Clarendon quietly indicts Sir John Danvers as a “proud, formal, weak man,” such as Cromwell “employed and contemned at once.” George Bate gives him a harder character, saying that he “proved his brother to be a delinquent in the Rump Parliament, whereby he might overthrow his will, and so compass the estate himself. He sided with the sectarian party, was one of the King’s judges, and lived afterwards some years in his sin, without repentance.” But the same accuser adds the saving fact that Dr. Thomas Fuller, like Aubrey, was Sir John’s friend, and, by his desire, preached many times at Chelsea, “where, I am sure, he was instructed to repent of his misguided and wicked consultations in having to do with the murther of that just man.” One half surmises that had the preliminaries of the great struggle occurred in her time Magdalen Herbert’s rather austere and advanced standards of right would have stood it out, despite her traditions, for the Commons against _Carolus Agnus_.[18] But that would have been a very different matter from sharing the feelings of the crude advocates of revolution and regicide. What a misconception of her spotless motives must she have borne, had others found her in agreement with her vagabond lord, who treated politics as he treated the sacrament of matrimony, purely as a makeshift and a speculation! He was no raw-head-and-bloody-bones, this Roderigo-like Briton who won the approval of Lord Bacon, and whom George Wither thanks for “those pleasurable refreshments often vouchsafed”; and whom very different men, such as George Herbert and Walton[19] and peaceable Fuller loved. He was a comely creature of some parts, a luckless worldling anxious to feather his own nest, and driven by timidity and the desire of gain into treacheries against himself. His short, thin, and “fayre bodie,” common, as George Herbert would have us imply, to all who bore his name, his elegance, his hospitality, and his devotedness to his elderly wife, carried him off handsomely in the eyes of her jealous circle. His house in Chelsea, commemorated now by Danvers Street, adjoined that which had been Sir Thomas More’s, and was presumably a part of the same estate. All around it, and due to its master’s genuine enthusiasm, lay the first Italian garden planted in England; and there, rolling towards the Thames, were the long glowing flower-beds and green orchard-alleys, which were also the “_horti deliciæ dominæ_” recalled thrice in the music of filial sorrow. This home of Magdalen Danvers was pulled down, and built over, in 1716. Within its unfallen walls, where she spent her serene married life, and where she died, she had time to think, nevertheless, that she stood, towards evening, in the ways of folly, and that hers was one of those little incipient domestic tragedies which must always look amusing, even to a friend. FOOTNOTES: