fT^-ZcV^ ¦ j-i^d (¦e-ttM\.~ f/aju{c (j-cto-usi / lliwi I 't'.v* 2': OLIVER CROMWELL'S LETTEES AID SPEECHES WITH ELUCIDATIONS. BY THOMAS CARLYLE. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. NEW-YORK: WILEY & PUTNAM, 161 BROADWAY. 1845. CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. INTRODUCTION. PAGE Chapter I. Anti-Dryasdust 3 II. Of the Biographies of Oliver ... 13 " III. Of the Cromwell Kindred .... 20 " IV. Events in Oliver's Biography . . 34 " V. Of Oliver's Letters and Speeches . . 72 CROMWELL'S LETTERS AND SPEECHES. PART I. TO THE BEGINNING OP THE CIVIL WAR. 1636-42. Letter I. To Mr. Storie : St. Ives, 11 Jan., 1635-6 . 83 Lectureship in Huntingdonshire. " II. To Mrs. St. John : Ely, 13 Oct., 1638 . . 91 Personal Affairs. Two Years 101 Letter III. To Mr. Willingham : London, Feb. 1640-1 . 105 The Scots Demands. In the Long Parliament 108 PART II. to the end of the first civil war. 1642-46. Preliminary 115 Letter IV. To R. Barnard, Esq. : Huntingdon, 23d Jan., 1642-3 127 A Domiciliary Visit CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. PAGE Letter V. To T. Knyvett, Esq. : Norfolk, Jan., 1642-3 . 129 Parishioners of Hapton. LowESTOFr ......•¦• 131 Letter VI. Unknown : Grantham, 13 May, 1643 . . 135 Skirmish at Grantham. " VII. To Cambridge Committee : Huntingdon, 31 July, 1643 137 Action at Gainsborough. Winceby Fight ........ 142 Letter VIII. To Col, Walton : York, 5 July, 1644 . . 149 Marston Moor. Three Fragments of Speeches. Self-denying Ordi nance ........ 153 Letter IX. To Sir T. Fairfax : Salisbury, 9 April, 1645 . 159 Proceedings in the West : Goring, Greenvil, Rupert. " X. To Governor R. Burgess : Farringdon, 29 April, 1645 . .161 Attack on Farringdon Garrison. " XI. To the same : same date .... 162 Same subject. " XII. To Sir T. Fairfax : Huntingdon, 4 June, 1645 163 Affairs at Ely. " XIII. To Hon. W. Lenthall : Harborough, 14 June, 1645 165 Battle of Naseby. " XIV. To Sir T. Fairfax : Shaftesbury, 4 Aug., 1645 171 The Clubmen. " XV. To Hon. W. Lenthall : Bristol, 14 Sept., 1645 176 Storm of Bristol. " XVI. To the same : Winchester, 6 Oct., 1645 . 182 Taking of Winchester. " XVII. To the same : Basingstoke, 14 Oct., 1645 . 184 Basing House Stormed. " XVIII. To Sir T. Fairfax : Wallop, 16 Oct., 1645 . 189 Marching to the West. CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. PART III. BETWEEN THE TWO CIVIL WARS. 1646-48. PAGE Letter XIX. To Sir T. Fairfax : London, 31 July, 1646 . 196 Adjutant Flemming. " XX. To the same : London, 10th Aug., 1646 . 197 News : Commissioners to the King and Scotch Army have returned. " XXI. To J. Rushworth, Esq. : London, 2-6th Aug., 1646 199 On behalf of Major Henry Lilburn. " XXII. To Sir T. Fairfax : London, 6 Oct., 1646 . 200 Staffordshire Committee-men. " XXIII. To Mrs. Ireton : London, 25 Oct., 1646 . 201 Fatherly Advice. " XXIV. To Sir T. Fairfax: London, 21 Dec, 1646 203 News, by Skippon : Agreement with the Scots con cluded ; City disaffected to Army. " XXV. To the same: London, 11 March, 1646-7 . 207 Army matters ; City still more disaffected. " XXVI. To the same : London, 19 March, 1646-7 . 209 Encloses an Order to the Army, Not to come within Twenty- five miles of London. Army Manifesto . . . . . . . .211 Letter XXVII. To Col. Jones : Putney, 14 Sept., 1647 . 229 Congratulates on the Victory at Dungan Hill. " XXVIII. To Sir T. Fairfax: Putney, 13 Oct., 1647 230 Capt. Middleton, Court-Martial. " XXIX. To the same : Putney, 22 October, 1047 . 232 Col. Overton for Hull Garrison. " XXX. To Hon. W. Lenthall : Hampton Court, 11 Nov., 1647 235 King's Escape from Hampton Court. " XXXI. To Col. Whalley : Putney, Nov., 1647 . 236 The same. " XXXII. To Col. Hammond ; London, 3 Jan., 1647-8 237 Concerning the King in the Isle of Wight. CONTENTS OF VOLUEE I. PAGE Letter XXXIII. To Col. Norton : London, 25 Feb., 1647-8 240 On Richard Cromwell's Marriage. " XXXIV. To Sir T. Fairfax: London, 7 March, 1647-8 244 Has been dangerously ill. Free Offer 244 ' Letter XXXV. To Col. Norton : Farnham, 28th March, 1648 245 Richard Cromwell's Marriage. " XXXVI. To the same : London, 3d April, 1648 . 247 The same. " XXXVII. To Col. Hammond : London, 6tn April, 1648 249 Isle-of- Wight Business ; King intends Escape. Prayer-Meeting . . . . . . . .251 PART IV. SECOND CIVIL WAR. 1648. Letter XXXVIII. To Major Saunders : Pembroke, 17 June, 1648 263 To Seize Sheriff Morgan and Sir Trevor Williams, two Rebel Welshmen. " XXXIX. To Lord (late Sir Thomas) Fairfax: Pern- broke, 28 June, 1648 264 Siege of Pembroke. Preston Battle 271 Letter XL. To Lancashire Committee : Preston, 17 Aug., 1648 274 Battle of Preston. " XLI. To Hon. W. Lenthall : Warrington, 20 Aug., 1648 276 The same. " XLII. To Lord Wharton : near Knaresborough, 2 Sept., 1648 290 Religious Reflections ; Congratulations on public events and private. CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. PAGE Declaration 293 Letter XLIII. To Lord Fairfax : Berwick, 11 Sept., 1648 294 Col. Cowell's Widow " XLIV. To Marquis Argyle, and the Well-affected Lords now in arms in Scotland : near Berwick, 16 Sept., 1648 296 Announces Messengers coming to them. " XLV. To Scots Committee of Estates : near Ber wick, 16 Sept., 1648 297 His Reasons for entering Scotland. " XLVI. To Earl Loudon : Cheswick, 18 Sept., 1648 299 Intentions and Proceedings as to Scotland. Proclamation 302 Letter XLVII. To Scots Committee of Estates : Norham, 21 Sept., 1648 303 In excuse for some disorder by the Durham horse in Scotland. " XLVIII. To Hon. W. Lenthall : Berwick, 2 Oct., 1648 305 Surrender of Berwick and Carlisle. " XLIX. To Lord Fairfax : Berwick, 2 Oct., 1648 . 306 To have Sir Arthur Haselrig take care of Berwick. " L. To Scots Committee of Estates : Edinburgh, 5 Oct., 1648 . 308 His Demands concerning Scotland. " LI. To Hon. W. Lenthall : Dalhousie, 9 Oct., 1648 311 Account of his Proceedings in Scotland. " LII. To Governor Morris : Pontefract, 9 Nov., 1648 314 Summons to Pontefract Castle. " LIII. To Jenner and Ashe : Knottingley, near Pon tefract, 20 Nov., 1648 315 Rebuke for their Order concerning Col. Owen. " LIV. To Lord Fairfax : Knottingley, 20 Nov., 1648 319 With certain Petitions from the Army. CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. PAGE Letter LV. To Col. Hammond : Knottingley, 25 Nov., 1648 320 Exhortation and Advice concerning the Business of the King. Death- Warrant 328 PART V. CAMPAIGN IN IRELAND. 1649. Letter LVI. To Rev. Mr. Robinson : London, 1 Feb., 1648-9 337 This Letter and the three following relate to Richard Cromwell's Marriage. Pass 338 Letter LVII. To R. .Mayor, Esq. : London, 12 Feb., 1648-9 339 Order 340 Letter LVIII. To R. Mayor, Esq. : London, 26 Feb., 1648-9 342 " LIX. To the same : London, 8 March, 1648-9 . 343 " LX. To Dr. Love : London, 14 March, 1648-9 . 345 Recommends a Suitor to him. « LXI. To R. Mayor, Esq. : London, 14 March, 1648-9 347 This and the four following relate to Richard Crom well's Marriage. " LXII. To the same : London, 25 March, 1649 . 349 " LXIII. To the same : London, 30 March, 1649 . 351 " LXIV. To the same : London, 6 April, 1649 . 352 " LXV. To the same : London, 15 April, 1649 . 353 The Levellers ........ 356 Letter LXVI. To Hon. W. Lenthall : London, 10 July, 1649 366 Recommends Mr. Lowry, his fellow Member. " LXVII. To R. Mayor, Esq.: Bristol, 19 July, 1649 368 In answer to a Recommendation. CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. rAuii Letter LXVIII. To the same: Milford Haven, 13 Aug., 1649 370 News received from Ireland : Jones's Defeat of Ormond at Bagatrath. " LXIX. To Mrs. Richard Cromwell : Milford Ha ven, 13 Aug., 1649 372 Religious Advices. Irish War ......... 374 Letter LXX. To President Bradshaw, Dublin, 16 Sept., 1649 380 Storm of Drogheda. " LXXI. To Hon. W. Lenthall : Dublin, 17 Sept., 1649 381 The same. " LXXII. To the same : Wexford, 14 Oct., 1649 . 387 March to Wexford ; Capture of Wexford. " LXXIII. To Governor Taaf; Ross, 17 Oct., 1649 . 392 Ross summoned. " LXXIV. To the same : Ross, 19 Oct., 1649 . 394 Terms for Ross. " LXXV. To the same : same date . . . 395 Same subject. " LXXVI. To Governor Taaff: Ross, 19 Oct., 1649 396 Terms for Ross. " LXXVII. To Hon. W. Lenthall : Ross, 25 Oct., 1649 396 Account ofthe Gaining of Ross. " LXXVIII. To R. Mayor, Esq. : Ross, 13 Nov., 1649 • • -3" Irish News, and Family Affairs. « LXXIX. To Hon. W. Lenthall : Ross, 14 Nov., -1649 40° Proceedings in Munster : Cork, Youghal, Baltimore, Castlehaven ; other Mercies. " LXXX. To the same : Waterford, Nov., 1649 . 404 Reynolds takes Carrick-on-Suir ; defends it gallantly : Reflections. CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. PAGE Letter LXXXI. To the same : Cork, 19 Dec, 1649 . 409 Waterford not taken ; Death of Lieut.-Gen. Michael Jones ; Repulse of the Enemy at Passage. " LXXXII. To the same : Castletown, 15 Feb., 1649-50 413 New Campaign : Reduction of many places in Tippe rary and the Southwest. « LXXXIII. To President Bradshaw : Cashel, 5 March, 1649-50 417 Progress of the Campaign ; Cahir Castle. " LXXXIV. To Hon. W. Lenthall: Carrick, 2 April, 1650 418 The same : Kilkenny taken ; Col. Hewson. " LXXXV. To R. Mayor, Esq. : Carrick, 2 April, 1650 423 Reflections on the Mercies in Ireland. PART VI. war with scotland. 1650-51. War with Scotland ....... 433 Letter LXXXVI. To R. Mayor, Esq. : Alnwick, 17 July, 1650 440 Concerning his Son and Daughter-in-law. " LXXXVII. To President Bradshaw : Musselburgh, 30 July, 1650 443 Appearance before Edinburgh ; Lesley within his Lines. " LXXXVIII. To Scots Committee of Estates : Mus selburgh, 3 Aug., 1650 446 Remonstrates on their dangerous courses, on their un christian conduct towards him. « LXXXIX. To Gen. Lesley: Camp at Pentland Hills, 14 Aug., 1650 451 Answer to Lesley's Message and Declaration. " XC. To the Council of State: Musselburgh, 30 Aug., 1650 454 Progress ofthe Scotch Campaign : Skirmish on the Stir ling Road, no Battle ; retreat to the eastward again. Battle of Dunbar ....... 457 CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. PAGE Letter XCI. To Sir A. Haselrig : Dunbar, 2 Sept., 1650 . 458 Day before Dunbar Battle. " XCII. To Hon. W. Lenthall: Dunbar, 4 Sept., 1650 467 Of Dunbar Battle : — This Letter and the next three. " XCIII. To President Bradshaw : Dunbar, 4 Sept., 1650 473 " XCIV. To Mrs. Cromwell : Dunbar, 4 Sept., 1650 474 " XCV. To R. Mayor, Esq. : Dunbar, 4 Sept., 1650 . 475 Letter XCVI. To Governor Dundas : Edinburgh, 9 Sept., 1650 479 Has offered to let the Ministers in Edinburgh Castle preach in the City: Rebuke for their refusal. " XCVII. To the same: Edinburgh, 12 Sept., 1650 . 482 Second more deliberate Rebuke, with Queries. Queries 486 Letter XCVIII. To President Bradshaw : Edinburgh, 25 Sept., 1650 489 Has marched towards Stirling, but been obliged to re turn. " XCIX. To Scots Committee of Estates : Linlith gow, 9 Oct., 1650 494 Remonstrates again with them concerning the folly and impiety of this War. Proclamation ........ 497 Letter C. To Hon. W. Lenthall : Edinburgh,, 4 Dec, 1650 499 Progress of Scotch affairs : Ker and Strahan. " CI. To Governor Dundas : Edinburgh, 12 Dec, 1650 502 This and the six following, with the Pass and Proclama tion, relate to the Siege of Edinburgh Castle. " CII. To the same : same date .... 503 " CIII. To the same : Edinburgh, 13 Dec, 1650 . 505 " CIV. To the same : Edinburgh, 14 Dec, 1650 . 506 " CV. To the same : same date .... 507 « CVI. To the same : Edinburgh, 18 Dec, 1650 . 508 « CVII. To tbe same : same date .... 509 CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. PAGE Pass 509 Proclamation ........ 510 Letter CVIII. To Hon. W. Lenthall : Edinburgh, 24 Dec, 1650 511 Edinburgh Castle surrendered. " CIX. To Col. Hacker: Edinburgh, 25 Dec, 1650 514 Capt. Empson's Commission cannot be revoked. Cen sures a phrase of Hacker's. " CX. To Gen. Lesley: Edinburgh, 17 Jan., 1650-1 516 Provost Jaffray, Rev. Messrs. Waugh and Carstairs. " CXI. To Scots Committee of Estates : Edinburgh, 17 Jan., 1650-1 520 Augustin the German Mosstrooper. " CXII. To Committee of Army : Edinburgh, 4 Feb., 1650-1 522 Symonds, and the Medal for Dunbar Battle. " CXIII. To President Bradshaw : Edinburgh, 24 March, 1650-1 526 Has been dangerously unwell : thanks for their inquir ing after him. « CXIV. To Mrs. Cromwell : Edinburgh, 12 April, 1651 527 Domestic. The Lord Herbert. Richard and the other Children. " CXV. To Hon. A. Johnston : Edinburgh, 12 April, 1651 529 Public Registers of Scotland. Second Visit to Glasgow ...... 53] Letter CXVI. To Mrs. Cromwell : Edinburgh, 3 May, 1651 536 Domestic. Regards to his Mother. " CXVII. To Hon. W. Lenthall : Linlithgow, 21 July, 1651 538 Inverkeithing Fight " CXVIII. To President Bradshaw : Dundas, 24 July, 1651 .540 Gone over to Fife. " CXIX. To the same : Linlithgow, 26 July, 1651 . 541 Inchgarvie surrendered. CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. PAGE Letter CXX. To R. Mayor, Esq. : Burntisland, 28 July, 1651 541 Rebukes his son Richard for excess in expenditure. " CXXI. To Hon. W. Lenthall : Burntisland, 29 July, 1651 543 Burntisland. Army mostly in Fife. " CXXII. To the same : Leith, 4 Aug., 1651 . . 544 St. Johnston taken : the enemy suddenly gone south ward. Battle of Worcester ....... 549 Letter CXXIII. To Hon. W. Lenthall : near Worcester, 3 Sept., 1651 552 Battle of Worcester. CXXIV. To the same : Worcester, 4 Sept., 1651 .553 The same. OLIVER CROMWELL'S LETTERS AO SPEECHES, VOL. I. 2 INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. ANTI-DRYASDUST. What and how great are the interests which connect themselves with the hope that England may yet attain to some practical belief and understanding of its History during the Seventeenth Century, need not be insisted on at present ; such hope being still very distant, very uncertain. We have wandered far away from the ideas which guided us in that Century, and indeed which had guided us in all preceding Centuries, but of which that Century was the ultimate manifestation : we have wandered very far ; and must endeavor to return, and connect ourselves therewith again ! It is with other feelings than those of poor peddling Dilettantism, other aims than the writing of successful or unsuc cessful Publications, that an earnest man occupies himself in those dreary provinces of the dead and buried. The last glimpse of the Godlike vanishing from this England ; conviction and veracity giving place to hollow cant and formulism, — antique ' Reign of God,' which all true men in their several dialects and modes have always striven for, giving place to modern Reign of the No-God, whom men name Devil : this, in its multitudinous meanings and results, is a sight to create reflections in the earnest man ! One wishes there were a History of English Puritanism, the last of all our Heroisms ; but sees small prospect of such a thing at present. ' Few nobler Heroisms,' says a well-known Writer long occu pied on this subject, ' at bottom perhaps no nobler Heroism ever transacted itself on this Earth ; and it lies as good as lost to us ; INTRODUCTION. overwhelmed under such an avalanche of Human Stupidities as no Heroism before ever did. Intrinsically and extrinsically it may be considered inaccessible to these generations. Intrinsically, the spiritual purport of it has become inconceivable, incredible to the modern mind. Extrinsically, the documents and records of it, scattered waste as a shoreless chaos, are not legible. They lie there, printed, written, to the extent of tons and square miles, as shot-rubbish ; unedited, unsorted, not so much as indexed ; full of every conceivable confusion ; — yielding light to very few ; yielding darkness, in several sorts, to very many. Dull Pedantry, conceited idle Dilettantism, — prurient Stupidity in what shape soever, — is darkness and not light ! There are from Thirty to Fifty Thousand unread Pamphlets of the Civil War in the British Museum alone : huge piles of mouldering wreck, wherein, at the rate of perhaps one pennyweight per ton, lie things memorable. They lie preserved there, waiting happier days ; under present conditions they cannot, except for idle purposes, for dilettante excerpts and such like, be got examined. The Rushworths, Whitlockes, Nalsons, Thurloes ; enormous folios, these and many others, they have been printed, and some of them again printed, but never yet edited, — edited as you edit wagonloads of broken bricks and dry mortar, simply by tumbling up the wagon ! Not one of these monstrous old volumes has so much as an available Index. It is the general rule of editing on this matter. If your editor correct the press, it is an honorable distinction to him. Those dreary old records were compiled at first by Human Insight, in part ; and in great part, by Human Stupidity withal ; — but then it was by Stupidity in a laudable diligent state, and doing its best ; which was something : — and, alas, they have been succes sively elaborated by Human Stupidity in the idle state, falling idler and idler, and only pretending to be diligent; whereby now, for us, in these late days, they have grown very dim indeed ! To Dryasdust Printing-Sqdfpes, and such like, they afford a sorrow ful kind of pabulum ; but for all serious purposes, they are as if non-extant ; might as well, if matters are to rest as they are, not have been written or printed at all. The sound of them is not a voice, conveying knowledge or memorial of any earthly or hea venly thing ; it is a wide-spread inarticulate slumberous mumble- ANTI-DRYASDUST. ment, issuing as if from the lake of Eternal Sleep. Craving for oblivion, for abolition and honest silence, as a blessing in com parison ! ' This, then,' continues our impatient friend, ' is the Elysium we English have provided for our Heroes ! The Rushworthian Elysium. Dreariest continent of shot-rubbish the eye ever saw. Confusion piled on confusion to your utmost horizon's edge : ob scure, in lurid twilight as ot the Shadow of Death ; trackless, without index, without finger-post, or mark of any human fore- goer ; — where your human footstep, if you are still human, echoes bodeful through the gaunt solitude, peopled only by somnambulant Pedants, Dilettants, and doleful creatures, by phantasms, errors, inconceivabilities, by Nightmares, pasteboard Norroys, griffins, wiverns, and chimeras dire! There, all vanquished, overwhelmed under such waste lumber-mountains, the wreck and dead ashes of some six unbelieving generations, does the Age of Cromwell and his Puritans lie hidden from us. This is what we, for our share, have been able to accomplish towards keeping our Heroic Ones in memory. By way of sacred poet they have found voluminous Dryasdust, and his Collections and Philosophical Histories. ' To Dryasdust, who wishes merely to compile torpedo Histo ries of the philosophical or other sorts, and gain immortal laurels for himself by writing about it and about it, all this is sport ; but to us who struggle piously, passionately, to behold, if but in glimpses, the faces of our vanished Fathers, it is death ! — O Dry asdust, my voluminous friend, had Human Stupidity continued in the diligent state, think you it had ever come to this ? Surely at least you might have made an Index for these huge books ! Even your genius, had you been faithful, was adequate to that. Those thirty thousand or fifty thousand old Newspapers and Pamphlets of the King's Library, it is you, my voluminous friend, that should have sifted them, many long years ago. Instead of droning out these melancholy scepticisms, constitutional philoso phies, torpedo narratives, you should have sifted those old stacks of pamphlet matter for us, and have had the metal grains lying here accessible, and the dross-heaps lying there avoidable ; you INTRODUCTION. had done the human memory a service thereby ; some human remembrance of this matter had been more possible !' Certainly this description does not want for emphasis: but all ingenuous inquirers into the Past will say there is too much truth in it. Nay, in addition to the sad state of our Historical Books, and what indeed is fundamentally the cause and origin of that, our common spiritual notions, if any notion of ours may still deserve to be called spiritual, are fatal to a right understanding of that Seventeenth Century. The Christian Doctrines which then dwelt alive in every heart, have now in a manner died out of all hearts, — very mournful to behold ; and are not the guid ance of this world any more. Nay, worse still, the Cant of them does yet dwell alive with us, little doubting that it is Cant ; — in which fatal intermediate state the Eternal Sacredness of this Universe itself, of this Human Life itself, has fallen dark to the most of us, and we think that too a Cant and a Creed. Thus the old names suggest new things to us, — not august and divine, but hypocritical, pitiable, detestable. The old names and similitudes of belief still circulate from tongue to tongue, though now in such a ghastly condition : not as commandments of the Living God, which we must do, or perish eternally ; alas, no, as something very different from that ! Here properly lies the grand unintel- ligibility of the Seventeenth Century for us. From this source has proceeded our maltreatment of it, our miseditings, misvvritings, and all the other ' avalanche of Human Stupidity,' wherewith, as our impatient friend complains, we have allowed it to be over whelmed. We have allowed some other things to be overwhelmed ! Would to Heaven that were the worst fruit we had gathered from our Unbelief and our Cant of Belief! — Our impatient friend continues : ' I have known Nations altogether destitute of printer's-types and learned appliances, with nothing better than old songs, monu mental stone-heaps and Quipo-thrums to keep record by, who had truer memory of their memorable things than this ! Truer memory, I say : for at least the voice of their Past Heroisms, if indistinct, and all awry as to dates and statistics, was still melo dious to those Nations. The body of it might be dead enough ; but the soul of it, partly harmonized, put in real accordance with ANTI-DRYASDUST. the " Eternal Melodies," was alive to all hearts, and could not die. The memory of their ancient Brave Ones did not rise like a hideous huge leaden vapor, an amorphous emanation of Chaos, like a petrifying Medusa Spectre, on those poor Nations : no, but like a Heaven's Apparition, which it was, it still stood radiant beneficent before all hearts, calling all hearts to emulate it, and the recognition of it was a Psalm and Song. These things will require to be practically meditated by and by. Is human Writing, then, the art of burying Heroisms, and highest Facts, in Chaos ; so that no man shall henceforth contemplate them without horror and aversion, and danger of locked-jaw ? What does Dryasdust consider that he was born for ; that paper and ink were made for ? ' It is very notable, and leads to endless reflections, how the Greeks had their living Iliad where we have such a deadly inde scribable Cromwelliad. The old Pantheon, home of all the gods, has become a Peerage-Boole, — with black and white surplice- controversies superadded, not unsuitably. The