Cromwell with his accustomed faith and vigour set himself to construct such an army. Events proved the sagacity of Cromwell. The ranks of Cromwell's pikemen, composed of persons superior in station and education to the multitude, were as Cromwell himself said 'never beaten.' The Queen, Henrietta Maria, the high-spirited daughter of the warlike Henry IV of France, supplied her husband with artillery and ammunition, with which the King was ill-provided, and which she purchased in Holland by funds procured by the sale of her own and the Crown jewels. The cause of the King was on the whole gaining ground. Bristol, the second city in the kingdom, had been wrested from the Parliament. Lord Macaulay is of opinion that if in August, 1643, Charles instead of sitting down to besiege Gloucester had advanced upon London, he might have marched in triumph on Whitehall. To have executed this feat, it would have been necessary for the King to have combined operations with the Marquis of Newcastle's powerful army. Hallam doubts

art.

whether it would have been prudent in Newcastle to have left behind him the strong garrison of Hull under Fairfax, and an unbroken though inferior force, commanded by Lord Willoughby and Cromwell, in Lincolnshire. These are questions which must be referred to proficients in the military If Charles's generals had been men of greater capacity, as Dr. Arnold has observed, the result of the Civil War might have been very different. The moment when Charles might have secured victory passed away. The Parliament entered into alliance with the Scots. who in the beginning of 1644 sent an army to its aid. Charles meanwhile made a truce with the insurgent Roman Catholics in Ireland, in order that he might bring over troops from thence. In the south, where Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, the son of Queen Elizabeth's favourite, held the command, the Parliamentary forces underwent a series of disasters. The troops in the eastern counties, raised and trained under Cromwell's influence, were soon able to push further north, joining with the Yorkshire leaders, Lord Fairfax and his son, Sir Thomas, and the Scots. In the battle fought on the Moor of Long Marston, about four miles from York, the bloodiest battle in the whole war, which lasted from 7 to 10 o'clock on

the evening of Tuesday, July 2, 1644, the Royalists were utterly routed. Cromwell wrote in triumph that his men had worsted Prince Rupert's renowned horse: 'God made them as stubble to our swords.' That victory compensated the Parliament generals for all that had been lost elsewhere and placed the north of England in their power. In the southwest, with Donnington Castle at Newbury and Basing House at Basingstoke, the Royalists were able to obstruct the intercourse between London and the western parts till the storming of Basing House by Cromwell in October, 1645. Such was the general condition of affairs when Dillington wrote this letter to Oglander in London. In the Isle of Wight the inhabitants were, as in the rest of England, divided into two hostile camps; the Royal cause was generally popular with the gentry and their tenants, while the burghers of Newport were attached to the Puritans. Jerome Weston, Earl of Portland, had in 1634 succeeded his father, Richard, the first Earl of Portland, as Captain and Governor of the Island, till he was displaced by Parliament in 1642. Lord Clarendon says in his history of this man, who was a type of the baser sort of Cavaliers, that the Parliament threatened the Earl of Portland, who with extraordinary vivacity crossed their expectations, that they would remove him from his charge and government of the Isle of Wight [which last they did de facto by committing him to prison. without assigning a cause], and to that purpose objected to all the acts of good fellowship, all the waste of powder, and all the waste of wine in drinking of healths, and other acts of jollity which ever he had been at in his government, from the first hour of entering upon it.' Another letter (see p. 138) gives an account taken from the Oglander MSS. of the Sunday frolics of this wild rollicking governor, with his company of dissolute bravoes and boon companions, which must have made him an object of aversion to the quiet wellconducted citizens of Newport, though he was able to get up a petition from some of the inhabitants of the Isle of Wight in his favour.

It was the good fortune of this roystering cavalier earl to marry Frances Stuart, daugher of Esmé, third Duke of Lennox, ' a young beautiful lady,' as Clarendon says, 'nearly related to

his Majesty, and to the Crown of Scotland.' On her husband's imprisonment the Countess of Portland took refuge with her five children, accompanied by her husband's brother and sister, in Carisbrooke Castle, which was under the charge of Colonel Brett, to whom the King had by his commission given the custody of that fortress. The Countess, depending on the affection expressed by the inhabitants of the Isle of Wight for her husband in their petition to Parliament, signed August 8, 1642, thought herself secure from molestation. She was mistaken, for Moses Read, the Mayor of Newport, represented to the Parliament that the town could not be deemed safe with the Countess hoping to preserve Carisbrooke Castle for the King. The Parliament in consequence of Read's representation directed the captains of the ships in the river to assist him in any measures he should think necessary for the protection of the Island. Read accordingly marched the Newport Militia, with four hundred naval auxiliaries, against the Castle, where Brett had not above twenty men. Royalists were in fear of the populace who had been stirred up by the harangues of a certain Mr. Harby, the curate of Newport, a man under peculiar obligations to the Earl of Portland, who told the besiegers that they were fighting the battle of the Lord,' as the Countess was a Papist.

