On the 28th of July, 1652, the House of Commons, immediately after prayers, “Resolved, That the Earl of Worcester do stand committed to the Tower of London, in order to his trial.” And, “That it be referred to the Council of State to consider, in what way the Earl of Worcester may be tried, and who hath harboured him; and to consider of all circumstances in his business, and to report their opinion thereon to the House, on Friday morning next.”
A year later, being on the 29th of August, 1653, Colonel Rous reports from the Committee of Petitions, “The most humble Petition of Edward Somerset, Earl of Worcester, now prisoner in the Tower.
“As also, the humble Petition of Margaret, Countess of Worcester; which were both read.”
Followed, on the 3rd of October, by repetitions of the same report, when it was “Resolved that this Petition be laid aside.”
While, on the 5th of October, 1654, one year later, after other business, the Earl’s petition was again read, and it was thereon “Resolved, That the Earl of Worcester have his liberty for the present upon bail, until the Parliament take further order. And that the Lieutenant of the Tower do take sufficient bail: And that a Warrant do issue under Mr. Speaker’s hand, to that purpose.”[57]
In Burton’s highly valuable and interesting Diary of Oliver Cromwell’s Parliament, when noticing the foregoing business in respect to the Marquis’s petition, it is added:—“The Petitioner was alleged to be a papist, in arms in England, who had headed a party in Ireland, making a most dishonourable peace there, and had done many other disservices, for which he was excepted from all mercy and pardon; his whole estate ordered to be sold, and all such to be banished. Yet, it was urged, he was an old man, had lain long in prison, and the small-pox then raging under the same roof where he lay. And he had not, as was said, done any actions of hostility, but only as a soldier; and in that capacity had always shown civilities to the English prisoners and protestants. It was, therefore, ordered, that he should be bailed out of prison.”[22]
Consequently he was a close prisoner for at least two years and a quarter, assuming that he was then liberated; which is the more likely, as we find that a Warrant was given by Cromwell, dated the 26th of June, 1655, to pay his Lordship the sum of three pounds a week, for his better maintenance.[B] He would be about or verging on 53 years of age, and must have suffered very seriously from fatigue, disease, and severe mental disquietude, prolonged through at least eight years passed in every diversity of honour and disgrace, wealth and poverty, high hopes and aspirations, terminating in blank disappointment; he thus united in his own person and history the most violent contrasts, enough to have broken down and utterly destroyed any enthusiasm less than is due to the conscious possession of surpassing mental wealth. It would be difficult to find in the voluminous history of scientific biography a parallel case of so much self-reliance on the promptings of a great and noble mind, under anything like such an unmitigated burden of uncontrollable evils, as fell to the share of this extraordinary man in the very decline of life, when tired nature seeks calm, repose, and competence.
It would seem as if, while still a prisoner, he was treating for Vauxhall, where we shall find he was afterwards actively engaged with his Water Engine; for Samuel Hartlib, well known from his acquaintance with Milton, writes to the Honourable Robert Boyle on the 8th of May, 1654, signifying that, the Marquis is buying Vauxhall from Mr. Trenchard.[14]
The next incident we meet with, of which any record occurs, after his enlargement, is a melancholy evidence of his extreme necessities and indeed absolute poverty. It consists in the following, taken from the original acknowledgment:—[C]
“Receaved and borrowed of my Honored friend Sr David Watkins the full somme of Twenty pownds sterling wch I faythfully promise to repaye at or before the second day of February next ensueing to wch I oblige myselfe my Hayre Executor Administrator or assign in a dubble somme or forfeiture Witnesse my hand and seale this eight of De: 1655.