Purchas, in his Pilgrimage, gives a long description of the abundance of sea-fowl, on which the shipwrecked mariners feasted, and of the wonderful tameness of the birds,—for Somers might have said with Alexander Selkirk:—
‘They are so unaccustomed to man,
Their tameness is shocking to me.’
Purchas goes on to say, ‘Notwithstanding the wonted danger, you may now touch at Bermuda, for danger hath made it not so dangerous:’ after the fashion of many another peril that calls for precautionary measures.
Waller, in his didactic poem on the beauties of this region, forgets to do honour to the gallant old ‘salt,’ who was as well known for his daring rejoinder to King James I. as for his nautical adventures; it was when subjected to one of the tyrant’s manifold acts of injustice. ‘I hope I may be the last of sacrifices in your time. When from private appetite it is resolved that a creature shall be sacrificed, it is easy to pick up sticks enough from any thicket, whither it has strayed, to make a fire to offer it with.’
The immediate ancestors of the Lord Chancellor had been settled for some time on a small estate in Gloucestershire, called Stoke Severne, and they also owned the ‘Whiteladies,’ then a suburb of Worcester. Here, in 1585, the family entertained Queen Elizabeth, in her progress through Worcestershire, and although the Som̅erses afterwards imbibed republican principles, the bed in which good Queen Bess lay, and the cup out of which she drank, were long preserved as precious relics in the family.
Queen Elizabeth was much pleased with her reception at the Whiteladies, and indeed at Worcester altogether. More especially was her Grace’s fancy taken by a conceit of Master Som̅ers, who caused a splendid pear-tree, loaded with fruit, to be transplanted from his own garden to the market-place in the town, as a decoration, at the time of the Queen’s public reception,—in remembrance of which Elizabeth granted an augmentation to the arms of the city, in the shape of three pears, as may be seen to this day.
Master Som̅ers, the father of the future Peer, had been bred up to the law, and practised as an attorney, but, when the civil war broke out, in opposition to the majority of his fellow-citizens, he took part with the Roundheads, and raised a troop of horse to serve under Cromwell. He was for some time quartered at Upton, near his own estate of Stoke Severne, the parish church of which he frequented.
Now the Rector was a Royalist, and a firm upholder of Divine right, and he was very apt to mix political with theological arguments in his sermons. Captain Som̅ers had constantly warned him against so doing, but in vain; and one Sunday the good parson indulged in so much abuse of the Cromwell men as to raise the ire of the Parliamentarian officer, who, drawing forth a loaded pistol, lodged a shot in the sounding-board above his reverence’s head.
In spite of all this, King Charles passed the night previous to the battle of Worcester, and that following, at the Whiteladies, where, after ‘shifting himself’ into a disguise, he left his trunk hose, his garters, and two pairs of fringed gloves, to be added to the Royal Elizabethan relics. Lord Campbell remarks that a species of sanctity had been attached to the Whiteladies by both parties, since the building was spared, when almost every other edifice was destroyed; but Nash, the county historian, accounts for the circumstance by saying that the soldiers spared the house on account of its being a strong building, capable of holding 500 men with safety.