# The Works of Thomas Carlyle/Volume 6/Events in Oliver’s Biography

Layout 4
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 Grandfather 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 exhibitions; which must have 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 Royston, on Friday forenoon. The Cambridge Doctors brought him an Address while here; ​Uncle Oliver, besides the ruinously splendid entertainments, gave his hounds, horses and astonishing gifts at his departure. In return there were Knights created, 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 honour by this and other royal visits; but found it, by and by, a dear-bought honour.—
Oliver’s Biographers, or rather Carrion Heath his first Biographer 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 tyrannously with boys; of his acting in School Plays; of his etc. etc—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 worthy Dr. Beard, of whose writing I possess a Book, of whom we shall hear again: he learned, to appearance moderately well, what the sons of other gentlemen were taught in such places; went through the universal destinies which conduct all men from childhood to youth, in a way not particularised in any one point by an authentic record. Readers of lively imagina​tion 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 labours 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 religious, as all rational persons then were. He had two sisters elder, and gradually four younger; the only boy among seven. Readers must fancy his growth there, in the North end of Huntingdon, in the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, as they can.
In January 1603-4, was held at Hampton Court a kind of 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 humours 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 straitened 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 savour 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 Conference was accordingly summoned. Four world-famous Doctors, from Oxford and Cambridge, represented the pious straitened class, now beginning to be generally conspicuous under the nickname 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 glorious than 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, Θεός, 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 impropriations’ (tithes snatched from the old Church by laymen) might be made to yield a ‘seventh part’ of their amount, towards maintaining 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 (refused with indignation);—on the whole (if such a thing durst be hinted at, for the tone is almost inaudibly low and humble), That pious straitened Preachers, in terror of offending God by Idolatry, and useful to human souls, might not be cast out of their parishes for genuflexions, white surplices and suchlike, 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 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 poisonous confusions of the Romish Babylon, substituted in their room! The eternal Truth of the Living God to become an empty formula, 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, and the prospective 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 kept full of news, and never wanted for pabulum! 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 himself to ​be met with anywhere, till in the Admission-Book of SidneySussex College, Cambridge, we come to this,
1616
‘A Festo Annunciationis ad Festum Sancti Michaelis Archangeli, 1616’: such (meaning merely, From New-year’s-day. or 25th March, to 29th September) is the general Heading of the List of Scholars, or Admissi, for that Term;—and first in order there stands, ‘Oliverius Cromwell Huntingdoniensis admissus ad commeatum Sociorum, Aprilis vicesimo tertio; Tutore Magistro Ricardo Howlet’: Oliver Cromwell from Huntingdon admitted Fellow Commoner, 23d April 1616; Tutor Mr. Richard Howlet.—Between which and the next Entry some zealous individual of later date has crowded-in these lines: ‘Hic fuit grandis ille Impostor, Carnifex perditissimus, qui pientissimo Rege Carolo Primo nefariâ cœde sublato, ipsum usurpavit Thronum, et Tria Regna per quinque ferme annorum spatium, sub Protectoris nomine, indomitâ tyrannide vexavit.’ Had the zealous individual specifically dated this entry, it had been a slight improvement,—on a thing not much improvable. We can guess, After 1660, and not long after.
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. Ætatis 53. Die 23 Apr
While Oliver Cromwell was entering himself of Sidney-Sussex College, William Shakspeare was taking his farewell of this world. Oliver’s Father had, most likely, come with him; it is but some fifteen 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 Puritanism 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 of 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 trying 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 England. Poor Somerset Ker, King’s favourite, ‘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 antiquarian 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, endeavour to infiltrate something 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 Radcliffe, 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. But this time, I conceive, the royal entertainment 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 ever see, or fancy in his mind, a Tulchan? A 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 Tulchan; is the Tulchan ready?’ So of the Bishops. Scotch Lairds were eager enough to ‘milk’ the Church Lands and Tithes, to get the rents out of them freely, which 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 disturb- ance. 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 clamour, and scattered to the four winds, so soon as the Cow became awake to it!—
Villiers Buckingham, the new favourite, 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 Hunting- don, the cradle of his promotions, and the birthplace of Oliver. In Scotland, Dr. Laud, much to his regret, found ‘no religion at all,’ no surplices, no altars in the east or anywhere; no bowing, no responding; not the smallest regu- larity 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 Huntingdon, Robert Cromwell died. His Will is dated 6th June 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 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 searching 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 Cromwell 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 Wolsey;—taking the opportunity of hearing the ‘readers,’ old Benchers who then actually read, and of learning Law. The Henry Cromwell of February 1653-4 is expressly entered as ‘Second sonne to his Highness Oliver, Lord Protector’: ​an interesting 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 Treland; in the 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 became 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 gentleman, 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 Penalties, dissolved all in cant and mealy-mouthed official flourishings,—it might perhaps, with certain parties, be a credit; the admirers and the censurers of Cromwell have alike no word to record on the subject.
