My dear son,

Thank you for your letter, and your prayers for me. I, too, pray for you and see, truly,  the success of your work with my brother an evidence of the blessings of Providence, that you are about the work of the Lord. It is too my prayer that this ends without death, without the blood and ruin that is the dark handmaid of war, and that God restores to England the blessings of peace that have made us the envy of Christendom. My dear son, I msut ask: Charles hath sewn the wind, but must we join him in reaping the whirlwind? Yet God hath his purposes, and to each of us our part assigned in the tragedy.

Edmund, you asked, and with anger,  about your father. There is much I did not tell you while you were in the colonies; not wishing to trouble you, and distract you, while you were about the great work being done there by the godly; distract and trouble you with matters that while painful, nay bitter, were for all that eminently addressable.

My dear son, you know my constant prayers are for peace; peace in this nation, people among God's people, peace among this family; but peace is obtained only through struggle, only through warfare; having I know, having long wrestled with God in the deeps of the night, in the deserts and empty places, in Meshek and Kedar, I know that Christ intends darkness not to overwhelm, but to strengthen, to temper, the metal of the soul, to bend the will on the straight and true path of prayer. This contest, this warfare --  this holy war is in truth our true calling -- breaks some, even as we are broken by physical swords and cannon. These are borken for reasons that are dark to us, that are obscure. Who can know the His reasons, except as revealed in prayer, in Scripture? But no matter the darkness, the obscurity, the struggle must continue.

Your father, Edmund, is, I fear, a man so broken. He hath fallen to a low place; it may be you saw the seeds of destruction take root before you left to America. Perhaps that is one of the secondary reasons for your departure. But fallen he has, and hath taken Thomas, loyal Thomas, with him. I have not time to write the entire tale; other than to say, he was on the verge of being condemned as a debtor to the Fleet, and taking all -- all -- with him. Holyfen, what I have in Huntington through my father and my brother Oliver. Sydney, then in Italy engaged in the importing of TK, returned to England and placed your fathers affairs in order and shielded my property from any suit that might be brougbt against him.

Edmund, you say that father’s manner of life now is beneath his dignity and Sydney is a scoundrel. I would ask you to consider what your father’s life would be were it not for Sydney. Your father has a roof, and meals, and a church.  I do not think it wise to take as whole cloth what they might say against Sydney.

The woman Anne you mention is from Coveney, deep in the Fen. She has a bastard by Thomas. There is talk she is a witch. Sydney says this is untrue, witches being a superstition much the same as Popery, a fiction to frighten children and bamboozle the ignorant.

Love,

Your mother.