, standing in a
field near Ormskirk, still tell of the great nobility and beauty of the
original structure. Burscough Priory was for a long time the
burial-place of the Earls of Derby; but at a later period, many of the
coffins were removed to the vault of the Stanleys in Ormskirk church,
which was built by the sumptuous-minded third Earl of Derby. In the
reign of Edward I. the grandson of Robert Fitz-Henry married Amicia, the
sister and co-heir of the lord and baron of Alfreton and Norton. Sir
Rupert, their son, married Katherine, daughter and heiress of Sir Robert
de Knowsley, that magnificent estate being thus brought into the family.
“Of this ancient and noble family of the Stanleys,” writes Edmondson,[5]
“are the Stanleys of Hooton in Cheshire, from whom descended Sir John
Stanley, who, in the reign of Henry IV., obtained in 1406 a grant in fee
of the Isle of Man, and from that time till February 1736 (except during
the civil wars), the Earls of Derby have had an absolute jurisdiction
over the people and soil.... The grandson of Sir John Stanley, named
Thomas, was summoned to Parliament in 1456 as Lord Stanley; which Thomas
married for his second wife Margaret, daughter and heir to John
Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, and mother of Henry VII. For his services to
Henry he was created, 1485, Earl of Derby. From the eldest son, Thomas,
born to him by his first marriage, descended the Earls of Derby.”
Footnote 5:
1785, Mowbray Herald Extraordinary.
The crest of the Stanleys is an eagle surmounting a child: and
concerning it, tradition hands down the legend that the Sir Thomas
Stanley who was the father of Isabel, his only legitimate offspring, had
a son by a gentlewoman named Mary Osketell. Sir Thomas, who at the time
of the boy’s birth appears to have been well on in years—since his wife
is described as an aged lady—artfully contrived that the infant should
be carried by a confidential servant to a certain spot in the park, and
there laid at the foot of a tree, whose branches were the favourite
haunt of an eagle. Presently, in the course of their walk, came by Sir
Thomas and his wife, and there they beheld the huge bird hovering with
outspread wings above the infant. The crafty Sir Thomas, who loved the
little creature well, feigned to his lady that he believed that the
eagle had borne it hither in its talons, and launched into enthusiastic
praise of the providence which had thus so miraculously preserved the
babe, and placed it in their tender care. The gentle-hearted,
unsuspecting lady placed implicit faith in Sir Thomas’s representations,
and
“Their content was such, to see the hap
That the ancient lady hugs yt in her lap,
Smoths’ yt with kisses, bathes yt in her tears,
And into Lathom House the babe she bears.”
The child was christened Osketell. When however, the knight felt death
not very far off, his conscience began to reproach him for the deception
which he had played upon his wife, and he bequeathed the bulk of his
fortune and estates to his legitimate child Isabel, who was now married
to Sir John Stanley. To the poor “love child,” whom the King had
knighted, he left only the Manor of Irlam and Urmston near Manchester,
and some possessions in Cheshire. Here Osketell settled, and became the
founder of the family of Lathom of Ashbury.
This story would seem purely legendary: at all events, so far as it
connects itself with Sir Thomas; since, in the Harleian MSS., there
stands an account of some painted windows in Ashbury Church, near
Congleton, on which is represented a figure with sword and spurs,
habited in a white tabard, hands clasped. Over its head, a shield set
anglewise under a helmet and mantle, emblazoned _or_; on a chief
indented _az._, three tyrants; over all a bandlet _gules_. Crest, an
eaglet standing on an empty cradle, with wings displayed regardant _or_,
with this inscription: “Orate pro anima Philippi fil. Roberti Lathom
militis.” This Philip of Lathom was uncle of Sir Thomas. Still thrown
back to an earlier date, the tradition would equally hold good, and it
is not beyond the bounds of possibility that some ancestor of Sir Thomas
was really answerable for the crest of the Stanleys which carries with
it the motto, “Sans changer.”
Lathom House was built at a very early period, when the mansions of
great families were castellated and fortified to withstand the attacks
of the foemen, native or foreign. It stood upon flat, marshy ground in
the midst of low, gradual acclivities, its situation being best
described by comparison with the hollow in the middle of the palm of the
hand. Its sturdy environing walls were six feet thick, strengthened with
bastions surmounted by nine towers, which commanded each other. In the
centre, facing the gatehouse, which was flanked by two strong towers,
was the lofty Eagle Keep tower. Externally, a moat surrounded the walls:
this was twenty-four feet wide and six feet deep, full of water; and
between it and the walls ran a stout palisading. The gatehouse opened
into the first court; the dwelling part of the mansion was in the Eagle
Tower. South and south-westward of the house was “a rising ground, so
near as to overlook the top of it, from which it falls so quick that
nothing planted against it on the other side can touch it farther than
the front wall; and on the north and east sides there is another rising
ground, even to the edge of the moat.”
“Thus it will be seen,” writes the Rev. Mr Rutter, his lordship’s
chaplain, “that over and above these artificial defences, there is
something picturesque and noteworthy in the situation of the house, as
if nature hereby had destined it for a place of refuge and safety.” It
could not be taken by assault of battery, since the cannon placed at the
top of the high surrounding hills could not damage the walls so as to
effect a breach in them.
Old Lathom House bristled with towers. Eighteen in all rose from its
walls. Thomas, second Earl of Derby, writing in the time of Henry VIII.,
thus apostrophises his ancestral home:—
“Farewell, Lathom! that bright bower;
Nine towers thou bearest on hye,
And other nine thou bearest in the outer walls,
Within ther may be lodged kings three.”
From the time of its foundation, Lathom was associated with royal
memories and noble deeds. Among its heroes was Sir Thomas Stanley, Chief
Governor of Ireland, the father of the first Earl of Derby, Sir Edward
Stanley—
“There is Sir Edward Stanley stout,
For martial skill clear without make;
Of Lathom House by line came out,
Whose blood will never turn their back”[6]—
and of Sir William Stanley, the brother of the first Earl. Those days of
endless Yorkist and Lancastrian fighting for the crown, causing such
bitterness and division between father and son, brother and brother,
brought about the death upon the scaffold of Sir William Stanley. He was
executed for his brave adherence to the cause of Perkin Warbeck, whom
he, with so many more, believed to be the Duke of York, said to have
been murdered in the Tower by Richard of Gloucester. Sir William met his
fate February 1495; and in the summer following, King Henry VII. made a
royal progress northward, to spend a few days with his mother, the
Countess of Derby, at Lathom. After showing his house to his royal
guest, the Earl conducted him on to the leads for a prospect of the
country which the roof commanded. The Earl’s fool was among the company
in attendance, and observing the King draw very near the edge, which had
no parapet or defence of any kind, Master Yorick stepped up to the Earl,
and, pointing to the perilous verge, said: “Tom, remember Will.” The
King not only caught the words, but their meaning; “and,” concludes the
chronicler, “made all haste down stairs and out of the house; and the
fool, for long after, seemed mightily concerned that his lord had not
had the courage to take the opportunity of avenging himself for the
death of his brother”[7]: thus exemplifying the vast difference that
exists between a fool and a wise man.
Footnote 6:
Harl. MSS.
Footnote 7:
Burke.
The jester was an important personage at Lathom, as in all great
families of the time. The homes of the nobility were each in themselves
royal courts in miniature, and the quips and cranks of these “strange
caperers” must have been, not merely acceptable and welcome, but in a
manner indispensable to the many—from my lord himself to the kitchen
scullion—when books were rare, even for those who possessed the
accomplishment of reading them. The wise saws and modern instances too
often wrapped up in the quips of a clever fool must have kept awake many
a brave gentleman when he had laid aside baldrick and hunting horn, and
the falcon slept upon his perch. Moreover, as extremes so frequently do
meet, in justice to all concerned the fact should never be lost sight of
that the fool so called was often furnished with a very superior if
fantastic headpiece beneath his cap and bells, and in many instances was
a poet of a high order. To wit, one such a “fool” as Master John
Heywood, King Henry VIII.’s jester, would be nowadays as acceptable as
half a score of savants.
In a catalogue, or, as it is called, a “Checkrowle of my Lord of Darby’s
householde,” drawn up in 1587, “Henry ye ffoole” is enumerated last
indeed, but obviously as a very distinctive member of the establishment.
At this time the steward of Lathom had three servants, the controller
three, and the receiver-general three. Seven gentlemen waiters had each
a servant, and the chaplain, Sir Gilbert Townley, had one. Then came
nineteen yeomen ushers, six grooms of the chamber, two sub-grooms,
thirteen yeomen waiters, two trumpeters, and inferior servants: making
the total number to feed, one hundred and eighteen persons. As will be
seen, a spiritual teacher figures in this list, in the person of Sir
Gilbert Townley; but neither physician nor surgeon, nor, for that
matter, a barber. Possibly, these indispensable members of a large
household are both included in the person of “a conjurer,” kept in his
lordship’s service, “who cast out devils and healed diseases.”
The weekly consumption of food at Lathom in the sixteenth century was an
ox and twenty sheep; and in the way of liquor, fifteen hogsheads of
beer, and a fair round dozen tuns of wine, yearly. In addition to the
above enumerated comestibles were consumed large quantities of deer from
the park, game from the woods, and fish from the ponds. For magnificence
and hospitality, Lathom House in the time of the Stanleys surpassed all
the residences of the north; and its possessors were regarded with such
veneration and esteem, that the harmless inversion, “God save the Earl
of Derby and the King,” was as familiar as household words.
And if in the days of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth this was held no
treason, still less was it so in the days of Charles I. in the time of
the Lord and Lady of Lathom whom peril and death itself could not render
disloyal to their King, or a mockery to their motto, “Sans changer.”
This was the home in which Lady Strange spent the best part of the years
of her married life, happily enough in the domestic relations of wife
and mother, but hampered by the public and political complications in
France, which were for ever hindering the payment of the money supplies
belonging to her by inheritance, and troubled by yearly increasing
anxiety for the disturbed condition of her adopted country.
Charles, from the beginning of his reign, had given great offence to the
nation by the taxations which he strove to impose upon it for the
carrying on of his foreign wars. This discontent was aggravated by the
favour which he showed to the Duke of Buckingham. The Duke had not
merely a voice in every question of State affairs, for which privilege
he did his royal master the doubtful service of defending him against
the Parliamentary attacks which daily gathered in angry strength, but he
crowned all by aspiring to and obtaining the command set on foot for the
assistance of the Huguenots against the forces of Richelieu, which were
beleaguering the city of la Rochelle. Buckingham’s religious convictions
were however considerably less strong than his anger against the
Cardinal, to whom his behaviour had begun to give offence ever since the
day when he first set foot in the French Court and had cast amorous eyes
upon Anne of Austria, the beautiful wife of Louis XIII. Buckingham took
his fleet to Rochelle, having persuaded Charles that the expedition
would be regarded with special favour by the English nation, since it
was to contend for Protestantism and Protestants against the proud
Romanist arch-priest. This might in a measure have proved to be the case
had the undertaking been successful; and, since there is nothing that
succeeds like success, it might have turned the whole course of
subsequent events for Charles. But George Villiers was not of the stuff
to measure arms with Armand de Richelieu, whose axiom was that there was
“no such word as fail”—and the expedition was a total fiasco. Buckingham
returned to England to organise a second attempt; but while waiting at
Portsmouth for this purpose, he died by the hand of the assassin Felton.
Charles was now left to bear alone the bitter complaints of his people,
who had been taxed for the expenses of the fleet, the ill-success of
which had cast ridicule not only on England, but on the Protestant
cause, and simply enhanced the growing triumphs of the Catholics in
France. The King furthermore, was giving great offence to Protestants of
all denominations by the toleration which he granted the papists. From
the Independents, the growing party of the Puritans, and almost without
exception from the Episcopalians, the Roman Catholics of the country met
with no quarter. Many patriotic and loyal English men and women had
remained faithful to the old creed, keeping spiritual and political
conviction absolutely apart; but upon these, baleful reflections were
cast by the foreign Jesuit party, and suspicion fell on the most
unbigoted and inoffensive. Charles’s leniency towards his Roman Catholic
subjects was far less the effect of any sympathy with their doctrines
than that of a mistaken policy. His idea in coming to any sort of
_entente cordiale_ with them was to make terms for dispensations from
the severity of the penal laws existing against them. He wanted the
benevolences of them, and forced loans, for the purpose of carrying on
his war against Spain, since he could not obtain the needful supplies
from Parliament; and the nation objected on the double score of the
illegality of such a measure, and the inadvisability of keeping up
warfare with the Continent at all.
These offences on the King’s part crowned the grievances he had caused
by his levy of tonnage and poundage, and the new Parliament which was
now summoned inaugurated proceedings by an inquiry into the “national
grievances.” In 1628 all this resulted in the bill known as the Petition
of Rights, which, after some demur in the Upper House, was finally
passed by the lords, and received the royal assent. This bill required
the consent of both Houses to the furnishing by anyone of tax, loan, or
benevolences. It claimed for the people exemption from enforced
quartering upon them of soldiers and seamen. Martial law was to be
abolished, and no person to be arbitrarily imprisoned.
Matters might now have improved; but Charles sprang a new mine by the
tenacity with which he clung to the disputed right of tonnage and
poundage. The Commons, unfaithful to their promise to look into the
justice of the claim, arrived at the decision that anyone paying it
should be held a traitor to his country. The offended King, calling the
members of the Commons all “vipers,” once more dissolved Parliament,
made peace with France and Spain, and proceeded to act upon his
declaration that he would govern without the aid of Parliament.
The blame of all these disputes was laid to the Duke of Buckingham. The
sanction given by the King to the Bill of Rights did little to appease
the storm of discontent. Five months after the prorogation of Parliament
(23rd August 1628) Buckingham was assassinated by one of his disbanded
officers.
“I expect,” writes Lady Strange to her sister-in-law a month later,
“that before this reaches you, you will have heard of the death of the
Duke of Buckingham, who was killed by one Felton, the lieutenant of a
company to whom the Duke had refused it after the death of its chaplain.
“He might have been saved, but a wish to die, and a melancholy
disposition contributed to his end.
“His wife,[8] whom he loved greatly, and who is very amiable and modest,
is much to be pitied. The King has shown great displeasure at the deed,
and for a whole day would see no one, nor eat till ten o’clock at night.
He received the news at morning service, at which he remained, and on
the Sunday following was present at the sermon. He has sent word to the
Duchess that he will befriend her to the utmost. You may judge what a
change all this will make at Court. God grant that it may be to His
glory, and for peace.”
Footnote 8:
Lady Catherine Manners, daughter of the Earl of Rutland.
The subsidies voted by Parliament were however levied.
“The greatest people contribute to these subsidies, and each according
to his possessions,” writes Lady Strange to her mother. “My husband’s
great-grandfather was taxed at four thousand francs. He possesses,
however, quite three times as much money as we have, and yet we gave as
much. All this is greatly to the disadvantage of the wealthy; but the
people are satisfied; and since the King has not power to raise these
subsidies but when Parliament permits, it will not happen every year,
but only on special occasions.”
Lady Strange prefaces with these observations a new request for the
payment of her marriage portion.
“If Château-Neuf has the honour of seeing you, he will be able to tell
you Madame, how it injures my repute and that of my family that I have
not yet had this sum of twenty thousand crowns. If my husband were not
as good as he is, he would begin to grow suspicious, which, thank God,
he does not. What most distresses me is that I find myself one of this
household only to increase its debts and expenses; and that also several
of his friends from whom he borrowed money for his journey (to Holland,
on the occasion of his marriage) were pressed to ask him to pay it back,
and that he could not do so is a great trouble to him, as it is to me
also; for there is nothing that he hates more than not keeping his
word.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER V
A CHAPTER OF CORRESPONDENCE
About this time a fresh trouble arose for Lady Strange, and for her
mother and sister-in-law, in the defection of the Duke de la Trémoille
from Protestantism. He went to Rochelle; not, however, to take part in
the defence of the Huguenots against Richelieu’s attacks, but to join
the besiegers. Being received into the Church of Rome by the Cardinal
himself, he was at once nominated to the command of the light cavalry.
“I cannot get over my astonishment at my brother’s change of religion,”
writes Lady Strange to her mother. “There has been a report of it for
this long time past; and even the Queen was told that it was quite
certain; but she, finding that you Madame, were included in the
defection, said she believed nothing at all about it. That led me also
to doubt about my brother; but God has thought fit to send this
affliction upon you Madame, and upon our house. It distresses me
greatly, and even more than I could have believed. The letter from him
which you have been pleased to send me shows his thoughts; but I cannot
believe in what he says, that ‘a worldly mind would have done
differently.’ The Catholics always talk so.”
In writing to her sister-in-law, who had just given birth to a little
girl, she adds:—
“I honour and love you with all my heart; and that makes me
doubly disturbed at the change in your husband. It has
marvellously astonished me; and I can hardly credit it, but I
trust in the goodness of God to change his heart. Certainly,
scarcely anyone will believe that it is out of anything but a
mere human consideration: and truly, when one regards only that,
it does lead one to lose no time in abandoning one’s religious
profession. I pity very much the pain you will suffer in not
following his example; but nevertheless dear heart, I doubt not
that you will resist. God give you strength above your own, and
we shall see you doubly serving the advancement of His glory,
since you have now no help.—I am told that if my brother could,
he would have asked for my fortune: but that the law of the
country did not permit it.—I must confess to you Madame, that
save from respect to you, I do not know what I should be driven
to, by the contempt with which he treats us.”
She concludes by imploring her mother’s forgiveness of her second
brother, the Count de Laval, who had taken refuge in Holland after some
escapades in France.
During the sitting of Parliament, Lord and Lady Strange were in London,
where she gave birth to a daughter, who died very soon after, suffocated
in the nurse’s bed. For a time this accident greatly troubled her; the
child, however, was a very young infant when it happened. The little boy
was well and flourishing, and the mother appears to have found
consolation before very long. Towards the close of the year 1629 she
returned to Lathom, and no further correspondence is to be found of hers
until October 1631. Then she writes in profound grief, for her mother
had died, at Château Nonard, in the preceding August.
“DEAR SISTER,—It would have been a consolation in my extreme
affliction to have been honoured by letters from you, and above
all, to know that I continue to live in your friendship, which
is one of the things I most desire in this world to be honoured
by; and I am sure that you will always keep it for me—not that I
deserve it, but for the sake of the love of her whom we mourn,
since you did not doubt of the affection she bore for me; and as
I have always loved you best after her, at this time, when God
has taken her from us, I put you in her place, to give you all
the respect, duty, and friendship which I entertained for her.
