Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/675

5, 1863.] not?” she asked, in a voice which melted one heart there, if not Monmouth’s.

“I know not, I cannot say, I cannot think. I am so—so confused, so wretched!”

“You are worn out,” she said, tenderly.

“I believe I am,” he answered, piteously.

“I had better go now,” she said.

When no word to the contrary was said, she added:—

“I will go to the King; and as soon as you arrive in London, I will come”

“You will? Try to save me! It will be good of you, it will be—yes, it will be noble of you to save me, Anne! I know, I feel, that your lot has been hard,—that you have something to forgive.”

“Something!”

“Yes, much to forgive. And I cannot now say—I am not in a condition to promise”

“To do anything,—to go anywhere,” interposed Lord Grey, in the lowest tone, which yet Monmouth heard.

“Be silent, my Lord,” cried Monmouth. “I cannot be pressed at such a moment as this. I will do what I can; but, Anne, try to save me!”

“Yes, I will try to save you,” she replied, in a manner which smote on her husband’s heart.

When she was gone, he answered to what was in his companion’s mind. Lord Grey had not spoken again, and he now laid down his pen to listen. He did not look round, probably because tears were on his face.

“She is too good to me,” Monmouth said. “But what can I do? We were married so young! It was really no marriage on my part. Henrietta is everything to me.—Ah! that fortune,—that title! I wish Anne had them back again! I wish I had never had them! I wish I were the meanest citizen! Henrietta is everything to me.”

He did not divine Lord Grey’s next thought: “If you had been a humble citizen, the Lady Henrietta would never have been anything to you.”

the rest of that fearful summer, there were two travelling parties in the Western Counties which fixed all eyes, and created fears and hopes unspeakable.

After the Battle of Sedgemoor, Colonel Percy Kirke, an officer fresh from African service, and commanding the First Tangier Regiment, was appointed to govern Bridgewater, and to keep Somersetshire in order. How he did it there is no need to relate; for the story of the barbarities of Kirke and his Lambs is not forgotten, and never will be.

The other traveller, who had a very different following, was the Bishop of Bath and Wells. He had been known by his sternness among the large proportion of the people in his diocese who were Nonconformists. He never ceased to denounce their doctrines; and he had followed up their offences of clandestine worship with all the severity that his office, and the influence that it gave him, enabled him to exercise. When Kirke was recalled, because public indignation at his cruelties was too strong to be braved by a king whose throne had been so lately in danger, the Puritans believed themselves still under special trial, and spoke of Bishop Ken’s visitations of the towns as another sign of the time of tribulation which was to try their souls, in preparation for the approaching triumph of their purified Christianity. From the pulpits in the meeting-houses, to which the people resorted more than ever, there were prayers that the hand of the persecutor might be stayed, and that the proud oppressor who mimicked the shows and assumed the airs of Papistry might be humbled. But day by day perplexing stories spread, which bewildered people’s minds about the Bishop whom they had supposed they knew so well. He had come to convert as many as he could, certainly: but he had also visited the prisons; had rebuked the harshness of jailors; had spoken with the prisoners of their families, and promised to see after them; had supplied the needs of many who were ill-fed and clothed; had caused the separation of the sick and the well, and had done what was possible to have those fearful places made less unwholesome and miserable. There were many who pronounced these deeds to be arts of Satan, designed to lead the elect over into Prelacy, if not Popery: but on others such acts produced their natural effect; and in their minds the idea of Bishop Ken, the persecutor of the Lord’s people, became so altered and confused that their pastors feared that Satan’s devices were not altogether in vain.

On his part, the Bishop had his own perplexities; and some matters which had before appeared to him so plain that only minds blinded by sin could have a doubt about them, now showed a different side, when he went among the Puritans. His own views were unchanged. He had long passed beyond the mental opportunity for change: but he was becoming more or less aware how it was that everybody within his reach did not arrive at seeing things as he saw them. He was so struck with the intelligence with which some of the Nonconformists held and defended their opinions, that he was believed to have some hand in the increase of the emigration from the Southern and Western coasts, by which many hundreds of Roundheads were carried beyond the danger of taking their turn in the prisons, or being consigned, on some pretence about the rebellion, to the gallows. He was extremely severe with them for their deficiency of passiveness in their obedience to the existing Government, whatever it might be, and for the trouble they caused to the Church by leaving it: but when it came to the alternative of going to a new world by emigration, or to another world by the jail and the halter, he helped them in their strait, and told them that they richly deserved the severer fate; and that the reason why he assisted them to avoid it was the hope that their lengthened term of life might be so used as to bring them back within the privileges of loyalty and the pale of the Church. He abhorred William Penn as a sectary of mischievous audacity: and he could not speak with patience of the favour with which the King seemed to regard this great foe of ecclesiastical obedience: but Penn’s colony was a better place than the grave for repentance; and he therefore paid the passage of scores of heretics,