xxxii THE LIFE OF HARVEY. 



Harvey, however, did not long enjoy his new office or its 

 emoluments ; for Oxford having surrendered to the Parlia- 

 mentary forces under Fairfax the following year, Harvey, of 

 course, resigned his charge, and immediately afterwards betook 

 himself to London. Sir Nathaniel Brent, on the contrary, 

 returned to Oxford; and the star of the Parliamentarians 

 being now in the ascendant, Merton College was not slow to 

 reinstate its old Presbyterian warden in the room of its late 

 royalist head. 1 



From the date of the surrender of Oxford (July, 1646), 

 Harvey followed the fortunes of Charles no longer. Of his rea- 

 sons for quitting the service of his old master we know nothing. 

 He probably felt anxious for repose ; at sixty-eight, which was 

 Harvey's age, a man begins to find that an easy chair is a fitter 

 resting-place than the bare ground, a ceiled roof more suitable 

 covering than the open sky prospects which a continuance of 

 the strife held out. Harvey, besides, as we have seen, had no 

 stomach for contention in any shape or form, not even in the 



1 I find a kind of obloquy commonly thrown on the memory of Nathaniel Brent 

 for what is styled his desertion of Charles ; but he never deserted Charles ; he never 

 belonged to him. Brent, forsooth, had received knighthood at the royal hands in 

 former years ; but knighthoods were sometimes forced upon men in those days for 

 the sake of the fees, and often as means of attaching men of mark and likelihood. 

 The truth is that Brent, who was a profound lawyer and scholar, as well as a 

 traveller, was greatly attached to Archbishop Abbott, who had patronized and ad- 

 vanced him through the whole course of his life. In the differences that took place 

 between Abbott, in common with all moderate men, and Archbishop Laud, Brent 

 naturally sided with his friend, led to do so, however, not by blind attachment only, 

 but by natural constitution of mind, which appears to have abhorred the notion of a 

 theocracy in the civil government of England, and to have been unfitted to com- 

 prehend the divinity that some conceive to inhere in despotism. Brent was, in fact, 

 a man of such note, that Charles had tried to win him to his party many years before 

 by various attentions and the free gift of knighthood ; but this was in times when 

 men were not required to take a side, when they stood naturally neutral. When the 

 time came that it behoved him" to show under what flag he meant to fight, Brent 

 was not wanting to his natural bias and to independence. He therefore left Oxford 

 when it was taken possession of by the royal forces, among other adherents of the 

 popular cause, and was simply true to his principles, in nothing false to a patron 

 or benefactor. 



