Part 4

Therefore they were enabled to preserve a calm and resigned aspect before the village, and before their household, though plain Peter and the good maidens were not to be deceived as to their silent sufferings; for master did not notice the flowers and birds in the garden so much now, and walked up and down thinking, instead of talking pleasant; and mistress had not looked after her fruit-preserves and her home-made wines this year with the heart she used to do; and, worst sign of all, the dinner was often carried away hardly touched by either. The apprehensions of Noble as to the progress of disaffection to the royal cause proved but too well founded. The private agents and emissaries of the Parliament party wrought underhand to persuade the people, that, by the commission of array, a great part of the estates of all substantial yeomen and freeholders would be taken from them, alleging, that some lords had said that “twenty pounds by the year was enough for every peasant to live on;” and they further said, that all the meaner and poorer sort of people were appointed by the same commission to pay a tax of one day’s labour in every week to the King. These reports, however little deserving of credit, were received by the more ignorant with implicit belief, and circulated by the interested and designing with most persevering activity. The people were thus taught that, if they did not adhere to the Parliament, and submit to the ordinance for the militia, they would soon be no better than slaves to the lords, and the victims of a most cruel oppression.

The ignorance and credulity of the vulgar were by these arts widely and successfully imposed upon; but the population of Cheddar was preserved from these corrupting falsehoods by the prudence of Noble. He early obtained a copy of the commission of array, which was written in Latin, and having translated it with fidelity, distributed copies from house to house. The word of the good parson was ever held in reverence by his flock, therefore, with few exceptions, and those confined to the worst characters in the village, his account of the matter was received as true; while in many other places the crafty supporters of the levelling party, taking advantage of the commissions being in Latin, translated it into what English they pleased, and abused simple folk in the manner related.

While the Marquis of Hertford maintained himself at Wells all things continued quiet at Cheddar; but as Noble had foreseen, there was soon a very powerful party brought against him, and he was compelled to retire, before the increasing forces and the active officers of the Parliament, to Sherborne, in Dorsetshire.

Master Daws, the artful and the covetous enemy of Noble, who had been already baffled in his endeavour to drag him before a committee, and whose eyes were steadily fixed upon the living of Cheddar, had not been inactive while the Royalists lay at Wells.

He had, it is true, seldom ventured from home for fear his precious carcass might receive some weighty mark of the wrath or merriment of a royal trooper, though he might have gone to and fro in his clerical garb as safe as an innocent child: but conscience made a coward of him; for he had employed the period of his confinement to his house in preparing certain lying and inflammatory papers, which, through the agency of a near relation, who was a scrivener’s clerk at Bristol, he procured to be secretly printed in that city. These papers were of the most indecent and outrageous nature, directed chiefly against prelacy, and all supporters of the church of England and the episcopal form of government. Now, this scrivener’s clerk, though he knew and despised the hypocrisy of Master Daws, and laughed at all religion, whether real or pretended, lent himself as a most ready agent in this charitable work. “There are diversities of gifts, my dear Matty,” said his crafty uncle Daws in the letter which accompanied his manuscript libels,--“diversities of gifts, but the same spirit:--thou hast a lively wit, and a playful hand with thy pencil; prithee put a little device of some facetious kind at the head of each of these papers,--such an one as may be easily struck off in a wood-cut of the kind, which the profane Italians call caricature: but what need I say more? Thou knowest what I would have:--see thou do it. I wish to have them done before Cheddar fair, which is held, thou knowest, at the latter end of September. They are a bigoted, base, priest-ridden herd of swine in that parish, and as blind as the moles and the bats:--we must let in a little light on them:--see thou do it broadly.”

The sharp-visaged, pale-faced nephew grinned as he read his worthy uncle’s epistle, and secretly resolved at once to gratify the mean desire expressed in it, and to amuse himself, at his uncle’s expense, when it was too late for him to make any alteration should he detect it. Of the ungainly figure, and the hideous features of his uncle, he had caricatures without number; and as they were so strongly marked, that the rudest engraver of a wooden block could not fail to copy them faithfully, he determined that the long visage of Daws himself should find a place in his performance.

The fair-day of Cheddar was that one day in the year which was always most trying to Noble. All the other holydays were home festivals, and were kept by the villagers among themselves, being seldom intruded on by strangers; but the annual fair always brought with it a herd of idle vagabonds from Bristol, and other towns within a convenient distance, and seldom terminated without many profligate, disgusting scenes, or an open brawl. The state of public affairs, and the presence of a Puritan force in Somersetshire, had such an effect on the fairs throughout the county this autumn, that they were in general but thinly attended, and little or no business was done among the farmers and dealers, by whom they were commonly frequented.

