 | The cavaliers of England, or, The times of the revolutions of 1642 and 1688 |  |
The Brothers in Arms;
OR,
THREE NOBLEST VICTIMS FOR OPINION SAKE.
A
Battlefield of Berkshire.
1643.
It is the saddest of all the considerations which weigh upon
the candid and sincere mind of the true patriot, when civil dispute
is on the eve of degenerating into civil war, that the best,
the wisest, and the bravest of both parties, are those who first
fall victims for those principles which they mutually, with equal
purity and faith, and almost with equal reason, believe to be
true and vital; that the moderate men, who have erst stood
side by side for the maintenance of the right and the common
good — who alone, in truth, care for either right or common
good — now parted by a difference nearly without a distinction,
are set in deadly opposition, face to face, to slay and be slain
for the benefit of the ultraists — of the ambitious, heartless, or
fanatical self-seekers, who hold aloof in the beginning, while
principles are at stake, and come into the conflict when the
heat and toil of the day are over, and when their own end, not
their country's object, remains only to be won.
So great and manifest a truth is this, and so heavily has the
sense of this responsibility weighed upon the souls of the best,
and therefore greatest men, that not a few have doubted whether
it be not better to endure all endurable assaults on liberty, all,
in a word, short of its utter extinction, than to defend it through
the awful path of civil war; which, terminate it how it may,
aloof from true liberty on the one side, as it was in the commencement
on the other.
This sad and terrible truth was never more clearly demonstrated
than in the opening of the great English civil war
between the first Charles and his parliament — a war which
began, undeniably, with the king, as principally in the wrong —
though the worst grievances on his part were already redressed,
and his most odious pretensions renounced — and which ended
with the parliament as the most odious, intolerant, persecuting,
and despotical oligarchy, that ever induced true men almost to
loathe the prostituted name of liberty.
I am not about to write history, but to portray one true and
sad scene of it. Yet to do so, it is necessary to glance briefly
at the events preceding it. All readers are of course aware
that, during the whole seventeen years, between the accession
of the unfortunate Charles to the throne and the hoisting of his
standard at Nottingham, there had been a long and fiercely-disputed
civil struggle between the supporters of constitutional
liberty and the upholders of irresponsible monarchy; in which
the latter were beaten, step by step, till every stronghold of
their position was forced, and the position itself abandoned as
untenable.
When Charles, at Nottingham, raised that hapless standard,
amid the wind and tempest, which, ominous of ill, rent it from
the banner-staff, he had no choice but to do so if he intended aught
beyond holding the title and wearing the insignia of a royalty
which had ceased to exist. And so clearly was this visible,
that many of those who had waged the civic strife most strenuously
in their places in the senate, who had risked their all —
that all which the signers of the Declaration of Independence
pledged — their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honors,
against the absolute yea of a despotic king — now risked that
Nay! that the most prominent of the leaders on the
side of the parliament itself, dreading the victory of their own
masters but little less than that of the king, suffered the war to
languish which they might have finished at a blow, almost before
it was begun; while the “nobles who fought for the crown”
were almost equally unwilling to see Charles too suddenly and
thoroughly successful, lest with the recovery of his just prerogative
he might return to his unjust assumptions.
But scarcely had a year flown, or ever the field was left clear,
the true patriots — the wise, the noble, and the good, on either
side — had fallen fruitless victims to their principles — clear
for the conflict of the unscrupulous and the selfish, the bold and
the bad.
Every field, on which the kindred armies met during the
first two years, was watered with the best blood of England.
But though great men and good men fell on either side, it is on
record, from the lips of one not likely to overland the royalists,
that in every action, whether he won or lost the day, the king
was the loser; for that he lost nobles and gentlemen, while the
parliament lost pimple-nosed serving-men and drunken tapsters;
and Oliver Cromwell was not the man to value the life of gentleman
or noble above that of serving-man or tapster, merely
for the station which he filled or the title which he held, unless
there had been something truly noble — noble with the nobility
of manhood, truth, and virtue — in those dead peers of England
to whom he left this honest epitaph.
