Part 21

“Your assured friend and servant, W. C.,” (as the letter is signed,) writes to the Parliament man from “Usk, August 15, 1646.--I shall now give you an account how near our approaches are made unto the Castle. That which is our maine work is about sixty yardes from theirs, and that’s the most. We have planted four mortar pieces, each of them carrying a grenado shel twelve inches diameter; and two mortar peeces planted at another place carrying shels about the like compas; soe that in case the treatye doe breake off, we are then ready to show by what extremitye they must expect to be reduced. This we are very confident, that the grenadoes will make them quit their workes and outhouses, and solely betake themselves into the Castle, which indeed will be a worke of time before we are able to undermine it, in regard we must mine down a hill[269] under a moate, and then the workes, before we can come to the Castle; yet we conceive it feasible to be done with some losse. Our engineer, Captain Hooper, a painful and honest man, proceeding, as he hath begun, with exact running trenches, which we made so secure as if they were workes against a storme, will, with God’s blessing, come within ten yards in a few dayes; and then, I believe, we shall make galleries, mines, and many batteries. The General is every day in the trenches, and yesterdaye appointed a new approache, which the engineer of this army, who is now returned from Worcester, is to carry on with all expedition. He has already broken the ground, throwne up approaches of about an hundred yardes in length and circuit, and is within sixty yards of the under part of their workes.”

The writer then proposes that the Parliament should agree to moderate terms, and accept of an honourable answer. That the plan might succeed he deems quite certain, though not without farther loss; and he adds, in terms less courteous than characteristic of the times, that “it would not be worth while to gaine this old man’s carkasse at so dear a rate.”[270]

AUG. 14.--Fairfax appointed a new approach, which the engineer, Captain Hooper, had so far proceeded in as to throw up approaches of an hundred yards in circuit, making exact running trenches (as secure as if they were works against a storm), coming within sixty yards of their works.

AUG. 15.--The Marquess sent forth his desire to treat upon the General’s propositions; whereupon the treaty was appointed at Mr. Oates’s house, (about a mile and a half from Raglan,) to begin at two of the clock that afternoon. Fairfax’s commissioners were Colonel Birch, Mr. Herbert, Quartermaster-General Grosvenor, Lieutenant-Colonel Ashfield, and Major Tulida.

By Monday the 17th of August, two days after the date of this report, the preliminaries for capitulation were finally arranged.[271]

Surrender. --During the blockade of Raglan, the Parliamentary General fixed his head-quarters at Kevantilla House,[272] the residence of Mr. Oates, about a mile and a half from Raglan; and there the treaty for the surrender of the Castle was finally adjusted and prepared for signature. The commission deputed for the occasion by Fairfax, were Colonel Birch, Quarter-Master Herbert, General Grosvenor, Lieutenant-Colonel Ashfield, and Major Tuliday. The meeting, as previously arranged, took place at two o’clock in the afternoon of Saturday, August the fifteenth; and, on the Monday following, the document was ratified, by appending to it the signatures of the authorized commissioners. The capitulation was agreed to on the following conditions:--

Article the First. The garrison, ammunition, and artillery of Raglan, to be surrendered to General Fairfax on the third day after the ratification of the said treaty; namely, at ten o’clock on the morning of the Wednesday following, being the nineteenth day of August.

Article the Second, stipulated that all the officers, soldiers, and gentlemen of the garrison, should march out with horses and arms; colours flying; drums beating; trumpets sounding; matches lighted at both ends; bullets in their mouths; and every soldier with twelve charges of powder and ball; with permission to select any place, within ten miles of the Castle, for the purpose of delivering up their arms to the general in command; after which the soldiers were to be disbanded and set at liberty.

Article the Third, engaged the General’s safe conduct and protection to all the gentlemen and others who had sought refuge within the walls of Raglan Castle to their respective homes.

Article the Fourth, was an enlargement of the preceding article, by which three months’ protection was guaranteed to certain other gentlemen, until they should either have made their peace with Parliament, or departed the realm.

