HISTORIC SKETCHES. 



21 



powers of the air " were holding fearful roveln amid the storm- 

 driven .-l..u.lrt in honour of the prospect of seizing on a great 

 offender's soul. 



lying man was Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of Eng- 

 land and In-hind, the man who for ton years had governed the 

 kingdom in a right kingly way, and made it stronger and more 

 respected by all foreign powers than it had been since the days 

 (f H.'iiry V. and Aginconrt; the man who had subverted the 

 subverters of the monarchy, and had yet annihilated monarchy 

 itself in the person of his own king ; who had overcome all 

 punished all rebels against his own authority, and seated 

 himself firmly on the throne of kings, though he had refused 

 the name and emblems of royalty. 



It was the 3rd of September, the day Cromwell was wont to 

 call his fortunate day. On a 3rd of September he overcame the 

 Scots' army at Dunbar, when, looking at the position of hia army 

 in a military point of view, he was committed to certain destruc- 

 tion at their hands ; on a 3rd of September he had fought the 

 battle of Worcester, " the Lord's crowning mnrcy to him," as he 

 called it, when the royalist cause was lost in England, so long as 

 Cromwell could move a regiment or man a ship. His wife and 

 his friends hoped much from this circumstance, that the worst of 

 the fever seemed to come upon him on this his fortunate day. 

 Fortunate indeed if he could realise in his own case the assertion 

 of the wise king, that the day of one's death is better than the 

 day of his birth ; fortunate too, still, if he could feel that death 

 was but the entrance into life, the outlet from a world of which 

 he was heartily tired and weary ; the means by which, and by 

 which only, he could enter into rest. 



In this sense surely the 3rd of September was still Cromwell's 

 fortunate day, for if ever a man was weary of life and anxious 

 to be quit of its cares, Cromwell must have been that man. 



Whether he was to be blamed or not for the part he had taken 

 in the recent troubles, the result to him was the same : the 

 weight of the government pressed heavily upon his shoulders, 

 and he found at the end of ten years that all he had for tho 

 labour which he had taken under the sun was vanity and vexa- 

 tion of spirit. Fatigue of body and mind was supplemented 

 latterly by a spring of bitterness welling up within, sapping the 

 strong man's energy, gnawing away at the very vitals of hia 

 strength, overwhelming him with a dreadful sense of responsi- 

 bility and fear lest he had striven in vain and in the wrong 

 direction. Once he had felt no hesitation about what he should 

 do, and believed that his decision was an inspiration direct from 

 the Spirit of the Almighty ; now he doubted whether all things 

 were lawful or expedient unto him. Once he had felt no difficulty 

 in telling his troopers, by way of assurance against their fears 

 as to the propriety of offering personal violence to the king, " If 

 I should meet the king in battle, I would shoot the king ; " now 

 he was uneasy in his mind when even his favourite daughter, 

 Mrs. Claypole, suggested to him doubts as to the integrity of his 

 conduct in the sight of God. Even his old friends, the men who 

 had stood by him through good report and evil until his genius 

 eclipsed them and turned them into rivals and opponents, these 

 too had forsaken him, and left him alone in the state like a lodge 

 in a garden of cucumbers. Then he found how, without being 

 bitter, a man's household may be among his foes. His mother, 

 a homely woman, quite incapable of realising the magnitude and 

 tho difficulties of her son's position, disquieted him in return for 

 his filial devotion to her with the expression of her convictions 

 that they and the like of them had no business in the royal 

 palaces. His children were incapable, excepting perhaps Henry, 

 of appreciating his statesmanship and his motives, and were 

 therefore divided from him by a great gulf of wont of sympathy; 

