On both sides of the sea: a story of the Commonwealth and the Restoration. A sequel to "The Draytons and the Davenants."

Front matter

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Chapter I

olive's recollections.

INCE England was, such an event was never witnessed within sound of her seas, as that which darkened London on the fatal 30th of January, 1649.

In tbe recollection of such moments it is difficult to disentangle feeling from fact, what Ave saw with our eyes and heard with our ears from what others told us, from what we saw with the imagination and heard with the heart.

In my memory that day lies shrouded and silent, as if all that happened in it had been done in a city spell-bound into silence in a hushed, sunless, colorless world, where all intermediate tints were gathered into funereal black and white, the black of the heavily-draped scaifold and the whiteness of the frosty ground from which it rose into the still and icy air ; whilst behind the palace slept, frost-bound, the mute and motionless river, imprisoning with

icy bars *.he motionless ships.

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From early in the day the thoroughfares and squares and open gathering-places of the city ivere filled with the Commonwealth soldiers- I remember no call of trumpet or beat of drum; only a slow pacing of horsemen, and marching of foot* men, silently, to their assigned positions, the tramp of men and the clatter of the horse-hoofs ringing from the hard and frosty ground, and echoing from the closed and silent houses on the line of march.

It was no day of triumph to any. To the army, and those who felt with them, it was a day of solemn justice, not of triumphant vengeance. To the Royalists it was a day of passionate hushed sorrow and bitter inward vows of retribution ; to the people generally a day of perplexity and woe.

Old Mr. Prynne, who owed the king nothing, as he said, but the loss oi his ears, the pillory, imprisonment, and fines, haC pleaded for him generously in the House, before the House had been finally " purged."

And the most part of the men, and well-nigh all the women, I think, would have said " Amen " to Mr. Prynne. If the king's captivity and trial and condemnation had been a solemn drama enacted to win the hearts of the people back to him, it could not have been more effectual. Political and civil rights, rights of taxation and rights of remonstrance, seemed to the hearts of most people to become mere technical legal terms in the presence of Royalty and Death. Pillories and prisons were dwarfed into mere private grievances beside the scaffold on which tbe king, son of so many kings, kings of so many

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submissive generations, the source of power, the only possible object of the dreadful crime called treason, was to die the death of a traitor.

The trial brought out all that was most pathetic in royalty and most noble in the king. The haughty glance which had been resented on the throne, was simply majestic when it encountered unflinchingly the illegal bench of judges on whom his life depended.

The Parliament, mutilated to a remnant, of fifty; the High Court of Justice, who could not agree among themselves, whose assumption of legal forms sounded (to many) like mockery, whose trappings of authority sat on them (many thought) like masquerade-robes, were a poor show to confront with that lonely majestic figui'e defying their sentence and their authority, a captive in the ancient Hall of Justice from which, throughout the centuries, not a sentence had issued save by the sanction of his forefathers.

The royal banners, which drooped from the roof above him, taken from his Cavaliers at Edgehill, Marston Moor, and Naseby, seemed to float there rather in his honor than in that of his judges. Many felt that adversity had restored to him his true royalty, and that he sat far more a king now, arraigned at the bar, than when, eight years before, at the last trial those walls had witnessed, he sat as a helpless spectator of the proceedings which brought Stratford, his greatest minister, to the scaffold

It was well for his adversaries that those days of the king's humiliation were not prolonged. Irro

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pressible veneration and pity began to stir among the crowds who beheld him, and the cries of "Justice ! justice !" were changed more thnn once into murmurs of " God save the king."

But the pity was a slowly-rising tide of waves now advancing and now recoiling. The determination for "justice on the chief delinquent" was a strong and steady, though narrow current ; and it Bwcpt the l ation on irresistibly to its end.

The soldiers, foot and horse, had taken up their position. My brother Roger and Job Forster were posted opposite Whitehall. Roger waved his hand as he passed our windows. His face, as was his wont in times of strong emotion, was fixed and stern. He was riding in a funeral procession, which for him led to more graves than one.

