Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 32.djvu/23

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Lambert
17
Lambert

had taken no part in the king's trial, and so escaped with comparitively light punishment. The commons included him among the twenty culprits who were to be excepted from the Act of Indemnity for punishment not extending to life (16 June 1660). The lords voted he should be wholly exempted from the act (1 Aug.) A compromise was finally arrived at by which the two houses excepted Lambert, but agreed to petition that if he was attainted the death penalty might be remitted (Old Parliamentary History, xxii. 443, 472). Lambert himself petitioned for pardon, declaring that he was satisfied with the present government, and resolved to spend the rest of his days in peace (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1660–1, pp. 8, 175). In October 1661 he was removed from the Tower to Guernsey, where he was allowed to take a house for himself and his family (ib. 1661–2, pp. 118, 276). On 1 July 1661 the House of Commons, more unforgiving than the Convention parliament had been, ordered that Lambert, having been excepted from the Act of Indemnity, should be proceeded against according to law. In answer to their repeated requests the he reluctantly ordered him to be brought from Guernsey to the Tower (Commons Journals, viii. 287, 317, 342, 368; Lister, Life of Clarendon, ii. 118; Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1661–2, p. 329). On 2 June 1 Lambert was arraigned in the court of king's bench for high treason in levying war against the king. His behaviour was discreet and submissive; he endeavoured to extenuate but not to justify his offences, and when sentence had been pronounced the lord chief justice announced that the king was pleased to respite his execution (State Trials, vi. 133, 156; The Kingdom's Intelligenceer, 9–18 June 1662). Lambert was then sent back to Guernsey where Lord Hatton, the governor, was empowered to give him ‘such liberty and indulgence within the precincts of the island as will consist with the liberty of his person’ (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1661–2, p. 555). This he attributed in a grateful letter to the intervention of Clarendon, to whom he praised Hatton's ‘candid and friendly deportment’ (Lister, Life of Claredon, iii. 310; cf. Hatton, Correspondance, i. 35, 38). In 1664 he was again closely confined for a time, and in 1666, a plot for his escape having been discovered, Hatton was instructed to shoot his prisoner if the French effected s lending (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1663–4 pp. 508, 514, 1665–6 pp. 480, 522; Notes and Queries, 3rd ser. iv. 90). The clandestine marriage of Mary Lambert with the governor's son, Charles Hutton, further strained Lambert's relations with the governor, and in 1667 he was removed to the island of St. Nicholas in Plymouth Sound (ib.) There he was visited in 1673 by Miles Halhead, a quaker, who came to charge him with permitting the persecution of that sect in the time of his power (Notes and Queries, 1st ser. vi. 103). Rumour, however, had persistently accused Lambert of favouring the catholics, and Oates in 1678 asserted that he was engaged in the popish plot, ‘but by that time,' adds Burnet, ‘he had lost his memory and sense' (Own Time, ed. 1833, ii. 159; cf. Carte, Original Letters,, ii. 225). He died a prisoner in the winter of 1683 (Notes and Queries, lst ser. iv. 339).

Among his own party Lambert was known as ‘honest John Lambert.' To the royalists he was a generous opponent, and showed much kindness to his prisoners in 1659. Mrs. Hutchinson mentions his taste for gardening; he is credited with introducing the Guernsey lily into England, and Flatman describes him in his satirical romance as ‘the Knight of the Golden Tulip’ (Don Juan Lamberto, or a Comical History of our late Times, ed. 1664, p. 2; Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ii. 205; Notes and Queries, 1st ser. vii. 459). He was fond of art, too, bought 'divers rare pictures' which had belonged to Charles I, and is said himself to have painted flowers, and even a portrait of Cromwell (Hist. MSS. Comm. 7th Rep. p. 189; Notes and Quries, 2nd ser. iii. 410). As a soldier he was distinguished by great personal courage, and was a better general that his rivals, Harrison and Fleetwood. He was a good speaker, but rash, unstable, and shortsighted in his politcal action. Contemporaries attributed ambition to the influence of his wife, whose pride is often alluded to (Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ii. 189). She and her husband were satirised in Tatham's play ‘The Rump,’ and in Mrs. Behn’s ‘The Roundheads, or the Good Old Cause.’

A portrait of Lambert by Robert Welker, formerly in the possession of the Earl of Hardwicke, is now in the National Portrait Gallery, London, Other portraits belong to Sir Matthew Wilson and Lord Ribblesdale. A list of engraved portraits of Lambert is given in the Catalogue of the Sutherland collection (i. 578). The best known is that in Houbraken’s ‘Heads of Illustrious Persons of Great Britain,’ 1743.

Lambert left ten children. At the Restoration he lost the lands he had purchased at Wimbledon and at Hatfield Chase, but his ancestral estates were granted by Charles II to Lord Bellasis in trust for Mrs. Lambert (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1661–2 p. 478, 1663–4 pp. 30, 41, 166). These were inherited by his eldest son, John Lambert of