“The reign of rebellion soon commenced,--and Sir Roger, as a
distinguished loyalist, felt the severest scourge of its power.
Sequestrations and compositions,--fines for malignancy, and forced loans
for the support of a cause he detested,--drained the well-filled
coffers, and depressed the high spirit, of the aged loyalist. Domestic
inquietude was added to his other calamities. He had three
children.--His eldest son had fallen fighting in the King’s cause at the
battle of Newbury, leaving an infant daughter, then supposed the heiress
of immense wealth. His second son had embraced the Puritanic cause, and,
lapsing from error to error, married the daughter of an Independent,
whose creed he had adopted; and, according to the custom of those days,
fought all day at the head of his regiment, and preached and prayed to
them all night, in strict conformity with that verse in the psalms,
which served him alternately for his text and his battle-word--“Let the
praises of God be in their mouth, and a two-edged sword in their hands.”
This double exercise of the sword and the word, however, proved too much
for the strength of the saint-militant; and after having, during
Cromwell’s Irish campaign, vigorously headed the attack on Cloghan
Castle(5), the ancient seat of the O’Moores, princes of Leix,--and being
scalded through his buff-coat by a discharge of hot water from the
bartizan,--and then imprudently given the word of exhortation for an
hour and forty minutes to his soldiers, on the bare heath that
surrounded the castle, and under a drenching rain,--he died of a
pleurisy in three days, and left, like his brother, an infant daughter
who had remained in England, and had been educated by her mother. It was
said in the family, that this man had written the first lines of
Milton’s poem “on the new forcers of conscience under the Long
Parliament.” It is certain, at least, that when the fanatics who
surrounded his dying bed were lifting up their voices to sing a hymn, he
thundered with his last breath,
“Because ye have thrown off your prelate lord,
And with stiff vows renounce his Liturgy,
To seize the widowed w--e pluralitie,
From them whose sin ye envied not, abhorr’d,” &c.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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