of his loyal fortunes, it is as though it gleamed | tunate than his father. Elizabeth esteemed reproachfully down upon the terrible act which him highly, knighted him in 1563, and in the laid the foundation of the mightier fortunes of following year honoured him by a visit at his his great-grandson Oliver. On May-day, 1540, family seat of Hinchinbrook, on her return from a brilliant tournament at Westminster opens the University of Cambridge. His memory its lists before us, in which Richard Cromwell still lived in the neighbourhood of his estates and others had proclaimed themselves to some century since, for he had associated it France, Flanders, and Scotland the defenders with generous actions in the hearts of the poor of the honour and rights of their English king. of the district, and, to the poor, long memories Henry VIII. looks on, and when Sir Richard for benefits belong. They called him in his Cromwell has struck down challenger after chal- lifetime the Golden Knight, for he never entered lenger with undaunted arm, forth from his deep any of the towns or villages around him withbroad chest rolls out the royal laugh of Henry: out bestowing some money on the needy and "Formerly thou wast my Dick, but hereafter distressed; and that honourable title survived thou shalt be my diamond." Then from the him. He lived to a good old age, and left finger of majesty drops a diamond ring, which behind him six sons and five daughters, of whom Sir Richard picks up and again presents to the second daughter, Elizabeth, gave birth to Henry, who laughingly places it on his finger, the patriot Hampden, and of whom the second and bids him ever after bear such a one in the son, Robert, the meanest in fortune, was desfore gamb of the demi-lion in his crest; and tined to exert an influence on the destinies of such a ring did Oliver Cromwell wear there* the world unapproached by the most illustrious when he left his farm at Ely to bear more of his ancestors, or the most powerful of their formidable arms at the challenge of a king! patron princes, for he was the father of Oliver Cromwell.

The sudden and violent fall of Essex had no disastrous effect on his kinsman's fortunes, which shone brightly to the last. Enriched to an almost unprecedented extent by the plunder of the religious houses, he left to his son, Henry Cromwell, the inheritance of a most noble fortune. Nor was this Henry less forcourse, lost their gauntlets, and that day Sir Richard Cromwell overthrew M. Palmer in the field off his horse, to the great honour of the challengers. The 5th of May, the said challengers fought on foot, at the barriers, and against them came thirty defendants, which fought valiantly, but Sir Richard Cromwell overthrew that day, at the barriers, M. Culpepper in the field; and the sixth of May the said challengers brake up their household: in the which time of their house-keeping they had not only feasted the king, queen, ladies, and the whole court, as was aforesaid, but on the Tuesday in the Rogation Weeke they feasted all the knights and burgesses of the Common House in the Parliament; and on the morrow after, they had the mayor of London, the aldermen, and all their wives to dinner; and on the Friday they brake it up as is aforesaid." Sir Richard and the five challengers had then each of them, as a reward of their valour, 100 marks annually, with a house to live in, to them and to their heirs forever, granted out of the monastery of the friars of St. Francis, in Stamford, which was dissolved October 8, 1538; and his majesty was the better enabled to do this, as Sir Will. Weston, the last prior, who had an annuity out of the monastery, died two days after the justs. Fortunate king and fortunate knights, to have a prior die so opportunely! But to break a heart is not a bad recipe for death at any time.

See Noble's Protectoral House, vol. i., p. 11, and Fuller's Church History.

In his will (which is dated as early as June, 1545), it appears, he styled himself by the alias Williams, a custom sbserved by all the Cromwells up to and even past the time of Oliver. An extract of this will, in which Sir Richard describes himself as of "the privy chamber of the king," is given by Mr. Noble. "He directs that his body shall be buried in the place where he should die; and devises his estates in the counties of Cambridge, Huntingdon, Lincoln, and Bedford, to his eldest sou Henry, with the sum of £500 to purchase him necessary furniture, when he shall come of age: his estates in Glamorganshire he devises to his son Francis (his only other son), and bequeaths £300 to each of his nieces, Joan and Ann, daughters of his brother, Walter Cromwell; and directs, that if Tho. Wingfield, then in ward to him, should choose to marry either of them, he shall have his wardship remitted to him, otherwise that the same should be sold; he also leaves three of his best great horses to the king, and one other great horse to Lord Cromwell, after the king has chosen: legacies are also left to Sir John Williams, knt., and Sir Edw. North, knt., chancellor of the court of augmentation, and to several other persons, who seem to have been servants. Gab. Donne, clerk; Andr. Judde, Will. Coke, Phil. Lenthall, and Rich. Servington, were appointed executors. This will was proved Nov. 28th, 1546. Sir Richard," Mr. Noble adds, "must have left a prodigious fortune to his family, by what he possessed by descent, grants and purchases of church lands,

