office which he had, with much honour and gallantry, performed in the unhappy war*, was second son to Mr. James Strangeways, of Mussen, in the county of Dorset: a gentleman of an antient and unblemished family, whose virtues this unhappy son of his, till sullied by this rash act of ungoverned fury, did rather seem to illustrate by a constant course of worthy and manly actions, than any ways to degenerate from the best atchievements of his most successful predecessors. He was now about the five or six-andfortieth year of his age: a person that had a brave and generous soul, included in a stout and active body. He was of stature tall, and framed to the most masculine proportion of man; his constitution, such as rather fitted him for the active employments of busy war, than the more quiet affairs of peace-affecting studies; yet was he not so much a stranger to those arts, which are the adorning qualifications of a gentleman, but that he had sacrificed to Minerva, whilst in the Temple of Mars; and, in the most serious consultations, had always a judgment as dexterous to advise, as a heart daring to act. What he appeared most unskilled in, was love's polemicks, he having spun out the thread of his life without twisting it in matrimony.
He was in some trivial actions, performed since the time of his imprisonment, condemned for a parsimonious sparing, too low for the quality of a gentleman; which, if true, I much wonder that he, whose former frugality was but the child of discretion, being now so near a supersedeas from all the afflicting wants mortality trembles at, and having none of his relations, whose necessities craved a subsistence from what he left behind, should, near his death, save that with dishonour, which in his life he spent with reputation.
But to detain thee no longer with the character either of his person or qualities, which probably some of his many enemies may unjustly censure for partiality; I will hasten to as full a relation, both of the original ground of their unhappy difference, aud the fatal conclusion of his implacable wrath, as it hath been possible by the most diligent inquisition to obtain, both from the nearest in acquaintance to both parties, and such ocular informations as were observable in much of the time from his sentence to his execution.
The father of Mr. Strangeways, dying about some ten years since, left him in possession of the farm of Mussen, leaving his eldest daughter, Mrs. Mabel Strangeways, since wife to Mr. Fussel, his executrix.
The estate being thus left, Mrs. Mabel, being then an ancient maid, rents the farm of her brother George, and stocks it at her own cost; towards the procuring of which stock, she engaged herself, in a bond of three hundred and fifty pounds, to her brother George, who, presuming on her continuance of a single life, and, by consequence, that her personal estate might, in time, return to her then nearest relations (of which himself had a just reason to expect, if not the whole, the greatest share), he not only entrusted her with the fore-mentioned bond, but likewise with that
• Between the king and parliament, in 1612,