University of Virginia Library

1. HOPE LESLIE.

1. CHAPTER I.

William Fletcher was the son of a respectable
country gentleman of Suffolk, in England; and
the destined heir of his uncle Sir William Fletcher,
an eminent lawyer, who had employed his talents
with such effective zeal and pliant principle, that
he had won his way to courtly favour and secured
a courtly fortune.

Sir William had only one child—a daughter;
and possessing the common ambition of transmitting
his name with his wealth, he selected his
nephew as the future husband of his daughter
Alice.

“Take good heed,” Sir William thus expressed
himself in a letter to his brother, “take good

heed that the boy be taught unquestioning and
unqualified loyalty to his sovereign—the Alpha
and Omega of political duty. These are times
when every true subject has his price. Divers of
the leaders of the Commons are secret friends of
the seditious mischief-brewing puritans; and Buckingham
himself is suspected of favouring their
cabals—but this sub rosa—I burn not my fingers
with these matters. `He who meddleth with
another man's strifes, taketh a dog by the ear,'
said the wisest man that ever lived; and he—
thank God—was a king. Caution Will against
all vain speculation and idle inquiries—there are
those that are for ever inquiring and inquiring,
and never coming to the truth. One inquiry
should suffice for a loyal subject. `What is established?'
and that being well ascertained, the line
of duty is so plain, that he who runs may read.

“I would that all our youths had inscribed on
their hearts that golden rule of political religion,
framed and well maintained by our good Queen
Elizabeth. `No man should be suffered to decline
either on the left or on the right hand, from
the drawn line limited by authority, and by the
sovereign's laws and injunctions.'

“Instead of such healthy maxims, our lads'
heads are crammed with the philosophy and rhetoric
and history of those liberty-loving Greeks
and Romans. This is the pernicious lore that has
poisoned our academical fountains. Liberty, what
is it! Daughter of disloyalty and mother of all

misrule—who, from the hour that she tempted our
first parents to forfeit paradise, hath ever worked
mischief to our race.

“But above all, brother, as you value the temporal
salvation of your boy, restrain him from all
confederacy, association, or even acquaintance
with the puritans. If my master took counsel of
me, he would ship these mad canting fools to our
New-England colonies, where their tender consciences
would be no more offended because, forsooth,
a prelate saith his prayers in white vestments,
and where they might enjoy with the savages
that primitive equality, about which they
make such a pother. God forefend that our good
lad William should company with these misdoers!
He must be narrowly watched; for, as I hear,
there is a neighbour of yours, one Winthrop, (a
notable gentleman too, as they say, but he doth
grievously scandalize his birth and breeding) who
hath embraced these scurvy principles, and doth
magnify them with the authority of his birth and
condition, and hath much weight with the country.
There is in Suffolk too, as I am told, one
Eliot, a young zealot—a fanatical incendiary, who
doth find ample combustibles in the gossiping
matrons, idle maidens, and lawless youth who
flock about him.

“These are dangerous neighbours—rouse yourself,
brother—give over your idle sporting with
hawk and hound, and watch over this goodly scion
of ours—ours, I say, but I forewarn you, no daughter

or guinea of mine shall ever go to one who is
infected with this spreading plague.”

This letter was too explicit to be misunderstood;
but so far from having the intended effect of awakening
the caution of the expectant of fortune,
it rather stimulated the pride of the independent
country gentleman. He permitted his son to follow
the bent of accident, or the natural course of
a serious, reflecting, and enthusiastic temper.
Winthrop, the future governor of Massachusetts,
was the counsellor of young Fletcher; and
Eliot, the “apostle of New-England,” his most
intimate friend. These were men selected of
Heaven to achieve a great work. In the quaint
language of the time, “the Lord sifted three nations
for precious seed to sow the wilderness.”

There were interested persons who were not
slow in conveying to Sir William unfavourable
reports of his nephew, and the young man received
a summons from his uncle, who hoped, by
removing him from the infected region, to rescue
him from danger.

Sir William's pride was gratified by the elegant
appearance and graceful deportment of his nephew,
whom he had expected to see with the
“slovenly and lawyerlike carriage” that marked
the scholars of the times. The pliant courtier
was struck with the lofty independence of the
youth who, from the first, shewed that neither
frowns nor favour would induce him to bow the
knee to the idols Sir William had served. There

was something in this independence that awed
the inferior mind of the uncle. To him it was
an unknown mysterious power, which he knew
not how to approach, and almost despaired of
subduing. However, he was experienced in
life, and had observed enough of human infirmity
to convince him, that there was no human
virtue that had not some weak—some assailable
point. Time and circumstances were not
long in developing the vulnerability of the nephew.
Alice Fletcher had been the companion
of his childhood. They now met without any of
the reserve that often prevents an intimate intercourse
between young persons, and proceeds from
the consciousness of a susceptibility which it
would seem to deny.

