LUCY HUTCHINSON, succeeded in procuring an allowance of ten pounds a week for the Governor's table from the Parliament, that their pecuniary embarrassments were in any way relieved, though that sum did not cover a third of the charges incurred in the public service. The Colonel had soon every need of his utmost fortitude and skill. The citizens, always disaffected, werewatching for the earliest opportunity of betraying the town ; and one night his cousin, Sir Richard Byron, was treacherously admitted, and the streets of Nottingham silently filled with six hundred Cavaliers. At the beating of the reveille the Governor found himself shut up by a hostile army in his little fortress with only eighty men to hold out with, the remain- der of the garrison having disobeyed his orders overnight, and quitted the Castle to visit their friends and relatives in the town ; but promptly despatching messengers by a private sally-port to Leicester and Derby for aid, he quietly gathered together the remnants of his band, and commenced a vigorous cannonade of the enemy in the face of the most desperate danger. The officers and surgeons, having left the fortress the preceding night, had been unable to regain their quarters ; and now to the gentle Lucy Hutchinson all the wounded and suffering looked for succour. Amid the roar and boom of cannon, the shouts and shrieks of besiegers and besieged, and the dreadful anxiety for her husband and his brother, the brave- hearted woman calmly performed an heroic duty. 36
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