Philip Lancaster

Chapter I

During the reign of King James I., and some years before the unhappy troubles that disturbed these kingdoms, a certain gentleman in the west of England, occupying about that station which the said King James was wont to call the happiest — below the lot of a justice of the peace, and above that of a petty constable — turned his younger son adrift to seek his fortunes. Family tradition asserts that this younger son dared to lift his eyes to a beautiful cousin, an heiress, his father's ward, and destined for the elder brother. Family history re cords that the beautiful cousin married the elder son, joining her acres to his, and brought him, in course of years, a goodly famdy of sons and daugh ters, whose portraits now hang in the old, old, house, where they were taken two hundred and fifty odd years ago.

The sons and daughters of the VOL. I. B beauty raised the family credit; they rose above the station of their grandfather; some of the sons were justices of the peace, and walked and talked in assize time with Sir George, afterwards Lord, Jeffreys : one took holy orders, and became chaplain and conscience-keeper to a certain court nobleman, subsequently assuming the mitre, which he stdl wears in his portrait. As for the daughters, they married, to use the old phrase, into considerable f amdies ; their pictures, strait-boddiced, dark-eyed, ruddy-cheeked, hang yet in yon old house, making sunshine in a shady place. Ah, how many changes have befallen since they and theirs were laid beneath the still sod or in the silent vault; yet the sun at eventide irradiates their pictures, so curiously quaint, so strangely beautiful: still their pictured faces tell in some sort the story of their lives, and beam upon us from the olden wall like revelations.

Well, well, in turn we aU pass away, and leave only our pictures and our names behind. The younger son, outturned and fortuneless, had a great spirit and an ardent brain : had means of fered, he might have done great things; but he spent many years of his life " gentleman " — so runs the ancient phrase, which gently disguised social slavery, — gentleman to my Lord Pembroke. Phdip Lancaster, the outcast son, met accidentally with the Earl, who was charmed with the lad's sprightly conversation, and persuaded him to become a de pendent of his family. Those times were not so grinding and unkindly in the social relations as are these ; Philip made himself beloved and valued by my lord; nursing him, indeed, through a long and severe illness, with more than womanly tenderness ; and my lord learned to love Lancaster.

Presently, when Pembroke came to be Lord Chamberlain, he preferred his friend's interest to his own comfort, and procured him a place in the king's service. Lancaster was made keeper of the orchard at Whitehall, and, subsequently, page of the back stairs, to James, Duke of York. This place entailed a personal attendance on the prince, in which Lancaster acquitted himself well. He came to be regarded by the king as a faithful servant and true friend. Indeed, after the troubles began (in King Charles the Fnst's time), Lancaster continued to Uve at WhitehaU, though all emoluments of his appointment had ceased; and the king, on his way to take water to Westminster, to undergo his trial, enquired for his faithful servant. Whereupon PhiUp Lancaster bade God bless his Majesty, and deliver him out of the hands of his enemies.

For this speech, the guards accompanying the king showed him no good wdl, and might have done him misb chief, had not the care of their august prisoner interfered. Before this, however, Philip Lancaster, who we may presume had got over early love affairs, had taken unto himself a wife, a pious gentlewoman of the parish of St. Martin-in-the-Ficlds, who was a great help and consolation amid the varying troubles of his life. She lived with her husband in his apartments at Whitehall, and had brought him a little son, whose birth took place not long after that of the Duke of York. The chdd, owing to his father's office, and the similarity of age, was fre quently with the young princes, who promised him all kinds of preferment when he should be old enough to avaU himself of it. It is also noted that Archbishop Laud took friendly notice of our little Philip, for the child would often attend at the Watergate at Whitehall to let the archbishop through, as he came from council on his way to cross the water to Lambeth.