Greeks had their Homers, Hesiods, where we have our Rymers, Rushworths, our Norroys, Garter-Kings, and Bishops Cobweb. Very notable, I say. By the genius, wants and instincts and opportunities of the one People, striving to keep themselves in mind of what was memorable, there had fashioned itself, in the effort of successive centuries, a Homer's Iliad : by those of the other People, in suc cessive centuries, a Coliins's Peerage improved by Sir Egerton Brydges. By their Pantheons ye shall know them ! Have not we English a talent for Silence ? Our very Speech and Printed- Speech, such a force of torpor dwelling in it, is properly a higher power of silence. There is no Silence like the Speech you can not listen to without danger of locked-jaw ! Given a divine Heroism, to smother it well in human Dulness, to touch it with the mace of Death, so that no human soul shall henceforth recog nize it for a Heroism, but all souls shall fly from it as from a chaotic Torpor, an Insanity and Horror, — 1 will back our English genius against the world in such a problem ! Truly we have done great things in that sort ; down from Norman William all the way, and earlier : and to the English mind at this hour, the past History of England is little other than a dull dismal labyrinth, INTRODUCTION. in which the English mind, if candid, will confess that it has found of knowable (meaning even conceivable), of loveable, or memorable — next to nothing. As if we had done no brave thing at all in this Earth ; — as if not Men but Nightmares had written of our History ! The English, one can discern withal, have been perhaps as brave a People as their neighbors ; perhaps, for Valor of Action and true hard labor in this Earth, since brave Peoples were first made in it, there has been none braver anywhere or any when : but also, it must be owned, in Stupidity of Speech they have no fellow ! What can poor English Heroisms do in such case, but fall torpid into the domain of the Nightmares 1 For of a truth, Stupidity is strong, most strong : as the poet Schiller sings, "Against Stupidity the very gods fight un victorious :" there is in it a placid inexhaustibility, a calm viscous infinitude, which will baffle even the gods, — which will say calmly, " Try all your lightnings here ; see whether I cannot quench them !" " Mit der Dummheit kampfen Gotter selbst vergebens." ' Has our friend forgotten that it is Destiny withal as well as "Stupidity;" that such is the case more or less with Human History always ! By very jjature it is a labyrinth and chaos, this that we call Human History ; an abatis of trees and brush wood, a world-wide jungle, at once growing and dying. Under the green foliage and blossoming fruit-trees of Today, there lie, rotting slower or faster, the forests of .all other Years and Days. Some have rotted fast, plants of annual growth, and are long since quite gone to inorganic mould ; others are like the aloe, , growths that last a thousand or three thousand years. You will j find them in all stages of decay and preservation ; down deep toy the beginnings ofthe History of Man. Think where our Alpha betic Letters came from, where our Speech itself came from ; the Cookeries we live by, the Masonries we lodge under ! You will find fibrous roots of this day's Occurrences among the dust of Cadmus and Trismegistus, of Tubalcain and Triptolemus ; the tap-roots of them are with Father Adam himself and the cinders of Eve's first fire ! At bottom, there is no perfect His tory ; there is none such conceivable. ANTI-DRYASDUST. All past Centuries have rotted down, and gone confusedly dumb and quiet, even as that Seventeenth is now threatening to do. Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul ! For the leafy blossoming Present Time springs from the whole Past, remembered and unremem- berable, so confusedly as we say : — and truly the Art of History, the grand difference between a Dryasdust and a sacred Poet, is very much even this : To distinguish well what does still reach to the surface, and is alive and frondent for us ; and what reaches no longer to the surface, but moulders safe underground, never to send forth leaves or fruit for mankind any more : of the former we shall rejoice to hear ; to hear of the latter will be an affliction to us ; of the latter only Pedants and Dullards, and disastrous malefactors to the world, will find good to speak. By wise memory and by wise oblivion : it lies all there ! Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past : when both are foolish, and the general soul is over clouded with confusions, with unveracities and discords, there is a ' Rushworthian chaos.' Let Dryasdust be blamed, beaten with stripes if you will ; but let it be with pity, with blame to Fate chiefly. Alas, when sacred Priests are arguing about ' black and white surplices ;' and sacred Poets have long professedly de serted Truth, and gone a wool-gathering after ' Ideals ' and such like, what can you expect of poor secular Pedants 1 The laby rinth of History must grow ever darker, more intricate and dis mal ; vacant cargoes of ' Ideals ' will arrive yearly, to be cast into tbe oven ; and noble Heroisms of Fact, given up to Dryas dust, will be buried in a very disastrous manner ! — But the thing we had to say and repeat was this, That Puri tanism is not of the Nineteenth Century, but of the Seventeenth ; that the grand unintelligibility for us lies there. The Fast-day Sermons of St. Margaret's Church, Westminster, in spite of printers, are all grown dumb ! In long rows of little dumpy quartos, gathered from the bookstalls, they indeed stand here bodily before us : by human volition they can be read, but not by any human memory remembered. We forget them as soon 2* 10 INTRODUCTION. as read ; they have become a weariness to the soul of man. They are dead and gone, they and what they shadowed ; the human soul, got into other latitudes, cannot now give harbor to them. Alas, and did not the honorable Houses of Parliament listen to them with rapt earnestness, as to an indisputable mes sage from Heaven itself? Learned and painful Dr. Owen, learned and painful Dr. Burgess ; Stephen Marshall, Mr. Spur- stow, j^pniram Byfield, Hugh Peters, Philip Nye : the Printer has done for them what he could, and Mr. Speaker gave them the thanks\ of the House ; — and no most astonishing Review- Article of oi>r day can have half such ' brilliancy,' such potency, half such virtue, for producing belief as these their poor little dumpy quartos once had. And behold, they are become inar ticulate men ; spectral ; and . instead of speaking, do not screech and gibber ! All Puritanism has grown inarticulate ; its fervent preachings, prayings, pamphleteerings are sunk into one indis criminate moaning hum, mournful as the voice of subterranean winds. So much falls silent : human Speech, unless by rare chance it touch on the ' Eternal Melodies,' and harmonize with them ; human Action, Interest, if divorced from the Eternal Melodies, sinks all silent. The fashion of this world passeth away. The Age of the Puritans is not extinct only and gone away from us, but it is as if fallen beyond the capabilities of Memory herself; it is grown unintelligible, what we may call incredible. Its earnest Purport awakens now no resonance in our frivolous hearts. We understand not even in imagination, one of a thou sand of us, what it ever could have meant. It seems delirious, delusive ; the sound of it has become tedious as a tale of past stupidities. Not the body of heroic Puritanism only, which was bound to die, but the soul of it also, which was and should have been, and yet shall be immortal, has for the present passed away. As Harrison said of his Banner and Lion of the Tribe of Judah : " Who shall rouse him up ?" — ' For indisputably,' exclaims the above-cited Author in his vehement way, ' this too was a Heroism ; and the soul of it re mains part of the eternal soul of things ! Here, of our own land and lineage, in practical English shape, were Heroes on the Earth ANTI-DRYASDUST. 11 once more. Who knew in every fibre, and with heroic daring laid to heart, That an Almighty Justice does verily rule this world ; that it is good to fight on God's side, and bad to fight on the Devil's side ! The essence of all Heroisms and Veracities that have been, or that will be. — Perhaps it was among the nobler and noblest Human Heroisms, this Puritanism of ours : but Eng lish Dryasdust could not discern it for a Heroism at all ; — as the Heaven's lightning, born of its black tempest, and destructive to pestilential Mudgiants, is mere horror and terror to the Pedant species everywhere ; which, like the owl in any sudden bright ness, has to shut its eyes, — or hastily procure smoked-spectacles on an improved principle. Heaven's brightness would be intoler able otherwise. Only your eagle dares look direct into the fire- radiance ; only your Schiller climbs aloft " to discover whence the lightning is coming." " Godlike men love lightning," says one. Our old Norse fathers called it a God ; the sunny blue- eyed Thor, with his all-conquering thunder-hammer, — who again, in calmer season, is beneficent Summer-heat. Godless men love it not ; shriek murder when they see it ; shutting their eyes, and hastily procuring smoked-spectacles. O Dryasdust, thou art great and thrice great !' ' But alas,' exclaims he elsewhere, getting his eye on the real nodus of the matter, ' what is it, all this Rushworthian inarticu late rubbish-continent, in its ghastly dim twilight, with its hag gard wrecks and pale shadows ; what is it, but the common Kingdom of Death ? This is what we call Death, this moulder ing dumb wilderness of things once alive. Behold here the final evanescence of Formed human things ; they had form, but they are changing into sheer formlessness ; — ancient human speech itself has sunk into unintelligible maundering. This is the col lapse, — the etiolation of human features into mouldy blank ; abso lution ; progress towards utter silence and disappearance ; dis astrous ever-deepening Dusk of Gods and Men ! Why has the living ventured thither, down from the cheerful light, across the Lethe-swamps and tartarean Phlegethons, onwards to these bale ful halls of Dis and the three-headed Dog ? Some Destiny drives him. It is his sins, I suppose : — perhaps it is his love, strong as 12 INTRODUCTION. that of Orpheus for the lost Eurydice, and likely to have no bet ter issue !' — Well, it would seem the resuscitation of a Heroism from the Past Time is no easy enterprise. Our impatient friend seems really getting sad ! We can well believe him, there needs pious love in any ' Orpheus' that will risk descending to the Gloomy Halls ; — descending, it may be, and fronting Cerberus and Dis, to no purpose ! For it oftenest proves so ; nay, as the Mycolo gists would teach us, always. Here is another Mythus. Balder the white Sungod, say our Norse Skalds, Balder, beautiful as the summer-dawn, loved of gods and men, was dead. His Brother Hermoder, urged by his Mother's tears and the tears of the Uni verse, went forth to seek him. He rode through gloomy winding valleys, of a dismal leaden color, full of howling winds and sub terranean torrents ; nine days ; ever deeper, down towards Hela's Deathrealm : at Lonesome Bridge, which, with its gold gate, spans the River of Moaning, he found the Portress, an ancient woman, called Modgudr, ' the Vexer of Minds,' keeping watch as usual : Modgudr answered him, " Yes, Balder passed this way ; but he is not here ; he is down yonder, — far, still far to the North, within Hela's Gates yonder." Hermoder rode on, still dauntless, on his horse, named ' Swiftness' or ' Mane of Gold ;' reached Hela's Gates ; leapt sheer over them, mounted as he was ; saw Balder, the very Balder, with his eyes: — but could not bring him back ! The Nomas were inexorable ; Balder was never to come back. Balder beckoned him mournfully a still adieu ; Nanna, Balder's Wife, sent ' a thimble' to her mother as a memoi ial : Balder never could return ! Is not this an emblem ? Old Portress Modgudr, I take it, is Dryasdust in Norse petticoat and hood ; a most unlovely beldame, the ' Vexer of Minds !' We will here take final leave of our impatient friend, occupied in this almost desperate enterprise of his; we will wish him which is very easy to do, more patience, and better success than he seems to hope. And now to our own small enterprise, and solid despatch of business in plain prose ! BIOGRAPHIES OF OLIVER. 13 CHAPTER II. OF THE BIOGRAPHIES OF OLIVER. Ours is a very small enterprise, but seemingly a useful one ; preparatory perhaps to greater and more useful, on this same matter : The collecting of the Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, and presenting them in natural sequence, with the still possible elucidation, to ingenuous readers. This is a thing that can be done ; and after some reflection, it has appeared worth doing. No great thing : one other dull Book added to the thou sand, dull every one of them, which have been issued on this subject! But situated as we are, new Dulness is unhappily in evitable ; readers do not reascend out of deep confusions without some trouble as they climb. These authentic utterances of the man Oliver himself — I have gathered them from far and near ; fished them up from the foul Lethean quagmires where they lay buried ; I have washed, or endeavored to wash them clean from foreign stupidities (such a job of buck-washing as I do not long to repeat) ; and the world shall now see them in their own shape. Working for long years in those unspeakable Historic Provinces, of which the reader has already had account, it becomes more and more apparent to one, That this man Oliver Cromwell was, as the popular fancy repre sents him, the soul of the Puritan Revolt, without whom it had never been a revolt transcendently memorable, and an Epoch in the World's History ; that in fact he, more than is common in such cases, does deserve to give his name to the Period in ques tion, and have the Puritan Revolt considered as a Cromwelliad, which issue is already very visible for it. And then farther, altogether contrary to the popular fancy, it becomes apparent that this Oliver was not a man of falsehoods, but a man of truths ; whose words do carry a meaning with them, and above all others of that time, are worth considering. His words, — and still more 14 INTRODUCTION. his silences, and unconscious instincts, when you have spelt and lovingly deciphered these also out of his words, — will in several ways reward the study of an earnest man. An earnest man, I apprehend, may gather from these words of Oliver's, were there even no other evidence, that the character of Oliver and of the Affairs he worked in is much the reverse of that mad jumble of ' hypocrisies,' &c. &c, which at present passes current as such. But certainly, on any hypothesis as to that, such a set of Docu ments may hope to be elucidative in various respects. Oliver's Character, and that of Oliver's Performance in this world : here best of all may we expect to read it, whatsoever it was. Even if false, these words, authentically spoken and written by the chief actor in the business, must be of prime moment for under standing of it. These are the words this man found suitablest to represent the Things themselves, around him, and in him, of which we seek a History. The newborn Things and Events, as they bodied themselves forth to Oliver Cromwell from the Whirl wind of the passing Time, — this is the name and definition he saw good to give of them. To get at these direct utterances of his, is to get at the very heart of the business ; were there once light for us in these, the business had begun again at the heart of it to be luminous ! — On the whole, we will start with this small ser vice, the Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell washed into something of legibility again, as the preliminary of all. May it prosper with a few serious readers. The heart of that Grand Puritan Business once again becoming visible, even in faint twi- light to mankind, what masses of brutish darkness will gradually vanish from all fibres of it, from the whole body and environment of it, and trouble no man any more ! Masses of foul darkness, sordid confusions not a few, as I calculate, which now bury this matter very deep, may vanish : the heart of this matter and the heart of serious men once again brought into approximation, to write some ' History ' of it may be a little easier, — for my impa tient friend or another. To dwell on or criticise the particular Biographies of Crom well, after what was so emphatically said above on the general subject, would profit us but little. Criticism of these poor Books BIOGRAPHIES OF OLIVER. li cannot express itself except in language that is painful. They far surpass in ' stupidity ' all the celebrations any Hero ever had in this world before. They are in fact worthy of oblivion, — of charitable Christian burial. Mark Noble reckons up some half dozen ' Original Biogra phies of Cromwell ;'* all of which and some more I have ex amined ; but cannot advise any other man to examine. There are several laudatory, worth nothing ; which ceased to be read when Charles II. came back, and the tables were turned. The vituperative are many : but the origin of them all, the chief fountain indeed of all the foolish lies that have circulated about Oliver since, is the mournful brown little Book called Flagellum, or the Life and Death of O. Cromwell, the late Usurper, by James Heath ; whieh was got ready so soon as possible on the back of the Annus Mirabilis or Glorious Restoration,-)- and is written in such spirit as we may fancy. When restored potentates and high dignitaries had dug up ' above a hundred buried corpses, and flung them in a heap in St. Margaret's Churchyard,' the corpse of Admiral Blake among them, and Oliver's old Mother's corpse ; and were hanging on Tyburn gallows, as some small satisfaction to themselves, the dead clay of Oliver, of Ireton, and Bradshaw ; — when high dignitaries and potentates were in such a humor, what could be expected of poor pamphleteers and garreteers 1 Heath's poor little brown lying Flagellum is described by one of the moderns as a ' Flagitium ;' and Heath himself is Called ' Carrion Heath,' — as being ' an unfortunate blasphemous dull ard, and scandal to Humanity ; — blasphemous ; who when the image of God is shining through a man, reckons it in his sordid soul to be the image of the Devil, and acts accordingly ; who in fact has no soul except what saves him the expense of salt ; who intrinsically is Carrion and not Humanity :' which seems hard measure to poor James Heath. : He was the son of the King's Cutler,' says Wood, ' and wrote pamphlets,' the best he was able, poor man. He has become a dreadfully dull individual, in addi tion to all ! — Another wretched old Book of his, called Chronicle * Noble's Cromwell, i., 294-300. His list is very inaccurate and incom plete, but not worth completing or rectifying. f The First Edition seems to be of 1663. 16 INTRODUCTION. of the Civil Wars, bears a high price in the Dilettante Sale- catalogues ; and has, as that Flagellum too has, here and there a credible trait not met with elsewhere : but in fact, to the ingenu ous inquirer, this too is little other than a tenebrific Book ; cannot be read except with sorrow, with torpor and disgust, — and in fine, if you be of healthy memory, with oblivion. The latter end of Heath has been worse than the beginning was ! From him, and his Flagellums and scandalous Human Platitudes, let no rational soul se.ek knowledge. Among modern Biographies, the great original is that of Mark Noble above cited ;* such ' original' as there is : a Book, if we must call it a Book, abounding in facts and pretended-facts more than any other on this subject. Poor Noble has gone into much research of old leases, marriage-contracts, deeds of sale and such like : he is learned in parish-registers and genealogies, has consulted pedigrees ' measuring eight feet by two feet four ;' goes much upon heraldry ; — in fact, has amassed a large heap of evidences and assertions^ worthless and of worth, respecting Cromwell and his connexions ; from wrlifch the reader, by his own judgment, is to extract what he can. For Noble himself is a man of extreme imbecility ; his judgment, for most part, seeming to lie dead asleep ; and indeed it is w^rth little when broadest awake. He falls into manifold mistakes, commits and omits in all ways ; plods along contented, in an 'element of perennial dim ness, purblindness ; has occasionally a .helpless broad innocence of .platitude which is almost interesting. A man indeed of ex treme imbecility ; to whom nevertheless let due gratitude be borne. His Book, in fact, is not properly a Book, but rather an Aggre gate of bewildered jottings ; a kind of Cromwellian Biographical Dictionary, wanting the alphabetical, or any other arrangement or index : which latter want, much more remediable than the want of judgment, is itself a great sorrow to the reader. Such as it is, this same Dictionary without judgment and without arrangement, ' bad Dictionary gone to pi,' as isf 'may call it, is the storehouse from which subsequent Biographies have all furnished themselves. The reader, * Memoirs of the Protectoral House of Cromwell, by the Rev. Mark Noble. 2 vols., London, 1787. BIOGRAPHIES OF OLIVER. 17 with continual vigilance of suspicion, once knowing what man he has to do with, digs through it, and again through it ; covers the margins of it with notes and contradictions, with references, deductions, rectifications, execrations, — in a sorrowful, but not entirely unprofitable manner. Another Book of Noble's, called Lives qf the Regicides, written some years afterwards, during the French Jacobin time, is of much more stupid character ; nearly meaningless indeed ; mere water bewitched ; which no man need buy or read : and it is said he has a third Book, on some other subject, stupider still, which latter point, however, may be considered questionable. For the rest, this poor Noble is of very impartial mind respect ing Cromwell ; open to receive good of him, and to receive evil, even inconsistent evil : the helpless, incoherent, but placid and favorable notion he has of Cromwell in 1787, contrasts notably with that which Carrion Heath had gathered of him in 1663. For, in spite of the stupor of Histories, it is beautiful, once more, to see how the Memory of Cromwell, in its huge inarticulate sig nificance, not able to speak a wise word for itself to any one, has nevertheless been steadily growing clearer and clearer in the popu lar English mind ; how from the day when high dignitaries and pamphleteers of the Carrion species did their ever-memorable feat at Tyburn, onwards to this day, the progress does not stop. In 1698,* one ofthe earliest works expressly in favor of Cromwell was written by a Critic of Ludlow's Memoirs. The anonymous Critic explains to solid Ludlow that he, in that solid but some what wooden head of his, had not perhaps seen entirely into the centre of the Universe, and workshop of the Destinies ; that, in fact, Oliver was a questionable uncommon man, and he Ludlow a common handfast, honest, dull and indeed partly wooden man, — in whom it might be wise to form no theory at all of Cromwell. By and by, a certain ' Mr. Banks,' a kind of Lawyer and Play wright, if 1 mistake not, produced a still more favorable view of Cromwell, but in a work otherwise of no moment ; the exact * So dated in Somers' Tracts (London, 1S11), vi., 416— but liable to correction if needful. Poor Noble (i. 297) gives the same date, and then placidly, in the next line, subjoins a fact inconsistent with it. As his man ner is ! 