together. Born in 1603, Capell, left an orphan, was brought up by his grandfather, a good owlde English gentleman of a good estate;' a firm Protestant and Protectionist- which characters usually go together still. His reasons against the travellinge of his grandchylde into the parts beyond the sea' are printed by Lady Theresa-we believe for the first time-and may perhaps be pondered with advantage by many of her readers in luminous 1852:

'Imprimis, His callinge is to be a countery gentillman, wherein there is little or no use of foreane experience. 2. Item.-If God visitt him with sicknes he shall not have those helpes abroade that he shall have at home in his owen countery. And there lyethe a greate penalty upon his deathe; for his brother is so younge, as in all probabylyty he is like to be a warde, which will be a greate hindrance unto the family, boathe by the impoveryshinge the estate of the next heyer, and by the ill providing for the younger children, his sisters, both for their educatyons and hopes for their preferments in maryage. 3. Item. His tyme maye be better spent at home than abroade, in regard that he maye study the lawes of the relme, maye be made acquaynted with his estate in his grandfather's lyfetime, whereby he shal be better able to governe it after. Allso, if he will applye himselfe, he maye be a good staye and helpe to his owlde and weak grandfather, whereby many of the name and family, as yet but in meane estate, maye be the better provided for. 4. Item. It is to be feared that thoroughe the wycked prests and Jesuites in those forane partes he maye be perverted to the idolatrous Romane relygion; and if it be aunswered that he is so well grounded in relygyon allready that there is no fear thereof, it maye be replyed agayne that he is very younge, and they subtyle and industrious: and that it is a safer waye by abstayninge from travell to avoyde the meanes, then for a man to thrust himself into the peryll withowt any necessary occasyon.'-vol. i. p. 250.

The owlde gentillman' died in 1632, and his nephew, succeeding to his acres and hospitalities, was naturally chosen county member. He sat for a short time in the Long Parliament, voting as an abater of grievances and a reformer. He was soon created a peer by purchase, a process cheap and common in those days, when the price of a baronetcy was 'come down to 3501' Lord Capell, like Falkland, soon saw the breakers a-head, and joined the King at York. He, says Clarendon,' was one of those high-minded cavaliers who, if the crown had been on a hedge-stake, would have remained to defend it to the death." Henceforward he served Charles with heart and soul, with purse and person; he was appointed of the council of the Prince of Wales, was one of the Royal Commissioners at Uxbridge, and distinguished himself in the disastrous campaign in the West of England. He accompanied the Prince and Clarendon to Jersey, and returned to England to swell the royal forces in the defence

of

of Colchester when besieged by Fairfax. The details have been woven into a continuous narrative by Lady Theresa, and we must content ourselves with few incidents. Some members of a parliamentary committee were prisoners in the town, whereupon the House of Commons seized the young son of Lord Capell; and one Gourdon, a liberal member, moving that Lady Capell, then great with childe, be set in front of the battle,' the father, rather than swerve from his loyalty, replied, 'Murder his son they might, whose blood he would leave it to Heaven to avenge.' History is a succession of parallels; thus at the siege of Tarifa, in 1292, when traitors brought the little child of the Governor Guzman and threatened to kill him if the father would not surrender, the good man threw his dagger from the ramparts, exclaiming, I prefer honour without a disgrace.'

