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CORRESPONDENCE OF

SIR EDWARD NICHOLAS

AND

VARIOUS MEMBERS OF THE ROYAL

FAMILY;

DURING THE

COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE.

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CORRESPONDENCE OF

SIR EDWARD NICHOLAS AND THE ROYAL

FAMILY,

AFTER THE DEATH OF CHARLES I.

THE subjoined letters, in continuation of the preceding correspondence, will be found to require little illustrative comment. They embrace the brief and unsuccessful royalist campaign which closed on the field of Worcester; they contain illustrations of Charles the Second's distrust and dislike of his Presbyterian friends and supporters; but they derive perhaps their chief interest from the gossiping details in which the deceased King's sister, Elizabeth of Bohemia, so largely indulges, and in which the fears and jealousies, the enjoyments and privations of the Exiles, the fluctuation of her nephew's hopes, Cromwell's assumption of power, the vagaries of the errant Queen of Sweden, the attempts of the Queen-mother Henrietta to make Roman Catholics of her children, and the childhood of that young Prince of Orange for whom those attempts were preparing a throne, are curiously and impartially mixed up The letter of earnest remonstrance to the Duke of Gloucester, "concerning his being tempted to turne papist," bearing the signature of his elder brother, is a somewhat strange comment on the faith in which Charles the Second died.

Sir,

PARIS,' Nov. 6, 1649. St. No.

To giue you an account of the vastnesse of this packet, give me leaue to tell you, that together with this booke wch I send you, there came in half a

'Charles, at the period of his father's death, was at the Hague with his brother in law, the Prince of Orange; after which he went to France to join his mother; but having been proclaimed King throughout Ireland, with the exception of Dublin and Londonderry, he would have proceeded there, had he not been forewarned that such a procedure would produce much alarm among the Protestant friends to his

cause.

He therefore went no farther than Jersey, where he

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