DDD

Mr. Robert Cromwell, but for this memorable circumstance, would have lived and died unknown in Huntingdon, since his tastes were humble as his fortunes. He was sent, indeed, to one of Elizabeth's Parliaments by the electors of that borough, but he appears to have experienced only enough of that sort of public life to conceive disgust to it, since all the duties he afterward discharged were confined to his native town, in which he served as one of the bailiffs, sat as justice of the peace, and, when and from the sums he must have acquired by filling very lucrative employments, with the liberal donations of his sovereign, King Henry VIII. This is evident from his possessions in Huntingdonshire, the annual amount of which, at an easy rent, were worth at least £3000 per ann.; these estates only, in Fuller's time, were, he says, valued by some at £20,000, and by others at £30,000 annually, and upward; and from what these estates now let for, in and near Ramsey and Huntingdon (which are only a part of them), I should presume that Sir Richard's estates in that county only would now bring in as large a revenue as any peer at this time enjoys; and yet it is evident that he had considerable property in several other counties."

p.

* See Noble's Memoirs of the Cromwell Family, vol. i., 22. These fortunes are thus described by Noble: "Rob. Cromwell, Esq., second son of Sir Henry Cromwell, knt., had, by the will of his father, an estate in and near the town of Huntingdon, consisting chiefly, if not wholly, of possessions belonging formerly to the monastery of St. Mary for Augustine friars, amounting, with the great tithes of Hartford, to about £300 per ann."

His name as bailiff is to be found at this day in the nave of a church in Huntingdon. Dr. Russell's friend, before referred to, says: "In the nave of St. Mary's Church, Huntingdon, the following notice is to be seen on one of the pillars:

'Cromwell.
Turpin.
Bailiffs.
1600.'

The church was not built till 1620, and Robert Cromwell, the Protector's father, who must be the person here meant, died in 1617. The inscription was probably made by some curious person, after the name of Cromwell had

gathered all its fame,' and drawn public attention and inquiry to the ancestors of the Protector." That he took great interest in the concerns of his native county, and was consulted respecting its improvements by its leading proprietors, is, however, indisputable, from a passage in Sir William Dugdale's History of the Fens, where his signature is found attached to a certificate addressed to the privy council in 1605, stating that the draining of the fens in Northampton, Lincoln, Huntingdon, and Cambridge (a work which his son afterward resolutely opposed), was practicable, and might be accomplished "without peril to any haven or county." In recommending this great improvement, he wa joined by sixteen of the principal persons in the four cou

his family had outgrown his income, betook | band's death, did continue in the same employhimself to the occupation of a brewer. He had married in early life Elizabeth, the daughter of William Steward, of the city of Ely, an undoubted descendant of the royal family of the Stuarts. This lady had already been the wife of "Will. Lynne, gent., son and heir-apparent of John Lynne of Bassingborne, Esq.,"t when, in the second year of her widowhood, with a jointure of only £60 a year,‡ she married Mr. Robert Cromwell.

ment and calling of a brewer, and thought it no disparagement to sustain the estate and port of a younger brother, as Mr. Robert Cromwell was, by those lawful means; however, not so reputable as other gains and trades are accounted." True, not so reputable as Mr. Heath would have accounted the trade and gain of a servile follower of courts, of a mean flatterer of kings, of a base tool of incapable favourites or ministers. Had Mr. Cromwell been all this, and lent out his wife in furtherance of the calling, loud should have been the praises of the apostles of the Restoration!

