The Governor of England

by Marjorie Bowen

In Whitehall, a meeting of preachers and godly persons besought God with prayers and tears to spare His Highness, and all over the city were apprehension, expectation, hopes, fears, and supplication.

So it had come to this: the twenty years of great events, with all the toil, achievement, triumph, tumult, and sorrow, had swept up to this moment when the gentleman farmer from St. Ives, who had received a command from God, lay dying at Whitehall, with that command executed as far as it is in a man to accomplish a mission he conceives Divine, dying, with England breathless, and the son of the late tyrant breathless too, and watching and waiting from across the water.

It seemed to many valiant souls as if this England so violently shaped anew into something of the form which was the ideal of Puritanism, purged and glorified, was no more than the vivified dream of this one man, and that when he passed from the earth it would be as when a sleeper wakes—the dream would be dispelled and all things become as they had been.

What he himself might think, now that he knew the summons had come, none could tell, for he was mostly silent during the ebb and flow of his illness, and only spoke to pray; once or twice the passionate entreaties to God, which he heard rising around him, and the passionate affection of his family and friends, seemed to rouse in him a desire and hope of life. He could not but know that his work was not yet finished, and that this was not the best of times for him to die.

"Lord, Thou knowest," he said, "that if I do desire to live, it is to show forth Thy praise and declare Thy works!" and, "Is there none that says, Who will deliver me from this peril?" then, "Man can do nothing; God can do what He will."

And at times he fell into a kind of enthusiasm, speaking much of the Covenants of Works and of Grace and expounding them; to his wife and children, who felt their very life being torn from them, he spoke, too: "Love not this world"—he repeated the words with great vehemence, as was his wont—"I say, love not this world; it is not good that you should love this world—children, live like Christians. I leave you the Covenant to feed on!"

But for the most he had done with human affection; weeping did not seem to touch that heart that had once been so tender to tears.

He did not even look at those about him, but upwards at the dark canopy of his bed; and to that inner eye which had beheld the sword stretched out of the cloud in the barn at St. Ives, it was no covering of tapestry which hung above him, but the threshold of the eternal world.

The dry wind, which had begun before the Lady Elisabeth died, and blown for weeks across the Island from sea to sea, deepened and strengthened now from day to day, and at the end of this month of August, when His Highness was rapidly coming to the end of all storms and calms alike, a hurricane of wind arose—the most fearful, violent, and protracted any man could remember.

The angry seas sucked in ships and sailors and beat furiously on the coast, trees were uprooted, haystacks and barns overturned, tiles and chimneys cast down; in the cities men could scarcely stand in the streets for the wind which roared and piped round the corners.