University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.
SIR REGINALD BELLARMYNE, AN OLD SOLDIER OF THE KING'S.

It was on a fine sunshiny morning of September, 1653, that
Sir Reginald Bellarmyne sat by the wide hearth of the summer
parlor, which he occupied when there were no guests, as was
for the most part now the case in the once hospitable cloisters
of Bellarmyne Abbey.

A small round table at his elbow displayed the relies of a
large hare-pasty—it would have been venison in the good days
of old; and, in lieu of stoups of Malvoisie and Bourdeaux wine,
a solitary silver tankard thrust forward its capacious womb,
mantling with stout English ale recently stirred with the sprig
of rosemary, then held to impart a sovereign relish to the substantial
joint; nor did it appear, from the inroads the good
baronet had made on the contents of both, that his appetite had
suffered seriously from the retrenchment of luxuries which he
had, perhaps, once deemed necessaries to his rank and station.
He was a man of sixty years or upwards, who must at a former

period of his life, have been eminently handsome, and who still
retained in his erect form, clear eye, and nobly cast features,
many traces of the beauty for which he had once been celebrated,
even in the courts of the great and famous monarch. He
had, however, grown of latter years somewhat ponderous and
corpulent; and his sinister leg wrapped in flannels, and bolstered
up on an easy stool, gave painful evidence of that distemper
which is held to visit upon the children the pleasant
indulgences of their forefathers. Otherwise, Sir Reginald's appearance
showed no token of those excesses which were unfortunately
so much in vogue, in those days, among the cavaliers
and courtiers of the king, as to be regarded almost one of their
characteristics. His eye was clear and calm, his complexion
pale rather than flushed; and his frame, though somewhat
unwieldy, was well-knit, and still capable, when he was not
laboring under the attacks of the ancestral enemy, of both effort
and exertion.

His hair, which he still wore long and unpowdered, not having
adopted the new-fashioned abomination of the periwig, was,
indeed, very grey; his brow was deeply wrinkled; and there
was a singular expression, weary and wasted, yet intelligent and
keen withal, and full of eager energy, pervading all the lines of
his face, which seemed to tell a history of cares, and troubles,
and anxieties—perhaps of almost mortal sorrows—encountered,
resisted, combated inch by inch as a man should combat such
things, if not vanquished by him.

He was dressed at all points as became a gentleman, in an
age when the distinctive garb of the different classes was maintained
in all strietness, and when scarcely an article of wearing
apparel was common to the nobly born, and to the next beneath
him in station; but yet so dressed that was evidently rather
a matter of etiquette and self-respect than of convenience with

him to maintain the outward show of his family. His doublet
of uncut velvet was rather suited for the field sports, or out-door
occupations, than for the full morning-dress of a country gentleman
of the day; yet it was evident from the ruffles at wrist
and knee, from the neat russet-leather buskins, and the long
rapier, with its ornamental shoulder-belt, that he were it as his
habitual and distinctive attire.

A slouched grey hat, with a drooping feather, and a dark-green
roquelaure lay neatly folded and brushed on a slab hard by,
together with a crutch-headed cane mounted with a fine reddeer's
antler, and a pair of fringed buckskin gloves, that would
have reached well-nigh to the elbow of the wearer.

A noble deer greyhound, of the great Scottish breed, and of
the largest size, long of limb, long of muzzle, wire-haired, with
deep, earnest hazel eyes, lay on the deer-skin which covered the
hearth-stone, gazing into the face of his master with almost
superhuman intelligence; while a couple of smaller dogs, fine
curly-fleeced water-spaniels, dozed closer to the embers of the
wood-fire, which the autumnal atmosphere, and the thick walls
of the ancient abbaye, rendered anything rather than unpleasant.
The parlor itself in which he sat showed, like its master, something
at least of privation, if not of absolute poverty; the old
oak wainscoting, indeed, was as brightly polished; the old high-backed
chairs and settles, with their quaint carvings and old
tapestried cushions, were as free from any speck of mould; the
antique suits of steel-armor on the walls were as clear from rust;
the modern implements of falconry or the chase were in as
accurate order and arrangement as if a hundred zealous hands
were daily employed in furbishing them. Still there was
nothing gay, nothing lightsome, nothing new; nothing in all
the furniture or decorations of the room which did not wear a
wan and faded aspect, as if they had been coeval at least with

their aged possessor; and as if, like him, they had seen their
better days.

