Four days of prayer and pious exercises interrupted the operations of the besiegers, four days of “sleep,” says the Royalist chronicler, profoundly incredulous in the matter of Colonel Rigby’s piety. At the expiration of this time the garrison determined to waken the besiegers by an angry sortie; they spiked several of their cannon, and took a number of men prisoners. The Countess, proud of having left hardly any of her own men in the hands of the enemy, would have surrendered these in exchange; and she offered to render up all the prisoners she had made, if the Parliamentarians would release some of the King’s friends detained at Manchester, Preston, and Lancaster. This Colonel Rigby promised to do; but he was wanting to his promise. “It was part of their religion,” says the narrator of the siege of Lathom, “to observe faith neither with God nor men; and there ensued a sad massacre of the prisoners at Lathom, whom the Countess could neither keep or release.”[14] Footnote 14: Halsall. She was always engaged with her two daughters, Mary and Catherine, superintending everything, providing for the nourishment of the soldiers, seeing to the distribution of powder, tending the wounded, frequently upon the ramparts, always in chapel at prayer time, and smiling disdainfully when a bullet happened to fall into her sleeping-chamber. She did not even deign to change her apartment until she had received such a visit three or four times. “I will hold this house while there is a bit of wall to shelter me, and a corner of roof to cover my head,” she said, when she installed herself in the Eagle Tower in the middle of the building. A bomb had fallen and burst in the dining-hall during dinner, breaking all the casement panes, and smashing the furniture, but not wounding anyone. The children were beside their mother, but they had not stirred; scarcely had they changed colour. The Countess bestowed a glance of approval on them. That was all, and the repast was proceeded with. Sir Thomas Fairfax, who from the beginning had never been heartily with his task, discovered towards the end of April that his presence was indispensable at York; and he delegated the command of the siege of Lathom House to Colonel Rigby. With the departure of Fairfax, the entire face of matters was changed. Lady Derby had no longer to do with “a gentleman, a sincere patriot, but a well-reared man, with a noble heart, and of pure hands. Her chief assailant now was an old attorney, a wretched lawyer, a pilferer, a thief, a hypocrite, determined not to be beaten by a woman.” He so little understood his new trade, that he allowed his plentiful supply of powder to be so flung about and wasted, that the besieged were able to renew their supplies of it from the trenches.[15] Footnote 15: De Witt.