CHAP. XII.
Thus see we how these ugly furious spirits
Of warre are cloth’d, colour’d, and disguis’d,
With stiles of vertue, honour, zeale, and merits,
Whose owne complexion, well anatomis’d,
A mixture is of pride, rage, avarice,
Ambition, lust, and every tragicke vice.
Lord Brooke.
It is now necessary to relate that treatment of George Juxon to which old Margery alluded in the last chapter. For six weeks after the first visit of the Parliamentary soldiers to Old Beech he successfully maintained his post, and continued to officiate every Sabbath among his people. His house, indeed, had been often beset by small parties of soldiers or by other godly reformers deputed to arrest him, but he was so beloved by the villagers that he was always warned, and was thus enabled to escape their hands or evade their search; nor were any of these parties of a strength sufficient for attempting acts of violence upon the church or the parsonage. Indeed one of them was fairly braved and driven away by Juxon himself, disguised like a farmer, and aided by his faithful friend the blacksmith and half a dozen more. One Sabbath morning, as he was out upon the watch, in the disguise of a belted woodman, he met a party coming to seize him about a mile from Old Beech, and, having put them on a wrong scent, went joyfully home, and preached to a glad and attentive congregation. However, his popularity and his very name were offences too great in the sight of the Roundheads of Coventry to suffer him much longer to elude his enemies. A squadron of horse made a sudden march from that city on a Sunday afternoon, and surprised both pastor and flock while engaged at divine service. They rode into the churchyard; and having there dismounted, their commander, followed by a dozen or more officers and troopers, entered the church with their steel caps on their heads, and, by the noise of their steps, would have drowned the voice of Juxon if he had not instantly made a pause to consider his best course. One look at the leader of this band satisfied him that any appeal to the spirit of love and of a sound mind would be vain; and a glance through the window had shown him that any resistance by force on the present occasion would only expose his people to a very great calamity.
The commander of the troops was no other than Sir Roger Zouch. Accordingly Juxon said, with a loud voice, “My Christian brethren, the worship of God in this place being thus interrupted, I dismiss you to your homes.” His manly tone caused an attention on the part of the soldiery, which produced a short and silent pause, and, taking advantage of this, he solemnly pronounced the blessing with which the service of the church always concludes. Sir Roger, after stammering with anger, now broke out most violently, “Peace, peace! thou criest peace where there is no peace, thou son of perdition. Come out of thy calves’ coop, and make an end of thy pottage. I know thee, who thou art; thy very name savoureth of all evil: take him out, thou good and faithful soldier of the cross, Zachariah Trim, and that book of abomination with him, and make my passage to yon pulpit pure;—verily I will speak a word to these poor, perishing, and neglected people.” If it had not been for Juxon’s discretion at this moment the church would soon have become a scene of blood; for the stout blacksmith, seeing Zachariah move towards the desk with an action as if he would lay hands on Juxon, interposed with so hasty and resolute a manner, as caused Zachariah to step back two or three paces and draw his sword. His example was instantly followed by many comrades; and the shrieks of alarm among the women and children were dreadful. But Juxon came forth in a collected mood, and so spoke, that the swords were returned to their scabbards, and his people submitted, though in fear yet in silence, while the few among them, who, like the blacksmith, were ready for any hazards, forebore any further attempt at resistance.
Sir Roger ascended the pulpit, put down his steel cap by his side, poured forth a long, rambling, confused prayer, took out his pocket Bible, and preached for two hours; till the sweat streamed down his bony cheeks, and his voice became hoarser than any raven that ever croaked his sad predictions at a sick man’s window. Juxon listened with profound and with indignant astonishment to his wild and blasphemous perversions of divine truth; but he was comforted, as far as his own flock was concerned, in the consciousness that they were better instructed than to be moved by his fanaticism. His manner corresponded with his matter; and if he had not been accompanied by too many and too formidable and ready ministers of his violent will he would only have excited sentiments of disgust and ridicule. But as he thundered forth his curses upon the church in which the poor villagers had been brought up, and described her by a flood of reproachful names and epithets, of which last, Babylonish was the most gentle, no one could listen to his ravings without serious fears that they were a plain preface to deeds of crime. It was, therefore, with a heart full of devout and sincere thanksgiving for his people that Juxon heard this strange and fierce iconoclast promise with solemnity that their houses and their little property should be respected, and that no one of them should suffer any harm from his soldiers; but that he would take away with him their blind and wicked guide, and would only purge and purify the polluted temple and the priest’s dwelling.
The surplice and hood of Juxon had been torn from his back before this precious discourse began, and he had been placed in custody between two armed troopers, with pistols in their hands, and was frequently addressed by the heated Sir Roger in those words which are applied both in the Old Testament and the New to false and unfaithful teachers. All this he had borne with a calm and admirable courage,—feeling within the answer of a good conscience, and supported by an unshaken faith in a God of wisdom and love.
