Honor Bright: A Story of the Days of King Charles

by Mary C. Rowsell

The merle looked at him with his bright eyes, in which there seemed to the boy to be a sorrowful pleading expression.

“What is the matter, birdie, old fellow?” said Charles. “Are you hungry? No; they would never have neglected to give you seed and water, I am sure.”

And there, as he looked to ascertain, he found not only seed and water to the very brim of the pannikins, but also, stuck between the bars, a big piece of watercress, while at the bottom of the cage was a large worm wriggling about. Nothing, in fact, was wanting to the convenience and content of the tenant of the cage—in the way, that is, of creature comforts—but his wings drooped forlornly, and he looked very unhappy, nevertheless.

“Ah,” said the Prince, as he clambered on to the high window-seat, and took down the cage, “I like you very much, you dear little fellow; and I should like to keep you, for I am very lonely, and you are most sweet company, and it is a very fine cage, isn’t it? But you are breaking your merry heart in it, I am positive you are, and you shall get out. Her ladyship may not approve; she may even whip me for it, though I believe she mustn’t do that, much as her fingers often itch for it, but I’m going to let you go,” and so saying, he unfastened the door of the cage, and set the entrance against the open lattice. “There, go,” he went on, as for an instant the bird perked his shiny head on one side, as if he was listening intently to all Charles was saying to him, “fly away, dear bird, and joy go with you, for outside you will find it again.”

And then with a flap of his wings, away flew the merle, straight across the moat into mid-air, till he reached the bough of a high elm not far off. There he settled, and opening his yellow beak, he set up such a joyous song as never was heard—anyway, inside a cage.

“I expect,” said Charles, looking into the cage again, and poking the watercress stalk under the body of the worm, “that you would rather wriggle down there among the flowers than in that miserable sprinkling of sand,” and with that he flung the worm far across the moat on to the grassy bank below. “Of course, if Master Merle catches you again, you must settle the matter between you, and it is certain he will be picking up an appetite again now, and it will be ‘catch as catch can.’”

Then, putting the toe of his little silver-and-blue rosetted shoes to the cage, he sent it flying to the other side of the room. That done, he dropped wearily down again in the great tall velvet chair, and lolled back, a very picture of misery and discontent.

“Who’d imagine,” he muttered to himself, “that it was such a horrid thing to be a Prince? I wonder if all Princes are so wretched, or whether it is only Princes of Wales, like me?” Then he yawned and lay with his eyes wandering listlessly round the room, watching the rays of the afternoon sun as they poured in at the lattice. The air felt stifling, for it was a small room, considering, that is, that the house was such a large one; but great mansions in those golden days, when Charles the First was King, contained rooms of all sizes as well as all shapes. Rooms were not merely four square walls, as mostly they are now, but built as it might be into all sorts of passages and corridors and staircase landings, now with a step or two up, now with a step or two down. One reason for this was that, as time went on, the owners of these big houses would add on a piece here, a wing there, and the level of the old floors and the new floors would not always exactly lie together, but it made the houses much more amusing and snug to live in.

Such a queer hole-and-corner chamber was the old Cedar Room, as it was called, in which little Charles Stuart, King Charles the First’s eldest son, had been shut up for three weeks past. The King himself, with his Court, had been in London, but the Roundheads, who were the King’s discontented subjects, and the Royalists, who were faithful to him, were glowing into a red heat of rage with each other. It was no longer safe for the little boy to be in London, and so the King had entrusted him to the care of one of his most devoted friends and counselors, who took him away at dead of night from London to his home in Warwickshire, and nobody—not even the other Royalists—was certain where the child was. Many thought that he had been carried across the sea to France. It was not of much use telling the boy that he had been taken away from his father and mother for his good. The poor little lad was not old enough to understand how this could be, and so he was very unhappy, and he detested with all his might that old Cedar Room, and all that was in it, though it was considered a vastly fine room, and a very curious one. That, indeed, was one reason why Lady Chauncy, who, for all her prim manner, was a most kind, motherly person, had persuaded her husband to lodge the young Prince in it, “for besides being so high up and remote,” said she, “the mannikins will be huge and endless amusement for him, and make the time pass more quickly till there is an end to all this pother, and the child can get about again.”