



Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England




No Quarter!
By Captain Mayne Reid
Published by Hurst and Company, New York.
This edition dated 1890.

No Quarter! by Captain Mayne Reid.

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NO QUARTER! BY CAPTAIN MAYNE REID.



PROLOGUE.

There is no page in England's history so bright, nor of which Englishmen
have such reason to be proud, as that covering the period between 1640
and 1650.  This glorious decade was ushered in by the election of the
"Long Parliament," and I challenge the annals of all nations, ancient or
modern, to show an assembly in which sat a greater number of statesmen
and patriots.  Brave as pure, fearless in the discharge of their
difficult and dangerous duties, they faltered not in the performance of
them--shrank not from impeaching a traitor to his country, and bringing
his head to the block, even when it carried a crown.  True to their
consciences, as to their constituencies, they left England a heritage of
honour that for long haloed her escutcheon, and even to this hour throws
its covering screen over many a deed of shame.

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"Be a King?"

"Am I not one?"

"In name--nothing more.  Ah! were I a man and in your place?"

"What would you do?"

"Give your island churls a taste of kingship, as we know it in France.
My brother wouldn't let his subjects so beard him.  Oh, it's
abominable!"

"Ah, _chere_; for subjects your brother has a very different sort of
people to deal with.  In France they're not yet come to clamouring for
what they call their rights and liberties.  Here in England they've got
Magna Charta into their heads--to a craze."

"I'd have it out of their heads, or have their heads off.  _Ciel_!  I'd
reign King as King should, or resign.  No! not resign.  Sooner than that
I'd waste the country with fire and sword--make it a wilderness."

It was Henrietta, wife of Charles the First, who thus expressed herself
to her husband.  They were alone in the gardens of Whitehall Palace,
sauntering side by side on a terrace overlooking the Thames, the
afternoon being an unusually fine one.  As they made a turn which
brought Westminster Hall before their eyes, the angry fire in those of
the Queen flashed up again, and she added--

"Anything but be dictated to by that _canaille_ of a Parliament!
Anything but let them go on as now?"

"How am I to hinder it, Henriette?" the King timidly interrogated.

"Dismiss--send them packing back to their constituencies, and let them
prate away there as much as they please.  Dissolve and do without them,
as you've done before."

"That would be to do without the money we so much need.  My subjects are
determined to resist every tax levied under Privy Seal or otherwise.  I
can no longer raise loan or sell monopoly.  Your own secretary, Sir John
Wintour, has just been telling me how the people of Dean Forest have
been harassing him about the grant we gave him of its timber and mines.
Impossible now to obtain the most insignificant supplies without their
being sanctioned by this _cabal_ called Parliament."

"Then make the _cabal_ sanction them."

"But how, _chere_?"

"Have a score or two of them arrested--lodged in the Tower; and let
Monsieur Tom Lunsford take care of them.  He'll soon cure them of their
seditious inclinings."

"To do that were as much as my crown's worth."

"If't be worth no more, you may as well cease wearing it.  Fling it into
the Thames, or melt it down and sell it to the Ludgate Street goldsmiths
for old metal.  Shame of you, Charles!  You talk of kingly rights, yet
fail to exercise them--fear it?"

"My subjects talk of rights, too."

"Yes, and you encourage them--by your timidity.  Ever on your knees
begging this and begging that, when a true king would command.
Subjects, indeed! more like our masters.  But I'd teach them obedience.
What would they be without a king?  What were they born for but to
administer to our wants and our pleasures?"

Words worthy of a Medici; the sentiments of a queen two centuries and a
half ago.  Yet not so very different from those entertained by most
Royal personages at the present day and hour.  But few of them who would
not sit placidly upon their thrones, see subjects slain, and realms
reduced to desolation, rather than resign crown or yield up one iota of
what they are pleased to call their prerogative.  How could it be
otherwise?  Environed by sycophantic flatterers, heads bowing, knees
bending, tongues eternally bepraising; things in human shape giving them
adoration as to God Himself--ay, greater than to God--how could it be
otherwise?  Not so strange that this proud, pampered woman, from her
cradle accustomed to such slavish obedience, should verily believe it
but her due.

