of which Englishmen have so long and so justly down, each in well known by my readers, and it is only needful that I should say that the people stood upon that glorious charter, and demanded that it be maintained and carried out in good faith; the king, James I., defined his position very clearly in these strong words :"Kings are justly called gods, for that they exIercise a manner or resemblance of divine power upon earth; for if you will consider the attributes of God, you shall see how they agree in the person of a king. turn sought to subvert or at least evade its inesti- God hath power to create or destroy, to make or mable guarantees, and the people steadfastly main- unmake, at his pleasure; to give life, or send tained and defended the great charter of their liber-death, to judge all, and to be judged nor acties. Thus there was an almost perpetual conflict countable to none; to raise low things, and to between the monarchs and the people of England. make high things low, at his pleasure; and to I cannot detail these struggles, nor would it be God both soul and body are due. And the like germane to my present purpose to attempt it. Passing over the reigns of the kings from John to James I., I need only recall to the minds of my readers how the contest between the latter and the people was waged with unrelenting vigor from the time of his accession until his death; then taken up by his son and successor, Charles I., and prosecuted by him with augmented zeal, even fury, until the people were reduced to the dire alternative of surrendering their loved liberties and accepting the king's interpretation of his prerogatives or taking up arms in defence of their liberties against the royal encroachments. power have kings: they make and unmake their subjects; they have power of raising and casting down, of life and death: judges over all their subjects, and in all causes, and yet accountable to God only. They have power to exalt low things, and abase high things, and make of their subjects like men of chess-a pawn to take a bishop or a knight, and to cry up or down any of their subjects as they do their money. And to the king is due both the affection of the soul and the service of the body of his subjects." Between the "Magna Charta" and such views of kingly rights and prerogatives there could be no accord. Charles was not so outspoken in words, but was more daring in action. Then Charles married a Roman Catholic, and himself was scarcely less. Not content to wage a civil and political warfare against his subjects, he sought likewise ARCHBISHOP LAUD. The better to understand the extent of the divergence between the kings and the people, it may be well to digress from my subject proper to allude to the position of each in James's reign: The broad, noble scope of the "Magna Charta" is to this Ir bruger Commanded by you seanie, I think my selfs bound to ac= quaint you with the good hand of God Lowards you, and is, weg manched yestend by after the Kingo whoe went befoud us from Dauenture to Hawrk brows, and quan kurd about fix miles from him, this day wer marched towards him, Her Derw out to meste vs, both Armirs engaged, wer, afton 3. howsus fight, very doubtful att last youted his Summis, killed and tooke about 5000. very many officrus I wish this action may bigest thankfull wiffe, and muistity in all that aus concruned in itt, ther that ventens his life for the libertye of his cuntie, I wish Her tamist God for ins. Fou the libradyo of his confeirned, and you libentyo Her fights fou, In Uns Hire usis whor is Juno. 14. $1,645. Haurubnowe. your most humble semant Chinier Crowenstt FAC-SIMILE OF BEGINNING AND ENDING PORTIONS OF CROMWELL'S LETTER ANNOUNCING THE VICTORY OF NASHT. But soon he found it necessary again to convene Parliament and this was the Long Parliament under which Charles fell and Cromwell arose. Need I recount how it all came to pass? Suffice it to say, the Parliament under the leadership of the great and noble Pym, by a series of enactments, formally stripped the King of his obnoxious prerogatives; sent Laud to the Tower whence he only came forth to mount the scaffold four years later; and in other emphatic ways asserted the rights of the long down-trodden nation. Then came the Militia Bill, the ostensible cause of the Civil War, and then the Civil War itself. Then, after a series of reverses and victories, under other leaders, came to the head of the Parliamentary Army the great Cromwell; the complete overthrow of Charles and overwhelming triumph of the Parliament speedily ensued, leaving Charles a prisoner in the power of the Parliament. It was the Parliamentary Army under Cromwell's command which had achieved all this, and now, with Charles a prisoner and the victorious army enthusiastically devoted to its chief, Cromwell readily became the head of the government. to enslave them in their religious tenets and practices. The English Church, itself intolerant enough, was made by him tenfold worse. With Buckingham to carry out his political, and Laud to execute his religious, measures, the tyranny of Charles became absolutely unbearable by any but those willing to become abject slaves, and of these England is never prolific. His repeated efforts to coerce Parliament, his governing absolutely without a Parliament for nearly eleven years, his terrible measures, instigated and executed by Laud, against all non-conforming Protestants, the Independents or Puritans especiallythese are all recorded in the history of the realm; so is the supposed victory of the Parliament in forcing upon the king the famous "Petition of Right" -second in importance as a charter of liberty only to the "Magna Charta." But the royal tyrant submitted only in form; his determined will was never subdued or changed while he sat on the throne. The death of Buckingham at the hands of John Felton increased the tyranny of Charles; for Laud, the Primate, became also Premier. Laud's infamy is sufficiently recognized by all honest critics to make it possible to class him as But let us pause and consider the man and his second to no human fiend in the world's history. helpers in founding the Commonwealth: The With such a supporter, Charles quickly filled the founder of the Cromwell family was a Welsh gencup of his iniquities and hastened the hour of his tleman named Williams, who married a sister of doom. The brutal treatment of Prynne, Alexander Thomas Cromwell, minister and vicar-general of Leighton, John Lilburne, and other popular favor- Henry VIII.; the eldest son by this marriage was ites, and still more the harsh treatment of John a special favorite and protegè of his grandfather, Hampden, raised the popular blood to boiling and actuated by gratitude or by policy laid aside heat, and all that was wanting was a leader to his own patronymic and adopted that of his powerinsure speedy and terrible retribution. In 1640, ful