God has taken her for our punishment, and to render her happy. I
never liked this residence of Château Nonard, because it was so
far from all her children; but Heaven decreed that should be so,
in order to detach her from earthly things. As for me, I confess
that I have no longer any pleasure in them. Touching what you
bid me tell you of the feelings of my brother de Laval, I did
not see him until three days after the news arrived, and I saw
him shed a few tears; but soon after, he was as merry as before.
For me, I own that were I in his place, I should never have any
happiness again; but I cannot say whether he conceals grief
beneath. At all events, he shows no sorrow for the past. He only
comes to see me now and again, and displays great impatience in
my company, and a desire to be going again. He is so diversely
spoken of, that I do not know what to believe of it all.”
This letter is dated from Chelsea, where she had been staying for some
time.
At this place she gave birth to a daughter, who was baptized Henrietta
Maria, the Queen probably being its godmother. About the same time, a
second daughter was born to Madame de la Trémoille—Marie Charlotte.
In the month of March 1632, Lady Strange arrived in London, on her way
to the Hague—probably with the object of settling the affairs of
Charlotte of Nassau’s inheritance. Differences were now beginning to
arise between the Duke de la Trémoille and the Count de Laval, which
gave their sister great concern.
“I hope that your husband will acquiesce in the last wish of her who
brought us into the world,” she writes. “For you dear sister, I do not
doubt that your goodness and generosity will override all other
considerations.”
The generosity and indulgence of the Duchess de la Trémoille was to be
put more than once to the test by the Count de Laval.
A certain Englishwoman, Miss Orpe, with whom he had entangled himself,
pretended that she was married to him, and took the name of Countess de
Laval. Lady Strange was greatly disturbed at this; but her chief anxiety
was always the money from France, which either did not come at all, or
arrived much diminished in transit. The rents of Christmas were not paid
by midsummer.
“I beg your forgiveness, dear sister,” she writes on the 2nd October
1638, “if I speak to you so freely, but I know you to be so reasonable
and so just, that you cannot approve of what is not so. I have no doubt
that your son has arrived safely in Holland. He will not have found it
so prosperous there as usual. Pray God that he may have found the Prince
of Orange in good health.”
Here the correspondence ceases for eight years—with the exception of one
letter written in 1640, on the occasion of the death of Mademoiselle de
la Trémoille. Letters in those troublous days frequently got lost upon
the road, and those for a long time preserved in the family archives
finally suffered many rude vicissitudes. These years were the most
momentous ones in the life of Charlotte de la Trémoille. In those
letters she made few allusions to the events which have rendered her
name illustrious. She saw nothing extraordinary in what she did; simply
doing the duty which came next. The duty accomplished, all her thoughts
reverted to the past.
Fortunately, this grand life of a modest, noble-minded woman here takes
its place in history; and the documents of the time enable us to
supplement the silence of Lady Strange, now very soon to be Countess of
Derby.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VI
OTIUM CUM DIGNITATE. THE NEW EARL. A ROYAL WATER JOURNEY TO HAMPTON
COURT. “MERRIE ENGLAND.” CAVALIERS AND ROUNDHEADS. “HOUSEHOLD WORDS.”
THE NEW LETTER-POST. HACKNEY COACHES. LINEN. FAITHFUL FRIENDS. A
LORDLY HOME
A few years before his death, the Earl of Derby retired to a country
house which he had bought, on the banks of the Dee, near Chester. Weary
of the cares of life, and of the ordering of his large estate, he made
all his possessions over to his son, Lord Strange, reserving to himself
a thousand pounds a year for his own maintenance. In 1640 Lord Strange
was appointed to share with his father in the office of Lord Chamberlain
of Chester. Two years later the old Earl died; and his son succeeding
him, “Madame Strange,” as her French and Dutch relatives called her,
became Countess of Derby.
In the course of time, since the murder of the Duke of Buckingham, the
affairs of the country had gone from bad to worse, and year by year the
breach between Royalists and Parliamentarians widened. Outwardly the
kingdom not only seemed to prosper, but was in a manner flourishing. Her
possessions abroad were increased by new colonies, and her harbours were
filled with merchant ships sailing from all parts of the world. Art and
learning prospered exceedingly. In the midst of the turmoil of ribaldry
and fanaticism of the extreme parties, and the smoke and luridness of
battle-fields, learning and civilisation were steadily advancing. Like
Archimedes, men of science, painters and scholars, worked on, some of
them amid the din of battle; and, with a happier fate than his, lived
on, for the most part into calmer days. Others, sheltered in the
retirement of country homes, and recking little of papist or puritan
shibboleths, wrote and thought, and to this day their work remembers
them. Trade flourished, and diversions and junketings were in nowise
neglected. Amid all the royal troubles, courtly state was not only well,
but splendidly maintained.
A refinement and dignity prevailed in Charles’s Court which fascinated
his loyal subjects; and the beauty of the Queen, and the gracious if
always melancholy aspect of the King, won hearts, and intellects to
boot, which had originally inclined to the side of his disaffected
subjects. The French nature of Henrietta Maria delighted in masques and
gaieties and music; and though etiquette and sobriety ruled the King’s
household, dulness found no part there. Often the people had the chance
of looking on their sovereigns as their gilded barge rowed down the
river from London to Hampton Court, to the music of lutes and viols, and
sweet choiring voices mingling with the song of the birds, not yet
driven hence by the smoke and screech of an overcrowded city. From
Westminster Stairs on one side, and Lambeth Palace on the other, the
banks were still open, clothed with grass and foliage, and dotted here
and there with gabled and timbered dwellings, whose gardens glowed with
fragrant flowers and ripening fruit. Tothill Fields were rookeries then,
as now; but the birds were of another feather. Battersea Fields on the
south side still grew simples and herbs for the medicaments of London
apothecaries—the “Physic Garden” of Sir Hans Sloane opposite being but a
concentrated, double-distilled essence of these older sources. Beyond
and behind lay the Five Fields, soon to become notorious for infesting
footpads and highwaymen; for the numbers of the gentlemen of the road
increased with alarming speed, as the means of travelling improved and
increasing opportunities made more and more thieves. Leaving the
immediate environing of London, the village of Chelsea reflected its
stately mansions and terraces in the clear Thames reaches. And so,
onward by the winding stream, till under the shadows of fair Richmond
woods the royal beeches and elms of Hampton Court bent their boughs in
the summer breeze to their majesties and the courtly train in greeting
and in welcome to the palace associated with memories and traditions,
not all of them too fair and consolatory, of “my good Lord Cardinal” and
his tyrannical lord.
In reasonable pastime and amusements the average subject of King
Charles’s day followed the suit of the Court. A sour forbiddance and
abhorrence of amusements had not yet come to be the order of the day.
If fasts were duly kept, festivals were in nowise forgotten. The “all
work and no play making Jack a dull boy” observance was not yet rendered
paramount by the prick-eared, aggressive spirit of Puritanism; for the
master enjoyed a sober junketing and relaxation every whit as much as
the ’prentice loved his turn at the quintain, or a merry round with the
maid of his choice, or a stage play in an inn yard. As to the shameful
“sport” of bear-baiting, to give the Puritan his due, he did excellent
work indeed when he succeeded in stamping it out; though his
consideration for the bear appears to have been somewhat circumscribed,
if, as more than one account tells, generally the first proceeding was
to kill the bear. Anything less than sweeping reform and a _tabula rasa_
savoured ill to Puritan nostrils; and while Praise-God-Barebones took
away the bears, he forgot the abhorrence of nature,—human nature
notably—for a vacuum, and that in a few years the lack of all rational
diversions, the pulling down of maypoles, the silencing of all music but
psalm-singing, would drive man and woman to try and drown care in the
pottle-pot. It was small wonder that the English people so soon came to
regard the Commonwealth as a not utterly unmitigated blessing. The
promised millennium grew to be unsatisfactory to all but the very elect;
and outside that pale, the desire for the King to have his own again was
to spread fast and wide. The intrinsic worth of that King they were less
concerned about; and if, after a few years’ experience of the Merry
Monarch’s rule, they found it full of flaws, they endured as they might:
not perhaps altogether forgetful that if the young Prince had not been
hounded from his country to herd with all sorts and conditions of
swashbucklers and adventurers, finding no rest for the sole of his foot,
no true and sober counsel in the very years that temptations are
strongest upon all men—especially men of his temperament—their restored
King’s virtues might have outshone his shortcomings.
To the moderate-minded the typical Royalist and Puritanic extremes of
the civil war days could only have been vexatious to a degree. It is
curious to observe how many scholars and writers of the middle of the
seventeenth century make no allusion to what was passing around them.
Take only the one instance of Isaac Walton, who at least lived in the
very thick of the fray, in that pargeted and latticed-casemented old
house of his at the corner of Chancery Lane. Truly, in his lives of the
worthies and divines of the time, he alludes frequently to the religious
and political divisions of the country, as indeed his themes entailed;
but in his immortal volume, whose secondary title is the significant one
of “The Contemplative Man’s Recreation,” scarce a shadow of the gloom of
the times darkens its equable, sunshiny humour. Soberly, but with
intense enjoyment, Master Isaac Walton takes his way from Fleet Street,
and, stretching his legs over Tottenham Hill—no short stretch neither—he
falls in with his hunter and falconer, gossips along the road to Ware,
whither he is bound that “fine, fresh May morning”; and so the three
trudge on together in genial discourse to the text that “good company
makes the way to seem shorter.” How thoroughly the wayfarers enjoy the
freshness of the country and the green beauty of the “new livery’d
year”! How they delight in the milkmaid’s song, and luxuriate in the
“honest alehouse with its cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and
twenty ballads stuck about the wall”!
Last, not least, in the general intellectual and mental life of England
in Charles’s reign, comes the band of poets, a goodly train, Cavalier or
Puritan, or not greatly concerned for either, but writing in
“numbers,
Since the numbers came.”
Milton, Cowley, Herrick, Lovelace, Herbert, Wither, Dekker, Webster, and
many more, breathing forth sweet words and quaint aphorisms which mingle
in our every-day talk, and are too familiar for us to pause to think
whence or how they rise to the lips. Those dead poets of Charles’s reign
resting beneath the hoary old stones of Westminster, or the sod of
peaceful village graveyards, or whose dust the venom of bigots and
fanatics has scattered, left their country a heritage which cannot
perish while the English tongue endures.
Only a comparison between the closing years of James I.’s reign, and the
opening ones of Charles II., a period of thirty-five years at the
utmost, can afford a true estimate of the improvements in the public and
social conditions of the country. Among these was the establishment of
regular inland postal communication in 1635. The proclamation “for
settling of the letter-office of England and Scotland” sets forth that
“there hath been no certain or constant intercourse between the kingdoms
of England and Scotland,” and commands “Thomas Witherings, Esq., his
Majesty’s postmaster of England for foreign parts, to settle a
running-post or two to run night and day between England and Scotland
and the city of London, to go thither and come back in six days.”
Ireland was included in these arrangements. The horses for conveyance of
the letters were furnished by the postmasters at the rate of
twopence-halfpenny a mile. In 1649 letters were forwarded once a week to
all parts of the kingdom.
Another public benefit was the setting-up of hackney coaches. These
predecessors of our four-wheelers and hansoms were first started from
Hackney—then a fair-sized village—to London, for those who had business
or pleasure in the metropolis. Very soon the coaches began to ply in
London streets, making their stands at the inns. There were twenty of
them in 1625 under the superintendence of one Captain Bailey, an old
sea-officer.
For its linen industries Ireland owes a deep debt of gratitude to the
memory of the Earl of Strafford. While Governor of Ireland, he observed
that the soil of the Green Isle was suited to the production of flax. He
sent to Holland for the seed, and to France and the Netherlands for
skilful workmen. To promote still further the undertaking, he advanced a
considerable sum from his own private fortune, thus establishing
Ireland’s most important manufacture.
England was later in the field: for linen was not produced in this
country to any degree of perfection until twoscore years later, when the
French Protestant refugees sought shelter here at the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes. Under their skilful instructions, the English
manufacturers wrought immense improvement in the material. It is small
wonder that housewives and betrothed maidens of the olden days set such
store by the contents of their linen-presses and dowry-chests. The Queen
of Henry VI. could boast only two linen shifts. The scarcity of this
commodity when Lady Strange first arrived in England, doubtless accounts
for her writing for so many articles of clothing for her young family to
be sent from France.
From such a quickening of industrial activity through the length and
breadth of the nation, quite independently of the improvements in
printing, or rather of the dissemination of books, in engraving and in
etching, it is obvious that time no longer necessarily hung heavy on the
hands of country gentlemen. The wits of the domestic “ffoole” were no
longer so indispensable now that the lord of the manor had material upon
which to exercise his own. If, _faute de mieux_, he had hitherto
bestowed all his time on his hawk and his hound, the pleasures of the
table, and a vast amount of sleep, he was no longer forced to confine
himself to these pastimes. “To divert at any time a troublesome fancy,”
says worthy Master Fuller, “run to thy books. They presently fix thee to
them, and drive the other out of thy thoughts. They always receive thee
with the same kindness.”
With many other noblemen and gentlemen of that time, the Earl of Derby
fell in with this sound advice. “His life,” says Walpole,[9] “was one of
virtue, accomplishments, and humanity.” Neither firebrand, busybody, nor
time-server—too high of rank to desire to be higher—James, seventh Earl
of Derby, nearing on to middle life at the time of his father’s death,
lived chiefly on his own estates, and these preferably at Lathom House.
He appeared rarely at Court, finding full occupation in the affairs of
his own estate, of which the kingdom of Man formed an important and
seemingly difficult part to manage. “But,” says one of his biographers,
“peaceful years and charitable acts fill few pages in history; and Lord
Derby owes his place there, not to virtues arising from his own choice
and goodwill, but to those which were struck from him by the blows of
fortune, as fire is struck from flint stones.”
Footnote 9:
_Noble Authors._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VII
MANX LAND. THE SON OF LEIR. ST. PATRICK. PREHISTORIC MAN. KING ORRY AND
HIS HIGH-ROAD. THE HOUSE OF KEYS. PUBLIC PENANCE IN MANX LAND. A
FORTUNATE FILE. BREAST LAWS AND DEEMSTERS. THE LITTLE PEOPLE. A
HAUNTED CASTLE. A THOROUGH BAD DOG. CATS’ TAILS. “A SHIP IN HER
RUFF.” A CONTESTED PRIZE. THE THREE LEGS. THE LORD OF MAN
Of the Isle of Man, one chronicler tells us that its early history is
“more than ordinarily obscured in the mists of the past;” another, that
“the Isle of Man is almost the only place where there is any chance of
seeing a fairy;” a third, that “nowhere in the same area are there so
many relics of an unknown past.”
The fact that the island owns no ancient literature, its laws being
unwritten, and that it maintained scarcely any intercourse with other
nations, renders it impossible to disentangle from myth and tradition
any authentic chronicle of the little dominion which at a later period
was to come under the rule of the Stanleys.
To “begin at the beginning” of Manx history, the precise date of the
reign of Mannanen Beg Mac-y-Leir—which, being interpreted, is Little
Mannanen, the son of Leir, and who is the mythic hero of Man—is somewhat
difficult to determine, seeing that he is said to have reigned any time
between thirteen centuries before Christ and four centuries after. As
another name for him was Angus Oge, “The Immortal,” this Mannanen may
have lived to a good old age; but seventeen centuries is a far cry.
His parentage is further variously attributed to Scottish and to Irish
kings; and he was the first law-maker of the island. Also, besides being
a warrior, navigator, and trader, he was a skilful forger of weapons,
and a mighty necromancer and magician, having the power to hide his
dominions in mist at the approach of the enemy.
If Mannanen was killed by St Patrick, and his subjects were driven by
that apostle to the alternative of becoming Christians or of being
exterminated—for, saith the chronicler, “of the seed of the conjurer,
there were none but what the saint destroyed”—the founder of Man
necessarily is a comparatively modern personage of sixth-century days.
Something like an air of reality is spread over this tradition of
Mannanen and St Patrick by the traditions of St Maughold, whose name
appears in the English, Scotch, and Irish calendars, and who gives his
name to the headland near Ramsey. This Maughold or Macguil appears to
have been a wild Irish chieftain who designed to murder St Patrick. The
saint however filled Maughold with awe by exercising a miracle, and
restoring to life one of his band of ruffian followers. This deed, more
marvellous than useful, converted Maughold on the spot to the Christian
faith, and he offered to do any penance St Patrick thought fit to
impose.
The saint having considered awhile, bade the penitent to repair to the
seashore, and there, entering a little coracle, have his hands and feet
bound, and then let himself drift over the trackless waters till they
should bring him to land once more; and so he was brought to the foot of
the rocks eastward of the Isle of Man. Here he was welcomed by the
Christian missionaries whom St Patrick had left in charge of the island;
and after a long life spent in pious prayers and deeds and many
austerities, and, in his turn, miracles, he died, and was buried in the
church which afterwards bore his canonised name and stood in the midst
of the city which he had founded on that rock. After all this, it is
cruel to find that the most laborious and learned seekers into the lives
of the saints and early apostles of Christianity can discover not the
slightest evidence of this visit of St Patrick to the Isle of Man, nor
of any episcopate left there by him. The monkish compilers of the
“Chronicles of Man” give their summing-up of this tradition to the same
effect, in the fourteenth century:—
“Suffice it to say we are entirely ignorant who or what bishops
existed before the time of Goddard Crovan, Captain of William
I., because we have not found it written, nor have we learned it
by certain report of the elders.”
King Arthur is said to have conquered Man, and then, restoring it to its
vanquished possessor, enrolled him among the knights of his Round Table.
From its situation, the island was little likely to be left long in the
undisputed possession of the latest warrior who might have conceived a
desire of annexing it; and it undoubtedly changed hands many times
between the Irish and Scots, not to speak of the Welsh and English.
Finally, in the ninth century, the Scandinavians, who had made their
power felt all over Europe, gained the upper hand in the island, and
made it one of their central strongholds. To balance the discredit
thrown on the early Christian traditions of Man, stands the fact that
monumental vestiges of each race recorded to have inhabited it have been
found in it. Prehistoric remains, kist-vaens, burial-places, earthenware
urns, flint arrow-heads, not unfrequently are dug up; also circular huts
of unhewn stone of the locality. A few Roman relics have been found at
Castletown. Mediæval remains are at Peel, Castletown, and Kirk Maughold,
and many Runic and Scandinavian monuments in various parts. Querns, the
ancient handmills for grinding grain, are found now and again. Such
relics of early times all prove that if originally a desert, the Isle of
Man was peopled at a comparatively early period in the world’s history.