1618
Thursday, 29th October 1618. This morning, if Oliver, as is probable, were now in Town studying Law, he might be eye-witness of a great and very strange scene; the last scene in the Life of Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh was beheaded in Old Palaceyard; he appeared on the scaffold there ‘about eight 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 Doncaster (‘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 gray; with his strong heart ‘breaking,’—still strength enough in it to break with dignity. Somewhat proudly he laid his old gray 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 seemingly come of City merchants rather, who by some of their quarterings and cognisances 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 daughters; 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 signatures; 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, unnoticeable 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;—living as his Father before him had done. His first child was born here, in October 1621; a son, Robert, baptised at St. John’s Church on the 13th of the month, of whom nothing farther is 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. A matter of endless joy to all true Englishmen of that day, though no Englishman 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 endeavourings to marry his son into some firstrate 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 Phaëton’s Sun-chariot took the road, no honest English soul could wish to have concern with. Hence England illuminated itself. The articulate tendency 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 compelled to struggle another way. The rent by degrees became wide enough!
For the present, England is all illuminated, a new Parliament 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 Huntingdonshire. 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 beginning of the Seventeenth. The Palatinate 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 mustered 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 shipboard. nothing came of it, nothing could come. With a James Stuart for Generalissimo, there is no good fighting possible. The poor King himself soon after died; left the matter to develop itself in other still fataler ways.
In those years it must be that Dr. Simcott, Physician in Huntingdon, 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 reflective 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 sorrows 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 inverted image of our nobleness. The depth of our despair measures 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 deliverance from the jaws of Eternal Death. Certainly a grand epoch for a man: properly the one epoch; the turningpoint which guides upwards, or guides downwards, him and his activity forevermore. 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 Allhallowtide,’ with words very imperfect; or by no man and no words, but only by the Silences, by the Eternities, by the Life everlasting 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, man-like, fruitful to all generations. It is by far the memorablest achievement of our Species; without 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 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 insufficiently 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 bishoprics; 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-afternoon,’ as supplemental to the regular Priest when he might happen to be idle, or given to black and white surplices; or as ‘running Lecturers,’ now here, now there, over a certain district. 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 Lecturers, 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 Enterprise into the Star-chamber, ​and there, with emphasis enough, and heavy damages, amid huge rumour from the public, suppressed 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 devout 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 England had declared itself Puritan.
1625
Mark Noble, citing Willis’s Notitia, reports that Oliver appeared this year as Member ‘for Huntingdon’ in King Charles’s first Parliament. It is a mistake; grounded on mere blunders and clerical errors. Browne Willis, in his Notitia Parliamentaria, does indeed specify as Member for Huntingdonshire an “Oliver Cromwell, Esq.,” who might be ​our Oliver. But the usual member 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 credited. What the original Chancery Parchments say of the business, whether the error is theirs or Browne Willis’s, I cannot decide: on inquiry at the Roll’s 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 vigour 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 Huntingdon 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 ‘Letter 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 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 hemlock 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, eager beyond law? Whoever the thief may be, he is probably dead long since; and has answered for this,—and also, we may fancy, for heavier thefts, which were likely to be charged upon him. If any humane individual ever henceforth get his eye upon the Letter, let him be so kind as send a copy of it to the Publishers of this Book, and no questions will be asked.
