The sequel of the story depicts, in small, what was then passing at large over much of the length and breadth of England. The farmers on the Conington estate were told, in the plainest of words, that if they did not pay their rents ‘to us at Huntingdon,’ their moveables would be seized and themselves treated as ‘delinquents.’ Execution, in those days, followed hard on process; and little difference was made, either in word or deed, at the farms and at the manor-house. On one morning, Lady COTTON was visited in her bedchamber—before she could dress—by five troopers, who, under her own eyes, broke open her drawers and trunks, and carried off what they thought meet. On another, one of Sir Thomas’ confidential servants received a similar visit; had his papers rifled in a like fashion, and his apparel stolen. At the stables and out-offices scarcely any three days passed, during the entire summer of 1643—from May to August—without some raid or other for plunder. For much of this there was scarcely the semblance or the pretext of a legal warrant. During those saturnalia of ‘liberty’ there was, virtually, no judge in England, and not a few men did whatsoever seemed good in their own eyes. Sir Thomas COTTON was old enough to remember the early stages of the long conflict of which—in 1643—this was seemingly the upshot. In the Parliament at Oxford he had sat beside his father and his father’s friends. His correspondence at this time—so far as it appears to have survived—deals merely with the passing events. It contains, I think, no disclosure of any reflections which may have crossed his mind on the principles which underlay them. He was probably shrewd enough to see already that the grossness of the current abuses of popular power carried with it no scintilla of valid blame upon the first leaders in that conflict—the real issues of which were still far off. What he, in common with so many of the best gentlemen in England, was now smarting under was the consequence rather of the royal triumphs of CHARLES’ earlier years, than of the royal defeats of his later years. Had the policy of Robert COTTON and of John ELIOT prevailed a quarter of a century sooner, there would (very probably) have been no county committees of sequestrators; no political scaffolds at Whitehall; no ruling of England by brute force under artificers suddenly transformed into generals; no wholesale massacres in Ireland, fraught with mischief for the whole empire during centuries to come.