In the sixteenth century came the renowned Manx hero, Orry, from his
Icelandic home. The story tells that he landed on a starlight night, and
when the Manx men asked him whence he came, he pointed to the Milky Way:
and so it is that the people of Man to this day call the Milky Way _Road
Moar Ree Orree_—King Orry’s highroad. To Orry is ascribed the
establishment of a civil government, and its powers and privileges as a
separate though feudatory kingdom. It was long designated “The Kingdom
of Man and the Isles.” Its representative assembly is the oldest in
Europe, coeval with the English Parliament, and is styled the House of
Keys. Its Tynwald Court is held on the 5th of July on the Tynwald Hill,
and is a signing and proclamation of the Acts passed by the Imperial
Government during the preceding year, being proclaimed in English and in
Manx.
In former times this assembling of the legislators was attended by great
pomp and ceremony. The second Earl of Derby relinquished the title of
King of Man, being content with the appellative of Lord of the island;
but Sir John Stanley was bidden as king to meet his officers of state,
deemsters, and barons in his “royal array, as a king ought to do—and
upon the Hill of Tynwald sitt in a chaire covered with a royall cloath
and cushions and his visage unto the east”; and many more injunctions to
the king, and rules for the conduct of the great annual ceremonial,
follow. Since 1765, the Duke of Athoel, the last lord of the island,
transferred his right to the English Crown—notwithstanding, the laws of
Imperial Parliament are not valid in Man unless they are in accordance
with its ancient laws and liberties, and have been duly confirmed by the
Tynwald Court and proclaimed on the Tynwald Hill.
One or two of these laws still differ in detail from those of England. A
debtor for example, if suspected of designing to abscond in order to
defraud his creditors, is open to arrest. Public penance was performed
in Man long after that observance became obsolete in England. This
fortunate isle is not burdened with income-tax, poor-laws, or turn
pikes; neither are stamps required for receipts of property transfers. A
man, for a nominal compensation, may enter on his neighbours lands and
take thence limestone or building stone for his own needs.
The “Breast Laws” are ascribed to King Orry, and were the laws of the
island, unwritten and delivered orally by the leaders of one generation
to the next. Sir John Stanley, in the reign of Henry IV., caused these
to be written. The government of the Tynwald consists, like the English
legislature, of three estates—the Governor (Lord or “King”), Council,
and the House of Commons (House of Keys). In the Council, the two
deemsters occupy an important position. They are the supreme judges,
both for life and property.
The staple food of all ranks in the island was for many centuries its
herrings. The deemster’s oath, on his appointment to office, contains
this clause: “I will execute the laws of this isle justly betwixt our
Sovereign Lord the King, and his subjects within this isle—as
indifferently as the herring backbone doth lie in the midst of the
fish.”
Godred, the son of Orry, founded Castle Rushen, around which so many
traditional and historical associations cling.
Fairies are by no means the only mysterious sort of creatures one may
see in Man; if in the classification the light-toed, little court of
Oberon and Titania alone be included, the very air must be full of
spirits yet, if the mists which so often envelop the island were indeed
and originally the work of Angus Oge, the Immortal. As Manx grandsires
and grandams still tell, those sea-mists rose at his bidding to shroud
his dominions from his enemies when they were seen approaching. Hence
the hero was venerated as demi-god, the Irish Neptune. Under the ground,
tongue of mortal should be guarded when it speaks of the giants and
terrible beings who dwell there. The main road to their abodes lies
through the sealed and gloomy chambers and dungeons of Castle Rushen;
but the boldest spirit must quail at the bare thought of penetrating
those pitch-dark subterranean passages. Often the experience of the one
man who made the attempt is related; and though he did live to tell the
tale, it was only by the skin of his teeth that he escaped, and the
merest intervention of Providence which prompted him “to open one door
instead of another at which had he sought admission, where he would have
seen company enough, but could never have returned.”
Not only about haunted Castle Rushen, with its wishing-stone in the
chapel, but all over the island, traditions abound, and strange beings
wander at will. At Peel Castle, until recently, as soon as candles were
lighted came that gruesome dog, the “Mauthe Dhoo,” as he is called—dog
or devil as he may be; and by way of agreeable contrast, the “harmless
necessary” and exceedingly tangible cat is to be seen by the most
incredulous and unimpressionable of mortals. The creature’s deficiencies
in the matter of tail only bear out the distinctive character marking
all things Manx. Whether in prehistoric times the Mauth Dog in a fit of
canine prejudice, bit it off, or why otherwise the Manx cat boasts
nothing of a tail worth mentioning, does not seem to have been ever
satisfactorily explained. Only the fact—the stump of a tail—remains. In
all other respects the Isle of Man cat can hold its own with other
Grimalkins of the domestic feline tribe, and indeed its fur is somewhat
exceptionally fine and thick.
The old heraldic Arms of Man were a “ship in her ruff”—a ship with
furled sails—and were adopted by Hacon, King of Man, in the tenth
century. With Goddard Crovan, son of the Icelandic Harold the Black, a
new dynasty began. He slew Fingal, and allied himself with William the
Conqueror. From this time the Irish, Manx and English royal families
intermarried. The King of Man, in the reign of King John, paid the Pope
of Rome homage for his crown. Soon after, Man fell into possession of
the Kings of Scotland, but their oppressive rule drove the Manxmen to
seek the protection of Edward I., who granted the little kingdom to
Walter de Huntercomb. This knight presented it once again to John
Baliol, King of Scotland and Edward’s vassal.
The strange device of the “Three Legs” was then substituted for the old
ship in her ruff as the armorial bearings of the kingdom. The most
probable explanation of the device seems to be that the Three Legs
represent the three kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Scotland, to which
countries severally the island has in times past belonged, as now
collectively it still appertains.
Piers Gaveston, the minion favourite of Edward II., was King of Man in
his flourishing days. Later, for about fifty years, the Montacutes,
Earls of Salisbury, ruled it.
In 1393, Sir William Scroop, who was afterwards beheaded, bought it of
the Earl of Salisbury. Henry IV. gave it to Percy, Earl of
Northumberland. On his forfeiture of it in 1405, it was given to Sir
John Stanley, treasurer of the household of Henry IV.; and for three
centuries the Isle of Man has remained under the Stanleys’ rule. The
feudal service required of them for its tenure was the presentation of
two falcons at the king’s coronation. Sir John Stanley transferred a
great deal of ecclesiastical power into the hands of the deemsters, and
established other wise regulations.
Thus the Isle of Man became the brightest jewel in the possessions of
the Earls of Derby; and now, in the opening year of the English
Revolution, James, the seventh Earl, became Lord of Man. Of all that
befell there under his not altogether wise, if always well intentioned
and beneficent rule, will be seen later.
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CHAPTER VIII
A FATAL CHOICE. STRAFFORD AND LAUD. HUGUENOTS AND ANGLICANS. ROYAL
PRODIGALITY. PLEASANT HOURS IN THE PILLORY. SHIP-MONEY. A PATRIOT.
MODERATE MEN. NO MORE PEACEFUL DAYS AT LATHOM. “THE RED HORSE OF THE
LORD.” VIRGIL UNDER DIFFICULTIES. EDGEHILL. “COME LIKE SHADOWS, SO
DEPART”
Charles was invariably unfortunate in his selection of advisers. When he
lost Buckingham, he took into his place Sir Thomas Wentworth. This
choice, on the face of it, would have appeared eminently wise, since at
the beginning of his public career Wentworth was a favourite with the
people and the Commons, chiefly on account of the Petition of Rights
being practically his work. His temperament however, was not made for
liberal partisanship. He was scholarly by rearing, proud, energetic,
full of ambition, and, once on the side of the Crown, he made his power
felt. In general demeanour he was a striking contrast to the amiable,
courtly Buckingham, doing his work skilfully, with a grave ceremony.
Unlike Buckingham too, who was before all things a royal favourite,
Wentworth was first a statesman; and while standing high indeed in the
King’s esteem, his usefulness was the quality which Charles more
appreciated. Desirous of employing his powerful abilities to the
greatest advantage, Charles rapidly advanced him in titles and
dignities, until in 1631 Thomas, now Viscount Wentworth, was appointed
Lord-Deputy of Ireland.
The deep-rooted attachment of Charles for the Anglican Church drew him
into bonds of close sympathy with Wentworth’s friend, Laud, who about
the same time, was raised to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. Laud was a
man honest of conviction, pure in intention, but unconciliatory of
speech, and narrow in his theological views. His intolerance of dissent
from the Church of England was rigid, whether in the direction of
Puritanism or of Romanism. This fixity of purpose was little understood
in his own day, either by Papist or by Puritan, and perhaps not even by
his greatest admirers; so little comprehended by the Romanists, that the
Pope was deluded into offering him a cardinal’s hat. Laud established
his theory of canonical guidance and of church rule solely upon the
Prayer Book, carrying out its directions in the spirit and the rubric,
and finding in these neither ambiguity nor elasticity; and he imposed
upon all his clergy a rigorous adherence to the ritual and ceremonial of
the Anglican Church, as he understood it. Many refused this, and were
punished as contumacious, being deprived of their cures; and when the
people crowded to hear the preaching of these “confessors”—for as such
they were regarded—to Gospel truth in its purity, all expounding or
preaching was forbidden them. While Laud denounced the excess, as he
regarded it, of ecclesiastical ceremony conducted in the private chapel
of the Queen, he offended the greater part of his own flock, clergy and
lay alike, by the pomp and ceremonial which he introduced into the
public services of the Church of England. Possibly no servant of the
Anglican Church ever grasped more entirely than Laud the real spirit and
tendency of Anglican doctrine; and, had he lived in a later time, his
sphere and mission would have been widely acknowledged. As it was,
though the few regarded his death as a martyrdom, the multitude rejoiced
at the removal of such a stumbling-block in the path of the true
spiritual seeker. Music and vesture and change of posture in the Lord’s
house were choking husks, to be cast into the fire, and the advocates of
these “mummeries” to be as summarily disposed of as might be. The
mistake of Laud was in imposing outward observations of religion upon
persons who had long discarded the self-denials and practices of the
early Christians. Laud might and did closely abide by such rules
himself, but they were less easily accepted by the general herd of
professing churchmen, who had no mind for too much self-discipline: and
hence the charge of pharisaism and needless austerities against the
ritualist Laud and his disciples. The accusation of his papistical
leanings holds good no further than that Laud, in common with many
upright and charitably thinking Christians of all sects and nations,
regretted the divisions among the followers of Christ, and strove to
mould his teaching by a spirit which might one day develop a stronger
desire for the unity of Christendom. Laud’s nature had in it, however,
no temporising spark; and, though taxed with Jesuitry, he, at all
events, did not understand that primary motive power of the Jesuits—of
being all things to all men, or of gradual achievement. Charles,
profoundly influenced by Laud, acted upon his counsel, and turned a cold
eye upon the Protestants of the Continent, going the length of
forbidding his ambassador in Paris to attend divine service in the
Protestant chapel there; and, truly, the religious reform of France and
Geneva wore a widely different aspect from that of England. No _via
media_ was offered by Huguenot and Calvinist. All was rigidly simple and
austere in their public worship. The Psalms, sermons, and long prayers
composing it were read, or, at the best, given forth in nasal sing-song,
which allowed no exercise to the senses or to the intellect of the
congregation. All was, or was intended to be, exclusively spiritual. And
to men and women of education and of intellect such limitations were
irksome and unedifying. Hence, when the Reformed members of the upper
classes came to pitch their tents in England, many of them quickly
conceived a liking for the Church of England, and, as in the case of the
Huguenot Charlotte de la Trémoille, fell naturally in with its teaching
and ritual, and so, as by second nature, mostly became ardent Royalists.
In order to retain foreign sympathy and support, Charles was often
prodigal in his gifts to and recognitions of his Continental friends.
This, considering the poverty of his exchequer and the needs of the
country, was reprehensible to a degree. Abuses increased. Taxation
became unendurable, and the people resisted, their remonstrances often
being couched in terms of respect and of loyal feeling which are
singularly pathetic. Every day the agitation and discontent increased;
until at last, the King, fearful of the spread of its contagion in the
country, issued commands that all country gentlemen should remain upon
their own estates.
Force had now to be employed to repress the popular discontent. Four of
the champions of the people were whipped, mutilated, and put in the
pillory; but instead of the portion of stones, filth, and rotten eggs,
ordinarily allotted to the occupiers of that unenviable eminence, they
received an ovation of sympathy and applause for their endurance and
patriotic courage.
The time had now arrived however, when the popular cause was to be taken
up by the wealthy and powerful. John Hampden, a Buckinghamshire
gentleman, refused to pay the tax of ship-money. He was not the first by
many who had murmured against its levying, as an illegal act, because
unsanctioned by Parliament; but he was the first to contest the question
in open court. The Crown lawyers, on the other side, proved that the
impost was of ancient origin, reaching as far back as the days when the
Danes ravaged the English coasts in their dragon-prowed warships, and
the people had contributed to the fitting-up and manning of vessels to
keep them at bay. From time to time, as occasion had demanded in the
interval of centuries, the tax had been revived, and dropped again when
the requirement no longer existed. That this did now actively exist, the
King’s party maintained; since the navy in James’s time had been
criminally neglected, and the protection against foreign invasion was
inadequate. The victory was to the King. Hampden was condemned, and
suffered. But the victory was a losing one. Hampden was hailed as the
champion of the people, and the greatest patriot of the time. Henceforth
all was contention between the royal party and the popular party. No
action on the part of Charles and his advisers went uncanvassed and
uncontested. The spirit of religious and political freedom waxed fierce;
Laud’s high churchmanship in England, Strafford’s high-handed government
in Ireland, the King’s endeavour to propagate Protestantism in Ireland,
and his attempt to force Episcopacy on Scotland, heaped fuel on fuel.
The King’s accusation of high treason against the five members, with his
command for their arrest, kindled the blaze of war. Mutual open defiance
between the King and his subjects first reared its ugly head at
Nottingham. Royalist and Roundhead fought a drawn battle at Edgehill,
and henceforth bloodshed and strife ruled the country. Many
moderate-minded men, before events reached this point, had withdrawn
from the Parliamentary party. They foresaw with apprehension the lengths
to which the “Reformers” were rushing; and, as it were, pausing to
consider, remained to rally round the King, his truest, ablest advisers.
Among these were Hyde, Lord Clarendon, who became Chancellor of the
Exchequer; and Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland, the hero, as he has been
called, of the great Chancellor’s epic.[10] And it is at this crisis
that Lord Strange, not as yet Earl of Derby, first steps into prominence
in the tragic scenes enacting in the drama, which only finds its
parallel in the chronicles of modern times, in France, nearly a century
and a half later.
Footnote 10:
Walpole.
Hitherto, since his marriage, Lord Strange had spent his time almost
entirely upon his estates, devoting himself to the welfare of his own
people and tenantry, and enjoying the pleasures of a country life and
the interchange of stately though simple hospitalities. Of Lady Strange,
little is recorded during these years. “Happy,” says the old axiom, “are
the people who have no history.” The daily events in the life of this
great lady, in whom discreetness and simplicity are such leading
characteristics, were as the ripples upon a calm ocean, upon whose
horizon for a long time little clouds scarce bigger than a man’s hand
threatened. Suddenly, after fifteen years of this comparative peace and
tranquillity, the clouds gathered thick, lowering till the storm broke
upon the Buckinghamshire plains.
The Parliamentarians were commanded by Lord Essex. Southwards lay the
vale of the Red Horse, the famous charger cut into the red rock in
memory of that ancestral kinsman of Lord Strange, who killed his horse,
vowing to share the perils of the meanest of his soldiers. The Puritans
called this figure “the Red Horse of the Lord, which He caused to ride
about furiously to the ruin of the enemy.”
Above the village of Radway, the King’s tent was pitched in the midst of
his redcoats. The royal standard, borne by Sir Edmund Verney, floated in
the morning breeze. The position of the Royal army was very strong, and,
had it remained to await the attack of the enemy, complete victory for
the King could hardly have been doubtful; but in spite of brave old Lord
Lindsay’s counsel, the King consented to the pushing forward of his
impatient soldiers, and met the attack half way.
The King rode along in front of his troops, clad as Vandyck has
presented him, a stately figure in full armour, with the ribbon of the
Garter across his breastplate, and its star on his mantle of black
velvet. In his tent he addressed his principal officers: “If this day
shine prosperous for us, we shall all be happy in a glorious victory.
Your King is both your cause, your quarrel, and your captain. The foe is
in sight. The best encouragement I can give you is this: that come life
or death, your King will bear you company, and ever keep this field,
this place, and this day’s service in his grateful remembrance.”
Major-General Sir Jacob Astley’s prayer is as memorable: “O Lord, Thou
knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not Thou
forget me.... March on, boys.”
That some spirits no stress of circumstances can attune to war, the case
of William Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, will
attest. Sir Edward Hyde and Harvey had charge of the two young princes,
Charles and James, during the battle. In the heat of the thunder of
cannon, and the rain of shot, Harvey was found seated comfortably under
a hedge, reading Virgil; though he consented, when urged, to retire into
a place of greater safety. The result of that day is well known. Both
sides claimed the victory; but the advantage, in absolute fact, was to
the Royalists.
The ghosts of the slain in that day’s fight are still said to haunt the
old scene of battle; and some three months after the event, “apparitions
and sundry noyses of war and battels” are recorded to have been seen and
heard on Edgehill. The faces of Sir Edmund Verney, the King’s
standard-bearer, and of many of the other “incorporeal substances,”
destroyed in the flesh, were recognised.
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CHAPTER IX
THE FATE OF KINGS. ONLY ONCE AGAIN. THE CROWN JEWELS. A LOYAL VASSAL.
“THE VAIN SHADOW OF A KING.” SLANDER. TEMPTATION SCORNED. MORE ARDOUR
THAN DISCRETION
Charles, from the first day of his reign, had never known real peace of
mind or enjoyed a sense of security. The words put into the mouth of his
predecessor by Shakespeare,
“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,”
were ever, from first to last, realised by him to the full. Till that
head lay severed from his body in its coffin at Whitehall, it found no
rest. One by one he lost, by circumstances—generally the circumstance of
violent death—the friendship and counsel of those dearest to him.