Of those who had most earnestly, most usefully striven, side
by side in the house for constitutional liberty, before the sword
was drawn, the best and wisest were, John Hampden; Lucius
Cary, better known as Lord Falkland; Hyde, earl of Clarendon,
the great historian; Sir Harry Vane; Lord Kimbolton,
afterward earl of Manchester; the Lord Carnarvon; and many
Englishmen, all alike resolute champions, noble conquerors of
England's constitutional freedom.
The sword was drawn: and where were those banded brothers?
Hampden in arms for the state, Falkland in arms for the
king; Hyde and Sir Harry Vane with but the rapier's length
between them; Manchester a general of the parliament, Carnarvon
the best horse-officer of the king!
Alas, patriotic blood! alas, noble victims! on both sides victims
to the same cause of liberty — each as he understood the
term in his sincere, unselfish soul! — alas! band of brethren
severed and set in mortal opposition, by the least difference of
opinion, by the mere shadow of a shade!
And of all these, or ever a full year had passed away from
the displaying of that standard, the best slept in a bloody grave.
Or ever the fierce struggle was fought out, all had retired to
make way for the unscrupulous and unpatriotic, who fought for
names, not for things; for profit, not for principle.
The first action of the armies, at Edgehill, was a drawn battle;
but its consequences, no less than the prestige of first victory,
were with Charles. Essex retreated; and the king took
Oxford, Reading, marched on his metropolis, beat the parliament-men
at Brentford, within six miles of London, and might
have finished the war that day; but that his own officers, distrusting
him, as Essex distrusted his masters, persuaded him
to draw off his forces, and retire to Oxford, in hope of a speedy
accommodation.
So closed the first campaign: but here to close the war was
found impossible; for the king could not, the parliament would
not, recede one inch. With the spring of 1643 the war was
recommenced; and, with the war, havoc unheard of in England
since the bloody conflict between the rival roses. In the
north the cavaliers, in the east the puritans, were in the ascendency;
the west, every stream ran red, every grass field grew rank, with
carnage. At Stratton, on the 16th of May, the Cornish under
Trevannion, Slanning, and Sir Bevil Grenville, all peaceful and
accomplished men, torn from the endearments of home and the
charming ties of family by an overruling sense of duty, and the
last of the three admitted by his enemies to be the best-beloved
person in all the west of England, carried all before them —
weeping amid the joy of victory over the gallant dead who had
fallen by their own unwilling swords. At Chalgrove-field, in
Berkshire, only a few weeks later, fell John Hampden, serving
as a volunteer with the horse of Lord Essex; and — I quote
from a well-known historian — “what most pleased the royalists
was the expectation that some disaster had happened to Mr.
Hampden, their capital and much-dreaded enemy. One of the
prisoners taken in the action said he was confident Mr. Hampden
was hurt; for he saw him, contrary to his usual custom,
ride off the field before the action was finished; his head hanging
down, and his hands leaning on his horse's neck. Next
day the news arrived that he was shot in the shoulder with a
brace of bullets, and the bone broken. Some days after he
died, in exquisite pain, of his wound; nor could his whole
party, had their army met a total overthrow, have been thrown
into greater consternation.” The death of John Hampden most
pleased the royalists! — most pleased the very men who, one
little year before, had been his friends and fellow-voters, for
freedom and against the king! And this is civil war! its consequences
and its glory!
Oh, fatal joy of the victorious royalists! For had John
Hampden not ridden off the field of Chalgrove, “with his head
hanging down and his hands on his horse's neck,” but lived to
see the end of that dread war, the first Charles had never bent
his head to the block at Whitehall; had the good commoner
king died in exquisite indignity of the headman's blow.
Almost at the same moment, on Lansdown, known to this day
as the “field of gentle blood,” fell Basil Grenville, “the person
most beloved in all the west of England” — fell in the arms of
victory, almost rejoicing to be thus early released from the sad
task of fighting against Englishmen, as he believed for England's
welfare. At Roundway-down, on the 13th of July, Wilmot,
with fearful loss, utterly routed Waller for the parliament;
and the next month Rupert won Bristol at the pike's point, but
left in the bloody breaches Slanning, Trevannion, Viscount
Grandison, all patriots, all men of moderation, with five hundred
others, all gentlemen of veritable honor.
