On Both Sides of the Sea:

A STORY OF

The Commonwealth and the Restoration

A SEQUEL TO "THE DRAYTONS AND THE DAVENANTS"

BY THE AUTHOR OF "Chronicles of the Schonberg-Cotta Family."

NEW YORK: DODD, MEAD & COMPANY, PUBLISHERS.

CARD FROM THE AUTHOR.

"The Author of the Schonberg-Cotta Family wishes it to be generally known among the readers of her books in America, that the American Editions issued by Mr. M. W. Dodd, of New York alone have the Author's sanction."

Contents

Chapter

I. Olive's Recollections II. Olive's Recollections III. Lettice's Diary IV. Lettice's Diary V. Olive's Recollections VI. Olive's Recollections VII. Olive's Recollections VIII. Olive's Recollections IX. Notes by Magdalene Antony X. Lettice's Diary XI. Lettice's Diary XII. Lettice's Diary

On Both Sides of the Sea.

ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA.

CHAPTER I. OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.

Since England was, such an event was never witnessed within sound of her seas, as that which darkened London on the fatal 30th of January, 1649. In the recollection of such moments it is difficult to disentangle feeling from fact, what we saw with our eyes and heard with our ears from what others told us, from what we saw with the imagination and heard with the heart.

In my memory that day lies shrouded and silent, as if all that happened in it had been done in a city spell-bound into silence in a hushed, sunless, colorless world, where all intermediate tints were gathered into funereal black and white, the black of the heavily-draped scaffold and the whiteness of the frosty ground from which it rose into the still and icy air; whilst behind the palace slept, frost-bound, the mute and motionless river, imprisoning with icy bars the motionless ships.

From early in the day the thoroughfares and squares and open gathering-places of the city were filled with the Commonwealth soldiers. I remember no call of trumpet or beat of drum; only a slow pacing of horsemen, and marching of footmen, silently, to their assigned positions, the tramp of men and the clatter of the horse-hoofs ringing from the hard and frosty ground, and echoing from the closed and silent houses on the line of march.

It was no day of triumph to any. To the army, and those who felt with them, it was a day of solemn justice, not of triumphant vengeance. To the Royalists it was a day of passionate hushed sorrow and bitter inward vows of retribution; to the people generally a day of perplexity and woe.

Old Mr. Prynne, who owed the king nothing, as he said, but the loss of his ears, the pillory, imprisonment, and fines, had pleaded for him generously in the House, before the House had been finally "purged."

And the most part of the men, and well-nigh all the women, I think, would have said "Amen" to Mr. Prynne. If the king's captivity and trial and condemnation had been a solemn drama enacted to win the hearts of the people back to him, it could not have been more effectual. Political and civil rights, rights of taxation and rights of remonstrance, seemed to the hearts of most people to become mere technical legal terms in the presence of Royalty and Death. Pillories and prisons were dwarfed into mere private grievances beside the scaffold on which the king, son of so many kings, kings of so many submissive generations, the source of power, the only possible object of the dreadful crime called treason, was to die the death of a traitor.

The trial brought out all that was most pathetic in royalty and most noble in the king. The haughty glance which had been resented on the throne, was simply majestic when it encountered unflinchingly the illegal bench of judges on whom his life depended.

The Parliament, mutilated to a remnant of fifty; the High Court of Justice, who could not agree among themselves, whose assumption of legal forms sounded (to many) like mockery, whose trappings of authority sat on them (many thought) like masquerade-robes, were a poor show to confront with that lonely majestic figure defying their sentence and their authority, a captive in the ancient Hall of Justice from which, throughout the centuries, not a sentence had issued save by the sanction of his forefathers.

The royal banners, which drooped from the roof above him, taken from his Cavaliers at Edgehill, Marston Moor, and Naseby, seemed to float there rather in his honor than in that of his judges. Many felt that adversity had restored to him his true royalty, and that he sat far more a king now, arraigned at the bar, than when, eight years before, at the last trial those walls had witnessed, he sat as a helpless spectator of the proceedings which brought Strafford, his greatest minister, to the scaffold.

