"Will you go up to London with my father?" she said.
"No," he answered, in the same stern voice. "I shall go alone, and lay my virgin sword at my king's feet."
His sister looked at him with intense love and pride. They were the only children of Colonel Newbolt, who had served the Republican cause throughout the Civil Wars so well that Cromwell had rewarded him with gifts of land and property which had belonged to old Royalist families, who had either disappeared in the struggle or been dispossessed. The most important of these was the Abbey de Lisle, a lovely estate in Westmorland, amidst the moors and fells, just bordering upon Yorkshire. The house had been an old monastery of great fame. Its chapel had been one of exquisite beauty a hundred years before, but under Thomas Cromwell's ruthless hand, in the reign of Henry VIII, when monasteries and abbeys were sacked, it had been reduced to ruins, and so remained, unroofed, with the grass growing up the nave and through the aisles. Ivy clambered round the delicate pillars, and moss lay thick on the steps leading up to the broken altar.
It had been bestowed by Henry on the De Lisles, and with it, as was believed by many, a curse had been inherited, uttered by the last monk who passed out of the monastery grates. It ran thus: "The abbey and its lands shall go from the De Lisles, even as it came to them, by fire and sword".
Now the prophecy had been fulfilled. Gilbert de Lisle, the last of his race, had fallen fighting for King Charles in the Battle of Worcester. He left no children--the race was extinct.
So Cromwell had bestowed the land and all that appertained thereto, the dower-house and the abbey itself, upon Colonel Newbolt, to be his and his heirs' after him. Thither he had brought his wife and children, had spent a considerable sum of money in restoring the house, which had been injured during the war; but the chapel remained a ruin--even that was a concession--and many blamed him for not razing it to the ground. Cromwell's soldiers had finished Henry VIII's vandalism, mutilated the few remaining statues, and broken to pieces the stained-glass window over the altar.
In the country around it was whispered that at midnight there were shadows seen coming and going, ghosts of the dead monks, whose tombs had been desecrated, but whose bodies still rested in the crypt below the altar, awaiting the great judgment day.
Reginald and Ann Newbolt had been little more than children when they came to the Abbey, and the very atmosphere of the place seemed to seize upon their imaginations. They felt kindly towards the dead monks and towards the De Lisles, whose portraits hung in the long gallery which ran the length of the quadrangle. They became, to their father's horror, Royalists. Reginald at fifteen refused to join the Parliamentary forces, though his father could have obtained for him a first-rate appointment. Had he been older, he would have gone straight over to the other side; but the final defeat of the king and his death prevented him from taking that step.
A year or two before our story opens the young man had gone abroad, had visited King Charles in Holland, and sworn allegiance to him. This was unknown to his father, and upon his return he had contented himself with following the natural course of events, fully persuaded in his own mind that when Cromwell should cease to rule England, the English nation would recall their rightful monarch.
His was not an isolated case. There were many young men--ay, old men too--in England in whom Charles's death killed republicanism and awoke once more the smouldering embers of loyalty.