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more beautiful in themselves and in their accompaniments than the fountains of the Thames, or the Danube, or the Nile, but how inferior in kind and in degree is the feeling which they excite !

Before Cromwell had quite completed his seventeenth year he was removed from the school at Huntingdon to Sydney Sussex College, Cambridge.* Though his passion for athletic exercises still continued, so much so that he is said to have acquired the name of a royster in the university, it appears certain, that the short time which he passed there was not mis-spent, but that he made a respectable proficiency in his studies. He had not, however, been there more than a year when his father died, and his mother, to whose care he appears to have been left, removed him from college. It has been affirmed that he was placed at Lincoln's Inn, but that instead of attending to the law he wasted his time "in a dissolute course of life, and good-fellowship and gaming." His descendant denies this, because his name is not to be found in the records of Lincoln's Inn; to which sufficient disproof he adds, that "it is not likely a youth of eighteen or nineteen should in those days have been sent to an inn of court.' The unlikelihood is not apparent; there is no imaginable reason why he should have been represented as a student of law if he had never been so, and the probability is that he was entered at some other of the inns of court. Returning thence to reside upon his paternal property, he is said to have led a low and boisterous life; and for proof of this, a letter to his cousin, Mrs. St. John, is quoted, in which he says,-"You know what my manner of life hath been. Oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated the light; I was a chief, the chief of sinners. This is true; I hated

godliness, yet God had mercy on me." The present Mr. Oliver Cromwell argues that no such meaning is to be inferred from the words, but that such" it is conceived would be the language of any person of the present day, who, after professing christianity in the common loose way in which it is commonly professed, and even preserving themselves free from the commission of all gross sins and immoral acts, should become a convert to the stricter doctrines and precepts of the Scriptures, as held by those who

[* 23rd April, 1616. Noble, i. 254. ed. 1787.]

are deemed to be the evangelical or orthodox believers of these times." Mr. Cromwell is right; the letter proves nothing, except that there is a good deal of the same canting now that there was then, cant indeed being a coin which always passes current. The language of an evangelical professor concerning his own sins and the sense of his own wickedness, is no more to be taken literally than that of an amorous sonnetteer who complains of flames and torments.

The course of Cromwell's conduct, however, at this time was such as to offend his paternal uncle, Sir Oliver, and his maternal one, Sir Thomas Steward. The offence given to the former is said to have been by a beastly frolic, for which the master of Misrule very properly condemned him to the discipline of a horsepond. The story, from its very filthiness, is incredible: Bates, however, would not have related it unless he had believed it, and Oliver's practical jests were sometimes dirty as well as coarse. The means by which he displeased Sir Thomas are less doubtful and of a blacker dye :-wishing to get possession of his estate, he represented him as not able to govern it, and petitioned for a commission of lunacy against him, which was refused. Because Sir Thomas was reconciled to him afterwards, and ultimately left him the estate, the present Mr. O. Cromwell denies the fact, saying, "this supposed attempt to deprive his uncle of his estate would have been so atrocious and unpardonable, that the reasonable conclusion must be, that this disposition in favour of Cromwell proves the falsehood of the story." A better ground of defence would have been to maintain that the uncle was not in his sound senses, and to allege the bequest, after such provocation, in proof of it. The story is most certainly true; it is established by a speech of Archbishop Williams to the king concerning Cromwell, wherein he says, "Your Majesty did him but justice in refusing his petition against Sir Thomas Steward of the isle of Ely; but he takes them all for his enemies that would not let him undo his best friend." Mr. O. Cromwell has overlooked this evidence. But he is not the only modern biographer who has thought proper to contradict the facts which are recorded of an ancestor, because it is not agreeable to believe them. The probability is, that Cromwell, who was not naturally a wicked man, thought his petition well grounded.

Whatever may have been the follies and vices of his youth, it is certain that he had strength and resolution enough to shake them off. As soon as he came of age he married* Elizabeth, daughter of Sir James Bourchier, of Felsted, in Essex, a woman whose irreproachable life might have protected her from obloquy and insult, if in the heat of party-spirit any thing were held sacred. She brought him some fortune, and, in the year 1625, he was returned to King Charles's first parliament for the borough of Huntingdon. There was no disaffection in his family either to the church or state; they had indeed enjoyed in a peculiar manner the bounty as well as the favour of the crown. But Cromwell was not likely to behold the measures of the government with indifference or complacency; a man so capable of governing well perceived the errors which were committed; and the displeasure, thus reasonably excited, was heightened by accidental and personal circumstances till it became a rooted disaffection. To this some of his family connexions must have contributed in no slight degree. Hampden was his first cousin ; and St. John, who was connected with the Cromwells by his first marriage, married for his second wife one who stood in the same degree of near relationship to him. They were unquestionably two of the ablest men in that distinguished age; and Hampden, who had sagacity enough to perceive the talents of his kinsman when they were not suspected by others, possessed a great influence over his mind; Cromwell "followed his advice whilst living, and revered his memory when dead." These eminent men were both deadly enemies at heart to the established church, and the puritanical bias which their conversation was likely to impart was increased by his own disposition, for in the early part of his life it is certain that he was of a fanatical constitution. He often supposed himself to be dying, and called up his physician at unseasonable hours in causeless alarm; and that physician's account of him is, that "he was quite a splenetic, and had fancies about the Cross in the town."†