It was well for his adversaries that those days of the king's humiliation were not prolonged. Irrepressible veneration and pity began to stir among the crowds who beheld him, and the cries of "Justice! justice!" were changed more than once into murmurs of "God save the king."

But the pity was a slowly-rising tide of waves now advancing and now recoiling. The determination for "justice on the chief delinquent" was a strong and steady, though narrow current; and it swept the ration on irresistibly to its end.

The soldiers, foot and horse, had taken up their position. My brother Roger and Job Forster were posted opposite Whitehall. Roger waved his hand as he passed our windows. His face, as was his wont in times of strong emotion, was fixed and stern. He was riding in a funeral procession, which for him led to more graves than one.

At ten o'clock His Majesty walked through St. James's Park to Whitehall, passing rapidly through the bitter cold, under the bare branches of the silent trees, through a crowd in appearance as cold as silent. His face, men said, was calm and majestic as ever, although worn; his beard had become gray, and his form had a slight stoop, although he was not fifty years of age, but his step was firm. He disappeared through the Palace gates, from which he was never to step forth again. Then followed six hours of suspense and terrible expectation, the crowds surging uneasily to and fro, unable to rest, repelled and yet attracted by the terrible fascination of the empty, expectant scaffold, whose heavy funereal draperies fell from the windows of the Banqueting Hall on the frosty ground beneath. There were whispers that the ambassador of the United Provinces was pleading not hopelessly with Lord Fairfax; that the Prince of Wales had sent a blank letter signed by himself, to be filled with any conditions the Commons chose to demand; but that the king had burned this letter, and refused the

ministrations of any but the clergy of the Episcopal Church of the realm;—so that if he was indeed to die, it would be as a martyr to the rights of the Crown and the Church.

And through these soberer reports ever and anon rose wild rumors of approaching deliverance, of risings in the Royalist counties, of avenging fleets approaching the Thames, of judgment direct from heaven on the sacrilegious heads of the regicides.

But to us who knew of the purpose which had been gathering force in the army since that prayer-meeting at Windsor six months before, those mid-day hours were hours not of doubt or suspense, but of awful certainty, as minute by minute the hour approached when that scaffold was to be empty no more.

We knew that within the still and deserted halls of that palace, the king was preparing to meet his doom; and (all political questions and personal wrongs for the time forgotten) from a thousand roofs in the city went up prayers that he might be sustained in dying, and might exchange the earthly crown which had sat on his brow so uneasily, for the crown of life which burdens not, nor fades away.

At length three o'clock, the moment of doom, came. "It was the ninth hour," as the Royalists loudly noted. Save the guard around the scaffold, and those who attended his dying moments on it, none were near enough to hear what passed there. It was all mute; but the spectacle spoke. In most royal pageants, the thing seen is but a sign of the thing not seen. In this the thing to be seen was no mere sign, but a dread reality, a tremendous event. The black scaffold, the wintry silence, the vast awe-stricken crowd gazing mute and motionless on the inevitable tragedy; a few plainly dressed men at last appearing on the scaffold around the well-known stately figure of the king, richly arrayed "as for his second bridal;" "the comely head" laid down without a struggle on the block "as on a bed;" the momentary flash of the axe; the severed head raised an instant on high as "the head of a traitor;" a shrouded form prostrate on the scaffold;—and then, as good Mr. Philip Henry, who was present, said, "at the instant when the blow was given, a diurnal universal groan among the

thousands of people who were within sight of it, as if with one consent, such as he had never heard before, and desired he might never hear the like again, or see such a cause for it."

The multitude were not left long to bewail their king. One troop of Parliament horse rode instantly, by previous order, from Charing Cross towards King Street, and another from King Street towards Charing Cross; and so the crowd were scattered right and left, to lament as they might each man under his own roof, and to read in secret the "Eikon Basilike," which it is said the king composed, copies of which were distributed under his scaffold, and will, doubtless, be reverently treasured in every Royalist household; not in the library, but in the oratory, beside the Bible and the Prayer-book, enkindling loyalty from a conviction into a passion, deepening it from a passion to a religion, while they compare the king's trial to that before the unjust judge of old, his walk to the scaffold to that along the Dolorous Way, his sayings to those last words on which dying men and women have hung ever since.