 while some of them, if the accounts of those times are to be 

 trusted, actually reproached him for what he had done for the 

 country. On one side, a numerous and implacable enemy, burn- 

 ing with desire to revenge the unpardonable death of " the royal 

 martyr," and the losses they had incurred in his behalf on 

 another side, a formidable array of enemies who had once been 

 friends and associates ; the hatred of foreign nations, only kept 

 from finding expression by the fear inspired by his sword ; chronic 

 rebellion at home ; within the camp lukewarm allies, ready to 

 fall away like water as soon as they should " perceive the least 

 rub in his fortunes ; " his own kith and kin not with him, and 

 uneasy in his own mind about grace and acceptance : ionbtful, 

 too, as has been said, whether or not he had striven in vain for 

 the ultimate good of his country what comfort could he have 



in living 'f He was alone, and be felt it keenly ; the still strong 

 man felt the need of some sympathy, noine divider of cares with 

 whom he could relieve himself of the great burden of public and 

 private care which came upon him daily in the singularly excep- 

 tional position in which he found himself placed. As age 

 increased he suffered more and more from the chilling wind of 

 isolation, and seemed to yearn after that rest which the weary 

 love. Yet the spirit of duty within him, the duty which he 

 believed he was called to discharge in England, strove to prevent 

 his wish to depart ; he saw his work all unfinished, and be knew 

 that he had no fit successor ; he believed some say affected to 

 believe that his work was Qod's work, and he wished to do it 

 to the utmost of his power. For duty's sake and religion's, and 

 because it was " God's high gift," he guarded his life " from 

 scathe and wrong," and his hold on life was not a little strength- 

 ened by the natural dread a man has of loosening it through 

 sudden violence and deadly malice. Such a dread had Cromwell 

 for a companion, in addition to his load of corking cares and 

 weighty troubles. Plots to assassinate him were continually 

 being made, and were only baffled by the most watchful energy 

 and the most exemplary punishments. The knowledge of their 

 existence, and the consciousness that at any moment he might 

 fall a victim, contributed to make a man whose mind was 

 already overladen, a man who had a religions or superstitions 

 dread of being sent to his account suddenly, "disappointed, 

 unaneled," without any reckoning made, excitable and nervoo* 

 to an almost unbearable degree. 



In August, 1658, he was at Hampton Court Palace, watching 

 the sure progress of disease in the body of his best beloved 

 child, Elizabeth Claypole. He was, and had been for some time, 

 far from well, but the absorbing attractions of his daughter's 

 state made him oblivious or indifferent to his own ills. On the 

 6th of August the strongest link of affection that bound him to 

 the world was snapped ; Elizabeth Claypole died, and then the 

 Protector found out, what other men had known long since, 

 that he was very ill. For a time he distracted himself by 

 the sad cares of the last offices for his daughter, whom he 

 caused to be buried with imperial pomp among kings and 

 queens in Westminster Abbey ; but this done he had leisure to 

 find out that he was mortal. At the moment of his daughter's 

 death he was confined to his bed with gout, and upon that fever 

 supervened. His pulse became intermittent, but his physicians 

 did not seem to be anxious, and be, on his wife expressing her 

 fears as to the issue of hia illness, bade her be sure he should 

 not die, since he knew he should not " from better authority 

 than any which you can have from Galen or Hippocrates. It is 

 the answer of God himself to our prayers ; not to mine alone, 

 but to those of others who have a more intimate interest in him 

 than I have.'' 



For sake of the change he had moved from Hampton Court 

 to Whitehall, where he took to his bed, and within a month of 

 his daughter's decease he had followed her to her long home. 

 Thurloe, . his faithful secretary and most devoted friend, 

 announced the event to the Deputy of Ireland in a letter 

 wherein he said of Cromwell, " He is gone to heaven, embalmed 

 with the tears of his people, and upon the wings of the prayers 

 of the saints." 



With a magnificent ceremonial, copied from that which was 

 used at the funeral of the Spanish King Philip II., in 1598, the 

 Republican Government laid the body of Oliver Cromwell in 

 Westminster Abbey, where it remained with those of princes and 

 senators till the restoration of the monarchy, when tho spirit of 

 revenge wreaked itself on the corpse of the spoiler of kings by 

 causing it to be exposed on the gallows at Tyburn, and then buried 

 in a hole like the carcase of a dog. To Cromwell himself it could 

 scarcely have mattered much where they laid his body or what 

 they did with it after he had done with it ; tho splendid funeral 

 at St. Peter's was as little in accordance with his habits an'', 

 ways as the ignominious barbarity at Tyburn. He was beyond 

 the reach of honour and dishonour, insensible to flattery A to 

 blame ; but to those who remained these two ceremonies sig- 

 nified something. What had Cromwell done that gav<: signifi- 

 cance to them ? 



In order to answer this question, it is necessary to take s> 

 survey of the life of the man, as the history of it k presented to- 

 ns in the records of his time, and by the light of dispassionate, 

 truth-seeking inquiry instituted since then. 



Oliver Cromwell was born on April 25. 1599. at Hunting- 



