into the house, as also grenadoes of the same size, alias bomb-shells; the first of which falling near the place where the Lady and her children with all the commanders were seated at dinner, shivered all the room, but hurt nobody." The day after Fairfax's departure, Rigby resolved on a grand attack with this terrible mortar and his other artillery, and so sure was he of success that on the 25th of April he sent a messenger to the Countess, calling on her to "surrender at discretion Latham, with all and everything that it contained, before two on the clock the next day." When the messenger arrived the Countess, surrounded by her officers, was in the court-yard. She read the letter and "then," says the chronicler of the siege, himself among the garrison," calls for the drum and tells him that a due reward for his pains is to be hanged up at her gates; but, says she, 'thou art but the foolish instrument of a traitor's pride; carry this answer back to Rigby' (with a noble scorn tearing the paper in his sight), and tell that insolent rebel he shall neither have persons, goods, nor house. When our strength and provision are spent we shall find a fire more merciful than Rigby's, and then, if the providence of God prevent it not, my goods and house shall burn in his sight; and myself, children, and soldiers, rather than fall into his hands, will seal our religion and loyalty in the same flame;' which being spoken aloud in her soldiers' hearing they broke out into shouts and acclamations of joy, all closing with this general voice,' We will die for his Majesty and your honour! God save the King !'”

The crisis had arrived, as the Countess well knew, when she used this language of defiance bordering on desperation. It was resolved that a strenuous effort should be made to capture the terrible mortar, previous attempts to spike it having failed. The day after Rigby's summons to surrender, at four in the morning, a sortie was made, and made successfully. On the very day for which Rigby had issued invitations to

his friends in the neighbourhood to come and witness the finale of the siege, the great mortar was brought in triumph into the court-yard to the feet of the delighted Countess, who "immediately ordered her chaplain to be called, and gathered her household together in the chapel to return thanks to God." From the time of this achievement of the besieged despondency fell on the besiegers. Their ranks were thinned by desertion, while the garrison redoubled its efforts to harass them. A portion of the besieging force was summoned on duty elsewhere, and in a letter which he wrote on the 1st of May to the Deputy-Lieutenant of Lancashire, Rigby thus dolefully sketched his situation. "We are obliged," he said, "to drive them "—the garrison—"back as often as five or six times in the same night. These constant alarms, the strength of the garrison, and the numerous losses we have had, oblige the soldiers to guard the trenches sometimes two nights running, and always the whole of the two nights; my son does this duty, as well as the younger officers. And for my own part I am ready to sink under the weight, having worked beyond my strength." Rigby's complaints procured him some additional force, but all was in vain. Before the end of May it was intimated to Lady Derby that the original conditions of surrender asked by her would be granted. "Let that insolent fellow Rigby," was her reply, "send me no more propositions, or his messenger shall be hanged at my gates."

And help, effective help, was at hand. After having quieted the malcontents among the Manxmen by tact and conciliation, Lord Derby left the island and was at Chester in the March of 1644, doing his best to procure succour for his Countess. His chief hope was in Prince Rupert, who, as son of the Queen of Bohemia, was a kinsman of his wife's, and who alone of the Royalist generals was making head against the parliament's forces. "Sir," Lord Derby wrote

to the Prince from Chester on the 7th of March 1644, "I have received many advertisements from my wife of her great distress and imminent danger unless she be relieved by your Highness, on whom she doth more rely than on any other whatsoever, and all of us consider well she hath chief reason so to do. I was in hope to have seen your Highness here yesterday, being you were so resolved when last I had the honour to wait upon you. But not now knowing any certainty of your coming hither, and my Lord Byron and others most unwilling to stir hence, with any forces towards her, without your Highness's special direction, I do take the boldness to present you again my most humble and earnest request in her behalf, that I may be able to give her some comfort in my next. I would have waited on your Highness this time, but I hourly receive little letters from her,1 who haply a few days hence may never send me more." On the 23d of March the leading Royalists of Chester addressed a memorial to Prince Rupert (among the signatures to which is that of "Richard Grosvenor," ancestor of the present Marquis of Westminster) on behalf of the lady whom they styled "your very heroic kinswoman." After referring to her gallant, and so far successful, resistance the memorialists go on to say :-"But she hath wasted much of her ammunition and victual, which must needs hasten the sadness of her Ladyship's condition, or render her captive to a

