At all events, there
was a tradition in the family, that when, on his last ride through his
territorial demesne, Sir Orlando saw his favourite remaining bird fly
from the falconer’s hand, and break her jesses, he exclaimed, “Let her
fly; she knows the way to my lord of Leicester’s.”

“During the reign of James, the Mortimer family took a more decided
part. The influence of the Puritans (whom James hated with a hatred
passing that of even a controversialist, and remembered with pardonable
filial resentment, as the inveterate enemies of his ill-fated mother)
was now increasing every hour. Sir Arthur Mortimer was standing by King
James at the first representation of “Bartholomew Fair,” written by Ben
Jonson, when the prologue uttered these words(4):

    “Your Majesty is welcome to a Fair;
    Such place, such men, such language, and such ware,
    You must expect--with these the _zealous noise_
    Of your land’s faction, scandalized at toys.”

  (4) Vide Jonson’s play, in which is introduced a Puritan preacher, a
  _Banbury man_, named Zeal-of-the-land Busy. “My lord,” said the King, (for Sir Arthur was one of the lords of the
privy council), “how deem you by that?”--“Please your Majesty,” answered
Sir Arthur, “those Puritans, as I rode to London, cut off mine horse’s
tail, as they said the ribbons with which it was tied savoured too much
of the pride of the beast on which the scarlet whore sits. Pray God
their shears may never extend from the tails of horses to the heads of
kings!” And as he spoke with affectionate and ominous solicitude, he
happened to place his hand on the head of Prince Charles, (afterwards
Charles I. ), who was sitting next his brother Henry, Prince of Wales,
and to whom Sir Arthur Mortimer had had the high honour to be sponsor,
as proxy for a sovereign prince. “The awful and troubled times which Sir Arthur had predicted soon
arrived, though he did not live to witness them. His son, Sir Roger
Mortimer, a man lofty alike in pride and in principle, and immoveable in
both,--an Arminian in creed, and an aristocrat in politics,--the zealous
friend of the misguided Laud, and the bosom-companion of the unfortunate
Strafford,--was among the first to urge King Charles to those
high-handed and impolitic measures, the result of which was so fatal. “When the war broke out between the King and the Parliament, Sir Roger
espoused the royal cause with heart and hand,--raised a large sum in
vain, to prevent the sale of the crown-jewels in Holland,--and led five
hundred of his tenants, armed at his own expence, to the battles of
Edge-hill and Marston-moor. “His wife was dead, but his sister, Mrs Ann Mortimer, a woman of
uncommon beauty, spirit, and dignity of character, and as firmly
attached as her brother to the cause of the court, of which she had been
once the most brilliant ornament, presided over his household, and by
her talents, courage, and promptitude, had been of considerable service
to the cause. “The time came, however, when valour and rank, and loyalty and beauty,
found all their efforts ineffectual; and of the five hundred brave men
that Sir Roger had led into the field to his sovereign’s aid, he brought
back thirty maimed and mutilated veterans to Mortimer Castle, on the
disastrous day that King Charles was persuaded to put himself into the
hands of the disaffected and mercenary Scots, who sold him for their
arrears of pay due by the Parliament. “The reign of rebellion soon commenced,--and Sir Roger, as a
distinguished loyalist, felt the severest scourge of its power. Sequestrations and compositions,--fines for malignancy, and forced loans
for the support of a cause he detested,--drained the well-filled
coffers, and depressed the high spirit, of the aged loyalist. Domestic
inquietude was added to his other calamities. He had three
children.--His eldest son had fallen fighting in the King’s cause at the
battle of Newbury, leaving an infant daughter, then supposed the heiress
of immense wealth. His second son had embraced the Puritanic cause, and,
lapsing from error to error, married the daughter of an Independent,
whose creed he had adopted; and, according to the custom of those days,
fought all day at the head of his regiment, and preached and prayed to
them all night, in strict conformity with that verse in the psalms,
which served him alternately for his text and his battle-word--“Let the
praises of God be in their mouth, and a two-edged sword in their hands.”
This double exercise of the sword and the word, however, proved too much
for the strength of the saint-militant; and after having, during
Cromwell’s Irish campaign, vigorously headed the attack on Cloghan
Castle(5), the ancient seat of the O’Moores, princes of Leix,--and being
scalded through his buff-coat by a discharge of hot water from the
bartizan,--and then imprudently given the word of exhortation for an
hour and forty minutes to his soldiers, on the bare heath that
surrounded the castle, and under a drenching rain,--he died of a
pleurisy in three days, and left, like his brother, an infant daughter
who had remained in England, and had been educated by her mother. It was
said in the family, that this man had written the first lines of
Milton’s poem “on the new forcers of conscience under the Long
Parliament.” It is certain, at least, that when the fanatics who
surrounded his dying bed were lifting up their voices to sing a hymn, he
thundered with his last breath,

    “Because ye have thrown off your prelate lord,
    And with stiff vows renounce his Liturgy,
    To seize the widowed w--e pluralitie,
    From them whose sin ye envied not, abhorr’d,” &c.

  (5) I have been an inmate in this castle for many months--it is still
  inhabited by the venerable descendant of that ancient family. His son
  is now High-Sheriff of the King’s county. Half the castle was battered
  down by Oliver Cromwell’s forces, and rebuilt in the reign of Charles
  the Second. The remains of the _castle_ are a tower of about forty
  feet square, and five stories high, with a single spacious apartment
  on each floor, and a narrow staircase communicating with each, and
  reaching to the bartizan. A beautiful ash-plant, which I have often
  admired, is now displaying its foliage between the stones of the
  bartizan,--and how it got or grew there, heaven only knows. There it
  is, however; and it is better to see it there than to feel the
  discharge of hot water or molten lead from the apertures. “Sir Roger felt, though from different causes, pretty much the same
degree of emotion on the deaths of his two sons. He was fortified
against affliction at the death of the elder, from the consolation
afforded him by the cause in which he had fallen; and that in which the
apostate, as his father always called him, had perished, was an equal
preventive against his feeling any deep or bitter grief on his
dissolution.