That the untimely death at the age of fifty-eight of that great prince, Charles, Duke of Shrewsbury, my most noble and generous patron, has afflicted me with a sorrow which I may truly call acerbus et ingens, is nothing to the world; which from one in my situation could expect no other, and, on the briefest relation of the benefits I had at his hands, might look for more. Were this all, therefore, or my task confined to such a relation, I should supererogate indeed in making this appearance. But I am informed that my lord Duke's death has revived in certain quarters those rumours to his prejudice which were so industriously put about at the time of his first retirement; and which, refuted as they were at the moment by the express declaration of his Sovereign, and at leisure by his own behaviour, as well as by the support which at two great crises he gave to the Protestant succession, formed always a proof of the malice, as now of the persistence, of his enemies.

Still, such as they are, and though, not these circumstances only, but a thousand others have time after time exposed them, I am instructed that they are again afloat; and find favour in circles where to think ill of public men is held the first test of experience. And this being the case, and my affection for my lord such as is natural, I perceive a clear duty. I do not indeed suppose that anyone can at this time of day effect that which the sense of all good men failed to effect while he lived--I mean the final killing of those rumours; nor is a plain tale likely to persuade those, with whom idle reports, constantly furbished up, of letters seen in France, weigh more than a consistent life. But my lord's case is now, as I take it, removed to the Appeal Court of Posterity; which nevertheless, a lie constantly iterated may mislead. To provide somewhat to correct this, and wherefrom future historians may draw, I who knew him well, and was in his confidence and in a manner in his employment at the time of Sir John Fenwick's case--of which these calumnies were always compact--propose to set down my evidence here; shrinking from no fulness, at times even venturing on prolixity, and always remembering a saying of Lord Somers', that often the most material part of testimony is that on which the witness values himself least. To adventure on this fulness, which in the case of many, and perhaps the bulk of writers, might issue in the surfeit of their readers, I feel myself emboldened by the possession of a brief and concise manner of writing; which, acquired in the first place in the circumstances presently to appear, was later improved by constant practice in the composition of my lord's papers.

And here some will expect me to proceed at once to the events of the year 1696, in which Sir John suffered, or at least 1695. But softly, and a little if you please ab ovo; still the particulars which enabled my lord's enemies to place a sinister interpretation on his conduct in those years had somewhat, and, alas, too much, to do with me. Therefore, before I can clear the matter up from every point of view, I am first to say who I am, and how I came to fall in the way of that great man and gain his approbation; with other preliminary matters, relating to myself, whereof some do not please at this distance, and yet must be set down, if with a wry face.

Of which, I am glad to say, that the worst--with one exception---comes first, or at least early. And with that, to proceed; premising always that, as in all that follows I am no one, and the tale is my lord's, I shall deal very succinctly with my own concerns and chancings, and where I must state them for clearness of narration, will do so currente calamo (as the ancients were wont to say) and so forthwith to those more important matters with which my readers desire to be made acquainted.

Suffice it, then, that I was born near Bishop's Stortford on the borders of Hertfordshire, in that year so truly called the Annus Mirabilis, 1666; my father, a small yeoman, my mother of no better stock, she being the daughter of a poor parson in that neighbourhood. In such a station she was not likely to boast much learning, yet she could read, and having served two years in a great man's still-room, had acquired notions of gentility that went as ill with her station as they were little calculated to increase her contentment. Our house lay not far from the high road between Ware and Bishop's Stortford, which furnished us with frequent opportunities of viewing the King and Court, who were in the habit of passing that way two or three times in the year to Newmarket to see the horse-races. On these occasions we crowded with our neighbours to the side of the road, and gaped on the pageant, which lacked no show of ladies, both masked and unmasked, and gentlemen in all kinds of fripperies, and mettlesome horses that hit the taste of some among us better than either. On these excursions my mother was ever the foremost and the most ready; yet it was not long before I learned to beware of her hand for days after, and expect none but gloomy looks and fretful answers; while my father dared no more spell duty for as much as a week, than refuse the King's taxes.

Nevertheless, and whatever she was as a wife--and it is true she could ding my father's ears, and, for as handsome as she was, there were times when he would have been happier with a plainer woman--I am far from saying that she was a bad mother. Indeed, she was a kind, if fickle, and passionate one, wiser at large and in intention than in practice and in small matters. Yet if for one thing only, and putting aside natural affection--in which I trust I am not deficient--she deserved to be named by me with undying gratitude. For having learned to read, but never to write, beyond, that is, the trifle of her maiden name, she valued scholarship both by that she had, and that she had not; and in the year after I was breeched, prevailed on my father who, for his part, good man, never advanced beyond the Neck Verse, to bind me to the ancient Grammar School at Bishop's Stortford, then kept by a Mr. G----.