1627
A Deed of Sale, dated 20th June 1627, still testifies that Hinchinbrook this year passed out of the hands of the Cromwells into those of the Montagues. The price was 3000l.; curiously divided into two parcels, down to shillings and pence,—one of the parcels being already a creditor’s. The Purchaser is ‘Sir Sidney 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 splendour, 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 rigour for the arms; while the Captain respectfully conversed with his Uncle; and even ‘insisted’ through the interview, say the old Books, ‘on standing uncovered’: which latter circumstance may be taken as an astonishing hypocrisy in him, say the old blockhead Books. The arms, munitions, furnishings were with all rigour of law, not with more rigour 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. Oliver, while in military charge of that country, had probably repeated visits to pay to his Uncle; and they know little of the man or of the circumstances, who suppose there was any likelihood or any 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 of hospitality; and averse to severer 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 business records, into the darker places of the Fens. His name disappears 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 Montague, 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 valour worthy of a better generalissimo than poor James Duke of York, in the Seafight of Solebay (Southwold Bay, on the coast of Suffolk) in 1672.
In these same years, for the dates and all other circumstances of the matter hang dubious in the vague, there is record given by Dugdale, a man of very small authority on these Cromwell matters, 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 petition 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 Oliver 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 Sir Thomas was imbecile, Oliver was not wrong! Alas, all calumny and carrion, does it not incessantly cry, ‘Earth, oh, 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 Parlia​ment 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 indignation, dismissed 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 domestic, at Cadiz, at Rhé, 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 with one prorogation till March 1629. The two former Parliaments had sat but a few weeks each, till they were indignantly hurled asunder again; this one continued nearly a year. Wentworth (Strafford) was of this Parliament; Hampden too, Selden, Pym, Holles, and others known to us: all these had been of former Parliaments as well; Oliver Cromwell, Member for Huntingdon, 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 Parliament should succeed; and took what he must have thought incredible 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 innumerable 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 Ilegality, to temporal and eternal Perdition!” The Nobility and Gentry of England were then a very strange body of men. 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; England 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 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 subsidies, but not till there were reasonable discussion of grievances. That in manner it was most gentle, soft-spoken, cautious, reverential; and in substance most resolute and valiant. Truly with valiant patient energy, in a slow stedfast 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-rubbish. The memory of it, could any real memory of it rise upon honourable 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 mournfulest 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 of the Court of Wards,’ a gentleman entirely unknown to us, received fresh and new, before breakfast, on a June morning of the 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 .
‘Friday, 6th June 1628.
‘Sir,—Yesterday was a day of desolation among us in Parliament; 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 religion, by the insufficiency of his Ministers, by the’ etc. etc. ‘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 inclined to such a Declaration; which was accordingly resolved to be set about.
‘But next day, Wednesday, we had a Message from his Majesty 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 morning, 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 we arriving 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.’ Oh, Mr, Chamberlain of the Court of Wards, was the like ever witnessed? ‘Yea, the Speaker in his speech could not refrain from weeping and shedding 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 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 speaking 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 pro​ceedings; 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 entertained and answered with a cheerful acclamation of the 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 everyone 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 Remonstrance 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.’ And so, ever since, King’s Majesty, Speaker, Duke and Councillors, they have been meditating it all night!
‘What we shall expect this morning, therefore, God of Heaven knows! We shall meet betimes this morning; partly for the business’ sake; and partly because, two days ago, we made an order, That whoever comes in after Prayers shall pay twelvepence to the poor.
‘Sir, excuse my haste:—and let us have your prayers; 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 memorablest he was ever in. Why did those old honourable gentlemen ‘weep’? 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 honourable 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 discover 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 gentleman 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 condition, and on the condition of England, and a Duke of Buckingham 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 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 without Parliamentary consent; in the teeth of old Tallagio non concedendo, nay even of the late solemnly-confirmed Petition of Right; and naturally gave rise to Parliamentary consideration. Merchants had been imprisoned for refusing to pay it; Members of Parliament themselves had been ‘subpeena’d’ : there was a very ravelled coil to deal with in regard to Tonnage and Poundage. Nay the Petition of Right itself had been altered in the Printing; a very ugly business too.
