32 OLD WARDOCJR CASTLE. 



store of pi'Dvisions. Within a fortnight the new Lord Arundell, 

 •who had come into the title hy his father's death at Oxford, after 

 he had heard of the loss of his castle, came and called on Ludlow 

 to surrender. This he refused to do, and Lord Arundell, not being 

 strong enough to begin an attack, withdrew for a time. As 

 Ludlow was in great danger of being cut off from the rest of the 

 Parliamentary army, he was granted permission to abandon the 

 castle if he saw fit to do so ; but thic order only quickened his zeal 

 for the cause, and he made use of the respite to procure ammuni- 

 tion from Southampton, and discovered some money which had 

 been walled up by the late holders. This was, no doubt, an 

 agreeable discovery to him; he expended part of it on his garrison, 

 keeping a strict account for the Parliament. The enemy were 

 now drawing near, and they managed to send a Shaftesbury boy, 

 twelve years old, as a spy into the castle. The .precocious young 

 gentleman is said to have previously made an attempt to poison 

 his grandfather, and was, so he afterwards said, whetlier truthfully 

 or not I cannot say, employed by Captain White to find out the 

 number of men in the garrison, poison the beer, the well, and the 

 arms, to blow up the ammunition, and then to steal a horse to 

 carry him back to Shaftesbury, for which services he was 

 promised the enormous sum of half-a-crown. He was admitted to 

 the castle, as his youth freed him from suspicion, and employed as 

 a turnspit. 



The enemy now appeared ; the first notice of their coming was a 

 stampede among the cattle. Ludlow and some of his men 

 endeavoured to turn the cattle back and were attacked. Ludlow 

 himself got into a hollow tree, but a bullet wounded him in the 

 leg and kept him, he says, in bed two days. The next disaster 

 was the bursting of a big gun in the castle roof. Some of the 

 garrison now became suspicious of the boy, and a rope with one 

 end round his neck and the other fastened to the end of a halbert 

 made him confess. He said he had " poisoned " the gun that had 

 burst and two others, but that his conscience had prevented him 

 from poisoning the provisions. The "poison" for the cannon is 



