Room after room was searched in vain; but, at last, Lady Elizabeth and Frances were discovered hidden in a small closet.  Both the father and the mother clasped their daughter in their arms almost at the same moment.  The daughter clung to the mother; the father clung to the daughter.  Sir Edward pulled; Lady Elizabeth pulled; and, after a violent struggle between the husband and the wife, Coke succeeded in wrenching the weeping girl from her mother’s arms.[17] Without a moment’s parley with his defeated antagonist, he dragged away his prey, took her out of the house, placed her on horseback behind one of her half-brothers, and started off with his whole cavalcade for his house at Stoke Pogis.

The writer is old enough to have seen farmers’ wives riding behind their husbands, on pillions.  Most uncomfortable sitting those pillions appeared to afford, and he distinctly remembers the rolling movements to which the sitters seemed to be subjected.  This was when the pace was at a walk or a slow jog.  But the unfortunate Frances must have been rolled and bumped at speed; for there was a pursuit.  In his already quoted letter to Carleton, Chamberlain says that Sir Edward Coke’s “lady was at his heels, and, if her coach had not held”—­i.e., stuck in the mud of the appalling roads of the period—­“in the pursuit after him, there was like to be strange tragedies.”  Miss Coke must have been long in forgetting that enforced ride of at least a dozen long miles, on a pillion behind a brother, and as a prisoner surrounded by an armed force.

Campbell states that, on reaching Stoke Pogis, Coke locked his daughter “in an upper chamber, of which he himself kept the key.”  Possibly, Sir John Villiers’ mother, Lady Compton, may have been there, in readiness to receive her; for Chamberlain says that Coke “delivered his daughter to the Lady Compton, Sir John’s mother; but, the next day, Edmondes, Clerk of the Council, was sent with a warrant to have the custody of the lady at his own house.”  This was probably Bacon’s doing.

Among the manuscripts at Trinity College, Cambridge, is a letter[18] written from the Inner Temple to Mrs. Ann Sadler, a daughter of Sir Edward Coke by his first wife.  From this we learn that, on finding herself robbed of her daughter, Lady Elizabeth hastened to London to seek the assistance of her friend Bacon.  In driving thither her coach was “overturned.”  We saw that it had “held” in the heavy roads when she was chasing her husband in it, and very likely its wheels may have become loosened in some ruts on that occasion.  An upset in a carriage, however, was a common occurrence in those days, and, nothing daunted, Lady Elizabeth managed to complete her journey to the house of Bacon in London.