124 COACHING DAYS AND COACHING WAYS 



deferred. Here he sought a last interview and explana- 

 tion with James, who sent word that he was sorry, but 

 was hunting ; here he tried to gain time for his suit 

 (foreseeing the Tower at the end of his journey to London) 

 by feigning sickness by the aid of a French quack ; failing 

 of course to move his drunken and hunting master's 

 compassion in the least ; here he wrote his apology for 

 the voyage to Guinea ; and hence he started on his 

 last journey from Salisbury to London, the last of many 

 journeys up the Exeter Road, from that west country 

 which saw his birth — as it saw the birth of the best and 

 greatest of English manhood — which fed his stirring 

 genius with many a wild tale of sea romance and adven- 

 ture, and whose pleasant green hollows " crowned with 

 summer sea," still hold the decapitated head, in which 

 that wonderful, wild, restless brain throbbed, and schemed, 

 and laboured. 



It is a long way from Raleigh to Charles II., though 

 not so far from Raleigh to Cromwell, who was at 

 Salisbury and on the Exeter Road on October 17, 

 1646, after the taking of Basing House, as I have 

 already remarked. The merry monarch was here twice, 

 but on neither occasion, I suspect, was he peculiarly 

 merry ; for after the battle of Worcester, when he lay 

 concealed near the town for a few days, and his com- 

 panions used to meet at the King's Arms in John 

 Street, to plan his flight, the Ironsides were much 

 too close on his track to allow opportunity for jesting ; 

 and when he came here as king in 1665, all but the 

 most forced mirth was banished from a court which 

 dreaded every day to be stricken by the plague. 



I have already recalled the fact that it was from 

 Salisbury that James II. fell back upon Andover, 

 when the army which he had concentrated there to bar 

 the way of William of Orange, departed on the more 

 pastoral errand of conducting him in triumph to London ; 

 and this episode in the Rcxokition closes, I think, 

 Salisbury's historical account, which I am rather glad 



