Harvey, however, did not long enjoy his new office or its emoluments; for Oxford having surrendered to the Parliamentary forces under Fairfax the following year, Harvey, of course, resigned his charge, and immediately afterwards betook himself to London. Sir Nathaniel Brent, on the contrary, returned to Oxford; and the star of the Parliamentarians being now in the ascendant, Merton College was not slow to reinstate its old Presbyterian warden in the room of its late royalist head.[1]
From the date of the surrender of Oxford (July, 1646), Harvey followed the fortunes of Charles no longer. Of his reasons for quitting the service of his old master we know nothing. He probably felt anxious for repose; at sixty-eight, which was Harvey's age, a man begins to find that an easy chair is a fitter resting-place than the bare ground, a ceiled roof more suitable covering than the open sky—prospects which a continuance of the strife held out. Harvey, besides, as we have seen, had no stomach for contention in any shape or form, not even in the
- ↑ I find a kind of obloquy commonly thrown on the memory of Nathaniel Brent for what is styled his desertion of Charles; but he never deserted Charles; he never belonged to him. Brent, forsooth, had received knighthood at the royal hands in former years; but knighthoods were sometimes forced upon men in those days for the sake of the fees, and often as means of attaching men of mark and likelihood. The truth is that Brent, who was a profound lawyer and scholar, as well as a traveller, was greatly attached to Archbishop Abbott, who had patronized and advanced him through the whole course of his life. In the differences that took place between Abbott, in common with all moderate men, and Archbishop Laud, Brent naturally sided with his friend, led to do so, however, not by blind attachment only, but by natural constitution of mind, which appears to have abhorred the notion of a theocracy in the civil government of England, and to have been unfitted to comprehend the divinity that some conceive to inhere in despotism. Brent was, in fact, a man of such note, that Charles had tried to win him to his party many years before by various attentions and the free gift of knighthood; but this was in times when men were not required to take a side, when they stood naturally neutral. When the time came that it behoved him to show under what flag he meant to fight, Brent was not wanting to his natural bias and to independence. He therefore left Oxford when it was taken possession of by the royal forces, among other adherents of the popular cause, and was simply true to his principles, in nothing false to a patron or benefactor.
