Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 07.djvu/50

28 ' After a solemn seeking of God by prayer,' they agree that it shall be by lot: tickets are put into a hat, a child draws them: the regiments, fourteen of foot and fourteen of horse, are decided on in this manner. 'The officers on whom the lot fell, in all the twenty-eight regiments, expressed much cheerfulness at the decision.' The officers did:—but the common men are by no means all of that humour. The common men, blown upon by Lilburn and his five small Beagles, have notions about England's new Chains, about the Hunting of Foxes from Triploe Heath, and in fact ideas concerning the capability that lies in man and in a free Commonwealth, which are of the most alarming description.

Thursday 26th April. This night, at the Bull in Bishopsgate, there has an alarming mutiny broken out in a troop of Whalley's regiment there. Whalley's men are not allotted for Ireland: but they refuse to quit London, as they are ordered; they want this and that first. they seize their colours from the Cornet, who is lodged at the Bull there:—the General and the Lieutenant -General have to hasten thither; quell them, pack them forth on their march; seizing fifteen of them first, to be tried by Court-Martial. Tried by instant Court-Martial, five of them are found guilty, doomed to die, but pardoned; and one of them, Trooper Lockyer, is doomed and not pardoned. Trooper Lockyer is shot, in Paul's Churchyard, on the morrow. A very brave young man, they say; though but three-and-twenty, 'he has served seven years in these Wars,' ever since the Wars began. 'Religious' too, 'of excellent parts and much beloved';—but with hot notions as to human Freedom, and the rate at which the millenniums are attainable, poor Lockyer! He falls shot in Paul's Churchyard on Friday, amid the tears of men and women. Paul's Cathedral, we remark, is now a Horse-guard; horses stamp in the Canons' stalls there: and Paul's Cross itself, as smacking of Popery where in fact Alablaster once preached flat Popery, is swept altogether away, and its leaden roof melted into bullets, or mixed with tin for culinary pewter. Lockyer's