“It is the Lord,” he said within himself, “let him do what seemeth him good,”—and all the unuttered petitions which his heart sent up to the throne of grace were for the spiritual and temporal preservation of his little flock.
When Sir Roger concluded his sermon, he gave forth one of those psalms, which, being directed against idolatry, he considered as appropriate to the work he now meditated. It was sung in loud and harsh notes by his gloomy looking troopers, after which, descending into the body of the church, he directed fire to be brought, and burned the Book of Common Prayer before the communion table; heaping on the same fire all those rags and fragments of the whore of Babylon, as he was pleased to designate pulpit and altar cloth, and all the decent vestments of the minister.
At this gross outrage, Juxon burst forth with a holy zeal, in a most earnest tone of faithful remonstrance; but he was instantly gagged in a painful mode, and was forced in this state to witness their after proceedings.
The people were now forcibly driven out of the church, and as many troopers as could find room were directed to come in and stable there for the night. The order was obeyed with tumultuous joy; and they had no sooner taken possession of their once sacred quarters, than they began and completed the work of demolition,—breaking the coloured windows, destroying the tombs, and crowning their work of hell by bringing in a baggage ass, and baptizing it with mock ceremonies at the font. This last work was not witnessed by Sir Roger, who was busily superintending the burning of poor George Juxon’s library, and of many curiosa in the way of antiquities, which his father had collected in foreign countries, and bequeathed to him at his death.
It so chanced, that the first thing on which the eyes of Sir Roger rested, when he entered the parsonage, was a glass case, or cabinet, in which, among other ancient relics, was a small crucifix, exquisitely wrought in ivory. The sight of this inflamed his zeal to the boiling pitch; and declaring that so great an abomination could only be punished by the utter destruction of the dwelling in which it was found, he called in two or three assistants, whom he judged qualified to overlook the books on the shelves, to the end that any godly ones might be saved from the general ruin;—declaring, at the same time, that all the silver, and the gold, and the raiment, and the furniture, and the pictures, and the vessels, of what sort soever, whether in hall or kitchen, were polluted, and must be consumed, and denouncing the wrath of God on any of his followers who should presume, like Achan, to appropriate a single article of the unhallowed heap. Accordingly, on the lawn before the windows, a huge fire was made of all these goods, which were cast forth from the windows; the shell only of the house being spared for the use of such godly minister as the Parliament might appoint.
The attention of Sir Roger and the few zealots with him was confined to the contents of the library: not a few valuables, however, from other parts of the mansion, were stolen and secreted by the sly rogues of the squadron. But it so chanced that, as the house was spared, in a concealed recess, behind a false wainscot, his family plate and a few heirlooms were preserved. Of five hundred volumes, however, only three copies of the Bible, also one work in folio, two small thin quartos, and a heap of loose pamphlets of a controversial nature, written by Puritans, escaped the sentence of fire. Upon the same pile, and doomed to blaze in the same flame, were thrown fine copies of the ancient fathers; the works of sound Protestant divines, and ponderous lives and legends of Romish saints; the tomes of Bacon, and old worthless folios on astrology and divination; the plays and poems produced by the genius of a Shakspeare and a Spenser, and the interminable and prosaic romances which, in the preceding age, our ancestors had found leisure and patience to peruse.
During the night, Juxon was confined as a prisoner in one of the out-houses in his own yard, and, in the morning, he was mounted on a lean, bony cart-horse, without saddle or bridle, and led by a small escort to Warwick, where, before he was committed to the gaol of the Castle, he was subjected to the odious and vile insults of an examination before a Committee of Religion. Three witnesses appeared against him: two of these were base knaves from his own parish, and the third was from Coventry.
Thomas Slugg, the first of these, a lazy hypocrite, who found it easier to affect the office of an itinerant singer of psalms than to dig, deposed that Parson Juxon was an enemy to all godly persons, and a teacher of falsehoods, caring nothing for the souls of his people; and, as a proof, stated that, when, on one occasion, he, the witness, had asked him, “whether there were many or few that should be saved?” he had turned his back upon him, and entered the church saying,—
“What is that to thee? follow thou me.”
Another, who was a turned-off journeyman of the blacksmith’s, deposed that he saw Parson Juxon one day in a field behind his own garden casting the bar and hammer; and that he, the parson, threw a bar, and a heavy stone, and a sledge hammer, and that the smith, and two farmers, and one Strong, a warrener, threw against him.
The third was no other than the witch-finder from Coventry, who swore that the parson consorted with dealers in magic and the black art; that books on those arts were found in his house, and burned (this was confirmed eagerly by some of the escort), and that he even kept in his pay and service a notorious witch named Yellow Margery.