From such early training at court, people were wont to account for his constant urbanity aud gentleness : his kindly man ners, we doubt not, had a yet more living spring. His mother, that pious gentlewoman of St. Martin's in-the-Fields, would certaiuly instruct him in the Christian duty of courtesy to aU men. The Court broke up in 1641, being scattered by the disorders of the times ; but our Philip retained his suave and pleasant manners. He was placed, some years after, under the care of Dr. Busby, at Westminster; the gentle puritan, his mother, requesting that he might be allowed to attend the morning lectures at the Abbey, between six and eight o'clock. So the little lad turned out early, writing down the sermons of the worthy divines who took turns in that service, and omitting no school duty on account of this religious observance.

He was bright and quick ; the severe and kind Busby appreciated the boy, and, indeed, was accustomed to call him his son. Such pro gress did he make at Westminster School, that in 1645 he was admitted king's scholar; "partly," says his candid biographer, " by his own merit, and partly by the Earl of Pembroke's interest : " and so he started for Oxford. But before he left Westminster School, he, and the other king's scholars, made their first commu nion in St. Margaret's, Westminster. Good Doctor Busby took such great and affectionate pains with our young gentleman, that he never forgot the obligation under which he lay, and years afterwards, when the Doctor, meeting him, said, " Prythee, child, what made thee a Nonconformist ? " the former pupil answered, " Truly, sir, you made me one ; for you taught me those things that hindered me from conforming."

He was no strait-laced pu ritan; and when the parliament made their visitation of the university in 1647-8, returned them an answer consistent with his oath of aUegiance, taken only a month before the visitation. At the uni versity he consorted chiefly with the cavaliers; the scholars who flocked in, rough and rude, when the parliament influence began to teU, being little to his mind. Towards the end of 1648, our young scholar paid his father a visit at Whitehall. There he was stiU on the 30th of January in the next year, and saw that tragical blow dealt which ended the days of the elder Lancaster's kind master. He noted what a dismal groan went forth from the crowd when that royal head was severed, and how the troops rode hither and thither; one party from Charing cross to King-street, another from King-street to Charing-cross, scattering and frightening the popu lace as they went.

He remembered the dark pen sive eyes which had looked on while he and the two princes played ; and his young heart ached for the fatal event of royal falsehood and treachery ; — but he called it the martyrdom of a Christian king. Studious, pious, cheerful, and witty, he made a mark in his College of Christchurch, and had every prospect of good preferment, when a certain judge's lady in the west of England, requiring a tutor for her sons, and a family chaplain, wrote to a friend at Oxford detading her wishes. Young Lancaster, a well-favoured youth of three-and-twenty years, was recommended to the lady's care, and he left Oxford for Worthenbury, by the Dee side, in the hundred of Flintshire. Before he quitted his university, he had gained no inconsiderable name as a pubUc orator ; the Vice-ChanceUor had openly praised his exercises, and he had been chosen on two occasions to answer the philosophy questions; and, with his academic honours on his brow, the young man set out.

He had now few ties ; his father had not long outlived the king, and his mother soon followed her yoke-fellow to the grave. Mr. Lancaster was to pray in the family, preach once on the Sunday, and instruct the sons of his employer ; all winch offices he consented to perform temporarily. The young man, who retained the les sons and teaching of the pious gentlewoman his mother, soon learned to pity the ignorant condition of the baptised Christian people of Worthenbury, by the Dee side. The judge, his master, was a quiet, well-meaning gentleman, who rather deferred to his lady, an active rehgious person, well-affected towards all who served her with fidelity, and, by consequence, attached to young Lancaster, her chaplain. So great a change did the youth's preaching effect, that the ale-house was deserted and the church ftdl; the whole aspect of the parish was improved, and when the young man's stipulated six months were run out, my lady begged him not to return to his academical Use, but to remain in a place where he was so useful.

Perhaps he felt lost among a people so impoUte and rural, and could not perceive that good influence of his preaching which my lady saw; perhaps he had overwhelming discomforts to bear in the judge's household; however that may be, he returned to Oxford as he had purposed, but was fetched back at the earnest entreaty of the Worthenbury people. Worthenbury had formerly been a chapelry depen dent on Bangor; but the parliament (prelacy was aboUshed) had made it into a separate parish, and the judge, who owned the tithes of Worthenbury, made them over to Mr. Lancaster, and budt him a house. Thus he became the parish minister, being ordained according to the recent act of par liament ; and, laying aside his scholarly leisure and courtly ease, preached and taught among the poor people of Worthenbury.

