In the course of time, since the murder of the Duke of Buckingham, the affairs of the country had gone from bad to worse, and year by year the breach between Royalists and Parliamentarians widened. Outwardly the kingdom not only seemed to prosper, but was in a manner flourishing. Her possessions abroad were increased by new colonies, and her harbours were filled with merchant ships sailing from all parts of the world. Art and learning prospered exceedingly. In the midst of the turmoil of ribaldry and fanaticism of the extreme parties, and the smoke and luridness of battle-fields, learning and civilisation were steadily advancing. Like Archimedes, men of science, painters and scholars, worked on, some of them amid the din of battle; and, with a happier fate than his, lived on, for the most part into calmer days. Others, sheltered in the retirement of country homes, and recking little of papist or puritan shibboleths, wrote and thought, and to this day their work remembers them. Trade flourished, and diversions and junketings were in nowise neglected. Amid all the royal troubles, courtly state was not only well, but splendidly maintained. A refinement and dignity prevailed in Charles’s Court which fascinated his loyal subjects; and the beauty of the Queen, and the gracious if always melancholy aspect of the King, won hearts, and intellects to boot, which had originally inclined to the side of his disaffected subjects. The French nature of Henrietta Maria delighted in masques and gaieties and music; and though etiquette and sobriety ruled the King’s household, dulness found no part there. Often the people had the chance of looking on their sovereigns as their gilded barge rowed down the river from London to Hampton Court, to the music of lutes and viols, and sweet choiring voices mingling with the song of the birds, not yet driven hence by the smoke and screech of an overcrowded city. From Westminster Stairs on one side, and Lambeth Palace on the other, the banks were still open, clothed with grass and foliage, and dotted here and there with gabled and timbered dwellings, whose gardens glowed with fragrant flowers and ripening fruit. Tothill Fields were rookeries then, as now; but the birds were of another feather. Battersea Fields on the south side still grew simples and herbs for the medicaments of London apothecaries—the “Physic Garden” of Sir Hans Sloane opposite being but a concentrated, double-distilled essence of these older sources. Beyond and behind lay the Five Fields, soon to become notorious for infesting footpads and highwaymen; for the numbers of the gentlemen of the road increased with alarming speed, as the means of travelling improved and increasing opportunities made more and more thieves. Leaving the immediate environing of London, the village of Chelsea reflected its stately mansions and terraces in the clear Thames reaches. And so, onward by the winding stream, till under the shadows of fair Richmond