Nevertheless, fairs were too important in the social economy to the convenience of the people to be wholly suspended. Therefore, on the appointed morning, early in September, a pleasant peal of five bells (not as yet silenced by force or law) gave due notice from the tower of Cheddar church that the day of fairings and gilt gingerbread had arrived; but although a certain quantity of booths had been erected, only one, and that but scantily supplied, was set apart for the profane display of those glittering temptations. Among the farm servants standing for hire, there were no stout young carters with their whips, no hale shepherds with their crooks and green sprigs in their hats; and though there was no lack of maids, yet, as they crowded together, they looked lonesome and sad, and their bonny brown hair was not tied up with ribands. The few children present were held fast by the hand, and led by their parents to see the common purchases made for the household; but even in these matters the traffic was dull. There were, indeed, a few cattle; a few pens of sheep; some piles of Cheddar and other Somersetshire cheese; a store of salted meats; one stall with fair garnishes of pewter for the cupboard; another with wooden bowls, and trenchers, and vessels for the dairy; and one great one, at which groceries, cloths, linens, and articles of hardware, were promiscuously set forth, and where the neighbouring housewives were wont to lay in their store of useful necessaries for the coming year. But now it was so uncertain what a day might bring forth, that not many cared to make their annual outlay.

It might be supposed, that, in such unsettled times, mountebanks, tumblers, and conjurers could hardly reckon on a sufficient harvest of pence to find them in beer and shoe leather; but some of them still ventured their exhibitions, and with a ready wit practised boldly, wherever they came, upon the popular prejudices of the hour, and lent themselves to the crafty suggestions of the designing, who well knew that the vulgar mind may be artfully seduced to join in the ridicule of those very persons and things, which, in its better moments, it has respected.

Now the nephew of Daws had been a most willing and active agent in forwarding the objects of his uncle; for he had not only procured his libellous papers to be printed, but he had provided them each with a caricature engraving on wood; and he had, in like manner, caused certain ribald songs to be headed for distribution at Cheddar fair; so that they who could not read the slanders and calumnies contained in the printed matter might see them pictured to their senses. Nor did he stop here; but he procured a base fellow, the son of a drunken saddler, who was a noted posture master in Bristol, to carry these papers and prints to Cheddar on the fair day, and to commend them to the people. This knave, taking with him a merriman and a fire-eater to assist him in attracting a crowd, repaired thither, and about noon began his operations on a scaffold near the market cross. They had been followed by a rabble of disorderly persons, among whom the report of some fun at Cheddar fair had been already spread by the rogues engaged on the occasion.

Master Daws, who had been advised by his nephew of the preparations that were made for bringing the church and its ministers into contempt before the population of Cheddar, walked to the village at an early hour in company with his nephew, under the pretence of buying a hundred weight of cheese and a salted mutton; and, though the day was fine, he took care to appear in the blue Geneva cloak, which was commonly worn by the Puritan divines. Having engaged an upper room in a public house facing the market place, he had no sooner stalked through the vacant crowd, and made his purchases, than he retired to feast his malignant envy from the window of this chamber.

The sound of the pipe and tabor, and the nasal tones of Master Merriman, soon gathered all the idle folk in the fair round the mountebank’s scaffold. The fool began with their favourite egg-dance; and they stood with gaping mouths to see him hop about on one leg, and then, being blindfolded, dance backwards and forwards between the eggs without touching one of them: their mouths gaped yet wider, as this performer was succeeded by the fire-eater, who, after commencing by the trick of drawing forth from his mouth yard after yard of ribands, as if his stomach had been a riband loom, put a bundle of lighted matches into his mouth, and blew the smoke of the sulphur through his nostrils. Last came the posture-master, whose art consisted in making all sorts of uncouth faces, and exhibiting in a natural but shocking manner every species of deformity and dislocation. Now he showed a huge rising of his left shoulder; now shifted the deformity into the other; now represented a humpback; accompanying these changes of his figure with sundry comical contortions of countenance, to which the crowd responded in roars of laughter. Having thus got them into good humour for his purpose, he went on to imitate the cries and voices of sundry animals and birds; the crow of the cock, the gabble of the geese, the gobble of the turkey, the quaak of the duck, the squeak of the sucking pig, the bleat of the lamb, the grunt of the old sow, and the braying of the ass. The crowd was on the broad grin while he went through these imitations. He now therefore disappeared for a minute, leaving the merriman to amuse them, by way of interlude, with a jocular dance, and returned in robes made of coarse materials to imitate those of a bishop. His figure was stuffed out to Falstaff-like proportions; his hands were crossed with due gravity; he had plumpers in his cheeks; and he forthwith began to intone an anthem with burlesque solemnity. The words were in mockery of the coronation anthem; and the petition for the growth of the King’s beard, and the shaving thereof, was delivered in all those varieties of note which he had before given when mimicking the animals of the farm-yard. He thus excited the mirth of the rabble vastly. He closed this mischievous performance by a comic song about tithes; and, after imitating the squeak of a sucking pig, and the clack of a hen, he produced upon the stage, by sleight of hand, as if from his paunch, a basket filled with curious samples of the small tithe, in which the tenth egg was not forgotten. His place was now taken by the mountebank, who professed to be appointed grand physician to the state, and purifier of the church. The fool stood by his side making all the uncouth faces which he could think of, taken, it must be confessed, most chiefly from the sour _kill-joys_ of the time; and holding a large bundle of printed papers, each headed by a wood-cut, he distributed them down among the people for due consideration of pence and farthings dropped into his cap. These papers, though ridiculous devices were prefixed to them, contained a venom of no laughable matter, and were eagerly bought up.

