The life-story of Charlotte de la Trémoille, Countess of Derby
Date: 2023-12-28T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Derby; Charlotte Stanley; countess of; 1599-1664

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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

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/72524

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

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 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

1

CHAPTER II

At the Hague. A Dreary Court. A Marriage of Convenience. A Lady-of-Honour. Home. The Firstborn. Cloudy Sunshine | 16

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

32

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

40

CHAPTER V

A Chapter of Correspondence | 56

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

62

CHAPTER VII

Manx Land. The Son of Leir. St. Patrick. 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

73

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”

84

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

95

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

107

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

114

CHAPTER XII

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

133

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”

149

CHAPTER XIV

An Indignant Refusal. Illness of Lady Derby. 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

163

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. 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

180

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

6.  Harl. MSS.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

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]

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]

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]

19.  Seacome.

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]

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.”

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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Table of Contents

- The Life-Story of Charlotte de la Trémoille Countess of Derby

- Contents
- CHAPTER I
- CHAPTER II
- CHAPTER III
- CHAPTER IV
- CHAPTER V
- CHAPTER VI
- CHAPTER VII
- CHAPTER VIII
- CHAPTER IX
- CHAPTER X
- CHAPTER XI
- CHAPTER XII
- CHAPTER XIII
- CHAPTER XIV
- CHAPTER XV
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE