On his melancholy departure from these ancestral halls, which he was never more to behold, the venerable Marquess—accompanied by certain members of his family and a few tried friends, among whom was the devoted Bayly—was conducted to London, and placed under the custody of the Black Rod. Expecting to be treated as a declared enemy of Parliament, notwithstanding the terms of capitulation, his lordship was agreeably surprised to find the severity, with which such cases were usually visited, was relaxed in his favour. “Lord bless us,” said he to Dr. Bayly, who never left him, “what a fearful thing was this Black Rod when I heard of it first! It did so run in my mind, that it made an infliction out of mine own imagination. But when I spoke with the man himself, I found him a very civil gentleman; and I saw no black rod! So, methinks, if we would not let these troubles and apprehensions of ours be made worse by our own fears, no rods would be black.” And although—
“The pride of life has vanished,
And here I stand alone,
Degraded, stript, and banished
From all that was mine own;
Yet in dreams, when friends surround me
With the loyal and the true,
The youthful links that bound me,
Seem all riveted anew.
When I hear their loyal voices,
I half forget my wrongs,
And again my heart rejoices
In our good old loyal songs.
Pent up in these dark regions,
The only gems I boast,
Are my honour and allegiance—
All else of earth is lost.”[279]
But we shall leave the worthy Marquess for a time, to observe what is passing in that dearly beloved, but now desolate mansion, the gates of which were now closed upon him for ever.
The woodcut here introduced represents one of the richly ornamented, but now dilapidated, windows of the front range of the Castle.
Of the settling of some portion of the Marquess of Worcester’s estates upon Cromwell, we take the following particulars from a popular writer of our own times:—“The Commons,” he observes, “now dealing with delinquents, do not forget to reward good servants—to ‘conciliate the grandees,’ as splenetic Walker calls it. For about two years (writing after the conclusion of the war) there has been talk and debate about settling £2,500 a year on Lieutenant-General Cromwell; but difficulties have arisen. First, they tried Basinghouse lands, the Marquis of Winchester’s, whom Cromwell had demolished; but the Marquis’s affairs were in disorder. It was generally found that the Marquis had only a life-rent there—only Abbotson and Itchin in that quarter could be realized. Order thereupon to settle lands of papists and delinquents to the requisite amount wheresoever convenient. To settle especially what lands the Marquis of Worcester had in that county of Southampton; which was done, though still with insufficient result. Then came the army quarrels, and an end of such business. But now, in the Commons’ Journals, March 7th, this is what we read:—‘An ordinance for passing unto Oliver Cromwell, Esquire, Lieutenant-General, certain lands and manors in the counties of Gloucester, Monmouth, and Glamorgan, late the Earl of Worcester’s, was this day read third time; and, upon the question, passed and ordered to be sent unto the Lords for their concurrence.’” Oliver himself, we shall find, has been dangerously sick; and the following is what Clement Walker reports upon the matter of the grant:—“The sixth of March brought an ordinance to settle two thousand five hundred pounds a year of land out of the Marquis of Worcester’s estate—the old Marquis of Worcester at Raglan—father of the Lord Glamorgan, who, in his turn, became Marquis of Worcester, and wrote the ‘Century of Inventions.’ But £2,500 a year out of the old Marquis’s estate upon Lieutenant-General Cromwell! I have heard some gentlemen, that knew the manor of Chepstow and the other lands, affirm that in reality they are worth £5,000, or even £6,000 a year. You see,” continues he, “though they have not made King Charles a ‘glorious king,’ they have settled a crown revenue upon Oliver, and have made him as glorious a king as ever John of Leyden was.”[280]
In addition to the personal anecdotes, or ‘pithy sayings,’ already introduced, the following are too original and piquant to be overlooked:—“We were talking one day,” says the family chronicler, “of an old drunken fellow, who having used his body to sad disorder in drinking all his lifetime, and at last giving it over, he presently died. The fact being thus brought before him, the Marquis observed, ‘there was nothing to be wondered at in such a termination of the man’s life; for if you take a brand,’ said he, ‘out of the fire that is thoroughly burnt, it will fall to pieces; but if you let it lie there still, it may remain a pretty while before it is turned to ashes.’”
This clearly shows that his Lordship was not a novice in the science of pathology; for, had he made the ‘anatomy of drunkenness’ his particular study, he could not have expressed himself by a figure that more completely illustrates the case. The burnt log may not only last longer, but also preserve its shape, and diffuse light and heat through the whole apartment, while it remains in the fire; but if suddenly removed, and the fire extinguished, it is soon transformed into a heap of black ashes. The comparison applies very forcibly to those in whom the pernicious habit of spirit-drinking has been long a rooted evil. If they suddenly reform, the constitution—to use the same figure—has been so thoroughly carbonized, that, on the artificial temperature being withdrawn, it breaks down like the charred firebrand and is extinguished; but if cautiously and gradually withdrawn, before the charring process has reached the core, it may live to furnish a better light than any that could be expected from it while in the furnace of dissipation. In the Marquess’s time, as already noticed, the habit of drinking was carried to a most fatal excess; and we may readily believe that the ‘apophthegm’ here recorded, was the result of personal observation among the troops of his own garrison, who—