Upon this signal achievement, Sir Edward Stanley, being much advanced thereby in the king’s favour, received from the hand of his royal master a letter of thanks, together with an assurance of some future reward.  Accordingly, we are told, the year ensuing, the king keeping Whitsuntide at Eltham in Kent, Sir Edward being in his train, he commanded that, for his valiant acts against the Scots, when he won the hill, and relieved the English from their distress, an achievement worthy of his ancestors, who bore an eagle on their crest, he should be created Lord Monteagle; whereupon he had a special summons to parliament in the same year by the title of Baron Stanley, Lord Monteagle.

“Twice did he and Sir John Wallop penetrate, with only eight hundred men, into the very heart of France, and four times did he and Sir Thomas Lovell save Calais,—­the first time by intelligence, the second by stratagem, the third by their valour and undaunted courage, and the fourth by their unwearied patience and assiduity.”  “In the dangerous insurrection by Aske and Captain Cobler, his zeal for the prince’s service and the welfare of his country caused him to outstrip his sovereign’s commands by putting himself at the head of his troops without the king’s commission, for which dangerous piece of loyalty he asked pardon, and received thanks.”  By stirring up jealousy and sedition, too, amongst the rebels, he gave his majesty time, by pretended treaties, to draw off the most eminent of the faction, and to overcome and dissipate the rest.  Yet, with all this outward show of prosperity, and the bruit of noble deeds so various and multiplied, that Fame herself seemed weary of rehearsing them, there were not wanting evil reports and dark insinuations against his honour.  Foul surmises prevailed, especially in the latter part of his life, as to the means by which he possessed himself of the estates he then held in right of his lady, and those too that he enjoyed through the attainder of her uncle, Sir James Harrington.  He acknowledged himself a freethinker and a materialist, a character of rare occurrence in those ages, showing him to be as daring in his opinions as in his pursuits.  That the soul of man was like the winding up of a watch, and that when the spring was run down the man died, and the soul was extinct, are still recorded as his expressions.  In those days of demoralising ignorance, this open and unhesitating opinion might be the means of creating him many dangerous and deadly enemies, especially amongst the priesthood, whose office, though tending to higher and nobler ends than the mere thralling of man’s spirit to creeds and systems of secular ambition, was yet but too often devoted to this purpose.  Every power that human cruelty and ingenuity could compass was tried, but happily in vain, to confine the free and unfettered spirit for ever in the dark cells of ignorance and superstition.