CHAPTER XIII.
FRANCIS NORTH.
We now come to one of the most contemptible of men—Francis North, known by the title of Lord Keeper Guilford. He had not courage to commit great crimes; but—selfish, cunning, sneaking, and unprincipled—his only restraint was a regard to his own personal safety, and throughout his whole life he sought and obtained advancement by the meanest arts.
Our hero, although he himself ascribed his success to his poverty, was of noble birth. The founder of his family was Edward North, a serjeant at law, chancellor of the Augmentations, and created a baron by writ in the reign of Henry VIII. Dudley, the third baron, “having consumed the greatest part of his estate in the gallantries of King James’s court, or, rather, his son Prince Henry’s,” retired and spent the rest of his days at his seat in Cambridgeshire. When the civil war broke out, he sided with the Parliament, and on rare occasions coming to London, he is said to have sat on the trial of Laud, and to have voted for his death. Having reached extreme old age, he died in the year 1666.
Dudley, his heir, who, at the age of sixty-three, stood on the steps of the throne in the House of Lords as “the eldest son of a peer,” was a great traveller in his youth, and served with distinction in the Low Countries under Sir Francis Vere. Yet he never would put on his hat, nor sit down in the presence of his father, unless by the old peer’s express commands. Being returned to the Long Parliament for the county of Cambridge, he strenuously opposed the Court, and signed the Solemn League and Covenant; but, adhering to the Presbyterian party, he was turned out by Pride’s purge, and lived in retirement till the Restoration. He married Anne, one of the daughters and coheirs of Sir Charles Montagu, brother of the Earl of Manchester, by whom he had a very numerous family.
The subject of this memoir was their second son, and was born on the 22d of October, 1637. Though he turned out such a zealous royalist and high churchman, his early training began among republicans and fanatics. As soon as he left the nursery, he was sent to a preparatory school at Isleworth, the master of which was a rigid Presbyterian. His wife was a furious Independent, and she ruled the household. “She used to instruct her babes in the gift of praying by the Spirit, and all the scholars were made to kneel by a bedside and pray; but this petit spark was too small for that posture, and was set upon a bed to kneel, with his face to a pillow.”
His family becoming disgusted with the extravagance of the ruling powers, and beginning to look to royalty as the only cure for the evils the nation was suffering, he was removed from Isleworth, and put to a grammar school at Bury St. Edmunds, under a cavalier master.
In 1653, he was admitted a fellow commoner at St. John’s College, Cambridge. He is said to have remained there two or three years, applying diligently to the studies of the place; but he seems to have devoted much of his time to the bass-viol, and he left the university without a degree.
He was then transferred to the Middle Temple. His father bought him a very small set of chambers, in which he shut himself up, and dedicated himself to the study of the law. He early learned and often repeated this saying of the citizens to their apprentices, “Keep your shop, and your shop will keep you.” He did not frequent riding schools, or dancing schools, or playhouses, or gaming houses—so dangerous to youth at the Inns of Court. Though he could “make one at gammon, gleek, piquet, or even the merry-main, he had ever a notable regard to his purse to keep that from oversetting, like a vessel at sea that hath too much sail and too little ballast.”
While a student, he paid frequent and long visits to his grandfather, who seems to have become a most singularly tyrannical and capricious old man. Frank exerted himself to the utmost to comply with all his humors, being allowed by him £20 a year. He was always industrious during these visits, though he could not altogether avoid bowling, fishing, hunting, visiting, and billiards; he spent the greater part of his time in reading and commonplacing the law books brought down to him by the carrier.