Part 13

The trial of the Archbishop was dragging slowly on through the year, and the Jesuit procured Inglesant another pass, and directed him to endeavour in every way to assist the Archbishop in his trial, without fear of his prosecutors, telling him that he could procure his liberation even if he were put in prison, which he did not believe he would be. Inglesant, therefore, on his return to London, gave himself heartily to assisting the counsel and secretary of the Archbishop, and found himself perfectly unmolested in so doing. He lodged at a druggist's over against the Goat Tavern, near Toy Bridge in the Strand, and frequented the ordinary at Haycock's, near the Palsgrave's Head Tavern, where the Parliament men much resorted. Here he met among others Sir Henry Blount, who had been a gentleman pensioner of the King's, and had waited on him in his turn to York and Edgehill fight, but then, returning to London, walked into Westminster Hall, with his sword by his side, so coolly as to astonish the Parliamentarians. He was summoned before the Parliament, but pleading that he only did his duty as a servant, was acquitted. This man, who was a man of judgment and experience, was of great use to Inglesant in many ways, and put him in the way of finding much that might assist the Archbishop; but it occurred to Inglesant more than once to doubt whether the latter would benefit much by his advocacy, a known pupil of the Papists as he was. This caused him to keep more quiet than he otherwise would have done; but what was doubtless the Jesuit's chief aim was completely answered; for the Church people, both in London and the country, who regarded the Archbishop as a martyr, becoming aware of the sincere and really useful exertions that Inglesant had made with such untiring energy, attached themselves entirely to him, and took him completely into their confidence, so that he could at this time have depended on any of them for assistance and support. The different parties were at this time so confused and intermixed--the Papists playing in many cases a double game--that it would have been difficult for Inglesant, who was partly in the confidence of all, to know which way to act, had he stood alone. He saw now, more than he had ever done, the intrigues of that party among the Papists who favoured the Parliament, and was astonished at their skill and duplicity. At last the Commons, failing to find the Archbishop guilty of anything worthy of death, passed a Bill of Attainder, as they had done with Lord Strafford, and condemned him with no precedence of law. The Lords hesitated to pass the Bill, and on Christmas Eve, 1644, demanded a conference with the Commons. The next day was the strangest Christmas Day Inglesant had ever spent. The whole city was ordered to fast in the most solemn way by a special ordinance of Parliament, and strict inquisition was made to see that this ordinance was carried out by the people. Inglesant was well acquainted with Mr. Hale, afterwards Chief Justice Hale, one of the Archbishop's counsel, then a young lawyer in Lincoln's Inn, who, it was said, had composed the defence which Mr. Hern, the senior counsel, had spoken before the Lords. Johnny spent part of the morning with this gentleman, and in the afternoon walked down to the Tower from Lincoln's Inn. The streets were very quiet, the shops closed, and a feeling of sadness and dread hung over all--at any rate in Inglesant's mind. At the turnstile at Holborn he went into a bookseller's shop kept by a man named Turner, a Papist, who sold popish books and pamphlets. Here he found an apothecary, who also was useful to the Catholics, making "Hosts" for them. These both immediately began to speak to Inglesant about the Archbishop and the Papists, expressing their surprise that he should exert himself so much in his favour, telling him that the Papists, to a man, hated him and desired his death, and that a gentleman lately returned from Italy had that very day informed the bookseller that the news of the Archbishop's execution was eagerly expected in Rome. The Lords were certain to give way, they said, and the Archbishop was as good as dead already. They were evidently very anxious to extract from Inglesant whether he acted on his own responsibility or from the directions of the Jesuit; but Inglesant was much too prudent to commit himself in any way. When he had left them he went straight to the Tower, where he was admitted to the Archbishop, whom he found expecting him. He gave him all the intelligence he could, and all the gossip of the day which he had picked up, including the sayings of the wits at the taverns and ordinaries respecting the trial and the Archbishop, of whom all men's minds were full. Laud was inclined to trust somewhat to the Lords' resistance, and Inglesant had scarcely the heart to refute his opinion. He told him the feeling of the Papists, and his fear that even the Catholics at Oxford were not acting sincerely with him. After the failure of the King's pardon, Laud entertained little hope from any other efforts Charles might be disposed to make; but Inglesant promised him to ride to Oxford, and see the Jesuit again. This he did the next day, before the Committee of the Commons met the Lords, which they did not do till the 2d of January. He had a long interview with the Jesuit, and urged as strongly as he could the cruelty and impolicy of letting the Archbishop die without an effort to save him.

"What can be done?" said the Jesuit; "the King can do nothing. All that he can do in the way of pardon he has done: besides, I never see the King; the feeling against the Catholics is now so strong, that His Majesty dare not hold any communications with me."