Juxon listened to these charges with a grave smile, and made no reply. Hereupon one of the commissioners observed, in great wrath,—
“That he was a most godless and obstinate Malignant, as was plain to see by his laughing, and the redness of his face; and that if not drunk, he was merry; but that a gaol and bread and water would soon take away the colour from his cheeks, and bring down the naughtiness of his spirit.”
They forthwith committed him to Warwick Castle, as a soul-destroying hypocrite, who held communion with idle and lewd fellows, and consorted with witches; and they appointed one Mr. Blackaby, a true brother, and bold as a lion for the faith, to succeed him at Old Beech, directing that he should be protected in his settlement by a detachment from the garrison, until the stubborn people of that village were reduced to submit heartily to God and the Parliament.
The room of the Castle to which Juxon was now removed was a large comfortless apartment with damp stone walls and no fire, containing about fourteen other prisoners, ten of whom were, like himself, incumbents. The two windows of this room looked down upon the river, which washed the very walls of the Castle; and the windows were not only securely barred, but even were it possible to force that obstacle, the fall being very great, any notion of the escape of a prisoner would have been judged an idle fear. However, the faithful blacksmith and George Juxon’s groom had followed the escort into Warwick, and watched the courageous parson as he walked with an upright carriage and manly step between the guards who took him to prison.
Having gained information concerning the part of the Castle in which he was confined, they laid a plan for his deliverance, which, from their knowledge of his strength and activity, they thought possible, though extremely difficult.
They conveyed to him in a loaf of brown bread, which was sent by one of the charity children of the place, and was given him without suspicion, a small cord, of sufficient strength to bear his weight, a small steel saw, and a phial of aqua-fortis.
It was not possible to conceal this from his fellow-prisoners, nor could he desire to do so. They promised secrecy, but dissuaded him from the attempt. That it was very perilous, he well knew; but he resolved upon it at once. In the afternoon of the day on which he received the cord, he saw the blacksmith standing on the river bank in the opposite meadow. The man did not pretend to take any notice of the Castle, but stripped off his clothes and plunged into the water; and it being a cold frosty day, he was loudly laughed at by a group of soldiers standing on the bridge. He swam out into the middle of the stream and back again; then putting on his clothes, he disappeared.
By two o’clock on the following morning Juxon had cut away a bar, and made fast his cord. Amid the breathless good wishes of his fellow-prisoners he began to descend, clad only in a pair of stout drawers and his shirt. The cord, though strong enough, was so small, that it cut his hands like a knife; but he got safely down to within twelve feet of the water, and from hence dropped into the river; and gaining the opposite side, was helped up the bank by the stout arm of his faithful blacksmith, and hurried to a hedge, behind which he found dry clothes and his groom with two horses. To dress himself, to snap a hunter’s mouthful, and to take one draught of cordial spirit from the leathern bottle of his servant, was the glad work of a few minutes; and by eight o’clock on the same morning he was forty miles on the road to Shrewsbury. Among other friends at the royal head-quarters he found Sir Charles Lambert and Arthur Heywood, and at once resolved to follow the fortunes of the camp as a volunteer chaplain to the regiment of horse with which they were serving. He was present with them in the battle of Keinton; and though decided himself not to use arms, he rode upon the flank of the regiment when it charged.
The horse of Sir Charles being killed under him, Juxon alighted, in an exposed and perilous position, and instantly gave his own to remount his friend. Here it was that, soon after, the gallant boy Arthur, returning wounded from the front, fell fainting from his saddle; and his frightened horse flying fast away, he would have been left helpless on the field before the advancing enemy, had not Juxon been a witness of his distress and danger. Hastening to the bleeding boy, he lifted him on his back, and so carried him a mile and a half to the top of Edge Hill, where a surgeon dressed his hurt, and pronounced it to be severe, but not dangerous, or likely to be attended with loss of limb or any very serious consequences. Having seen Arthur placed safely in a cart with other wounded officers going to a village in the rear, Juxon remained upon the hill, to which the royal army retired at sunset; and, as he saw Sir Charles and his own favourite roan horse coming safely back at the head of a squadron which had suffered severe losses, his heart swelled thankfully within him. He shook the hand of Sir Charles with a tearful cordiality; and they ate their cold and scanty supper by a little fire in the open fields, with sentiments of gratitude and of piety at once elevated and pure. The crown of England was hanging as it were on a bush, and they were among its guardians. Moreover, there was in both their bosoms a fine consciousness of what was passing in their respective hearts:—to see the noble and miraculous change in a man whom he had once, and with reason, despised, was a rich reward to Juxon,—while Sir Charles sat in the presence of his friend with the sweet and gracious feeling that he had been to him as a guardian angel and as a voice from Heaven.