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For one long term, or e’er her trial came,

Here Brownrigg linger’d. Often have these cells

Echoed her blasphemies, as with shrill voice

She screamed for fresh Geneva. Not to her

Did the blithe fields of Tothill, or thy street,

St. Giles, its fair varieties expand;

Till at the last, in slow-drawn cart she went

To execution. Dost thou ask her crime?

She whipp’d two female ’prentices to death,

And hid them in the coal-hole. For her mind

Shaped strictest plans of discipline. Sage schemes!

Such as Lycurgus taught, when at the shrine

Of the Orthyan goddess he bade flog

The little Spartans; such as erst chastised

Our Milton when at college. For this act

Did Brownrigg swing. Harsh laws! But time shall come

When France shall reign, and laws be all repeal’d!

[Henry Marten was one of the most interesting and remarkable of the Regicides, not only from his abilities and consistent honesty, but from the elegance of his manners, his wit, and the fascinating gaiety of his conversation; and, moreover, from his humane disposition and generosity to fallen foes. His private life, however, was disgraced by the most reckless debauchery, which might seem more appropriate in such libertines as Rochester and Sedley than in a coadjutor of the strict Puritan party. But from a note in Grey’s edition of Hudibras, pt. ii., ch. i., p. 313, it would appear that the general opinion at that time was that profligacy of a pronounced character was indulged in privately by more than a few of that sanctimonious sect.

He was the son of Sir Henry Marten, LL.D., a loyal Judge of the Admiralty. After receiving a learned education at Oxford, he entered one of the Inns of Court, and travelled in France. Having a stake in Berkshire—for he inherited a property of £3000 a year, besides several thousand pounds in money—he was elected, 1640, one of the members for the county in the last two Parliaments of King Charles I. His chief seat was at Becket, in the parish of Shrivenham. He afterwards obtained a grant of £1000 a year to him and his heirs out of the forfeited estates of the Duke of Buckingham. His early marriage with a rich widow, selected by his father, but not affected by himself, also benefited his finances.

From the commencement of the Civil Wars he was a violent Republican; and as early as 1643 openly expressed his opinion of the desirability of the destruction of the King and his children, for which rather premature advice he was expelled from the House of Commons, and underwent a short imprisonment in the Tower. He was appointed by the House of Commons a Colonel of Horse and Governor of Reading, but made less mark as a soldier than as a rapacious spoiler of the adherents of the King, which earned him the opprobrious nickname of “Plunder-master General”.

Being empowered to dispose of the Regalia and royal trappings, he once invested George Wither—who had been made one of Cromwell’s Major-Generals—with them, and so accoutred induced the old Poet to strut up and down Westminster Abbey to the scandal of right-thinking people.

To him also were referred the alterations in the public arms, the Great Seal, and the legends upon the money. Upon the latter was a shield bearing the cross of St. George, encircled by a palm and olive branch, and inscribed The Commonwealth of England, and on the reverse, God with us, 1648; which occasioned the remark “that God and the Commonwealth were not on the same side”.

Nothing apparently could damp the ill-timed jocosity too often prevalent in those troublous times, for at Marten’s trial, 16th October, 1660, Ewer, who had been his servant, swore that “at the signing of the warrant for the King’s execution he did see a pen in Mr. Cromwell’s hand, and he marked Mr. Marten in the face with it, and Mr. Marten did the like to him”. But many of his excesses were condoned in the eyes of both his friends and enemies by his generous and humane spirit.

D’Israeli, in his Commentaries on the life and Reign of Charles I., describes the ingenious way in which Marten saved the life of David Jenkins, a loyal and obstinate Welsh judge, who, when brought to the bar of the House of Commons to answer for imprisoning several persons for bearing arms against the King, peremptorily disowned their jurisdiction, and defied them in the following bold terms: “‘But, Mr. Speaker, since you and this House have renounced your allegiance to your Sovereign, and are become a den of thieves, should I bow myself in this House of Rimmon the Lord would not pardon me’. The whole House were electrified.... He was voted guilty of high treason without any trial. The day of execution was then debated. Harry Marten, who had not yet spoken, rose, not to dissent from the vote of the House, he observed, but he had something to say about the time of the execution. ‘Mr. Speaker,’ said he, ‘everyone must believe that this old gentleman here is fully possessed in his head resolved to die a martyr in his cause, for otherwise he would never have provoked the House by such biting expressions. If you execute him, you do precisely that which he hopes for, and his execution will have a great influence over the people, since he is condemned without a jury. I therefore move that we should suspend the day of execution, and in meantime force him to live in spite of his teeth.’ The drollery of the motion put the House into better humour, and he was reprieved. After being kept in various prisons for eleven years, he was released by Cromwell, and died in 1663, aged eighty-one.”