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1 Lord Derby has left on record some of the devices by which he was enabled to keep up a correspondence with his beleaguered Countess :"When Latham," he says, was besieged in the year 1644, my wife, some children, and good friends in it, I did write letters to them in ciphers as much in as little compass as I could. I rolled the same in lead, sometimes in wax, hardly as big as a musket bullet, that if the bearer suspected danger of discovery he might swallow it, and physic would soon find it again. I have writ in fine linen, with a small pen, which hath been sewed to the bearer's clothes, as part of the linings. I have put a letter in a green wound, in a stick, pen, &c."

barbarous enemy, if your Highness's forces do not speedily relieve her; in contemplation whereof, as also of the happy effects of her gallantry, who, by this defence, hath not only diverted a strong party of the Lancashire forces from joining with those who would endeavour to interrupt your Highness's march and retreat, or otherwise might have joined in one body to have annoyed us here in the division of your forces— we are, therefore, all bold (with an humble representation) to become suitors to your Highness for your princely consideration of the noble Lady's seasonable and speedy relief, in which (besides her particulars) we conceive the infinite good of all these Northern parts will be most concerned, and his Majesty's service very much advanced."

Two months, however, passed before the prayer of the memorial was complied with. It was not (Clarendon hints) until Lord Derby offered the bribe of a levy of 2,000 men and of "a considerable sum of money" that Charles resolved on the relief of Latham, and "sent his permission and approbation to the Prince, hoping that he would be able to despatch the service in Lancashire and return with his notable recruits to Oxford." On the 25th May (1644) Rupert entered Lancashire by Stockport bridge, and there defeated, with a loss of 800 men, a Parliamentary force attempting to bar his way. With Rupert thus making a successful entry into Lancashire, it would have been imprudent any longer to prosecute the siege of Latham. It was raised at midnight on the 27th, and Rigby threw himself into Bolton, "the Geneva of Lancashire Puritanism," on which Rupert and Lord Derby were marching with 8,000 men. Scarcely had Rigby entered Bolton when, on the afternoon of the 28th, the Royalist army appeared on the moors, by which the town was surrounded, and the tables were turned on the Puritan lawyer-colonel. His force is said to have consisted of "about two thousand soldiers, and five hundred towns

men armed chiefly with clubs." The Royalists were flushed with their recent success, and Lord Derby, especially, was stirred by resentment for all that had been suffered by his Countess and friends at Latham. Rigby's men, however, made a desperate resistance, and before they were driven back into the town, from which they seem to have sallied to confront the enemy outside its dilapidated walls, "three hundred men, including the colonel and major," of Rupert's own regiment of infantry, were slain by the stubborn Puritans. The storm of the town followed. The assault on it was led by Lord Derby himself, "with two companies of his old soldiers, then under the command of Colonel Tyldesley, and with a handful of men, consisting principally of his own Latham tenantry who had been daily on parade there." In less than half an hour, after much fierce and confused fighting, the town was in the hands of the Royalists, and Rigby on his way to Blackstone Edge, to take refuge at Bradford. Lord Derby's gallantry on this day, or rather the circumstances under which it was exhibited, proved most disastrous to him afterwards, when he was a prisoner in the hands of his foes. The Cavaliers seem to have given no quarter to the soldiers of the parliament, though, possibly through Lord Derby's exertion of his influence, they showed a little more mercy to the townspeople. But " the Bolton massacre," as it has been called, was never forgiven while he lived, and if the historian of Lancashire Nonconformity is forced to admit that "the Puritan accounts are undoubtedly exaggerated," Lord Derby's admiring biographer makes on the other hand the candid avowal: "There can be no doubt there was too great an extermination of life on that sad day." The future, however, was concealed from view, and Lord Derby felt nothing but joy when, on the evening of the same day on which Bolton had been stormed, he and Prince Rupert made a 1 Raines, i. cxi.

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