He was removed the same day to the neighbouring Kelham Hall, where he formed the richest prize and the bitterest source of contention between the English and the Scots, and all but caused a further warfare. Eventually, the Scottish Commissioners, true to the national love of money, sold their principles and their prisoner for £400,000 and withdrew themselves and their forces across the border. The story ends tragically, in Westminster, with the execution of the King on January 30th, 1649. The Coffee Room of the “Saracen’s Head” is a beautiful apartment, formed out of two rooms, and rich in panelling and deeply recessed windows. The bedroom upstairs, where the King is said to have slept, is, in the same manner, formed by abolishing the partition that once made two rooms of it; and there they still show the pilgrims after things of sentimental and historic interest the ancient four-poster bed on which the King slept. This history seems to have greatly upset Dr. Selwyn, Bishop of New Zealand and afterwards of Lichfield, who stayed at the “Saracen’s Head” in 1858, and slept--or rather, failed to sleep--in this historic bed. For my part, although a pilgrim--and a sentimental one at that--I found the four-poster, despite its associations, as inviting to slumber as any other; but then, I had cycled eighty-one miles that day, and--not being a bishop--had nothing on my conscience. [Illustration: KING CHARLES’ BEDROOM, “SARACEN’S HEAD,” SOUTHWELL.] Dr. Selwyn was so obsessed with the memories of that room and the house that he arose in the middle of the night, and lighted his bedroom candle and wrote a long set of couplets, sentimental, pietistic, and very jingly and inferior. I have a mental picture of him sitting up in bed, or perhaps at the dressing-table in his night-shirt, gruesomely cold on that March night, running his fingers through his hair and gazing at the ceiling for the inspiration which does not seem to have come; for a more uninspired set of verses it would be difficult to find. But you shall judge: I cannot rest--for on the spot where I have made my bed, O’erwearied with the strife of State, a King hath laid his head. Thy sacred head, ill-fated Charles, hath lain where now I lie; And thou hast passed, in Southwell Inn, as sleepless night as I. I cannot rest--for o’er my mind come thronging full and fast, The stories of the olden time, the visions of the past. ’Twas here he rested ere he raised his standard for the fight; Here called on Heaven to help his cause, My God, defend the right! Here gather’d round him all the flow’r of England’s chivalry; And here the vanquished Monarch closed his days of liberty. I cannot rest--for Cromwell’s horse are neighing in mine ear; E’en in the Holy House of God their ringing hoofs I hear. Lord! wilt Thou once again endure it stable vile to be? The proud usurper’s charger rein’d fast by Thy sanctuary.