Strafford and Laud had perished on the scaffold, and now he was called
upon to part with the Queen. In 1642, on the 10th of January, he left
his palace of Whitehall, whose doors he never again entered but to step
upon the scaffold. A little later he was at Windsor, and from thence it
was arranged her Majesty should repair to Holland, ostensibly for the
purpose of taking over her daughter, Henrietta Maria—still but a
child—to the Prince of Orange, who had married her six months
previously. The real object of the journey was however, to purchase arms
and ammunition, and to seek the aid and support of the Continental
Powers. The Queen took with her the Crown jewels to pawn or to sell, in
order to raise money for the purchase of war supplies. After
accompanying her to Dover, where she embarked for the Continent, Charles
had gone northwards, and established himself at York, there to wait the
issue of negotiations. That the issue of these could be doubtful, the
most earnest desirers of peace could hardly hope. The breach, daily
widening for so long, left no choice but to declare civil war; but both
parties shrank from the blame of throwing down the gauntlet. Finally, it
was done by the Parliamentarians, in the person of Sir John Hotham, who
refused, as “governor to the Parliament,” to open the gates of Hull. It
is at this juncture that the Earl of Derby, in absolute fact still only
Lord Strange, first came forth from his retirement to bear his loyal,
unswerving part on the King’s side of the contention. He was one of the
first to present himself at the Court at York, prepared in deed as by
word to give his life’s blood and the last penny in his purse for his
royal master and the legitimate cause.
It was now proposed to form a royal guard at York from among the
nobility of the neighbourhood. Fifty gentlemen refused to join his
company, and at their head was Sir Thomas Fairfax, who further
contrived, at great risk of being crushed by the feet of the King’s
horse, to fasten upon the pommel of Charles’ saddle a widely-signed
petition against war, and an entreaty that his Majesty would live in
peace with his Parliament. On the 1st June the propositions for
accommodation arrived at York from Westminster. They embodied demands
for the complete abolition of royal prerogative, and exercise of supreme
power for the Parliament. “If I granted your demands,” cried the King,
in a burst of indignation, “I should be nothing but an image—the vain
shadow of a king;” and he refused to listen further. The very terms
rendered it obvious that the Parliamentarians expected no other
response, any more than they desired it. Forty members only of the Lower
House voted against war, and one member, the Earl of Portland, in the
Lords. An army of the Parliamentarian party was at once organised, over
which Lord Essex was nominated commander-in-chief.
On the King’s side, his faithful subjects rallied quickly round him; and
Lord Strange appears in their foremost ranks with a contingent of three
thousand well-accoutred and well-provisioned men, raised from among his
own people. On finding however, that the King, isolated as it were at
York, was destitute of all assistance, and knew not where to obtain
weapons, Lord Strange placed at his disposal everything the arsenals of
his mansions contained.
Such generosity and self-devotion on the part of so powerful a nobleman
was hardly likely to go uncontested by the sycophants and time-servers
who swarm in royal courts. The Earl himself speaks of “the envy and
malice against which he had to defend his honour.” This jealousy found
its opportunity when, the hasty preparations made, the question became
in what county of the north the royal standard should be raised. After
listening “with a grave and serene dignity,” relates his biographer, “to
the several suggestions and reasons for the uplifting of the standard in
five or six of the more northern counties, Lord Strange begged the King
to turn his considerations upon Lancashire. Its neighbouring counties
were equally favourably disposed towards the royal cause. The people
were robust, and well fitted for good soldiers. For himself, Lord
Strange added, he was but an unworthy lieutenant of his Majesty; but he
would undertake to find, at his own expense, three thousand foot
soldiers and five hundred horse. Further, he would use his best
endeavour to enlist and enroll seven thousand men of the county, thus
furnishing his Majesty out of Lancashire alone a force of ten thousand
men. From thence, access was easy to the neighbouring counties. His
Majesty would find himself at the head of a powerful army, and be able
to march upon London before the rebels had had time for raising troops
to resist.”
The King determined to abide by this counsel. The standard was to be
unfurled at Warrington in Lancashire; and Lord Strange was commissioned
to levy forces and supplies, and to stir the population to the contest.
He rallied the Royalists at three points—at Preston, Ormskirk, and Bury.
That done, he prepared to go southward with the same object, first to
Cheshire, and then into North Wales, of which he was lieutenant. At this
point, the malignant spirit of the so-called Court party interfered; in
every probability to their own downfall, as to the ruin of the Royal
cause. Had the vacillating King remained true to himself and to this
powerful supporter at the difficult crisis, the whole tide of affairs
might have turned in the royal favour. Time, at least, would have been
obtained, and the disaffected party would have been forced to reconsider
its demands; but this was not to be. Hardly was Lord Strange gone on his
arduous mission than the slanderers set to work to prejudice Charles
against him. The old Earl, said they, was dying; Lord Strange was
ambitious, little favourable to the Court or conforming to its views.
What if all this levying of troops should be a cover for mischievous
designs? Was not Lord Strange allied to the blood-royal? The Stanleys
had not been always faithful to the party they seemed to favour—to wit,
that Stanley, his ancestor, who marched at Richard’s side to Bosworth
field, and remained to crown Henry of Richmond, his stepson, king. Had
not Earl Ferdinand, this Lord Strange’s uncle, openly declared his
claims upon the throne? This man—this James Stanley—had married a
Frenchwoman, a Huguenot, reared in the pernicious doctrines of the Low
Countries, one of the house of Nassau, which had stirred the United
Provinces to revolt. In such hands his Majesty could not be safe.
These arguments touched the characteristic weakness of Charles’s nature.
Prone to look upon the less hopeful and more shadowy side of a question,
he lent an ear to these representations of a jealous faction, and gave
orders for the raising of the standard at Nottingham. Lord Strange was
suddenly and unceremoniously deprived of his lieutenancy of Cheshire and
of Wales.
When he heard of these decisions of the King, he was greatly disturbed
for the moment. Then, “recovering himself with that greatness of soul
which belonged to his fine character,” he replied to the messenger of
the news: “May my master prosper—my poor self is of no consequence. If
this counsel be good for him, I shall not trouble myself more for what
happens to me. My wife, my children, and my country are very dear to me;
but if my prince and my religion are safe, I shall bless the enemies who
work their good, though it be at the price of my ruin.”
By the advice of the friends whom he was accustomed to consult in cases
of perplexity, he despatched a messenger to the King with assurances of
his fidelity, declaring that it was in vain that his enemies strove to
hinder him in serving him to the best of his power; that he would never
draw the sword against him; that he placed his lieutenancies of Cheshire
and of Wales at his Majesty’s disposal; and that he begged him also to
take back that of the county of Lancashire, so that no one could accuse
him more of pretentions against the King.
These frank assurances exercised their due effect upon Charles, who now
recognised the true value of so loyal and powerful a servant; but the
doubts thus cast upon Lord Strange had given great offence to his
friends and adherents, and materially injured the Royal cause in
Cheshire and Lancashire. Many of the country gentlemen, who had been
ready to risk life and money for their King, retired to their estates
once more; others went over in large numbers to the Parliamentarian
side. This exodus was such a large and important one, that its leaders
offered Lord Strange the command of their forces, or whatever other
position he might prefer. The offer was indignantly refused, and Lord
Strange prepared to join the King, who had now written him a letter with
his own hand, calling him to join; and the Royal standard was raised at
Nottingham on the 28th August 1642. Though things were no longer as they
were, the ardour for the King having cooled on account of his suspicious
treatment of the Earl—for such he now was, his father having just
died—Lord Derby did his utmost, and rallied around him from among his
own tenantry and friends a goodly force of three regiments of infantry
and three squadrons of horse. With these he was ordered to make an
attack on Manchester, which was now in the hands of the rebels. Scarcely
had he arrived with his soldiers before the place over which he
anticipated an easy victory, than the King summoned him to join his army
at Shrewsbury, since the Parliamentarians were marching upon them under
Lord Essex. Full of regret at being called off, Lord Derby obeyed this
mandate, to find himself once more the object of mistrust and of
jealousy. Directly he arrived his command was taken from him, the King
telling him that he was now wanted in Lancashire to keep watch there
upon the rebels.
“Worms will turn.” The Earl was a man, though one of very equable
temperament; but he was proud. For a moment he remained silent, in an
effort to restrain his indignation. Then he said to the King: “Sire, had
I merited this indignity, I should have also justly deserved hanging;
but my honour and my rank bid me claim your justice against those who
are thus insolent to your Majesty, as they are to me. And if there be a
man living (your Majesty excepted) who dares accuse me of the least
action to your disadvantage, I desire your permission to go and seek
this calumny upon his lips, at my sword’s point.”
The King was troubled. He sought to calm the Earl. “My affairs are in
such a bad state, my lord,” he said; “the rebels are marching against
me; and this is not the moment for us to quarrel among ourselves. Have a
little patience, and I will show you justice.”
The Earl was silent, swallowing his anger; but once more his soldiers
and friends, getting wind of the treatment to which he had been
subjected, waxed indignant, and refused their service. The Earl however,
succeeded in allaying their discontent; and on quitting Shrewsbury to
return to Lathom House, he left his troops loyal and determined as
himself in the King’s service.
The Parliamentarians of Lancashire soon learned of the Earl’s treatment
by the Royalists, and once more took advantage of it to try and tempt
him over to their side. “The Earl of Derby ought,” said they, “to resent
the outrages which he had suffered at Court from the King’s bad
advisers. His enemies were the enemies also of the nation. They attacked
the religion of all decent people; leaving his Majesty none but papists,
or those inclined to popery.” “The intention of Parliament,” went on the
message which Lord Derby received, “was to remove from about the royal
person such dark and dangerous designers, in order to ensure the true
Protestant religion. His lordship should receive a command worthy of his
greatness, and of that of his ancestors, if he would engage in the good
cause.”
Lord Derby did not even give himself the trouble to pen a reply to this
message.
“Say, I beg you,” he said to the Colonel charged with its
bringing, “to these Manchester gentlemen, and let them acquaint
those in London, that when they have heard I have turned traitor
I will listen to their proposals; but until then, if I receive
any more papers of this kind, it will be at the peril of him who
brings them.”
Prince Rupert, the King’s nephew, who arrived at this time to assist the
Royalists, and was placed by his Uncle at the head of the cavalry, was
one of the hot-headed, ardent folk, who are apt to encumber with their
assistance. Brave, and audacious to a degree, accustomed to rough German
warfare, he did much damage to the Royal cause by his wild raids over
the country, pillaging and ravaging wherever he went, but was of not
overmuch service in the day of battle. This was the state of things
between the Royalists and “the Rebels” when the two opposing armies met,
and fought out, on 23rd October 1642, that drawn battle of Edgehill.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER X
NO REST. THE QUEEN’S JOURNEY TO HOLLAND. A FRIEND IN NEED. “MASTER, GO
ON, AND I WILL FOLLOW THEE.” THE GREEN-EYED MONSTER ASTIR. THROUGH
GOOD REPORT AND ILL. AN INDIGNANT REFUSAL. BACK AT LATHOM. A
BOISTEROUS FRIEND
More than once in the early days of the civil war which had now fairly
broken out in the country, the King seemed to miss that tide in his
affairs which, if taken at the flood, promised to lead on to an issue
very different from that one which he did ultimately reach. After the
battle of Edgehill, though the Royalists suffered many reverses, their
star was undoubtedly in the ascendant. There were several reasons for
this, chief among them possibly, that the country at heart had not the
desire to fight, father against son, brother against brother.
Differences of political and religious creed might be sharply defined,
but for such trials by ordeal of bloodshed a large majority of men on
either side was not willing. General sympathy consequently belonged to
the Royalists, who were regarded as on the defensive. In a sense the
Royalists were the popular party. They had rallied round their King in
his hour of need, and sentiment was with them, as it is still, and as it
is likely to remain till the end of time—or at least until that day when
the name of king is wiped out from speech. Reason and prudence and much
more that is desirable might weigh heavily in the Parliamentary balance,
but chivalry and brightness of spirit and loyal daring had their
fascinations. The sombre Puritan belief was setting in more and more
darkly over the land, and the youthful English nobility and yeomanry had
no mind for it. By education and rearing, they revolted against its
limitations. They were not, on this account, all such reckless,
daredevil, licentious fighters, any more than the men of the opposite
party were all prick-eared, pragmatical pretenders to holiness; but that
the strength of the Royalists lay in an element which the
Parliamentarians did not possess, Cromwell, now rapidly coming to the
front, was not slow to recognise. Discussing this question one day with
Hampden, the astute lieutenant who was to eclipse the lustre of all the
members of his party, replied to Hampden’s speculative remarks upon the
weakness of their own cavalry men, and the strength of the King’s—“What
can your expect? Our cavaliers are old menials or pot-house lads; theirs
are sons of gentlemen, younger members of families of high rank. We
ought to have men animated by a spirit which is able to make them go as
far as gentlemen may go; otherwise I am certain that you will always be
beaten.”
“That is true,” said Hampden. “But what can be done?”
“I can do something,” replied Cromwell. “I will bring up men who have
the fear of God before their eyes, and who will put some conscience into
what they do. I will answer for it that they will not be beaten.” Then
he went to work and beat up recruits from among the tenantry of the
Eastern counties—men who engaged in the contest for conscience sake,
fiery fanatics, who spent in prayer the time they did not give to
fighting. Thus came into the world Cromwell’s Ironsides.
Another very material encouragement was experienced by the Royalists in
the return of the Queen with a convoy of troops and ammunition.
Burlington, where she landed, was bombarded, and the bullets fell into
the room she occupied. She was forced to take flight into the open
country, where she remained hidden under a bank. Lord Newcastle came to
her rescue, and conducted her to York, where the Roman Catholics of the
North rallied in great strength about her. She now sought to negotiate
terms with several of the Parliamentarian leaders, who were already
tiring of their cause; but the King’s final conditions, upon which he
consented to an arrangement, gave such offence to Parliament, that the
deputies were recalled by a message so peremptory that they had not time
to wait for their coaches, and started back to London on horseback. In
the meantime, the Earl of Derby had been successfully fighting for the
Royal cause in the North. He took Lancaster and Preston from the
Parliamentarians. There is little doubt that he would have followed up
these triumphs by the subjection of Manchester, though it held out with
great determination; but again he was thwarted by demands for his men to
be drafted elsewhere.
Despite the rudeness and insults of this course, the Earl strove to
endure them in an unmurmuring spirit. He was forced to see, without
contesting, an attack on the little town of Wigan, which he had
garrisoned under the Scotch General Blair. The town was taken and
pillaged. The sacramental vessels were even stolen from the church, and,
in accordance with the fanatical spirit of the time, which was beginning
to know no bounds, one of the Puritan bigots hung them round his neck as
idolatrous trophies. When his people and soldiers vented their
indignation at the treatment to which their beloved and honoured chief
was subjected by the Court, and at the hands of the master whom he was
striving with all his might, and at such sacrifices, to serve, he quoted
the noble passage from Tacitus: “_Pravis dictio factisque ex posteritate
et fama metus._”[11]
Footnote 11:
“It belongs to fame and posterity to strike bad actions and bad words
with fear.”
Nothing now remained for the Earl to do under such an enforced
inactivity but to return to Lathom House, in order to superintend the
work begun there of fortifying and victualling it, to ensure the safety
of his wife and children, who resided in it during his long absences.
The loyal, single-minded Earl was not likely to be a favourite with the
ruck of the Court party. For the butterfly courtiers he was too austere,
and for the place-seekers too honest, for them to be desirous of his
presence near the King, who was at Oxford, or the Queen, who was at
York. The uttermost confines of the kingdom were not too far to banish
him, in the opinion of many; and accordingly, under sufficiently
specious pretexts, thither he was sent, although the Parliamentarians
were rapidly gaining ground in the North; but, as the Earl writes in his
memoirs—“The old saying is verified, ‘Misfortunes never come
single-handed.’”
“I received,” he goes on to say, writing to his son, Lord Strange,
“letters from the Isle of Man, indicating threatenings of a great
revolt.” Many there, following the example of England, began to murmur
against the Government—thanks to a few malicious and seditious spirits.
They had learned the same lesson as the Londoners, coming tumultuously
to Court to demand new laws, and modification of old ones; saying that
they would have no bishops, and would not pay tithes to the clergy. They
despised authority, and set free several persons whom the Government had
arrested for their insolence. “I had also learned,” he continues, “that
an armed ship which I kept there for the defence of the island had been
seized by the Parliament ships—which turned out to be true. His Majesty,
therefore, had those about him, such as Lord Goring, Lord Digby, Lord
Jermyn, Sir Edward Dering and several others, who advised me to repair
immediately to the island, in order to prevent mischief in time to be of
service to his Majesty, and for the preservation of my heritage.”
But in this again the Earl might have coupled with his quoted axiom of
the arrival of evils in battalions, the fable of the old man and the
ass; for while he pleased the King and his lords, his enemies set his
departure to the Isle of Man to a desire to be out of the general
struggle. The Earl treats these calumnies with the contempt they
merited. It suffices that his son knows and understands him. “As to the
others,” he writes, “it matters little to me whether they understand or
not.”
Lord Derby delayed only long enough to return to Lathom, where he
mustered all the men, and got together all the money and ammunition
possible “to defend and protect my wife and children against the
insolence of the enemy.” Then he embarked for the Isle of Man.
“I left my house and my children,” the Earl concluded, “and all my
affairs in England in charge of my wife, a person of virtue and of
honour, worthy of her high birth and rank, who thus found herself alone,
a stranger in the land, and (so it was thought) destitute of friends,
provisions, or arms for defence. It was imagined that Lathom House would
be an easy conquest, and a commission from Parliament was procured to
subdue it by treaty or by force.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XI
CHARLOTTE OF DERBY. A JOURNEY TO LONDON IN OLDEN DAYS. QUEEN OF HER
HOME. LEARNED LADIES. “HIS REVERENCE.” LADY DERBY SPELLS LANCASHIRE.
A DEMAND, AND A REFUSAL. DEFENCE, NOT DEFIANCE. “A NEST OF
DELINQUENTS.” THE SERMON TEXT. ORDERS TO MARCH. DEMANDS AND TERMS.
SURPRISES. WORTHY OF A PAINTER’S BRUSH. THE ASTUTE ECCLESIASTIC AND
ROUNDHEAD FRIEND. MORE CONDITIONS. “LOOK TO YOUR OWN WAYS.” A DAY OF
REST. NO SURRENDER
For more than half a score of years following the earliest years of
her married life, records concerning Lady Strange are scanty. It is
only a short time before she becomes Countess of Derby that she begins
to live in history. Till then, she passed the ordinary existence of a
highborn lady of her time—those ladies notably who affected home life
more than Court life. Her provincial rearing at Thonars, coupled with
her simple Huguenot education, no doubt conduced to this preference.
Another reason which made a country lady of Charlotte de la Trémoille
was probably the remoteness of Lathom from the capital. No doubt she
occasionally appeared at Court; but a journey then from the North to
London, for women at all events, called for serious consideration
before its undertaking. The choice of locomotion lay between a
pillion-ride on horseback, in fair weather or foul, as it might be,
and a clumsy springless wooden coach occupying a good week upon the
road, provided all went well, and that the huge wheels did not wedge
themselves into the ruts or the mire of the King’s highway, or the
Flanders mares did not stumble or cast a shoe five miles from a
smithy. For such were some of the mishaps which befell travellers in
the good old times, not to speak of the attacks of highwaymen. Just
however, as the blessings of penny post have their shadows, conversely
the lack of facilities for travelling had its brighter side.
