28 MAY 1881, Page 19

A CAVALIER'S _NOTE-BOOK.* Tuts book is full of deep interest,

and its appearance is peculiarly appropriate at the present time, when, in a neighbouring country, penal laws are once more being put in force against the Jesuits— laws which, if more lenient, are less logical and thorough-going than those by which it was sought, two or three centuries ago, to stamp out the Order and its supporters in this realm of Eng- land. For it should be explained that William Blundell, ex- tracts from whose note-books are here set before us, was scarcely a typical Cavalier, and that the part which he played in the brunt and turmoil of the Civil War was necessarily small. Like almost the entire body of his co-religionists, he threw in his lot with the King at the outbreak of hostilities, and obtained a commission as captain of dragoons under Sir Thomas Tiklesley.

His first experience of battle was also his last. In Lord Derby's assault upon Lancaster, Blundell's thigh was shattered by a musket-shot, and he was lamed for life, so that he was thence- forward known familiarly as " Halt Will." Very little, therefore, is to be gleaned from this volume about the Civil War in particular. Both armies appear to have harassed Blundell with singular impartiality, and he was compelled to fly to the Isle of Man and other remote places to avoid extortion and outrage. Under the Commonwealth his entire estate was confiscated, and he was only able to recover it by raising the purchase-money among his friends. He was repeatedly imprisoned. His public appearances after the king "came in" seem to have been but few. He accompanied him on board the Royal Charles,' on the memorable May 5th, 1660, and relates the following anecdote :—

" I was present in the ship (about five miles from Dover) two or three hours before King Charles II. landed in England, when the King (by reason of an accident) took his own measure, standing under a beam in the cabin, upon which place ho made a mark with his knife. Sundry tall persons wont under it, but there were none that could reach it. After all, I went under it myself, and turning in the ends of my thumb and my little finger, I set the knuckle of my thumb, stretched out as much as could be, upon my head, and turning the knuckle of my little finger (borne np as stiff us might be), I found it did touch directly the mark which the King had made."

A few weeks before, when sojourning at Breda, he had seen the Dukes of York and Gloucester, with their sisters, " playing a long time at ninepins upon a Sunday, whilst the King their brother looked on."

The compiler of this common-place book shared the general lot of those who had trusted the promises of their faithless master while ho was yet an exile. All through the reign of Charles II. *Blundell was subjected to spasmodic persecution, and when Titus Oates had maddened the English people by the blackest of all recorded perjuries, the death which was inflicted upon his friend and correspondent Langhorne threatened him and his. Under the brief misrule of James II., he hoped for a moment not only for toleration, but even for reward. In a memorial which was drawn up, but never presented, he set forth how no member of his house had ever apostatised from the ancient faith ; how one hundred of his kin had become priests or had taken religious vows ; and how his township of Crosby for many years had possessed neither beggar, nor alehouse, nor Protestant. But James forfeited the throne, and under his successor freedom from molestation was all that a Roman Catholic could hope for. In 1691, Blundell writes that" we may sit very securely under our own vines, and we have reason to pray for the King. I am sure without his favour (a favour, I confess, unexpected), we had all been a prey to the law, or rather, perhaps, to the rabble." Once more, in 1694,

Crolbti Records; a Cavalier's) Note-Rook. Edited, with Introductory Chapter, by the Hey. T. Effleou Ott ice. London ; Lougmans. 1880.

he narrowly escaped arrest, and in 1698 death released him from the narrow limits of his " five miles' chain." The editor has told his life well, and both his talents and his character make it fully worth the telling.

But after all, though the common-place book abounds with curious jottings on a great variety of subjects, from duelling to hair-dyes, from doctors' bills to horse-racing, and from philo- logy to the cost of millinery, the main interest of this instal- ment of the Crosby Becords consists in the vivid picture it gives us of the life of a Roman Catholic country gentleman in the seventeenth century, and the lesson it conveys as to the futility of penal laws in matters of religion. Not that that spirit is by any means wholly extinct to-day. Religious animosity has scarcely even yet learned to be silent at the open grave. But we have progressed since 1611, when the grandfather of William Blundell,"finding his fellow-Catholics refused burial at their parish church, ordered a plot within his own grounds to be set