Our young pastor among his midtifarious cares had not forgotten that he must have a helpmeet ; he courted and married the daughter of a gentleman in the neighbourhood, after some difficulties and obstructions on her father's part. Perhaps the father thought those were dark days for the clerical profession, and would have preferred that his daughter should have married young Flint, the magistrate's son ; — young FUnt, who succeeded his father on the bench, and arrested Mr. Lancaster years after, for preaching contrary to the law; — but the pastor gained his point : he married and took home his wife. She was an only child, her father's heiress ; and, some years after, succeeded to his property. By that time she had four or five children, and her husband was of great repute among the religious people of tbe district.

Yet, though keeping peace with his neighbours, and endeavouring to set them a Christian example, our pastor was not so much a puritan as many in those days ; he had no love for dissent, as such, and rather taught conformity in everything, where his conscience would allow him. He was loyal still, and deplored what he considered the usurpation of Oliver CromweU. For his princely playmates, now exiled and in poverty, he offered up constant prayers, and even sent them (for him) a munificent present when he heard they were in want of money. For months b Lancaster's table was poorly furnished in conse quence of this loyal act : the prince who got the money tbrew it away on his worthless companions, and purchased himself an hour's enjoyment with people he despised. Clever, selfish, heartless, wicked, what cared he that warm hearts were stdl storing up prayerful hopes of the future, and begging God bless him, and restore him to his nation.

So long as he had a woman to flatter him, and a man of whom he could borrow money, what anxiety tormented that son of a thrice unhappy pair ? So Lancaster's money was spent in drunkenness, top knots, and frippery, while the pastor discharged a serving-man to make up for his expenses, and had the farm-work of his little estate considerably in arrears. The judge had melted down his silver plate, and sent it on the same errand as Lancaster's more modest present. Kindly loyalty of brave English hearts ; how easily provoked, how basely repaid ! What punishment was too severe for a race that tyrannised and trifled away such a depth of love and fervour ? Meantime our young pastor became surrounded with sons and daughters, good, and fair, and kind ly, as became their parentage and training. He visited his parishioners, catechised their children, preached in their church, relieved their sorrows, and guided their prayers.

His gentle teaching, fuU of love and simplicity, subdued the rough English hinds, and turned the desert of Worthenbury into a garden. Happy within doors and without, blest in his people and in his family, Lancaster went ou his laborious way, taking pleasure in his many la bours, and knowing no weariness in his Master's work. How could he grow tired? The people loved and trusted him ; their young men and he had grown up into life together ; he had married them, and baptised their children: the aged at the fireside looked eagerly for his visits ; they were past visiting him, so he came to them. They remembered the old times, when Worthenbury depended on Baugor, and those who could not go to Bangor rarely heard a word of rehgious teaching. The pro fligates whom he had reformed blessed him; the miserable he had consoled smiled upon him; the poor he had relieved gratefully acknowledged his bounty.

Ah ! what an anxious, good, lovely life ! Ever busy, never weary; constant in prayers and teachings, sparing in rebukes, is it wonderful that the pastor of Worthenbury was known all over the county side ? He was not of the unquiet sort, hating king and priest, eager for preferment from Parliament, ungenial, unthankful, uncourteous, mean. He troubled not himself with public affairs, excepting to beg the mercy of heaven on his country and his royal friends across the seas. His Use was prayer and love. And yet he did not neglect the few fields he possessed; he considered it his duty to manage well his worldly affairs ; for he inculcated on his neighbours, that religion should interfere with no business of life, but rather incite them to the due performance of it. We may readily guess, that if his hay wanted carrying, and the clouds were gathering, other men might wait while he was served.