I believe that there were some who thought this as much beyond our pretensions, as our small farm fell below the homestead of a man of substance; and for certain, the first lesson I learned at that school was to behave myself lowly and reverently to all my betters, being trounced on arrival by three squires' sons, and afterwards, in due order and gradation, by all who had or affected gentility. To balance this I found that I had the advantage of my master's favour, and that for no greater a thing than the tinge of my father's opinions. For whereas the commonalty in that country, as in all the eastern counties, had been for the Parliament in the late troubles, and still loved a patriot, my father was a King's man; which placed him high in Mr. G----'s estimation, who had been displaced by the Rump and hated all of that side, and not for the loss of his place only, but, and in a far greater degree, for a thing which befell him later, after he had withdrawn to Oxford. For being of St. John's College, and seeing all that rich and loyal foundation at stake, he entered himself in a body of horse which was raised among the younger collegians and servants; and probably if he had been so lucky as to lose an eye or an arm in the field of honour, he would have forgiven Oliver all, and not the King's sufferings only, but his own. But in place of that it was his ill-chance to be one of a troop that, marching at night by the river near Wallingford, took fright at nothing and galloped to Abingdon without drawing rein; for which reason, and because an example was needed, they were disbanded. True, I never heard that the fault on that occasion lay with our master, nor that he was a man of less courage than his neighbours; but he took the matter peculiarly to heart, and never forgave the Roundheads the slur they had unwittingly cast on his honour; on the contrary, and in the event, he regularly celebrated the thirtieth of January by flogging the six boys who stood lowest in each form, and afterwards reading the service of the day over their smarting tails. By some, indeed, it was alleged that the veriest dunces, if of loyal stock, might look to escape on these occasions; but I treat this as a calumny.

That the good man did in truth love and favour loyalty, however, and this without sparing the rod in season, I am myself a bright and excellent example. For though I never attained to the outward flower of scholarship by proceeding to the learned degree of arts at either of the Universities, I gained the root and kernel of the matter at Bishop's Stortford, being able at the age of fourteen to write a fine hand, and read Eutropius, and CÆsar, and teach the horn-book and Christ-Cross to younger boys. These attainments, and the taste for polite learning, which, as these pages will testify, I have never ceased to cultivate, I owe rather to the predilection which he had for me than to my own gifts; which, indeed, though doubtless I was always a boy of parts, I do not remember to have been great at the first. Sub ferula, however, and with encouragement, I so far advanced that he presently began to consider the promoting me to the place of usher, with a cane in commendam; and, doubtless, he would have done it but for a fit that took him at the first news of the Rye House Plot, and the danger his Sacred Majesty had run thereby--which a friend imprudently brought to him when he was merry after dinner--and which caused an illness that at one and the same time carried him off, and deprived me of the best of pedagogues.

After that, and learning that his successor had a son whom he proposed to promote to the place I desired, I returned to the school no more, but began to live at home; at first with pleasure, but after no long interval with growing chagrin and tedium. Our house possessed none of the comforts that are necessary to idleness, and therefore when the east wind drove me indoors from swinging on the gate, or sulking in the stack-yard, I found it neither welcome nor occupation. My younger brother had seized on the place of assistant to my father, and having got thews and experience ambulando, found fresh ground every day for making mock of my uselessness. Did I milk, the cows kicked over the bucket, while I thought of other things; did I plough, my furrows ran crooked; when I thrashed, the flail soon wearied my arms. In the result, therefore, the respect with which my father had at first regarded my learning, wore off, and he grew to hate the sight of me whether I hung over the fire or loafed in the doorway, my sleeves too short for my chapped arms, and my breeches barely to my knees. Though my mother still believed in me, and occasionally, when she was in an ill-humour with my father, made me read to her, her support scarcely balanced the neighbours' sneers. Nor when I chanced to displease her--which, to do her justice, was not often, for I was her favourite--was she above joining in the general cry, and asking me, while she cuffed me, whether I thought the cherries fell into the mouth, and meant to spend all my life with my hands in my pockets.