The nephew of old Daws had been at little pains to rack his invention for the subject of these curious cuts. On one, he had engraven the figure of a fox, vested in canonicals, with a crosier in his hand and a mitre on his head, hanging upon a tree, with a flock of geese and other fowl beneath chattering at him; on another, he had represented a fox in chains, with his right paw on a bag of money, and a monkey at prayers by his side, trying to steal it away. On the next was given the figure of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, bearing a close resemblance to his own uncle, puffing a large fire with a pair of bellows, on which was inscribed “Groans and sighs;” while above was depicted an owl, with a wolf and a lamb joining in prayers. By a self-deception not uncommon, Master Daws had not the slightest suspicion that the said wolf bore any likeness to himself, and, to the secret diversion of his nephew, he gave a most ghastly smile of approval as he looked over the rude caricatures, three of which we have described. The time was now come for directing the wayward crowd to a stronger expression of their contempt for the church than laughter. Accordingly, the nephew of Daws descended among them, and proposed that they should burn a bishop’s effigy before the parson’s house. While the effigy was preparing, the people stood in groups reading the papers; and sundry charitable suggestions were made by the baser among them. “Let’s get into his cellar,” said one, “and drink a little of the sacrament wine.”--“Let’s lay hold of the church plate,” said another:--“Or give the parson a ride on old Bruin here,” was the cruel proposal of a third, pointing to a huge bear in a string, led by a wandering showman. All things were soon ready; and, led by the posture master in front, and guided behind by the mischievous nephew of Master Daws, off the rabble moved, noisy and half drunk, and ready for all evil. They had no sooner reached the yew-tree in the churchyard, and were advancing towards the wicket, than out rushed an old beggar, stumping on his wooden leg, followed by plain Peter and two more old labourers, and immediately behind them, as if in pursuit, a fine young bull. The old beggar, who was no other than the worn-out veteran before mentioned, shouted, “_Mad bull!_” at the top of his voice, with an earnestness and passion that made him at once believed; and the crowd fled, tumbling over each other, as they ran, in inextricable confusion: nor were they allowed time to detect the deception practised on them; for the old soldier and plain Peter slipping behind the frightened beast, and goading him forward, he performed his friendly office as well as the maddest of all bulls, and very effectually dispersed the mob, and defeated their base and cruel intentions for that day. Master Daws, who had from his post of observation at the window witnessed the scenes in the market-place with the most malignant satisfaction, as soon as the crowd marched off towards the vicarage with the effigy, and he saw the coast clear, could not repress his curiosity, and, stealing down, followed afar off to watch their operations. In the luckless moment of their panic and flight, he was so terrified and puzzled, that he could not regain the house, but ran with the crowd, and was thrown down by a pig; nor was this the worst, for it so happened that a man, leading a monkey, fell at the same moment, and jocko flew upon Daws and bit his right ear, till he screamed for agony: beyond this, however, and the tearing of his clothes, he sustained no injury. A worse fate waited the posture-master, the bear being infuriated at the hubbub, and having broken away from his master, seized him fiercely, and embraced him in a hug so fatal, that it produced contortions of countenance and a dislocation of bones very different from those he had so lately been exhibiting, and left him a cripple for life. The warning of his master’s danger had been communicated to plain Peter, that very morning, by the grateful old soldier, who had come to that fair with no other intention than rendering this service, he having heard a whisper of the intended doings in a tap at Bristol. It so chanced that old Noble was confined to the house by a sprain of the ankle, and his mistress was not well; so Peter kept from them all mention of these fears. The stratagem he adopted for putting the mob to flight was suggested by the old soldier, and cheerfully aided by a neighbouring farmer and two of his servants. Thus was the worthy parson protected in peace, and kept safe from the strife of tongues and the violence of a base rabble, throughout a day that was very threatening: unconscious himself how Daws had been undermining him, he had passed it in a frame of mind more than usually composed.