son to a son with

Colchester surrendered after a noble defence, and Fairfax, having made a terrorist example by the execution of two brave and honourable officers, granted quarter to the rest. Lord Capell was confined in the Tower previous to his banishment, which both Houses had intended; but the armed man now stood forth, and the great catastrophe was at hand. Yet no dungeons of the Tower could damp the loyalty of Capell, who concluded an urgent letter to Cromwell with the offer of his life to redeem that of his King; a vain attempt, which only accelerated his own fate. Ordered for immediate trial by the House of Commons, he escaped from the Tower, was betrayed, retaken, and condemned by a mock tribunal. Parliament, then swayed by the eloquence-adorned or unadorned—of a few demagogues, violated every principle of honour and morality, to say nothing of the mud-trampled constitution. Petitions in his favour were presented with no avail. Capell's very merits precluded him from mercy, and the wielder of the sword, Carlyle's magnanimous hero, urged the death, for the good of the Commonwealth, of a man whose great courage, industry, and generosity would ever make a thorn in their sides.' Thus was Capell 'struck down' by one who, of all others, as a soldier, should (says Lady Theresa) have protected when fair quarter had been granted on the field;' and another victim was added to those judicial murders, which, according to Voltaire, the genius of England loves to commit. And well for us has been this habit of legality, when, cruel as the letter of the law may have been, or abominable its perversion, still a symbol of justice dealt the blow, checked popular fury, and spared us the burning national infamy of massacres, dragonnades, noyades, fusillades, and other wholesale ferocities for which we have no name. Our most sinful judicial murders

VOL. XCI. NO. CLXXXI.

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murders were at least committed in open day and before God and man.

We must beg the laziest of readers not to skim Lady Theresa's tenth chapter, where the last hours of this true nobleman are recounted. Bishop Morley, who attended him, has left a touching detail. The lion-hearted Capell bade farewell to his wife and family with tender manliness: 'God will be to thee a better husband, and a better father to our children.' He told his weeping friends to be of good cheer: 'there will be more to celebrate my memory with praise than sadness.' He met death with the fortitude of a soldier and a Christian. His head-better than a Golgotha of Roundheads-was severed at one blow. His heart was, by his express desire, enclosed in a silver box, to be buried at his Royal master's feet. At the Restoration it was placed in the hands of Charles II.—removed to the Capell evidence-room in the country-and forgotten! It was accidentally found in 1703 by the family chaplain, who, fearful that the sexton might covet the silver if the box were buried, had it sold, and an iron one substituted, in which all that remains of some of the noblest dust on earth now rests for ever.

6

We must pass once more to chivalrous, romantic Spain. The heart of the royal Bruce, which the good Lord James Douglas' was enjoined to carry to the Holy Land, was also inclosed by him in a silver box, which he wore round his neck, until at Teba, in 1328, on being deserted in the critical moment by his Spanish allies, the Scottish Knight threw the glorious relic into the fiercest fray, exclaiming

'Pass first in fight, as thou wast wont to do

Douglas will follow thee or die!'

And he kept his word. This identical box was preserved within a few years at Jaen, having escaped chaplains, sextons, and melting-pots, Moorish and Christian. We understand that, since the recent reforms, it has gone the way of most Peninsular plate. Good Lord James's own heart, also in a silver box, is still preserved in the striking Cemetery of his grand race at Douglas.

It has been a sincere pleasure to us to agree so often with our fair Whig, who must pardon us if we can find no analogy between the cases of Lord Capell and Marshal Ney-beyond the simple fact that both were tried and executed-the one in defiance of granted quarter, the other in strict accordance with clearly reserved rights; a truth, and a whole truth, that stands clearly and also most gracefully explained in the Duke's memorandum of November 19, 1815. Lord Capell, bred and born an English gentleman, was quite as physically brave as le brave des braves, and infinitely more morally courageous than that weak

minded,

minded, impulsive soldier. Ready to ransom his king's life at the cost of his own, Capell never would have betrayed his Charles with Judas kiss; never would have sworn to bring Cromwell in an iron cage, and forthwith joined him, adding gratuitous perjury to treason. It suited, indeed, the anti-English politics hatched and fostered in a suburban villa-and how virulent what Lord Dudley called 'the Esoteric Doctrine of ultra-Whiggism,' a recent parricidal publication has revealed-to elevate into hero-worship our bitterest enemies, and to hamper and depreciate our best defenders. The truth is,' wrote Dudley-(22nd June, 1816)'the Whig Opposition had staked everything upon Napoleon's success, and are grieved at his failure.' 'The Whigs,' said Wilberforce, are glad to see just so much mischief befall their country as would bring themselves into office.' 'Lord Holland,' wrote the Duke in the very last page of his immortal Despatches, 'accuses me, in pretty plain terms, of allowing that accomplished soldier [Ney] to be judicially murdered, because I could not beat him in the field. If the letter had not been shown to me confidentially, I would have prosecuted his lordship for a libel.The cannon that announced the Duke's victories over Ney at Busaco, Santarem, and Fuentes de Oñoro, found no echo in the dull ear of ex-official Brookes's or Kensington, where even the sham of loyalty was only called forth by the sunshine of place.