Inglesant inquired what the policy of the Roman Catholic Church really was; was it favourable to the King and the English Church, or against it?

The Jesuit hesitated, but then, with that appearance of frankness which always won upon his pupil, he confessed that the policy of the Papal Court had latterly gone very much more in favour of the party who wished to destroy the English Church than it had formerly done; and that at present the Pope and the Catholic powers abroad were only disposed to help the King on such terms as he could not accept, and at the same time retain the favour of the Church and Protestant party; and he acknowledged that he had himself under-estimated the opposition of the bulk of English people to Popery. He then requested Inglesant to return to London, and continue to show himself openly in support of the Archbishop, assuring him that in this way alone could he fit himself for performing a most important service to the King, which, he said, he should be soon able to point out to him. The old familiar charm, which had lost none of its power over Johnny, would, of itself, have been sufficient to make him perfectly pliant to the Jesuit's will. He returned to London, but was refused admission to the Archbishop until after the Committee of the Commons had met the Lords, and on the 3d of January the Lords passed the Bill of Attainder. When the news of this reached the Archbishop, he broke off his history, which he had written from day to day, and prepared himself for death. He petitioned that he might be beheaded instead of hanged, and the Commons at last, after much difficulty, granted this request. On the 6th of January it was ordered by both Houses that he should suffer on the 10th. On the same day Inglesant received a special message from the Jesuit in these words, in cypher:--"Apply for admission to the scaffold; it will be granted you."

Very much surprised, Inglesant went to Alderman Pennington, and requested admission to attend the Archbishop to the scaffold, pleading that he was one of the King's household, and attached to the Archbishop from a boy.

Pennington examined him concerning his being in London, his pass, and place of abode, but Inglesant thought more from curiosity than from any other motive; for it was evident that he knew all about him, and his behaviour in London. He asked him many questions about Oxford and the Catholics, and seemed to enjoy any embarrassment that Inglesant was put to in replying. Finally he gave him the warrant of admission, and dismissed him. But as he left the room he called him back, and said with great emphasis,--

"I would warn you, young man, to look very well to your steps. You are treading a path full of pitfalls, few of which you see yourself. All your steps are known, and those are known who are leading you. They think they hold the wires in their own hands, and do not know that they are but the puppets themselves. If you are not altogether in the snare of the destroyer, come out from them, and escape both destruction in this world and the wrath that is to come."

Inglesant thanked him and took his leave. He could not help thinking that there was much truth in the alderman's description of his position.

The next three days the Archbishop spent in preparing for death and composing his speech; and on the day on which he was to die, Inglesant found when he reached the Tower, that he was at his private prayers, at which he continued until Pennington arrived to conduct him to the scaffold. When he came out and found Inglesant there, he seemed pleased, as well he might, for excepting Stern, his chaplain, the only one who was allowed to attend him, he was alone amongst his enemies. He ascended the scaffold with a brave and cheerful courage, some few of the vast crowd assembled reviling him, but the greater part preserving a decent and respectful silence. The chaplain and Inglesant followed him close, and it was well they did so, for a crowd of people, whether by permission or not is not known, pressed up upon the scaffold, as Dr. Heylyn said, "upon the theatre to see the tragedy," so that they pressed upon the Archbishop, and scarcely gave him room to die. Inglesant had never seen such a wonderful sight before--once afterwards he saw one like it, more terrible by far. The little island of the scaffold, surrounded by a surging, pressing sea of heads and struggling men, covering the whole extent of Tower Hill; the houses and windows round full of people, the walls and towers behind covered too. People pressed underneath the scaffold; people climbed up the posts and hung suspended by the rails that fenced it round; people pressed up the steps till there was scarcely room within the rails to stand. The soldiers on guard seemed careless what was done, probably feeling certain that there was no fear of any attempt to rescue the hated priest.

Inglesant recognized many Churchmen and friends of the Archbishop among the crowd, and saw that they recognized him, and that his name was passed about among both friends and enemies. The Archbishop read his speech with great calmness and distinctness, the opening moving many to tears, and when he had finished, gave the papers to Stern to give to his other chaplains, praying God to bestow His mercies and blessings upon them. He spoke to a man named Hind, who sat taking down his speech, begging him not to do him wrong by mistaking him. Then begging the crowd to stand back and give him room, he knelt down to the block; but seeing through the chinks of the boards the people underneath, he begged that they might be removed, as he did not wish that his blood should fall upon the heads of the people. Surely no man was ever so crowded upon and badgered to his death. Then he took off his doublet, and would have addressed himself to prayer, but was not allowed to do so in peace; one Sir John Clotworthy, an Irishman, pestering him with religious questions. After he had answered one or two meekly, he turned to the executioner and forgave him, and kneeling down, after a very short prayer, to which Hind listened with his head down and wrote word for word, the axe with a single blow cut off his head. He was buried in All Hallows Barking, a great crowd of people attending him to the grave in silence and great respect,--the Church of England service read over him without interruption, though it had long been discontinued in all the Churches in London.