Without, so far as could be seen from the large oriel window,
the stone mullions of which were so much overrun with clustering
ivy and woodbines as to indicate some slackness on the
gardener's part, things did not, on the whole, wear a more promising
or brighter aspect. The fine elm avenue, which wound
away for above a mile, in full view, a broad belt of massive
verdure, had grown all out of shape and rule; the great boughs
of many of the trees sweeping so low as to render the road
impassable to carriages, and difficult even to travellers on horseback.
The lawn, immediately around the house, which had in
its palmier days been so neatly shorn and rolled, and decorated
with trim clumps of evergreens, and marble urns and statues,
was all grown up with coarse, long grass, among which the
hares and rabbits fed boldly as unscared by man; and the wild
park beyond, with all its sunny fern-clad knolls, and rich sheltered
hollows so closely pastured of old by the graceful herds of
fallow deer, showed but a wide expanse of rank untended vegetation,
stocked with no denizens more aristocratical than a flock
of ragged-looking, black-faced, mountain-muttons, a score of
little sharp-horned kyloe oxen, and two or three queer-visaged
Shetland ponies, not much larger and much more ragged than
the moorland sheep with which they kept company.

The fish-ponds, one or two of which were visible among the
trees, scarcely gleamed blue, unless in casual spots, under the
bright sky of autumn, so thickly were they overspread with
water-grass and the green, slimy duckweed; the gravel road
before the door was matted with weeds, as if no wheel-track
had disturbed it for years.

All was a picture of neglect and desolation, yet beautiful
withal, from the very wildness and liberty of the unchecked

vegetation, and the frequency of those unusual sounds, so seldom
heard in the close vicinity of the abodes of men—the incessant
cooings of the hoarse woodpigeons, the crow of the
cock-pheasants from the garden walks, the harsh half-barking
bleat of the moorland sheep, and, most rarely heard of all, the
deep booming of the bitterns from the stagnant morass, into
which the fish-ponds were fast degenerating.

It was not difficult, though sad it was, either to understand
or to explain. Sir Reginald Bellarmyne, of Bellarmyne Abbey,
a baronet and a catholic, as long as there had been catholics
or baronets in England, loyalist and royalist, like all his fellows,
had in his own person, and in that of his fathers before him,
fought always on the wrong king's side, so far as fortune was
concerned, whatever might be said of fidelity.

One ancestor had perished on Crook-back Richard's side, at
Bosworth; his grandson, and Sir Reginald's grandfather, had
fallen under the heavy censure of the man-hearted queen, Elizabeth,
and escaped narrowly with life, for Scottish Mary's sake.
The baronet's own father, most unjustly, as they ever averred,
was mulcted thirty thousand pounds after the gunpowder affair
of Fawkes, with which they denied all participation; and himself,
as he most undisguisedly proclaimed, had fought for King
Charles on every stricken field from Edgehill to Worcester
fight; and when all was lost, had followed the fortunes of his
son in foreign lands, and melted his last ounce of plate to support
the needy parasites of the discrowned and exiled king.

Mulcts, confiscations, forfeitures, in past reigns, had done
much; the sequestrations under the parliament, for confirmed
and inveterate malignancy, all but completed the ruin of that
old, honorable family, as true and as English as the old oaks of
Bellarmyne. The last forfeiture would have completed it altogether,
but that, by a strange chance, the abbey, and a part of

the estates immediately attached to it, being entailed most
strictly on the male heirs of the name for ever, an unknown,
and almost unsuspected cousin of the late Sir Armytage Bellarmyne,
turned up in the very nick of time, in the shape of a city
merchant, and a friend of some among the powers that were,
after justice had been done on the “Man of Blood,” as they termed
it. He interposed the claim of himself and his son, who was
serving at the time under Lockhart against the Spaniards at
Dunkirk; thereby preventing the alienation of the property,
which was sorely coveted by a puritan drysalter of the West
Riding, from the old name of the feudal tenure.

No sequestration occurred, therefore, of the last demesnes of
the House of Bellarmyne; and, at the Restoration, the old, battered,
widowed cavalier returned, with one daughter, who had
been educated in a French convent—his only son, the promise
of his race, had fallen, a boy of fifteen, fighting like a man by
his side at Worcester—to all that now remained of the once
broad possessions; the old abbey, a world too wide for the
shrunken acres that now alone looked up to its time-honored
belfries.

The city cousin, the Bellarmyne of London, like an honest
man and a good Christian as he was, though a heretic in the
parlance of Rome—and a true gentleman, although he smacked
a little of the puritan—had ever remitted the rents of the abbey
to Sir Reginald, whom he constantly acknowledged, though
he had never seen him, as the head of the house during the
whole period of his exile; and, on the restoration of King Charles
II., to which, with others of the eminent London merchants, he
had largely contributed, made over to him, as a matter of right,
and of course, and in no wise as a favor, the mansion and the
remnant of the lands, somewhat neglected, indeed, and out of
order, but neither dilapidated nor exhausted.