Thus allied to a self-ennobled family on the one hand, and on the other to royalty itself, Mr. Robert Cromwell and his wife were nevertheless brewers of Huntingdon. It is strange, Scarcely less contemptible do they seem to indeed, that this should ever have been dispu- us, however, who foolishly imagine they exalt ted, since not the remotest shade of doubt, and the claims of Robert Cromwell's son, in making as little of discredit, can possibly be thrown out his father an idle "gentleman," and his upon the fact. The records of the purchase of mother a laborious drudge. That the wife asthe brewery, and of its management, are in sisted the husband in his pursuits is yet indisexistence still; and from the unimpeachable putable, as it was natural, for the fashion of testimony of many witnesses, that of Roger fine ladyism in a tradesman's wife had not then Coke may be selected, whose father, being "come up" in the world; while of her own asked whether he knew the Protector, answer- more homely fashion, she proved the superior ed, "Yes, and his father too, when he kept his advantage, when her husband's death had left brewhouse in Huntingdon." A contemporary her the sole protectress of a young and numerwriter tells us something more: "Both Mr. ous family. An interesting person, indeed, Cromwell and his wife were persons of great was this mother of Oliver Cromwell-a woman worth, and no way inclined to disaffection, either with the glorious faculty of self-help when othin their civil or religious principles, but remark- er assistance failed her: ready for the demands able for living upon a small fortune with de- of fortune in its extremest adverse time-of cency, and maintaining a large family by their spirit and energy equal to her mildness and pafrugal circumspection."|| In subjoining the tience; who, with the labour of her own hands, statement of Sir William Dugdale, we may, gave dowries to five daughters sufficient to perhaps, discover the ridiculous pretence with marry them into families as honourable, but which the scrupulous asserters of Mr. Robert more wealthy than their own; whose single Cromwell's "pure gentility" satisfy their ten- pride was honesty, and whose passion love; der consciences, and lay the burden of the who preserved in the gorgeous palace at Whitebrewery on his wife. "Robert Cromwell," hall the simple tastes that distinguished her in says Dugdale,¶ "though he was, by the coun- the old brewery at Huntingdon; whose only tenance of his elder brother, Sir Oliver, made care, amid all her splendours, was for the safea justice of the peace in Huntingdonshire, had ty of her beloved son in his dangerous emibut a slender estate; much of his support be- nence; finally, whose closing wish, when that ing a brewhouse in Huntingdon, chiefly man- anxious care had outworn her strength, accordaged by his wife." The Royalist chronicler, ed with her whole modest and tender history, Heath,** is still more explicit on the latter point. for it implored a simple burial in some country "The brewhouse," he says, "was kept in his churchyard, rather than those ill-suited trapfather's time, and managed by his mother and pings of state and ceremony wherewith she his father's servants, without any concernment feared, and with reason feared, that his highof his father therein, the accounts being al-ness, the Lord Protector of England, would ways given to the mistress, who, after her hus

ties most immediately interested, and among them by his See Appendix A.

brother Sir Oliver.

The following inscription rests on a tombstone in the Cathedral of Ely: "Hic inhumatus jacet optima spei adolescens Gulielmus Lynne, generosus, filius & hæres apparens Johannis Lynne de Bassingborne in Co. Cantab. Arm. qui quidem Gulielmus immatura morte peremptus in ipsius Etate flore 27 agens Anuum, 27 die Julij A D. 1589, non sine summo omnium dolore, ex hâc Vitâ placide migravit; uniquam relinquens filiam Catherinam scilicet, quam etiam 17 die Martij sequentis præpropera mors eadem Naturæ lege natam sustulit, simulque jam cum Patre æterno fruitur gau

dio-Posuit amoris ergò moestissima illius Conjux Elizabetha filia Gulielmi Steward de Ely Armigeri."

The smallness of this jointure (for the family fortune that remained to the Stewards rested solely with her brother, Sir Thomas, of whom mention will be made hereafter) was a favourite subject of lampoon with the Cavaliers up to the period of his death. "It is hoped," I find in one of their scurrilous papers, "that now our enormous taxes will be eased, as the Protector's highness, by the death of his mother, is freed from her dowry, which amounted to the prodigious sum of £60 annually."