His

Unlike Lord Falkland, the soul of the lion-hearted' Capell was enshrined in a mortal coil worthy of its greatness. frame was powerful and nobly formed-his features stamped with all the graces of one of nature's gentlemen: in body and mind he was every inch a man. His portrait at the Grove, attributed to Vandyke, scarcely does him justice; but better representations exist in the collections of Lord Essex and Mr. Ford.

Lady Theresa concludes the series of her interior Tribune with William Seymour, Marquis of Hertford. To him perhaps a space greater than strictly his due has been allotted; we cannot, however, press hardly on the fair author's partiality for what may almost be called a new subject. Born in 1588, he was grandson of that Earl of Hertford who, during nine years' imprisonment in the Tower, had tasted the proud Tudor-vengeance of Elizabeth, angered at his stolen marriage with her cousin, the Lady Katherine Grey. Undeterred by this example, William, in 1610, married that celebrated unfortunate, the Lady Arabella Stuart, cousin to James I., without his Majesty's privity and consent. We must refer our readers to Lady Theresa's full and true particulars of this tragic romance of real life. The poor lady died in the Tower in 1615-her reason having given way under a four

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years.

years' captivity and the ill-usage of her cruel and cowardly king and kinsman. Her husband, who had escaped to Belgium, now returned, married the sister of Lord Essex, and in 1621 succeeded, in his thirty-third year, to the family estates. As neither his own nor his ancestors' antecedents inclined him to seek the Court, he lived apart in literary ease until 1640, when, in his fiftieth year, he was one of the first to petition Charles to summon a parliament. He was also one of the first, like Falkland and Capell, to cling to the Crown when the real views of the reformers began to be manifest. He had disapproved of the proceedings against Strafford, ere mistrust of the King's wordwho in that death-warrant signed his own-and the disappointment of the Bedfords, Pyms, Hampdens, and other patriots, in getting place and office, turned possible friends into foes, and fanned reform into revolution.

Hertford, in 1641, was made a member of the Privy Council, which then, as Lady Theresa has well shown, formed a sort of legislative cabinet, and his appointment was one of the first conciliatory concessions made to the growing supremacy of parlia

ment.

He was soon named Governor to the Prince of Wales, to the satisfaction of every one except himself. He shrank from the duties a long indulgence had engrafted a poco-curante laziness, not unusual, indeed, but prejudicial to premiers and preceptors. The heir-apparent was now a sort of hostage; and the Parliament, who feared his conversion to Popery and removal from England, by taking steps to separate him from his parents, offered an insult to the King and father, which was met by the unconstitutional coup d'état, the attempt to arrest the five members. Hertford joined Charles at York, and was among the first to face the rebels in the field in the West, until, overlooking the new slights put on himself by the fatal nepotism of the Crown, he exchanged the sword for the household wand, and never again quitted his master in life, until his master quitted him by flying from Oxford to be sold for thirty pieces' by the Scots. No sooner was Charles condemned to die than Lord Hertford, like Lord Capell, tendered his life in ransom; and next, the regicidal tragedy complete, prayed to perform the last duty to his master, and wait upon him to the grave.' And here let us remark that the very French theatrical incident told by Guizot, and painted by De la Roche, of Cromwell's lifting up the coffin-lid of his murdered sovereign, is a pure invention of the enemy.' The royal martyr, as republican Marvell allows,

'Nothing common did nor mean
Upon that solemn scene'-

nor were any French meannesses thought of by even his murderers.