Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/167

 promptly on the morrow, ‘11th March;—I say received: Joun Netson.” How the Norfolk businesses proceeded, and what end they came to in Suffolk itself, we shall now see.

Colonel has already had experience in such Delinquent matters; has, by vigilance, by gentle address, by swift audacity if needful, extinguished more than one incipient conflagration. Here is one such instance,—coming to its sad maturity, and bearing fruit at Westminster in these very hours.

On Monday 13th March 1642-3, Thomas Conisby, Esquire, High Sheriff of Herts, appears visibly before the House of Commons, to give account of a certain ‘Pretended Commission of Array,’ which he had been attempting to execute one Market-day, some time since, at St. Albans in that county. Such King’s Writ, or Pretended Commission of Array, the said High Sheriff had, with a great Posse Comitatus round him, been executing one Market-day at St. Albans (date irrecoverably lost),—when Cromwell’s Dragoons dashed suddenly in upon him; laid him fast,—not without difficulty: he was first seized by ‘six troopers,’ but rescued by his royalist multitude; then ‘twenty troopers’ again seized him; ‘barricadoed the inn-yard’; conveyed him off to London to give what account of the matter he could. There he is giving account of it,—a very lame and withal an ‘insolent’ one, as seems to the Honourable House; which accordingly sends him to the Tower, where he had to lie for several years. Commissions of Array are not handy to execute in the Eastern Association at present! Here is another instance; general result of this ride into Norfolk,—‘ end of these businesses,’ in fact.