Gentlefolks were apt to be more quiet-minded in those days. The
imperative necessity for constant “change” had not come to be
recognised. If ladies were troubled with the migraine or the spleen,
or ailments of the sort, they had to seek their remedies from the
local apothecary, supposing he lived anywhere within hail; or, better,
select some mint tea or tansy drink or other herbal concoction out of
their own stillrooms; or, better than all, shake off the distemper in
a goodly game of “Hoodman Blind,” or “Hunt-the-slipper.” The home of
the good wife in any rank was her kingdom, and her daughters were
reared in her own creed of domesticity, although it is a heresy to
imagine that the women of those times were mere household drudges.
Allowing for the scarcity of books, the average of educated matrons
and maids stood high. A knowledge of the classics and of the dead
languages can be by no means claimed as a monopoly by Girton and
Newnham and kindred modern shrines of female erudition. Again and
again in the abstracts and chronicles of the time we come upon
references to Mistress this and Dame the other, who read and wrote
both Greek and Latin, and could quote you a passage from Virgil, or
explain you the form of elegiac verse, and above all found real
enjoyment in such pursuits; yet, judging from their correspondence,
there was little or no pedantry mixed up with their classical
knowledge. Such Gorgons of learning as Margaret Duchess of Newcastle
do not come into this or any category; they are simply warnings and
terrible examples of the “weaker sex.”
There is small question that many of these gentlewomen were indebted for
their attainments in classical literature to the chaplains, who
continued to be regarded as indispensable part and parcel of the
households of the nobility and wealthier gentlemen of the kingdom.
Generally speaking, the post was almost a sinecure. The lay members of
the Anglican Establishment were not unduly eager to take advantage of
the privileges permitted by their spiritual mother, of making
confession, or of seeking direction from their clergy; and when my
lord’s chaplain had put in an appearance to read morning, and possibly
also evening, prayers, and to give thanks at meal-times, he had done
pretty well all that was required of him; and indeed was not
unfrequently given to understand that his withdrawal from table when the
sweets and cakes were placed upon it would not be hindered. His salary
might not be princely, but his duties were certainly light; and to a
studious-minded man, who did not set undue value on worldly
considerations, the house chaplain might enjoy a comfortable learned
leisure in the seldom-invaded library of his patron’s mansion. If sons
and daughters were included in the domestic circle, he probably was
called upon to complete his round of service by giving them instruction;
but in those times of hawk and hound and bowling-greens and tennis,
average youths were apt to throw learning to the dogs as soon as they
dared, and it was the maidens who mostly profited by his instructions.
Hence such women as “Sidney’s sister,” Lady Russel, the Countess of
Pembroke—who erected a monument to her sometime tutor, Samuel Daniel,
the poetic historian—and many more who could at once ply the needle
exquisitely, understood brewing and baking and the mysteries of the
still-room, and were well-informed “_gentlewomen_” in the most
pronounced acceptance of the term. The style of the correspondence even
of those who followed up their classical acquirements less closely,
reveals unconsciously as it were, an intimacy with the ground-work, so
that through quaintnesses and archaic expressions the educated mind
shines distinctly; and beside those old letters and pieces of
composition the scrawl of many a latter-day college and school miss who
owns a smattering of half a dozen ologies, would make a sorry figure,
with its misbegotten face.
This is the case with the letters of the Countess of Derby. In her there
was not the slightest trace of _précieuse_ taint; her mode of expression
is as clear as it is elegant and eloquent. To be sure, after twenty
years’ residence in England, we find her spelling Lancashire
_Lenguicher_, for which she deserves no quarter; but this appalling
exception only proves the rule of her graceful diction.
That Charlotte de la Trémoille however, while possessing such command of
her pen, was preeminently a woman of ready wit and of prompt action, the
great crisis in her stormy life amply testified. Lord Derby had scarcely
set foot in the Isle of Man when a message reached the Countess at
Lathom House from Lord Holland, the Parliamentary governor of
Manchester, requiring her to accede to the conditions which he offered
her, or to surrender Lathom House. Her reply was given without loss of
time. It did not become her, she said, to give up her house, nor to
purchase repose at the price of honour. That was the answer which Lord
Holland’s deputy took back. The Countess, nevertheless, was conscious of
her weakness. The supply of provisions and of ammunition within the
walls of the house was utterly inadequate for withstanding a siege. More
than all, it was not sufficiently garrisoned. Lady Derby therefore,
offered no defiance; she sought only leave to defend herself and her
household, by retaining a company of her own men of the Royalist party
for protection against the molestation of the Parliamentary soldiery;
but leaving the estate and the surrounding park at their mercy. Consent
to this request was grudgingly accorded. “Thus she remained through
eight months, a prisoner in her own domain,” says her biographer,
“rarely leaving the house for fear of meeting some affront, deprived of
her revenues, blamed alike by friends and foes; by these, for not having
defended possessions and liberty; by those, for not yielding up the
house as she had the surrounding estate; but she waited with patience
for the moment when she might openly resist, working unceasingly and
secretly at collecting provisions and ammunition; one by one getting in
the men and barrels of powder under cover of the night, repressing the
zeal of her garrison, which burned to revenge the insults she daily
received, and in all ways silently preparing for the siege which she
anticipated. A noble patience which, in such a high heart as Lady
Derby’s, called for more courage than even that which she exercised in
the midst of the fray itself; the courage of a woman and of a general,
which knew how to endure all, while waiting to see how to dare all.” So
the still waters ran deep, so under the white ash the fiery coal
smouldered and glowed, and despite the keen vigilance of the
Parliamentary Colonel Rigby, who was in command of the troops stationed
in the neighbourhood, the Countess succeeded in mustering a garrison of
three hundred men within those old towered and moated walls, and
sufficient provision to sustain it under a lengthy siege. Ammunition was
less plentiful, and would have to be husbanded; but throughout defence,
not defiance, was the watchword.
The Countess took the command-in-chief; but her want of military
experience was supplied by Captain Farmer, a Scottish gentleman, whom
she nominated major at the head of six lieutenants chosen from among the
neighbouring gentlemen who came to offer their services.
Of all these preparations the rebel party had not the vaguest
conception. Matters might have continued for some time longer in this
condition, had it not been for a sudden small encounter which took place
between the soldiers of the opposing sides. Colonel Rigby then resolved
to annihilate this “nest of delinquents” without further delay; and
orders were given to march. Whither, the majority of the men were far
from being certain. The attachment of the Northerners of Derby,
Cheshire, and Lancashire was very strong for the ancient race of
Stanley. To go against an Earl of Derby was hardly less than actual
laying of rough hands on their anointed King, and to that pass only the
fiercest malignants had as yet desired; thus for a while the soldiers
were permitted to suppose that they were bound for Westmoreland. On
Sunday however, when a halt was made at Wigan, and a large contingent of
the soldiers attended service in the church, the preacher took for his
text the 14th verse of the 50th chapter of Jeremiah: “Put yourselves in
array against Babylon round about; all ye that bend the bow, shoot at
her, spare no arrows; for she hath aimed against the Lord.”
Then in the course of the sermon which followed, the preacher compared
the Countess of Derby to the great city of Babylon; and finally this
messenger of the Gospel of Peace announced that he reserved the verse
which followed—“Shout against her round about; she hath given her hand;
her foundations are fallen, her walls are thrown down”—for the text of
the sermon which was to celebrate the victory over Lathom.
The next day all lingering doubts came to an end; for the order to halt
was given within two miles of Lathom House, and on the 28th February
Captain Markland arrived to demand an audience of the Countess. He
brought with him a letter from Sir Thomas Fairfax, and a Parliamentary
decree promising pardon to the Earl of Derby if he would make his
submission. Sir Thomas, promising to abide faithfully by his part of the
contract, further required the Countess to deliver Lathom House into his
hands. The letter was couched in courteous terms. The Countess responded
in the same spirit of outward calmness and moderation. She expressed
herself greatly astonished at being called upon to render up her
husband’s house, without her having given the Parliament any offence;
but that, in a matter of such importance, and one which at the same time
touched on her religion and this present life, concerning moreover her
Sovereign, her husband and lord, and all her posterity, she asked a week
for reflection, to settle her doubt of conscience, and to take counsel
on the questions of right and of honour which it involved.
The Countess thus replied for the purpose of gaining a little longer
time. Each day was showing more and more a splendid promise of the
courage and fidelity of her garrison; but they needed more experience
and instruction from their skilful leaders. Sir Thomas Fairfax refused
the concession thus demanded, and sent her a summons to repair at once
in her coach to New Park, a house belonging to the Earl not far from
Lathom, for the purpose of an interview with him there, in order to
discuss the whole affair at length.
The pride of the highborn lady now rose beside the courage of the heroic
woman. “Say to Sir Thomas Fairfax,” was her answer to this message,
“that notwithstanding my present condition, I remember my lord’s honour
as I remember my birth, and that it appears to me more fitting that he
should come to me than that I should go to him.” After two days spent in
messages and replies, the general demanded a free and safe entry into
Lathom House for two of his colonels, and the Countess promised to let
them come and depart again in safety.
In due course the two colonels arrived. The sight which met their gaze
as they neared Lathom House must have caused them some astonishment. The
old house bristled with arms. The Parliamentarian assumption that an
easy victory was about to be obtained over a houseful of women,
children, a few men-at-arms and old servants, was dispersed to the four
winds by the sight of these towers and walls manned with soldiers, and
the batteries and ordnance facing at all points. Whether the Countess
desired to inspire the ambassadors with respect and awe, or whether she
feared a sudden attack, she was there to meet the Parliamentarian
deputies in formidable battle array. They were conducted to the mistress
of the mansion between lines of armed men drawn up on each side, from
the gates of the outer court to her presence in the Great Hall, each
company ranged under its lieutenant. At the upper end of the hall, her
two little daughters at each side, and her women round her, stood the
Countess. With a majestic air she bade the officers be seated, and
waited to hear them unfold what their general, Sir Thomas Fairfax, had
to propose.
The brush of the painter who should succeed in depicting that scene
would have to be skilful indeed. Words might bring to the mind’s eye the
ancient hall, bright with the hues of the women’s attire, the cuirassed
buff coats tied with their fringed silken scarves, the gleaming arms of
the Royalist soldiery—and in their midst the plainly clad
Parliamentarian officers in their linen bands, close-cropped hair, and
the tight-fitting head-gear which has earned the enemies of Charles I.
their eternal sobriquet of Roundhead. All this and much similar detail
of that scene in the old presence chamber of Lathom House rises to the
imagination like a brilliant and stately dream of pageantry; but it
would be another matter to picture faithfully the repression of varying
and contrasting mental agitation working in that assemblage—the courage
and the dauntless bearing of the stately lady, the inquiring gaze of her
young daughters, the eager, attent gaze of her women amid the rugged and
resolute soldiers of their own side, and the endeavours of the
emissaries to maintain an unruffled and undiscomfited aspect in the face
of the surprise they were experiencing. Their astonishment could only
have been of a very complete kind, and the Countess owed no small debt
of gratitude at this crisis and later on, to her chaplain, the Rev. Mr
Rutter. “All is fair in love and war,” says the old adage, and this
faithful and astute ecclesiastic contrived to hoodwink an officer of the
Parliamentarians who was among the besiegers. This person was an old
friend of Mr Rutter’s from early childhood, and the clergyman had given
him to understand that Lathom House was in no way prepared for
sustaining a prolonged siege. Possibly at the time Mr Rutter confided to
his gossip this particular bit of information it was true to the letter,
but “tempora mutantur,” and during those stirring days at Lathom the
times changed very quickly indeed.
The conditions brought by the emissaries of Sir Thomas Fairfax were as
follows:—
“1st. All the arms and ammunition at Lathom should be delivered over to
Sir Thomas Fairfax.
“2nd. The Countess of Derby and all living in Lathom House should be at
liberty to retire with their belongings to Chester or to any other town
occupied by the enemy. If they thought proper to submit to Parliament,
they might retire to their own homes.
“3rdly. The Countess, with all her servants, could reside at Knowsley
House, and maintain there twenty men-at-arms for her defence, or she
would be permitted to rejoin her husband in the Isle of Man.
“4thly. For the present, and until Parliament should further inquire
into the matter, the Countess should receive for her maintenance the
revenues of the estates and land of the Earl, her husband, in the
hundred of Derby; and Parliament would be called upon to preserve this
revenue to her.”
The Countess rejected these proposals. She found them neither honourable
nor certain. “Since Parliament has not given its pronouncement on these
points, you are not in a position to carry out your own propositions,
gentlemen,” she said, with a lofty sarcasm. “It would be more prudent
for you first to ascertain its good pleasure. As to myself, my good
gentlemen,” she added, “I will not embarrass you by petitioning for me.
I should regard it as a far greater favour if you will leave me in my
humble condition.”
The two colonels did not press their points. They were in no mood for
doing so. Colonel Rigby burned to wipe off the score of some insult
which he fancied he had once received from the Earl, and both the
deputies saw from the first strong determination in the eyes of the
Countess. All the same, they did not care to allow themselves to be
conquered by a woman, and both sought to represent to her the error of
her ways, and to reproach her with the evils visited on the country by
her party, and by her own friends and adherents. “I know,” gravely
replied the Countess, “how to take heed to my ways, and to those of my
people. You will do well to do as much for your ministers and your
religious helpers, who go about sowing discord and trouble in families,
and whose ill-conditioned tongues do not even always spare the sacred
person of his Majesty.”
Henry Martin had said to Parliament, “It is certain that the ruin of one
family is better than that of many families,” and when he was asked of
whom he spoke, he replied without hesitation, “Of the King, and of his
children.”
The lieutenants of Fairfax, “the two solemn personages,” disappointed,
baffled, and brow-beaten, were forced to go back, with what comfort they
might, to the camp of the Parliamentarians.
Sunday was a day of rest for the besiegers, as for the besieged. While
they were being preached against in the camp of Fairfax, probably with
equal sincerity the Countess of Derby assisted with her children, and
the greater part of her garrison, at divine service in the chapel of her
mansion, where four times a day during the siege she caused prayers to
be read by her chaplain, always herself attending, and gathering fresh
strength for her heavy task at the feet of Him who has willed Himself to
be called The Lord of Battles.[12]
Footnote 12:
De Witt.
On Monday Colonel Rigby again arrived at Lathom, to receive and to carry
back to his general the proposed conditions of Lady Derby. There were
four in the articles of their summing-up, and ran thus:—
“I demand to remain another month in peace at Lathom. The duties
confided to me here are of a double nature. I owe my fidelity
and my loyalty to my husband; my allegiance and my service to my
Sovereign. Since I have not obtained their consent, I cannot
render up this house without manifestly wanting in my duty
towards both. If they consent, I will peaceably yield up this
house, asking only a free egress for myself and my children,
with my friends, my soldiers, my retainers, my belongings, my
ammunition, and my artillery, in order to go to the Isle of Man.
I shall maintain a garrison in my house for my defence.
“_2ndly._ I promise, during my residence in this county, and
when I shall be in the Isle of Man, that my arms shall not be
employed against Parliament.
“_3rdly._ While I remain in this county, no Parliamentarian
soldier must be quartered in the lordship of Lathom. After my
departure no garrison is to be put into Lathom, nor at Knowsley
House.
“_4thly._ None of my tenants, neighbours, or friends, now in the
house with me, shall be molested, nor suffer in their person or
their property, after my departure, for having come to my aid.”
Fairfax was not deceived by these conditions. He read between the lines
of clause 2, and knew perfectly well that _his_ Parliament and Lady
Derby’s Parliament were very different things. His Parliament might be
what it might, and at Westminster; the Countess’s was composed as
heretofore, of three estates, King, Lords, and Commons, then assembled
at Oxford; and his counter-propositions went back for the last time to
the Lady of Lathom. She would be permitted all the time she wished, with
liberty to transport her arms and possessions to the Isle of Man, with
exception of the cannon, which must remain for defending the place.
Further, to-morrow morning Lady Derby would have disbanded all her
soldiers excepting her own servants, and she would receive a
Parliamentarian officer and forty Parliamentarian soldiers to serve her
as guards.
“I refuse utterly,” said Lady Derby to the messenger, this time a fresh
man, one Morgan, a Welshman, “a little man, short and peremptory, who
met with a great staidness to cool his heat, and he had the honour to
carry back this last answer; for her ladyship could screw them to no
more delays.”
“Though a woman, and a foreigner, far from my friends, and despoiled of
my property, I am prepared to endure all your utmost violence, trusting
in God, both for protection and deliverance.”
All temporising being at an end, the Parliamentarians, in a council of
war, decided to open the siege. Some were for attempting the place by
assault, and bringing the matter to rapid conclusion; but perhaps the
sight beheld by those two colonels within the walls of Lathom deterred
the general from this course, and led him to adopt _festina lente_ for
his watchword. Here the tactics of the Rev. Mr Rutter served the
Royalists to good purpose. The worthy parson’s Parliamentarian crony now
came forward advising for the siege, and assigning his good and
sufficient reason therefor. He had, he said, been in conversation with
his old friend the chaplain of Lathom House, and that veracious
clergyman had allowed him clearly to understand that the supplies within
the house were very small, and not sufficient to feed the garrison for a
fortnight. Upon this valuable and authoritative information the siege
was determined on; and the enemy began to dig trenches, to aid in which
work the people of the neighbouring villages were compelled to give
their services.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XII
FIGHTING A WOMAN. FORMING THE TRENCHES. PUPPETS. A FALSE MOVE. “DO NOT
RECKON THAT LATHOM WILL BE YOURS.” A LETTER FROM THE EARL.
INEFFECTUAL FIRES. AT PRAYERS, OR ASLEEP? A SAD MASSACRE. HOSPITAL
NURSES. UNWELCOME VISITORS. IN THE EAGLE TOWER. BRAVE MAIDENS. A
CHANGE FOR THE WORSE. THREATS. THE COUNTESS’S ANSWER. “LONG LIVE THE
KING!” A TERRIBLE MONSTER, AND HIS IGNOBLE END. RIGBY’S IRRITATION.
GLEAMS. GOOD NEWS. DECAMPING. VICTORY! AND PRINCE RUPERT’S HOMAGE
That Lord Fairfax was reluctant to attack Lathom House is very certain,
whatever his reasons may have been. By some these are attributed to
shame at employing force against a woman; by others they are set to the
wholesome remembrance of what his deputies had beheld within the
precincts of the old mansion on that February morning.
