After the conclusion of the wedding festivities, Madame de la Trémoille accompanied her daughter to England, to see her duly installed in her new home.
For a very short time Lady Strange now appeared at Court, in the capacity of lady-of-honour to Queen Henrietta Maria, sister of the French King, herself but the wife of a year to King Charles I. Twelve months later, in the month of August, Lord and Lady Strange were established at Lathom House.
Lathom House was situated in Lancashire, about three miles north-east of Ormskirk, and eight from the sea-coast. The ground on which it stood, as well as its outlying territories and neighbourhood, had been in the possession of the Earls of Derby, and of the de Lathoms and Ferrars (from whom the Stanleys had descended) before them, from Saxon times. Orm, the Saxon lord of Halton, which is one of the thirty-eight manors mentioned in Domesday Book, married Alice, the daughter of a Norman nobleman; obtaining, thereby, large estates in the county. Orm appears to have founded the church which was co-existent with the name of Ormskirk in the reign of Richard I., when Robert, son of Henry de Tarbosh and Lathom—who is supposed to be a descendant of Orm—founded the priory[[3]] which was for long the burial-place of the Earls of Derby. The mansion, which was very ancient, moated and walled, and built for the defiance and self-defence which those turbulent and unsettled feudal days demanded, came into possession of the Stanleys by the marriage of Isabella de Lathom with Sir James Stanley in the reign of Henry IV.
[3]. Baines.
The Earl of Derby of the earlier years of Charles’s reign presented Lathom House to his eldest son and heir, James, Lord Strange, the Earl himself making his home at Chester. Concerning her father-in-law, Lady Strange writes to her mother in the following terms—after premising that her epistle is merely the replica of one previously written, but which had gone astray in transit; a matter of far from infrequent occurrence in those days, when postal facilities were only in the first throes of being:—
“I informed you Madame, that I had been to see my father-in-law at Chester, the capital city of Cheshire, where he has always lived, in preference to any of his other residences, for these three or four years past. He speaks French; and conversed with me in very agreeable terms, calling me lady and mistress of the house; that he wished to have no other woman but myself (sic, for daughter-in-law?), and that I was to have full authority. We were well received by the townspeople, although our visit was not expected. Many came out to conduct us. I also told you, Madame, how greatly I found Lathom House to my liking; and that I have to thank God and you for placing me so excellently. I do not question Madame, that you will do all in your power about my money. I am waiting to hear from you regarding it. Truly Madame, necessity constrains me to be more importunate than I ought; but your kindness gives me courage. Indeed, my happiness a little depends upon it, in order to shut the mouths of certain persons who do not love foreigners; although, thank God, the best among them wish me no harm. Your son (in law) is well, I am thankful to say, and feels no return of his disorder. He almost lives out of doors, finding the air very good for him.”
At this point however, Lord Strange must have come indoors; for the postscript is in his handwriting, which is of a sort preferable to his wife’s, both in penmanship and spelling.
“Madame” (runs this post-scriptum),—“I cannot let my wife’s letter go without myself thanking you for the honour you do me. If I were able to speak with you, I should rejoice in constantly assuring you that I can never be other, Madame, than your very humble and obedient son and servant—J. Strange.”
In the autumn of this year, the first child of Lady Strange was born. The home was complete; but domestic peace and content were destined to be lost like a beautiful dream, in the gloom of the times. Charles had not reigned twelve months before the first signs of the coming struggle took form and shape; if even already, in marrying the Roman Catholic Henrietta Maria, he had not hopelessly offended his subjects. Marriage with French princesses has almost invariably brought disaster on our English kings, and violent death in some form; the union of Henry V. with the Princess Catherine of France being one of the exceptions proving the rule. Even in his domestic affections the evil destiny of the Stuarts thus attended Charles; and truly his fate was an ill one indeed which placed him at the head of a kingdom at such an epoch in its history. The times were out of joint; and the vacillating, arbitrary Charles was not the man to set them right at this crisis, when the very strength of the divinity hedging a king was being questioned and tested by that sense of the rights of individual and collective humanity which was beginning to quicken on every side.
The state of England however, on Charles’s accession, was but the effect of causes which had been at work for many a generation past. Looking back no farther than to the Wars of the Roses, we see the resistance of a proud and jealous nobility to supreme kingly power, and its subjection by the ruthless Henry VIII., who suffered no mortal to live, from loftiest to lowliest, who attempted to cross his path or to thwart his will. Henry’s despotism, inherent in Queen Mary, and carefully nourished by her bigoted husband, Philip of Spain, was in Elizabeth softened by the chastening experiences of early life, and throughout her long reign kept in check by prudent counsellors. During the time that she was on the throne moreover, the new religion was on its probation. In its form of “Church of England, as by law established,” it had still to approve itself to the nation. But long before her successor James I. took her place, Episcopalianism had been accepted by the English people from Tyne to Thames. By Roman Catholics it might be regarded as a hollow pretence, and by nonconformists as a popishly tainted compromise; but by the bulk of the community it was recognised as an ark of safety, spiritual and temporal, whose bulwarks warded off the shafts of Rome as effectually as her course ran clear of the shoals and whirlpools of the sectaries. The Church of England, risen purified from the ashes of Romanism, was, or at least was accepted as, the reproduction of the church of the early Christians. It contained the ideal scheme of a perfect law of liberty—religious, social, and political; and allowed a range of thought and of speculation not to be found in any other formulated expression of Christian belief whatever. Only of papistry the Church of England was intolerant. Pains and penalties, in countless instances not one degree less cruel than “Bloody Mary” inflicted on the Protestant martyrs, did “good Queen Bess” and her successor, “gentle King Jamie,” inflict on the confessors of the older creed. To all other Christians, the Church of England extended sympathy. While her sanctuaries, retaining much of the pomp and ceremonial of Roman ritual, were served by consecrated bishop, priest, and deacon, the crypts beneath them afforded places for the simple and austere public worship of refugee Huguenots and Calvinists. Singing boys still chanted psalm and antiphon; and in the private chapel of Elizabeth, the “morning star of the Reformation,” the retention of the lighted candles on the altar betokened the belief in the reality of Christ’s presence in the sacramental bread and wine. The transubstantiation of Romanism—the consubstantiation of Lutheranism—the spiritual presence only of Christ in the elements of Calvinism—the unchanged condition of the bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper of Nonconformity and of Dissent generally, were alike set aside by the Established Church. The answer quoted by Elizabeth when questioned as to her conception of the manner of the divine presence in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper:—