The night after King Charles the First was beheaded, my Lord Southampton and

tercepting a letter from Charles to the Queen, by ripping open a packsaddle, in which the King told her he meant to throw himself into the hands of the Scotch presbyterians. This is evidently the same story in another form, to which Dugdale alludes in his Short View, &c. fol. 1681, p. 378, where he mentions that it had been reported, in order to blacken the King's memory, that after Charles had been brought from Holdenly to Hampton Court, a certain letter from the Queen to him was intercepted and opened by Cromwell, in which she acquainted him "that the Scots were raising an army in order to rescue him from his captivity;" that Cromwell having read this letter, and made it up so artificially that no violation of the seal could appear, conveyed it to the King, and the next morning sent Ireton to him to inquire whether he knew of any hostile preparations making by the Scots; to which inquiry the King replied, that "he neither knew nor believed any thing of it." Whereupon they both conIcluded that he was not to be further trusted, and determined to put him to death. This story Dugdale completely refutes.

With respect to Lord Oxford's pretended letter, it is only necessary to observe that if Charles had been so lax in his principles as this story represents him, and had thought himself at liberty to recede at a subsequent period from his engagements with the execra

T

a friend of his got leave to sit up by the body in the banqueting-house at Whitehall. As they were sitting very melancholy there, about two o'clock in the morning they heard the tread of somebody coming very slowly up stairs. By and by the door opened, and a man entered, very much muffled up in his cloak, and his face quite

ble wretches with whom he had to deal, he might on many occasions have closed with them, and saved both his crown and his life. But in his treaties with them he firmly adhered to the maintenance of episcopacy, and other points which he thought himself bound to maintain, and by this means these treaties were broken off.

This proves decisively that the letter in question is a forgery. And his answer on the Sunday before he died to the proposal then made to him by Cromwell, Ireton, and the rest, is also a strong evidence to the same point. As soon as he had read two or three of the propositions, he threw them aside with indignation, saying, that he would rather become a sacrifice for his people than thus betray their laws, liberties, lives, and estates, together with the church, the commonwealth and honour of the crown, to so intolerable a bondage of an armed faction.-See Clement Walker's History of Independency, P. II. p. 103.-M.

hid in it. He approached the body, considered it very attentively for some time, and then shook his head, and sighed out the words," Cruel necessity!" He then departed in the same slow and concealed manner as he had come in. Lord Southampton used to say that he could not distinguish any thing of his face, but that by his voice and gait he took him to be Oliver Cromwell *.-The same.

* King Charles was murdered on Tuesday, January 30, at two o'clock. The body remained that night and the next at Whitehall, and on Thursday, February 1, was removed to St. James's. If Lord Southampton did sit up with the body on Tuesday night, the person who accompanied him in this sad office was without doubt Mr. Herbert. Herbert, who could not bear to see the stroke given, stood in the banqueting-house, near the scaffold, till the Bishop of London (Juxon) came from thence with the royal corpse, which was immediately put into a coffin, and carried by them to the backstairs to be embalmed. They then left the body to the surgeons, who were specially chosen by the faction, and care taken that they should not be the King's own surgeons, and Mr. Herbert then walked into the gallery, where he met both Fairfax (with whom he had an extraordinary conversation) and

Scaliger's Poetics is an exceeding useful book in its kind, and extremely well collected.-The same.

Cromwell, who told him he should have orders for the King's burial speedily. "The royal corpse (says Herbert) being embalmed and coffined, and then wrapped in lead, and covered with a new velvet pall, was removed to the King's house at St. James's, where was great pressing by all sorts of people to see the King." According to this account it should seem that the body was removed the same day to St. James's; but it was not so, as appears from Dugdale's Short View, &c. 1681. Mr. Herbert, it is observable, says nothing of any person's having leave to sit up with the body the first night; and, as undoubtedly he himself sat up with it, having the care of the funeral, had such a circumstance as a man thus stalking in happened, he would probably have mentioned it. Allowing, however, the fact, most assuredly that flagitious and detestable impostor Cromwell was not the man. The whole tenour of his life and of his conduct to Charles proves that he had no such tender or honourable feelings. On the trial of Harry Martin, Sir Patrick Temple swore, that from a hole in the hangings of the House of Lords, where he was concealed on the 20th of January, 1648-9, he saw and heard the consultation held in the painted chamber previous to Charles's being brought into Westminster Hall; that as soon as news was brought that the King was landed (from Whitehall) at Sir

Middling poets are no poets at all. There is always a great number of such in each

Robert Cotton's stairs, Cromwell ran to the window to look at his majesty as he came up the garden, and returned as white as the wall: he then said to Bradshaw and the rest," My masters, he is come, he is come," &c. as in the trial of the regicides. Cromwell appears to have been in Whitehall the whole of the 30th of January. At eleven o'clock he let Nunelly, a doorkeeper to the committee of the army, into the boarded gallery there, saying to him, " Nunelly, will you go to Whitehall? surely you will see the beheading of the King!" At past one o'clock the warrant to the executioner was made out. A warrant had been issued by the pretended court of justice on the 29th, directed "To Col. Francis Hacker, Col. Huncks, Col. Phayre, and to every of them," to see execution done on the King the next day between the hours of ten and five in the afternoon. On the trial of Hacker, Huncks became King's evidence, and swore that a little before the King came on the scaffold, Cromwell showed him that warrant in a little room in Whitehall (Ireton's chamber), where Ireton and Harrison were in bed together, and desired him to draw up and sign another warrant to the executioner, which Huncks refused; on which Cromwell said, "he was a froward peevish fellow." Col. Hacker and Phayre were also in the room, and Col. Axtell at the door, half in and half out. There being a little table, with pen, ink, and paper on it, in the room, Crom