In regard to Religion also, matters looked equally ill. Sycophant Mainwaring, just censured in Parliament, had been promoted to a fatter living. Sycophant Montague, in the like circumstances, 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 Religion, on the 11th day of February 1628-9, that Mr. Cromwell, Member for Hunting​don, 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, 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 Athenæ. 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 manner! And Neile had forbidden him to preach against it: ‘what are we to expect?’
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 Ephemeris Parliamentaria, professing to be compiled by Thomas Fuller; and actually containing a ​Preface recognisable as his, but nothing else that we can so recognise: for ‘quaint old Fuller’ is a man of talent; and this Book looks as if compiled 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 perennial preservation, this notice: ‘Upon question, Ordered, That Dr. Beard of Huntingdon 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. Cromwell’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? Adjourn for two days, and consider what to do! On the second day, which was Wednesday, Speaker Finch signified 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. Holles, Denzil Holles, the Earl of Clare’s second son, he and certain other honourable 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 of the Speaker; ‘Let Mr. Speaker go!’ cried they imploringly—‘No!’ answered Holles; ‘God’s wounds, he shall 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, against Papistry, against 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 honourable gentlemen, Denzil Holles, 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; that he might at leisure go on with his Theatre of God’s Judgments now. His Majesty dissolved the Parliament by Proclamation; 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 Shipmoney may be considered the most original, and sale of Monopolies the most universal. The monopoly of ‘soap’ itself was very grievous to men. 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 Allhallowtide.’ 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 another: the split became too wide for healing. Oliver and others seemed now to have done with Parliaments; a royal Proclamation 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 imbroglio 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; the properties are specified as in the possession of ​himself or his Mother; the sum they yielded was 1800l. 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 advanced 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 Huntingdon, 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 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 Worlds. 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 comparison to the alternative of Heaven or Hell to all Eternity, was a mighty small matter.
The lands he rented are still there, recognisable 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 etc. etc. are, as is usual in these cases, when you come to try them by the documents, ​a mere jumble of incredibilities, 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 undubitable to us. What more is to be said on St. Ives and the adjacent matters will best arrange itself round that Document. One or two entries here, and we arrive at that, and bring these imperfect Introductory Chronicles 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 remained 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. ​This same year, William Prynne first began to make a noise in England. A learned young gentleman ‘from Swainswick, near Bath,’ graduate of Oxford, now ‘an Outer Barrister of Lincoln’s Inn’; well read in English Law, and full of zeal for Gospel Doctrine 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 Puritan 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, ‘6th November
​1632,’ the great Gustavus died on the Field of Lützen; 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; rette Dich. Brother, I have got enough; save thyself.’
On the 19th of the same month, November 1632, died likewise 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 conducted herself, as she had all along done, in a way that gained much respect. ‘Alles für 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 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 husbandries and operations of mankind. His ostensible business was to be crowned; but his intrinsic errand was, ​what his Father’s formerly 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, on this occasion, in his way Northward, his Majesty had visited the Establishment of Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding, on the western border of that county. 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 Prayer-books,’ embroidering of hassocks, in alms-giving also, and what charitable work was possible in that desert region; above all, they kept up, night and day, a continual repetition of the English Liturgy; being divided into relays and watches, one watch relieving another as on shipboard; 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 Izaac Walton’s Lives there is some drowsy notice of these people, 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 ​neighbourhood. 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?’ Nicholas, a dark man, who had acquired something of the Jesuit in his Foreign travels, looked at him ambiguously, and said, ‘I perceive 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 zealous 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!
1634
In the end of this the third year of Oliver’s bode 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 Department. 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 sheep-skin writs, and his belly consisted of a barrel of soap. 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 Hampden 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.
* ↑ Poor Noble, unequal sometimes to the copying of a Parish-register, with his judgment asleep, dates this event 1603-4 (at p. 20, vol. i.), and then placidly (at Pp. 40) states a fact inconsistent therewith.
