A more important place was reserved for Merton College in the great national drama of the following century. Having been one of the Colleges in which members of the Legislature were lodged during the Oxford Parliament of 1625, and upon which the officers of a Parliamentary force were quartered in 1641, it was selected, in July 1643, for the residence of Queen Henrietta Maria, who then joined the King at Oxford, and remained there during the autumn and winter. She occupied the present dining-room and drawing-room of the Warden’s house, with the adjoining bedroom, still known as “the Queen’s Room.” The King, who held his Court at Christ Church, often came to visit her by a private walk opened for the purpose through Corpus and Merton gardens; and doubtless took part in many pleasant re-unions, of which history is silent, though a graphic picture of them is preserved in the pages of _John Inglesant_. It does not follow that Royalist opinions preponderated among the Merton Fellows, and there is clear evidence that both sides were strongly represented in the College. Sir Nathaniel Brent, the Warden, being a Presbyterian, and having openly espoused the Parliamentary cause, absented himself, and was deposed in favour of the illustrious Harvey, Charles I.’s own physician, recommended by the King, but duly elected by the College. Ralph Button, too, a leading Fellow and Tutor, quitted Oxford, when it became the Royal head-quarters, lest he should be expected to bear arms for the King. On the other hand, Peter Turner, one of the most eminent Mertonians of his day, accompanied a troop of Royalist horse as far as Stow in the Wold, was there captured, and was committed to Northampton Gaol. A third Fellow, John Greaves, Savilian Professor of Astronomy, drew up and procured signatures to a petition for Brent’s deposition; and two more, Fowle and Lovejoy, actually served under the Royal standard. But we search the College Register in vain for any formal resolution on the subject of the Civil War. It is certain that Merton gave up the whole of its plate for the King’s use in 1643, and no silver presented at an earlier date is now in the possession of the College. But it is interesting, if not consolatory, to know that in the previous reign a large quantity of old plate had been exchanged for new, so that, from an antiquarian point of view, the sacrifice made to loyalty was not so great as might be imagined. No College order directing the surrender is extant, and two of the Fellows afterwards mutually accused each other of having thus misappropriated the College property.