At ten o'clock His Majesty walked through St. James's Park to Whitehall, passing rapidly through the bitter cold, under the bare branches of the silent trees, through a crowd in appearance as cold as silent. His face, meu said, was calm and majestic as ever, although worn ; his beard had become gray, and his form had a slight stoop, although he was not fifty years of age, but his step was firm. He disappeared through the Palace gates, from which he was never to step forth again. Then followed six hours of suspense and terrible expectation, the crowds surging uneasily to and fro, unable to rest, repelled and yet attracted by the terrible fascination of the empty, expeetan* scaffold, whose heavy funereal draperies fell from the windows of the Banqueting Hall on the frosty ground beneath. There were whimpers that the uinliu&audor of the

United Provinces was pleading not hopelessly with Lord Fairfax ; that the Prince of Wales had sent a blank letter signed by himself, to be filled with any conditions the Commons chose to demand ; but that the king bad burned this letter, and refused the ministrations of any but the clergy of tbe Episcopal Church of the realm ; — so that if he was indeed to die, it would be as a martyr to the rights of the Crown and the Church.

And through these soberer reports ever and anon rose wild rumors of approaching deliverance, of risings in the Royalist counties, of avenging fleets approaching the Thames, of judgment direct from heaven on the sacrilegious heads of the regicides.

But to us who knew of the purpose which had been gathering force in the army since that prayer-meeting at Windsor six months before, those midday hours were hours not of doubt or suspense, but of awful certainty, as minute by minute the hour approached when that scaffold was to be empty no more.

We knew that within the still and deserted halls of that palace, the king was preparing to meet his doom ; and (all political questions and personal wrongs for the time forgotten) from a thousand roofs in the city went up prayers that he might be sustained ir dying, and might exchange the earthly orown which had sat on his brow so uneasily, for the crown of life which burdens not, nor fades away.

At length three o'clock, the moment of doom, came. "It was the ninth hour," as the Royalista loudly no^ed. Save the guard around the scaffold, 2

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and (hose who attended his dying moments on it, none were near enough to hear what passed there. It was all mute ; but the spectacle spoke. In most royal pageants, the thing seen is but a sign of the thing not seen. In this the thing to be seen was no mere sign, but a dread reality, a tremendous event. The black scaffold, the wintry silence, the vast awe-stricken crowd gazing mute and motionless on the inevitable tragedy ; a few plainly dressed men at last appearing on the scaffold around the well-known stately figure of the king, richly arrayed " as for his second bridal ;" " the comely head " laid down without a struggle on the block " as on a bed ;" the momentary flash of the axe ; the severed head raised an instant on high as " the head of a traitor ;" a shrouded form prostrate on the scaffold ; — and then, as good Mr. Philip Henry, who was present, said, " at the instant when the blow was given, a dismal universal groan among the thousauds of people who were within sight of it, as if with one consent, such as he had never heard before, and desired he might never hear the like again, or see such a cause for it."

The multitude were not left long to bewail their king. One troop of Parliament horse rode instantly, by previous order, from Charing Cross towards King Street, and another from King Street towards Charing Cross ; and so the crowd were scattered right and left, to lament as they might each man under his own roof, and to read in secret the " Eikon Basilike ' which it is said the king composed, copies of which were distributed under his

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«5 scaffold, and will, doubtless, be reverently treasured in every Royalist household ; not in the library, but in the oratory, beside the Bible and the Prayer-book, enkindling loyalty from a eonviction into a passion, deepening it from a passion to a religion, while they compare the king's trial to that before the unjust judge of old, his walk to the scaffold to that along the Dolorous Way, his sayings to those last words on which dying men and women have hung ever since.

Every one knows the heaviness with which even a day of festivity closes, when the event of the day is over. The weight with which that fatal day closed it is hard for any who did not feel it to imagine.

Scripture words repeated with ominous warning by ministers, Presbyterian and Episcopal, echoed like curses through countless hearts : " I gave them a king in my anger and took him away in my wrath." " Who am I that I should lay hands on the Lord's anointed ?"

Death gave to the king's memory an immaculateness very different from the technical, " the king can do no wrong of the ancient constitution."

And even with those whose resolution remained unwavering to the last, this was not the time for speech. The extremity of justice had been done, there was nothing more to be said. It would have been an ungenerous revenge far from the thoughts of such regicides as Colonel Hutchinson and General Cromwell to follow it with insulting words, and their own self-defence they were content to leavo to events. Mr. Milton's majestic Defences of the Eng« lish People came later.

Ours was a silent fireside that winter night, as Roger, weary and numb, came at last to warm hiai« self beside us.

As he entered, I was saying to my husband, " The terrible thing is, that he who lived trampling on the constitution and the rights of conscience, seems to have died a martyr to the constitution and conscience, doomed by a few desperate men."

