For this Prynne ‘kept a school of instruction’ for the witnesses, and tampered with the Archbishop’s papers, of which he had forcibly possessed himself. The spirit that guided the whole trial was shown in his reply to one who said the Archbishop was a good man. ‘Yea, but we must make him ill.’ The Peers raised a feeble opposition. The King, whose consent the Parliament had not attempted to procure, sent to the Archbishop by a sure hand, from Oxford, a full pardon under the Great Seal, but neither received the least attention.
ARCHBISHOP LAUD MURDERED.
On January 10, on Tower Hill, the unjust sentence was fulfilled. Few things are more touching than the account given by his chaplain and biographer, Heylin, of the way in which the Archbishop met that cruel fate. It is some comfort to remember that, though the Church Services were then forbidden, yet his enemies did not interfere, but suffered the Burial Service to be read in All Hallows, Barking, where he was first interred. After the Restoration, the coffin was removed to S. John’s College, Oxford, and buried under the altar in the chapel. He left Bishop Wren and Dr. Duppa, Bishop of Salisbury, executors of his will. It contained a great number of bequests for charitable foundations, especially for his native town of Reading; but as his whole estate had been taken from him, these were unfulfilled. His murder was an immense triumph to all the Sectarians in England and Scotland, who probably considered it as a death-blow to the Church.
The Bishop of Ely in his cell must have listened in grief and horror to the tolling of the Tower bell which proclaimed the bloody death of the friend with whom he had laboured for many years, latterly his patient fellow-prisoner. The entry in the diary is brief: ‘Parce, O Deus Requisitor sanguinis.’ The same fate seemed very near to himself, and he was ready to follow the Archbishop; but he had eighteen years of close imprisonment to endure, and a different work to do.
Early in 1644, George Monk, then a colonel in the King’s service, was taken prisoner by Fairfax in his attack upon the army besieging Nantwich, in Cheshire. He was imprisoned first at Hull, and then, as he was thought too important to be exchanged except for some considerable prisoner, he was sent to the Tower, and there remained two years. The Tower charges were high, and a long confinement in its walls was a strain upon the resources of a prisoner, which reduced those, whose fortune, like that of Monk, was scanty, to extreme poverty. The King, who knew Monk’s condition, contrived to send him a hundred guineas, and upon this he existed for some time, and resisted the offers of Cromwell, then rapidly rising in power and authority.
Somehow or other, Monk contrived to obtain several interviews with Bishop Wren, who did his best to confirm the soldier in his loyalty. He perceived that Monk, whose popularity with the army was very great, and whose military talents were thought to be of a high order, might one day be a valuable ally, and a useful counterpoise to Cromwell. At length, when the King’s cause appeared for the time lost, and Monk himself was reduced to extreme poverty, he yielded to Cromwell’s request, and accepted a commission in the Irish army, under his kinsman Lord Lisle. Before his release, Monk had a final interview with the Bishop of Ely, and, as he knelt to ask the Bishop’s blessing, bound himself with a solemn engagement never to be an enemy to his king, and said he was going to do his majesty the best service he could against ‘the rebels in Ireland, and hoped he should one day do him further service in England.’
Bishop Wren held firmly to his trust in Monk’s loyalty, though many things might well have shaken his confidence. In the curious life of Dr. John Barwick, one of the King’s most faithful agents, from whom Sir Walter Scott may have taken many of the features of his indefatigable plotter ‘Dr. Rochecliffe,’ it is said that[43] ‘he’ (Dr. Barwick) ‘often heard the Right Reverend Bishop of Ely promise himself all he could wish from the General’s fidelity.’ As Monk gave no other hint of his intentions, refusing even to receive Charles II.’s letters, this assurance was precious to the Royalists.
CHRISTOPHER AT OXFORD.
In 1646, Christopher Wren left Westminster, and at the age of fourteen went up to Oxford, and was entered as a Gentleman Commoner at Wadham College. He had, young as he was, distinguished himself at Westminster, inventing an astronomical instrument, of which no description remains, and dedicating it to his father in a short Latin poem,[44] which has been often praised for the flow and smoothness of its lines; a set of Latin verses in which the signs of the Zodiac are transformed into Christian emblems, is, in spite of its ingenuity, much less successful; a short poem on the Nativity also in Latin, belongs probably to the same date, and is of the same order of poetry.
Far more graceful are the playful lines cut on the rind of an immense pomegranate sent to ‘that best man, my dearest friend E. F., by Christopher Regulus,’ in which on the ‘Pomo Punico,’ as he calls it, Christopher rings the changes on ‘Punic gifts’ and ‘Punic faith,’ and declares his pomegranate is connected neither with the one nor the other.