* ↑ Stowe’s Chronicle, 812, etc.
* ↑ The Theatre of God’s Judgments: by Thomas Beard, Doctor of Divinity, and Preacher of the Word of God in the Town of Huntingdon: Third Edition, increased by many new Examples (‘Examples’ of God’s Justice vindicating itself openly on Violators of God’s Law,—that is the purport of the Book): London, 1631.—A kindly ingenious little Book; still partly readable, almost lovable; some thin but real vein of perennial ingenuity and goodness recognisable in it. What one might call a Set of ‘Percy-Anecdotes’; but Anecdotes authentic, solemnly select, and with a purpose: ‘Percy-Anecdotes’ for a more earnest Century than ours! Dedicated to the Mayor and Burgesses of Huntingdon,—for sundry good reasons; among others, ‘because, Mr. Mayor, you were my scholar, and brought up in my house.’
* ↑ 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-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 most Protestant countries, excepting England, it soon after that began to do. Scotland in respect of the day of the month still followed the Old Style. ‘New-Year’s Day the 25th of March’: this is the whole compass of the fact; with which a reader in those old books has, not without more difficulty than he expects, to familiarise himself. It has occasioned more misdatings 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 to our great amazement going on to forward bntter-boxes in the May following;—and similar miracles not a few occurring: and in short the whole Correspondence is jumbled to pieces; a due bit of topsy-turvy being introduced 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.
* ↑ Neal’s History of the Puritans (London, 1754), i. 411.
* ↑ 6th Nov. (Camden’s Annals).
* ↑ Noble, i. 254;— corrected by the College Book itself.
* ↑ Collier’s Life of Shakspeare (London, 1845), p. 253.
* ↑   ‘University College, Oxford, 4th 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 (London, 1810), p. 64-5.
* ↑ Camden’s Annals; Nichols’s Progresses.
* ↑ Wharton’s Laud (London, 1695), pp. 97, 109, 138.
* ↑ Noble, i. 84.
* ↑ Old Newspaper, in Cromwelliana, p. 91.
* ↑ ‘10th May 1653,—Mr. Henry Cromwell to Elizabeth Russel’ (Registers of Kensington Church, in Faulkener’s History of Kensington, p. 360).
* ↑ Here are the successive dates: 4th March 1653-4, he arrives at Dublin (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 November 1657 (Noble, i. 202).
* ↑ Camden; Biog. Britan.
* ↑ Date of his burial discovered lately, in the old Parish-Register of Felsted in Essex; recorded in peculiar terms, and specially in the then Vicar’s hand: ‘Robertus Cromwell, Filius honorandi viri M$^{tis}$ (Militis) ‘Oliveris Cromwell et Elizabethæ Uxoris ejus, sepultus fuit 31° die Maii 1639. Et Robertus fuit eximiè pius iuvenis, Deum timens supra multos.’ (See Edinburgh Review, No. 209. January 1856, p. 54.) So that Oliver’s first great loss in his Family was of this Eldest Son, then in his 18th year; not of a Younger one as was hitherto supposed. (Note of 1857.)
* ↑ Noble, i. 134.
* ↑ H. L. (Hamond l’Estrange), Reign of King Charles (London, 1656), p. 3 ‘October 5th,’ the Prince arrived.
* ↑ 11th June 1620 (Camden’s Annals).
* ↑ Sunday, 27th March 1625 (Wilson, in Kennet, ii. 790).
* ↑ Sir Philip Warwick’s Memoirs (London, 1701), p. 249.
* ↑ Heylin’s Life of Laud.
* ↑ Noble, i. 100.
* ↑ Bodleian Library; Codices Mss. Ashmoleani, No. 8398.
* ↑ Letter found, worth nothing: Appendix, No. 1. (Note to Second Edition.)
* ↑ Noble, i. 43.
* ↑ Fuller’s Worthies, § Huntingdonshire.
* ↑ Collins’s Peerage (London, 1741), ii, 286-9.
* ↑ Rushworth’s Historical Collections (London, 1682), i. 609-10. (Note, vols, ii and iii. of this Copy are of 1680, a prior edition seemingly; iv. and v. of 1692; vi. and vii. of 1701; viii. Strafford’s Trial, of 1700.)
