Sir Michael Drayton, of Drayton Manor, in the southward part of the county of Somerset, was already well on in years when I, the second child of his second wife, was born. And that was in the eighth year of the second Charles. For he, my father, first saw the light in the year of grace 1609, and thus, at the time of my meeting with Ned, which was in the summer of the year 1673, and in the sixth year of my little life, he had fulfilled sixty-four years, of which number some five and forty had brought him trouble sufficient, on moderate computation, to furnish out a fair portion of strife and affliction to six ordinary men. For, ardent and devoted Cavalier though he was, 't was not the outburst of the great war of the Rebellion that marked the worst point of his troubles. Often in his old age have I heard my dear father tell how, after the tedious and ever embittering doubts and hesitations of that civil strife that had endured in England since the coming of the first Stuart, to him as to many another the resort to arms came as a clearing of the vexed mind and settlement of conscience perturbed. Of the momentous action of the Long Parliament, in the year 1642, I have heard him say: "Then at length our duty was plain. I, for one, slept better o' nights thereafter than I had done since the meeting of the Short Parliament." For Sir Michael had been elected of the shire for that hapless assembly, as subsequently for its successor, the Long Parliament; of his seat in the latter he was illegally deprived when he withdrew from Westminster to join the King at Oxford, which he did in the late spring of that same year (I mean 1642), in the excellent company of my Lord Falkland and the late Lord Chancellor Clarendon, then Sir Edward Hyde. And thenceforth his life was war, and raising of money in order to its prosecution; in both which perilous and comfortless means of assisting his sovereign and of hurting his foes Sir Michael Drayton was ever forward, to the most lamentable detriment of his own person and estate. He raised on his own land, and maintained at his own expense, a troop of horse that were ever with him throughout the first period of that long and evil war, I mean until the fight at Naseby in Yorkshire. There he lost great part of his following upon the field, and was himself grievously hurt. Yet with that scent, as I may say, which led him in all those years ever where the work was hottest, he was found again in the Welsh rising three years later, whence, escaping after the fall of Pembroke Castle, he joined himself with his little remnant of troopers to the Scots, in bare time to share their overthrow at Warrington by the late Protector (although he had not then that title).
Sore in mind, sick in body,—for he was never wholly healed of his great wound in the right thigh which he took at Naseby,—he reached home only to hear of his King's terrible end. 'T is perhaps strange to tell that this awful deed of murder and sacrilege put a new heart in that much-buffeted and enduring gentleman, my father. That Martyrdom, I think, went far to atone, in Sir Michael's mind and heart, for certain wrongs and fickle veerings of purpose, proceeding as much from the complexion as the misfortunes of that pious Martyr and unhappy King. No word did he ever utter to asperse the royal memory; yet once in the passage of these more recent transactions of state, which have brought into my life, as into that of the nation at large, so much of betterment, did I hear him murmur (though but as for his own ear alone), "Ay, ay—he served us best, when they served him worst." Be that as it may, from that hour until the happy restoration of King Charles the Second, all that he had—the remnant of health, much of his land, the lives of his sons, the thoughts of his mind, and the prayer of his heart, were given to forward that happy end, which was achieved, as all men know and many remember, in the year 1660—but, for the house of Drayton, at what a cost!
But my father's story I must not make overlong, lest I never come at my own. In brief, then, all his money and much of the Drayton timber, with here and there a fair slice of his land, were gone while the head of the royal Martyr was yet where God had set it. From that fatal day, however, he set himself to the husbanding what God and the rebels had left to him. Here again was disaster in wait for him; for when, by dint of living as a peasant, and by help of his breeding of horses (for which he was already famous in the west, and, in the early years of the war, well known to the farriers of Prince Rupert's Horse), he had begun to lay by the means of one day aiding the cause to which his life was given, he was, through the lust and malice of a certain Puritan neighbor, denounced as a Malignant, and most heavily fined by the despotic rule of the late Lord Protector Cromwell. Through Mr. Nathaniel Royston (of whom more in good time), he was warned of this instant spoliation, and was so enabled privily to convey his store of gold into France, and to lay it in the hands of his exiled sovereign, to be spent, no doubt, in far other fashion than the earning of it. And though he proved to the commissioners sent down upon that proditorious information to be less worth the plucking than had been supposed, yet his acts in the late troubles being known, and somewhat, perhaps, of that sending of money into France leaking out, the blow fell upon him even as his psalm-singing but ungodly neighbor had designed. So, the gold in France, land must be sold. And sold it was, but not as that godly brewer of Yeovil did intend—to wit, into his own hand; for here again Mr. N. Royston did us great service, buying of the land which adjoined his own a small portion at so high a price that the great fine was paid with the loss of a few fields.