18 INTRODUCTION. \ date, and indeed the whole substance of which is hardly worth remembering.* The Letter of ' John Maidston to Governor Win throp,' — Winthrop Governor of Connecticut, a Suffolk man, of much American celebrity, — is dated 1659 ; but did not come into print till 1742, along with Thurloe's other Papers.f Maidston had been an officer in Oliver's Household, a Member of his Par liaments, and knew him well. An Essex man he ; probably an old acquaintance of Winthrop's; visibly a man of honest affections, of piety, decorum, and good sense. Whose loyalty to Oliver is of a genuine and altogether manful nature, — mostly silent, as we can discern. He had already published a credible and still interesting little Pamphlet, Passages concerning his late Highness's last Sickness ; to which, if space permit, we shall elsewhere refer. In these two little off-hand bits of writing there is a clear credi bility for the reader ; and more insight obtainable as to Oliver and his ways than in any of his express Biographies. That anonymous Life of Cromwell, which Noble very igno rantly ascribes to Bishop Gibson, which is written in a neutral spirit, as an impartial statement of facts, but not without a secret decided leaning to Cromwell, came out in 1724. It is the Life of Cromwell found commonly in Libraries :% it went through several editions in a pure state ; and I have seen a ' fifth edition ' with foreign intermixtures, ' printed at Birmingham in 1778,' on grey paper, seemingly as a Book for Hawkers. The Author of it was by no means ' Bishop Gibson,' but one Kimber, a Dissent ing Minister of London, known otherwise as a compiler of books. He has diligently gathered from old Newspapers and other such sources ; narrates in a dull, steady, concise, but altogether unin telligent manner ; can be read without offence, but hardly with any real instruction. Image of Cromwell's self there is none, express or implied, in this Book ; for the man himself had none, and did not feel the want of any : nay in regard to external facts . * Short Critical Review of the Life of Oliver Cromwell : By a Gentleman ofthe^Middle Temple. London, 1739. t Th'urloe, i., 763-8. t The Life of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth. Impartially collected, &c. London, 1724. Distinguished also by a not intolerable Portrait BIOGRAPHIES OF OLIVER. 19 also, there are inaccuracies enough, — here too, what is the gene ral rule in these books, you can find as many inaccuracies as you like : dig where you please, water will come ! As a crown to all the modern Biographies of Cromwell, let us note Mr. Forster's late one :* full of interesting original excerpts, and indications of what is notablest in the old books ; gathered and set forth with real merit, with energy in abundance and superabundance ; amounting in result, we may say, to a vigorous decisive tearing up of all the old hypotheses on the subject, and an opening of the general mind for new. Of Cromwell's actual biography, from these and from all Books and sources, there is extremely little to be known. It is from his own words, as I have ventured to believe, from his own Let ters and Speeches well read, that the world may first obtain some dim glimpse of the actual Cromwell, and see him darkly face to face. What little is otherwise ascertainable, cleared from the circumambient inanity and insanity, may be stated in brief com pass. So much as precedes the earliest still extant Letters, I subjoin here in the form most convenient. * Statesmen ofthe Commonwealth, by John Forster (London, 1840), vols iv. and v. 20 INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER III. OF THE CROMWELL KINDRED. Oliver Cromwell, afterwards Protector of the Commonwealth of England, was born at Huntingdon, in St. John's Parish there, on the 25th of April, 1599. Christened on the 29th of the same month ; as the old Parish-registers of that Church still legibly testify.* His Father was Robert Cromwell, younger son of Sir Henry Cromwell, and younger brother of Sir Oliver Cromwell, Knights both ; who dwelt successively, in rather sumptuous fashion, at the Mansion of Hinchinbrook hard by. His Mother was Eliza beth Steward, daughter of William Steward, Esquire, in Ely ; an opulent man, a kind of hereditary Farmer of the Cathedral Tithes and Church lands round that city ; in which capacity his son, Sir Thomas Steward, Knight, in due time succeeded him, resi dent also at Ely. Elizabeth was a young widow when Robert Cromwell married her : the first marriage, to one ' William Lynne, Esquire, of Bassingbourne in Cambridgeshire,' had lasted but a year ; husband and only child are buried in Ely Cathedral, where their monument still stands ; the date of their deaths, which followed near on one another, is 1589. f The exact date of the young widow's marriage to Robert Cromwell is nowhere given ; but seems to have been in 1591.^; Our Oliver was their fifth child ; their second boy ; but the first soon died. They had ten children in all ; of whom seven came to maturity, and Oliver was their only son. I may as well print the little Note, smelted long ago out of huge dross-heaps in Noble's Book, that the reader too may have his small benefit of it.§ * Noble, i., 92. t Noble, ii., 198, and ms. penes me. % Noble, i., 88. § Oliver Cromwell's Brothers and Sisters. Oliver's mother bad been a widow (Mrs. Lynne of Bassingbourne) before marrying Robert Cromwell ; neither her age nor his is discoverable here. THE CROMWELL KINDRED. 21 This Elizabeth Steward, who had now become Mrs. Robert CromweU, was, say the genealogists, 'indubitably descended from the Royal Stewart Family of Scotland ;' and could still count kindred with them. ' From one Walter Steward, who had accompanied Prince James of Scotland,' when our inhospitable politic Henry IV. detained the poor Prince, driven in by stress of weather to him here. Walter did not return with the Prince to Scotland ; having ' fought tournaments,' — having made an ad vantageous marriage-settlement here. One of his descendants, Robert Steward, happened to be Prior of Ely when Henry VIII. dissolved the monasteries ; and, proving pliant on that occasion, Robert Steward, last Popish Prior, became the first Protestant Dean of Ely, and — ' was remarkably attentive to his family,' says Noble. The profitable Farming ofthe Tithes at Ely, above mentioned ; this, and other settlements, and good dotations of Church lands among his Nephews, were the fruits of Robert Steward's pliancy on that occasion. The genealogists say, there is no doubt of this pedigree ; — and explain in intricate tables, how Elizabeth Steward, Mother of Oliver Cromwell, was indubi tably either the ninth, or the tenth, or some other fractional part of half a cousin to Charles Stuart King of England. 1. First child (seemingly), Joan, baptized 24th September, 1592 ; she died in 1600 (Noble, i., 88). 2. Elizabeth, 14th October, 1593 ; died unmarried, thinks Noble, in 1672, at Ely. 3. Henry, 31st August, 1595 ; died young, 'before 1617.' 4. Catherine, 7th February, 1596-7; married to Whitstone, a Parlia mentary Officer ; then to Colonel Jones. 5. Oliver, born 25th April, 1599. 6. Margaret, 22d February, 1600-1 ; she became Mrs. Wauton, or Wal ton, Huntingdonshire; her son was killed at Marston Moor, — as we shall see. 7. Anna, 2d January, 1602-3 ; Mrs. Sewster, Huntingdonshire ; died lst Noverri-er, 1646 : — her Brother Oliver had just ended the ' first Civil War' then. 8. Jane, 19th January, 1605-6 ; Mrs. Disbrowe, Cambridgeshire ; died, seemingly, in 1656. 9. Robert, 18th January, 1608-9 ; died same April. 10. Robina, so named for the above Robert : uncertain date : became Mrs. Dr. French : then Mrs. Bishop Wilkins : her daughter by French, her one child, was married to Archbishop Tillotson. • 22 INTRODUCTION. Howsoever related to Charles Stuart or to other parties, Ro bert Cromwell, younger son of the Knight of Hinchinbrook, brought her home, we see, as his Wife, to Huntingdon, about 1591 ; and settled with her there, on such portion, with such prospects as a cadet of the House of Hinchinbrook might have. Portion consisting of certain lands and messuages round and in that Town of Huntingdon, — where, in the current name ' Crom well's Acre,' if not in other names applied to lands and mes suages there, some feeble echo of him and his possessions still ^.survives, or seems to survive. These lands he himself farmed ; the income in all is guessed or computed to have been about 300Z. a year ; a tolerable fortune in those times ; perhaps something like 1000Z. now. Robert Cromwell's Father, as we said, and then his elder Brother, dwelt successively in good style at Hinch inbrook near by. It was the Father Sir Henry Cromwell, who from his sumptuosity was called the ' Golden Knight,' that built, or that enlarged, remodelled and as good as built, the Mansion of Hinchinbrook, which had been a Nunnery, while Nunneries still were : it was the son, Sir Oliver, likewise an expensive man, that sold it to the Montagues, since Earls of Sandwich, whose seat it still is. A stately pleasant House, among its shady lawns and expanses, on the left bank of the Ouse river, a short half mile west of Huntingdon ; — still stands pretty much as Oliver Crom well's Grandfather left it ; rather kept good and defended from the inroads of Time and Accident, than substantially altered. Several Portraits of the Cromwells, and other interesting por traits and memorials of the seventeenth and subsequent centu ries, are still there. The Cromwell blazonry ' on the great bay window,' which Noble makes so much of, is now gone ; has given place to Montague blazonry ; and no dull man can bore us with that any more. Huntingdon itself lies pleasantly along the left bank of the Ouse ; sloping pleasantly upwards from Ouse Bridge, which con nects it with the old village of Godmanchester ; the Town itself consisting mainly of one fair street, which towards the north end of it opens into a kind of irregular market-place, and then con tracting again soon terminates. The two churches of All-Saints, and St. John's, as you walk up northward from the Bridge, ap- THE CROMWELL KINDRED. 33 pear successively on your left; the churchyards flanked with shops or other houses. The Ouse, which is of very circular course in this quarter, ' winding as if reluctant to enter the Fen- country,' says one Topographer, has still a respectable drab- color, gathered from the clays of Bedfordshire ; has not yet the Stygian black which in a few miles farther it assumes for good. Huntingdon, as it were, looks over into the Fens ; Godmanches- ter, just across the river, already stands on black bog. The country to the East is all Fen (mostly unreclaimed in Oliver's time, and still of a very dropsical character) ; to the West it is hard green ground, agreeably broken into little heights, duly fringed with wood, and bearing marks of comfortable long-con tinued cultivation. Here on the edge ofthe firm green land, and looking over into the black marshes with their alder-trees and willow-trees, did Oliver Cromwell pass his young years. Drunk en Barnabee, who travelled, and drank, and made Latin rhymes, in that country about 1635, through whose glistening satyr-eyes one can still discern this and the other feature of the Past, repre sents to us on the height behind Godmanchester, as you ap proach the scene from Cambridge and the south, a big Oak Tree, which has now disappeared, leaving no notable successor. Veni Godmanchester, ubi Ut Ixion captus nube, Sic, Sfc. And he adds in a Note, Quercus anilis erat, tamen eminus oppida spectat ; Stirpe viam monstrat, plwmea fronde tegit ;— Or in his own English version, An aged Oak takes of this Town survey, Finds birds their nests, tells passengers their way.* If Oliver Cromwell climbed that Oak-tree, in quest of bird-nests or boy-adventures, the Tree, or this poor ghost of it, may still have a kind of claim to memory. * Barnabae Itinerarium (London, 1818), p. 96. 24 INTRODUCTION. The House where Robert Cromwell dwelt, where his son Oliver and all his family were born, is still familiar to every inhabitant of Huntingdon : but it has been twice rebuilt since that date, and now bears no memorial whatever which even tradi tion can connect with him. It stands at the upper or northern extremity of the town, — beyond the Market-place we spoke of; on the left or riverward side of the street. It is at present a soli J ¦ yellow brick house, with a walled court-yard ; occupied Joy some townsman of the wealthier sort. The little Brook of Hinchin, making its way to the Ouse which is not far off, still flows through the courtyard of the place, — offering a convenience for malting or brewing, among other things. Some vague but confi dent tradition as to Brewing attaches itself to this locality ; and traces of evidence, I understand, exist that before Robert Crom well's time, it had been employed as a Brewery : but of this or even of Robert Cromwell's own brewing, there is, at such a dis tance, in such an element of distracted calumny, exaggeration and confusion, little or no certainty to be had. Tradition, ' the Rev. Dr. Lort's Manuscripts,' Carrion Heath, and such testimo nies, are extremely insecure as guides ! Thomas Harrison, for example, is always called 'the son of a Butcher;' which means only that his Father, as farmer or owner, had grazing-lands, down in Staffordshire, wherefrom naturally enough proceeded cattle, fat cattle as the case might be, — well fatted, I hope. Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex in Henry Eighth's time, is in like manner called always ' the son of a Blacksmith at Putney ;' and whoever figures to himself a man in black apron and ham mer in hand, and tries to rhyme this with the rest of Thomas Cromwell's history, will find that here too he has got into an inso lubility. ' The splenetic credulity and incredulity, the calumni ous opacity, the exaggerative ill-nature, and general flunkeyism and stupidity of mankind,' says my author, ' are ever to be largely allowed for in such circumstances.' We will leave Ro bert Cromwell's brewing in a very unilluminated state. Uncon tradicted Tradition and old printed Royalist Lampoons do call him a Brewer ; the Brook of Hinchin, running through his pre mises, offered clear convenience for malting or brewing ; — in regard to which, and also to his Wife's assiduous management of THE CROMWELL KINDRED. 25 the same, one is very willing to believe Tradition. The essen tial trade of Robert Cromwell was that of managing those lands of his in the vicinity of Huntingdon : the grain of them would have to be duly harvested, thrashed, brought to market; whether it was as corn or as malt it came to market, can remain indifferent to us. For the rest, as documents still testify, this Robert Cromwell did Burgh and Quarter-Session duties ; was not slack but moder ately active as a country-gentleman ; sat once in Parliament in his younger years ;* is found with his elder or other Brothers on various Public Commissions for Draining the Fens of that region, or more properly for inquiring into the possibility of such an operation ; a thing much noised of then ; which Robert Cromwell, among others, reported to be very feasible, very promising, but did not live to see accomplished, or even attempted. His social rank is sufficiently indicated ; — and much flunkeyism, falsity, and other carrion ought to be buried ! Better than all social rank, he is understood to have been a wise, devout, steadfast and worthy man, and to have lived a modest and manful life in his station there. Besides the Knight of Hinchinbrook, he had other Brothers set tled prosperously in the Fen regions, where this Cromwell Family had extensive possessions. One Brother Henry was ' seated at Upwood,' a fenny district near Ramsey Mere ; one of his daugh ters came to be the wife, second wife, of'Oliver St. John, the Shipmoney Lawyer, the political ' dark-lantern,' as men used to name him ; of whom we shall hear farther. Another Brother ' was seated' at Biggin House between Ramsey and Upwood ; a moated mansion, with ditch and painted paling round it. A third Brother was seated at — my informant knows not where ! In fact I had better, as before, subjoin the little smelted Note which has already done its duty, and let the reader make of that what he can.f Of our Oliver's Aunts one was Mrs. Hampden of Great * ' 35to Eliz. :' Feb.— April, 1593 (Noble, i., 83 ; from Willis). f Oliver's Uncles. 1. Sir Oliver of Hinchinbrook: his eldest son John, born in 1589 (ten years older than our Oliver), went into the army, ' Colonel of an English regiment in the Dutch service :' this is the Colonel Cromwell who is said VOL. I. 3 INTRODUCTION. Hampden, Bucks : an opulent, zealous person, not without ambi tions ; already a widow and mother of two Boys, one of whom proved very celebrated as John Hampden ; — she was Robert or fabled to have sought a midnight interview with Oliver, in the end of 1648, for the purpose of buying off Charles I. ; to have ' laid his hand on his sword,' &c, &c. The story is in Noble, i., 51 ; with no authority but that of Carrion Heath. Other sons of his were soldiers, royalists these '. there are various Cousin Cromwells that confusedly turn up on both sides of the quarrel. — Robert Cromwell, our Oliver's Father, was the next Brother ofthe Hinchinbrook Knight. The Third Brother, second uncle, was 2. Henry Cromwell, of Upwood near Ramsey Mere : adventurer in the Virginia Company ; sat in Parliament 1603-1611 ; one of his daughters Mrs. St. John. Died 1630 (Noble, i., 28). 3. Richard : ' buys in 1607 ' a bit of ground in Huntingdon ; died ' at Ramsey,' 1628 ; was Member for Huntingdon in Queen Elizabeth's time :— Lived in Ramsey ? Is buried at Upwood. 4. Sir Philip: Biggin House; knighted at Whitehall, 1604 (Noble, i., 31). His second son, Philip, was in Colonel Ingoldsby's regiment; — wounded at the storm of Bristol, in 1Q45. Third son, Thomas, was in Ire land with Strafford (signs Montnorris's death-warrant there, in 1630) ; lived afterwards in London ; became Major, and then Colonel, in the Kings Army. Fourth son, Oliver, was in the Parliamentary Army ; had watched the King in the Isle of Wight, — went with his cousin, our Oliver, to Ireland in 1649, and died or was killed there. Fifth son, Robert, ' poisoned his Master, an Attorney, and was banged at London,'— i{ there be truth in ' Heath's Flagellum' (Noble, i., 35) ' and some Pedigrees ;'— year not given ; say about 1635, when the lad, ' born 1617,' was in his 18th year ? I have found no hint of this affair in any other quarter, not in the wildest Royalist- Birkenhead or Walker's-Independency lampoon ; and consider it very possi ble that a Robert Cromwell having suffered ' for poisoning an Attorney,' he may have been called the cousin of Cromwell by ' Heath and some Pedi grees.' But of course anybody can ' poison an Attorney,' and be hanged for it ! & Oliver's Aunt Elizabeth was married to WiUiam Hampden of Great Hampden, Bucks (year not given, Noble, i., 36, nor at p. 68 of vol. ii. ; nor in Lord Nugent's Memorials of Hampden) : he died in 1597 ; she survived him 67 years, continuing a widow (Noble, ii., 69). Buried in Great Hamp den Church, 1 664, aged 90. She had two sons, John and Richard : John, born 1594,— Richard, an Oliverian too, died in 1659 (Noble, ii., 70). Aunt Joan (elder than Elizabeth) was < Lady Barrington ;' Aunt Frances (younger) was Mrs. Whalley. Richard Whalley of Kerton, Notts; a man of mark ; sheriff, &c. ; three wives, children only by this second,' < Aunt THE CROMWELL KINDRED. 27 Cromwell's Sister. Another Cromwell Aunt of Oliver's was mar ried to ' Whalley, heir of the Whalley family in Notts ;' another to the ' heir ofthe Dunches of Pusey, in Berkshire ;' another to — In short the stories of Oliver's ' poverty,' if they were otherwise of any moment, are all false ; and should be mentioned here, if still here, for the last time. The family was of the rank of sub stantial gentry, and duly connected with such in the counties round, for three generations back. Of the numerous and now mostly forgetable cousinry we specify farther only the Mashams of Otes in Essex, as like to be of some cursory interest to us by and by. There is no doubt at all but Oliver the Protector's family was related to that of Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, the Putney 'Blacksmith's' or Iron-master's son, transiently mentioned above; the Malleus Monachorum, or as old Fuller renders it, ' Mauler of Monasteries,' in Henry Eight's time. The same old Fuller, a perfectly veracious and most intelligent person, does indeed report as of ' his own knowledge,' that Oliver Protector, once upon a time when Bishop Goodman came dedicating to him some unread able semi-popish jargon about the ' mystery ofthe Holy Trinity,' and some adulation about ' his Lordship's relationship to the for mer great purifier of the Church,' and Mauler of Monasteries, — answered impatiently, " My family has no relation to his !" This old Fuller reports, as of his own knowledge. I have consulted the unreadable semi-popish jargon, for the sake of that Dedica tion ; I find that Oliver's relationship to Thomas Cromwell is in any case stated wrong there, not right : I reflect farther that Bishop Goodman, oftener called ' Bishop Badman' in those times, went over to Popery ; had become a miserable impoverished old piece of confusion, and at this time could appear only in the character Fanny.' Thomas Whalley (no years given, Noble, ii., 141) died in his father's lifetime ; left a son who was a kind of royalist, but yet had a cer tain acceptance with Oliver too. Edward Whalley, the famed ' Colonel,' and Henry Whalley, ' the Judge-Advocate' (wretched biographies of these two, Noble, pp. 141, 143-56). Colonel Whalley and Colonel Goff, after the Restoration, fled to New England, lived in ' caves ' there, and had had a sore time of it Enough ofthe Cousinry ! — 28 INTRODUCTION. of begging bore, — when, at any rate, for it was in the year 1653, Oliver himself, having just turned out the Long Parliament,* was busy enough ! I infer therefore that Oliver said to him impa tiently, without untruth, " You are quite wrong as to all that : good morning !" — and that old Fuller, likewise without untruth, reports it as above. But at any rate there is other very simple evidence entirely con clusive. Richard or Sir Richard Cromwell, great-grandfather of Oliver Protector, was a man well known in his day ; had been very active in the work of suppressing monasteries ; a right-hand man to Thomas the Mauler : and indeed it was on Monastic Pro perty, chiefly or wholly, that he had made for himself a sump tuous estate in . those Fen regions. Now, of this Richard Crom well there are two Letters to Thomas Cromwell, ' Vicar-General,' Earl of Essex, which remain yet visible among the Manuscripts of the British Museum ; in both of which he signs himself with his own hand, ' your most bounden Nephew,' — an evidence suffi cient to set the point at rest. Copies of the Letters are in my possession ; but I grudge to inflict them on the reader. One of them, the longer of the two, stands printed, with all or more than all its original mis-spelling and confused obscurity, in Noble :")" it is dated ' Stamford,' without day or year ; but the context far ther dates it as contemporary with the Lincolnshire Rebellion, or Anti-Reformation riot, which was directly followed by the more * The date of Goodman's Book is 25th June, 1653 ; here is the correct title of it (King's Pamphlets, small 4to., no. 73, §1) : 'The two great Myste ries of Christian Religion ; the Ineffable Trinity and Wonderful Incarna tion : by G. G. G.' (meaning Godfrey Goodman, Glocestrensis). Unfor tunate persons who have read Laud's writings are acquainted with this Bishop Goodman, or Badman ; he died a declared Papist. Poor man, his speculations, now become jargon to us, were once very serious and eloquent to him ! Such is the fate that soon overtakes all men who, quitting the ' Eternal Melodies,' take up their abode in the outer Temporary Discords, and seek their subsistence there ! This is the part of the Dedication that concerns us : ' To his Excellency my Lord Oliver Cromwell, Lord General. My Lord, — Fifty years since the name of Socinus, &c— ' Knowing that the Lord Crom well (your Lordship's great uncle) was then in great favor,' &c. — ' God- free Goodman.' t i., 242. THE CROMWELL KINDRED. 