News of his death spread rapidly over England, and was received by all Church people with religious fervour as the news of a martyrdom; and wherever it was told, it was added that Mr. John Inglesant, the King's servant, who had used every effort to aid the Archbishop on his trial, was with him on the scaffold to the last. Inglesant returned to Oxford, where the Jesuit received him cordially. He had, it would have seemed, failed in his mission, for the Archbishop was dead; nevertheless, the Jesuit's aim was fully won.

On the King's leaving Oxford, before the advance of General Fairfax, Inglesant accompanied him, and was present at the battle of Naseby, so fatal to the royal cause. No mention of this battle, however, is to be found among the papers from which these memoirs are compiled; and the fact that Inglesant was present at it is known only by an incidental reference to it at a later period. Amid the confusion of the flight, and the subsequent wanderings of the King before he returned to Oxford, it is impossible to follow less important events closely, and it does not seem clear whether Inglesant met with the Jesuit immediately after the battle or not. Acting, however, there can be no doubt, with his approval, if not by his direction, he appears very soon after to have found his way to Gidding, where he remained during several weeks.

*CHAPTER XI.*

The autumn days passed quickly over, and with them the last peaceful hours that Inglesant would know for a long time, and that youthful freshness and bloom and peace which he would never know again. Such a haven as this, such purity and holiness, such rest and repose, lovely as the autumn sunshine resting on the foliage and the grass, would never be open to him again. It was long before rest and peace came to him at all, and when they did come, under different skies and an altered life, it was a rest after a stern battle that left its scars deep in his very life; it was apart from every one of his early friends; it was unblest by first love and early glimpse of heaven. It was about the end of October that he received a message from the Jesuit, which was the summons to leave this paradise, sanctified to him by the holiest moments of his life. The family were at evening prayers in the Church when the messenger arrived, and Inglesant, as usual, was kneeling where he could see Mary Collet, and probably was thinking more of her than of the prayers. Nevertheless he remembered afterwards, when he thought during the long lonely hours of every moment spent at Gidding, that the third collect was being read, and that at the words "Lighten our darkness" he looked up at some noise, and saw the sunshine from the west window shining into the Church upon Mary Collet and the kneeling women, and, beyond them, standing in the dark shadow under the window, the messenger of the Jesuit, whom he knew. He got up quietly and went out. From his marriage feast, nay, from the table of the Lord, he would have got up all the same had that summons come to him.

His whole life from his boyhood had been so formed upon the idea of some day proving himself worthy of the confidence reposed in him (that perfect unexpressed confidence which won his very nature to a passionate devotion capable of the supreme action, whatever it might be, to which all his training had tended), that to have faltered at any moment would have been more impossible to him than suicide, than any self-contradictory action could have been--as impossible as for a proud man to become suddenly naturally humble, or a merciful man cruel. That there might have been found in the universe a power capable of overmastering this master passion is possible; hitherto, however, it had not been found.

Outside the Church the messenger gave him a letter from the Jesuit, which, as usual, was very short.

"Johnny, come to me at Oxford as soon as you can. The time for which we have waited is come. The service which you and none other can perform, and which I have always foreseen for you, is waiting to be accomplished. I depend on you."

Inglesant ordered some refreshment to be given to the messenger, and his own horses to be got out. Then he went back into the Church, and waited till the prayers were over.

The family expressed great regret at parting with him; they were in a continual state of apprehension from their Puritan neighbours; but Inglesant's presence was no defence but rather the contrary, and it is possible that some of them may have been glad that he was going.

Mary Collet looked sadly and wistfully at him as they stood before the porch of the house in the setting sunlight, the long shadows resting on the grass, the evening wind murmuring in the tall trees and shaking down the falling leaves.

"Do you know what this service is?" she said at last.

"I cannot make the slightest guess," he answered.

"Whatever it is you will do it?" she asked again.

"Certainly; to do otherwise would be to contradict the tenor of my life."

"It may be something that your conscience cannot approve," she said.

"It is too late to think of that," he said, smiling; "I should have thought of that years ago, when I was a boy at Westacre, and this man came to me as an angel of light--to me a weak, ignorant, country lad--to me, who owe him everything that I am, everything that I know, everything--even the power that enables me to act for him."

Did she remember how he had once offered himself without reserve to her, then at least without any reservation in favour of this man? Did she regret that she had not encouraged this other attraction, or did she see that the same thing would have happened whether she had accepted him or no? She gave no indication of either of these thoughts.