Every one knows the heaviness with which even a day of festivity closes, when the event of the day is over. The weight with which that fatal day closed it is hard for any who did not feel it to imagine.

Scripture words repeated with ominous warning by ministers, Presbyterian and Episcopal, echoed like curses through countless hearts: "I gave them a king in my anger and took him away in my wrath." "Who am I that I should lay hands on the Lord's anointed?"

Death gave to the king's memory an immaculateness very different from the technical, "the king can do no wrong of the ancient constitution."

And even with those whose resolution remained unwavering to the last, this was not the time for speech. The extremity of justice had been done, there was nothing more to be said. It would have been an ungenerous revenge far from the thoughts of such regicides as Colonel Hutchinson and General Cromwell to follow it with insulting words, and their own self-defence they were content to leave to events. Mr. Milton's majestic Defences of the English People came later.

Ours was a silent fireside that winter night, as Roger, weary and numb, came at last to warm himself beside us.

As lie entered, I was saying to my husband, "The terrible thing is, that he who lived trampling on the constitution and the rights of conscience, seems to have died a martyr to the constitution and conscience, doomed by a few desperate men."

"We must concern ourselves as little as possible, sister," Roger said very quietly, "with what seems."

"I fear this day will turn the tide against all for which you have fought throughout the war."

"The tide will turn back," he said.

"But what if not in our time?" I said.

"Then in God's time, Olive," he said; "which is the best."

But he looked very worn and sad. I repented of having said these discouraging words, and weakly strove to undo them as he asked me to unlace the helmet which his benumbed hands could not unloose.

"I would rather a thousand times," I said, "have you with Colonel Hutchinson, and General Cromwell, and those who dared to do what they thought right in the lace of the world, than with those who thought it right yet dared not do it. The nation will recognize their deliverer in General Cromwell yet."

"I do not know that, Olive," he said; "but it will be enough if General Cromwell delivers the nation."

"At least the generations to come will do you all justice," I said.

"I am not sure of that," he said. "It depends on who writes the history for them. There is one Judgment Seat whose awards it is safe to set before us. Before that we have sought to stand. That sentence is irrevocably fixed. What it is we shall hear hereafter, when the voice of this generation and all the generations will move us no more than the murmur of a troubled sea a great way off, and far below."

Yet he could not touch the food we set before him; and as he sat gazing into the fire, I knew there was one adverse verdict which he knew too well, and which moved his heart all the more that it had not been able to move a hair's breadth his conscience or his purpose.

Many sorrows met in Roger's heart, I knew, that night; the pain of pity repressed driven back on the heart by a stern sense of justice; the pain of being misjudged by some whom we honour; the pain of the resignation of the tenderest love and hope; the pain of giving bitter pain to the heart dearest to him in the world. But one pain, perhaps the worst of all, he and men who, like Cromwell and Colonel Hutchinson, had carried out that day's doom fearlessly before the world because in unshaken conviction of its justice before God, were spared—the enervating anguish of perplexity and doubt. And this, perhaps, is the sorest pain of all.

LETTICE'S DIARY.

"'The space between is the way thither,' Mr. Drayton said. It may be; it ought to be. But is it? That seems to me precisely the one terrible question which, when we can get cleared, all life becomes clear in the light of the answer, but which it is so exceedingly hard to have cleared.

"The days, as they pass, whether clothed in light and joy, as the old time at home was when I had a home, and a mother, and so many hopes—or in darkness that may be felt, as so many of these later days have been to me, are indeed surely leading us on to old age, to death, to the unseen world, and the judgment. But are they indeed leading us on to new youth, to changeless life, to heaven, and the King's 'Well done?'

"If I were as sure of the last as of the first, for me and mine, I think (at least there are moments when I think) I would scarcely care whether the days were dark or bright. For life is to be a warfare. All kinds of Christian people agree in that. And having learned what war means, I do not expect it to be easy or pleasant.

"But I am not sure. For myself or for any one.

"Roger thinks the execution of the king was a terrible duty. I think it was almost an inexpiable crime.

