This ancient prison had been, until that time, a place of durance for persons sentenced by the Council Table, then called the Court of the Star Chamber--so that Howell had the additional vexation of being apprehended by one of the warrants which he would himself have issued had the troubles of the Rebellion never commenced;--had things remained as they were when Lord Surrey suffered from its pestilent atmosphere, and when the importunate Lady Dorset was silenced in what was truly called by Surrey, “that noisome place.” The Star Chamber was, however, it appears, abolished before the time when James Howell, descending Whitehall stairs, was rowed up the river Fleet, to a gate as portentous in its aspect and associations as the Traitor’s-gate at the Tower; and thence conducted to what was afterwards called the Common side of the prison.[239] When the letter-writer entered its miserable courts, the Fleet had lost the dignity of a state prison for minor political offences, and was a place for debtors, and divided into two sides, the Master’s side and the Common side. In the Common side, to complete the horrors, was a strong-room, or vault, which has been described “to be like those in which the dead are interred, and wherein the bodies of persons dying are usually deposited till the coroner’s inquest has passed them.” Footnote 239: See Cunningham, vol. i., p. 311. The Author cannot avoid expressing obligations to this excellent work. Howell, as he entered the Common side, probably thought that he might live to be one of the mute inhabitants of that ghastly chamber--for he was not only suspected by the Parliament, but in debt. Wood, indeed, ascribes his captivity wholly to the curse of debt, brought on by his own extravagance; and since Howell, like many public men of the day, had no “income but such as he scrambled for,” and since it was an age of careless expenditure, Wood is, perhaps, in this statement, as he generally is, correct. The character of the man of desultory life rose under the trial. During five years the once free and happy James Howell lay in that den of misery--rendered more miserable by all that was going on in the world, of which he heard enough in his durance, perhaps too much. During that period Charles was beheaded; the gay precincts of Whitehall were stained with the blood of one whom Howell had reverenced as a royalist, but whose advisers, Buckingham, Laud, and Strafford, he had censured, as a man of the world, of sense and candour, could not fail to do. Whilst he lay in the place where Falkland had been sent for sending a challenge--where Prynne had paid the penalty for his “Histriomastix,” Howell’s thoughts no doubt reverted to the pleasant days of Charles’s youth, in the fields near Madrid, where plumed knights ran a course--or to the arena of the bull-fight. He dreamed, perhaps, of the incomparable Infanta, or of the stately Philip, and his gallant, flattered, sanguine English guests.