To make a long story short, at the end of twelve months, whereof every day of the last ten increased my hatred of our home surroundings, the dull strip of common before the door, the duck-pond, the grey horizon, and the twin ash-trees on which I had cut my name so often, I heard through a neighbour that an usher was required in a school at Ware. This was enough for me; while, of my family, who saw me leave with greater relief on their own account than hope on mine, only my mother felt or affected regret. With ten shillings in my pocket, her parting gift, and my scanty library of three volumes packed among my clothes on my back, I plodded the twelve miles to Ware, satisfied the learned Mr. D---- that I had had the small-pox, would sleep three in a bed, and knew more than he did; and the same day was duly engaged to teach in his classical seminary, in return for my board, lodging, washing, and nine guineas a year.

He had trailed a pike in the wars, and was an ignorant, but neither a cruel, nor, save in the pretence of knowledge, a dishonest man; it might be supposed, therefore, that, after the taste of idleness and dependence I had had, I should here find myself tolerably placed, and in the fair way of promotion. But I presently found that I had merely exchanged a desert for a prison, wherein I had not only the shepherding of the boys to do, both by night and day, which in a short time grew inconceivably irksome, so that I had to choose whether I would be tyrant or slave; but also the main weight of teaching, and there no choice at all but to be a drudge. And this without any alleviation from week's end to week's end, either at meals or at any other time! for my employer's wife had high notions, and must keep a separate house, though next door, and with communications; sitting down with us only on Sundays, and then at dinner, when woe betide the boy who gobbled his food or choked over the pudding-balls. Having satisfied herself on my first coming that my father was neither of the Quorum nor of Justice's kin, and, in fact, a mere rustic nobody, she had no more to say to me, but when she was not scolding her husband, addressed herself solely to one of the boys, who by virtue of an uncle who was a Canon, had his seat beside her. Insensibly, her husband, who at first, with an eye to my knowledge and his own deficiencies, had been more civil to me, took the same tone; and not only that, but, finding that I was to be trusted, he came less and less into school, until at last he would only appear for a few minutes in the day, and to carve when we had meat, and to see the lights extinguished at night. This without any added value for me; so that the better I served him--and for a year I managed his school for him--the less he favoured me, and at last thought a nod all the converse he owed me in the day.

Consigned to this solitary life by those above me, it was not likely that I should find compensation in the society of lads to whom I stood in an odious light, and of whom the oldest was no more than fourteen. For what was our life? Such hours as we did not spend in the drudgery of school, or in our beds, we passed in a yard on the dank side of the house, a grassless place, muddy in winter and dusty in summer, overshadowed by one skeleton tree; and wherein, since all violent games and sports were forbidden by the good lady's scruples (who belonged to the fanatical party) as savouring of Popery, we had perforce to occupy ourselves with bickerings and complaints and childish plays. Abutting on the garden of her house, this yard presented on its one open side a near prospect of water-butts, and drying clothes, so that to this day I profess that I hold it in greater horror than any other place or thing at that school.

It is true we walked out in the country at rare intervals; but as three sides of the town were forbidden to us by a great man, whose property lay in that quarter, and who feared for his game, our excursions were always along one road, which afforded neither change nor variety. Moreover, I had a particular reason for liking these excursions as little as possible, which was that they exposed me to frequent meetings with gay young sparks of my own age, whose scornful looks as they rode by, with the contemptuous names they called after me, asking who dressed the boys' hair and the like, I found it difficult to support--even with the aid of those reflections on the dignity of learning and the Latin tongue which I had imbibed from my late master.

Be it remembered (in palliation of that which I shall presently tell) that at this time I was only eighteen, an age at which the passions and ambitions awake, and that this was my life. At a time when youth demands change and excitement and the fringe of ornament, my days and weeks went by in a plain round, as barren of wholesome interests as it was unadorned by any kindly aid or companionship. To rise, to teach, to use the cane, to move always in a dull atmosphere of routine; for diversion to pace the yard I have described, always with shrill quarrellings in my ears--these with the weekly walk made up my life at Ware, and must form my excuse. How the one came to an abrupt end, how I came to have sore need of the other, it is now my business to tell; but of these in the next chapter; wherein also I propose to show, without any moralities, another thing that shall prove them to the purpose, namely, how these early experiences, which I have thus curtly described, led me per viam dolorosam to my late lord, and mingled my fortunes with his, under circumstances not unworthy of examination by those who take mankind for their study.