peace to Britannia, 'and grant that each honest shepherd may again sit
under his own vine and fig-tree, and feed his own flock,' when the King
comes, no doubt. 'About' 1646 Walton married Anne, half-sister of Bishop
Ken, a lady 'of much Christian meeknesse.' Sir Harris Nicolas thinks
that he only visited Stafford occasionally, in these troubled years. He
mentions fishing in 'Shawford brook'; he was likely to fish wherever
there was water, and the brook flowed through land which, as Mr. Marston
shows, he acquired about 1656. In 1650 a child was born to Walton in
Clerkenwell; it died, but another, Isaac, was born in September 1651. In
1651 he published the _Reliquiae Wottonianae_, with a Memoir of Sir Henry
Wotton. The knight had valued Walton's company as a cure for 'those
splenetic vapours that are called hypochondriacal.'

Worcester fight was on September 3, 1651; the king was defeated, and
fled, escaping, thanks to a stand made by Wogan, and to the loyalty of
Mistress Jane Lane, and of many other faithful adherents. A jewel of
Charles's, the lesser George, was preserved by Colonel Blague, who
intrusted it to Mr. Barlow of Blore Pipe House, in Staffordshire. Mr.
Barlow gave it to Mr. Milward, a Royalist prisoner in Stafford, and he,
in turn, intrusted it to Walton, who managed to convey it to Colonel
Blague in the Tower. The colonel escaped, and the George was given back
to the king. Ashmole, who tells the story, mentions Walton as 'well
beloved of all good men.' This incident is, perhaps, the only known
adventure in the long life of old Izaak. The peaceful angler, with a
royal jewel in his pocket, must have encountered many dangers on the
highway. He was a man of sixty when he published his _Compleat Angler_
in 1653, and so secured immortality. The quiet beauties of his manner in
his various biographies would only have made him known to a few students,
who could never have recognised Byron's 'quaint, old, cruel coxcomb' in
their author. 'The whole discourse is a kind of picture of my own