STRICKLAND’S PARDON

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 July 1936, Page 11

STRICKLAND’S PARDON

DISCOVERED AFTER 276 YEARS The Vicar of Flamborough, Yorkshire, the Rev. E. C. Peters, opened his church safe recently and found a rare old document. For generations it had been lying there for all to see, but no one had read it to see what it was about. Now it has been examined and found to be a pardon granted by Charles the Second to Walter Strickland in 1660.

Walter Strickland owned property at Flamborough, the village behind! the famous Flamborough Head, where the chalk cliffs go far out to sea; and he spent several years in Holland, marrying Anne Morgan, the daughter of the Governor of Bergen-op-Zoom. While it is not true that he signed Charles Stuart’s death warrant, ■ Walter Strickland was an ardent Roundhead. The Long Parliament chose him as its agent to go to Holland to complain of the help Holland t had given to Henrietta Maria; and he sat in several of Cromwell’s Parliaments, serving the Roundheads so well before and after the King’s execution that the Royalists hated him. Often in grave peril, he narrowly escaped death while at The Hague, where Jyj was trying to bring about an alliance between England and Holland. Had he slept at the house of his friend Dr. Dorislaus at the White Swan on a certain night, he would certainly have been dead before morning, for masked assassins on that night killed the doctor. When we learn that Charles the Second paid a man a pension for trying to kill this Yorkshireman, it is astonishing that, in the year of the Restora'tion, Strickland should receive a pardon. The document, which has been translated, gives a long list of his offences, and it is surprising that at a time when Cromwell’s body was brutally dragged from its grave this old enemy of the Stuarts should be forgiven. Allowed to end his days in peace, he lived on for 11 years after Charles came back in triumph, and when he died they buried him in the church at Flamborough, where his pardon has been all these years.