“Sport enough there was for both the garrisons of Raglan and Hereford. Nevertheless, it stood the Marquess upon to be sollicitous in the business, being sore prest between two strong passions, love and pitty. Me he sends to solicit the businesse, with instructions; whose telling me never so often, ‘that it was no laughing matter,’ could not make me forbear laughing.
“But having taken my leave, his Lordship called me back again, and with a loud and angry voice said to me, ‘Tell the Generall, that if he hang my Lieutenant, I’ll hang the centry for not giving fire upon him when he was bid.’ Whereupon I said unto his Lordship, ‘What doth he care how many you hang?’ ‘God bless us all,’ said the Marquess; ‘if he neither cares who he hangs of the King’s party, nor who other folkes hang; for aught I know he cares not an’ we were all hanged.’
“So taking my second leave of the Marquess, and then my humble leave of the Lady Elizabeth, who fearing nothing more but that I would prove too good a sollicitor for her good, I went to Hereford, and made some sport there; and so brought home the Lieutenant to his wife and daughter, who ever after was called ‘My Lady Marquess.’”
We now proceed to that part of our subject, in which the desperate fortunes of the Monarch are connected with his last visit to Raglan.
After the battle of Naseby, nothing prospered with the King. His army, it was suspected, had not displayed on that day their former valour. Though not disaffected, they were dispirited; the mass of the infantry threw down their arms and cried for quarter; and with Cromwell’s horse thundering in his rear, the King escaped to Leicester, and thence through Bewdley, in Worcestershire, to Hereford. Only five days before this ruinous defeat he had written in a letter to the Queen, that since the rebellion began, “his affairs were never in so fair and hopeful a way.” On the sixth he was a fugitive. But he had still hopes--strange as it must appear--of getting together an army in South Wales.[253] At Hereford, Prince Rupert took leave of the King, and hastened to Bristol, that he might put it into a condition to resist the victorious army that was speedily to make its appearance before it; and thence, says Lord Clarendon, “his Majesty went to Abergavenny to meet the Commissioners. As they were for the most part persons of the best quality and the largest fortunes of these counties, so they had manifested great loyalty and affection from the beginning of the war, by sending many good regiments to the army; and with their sons and brothers and nearest kindred--many of whom had lost their lives bravely in the field. They now made as large professions as ever, and seemed to believe that they should be able in a very short time to raise a good army of foot, with which the King might again look upon the enemy, and accordingly agreed what numbers should be levied upon each of the counties.” From hence, says the historian, “his Majesty went for the last time to <g>Raglan Castle</g>, the noble house of the Marquess of Worcester, which was well fortified and garrisoned by him who remained then in it.” There the King “resolved to stay till he saw the effect of the Commissioners’ mighty promises. But in a short time he found that, either by the continued successes of the Parliament armies, the particular information whereof was every day brought to them by intelligence from their friends, or the triumphs of their enemies in Monmouth or Gloucester, there was little probability of their raising an army in those parts, where all men grew less affected, or more frighted: which produced one and the same effect.”