Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/394

 Edgehill Fight; but it was one of those that ran away; whereupon the unhappy Colonel took refuge ‘in a sawpit,‘—says Royalism confidently, crowing over it without end. quarrel between him and Sir Henry Mildmay, Member for Malden, about Sir Henry’s saying, ‘He Wharton had made his peace at Oxford’ in November 1643, is noted in the Commons Journals, iii. 300. It was to him, about the time of this Cromwell Letter, that one Osborne, a distracted King’s flunky, had written, accusing Major Rolf, a soldier under Hammond, of attempting to poison Charles in the Isle of Wight. —This Philip’s patrimonial estate, Wharton, still a Manor-house of somebody, lies among the Hills on the southwest side of Westmoreland; near the sources of the Eden, the Swale rising on the other watershed not far off. He seems, however, to have dwelt at Upper Winchington, Bucks, ‘a seat near Great Wycombe.‘ He lived to be a Privy Councillor to William of Orange. He died in 1696. Take this other anecdote, once a very famous one:

‘James Stewart of Blantyre, in Scotland, son of a Treasurer Stewart, and himself a great favourite of King James, was a gallant youth; came up to London with great hopes: but a discord falling out between him and the young Lord Wharton, they went out to single combat each against the other; and at the first thrust each of them killed the other, and they fell dead in one another’s arms on the place’. The ‘place’ was Islington Fields; the date 8th November 1609. The tragedy gave rise to much ballad-singing and other rumour. Our Philip is that slain Wharton’s Nephew.

This Letter has been preserved by Thurloe; four blank spaces ornamented with due asterisks occur in it,—Editor Birch does not inform us whether from tearing-off the Seal, or