Returning to the subject of Raglan, we must not overlook the following predictions, as calculated to excite no little attention in times when witchcraft, sorcery, and apparitions, were admitted as articles of popular belief.
<g>Prophecies.</g>--Of the prophetic warnings which, from time to time, and particularly during the siege, had taken possession of the vulgar mind regarding the fall of Raglan and its hereditary lords, the following passage is sufficiently characteristic:--One evening, during the progress of the siege, one of his officers was relating to the Marquess how strangely the narrator, Dr. Bayly, had escaped a shot by means of the iron bar of a window that looked out upon the leaguer. Standing, for example, in a window of the castle, there came a musket bullet and hit full against the edge of an iron bar of a chamber window, so that it parted the bullet in halves, the bar expatiating itself by degrees towards the middle; “one half of the bullet,” said he, “flew by me on the one side, and the other half on the other side; so that, by God’s providence, I had no hurt.”
“The Marquess hearing this, asked me in what chamber it was. I told him. His Lordship then said, as I remember, ‘The window was cross-barred; and you will never believe me,’ said he emphatically, ‘how safe it is to stand before the <g>Cross</g>, when you face your enemy!’”
But returning to the subject of predictions:--“Never,” says the family historian, “never was there a noble house so pulled down by _prophecies_--ushered into its ruin by predictions, and so laid hold upon by signes and tokens! I shall tell you no more,” he continues, “but what I have both read and seen long before the fall of that proud fabric, which had the honour to fall the last of any that stood upon the tearmes of honour. Now there was one old book of prophecies that was presented to the Marquess, because it so much concerned <g>Raglan</g> Castle, wherein there were these predictions: namely, That there should come an Earl that should first build a _white_ gate before the castle-house, and after that should begin to build a _red_ one; and before that red one should be finished, there should be wars over all the land.”