Again the king might have marched upon London, and again
would he certainly have carried it. But again the moderation
of his nobles, and their distrust of him whom yet they most
trusted, prevailed; and they induced him to sit down, fatally
for the royal cause, before the trifling town of Gloucester —
still hoping that in its weak and reduced condition the parliament
might now be willing to treat on fair and equitable terms.
But the moderate men were dead, or disgusted with the weary
war, and had retired from a strife which they already perceived
to be hopeless if not endless. And with persistency equal to
that of Rome when Hannibal was thundering at her gates —
and had it been in as just a cause, equally noble — the parliament
still stood defiant, refusing all accommodation, save on
terms that would have left the king virtually crownless and the
realm actually churchless. Within the walls of Gloucester,
Massey made a defence that was indeed heroical. And as the
king's fortunes waxed sick with hope delayed, more and more
did the moderate men, at length then perceiving the ambition
of the parliament, fall off from those who no longer fought for
freedom. Bedford, Holland, and Conway, all peers of England,
of the largest liberty, deserted the puritans' parliament at Whitehall,
to join the king's parliament at Oxford. Northumberland,
the parliamentarian admiral, forsook the fleet and retired to his
castle in his own northern county; Essex, the parliamentarian
general, exhorted his masters to peace, and almost declined
their service. All thoughts of pacification were then laid aside,
for the presbyterian pulpits thundered, the puritan zealots of
the city raved and rioted, the parliamentarian statesmen lied,
without shame or remorse; spreading a rumor, which they knew
to be false, shaking the national and religious heart of England
to its very core — “a rumor of twenty thousand Irish papists
who had landed, and were to cut the throat of every protestant.”
Then Essex marched, and then reluctant — marched only
then because unwilling to resign his leading to fierce, unscrupulous,
fanatic gladiators. By a masterly move, he relieved
Gloucester; but, still unwilling to conquer, declined battle, and
retired by a circuitous route on London. The cavaliers meanwhile
did now, when it was too late, what, had they done in
July, would have placed the king in that palace which he was
never to enter but once more, and only thence to issue upon
the scaffold. They marched straight upon London, seeing at
last that peace could be only had through conquest.
When Essex came to Newbury, some sixty miles from London,
thinking that he had circumvented the royalists and left
them far to the rearward, he found them in force, and prepared
for instant action, between him and his goal. He had no choice
but to fight; and it was with a heavy heart, and a dull, careworn
countenance, that he saw the sun go down behind the
Berkshire hills, as he gave orders to deliver battle on the
morrow.
There is no lovelier or more sweetly pastoral plain in all the
of the brimful Kennet, whereon stands the old town of Newbury,
defended by the gray and dismantled keep of Donnington,
stretching away northward in a boundless champaign of green
luxuriance far into level Berkshire, but to the southward bounded
by the rich beech-woods of Hampshire, above which rise, scarce
six miles distant — this bleak and bare to the top, where it is
crested by the vallum of a Roman camp, that clothed in glorious
umbrage to the very summit — the twin chalk-hills Beacon
and Syddon. Sweet plain! dear, unforgotten hills! two fifths
of a century have flown since I beheld you last, happy in easy,
careless childhood, and in all chances of mortality never shall
I behold you any more; yet the memory of your green slopes,
your gleaming waters, and of those gray, war-battered walls of
Donnington, is fresher and warmer at my heart than many a
thing of yesterday — fresh and warm as the tones of a voice,
long since mute in the cold grave, which told me, yet a mere
child, while the speaker's hand pointed to the crumbling keep,
that beneath those gray ruins, nearly two hundred years ago,
one fell, who bore a familiar and a kindred name — fell in his
duty, fighting for his king, his country, and his God; and fixed
the moral in the boy's mind by the injunction, “When need
shall be, see that thou do in likewise!”
The day had come when that one finished his career of glory.
And on the morning of that September day he sat with two
others, brothers in arms, before a frugal table, nigh to a latticed
window of his then unbattered tower of Donnington. And he
gazed through the lattice over the deep woodlands of East
Woodhay, then glowing with the first golden hues of autumn,
over the fair demesnes of Highclere, toward those fair hills, his
birthright, as his birthplace: but between these and his eye
frowned the deep masses of the parliamentarian foot, bristling
with puissant pikes, and sparkling with the already kindled
from the sight, and raised the winecup with a sigh.
