a Scottish Jesuit, he prefixed
a prayer, not very pertinent to the matter in hand, and containing
references to his family which were the occasion of some wit in his
adversary's answer; and appended what seems equally irrelevant, one of
his devout letters to Mrs. Bowes, with an explanatory preface. To say
truth, I believe he had always felt uneasily that the circumstances of
this intimacy were very capable of misconstruction; and now, when he was
an old man, taking "his good-night of all the faithful in both realms,"
and only desirous "that without any notable sclander to the evangel of
Jesus Christ, he might end his battle; for as the world was weary of
him, so was he of it";--in such a spirit it was not, perhaps, unnatural
that he should return to this old story, and seek to put it right in the
eyes of all men, ere he died. "Because that God," he says, "because that
God now in His mercy hath put an end to the battle of my dear mother,
Mistress Elizabeth Bowes, before that He put an end to my wretched life,
I could not cease but declare to the world what was the cause of our
great familiarity and long acquaintance; which was neither flesh nor
blood, but a troubled conscience upon her part, which never suffered her
to rest but when she was in the company of the faithful, of whom (from
the first hearing of the word at my mouth) she judged me to be one....
Her company to me was comfortable (yea, honourable and profitable, for
she was to me and mine a mother), but yet it was not without some cross;
for besides trouble and fashery of body sustained for her, my mind was
seldom quiet, for doing somewhat for the comfort of her troubled
conscience."[110] He had written to her years before from his first
exile in Dieppe, that "only God's hand" could withhold him from once
more speaking with her face to face; and now, when God's hand has indeed
interposed, when there lies between them, instead of the voyageable
straits, that great gulf over which no man can pass, this is the spirit
in which he can look back upon their long acquaintance. She was a
religious hypochondriac, it appears, whom, not without some cross and
fashery of mind and body, he was good enough to tend. He might have
given a truer character of their friendship had he thought less of his
own standing in public estimation, and more of the dead woman. But he
was in all things, as Burke said of his son in that ever memorable
passage, a public creature. He wished that ev