126 Review of Waylen’s History of Marlborough. 
soldier and agent of the ‘Rump,’ the same person who conducted 
the late King from Holmby. Houlbrook was suspected of being 
an agent of Prynne’s who had turned royalist at this time, and 
had been certainly in communication with the loyal blacksmith 
while passing through Marlborough. This was about the time of 
Sir G. Booth’s rising in Cheshire in 1659, when a few royalists did 
appear in arms near Malmesbury, but were speedily crushed. 
The shrewd smith seems by his own account to have been too 
eunning for his examiners, when, upon being arrested and taken to 
London, he was questioned before the council consisting of Brad- 
shaw, Disbrowe, and Sir Henry Vane. At all events he was dis- 
missed unpunished, and a few months later the monarchy being 
restored, he became the hero of his locality, and ends his exulting 
and triumphant narrative by the boast that 
‘‘ Now he lives in Marlborough town, 
And is a man of some renown,” 
In 1663 King Charles IL. was sumptuously entertained at Marl- 
borough by Lord Seymour, while on a western progress, accompanied 
by his Queen and his brother, the Duke of York. It was during 
this visit that Aubrey was summoned to the presence of royalty, 
and had the honour and gratification of playing cicerone to the 
Sovereign among the local antiquities of Avebury and Stonehenge. 
The King according to Aubrey’s relation, walked up to the top of 
Silbury Hill with the Duke of York, Dr. Charlton and Aubrey 
himself acting as their guides. 
Mr. Waylen takes the occasion of his narrative, having reached 
the period of the restoration, to give biographical sketches of 
several of the ejected Divines among the Wiltshire clergy, who, 
by the Act of Uniformity, were deprived of their preferment. 
The Wiltshire Commissioners for enforcing the execution of the 
act sat chiefly at Marlborough, and one of them was the famous 
Adoniram Byfield for some time Rector of Collingbourn Ducis, 
This portion of the work will offer matter of great interest to many 
readers. But we have not space here to dwell upon it further than 
by mentioning, as one among this ‘army of martyrs,’ the well- 
