"When he was going to his execution, he looked about and espied a man, to whom he gave a piece of gold (having bowed it first), and desired him to go to the place where his daughter lodged, and to carry that to her as a token from him, and to let her know that his heart was as full of comfort as it could be, and that before that piece should come into her hands he should be with God in glory.
"Being upon the ladder, he spake to the Sheriff, saying, 'Sir, you have here slain one of the servants of God before mine eyes, and have made me to behold it on purpose to terrify and discourage me; but God hath made it an ordinance to me for my strengthening and encouragement.'
"When he was going to die, he said, 'What! flesh, art thou unwilling to go to God through the fire and jaws of death? Oh' (said he), 'this is a good day; he is come that I have long looked for, and I shall be with him in glory;' and so smiled when he went away.
"What Mr. Peters said farther at his execution, either in his speech or prayer, it could not be taken, in regard his voice was low at that time, and the people uncivil."[323]
Ben Jonson is supposed to have been born in Hartshorn Lane, Charing Cross, where he lived when a little child. "Though I cannot," says Fuller, "with all my industrious inquiry, find him in his cradle, I can fetch him from his long coats. When a little child he lived in Hartshorn Lane, Charing Cross, when his mother married a bricklayer for her second husband. He was first bred in a private school in St. Martin's Court; then in Westminster school." But we shall have other occasions of speaking of him.
The famous reprobate Duke of Buckingham, Villiers, the second of that name, was born in Wallingford House, which stood on the site of the present Admiralty. "The Admiralty Office," says Pennant "stood originally in Duke Street, Westminster: but in the reign of King William was removed to the present spot, to the house then called Wallingford, I believe, from its having been inhabited by the Knollys, Viscounts Wallingford. From the roof the pious Usher, Archbishop of Armagh, then living here with the Countess of Peterborough, was prevailed on to take the last sight of his beloved master Charles I., when brought on the scaffold before Whitehall. He sank at the horror of the sight, and was carried in a swoon to his apartment." Wallingford House was often used by Cromwell and others in their consultations.
"The present Admiralty Office," continues Pennant, "was rebuilt in the late reign, by Ripley; it is a clumsy pile, but properly veiled from the street by Mr. Adam's handsome screen." Where the poor Archbishop sank in horror at the sight of the misguided Charles, telegraphs have since plied their dumb and far-seen discourses, like spirit in the guise of mechanism, telling news of the spread of liberty and knowledge all over the world. Of the Villierses, Dukes of Buckingham, who have not heard? The first one was a favourite not unworthy of his fortune, open, generous, and magnificent; the second, perhaps because he lost his father so soon, a spoiled child from his cradle, wilful, debauched, unprincipled, but witty and entertaining. Here, and at York House in the Strand, he turned night into day, and pursued his intrigues, his concerts, his dabblings in chemistry and the philosopher's stone, and his designs on the Crown: for Charles's character, and the devices of Buckingham's fellow quacks and astrologers, persuaded him that he had a chance of being king. When a youth, he compounded with Cromwell, and married Fairfax's daughter;—he was afterwards all for the king, when he was not "all for rhyming" or ousting him;—when an old man, or near it (for these prodigious possessors of animal spirits have a trick of lasting a long while), he was still a youth in improvidence and dissipation, and his whole life was a dream of uneasy pleasure. He is now best known from Dryden's masterly portrait of him in the "Absalom and Achitophel."
"A man so various, that he seemed to be,
Not one, but all mankind's epitome;
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,