After the battle of Worcester, Sir Thomas Urquhart and some of the other Scottish gentlemen who had been taken prisoners there were confined in the Tower of London. He seems to have speedily gained the favour of his captors, and to have been treated with remarkable leniency. Indeed, he speaks in terms of affectionate respect of various officers of the Parliamentary army from whom he had received kindness, and acknowledges courtesies extended towards him by the Lord General himself. Thus he places on record his indebtedness to a "most generous gentleman, Captain Gladmon," for speaking in his favour to the Protector. And of another, whom he calls the Marshal-General, in whose charge he had been placed, he has set down the praise in the following elaborate sentence:--"The kindly usage of the Marshal-General, Captain Alsop, whilst I was in his custody, I am bound in duty so to acknowledge, that I may without dissimulation avouch, for courtesies conferred on such as were within the verge of his authority, and fidelity to those by whom he was intrusted with their tuition [oversight of them] in that restraint, that never any could by his faithfulness to the one and loving carriage to the other bespeak himself more a gentleman, nor in the discharge of that military place acquit himself with a more universally-deserved applause and commendation."[116]
The severity of his imprisonment was soon abated; and he was removed from the Tower to Windsor Castle,[117] and not long after, by the orders of Cromwell, was paroled _de die in diem_.[118] The comparative liberty he now enjoyed enabled him to repair the loss of his manuscripts after the battle of Worcester, and he set himself to make the best of the fragments he had recovered, and to prepare them for publication, as well as to compose new material. A paragraph in the Epilogue of one of his works, in which he describes his warm appreciation of the measure of freedom he now enjoyed, is worth quoting. "That I, whilst a prisoner," he says, "was able to digest and write this Treatise, is an effect meerly proceeding from the courtesie of my Lord General Cromwel, by whose recommendation to the Councel of State my parole being taken for my true imprisonment, I was by their favour enlarged to the extent of the lines of London's communication; for had I continued as before, coopt up within walls, or yet been attended still by a guard, as for a while I was, should the house of my confinement have never been so pleasant, or my keepers a very paragon of discretion, and that the conversation of the best wits in the world, with affluence of all manner of books, should have been allowed me for the diversion of my minde, yet such all antipathie I have to any kinde of restraint wherein myself is not entrusted, that notwithstanding these advantages, which to some spirits would make a jayl seem more delicious then [than] freedom without them, it could not in that eclipse of liberty lie in my power to frame myself to the couching of one sillable, or contriving of a fancie worthy the labour of putting pen to paper, no more then [than] a nightingale can warble it in a cage, or linet in a dungeon."[119]