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d then wasted them by license. His troops had no tents, no wagons, no military stores; they used those of the enemy. Clarendon says, that the King's cause labored under an incurable disease of want of money, and that the only cure for starvation was a victory. To say, therefore, that Rupert's men never starved is to say that they always conquered,--which, at this early period, was true.
He was the best shot in the army, and the best tennis-player among the courtiers, and Pepys calls him "the boldest attacker in England for personal courage." Seemingly without reverence or religion, he yet ascribed his defeats to Satan, and, at the close of a letter about a marauding expedition, requested his friend Will Legge to pray for him. Versed in all the courtly society of the age, chosen interpreter for the wooing of young Prince Charles and La Grande Mademoiselle, and mourning in purple, with the royal family, for Marie de Médicis, he could yet mingle in any conceivable company and assume any part. He penetrated the opposing camp at Dunsmore Heath as an apple-seller, and the hostile town of Warwick as a dealer in cabbage-nets, and the pamphleteers were never weary of describing his disguises. He was charged with all manner of offences, even to slaying children with cannibal intent, and only very carelessly disavowed such soft impeachments. But no man could deny that he was perfectly true to his word; he never forgot one whom he had promised to protect, and, if he had promised to strip a man's goods, he did it to the uttermost farthing. And so must his pledge of vengeance be redeemed to-night; and so, riding eastward, with the dying sunlight behind him and the quiet Chiltern hills before, through air softened by the gathering coolness of these midsummer eyes, beside clover fields, and hedges of wild roses, and ponds white with closing water-lilies, and pastures sprinkled with meadow-sweet, like foam,--he muses only of the clash of sword and the sharp rattle of shot, and all the passionate joys of the coming c