The intercourse of the cousins was renewed with
all the frankness and artlessness of the sunny season
of childish love and confidence. Alice had
been educated in retirement, by her mother, whom
she had recently attended through a long and fatal
illness. She had been almost the exclusive
object of her love, for there was little congeniality
between the father and daughter. The ties
of nature may command all dutiful observances,
but they cannot control the affections. Alice
was deeply afflicted by her bereavement. Her
cousin's serious temper harmonized with her sorrow,
and nature and opportunity soon indissolubly
linked their hearts together.

Sir William perceived their growing attachment

and exulted in it; for, as he fancied, it reduced
his nephew to dependence on his will and
whims. He had never himself experienced the
full strength of any generous sentiment; but he
had learned from observation, that love was a
controlling passion, and he now most anxiously
watched and promoted the kindling of the flame,
in the expectation that the fire would subdue
the principles of civil and religious liberty, with
which he had but too well ascertained the mind
of his nephew to be imbued.

He silently favoured the constant and exclusive
intercourse of the young people: he secretly contrived
various modes of increasing their mutual
dependence; and, when he was certain their happiness
was staked, he cast the die. He told his
nephew that he perceived and rejoiced in the mutual
affection that had so naturally sprung up
between him and his daughter, and he confessed
their union had been the favourite object of his
life; and said, that he now heartily accorded his
consent to it, prescribing one condition only—but
that condition was unalterable. “You must abjure,
William, in the presence of witnesses,” he
said, “the fanatical notions of liberty and religion
with which you have been infected—you must
pledge yourself, by a solemn oath, to unqualified
obedience to the king, and adherence to the established
church: you shall have time enough for
the effervescence of your young blood. God
send this fermentation may work off all impurities.

Nay, answer me not now. Take a day—a week
—a month for consideration; for on your decision
depends fortune and love—or the alternative,
beggary and exile.”

If a pit had yawned beneath his feet, and
swallowed Alice from his view, William Fletcher
could not have been more shocked. He was
soul-stricken, as one who listens to a sentence of
death. To his eye the earth was shrouded in darkness;
not an object of hope or pursuit remained.

He had believed his uncle was aware of what
he must deem his political and religious delinquency;
but he had never spoken to him on the
subject: he had treated him with marked favour,
and he had so evidently encouraged his attachment
to his cousin, that he had already plighted
his love to her, and received her vows without
fearing that he had passed even the limit of strict
prudence.

There was no accommodating flexibility in his
principles; his fidelity to what he deemed his duty
could not have been subdued by the fires of martyrdom,
and he did not hesitate to sacrifice what
was dearer than life to it. He took the resolution
at once to fly from the temptation that, present,
he dared not trust himself to resist.

“I shall not again see my Alice,” he said. “I
have not courage to meet her smiles; I have not
strength to endure her tears.”

In aid of his resolution there came, most opportunely,
a messenger from his father, requiring his

immediate presence. This afforded him a pretext
for his sudden departure from London. He
left a few brief lines for Alice, that expressed without
explaining the sadness of his heart.

His father died a few hours before he arrived at
the paternal mansion. He was thus released from
his strongest natural tie. His mother had been
long dead; and he had neither brother nor sister.
He inherited a decent patrimony, sufficient at least
to secure the independence of a gentleman. He
immediately repaired to Groton, to his friend Winthrop;
not that he should dictate his duty to him,
but as one leans on the arm of a friend when he
finds his own strength scarcely sufficient to support
him.

Mr. Winthrop is well known to have been a
man of the most tender domestic affections and
sympathies; but he had then been long married—
and twice married—and probably a little dimness
had come over his recollection of the enthusiasm
of a first passion. When Fletcher spoke of Alice's
unequalled loveliness, and of his own unconquerable
love, his friend listened as one listens to a
tale he has heard a hundred times, and seemed to
regard the cruel circumstances in which the ardent
lover was placed only in the light of a fit and fine
opportunity of making a sacrifice to the great and
good cause to which this future statesman had
even then begun to devote himself, as the sole object
of his life. He treated his friend's sufferings
as in their nature transient and curable; and

concluded by saying, “the Lord hath prepared
this fire, my friend, to temper your faith, and you
will come out of it the better prepared for your
spiritual warfare.”

Fletcher listened to him with stern resolution,
like him who permits a surgeon to probe a wound
which he is himself certain is incurable.

Mr. Winthrop knew that a ship was appointed
to sail from Southampton in a few days for New-England.
With that characteristic zeal which
then made all the intentions of Providence so obvious
to the eye of faith, and the interpretation of
all the events of life so easy, Mr. Winthrop assured
his friend that the designs of Heaven, in relation
to him, were plain. He said, “there was a
great call for such services as he could render in
the expedition just about to sail, and which was
like to fail for the want of them; and that now,
like a faithful servant to the cause he had confessed,
he must not look behind, but press on to
the things that were before.”

