Sore in mind, sick in body,--for he was never wholly healed of his great wound in the right thigh which he took at Naseby,--he reached home only to hear of his King's terrible end. 'T is perhaps strange to tell that this awful deed of murder and sacrilege put a new heart in that much-buffeted and enduring gentleman, my father. That Martyrdom, I think, went far to atone, in Sir Michael's mind and heart, for certain wrongs and fickle veerings of purpose, proceeding as much from the complexion as the misfortunes of that pious Martyr and unhappy King. No word did he ever utter to asperse the royal memory; yet once in the passage of these more recent transactions of state, which have brought into my life, as into that of the nation at large, so much of betterment, did I hear him murmur (though but as for his own ear alone), "Ay, ay--he served us best, when they served him worst." Be that as it may, from that hour until the happy restoration of King Charles the Second, all that he had--the remnant of health, much of his land, the lives of his sons, the thoughts of his mind, and the prayer of his heart, were given to forward that happy end, which was achieved, as all men know and many remember, in the year 1660--but, for the house of Drayton, at what a cost!
But my father's story I must not make overlong, lest I never come at my own. In brief, then, all his money and much of the Drayton timber, with here and there a fair slice of his land, were gone while the head of the royal Martyr was yet where God had set it. From that fatal day, however, he set himself to the husbanding what God and the rebels had left to him. Here again was disaster in wait for him; for when, by dint of living as a peasant, and by help of his breeding of horses (for which he was already famous in the west, and, in the early years of the war, well known to the farriers of Prince Rupert's Horse), he had begun to lay by the means of one day aiding the cause to which his life was given, he was, through the lust and malice of a certain Puritan neighbor, denounced as a Malignant, and most heavily fined by the despotic rule of the late Lord Protector Cromwell. Through Mr. Nathaniel Royston (of whom more in good time), he was warned of this instant spoliation, and was so enabled privily to convey his store of gold into France, and to lay it in the hands of his exiled sovereign, to be spent, no doubt, in far other fashion than the earning of it. And though he proved to the commissioners sent down upon that proditorious information to be less worth the plucking than had been supposed, yet his acts in the late troubles being known, and somewhat, perhaps, of that sending of money into France leaking out, the blow fell upon him even as his psalm-singing but ungodly neighbor had designed. So, the gold in France, land must be sold. And sold it was, but not as that godly brewer of Yeovil did intend--to wit, into his own hand; for here again Mr. N. Royston did us great service, buying of the land which adjoined his own a small portion at so high a price that the great fine was paid with the loss of a few fields.
