THE MARQUIS OF WORCESTER AN EXILE; RESIDES IN FRANCE.

The Earl of Glamorgan, succeeding to his father’s title and honours in December, 1646, while he was yet in Ireland, very soon after, as we have seen, went to France, a voluntary exile. His countrymen had heaped on him (in common with the entire Roman Catholic adherents to the royal cause) all the acrimonious abuse which political and religious intolerance is always too ready to disseminate, with a zealous ardour which defies discrimination. His fate, it is true, was the general fate of hundreds of noble families, condemned in like manner to suffer for their loyalty. While we are prone to praise what is gained by a rebellion, we are apt to overlook whether the civil war entered upon for effecting it, might not have been avoided; and while lauding times which bring to light some great military and naval spirits or still greater statesmen, we overlook entirely the possibility of altogether destroying the mental energies of men of brighter intellects, doomed to fall in the flower of their age on the field of battle. The blessings of good government all readily admit, but sad indeed is it, when wholesome changes in a state have to be effected through convulsions that paralyse a nation’s advance in civilization.

It is clear, on a retrospect, that much has been delayed, much missed, and more possibly lost that otherwise might have arisen from energies sacrificed, alas! to the sword, and fortunes turned into other and wasteful channels. In this nineteenth century we can calmly look with some wonder and astonishment on the indifference of the seventeenth, in failing to realize at least some of the Marquis of Worcester’s remarkable Inventions, of which we shall shortly have to treat more at large.

On the 18th of September, 1646, the House of Commons “Ordered, That the Lady Herbert, wife of the Lord Herbert of Raglan, shall have Mr. Speaker’s pass to go into France, only according to the pass given her by Sir Thomas Fairfax.”

Mr. Carte,[24] in his life of the Duke of Ormond, incidentally alludes to the Marquis of Worcester, as being at Paris a few months before March, 1648; he says:—

“In 1648, the Duke of Ormond considered the Parliament was grown jealous of him, and wanted a pretext to seize his person. He had notice likewise given him, that a warrant was actually issued out for that purpose, though in breach of the articles.[A] Upon this advertisement, he quitted Acton—ten miles from Bristol, where he was then residing,—and crossing the country to Hastings in Sussex, he took shipping for France, and landed happily at Dieppe in Normandy. From thence he went in the beginning of March [1648] to Paris, there to wait upon the Queen and Prince, and assist with his advice in the present conjuncture of affairs, when matters of the greatest consequence, the most intricate nature, and the most embroiled circumstances, were under their consideration, and resolutions to be taken therein for his Majesty’s service:”—he having just previously escaped from the Isle of Wight.

“The Earl of Glamorgan[B] had come to Paris a few months before him, recommended by the Nuncio Rinuccini to Cardinal Mazarine, and to the Pope’s Nuncio in that place, on account of his attachment to the Holy See, though unfortunate in all his undertakings, and not endued with that prudence which was necessary to the post he desired. His business there was to solicit the Queen to make him Governor of Ireland, but he met with so ill a reception at Court, that he soon despaired of succeeding. His Lady, to whom the Marquis of Ormond had once made his addresses, (before he had hopes of marrying his cousin, and uniting the estate of his family) resented the neglect shewed of her Lord, and imputed it, as well as his imprisonment at Dublin, to the influence and power of the Marquis. She carried her resentment so far, that when he waited upon her after his arrival at Paris, and offered to salute her, she turned away her face with great disdain. The Marquis thereupon made her a reverence, and with great presence of mind, said, ‘Really, Madam, this would have troubled me eighteen years ago;’[C] and then went to the next, the company present being of his acquaintance, and much pleased with what he had said.”

We may here pause to remark that, from the close of the year 1640, when the Long Parliament commenced its memorable sittings, the prominent events affecting the history of art and science in England are comparatively meagre, as might be expected, while the public mind was being perpetually distracted and disturbed not by intestine war alone, but also by plague and pestilence in fearful forms.

Of remarkable events of the period we especially notice the fortifying of London in 1643, and the delivering up of Charles the First to the Parliament by the Scots in January 1647, followed by his execution on the 30th of January 1649, the establishment of the Commonwealth on the 6th of February following, and of the Protectorate under Cromwell in 1654.

Under the new regime, public taste either was greatly changed, or was to be compulsorily directed into new channels, for, in 1647, theatrical performances were prohibited, actors were declared rogues and vagabonds, and all places usually employed for theatrical performances were ordered to be demolished. Such was the narrow-minded and furious puritanical zeal of the then governing power.

Charles the Second held his Court at Paris, where alone the Marquis of Worcester associated with the libertine monarch; at least no circumstance occurs to show that he ever removed with the Court in its several changes to Cologne, Bruges, Brussels, and other continental towns.

Sir Richard Browne, ambassador at Paris, in his correspondence with John Evelyn, when writing from Paris, the 3rd of August, 1648, incidentally observes in a postscript:—“Our Court wants money, and lives very quietly at St. Germains: where no peer appears but my Lord Jermin. The Marquis of Worcester, the Lords Digby and Hatton, though yet in France, yet live for the most part in Paris.”[37]

The Marquis had been little more than a year in France, when he seems to have written to the exiled King, then at Jersey, for some confirmation of his titles; to which request he received the following courtly compliments and vain empty promises:—[D]

“My Lord Worcester,

I am truly sensible of your great merit and sufferings in the service of the King my father, and I shall never be wanting to reward and encourage as well that kindness to his person as that zeal to his service which you have expressed in all your actions, and which I doubt not but you will still continue to me. I fear that in this conjuncture of time it will not be seasonable for me to grant, nor for you to receive the addition of honour you desire; neither can I at this time send the order you mention concerning the Garter, but be confident that I will in due time give you such satisfaction in these particulars and in all other things that you can reasonably expect from me, as shall let you see with how much truth and kindness I am

“Your affectionate friend,

“Charles R.

“I do not send the letter to Monsieur Monbrun till I understand more particularly from you what the intention of it is, which I do not yet well understand.

“Jersey, 21/31 of Octob. 1649.
“For the Marquis of Worcester.”

The Marquis was probably for four or five years a refugee in France, intimately associated with the exiled Court; “Paris and indeed all France (says Evelyn[37]), being full of loyal fugitives,” in 1650. Many vague surmises have originated with different writers to account for the manner in which he passed his time abroad, all alike fallacious, being inconsistent with facts. It is certain that his finances were equally straitened with those, not only of the nobility around him, but likewise of the King himself. He could have had but few, if any, opportunities for leisurely engaging in his usual studies, much less for any practical pursuits in experimental natural philosophy. That he was not wholly idle, however, we may well conceive; yet it is more consistent to suppose that it was a period in his life which he would most likely employ to investigate the works of those writers whose labours he most affected, rather than engage himself in productions which might only add to the danger as well as the difficulties of his uncertain journeyings, surrounded as the Court was with political spies.

During the Marquis’s absence on the continent, we proceed to trace the progress of events at home.