n." On the 18th of December he was
in charge of the gentleman-usher of the Lords on impeachment of high
treason. In his company the Archbishop returned for a few hours to see
his house for the last time, "for a book or two to read in, and such
papers as pertained to my defence against the Scots;" really to burn,
says Prynne, most of his privy papers. There is the first little break
in the boldness with which till now he has faced the popular ill-will,
the first little break too of tenderness, as though the shadow of what
was to come were softening him, in the words that tell us his last
farewell: "I stayed at Lambeth till the evening, to avoid the gaze of
the people. I went to evening prayer in my chapel. The Psalms of the day
(Ps. 93 and 94) and cap. 50 of Isaiah gave me great comfort. God make me
worthy of it, and fit to receive it. As I went to my barge hundreds of
my poor neighbours stood there and prayed for my safety and return to my
house. For which I bless God and them."

So Laud vanished into the dark December night never to return. The house
seems to have been left unmolested for two years. Then "Captain Browne
and his company entered my house at Lambeth to keep it for public
service." The troopers burst open the door "and offered violence to the
organ," but it was saved for the time by the intervention of their
captain. In 1643 the zeal of the soldiers could no longer be restrained.
Even in the solitude and terror of his prison in the Tower Laud still
feels the bitterness of the last blow at the house he held so dear. "May
1. My chapel windows defaced and the steps torn up." But the crowning
bitterness was to come. If there were two men living who had personal
wrongs to avenge on the Archbishop, they were Leighton and Prynne. It
can only have been as a personal triumph over their humbled persecutor
that the Parliament appointed the first custodian of Lambeth and gave
Prynne the charge of searching the Archbishop's house and chambers for
materials in support of the impeachment. Of the spirit in which Prynne
executed his task, the famous 'Canterburie's Doom,' with the Breviat of
Laud's life which preceded it, still gives pungent evidence. By one of
those curious coincidences that sometimes flash the fact upon us through
the dust of old libraries, the copy of this violent invective preserved
at Lambeth is inscribed on its fly-leaf with the clear, bold "Dum spiro
spero, C.R." of the King himself. It is hard to pic