See Detection, vol. ii., p. 57. Noble, vol. i., p. 84. T See Short View of the Recent Troubles, p. 459. **In his Flagellum, p. 15.

have her carried to some royal tomb! There is a portrait of her at Hinchinbrook, which, if that were possible, would increase the interest she inspires and the respect she claims. The mouth, so small and sweet, yet full and firm as the mouth of a hero; the large, melancholy eyes; the light, pretty hair; the expression of quiet affectionateness suffused over the face, which is so modestly enveloped in a white satin hood; the simple beauty of the velvet cardinal she wears, and the richness of the small jewel that clasps it, seem to present before the gazer her living and breathing character.*

*Out of the profits of her trade," says a writer in the Biographica Britannica," and her own small jointure of sixty pounds a year, she provided fortunes for her daughters, su ficient to marry them into good families. The eldest was the wife of Mr. John Desborough, afterward one of the Protector's major-generals; another married, first, Roger Whetstone, Esq., and afterward Colonel John Jones, who was executed for being one of the king's judges; the third espoused Colonel Valentine Walton, who died in exile; the fourth, Mrs. Robina Cromwell, married, first, Dr. Peter French, and afterward Dr. John Wilkins, bishop of Chester,

66

On the 25th of April, in the year 1599, this the hangings. On the same authority rests the excellent woman gave birth to Oliver Crom-version of one of Oliver's escapes, wonderful as well. He was her second son, and the only Gulliver's at Brobdignag. His grandfather, one of three who lived to manhood; one of her Sir Henry Cromwell," so goes the story, "havdaughters had also died in youth, and the names ing sent for him to Hinchinbrook, when an inof the survivers were Elizabeth, Catharine, fant in arms, a monkey took him from the craMargaret, Anna, Jane, and Robina, who, with dle, and ran with him upon the lead that covOliver, formed the family of Mr. Robert Crom-ered the roofing of the house. Alarmed at the well.

Four days after his birth, Oliver Cromwell was baptized in the parish church of St. John's, in his native place: his uncle, Sir Oliver, after whom he was named,* standing for him at the font.

danger Oliver was in, the family brought beds to catch him upon, fearing the creature's dropping him; but the sagacious animal brought the fortune of England' down in safety: so narrow an escape had he, who was doomed to be the conqueror and sovereign magistrate of Of his extreme youth, marvellous stories three mighty nations, from the paws of a monwere recollected in his days of power, not for key." "# The tradition which saves the daring this, however, to be rejected, since what has and reckless young lad from drowning by the once been believed should in all future time be providential interference of the curate of Cunmatter of just concern. When Milton under-nington,† is, perhaps, better worthy of belief, took a history of England, he began it with a though it might be difficult to say so much of large collection of traditional fables, because the Royalist addition to the story, tagged on he well knew that to whatever has been truly after the Restoration-that this same worthy believed, however false or fabulous, belong curate, at a future period, when kindly called some of the most sacred privileges of truth it- upon by Oliver, in a march at the head of his self, and that the imagination can never be troops through Huntingdon, and asked if he strongly influenced without a corresponding and recollected the service he had done, answerenduring action upon the opinions and the char-ed, "Yes, I do; but I wish I had put you in, acter. The fables of biography may show us, rather than see you here in arms against your at all events, in what various ways the celeb- king." rity of their object has wrought upon his countrymen.

From the instant of his birth, according to the traditions of Huntingdon, the peculiar destiny which had marked the infant for its own saved him from all meaner chances. A nonjuror, who afterward purchased and inhabited his father's house, used to assert this destiny to have been nothing less than the devil; and, in proof of the connexion, would show, behind the door of the room that Oliver was born in, a curious figure of that personage wrought in

a famous preacher and a celebrated mathematician. It may
not be amiss to add, that an aunt
of Cromwell's married
Francis Barrington, Esq.; another aunt, John Hampden,
Esq., of Buckinghamshire, by whom she was mother to the
famous John Hampden; a third aunt was the wife of Mr.
Whaley, and the mother of Colonel Whaley, in whose cus-
tody the king was while he remained at Hampton Court.
He had two other aunts, but of their marriages we have no
account." There are some errors and some omissions in
this account. The wife of Desborough was Jane, the fifth
daughter (the eldest, Elizabeth, dying unmarried); Catha-
rine, the second, married Jones; Margaret, the third, mar-
ried Walton; Anna, the fourth, who is omitted by the
writer, married John Sewster, of Wistow, in Huntingdon-
shire, Esq.; and the sixth and youngest, Robina, married
as stated. [This article was written by Kipper, and is a
very satisfactory narrative; perhaps it affords as clear a
representation of the Protector as can be found in the same
compass.-C]