"I think you owe something to another," she said, softly; "to One who knew you before this Jesuit; to One who was leading you onward before he came across your path; to One who gave you high and noble qualities, without which the Jesuit could have given you nothing; to One whom you have professed to love; to One for whose Divine Voice you have desired to listen. Johnny, will you listen no longer for it?"

He never forgot her, standing before him with her hands clasped and her eyes raised to his,--the flush of eager speaking on her face,--those great eyes, moistened again with tears, that pierced through him to his very soul,--her trembling lip,--the irresistible nobleness of her whole figure,--her winning manner, through which the love she had confessed for him spoke in every part. He never saw her again but once--then in how different a posture and scene; and the beauty of this sight never went out of his life, but it produced no effect upon his purpose; indeed how could it, when his purpose was not so much a part of him as he was a part of it? He looked at her in silence, and his love and admiration spoke out so unmistakably in his look that Mary never afterwards doubted that he had loved her. He had not power to explain his conduct; he could not have told himself why he acted as he did. Amid the distracting purposes which tore his heart in twain he could say nothing but,--

"It may not be so bad as you think."

Mary gave him her hand, turned from him, and went into the house; and he let her go--her of whom the sight must have been to him as that of an angel--he let her go without an effort to stay her, even to prolong the sight. His horses were waiting, and one of his servants would follow with his mails; he mounted and rode away. The sun had set in a cloud, and the autumn evening was dark and gloomy, yet he rode along without any appearance of depression, steadily and quietly, like a man going about some business he has long expected to perform. I cannot even say he was sad: that moment had come to him which from his boyhood he had looked forward to. Now at last he could prove, at any rate to himself, that he was equal to that effort which it had been his ideal to attempt.

When Inglesant reached Oxford he sought out the Jesuit and found him alone. The royal affairs were at the lowest ebb. Since the battle of Naseby the King had done little but wander about like a fugitive. He was now at Oxford; but it was doubtful whether he could stay there in safety through the winter, and certainly he would not be able to do so after the campaign began, unless some change in his fortunes meanwhile occurred. All this Inglesant knew only too well. The ruin of the royal cause, entailing his own ruin and that of all his friends, was too palpable to need description. The Jesuit therefore at once proceeded to the means which were prepared to remedy this disastrous state of things. The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Duke of Ormond, had, with the consent of the King, concluded a truce with the Irish, who, after long years of oppression, spoliation and misery, had, a few years before, broken out suddenly in rebellion, and massacred hundreds of the unprepared Protestants, men, women, and children, under circumstances, as is admitted by Catholics, and is perhaps scarcely to be wondered at, of frightful cruelty. A feeling of intense hatred and dread of these rebels had consequently filled the minds of the English Protestants, both Royalists and Parliamentarians; a feeling in which horror at murderous savages--for as such they not unnaturally regarded the Irish--was united with the old hatred and fear of popish massacres and cruelties. The Parliament had remonstrated with the King for his supineness in not concluding the war by the extirpation of these monsters, and when at last a truce was concluded with them, the anger of the Parliament knew no bounds, and even loyal Churchmen, although they acknowledged the hard necessity which obliged the King to such a step, yet lamented it as one of the severest misfortunes which had befallen them. The King hoped by this peace not only to be able to recall the soldiers who had been engaged against the rebels to his own assistance, but also to procure a detachment of Irish soldiers for the same purpose from the popish leaders. But the popish demands being very excessive, Ormond had not been able to advance far towards a settled peace, when, in the previous spring, the Lord Herbert (afterwards Earl of Glamorgan), the son of the Marquis of Worcester, of a devoted Catholic family and of great influence, announced his intention of going to Ireland on private business, and offered to assist the King with his influence among the Catholics. He had married a daughter of the great Irish house of Thomond, and undoubtedly possessed more influence in that island among the Papists than any other of the royal party.

The King eagerly accepted his assistance, and Glamorgan afterwards produced a commission, undeniably signed by the King, in which he gives him ample powers to treat with the Papists, and to grant them any terms whatever which he should find necessary, consistent with the royal supremacy and the safety of the Protestants. In this extraordinary commission he creates him Earl of Glamorgan, bestows on him the Garter and George, promises him the Princess Elizabeth as a wife for his son, gives him blank patents of nobility to fill up at his pleasure, and promises him on the word of a King to endorse all his actions. The only limit which appears to have been set to the Earl was an obligation to inform the Lord Lieutenant of all his proceedings; and the only doubt respecting this commission appears to be whether it was filled up before the King signed it, or written on a blank signed by the King, in accordance with conclusions previously agreed upon between him and the Earl.