" We must concern ourselves as little as possible, sister," Roger said very quietly, " with what seems."

" I fear this day will turn the tide against all for which you have fought throughout the war."

" The tide wull turn back," he said.

" But what if not in our time ? " I said.

" Then in God's time, Olive," he said ; " which is the best."

But he looked very worn and sad. I repented of having said these discouraging words, and weakly strove to undo them as he asked me to unlace the helmet which his benumbed hands could not unloose.

"I would rather a thousand times," I said, "have you with Colonel Hutchinson, and General Cromwell, and tliAse who dared to do what they thought right in the lace of the world, than with those who thought it right yet dared not doit, The nation will recognize their deliverer in General Cromwed yet."

" I do not know that, Olive," ho said ; " but it will be enough if General Cromwell delivers th«« nation."

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" At least the generations to come will do you all justice," I said.

" I am not sure of that," he said. " It depends on who writes the history for them. There is one Judgment Seat whose awards it is safe to set before us. Before that we have sought to stand. That sentence is irrevocably fixed. What it is we shall hear hereafter, when the voice of this generation and all the generations will move us no more than the murmur of a troubled sea a great way off, and far below."

Yet he could not touch the food we set before him ; and as he sat gazing into the fire, I knew there was one adverse verdict which he knew too well, and which moved his heart all the more that it had not been able to move a hair's breadth his conscience or his purpose.

Many sorrows met in Roger's heart, I knew, that night ; the pain of pity repressed driven back on the heart by a stern sense of justice ; the pain of being misjudged by some whom we honour; the pain of the resignation of the tenderest love and hope ; the pain of giving bitter pain to the heart dearest to hiin in the world. But one pain, perhaps the worst of all, he and men Avho, like Cromwell and Colonel Hutchinson, had carried out that day's doom fearlessly before the world because in unshaken conviction of its justice before God, were spared— the enervating anguish of perplexity and doubt. Aud this, perhaps, is the sorest pain of alL lettice's diaky.

" ' The space between is the way thither,' Mr, Drayton said. It may be ; it ought to be. Bu* is it? That seems to me precisely the one terrible question which, when we can get cleared, all life becomes clear in the light of the answer, but which it is so exceedingly hard to have cleared.

" The days, as they pass, whether clothed in light and joy, as the old time at home was when I had a home, and a mother, and so many hopes — or in darkness that may be felt, as so many of these later days have been to me, are indeed surely leading us on to old age, to death, to the unseen world, and the judgment. But are they indeed leading us on to new youth, to changeless life, to heaven, and the King's ' Well done ? '

" If I were as sure of the last as of the first, for me and mine, I think (at least there are moments when I think) I would scarcely care whether the days were dark or bright. For life is to be a war-

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fare. All kinds of Christian people agree in that. And having learned what war means, I do not expect it to be easy or pleasant.

" But I am not sure. For myself or for any one.

" flower thinks the execution of the king was a terrible duty. I think it was almost an inexpiable crime.

" Olive, I know, thinks I am breaking plighted faith, and betraying the most faithful affection in the world in parting from Roger. Mistress Dorothy *b inks I am fulfilling a sacred duty, doing what was

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saeant when we were commanded to pluck out tha right eye. As to the pain, I am sure she is right. If I could only be as sure as to the duty ! For if it is right, it must be good, really, in the end for him as well as for me. How, I cannot imagine. For it seems bad as well as bitter for me. And Olive says it will be bad and embittering for him.

" Happy, happy people, who lived in the old days of dreams, and visions, and heavenly voices, saying, ' This is the way ; walk in it ; ' when God's will became manifest in pillars of fire and cloud, in discriminating dews and fires of sacrifice, and such simple outward signs as poor perplexed hearts like mine can understand.

" Holy people say these days of ours are in advance of those, that the light has increased since then. I suppose it has, for holy people, who have grown up to it, and have eyes to see those inward leadings, and ears to hear those inward voices, which to me are so dim. But I feel as if I were still a child, and would fain have lived in that simple childhood of the world, when God spoke to men in plain ways as to children.

