murred to his authority and resigned their commissions, but resumed his position in 1659. After the Cromwell family had fallen from power, and Ludlow had taken the command of the soldiers in Ireland, Axtel was one of those sent back to England to maintain the republic against the imminent Restoration. But when Monk was marching on London, and Lambert advanced to oppose him, Lambert's troops, the Irish contingent of which was under Ludlow's officers, revolted to their former Cromwellian commanders, and so weakened Lambert's army that Monk marched on peaceably to London. Axtel retired into private life, only emerging to support Lambert in his futile attempt to revolt, April 1660. At the Restoration Axtel was excepted from the bill of indemnity in July, and from the general pardon in August. On 10 Oct. he was arraigned at the Old Bailey for compassing and imagining the death of the king. The chief overt acts adduced in support of the charge were his command of soldiers at the trial, his threat to shoot Lady Fairfax for her interruption of the proceedings, his beating the soldiers to make them cry 'justice' and 'execution,' and his personal insults to Charles. These last he positively denied; for the rest he pleaded justification, since what he had done was by the authority of parliament and the command of Fairfax. He made the absurd suggestion that he might have beaten the soldiers for crying out, and repeated their words, 'I'll justice you!' 'I'll execution you!' and added, 'But the word execution of justice is a high and glorious word.' The court disposed of his main plea by the reminder that the House of Commons had been reduced to its eighth part by the violence of the army, twenty-six only voting for the act in question, and that, even had the house retained its full numbers, it could still have possessed no coercive power over the sovereign. After protesting that he had had no hand in the king's death, Axtel was condemned. Then his self-confidence returned. He was murdered, he said, for the good old cause. He assumed the tone of a martyr, and even ventured a prophecy that the surplice and Common Prayer Book would not be long in England. He bewailed his general depravity, but justified everything he had done, and hinted a parallel between his own sufferings and those of the Redeemer. The sentence for treason was fully carried out, and his head was set up 'on the further end of Westminster Hall.'
[Ludlow's Memoirs; State Trials.]
AYLESBURY, Sir THOMAS (1576–1657), a patron of mathematical learning, was born in London in 1576, the second son of William Aylesbury and Anne Poole, his wife. Of his father's position nothing is known beyond the fact mentioned by Lloyd (Memoirs (1677), p. 699), that his ancestors were high sheriffs of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire in the reigns of the second and third Edwards. From Westminster School Aylesbury passed in 1598 to Christ Church, Oxford, where he took the degrees of B.A. and M.A. in 1602 and 1605 respectively. His strict application to study, especially of a mathematical kind, brought him into favourable notice; and on quitting college he was appointed secretary to the Earl of Nottingham, lord high admiral of England. So well did he use the opportunities both of improvement and distinction offered by this post, that he was continued in it by Buckingham, Nottingham's successor (1618), who befriended him actively, procuring for him the additional offices of one of the masters of requests and master of the mint, with (19 April 1627) the title of baronet. This prosperity enabled him to exercise the utmost liberality towards men of learning. To the indigent he allowed regular pensions, or maintained them at his country seat in Windsor Park, while many more enjoyed his patronage and the hospitality of his table in London. Amongst his dependants were Thomas Warner, a mathematician, who at his request wrote a treatise on coins and coinage; Thomas Allen, of Oxford, whom he recommended to Buckingham, and who made him the depositary of his astrological writings; and the celebrated Thomas Harriot, who bequeathed to him, with Viscount Lisle and Robert Sidney, the whole of his valuable papers. Many of these, with other precious manuscripts and rare books collected by or bestowed upon him, were either lost during the civil war, or sold in Aylesbury's time of distress abroad. For in 1642 he was, as a steady royalist, stripped of his fortune and places, and on the death of the king retired with his family to Antwerp, whence he removed in 1652 to Breda, and there died in 1657 at the age of 81. He was, Anthony à Wood says, 'a learned man, and as great a lover and encourager of learning and learned men, especially of mathematicians (he being one himself), as any man in his time.' He had issue one son, William Aylesbury, and a daughter Frances, married to the great Earl of Clarendon, by whom she became the mother of Anne Hyde, first wife of James II., and mother of the two queens, Mary and Anne.
[Biog. Brit. (1747), i. 308; Wood, Fasti Oxon. i. 306; Archaeologia, xxxii. 142.]
