gigantic figure drew aside the curtains of his bed, and told him that he should be the greatest man in all England. The story may be worthy of as much credence as Cromwell could have wished to be given it. There are few schoolboys who have not had their visions of future greatness, and, to an imagination always powerful, and frequently morbid, the beings of another world might not seem to be unfrequent visitants. An incident which occurred to him whilst at the Grammar School of Huntingdon has been frequently commented upon by his admiring biographers. It was the custom of the school to perform a play annually; and, on one occasion, the comedy of Lingua was chosen, and the part of Tactus assigned by chance to Cromwell. The hero stumbles by fortune upon a robe and crown; and, though it is not to be assumed for a moment that such a trifling circumstance could have impressed the boy with an idea of his subsequent destiny, it is more than probable that in some of the passages of his after life, when the actual ensigns of sovereign power seemed to court his acceptance, the school scene might have seemed to him a happy, though unconscious, omen; but little is known of his career as a student. By turns persevering and careless, caring less for the charms of literature than the sports of the field, he would appear to have been more ambitious of the reputation of a "roysterer" than anxious to cultivate the good opinion of the learned. Nor is this to be wondered at; to a mind like Cromwell's much of the wisdom of the schools must have seemed mere folly. He would be at all times less pleased at the mastery over words than at the rule over men. Some smattering of Latin and a tolerable share of general knowledge was all for which he stood indebted to his tutors. The rest of his wondrous lore was imparted to him direct from the great and inexhaustible storehouse of nature.

A short residence at Sydney College, Cambridge, was succeeded by a brief stay in London, where he is thought to have entered himself as a student at one of the inns of court, and to have materially impaired his patrimony by rioting and debauchery. His enemies have asserted that this period of his life was marked by the commission of more than the ordinary excesses of youth; but his season of madness was but brief, for in his twenty-first year he married Elizabeth, the daughter of Sir James Bourchier, of Filsted in Essex, by whom he had nine children. For the next sixteen years his life is a perfect blank, his time being divided between brewing and farming, an interval in the personal story which we will take advantage of, to give a rapid sketch of the state of public affairs during the closing years of the reign of Charles I.

The unhappy monarch who filled the throne of England at this period was certainly not the worst prince of his family, nor were the tyrannies for which he forfeited crown and life at all to be compared in atrocity to those which have rendered the memory of Henry VIII. painful to the thought; but whilst the ruler remained stationary, the nation had advanced. The Reformation and the art of printing had almost wholly revolutionised men's opinions upon religion, politics, and literature; questions once considered too revered to be debated, were now freely canvassed, and ideas once held sacred were subjected to the rigid ordeal of discussion. With the introduction, by means of a widely extended commerce, of new articles of use and luxury, were also imported the moral experiences of travel; and a spirit of inquiry and adventure had extended its influence through all classes. But what contributed mainly to the breaking out of the civil war was the religious disputes of the time. James I. had

been more than suspected of a leaning towards Popery, and this belief had gained almost universal ground in the case of his successor, who openly preferred Roman Catholics to offices of trust and emolument. Charles had not the sagacity to perceive that the long and glorious reign of Elizabeth, following immediately upon that of the hated "bloody Mary," had fixed the doctrines of Protestantism firmly in the hearts of the people, and that the religious wars undertaken against her by France and Spain, with the succour which she rendered to the distressed Protestants of Flanders and Germany, had indissolubly associated the greatness of England with the doctrines of the Reformation. In little more than a single generation the nation had realised a new faith, a new literature, at the head of which were Shakspere and Jonson, and achieved its perfect independence of foreign control. Now that a century and a half had elapsed since the destruction of the feudal power of the nobles, the people had begun to apprehend the true sources of authority. They saw that with the downfall of the ancient domination, the task of reforming the abuses of government rested with the people, and that to be deprived of popular support, or to be visited by the popular hatred, was to insure the destruction of any and the highest power known to the constitution. The disputes as to the succession, in the case of the Scottish king, and the accession, in his person, of the first prince of a foreign dynasty, tended to promote the growing taste for political discussion, and destroyed all attachment to the reigning sovereign.

Such was the state of affairs, when Charles I. mounted the throne; but if the most hateful doctrines of prerogative had rendered James obnoxious to the majority of his subjects, it was speedily discovered that the love of kingly power had descended to his successor; that the will of the monarch should not only have the force of legal enactments, but be preferred to all laws, as proceeding from divine right; that taxes might be raised in defiance of parliament; that property might be confiscated without any regard to equity; and church government enforced with no admixture of religion: these were the doctrines which the first Charles promulgated for the space of twenty years, to the final ruin of church, nobility, and king.

The identity of popery with secular despotism was a lesson inscribed in characters of flame upon the annals of every nation. From the surrender of the soul to the exclusive wardenship of the priest, to the acknowledgment of the divine right of the monarch, the step was easy, and almost imperceptible. With the assertion of the right of private judgment as the prime article of the protestant creed, was of necessity associated the independence of thought upon all secular topics; the mind, encouraged to think for itself, upon the questions of immortality, was not likely to forego the exercise of its newly acquired power with reference to the less interesting matters of this life. The time had not yet arrived for the discovery of the truth, that with the existence of a reformed establishment, the authority of the monarch, and the privileges of the nobility could be placed upon a basis of equal security.

Such was the state of affairs in the year 1638, when the king thought proper to interfere with the property of the Duke of Bedford, who had drained a large tract of land, afterwards called the Bedford Level; the royal pretext was, that the work had not been performed properly, and upon this ground Charles claimed a large portion of the land. This at length called into notice the existence of Oliver Cromwell. By a vigorous and continual resistance the king was defeated; and as a reward, most probably, for his spirited conduct in this matter, Cromwell was returned as member for the borough of

Huntingdon, in the parliament called after an abeyance of eleven years, in the year 1640.

