PROLOGUE

OUNTIFUL Lord, in Whom we have our being,

You bless us with each breath and every heartbeat.

You count each sparrow’s fall, yea, every feather’s,

and knock down towers to manifest Your glory.

And in the larger motions of Your people,

our argosies, migrations, flights, and conquests,

our Exoduses and Apocalypses,

You raise up instruments to teach and lead us,

men such as Abel, Moses, and Josiah,

Elisha, Paul, Calvin, Edward the Sixth,

and Sweden’s royal champion, grave Gustavus–

You rear up men we need when most we need them,

and when their work is done, lay them aside,

mere lifeless tools remembered for Your service,

to show we must rely on You alone.

HUS Greville-Brooke, the noblest of our Romans,

a Christian soldier and philosopher,

commander of Your host in Warks and Staffs,

whilst firing on the Rs in Lichfield Close

as Parliament pushed back on R advances,

caught a sniper’s ball square in the eye–

dumb Dyott’s, from the minster’s central spire–

which gouged an unseen vacancy among

his friends, the godly folk, and Dev-Ex’ Council.

He left behind his lady, Catherine Greville,

and Francis, Fulke, and Robert, three young sons,

the youngest born the day his father died.

Francis was named for the great Earl of Bedford,

their mother’s father; Robert for their father;.

Fulke for their father’s father and the kinsman

from whom they had the barony and castle.

HUS Colonel Hampden perished of two bullets

he stopped at Chalgrove Field, an ugly struggle

in which the General’s major also died.

John Gunter was a veteran of Edgehill;

his orange cornet showed an armored fist

emerging from a cloud, gripping a saber,

the warning “Cave Adsum” stitched on the field.

Hampden’s fall unballasted the store

of wisdom garnered by our godly chieftains;

Dev-Ex lost a friend and his personal lawyer.

Hampden, of course, was one of the Five Members.

John Jr. had been killed in a fight at Chenies,

a Russell house in Bucks, back in November.

The third Earl of Bedford had been penned there

for taking part in Dev-Ex Sr.’s quarrel.

OU took John Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough,

Dev-Ex’ former General of the Ordnance–

whose LC turned and fought for Charles at Edgehill–

who yielded Banbury, then abandoned Reading

whose father spent a half-year in the Tower,

suspected as a Gunpowder Plotter–

whom, Dev-Ex-like, James drafted for the court

to join his troop of handsome noble youths,

and whom he joined, like Dev-Ex, to a Howard.

The earl expired, it seems, of a consumption,

leaving a son who turned and fought for Charles.

OU took Colonel Arthur Goodwin MP,

Lord Wharton’s father-in-law and Hampden’s friend,

who helped Hampden to Thame when he was wounded.

Goodwin led the regiment of horse

that captured Howard-Berkshire when he sought 

to seize the magazine at Watlington,

an action carried out with Hampden’s foot.

(Howard sojourned briefly in the Tower,

the former home of Howard’s sister, Frances,

the Lord General’s infamous first wife.)

He joined Lord Brooke in capturing Rs near Brackley,

rode to the relief of Marlborough Wilts,

which George Digby stormed with Henry Wilmot,

and chivvied Digby’s regiments from Wantage.

Appointed c-in-c in Bucks by Dev-Ex,

he made his base at Aylesbury, looted supra.

He died in Clerkenwell of camp fever.

TILL graver for Your Cause: the loss of Pym,

John Pym MP, dead of an inward abscess.

Raised by an old friend of Sir Francis Drake’s

and first elected in the Russell interest,

he served Rich-Warwick as his business agent,

then served as treasurer for Warwick’s, Brooke’s,

and Saye and Sele’s Providence Island Co.

He drafted the notorious Petition,

whereby the godly peers prevailed on Charles

to call the Parliament that cut down Strafford,

and drafted, joined by Hampden, the Remonstrance

enlarging on the wrongs of Charles’s reign.

One of the Five Members Charles went to arrest,

he organized the loans to raise an army.

King Pym men called him, enemies and friends.

What meant You, Lord, by this unlooked-for blow?

That You were the godly party’s heart, not Pym.

Of four surviving children, Charles MP

served as a P horse captain under Dalbier.

OR did You spare the host of Antichrist:

Sidney Godolphin MP, a poet,

friendly with Falkland, Hyde, and Thomas Hobbes,

fell at Chagford, a humble soldier under Dev;

Colonel Sir William Godolphin MP.

Compton-Northampton died at Hopton Heath;

of halberd blades applied to face and head

by the “base rogues and rebels” he contemned.

Feilding-Denbigh, father of our Colonel Basil,

died of wounds received in Rupert’s storm

of Birmingham, a Parliamentarian town.

T Lansdowne Som, a Parliamentarian poleaxe

killed Colonel Sir Bevil Grenville MP,

brother of the ungovernable Sir Richard.

Pierrepont-Kingston, Charles’s lord-lieutenant

of Rutland, Lincs, Norfolk, Hunts, and Cambs,

and father of William Pierrepont MP (P),

declared, “May a cannon-ball divide me

if I should fight Parliament for the king

or king for Parliament.” And so it happened,

when a P pinnace bearing the captured earl

downstream from Gainsborough came under R fire.