Robert Dormer, of that line the last earl of Carnarvon — his
portrait, and in his portrait the man, yet lives, as he lived then,
in the unaltered colors of Antonio Vandyke. Tall, slender,
graceful, with the high, sharp-cut, aquiline features and loose-waving
chestnut locks — sure indications of his Norman blood
— with the loose velvet jerkin, the broad embroidered sword-belt,
the richly-wrought lace collar, in which — for few of the
cavaliers wore defensive armor, although their enemies were
cased in complete steel — he was ever wont, as Clarendon has
left it of him, to charge home.
His friends and fellow-soldiers, fellow-lovers of liberty above
glory, now fighting for its substance and reality against its empty
name and semblance, were Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland,
and the young earl of Sunderland, immortalized they also by
the same wondrous Flemish painter.
But Falkland lives not on his canvass as he showed on that
morning, but as before the civil wars began — young, smooth-faced,
serene, joyous, happy; courtly attired in rich blue velvet,
with large white tassels pendent from his Flanders lace cravat.
Such was he in happier days, who, “when called into public
life, stood foremost in all attacks upon the high prerogatives of
the crown, and displayed that masculine eloquence and undaunted
love of liberty, which, from his intimate acquaintance
with the sublime spirits of antiquity, he had greedily imbibed.”
Such was he in happier days, who, when compelled to choose
sides in actual war, when he had elected to “defend those limited
powers which remained to monarchy, and which he deemed
necessary to the support of the English constitution,” lost all
his natural cheerfulness and vivacity, became almost a sloven
in his dress, and was wont oftentimes, even when in the midst
of joyous friends, with wine and revelry around him, to shake
with shrill, sad accents, the words `peace, peace!”'
Such was he in happier days, who was beloved by friend and
foe; the friend of John Hampden, the friend of Charles Stuart;
one of the best and truest gentlemen the world ever saw — oraator,
scholar, statesman, soldier, patriot, man. Even when he
took arms for conscience sake, for conscience sake also he
would take no command, but fought ever, as Hampden was
fighting when he fell, a volunteer in the horse.
The earl of Sunderland was the youngest of the three, and,
as the youngest, untried in statesmanship though proved in war,
less a scholar than a soldier, and less a thinker than an actor,
the cheeriest and lightest-hearted of the three. He alone of
the three was sheathed from head to foot in a complete panoply
of antique armor, but he wore his visor up and beaver down,
revealing the whole of his smooth, youthful face and delicate
features, flushed a little by the heat of his armor and the excitement
of the moment.
“Why do you sigh,” he said, “Carnarvon? You are not
wont to sigh, I think, on the eve of battle.”
“I am not wont to sigh,” replied the other, “you should say
rather, Sunderland, in the act of battle. But who would not
sigh to look on such a sight as that?” He pointed to the steady
front of the puritans, stationary on the plain, and thence to the
gay cassocks and plumed hats of Rupert's highborn cavalry,
wheeling and careering in the distance; and concluded by quoting
in a solemn and melancholy tone the glorious lines of
Massinger:—
Two royal armies full of fiery youth,
Equal in power to do and courage to bear,
So near intrenched it is beyond all hope
That shall be divided any more
Until it be determined by the sword
Concludes the victor innocent, the vanquished
Most miserably guilty.'
But he whom he addressed shook his head with a calm,
grave smile; and then his companions observed, for the first
time, that he was dressed with elegance and taste very unusual
for him in later days, and that his long, light hair, once so beautiful,
was carefully combed out and curled, and although sadly
faded and thickly streaked with gray, bespoke the courtier and
the cavalier rather than the spirit-broken murmurer for “peace!
peace!”
Sunderland saw this first, and partly it may be from a touch
of recklessness, partly from a desire to cheer up the despondent
spirits of his gallant friends, he still spoke in livelier tones
than his own heart suggested.
“The days of miracles have come again, I think,” he said.