Cromwell sate for the same borough in the parliament of 1628, and spoke severely and justly against the promotion of Dr.

[* 20th August, 1620. In the church of St. Giles's, Cripplegate, the church in which Milton is buried. Noble, i. 123.]

[t Sir Philip Warwick's Memoirs, ed. 1702, p. 249.]

Manwaring; but by complaining at the same time of persons who "preached flat popery," which was a flat falsehood, he lessened the effect of his opinion upon unprejudiced and judicious minds. Three years afterwards he sold some of his estates for 18007.; stocked a grazing farm at St. Ives, and removed thither from Huntingdon. The barn which he built here was still standing, and bore his name, when Mr. Noble published his Memoirs of the Protectoral House ;* and the farmer who then rented the estate marked his sheep with the identical marking irons which Oliver used, and which had O. C. upon them.† While he resided here he returned some money which he had formerly won by gaming, and which he considered it sinful to keep. The sums were not inconsiderable for that time and for his means, one of them being 30%. and another 1207. The death of Sir Thomas Steward placed him in affluence, and, in 1635, he removed to the Glebe House, in the city of Ely. He had now a large family, and took his full share in local business as an active country gentleman, not always as a useful one, for the scheme of draining the fens of Lincolnshire and the Isle of Ely, which his father and many others of his relations had promoted, was defeated chiefly by his opposition. There was a popular cry against the measure, because the inhabitants enjoyed a customary right of commoning and fishing there; Cromwell therefore became so great a favourite with them for espousing their immediate interest, that he was called the Lord of the Fens. It is more likely that he was actuated by a desire of ingratiating himself with the people of the country on this occasion, than that so far-sighted and able a man should not have perceived the great and obvious utility of the measure which he resisted. Afterwards, when the act passed under the Commonwealth, he was appointed one of the Commissioners; and the work proceeded with his favour when he was Protector.

The state of England, though the country was rapidly improving, and prosperous beyond all former example, was such as might well trouble every upright and thoughtful observer. The wisest man could not possibly foresee in what the conflict of opi

[* The first edition of Noble's Memoirs was published in 1784.] [t Noble, i. 262.]

nions, which had begun, was likely to terminate: this only was certain, that there must inevitably be great evil in the process, and that whatever extreme prevailed, the end must needs be one which no good man, or true friend of his country, could contemplate without sorrow. In any other age, Charles I. would have been the best and the most popular of kings. His unambitious and conscientious spirit would have preserved the kingdom in peace; his private life would have set an example of dignified virtue, such as had rarely been seen in courts; and his love of arts and letters would have conferred permanent splendour upon his age, and secured for himself the grateful applause of after generations. But he succeeded to a crown whose prerogatives had been largely asserted and never defined; to a scanty revenue, and to a popular but expensive war, no ways honourable to the nation either in its cause or conduct. The history of his reign thus far had been a series of errors and faults on all sides, so that an impartial observer would have found it difficult to satisfy himself whether the King and his ministers or the Parliaments were the most reprehensible; or which party had given the greatest provocation, and thereby afforded most excuse for the conduct of the other. Unable to govern with a parliament, and impatient of being governed by one, Charles had tried the perilous experiment of governing without one. There can be no doubt that the liberties of Great Britain must have been destroyed if that experiment had been successful; and successful in all human probability it would have been, if a spirit of religious discord had not possessed the nation. For though the system of Charles's administration was arbitrary, and therefore tyrannical, the revenue which he raised by extraordinary means was not greater than what would cheerfully have been granted him in the ordinary and just course of government; it was frugally administered, and applied in a manner suitable to the interest and honour of the kingdom, which, for twelve years, in the words of Lord Clarendon, "enjoyed the greatest calm and the fullest measure of felicity that any people in any age, for so long time together, have been blessed with, to the wonder and envy of all the other parts of Christendom." Foreign and domestic trade flourished and increased; towns grew, not with a forced and unhealthy growth, occasioned by the unnatural

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