HISTORY OF HARTING. 8$ 



When we next hear of Sir Edward Ford he is found 

 to possess interest and favour with Cromwell and the 

 Parliament. It is probable that from his father's side 

 he would inherit the traditionary popular instincts of 

 the Ford's: and from his mother, the Caryll, a loyalty 

 for King Charles. He appears probably from this 

 cause to have had high friends on both sides; but he 

 has never been charged of being a Trimmer. " Rune- 

 gado Foord," as the Roundhead newspapers dubbed 

 him at Arundel, simply meant that he had been im- 

 prisoned early in the war, and had managed to escape. 

 He had married Sarah Ireton, sister to Ireton, Crom- 

 well's lieutenant,* a Derbyshire heiress, and when Henry 

 Ireton married Cromwell's daughter, Sir Edward Ford 

 afterwards became connected by family ties with old 

 Noll, the Protector himself. 



King Charles L, sold by the Scots for ^"40x3,000 

 (1646), was given up to the Parliament and kept 

 prisoner at Hampton Court (1647 ). Ashburnham, who 

 was helping the king's escape to Tichfield, on the way 

 to Carisbrooke, communicated with Cromwell and 

 Ireton through Sir Edward Ford, "who had married 

 Ireton's sister, but had been himself an officer in the 

 king's army from the beginning of the war, and was a 

 gentleman of good meaning, though not able to fathom 

 the reserved and dark designs of his brother-in-law," 

 Ireton. 



Sir Edward Ford, however, was best known to his 

 immediate posterity as an engineer, machinist, and 

 ardent disciple of the Baconian philosophy. Camden 

 calls him " an ingenious mechanical gentleman ; " and 

 Wood in his " Athenae/'f enlarging upon Camden, in 

 some measure repays the debt which the succeeding 

 generations of Londoners felt to be due to Ford. 

 " Edward Ford of Up Park was a most ingenious 

 mechanist, and being encouraged by Oliver, and 

 invited by the citizens of London, in 1656 he raised 

 the Thames water into all the highest streets of the 

 Clarendon, x. 128. t Wood's " Athene," I, 469. 