Meantime the weeks fled on, the trenches were nearly completed. Close on
three months had passed, and the garrison, far from showing signs of
being starved, made their evidences of strength and activity very
conspicuous and troublesome by shooting at the trench-makers, and
harassing them in every possible way, so that the work proceeded very
slowly. It was only towards the end of April that the circle of
ditchwork began to meet. About this time, one more attempt to dissuade
Lady Derby from holding out any longer was made; ostensibly by six of
her neighbours, gentlemen of rank and distinction. When they asked an
interview with her, she received them with gracious courtesy, and, still
more, credited them with intentions of real goodwill towards herself.
Notwithstanding, she saw with her usual clearness of perception, that
they were but the puppets worked by the strings in the hands of the
Parliamentarians, and had been made to see the matter in their light.
These worthy delegates conjured her ladyship “by love of their country,
not to expose herself to great personal dangers, or the whole land to
destruction, which she could easily avoid, by relaxing the rigour of her
resolutions, and by lending an ear to their propositions.”
The Countess evinced none of the haughty contempt to these gentlemen
which she had shown the Parliamentarian officers. She vouchsafed a
reasonable explanation of the course which she had adopted, and then
added that they would do better to expostulate with the men who pillaged
and ravaged the country, rather than with her, who “asked as the one
favour that she might be left in peace in her own house.”
The little band retired, shouting as they went, “Long live the King, and
the Earl of Derby!” and the Parliamentarians knew that they had taken
another false step.
Still holding back, Sir Thomas Fairfax made one more forlorn attempt to
bring the indomitable lady to reason; and now, in the person of Colonel
Ashurst, substituted gentleness and some courtesy. He was bidden to tell
the Countess that, cancelling all the former conditions, she and all
those with her in the house might depart whither they would, with their
arms and baggage, artillery included, giving the house into the hands of
Sir Thomas Fairfax. This was on condition that the arms should not be
employed against the Parliament; and that “everyone in the house should
depart immediately, excepting one hundred persons who should go at the
end of ten days.”
To this proposal the Countess’s answer was: “Tell your general that I
have not yet lost my veneration for the Church of England, my allegiance
to my King, and my fidelity to my husband; I cannot therefore render up
this house until I have lost that respect and fidelity, or given my life
in their defence. Do not reckon, then, that Lathom will be yours.”
The siege was now determined on. The trenches encircled the house. The
blockade commenced. “The leaders had the courage to starve a woman; but
not to fight with her.”[13]
Footnote 13:
Halsall.
Yet once more Sir Thomas Fairfax stayed his hand, seemingly with little
regret. A letter reached him from Lord Derby. The Earl wrote from the
Isle of Man, demanding the right for his wife and children to have
perfect freedom to leave Lathom, and thus to spare their weakness the
horrors of a siege. He feared the brutality of the besiegers, and
believed that the house could be but scantily supplied with provisions.
When the Countess heard of this letter to Sir Thomas Fairfax, it had
only the effect of adding fuel to the flame of her courage.
“Tell Sir Thomas Fairfax that I thank him for his courtesy,” she
said to the messenger, a preacher in the employment of Captain
Rigby. “I shall always obey the commands of my lord, and the
general can treat with him; but until I am certain of his good
pleasure, I shall not give up his house, and I will not forsake
it; I await the issue of these events, as God may will it to
be.”
Meantime, Lord Derby had returned from the Isle of Man, and the Countess
contrived to send him a dispatch, which found him at Chester, occupied
in an endeavour to muster troops to march to her assistance; but as yet
the Earl had a mere handful of men only, and three thousand soldiers
surrounded Lathom.
Notwithstanding, the sorties from the house continued; cannon commenced
to fire upon the walls, but thanks to the configuration of the ground,
very ineffectually. The garrison was interested in watching the
manipulation of a mortar which was planted on a little mound at the
distance of half a musket range from the house. The first grenadoes from
it passed over the roof of the house, to the great joy of the besieged,
whom the Countess had supplied with the skins of the beasts slaughtered
for the daily food of the soldiers, in order that they might extinguish
the flames with these if the house should catch fire.
Four days of prayer and pious exercises interrupted the operations of
the besiegers, four days of “sleep,” says the Royalist chronicler,
profoundly incredulous in the matter of Colonel Rigby’s piety. At the
expiration of this time the garrison determined to waken the besiegers
by an angry sortie; they spiked several of their cannon, and took a
number of men prisoners. The Countess, proud of having left hardly any
of her own men in the hands of the enemy, would have surrendered these
in exchange; and she offered to render up all the prisoners she had
made, if the Parliamentarians would release some of the King’s friends
detained at Manchester, Preston, and Lancaster. This Colonel Rigby
promised to do; but he was wanting to his promise. “It was part of their
religion,” says the narrator of the siege of Lathom, “to observe faith
neither with God nor men; and there ensued a sad massacre of the
prisoners at Lathom, whom the Countess could neither keep or
release.”[14]
Footnote 14:
Halsall.
She was always engaged with her two daughters, Mary and Catherine,
superintending everything, providing for the nourishment of the
soldiers, seeing to the distribution of powder, tending the wounded,
frequently upon the ramparts, always in chapel at prayer time, and
smiling disdainfully when a bullet happened to fall into her
sleeping-chamber. She did not even deign to change her apartment until
she had received such a visit three or four times. “I will hold this
house while there is a bit of wall to shelter me, and a corner of roof
to cover my head,” she said, when she installed herself in the Eagle
Tower in the middle of the building. A bomb had fallen and burst in the
dining-hall during dinner, breaking all the casement panes, and smashing
the furniture, but not wounding anyone. The children were beside their
mother, but they had not stirred; scarcely had they changed colour. The
Countess bestowed a glance of approval on them. That was all, and the
repast was proceeded with.
Sir Thomas Fairfax, who from the beginning had never been heartily with
his task, discovered towards the end of April that his presence was
indispensable at York; and he delegated the command of the siege of
Lathom House to Colonel Rigby. With the departure of Fairfax, the entire
face of matters was changed. Lady Derby had no longer to do with “a
gentleman, a sincere patriot, but a well-reared man, with a noble heart,
and of pure hands. Her chief assailant now was an old attorney, a
wretched lawyer, a pilferer, a thief, a hypocrite, determined not to be
beaten by a woman.” He so little understood his new trade, that he
allowed his plentiful supply of powder to be so flung about and wasted,
that the besieged were able to renew their supplies of it from the
trenches.[15]
Footnote 15:
De Witt.
There was no letting “I dare not wait upon I would” with this Roundhead
warrior; and no sooner had he assumed the command than he announced his
intention of attacking the house with mortar and cannon. The Countess
was however, permitted the alternative of “giving up her house,
garrison, arms and ammunition next day before two o’clock in the
afternoon.” She was in the courtyard when the drummer who brought the
summons presented himself at the gates. She took the letter, and, having
glanced at it, said to the Parliamentarian: “You deserve to hang at
these gates. But you are only the foolish tool of a traitor’s vanity.
Therefore convey this answer to Rigby,” and she tore the paper in two.
“Tell this insolent rebel that he will have neither our persons, goods,
nor house. When our resources are exhausted, we shall find a fire more
supportable than Rigby’s. If God’s providence does not come to the
rescue, my house and my possessions shall burn before his eyes; and I,
my children and my soldiers, sooner than fall into his hands, will seal
our religion and our loyalty in the flames.”
She spoke in a loud, firm, and resonant voice. Her soldiers pressed
round her. “We will die for his Majesty, and for our honour!” shouted
they with one accord. The drummer departed from Lathom to cries of “Long
live the King!”
The mortar to which the Parliamentarians pinned their faith was indeed a
terrible engine of destruction. It was a monster which vomited forth
flame and bombs with somewhat impartial energy to both besieged and
besiegers. It was invaluable, of course, to the Parliamentarians; but it
refused to be humoured, and while serving their turn upon their enemies,
had done themselves no small damage. It might be, and was, the terror of
the garrison; but it was a dangerous friend to those whom it served. It
was capable of throwing stones thirteen inches in diameter and of eighty
pounds’ weight, and also grenadoes, balls of iron filled with powder and
lighted by fuses.
On Easter Monday it lodged a twenty-four pounder in the Countess’s
chamber in the Eagle Tower, where she was having breakfast with her two
daughters.
“The little ladies,” says the chronicler, “had stomach to digest cannon;
but the strongest soldiers had no hearts for grenadoes, and might not
they at once free themselves from the continual expectation of death?”
At all events they determined to try; and at four o’clock next morning a
small contingent of twenty-four soldiers stole noiselessly forth,
creeping under the shadow of the cannon until they reached the little
fort which commanded the mansion. At the same time Captain Fox, issuing
by another door, was in possession of the earthworks which guarded the
mortar. To reach this point, a deep ditch and a high rampart had to be
scaled. The first care of the two captains was to mount the ditch, while
the soldiers were prepared to defend themselves against the enemy, if it
should try to regain the position.
All the household of the Countess sallied forth and crowded round the
mortar, eager to give a hand to the ropes which were now passed about it
to drag it within the walls.
Captain Ogle, with a detachment of soldiers, protected the men who
pulled the ropes, and very soon, amidst the joyful shouts of the whole
garrison, and to the consternation of the besiegers, the savage monster
went rolling into the courtyard to the feet of the Countess, who
forthwith summoned Chaplain Rutter, and, in company with all her people,
rendered thanks to Heaven in the chapel.
The soldiers wanted to take the artillery as well, but the pieces were
too heavy, and they contented themselves with spiking them, as they had
vainly striven many times to do with the mortar.
“This action cost the Lathom men two soldiers; the loss of the enemy was
more considerable.”[16] All the time it was going on, the gunners on the
walls never ceased peppering the Parliamentarians, and did great havoc
among those who were near the fort and the trenches. The ditch was
levelled in this sally.
Footnote 16:
Halsall.
The joy at the capture of the mortar knew no bounds in the house. The
monster whose flames had so often threatened to burn the older parts of
the house, which were constructed mainly of wood, now lay in the
courtyard silent and impotent. The soldiers indulged their feelings by
bestowing on it a kick when they passed it, for all the terror it had
caused in its time. Everybody was the more delighted from the fact
coming to their knowledge that Captain Rigby had invited his friends and
neighbours that same day to assemble to witness either the ceding or the
burning of Lathom House. They were invited to be there at two o’clock.
“And they punctually arrived in time to console Rigby, who was
sick with shame and rage at finding himself beaten by a woman
and a handful of soldiers.”[17]
Footnote 17:
Halsall.
The besiegers now began to lose heart. Captains and men deserted the
camp; the rain, which fell incessantly that spring, destroyed their
trenches, and the undertaking throughout had brought them little credit.
On the 23rd May the Countess was once more required, in insolent terms,
to capitulate, “and to submit to the mercy of Parliament.” Lady Derby
replied with a bitter smile, “You mistake. You mean the cruelties, not
the mercies.”
“No, madam,” replied the puzzled delegate, “the mercies of Parliament.”
“The mercies of the wicked are cruel,” quickly responded she. Then she
added that it was not Parliament, but its corrupt agents with whom she
refused to treat. “Let them make terms with my lord,” she went on;
“failing that, they will have neither me nor my friends while there is
life in us.” When the deputy persisted, she said: “This insolent rebel
shall make no more proposals. If he does, his messenger shall hang at my
gates.”
For the last time the ambassador retired. Nothing daunted the Countess.
She paid no heed to all the gloomy rumours which reached her of the
Royalist reverses. Prince Rupert, on the other hand, had vanquished the
rebels at Newark, and was now marching to the assistance of Lord
Newcastle, who was at York, menaced on all sides. The Earl of Derby
implored the Prince to take his way by Lancashire, and relieve Lathom
House and his wife and children. He promised the troops £3000, which he
had borrowed on the jewels of his wife, she having contrived to find a
way of conveying them to him during the siege.
A few hours after the departure of the discomfited Parliamentarian
delegate late at night, one of Lady Derby’s couriers arrived at Lathom
House. To obtain his entrance he had killed the enemy’s sentinel. The
news which he brought the Countess was that Prince Rupert was on the way
to the relief of Lathom House, and that my Lord Derby accompanied him.
Deep thankfulness pervaded all hearts in Lathom House. The Countess
however, annexing a leaf from the enemy’s book of axioms, trusted in
God, “but kept her powder dry.” While rendering heartfelt thanks to
Heaven, she abated not one tittle of her unceasing vigilance.
In silence now the Parliamentarians guarded their trenches. The sound of
their mocking rhymes and songs was heard no more. The prowess and
successes of Cromwell and of Fairfax were no longer vaunted. No more was
said about taking the King in a mouse-trap. On the evening of the 26th
May the guard was so carelessly mounted, that Lady Derby resolved on a
grand sally next day, beginning at three o’clock in the morning.
But Prince Rupert was at hand—Prince Rupert, the terror of his foes, if
not also, like that Parliamentarian mortar, the terror of some of his
friends—and at one o’clock the Parliamentarian soldiers took up their
arms, folded their tents, and silently departed from Lathom, after a
four months’ fruitless siege, the loss of five hundred men, against the
loss of six of the besieged, and the expending of one hundred barrels of
gunpowder. Like a wise man, economical of his blood, Rigby stood no
longer upon much order of going, but went at once.
Still foresight and prudence detained the Prince and the Earl to punish
the enemy upon the way, and to destroy chances of any speedy or sudden
return to the attack; but it was not long before the victorious Lady of
Lathom stood at her gates to receive her husband, and to bid him welcome
to the home which she had so gallantly defended.
Sir Richard Crane attended the Earl, laden with twenty-two trophies
taken by her kinsman Prince Rupert at Bolton and Liverpool, to present
in homage to his “fair relative and companion in arms.” These banners,
after floating proudly in the breeze on the towers of Lathom, Lady Derby
hung in the chapel in reverent “gratitude to the God in whom she had put
her trust, and in memory of the deliverance which He had sent to
her.”[18]
Footnote 18:
De Witt.
Captain Roshern and Captain Chisenhall were raised by Prince Rupert, at
Lady Derby’s request, to the rank of colonel. The first was made
governor of Lathom House, the other followed the Prince’s fortunes.
The occasion ended, Charlotte de la Trémoille was now once more but a
gracious gentlewoman, a loving wife and mother. No word in her
correspondence makes the slightest allusion to her brave actions and
heroic endurance. Home and her children once more engrossed her
thoughts.
“Take good care of them,” said Prince Rupert, ere he bid his hostess
farewell; “the children of such a father and such a mother will one day
do their King such service as their parents have done theirs.” And
indeed “Faithful unto death” would have been the only motto for that
seventh Earl of Derby and his wife, Charlotte de la Trémoille, had they
ever needed to replace the one graved on their unsullied shield of “Sans
changer.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XIII
AT CASTLE RUSHEN. AN HONOURABLE SURRENDER. THE MAUDLIN WELL.
CORRESPONDENCE RECOMMENCES. DISAPPEARANCE OF LORD STRANGE. A PRICE ON
LORD DERBY’S HEAD. HOLMBY HOUSE. MISS ORPE AGAIN. A LAWSUIT.
DIVISIONS AMONG THE PARLIAMENTARIANS. A LULL IN THE STORM. A NOBLE
AUTHOR. AT KNOWSLEY. THE SUBSTANCE AND THE SHADOW. THE SECTARIES. “A
GOOD EXCHANGE”
On the conclusion of the siege of Lathom House, the Countess of Derby
went with her children to the Isle of Man. This appears to have been
done by the advice of Prince Rupert, who well knew, not only the
animosity of the Parliamentarians against the Earl, and therefore
against his family, but also the jealousy entertained against him by the
King’s party.
In the old castles of Rushen and of Peel, Lady Derby spent the ensuing
years of King Charles Ist’s stormy reign, for the most part in peace,
compared with the turmoil and anxiety of the previous months.
As for the brave old mansion, it remained for some time in the charge of
the garrison left in it. Finally, by the desire of the King, whose
fortunes were now too low to come to its assistance when again it was
attacked by the Roundheads, it yielded, but with honours for all it
contained, and the garrison marched forth with their arms and baggage.
Neither were they called upon to take the oath to Parliament.
Whether it would even have yielded when it did is more than
questionable, had it not been for an Irish soldier, “the one traitor the
garrison contained, who swam the moat and informed the enemy of the
deplorable condition of the besieged—at the end of their food and
ammunition.” The matter was now easy to compass—brute strength against
weakness. The doors were burst open, the house sacked, its towers thrown
down, and its walls levelled with the ground. Three little pieces of the
battlements alone remained to tell of the long, brave defence it had
made. Cromwell’s sequestrators sold its doors, its floors, and all else
of it, and the receipts of sale are still to be found in the Ormskirk
parish records.[19] Finally, the peasants of West Derby were invited to
take away the stones and timbers without any charge.[20]
Footnote 19:
Seacome.
Footnote 20:
Heywood.
“Nothing remained of the old place,” says a later chronicler, “along
whose banks knights and ladies have a thousand times made resort,
harking to stories as varied as those of Boccaccio. The Maudlin Well,
where the pilgrim and the lazar devoutly cooled their parched lips—the
brewing-house—the training round—all now are changed, and a modern
mansion and a new possessor fill their places.”
The new mansion which a later Earl raised upon the honoured ashes of the
old is a splendid house; but with it our story has not to do. The noble
presence of Charlotte de la Trémoille never graced its Ionic colonnades
and spacious chambers; and it is to her once more that we will turn, in
her old feudal stronghold in the Kingdom of Man.
Yet one more word, before biding adieu to Lathom, as to the Maudlin Well
mentioned. A question arises which suggests itself for antiquarian
solving. In later times a “Lathom Spaw” came into some repute in that
neighbourhood. Was this “Spaw” the old Maudlin Well of the Stanleys’
famous home?
For the first time after several years, Charlotte de la Trémoille’s
correspondence recommences. Probably from time to time, during the siege
of Lathom, and the first year or two of her sojourn in the Isle of Man,
she wrote to her relatives in France, but these letters have been lost
or stolen. It is only in the month of August 1646 that she writes from
the Isle of Man in no small anxiety. Her eldest son, Lord Strange, had
secretly left the island to go, no one knew whither. “We are told that
he is in Ireland,” she writes to her sister-in-law, “but the letters he
left behind with us say that he was going to you.” She adds that if this
be the case, and the Duchess receives him graciously, forgiveness from
both parents for his escapade will not be long withheld from him.
Lord Strange had, in fact, made his way to Paris, where the Duchess de
la Trémoille, his aunt, had received him kindly, and treated him with
maternal solicitude. On learning this gratifying intelligence, it is
Lord Derby who writes to thank Madame de la Trémoille in terms of almost
enthusiastic courtesy for her obligations. “No service which I could
humbly render you, madame, would be too difficult for me,” he writes,
“so that I might prove to you with what devotion I am, madame, your very
humble and very obedient brother and servant, Derby.”