29 formidable ' Pilgrimage of Grace' in Yorkshire to the like effect, in the autumn of 1536.* Richard, in company with other higher official persons, represents himself as straining every nerve to beat down and extinguish this traitorous fanatic flame, kindled against the King's Majesty and his Reform of the Church ; has an eye in particular to a certain Sir John Thymbleby in Lincoln shire, whom he would fain capture as a ringleader ; suggests that the use of arms should be prohibited to these treasonous popula tions, except under conditions ; — and seems hastening on, with almost furious speed ; towards Yorkshire and the Pilgrimage of Grace, we may conjecture. The second Letter, also without date except ' Saturday,' shadows to us an official man, again on business of hot haste ; journeying from Monastery lo Monastery ; finding this Superior disposed to comply with the King's Majesty, and that other not disposed, but capable of being made so ; inti mates farther that he will be at his own House (presumably Hin chinbrook), and then straightway ' home,' and will report pro gress to my Lord in person. On the whole, as this is the earliest articulate utterance of the Oliver Family ; and casts a faint glimmer of light, as from a single flint-spark, into the dead dark ness ofthe foregone century; and touches withal on an acquaint ance of ours the ' Prior of Ely,' — Robert Steward, last Popish Prior, first Protestant Dean of Ely, and brother of Mrs. Robert Cromwell's ancestor, which is curious to think of, — we will give the Letter, more especially as it is very short : " To my Lord Cromwell. " I have me most humbly commended unto your Lordship. I rode on Sunday to Cambridge to my bed ;f and the next morn ing, was up betimes, purposing to have found at Ely Mr. Pollard and Mr. Williams. But they were departed before my coming : and so, ' they ' being at dinner at Somersham, with the Bishop of Ely, I overtook them ' there. '% At which time, I opened your * Herbert (in Kennet, ii. 204-5). f From London, we suppose. % The words within single commas, ' they' and 'there,' are added, for bringing out the sense ; a plan we shall follow in all the Original Letters of this Collection. 30 INTRODUCTION. pleasure unto them in everything. Your Lordship, I think, shall shortly perceive the Prior of Ely to be of a froward sort, by evident tokens ;* as, at our coming home, shall be at large related unto you. " At the writing hereof we have done nothing at Ramsey ; saving that one night I communed with the Abbot ; whom I found conformable to everything, as shall be at this time put in act.f And then, as your Lordship's will is, as soon as we have done at Ramsey, we go to Peterborough. And from thence to my House ; and so home.J The which, I trust, shall be at the farthest on this day come seven days. " That the blessed Trinity preserve your Lordship's health ! " Your Lordship's most bounden Nephew, " Richard Cromwell. " From Ramsey, on Tuesday in the morning."§ The other Letter is still more express as to the consanguinity ; it says, among other things, ' And longer than I may have heart so, as my most bounden duty is, to serve the King's Grace with body, goods, and all that ever I am able to make ; and your Lordship, as Nature and also your manifold kindness bindeth, — I beseech God I no longer live.' ' As Nature bindeth.' Richard Cromwell then thanks him, with a bow to the very ground, for ' my poore wyef,' who has had some kind remembrance from his Lordship ; thinks all ' his travail but a pastime ;' and remains, ' at Stamford this Saturday at eleven of the clock, — your humble Nephew most bounden,' as in the other case. A vehement, swift- riding man ! — Nephew, it has been suggested, did not mean in Henry the Eighth's time so strictly as it now does, brother's or sis ter's son ; it meant nepos, or rather kinsman of younger generation : but on all hypotheses of its meaning, the consanguinity of Oliver * He proved tameable, Sir Richard,— and made your Great-grandson rich, for one consequence of that ! f Brought to legal black-on-white. J To London. § MSS. Cotton. Cleopatra E. IV., p. 2046. The envelope and ad dress are not here ; but this label of address, given in a sixteenth-century hand, and otherwise indicated by the text, is not doubtful. The signature alone, and line preceding that, are in Richard's hand. In the Letter printed by Noble the address remains, in the hand of Richard's clerk THE CROMWELL KINDRED. 31 Protector of England and Thomas Mauler of Monasteries is not henceforth to be doubted. Another indubitable thing is, That this Richard, your Nephew most bounden, has signed himself in various Law-deeds and No tarial papers still extant, ' Richard Cromwell alias Williams ;' also that his sons and grandsons continued to sign Cromwell alias Williams ; and even that our Oliver himself in his youth has been known to sign so. And then a third indubitable thing on this matter is, That Leland, an exact man, sent out by Authority in those years to take cognizance and make report of the Church Establishments in England, and whose well-known Itinerary is the fruit of that survey, has written in that work these words ; under the head, ' Commotes* in Glamorganshire :' ' Kibworth liethfNfrom the mouth of Remny up to an Hill in the same Commote, called Kevenon, a six miles from the mouth of Remny. This Hill goeth as a Wall overthwart betwixt the Rivers of Thave^; and Remny. A two miles from this Hill by the south, and a two miles from Cardiff, be vestigia of a Pile or Ma nor Place decayed, at Egglis Newith§ in the Parish of Landaff. On the south side of this Hill was born Richard William alias Cromwell, in the Parish of Llanilsen."|| That Richard Cromwell, then, was of kindred to Thomas Cromwell ; that he and his family after him signed ' alias Wil liams;' and that Leland, an accurate man, said and printed, in the official scene where Richard himself was living and conspi cuous, he was born in Glamorganshire : these three facts are indubitable ; — but to these three we must limit ourselves. For, * Commote is the Welsh word Cwmwd, now obsolete as an official divi sion, equivalent to cantred, hundred. Kibworth Commote is now Kibbor Hundred. t Extendeth. % Thave means Taff ; the description of the wall-like Hill between these two streams is recognizably correct; Kevenon, spelt Cevn-on, 'ash-tree ridge,' is still the name of the Hill. § Eglwys JVewydd, New Church, abolished now. || Noble, i., 238, collated with Leland (Oxford, 1769), iv.,fol. 56, pp. 37, 8. Leland gathered his records ' in six years' between 1533 and 1540; he died, endeavoring to assort them, in 1552. They were long afterwards pub lished by Hearne. 32 INTRODUCTION. as to the origin of this same ' alias Williams,' whether it came from the general ' Williamses of Berkshire,'* or from ' Morgan Williams* a Glamorganshire gentleman married to the sister of „ Thomas Cromwell,' or from whom or what it came, We have to profess ourselves little able, and indeed not much concerned to decide. Williamses are many : there is Richard Cromwell, in that old Letter, hoping to breakfast with a Williams at Ely, — but finds both him and Pollard gone ! Facts, even trifling facts, when indisputable may have significance ; but Welsh Pedigrees, ' with seventy shields of arms,' ' Glothian Lord of Powys' (prior or posterior to the Deluge), though ' written on a parchment 8 feet by 2 feet 4, bearing date 1602, and belonging to the Miss Cromwells of Hampstead,'f are highly unsatisfactory to the inge nuous mind ! We have to remark two things : First, that the Welsh Pedigree, with its seventy shields and ample extent of sheepskin, bears date London, 1602 ; was not put together, there fore, till about a hundred years after the birth ofRichard, and at a great distance from the scene of that event : circumstances which affect the unheraldic mind with some misgivings. Second ly, that ' learned Dugdale,' upon whom mainly, apart from these uncertain Welsh sheepskins, the story of this Welsh descent of the Cromwells seems to rest, has unfortunately stated the matter in two different ways, — as being, and then also as not being, — in two places of his learned Lumber-Book.:): Which circumstance affects the unheraldic mind with still fataller misgivings, — and in fact raises irrepressibly the question and admonition, " What boots it 1 Leave the vain region of blazonry, of rusty broken shields, and genealogical marine-stores ; let it remain for ever doubtful ! The Fates themselves have appointed it even so. Let the uncertain Simulacrum of a Glothian, prior or posterior to Noah's Deluge, hover between us and the utter Void ; basing himself on a dust-chaos of ruined heraldries, lying genealogies, and saltires cheeky, the best he can !" The small Hamlet and Parish Church of Cromwell, or Crum well (the Well of Crum, whatever that may be), still stands on * Biographia Britannica (London, 1789), iv., 474. f Noble, i., 1. X Dugdale's Baronage, ii., 374, and ii., 393. THE CROMWELL KINDRED. 33 the Eastern edge of Nottinghamshire, not far from the left bank of the Trent ; simple worshippers still doing in it some kind of divine service every Sunday. From this, without any ghost to teach us, we can understand that the Cromwell kindred all got their name, — in very old times indeed. From torpedo rubbish- records we learn also, without great difficulty, that the Barons Cromwell were summoned to Parliament from Edward Second's time and downward ; that they had their chief seat at Tatter- shall in Lincolnshire ; that there were Cromwells of distinction, and of no distinction, scattered in reasonable abundance over that Fen-country, — Cromwells Sheriffs of their Counties there in Richard's own time.* The Putney Blacksmith, Father of the Malleus, or Hammer that smote Monasteries on the head, — a Figure worthy to take his place beside Hephaistos, or Smith Mimer, if we ever get a Pantheon in this Nation, — was probably enough himself a Fen-country man ; one of the junior branches, who came to live by metallurgy in London here. Richard, also sprung of the Fens, might have been his kinsman in many ways, have got the name of Williams in many ways, and even been born on the Hill behind Cardiff, independently of Glothian. Enough: Richard Cromwell, on a background of heraldic darkness, rises clearly visible to us ; a man vehemently galloping to and fro, in that sixteenth century ; tourneying suc cessfully before King Harry, f who loved a man ; quickening the death-agonies of Monasteries ; growing great on their spoil ; — and fated, he also, to produce another Malleus Cromwell that smote a thing or two. And so we will leave this matter of the Birth and Genealogy. * Fuller's Worthies, § Cambridgeshire, &c. t Stowe's Chronicle (London, 1631 ), p. 580 ; Stowe's Survey, Holin shed, &c. 3* 34 INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER IV. events in Oliver's biography. The few ascertained, or clearly imaginable, Events in Oliver's Biography may as well be arranged, for our present purpose, in the form of annals. 1603. Early in January of this year, the old Grandfather, Sir Henry, ' the Golden Knight,' at Hinchinbrook, died :* our Oliver, not quite four years old, saw funeralia and crapes, saw Father and Uncles with grave faces, and understood not well what it meant, — understood only, or tried to understand, that the good old Grand father was gone away, and would never pat his head any more. The maternal Grandfather, at Ely, was yet, and for above a dozen years more, living. The same year, four months afterwards, King James, coming from the North to take possession of the English crown, lodged two nights at Hinchinbrook ; with royal retinue, with immense sumptuosities, addressings, knight-makings, ceremonial exhibi tions; which must Jiave been a grand treat for little Oliver. His Majesty came from the Belvoir-Castle region, ' hunting all the way,' on the afternoon of Wednesday, 27th April, 1603 ; and set off, through Huntingdon and Godmanchester, towards Roys ton, on Friday forenoon.-)- The Cambridge Doctors brought him an Address while here ; Uncle Oliver, besides the ruinously splendid entertainments, gave him hounds, horses and astonishing gifts at his departure. In return there were Knights created, * Poor Noble, unequal sometimes to the copying of a Parish-register, with his judgment asleep, dates this event 1603-4 (at p. 20, vol. 1), and then placidly (at p. 40) states a fact inconsistent therewith. t Stowe's Chronicle, 812, &c. EVENTS IN OLIVER'S BIOGRAPHY. 35 Sir Oliver first of the batch, we may suppose ; King James had decided that there should be no reflection for the want of Knights at least. Among the large batches manufactured next year was Thomas Steward of Ely, henceforth Sir Thomas, Mrs. Robert Cromwell's Brother, our Oliver's Uncle. Hinchinbrook got great honor by this and other royal visits ; but found it, by and by, a dear-bought honor. Oliver's Biographers, or rather Carrion Heath his first Biogra pher whom the others have copied, introduce various tales into these early years of Oliver : of his being run away with by an ape, along the leads of Hinchinbrook, and England being all but delivered from him, had the Fates so ordered it ; of his seeing prophetic spectres ; of his robbing orchards, and fighting tyran- nously with boys ; of his acting in School Plays ; of his &c, &c. The whole of which, grounded on ' Human Stupidity' and Carrion Heath alone, begs us to give it Christian burial once for all. Oliver attended the Public School of Huntingdon, which was then conducted by a Dr. Beard, of whom we shall hear again ; he learned to appearance moderately well, what the sons of othei gentlemen were taught in such places ; went through the univer sal destinies which conduct all men from childhood to youth, in a way not particularized in any one point by an authentic record. Readers of lively imagination can follow him on his bird-nesting expeditions, to the top of ' Barnabee's big Tree,' and elsewhither, if they choose ; on his fen-fowling expeditions, social sports and labors manifold ; vacation-visits to his Uncles, to Aunt Hampden and Cousin John among others : all these things must have been ; but how they specially were is for ever hidden from all men. He had kindred of the sort above specified : parents of the sort above specified, rigorous yet affectionate persons, and very reli- giouSj as all rational persons then were. He had two sisters elder, and gradually five younger ; the only boy among seven. Readers must fancy his growth there, in the North end of Hunt ingdon, in the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, as they can- In January, 1603-4,* was held, at Hampton Court, a kind of * Here, more fitly perhaps than afterwards, it may be brought to mind, that the English year in those times did not begin till March ; that New 36 INTRODUCTION. Theological Convention, of intense interest all over England, and doubtless at Huntingdon too ; now very dimly known if at all known, as the ' Hampton-Court Conference.' ^ It was a meeting for the settlement of some dissentient humors in religion. The Millennary Petition, — what we should now call the ' Monster Petition,' for the like in number of signatures was never seen before,— signed by near a thousand Clergymen, of pious strait ened consciences : this and various other Petitions to his Majesty, by persons of pious straitened consciences, had been presented ; craving relief in some ceremonial points, which, as they found no warrant for them in the Bible, they suspected (with a very natural shudder in that case) to savor of Idol-worship and Mimetic Dramaturgy, instead of God-worship, and to be very dangerous indeed for a man to have concern with ! Hampton-Court Con ference was accordingly summoned. Four world-famous Doctors, from Oxford and Cambridge, represented the pious straitened Year's Day was the 25th of March. So in England, at that time, in all records, writings and books ; as indeed in official records it continued so till 1752. In Scotland it was already not so ; the year began with January there ever since 1600 ;— as in all Catholic countries it had done ever since the Papal alteration of the Style in 1582; and as in the most Protestant countries, excepting England, it soon after that began to do. Scotland in respect of the day ofthe month still followed the Old Style. ' New Year's Day, the 25th March :' this is the whole compass of the fact ; with which a reader in those old books has, not without more diffi culty than he expects, to familiarize himself. It has occasioned more mis- datings and consequent confusions to modern editorial persons, than any other as simple circumstance. So learned a man as Whitaker, Historian of Whalley, editing Sir George Radcliffe's Correspondence (London, 1810), with the lofty air which sits well on him on other occasions, has altogether forgotten the above small circumstance : in consequence of which we have Oxford Carriers dying in January, or the first half of March, and in our great amazement going on to forward butter-boxes in the May follow ing ; — and similar miracles not a few occurring : and in short the whole Correspondence is jumbled to pieces ; a due bit of topsy-turvy being intro duced into the Spring of every year ; and the learned Editor sits, with his lofty air, presiding over mere Chaos come again ! — In the text here, we of course translate into the modern year, but leaving the day of the month as we find it ; and if for greater assurance both forms be written down, as for instance 1603-4, the last figure is always the modern one ; 1603-4 means 1604 for our calendar. EVENTS IN OLIVER'S BIOGRAPHY. 37 class, now beginning to be generally nicknamed Puritans. The Archbishop, the Bishop of London, also world-famous men, with a considerable reserve of other bishops, deans, and dignitaries, appeared for the Church by itself Church. Lord Chancellor, the renowned Egerton, and the highest official persons, many lords and courtiers with a tincture of sacred science, in fact the flower of England, appeared as witnesses ; with breathless interest. The King himself presided ; having real gifts of speech, and being very learned in Theology, — which it was not then ridiculous but glorious for him to be. More glorioutthan the monarchy of what we now call Literature would be ; glorious as the faculty of a Goethe holding visibly of Heaven : supreme skill in Theology then meant that. To know God, 9eo;, the Maker, — to know the divine Laws and inner Harmonies of this Universe, must always be the highest glory for a man ! And not to know them, always the highest disgrace for a man, however common it be! — Awful devout Puritanism, decent dignified Ceremonialism (both always of high moment in this world, but not of equally high) appeared here facing one another for the first time. The demands of the Puritans seem to modern minds very limited indeed : That there should be a new correct Translation of the Bible (granted), and increased zeal in teaching (omitted) ; That ' lay impropri ations' (tithes snatched from the old Church by laymen) might be made to yield a ' seventh part ' of their amount, towards main taining ministers in dark regions which had none (refused) ; That the Clergy in districts might be allowed to meet together, and strengthen one another's hands as in old times (passionately refused) ; — on the whole (if such a thing durst be hinted at, for the tone is almost inaudibly low and humble), That pious strait ened Preachers in terror of offending God by Idolatry, and useful to human souls, might not be cast put of their parishes for genu flexions, white surplices and such like, but allowed some Christian liberty in mere external things : these were the claims of the Puritans ; but his Majesty eloquently scouted them to the winds, applauded by all bishops and dignitaries lay and clerical ; said, If the Puritans would not conform, he would ' hurry them out of the country ;' and so sent Puritanism and the Four Doctors home again, cowed into silence, for the present. This was in January, 38 INTRODUCTION. 1604.* News of this, speech enough about it, could not fail in Robert Cromwell's house, among others. Oliver is in his fifth year, — always a year older than the Century. In November, 1605, there likewise came to Robert Cromwell's house, no question of it, news of the thrice unutterable Gunpowder Plot. Whereby King, Parliament, and God's Gospel in England, were to have been, in one infernal moment, blown aloft ; and the Devil's Gospel, and accursed incredibilities, idolatries, and poison ous confusions of the Romish Babylon, substituted in their room ! The eternal Truth of the Living God to become an empty for mula, a shamming grimace of the Three-hatted Chimera ! These things did fill Huntingdon and Robert Cromwell's house with talk enough in the winter of Oliver's sixth year. And again, in the summer of his eleventh year, in May, 1610, there doubtless failed not news and talk, How the Great Henry was stabbed in Paris streets : assassinated by the Jesuits ; — black sons of the scarlet woman, murderous to soul and to body. Other things, in other years, the diligent Historical Student will supply according to faculty. The History of Europe, at that epoch, meant essentially the struggle of Protestantism against Catholicism, — a broader form of that same struggle, of devout Puritanism against dignified Ceremonialism, which forms the History of England then. Henry the Fourth of France, so long as he lived, was still to be regarded as the head of Protestantism ; Spain, bound up with the Austrian Empire, as that of Catholicism. Henry's ' Grand Scheme ' naturally strove to carry Protestant England along with it ; James, till Henry's death, held on. in a loose way, by Henry ; and his Political History, so far as he has any, may be considered to lie there. After Henry's death, he fell off to 'Spanish Infantas,' to Spanish interests; and, as it were, ceased to have any History, nay began to have a negative one. Among the events which Historical Students will supply for Robert Cromwell's house, and the spiritual pabulum of young Oliver, the Death of Prince Henry in 1612,f and the prospective • Neal's History of the Puritans (London, 1754), i., 411. t 6 Nov. (Camden's Annals). EVENTS IN OLIVER'S BIOGRAPHY. 