Another instance may be given of Marten’s felicitous humour and humane temper. When the Commons had rid themselves of the Sovereign, they voted the Lords to be dangerous and useless. But Marten proposed an amendment in their favour; namely, that they were useless, but not dangerous.

His speeches in the House were represented to have been not long, “but wondrous poynant, pertinent, and witty. He was exceedingly apt in apt instances; he alone hath sometimes turned the whole House.”

He wrote several tracts on parliamentary subjects, and Verses on the Death of his Nephew, Charles Edmonds, 7th July, 1661, æt. 30. But the most amusing of the publications bearing his name is one entitled Familiar Letters to his Lady of Delight; also her kinde Returnes: with his Rivall R. Pettingall’s Heroicall Epistles. Printed by Edmundus de Speciosâ Villâ [i.e., Edmund Gayton]. Bellositi Dobunorum [Oxford], 1662 and 1663, 4to. Another edition, with additions, appeared in 1685. “These epistles,” says D’Israeli, “paint to the life the loose habits and espiègleries of this witty profligate; and I think they have been referred to by some inconsiderate writers as a genuine correspondence.” They were probably altogether concocted by Gayton. He was severely attacked in various scurrilous lampoons, some of which are printed among the Rump Songs, 1662.

On his trial he was found guilty and sentenced to death; but the good feeling created among many who had in his prosperous days enjoyed his society and hospitality, and even among many of his former opponents by his generous treatment of them when in danger, stood him in good stead, and it was by a well-timed and humorous appeal to the Judges—such as he himself might have used—that his life was saved. Henry, fourth Viscount Falkland, whose virtuous and heroic father fell at the first Battle of Newbury while fighting for the King, said to the Judges: “Gentlemen, ye talk here of making a sacrifice: it was old law that all sacrifices were to be without spot or blemish; and now you are going to make an old rotten rascal a sacrifice”. This piece of wit pleased his Judges, and his sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life. He was confined in Chepstow Castle, Monmouthshire, for twenty years, and died in September, 1680, aged seventy-eight.

He must have felt some contrition for his vicious life, for some time before his death he made this epitaph, by way of acrostic, on himself:

H ere, or elsewhere (all’s one to you, to me),

E arth, air, or water gripes my ghostly dust,

N one knowing when brave fire shall set it free.

R eader, if you an oft tryed rule will trust,

Y ou’ll gladly do and suffer what you must.

M y life was worn with serving you and you,

A nd now death’s my pay, it seems, and welcome too.

R evenge destroying but itself, while I

T o birds of prey leave my old cage, and fly.

E xamples preach to the eye, care (then mine says)

N ot how you end, but how you spend your days.

“In Cromwell’s time Chepstow Castle served as a place of imprisonment for Jeremy Taylor; and, after the Restoration, it received a less illustrious occupant in the person of Harry Marten, the Regicide, whose imprisonment here has attracted more than its share of notice in consequence of the foolish lines written by Southey in his days of republicanism and pantisocracy, but which are as untrue in fact as they are mischievous in sentiment. As to the fact, it is notorious that Marten—at all events after the first few years of his imprisonment—was little more than a prisoner on parole; allowed to visit the neighbouring gentry, and occupying at Chepstow Castle, with his family and servants, spacious and comfortable apartments in the tower which still bears his name. As to the sentiment, the lines received their best antidote in the clever parody of Canning and Frere in The Anti-Jacobin.”—Annals of Chepstow Castle, by J. F. Marsh, 1883; 4to.]

[Mrs. Elizabeth Brownrigg was executed at Tyburn on Monday, 14th Sept., 1767, for murdering one of her apprentices, Mary Clifford.—Ed.]