“Here is Carnarvon grave and Falkland gay at the prospect
of striking one more good blow for the king, perhaps the winning
blow. For if we scatter, as the Lord in his grace send
we may, those scurvy Londoners to the four winds of heaven,
it is as clear as yon rising sun that the rogue parliament can
raise no army any more, and the king must enjoy his own
again. Thinkest thou not with me, gallant Falkland? Nay,
but I know thou dost, else why so light a smile and so gay a
garb, unless that thy clear soul foresees thy long-desired peace?”
“Those scurvy Londoners are Englishmen still, Sunderland,”
replied Carnarvon; “Englishmen fighting, as we fight, for what
they honestly believe the right. I for one am sick of smiting,
and would it were over, whether it were by peace or by —”
“Death, dear Carnarvon,” interrupted Falkland; “death, gentle
Sunderland. It is death that I foresee, not victory nor peace.
I would not that the enemy should find me dead in slovenly
our cause. Therefore it is that I am brave to-day; and if I
be less sad than is my wont, it is that I am aweary of the times
and foresee much more misery to England. But I believe
that I shall be out of it before night.”
“Indeed! indeed! do you too feel this?” cried Carnarvon.
“Why, as I looked but now over my greenwoods of East Woodhay,
over my chase of Highclere, over my Hampshire hills, I
felt as if a voice spoke to me audibly, `Look thy last, look thy
last at them, Robert Dormer; for never wilt thou, nor any of
thy name, see the sun rise up any more or go down over them.”'
“But it was not therefore thou didst sigh?” asked his friend.
“Thou dost not fear to fall; dost thou regret to die?”
“I neither fear nor regret, Lucius Cary. But I would fain
live to see my king restored to his throne, and the servant of
my God restored to his churches. Nevertheless, not my will
be done, but His, for He knows best who knows all things.”
“Amen!” said Falkland solemnly.
“And amen!” replied Sunderland a moment afterward. “And
may he be gracious to us and forget not us, even if we forget
him, in the heat and hurry of the day that is before us; for if
you dream aright, and you too fall before me, I think I shall
not be far behind you.”
And as he spoke, he stretched out his mail-clad arms, and
in one close embrace commingled stood for the last time those
three noble brothers.
While they were still clasped breast to breast, sharp and shrill
rang the trumpets from below with a right royal flourish, until
from “turret to foundation-stone” the old keep resounded, and
almost seemed to rock, at that soul-stirring summons.
“The king! the king! God save the king!” shouted Carnarvon,
casting his beaver on his long love-locks, and snatching
his heavy sword from the table.
“To horse and away! to horse and away!” cried Sunderland.
“And the best man to-day is he who strikes the hardest,”
exclaimed Falkland, every trace of melancholy vanishing from
his fine face.
Down stairs they hurried, and as they reached the castle-court,
there stood the king, all armed except his helmet, which
a page held behind, with the George in its blue riband about
his neck, and the star of the garter on his breast, about to
mount a splendid snow-white charger, with a tall greyhound at
his side, looking, as he was to the very last, every inch a man,
a gentleman, and a king.
His face, that serene, melancholy face — prophetic, as some
thought, of a violent and early death — kindled as he looked on
that devoted three, and his manner, usually so austere and
grave, relaxed.
“My noble lords, my faithful friends —” Some inward feeling
overpowered the stern, grave nature of the man, and he
could say no more. But as each bent his knee in silence, and
left a teardrop with the last kiss of loyalty upon his ungloved
hand, a tear — a tear which no extremity of his own sorrows
ever wrung from those calm, steady eyes — dropped on the
head of Falkland.
Again the trumpets flourished, and every cavalier was in his
saddle, every sword out of its scabbard.
A little hour and they stood face to face, those kindred hosts
arrayed beneath the glorious sun for mutual slaughter — but no
time now for thought, but for action! action! action!
Hot Rupert's sword is out, his banner on the wind, his spur
in his charger's side. “God and the king! God and the king!”
and out went the unconquered cavaliers, an overwhelming torrent
of black feathers, and blue scarfs, and glittering sword-points.
“God and the king!” — and though the troopers of the
parliament fought like men, and rallied again and again when
longer; and fought by squadrons first, with Sir Philip Stapleton's
white hat conspicuous in their van, and then in troops,
and at last in little knots, back to back — still who were they,
that they should match the matchless cavaliers of England?
