When first the war broke out she was living happily in her pleasant
home with her husband and children; but when King Charles raised his
standard at Nottingham, all this comfort and happiness had to be
given up. Sir Walter Woodley joined the royal army, and it soon
became unsafe for his wife and children to remain at home, so that
they were forced to go about with him, and suffer all the hardships
of the sieges and battles. Lady Woodley was never strong, and her
health was very much hurt by all she went through; she was almost
always unwell, and if Rose, though then quite a child, had not shown
care and sense beyond her years for the little ones, it would be hard
to say what would have become of them.

Yet all she endured while dragging about her little babies through
the country, with bad or insufficient food, uncomfortable lodgings,
pain, weariness and anxiety, would have been as nothing but for the
heavy sorrows that came upon her also. First she lost her only
brother, Edmund Mowbray, and in the battle of Naseby her husband was
killed; besides which there were the sorrows of the whole nation in
seeing the King sold, insulted, misused, and finally slain, by his
own subjects. After Sir Walter's death, Lady Woodley went home with
her five younger children to her father's house at Forest Lea; for
her husband's estate, Edmund's own inheritance, had been seized and
sequestrated by the rebels. She was the heiress of Forest Lea since
the loss of her brother, but the old Mr. Mowbray, her father, had
given almost all his wealth for the royal cause, and had been
oppressed by the exactions of the rebels, so that he had nothing to
leave his daughter but the desolate old house and a few bare acres of
land. For the shelter, however, Lady Woodley was very thankful; and
there she lived with her children and a faithful servant, Deborah,
whose family had always served the Mowbrays, and who would not desert