39 accession of Prince Charles, fitter for a ceremonial Archbishop than a governing King, as some thought, will not be forgotten. Then how the Elector Palatine was married ; and troubles began to brew in Germany ; and little Dr. Laud was made Archdeacon of Huntingdon : — such news the Historical Student can supply. And on the whole, all students and persons can know always that Oliver's mind was kejit full of news, and never wanted for pabu lum ! But from the day of his Birth, which is jotted down, as above, in the Parish-register of St. John's, Huntingdon, there is no other authentic jotting or direct record concerning Oliver him self to be met with anywhere, till in Sidney-Sussex College, Cam bridge, we come to this,* 1616. ' A Festo Annunciaiionis, 1616. Oliverius Cromwell Hunting, doniensis admissus ad commeatum Sociorum, Aprilis vicesimo tertio ; Tutore Magistro Ricardo Howlet :' Oliver Cromwell from Hunt ingdon admitted here, 23d April, 1616 ; Tutor Mr. Richard Howlet. — Between which and the next Entry some zealous indi vidual of later date has crowded-in these lines : ' Hic fuit grandis ille Impostor, Carnifex perditissimus, qui pientissimo Rege Carolo Primo nefaria. ca.de sublato, ipsum usurpavit Thronum, el Tria Regna per quinque ferme annorum spatium, sub Protecloris nomine, indomitd iyrannide vexavit.' Pientissimo, which might as well be piantissimo if conjugation and declension were observed, is ac credited barbarous-latin for most pious, but means properly most expiative ; by which title the zealous individual of later date indicates his martyred Majesty ; a most ' expiative ' Majesty indeed. f Curious enough, of all days on this same day, Shakspeare, as his stone monument still testifies, at Stratford-on-Avon, died : Obiit Anno Domini 1616. Atatis 53. Die 23 Apr.* While Oliver Cromwell was entering himself of Sidney-Sussex College, William Shakspeare was taking his farewell of this * Noble, i., 254. t Collier's Life of Shakspeare (London, 1845), p. 253. 40 INTRODUCTION. world. Oliver's Father had, most likely, come with him ; it is but twelve miles from Huntingdon ; you can go and come in a day. Oliver's Father saw Oliver write in the Album at Cambridge : at Stratford, Shakspeare's Ann Hathaway was weeping over his bed. The first world-great thing that remains of English History, the Literature of Shakspeare, was ending ; the second world-great thing that remains of English History, the armed Appeal of Puri- • tanism to the Invisible God of Heaven against many very Visible Devils, on Earth and Elsewhere, was, so to speak, beginning. They have their exits and their entrances. And one People in its time plays many parts. Chevalier Florian, in his Life of Cervantes, has remarked that Shakspeare's death-day, 23d April, 1616, was likewise that of Cervantes at Madrid. ' Twenty-third of April ' is, sure enough, the authentic Spanish date : but Chevalier Florian has omitted to notice that the English twenty-third is of Old Style. The brave Miguel died ten days before Shakspeare ; and already lay buried, smoothed right nobly into his long rest. The Historical Student can meditate on these things. — In the foregoing winter, here in England, there was much try ing of Ker Earl of Somerset, and my Lady once of Essex, and the poisoners of Overbury ; and before Christmas the inferior murderers and infamous persons were mostly got hanged ; and in these very days, while Oliver began his studies, my Lord of Somerset and my Lady were tried, and not hanged. And Chief Justice Coke, Coke upon Lyttleton, had got into difficulties by the business. And England generally was overspread with a very fetid atmosphere of Court-news, murders, and divorce-cases, in those months : which still a little affects even the History of Eng land. Poor Somerset Ker, King's favorite, ' son of the Laird of Ferniehirst,' he and his extremely unedifying affairs, — except as they might transiently affect the nostrils of some Cromwell of importance, — do not much belong to the History of England ! Carrion ought at length to be buried. Alas, if ' wise memory' is ever to prevail, there is need of much ' wise oblivion' first. Oliver's Tutor in Cambridge, of whom legible History and I know nothing, was ' Magister Richard Howlet :' whom readers must fancy a grave ancient Puritan and Scholar, in dark antiqua- EVENTS IN OLIVER'S BIOGRAPHY. 41 rian clothes and dark antiquarian ideas, according to their faculty. The indubitable fact is, that he, Richard Howlet, did, in Sidney- Sussex College, with his best ability, endeavor to infiltrate some thing that he called instruction into the soul of Oliver Cromwell and of other youths submitted to him : but how, of what quality, with what method, with what result, will remain extremely obscure to every one. In spite of mountains of books, so are books written, all grows very obscure. About this same date, George Ratcliffe, Wentworth Strafford's George, at Oxford, finds his green-baize table-cover, which his mother had sent him, too small, has it cut into ' stockings,' and goes about with the same.* So unfashionable were young Gentlemen Commoners. Queen Elizabeth was the first person in this country who ever wore knit stockings. 1617. In March of this year, 1617, there was another royal visit at Hinchinbrook. ¦f But this time, I conceive, the royal entertain ment would be much more moderate ; Sir Oliver's purse growing lank. Over in Huntingdon, Robert Cromwell was lying sick, somewhat indifferent to royal progresses. King James, this time, was returning northward to visit poor old Scotland again, to get his Pretended-Bishops set into activity, if he could. It is well known that he could not, to any satisfactory extent, neither now nor afterwards : his Pretended-Bishops, whom by cunning means he did get instituted, had the name of Bishops, but next to none of the authority, of the respect, or alas, even of the cash, suitable to the reality of that office. They were by the Scotch People derisively called Tulchan Bishops. — Did the reader * " University College, Oxford, 4 Dec, 1610. " Loving Mother, — * * Send also, I pray you, by Briggs" (this is Briggs the Carrier, who dies in January, and continues forwarding butter in May) " a green table-cloth of a yard and half a quarter, and two linen table cloths. * * If the green table-cloth be too little, I will make a pair of warm stockings of it. * * — Thus remembering my humble duty, I take my leave. — Your loving Son, " George Radcliffe." Radcliffe's Letters (by Whitaker), p. 64-5. t Camden's Annals ; Nichols's Progresses. 42 INTRODUCTION. ever see, or fancy in his mind, a Tulchan? Tulchan is, or rather was,, for the thing is long since obsolete, a Calf-skin stuffed into the rude similitude of a Calf, — similar enough to deceive the imperfect perceptive organs of a Cow. At milking-time the Tulchan, with head duly bent, was set as if to suck ; the fond cow looking round fancied that her calf was busy, and that all was right, and so gave her milk freely, which the cunning maid was straining in white abundance into her pail all the while ! The Scotch milkmaids in those days cried, ' Where is the Tul chan ; is the Tulchan ready V So of the Bishops. Scotch Lairds were eager enough to milk the Church Lands and Tithes, to get the rents out of them freely, whieh was not always easy. They were glad to construct a Form of Bishops to please the King and Church, and make the ' milk ' come without disturbance. The reader now knows what a Tulchan Bishop was. A piece of mechanism constructed not without difficulty, in Parliament and King's Council, among the Scots ; and torn asunder afterwards with dreadful clamor, and scattered to the four winds, so soon as the Cow became awake to it ! — Villiers Buckingham, the new favorite, of whom we say little, was of the royal party here. Dr. Laud, too, King's Chaplain, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, attended the King on this occasion ; had once more the pleasure of seeing Huntingdon, the cradle of his promotions, and the birth-place of Oliver. In Scotland, Dr. Laud, much to his regret, found " no religion at all," no surpli ces, no altars in the east or anywhere ; no bowing, no respond ing ; not the smallest regularity of fuglemanship or devotional drill-exercise ; in short " no religion at all that I could see," — which grieved me much.* What to us is greatly more momentous : while these royal things went on in Scotland, in the end of this same June at Hunt ingdon, Robert Cromwell died. His will is dated 6th June.f His burial-day is marked in the Church of All-Saints, 24th June, 1617. For Oliver, the chief mourner, one of the most pregnant epochs. The same year, died his old Grandfather Steward at Ely. Mrs. Robert Cromwell saw herself at once fatherless and * Wharton's Laud (London, 1695), pp. 97, 109, 138. f Noble, i., 84 EVENTS IN OLIVER'S BIOGRAPHY. 43 a second time widowed, in this year of bereavement. Left with six daughters and an only son ; of whom three were come to years. Oliver was now, therefore, a young heir ; his age eighteen, last April. How many of his Sisters, or whether any of them, were yet settled, we do not learn from Noble's confused search ing of records or otherwise. Of this Huntingdon household, and its new head, we learn next to nothing by direct evidence ; but can decisively enough, by inference, discern several things. ' Oliver returned no more to Cambridge.' It was now fit that he should take his Father's place here at Huntingdon ; that he should, by the swiftest method, qualify himself in some degree for that. The universal very credible tradition is that he, ' soon after,' proceeded to London, to gain some knowledge of Law. ' Soon after ' will mean certain months, we know not how many, after July, 1617. Noble says, he was entered ' of Lincoln's Inn." The Books of Lincoln's Inn, of Gray's Inn, of all the Inns of Court have been searched ; and there is no Oliver Cromwell found in them. The Books of Gray's Inn contain these Crom well names, which are perhaps worth transcribing : Thomas Cromwell, 1524 ; Francis Cromwell, 1561 ; Gilbert Cromwell, 1609 ; Henry Cromwell, 1620; Henry Cromwell, 22d February, 1653. The first of which seems to me probably or possibly to mean Thomas Cromwell Malleus Monachorum, at that time returned from his Italian adventures, and in the service of Cardinal Wol sey ; — taking the opportunity of hearing the ' readers,' old Benchers who then actually read, and of learning Law. The Henry Cromwell of February, 1653, is expressly entered as ' Second sonne to his Highness Oliver, Lord Protector :' an inte resting little fact, since it is an indisputable one. For the rest, Henry Cromwell was already a Colonel in the Army in 1651 :* in 1654, during the spring months he was in Ireland ; in the * Old Newspaper, in Cromwelliana, p. 91. 44 INTRODUCTION. month of June he was at Chippenham in Cambridgeshire with his father-in-law, being already married; and next year he went again on political business to Ireland, where he before long be came Lord Deputy :* if for a while, in the end of 1654, he did attend in Gray's Inn, it can only have been, like his predecessor the Malleus, to gain some inkling of Law for general purposes ; and not with any view towards Advocateship, which did not lie in his course at all, and was never very lovely either to his Father or himself. Oliver Cromwell's, as we said, is not a name found in any of the Books in that period. Whence is to be inferred that Oliver was never of any Inn ; that he never meant to be a professional Lawyer; that he had entered himself merely in the chambers of some learned gentle man, with an eye to obtain some tincture of Law, for doing County Magistracy, and the other duties of a gentleman citizen, in a reputable manner. The stories of his wild living while in Town, of his gambling and so forth, rest likewise exclusively on Carrion Heath ; and solicit oblivion and Christian burial from all men. We cannot but believe he did go to Town to gain some knowledge of Law. But when he went, how long he stayed, cannot be known except approximately by years ; under whom he studied, with what fruit, how he conducted himself as a young man and law-student, cannot be known at all. Of evidence that he ever lived a wild life about Town or elsewhere, there exists no particle. To assert the affirmative was then a great reproach to him ; fit for Carrion Heath and others ; it would be now, in our present strange condition of the Moral Law, one knows not what. With a Moral Law gone all to such a state of moonshine ; with the hard Stone-tables, the God-given Precepts and eternal Penal ties, dissolved all in cant and mealy-mouthed official flourishings, — it might perhaps, with certain parties, be a credit ! The ad mirers and censurers of Cromwell have no word to record on the subject. * Here are the successive dates : 4th March, 1653-4, he arrives at Dub lin (Thurloe's State Papers, ii., 149) ; is at Chippenham, 18th June, 1654 (ib. ii., 381) ; arrives at Chester on his way to Ireland again, 22d June, 1655 {ib. iii., 581) ; — produces his commission as Lord Deputy, 24th or 25th No vember, 1657 (Noble, i., 202). EVENTS IN OLIVER'S BIOGRAPHY. 45 1618. Thursday, 29th October, 1618. This morning, if Oliver, as is probable, were now in Town studying Law, he might be eye-wit ness of a great and very strange scene : the Last Scene in the Life of Sir Walter Raleigh.* Raleigh was beheaded in Old Palace Yard ; he appeared on the scaffold there ' about 8 o'clock' that morning ; ' an immense crowd,' all London, and in a sense all England, looking on. A cold hoarfrosty morning. Earl of Arundel, now known to us by his Greek Marbles ; Earl of Don caster ('Sardanapalus' Hay, ultimately Earl of Carlisle) : these with other earls and dignitaries sat looking through windows near by ; to whom Raleigh in his last brief manful speech appealed, with response from them. He had failed of finding Eldorados in the Indies lately ; he had failed, and also succeeded, in many things in his time : he returned home with his brain and his heart ' broken,' as he said ; — and the Spaniards, who found King James willing, now wished that he should die. A very tragic scene. Such a man, with his head grown grey ; with his strong heart ' breaking,' — still strength enough in it to break with dig nity. Somewhat proudly he laid his old grey head on the block ; as if saying, in better than words, " There then !" The Sheriff offered to let him warm himself again, within doors again at a fire. " Nay, let us be swift," said Raleigh ; "' in few minutes my ague will return upon me, and if I be not dead before that, they will say I tremble for fear." — If Oliver, among ' the immense crowd,' saw this scene, as is conceivable enough, he would not want for reflections on it. What is more apparent to us, Oliver in these days is a visitor in Sir James Bourchier's Town residence. Sir James Bourchier, Knight, a civic gentleman ; not connected at all with the old Bourchiers Earls of Essex, says my heraldic friend ; but seem ingly come of City Merchants rather, who by some of their quar terings and cognizances appear to have been ' Furriers,' says he : — Like enough. Not less but more important, it appears this Sir James Bourchier was a man of some opulence, and had daugh- * Camden ; Biog. Britan. 46 INTRODUCTION. ters; had a daughter Elizabeth, not without charms for the youthful heart.' Moreover he had landed property near Felsted in Essex, where his usual residence was. Felsted, where there is still a kind of School or Free-School, which was of more note in those days than now. That Oliver visited in Sir James's in Town or elsewhere, we discover with great certainty by the next written record of him. 1620. The Registers of St. Giles's Church, Cripplegate, London, are written by a third party as usual, and have no autograph signa tures ; but in the List of Marriages for ' August, 1620,' stand these words, still to be read sic : ' Oliver Cromwell to Elizabeth Bourcher. 22.' Milton's burial-entry is in another Book of the same memorable Church, ' 12 Nov., 1674;' where Oliver on the 22d of August, 1620, was married. Oliver is twenty-one years and four months old on this his wedding-day. He repaired, speedily or straightway we believe, to Huntingdon, to his Mother's house, which indeed was now his. His Law-studies, such as they were, had already ended, we infer : he had already set up house with his Mother ; and was now bringing a Wife home ; the due arrangements for that end having been completed. Mother and Wife were to live together : the Sisters had got or were getting married, Noble's researches and confused jottings do not say specially when : the Son, as new head of the house, an inexperienced head, but a teachable, ever- learning one, was to take his Father's place ; and with a wise Mother and a good Wife, harmonising tolerably well we shall hope, was to manage as he best might. Here he continued, un- noticeable but easily imaginable by History, for almost ten years : farming lands ; most probably attending quarter-sessions ; doing the civic, industrial, and social duties, in the common way ; — liv ing as his Father before him had done. His first child was born here, in October, 1621 ; a son, Robert, baptized at St. John's Church on the 13th of the month, of whom nothing farther is EVENTS IN OLIVER'S BIOGRAPHY. 47 known. A second child, also a son, Oliver, followed, whose baptismal date is 6th February, 1623, of whom also we have almost no farther account, — except one that can be proved to be erroneous.* The List of his other children shall be given by and by. 1623. In October, 1623, there was an illumination of tallow lights, a ringing of bells, and gratulation of human hearts in all Towns in England, and doubtless in Huntingdon too ; on the safe return of Prince Charles from Spain without the Infanta. f A matter of endless joy to all true Englishmen of that day, though no English man of this day feels any interest in it one way or the other. But Spain, even more than Rome, was the chosen throne of Popery ; which in that time meant temporal and eternal Damnability, Falsity to God's Gospel, love of prosperous Darkness rather than of suffering Light, — infinite baseness rushing short-sighted upon infinite peril for this world and for all worlds. King James, with his worldly-wise endeavorings to marry his son into some first- rate family, never made a falser calculation than in this grand business of the Spanish Match. The soul of England abhorred to have any concern with Spain or things Spanish. Spain was as a black Domdaniel, which, had the floors of it been paved with diamonds, had the Infanta of it come riding in such a Gig of Respectability as was never driven since Phaeton's Sun-chariot took the road, no honest English soul could wish to have concern with. Hence England illuminated itself. The articulate ten dency of this Solomon King had unfortunately parted company altogether with the inarticulate but ineradicable tendency of the Country he presided over. The Solomon King struggled one way ; and the English Nation with its very life-fibres was com pelled to struggle another way. The rent by degrees became wide enough ! For the present, England is all illuminated, a new Parliament * Noble, i., 134. t H. L. (Hamond 1' Estrange) : Reignof King Charles (London, 1656), p. 3. ' October 5th,' the Prince arrived. 48 INTRODUCTION. is summoned ; which welcomes the breaking of the Spanish Match, as one might welcome the breaking of a Dr. Faustus's Bargain, and a deliverance from the power of sorcerers. Uncle Oliver served in this parliament, as was his wont, for Hunting donshire. They and the Nation with one voice impelled the poor old King to draw out his fighting tools at last, and beard this Spanish Apollyon, instead of making marriages with it. No Pitt's crusade against French Sansculottism in the end of the Eighteenth Century could be so welcomed by English Preservers of the Game, as this defiance of the Spanish Apollyon was by Englishmen in general in the end of the Seventeenth. The Pala tinate was to be recovered, after all ; Protestantism, the sacred cause of God's Light and Truth against the Devil's Falsity and Darkness, was to be fought for and secured. Supplies were voted ; ' drums beat in the City' and elsewhere, as they had done three years ago,* to the joy of all men, when the Palatinate was first to be ' defended :' but now it was to be 'recovered ;' now a decisive effort was to be made. The issue, as is well known, corresponded ill with these beginnings. Count Mansfeldt mus tered his levies here, and set sail ; but neither France nor any other power would so much as let him land. Count Mansfeldt's levies died of pestilence in their ships ; ' their bodies, thrown ashore on the Dutch coast, were eaten by hogs,' till half the armament was dead on ship-board : nothing came of it, nothing could come. With a James Stewart for Generalissimo there is no good fighting possible. The poor King himself soon after died ;f left the matter to develope itself in other still fataller ways. In those years it must be that Dr. Simcott, Physician in Hunt ingdon, had to do with Oliver's hypochondriac maladies. He told Sir Philip Warwick, unluckily specifying no date, or none that has survived, " he had often been sent for at midnight ;" Mr. Cromwell for many years was very " splenetic" (spleen -struck), often thought he was just about to die, and also " had fancies about the Town Cross. "\ Brief intimation ; of which the re- * 11th June, 1620 (Camden's Annals). t Sunday, 27th March, 1625 (Wilson, in Kennet, ii., 790). X Sir Philip Warwick's Memoirs (London, 1701), p. 249. EVENTS IN OLIVER'S BIOGRAPHY. 