The Earl was probably glad that the youthful heir of his home was out of
the country; for the Royalist cause was growing desperate. It was death
now to anyone who should have to do with the King. The Parliament sent
proposing an amnesty. Its terms were: his acceptance of the Scottish
Covenant, the abolition of the Anglican Church, and the entire
relinquishment of power into the hands of Parliament. Thirty-six persons
were excluded from this amnesty, and a price set upon the heads of seven
of them. Third on the list, after Prince Rupert and Prince Maurice,
stood the name of Lord Derby; and in the next letter of the Countess she
speaks of a proposed journey to London to intercede for the Earl, “after
a journey from the Isle of Man, which lasted forty-eight hours, upon a
dangerous sea, in a wretched boat; but if God blesses my efforts, as I
have prayed Him to do, I can bear anything.”
She further speaks hopefully of obtaining her husband’s pardon. “The
Lords,” she writes, “will, I think, easily grant it.” From the Commons
she looks for more obduracy. “But God will give me wisdom and prudence.
The King continues to refuse to do what Parliament desires, and declines
to listen to the preaching of its ministers.” There are natures which
can meet martyrdom; but flinch at slow torture, and spiritual discourses
in those days were nothing if they did not stretch to a good hour at the
least. The sword of the Spirit was a long one. On the 25th March the
King had been sold by the Scotch to the Parliament. He was now at Holmby
House in Northamptonshire, only to go thence upon the road which
terminated on the scaffold of Whitehall.
In addition to all these grave cares Lady Derby was burdened with the
settlement of her brother’s affairs. He had recently died, and his title
and estates were claimed by Miss Orpe, who asserted that she had been
privately married to him. Lady Derby complains bitterly of the part
which the Queen took in this matter. She openly gave countenance to Miss
Orpe’s pretensions. Notwithstanding, Lady Derby and the Duke de la
Trémoille gained their suit; and his estate was shared between them.
From this time it was that the opponents of the King became divided
against themselves. The Independents and the Presbyterians had little in
common sympathy. The Independents formed the majority in the army, and
the Presbyterians, jealous of their power, were now anxious to disband
the army. In this difference the Independents, gaining the day, formed a
military Parliament, and took possession of the King; but the hope that
this raised in the minds of the Royalists, and among them the hopes of
the Earl and Countess of Derby, was doomed to be disappointed. The King
in the hands of the Independents was merely a puppet to play off against
the Presbyterians.
The Earl of Derby was all this time being treated with comparative
leniency, considering that his loyalty to his party amounted to a
passion which no terrors or threats could ever quench. Total inaction
was imposed upon him; and policy prompted him to compliance. “Reculer
pour mieux sauter” was the watchword now for the ardent-spirited Earl.
To attempt to do anything for his royal master’s defence at this time
was but to hurry him the faster to his doom; though there was a gleam of
hope in the treatment which the King was now receiving. During some
months which he spent at Hampton Court, the semblance of kingly state
and of loyal respect surrounded him. It was the calm and deceptive
tranquillity which precedes the tempest. Like the old _trève de Dieu_ of
mediæval days—the oasis which travellers come upon in the desert, and
perforce must leave again—those few little months at Hampton Court, with
his children once more about him, must have been very blessed to the
King. Despite the gloom on all sides of the horizon, sunshine was
overhead, sweetness was in the air.
Lord Derby during his enforced inactivity took up his pen, and began his
“History and Antiquities of the Isle of Man.” He wrote it for the
instruction of his son, and its title _in extenso_ explains his
intentions in writing it. “With an account of his own proceedings, and
losses in the Civil War; interspersed with sundry advises to his son.”
The advice is excellent. After some details concerning the early history
of the island, its noble chronicler writes: “Sir John Stanley, who was
the first of our family to possess it, took out in letters-patent the
name of the King of Man. His successors did the same until the time of
Thomas, second Earl of Derby, who, for good and wise reasons, decided to
relinquish this title.
“I know no subject who owns a dominion as important as this,” and then
the Earl adds that, lest it may be found to be too important, his son
will do well to observe this rule, which will enable him to keep the
kingdom uncontested: “Fear God, and honour the King.”
Further on, the Earl takes blame to himself for not having seen how he
might have added to the prosperity of the Manx folks by turning the
island to more profitable account, “for he who is not careful of what he
has, is not worthy to possess it.” He advises that manufactories and
more trade be established in Man. “Then the sea will be covered with
ships, and the land with inhabitants, to the great advantage of the
whole country.” He further gives excellent advice as to the selection of
a bishop for the island. He must be one, he says, who is a pious and
worthy person, seeing that the clergy do their duty, and therefore one
who must reside in the island, and have no benefice elsewhere. Further,
the Earl would have a university, which, from the great natural
advantages of the island, might be maintained at moderate cost and be
serviceable to many, “finishing by putting something into the purse of
its suzerain lord. But of this I will talk with you more, if it please
God that I see you again, and have a quiet mind.”
He adds more good counsel for personal conduct, and for the general
business of life. This work was never finished, as the Earl intended it,
but is published as he left it in Peck’s _Desiderata Curiosa_.[21]
Footnote 21:
Vol. ii. lib. ii.
In September of 1647 Parliament at last definitely made allowance for
the maintenance of the Earl’s children. It was one-fifth of his revenue,
the same as they meted to the rest of the “delinquents.” The allowance
was made upon Knowsley, and thither two of the Earl’s three daughters,
Catherine and Mary, were at once sent. Lord Fairfax issued orders that
Major Jackson, who had established himself with his family in the
mansion, should clear out, and the guardians were further enjoined to
see “that the said Major Jackson” did no damage to house or park before
he went. Lady Derby writes from London, 14th March 1648: “I am advised
to go to Lancashire, and live there on the little which has been allowed
to my children; for I receive nothing; and I hope that I may be able to
make it go further if I am on the spot. One must live economically, and
make the best of what one has.”
There seems to have been no false sentiment about Lady Derby’s nature.
And if the theories of Lavater are in any way correct, it is easiest to
recall her living personality through the portrait of Vandyke, who,
mighty portrayer that he was, gives Charlotte de la Trémoille on his
canvas the frank and happy face of a good wife and a good mother, if not
as specially beautiful or striking, as Scott has depicted the widowed
Countess of Derby and “Queen in Man” in his _Peveril of the Peak_. Scott
claims his rights as a romancer to give us the famous Countess of Derby
as it suited his great novel to depict her. The Wizard has indeed drawn
a curiously different personality from the real wife of James Stanley.
On the other hand, her wifehood was almost past before Julian Peveril of
the Peak was born. It is the woman advancing in years, with the memory
of dead joys and loves and countless bitter wrongs heavy upon her, whom
Scott characterises. When Charles II. was king, Charlotte de la
Trémoille must have been greatly changed; but it is in having changed
her creed that Scott misses the strong individuality in which he might
have clothed her, without overleaping fact by a hair’s-breadth. No one
comprehended better than he the play of light and shadow upon every act
and word of man, woman, or even child, which is cast by religious
conviction or the lack of it. Scott, while apologising for the
dereliction, has transformed the born Huguenot, the staunch Anglican of
twoscore years’ profession, into an ardent, even fanatical Roman
Catholic. How completely she stood between the Scylla and Charybdis of
Rome and the Sectaries, the extract from the following letter
illustrates with striking emphasis:—
“For my husband and myself, in the matter of religion, it is, thank God,
so deeply graven in our hearts, that nothing by His grace can take it
from us; and if Parliament really held the interests of religion and the
glory of God, which you think they entertain, they would not have the
cruelty and injustice which signalise all their actions. And for
religion, they have misled the people of this nation, until now they see
their error, and groan under the burden of tyranny. Those even, who are
most attached to their party, deplore their own misery and ours, and
would find it difficult to tell you what their belief is, there being as
many religions as there are families. The _Test_ is publicly maintained;
books are printed denying the existence of the Holy Spirit. Those who do
this are not punished for it. God’s commandments are scorned—even the
Creed itself. Sunday worship is neglected, and not constrained to be
celebrated anywhere. The sacraments are administered according to each
person’s fancy; the ministry is neglected. Anyone who considers himself
capable of preaching, may do so without any licence or examination; even
women may do it. Baptism is neglected, and not given to children; and
there are other things still worse, which make those who have any
religion left in them shudder to see such abuses.
“For our ill-wishers, we have them, but not more than the Lords in
Parliament have them, it being the desire of the Commons to have no
Lords, but to make all equal. That is understood by the Lords, but not
the remedy for it. If you could hear the prevailing discontent, you
would hardly be able to credit it. I speak of those who have ventured
all for Parliament, and are enemies of the King’s party. This has
reached such a point, that if the Scotch come, as we are led to think
they may, there are not many who would not join them. This has of late
led to changing all the leaders who were most affected to Parliament;
replacing them by men who only regard their own faction; and though it
was decreed in Parliament that if the army did not approve of this, it
was to be changed, one day undoes what the other has done.
“This is not credible, excepting to those who see it all; and while I
was away, they had a difficulty in persuading me that it was true. If I
had the honour of seeing you, and speaking with you for a little while,
I know you would soon be convinced of the truth, and would regret to see
the Protestant religion suffering, and the Papists turning it to their
advantage.”
National affairs were now in a state of hopeless
entanglement—Presbyterian against Independent, and both against the King
and all who had held by him through fortune good and ill. There could be
no quarter for the Royalists. “There is no doubt,” writes the Countess
in March of 1648, “that affairs will settle themselves.”
She wrote prophetically when she added:
“There is such discontent prevailing, that those who are in
authority say—_in confidence_—that things cannot remain long
without a change.”
On the next 30th January King Charles I. made his “good exchange” upon
the scaffold at Whitehall; penalties of high treason were declared
against all who acknowledged Charles Stuart as king; the House of Peers
was abolished; and Cromwell was at the head of public affairs.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XIV
AN INDIGNANT REFUSAL. ILLNESS OF LADY DERBY. THE GREAT “TABOURET”
QUESTION. A MIS-ALLIANCE. A PITIABLE STORY. AFTER DUNBAR. THE FATAL
FIGHT OF WORCESTER. THE ROYAL EXILE. WOUNDED AND SPENT. LORD DERBY
TAKEN PRISONER. A “COURT-MARTIAL.” FAREWELL LETTERS. A FRIENDLY
SERVICE? LEAVE-TAKINGS. _FINIS CORONAT OPUS_
No letters of either Lord Derby or his wife now exist written during the
passing of that sad time. If any were written by them, they were lost,
or not preserved.
In July following the King’s execution, Lord Derby, now in the Isle of
Man, wrote his memorable letter to Ireton, who offered him tempting
bait, no less than the free restoration of all his other estates and
lost power, if he would deliver up the island to Parliament:—
“I received your letter with indignation, and with scorn return
you this answer: that I cannot but wonder whence you should
gather any hopes that I should prove like you, treacherous to my
Sovereign; since you cannot be ignorant of my former actings in
his late Majesty’s service, from which principles of loyalty I
am no whit departed. I scorn your proffers; I disdain your
favour; I abhor your treason; and am so far from delivering up
this island to your advantage, that I shall keep it to the
utmost of my power to your destruction. Take this for your final
answer, and forbear any further solicitations: for if you
trouble me with any more messages of this nature, I will burn
the paper and hang up the bearer. This is the immutable
resolution, and will be the undoubted practice of him who
accounts it his chiefest glory to be his Majesty’s most loyal
and obedient subject,
DERBY.
“From Castletown, this
12th of July, 1649.”
Lord Derby further promulgated an announcement to similar effect,
“inviting all his allies, friends, and acquaintance, all his
tenantry in Lancashire, and Cheshire, and other places, as well as
all his Majesty’s faithful and loyal subjects,” to repair to the
Isle of Man, as a refuge and a rallying-place. No menaces or
dangers, added the Earl in the proclamation, could trouble him, nor
dangers deter him. A letter written by Lady Derby, the year of the
King’s death, bitterly complains of the duplicity of Parliament
dealings in respect of the disposal of their property. “As to the
sects, their numbers daily increase, and their tenets are enough to
make the hair stand on end.”
She has been very ill for weeks past, and would be more than content
to die and be at rest, but for the loved ones she would leave
behind. Once more she descants upon the aberrations of the
hydra-headed fanaticism which made such rampant strides in the last
half of the seventeenth century, and once more, on the other hand,
is amazed at the freedom which Roman Catholics are permitted. Only
for the Church of England breathing space is not allowed; but her
husband, she assures the Duchess de la Trémoille, who appears to
entertain fears lest Lord Derby might waver, is more “Protestant”
than ever.
In the midst of all these real trials, she discusses with great
interest a point of Court etiquette: the mighty question of the
_tabouret_; and it is with as intense gratification that the
Countess hears finally that the _tabouret_ has been accorded to her
niece on her marriage, as it had once been given to herself.
Another domestic incident of a disagreeable nature took place about
this time, in the marriage of the heir of the Stanleys, Edward Lord
Strange, with a Mademoiselle de Rupa, a German lady of neither
position nor fortune. His parents never forgave this offence, and,
to crown all, Lord Strange entertained some dreams of compounding
with Parliament, fearing that hope for the Royalists was utterly
gone, and that they would all be left at last to starve.
Truly trouble was heavy on the friends of the murdered King’s son,
who was now wandering in Scotland, after the execution of Montrose.
Bradshaw’s hatred against the Earl of Derby was intense, and, with
the ingenuity bred of spite and cruelty, he attacked him in the part
most sensitive in such a man, through his children. For two years
the two daughters, Catherine and Amelia, had been left in peace at
Knowsley. “Now,” writes Lady Derby, 8th June 1650, “one Birch,
governor of a little town called Liverpool, has taken them
prisoners, and carried them there, where they are under guard.”
The Countess attributes this treatment to the pressure Parliament
intends putting upon the Earl. “That is all, dear sister, which I
can tell you of this pitiable story,” she concludes. “I pray God to
protect them, and do not fear that He will do so. It is said that
they endure bravely. I am less troubled for the elder, but my child
Amelia is delicate and timid, and was under treatment from M. de
Mayerne [a doctor in whom Lady Derby placed great confidence]. The
place where they are is very ugly, and has bad air, and they are
very wretchedly lodged.
“But these barbarians think of nothing but pursuing their damnable
plans; one might think that if all the demons of hell had devised
them, they could not have been worse.”
The sufferings of these two innocent girls increased. They had not
bread enough to eat, and must have starved but for the charity of
the poor Royalists and the fidelity of their attendants, who went
begging for them from house to house. They complained at last to
Fairfax, who wrote thereupon to the Earl: “If his lordship would
place the Isle of Man at Parliament’s good pleasure, his children
should be liberated, and enjoy half of his revenues.” The Earl
replied that he was deeply afflicted at the sufferings of his
children. It was not the custom of noble minds to punish innocent
children for their parents’ faults. He begged Sir Thomas Fairfax to
give them back to him, or to let them pass free to France or to
Holland; but if this were not possible, they must trust in the mercy
of the Most High, for he could never deliver them by an act of
treachery.
The contest between King and Parliament, or, more truly, between
King and Cromwell, was raging in Scotland. Of that country Charles
II. was now crowned King. He should be crowned King of England too,
while a Royalist lived. That was the Royalist determination, and
Cromwell’s sudden illness favoured hope, in addition to the
prevailing disaffection in the opposite camp; for betwixt Covenanter
and Presbyterian and Independent, and all the myriad political and
religious sectaries, little love was lost. Cromwell, however,
recovered, and attacked Perth. Charles announced his intention of
going to England. The Duke of Argyle sought to dissuade him from
this, and withdrew his aid. Cromwell followed the King to Carlisle
in pursuit. Charles immediately summoned Lord Derby, and the
Countess writes, 1st September 1651:—
“We are still here (Isle of Man), by the goodness of God,
who has safely guided my husband to the King his
sovereign.... I learn that the King has received him with
great joy and proofs of affection, and I await special
details with impatience; though I fear they cannot reach me
quickly, because of the vessels of the enemy, which are all
round our shores.”
Charles informed Lord Derby, in a letter in his own hand, that the
Presbyterians of Lancashire were ready to join under his leadership.
This Lord Derby found to be true only _cum grano salis_, and that no
small grain. He had brought with him three hundred gentlemen, for
the most part Roman Catholics, from the Isle of Man; these, the
Covenanting partisans of the King insisted, were to be sent back
again, before they joined issue in the struggle. This equally Lord
Derby refused. He demanded for these gentlemen the same latitude and
liberty the Lancashire Presbyterians required for themselves; and if
they could not accord it, though he despaired of success without
their aid, he had no voice but to dispense with it; and, mounting
his horse, the Earl rode away with his little band of Royalists to
encounter Colonel Robert Liburne, close by Wigan, a town which had
always remained true to the Royal cause. A hand-to-hand struggle
ensued. Two horses were killed beneath the Earl, and were replaced
at the peril of his own life by a faithful French servant. Finally,
in the confusion Lord Derby escaped into the town, finding refuge in
a poor woman’s cottage. She drew the door bolts, and maintained such
a stout defence of her little domain, that the Earl had time to
escape by the back of the house, and rejoined his friends; but he
was fearfully wounded, and scarcely able to sit his horse for
weakness.
As soon as he could stir, he made his way in disguise to Worcester,
where the King’s forces were mustered, and on 3rd September 1651, in
the battle of Worcester, which ended in the routing of the
Royalists, Lord Derby, with Lord Cleveland and Colonel Wogan,
protected their royal master, when all was over, through the enemy’s
ranks with their own swords and bodies, and then conducted him to
Whiteladies, safe with the loyal Giffards and Pendrells. Thence,
followed by some of his friends, he found his way to the coast, and
escaped to France.
With Lord Lauderdale, Lord Derby took his way back to the North, his
noble heart well-nigh broken, and his body weak and torn with
wounds. At Wigan his course was stopped by a detachment of the
victorious Parliamentarians, under Major Edge. The Earl and his
friends gave their names, and surrendered, under condition of
receiving quarter. This was promised on condition of their yielding
up arms, and considering themselves prisoners. Lord Lauderdale was
conducted to another part of the country. Lord Derby was taken
direct to Chester. Arrived there, he wrote a long letter to his
wife, which he obtained leave to be transmitted to her by Mr
Bagalay, a prisoner of war in the city—a long letter, full of
solicitude for his wife and family, and for all in any way dependent
on him. He tells her that though a prisoner in body, his heart is
free and at peace, having “no other sadness in it than the regret at
knowing her suffering and sorrow, and that of his poor children.”
