Your Majesty is welcome to a Fair;
Such place, such men, such language, and such ware,
You must expect—with these the zealous noise
Of your land’s faction, scandalized at toys.
“My lord,” said the King (for Sir Arthur was one of the lords of the privy council), “how deem you by that?”
“Please your Majesty,” answered Sir Arthur, “those Puritans, as I rode to London, cut off mine horse’s tail, as they said the ribbons with which it was tied savoured too much of the pride of the beast on which the scarlet whore sits. Pray God their shears may never extend from the tails of horses to the heads of kings!” And as he spoke with affectionate and ominous solicitude, he happened to place his hand on the head of Prince Charles (afterwards Charles I), who was sitting next his brother Henry, Prince of Wales, and to whom Sir Arthur Mortimer had had the high honour to be sponsor, as proxy for a sovereign prince.
The awful and troubled times which Sir Arthur had predicted soon arrived, though he did not live to witness them. His son, Sir Roger Mortimer, a man lofty alike in pride and in principle, and immoveable in both—an Arminian in creed, and an aristocrat in politics—the zealous friend of the misguided Laud, and the bosom-companion of the unfortunate Strafford—was among the first to urge King Charles to those high-handed and impolitic measures, the result of which was so fatal.
When the war broke out between the King and the Parliament, Sir Roger espoused the royal cause with heart and hand—raised a large sum in vain, to prevent the sale of the crown-jewels in Holland—and led five hundred of his tenants, armed at his own expense, to the battles of Edge-hill and Marston-moor.
His wife was dead, but his sister, Mrs. Ann Mortimer, a woman of uncommon beauty, spirit, and dignity of character, and as firmly attached as her brother to the cause of the court, of which she had been once the most brilliant ornament, presided over his household, and by her talents, courage, and promptitude, had been of considerable service to the cause.
The time came, however, when valour and rank, and loyalty and beauty, found all their efforts ineffectual; and of the five hundred brave men that Sir Roger had led into the field to his sovereign’s aid, he brought back thirty maimed and mutilated veterans to Mortimer Castle, on the disastrous day that King Charles was persuaded to put himself into the hands of the disaffected and mercenary Scots, who sold him for their arrears of pay due by the Parliament.
The reign of rebellion soon commenced—and Sir Roger, as a distinguished loyalist, felt the severest scourge of its power. Sequestrations and compositions—fines for malignancy, and forced loans for the support of a cause he detested—drained the well-filled coffers, and depressed the high spirit, of the aged loyalist. Domestic inquietude was added to his other calamities. He had three children.—His eldest son had fallen fighting in the King’s cause at the battle of Newbury, leaving an infant daughter, then supposed the heiress of immense wealth. His second son had embraced the Puritanic cause, and, lapsing from error to error, married the daughter of an Independent, whose creed he had adopted; and, according to the custom of those days, fought all day at the head of his regiment, and preached and prayed to them all night, in strict conformity with that verse in the psalms, which served him alternately for his text and his battle-word—“Let the praises of God be in their mouth, and a two-edged sword in their hands.” This double exercise of the sword and the word, however, proved too much for the strength of the saint-militant; and after having, during Cromwell’s Irish campaign, vigorously headed the attack on Cloghan Castle,55 the ancient seat of the O’Moores, princes of Laois—and being scalded through his buff-coat by a discharge of hot water from the bartizan—and then imprudently given the word of exhortation for an hour and forty minutes to his soldiers, on the bare heath that surrounded the castle, and under a drenching rain—he died of a pleurisy in three days, and left, like his brother, an infant daughter who had remained in England, and had been educated by her mother. It was said in the family, that this man had written the first lines of Milton’s poem “on the new forcers of conscience under the Long Parliament.” It is certain, at least, that when the fanatics who surrounded his dying bed were lifting up their voices to sing a hymn, he thundered with his last breath,
Because ye have thrown off your prelate lord,
And with stiff vows renounce his Liturgy,
To seize the widowed w—e plurality,
From them whose sin ye envied not, abhorr’d, etc.
Sir Roger felt, though from different causes, pretty much the same degree of emotion on the deaths of his two sons. He was fortified against affliction at the death of the elder, from the consolation afforded him by the cause in which he had fallen; and that in which the apostate, as his father always called him, had perished, was an equal preventive against his feeling any deep or bitter grief on his dissolution.
When his eldest son fell in the royal cause, and his friends gathered round him in officious condolence, the old loyalist replied, with a spirit worthy of the proudest days of classic heroism, “It is not for my dead son that I should weep, but for my living one.” His tears, however, were flowing at that time for another cause.
His only daughter, during his absence, in spite of the vigilance of Mrs. Ann, had been seduced by some Puritan servants in a neighbouring family, to hear an Independent preacher of the name of Sandal, who was then a serjeant in Colonel Pride’s regiment, and who was preaching in a barn in the neighbourhood, in the intervals of his military exercises. This man
