premises at present occupied by Messrs. Gubbins, was the place of entertainment for the Royalists. Here on the night of October 11 divers of the Royalist party assembled, and began to drink the King's health right lustily, but over their cups they discussed some of the concessions which the King had made, and of which they so far disapproved, that they protested they would avenge the wrong done to their party upon some of their opponents. The dispute ran so high, and the noise so excessive, that four files of musketeers were sent to apprehend them, and bring the ringleaders before the Governor; against this arrest the Royalists drew their swords and discharged their pocket-pistols, and the tumult increased to such an extent that a reinforcement of more soldiers was sent for, who, under Ensign Smith, at last secured the whole company with the loss of two Royalists and three soldiers killed in the affray.

By way of relaxation the Commissioners often visited the Governor at Carisbrooke Castle, 'where they went to the bowling-alley, after being received by the soldiers with great love and affection, and twenty shot made from the great ordnance to give them a salute.' As for Charles, Sir Philip Warwick says, 'that every night when the King was alone, about eight o'clock, except when he was writing his own private letters, he commanded me to come to him, and he looked over the notes of the treaty and the reasons upon which it moved, and so dictated the heads of a dispatch which he sent to the Prince of Wales.'

Nothing came of this treaty, if such it can be called. The word treaty (from the French traité') designates the convention or agreement which governments make with one another, but it is not absolutely necessary that the party to a treaty should always be an absolute sovereign and independent power or political society. A treaty may therefore be agreed upon by two co-ordinate authorities, such as a King and a Parliament.

Hallam justly remarks that the King's real error was to have entered upon any treaty, and still more to have drawn it out by tardy and ineffectual capitulations. The abdication of the throne might have been too late to save the King's life, but it would have been more honourable for Charles than the

treaty of Newport. Unfortunately for the character of Charles, there is ample evidence from his own letters, as preserved in Wagstaff's Vindication of the Royal Martyr, that the King had no thought of dealing sincerely with the Parliament in this treaty. He gave instructions to Ormond to obey all the Queen's commands, but not to obey any further orders he himself might send, nor to be startled at his great concessions respecting Ireland, for they would come to nothing. If his entering on the treaty was a blunder, this insincerity during the negotiations was far worse than a blunder. But we must not be hard upon the unfortunate King; like a hunted animal, he made for refuge to any covert. The army, the sectaries, the republicans, and the levellers were thirsting for the blood of him whom they called 'the chief delinquent.' Very true are Hallam's weighty words: Few personages in history, we should recollect, have had so much of their actions revealed and commented upon as Charles; it is perhaps a mortifying truth that those who have stood highest with posterity have seldom been those who have been most accurately known.' If Charles had been born in a private station, though his name had been unknown, he would have passed away without censure. Let declaimers and writers in their study chairs upbraid him; with Carisbrooke Castle before them, the people of the Isle of Wight will always be ready to judge the character of its royal prisoner with due consideration for the violence of his temptations, the stratagem of the occasion, and the yielding frailties of weak human

nature.

January 15, 1887.

SIR EDWARD WALKER, KNIGHT, SECRETARY AND WRITER TO CHARLES I AT THE TREATY OF NEWPORT, 1648.

MR. HILLIER, in his useful little book, Charles I in the Isle of Wight, p. 249, states that the names and occupations of those persons who were required by Charles I to wait

upon him during the negotiations of the Treaty of Newport, I. W., A.D. 1648, are preserved in the Journals of the Houses of Parliament. He further adds that the original list in the autograph of the King, together with the letter which accompanied it to the Earl of Manchester as Speaker of the House of Lords, will be found in the Additional MSS., 11,252, of the British Museum.

