A story of Sedgemoor times and of a woman who was both a saint and a heroine.
I committed a great folly when I was young and ignorant; for I left my father's house and hid myself in London only that I might escape the match he desired to make for me. I knew nothing at that time of the dangers and sorrows of those who live in the world and are mixed in its affairs.
Yet it was a time of public peril, and not a few who dwelt in the quiet corners of the earth found themselves embroiled suddenly in great matters of state. For when the Duke of Monmouth landed in Dorsetshire it was not the dwellers in great cities or the intriguers of the Court that followed him chiefly to their undoing; it was the peasant who left his plough and the cloth-worker his loom. Men who could neither read nor write were caught up by the cry of a Protestant leader, and went after him to their ruin.
The prince to whose standard they flocked was, for all his sweet and taking manners, but a profligate at best; he had no true religion in his heart—nothing but a desire, indeed, for his own aggrandisement, whatever he might say to the unhappy maid that handed a Bible to him at Taunton. But of this the people were ignorant, and so it came to pass that they were led to destruction in a fruitless cause.
French Leave
But there were, besides the men that died nobly in a mistaken struggle for religious freedom, others that joined the army from mean and ignoble motives, and others again that had not the courage to go through with that which they had begun, but turned coward and traitor at the last.
Of one of them I am now to write, and I will say of him no more evil than must be.
How I, that had fled away from the part of the country where this trouble was, before its beginning, became mixed in it was strange enough.
I had, as I said, run away to escape from the match that my father proposed for me; and yet it was not from any dislike of Tom Windham, the neighbour's son with whom I was to have mated, that I did this; but chiefly from a dislike that I had to settle in the place where I had been bred; for I thought myself weary of a country life and the little town whither we went to market; and I desired to see somewhat of life in a great city and the gaiety stirring there.