[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL FROM STOWE CHURCH.]
Lord Brooke was a fanatic, and ever fierce against cathedrals: he had, according to the diary of Archbishop Laud, two years before, as he was passing in a boat upon the Thames, said he hoped to see St. Paul's with not one stone left upon another. It was in this spirit that he set about the siege of the cathedral, and of his fate there are many accounts. Perhaps the following, taken from Dugdale's "View of the Late Troubles in England," is as good as any:--"This lord (Lord Brooke) being strangely tainted with fanatic principles, by the influence of one of his near relations, and some schismatical preachers (though in his own nature a very civil and well-humoured man), became thereby so great a zealot against the established discipline of the Church, that no less than the utter extirpation of Episcopacy, and abolishing all decent order in the service of God, would satisfy him; to which end he became leader of all the power he could raise for the destruction of the cathedral of that diocese of Coventry and Litchfield. In order whereunto, when he had marched within half a mile of Litchfield, he drew up his army, and then devoutly prayed a blessing upon his intended works; withal earnestly desiring that God would, by some special token, manifest upon them His approbation of that their design: which being done, he went on and planted his great guns against the south-east gate of the close, himself standing in a window of a little house near thereto, to direct the gunners in their supposed battery; but it so happened that, there being two persons placed in the battlement of the chiefest steeple to make shot with long fouling guns at the cannoniers, upon a sudden accident, which caused the soldiers to give a shout, this lord, coming to the door (completely harnessed with plate armour _cap-à-pie_) was suddenly shot into one of his eyes; but the strength of the bullet, so much abated by the glance thereof on a piece of timber which supported a pentiss over the door, that it only lodged in his brains, whereupon he suddenly fell down dead; nor is it less notable that this accident fell out on the second day of March, which is the festival of that sometime famous Bishop S. Chad, to whose memory Offa, King of the Mercians, first erected this stately church and devoutly dedicated it."