It is, perhaps, to be regretted that, at this time, no personal
meeting occurred between the kinsmen, for they were both
men of high character, high minds, and correct feelings; but
having had no intercourse, each had probably in some sort conceived
of the other, something of the character ascribed to his
political party. The protestant merchant took it too much,
and as it proved wrongfully, for granted, that the old cavalier
and inveterate swordsman was more or less the rash, reckless,
rakehelly debauchee and rioter of his day and class; and contented
with having done justice, thought no more about the
matter, nor troubled himself about his cousin, or his affairs.

The old soldier, more naturally, after he had acknowledged
frankly the honorable conduct of his unknown kinsman, and
expressed his sense of obligation, shrank from anything that
could savor of intrusion, or a desire of establishing any sort of
claim or clientelage on his rich and powerful relation. It is
probable that something might have added to this delicacy, in
the shape of the cavalier's distaste to the puritan, the romanist's
aversion to the heretic, and, yet more, of the soldier's distrust
and prejudice against the trader.

Still, none of these motives were very strong—for it was well
known that Nicholas Bellarmyne of the city, though neutral
throughout, and, at the commencement of the troubles, inclined
more to the parliament, had never joined the independents,
much less identified himself with the regicides. Sir Reginald
himself, moreover, though a catholic, was such rather because
he would not abjure the creed of his fathers than that he had
anything in him of the persecutor; and he had seen so much,
in the Low Countries, of the noble merchants of those days, when
merchants were men of patriotism, intelligence, and honor, that
he was unusually free from the prejudices of the noble against
the trader caste.

Neither of the two, in fact, knew much of the circumstances
or character of the other; and neither was, at this time, even
aware that his distant kinsman was a father, though from his
energy in the matter of the entail, Sir Reginald might suspect
that the merchant had some further representative.

On his diminished estates, then, which barely now gave returns
sufficient for the maintenance of himself and his child,
with a household the most limited, and on the narrowest scale
compatible with his rank and name, Sir Reginald settled himself
quietly, afar from the tumult, the dissipation, and the heartlessness
of courts; perceiving at once that he had nothing to expect
from the gratitude or generosity, much less from the justice of
the sovereign, whose seal and sign-manual he held, as well as
that of his unhappy father, for sums advanced as loans, the
repayment of which would have more than redeemed all the
recent losses of the Bellarmynes, and enabled them to resume
their appropriate station in the country.

Had he been alone in the world, it is more than probable
that Sir Reginald would have resigned himself contentedly to
his diminished circumstances, and would have ultimately sunk,
more or less graciously, and with more or less repining, into the
condition of the fox-hunting, ale-consuming squire of the day,
something above the farmer, but far from equal to the country
gentleman of England. The great nobles who in past reigns,
up to the unfortunate days of the unhappy Stuarts, had been
used to live on their own estates, in their viceregal castles,
during ten months of the year, holding cour-plenière of the
lesser gentry, and collecting around them the intelligence, the
civilization, and the splendor of their several shires, no longer
lived—like their forefathers—independent nobles on their own
hereditary principalities.

During the troublous times, which had scarcely passed over,

most of them wandering as exiles in foreign lands, France more
especially, they had contracted the false and pernicious usage
of abandoning their demesnes and rural residences to bailiffs
and intendants; and wasting profligate, dishonorable, useless
lives about the precincts of the royal court; parasites of kings;
loungers at the Exchange; gamblers at Tonbridge Wells or
Newmarket; fribblers and coxcombs, almost as free from any
manly vice, as from any grace or virtue.

At this time England had lost entirely that strong and living
feature of her social and political character—her rural aristocracy,
the greatest men of the land living among and with their
people, as if themselves of the people; and regarded rather by
the throne in the light of allied or kindred princes than as
mere subjects—much less as mere flatterers and courtiers.

From the accession of King James the First to the death of
Queen Anne, England was virtually Frenchified; she had no
longer a great nobility, but she had in lieu of it a little noblesse
of the court elique, of favorites of the great man, of favorites of
the bad woman of the day.

The lodgings of the metropolis were crowded with great lords,
crouching and crawling, and doing unutterable basenesses at
the feet of a minister, whose grandfathers their grandfathers
would have hung from their battlements!—the country was
deserted to rude boors, drunken ignoramus squires, time-serving,
grotesque parsons, who thought it an advancement to marry
the lady-of-the-manor's waiting-woman.

Coxcombry, profligacy, infidelity, insolvency, false refinement,
and favoritism at court, had reflected themselves in grossness,
ignorance, brutality, and want of all refinement in the country.
In the reign of Charles II. there was scarce a gentleman in all
England; and if there were one, he was something out of place,
ridiculous, and obsolete, without honor at court, or influence in

the country. And such, in sooth, was Sir Reginald Bellarmyne.