He had lodged, prior to the battle, in the house of a Mr. Spilsbury, “a very honest sort of man, who had an exceeding good woman to his wife;” and his effects, consisting of “scarlet cloaks, buff suits, arms of all sorts, and seven large portmantles full of precious commodity,” were stored in an upper chamber. Three of the “portmantles,” as has been said already, were filled with manuscripts in folio, “to the quantity of six score and eight quires and a half, divided into six hundred forty and two quinternions, the quinternion consisting of five sheets, and the quire of five-and-twenty.” There were, besides, law-papers and bonds to the value of about three thousand pounds sterling. After the total rout of the king’s forces, the soldiers of Cromwell went about ransacking the houses; and two of them having broken into Mr. Spilsbury’s house, and finding their way to the upper chamber, the scarlet cloaks, the buff suits, the seven “portmantles,” and the hundred manuscripts fell a prey to their rapacity. The latter had well-nigh escaped, for at first the soldiers merely scattered them over the floor; but reflecting, after they had left the chamber, on the many uses to which they might be applied, they returned and bore them out to the street. Some they carried away with them, some they distributed among their comrades, and the people of the town gathered up the rest. One solitary quinternion, containing part of the preface to the Universal Language, found its way into the kennel, and was picked out two days after by a Mr. Broughton, “a man of some learning,” who restored it to Sir Thomas. His Genealogy was rescued from the tobacco-pipes of a file of musketeers, by an officer of Colonel Pride’s regiment, and also restored. But the rest he never saw. He was committed to the Tower, with some of the other Scottish gentlemen taken at Worcester; and a body of English troops were garrisoned in the old castle, “upon no other pretence but that the stance thereof was stately, and the house itself of a notable good fabric and contrivance.” So oppressive were their exactions, that though he had previously derived from his lands an income of nearly a thousand pounds per annum (no inconsiderable sum in the days of the Commonwealth), not a single shilling found its way to the Tower.