Article the Fifth, guaranteed the protection and care of the sick and wounded left in the Castle.

Article the Sixth, was an indemnity for all words and acts of the garrison during the siege of the Castle.

On Wednesday the nineteenth of August, in pursuance of these arrangements, the Castle and Garrison of Raglan were duly surrendered to Sir Thomas Fairfax, for the use of both Houses of Parliament. The garrison, which at first had mustered eight hundred men, was now reduced to less than half that number; and as certain of the warlike muniments were becoming so diminished as to expose them at last to the chances of seeing the Castle entered by storm, a prolonged resistance must have been attended with disastrous consequences.

“The garrison had no sooner marched out,” says an eye-witness, “than Fairfax entered the Castle, took a view of it, had some conversation with the Marquess, and then, quitting the scene of his last operation in the way of siege, proceeded to Chepstow, where he was received in triumph by the committee; and, after a brief halt in the Castle, returned to his head-quarters at Bath,”

“A conqueror; and blushing on his sword The stains of blood, by loyal Raglan pour’d.”

Yet Fairfax, as far as lay in his power, was very exact in observing every condition to which he was a party. It is recorded to his honour, that, “far from allowing violence, he would not even permit insults, or expressions of triumph over the unfortunate Royalists.” Something of this generous bearing towards his opponents may be observed in his correspondence with the Marquess of Worcester. He is painted by historians as equally eminent for personal courage and for humanity; and though strongly infected with prejudices, or principles derived from religious and party zeal, he never seems, in the course of his public conduct, to have been diverted, by private interest or ambition, from adhering strictly to these principles. Sincere in his professions, disinterested in his views, open in his conduct, “he had formed,” says Hume,[273] “one of the most shining characters of his age, had not the extreme narrowness of his genius in everything but in _war_, and his embarrassed and confused elocution on every occasion but when he gave orders, diminished the lustre of his merit, and rendered the part which he acted, even when vested with the supreme command, but secondary and subordinate.”

With this just tribute to his merits as a man and a soldier, we take leave of the Conqueror of Raglan , annexing the following

Anecdotes. --When Fairfax, as we learn from the same authority, laid siege to Raglan Castle, and fair terms were offered to all the garrison, the Marquess only excepted, the generous old Nestor entreated his friends to accept the proposal, and allow _him_ to be the ‘Jonas.’ But this proposition, it may be readily believed, had the opposite effect, of strengthening their determination to stand by him to the last man. In thanking his officers for their devotedness, he added, in his own peculiar way, “I do not much like that way of embalming neither--to be served up to my audit as a thing newly taken out of the cost of many friends’ blood.”

In the conversation above alluded to, when Fairfax took possession of the Castle, the Marquess is said to have made a jocular request, bespeaking the General’s indulgence in favour of some pigeons that still kept possession of their ancient haunt. To which he gravely replied, that he was glad to perceive his Lordship in so ‘merrie’ a frame of mind. Whereupon the Marquess told him the following story:--

“There were two rogues once going up Holborn in a cart to be hanged; but the one being very jocund on so serious an occasion, gave offence to his companion, who, being very downcast, reproved him. ‘Tush, man,’ said the other, ‘thou art a fool; thou wentest a thieving, and never once thoughtest of what would become of thee; wherefore, being on a sudden surprised and taken, thou fallest into such a shaking fit, that I am ashamed to see thee in such a pitiful condition. Whereas I was resolved to be hanged before I fell to stealing, which is the reason I go so composedly unto my death.’ So, in my own case,” continued the Marquess, “I resolved to undergo whatsoever--even the worst--evils that you were able to lay upon me, before I took up arms for my sovereign; and, therefore, wonder not that I am so _merrie_.”

