Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son,
Though baffled oft, is always won!
Is always won! Is always won!”
Dick did not enter the Clarendon with his father. He knew that he might be a little superfluous. The squire had a certain childlike egotism which delighted in praising himself, and in telling his own story; and Annie was audience sufficient. If she approved, there was no more to be desired, the third person was often in the way. In addition to this wish to give the squire the full measure of his success, Dick was longing passionately to be with his love and his hopes. The squire would not speak of Faith, and Dick wanted to talk about her. Her name beat upon his lips, and oh, how he longed to see her! To draw her to his side, to touch her hair, her eyes, her lips! He told himself that the promise of silence until the Bill was passed, or thrown out was a great wrong, that he never ought to have made it, that his father never ought to have asked for it. He wondered how he was to get the time over; the gayeties of London had disappeared, the Leylands thought it prudent to live quietly, his mother and Katherine were tired of the city, and longed to be at home; and Harry, whose sympathy he had always relied on, was somewhere in Norfolk, and had not even taken the trouble to write and tell him the reason for his visit, to such a tame, bucolic county.
Yet with the hope of frequent letters, and his own cheerful optimistic temper, he managed to reach the thirtieth of May. On that morning he took breakfast with his parents, and the squire said in a positive voice that he was “sure the Bill would pass the House of Lords before May became June; and if you remember the events since the seventh of April, Dick, you will also be sure.”
“But I do not remember much about public affairs during that time, father. I was in Annis, and here and there, and in every place it was confusion and anger and threats. I really do not remember them.”
“Then thou ought to, and thou may as well sit still, and let me tell thee some things thou should niver forget.” But as the squire’s method was discursive, and often interrupted by questions and asides from Mistress Annis and Dick, facts so necessary may be told without such delay, and also they will be more easily remembered by the reader.
Keeping in mind then that Parliament adjourned at seven o’clock in the morning, on April fourteenth until the seventh of May, it is first to be noted that during this three weeks’ vacation there was an incessant agitation, far more formidable than fire, rioting, and the destruction of property. Petitions from every populous place to King William entreated him to create a sufficient number of peers to pass the Bill in spite of the old peers. The Press, nearly a unit, urged as the most vital and necessary thing the immediate passage of the Bill, predicting a United Rebellion of England, Scotland and Ireland, if longer delayed. On the seventh of May, the day Parliament reassembled, there was the largest public meeting that had ever been held in Great Britain, and with heads uncovered, and faces lifted to heaven, the crowd took the following oath:—
“With unbroken faith through every peril and privation, we here devote ourselves and our children to our country’s cause!”
This great public meeting included all the large political unions, and its solemn enthusiasm was remarkable for the same fervor and zeal of the old Puritan councils. Its solemn oath was taken while Parliament was reassembling in its two Houses. On that afternoon the House of Lords took up first the disfranchising of the boroughs, and a week of such intense excitement followed, as England had not seen since the Revolution of 1688.