49 flective reader may make a great deal. Samuel Johnson too had hypochondrias ; all great souls are apt to have, — and to be in thick darkness generally, till the eternal ways and the celestial guiding-stars disclose themselves, and the vague Abyss of Life knit itself up into Firmaments for them. Temptations in the wilderness, Choices of Hercules, and the like, in succinct or loose form, are appointed for every man that will assert a soul in himself and be a man. Let Oliver take comfort in his dark sor rows and melancholies. The quantity of sorrow he has, does it not mean withal the quantity of sympathy he has, the quantity of faculty and victory he shall yet have ? ' Our sorrow is the in- < verted image of our nobleness.' The depth of our despair mea sures what capability, and height of claim we have, to hope. Black smoke as of Tophet filling all your universe, it can yet by true heart-energy become flame, and brilliancy of Heaven. Courage ! It is therefore in these years, undated by History, that we must place Oliver's clear recognition of Calvinistic Christianity ; what he, with unspeakable joy, would name his Conversion ; his deliver ance from the jaws of Eternal Death. Certainly a grand epoch for a man : properly the one epoch ; the turning-point which guides upwards, or guides downwards, him aiid his activity for- evermore. Wilt thou join with the Dragons ; wilt thou join with the Gods ? Of thee too the question is asked ; — whether by a man in Geneva gown, by a man in ' Four surplices at Allhallow- tide,' with words very imperfect ; or by no man and no words, but only by the Silences, by the Eternities, by the Life everlast ing and the Death everlasting. That the ' Sense of difference between Right and Wrong' had filled all Time and all Space for man, and bodied itself forth into a Heaven and Hell for him : this constitutes the grand feature of those Puritan, Old-Christian Ages ; this is the element which stamps them as Heroic, and has rendered their works great, manlike, fruitful to all generations. It is by far the memorablest achievement of our Species ; with out that element, in some form or other, nothing of Heroic had ever been among us. For many centuries, Catholic Christianity, a fit embodiment of that divine Sense, had been current more or less, making the 50 INTRODUCTION. generations noble : and here in England, in the Century called the Seventeenth, we see the last aspect of it hitherto, — not the last of all, it is to be hoped. Oliver was henceforth a Christian man ; believed in God, not on Sundays only, but on all days, in all places, and in all cases. 1624. The grievance of Lay Impropriations, complained of in the Hampton-Court Conference twenty years ago, having never been abated, and many parts of the country being still thought insuf ficiently supplied with Preachers, a plan was this year fallen upon to raise by subscription, among persons grieved at that state of matters, a Fund for buying-in such Impropriations as might offer themselves ; for supporting good ministers therewith, in destitute places ; and for otherwise encouraging the ministerial work. The originator of this scheme was ' the famous Dr. Preston,' * a Puritan College Doctor of immense ' fame ' in those and in prior years ; courted even by the Duke of Buckingham, and tempted with the gleam of bishopricks ; but mouldering now in great oblivion, not famous to any man. His scheme, however, was found good. The wealthy London Merchants, almost all of them Puritans, took it up ; and by degrees the wealthier Puritans over England at large. Considerable ever-increasing funds were subscribed for this pious object ; were vested in ' Feoffees,' who afterwards made some noise in the world under that name. They gradually purchased some Advowsons or Impropriations, such as came to market ; and hired, or assisted in hiring, a great many ' Lecturers,' persons not generally in full ' Priest's-orders ' (having scruples about the ceremonies), but in ' Deacon's ' or some other orders, with permission to preach, to ' lecture,' as it was called : whom accordingly we find ' lecturing ' in various places, under various conditions, in the subsequent years; often in some market-town, 'on market-day ;' on ' Sunday-after noon,' as supplemental to the regular Priest when he might hap pen to be idle, or given to black and white surplices ; or as ' running Lecturers,' now here, now there, over a certain dis- * Heylin's Life of Laud. EVENTS IN OLIVER'S BIOGRAPHY. 51 trict. They were greatly followed by the serious part of the community ; and gave proportional offence in other quarters. In some years hence, they had risen to such a height, these Lec turers, that Dr. Laud, now come into authority, took them seriously in hand, and with patient detail hunted them mostly out ; nay, brought the Feoffees themselves and their whole En terprise into the Starchamber, and there, with emphasis enough, and heavy damages, amid huge rumor from the public, sup pressed them. This was in 1633 ; a somewhat strong measure. How would the Public take it now, if, — we say not the gate of Heaven, but the gate of the Opposition Hustings were suddenly shut against mankind, — if our Opposition Newspapers, and their morning Prophesyings, were suppressed ! — That Cromwell was a contributor to this Feoffee Fund, and a zealous forwarder of it according to his opportunities, we might already guess ; and by and by there will occur some vestige of direct evidence to that effect. Oliver naturally consorted henceforth with the Puritan Clergy in preference to the other kind ; zealously attended their ministry, when possible ; — consorted with Puritans in general, many of whom were Gentry of his own rank, some of them Nobility of much higher rank. A modest devout man, solemnly intent ' to make his calling and his election sure,' — to whom, in credible dialect, the Voice of the Highest had spoken. Whose earnestness, sagacity and manful worth gradually made him conspicuous in his circle among such. — The Puritans were already numerous. John Hampden, Oliver's Cousin, was a de vout Puritan, John Pym the like ; Lord Brook, Lord Say, Lord Montague, — Puritans in the better ranks, and in every rank, abounded. Already either in conscious act, or in clear tendency, the far greater part of the serious Thought and Manhood of Eng land had declared itself Puritan. 1625. Mark Noble citing Willis's Notitia, reports that Oliver ap peared this year as Member ' for Huntingdon ' in King Charles's first Parliament.* It is a mistake ; grounded on mere blunders * Noble, i., 100. 52 INTRODUCTION. and clerical errors. Browne Willis, in his Notitia Parliamentaria, does indeed specify as Member for HuntingdonsfaVe an ' Oliver Cromwell, Esq.,' who might be our Oliver. But the usual mem ber in former Parliaments is Sir Oliver, our Oliver's Uncle. Browne Willis must have made, or have copied, some slip of the pen. Suppose him to have found in some of his multitudinous parchments, an ' Oliver Cromwell, Knight of the Shire,' and in place of putting in the ' Sir,' to have put in 'Esq. ;' it will solve the whole difficulty. Our Oliver, when he indisputably did afterwards enter Parliament, came in for Huntingdon Town ; so that, on this hypothesis, he must have first been Knight of the Shire, and then have sunk (an immense fall in those days) to be a Burgh Member ; which cannot without other ground be cre dited. What the original Chancery Parchments say of the busi ness, whether the error is theirs or Browne Willis's, I cannot decide ; on inquiry at the Rolls' Office, it turns out that the Records, for some fifty years about this period, have vanished "a good- while ago." Whose error it may be, we know not; but an error we may safely conclude it is. Sir Oliver was then still living at Hinchinbrook, in the vigor of his years, no reason whatever why he should not serve as formerly ; nay, if he had withdrawn, his young Nephew, of no fortune for a Knight of the Shire, was not the man to replace him. The Members for Hunt ingdon Town in this Parliament, as in the preceding one, are a Mr. Mainwaring, and a Mr. St. John. The County Members in the preceding Parliament, and in this too with the correction of the concluding syllable in this, are ' Edward Montague, Esquire,' and ' Oliver Cromwell, Knight.' 1626. In the Ashmole Museum at Oxford stands catalogued a ' Let ter from Oliver Cromwell to Mr. Henry Downhall, at St. John's College, Cambridge ; dated Huntingdon, 14 October, 1626 :'* which might perhaps, in some very faint way, have elucidated Dr. Simcott and the hypochondrias for us. On applying to kind friends at Oxford for a copy of this Letter, I learn that there is • Bodleian Library: Codices MSS. Ashmoleani, No. 8398. EVENTS IN OLIVER'S BIOGRAPHY. 53 now no Letter, only a mere selvage of paper, and a leaf wanting between two leaves. It was stolen, none knows when ; but stolen it is ; — which forces me to continue my Introduction some nine years farther, instead of ending it at this point. Did some zealous Oxford Doctor cut the Letter out, as one weeds a hem lock from a parsley-bed ; that so the Ashmole Museum might be cleansed, and yield only pure nutriment to mankind ? Or was it some collector of autographs zealous beyond law ? Whoever the thief may be, he is probably dead long since ; and has an swered for this, — and also, we may fancy for heavier thefts, which were likely to be charged upon him. If any humane in dividual ever henceforth get his eye upon the Letter, let him be so kind as to send a copy of it to the Publishers of this Book, and no questions will be asked. 1627. A Deed of Sale, dated 20 June, 1627, still testifies that Hinch inbrook this year passed out of the hands of the Cromwells into those of the Montagues.* The price was 30007. ; curiously di vided into two parcels, down to shillings and pence, — one of the parcels being already a creditor's. The Purchaser is ' Sir Sid ney Montague, Knight of Barnwell, one of his Majesty's Masters of the Requests.' Sir Oliver Cromwell, son of the Golden Knight, having now burnt out his splendor, disappeared in this way from Hinchinbrook ; retired deeper into the Fens, to a place of his near Ramsey Mere, where he continued still thirty years longer to reside, in an eclipsed manner. It was to this house at Ramsey, that Oliver, our Oliver, then Captain Cromwell in the Parliament's service, paid the domiciliary visit much talked of in the old Books. The reduced Knight, his Uncle, was a Royalist or Malignant ; and his house had to be searched for arms, for munitions, for furnishings of any sort, which he might be minded to send off to the King, now at York, and evidently intending war. Oliver's dragoons searched with due rigor for the arms ; while the Captain respectfully conversed with his Uncle ; and even ' insisted' through the interview, say the old Books, ' on standing * Noble, i., 43. 54 INTRODUCTION. uncovered ;' which latter circumstance may be taken as an as tonishing hypocrisy in him, say the old blockfeead Books. The arms, munitions, furnishings were with all rigor of law, not with more rigor and not with less, carried away ; and Oliver parted with his Uncle, for that time, not ' craving his blessing,' I think, as the old blockhead Books say ; but hoping he might, one day, either get it or a better than it, for what he had now done. Oli ver, while in military charge of that country, had probably re peated visits to pay to his Uncle ; and they know little of the man or of the circumstances, who suppose there was any likeli hood or need of either insolence or hypocrisy in the course of these. As for the old Knight, he seems to have been a man of easy temper ; given to sumptuosity or hospitality ; and averse to se verer duties.* When his eldest son, who also showed a turn for expense, presented him a schedule of debts, craving aid towards the payment of them, Sir Oliver answered with a bland sigh, " I wish they were paid." Various Cromwells, sons of his, nephews of his, besides the great Oliver, took part in the civil war, some on this side, some on that, whose indistinct designations in the old Books are apt to occasion mistakes with modern readers. Sir Oliver vanishes now from Hinchinbrook, and all the public busi ness records, into the darker places of the Fens. His name dis appears from Willis : — in the next Parliament the Knight of the Shire for Huntingdon becomes, instead of him, ' Sir Capell Bedall, Baronet.' The purchaser of Hinchinbrook, Sir Sidney Monta gue, was brother of the first Earl of Manchester, brother of the third Lord Montague of Boughton ; and father of ' the valiant Colonel Montague,' valiant General Montague, Admiral Montague, who, in an altered state of. circumstances, became first Earl of Sandwich, and perished, with a valor worthy of a better general issimo than poor James Duke of York, in the Seafight of Solebay (Southwold Bay, on the coast of Suffolk) in 1672.f In these same years, for the dates and all other circumstances of the matter hang dubious in the vague, there is record given by * Fuller's Worthies, § Huntingdonshire. t Collins's Peerage (London, 1741), ii., 286-9. EVENTS IN OLIVER'S BIOGRAPHY. Dugdale, a man of very small authority on these Cromwell mat ters, of a certain suit instituted, in the King's Council, King's Court of Requests, or wherever it might be, by our Oliver and other relations interested, concerning the lunacy of his Uncle, Sir Thomas Steward of Ely. It seems they alleged, This Uncle Steward was incapable of managing his affairs, and ought to be restrained under guardians. Which allegation of theirs, and pe tition grounded on it, the King's Council saw good to deny : whereupon — Sir Thomas Steward continued to manage his affairs, in an incapable or semi-capable manner ; and nothing followed upon it whatever. Which proceeding of Oliver's, if there ever was such a proceeding, we are, according to Dugdale, to consider an act of villany, — if we incline to take that trouble. What we know is, That poor Sir Thomas himself did not so consider it ; for, by express testament some years afterwards, he declared Oli ver his heir in chief, and left him considerable property, as if nothing had happened. So that there is this dilemma : If Sir Thomas was imbecile, then Oliver was right ; and unless Sh Thomas was imbecile, Oliver was not wrong ! Alas, all calumny and carrion, does it not incessantly cry, " Earth, O, for pity's sake, a little earth !" 1628. Sir Oliver Cromwell has faded from the Parliamentary scene into the deep Fen-country, but Oliver Cromwell, Esq., appears there as Member for Huntingdon, at Westminster on ' Monday the 17th of March,' 1627-8. This was the Third Parliament of Charles : by much the most notable of all Parliaments till Charles's Long Parliament met, which proved his last. Having sharply, with swift impetuosity and in indignation, dis missed two Parliaments, because they would not ' supply' him without taking ' grievances' along with them ; and, meanwhile and afterwards, having failed in every operation foreign and do mestic, at Cadiz, at Rhe', at Rochelle ; and having failed, too, in getting supplies by unparliamentary methods, Charles ' consulted with Sir Robert Cotton what was to be done ;' who answered, summon a Parliament again. So this celebrated Parliament was summoned. It met, as we said, in March, 1628, and continued 56 INTRODUCTION. with one prorogation till March, 1629. The two former Parlia ments had sat but a few weeks each, till they were indignantly hurled asunder again ; this one continued nearly a year. Went worth (Strafford) was of this Parliament ; Hampden too, Selden, Pym, Holies, and others known to us : all these had been of for mer Parliaments as well ; Oliver Cromwell, Member for Hunting don, sat there for the first time. It is very evident, King Charles, baffled in all his enterprises, and reduced really to a kind of crisis, wished much this Parlia ment should succeed ; and took what he must have thought incre dible pains for that end. The poor King strives visibly throughout to control himself, to be soft and patient ; inwardly writhing and rustling with royal rage. Unfortunate King, we see him chafing, stamping, — a very fiery steed, but bridled, check-bitted, by innumer able straps and considerations ; struggling much to be composed. Alas, it. would not do. This Parliament was more Puritanic, more intent on rigorous Law and divine Gospel, than any other had ever been. As indeed all these Parliaments grow strangely in Puritanism ; more and ever more earnest rises from the hearts of them all, " O Sacred Majesty, lead us not to Antichrist, to Illegality, to temporal and eternal Perdition !" The Nobility and Gentry of England were then a very strange body ofmen. The English Squire of the Seventeenth Century clearly appears to have believed in God, not as a figure of speech, but as a very fact, very awful to the heart of the English Squire. ' He wore his Bible-doctrine round him,' says one, ' as our Squire wears his shot- belt; went abroad with it, nothing doubting.' King Charles was going on his father's course, only with frightful acceleration : he and his respectable Traditions and Notions, clothed in old sheepskin and respectable Church-tippets, were all pulling one way ; Eng land and the Eternal Laws pulling another; — the rent fast widening till no man could heal it. This was the celebrated Parliament which framed the Petition of Right, and set London all astir with ' bells and bonfires' at the passing'thereof ; and did other feats not to be particularised here. Across the murkiest element in which any great Entity was ever shown to human creatures, it still rises, after much consideration to the modern man, in a dim but undeniable manner, as a most EVENTS IN OLIVER'S BIOGRAPHY. 57 brave and noble Parliament. The like of which were worth its weight in diamonds even now ; — but has grown very unattainable now, next door to incredible now. — We have to say that this Parliament chastised sycophant Priests, Mainwaring, Sibthorp, and other Arminian sycophants, a disgrace to God's Church ; that it had an eye to other still more elevated Church-Sycophants, as the mainspring of all ; but was cautious to give offence by naming them. That it carefully ' abstained from naming the Duke of Buckingham.' That it decided on giving ample sub sidies, but not till there were reasonable discussion of grievances. That in manner it was most gentle, soft-spoken, cautious, reve rential ; and in substance most resolute and valiant. Truly with valiant patient energy, in a slow^ffeadfast English manner, it carried, across infinite confused opposition and discouragement, its Petition of Right, and what else it had to carry. Four hundred brave men, — brave men and true, after their sort ! One laments to find such a Parliament smothered under Dryasdust's shot-rub bish. The memory of it, could any real memory of it rise upon honorable gentlemen and us, might be admonitory, — would be astonishing at least. We must clip one extract from Rushworth's huge Rag-fair of a Book ; the mournfullest torpedo rubbish-heap, of jewels buried under sordid wreck and dust and dead ashes, one jewel to the wagon-load ; — and let the reader try to make a visual scene of it as he can. Here, we say, is an old Letter, which ' old Mr. Chamberlain ofthe Court of Wards,' a gentleman entirely unknown to us, received fresh and new, before breakfast, on a June morning ofthe year 1628 ; of which old Letter we, by a good chance,* have obtained a copy for the reader. It is by Mr. Thomas Alured, a good Yorkshire friend, Member for Malton in that county ; — written in a hand which, if it were not naturally stout, would tremble with emotion. Worthy Mr. Alured, called also 'Al'red' or 'Aldred;' uncle or father, we suppose, to a ' Colonel Alured,' well known afterwards to Oliver and us : he writes ; we abridge and present, as follows : * Rushworth's Historical Collections (London, 1682), i„ 609-10. 4* 58 INTRODUCTION.. Friday, 6th June, 1628. " Sir, — Yesterday was a day of desolation among us in Parlia ment; and this day, we fear, will be the day of our dissolution. " Upon Tuesday Sir John Eliot moved that as we intended to furnish his Majesty with Money, we should also supply him with Counsel." Representing the doleful state of affairs, " he desired there might be a Declaration made to the King, of the danger wherein the Kingdom stood by the decay and contempt of reli gion, by the insufficiency of his Ministers, by the " &c, &c. Sir Humphrey May, " Chancellor of the Duchy, said, ' It was a strange language ;' yet the House commanded Sir John Eliot to go on. Whereupon the Chancellor desired, ' If he went on, he the Chancellor might go out.' They all bade him ' begone :' yet he stayed, and heard Sir John out. The House generally in clined to such a Declaration," which was accordingly resolved to be set about. " But next day, Wednesday, we had a Message from his Ma jesty by the Speaker, That as the Session was positively to end in a week, we should husband the time, and despatch our old businesses without entertaining new. Intending " nevertheless " to pursue our Declaration, we had, yesterday, Thursday morn ing, a new Message brought us, which I have here enclosed. Which requiring us not to cast or lay any aspersion upon any Minister of his Majesty, the House was much affected thereby." Did they not in former times proceed by fining and committing John of Gaunt, the King's own son ; had they not, in very late times, meddled with and sentenced the Lord Chancellor Bacon and others ? What are wearriving at ! — Sir Robert Philips of Somersetshire spake, and " mingled his words with weeping. Mr. Pym did the like. Sir Edward Cook " (old Coke upon Lyttleton), "overcome with passion, seeing the desolation likely to ensue, was forced to sit down when he began to speak, by the abundance of tears." O, Mr. Chamberlain of the Court of Wards, was the like ever witnessed ? " Yea, the Speaker in his speech could not refrain from weeping and shed ding of tears. Besides a great many whose grief made them dumb. But others bore up in that storm, and encouraged the rest." We resolved ourselves into a Committee, to have freer EVENTS IN OLIVER'S BIOGRAPHY. 