The

This

The child's temper, it seems admitted on all hands, was wayward and violent, and is said to have broken out on one occasion, when he was yet only five years old, with an ominous forecast of times and deeds to come. anecdote is told by Noble. "They have a tradition at Huntingdon," says that industrious collector, "that when King Charles I., then Duke of York, in his journey from Scotland to London, in 1604, called, in his way, at Hinchinbrook, the seat of Sir Oliver Cromwell, that knight, to divert the young prince, sent for his nephew Oliver, that he, with his own sons, might play with his royal highness; but they had not been long together before Charles and Oliver disagreed; and as the former was then as weakly as the latter was strong, it was no wonder that the royal visitant was worsted; and Oliver, even at this age, so little regarded dignity, that he made the royal blood flow in copious streams from the prince's nose. was looked upon as a bad presage for that king when the civil wars commenced. I give this only as the report of the place: thus far is certain, that Hinchinbrook, as being near Huntingdon, was generally one of the resting-places when any of the royal family were going to or returning from the north of England, or into or from Scotland." An anecdote, which somehow In the very curious little volume which I have already had occasion to quote, Heath's Flagellum, it is made mat- bears upon it the stamp and greatness of realter of reproach against nature that no portentous omens had ity! If these boys ever met (and when King it had decreed and ordained the unhappy birth of this famo-borne in mind, it is difficult to suppose they "Fate," he says, "when James's frequent visits to Hinchinbrook are so, by her most secret and hidden malice, brought him into the world without any terrible remark of his portentous life, did not), what occurrence so likely as a quarrel, neither comets, nor earthquakes, nor such like violences of and what result so plain as that the anecdote nature, ushering or accompanying him, to the declaring and tells us ? pointing out that the scourge of the English empire and The nervous, feeble, tottering infannation was now born. Thus also she did, by indiscernible methods, train him up to the possession of the throne, and as secretly and cunningly, after all his bloody and most nefarious actions, shift him out of it, and with a blast of her spent fury turned him into his wished-for grave." The latter sentence is somewhat obscure, unless "the blast of her spent fary" is taken to indicate the storm, which actually, on the day of his death, unroofed the houses in London, and tore up trees in the parks.

* See Appendix D., Sir Oliver Cromwell.

ushered the lad into the world.

p. 92.

The Rev. Dr. Lort's MSS., quoted in Noble, vol. i., Then a Mr. Johnson. "From his infancy," says Heath, "to his childhood, he was of a cross and peevish disposition, which, being humoured by the fondness of his mother, made that rough and intractable temper more robust and outrageous in his juvenile years, and adult and masterless at man's estate." ◊ See Appendix D., Sir Oliver Cromwell

cy* of the shambling king's son, unequally matched against the sturdy little limbs and daring young soul of the man child of the Huntingdon brewer-yet foolish obstinacy urging the weakness of the one, and a reckless ambition of superiority overcoming the kindness and generosity of the other. The curtain of the future was surely for an instant upraised here!

Nor here alone. More signal and direct manifestations were avouched, if still stronger and more widely-believed traditions are received. Nor will they be rejected hastily by such as care to penetrate beneath the surface of the character which had lain, as it were, wrapped up even in the very cradle of this child. The supernatural, as it seems to the vulgar, is not always what it seems. The natural, when denied for a time its proper vent, will force itself into the light in many various shapes, which assume a fearful aspect from their intensity alone. The tame and common medium of dull and feeble minds is not what the world has distributed among all her sons. Thoughts, as their sufferer has himself described them, "like masterless hell-hounds," roared and bellowed round the eradle of Bunyan; round that of Vane the forms of angels of light seemed to vision the everlasting reign of peace which his virtuous labours would have realized; and now, round the bed of the youthful Cromwell played an awful yet delicious dream of personal aggrandizement and power.

