ice himself was squeezed through the aperture. Nobody appeared to
oppose their search; but preparations to prevent it had evidently been
made with great care; for Chamberlain wrote that they had to "brake
open divers doors."

Room after room was searched in vain; but, at last, Lady Elizabeth and
Frances were discovered hidden in a small closet. Both the father and
the mother clasped their daughter in their arms almost at the same
moment. The daughter clung to the mother; the father clung to the
daughter. Sir Edward pulled; Lady Elizabeth pulled; and, after a
violent struggle between the husband and the wife, Coke succeeded in
wrenching the weeping girl from her mother's arms.[17] Without a
moment's parley with his defeated antagonist, he dragged away his
prey, took her out of the house, placed her on horseback behind one of
her half-brothers, and started off with his whole cavalcade for his
house at Stoke Pogis.

The writer is old enough to have seen farmers' wives riding behind
their husbands, on pillions. Most uncomfortable sitting those pillions
appeared to afford, and he distinctly remembers the rolling movements
to which the sitters seemed to be subjected. This was when the pace
was at a walk or a slow jog. But the unfortunate Frances must have
been rolled and bumped at speed; for there was a pursuit. In his
already quoted letter to Carleton, Chamberlain says that Sir Edward
Coke's "lady was at his heels, and, if her coach had not held"--_i.e._,
stuck in the mud of the appalling roads of the period--"in the
pursuit after him, there was like to be strange tragedies." Miss
Coke must have been long in forgetting that enforced ride of at least
a dozen long miles, on a pillion behind a brother, and as a prisoner
surrounded by an armed force.

Campbell states that, on reaching Stoke Pogis, Coke locked his
daughter "in an upper chamber, of which he himself kept the key."
Possibly, Sir John Villiers' mother, Lady Compton, may have been
there, in readiness to receive her; for Chamberlain says that Coke
"delivered his daughter to the Lady Compton, Sir John's mother; but,
the next day, Edmondes, Clerk of the Council, was sent with a warrant
to have the custody of the lady at his own house." This was probably
Bacon's doing.

Among the manuscripts at Trinity College, Cambridge, is a letter[18]
written from the Inner Temple to Mrs. Ann Sadler, a daughter of Sir
Edward Coke by his first wife. From this we learn that, on find