In July an incident showed, my Father said, as much as anything could, how entirely the king's mind was unchanged, and how "thorough" would have been the tyranny established in his hands, though Laud, and Strafford, and the Queen, and every violent councillor, had been removed. My old friend, Dr. Bastwick, the physician, was seized by the royal forces at Worcester while engaged in levying men for the Parliament, under Earl Stamford, who retreated. It was with the greatest difficulty that one of the judges restrained the king from having him hanged on the spot although there could be no reason why he should have been sentenced with this exceptional severity except the fact that he had already been scourged, pilloried, and maimed by the cruelty of the Star-Chamber. The deep distrust which such indications of the king's true mind produced, cost him more than many lost battles. They tended to inspire such resistances as that made a few weeks afterwards by the brave commoners of Coventry, when, without garrison, without engineers, with no defence but their feeble ancient walls, they shut their gates in the Sovereign's face, defied the royal forces, and when the breach was made by artillery in the old tottering walls, barricaded the streets with barrows and carts, made a sally, carried the nearest lines, seized the guns, and turned them against the besiegers, compelling them at last to retire baffled. But it was Prince Rupert, "the Prince Robber," who, perhaps, more than any, turned the hearts of the people against the Sovereign who could use such an instrument. Trained in the cruel school of the Palatinate wars, he had read its terrible lessons the wrong way; having learned from the sufferings of his father's subjects not pity, but a savage recklessness of suffering. He brought home to hundreds of burning villages and plundered lonely farms, which no Parliamentary remonstrances or declarations would have reached, the conviction that the king looked on his people, not as a flock, but as mere live-stock on an estate, to be kept up if profitable and manageable, and if not to be sacrificed to any system of management which gave less trouble and brought in more profit. "_Whose own the sheep ore not_," was written in the ashes of every home ruined by Prince Rupert in the king's service. With these deeds the people contrasted the well-kept orders of the Parliament to Lord Essex. "You shall carefully restrain all impieties, profaneness, and disorders, violence, insolence, and plundering in your soldiers, as well by strict and severe punishment of such offences as by all others means which you in your wisdom shall think fit." And we grew to think that whoever the true shepherd and king of the people might be, it was scarcely one who employed the wolf for a sheepdog.