The

The Castle had not at that time three days' provision for the slender garrison. Yet,' as Oglander says in his Memoirs, quoted by Worsley in his History of the Isle of Wight, p. 116, this lady, with the magnanimity of a Roman matron, went to the platform with a match in her hand, and vowing she would fire the first cannon herself, and defend the Castle to the utmost extremity, unless honourable terms were granted. After some negotiations, the articles of capitulation were agreed on and the Castle surrendered. These were that Colonel Brett, the gentlemen with him, and their servants, who composed the garrison, should be allowed the freedom of the Island, but were restricted from going to Portsmouth then held for the King by Goring. The Countess was to enjoy her lodgings in the Castle until the contrary should be ordered by the Parliament. An order arrived soon after prescribing her removal from the Island within two days after notice given her, and she was then indebted to the humanity of

the seamen for the vessel which conveyed her and her family.'

This heroine of Carisbrooke Castle deserves a place in history by the side of the high-spirited and far-famed Countess of Derby, the Royal mistress of the Isle of Man, so well known from Sir Walter Scott's description of her in Peveril of the Peak, who defended Lathom House against the Parliamentary forces from February till May, 1644, when it was relieved by Prince Rupert. Neither Oglander nor Worsley gives the date of this attack made by Moses Read on Carisbrooke Castle. It appears that a Moses Read was Mayor of Newport in the years 1641, 1647, 1656, and 1661. The defence of the Castle by the Countess must have been later than 1641 and before 1647. Perhaps Oglander in calling Moses Read Mayor of Newport may only have meant that at some time or another he held the Mayoralty of that town.

Of the five children who were shut up with their mother in the Castle, the only son, Charles, who became after his father's death in 1662 the third Earl of Portland, was killed in the great naval engagement of Solebay off Lowestoft between the English fleet, commanded by the Duke of York (assisted by Prince Rupert and the Earl of Sandwich), and that of the Dutch, under Admiral Opdam, when so many of the young courtiers who were serving as volunteers lost their lives. The four daughters all entered into religious orders of Nuns in the Church of Rome, and the title became extinct.

Lord Clarendon has given a finished sketch of the first Earl of Portland in the gallery of statesmen, whom he brings before us in the commencement of his history, and has with his accustomed literary skill described the upshot of all the intrigues and ambition of the keen old politician, Richard Weston, Lord Treasurer of England, who, enriched by the King's bounties and his own accessions of wealth, left behind a family which was in a short time worn out and yet outlived the fortune he left behind him.'

September 3, 1887.

A CONTESTED ELECTION AT NEWPORT, I. W., A. D. 1645.

IN the calendar of the MSS. of the House of Lords, for 1645, will be found the following entries :

'Nov. 24th. Letter from the freeholders of Newport, Isle of Wight, to the Speaker of the House of Commons. Complain of the conduct of Mr. Stephens, one of the candidates at the late election for the borough, who made new burgesses to strengthen his party against the day of election, and on the day assembled a tumultuous rabble of the scum of the town, in order to awe the freeholders, and in the open hall at the time of the election, he being recorder of the town, peremptorily ordered the sergeants to lay a gentleman of known integrity and a freeholder by the heels. The writers request that the whole business of the election may be referred to a Committee for examination.'

This election is the more interesting because of its taking place in order to fill up the seat vacated by Lucius Carey, Viscount Falkland. The active Parliamentary career of the excellent Falkland belongs entirely to the representation of Newport. He was one of the leaders of the party to which M. Guizot, in his Lectures upon European Civilization, gives the title of the party of Legal Reform, as opposed to the other two parties of Political Revolution and Social Revolution. His peerage, being Scotch, did not entitle him to sit in the House of Lords. In 1640 he was elected member for Newport, I. W., in Charles I's fourth and short Parliament, which the King called after eleven years' intermission of Parliamentary government. Falkland was again elected for the same borough in the famous Long Parliament, which met on November 3 in the same year. When in 1642 Falkland left the popular party to attach himself to the cause of the King, he was 'disabled'—that is, declared incapable of sitting henceforth; and in 1643 this 'passionate promoter of all endeavours of peace betwixt the King and Parliament' insisted on making one of the first rank in Lord Byron's