The fall of Raglan Garrison was a source of much triumph and congratulation to the Parliamentary forces. “There were delivered up with it,” says Rushworth, “twenty pieces of ordnance, but only three barrels of gunpowder; for within the walls they had a mill with which they could make a barrel a day. There was found, however, ‘great store of corn and malt, wine of all sorts, and beer in abundance;’ but hay and forage for their horses had been so completely exhausted, that these noble animals were almost starved to death, and ‘had like to have eaten one another for want of meat, had they not been tied with chains.’”

The captors found also great store of goods and rich furniture in the Castle, which Fairfax committed to the care and custody of Mr. Herbert, commissioner of the army, Mr. Roger Williams, and Major Tuliday, or Tulida, to be inventoried. And in case any inhabitants of the country could make a just claim to them--as having been violently taken from them, or they compelled to bring them thither--that they should have them restored.

Agreeably to the terms of surrender, as recorded in the history of the siege, there marched out of the Castle--“The Marquess of Worcester, then in the eighty-fourth year of his age; the Lord Charles, the Marquess’s sixth son, Lieutenant-Governor of the Castle under his father: [he subsequently retired to Flanders, and died a canon of Cambray;] the Countess of Glamorgan; the Lady Jones; Sir Philip Jones; Dr. Bayly, so often quoted in the preceding narrative; Commissary Gwilliam; four Colonels; eighty-two Captains; sixteen Lieutenants; six Cornets; four Ensigns; four Quartermasters; fifty-two Esquires and Gentlemen.”

It is worthy of record in this place, that, of all the forts and garrisons in the King’s interest, those of Raglan and Pendennis endured the longest sieges, and held out the last of any forts or castles in England--being bravely defended by two persons of very great age--and were at length delivered up within a day or two of each other. “ Raglan ,” says Lord Clarendon, “was maintained with extraordinary resolution and courage by the old Marquess of Worcester (then 85) against Fairfax himself, until it was reduced to the greatest necessity. Pendennis refused all summons; admitting no treaty till all their provisions were so far consumed that they had not victuals left for four-and-twenty hours; and then they treated, and carried themselves in the treaty with such resolution and unconcernedness, that the enemy concluded they were in no straits, and so gave them the conditions they proposed, which were as good as any garrison in England had accepted. The governor of Pendennis was John Arundel of Trerice, in Cornwall, an old gentleman of near fourscore years of age, who, with the assistance of his son Richard, afterwards made a baron in memory of his father’s service, and his own eminent behaviour throughout the war, maintained and defended the same to the last extremity.”[274]

Returning to the subject of Raglan, we must not overlook the following predictions, as calculated to excite no little attention in times when witchcraft, sorcery, and apparitions, were admitted as articles of popular belief.

Prophecies. --Of the prophetic warnings which, from time to time, and particularly during the siege, had taken possession of the vulgar mind regarding the fall of Raglan and its hereditary lords, the following passage is sufficiently characteristic:--One evening, during the progress of the siege, one of his officers was relating to the Marquess how strangely the narrator, Dr. Bayly, had escaped a shot by means of the iron bar of a window that looked out upon the leaguer. Standing, for example, in a window of the castle, there came a musket bullet and hit full against the edge of an iron bar of a chamber window, so that it parted the bullet in halves, the bar expatiating itself by degrees towards the middle; “one half of the bullet,” said he, “flew by me on the one side, and the other half on the other side; so that, by God’s providence, I had no hurt.”

“The Marquess hearing this, asked me in what chamber it was. I told him. His Lordship then said, as I remember, ‘The window was cross-barred; and you will never believe me,’ said he emphatically, ‘how safe it is to stand before the Cross , when you face your enemy!’”

But returning to the subject of predictions:--“Never,” says the family historian, “never was there a noble house so pulled down by _prophecies_--ushered into its ruin by predictions, and so laid hold upon by signes and tokens! I shall tell you no more,” he continues, “but what I have both read and seen long before the fall of that proud fabric, which had the honour to fall the last of any that stood upon the tearmes of honour. Now there was one old book of prophecies that was presented to the Marquess, because it so much concerned Raglan Castle, wherein there were these predictions: namely, That there should come an Earl that should first build a _white_ gate before the castle-house, and after that should begin to build a _red_ one; and before that red one should be finished, there should be wars over all the land.”