"Olive, I know, thinks I am breaking plighted faith, and betraying the most faithful affection in the world in parting from Roger. Mistress Dorothy thinks I am fulfilling a sacred duty, doing what was meant when we were commanded to pluck out the right eye. As to the pain, I am sure she is right. If I could only be as sure as to the duty! For if it is right, it must be good, really, in the end for him as well as for me. How, I cannot imagine. For it seems bad as well as bitter for me. And Olive says it will be bad and embittering for him.

"Happy, happy people, who lived in the old days of dreams, and visions, and heavenly voices, saying, 'This is the way; walk in it;' when God's will became manifest in pillars of fire and cloud, in discriminating dews and fires of sacrifice, and such simple outward signs as poor perplexed hearts like mine can understand.

"Holy people say these days of ours are in advance of those, that the light has increased since then. I suppose it has, for holy people, who have grown up to it, and have eyes to see those inward leadings, and ears to hear those inward voices, which to me are so dim. But I feel as if I were still a child, and would fain have lived in that simple childhood of the world, when God spoke to men in plain ways as to children.

"Since I came here, I saw at the door of one of the churches a very awful piece of sculpture of the souls in purgatory, all aglow with the fires in which they were burning, stretching out piteous hands through iron bars for help and prayers from those still living on the earth.

"Mistress Dorothy was with me, and she clasped her hands over her eyes in horror, as she turned away.

"But to me it did not seem so horrible. At least not for the souls in purgatory. If there were a purgatory. Because the thought of its being purgatory, must take away all that is unendurable out of the anguish of the flames. There are hearts on earth tormented in fires as real. But the sting of their anguish is, they cannot be sure they are purgatorial fires. The anguish is clear enough. If we could only be as sure as to the purification. That the pain is from the remedy, not from the disease; that the flames are on the way to heaven, not mercifully confronting us on the other way to turn us back.

"It always seemed as if, by Roger's side, I should have grown good like him. How am I to grow good without him, severing myself from him? Oh, mother, mother! why must you leave me just now, when no one else in the world could have told me what to do. Because, while loving me more than yourself, you loved God's will far more than my pleasure.

"But Mistress Dorothy says, when I am tempted with 'vain reasonings' and 'debatings of the flesh,' I must go back to the first sacred impulse, when, by my mother's death-bed, I felt the death of the king for whom she would have died must place an impassable barrier between me and those who slew him, or consented to his death.

"First thoughts, says she, are often from above; second thoughts from within or from below. And if we endure to the end, third thoughts will come crowning the divine impulse of the first with a calm divine assurance.

"I will try to endure to the end. At least I will wait.

"To strengthen my resolve, let me go back to that sacred impulse, and through all it led to, up to this day.

"It was during those terrible days of early January, when hope and fear had passed, with uncertainty; and I sat by my mother's bedside, all my heart and soul absorbed in watching her depart, and in relieving any suffering or supplying any want for her so fast passing away from all suffering and from all our service.

"The east winds were careering across the Fens, and broke fiercely against the old house, and one night there was a crash of the great scarred elm-tree falling close outside the windows. But she heeded it not; and I remember feeling a strange kind of despairing triumph over all the violence of the elements. They might rage as at the Deluge; but they could neither hinder nor hasten the slow, silent progress of the awful power which was silently removing her from us.

"Before, in days of doubt and hope, I had been wont to watch the winds with a kind of superstitious solicitude, as if there were some mysterious sympathy between nature and men, and the ravings of her storms had been ominous of evil to us. But now that spell seemed broken. The sympathy between us and nature ceased with death. To her it was natural, a link in her endless chain of ever-recurring changes. To her, life and death were but as day and night, bright or dark phases of her ceaseless revolutions. She could see her children die as calmly as her suns set. To us death was unnatural, a convulsion, a horror, a curse. The terrible thing which seemed to assimilate us to her, in reality rent us from her sphere altogether. A week before, when we began to fear there was danger, I trembled at the wind wailing in the dead branches of the elms, or at a bird beating its wings against the window. Now that she was dying, I could have smiled at an earthquake or a tornado.