November 28th.--The king goes off to Oxford, and henceforth they are left to Sir Arthur's tender mercies: about this time we find a pathetic entry: "A noate of all such charges as have been disembursed, since the King's Majestie came first to Reading, for provisions, clothes for the soldiers, and for the king's own use;" being £6697, truly a prodigious sum for those times; but it is speedily followed by fresh requisitions. As the year opens it appears probable that Reading will be attacked, and so on 3rd March, 1543, a letter arrives from the king, ordering Sir Arthur to provision Reading for three months, to provision Greenlands a fortified country house just below Henley, to send out scouting parties to watch the enemy, and to prevent carriage of supplies to London. This rouses the Parliament. Essex is ordered to march on Oxford, taking Reading in his way; but the governor now is all ready for him. Mapledurham House and Cawsham have now been made into fortified out-posts, and, on the arrival of Essex's "trumpet," Colonel Codrington in his diary tells us the governor returned the stubborn answer that "he would either keep the town or die inside it!" There can be no doubt he would have made a resolute resistance; he was a brave and capable soldier, but, being wounded in the head by a tile dislodged by a cannon ball, on the third day of the siege, his place was taken by a Colonel R. Fielding, as next in seniority. The sad history of the gallant soldier is worth following further. At the capitulation he went to Oxford; there he managed to lose a leg, and presently turns up in Ireland, unluckily for him, at Drogheda. Cromwell storms, determined, after the inhuman massacres of Protestants, on making a harsh example of the Irish garrison, and Sir Arthur, now in command there, strange to say, has his brains knocked out with his own wooden leg, which the soldiers imagined was filled with gold pieces--they did find two hundred about his person--the very thing which Hood imagined long after of his unhappy heroine. "Gold, still gold! hard, yellow, and cold, For gold she had lived, and she died for gold, For a golden weapon had killed her! And the jury, its forman a gilder, They brought it in a Felo di Se Because her own leg had killed her! Price of many a crime untold, Good or bad, a thousand fold, How widely gold's agencies vary! To save, to curse, to ruin, to bless, As even its minted coins express, Now stamped with the image of Good Queen Bess, And now of a bloody Mary!" There is a portrait of Sir A. Aston at the Reading Public Library, a middle aged man with a large square chin and most determined expression. Sir Jacob Astley, after governor here, and made Baron Reading, is also in the Library, a pleasant looking old gentleman.