The poor people to whom he ministered loved and cherished him, and were eager to prove their affection. So gratefully and meekly he accepted their goodness, so tenderly he nurtured them, that all hearts were with him ; and, as he moved from place to place, every eye that saw him blessed him. During his career at Worthenbury, several offers of considerable preferment were made him, aU which he rejected for the sake of those, whom to serve was the object of his Use. But the country, tired of the burdensome puritan yoke, began to shake its fetters. Cheshire rose in August, 1659, and Lambert's forces were sent to queU the riot. The soldiers came to Worthenbury Church, where Lancaster was preaching. They were rough men, and one entered the church with his hat on, and wore it whde the people sang then psalm, for which he was duly admonished.

Poor Lancaster's heart palpitated strangely, no doubt, to have this fighting so near home. What would be the end thereof? On the 19th, the Cheshire men and Lambert's forces had a fight near Northwich, and the parliamentarians won it. Many of the ministers round about blamed Lancaster for not setting apart a thanksgiving-day ; but he was not so sure the parhament men were right. He remembered his prince over the seas, for whose return, in submission to the wiU of heaven, he never ceased to pray ; and, iu the following spring, by an unexpected turn in affairs, the king was quietly and peaceably settled on the throne of his fathers. Now Lancaster kept a thanksgiving-day, and his text was, " The King's heart is in the hand of the Lord." But that event for which he had prayed had not long befaUen, wUen great disappointments and troubles began to arise.

Lancaster had then been married only a little time, and his wife had not come into her property. He was told that the Duke of York had inquned for Uim, and some advised him to pursue his interest at court; but he was more mindful of the sacred work he had undertaken, and remained teaching and preaching at Worthenbury so loug as he was permitted. The deeds of the late parhament were disallowed ; the parson of Bangor was sent away, and the living restored to its former holder, son to the Bishop of Chester. Worthenbury was once more a chapelry of Bangor, and Lancaster only the incumbent's curate, illegaUy ordained, and removable at pleasure. Lancaster trembled at the prospect of becoming useless in a work he loved, and laboured the more diligently to fulfil his duties. He approved himself a good and loyal sub ject, taking the oath of aUegiance, and observing the anniversary of the king's happy restoration; but in August, 1662, Lancaster, and two thousand others, many of whom were like-minded peaceable men, were turned out of then livings, and forbidden to preach.

The wa'ntonest cruelty was used to en snare and entrap them; act upon act of despot ism foUowed. No attempt at concdiation was made, and we may be sure the quieter and better sort suffered most in such troublous times. Lancaster was not disposed to disturb any man's peace, yet he felt cruelly wronged when turned out of the pretty parsonage-house, built for him by his patron, the late judge. He might have conformed, it is true; the differences were not so great; a different gesture at the communion, a few prayers more or less, a fresh ordination, and a confession that his former ordination was null and void ; but Lancaster, if any such hints arose in his mind, sternly quelled them, recalling the honest teachings of his mother, that pious gentlewoman, long ago at rest with her husband. Lancaster could not feel his ordination null and void; could not think his ministrations had been illegal during the eight years he had laboured in Worthenbury.

The good had been consoled, the bad reformed, the chddren trained up in piety by his means ; nor could he confess that he had broken any law in distributing the bread of life. He was tinned out, and presently came the Five Mile Act, forbidding any nonconforming minister to live within five mUes of his former cure. Lancaster's wife's house was within the distance ; the father of the famdy had to flee from Worthenbury ; he lodged about among his acquaintance, secretly preaching here and there, until the year of the plague, when he came to London, took possession of a pulpit, from which the regular clergy had fled, aud preached, his hearers said, as though his lips had been touched with the live coal from off the altar ; but he caught the fell disease. Away from wife and children he died, and was hurried by strange hands into an in decent grave.

And this was the lot of Busby's favourite; the courteous, scholarly, Philip Lancaster. This was the punishment of that best and most exacting gift of heaven, — a conscience too noble to palter with truth. The poor lady at Worthenbury, in sorrow and sadness, set about the task of bringing up her children. She had seen her husband, good, clever, gay, oppressed and harassed by the agents of the chinch. She had seen him carried to jail for illegally expounding the Gospel of life ; tremblingly had she taken the celestial bread from his dear hand, and at last had had to hurry him away from Worthenbury and the people who loved him. Is it strange that she felt wronged ? Is it strange that her sons grew up bold and brave, defying the system under which their father had suffered ? Their father's troubles made bigots of the sturdy, shrewd lads : at their mother's death, they sold the little Worthenbury estate ; three went over the seas to New England ; one sought a quiet town in the south of his own country, and took up his abode not far from the noble University of Oxford, where his father's honours had been gained.

In that quiet place he pros pered ; he bought and sold, and got gain ; some acres he called his own; and, marrying a poor Huguenote lady, driven from France by the severity of King Louis XIV., he trained up a son, who added more to the little family property. This lad listened wonderingly to the tales of both parents : tales of romance, and love, and religion ; of imprisonment, and even slaughter. His mother had seen children PniLIP LANCASTER. snatched from the parents to be trained in the Ro mish faith, and had even lived in the house with the wdd licentious dragoons quartered for very vexation's sake on the quiet Huguenot people. She had seen the father of a famdy struck on the mouth by a drunken, cursing soldier, who thus interrupted the evening prayer of his hosts. Pursued by a wdd scion of quality, who was ravished by the dark eyes of the gentle heretic, she had escaped on shipboard with her life in her hand.

One night, hungry, wet, tired, in a stranger's land, and ignorant of the language, she had stopped in the rain, and at Lancaster's door had begged a piece of bread. While preferring her prayer, she fainted. Lancaster tended her as a sis ter, and she found peace and rest where at most she had expected an alms. He took that sweet creature to his home and heart ; and their son, trained up in piety by his mother, in hatred of tyranny and popery by his father, became no un worthy scion of the old stock. It was the Hugue note's husband who, in the glorious reign of King WiUiam III., laid the first stone of yonder ugly meeting-house in Woodington. Beautiful to him was the homely sanctuary where he and his might worship in peace. The same Gdbert Lancaster, " being blessed by Providence in his worldly en deavours," so runs his inscription, " and in gratitude for the happy deliverance of his dear wife, Anne Maria Jacquelet, from the hands of cruel and blood-thirsty enemies," erected the alms-houses yonder for six poor Protestant people, of decent life and conversation.

GUbert and his sweet Huguenote wife repose in the burial-ground hard by the homely meeting-house ; but the six poor Protestant people enjoy his bene faction still, and their establishment, with its quaint garden and curious old fountain, is no mean orna ment to Woodington, the Uttle town he inhabited. His son, and his son's sons, had their own peculiar troubles ; but the ugly meeting-house was still open to receive them, and they led, ordinarily, a quiet, peaceable life. Yet, iu spite of then harmlessness, they had been sometimes interfered with : one preacher of the name had been dragged from his pulpit, and through a horsepond, greatly to the edification of an idle crowd, who, no doubt, entered keenly into the delicate religious differences involved in the dispute. Another representative of the family had been mulcted in a considerable sum of money, for absenting himself from church; and, in default of payment, had been flung into j ad, wUere he died of a pestilent fever; for in his days a prison was a prison indeed.

Notwithstanding these and minor annoyances, there was no record of a Lancaster misconducting himself, in any other way than in presuming to differ from the church of these realms as by law established. They were a quiet, gentle, peaceful race, and the young Philip, of whom we shaU presently hear more, was not unworthy of them. Yet the general rule of their quietness and gentle ness was not without exception : one generation brought forth a Lancaster, wild, reckless, daring, clever. He scattered the property acquired during so many years. He left Woodington, and took arms in the Pretender's service ; he laughed at the meeting-house and the puritans, his kinsmen, who rue fully saw him flinging hither and thither the little family property. He married and brought home a wife, who used a mass-book, and scared Woodington by having a live priest in the house.