59 scope for speech ; and called Mr. Whitby to the chair. The Speaker, always in close communication with his Majesty, craves leave from us, with much humility, to withdraw " for half an hour ;" which, though we knew well whither he was going, was readily granted him. It is ordered, "No other man leave the House upon pain of going to the Tower." And now the speak ing commences, " freer and frequenter " being in Committee, and old Sir Edward Coke tries it again. " Sir Edward Cook told us, ' He now saw God had not accepted of our humble and moderate carriages and fair proceedings; and he feared the reason was, We had not dealt sincerely with the King and Country, and made a true representation of the causes of all those miseries. Which he, for his part, repented that he had not done sooner. And therefore, not knowing whether he should ever again speak in this House, he would now do it freely ; and so did here protest, That the author and cause of all those miseries was — the Duke of Buckingham." Which was enter tained and answered with a cheerful acclamation ofthe House." (Yea, yea ! Well moved, well spoken ! Yea,' yea !) " As, when one good hound recovers the scent, the rest come in with full cry : so they (we) pursued it, and every one came home, and laid the blame where he thought the fault was," — on the Duke of Buckingham, to wit. " And as we were putting it to the question, Whether he should be named in our intended Remon strance as the chief cause of all our miseries at home and abroad, — the Speaker, having been, not half an hour, but three hours absent, and with the King, returned ; bringing this Message, That the House should then rise (being about eleven o'clock), adjourn till the morrow morning, and no Committees to sit, or other business to go on, in the interim." They have been me ditating it all night ! " What we shall expect this morning therefore, God of Heaven knows. We shall meet betimes this morning ; partly for the business's sake ; and partly because, two days ago, we made an order ; That whoever corned in after Prayers shall pay twelve- pence to the poor. " Sir, excuse my haste : — and let us have your prayers ; 60 INTRODUCTION. whereof both you and we have need. I rest, — affectionately at your service, " Thomas Alured." This scene Oliver saw, and formed part of; one of the me- morablest he was ever in. Why did those old honorable gentle men ' weep V How came tough old Coke upon Lyttleton, one of the toughest men ever made, to melt into tears like a girl, and sit down unable to speak ? The modern honorable gentleman cannot tell. Let him consider it, and try if he can tell ! And then, putting off his Shot-belt, and striving to put on some Bible- doctrine, some earnest God's Truth or other, — try if he can dis cover why he cannot tell ! — The Remonstrance against Buckingham was perfected ; the hounds having got all upon the scent. Buckingham was expressly ' named,' a daring feat : and so loud were the hounds, and such a tune in their baying, his Majesty saw good to confirm, and ratify beyond shadow of cavil, the invaluable Petition of Right, and thereby produce ' bonfires,' and bob-majors upon all bells. Old London was sonorous ; in a blaze with joy-fires. Soon after which, this Parliament, as London, and England, and it, all still continued somewhat too sonorous, was hastily, with visible royal anger, prorogued till October next, — till January as it proved. Oliver, of course, went home to Huntingdon to his harvest- work ; England continued simmering and sounding as it might. The day of prorogation was the 26th of June.* One day in the latter end of August, John Felton, a short swart Suffolk gen tleman of military air, in fact a retired lieutenant of grim serious disposition, went out to walk in the eastern parts of London. Walking on Tower Hill, full of black reflections on his own con dition, and on the condition of England, and a Duke of Bucking ham holding all England down into the jaws of ruin and disgrace, — John Felton saw, in evil hour, on some cutler's stall there, a broad sharp hunting knife, price one shilling. John Felton, with a wild flash in the dark heart of him. bought the said knife ; rode down to Portsmouth with it, where the great Duke then was ; struck the said knife, with one fell plunge, into the great Duke's * Commons Journals, i., 920. EVENTS IN OLIVER'S BIOGRAPHY. 01 heart. This was on Saturday the 23d of August of this same year.* Felton was tried ; saw that his wild flashing inspiration had been not of God, but of Satan. It is known he repented : when the death-sentence was passed on him, he stretched out his right hand ; craved that this too, as some small expiation, might first be stricken off; which was denied him, as against law. He died at Tyburn; his body was swinging in chains at Portsmouth ; — and much else had gone awry, when the Parliament reassembled, in January following, and Oliver came up to Town again. 1629. The Parliament Session proved very brief; but very energetic, very extraordinary. ' Tonnage and Poundage,' what we now call Customhouse Duties, a constant subject of quarrel between Charles and his Parliaments hitherto, had again been levied with out Parliamentary consent ; in the teeth of old Tallagio non con cedendo, nay even of the late solemnly confirmed Petition of Right ; and naturally gave rise to Parliamentary consideration. Mer chants had been imprisoned for refusing to pay it ; Members of Parliament themselves had been ' supama'd :' there was a very ravelled coil to deal with in regard to Tonnage and Poundage. Nay the Petition of Fright itself had been altered in the Printing ; a very ugly business too. In regard to Religion also, matters looked equally ill. Syco phant Mainwaring, just censured in Parliament, had been pro moted to a fatter living. Sycophant Montague, in the like cir cumstances, to a Bishopric : Laud was in the act of consecrating him at Croydon, when the news of Buckingham's death came thither. There needed to be a Committee of Religion. The House resolved itself into a Grand Committee of Religion ; and did not want for matter. Bishop Neile of Winchester, Bishop Laud now of London, were a frightfully ceremonial pair of Bishops; the fountain they of innumerable tendencies to Papistry and the old clothes of Babylon ! It was in this Committee of Re- * Clarendon (i., 68) ; Hamond L'Estrange (p. 90) ; D'Ewes (ms. Auto- biography) &c. ; all of whom report the minute circumstances ofthe assas sination, not one of them agreeing completely with another. 62 INTRODUCTION. ligion, on the 11th day of February, 1628-9, that Mr. Crom well, Member for Huntingdon, stood up and made his first Speech, a fragment of which has found its way into History, and is now known to all mankind. He said, " He had heard by relation from one Dr. Beard" (his old Schoolmaster at Huntingdon), "that Dr. Alablaster had preached flat Popery at Paul's Cross ; and that the Bishop of Winchester" (Dr. Neile) " had commanded him as his Diocesan, He should preach nothing to the contrary. Mainwaring, so justly censured in this House for his sermons, was by the same Bishop's means preferred to a rich living. If these are the steps to Church-preferment," added he, " what are we to expect !"* Dr. Beard, as the reader knows, is Oliver's old Schoolmaster at Huntingdon ; a grave, speculative theological old gentleman, seemingly, — and on a level with the latest news from Town. Of poor Dr. Alablaster there may be found some indistinct, and instantly forgettable, particulars in Wood's Athenee. Paul's Cross, of which I have seen old Prints, was a kind of Stone Tent, ' with leaden roof,' at the north-east corner of Paul's Cathedral, where Sermons were still, and had long been, preached in the open air ; crowded devout congregations gathering there ; with forms to sit on, if you came early. Queen Elizabeth used to ' tune her pulpits,' she said, when there was any great thing on hand ; as Governing Persons now strive to tune their Morning Newspapers. Paul's Cross, a kind of Times Newspaper, but edited partly by Heaven itself, was then a most important entity ! Alablaster, to the horror of mankind, was heard preaching ' flat Popery' there, — ' Prostituting our columns' in that scandalous man ner ! And Neile had forbidden him to preach against it : ' what are we to expect V The record of this world-famous utterance of Oliver still lies in manuscript in the British Museum, in Mr. Crewe's Notebook, or another's ; it was first printed in a wretched old Book called the Ephemeris Parliamentaria, professing to be compiled by Thomas Fuller ; and actually containing a Preface recognizable as his, but nothing else that we can so recognize : for ' quaint • Parliamentary History (London, 1763), viii., 289. EVENTS IN OLIVER'S BIOGRAPHY. 63 old Fuller ' is a man of talent ; and this Book looks as if com piled by some spiritual Nightmare, rather than a rational Man. Probably some greedy Printer's compilation ; to whom Thomas, in ill hour, had sold his name. In the Commons Journals, of that same day, we are farther to remark, there stands, in peren nial preservation, this notice : ' Upon question, Ordered, Dr. Beard of Huntingdon to be written to. by Mr. Speaker, to come up and testify against the Bishop; the order for Dr. Beard to be delivered to Mr. Cromwell.' The first mention of Mr. Crom well's name in the Books of any Parliament. — A new Remonstrance behoves to be resolved upon ; Bishops Neile and Laud are even to be named there. Whereupon, before they could get well ' named,' perhaps before Dr. Beard had well got up from Huntingdon to testify against them, the King hastily interfered. This Parliament, in a fortnight more, was dissolved ; and that under circumstances of the most unparalleled sort. For Speaker Finch, as we have seen, was a Courtier, in constant communication with the King : one day while these high matters were astir, Speaker Finch refused to ' put the question ' when ordered by the House ! He said he had orders to the contrary ; persisted in that ; — and at last took to weeping. What was the House to do 1 Adjourn for two days, and consider what to do ! On the second day, which was Wednesday, Speaker Finch signi fied that by his Majesty's command they were again adjourned till Monday next. On Monday next, Speaker Finch, still recusant, would not put the former nor indeed any question, having the King's order to adjourn again instantly. He refused ; was reprimanded, menaced ; once more took to weeping ; then started up to go his ways. But young Mr. Holies, Denzil Holies, the Earl of Clare's second son, he and certain other honorable members were prepared for that movement : they seized Speaker Finch, set him down in his chair, and by main force held him there ! A scene of such agitation as was never seen in Parliament before. ' The House was much troubled.' " Let him go," cried certain Privy Councillors, Majesty's Ministers as we should now call them, who in those days sat in front ofthe Speaker, "Let Mr. Speaker go!" cried they im ploringly. " No !" answered Holies ; " God's wounds, he shall 64 INTRODUCTION. sit there, till it please the House to rise !" The House in a decisive though almost distracted manner, with their Speaker thus held down for them, locked their doors ; redacted Three emphatic Resolutions, their Protest against Arminianism, Papistry, and illegal Tonnage and Poundage; and passed the same by acclamation ; letting no man out, refusing to let even the King's Usher in ; then swiftly vanishing so soon as the resolutions were passed, for they understood the Soldiery was coming.* For which surprising procedure, vindicated by Necessity the mother of Invention, and supreme of Lawgivers, certain honorable gentle men, Denzil Holies, Sir John Eliot, William Strode, John Selden, and others less known to us, suffered fine, imprisonment, and much legal tribulation : nay Sir John Eliot, refusing to submit, was kept in the Tower till he died. This scene fell out on Monday, 2d of March, 1629. Directly on the back of which, we conclude, Mr. Cromwell quitted Town for Huntingdon again ; — told Dr. Beard also that he was not wanted now. His Majesty dissolved the Parliament by Proclama tion ; saying something about ' vipers ' that had been there. It was the last Parliament in England for above eleven years. The King had taken his course. The King went on raising supplies without Parliamentary law, by all conceivable devices, — of which Ship-money may be considered the most original, and sale of Monopolies the most universal. The monopoly of ' soap ' itself was very grievous to men.f Your soap was dear, and it would not wash, but only blister. The ceremonial Bishops, Bishop or Archbishop Laud now chief of them, — they, on their side, went on diligently hunting out ' Lecturers,' erecting ' altars in the east end of churches;' charging all clergymen to have, in good repair and order, ' Four surplices at All-hallowtide.'J Vexations spiritual and fiscal, beyond what we can well fancy now, afflicted the souls of men. The English Nation was patient; it endured in silence, with prayer that God in justice and mercy would look upon it. The King of England with his chief-priests was going one way ; the Nation of England by eternal laws was going * Rushworth, i., 667-9. f See many old Pamphlets. X Laud's Diary, in Wharton's Laud. EVENTS IN OLIVER'S BIOGRAPHY. 65 another : the split became too wide for healing. Oliver and others seemed now to have done with Parliaments ; a royal Pro clamation forbade them so much as to speak of such a thing. 1630. In the ' new charter ' granted to the Corporation of Huntingdon, and dated 8th July, 1630, Oliver Cromwell, Esquire, Thomas Beard, D.D., his old schoolmaster, and Robert Barnard, Esquire, of whom also we may hear again, are named Justices of the Peace for that Borough.* I suppose there was nothing new in this nomination ; a mere confirming and continuing of what had already been. But the smallest authentic fact, any undoubted date or circumstance regarding Oliver and his affairs, is to be> eagerly laid hold of. 1631. In or soon after 1631, as we laboriously infer from the imbro glio records of poor Noble, Oliver decided on an enlarged sphere of action as a Farmer ; sold his properties in Huntingdon, all or some of them; rented certain grazing-lands at St. Ives, five miles down the River, eastward of his native place, and removed thither. The Deed of Sale is dated 7th May, 1631 ;f the properties are specified as in the possession of himself or his Mother ; the sum they yielded was 1,800Z. With this sum Oliver stocked his Grazing-Farm at St. Ives. The Mother, we infer, continued to reside at Huntingdon, but withdrawn now from active occupation, into the retirement befitting a widow up in years. There is even some gleam of evidence to that effect : her properties are sold ; but Oliver's children born to him at St. Ives are still christened at Huntingdon, in the church he was used to ; which may mean also that their good Grandmother was still there. Properly this was no change in Oliver's old activities ; it was an enlargement of the sphere of them. His Mother still at Hunt ingdon, within few miles of him, he could still superintend and protect her existence there, while managing his new operations at St. Ives. He continued here till the summer or spring of • Noble, i., 102. t Ibid i-> 103-4. INTRODUCTION. 1636.* A studious imagination may sufficiently construct the figure of his equable life in those years. Diligent grass-farming ; mowing, milking, cattle-marketing : add 'hypochondria,' fits of the blackness of darkness, with glances of the brightness of very Heaven; prayer, religious reading and meditation; household epochs, joys and cares : — we have a solid, substantial, inoffensive Farmer of St. Ives, hoping to walk with integrity, and humble, devout diligence through this world ; and, by his Maker's infinite mercy, to escape destruction, and find eternal salvation, in wider Divine WTorlds. This latter, this is the grand clause in his Life, which dwarfs all other clauses. Much wider destinies than he anticipated were appointed him on Earth ; but that, in compari son to the alternative of Heaven or Hell to all Eternity, was a mighty small matter. The lands he rented are still there, recognizable to the tourist ; gross boggy lands, fringed with willow-trees, at the east end of the small Town of St. Ives, which is still noted as a cattle-market in those parts. The 'Cromwell Barn,' the pretended 'House of Cromwell,' the &c, &c, are, as is usual in these cases, when you come to try them by the documents, a mere jumble of incredibili ties, and oblivious human platitudes, distressing to the mind. But a Letter, one Letter signed Oliver Cromwell and dated St. Ives, does remain, still legible and indubitable to us. What more is to be said on St. Ives and the adjacent matters, will best ar range itself round that Document. One or two entries here, and we arrive at that, and bring these imperfect Introductory Chroni cles to a close. 1632. In January of this year Oliver's seventh child was born to him ; a boy, James ; who died the day after baptism. There re mained six children, of whom one other died young; it is not known at what date. Here subjoined is the List of them, and of those subsequently born ; in a Note, elaborated, as before, from the imbroglios of Noble.-f * Noble, i., 106. t Oliver Cromwell's Children. (Married to Elizabeth Bourchier, 22d August, 1620.) EVENTS IN OLIVER'S BIOGRAPHY. 67 This same year, William Prynne first began to make a noise in England. A learned voung gentleman ' from Painswick near Bath,' graduate of Oxford, now ' an Outer Barrister of Lincoln's 1. Robert; baptized 13th October, 1621. Named for his Grandfather. No farther account of him ; he died before ripe years. 2. Oliver; baptized 6th February, 1622-3; went to Felsted School ' Captain in Harrison's Regiment, — no. At Peterborough in 1C43 (Noble, i., 133-4). He died, or was killed during the war; date and place not yet discoverable. Noble says it was at Appleby; referring to Whitlocke. Whitlocke (p. 318 of lst edition, 322 of 2d), on ransacking the old Pam phlets, turns out to be indisputably in error. The Protector on his death bed alludes to this Oliver's death : " It went to my heart like a dagger, indeed it did." 3. Bridget; baptized 4th August, 1624. Married to Ireton, 15th January, 1646-7 (Noble, i., 134); widow, 26 November, 1651. Married to Fleet wood (exact date, after long search, remains undiscovered; Noble, ii., 355, says 'before' June, 1652, which is impossible). Died at Stoke Newington, near London, September, 1681. 4. Richard ; born 4th October, 1626. At Felsted School. ' In Lincoln's Inn, 27th May, 1647 :' an error ? Married in 164S, Richard Mayor's daugh ter, of Hursley, Hants. First in Parliament, 1 654. Protector, 1658. Dies, poor idle Triviality, at Cheshunt, 12th July, 1712. 5. Henry ; baptized at All-Saints (the rest are at St. John's), Hunting don, 20th January, 1627-8. Felsted School. In the army at sixteen. Captain in Fairfax's Lifeguard in 1647. Colonel, in 1 649, and "in Ireland with his Father. Lord Deputy there in 1657. In 1660, retired to Spinney Abbey, 'near Soham,' nearer Wicken, in Cambridgeshire. Foolish story of Charles II. and the ' stable-fork' there (Noble, i., 212). Died 23d March, 1673-4 ; buried in Wicken Church. A brave man and true : had he been named Protector, there had, most likely, been quite another History of England to write, at present ! 6. Elizabeth ; baptized 2d July, 1629. Mrs. Claypole, 1645-6 Died at 3 in the morning, Hampton-court, 6th August, 1658,-4 weeks before her Father. A graceful, brave, and amiable woman. The lamentation abqut Dr. Hewit and ' bloodshed (in Clarendon and others) is fudge. At St. Ives and Ely : 7. James ; baptized 8th January, 1631-2 ; died next day. 8. Mary ; baptized (at Huntingdon still) 9th February, 1636-7. Lady Fauconberg, 18th November, 1657. Dean Swift knew her : ' handsome and like her Father.' Died 14th March, 1712 (1712-3 ? is not decided in Noble). Richard died within a few months of her. 9. Frances : baptized (at Ely now), 6th December, 1638. ' Charles II. was for marrying her :' not improbable. Married Mr. Rich, Earl of War wick's grandson, 11th November, 1657 : he died in three months, 16th 68 INTRODUCTION. Inn ;' well read in English Law, and full of zeal for Gospel Doc trine and Morality. He, struck by certain flagrant scandals of the time, especially by that of Play-acting and Masking, saw good this year to set forth his Histriomastix, or Player's Scourge ; a Book still extant, but never more to be read by mortal. For which Mr. William Prynne himself, before long, paid rather dear. The Book was licensed by old Archbishop Abbot, a man of Puri tan tendencies, but now verging towards his end. Peter Heylin, ' lying Peter,' as men sometimes call him, was already with hawk's eye and the intensest interest reading this now unreadable Book, and, by Laud's direction, taking excerpts from the same. It carries our thought to extensive world-transactions over sea, to reflect that in the end of this same year, ' 6 November, 1632,' the great Gustavus died on the field of Liitzen ; fighting against Wallenstein ; victorious for the last time. While Oliver Cromwell walked peacefully intent on cattle husbandry, that winter-day, on the grassy banks of the Ouse at St. Ives, Gustavus Adolphus, shot through the back, was sinking from his horse in the battle-storm far off, with these words : " Ich habe genug, Bruder ; reite Dich. Brother, I have got enough ; save thyself!"* On the 19th of the same month, November, 1632, died like wise Frederick Elector Palatine, titular King of Bohemia, husband of King Charles's sister, and father of certain Princes, Rupert and others, who came to be well known in our History. Elizabeth, the Widow, was left with a large family of them in Holland, very bare of money, of resource, or immediate hope ; but con ducted herself, as she had all along done, in a way that gained much respect. ' Alles far Ruhm und Ihr, All for Glory and Her,' were the words Duke Bernhard of Weimar carried on his Flag, through many battles in that Thirty- Years War. She was February, 1657-8. No child by Rich. Married Sir John Russel, — the Checquers Russels. Died 27th January, 1720-1. In all 5 sons and four daughters; of whom 3 sons and all the daughters came to maturity. The Protector's Widow died at Norborough, her son-in-law Claypole's place (now ruined, patched into a farm-house ; near Market Deeping ; it is itself in Northamptonshire), 8th October, 1672. * Schiller : Geschichte des 30jahrigen Krieges. EVENTS IN OLIVER'S BIOGRAPHY. 69 of Puritan tendency ; understood to care little about the Four surplices at Allhallowtide, and much for the root of the matter. Attorney-General Noy, in these months, was busy tearing up the unfortunate old manufacturers of soap ; tormenting mankind very much about soap.* He tore them up irresistibly, reduced them to total ruin ; good soap became unattainable. 1633. In May, 1633, the second year of Oliver's residence in this new Farm, The King's Majesty, with train enough, passed through Huntingdonshire, on his way to Scotland to be crowned. The loud rustle of him disturbing for a day the summer husband ries and operations of mankind. His ostensible business was to be crowned ; but his intrinsic errand was, what his Father's for merly had been, to get his Pretended-Bishops set on foot there; his Tulchans converted into real Calves ; — in which, as we shall see, he succeeded still worse than his Father had done. Dr. Laud, Bishop Laud, now near upon Archbishophood, attended his Majesty thither as formerly ; still found ' no religion ' there, but trusted now to introduce one. The Chapel at Holyrood-house was fitted up with every equipment textile and metallic ; and little Bishop Laud in person ' performed the service,' in a way to illuminate the benighted natives, as was hoped, — show them how an Artist could do it. He had also some dreadful travelling through certain of the savage districts of that country. — Crossing Huntingdonshire, in his way Northward, his Majesty had visited the Establishment of Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding on the western border of that county.f A surprising Establishment, now in full flower ; wherein above fourscore persons, including domestics, with Ferrar and his Brother and aged Mother at the head of them, had devoted themselves to a kind of Protestant Monachism, and were getting much talked of in those times. They followed celibacy, and merely religious duties; employed themselves in ' binding of Prayerbooks,' embroidering of hassocks, in almsgiving also, and what charitable work was possible in that desert region ; above all, they kept up, night and day, a continual * Rushworth, ii., 135, 252, &c. f Rushworth, ii. 70 INTRODUCTION. repetition of the English Liturgy ; being divided into relays and watches, one watch relieving another as on ship-board ; and never allowing at any hour the sacred fire to go out. This also, as a feature of the times, the modern reader is to meditate. In Isaac Walton's Lives there is some drowsy notice of these peo ple, not unknown to the modern reader. A far livelier notice ; record of an actual visit to the place, by an Anonymous Person, seemingly a religious Lawyer, perhaps returning from Circuit in that direction, at all events a most sharp distinct man, through whose clear eyes we also can still look ; — is preserved by Hearne in very unexpected neighborhood.