* ↑ Commons Journals, i. 920.
* ↑ Clarendon (i. 68); Hamond l’Estrange (p. 90); D’Ewes (ms. Autobiography), etc. ; all of whom report the minute circumstances of the assassination, not one of them agreeing completely with another.
* ↑ Parliamentary History (London, 1763), viii. 289.
* ↑ Rushworth, i. 667-9.
* ↑ Third Edition, ‘increased with many new examples,’ in 1631.
* ↑ See many old Pamphlets.
* ↑ Laud’s Diary, in Wharton’s Laud.
* ↑ Noble, i. 102.
* ↑ Ibid, i. 103-4
* ↑ Noble, i. 106,
* ↑ OLIVER CROMWELL’s CHILDREN. (Married to Elizabeth Bourchier, 22d August 1620.) Robert; baptised 13th October 1621. Named for his Grandfather. No farther account of him (except, now, supra, p. 41 n.); he died before ripe years. Oliver; baptised 6th February 1622-3; went to Felsted School. ‘Captain in Harrison’s Regiment,’—no. At Peterborough in 1643 (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 1st edition, 322 of 2d), on ransacking the old Pamphlets, turns out to be indisputably in error. The Protector on his deathbed alludes to this Oliver’s death: ‘It went to my heart like a dagger, indeed it did.’ Bridget; baptised 4th August 1624. Married to Ireton, 15th June 1646 (Noble, i. 134, is twice in error); widow, 26th November 1651. Married to Fleetwood (exact date, after long search, remains undiscovered; Noble, ii. 355 ‘before’ June 1652,—at random seemingly). Died at Stoke Newington, near London, September 1681. Richard; born 4th October 1626. At Felsted School. ‘In Lincoln’s Inn, 27th May 1647’: an error? Married, in 1649, Richard Mayor’s daughter, of Hursley, Hants. First in Parliament, 1654. Protector, 1658. Dies, poor idle Triviality, at Cheshunt, 12th July 1712. Henry; baptised at All-Saints (the rest are at St John’s), Huntingdon, 20th January 1627-8. Felsted School. In the army at sixteen. Captain, under Harrison I think, in 1647. Colonel in 1649, 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 ‘stablefork’ 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! Elizabeth; baptised 2d July 1629. Mrs. Claypole, 1645-6. Died at 3 in the morning, Hampton-Court, 6th August 1658,—four weeks before her Father. A graceful, brave, and amiable woman. The lamentation about Dr. Hewit and ‘bloodshed’ (in Clarendon and others) is fudge. At St. Ives and Ely: James; baptised 8th January 1631-2; died next day. Mary; baptised (at Huntingdon still) 9th February 1636-7, Lady Fauconberg, 18th November 1657. Dean Swift knew her: ‘handsome and like her Father.’ (Journal to Stella, ‘13th Nov. 1710.’) Died 14th March 1712 (1712-3? is not decided in Noble). Richard died within a few months of her. Frances; baptised (at Ely now) 6th December 1638. ‘Charles ii. was for marrying her’: not improbable. Married Mr. Rich, Earl of Warwick’s grandson, 11th November 1657: he died in three months, 16th February 1657-8. No child by Rich. Married Sir John Russel,—the Checquers Russels, Died 27th January 1719-20. In all, 5 sons and 4 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 farmhouse; near Market-Deeping; it is itself in Northamptonshire), 8th October 1672.
* ↑ Schiller, Geschichte des 30jährigen Krieges,
* ↑ Rushworth, ii. 135, 252, etc
* ↑ Rushworth, ii. 178.
* ↑ Thomeæ Caii Vindiciæ Antiquitatis Academiæa Oxoniensis (Oxf. 1730), ii. 702-794. There are two Lives of Ferrar; considerable writings about him; but, except this, nothing that much deserves to be read.
* ↑ Rushworth; Wharton’s Laud.
* ↑ Wood’s Athenæ (Bliss’s edition, London, 1815), ii. 583.
* ↑ Rushworth.