The judge sentenced him to the Bedford county jail, where he remained a prisoner for twelve years (1660-1672).  Later on, he was again arrested (1675) and sent to the town jail on Bedford Bridge.  It was, he says, a squalid “Denn."[2] But in his marvelous dream of “A Pilgrimage from this World to the Next,” which he wrote while shut up within the narrow limits of that filthy prison house, he forgot the misery of his surroundings.  Like Milton in his blindness, loneliness, and poverty, he looked within and found that

“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell."[3]

[2] “As I walk’d through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where there was a Denn, and I laid me down in that place to sleep:  and as I slept I dreamed a dream.”—­“The Pilgrim’s Progress,” 1678. [3] “Paradise Lost,” Book I, 253.

473.  Seizure of a Dutch Colony in America (1664).

While these things were going on in England, a strange event took place abroad.  The Dutch had established a colony on the Hudson River.  It was on territory which the English claimed (S335), but which they had never explored or settled.  The Dutch had built a town at the mouth of the Hudson, which they called New Amsterdam.  They held the place undisturbed for fifty years, and if “Possession is nine points of the law,” they seem to have acquired it.  Furthermore, during the period of Cromwell’s Protectorate (S455), England had made a treaty with Holland and had recognized the claims of the Dutch in the New World.

Charles had found shelter and generous treatment in Holland when he needed it most.  But he now cooly repudiated the treaty, and, though the two nations were at peace, he treacherously sent out a secret expedition to capture the Dutch colony for his brother James, Duke of York, to whom he had granted it.

One day a small English fleet suddenly appeared (1664) in the harbor of the Dutch town, and demanded its immediate and unconditional surrender.  The governor was unprepared to make any defense, and the place was given up.  Thus, without so much as the firing of a gun, New Amsterdam got the name of New York in honor of the man who had now become its owner.  The acquisition of this territory, which had separated the northern English colonies from the southern, gave England complete control of the Atlantic coast from Maine to northern Florida.

474.  The Plague and the Fire, 1665, 1666.

The next year a terrible outbreak of the plague occurred in London, 1665, which spread throughout the kingdom (S244).  All who could, fled from the city.  Hundreds of houses were left vacant, while on hundreds more a cross marked on the doors in red chalk, with the words “Lord have mercy on us,” written underneath, told where the work of death was going on.[1]

[1] Pepys writes in his “Diary,” describing the beginning of the plague:  “The 7th of June, 1665, was the hottest day I ever felt in my life.  This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses with a red cross upon the door, and `Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there, which was a sad sight.”—­Pepys, “Diary,” 1660-1669.  Defoe wrote a journal of the plague in 1722, based, probably, on the reports of eyewitnesses.  It gives a vivid and truthful account of its horrors.