Colonel Duckenfield, he informs her, will proceed in the name of
Parliament to take possession of the Isle of Man. Once more, not as
from a prisoner, but as from one “whose soul is his own, as in his
best days,” he will give her his advice how to receive Duckenfield,
but that he will transmit by word of mouth to his trusty messenger.
“Take care of yourself, my dearest heart, and of my dear
Mall and Ned and Billy. As to those who are here, I will
give them the best advice I can. My son,[22] with his wife,
and my nephew Stanley have been to see me.... I will only
say now that my son shows me much affection, and that he is
gone to London with an ardent desire to serve me.”
Footnote 22:
Lord Strange, now arrived in England.
That he hopes little from this filial devotion is evident. “The cold
and the wind of the coming winter are more easy to be borne than the
malicious attacks of a venomous serpent, or an obstinate and
perfidious enemy.... May the Son of God, whose blood was shed for
us, preserve our life, so that by God’s mercy and goodness we may
see each other once again on this earth, and then in the kingdom of
Heaven, where we shall be safe from rapine, theft, and violence!—I
remain ever your faithful
“DERBY.”
There could be but little quarter for the noble prisoner. With the
son of Bradshaw, Colonel Birch, and Colonel Rigby, the vanquished
hero of Lathom House, among his judges, his doom was virtually
pronounced.
When brought before the tribunal of these men and of one or two
others, who from one cause or another were little inclined in his
favour, and styling itself a court-martial, he was voted guilty of a
breach of the Act passed 12th August 1651, which prohibited all
correspondence with Charles Stuart or his party. Consequently he had
committed high treason and sentence of death was pronounced. When he
heard himself called traitor, he cried: “I am no traitor—I——”
“Silence, sir,” said the President. “Your words are of no account.
Hear the act of accusation to the end.”
Neither books nor counsel were allowed him, and he defended himself.
This he did with skill, pleading in the first place that quarter had
been promised. A show of consideration was vouchsafed to what he
said; but, with casuistry which would have done credit to the
Sorbonne, his representations were overruled, and his execution
fixed for the 15th October at Bolton.
On Monday, 13th October, Mr Bagalay was permitted to wait upon him.
“He discoursed his own commands to me. With many affectionate
protestations of his honour and respect for my lady, both for her
birth, and goodness as a wife, and much tenderness of his children.
“Then in came one Lieutenant Smith, a rude fellow, and with his hat
on; he told my lord he came from Colonel Duckenfield, the Governor,
to tell his lordship he must be ready for his journey to Bolton. The
Earl replied, ‘When would you have me to go?’ ‘To-morrow about six
in the morning,’ was the man’s answer. The Earl desired to be
commended to the Governor, and for him to be informed by that time
he would be ready. Then said Smith, ‘Does your lordship know any
friend or servant that would do the thing your lordship knows of? It
would be well if you had a friend.’ And the Earl replied, ‘What do
you mean? Would you have me find one to cut off my head?’
“‘Yes, my lord,’ said Smith. ‘If you could have a friend——’
“‘Nay, sir,’ interrupted the Earl; ‘if those men that would have my
head will not find one to cut it off, let it stand where it is. I
thank God my life has not been bad, that I should be instrumental to
deprive myself of it.... As for me and my servants, our ways have
been to prosecute a just war by honourable and just means, and not
by these ways of blood, which to you is a trade.’”
When Smith was gone, the Earl called for pen and ink, and wrote his
farewell letters to his family; and while he wrote, Paul Morceau,
his lordship’s servant, went out and bought a number of rings, which
they wrapped in parcels, and these were addressed as parting gifts
to his children and servants.
The Earl’s letter to his wife began in these terms:—
“MY DEAR HEART—Hitherto I have been able to send you some
consolation in my letters, but alas! I have now none to
offer you. There only remains for us our last and best
refuge, the Almighty, to whose will we must submit; and when
we see how it has pleased Him to dispose of this nation and
of its Government, there is nothing for us to do, but to put
our finger on our lips, and bring ourselves to confess that
our sins, with those of others, have drawn these misfortunes
upon us, and with tears implore Him to have pity on us.”
Having given up their beloved little last stronghold to Duckenfield,
the Earl advises the Countess to retire to some peaceful spot; then,
“having leisure to think of your poor children, you will be able in
some way to provide for their subsistence, and then prepare to
rejoin your friends above in that happy place where peace reigns,
far from differences of opinion.
“I entreat you, dearest heart, by all the grace God has
given you, to use your patience in this great and cruel
trial. If any evil befall you, I should, as it were, be
dead; but till then I live in you, who are truly myself’s
better part. When I am no more, think of yourself and of my
poor children. Have courage, and God will bless you.
“I thank the great goodness of God, who gave me such a wife
as you, the honour of my family, and for me the most
excellent of companions, so pious and deserving, so entirely
all the good that can be said, that it is impossible to say
enough. I beg, with all my soul, God’s forgiveness if I have
not sufficiently recognised this great benefit, and with
clasped hands I equally entreat you to pardon anything I may
ever have done to offend you. I have no time to say more. I
implore the Most High to bless you, as well as my dear Mall,
Ned, and Billy. Amen! Lord Jesus!”
Then followed the few touching lines to—
“MY DEAR MALL, MY NED, AND MY BILLY—I remember how sad you
were to see me go away; but I fear that your grief will be
redoubled when you learn that you will never see me more in
this world. It is my advice to all of you to conquer down
your grief. You are all of a nature for that to do you much
harm. My desire and my prayer to God is that your life may
be happy. Strive to lead it as purely as possible, and shun
sin as much as is in your power.
“I am able now to give you this advice, having such
remembrances of the vanities of my own life that my soul is
full of grief.... Love the Archdeacon well; he will give you
good counsel. Obey your mother cheerfully, and do not be
troublesome to her. She is your example, your guardian, your
counsellor, your all after God. There never has been, and
never will be, one to surpass her worth. I am called, and
this is the last letter that I shall write you. May the Lord
my God bless you, and keep you from all ill; that is what
your father asks in a moment when his pain is so great at
leaving Mall, Neddy, and Billy. Think of me.
DERBY.”
He spent the rest of that day with his two other daughters, and his
son, Lord Strange, who had returned from his fruitless journey to
London to obtain his father’s pardon. It was refused by the members
of the House leaving one by one, so that not enough were left to
vote. In the morning before his execution they started for Bolton.
When he came to the castle gate, four Royalist gentlemen, who were
also condemned, came out of the dungeon (by the Earl’s request to
the marshal) and kissed his hand, and wept on taking their leave.
Giving them his blessing, and a few brave farewell and comforting
words, the Earl passed on, not on his own horse, for it was feared
the people might rescue him, but upon a little nag.
“After we were out of the town,” continues Mr Bagalay, “people
weeping, my lord, with an humble behaviour and noble courage, about
half a mile off, took leave of them, then of my Lady Catherine and
Amelia, and there prayed for them and saluted them, and so parted.
This was the saddest hour I ever saw, so much tenderness and
affection on both sides.”
“Once,” said the Earl, on that last night of lying down to rest on
earth, “the thought of dying sword in hand in the fight would not
have troubled me; it would something have startled me, tamely to
submit to a blow on the scaffold; but now I can as willingly lay
down my head upon a block, as ever I did upon a pillow.”
The clean shirt he put on next morning, he gave orders was to be his
winding-sheet. “I will be buried in it,” he said to Morceau.
Then he called for Lord Strange to put on his order, telling him
that he should receive it again, and so “return it to my gracious
sovereign, ... and say I sent it in all humility and gratitude, as I
received it spotless and free from any stain.”
The scaffold—which by one of the delicate refinements of Puritanism
was fashioned of the old wood from Lathom House—was not ready till
three in the afternoon, for the people, with tears and
protestations, refused to drive a nail into it.
At last, when it was ready, the Earl ascended the ladder, and,
standing at the east end, addressed the people. It was a long
address, and full of noble and just and eloquent thoughts. Still,
when he had done, the block was not ready.
The delay now began to fret him. At last the executioner seemed to
be prepared, and, turning once more to the people, Lord Derby said:
“Good people, I thank you for your prayers and for your tears. I
have heard the one, and seen the other, and our God sees and hears
both. Now the God of Heaven bless you all. Amen.”
“How must I lie?” he then asked. “Will anyone show me? I never yet
saw any man’s head cut off.”
Then, after much delay and bungling on the headman’s part, Lord
Derby “laid him down again, and blessing God’s name, he gave the
signal by raising his hands.
“The executioner did his work; and no other manner of noise was then
heard, but sighs and sobs.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XV
BEARING THE BURDEN ALONE. THE PARLIAMENTARIANS DEMAND THE ISLE OF
MAN. LADY DERBY A PRISONER. CAST ON CROMWELL’S MERCY. FAIR-HAIRED
WILLIAM AND HIS FATE. THE TIDE TURNS. “I MUST DEPART.” THE KING
HAS HIS OWN AGAIN. MARRIAGE, AND GIVING IN MARRIAGE. PEACEFUL
TIMES AT KNOWSLEY. “SWIFT TO ITS CLOSE EBBS OUT LIFE’S LITTLE
DAY.” COURT FAIRNESS. THE LAST LETTER. AN HONOURED MEMORY
With the death of the Earl perished the happiest and noblest part of
Charlotte of Derby. For all its storms, their married life had been
a true union. The alliance, which originally could not have been
more than one of consent on the part of a marriageable young man and
woman, had developed into a gracious, healthy life which sorrow and
death itself had no power to destroy. The bud of the _mariage de
convenance_ had proved a more glorious flower than many a passionate
love-match has culminated in. But now the noble heart of James
Stanley beat no more with its patriotic devotion, and henceforth
Lady Derby had to bear the burden of the endless contest alone. That
for good or for evil, life in its fullest sense was over for her,
she tells her friend of years, the Duchess de la Trémoille, in a
letter dated 25th March of 1652. The Duchess’s letters to her are,
she says, so full of sympathy and kindness, that if her sorrows
could be consoled, Madame de la Trémoille would console them. “But
alas! dear sister, I am no longer able to complain or to weep, since
all my happiness is in the grave; and I am astonished at myself that
I have been able to endure all my misfortunes, and be still in the
world; but that has been the will of God, who has helped me so
powerfully, that I do not know myself in having survived all my
miseries. The last letters of that glorious martyr give me proof of
his affection being beyond all that I deserved to hope; and his
dying commands bid me live, and take care of his children....”
The body of the Earl of Derby had already been laid by Lord Strange
and Mr Bagalay to its rest in the tomb of his ancestors at Ormskirk
before Lady Derby knew that the blow had really fallen; and it is
doubtful whether the first intelligence of it reached her by the
mouth of friend or foe. When the Earl was executed, the Countess was
busy fortifying the Castle of Rushen, to defend the last possession
left them of all their broad territories.
Castle Rushen contained the insignia of the Stanley sovereignty over
the Isle of Man—the leaden crown.
When Captain Young landed from the _President_ frigate, and,
presenting himself before her, commanded her to render up the island
in the name of Parliament, she refused, saying, as she had ever
done, that she waited her husband’s orders.
The Earl was dead.
Even after that, knowing the worst, she still refused. She held the
island now for her King. Then treachery came to the help of the
enemy. William Christian, the Receiver-General of the Earl, won over
the garrison, and surrendered the island to the Parliamentarian
fleet, which completely surrounded the coasts.
These Christians had long occupied high positions under the rulers
of Man, being deemsters and controllers of special departments of
public government. But already more than once the Earl had had good
grounds for displeasure and mistrust against them. He had some time
before deprived Edward Christian of authority in favour of one
Captain Greenhaigh; (though he had not withdrawn his countenance
from the family of Christian), who, in the meantime, had died. When
Lord Derby left Man to go to the assistance of Charles II. he
confided the forces of the island to William Christian, this
unfaithful Edward’s son. Never was confidence more misplaced.
William Christian allowed himself to be corrupted; he admitted the
Parliamentary troops into the island at dead of night, and daybreak
found Lady Derby and her children prisoners in Castle Rushen. For
two months she was detained prisoner in the island; then they let
her go free, in a forlorn quest of justice from Cromwell. “She who
had brought to this country fifty thousand pounds sterling had not
so much as a morsel of bread to eat, and was indebted for all to her
friends, almost as unfortunate as herself.”
This William Christian is a great hero with Manxmen. Iliam Dhône, or
“Fair-haired William,” is the subject of a long and doleful ballad,
which is still popular in the island. Eleven years later, when the
King had his own again, and the murdered Earl’s son Edward was once
more the Lord of Man, a day of retribution came to William Dhône. He
was tried for that day’s work of giving up the Isle of Man to the
Parliamentarians, and shot for a traitor on Hango Hill. The young
Earl met with great blame for his part in this act. There were
extenuating circumstances for William Christian’s actions. The trial
was a mock proceeding. A tale goes that a pardon was sent him on the
day before the one fixed for his execution, and that it was laid
hands on, and intercepted by an enemy, being afterwards found in the
foot of an old woman’s stocking.
“Protect,”
runs the ballad,
“every mortal from enmity foul,
For thy fate, William Dhône, sickens our soul.”
_Audi alteram bartem._ The Christians and those they represented of
the Manx people had had grievances against certain high-handed
doings of the late Earl, but, the tale all told, sympathy for
fair-haired William’s fate is not easy to muster; and if it be true
that the Countess of Derby had a share in hastening his end, it is
not necessary to be blind to the fact that she would, if she could
have compassed it, have visited similar lynch-law justice on those
“court-martial” judges who condemned her husband to the block. In
her virtues and in her failings—sins, if so they were—there was
nothing small about Charlotte of Derby when great crises hung over
her.
These past, she was just again the ordinary _grande dame_ of her
time. The daily round and common task of existence pleased her well
enough. Henceforth the remaining years of her life were devoted to
two primary ends—the placing in life of her children, and the
recovery of her money and lawful possessions. For this last, her
fortunes ran side by side with those of the exiled King and of many
another devoted Royalist family; but they were at their lowest ebb
on the days succeeding Worcester fight. Steady, but so gradual as to
be for long imperceptible, was the inflow of the tide; and only the
passing years really marked the turn of national affairs.
Parliamentary differences, jealousies of political parties,
sectarian bitterness, which it pleased them to call religious
opinion, were all seething to the great issue. The powerful mind of
Cromwell was not for ever to be proof against myriad influences. If
he desired the Crown, he dared not accept it: as he dared not do
many things which appealed to his own inclinations.
Having abolished the Anglican Church, he would have reinstated it.
Anything was better than the wild fanaticism that was overrunning
the land—Anabaptists, Quakers, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchy Men,
_et hoc genus omne_, who, all claiming the one divine spirit, seemed
animated by a million devils of hatred, pride, and malice. Haunted
by memories, saddened by domestic sorrows and bereavements, grown
fearful of the pitfalls for his own death lying in his path, the
existence of the Lord Protector was one he must have been well
willing to break with. Colonel Titus promulgating his views of
“Killing no Murder” in his tract; Ralph Syndercombe plotting his
bloody deed in the little Shepherd’s Bush cottage; and how many more
biding their time? But it was not so the end came to Oliver
Cromwell.
When he had prayed for peace—the much-needed peace—for the people
and for himself, “Lord, pardon them all,” he went on, “and whatever
Thou mayst do with me, grant them Thy mercy, and me also. Give them
peace.” The dawn of 3rd September broke—the anniversaries of Dunbar
and of Worcester, Cromwell’s “lucky day.” Parched with the thirst of
his aguish fever, they put a cup of drink to his lips. “I will
neither drink nor sleep,” he said. “I am thinking only of making
haste. I must depart.” And so he died.
And so when Richard Cromwell had just tasted of the cup of dignities
his father had left him, and but too gladly set it down again, and
retired to his quiet country home in the lanes of Cheshunt, Charles
II. was brought in triumph to Whitehall.
That home-coming is a tale told too often to tell again here—even
though Lady Derby has much to say about it in her graphic
correspondence. Many details of how gracious his Majesty was to her,
how handsome but for this or that his Queen would be, are mixed up
with those of her children’s marriages. When those sons and
daughters reached marriageable years, the worst of the Royalist
troubles were past. There was no difficulty in their making suitable
alliances. Amelia was married to the Earl of Athole. Catherine, less
happy in her union, became Marchioness of Dorchester. Mary, “dear
Mall,” became Lady Strafford. Two of her sons died while still
children.
Of absorbing interest to herself—as indeed they all might well
be—the incidents of Court life, and the doings of her children and
friends, drag somewhat heavily for us, like the more commonplace
though dazzling groupings in some stirring drama whose curtain is
about to fall.
Her own little day of life was nearing its setting. She died at a
fitting time. The son was not the father. The rebound from
Puritanism and religious hypocrisy o’erleaped itself. The licence of
Court life soon came to be a scandal and a grief to many of Charles
II.’s most loyal servants, as assuredly it might have made the
stately martyred King turn in his grave. To the Mistress Nellys and
my Lady Castlemaynes nothing was sacred; and when these frail
“beauties” had contrived to humble their Queen in her own
presence-chamber, or to secure a Clarendon’s downfall, they were
well pleased with their day’s work.
With some prescience of this, the Countess of Derby, no longer
compelled to remain in London, spent much of her time at Knowsley.
Chancellor Clarendon, who had been negotiating arrangements for the
restitution of her pension, had left England in disgust at the
indifference of the Court and the ingratitude of the King, who was
prone to make a hand-clasp and a “God bless you, my old friend,” do
duty for more substantial repayments to impoverished Royalists.
On 6th February 1663 the Countess was ill, and writes thus:—
“If the winter is as bitter where you are as it is here, it is a
miracle to think your health has improved. Mine has been very
indifferent for more than a month; but God has preserved it for me.
I pray Him to enable me to use it to better account than I have done
in the past, and it is that which impels me to hasten to tell you
that it has pleased his Royal Highness to give to your nephew
Stanley the post of first and sole gentleman of the bedchamber,
which is a very desirable one, and, what is of more importance, that
it is the voluntary act of his Highness, to whom, and to the
Duchess, he owes all the obligation. His youngest brother has a
cornetcy in the King’s Guards. His Majesty has done him the honour
to tell him that this is only a commencement. Therefore I have
hope.... All that I have to add is that I pray God to give you many
long and happy years, with all the content you can desire. Permit me
to say also as much to my brother.”
Here the Countess of Derby lays down her pen for ever. On the 31st
March 1664 she died.
The chaplain of Knowsley, after inscribing her name in his death
register, wrote after it: “_Post funera virtus_”; and her memory and
her works will live on in the hearts of the English people.
This noble friend, true wife and mother, loyal subject, Charlotte de
la Trémoille, was the embodiment of all the significance of the
motto of her house,
“_Je maintiendrai_.”
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