In the words of the gallant Sunderland, they were scattered
to the four winds of heaven, but not until the sun had already
“sloped his westering wheel,” and verged toward the horizon.
And now the day seemed to be all but won, and of the three
not one had fallen, not one was even wounded.
What foot as yet had borne the brunt of the charging cavaliers?
For once, Rupert forgot not his duty in the fury of his
triumph; for once, he restrained his madness for the chase, and
wheeled on the pikes of the puritans, lined by the musketeers
of the London trainbands. “Charge home! charge home!
God and the king! the day is ours!”
But theirs it was not yet; for the pikes stood like a wall of
solid steel, and that appalling roll of revolving English fire,
which no human horse has ever faced unbroken, rose and fell,
rose and fell incessant. And for the first time the cavaliers
were hurled back, dauntless though bent and shattered, like a
broken billow from an iron coast. There went down Lucius
Cary, shot through the heart by a musket-bullet from the scurvy
London trainbands. There went down Sunderland above him,
his avenger; for, as the fatal shot was discharged, his long,
keen broadsword cleft the musketeer, through skullcap, hair,
and skull, down to his eyes, and hurled him dead upon his
noble victim. But in that very point of time, one pike-point
pierced his charger's poitrel, and drove deep into his counter;
a second found the unguarded spot, the open visor of the gallant
rider, and down went he, unconscious of the sudden deathwound
—
“Rider and horse, friend and foe, in one red burial blent.”
Rallying to the trumpet and the royal cry, steadily wheeled
the unconquered cavaliers over the dying and the dead — again
upon the serried pikes, again upon the rolling volleys. And
now! now — is it victory? — back! back! by the very impetus
of their own charge — back! back! two hundred yards and
better, they bore the pikes before them! But the pikes were
still unbroken, and the fire still rolled incessant, tolling the
knell of many a patriot soul departed. Again the cavaliers recoiled
from that impenetrable phalanx, from that withering fire.
Bareheaded, in his shirt-sleeves, dripping from head to foot
with the blood of the enemy, but unscathed, as the bravest often
are, Carnarvon fought the foremost and fell back the last from
that second charge — ignorant still of the fate of his banded
brothers, such was the tumult and confusion of the fray. He
fell back, only to rally his men once more unto the charge; and
as he galloped after them, shouting, adjuring, praying them,
with his sword-point lowered, his eyes intent on the halting
and fast-rallying cavaliers, and thoughtless of any enemy at
hand, his charger started from a confused heap of dead which
lay right in his path.
The seat of the earl was too firm to be shaken, but his eyes
wandered for a moment to the pile of carnage. He saw and
knew his friends, and saw or knew no more on earth. For at
that instant a trooper of the parliamentarian army, not one of
whom had been seen on the battle-field for hours, came straggling
back to his banners; and as he casually passed in the
rear of the brave earl, recognised him on the instant, and drove
his sword, a coward blow from behind, through his unguarded
side, and laid him dead within five paces of his faithful fellows.
Charge after charge, again and again, on went and home
went Rupert! But in vain, all in vain! for those pikes still
received them — still, as they recoiled, advanced unbroken —
that fire still rolled on incessant!
Night at last, that common friend of all weary and dismantled
armies, severed them, and they sank down to sleep, with
no watch-fires kindled, no sentries posted, among the dying
and the dead, in the very lines where they had fought all day
exhausted but unconquered.
No note was taken of the dead that night, and the cold moon
alone kept watch over the solemn death-bed of the devoted
three. But when, at dawn of day, Essex decamped in haste,
and Rupert's trumpets sounded boot and saddle to beat up the
rear of the retiring army, Carnarvon was not there, nor Sunderland,
nor Falkland: and all men knew — their wars over —
that Sunderland's hot gallantry was cold, Carnarvon's latest
wish frustrated, and Falkland's “peace, peace,” won.
Thus fell they, the three noblest victims, for opinion's sake —
the last “brothers in arms” in England — and may they be the
last for ever!
With them, too, fell the crown; for from that day there were
no moderate men, on either side, for many a year, nor any real
hope of victory for Charles or peace for England. Therefore
with them fell for a while the crown, as never may it fall again
while the round world holds fast.
| The cavaliers of England, or, The times of the revolutions of 1642 and 1688 | |