"_Their_ rights?" she continued, with a satirical laugh.  "An absurd
notion they've got into their Saxon skulls.  Ah! _mon mari_, were I you
for a month--for a week--I'd have it out--stamp it out--I would."

And to give emphasis to her speech, she stamped her foot upon the
ground.

A pretty foot it was, and still a handsome woman she, this daughter of
the Medicis, notwithstanding her being now somewhat _passe_.  Ambitious
as Catherine herself--"that mother of a race of kings"--intriguing,
notoriously dissolute, not the less did Charles love her.  Perhaps the
more, for the cuckoo's cry is a wonderful incentive to passion, as to
jealousy.  He doted upon her with foolish fondness--would have done
anything she commanded, even murder.  And to more than this was she now
instigating him; for it was to stifle, trample out the liberties of a
nation, no matter at what cost in life or blood.

Wicked as were her counsels, he would have followed them and willingly,
could he have seen his way clear to success.  Men still talk of his
kindly nature--in face of the fact, proved by irresistible evidence,
that he rejoiced at the massacre of the Protestants in Ireland, to say
naught of many other instances of inhumanity brought home to this
so-called "Martyr King."  He may not have been--was not--either a Nero
or a Theebaw; and with his favourites and familiars no doubt behaved
amicably enough; at the same time readily sacrificing them when danger
threatened himself.  To his wife his fidelity and devotion were such as
to have earned for him the epithet "uxorious," a title which can be more
readily conceded.  But in his affection for her--whether upheld by
respect or not--there was a spice of fear.  He knew all about the
scandals relating to her mother, Marie of France, with Richelieu, and
his own and father's favourite, the assassinated Buckingham, now
sleeping in his grave.  Charles more than suspected, as did all the
world besides, that this same Queen-mother had sent her husband--king as
himself--to an untimely tomb by a "cup of cold poison."  And oft as the
dark Italian eyes of her daughter flashed upon him in anger, he felt
secret fear she might some day serve him as had her mother the ill-fated
monarch of France.  She was of a race and a land whence such danger
might be reasonably expected and dreaded.  Lucrezia Borgia and Tophana
were not the only great female poisoners Italy has produced.

"If you've no care for yourself, then," she went on with untiring
persistence, "think of our children.  Think of him," and she nodded
towards a gaudily-dressed stripling of some ten or twelve, seen coming
towards them.  It was he who, twenty years after, under the seemingly
innocent soubriquet of "Merry Monarch," made sadness in many a family
circle, smouching England's escutcheon all over with shame, scarce
equalled in the annals of France.

"_Pauvre enfant_!" she exclaimed, as he came up, passing her jewelled
fingers through the curls of his hair; "your father would leave you
bereft of your birthright; some day to be a king with a worthless
crown."

The "pauvre enfant," a sly young wretch, smiled in return for her
caresses, looking dark at his father.  Young as he was, he knew what was
meant, and took sides with his mother.  She had already well
indoctrinated him with the ideas of Divine Right, as understood by a
Medici.

"_Peste_!" exclaimed the King, looking vexed, possibly at the allusion
to a successor; "were I to follow your counsels, Madam, it might result
in my leaving him no crown at all."

"Then leave him none!" she said in quick return, and with an air of
jaunty indifference.  "Perhaps better so.  I, his mother, would rather
see him a peasant than prince, with such a future as you are laying out
for him."

"Sire, the Earl of Strafford craves audience of your Majesty."

This was said by a youth in the official costume of the Court, who had
approached from the Palace, and stood with head bent before the King.

A remarkably handsome young fellow he was, and the Queen, as she turned
her eyes on him, seemed to recover sweetness of temper.

"I suppose my company will be _de trop_ now," she said.  Then facing
towards the youth, and bestowing upon him one of her syren smiles--slyly
though--she added, "Here, Eustace; bring this to my boudoir," and she
handed him a large book, a _portfeuille_ of pictures, she had been all
the while carrying.

Whether the King caught sight of that smile