"I do wish he could be more a king with his own troops; I am sure he hates this ravaging and marauding. But so many of the gentlemen serve, and, indeed, keep their regiments at their own cost, which makes them difficult to control. "_October_.--Prince Rupert has been driven from Worcester. If it were only a lesson in reverence and modesty for the prince, it would not so much matter, some think, that he left twenty good and true men dead there. The Earl of Essex occupies the city. He has been there a fortnight doing nothing. Some remnants of loyalty, we think, hinder him from coming to open collision. But what the use of collecting an army can be unless it is to fight, it is hard to see. The truth is, perhaps, that he begins to feel the peril of setting his haberdashers and grocers' 'prentices, commanded by a forsworn peer, against gentlemen's sons fighting under their king! Meantime, our army is gathering at last, and only too eager, they say, to give the rebels a lesson. Once for all, God grant it be a lesson once for all. Although the battles do not seem to me half so dreadful as these 'plunderings.' But perhaps that is because I never came near a battle; nor, indeed, can the oldest man in England remember any one that ever did on English soil." OLIVE DRAYTON'S RECOLLECTIONS. All through the summer the armies were gathering. In our seven eastern counties--Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Lincoln, Huntingdonshire, and Hertfordshire--called the associated counties, because bound by Mr. Hampden and Mr. Cromwell into an association for mutual defence, the King's Commission of Array and the Parliament's Ordinance of Militia clashed less than elsewhere. In August Mr. Cromwell seized a magazine of arms and ammunition at Cambridge. The stronghold of the Puritans was in these eastern regions; and except where a few Royalist gentlemen, like the Davenants, led off their retainers, the Parliament had, amongst us, mostly its own way. All the more reason, my Father said, for our men to risk their persons, since our homes were safer than elsewhere.