" Since I came here, I saw at the door of one of the churches a very awful piece of sculpture of the eouls in purgatory, all aglow with the fires in which they were burning, stretching out piteous hands through iron bars for help and prayers from those still living on the earth.

u Mistress Dorothy was with me, and she clasped her hands over her eyes in horror, as she turned away fO

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" But to me it did not scorn so horrible. At leart not for the souls in purgatory. If there -,rere a purgatory. Because the thought of its beir.g purgatory, must take away all that is unendurable out of the anguish of the names. There are hearts on earth tormented in fires as real. But the sting of their anguish is, they cannot be sure they are purgatorial fires. The anguish is clear enough. If we could only be as sure as to the purification. That the pain is from the remedy, not from the disease ; that the flames are on the way to heaven, not mercifully confronting us on the other way to turn x» *ack.

" It always seemed as if, by Rogers side, I » Aould have orown eood like him. How am I to srrow gcod without him, severing myself from him ? G h, mother, mother! why must you leave me jus<- now, when no one else in the world could have t Ad me what to do. Because, while loving me moi e than yourself, you loved God's will far more than my pleasure.

" But Mistress Dorothy says, when I am tempted with ' vain reasonings ' and ' debatings of the flesh,' I must go back to the first sacred impulse, when, by my mother's death-bed, I felt the death of the king for whom she would have died must place an impassable barrier between me and those who slew him, or consented to his death.

" First thoughts, says she, are often from abpve second thoughts from within or from below. And if we endure to the end, third thoughts will come crowning the divine impulse of the first with a calm Urine assurance.

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u J. will try to endure to the end. At least 1 will wait.

" To strengthen my resolve, let me go hack to that sacred impulse, and through all it led to, up to this day.

" It was during those terrible days of early January, when hope and fear had passed, with uncertain ty ; and I sat by my mother's bedside, all my heart and soul absorbed in watching her depart, and in relieving any suffering or supplying any want for her so fast passing away from all suffering and from all our service.

" The east winds were careering across the Fens, and broke fiercely against the old house, and one night there was a crash of the great scarred elm-tree filling close outside the windows. But she heeded it not ; and I remember feeling a strange kind of despairing triumph over all the violence of the elements. They might rage as at the Deluge ; but they could neither hinder nor hasten the slow, silent progress of the awful power which was silently removing her from us.

" Before, in days of doubt and hope, I had been wont to watch the winds with a kind of superstitious solicitude, as if there were some mysterious sympathy between nature and men, and the ravings of her storms had been ominous of evil to us. But now that spell seemed broken. The sympathy be« twecn us and nature ceased with death. To her it was natural, a link in her endless chain of ever-recur ring changes. To her, life and death were but as day and night, bright or dark phases of her ceaseless revolutions. She could see her children die as calmly as her suns set. To us death was unnatural, a convulsion, a horror, a curse. The terrible thing which seemed to assimilate us to her, in reality rent us from her sphere altogether. A week before, when we began to fear there was danger, I trembled at the wind wailing in the dead branches of the elms, or at a bird beating its wings against the window. Now that she was dying, I could have smiled at an earthquake or a tornado.

" All the outward and visible world, the terrors of its stormy nights as well as the sweet familiar delights of its dawns and days, seemed to lie outside me like a world of shadows, as for the first time I learned in my inmost heart that we are but strangers, not belonging to it, but passing swiftly through. As I gazed into the eyes which so soon were to cease to be the portal where my soul could meet hers, my own body seemed to become a mere phantasm, the innermost shell of this world of phantasms, where we stay a little while, to read its lessons and experience its changes, and then vanish, we from it and it from us. It was not so with the conflict then going on about the king. There, consciences were concerned, and right and wrong. And by her dying bed, right and wrong seemed the only realities left. I dared not break on the calm of her spirit with oue word that might recall the conflicts of parties. Thus Love itself severed her spirit from me before death had sealed her eyes. And this was terrible beyond all. For as I sat there, the conviction became clearer and clearer that to put the king

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*J t:> death was crime, a crime she would have abhor red, a crime which, if he persisted in the doing i% must sever me from Roger.

" But alas, when Death came, this was all terriblj reversed.

" When the feeble voice which had called on the Heavenly King, and the eyes whose tender smiles for me had changed at the last into the awed yet joyful intensity of the gaze with which her spirit seemed to welcome heaven and enter it, the whole unseen world seemed to vanish from my heart with her, and nothing was left but the eyes which could never look at me, and the lips which could never speak to me more.