Yet none the less was the work all to begin again. So begun again it was, and that most stubbornly. And it was well the land was fat, and the breed of horses unmatched in the west country, for, when our western discontent grew to a head in the year 1655, Rupert, his youngest son by his first lady, was with Penruddock at Salisbury, whither he carried and left, on his own undertaking, most of that painful saving. Some few of his following drifted back to Drayton, but Rupert had spent the gold and himself for his King, even as Sir Michael had now spent all his family. For Henry and Maurice, the elder sons, had fallen, the one at Worcester fight, the other in duel with a Frenchman at The Hague, whither he had followed his sovereign, his opponent, it was said, being a spy of Cardinal Mazarin, and suspected by my brother of some ill intent to his exiled prince. Over and above all these troubles, that same affair of Penruddock's, so foolish and ill-devised, cost Sir Michael within the year the life of his wife, after a union with her of six and twenty years of that nature as to soften much the sting of his many afflictions, though it could not keep her own heart from bursting with the loss of the last child of their love.
His thereafter speedy marriage with my own dear mother, whom I do but faintly remember, had in it no token, whatever the show may have been, of disrespect to the former Lady Drayton. But here again is a story to excel, perhaps, in the right telling of it, the length of my own. Yet I do not purpose a full relation of so much sorrow, holding that the strong hand only of a master in letters should essay the portraiture of such tragedy as was in those days often enacted in the houses of many an old Royalist family.
Mr. Denzil Holroyd's only surviving child, the lady who afterwards became my mother, had passed a jejune childhood in a house impoverished by her father's loyalty to the Stuart cause, and persecuted in the latter days, even to bitterness, for its stanch adherence to the faith of Rome. She had been the close and tender friend of the first Lady Drayton. Following hard upon the death of that lady came fresh ill-fortune upon the Holroyd family, of which the death of Denzil, its head, was a part; and Mistress Alicia Holroyd, left without a natural protector, and stripped by cruel laws and wicked informers of her last acres, flung herself late of a bitter winter's night against my father's door, begging shelter from the inclemency of Nature, and protection from the baseness of her Puritan cousin, who, not content with the filching her inheritance, would have added her person to his plunder as the price of food and lodging, hoping thus to make sure his title against future turns of fate. Silas Holroyd pursuing, found her clinging as some frightened child to my father. Silas soon returned the way he came, but after what words with my father was never known, since he dared tell no man what passed between them, and none dared question Sir Michael. Yet Alicia could not dwell in the house where now was no mistress, so out of this difficulty, as of so many another, my father must needs find a way; which indeed he did, as the words he used in telling me of the matter shall now inform any that has read so far in my narrative. "I told your good mother, little daughter Phil," he said, "that I had little power or credit in the land to help my friend. 'But,' said I, that bitter night that she came to me, 'if you will wed an old man and a broken, there is yet left in Drayton the strength to make some show of cover for the mistress of his board and the partner of his bed. 'T is a poor thing to offer, but it will serve to make a fool of that knave Silas, when he shall try, as well I know he will, to recover the custody of your person by a process of law, charging me with your abduction. I will cherish you well, if you will have me for husband.'" And if the poor lady let gratitude usurp the place of love who shall blame her, being in such straits? Not I, her most happy daughter. Were it but for the father she gave me, I will thank her next in order only to her God and mine till I die, and after, I do firmly trust.
And so out of hand they were married, nor do I think either found cause of regret. For the lady found peace, and license to practise, as far as might be, the duties of her faith, with now and again the comfort of its holiest offices at the hands of some wandering or hunted priest. For my father's old and loud-spoken hatred of Rome, now indeed much softened by the mellowing of his own temper and the fellow-feeling of a common persecution, was yet so well fixed in the memory of that countryside, that Mistress Alicia Holroyd was generally held to have abjured the errors of Rome in committing the error of becoming Lady Drayton. Certain it is, that none ever discovered the secret chapel so cunningly hid among the wine vaults, devised by Sir Michael, and painted and floored, dressed and furnished by no hands save his and those of Simon Emmet. I have heard that Simon would grumble as he worked, predicting ill to come of this idolatry. For his own soul, he would say, he cared not so greatly, in the pleasing of so sweet a lady—but, for Sir Michael's, his same sweet lady's, and their children's to come, he would the cursed job were not to do. But, if bidden then to lay down his tools, "Nay," he would say, "you cannot do alone in the business. And if it be sin, as I verily think it, I will not hand it on to another."
From the few and petty memories of my infancy, antecedent to my first encounter with Ned, there stands out the vision of my mother's face, as she would ascend the stair that led, as I understood then, and for many a year thereafter, but from the cellars; the vision of a face shedding upon all a shining calm, so tender, and withal so glorious, as no cunning of the greatest painter's brush, I think, has ever coaxed into the nimbus of his saint. It is how I recall her face in my dreams, sleeping or waking. And when I learned at length the secret of the chapel I understood many things that each must find for himself.
Her first child was my brother Philip, born in the year 1658. Ten years later she gave my father his only girl and last child,—me, Philippa, to wit,—and died herself in the first days of the year 1673, some five months before my rescue from Betty at the hands of Master Royston, to which, in this opening chapter, as in my life, I will yet be referring all things, as it were an Hegira.
And all this time, though I am ever dinning this Master Royston, this Ned, this time-worn but, I hope, sempiternal lover, in your ears, as yet introduction of him into these pages does as much lack formal ceremony as did the beginning of our friendship.