This Lancaster laughed alike at mass-book, prayer-book, and mi nister. He fought and joked away through life, and fell at Culloden, after a day of bravery and prowess. Then his kinsmen took charge of his son, and the widow went abroad into a religious house. Her quiet soul longed for peace and pleasure such as she had known in the convent where she had been brought up. So, among those shady gardens, and in the gorgeous little convent chapel, the soldier's widow ended her days. Her boy was trained up to hate his mother's faith, and became in time the father of two children. But tlie property of the Lancasters had long been ebbing; Gilbert's acres had wasted away under various influences ; nothing was left but an old house and orchard, and a little meadow land, which feU to the elder son, father of the Philip, of whom our reader wdl hear more.

The younger son was a roUing stone; Wooding ton was too quiet for his restless spirit. He had his portion in money, like the prodigal son, and spent it in much the same manner. A fair scholar, he travelled over Europe while his funds lasted, making himself everywhere welcome. Presently his money was gone; he was then ashamed, (though povertj afterwards altered that,) to come back pen ndess to his stern elder. He subsisted awhile by acting as tutor to some lads of quality; but soon breaking loose from this drudgery, he entered the service of a foreign prince, and came back to Wood ington, at last, penniless stdl, and with only one leg. Poor Jack Lancaster was a born vagabond, and would have run through his thousands a year with distinction. All through life he was ready to serve a friend, and to injure himself with equal eagerness.

The elder son, our Philip's father, had an abhor rence of his brother's profligacy ; from a boy he had looked piteously at the acres once the property of his family, and longed, in his ardent young soul, to build up a fortune and redeem them. Studious, quick, bright, and keen, he mastered with ease and pleasure every department of learning presented to him. He longed to go further, and to scale heights beyond his power and opportunities. While poor Jack dogs'-eared his book, and besmeared his face with useless tears, the other lad repeated his task, and thought it out keenly to himself. An in defatigable student, he read and wrote early and late. The condition of his neighbours about him, the liberties and disadvantages of his puritan faith, any and every subject, fed his eager, ardent brain.

He had a contempt for the rosy, stupid brother, who laboured hard — under strict compulsion — to un derstand what he learned. The boy's master was one of the old school ; if Jack disliked learning, so much the more reason to press it on him. Jack and the cane were fearfully famUiar; but his tutor made a fair scholar of him ere he turned him abroad : in spite of himself Jack acquired a tolerable share of education. He was a theorist : he invented wonderful fish-hooks and bird-traps, which were always impracticable. At last, after many and bitter quarrels, Jack took his money, and left Woodington. The elder brother, shocked by Jack's conduct, ap plied himself with increased assiduity to his studies ; perhaps, also, (for human motives are seldom unmingled,) he rather gloried in the bright contrast he presented; hard, stern, clever, he hit on a truth worth working out, and wrote a little pamphlet on the subject.

It attracted the attention of government, which had been long puzzling over the difficulty that Lancaster, in the silence of his study, saw the means of surmounting. Enquiry was made, and his talent might have found appropriate employment ; in fact, he was designated to some little office under government, but the Test Act and a Lancaster's conscience prevented him from accepting the employ which involved the forswearance of his religious principles. Chafing and fretting over the impregnable honesty of his own nature, and yet glorying in his sacrifice, he turned his back on his wrorldly prospects, and, his father dying soon afterwards, he found his property so small as to require some improvement. He made his old barn into a spinning shop, and became a maker of hempen cloth : lord ing it imperiously over his workpeople, to whom, nevertheless, he was severely just and sternly kind.

He felt no little acrimony towards a system which he considered had treated him unjustly. The habit of counting himself an injured man had grown into a quarrelsome devotion to the ideas winch had cost him so much: he hated popery and prelacy, and tried to instil all his hatreds, theological and political, into the breast of Philip, his only son. A novel is nothing without a sketch of the gene alogy of the chief personages ; and it is for the reas surance of the poUte reader, should that transcen dental individual condescend to open this book, that these particulars of Lancaster's ancestry have been given. From the circumstance of his worshiping his Creator after the manner that some call heresy, many persons would be reasonably alarmed lest low company be introduced ; but Lancaster was a gentle man, though a hempen-cloth weaver, and came of a noble family, after the style of other nobility than that known at the Heralds' College.