that the politics of Major Bridgenorth began, on many points, to
assimilate themselves to his own. As a Presbyterian, he was not an
utter enemy to monarchy, and had been considerably shocked at the
unexpected trial and execution of the King; as a civilian and a man of
property, he feared the domination of the military; and though he
wished not to see Charles restored by force of arms, yet he arrived at
the conclusion, that to bring back the heir of the royal family on
such terms of composition as might ensure the protection of those
popular immunities and privileges for which the Long Parliament had at
first contended, would be the surest and most desirable termination to
the mutations in state affairs which had agitated Britain. Indeed, the
Major's ideas on this point approached so nearly those of his
neighbour, that he had well-nigh suffered Sir Geoffrey, who had a
finger in almost all the conspiracies of the Royalists, to involve him
in the unfortunate rising of Penruddock and Groves, in the west, in
which many of the Presbyterian interest, as well as the Cavalier
party, were engaged. And though his habitual prudence eventually kept
him out of this and other dangers, Major Bridgenorth was considered
during the last years of Cromwell's domination, and the interregnum
which succeeded, as a disaffected person to the Commonwealth, and a
favourer of Charles Stewart.

But besides this approximation to the same political opinions, another
bond of intimacy united the families of the Castle and the Hall. Major
Bridgenorth, fortunate, and eminently so, in all his worldly
transactions, was visited by severe and reiterated misfortunes in his
family, and became, in this particular, an object of compassion to his
poorer and more decayed neighbour. Betwixt the breaking out of the
Civil War and the Restoration, he lost successively a family of no
less than six children, apparently through a delicacy of constitution,