Howell, as he entered the Common side, probably thought that he might live to be one of the mute inhabitants of that ghastly chamber--for he was not only suspected by the Parliament, but in debt. Wood, indeed, ascribes his captivity wholly to the curse of debt, brought on by his own extravagance; and since Howell, like many public men of the day, had no “income but such as he scrambled for,” and since it was an age of careless expenditure, Wood is, perhaps, in this statement, as he generally is, correct.

The character of the man of desultory life rose under the trial. During five years the once free and happy James Howell lay in that den of misery--rendered more miserable by all that was going on in the world, of which he heard enough in his durance, perhaps too much. During that period Charles was beheaded; the gay precincts of Whitehall were stained with the blood of one whom Howell had reverenced as a royalist, but whose advisers, Buckingham, Laud, and Strafford, he had censured, as a man of the world, of sense and candour, could not fail to do. Whilst he lay in the place where Falkland had been sent for sending a challenge--where Prynne had paid the penalty for his “Histriomastix,” Howell’s thoughts no doubt reverted to the pleasant days of Charles’s youth, in the fields near Madrid, where plumed knights ran a course--or to the arena of the bull-fight. He dreamed, perhaps, of the incomparable Infanta, or of the stately Philip, and his gallant, flattered, sanguine English guests.

But he did better. Howell is not the only writer who has tried to bind up the wounds of a broken heart by authorship; or has succeeded in dissipating the hours of a long imprisonment by communicating not only with the world of letters, which was nearly extinct in general literature during the first year of the Protectorate, but with those among the free, the sympathetic, and the celebrated who remembered the poor debtor in his cell. One of his most notable efforts was his own epitaph, beginning--

“Here lies entomb’d a walking thing,

Whom Fortune with the Fates did fling

Between these walls.”

He wrote now his “Familiar Letters, Domestic and Foreign,” wisely putting no date on the epistles as to place. He composed also "Casual Discourses and Interlocutions between Patricius and Peregrin, touching the Distractions of the Times"--this work was the result of the Battle of Edge Hill--“Parables reflecting on the Times;” "England’s Tears for the Present War;" “Vindications of some Passages reflecting upon himself in Mr. Prynne’s book called the ‘Popish Royal Favourite,’” a work which coupled his name with that of Buckingham; and his “Epistolæ-Hoelianæ.” These works came out year after year. It is said by Wood that most of Howell’s letters were written in the Fleet, though some of them purported to have been sent from Madrid and other places. The fact is, he wrote for subsistence; and his works were popular and productive. His statements may, indeed, have been made so long after the events they relate occurred, as to render them doubtful; yet it is acknowledged that they contain a good view of the actors in those stirring times--whilst they are almost the only letters that still preserve the memory of the writer among us.

Most of his other writings were political; one of his imaginative flights recalls, in the idea that originated it, the title of the pleasant brochure, “Voyage autour de ma chambre,” in our own times. Howell’s composition is styled, “A Nocturnal Progress; or, a perambulation of such Countries in Christendom performed in one night by strength of imagination.” All the titles of his works are striking: “Winter Dream,” "A Trance, or News from Hell, brought first to town by Mercurius Acheronticus;"--this was published in 1649, after the King’s death. He still, Royalist as he was, bore his misfortunes cheerfully; yet his loyalty sank at last beneath the pressure of starvation, and he yielded to expediency. It was not, however, until 1653 that his constancy broke down, and that he addressed to Oliver Cromwell his “Sober’s Inspections made into the carriage and consult of the late Long Parliament.” One may know the views he took from the title; but when he compliments the Lord Protector, compares him to Charles Martel, and descends to flattery, Howell loses our respect. Neither does he regain it by his “Cordial for the Cavaliers,” published in 1660, and answered by the “Caveat for the Cavaliers” of Sir Roger L’Estrange.

Payne Fisher, who had been poet-laureate to Cromwell, edited “Howell’s Works,” in which he calls the author the “prodigy of the age for the variety of his writings.” These were forty in number, and in “them all,” says Fisher, “there is something still new, either in the matter, method, or fancy, and in an untrodden tract.”

For the change of politics in the famous letter-writer his friends were prepared, when, after the King’s death, he wrote with what some call prudence, others pusillanimity, these words:--“I will attend with patience how England will thrive, now that she is let blood in the Basilican vein, and cured, as they say, of the King’s evil.” Nevertheless, Howell was made Historiographer-Royal in England by Charles II., who was so lenient to his enemies, so ungrateful to his friends. The place was even created for him; but death soon caused him to vacate it. He ended his chequered life in 1660, and-was buried in the Temple Church.