* The Anonymous Person, after some survey and communing, suggested to Nicholas Ferrar, " Perhaps he had but assumed all this ritual mummery, in order to get a devout life led peaceably in these bad times ?" Nicho las, a dark man, who had acquired something ofthe Jesuit in his Foreign travels, looked at him ambiguously, and said, " I per ceive you are a person who know the world !" They did not ask the Anonymous Person to stay dinner, which he considered would have been agreeable. Note these other things, with which we are more immediately concerned. In this same year the Feoffees, with their Purchase of Advowsons, with their Lecturers and Running Lecturers, were fairly rooted out, and flung prostrate into total ruin ; Laud having set Attorney-General Noy upon them, and brought them into the Starchamber. ' God forgive them,' writes Bishop Laud, ' and grant me patience !' — on hearing that they spake harshly of him ; not gratefully, but ungratefully, for all this trouble he took ! In the same year, by procurement of the same Bishop hounding-on the same invincible Attorney-General, William Prynne our unreadable friend, Peter Heylin having read him was brought to the Starchamber ; to the Pillory, and had his ears cropt off, for the first time ; — who also, strange as it may look, manifested no gratitude, but the contrary, for all that trouble !* * Thomse Caii Vindiciae Antiquitatis Academiae Oxoniensis (Oxf., 1730), ii , 702-94. There are two Lives of Ferrar ; considerable writings about him ; but, except this, nothing that much deserves to be read. f Rushworth ; Wharton's Laud. EVENTS IN OLIVER'S BIOGRAPHY. 71 1634. In the end of this the third year of Oliver's abode at St. Ives, came out the celebrated Writ of Shipmoney. It was the last feat of Attorney-General Noy : a morose, amorphous, cynical Law-Pedant, and invincible living heap of learned rubbish ; once a Patriot in Parliament, till they made him Attorney-General, and enlightened his eyes : who had fished up from the dust-abysses this and other old shadows of 'precedents,' promising to be of great use in the present distressed state of the Finance Depart ment. Parliament being in abeyance, how to raise money was now the grand problem. Noy himself was dead before the Writ came out ; a very mixed renown following him. The Vintners, says Wood, illuminated at his death, made bonfires and ' drank lusty carouses :' to them, as to every man, he had been a sore affliction. His heart, on dissection, adds old Anthony, was found all 'shrivelled up like a leather penny-purse,' which gave rise to comments among the Puritans.* His brain, said the pasquinades of the day, was found reduced to a mass of dust, his heart was a bundle of old sheepskin writs, and his belly consisted of a bar rel of soap.f Some indistinct memory of him still survives, as of a grisly Law Pluto, and dark Law Monster, kind of Infernal King, Chief Enchanter in the Domdaniel of Attorneys ; one of those frightful men, who, as his contemporaries passionately said and repeated, dare to ' decree injustice by a law.' The Shipmoney Writ has come out then ; and Cousin Hamp den has decided not to pay it ! — As the date of Oliver's St. Ives Letter is 1635-6, and we are now come in sight of that, we will here close our Chronology. * Wood's Athenae (Bliss's edition, London, 1815), ii., 583. t Rushworth. 72 INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER V. of Oliver's letters and speeches. Letters and authentic Utterances of Oliver lie scattered, in print and manuscript in a hundred repositories, in all varieties of con dition and environment. Most of them, all the important of them, have already long since been printed and again printed ; but we cannot in general say, ever read : too often it is apparent that the very editor of these poor utterances had, if reading mean under standing, never read them. They stand in their old spelling ; mispunctuated, misprinted, unelucidated, unintelligible, — defaced with the dark incrustations too well known to students of that Pe riod. The Speeches above all, as hitherto set forth in The So mers Tracts, in The Milton State-Papers, in Burton's Diary, and other such Books, excel human belief : certainly no such agglo merate of opaque confusions, printed and reprinted ; of darkness on the back of darkness, thick and three-fold ; is known to me elsewhere in the history of things spoken or printed by human creatures. Of these Speeches, all except one, which was pub lished by authority at the time, I have to believe myself, not very exultingly, to be the first actual reader for nearly two Centuries past. Nevertheless these Documents do exist, authentic though de faced ; and invite every one who would know that Period, to study them till they become intelligible again. The words of Oliver Cromwell, — the meaning they had, must be worth recovering in that point of view. To collect these Letters and authentic Ut terances, as one's reading yielded them, was a comparatively grateful labor ; to correct them, elucidate and make them legible again, was a good historical study. Surely ' a wise memory ' would wish to preserve among men the written and spoken words of such a man ; — and as for the ' wise oblivion,' that is already by Time and Accident, done to our hand. Enough is already OF OLIVER'S LETTERS AND SPEECHES. 73 lost and destroyed ; we need not, in this particular case, omit farther. Accordingly, whatever words authentically proceeding from Oliver himself I could anywhere find yet surviving, I have here gathered ; and will now, with such minimum of annotation as may suit that object, offer them to the reader. That is the pur port of this Book. I have ventured to believe that, to certain patient earnest readers, these old dim Letters of a noble English Man might, as they had done to myself, become dimly legible again ; might dimly present, better than all other evidence, the noble figure of the Man himself again. Certainly there is His torical instruction in these Letters : — Historical, and perhaps other and better. At least, it is with Heroes and god-inspired men that I, for my part, would far rather converse, in what dia lect soever they speak! Great, ever- fruitful ; profitable for reproof, for encouragement, for building up in manful purposes and works, are the words of those that in their day were men. I will advise serious persons, interested in England past or present, to try if they can read a little in these Letters of Oliver Crom well, a man once deeply interested in the same object. Heavy as it is, and dim and obsolete, there may be worse reading, for such persons in our time. For the rest, if each Letter look dim, and have little light, after all study ; yet let the Historical reader reflect, such light as it has cannot be disputed at all. These words, expository of that day and that hour, Oliver Cromwell did see fittest to be written down. The Letter hangs there in the dark abysses of the Past : if like a star almost extinct, yet like a real star ; fixed ; about which there is no cavilling possible. That autograph Letter, it was once all luminous as a burning beacon, every word of it a live coal, in its time ; it was once a piece of the general fire and light of Human Life, that Letter ! Neither is it yet entirely extinct ; well read, there is still in it light enough to exhibit its own self; nay to diffuse a faint authentic twilight some distance round it. Heaped embers which in the daylight looked black, may still look red in the utter darkness. These letters of Oliver will convince any man that the Past did exist ! By degrees the combined small twilights may produce a kind of general feeble vol. I. 5 74 INTRODUCTION. twilight, rendering the Past credible, the Ghosts of the Past in some glimpses of them visible ! Such is the effect of contem- porary letters always ; and I can very confidently recommend Oliver's as good of their kind. A man intent on forcing for him self some path through that gloomy chaos called History of the Seventeenth Century, and looking face to face upon the same, may perhaps try it by this method as hopefully as by another. Here is an irregular row of beacon-fires, once all luminous as suns ; and with a certain inextinguishable erubescence still, in the abysses of the dead deep Night. Let us look here. In shadowy outlines, in dimmer and dimmer crowding forms, the very figure of the old dead Time itself may perhaps be faintly discernible here ! — I called these Letters good, — but withal only good of their kind. No eloquence, elegance, not always even clearness of expression, is to be looked for in them. They are written with far other than literary aims ; written, most of them, in the very flame and conflagration of a revolutionary struggle, and with an eye to the despatch of indispensable pressing business alone : but it will be found, I conceive, that for such end they are well written. Su perfluity, as if by a natural law of the case, the writer has had to discard ; whatsoever quality can be dispensed with is indiffer ent to him. With unwieldy movement, yet with a great solid step he presses through, towards his object ; has marked out very decisively what the real steps towards it are ; discriminating well the essential from the extraneous; — forming to himself; in short, a true, not an untrue picture of the business that is to be done. There is in these letters, as I have said above, a silence still more significant of Oliver to us than any speech they have. Dimly we discover features of an Intelligence, and Soul of a Man, greater than any speech. The Intelligence that can, with full satisfac tion to itself, come out in eloquent speaking, in musical singing, is, after all, a small Intelligence. He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet. Cromwell, emblem of the dumb English, is interesting to me by the very inadequacy of his speech. Heroic insight, valor and belief, without words, — how noble is it in comparison to elo- quent words without heroic insight ! — OF OLIVER'S LETTERS AND SPEECHES. 73 I have corrected the spelling of these Letters ; I have punc tuated, and divided them into paragraphs, in the modern manner. The Originals, so far as I have seen such, have in general no paragraphs : if the Letter is short, it is usually found written on the first leaf of the sheet ; often with the conclusion, or some post script, subjoined crosswise on the margin, — indicating that there was no blotting paper in those days ; that the hasty writer was loath to turn the leaf. Oliver's spelling and pointing are of the sort common to educated persons in his time ; and readers that wish it may have specimens of him in abundance, and of all due dimness, in many printed Books : but to us, intent here to have the Letters read and understood, it seemed very proper at once and altogether to' get rid of that encumbrance. Would the rest were all as easily got rid of ! Here and there, to bring out the struggling sense, I have added or rectified a word, — but taken care to point out the same ; what words in the Text of the Letters are mine, the reader will find marked off by single commas : it was of course my supreme duty to avoid altering, in any respect, not only the sense, but the smallest feature in the physiognomy, ofthe Original. And so 'a minimum of annotation' having been added, what minimum would serve the purpose, — here are the Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell ; of which the reader, with my best wishes, but not with any very high immediate hope of mine in that particular, is to make What he can. Surely it was far enough from probable that these Letters of Cromwell, written originally for quite other objects, and selected not by the Genius of History, but by blind Accident which has saved them hitherto and destroyed the rest, — can illuminate for a modern man this Period of our Annals, which for all moderns, we may say, has become a gulf of bottomless darkness ! Not so easily will the modern man domesticate himself in a scene of things every way so foreign to him. Nor could any measurable exposition of mine, on this present occasion, do much to illumi nate the dead dark world of the Seventeenth Century, into which the reader is about to enter. He will gradually get to understand, as I have said, that the Seventeenth Century did exist ; that it was not a waste rubbish-continent of Rushworth-Nalson State- papers, of Philosophical Scepticisms, Dilettantisms, Dryasdust 76 INTRODUCTION. Torpedoisms ; — but an actual flesh-and-blood Fact ; with color in its cheeks, with awful august heroic thoughts in its heart, and at last with steel sword in its hand ! Theoretically this is a most small postulate, conceded at once by everybody ; but practically it is a very large one, seldom or never conceded ; the due practi cal conceding of it amounts to much, indeed to the sure promise of all. I will venture to give the reader two little pieces of ad vice, which, if his experience resemble mine, may prove further- some to him in this inquiry : they include the essence of all that I have discovered respecting it. The first is, By no means to credit the widespread report that these Seventeenth-Century Puritans were superstitious crack- brained persons; given up to enthusiasm, the most part of them ; the minor ruling part being cunning men, who knew how to as sume the dialect of the others, and thereby, as skilful Machiavels, to dupe them. This is a wide-spread report ; but an untrue one. I advise my reader to try precisely the opposite hypothesis. To consider that his Fathers, who had thought about this World very seriously indeed, and with very considerable thinking faculty indeed, were not quite so far behindhand in their conclusions respecting it. That actually their 'enthusiasms,' if well seen into, were not foolish but wise. That Machiavelism, Cant, Offi cial Jargon, whereby a man speaks openly what he does not mean, were, surprising as it may seem, much rarer then than they have ever since been. Really and truly it may in a manner be said, Cant, Parliamentary and other Jargon, were still to invent in this world ! O Heavens, one could weep at the contrast ! Cant was not fashionable at all ; that stupendous invention of ' Speech for the purpose of concealing Thought' was not yet made. A man wagging the tongue of him, as if it were the clapper of a bell to be rung for economic purposes, and not so much as attempting to convey any inner thought, if thought he have, of the matter talked of, — would at that date have awakened all the horror in men's minds, which at all dates, and at this date too, is due to him. The accursed thing ! No man as yet dared to do it ; all men believing that God would judge them. In the History of the Civil War far and wide, I have not fallen in with one such phenomenon. Even Archbishop Laud and Peter Hey- OF OLIVER'S LETTERS AND SPEECHES. 77 lin meant what they say ; through their words do you look direct into the scraggy conviction they have formed : — or if ' lying Peter' do lie, he at least knows that he is lying ! Lord Clarendon, a man of sufficient unveracity of heart, to whom indeed whatso ever has direct veracity of heart is more or less horrible, speaks always in official language ; a clothed, nay sometimes even quilted dialect, yet always with some considerate body in the heart of it, never with none ! The use of the human tongue was then other than it now is. I counsel the reader to leave all that of Cant, Dupery, Machiavelism, and so forth, decisively lying at the threshold. He will be wise to believe that these Puritans do mean what they say, and to try unimpeded if he can discover what that is. Gradually a very stupendous phenomenon may rise on his astonished eye. A practical world based on Belief in God ; — such as many centuries had seen before, but as never any century since has been privileged to see. It was the last glimpse of it ia our world, this of English Puritanism : very great, very glorious ; tragical enough to all thinking hearts that look on it from these days of ours. My second advice is, Not to imagine that it was Constitution, ' Liberty of the people to tax themselves,' Privilege of Parlia ment, Triennial or Annual Parliaments, or any modification of these sublime Privileges now waxing somewhat faint in our admi rations, that mainly animated our Cromwells, Pyms, and Hamp- dens to the heroic efforts we still admire in retrospect. Not these very measurable ' Privileges,' but a far other and deeper, which could not be measured ; of which these, and all grand social improvements whatsoever, are the corollary. Our ancient Puri tan Reformers were, as all Reformers that will ever much benefit this earth are always, inspired by a Heavenly Purpose. To see God's own Law, then universally acknowledged for complete as it stood in the holy Written Book, made good in this world ; to see this, or the true unwearied aim and struggle towards this : it was a thing worth living for and dying for ! Eternal Justice ; that God's Will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven : corollaries enough will flow from that, if that be there ; if that be not there, no corollary good for much will flow. It was the general spirit of England in the Seventeenth Century. In other somewhat 78 INTRODUCTION. sadly disfigured form, we have seen the same immortal hope take practical shape in the French Revolution, and once more astonish the world. That England should all become a Church, if you like to name it so : a Church, presided over not by sham-priests in ' Four surplices at Allhallowtide,' but by true good-consecrated ones, whose hearts the Most High had touched and hallowed with his fire : — this was the prayer of many, it was the godlike hope and effort of some. Our modern methods of Reform differ somewhat, — as indeed the issue testifies. I will advise my reader to forget the modern methods of Reform ; not to remember that he has ever heard of a modern individual called by the name of Reformer, if he would understand what the old meaning of the word was. The Crom wells, Pyms, Hampdens, who were understood on the Royalist side to be firebrands of the Devil, have had still worse measure from the Dryasdust Philosophies, and sceptical Histories, of later times. They really did resemble firebrands of the Devil, if you looked at them through spectacles of a certain color. For fire is always fire. But by no spectacles, only by mere blinders and wooden-eyed spectacles, can the flame-girt Heaven's messenger pass for a poor mouldy Pedant and Constitution-monger, such as this would make him out to be ! On the whole, say not, good reader, as is often done, " It was then all one as now." Good reader, it was considerably different then from now. Men indolently say, " The Ages are all alike ; ever the same sorry elements over again, in new vesture ; the issue of it always a melancholy farce-tragedy, in one Age as in another !" Wherein lies very obviously a truth ; but also in secret a very sad error withal. Sure enough, the highest Life touches always, by large sections of it, on the vulgar and univer sal : he that expects to see a Hero, or a Heroic Age, step forth into practice in yellow Drury-lane stage-boots, and speak in blank verse for itself, will look long in vain. Sure enough, in the Heroic Century as in the Unheroic, knaves and cowards, and cunning greedy persons were not wanting, — were, if you will, extremely abundant. But the question always remains, Did they lie chained, subordinate in this world's business ; coerced by steel whips, or in whatever other effectual way, and sent whimpering OF OLIVER'S LETTERS AND SPEECHES. 79 into their due subterranean abodes, to beat hemp and repent ; a true never-ending attempt going on to handcuff, to silence and suppress them ? Or did they walk openly abroad, the envy of a general valet-population, and bear sway ; ' professing, without universal anathema, almost with general assent, that they were the Orthodox Party ; that they, even they, were such men as you had right to look for 1 — Reader, the Ages differ greatly, even infinitely, from one another. Considerable tracts of Ages there have been, by far the majority indeed, wherein the men, unfortunate mortals, were a set of mimetic creatures rather than men ; without heart-insight as to this Universe, and its Heights and its Abysses ; without con viction or belief of their own regarding it, at all ; — who walked merely by hearsays, traditionary cants, black and white sur plices, and inane confusions ; — whose whole Existence accordingly was a grimace ; nothing original in it, nothing genuine or sincere but this only, — their greediness of appetite and their faculty of digestion. Such unhappy ages, too numerous here below, the Genius of Mankind indignantly seizes, as disgraceful to the Family, and with Rhadamanthine ruthlessness — annihilates ; tumbles large masses of them swiftly into Eternal Night. These are the Unheroic ages ; which cannot serve, on the general field of Existence, except as dust, as inorganic manure. The memory of such Ages fades away for ever out of the minds of all men. Why should any memory of them continue ? The fashion of them has passed away ; and as for genuine substance, they never had any. To no heart of a man any more can these Ages become lovely. What melodious loving heart will search into their records, will sing of them, or celebrate them ? Even torpid Dry asdust is forced to give over at last, all creatures declining to hear him on that subject ; whereupon ensues composure and silence, and Oblivion has her own. Good reader, if you be wise, search not for the secret of Heroic Ages, which have done great things in this Earth, among their falsities, their greedy quackeries and wreheroisms ! It never lies and never will lie there. Knaves and quacks, — alas, we know they abounded : but the Age was Heroic even because it had 80 INTRODUCTION. declared war to the death with these, and would have neither truce nor treaty with these ; and went forth, flame-crowned, as with bared sword, and called the Most High to witness that it would not endure these ! — But now for the Letters of Cromwell themselves.