Daws and his nephew continued their retreat without staying to pay their reckoning at the public-house. The greater part of the crowd, finding themselves on the road to Axbridge, proceeded there, to make up for their disappointment at Cheddar by a riot at that place instead. So few, indeed, returned, after they had got beyond the reach of danger, to find out the truth of it, and they squabbled so much among themselves, that Master Blount and the villagers were able to prevent further disturbance at that time. Before evening all the strange rabble departed; and the sun set on Cheddar as tranquilly as in happier times.

CHAP. VI.

It’s a hard fate to be slain for what a man should never willingly fight. RALEIGH.

The prediction of Juxon concerning the city of Coventry proved correct:--not only was the disposition of the inhabitants such as he described, but the Parliamentarians, whose vigilance and activity were very great, sent forward a small force to assist the citizens in defending the place,--and the King had the mortification of summoning it in vain. The gates were shut against him, and the burghers sent out a message of defiance. His Majesty came to Stoneleigh Abbey the same afternoon, much dejected; and being there joined by several of the most considerable gentlemen in the county, he decided on raising his standard at Nottingham, which was accordingly done on the 25th of August; but he found that place much emptier than he expected, and learned that the army of the Parliament, composed of horse, foot, and cannon, was at Northampton. His own few cannon and stores were, as yet, at quarters in York; and the levy gathered immediately under his own person was at this moment very inconsiderable. Among the cavaliers, who had brought their contingent of horsemen for the royal service, was Sir Charles Lambert, with young Arthur Heywood and a small troop of stout yeomanry. The age of boyhood is so impressible, that the mind readily admits an omen for good or for evil; and Arthur felt, and was angry with himself for feeling, uncomfortable, because the very first evening of its erection the royal standard was blown down by a violent storm of wind and rain.

A short time was now consumed in messages between the King and the two Houses; but on neither side were the negotiations conducted in a spirit which could issue otherwise than they did. The declaration of the two Houses to the kingdom was a trumpet note that gave no uncertain sound, and it was answered to by the King with a princely courage.

He now removed to Derby; and having clear information that Shrewsbury was at his devotion, continued his march to that town; and, collecting all his forces in that strong and pleasant situation, was enabled to organise them for taking the field in security, and to keep up his correspondence with Worcester,--a city zealously affected to the royal cause. Soon after the King left Nottingham, the Earl of Essex marched from Northampton with his whole army towards Worcester, and, as he traversed Warwickshire, placed garrisons of foot both in Warwick and Coventry. It so chanced that, by these dispositions, the regiment to which Cuthbert belonged was stationed for a time at Warwick.

Sir Oliver Heywood had been disappointed of his wishes by an attack of gout so very severe, that it quite disabled him; and although he had contrived to present himself before the King at Stoneleigh, the effort had thrown him back, and reduced him to the helplessness of a cripple. He was therefore compelled to forego his intention of repairing to Nottingham and joining the levy. Under these circumstances he was willing to remain shut up at Milverton House, and to abide all chances and all consequences which might follow on that course, when the army of the Parliament should enter the county. But Juxon warmly represented to him the great imprudence of this unnecessary risk, and advised him to seek a temporary residence in a more protected situation. With a wise forethought he recommended Oxford; observing that it was at present occupied for the King; and, if his Majesty could make head against his enemies, would undoubtedly become the royal quarters, in the event of his not being fortunate enough to recover the capital before winter. It was true that in the interval which must pass before the King could take the field, and advance in strength, the University of Oxford might be exposed to a visit of some division of the Parliamentary forces; but it was not probable that private families lodging there without show would be seriously molested:--whereas it was almost certain that the country mansion of any Royalist of like consideration with himself would be subjected to a visitation of a very insulting and rude nature. Sir Oliver yielded to this sensible advice; and as soon as the King quitted Nottingham he departed from Milverton. Jane and Sophia Lambert accompanied Katharine Heywood to Oxford; and Juxon having escorted the party on their first day’s journey, took leave of them with the best composure which he could, and, without betraying the depth and tenderness of his solicitude by one look or tone of dejection, returned with all speed to Old Beech.

It was near midnight when he approached the village; and by the obscure light of a moonless but clear sky he discerned in the lane before him two men moving about at a point where another road crossed it. As a gate on his right hand opened into a large field, he dismounted, and leading in his horse, fastened it to a hedge-stake, and stole forward softly on foot by a pathway, leading to the point where the roads crossed. Just as he reached the spot, a disturbed bird nestled in a bush. “Who goes there?” said a gruff voice. Juxon remained perfectly still, and saw two sentinels, one a pikeman, and the other a musketeer, who now ceased their pacing, and stood halted, fronting the lane end.

“It is nobody,” replied the comrade of the soldier who had given the challenge:--“this is the second time thou hast been fooled to-night.”