Fletcher obeyed the voice of Heaven. This is
no romantic fiction. Hundreds in that day resisted
all that solicits earthly passions, and sacrificed
all that gratifies them, to the cause of God
and of man—the cause of liberty and religion.
This cause was not to their eyes invested with any
romantic attractions. It was not assisted by the
illusions of chivalry, nor magnified by the spiritual
power and renown of crusades. Our fathers
neither had, nor expected their reward on earth.

One severe duty remained to be performed.
Fletcher must announce their fate to Alice. He
honoured her too much to believe she would have
permitted the sacrifice of his integrity, if he would
have made it. He, therefore, had nothing to excuse;
nothing but to tell the terrible truth—to
try to reconcile her to her father—to express, for
the last time, his love, and to pray that he might
receive, at Southampton, one farewell line from
her. Accompanying his letter to Alice was one
to Sir William, announcing the decision to resign
his favour and exile himself for ever from
England.

He arranged his affairs, and in a few days received
notice that the vessel was ready to sail.
He repaired to Southampton, and as he was quitting
the inn to embark in the small boat that was
to convey him to the vessel, already in the offing,
a voice from an inner apartment pronounced his
name—and at the next moment Alice was in his
arms. She gently reproved him for having estimated
her affection at so low a rate as not to have
anticipated that she should follow him, and share
his destiny. It was more than could have been
expected from man, that Fletcher should have opposed
such a resolution. He had but a moment
for deliberation. Most of the passengers had already
embarked; some still lingered on the strand
protracting their last farewell to their country and
their friends. In the language of one of the most
honoured of these pilgrims—“ truly doleful was

the sight of that sad and mournful parting, to hear
what sighs, and sobs, and prayers, did sound
amongst them; what tears did gush from every
eye, and pithy speeches pierced each other's
hearts.”

With the weeping groupe Fletcher left Alice
and her attendants, while he went to the vessel to
prepare for her suitable reception. He there found
a clergyman, and bespoke his holy offices to unite
him to his cousin immediately after their embarcation.

All the necessary arrangements were made, and
he was returning to the shore, his eye fixed on the
lovely being whom he believed Heaven had interposed
to give to him, when he descried Sir William's
carriage guarded by a cavalcade of armed
men, in the uniform of the King's guards, approaching
the spot where she stood.

He comprehended at once their cruel purpose.
He exhorted the boatmen to put forth all their
strength; he seized the oars himself—despair
gave him supernatural power—the boat shot forward
with the velocity of light; but all in vain!—
he only approached near enough to the shore to
hear Alice's last impotent cries to him—to see
her beautiful face convulsed with agony, and her
arms outstretched towards him—when she was
forced to the carriage by her father, and driven
from his sight.

He leaped on the strand; he followed the troop
with cries and entreaties; but he was only answered

by the coarse jeering and profane jests of
the soldiery.

Notice was soon given that the boat was ready
to return to the ship for the last time, and Fletcher
in a state of agitation and despair, almost amounting
to insanity, permitted it to return without
him.

He went to London and requested an interview
with his uncle. The request was granted, and a
long and secret conference ensued. It was known
by the servants of the household, that their mistress,
Alice, had been summoned by her father to
this meeting; but what was said or done, did not
transpire. Immediately after, Fletcher returned
to Mr. Winthrop's in Suffolk. The fixedness of
despair was on his countenance; but he said nothing,
even to this confidential friend, of the interview
with his uncle. The particulars of the
affair at Southampton, which had already reached
Suffolk, seemed sufficiently to explain his
misery.

In less than a fortnight he there received despatches
from his uncle, informing him that he had
taken effectual measures to save himself from a
second conspiracy against the honour of his family—that
his daughter, Alice, had that day been
led to the altar by Charles Leslie; and concluding
with a polite hope, that though his voyage had
been interrupted, it might not be long deferred.

Alice had, indeed, in the imbecility of utter despair,
submitted to her father's commands. It was

intimated at the time, and reported for many years
after, that she had suffered a total alienation of
mind. To the world this was never contradicted,
for she lived in absolute retirement; but those
who best knew could have attested, that if her
mind had departed from its beautiful temple, an
angelic spirit had entered in and possessed it.

William Fletcher was, in a few months, persuaded
to unite himself with an orphan girl, a
ward of Mr. Winthrop, who had, in the eyes of
the elders, all the meek graces that befitted a
godly maiden and dutiful helpmate. Fletcher remained
constant to his purpose of emigrating to
New-England, but he did not effect it till the year
1630, when he embarked with his family and effects
in the ship Arabella, with Governor Winthrop,
who the, for the first time, went to that
land where his name will ever be held in affectionate
and honourable remembrance.