"For this honor I was wholly unprepared. 1 thought, when she went, she would have left me standing, if but for one never-to-be-forgotten moment, on the threshold of an opened Paradise ! She left me shivering on the brink of an impenetrable darkness. I could not feel even on the brink of an abyss. To have believed in an abyss even would have been an infinite relief. The horror was whether the darkness hid anything, whether there was a beyond at all.

" Could it be, indeed, that all, absolutely all, any one saw of death was just the heaving breast, the labouring breath, the lew, faint, intermittent sighs; all which, in all animated creatures, marks the dissolution of natural life, and nothing to mark the distinctive, continuing, spiritual life of man?

" Was faith, then, to step so absolutely alone, un« lighted by the least glimmer of the old familiar light, into the unknown ?

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"No one else arouud me seemed to experience this terrible darkness.

" They recalled the last words she spoke ; they spoke of the pure raiment, clean and white, in which her spirit was clothed, of the golden streets she was treading, of the 'harps of God' to which she was listening. But the words fell altogether outside me, like some sweet, pathetic story of faery or romance, such as she used to tell me.

" I, too, from my childhood had delighted in those fair pictures of a Paradise beyond the grave, of the city with gates of moon-like pearl, and walls of radiant gems ; of trees whose leaves were healing and whose fruit was life ; of waters clear as crystal, able to satisfy immortal thirst. I had delighted in those pictures, my fancy floating on thein as on the glow- Lag clouds of twilight, caring not to discriminate what was cloud, what were the bright glorified heights of earth, and what were heavenly, enduring Btars; caring not to separate symbol from fact.

" But now all this was changed. What were fair pictures to me, brought face to fiice with this visible, terrible fact, that the spirit which had been my guide before I could remember, that iny mother herself had gone where no cry of passionate entreaty, no tender ministry of love could reach, no agony of prayer avail to win the faintest sign that she heard, or cared, or existed?

" A few hours since she had said, ' Throw my warm old mantle round thee, Lettice, the nights are chilL' She had taken food from my hands, and murmured, smiling, 'Once I gave it thee.' And

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now 1 he farthest star that sent the faintest ray from the utmost verge of the world, was near, compared with the impassable gulf of distance between her and aie. What were fair visions of angels to me ? What had they been to the Magdalene of old ? II she lived, she was the same loving, tender saintly mother still, unlike any one else in the universe; not a white-robed angel lost in an overwhelming multitude of other white-robed angels, singing.

"My heart ached, and cried to heaven for one word, one syllable, one touch, to show that she was there. Would God give me instead, only fair pictures of an innumerable multitude far off, serenely singing as if they had not left any on earth bitterly weeping ?

"I scarcely dared to think those thoughts, much less to utter them, until one day, the dreadful day when we left the house with the precious burden through which she had been all she was to me, and returned with nothing, the passion of my grief overcame me.

" Olive and Dr. Antony had left. Mistress Dor othy was standing on one side of the fire, in the wainscotted parlour which they had reserved fur me.

" It was not her wont to dwell much on symbols and pictures, whether painted with words or colours. And seeing me sit with clasped hands in a kind of stupor, for I could not weep, she said, not in a tone of consolation so much as of rebuke, —

" ' Child, sorrow not as those without hope. It i* a sin. Thy mother is with God.'

" There was something in her words which went more to ray heart than all the tenderest consolations had done. They did not seem said so much to comfort me, as simply because they were true.

" * If I could hope, I would not sorrow,' I murnured.

" ' There is much reason to hope,' said she. ' Pa- *-ista even have been saved, I doubt not, at least lefore the Reformation. And Lady Lucy was not a Papist. I doubt not that the Spirit of God dwelt in her as his temple. The Lord, indeed, of old suffered neither idol nor trafficker in his temple. But, mayhap, the traffickers are worse than the idols. And, indeed, dear heart,' she concluded, ' I do think sometimes we Protestants are like the later Jews, if the Papists and the Papistically inclined are like the earlier. We have cleared out the idols ; but we keep the tables of the money-changers, mayhap the basest idolatry of all.'

"She had entirely misunderstood my perplexity. That she should imagine my mother's title to blessedness required defence to me, would have stung me to an indignant reply at other moments ; but I was too cast down to be angry, and I only said, —

" ' It is not of my mother I doubt, but of heaven ; of everything. It ^eems as if all my old faith had vanished like a dream.'

" I scarcely thought of the weight of my words, until their own echo startled me ; and I trembled at what effect they might have on Mistress Dorothy.

" But, to my surprise, her first words, spoken ai if to herself, were, —