If Charles had delayed calling the houses together, in the hope that an almost unbroken series of humiliations had crushed the spirits of the popular leaders, the result shewed his want of sagacity and foresight. Instead of debating the national questions in the order they had been set down by the king, they commenced by considering whether the notices of grievances should not precede the voting of supplies. It was in vain that ministers urged a course of proceeding more consistent with their professions of loyalty. The malcontents were firm; and, after a few passionate remonstrances, Charles dissolved them, their legislative authority having lasted just twenty-three days. But the force of circumstances overcame the repugnance of the king to have recourse again to the aid of parliament. Goaded to madness by the oppressive proceedings of the Archbishop Laud, in his attempts to introduce the English liturgy, and the rule of episcopacy, throughout the whole island, the Scots rose almost en masse, levied an army, and having sworn to observe the Solemn League and Covenant, against all powers on earth, forthwith proceeded to invade England. Charles hastily levied what troops he could raise upon the instant, and summoning a council of peers to meet him at York, hastened to attack the rebels. But the first assembly of his nobles disclosed the poverty of his resources. No subsidies could be raised without the sanction of the commons; the ordinary methods of raising money had been anticipated, or their legality resisted; and although, in this dilemma, he scrupled not to seize a sum of £300,000, which had been sent by merchants to the mint for coinage, it was found that the calling together the two houses was inevitable. Writs were issued accordingly, and, on the 3rd of November, 1640, met for the first time, the LONG PARLIAMENT, the subverters of a form of government which had endured for a thousand years.

The members of the parliament saw that it was to the king's necessity that they were indebted for their legislative existence. The strength of prerogative was exhausted, and the force of circumstances had called into being the hitherto unheard-of "Sovereignty of the People." The temper of the house may be gathered from the description given by Lord Clarendon, who tells us, "There was observed a marvellous elated countenance in many of the members of parliament, before they met together in the honse. The same men who, six months before, were observed to be of very moderate temper, and to wish that gentle remedies might be applied, without opening the wound too wide, and exposing it to the open air; and rather to cure what was amiss, than too strictly to make inquisition into the causes and original of the malady-talked now in another dialect, both of things and persons, and said they must now be of another temper than they were the last parliament; that this must not only sweep the house clean below, but must pull down all the cobwebs which hung in the tops and corners, that they might not breed dust, and so make a foul house hereafter; that they had now an opportunity to make their country happy, by removing all grievances, and pulling up the causes of them by the roots, if all men would do their duties; and used much other sharp discourse to the same purpose." The manner and language spoken of by Lord Clarendon would be natural to men placed in such circumstances; they felt that it rested with them to redress all the evils of the country, and at this period the overthrow of the monarchy was hardly to be dreamed of by the wildest republican.

Within a few days after its opening, the parliament nominated forty committees of grievances; and Cromwell, who had been returned for Cambridge, was chosen upon twenty of them. They invited the commissioners of the Scots malcontents to state their complaints to the house in person; and, that no doubt might be entertained as to the nature of their propositions, ordered the sum of £100,000 to be paid to both armies. They sent officers into the various parts of the kingdom, "to deface, demolish, and quite take away, all images, altars, and tables turned altarwise, crucifixes, superstitious pictures, monuments and reliques of idolatry, out of all churches and chapels; order which was executed with barbarous alacrity, to the ruin of the noblest monuments of genius and piety. They abolished monopolies, changed the king's ministers, and impeached his oldest counsellors, Archbishop Laud and the Earl of Strafford.

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The fate of the latter statesman has been abundantly bewailed, without, as it would appear, any reasonable excuse for the lamentation. He had sought to render the king wholly absolute, and, in his own government of Ireland, had sanctioned and committed the foulest wrongs. In punishing him by an ex post facto law, the parliament undoubtedly overstepped the limits of the constitution; but by what other method could they have vindicated the just rights of the nation? The fiction of the constitution proclaims that the king can do no wrong, and his ministers are wholly responsible for all which is done in his name; and, through all common seasons, the working of this principle is found to be beneficial. If the commands of the sovereign are inconsistent with a due regard to the laws, or the welfare of the kingdom, the minister relieves himself of his responsibility to the country, by resigning the seals of office, and leaving to his successor the option of also refusing obedience, or incurring the hazard of impeachment. But Charles had prevented the possibility of his ministers being called to account, by wholly dispensing with the authority of parliaments, and it is proved beyond doubt, that to this unhappy course of policy he was mainly instigated by Strafford. His abandonment of the fallen minister has invested the fate of the earlier victim with a pathetic interest; but had Strafford never lived, it is hardly possible to conceive that the king could have perished under the axe of the executioner. The character of the unhappy nobleman is thus summed up by a celebrated writer of our own times: * "For his accomplices various excuses may be urged-ignorance-imbecility; but Wentworth had no such plea. His intellect was capacious. His early prepossessions were on the side of popular right. He knew the whole beauty and value of the system which he attempted to defame. He was the first of the rats, the first of those statesmen whose patriotism has been only the coquetry of political prostitution; whose profligacy has taught governments to adopt the old maxim of the slavemarket, that it is easier to buy than to breed, to import defenders from an opposition than to rear them in a ministry. He was the first Englishman to whom a peerage was not an addition of honour, but a sacrament of infamy, a baptism into the communion of corruption. As he was the earliest of the hateful list, so was he also by far the greatest-eloquent, sagacious, adventurous, intrepid, ready of invention, immutable of purpose; in every talent which exalts or destroys nations, pre-eminent, the lost Archangel, the Satan of the apostacy. The little for which, at the time of his desertion, he exchanged a name heroically distinguished in the cause of the people, reminds us of the

* Macauley.