This incident in Cromwell's youth was not forgotten in his obscurity to be remembered only in his eminence; for Clarendon distinctly tells us that "it was generally spoken of, even from the beginning of the troubles, and when he was not in a posture that promised such exaltation." In the height of his glory, we have also good authority for saying, Cromwell himself mentioned it often; and when the farce of deliberation took place on the offer of the crown to the Protector, it is remarked by Lord Clarendon, that "they who were very near to him said, that in this perplexity he revolved his former dream or apparition, that had first informed and promised him the high fortune to which he was already arrived, and which was generally spoken of, even from the beginning of the troubles, and when he was not in a posture that promised such exaltation; and that he then observed that it had only declared that he should be the greatest man in England, and that he should be near to be king, which seemed to imply that he should be only near, and never actually attain, the crown."

Another incident, not, perhaps, unconnected with the foregoing, and as singular, if less awful, connected the childhood of Cromwell with the mighty future that awaited it. I shall detail it in the words of the Royalist Heath, because, of the many accounts that exist of this happily undisputed anecdote, they appear to be the most characteristic. "Now," observes that He had laid himself down one day, it is said, writer, "to confirm a royal humour the more too fatigued with his youthful sports to hope for in his ambitious and vain-glorious brain, it hapsleep, when suddenly the curtains of his bed pened (as it was then generally the custome in were slowly withdrawn by a gigantic figure all great free-schools) that a play called ⚫ The which bore the aspect of a woman, and which, Five Senses' was to be acted by the schollars gazing at him silently for a while, told him that of this school,t and Oliver Cromwell, as a conhe should, before his death, be the greatest fident youth, was named to act the part of Tacman in England. He remembered when he tus, the sense of feeling; in the personation told the story-and the recollection marked the of which, as he came out of the tyring-room current of his thoughts-that the figure had not upon the stage, his head encircled with a chapmade mention of the word king. The tradition let of lawrel, he stumbled at a crown, purof Huntingdon adds, that although the "folly posely laid there, which, stooping down, he took and wickedness" of such a notion was strongly up, and crowned himself therewithal, adding, pointed out to him, the lad persisted in the as- beyond his cue, some majestical mighty words; sertion of its truth, for which, "at the partic- and with this passage the event of his life held ular desire of his father," he was soundly good analogy and proportion, when he changed flogged by his schoolmaster. The flogging only the lawrel of his victories (in the late unnatuimpressed the fact more deeply on the young ral war) to all the power, authority, and splenday-dreamer; and betaking himself immedi-dour that can be imagined within the compass ately to his Uncle Steward,† for the purpose of unburdening himself once more respecting it, he was told by that worthy kinsman of royalty that it was "traitorous to entertain such thoughts."+

It is unnecessary to inform the reader that in the infancy of Charles I. he was unable to stand firmly, owing to the weakness and distortion of the legs which he had inherited from his father, and that in his most vigorous manhood the infirmity was never entirely corrected. Even in the fine equestrian portrait by Vandyke, now at Hampton Court, a curvature at the knee is distinctly visible.

+ Sir Thomas Steward. See Appendix A.

Mention of this matter is thus made in the Flagellum. All the other accounts give the story as in the text. ""Twas at this time of his adolescency that he dreamed, or a familiar rather instincted him and put it into his head, that he should be king of England; for it cannot be conceived that now there should be any such near resemblance of truth in dreams and divinations (besides, the confidence with which he repeated it, and the difficulty to make him forget the arrogant conceit and opinionated pride he had of himself, seem to evince it was some impulse of a spirit), since they had ceased long ago. However the vision came, most certain it is, that his father was exceedingly troubled

of a crown."

The extemporization of the "mighty majestical words" is an addition of the zealous narrator: the reader will observe, when the scene is before him, that the exact speeches of Tactus are mighty and majestical enough to effect the strange coincidences of the story without other aid. The comedy is well known to the lovers of old English dramatic literature by the at it; and having angerly rebuked him for the vanity, idleness, and impudence thereof, and seeing him yet persist in the same presumption, caused Dr. Beard to whip him for it; which was done to no more purpose than the rest of his chastisements, his scholar growing insolent and incorrigible from those results and suasions within him, to which all other dictates and instructions were useless, and as a dead letter."

The author of the Flagellum, which I have already quoted-the first biographer of Cromwell after the Restorstion. He was, I believe, the son of Charles I.'s cutler, am exiled Loyalist, and was, moreover, a needy scribe, who wrote pamphlets of all sorts to order, and corrected mangscripts for a maintenance.

+ Huntingdon Free-school, where Oliver then was.