"Five thousand citizens of condition rode forth on horseback to meet them, among them many a citizen's wife, and all with bay and rosemary in their hats and caps, to do honour to those their enemies had vainly sought to shame. I trow brave Mrs. Bastwick, who stood tearless by her husband at the pillory, and who hath not been suffered to see him in his prison since, thought it no shame to unman him by shedding tears of joy to-day. Old gray-haired Mr. Leighton, moreover, bent with imprisonment and torture, and young John Lilburn, for whom Mr. Cromwell so fervently pleaded, were there to share the triumph, all marked with honourable scars from the Star-Chamber. This outside the city. And within, at Westminster, another victory--not a triumph but a victory--not festive, but solemn and tragical, as victories on battle-fields are wont to be. "This day at the bar of the House of Peers, about three of the clock in the afternoon, Mr. Pym, in the name of all the Commons of England, impeached Thomas, Earl of Strafford, of high treason. And this night Lord Strafford lodges in the Tower. "He is too stately a cedar that there should not be something great in his fall. "Scorning the Commons' message, with a proud-glooming countenance the earl made towards his place at the head of the board. But at once many bade him void the house. Sullenly he had to move to the door till he was called. There he, at whose door so many vainly waited, had to wait till he was summoned. Loftily he stood to hear the sentence of the House. He was commanded to kneel, and on his knees he was committed prisoner to the Keeper of the Black Rod. He would have spoken, but he who had silenced England for eleven years was sternly silenced now, and had to go without a word. In the outer room they demanded his sword. The carl cried to his serving-man with a loud voice to take my Lord-Lieutenant's sword. A crowd thronged the doors of the House as he stepped out to his coach. No fellow capped to him before whom yesterday not a noble in England would have stood uncovered with impunity. One cried to another, 'What is the matter?' 'A small matter, I warrant you,' quoth the earl. Coming to where he had left his coach he found it not, and had to walk back again through the gazing, gaping crowd. He was not suffered to enter his own coach, but was carried away a prisoner in that of the Keeper of the Black Rod. "And this night he lodges--scarce, I trow, rests or sleeps--in the Tower. Will the memory of his old companion in the days before he turned traitor to England and liberty, our noble murdered patriot Eliot, haunt his memory there? From his ghost the earl is safe enough. Such ghosts are in other keeping and other company. And for the earl's memory, darker recollections than that of Eliot with all his wrongs may well haunt it, if report speaks truth; recollections which the Old Tower itself, with all its chambers of death, can scarce outgloom.