In this list the name of Sir Edward Walker appears with those of Mr. Philip Warwick (better known as Sir Philip Warwick, the courtly young gentleman,' M.P. for Radnor), John Oudart, and Charles Whitaker, as 'clerks and writers.' Through the kindness of Major Francis of Carisbrooke, who is descended from a nephew of this Sir Edward Walker in the female line, I have obtained some particulars about this gentleman. It appears from his monument in the Church of Stratford-on-Avon that Edward Walker, Knight, was descended from an ancient family of that name of Casterne in the county of Stafford, and being raised through all the degrees of the Heralds' Court became at last Garter King-atArms. During the Civil Wars he served as Secretary of War to Charles I. He married Agnes, daughter of John Reeve of Bookham in Surrey, by whom he had an only daughter, Barbara, whom he married to John Clopton, knight. He died Feb. 26, 1676, in the sixty-fifth year of his age. Clopton family lived in the neighbourhood of Stratford-onAvon, for Mr. Charles Knight, in The Land we Live in, vol. i. p. 238, states that one chapel in the Church of Stratfordon-Avon is entirely filled with monuments of the Clopton family, and many of them are handsome.' In the fifth volume of Granger's Biographical History, 1824, mention is made of two portraits of this Sir Edward Walker writing on a drum, with Charles I, castle, tent, &c. Granger adds that he was appointed Secretary of War by Thomas, Earl of Arundel, in the expedition into Scotland, 1639, and adhering to Charles I in all the King's misfortunes was imprisoned with him in Carisbrooke Castle. This fact is not mentioned by those who have told the story of the detention of Charles in our Island fortress. Readers of Mr. Carlyle's Cromwell, vol. i. pp. 252, 347, will remember a certain Clement Walker, who sat for Wales in the Long Parliament, 'a splenetic Presby

The

terian, an elderly gentleman of low stature in a gray suit with a stick in his hand, who was turned out in the far-famed Purging of the House by Colonel Pride, asking in the voice of the indomitablest terrier or Blenheim cocker, "By what law? I ask again by what law?" Walker is one of those common names which are not what they seem. Mr. Ferguson, in his valuable book, Surnames as a Science, p. 182, has shown that it is a very ancient name, formed probably from the Anglo-Saxon word wealh,' stranger. The family pedigree which dates from Sir Edward Walker may perhaps furnish evidence as to whether there was kindred between the loyalist cavalier, Sir Edward Walker, and the Presbyterian, Clement Walker. Lady B. Harley, the wife of the Presbyterian Colonel Harley, one of the old unsuccessful colonels or generals under Essex who shared the fate of Clement Walker under the regimen of Pride's Purge, writing to her son, says, 'I have no news at this time from London, except that Mr. Walker is still in prison.' Sir Edward appears to have been a military author, as Granger says that a book of his, entitled Historical Collections and Military Tactics, was printed in 1705 with his portrait prefixed. It was Sir Edward Walker to whom Sir Henry Vane at Newport addressed the often-quoted remark, that the commissioners of the Parliament had been much deceived in the character of the King, whom they had considered a weak man, 'but now that we find him to be a person of great parts of abilities, we must the more consider our own security, for he is only the more dangerous.' Sir Edward Walker was a man of tried integrity and considerable abilities. His journal during the Civil War, and its relation to Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, is discussed by Leopold von Ranke in the sixth volume of his History of England.

May 28, 1887.

THE STIPULATIONS OF THE TREATY OF
NEWPORT WITH
WITH REGARD TO THE
CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

IN a pamphlet written by Mr. Pye, the son-in-law of the late Bishop Wilberforce, on the subject of the Disestablishment of the National Church, reference is made to the concessions made by Charles I in the Treaty of Newport with regard to the Church of England. That pamphlet has been sent to a gentleman in the Isle of Wight, who, not being aware of the precise nature of the points yielded by the King on that occasion, has asked me what was the real state of the Many of your readers may like my friend have supposed that Charles I was so loyal a son of the Church as not to concede anything upon that point. It may therefore be of use to point out how far the King gave way to the Presbyterians during his negotiations at Newport in the Isle of Wight.

case.

The question of the Church was put foremost at Newport, as it had been previously advanced at Uxbridge and at Hampton Court, though Charles in spite of all his haggling gave way at Newport far more than he had done in former negotiations. The nature of these concessions will be best seen from the diary of each day's occurrences drawn up by Oudart, the King's attendant, at the time. This abstract of the propositions or demands of the two Houses, and his Majesty's concessions at the Treaty held at Newport, Isle of Wight, 1648,' has been published in Peck's Desiderata, to which reference was made in the letter on the Treaty of Newport, dated January 15, 1887 (See page 251).

(1) An Act for the repeal and nulling of all His Majesty's oaths, declarations, proclamations, &c., with a preface about the legality of the war on the Parliament's side.

Granted after a proviso made on both sides that nothing agreed in this Treaty should be binding in case the same break off.

(2) That the King should take and enjoin the Covenant.