[Illustration: _The Spires of Lichfield._]
One of the interesting features of Lichfield is an inscription that vividly recalls the ancient strife of Roundhead and Cavalier, two centuries and a half ago. This is found upon a stone scutcheon, set in the wall over the door of the house that is No. 24 Dam street, and these are its words: "March 2d, 1643, Lord Brooke, a General of the Parliament Forces preparing to Besiege the Close of Lichfield, then garrisoned For King Charles the First, Received his deathwound on the spot Beneath this Inscription, By a shot in the forehead from Mr. Dyott, a gentleman who had placed himself on the Battlements of the great steeple, to annoy the Besiegers." One of them he must have "annoyed" seriously. It was "a long shot, Sir Lucius," for, standing on the place of that catastrophe and looking up to "the battlements of the great steeple," it seemed to have covered a distance of nearly four hundred feet. Other relics of those Roundhead wars were shown in the cathedral, in an ancient room now used for the bishop's consistory court,--these being two cannon-balls (fourteen-pounders), and the ragged and dusty fragments of a shell, that were dug out of the ground near the church a few years ago. Many of these practical tokens of Puritan zeal have been discovered. Lichfield cathedral close, in the time of Bishop Walter de Langton, who died in 1321, was surrounded with a wall and fosse, and thereafter, whenever the wars came, it was used as a fortification. In the Stuart times it was often besieged. Sir John Gell succeeded Lord Brooke, when the latter had been shot by Mr. Dyott,--who is said to have been "deaf and dumb," but who certainly was not blind. The close was surrendered on March 5, 1643, and thereupon the Parliamentary victors, according to their ruthless and brutal custom, straightway ravaged the church, tearing the brasses from the tombs, breaking the effigies, and utterly despoiling beauty which it had taken generations of pious zeal and loving devotion to create. The great spire was battered down by those vandals, and in falling it wrecked the chapter-house. The noble church, indeed, was made a ruin, and so it remained till 1661, when its munificent benefactor, Bishop Hackett, began its restoration, now happily almost complete. Prince Rupert captured Lichfield close, for the king, in April, 1643, and General Lothian recovered it for the Parliament, in the summer of 1646, after which time it was completely dismantled. Charles the First came to this place after the fatal battle of Naseby, and sad enough that picturesque, vacillating, shortsighted, beatific aristocrat must have been, gazing over the green fields of Lichfield, to know,--as surely even he must then have known,--that his cause was doomed, if not entirely lost.