88 HISTORY OF HARTING. 



unaccountably passed over in the " Lives of Great 

 Engineers," would have become national. He was 

 certainly " First Lord of the Works " to Cromwell and 

 Charles II. As it is, while we look at his arched 

 tombstone in our chancel, which perhaps a severe 

 spirit of Puritanism has never allowed to receive its 

 recumbent figure, we may think of him resting, after a 

 well spent life of sixty-five years, in honoured peace in 

 the place in which he was born ; a man of universally 

 high character and usefulness : called to take a high 

 part in civil war, but with strong sympathies to either 

 side the king's soldier and fellow-sufferer, and yet a 

 kinsman to Cromwell the college friend and mathe- 

 matical pupil of Chillingworth, and yet the husband 

 of Sarah Ireton the unfortunate and yet stainless 

 defender of Arundel a man who could satisfy even so 

 strong a partisan as Clarendon that he "was of honesty 

 and courage and good meaning," honoured alike by 

 Charles I., Cromwell, and Charles II., because his guile- 

 less and simple nature lent itself to no intrigue a 

 patriot who, when the king's cause failed, and the fine 

 for unswerving loyalty had been paid, cheerfully de- 

 voted the energies of his active and practical mind 

 under Cromwell and the Restoration to the material 

 welfare of the people an enlightened advocate of 

 pure water supply to London as the best preventative 

 of the terrible Plague a practical philanthropist in 

 the dandy days of Charles II. a benefactor for many 

 generations to the poor of London a man who lived 

 to sixty-five, and yet never had an old age. 



Of all the sons of Harting there is none whose rest 

 is more honourable than that of her old master, a 

 simple-hearted gentle toiler for the many, Edward Ford. 



after the Great Fire the sum of Thirty shillings, 24th May, 1687. 

 See Register of Briefs at the end of Register No. II, which also 

 contains other curiosities, viz., collections or Briefs made for the 

 refugees after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and for re- 

 demption of Christians enslaved by the Turk. 