apart for this purpose. . . Later on, this act of humanity, coming to the knowledge of Government, was the occasion of a severe sentence being pronounced against him The fine was afterwards reduced to £500." But the walls and mounds of the churchyard were to be pulled down by the Sheriff, and the ground laid waste. Still, not even such outrages as this, which must have entered like iron into the very souls of men whose only crime was that they believed in transubstantiation and accepted the spiritual authority of the Pope, could shake the loyalty of Blundell and his fellows. They were Roman Catholics, indeed, but they were likewise Englishmen. " It hath ever been my professed principle," wrote Blundell, with trans- parent honesty, "that all, oven Catholic subjects, of a lawful Protestant king (such as King Charles II.) are obliged faithfully to adhere to that king in all invasions whatsoever, though made by Catholic princes, or even by the Pope himself." The Cavalier's faith was of a robust order, and it would be well if all the authorities of his Church at the present day would act on his wise maxim :—" I think it less damage to Christianity if we conceal a hundred true miracles than if we publish one false one."

This was surely the type of man whom a wise Government would have delighted to honour, and whom the statesmen of the Restoration epoch were especially bound to protect. But it did not avail our hero that he had shed his blood in the king's.

cause, and he experienced scarcely better treatment under Charles II. than under Cromwell. It was only his own up- rightness, and the very rigour of the penal laws, which over- reached their purpose and prevented their enforcement, that saved him from utter ruin. The editor points out how the severity of the law, which debarred Catholics of position from any secular career, tended to increase the ranks of the priest- hood, and to compel thousands of men and women, who might otherwise have been good citizens and mothers of loyal children, to embrace a religious life. It compelled the Catholic gentry, too, to educate their sons and daughters abroad, and so to bring them up as aliens and enemies of their native land. Blundell assures us that the number of Jesuits in England at one and the same time did not exceed 150. Yet, on account of this handful of men, a long string of odious and cruel laws was allowed to disfigure the Statute-book, the rabble was periodically wrought up to a pitch of frenzy that would only be allayed by the sight of blood, and the State lost the priceless services of many who had aacrified all that they held dear in the performance of their duty to their God. Of course, these penal laws were indirectly the cause of some good. If they produced a Titus Oates, they were like a furnace that purged away the dross and the base alloy from many a noble spirit. " Periissem, nisi peri- issem !" was the cry of Blundell, who redeemed the errors of his youth by the courage and steadfastness with which be faced persecution and worldly ruin. We, who do not share his faith, must yet admit that his life was worthy of all imitation, and that he and such as he—whether Catholic or Puritan—were the salt of the earth, in an evil age.

We had marked many passages for reference or quotation in the Cavalier's interesting collections. He was a keen observer of men and their doings. In one place, he notes that " the manners of wives are strangely changed. Once a velvet gown would have passed from mother to daughter for two or three generations, and they knew no more of London but only the name. Now they know the streets, as well as the porters of the town ; and they pay not for their gowns and silk stockings till there be half-a-dozen on the score." Elsewhere, ho tells as of a good lady of his acquaintance who was " so curious in her attire, as to send out of Lancashire to London her linen to be washed and starched ; such fine linens, I mean, as were used about her neck and shoulders." He complains sorely of the lack of honesty in English commerce, which was causing the trade of the world to flow in foreign channels ; and he quotes the remark of an Irish correspondent, who wrote, "I must say this for my nation, that next to the Spaniard, it is the laziest generation." But we must not draw further upon " Hodge-Podge," as one of Blundell's note-books was called. We will only add that for the history of Lancashire, this work is invaluable. It is inter- esting to read that even in 1662.3, a man who showed a -dromedary and a mountebank found nowhere in England more money stirring among the common people than in Lancashire, and that the Lincolnshire men of that day had remarkably small heads. We will hope that Charles II. was mistaken in pro- nouncing Lancashire "infamous for perjury and packing of juries." Strict as was Blundell's code of morals, and difficult as it was for him to keep his neck from the halter and his estate from the sequestrators, he had none of the moroseness of the Puritan. His anecdote of "the beggar (a hundred years old and odd) who, to move charity, said he was a poor, fatherless, and motherless creature," reads like an anticipation of the Pirates of Penzance. He makes a tantalising mention of a book which he printed privately, in 1661, entitled Quid Me Per- eequeris ?" and of which no printed copy is known to exist. This is enough to cause a flutter in the breast of every bibliogra- pher. For ourselves, we shall look forward with great interest to the appearance of another instalment of these admirably edited Crosby Records.