Whether it would even have yielded when it did is more than questionable, had it not been for an Irish soldier, “the one traitor the garrison contained, who swam the moat and informed the enemy of the deplorable condition of the besieged—at the end of their food and ammunition.” The matter was now easy to compass—brute strength against weakness. The doors were burst open, the house sacked, its towers thrown down, and its walls levelled with the ground. Three little pieces of the battlements alone remained to tell of the long, brave defence it had made. Cromwell’s sequestrators sold its doors, its floors, and all else of it, and the receipts of sale are still to be found in the Ormskirk parish records.[19] Finally, the peasants of West Derby were invited to take away the stones and timbers without any charge.[20] Footnote 19: Seacome. Footnote 20: Heywood. “Nothing remained of the old place,” says a later chronicler, “along whose banks knights and ladies have a thousand times made resort, harking to stories as varied as those of Boccaccio. The Maudlin Well, where the pilgrim and the lazar devoutly cooled their parched lips—the brewing-house—the training round—all now are changed, and a modern mansion and a new possessor fill their places.” The new mansion which a later Earl raised upon the honoured ashes of the old is a splendid house; but with it our story has not to do. The noble presence of Charlotte de la Trémoille never graced its Ionic colonnades and spacious chambers; and it is to her once more that we will turn, in her old feudal stronghold in the Kingdom of Man. Yet one more word, before biding adieu to Lathom, as to the Maudlin Well mentioned. A question arises which suggests itself for antiquarian solving. In later times a “Lathom Spaw” came into some repute in that neighbourhood. Was this “Spaw” the old Maudlin Well of the Stanleys’ famous home? For the first time after several years, Charlotte de la Trémoille’s correspondence recommences. Probably from time to time, during the siege of Lathom, and the first year or two of her sojourn in the Isle of Man, she wrote to her relatives in France, but these letters have been lost or stolen. It is only in the month of August 1646 that she writes from the Isle of Man in no small anxiety. Her eldest son, Lord Strange, had secretly left the island to go, no one knew whither. “We are told that he is in Ireland,” she writes to her sister-in-law, “but the letters he left behind with us say that he was going to you.” She adds that if this be the case, and the Duchess receives him graciously, forgiveness from both parents for his escapade will not be long withheld from him.