King Charles, at that critical moment in parliamentary history when his Majesty went down to the House in person, for the purpose of arresting the five members who had courageously withstood his will, asked Lenthall if he saw any of these five present, and he replied, with marvellous resourcefulness at so strained a juncture: “May it please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here; and humbly beg your Majesty’s pardon that I cannot give any other answer than this to what your Majesty is pleased to demand of me.” Lenthall was one of the few prominent men of that time who were able to enrich themselves. While most were ruined in those long-drawn troubles, he snatched profits out of them, became extensively rich, and died owner of many manors. These are the goodly rewards of a moderator; but history gives no favourable verdict upon such.
CHAPTER VI
CUMNOR, AND THE TRAGEDY OF AMY ROBSART
One comes more readily to Cumnor by road, but more picturesquely by river, from Bablockhythe, whence a byway leads steeply up to that famous place. Cumnor is indeed of such fame that, although one must needs allow it to be a hill-top—certainly not a valley—village, yet to omit it from these pages would surely be unpardonable. At Bablockhythe remains the last of the old river ferries, capable of taking a wheeled conveyance across; and capable, too, of giving an unwary oarsman or punter a very nasty check with its rope, permanently stretched athwart the stream.
There is some very noble, still, quiet scenery at, and just above and below, Bablockhythe, where the water runs with a deep and silent stealthiness, and the bushy poplars and pendant weeping willows are reflected with such startling faithfulness that the reflection in the water beneath looks more solid—much more real—than the foliage above. It is an illusion of the weirdest kind.
In one or other of the quiet backwaters between this and Oxford there may be found, by those who care to seek, the curious aquatic plant known as the “water-soldier.” Botanists of course know it by another, and a horrific, name: to them it is “stratiotes aloides.” But to those few rustic folk who know at all of its existence—and it is not a common affair—it is the “water-soldier.” It does not, however, convey any military impression to the ordinary beholder, being just a plumed bunch of leaves which in summer-time is found floating on the surface; coming up from its autumn, winter, and spring home below, in the river-mud, and growing long suckers, resembling strawberry runners, each of them with a youthful “soldier”—or recruit, shall we say—at its end. These form leaves, and each one produces a white flower. When these flowers fade the “water-soldier” and its outposts of young sink again to the river-bed, and there rest until summer comes again, when the process is repeated.
But what of Cumnor? It looks boldly down upon the Thames Valley from a conspicuous wooded ridge. It is a village picturesque alike in itself and in its romantic history, traditions, and legends. Figure to yourself a place of scattered rustic cottages, not yet touched to commonplace by that shrinkage of distances caused by the rapidity and frequency of modern methods of travel which have brought expansions, rebuilding, and general modernisings in their train; with an ancient and stately church rustically overhung with trees quite in the old Birket Foster and first-half-of-the-nineteenth-century convention. That is Cumnor to-day.