Now all this was fulfilled in the Marquess’s own day, who, having built the one gate and begun the other, yet by reason of the distractions of the time, was forced to discontinue the latter, which at the time of the siege remained unfinished. Some one standing by while this prophecy was mentioned, exhorted the Marquess--half in jest, half in earnest--to make haste and finish his red-gate house, because we should have no quiet until that were up.

“Hark’ye,” said the Marquess, “nobody shall ever prophesy so much money out of my purse in such times as these! Besides, the prophet does not say _until_, but _before_--‘before the red gate is up;’ and, for aught I know, if I should make haste with that building, I should hasten the war to my own sorrow; for the prophet says, ‘before the red-gate house shall be finished, there shall be wars all over the land.’ But what if I had built neither the one nor the other, how could this prophecie have concerned me?”

“Oh, my Lord,” said one of the company, “it is done; and you could not otherwise choose but to do what you did.”

“Ay; but I can choose,” said the Marquess, “whether I will _believe_ the prophet or not.”

“Another prophecie there was,” continues our authority, “that the king of the country should lose a great battle, [Naseby,] and afterwards fly to Raglan Castle for safety; that the enemy should pursue him; and that after a short time he should leave the Castle, and that the enemy should besiege and set fire to the Castle wall. All of which was literally fulfilled.”

Moreover it was said, that “an eagle should come into the park and be there slain, which should be a forerunner to the destruction of that house; which I saw literally performed; but yet executed by one that _never_ heard of the prophecie. It was furthermore foretold, that a cloud of bats should hang over the Castle before its final demolishment; this, three days before, all the Castle beheld to their no small astonishment, and it continued a quarter of an hour, about twilight, so thick that you could not, towards the middle of them, see the sky, though clear. Being shot at with hail-shot, some of them fell down, and the rest flew away.

“The Marquess being told of this, asked what those kind of creatures might signify. Some about him answered, that they were scripture emblems of ruin and desolation.[275] He then asked if they were all gone. It was told him that they were. Whereupon the Marquess asked us whether or no the enemy had begirt us round. It was answered that they had. ‘Then,’ said his Lordship, ‘I am glad of it; for then those emblems of ruin cannot fly away from us, but they must also fly over the heads of the enemy.’”

The Chaplain then proceeds, according to the superstitious belief of the times, to relate the following prediction regarding the King himself:--“The strangest prophecie of all,” he affirms, “both for signification and accomplishment, is this, which I read before I saw it in this book, and fourteen years before the war.” He then gives it in the Welsh language, and explains that _fab-anne_, as it is one word, signifies a baby, and joined to another Welsh word, should imply a crowned infant, that, on growing up to man’s estate, and ruling these realms for a season, should at last “fall by the stroke of an _axe_,” or, “he shall be slain with an axe.” We shall not detain our readers by following the Chaplain through the various arguments by which he appears to establish the truth of this singular prediction; but, referring them to the “Apophthegms,” in which it is recorded, we proceed to another portion of our history.

As soon as the Castle was fairly occupied by the new garrison, the work of demolition began. The peasantry were summoned to their aid; but on the great tower their united labours made but slight impression. So, “after battering the top with pickaxes,” they resolved to effect their purpose more expeditiously, and, transferring their implements to the foundation, succeeded in undermining it. As they proceeded, the gaps were propped up with timber, and when the personal risk became too imminent to continue the work, they set fire to the timber, and the instant the charred props gave way, down came a solid mass of the

Tower of Gwent , half filling the moat, where it now lies; a specimen of as firmly compacted a structure as ever was framed by the hand of man. The mortar, indeed, seems harder and more durable than the materials which it cements together. Of its massive construction the annexed woodcut, showing the staircase in the centre of the wall, and the engravings opposite, give a very clear and distinct notion.

