“1631, April 30th. London.—The Lord Castlehaven is tryd by his peeres, condemned upon” certain horrible crimes “to be hanged.... Dr. Winniffe of Paul’s and Dr. Wickam of York are his confessors. He was very dumb at first, but now speakes, prayes, weepes, tells the confession of his sins, writes the confession of his faythe. He abjures Rome, disavows that aspersion of drinking wine and tobacco[14] in the church, and saying ‘this is better than 20£ a month’. Never man more humbled and wonderfully chered by the receipt of the Communion. ‘Now,’ says he, ‘I feele my Saviour,’ and instantly gusht out teares.... He confesses all crimes but those that touche his life. These he layes to a plott. His sisters petition for his life; some saye the Queene appeares in the suite. He desires death, and is no more ashamed—he sayth—of hanging in a rope, then Christ was for his sins upon the crosse. Had he craved his booke, he had lived by the statute that gives it to noblemen for any first fact or crime but treason or murther.[15] This week four have died of the plague.”
[14] “Drinking tobacco” has an odd look; but it was a phrase of the time. One version of a well-known refrain ran:—
“Think this while you’re drinking tobacco”.
[15] He was executed on Tower Hill on 14 May, 1631. A fresh patent of nobility was afterwards granted to his son.
The appointment of Newcastle to attend the King to Scotland, noticed at the end of the next letter, was destined to put him to enormous expense.
“Francis, Lord Cottington to the Earl of Newcastle.
“1632, December 13. Charing Cross.—The death of the two Kings, Sweden and Bohemia, with his Majesty’s late sickness of the small-pox, has almost put by here all kind of home negociations; yet I must tell you from my Lord Treasurer that you are lively in the memory both of the King and of his lordship. The King is now well though he still keeps his chamber, and my Lord Deputy[16] is precisely sent for, so that you will have one friend more here. You are appointed to attend the King into Scotland which I conceive might be a good motive for your friends to put it to a period.”
[16] Strafford.
The “good motive for your friends to put it to a period” probably alluded to an object that Newcastle had very much at heart, of which we shall hear more by and by.