patron. In 1640, ful patron. He was raised to a baronetcy, and the well-known Short Parliament was called by acquired the famous estate of Hinchinbrook, Charles after eleven years of governing without a besides a vast amount of landed property elseParliament-it was almost immediately dissolved. where. At the quiet close of Elizabeth's reign OBELISK ON NASEBY FIELD, Erected to commemorate the final and complete triumph of Cromwell and and of the eventful sixteenth century, still dwelt in the lordly mansion of Hinchinbrook, Sir Henry Cromwell, whose eldest son, Oliver, succeeded him in 1604 in the title and in the possession of the family homestead; here Sir Oliver lived in princely style for upwards of twenty years, numbering among his guests on repeated occasions his King, James; but in 1627, we was obliged to part with Hinchinbrook, and thenceforwards lived in retirement until 1655, when he died at the age of ninety-three. Sir Henry's second son, Robert, had a patrimony consisting of a house in the town of Huntingdon where he is said to have carried on a brew-house (but that he made a business of brewing has been questioned by reliable critics) and some fields in the adjacent country. Here Oliver, the subsequent "Lord Protector," was born, the fifth child and second son of Robert and Elizabeth-the mother has been shown by English writers to have been a blood-relation, eighth cousin, to Charles I.; she was descended from Andrew Steward, second son of Alexander, Lord High Steward of Scotland, and Andrew's elder brother, James, was father of Walter, Lord High Steward, who married Margery, daughter of Robert Bruce, and was thus a progenitor of the royal Scottish line. This is interesting as showing that the great foe of the House was a blood connection thereof. Oliver received his first training (after what he doubtless had from his pious mother) from Dr. Thomas Beard, Master of Huntingdon Grammar School, who was of that more godly, pious sort of churchmen from which the Puritans later sprang ; and doubtless here Oliver imbibed the seeds of whatever Puritanic piety he afterwards possessed. Among the many curious traditions that are preserved of Oliver's babyhood is this: one day he had been carried by his nurse to Hinchinbrook, to see his grandfather; just at the house, a monkey succeeded in getting possession of the babe, and "bore him to the leads on the top of the house." More intelligent than common monkeys, possibly a Darwinian developement, this monkey appeared to understand that he had the destiny of England in his keeping, for, scampering about for a time, to the extreme terror of the grandfather and family, who had brought out multitudes of feather beds and other like things to save the child's life, should he fall as they confidently expected, he at last quietly descended and gently laid the babe upon one of the beds. But the most marvellous of the marvels of Oliver's childhood, was the dream te is said to have had; i.e. "that he saw a gigantic figure which came and opened the curtains of his bed, and told him that he should be the greatest person in the Kingdom, but did not mention the word king." Such is the statement of Cromwell's biographer, Rev. Mark Noble, who tells us that, "though Oliver was told of the folly as well as the wickedness of such an assertion, he persisted in ANDERSON'S PLACE, NEWCASTLE it; for which he was flogged by Dr. Beard, at the particular desire of his father; notwithstanding which he would sometimes repeat it to his un2 Steward, who told him it was traitorous to relate it." The same authority assures us that Cromwell "often mentioned this vision when he was in the height of his glory." On the 23d of April, 1616, Cromwell entered Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he studied but a little more than one year, whez, upon the death of his father, he left the University. the respect and confidence of those who knew him best in his early manhood; otherwise he could scarcely have been selected to represent them in the Parliament as early as 1628. Besides, we find his name sassociated in public town affairs of Huntingdon with those of Dr. Beard, Robert Bernard and others of unquestioned respectability and good repute. That, at most, nothing more than boyish carelessness and indiscretions can have marked his course, I think is clearly established by his early prominence in public station, for he certainly had little education and no culture to commend him and to cover a questionable character. This much is known or admitted, that he had shown no aptness for the acquirement of learning, and this to my mind proves that the story of his vision of becoming "the greatest person in England," belongs not to his school-days, but was a simple fabrication of later time, growing out of, rather than leading to, his remarkable uprise. THE TREATY-HOUSE (THE ONE TO THE RIGHT), Uxbridge, Where Charles's Trial was Conducted. It is said he soon after this went to London, and some say he commenced law at Lincoln's Inn, but his name cannot be found upon the registers of that or any other of the Inns of Court. If he studied law at all, which is doubtful, it was in the office of some attorney. The first that is certainly known of him after his leaving the University, is his marriage, August 22d, 1620, to Elizabeth, daughter of Sir James Bourchier, an eminent merchant of London. The story of the years intervening between his father's death and his own marriage, as told by royalist writers, is not credited by any but intense royalists, viz: (Anthony Wood, in "Fasti") "His father dying while he was at Cambridge, he was taken home and sent to Lincoln's Inn to study the common law; but making nothing of it, he was sent for home by his mother, became a debauchee, and a boisterous and rude fellow." James Heath (known as "Carrion Heath") appears to have been the inventor of many slanders in his "Life and Death of Oliver Cromwell, the late Usurper," and Dr. George Bate seems to have tried to outdo even Heath; but we must recollect that these, and others like them, wrote during the heated, ultra royal period immediately following the Restoration, when nothing was too bad to say against the Cromwells and the Puritans. The best English critics have long rejected the vile slanders of Heath, Bates and company. Oliver Cromwell must have commanded Without learning, culture or family prestige, he became a conspicuous Parliamentary debater and leader, very soon after his elevation to a seat therein, and as the quarrel between Charles and the people waxed hotter, Cromwell became more and more conspicuous as the fearless champion of popular rights. His success as a leader in Parliament doubtless accelerated, if it did not create, the vaulting ambition which grew to such dimensions that nothing was beyond its aim, and no impediment could baulk or check its determined strides. His JOHN PYM. |