few
labourers to be seen in the fields consisted of the aged, the sick, or
those who were disabled; and these no longer exhibited the cheerful
aspect of happy industry, but shewed sorrow in their faces, and
wretchedness in their garb. In towns, the more respectable inhabitants
were dressed in mourning, thus announcing, that the death of some
relation gave them a deep private interest in the public sorrow. The
unemployed manufacturers crowded the streets, eagerly perusing libellous
pamphlets, or diurnal chronicles, disputing furiously on points which
none could clearly explain or indeed comprehend, asking for news as if
it were bread, and shewing by the lean ferocity of their faces, and the
squalid negligence of their attire, that from unpitied poverty sprung
all the virulent passions of rage, envy, revenge, and disobedience. By
such as these, the detachment that escorted the prisoners were received
with transport as friends and deliverers, who, when their glorious toils
were completed, would transform the present season of woe into a golden
age of luxurious enjoyment and unvaried ease; and as the rebel troops
were well furnished with money, and supplied with every necessary out of
the royal magazines, which were seized in the beginning of the contest,
they were enabled to pay for all the articles of subsistence, and thus
acquired a popularity which the strict discipline preserved by their
officers tended to increase. Hence at every town they passed through,
they were not only hailed with acclamations, but received an
augmentation of force by the recruits who joined them, under a certainty
of receiving pay and cloathing.

Beside the mortification of thus viewing the strength of a party whom
they hoped to find weak, disjointed, and inefficient, our young captives
had the misery of hearing the royal cause every where vilified, and the
Sovereign's personal character traduced. Among the King's misfortunes
his inability to pay his army, or to supply it with necessaries, was
most injurious to his success. His forces were chiefly raised and kept
together by the private fortunes and influence of loyal noblemen and
gentry, many of whom, even members of the house of Peers, served as
privates, receiving neither honour nor reward, except the generous
satisfaction of conscious duty. The situation of those who ranged
themselves on this side without funds for their own support, was most
precarious, the King being compelled to tax the f