Much treasure, it was conjectured, had been thrown into the moat during the siege, while under the apprehension of being given up to plunder; so the people were set to work with axes, shovels, and pickaxes, to drain off the water, and collect the treasure. But nothing valuable being discovered in the moat, they were next set to cut the stanks of the fish-ponds, where they had store of very large carp and other fish. From these reservoirs, during many generations, the family had drawn an abundant supply for the table; and in times when the fasts of the Church were rigorously observed, fish-ponds were indispensable to every large establishment. The artificial oak roof of the great hall, already noticed in the introductory sketch, could not be removed with advantage; it was therefore allowed to remain full twenty years after the siege. But the sheet-lead with which it was covered was found to be a very “convertible material,” and was therefore rolled up, sent to market, and the product paid over to the Parliamentary Exchequer.

Above thirty vaults of all sorts of rooms and cellars, and three arched bridges, are yet standing; but the most curious arch of the chapel, and rooms above, with many others, are totally destroyed. Many coins of Queen Elizabeth have been found, but none deserving of preservation from the crucible of the silversmith, to whom they were speedily consigned by the finders.

These dreary “souterrains,” in the present day, are, of course, haunted by goblins, or other beings with lungs not likely to be affected by the damp and mephitic gases, which they are said to exhale. Never was place better adapted for unearthly visitants; and wherever blood has been spilt or treasure concealed, the spirits of vengeance or avarice seize upon the spot as their own exclusive territory. As it appeared to us, however, the _genii loci_ were spirits of a very different stamp--beings with whom the painter, the philosopher, and the poet, would choose to make their abode. Not so the cicerone who showed these mysterious caverns to Bloomfield. “Look down there,” said she, pointing to the great cellar; “something very awful; candles wont burn there! Some people says it’s because the damp chokes ’em. For my part, I think it’s the devil himself; and not much fancying to be seen at his work, he blows ’em out. Well, sir, you may smile as you please; but one puff of brimstone’s enough for me. Let’s step into the Fountain Court. All the wine’s gone; so a cellar with only bad spirits in it, is hardly worth notice.”

Passing from the cellar to the dairy, we may observe that during the siege, and for many generations previously, the fine meadows on the banks of the Olwy, in the adjoining parish of Llandenny, were appropriated as the dairy-farm of the Castle.

The Marquess’s Library was considered one of the best selected, and most extensive in Europe; and we cannot doubt that the Gallery of Paintings bore equal and corresponding testimony to the liberality and taste of the noble owner.[276]

The loss sustained by the family in the immediate destruction of the castle and woods, according to the printed statement, was computed at one hundred thousand pounds; besides enormous sums furnished to his Majesty for the raising and equipment of two armies, and the maintenance of a numerous garrison, of which the daily expenses alone must have required a princely revenue. With this evidence of the Marquess’s resources, it is not surprising that he should be described by Clarendon as “the most moneyed man of the kingdom.” The siege was followed by the sequestration and sale of the whole estate, which, by the parliamentary audit of 1646, amounted to twenty thousand pounds per annum, and remained in the hands of Cromwell till the Restoration, a period of fourteen years. All the old timber in the parks adjacent was cut down and sold; the lead was stript from the roof of the great hall, and sold for six thousand pounds; and a quantity of the timber was carried to Bristol, and there used in rebuilding the wooden houses upon the old bridge, which had recently been destroyed by fire. But the loss of the library was in every sense a national loss, for in this, among many rare invaluable manuscripts, were the archives of Gwent, with the earliest records of Welsh literature. “One of these manuscripts,” says the late Mr. Thomas,[277] “was an interesting work by Geraint Bardd Glass y Cadair, an illustrious Welshman, who flourished about the ninth century. He was the first who composed a Welsh grammar, a work that was revised by Einion and Edeyrn, which form and arrangement are now extant; but the original MS. was in the Raglan library at its capitulation.”