Reviews.

OLIVER CROMWELL.

History of the English Commonwealth, from the Execution of Charles I. to the Death of Cromwell. By M. Guizot. Translated by Andrew M. Scoble. In two volumes. Bentley, London.

PURITANISM is that form of religious delusion which clothes the spiritual pride of its intentions in the most grotesque assumption of scriptural phraseology. It makes hideous faces at the world, the flesh, and the devil, remaining all the while by no means on bad terms with any one of them; but it stipulates with all three that its ordinary language must always seem to be that of vernacular inspiration. Its visage is long, and its looks are sour. By its ordinary admirers little is seen but the whites of its eyes; nor would common spectators imagine, if history had not spoken, that those hands, folded so meekly on its bosom, could wield the sword of the soldier or the sceptre of sovereignty. Owen, Baxter, Howe, Flavel, and Manton, were its pundits and prophets, so far as pen and paper, prayer, doctrine, and preaching, were concerned; yet to have a living personification before us of what the system really was,-of what it professed to do, and what it actually perpetrated, it will be necessary to study with closeness and care the subject of these pages. Oliver Cromwell may teach us many lessons. His lot was cast in extraordinary times. An ecclesiastical revolt from the Holy See, such as the world had never witnessed since the days of Arius and his imitators, had convulsed Europe and desolated the Church. On the continent the tide of error had begun to retire; in England it was otherwise. Her crown had pushed aside the tiara; whereby Erastianism, selfishness, and absolute power had triumphed. The people had lost the liberties upon which they once lived and revelled, as derived traditionally from their Saxon forefathers. Henry VIII. had trampled them under his feet with the same ruthlessness which he manifested in the decapitation of his wives: nor were the Stuarts better than the Tudors; except that their follies and absurdities might be considered less formidable than the occasional abilities of their predecessors.

Elizabeth was still on the throne when Oliver Cromwell was born at Huntingdon, in a large Gothic, house, to which the brewery of his father was attached, on the 25th of April,

in A.D. 1599. Robert Cromwell, a gentleman of good lineage but narrow fortune, had purchased the property of one Philip Clamp, whose fermentation of malt and hops had established a creditable business on the premises,-far too profitable an affair to be sneezed at by the new-comer, although his wife, a sensible lady, originally named Steward, the widow of William Lynne, and rejoicing in a jointure of 607. per annum, claimed her descent from the royal family of Scotland. This highly respectable couple had three sons, of whom Oliver was the second, and the only survivor growing up to manhood. There were also six daughters, who lived to be well married; besides another, carried to her grave in early life. The mother could have been no ordinary woman, as was shown by her entire conduct through life, manifesting as it did a combination of simple tastes with great energy of mind. A portrait of her may still be seen at Hinchinbrook, with a small and sweet mouth, betokening not less firmness than gentleness of character; the light pretty hair over her forehead is modestly enveloped in a white satin hood; she wears a velvet cardinal, with a rich jewel clasping it. Her brother-in-law, Sir Oliver Cromwell, stood godfather to the future Protector, on the fourth day after his birth; holding the child at the baptismal font, and giving him his own name. Alison has not failed to remark, that Napoleon was brought into the world upon a sofa covered with tapestry representing the Iliad of Homer: about as sagacious a nonjuror, who subsequently bought and inhabited the house of the Cromwells at Huntingdon, used to point out a curious figure of the devil wrought in the hangings of the bed-chamber in which the conqueror of Dunbar and Worcester first gladdened the hearts of his parents. They had soon some trouble with him. Without noticing the legends of his being carried off by a monkey, and saved from drowning by the worthy curate of Cunnington, it is certain that his early tastes were for the excitements attending personal peril, and that his temper was wayward and violent. He was eighth or ninth cousin once removed on the maternal side to his rival Charles I.; and when only five years old is said to have had the honour of being a playmate with that prince, and in some boyish quarrel inflicting on him a bloody nose. There was a royal palace in the neighbourhood, to which, no doubt, on one of the progresses of the court, Sir Oliver Cromwell had taken his nephew in right of the distant relationship. What King James said to this premature onslaught on a son of the Lord's anointed we are not informed; but Forster observes, as well as Guizot, that for an instant "the curtain of the future was uplifted here."

Robert Cromwell transferred his hopeful progeny to the care of one Doctor Beard, who kept the free grammar-school of the town, and flogged his pupils after the most approved fashion of Solomon and Dr. Busby. But Oliver had the loosest notions of what constituted the rights of property with regard to fruit and poultry, pippins and pigeons. The fear of the rod never restrained him from any nocturnal raid upon the dovecots and orchards of his neighbours. He came to be called the "apple-dragon" of the district, in which he was devoted to practical jokes and unseemly frolics. His inclinations at this period present a singular contrast of what may be described as nastiness mingled with the sublime. Puritanism must have relished and fostered the strange combination; so that we may smile at, rather than admire, the magniloquence of Milton, when, in apologising for the coarseness of his patron, he assures us that the genius of such a hero was as much above refinement as it was superior to ordinances; "that it did not become a right hand to be wrapped in down amongst the nocturnal birds of Athens, by which thunderbolts were to be hurled thereafter at the eagles which emulate the sun." That there were extraordinary movements and presentiments in his mind during the hey-day of youth may be well imagined. He had laid himself down on one occasion to sleep, when the curtains of his bed were withdrawn by a gigantic female figure, which, gazing at him silently for a while, informed him that before his death he should be the greatest man in England. He remembered, when he told the story, that the apparition made no mention of the word king. His father seems to have received so marvellous a narration very much as Jacob the patriarch listened to the visions of his son Joseph; with remonstrance at least, as well as interest, since he wrote to the pedagogue, requesting that his ambitious and dreaming scholar might be soundly whipped for his presumption, which was done accordingly. Flagellation only strengthened his impressions; for he carried them to his uncle, Sir Thomas Steward. The latter, however, merely repaid his confidence with loyal and suitable assertions that "it was traitorous to entertain such thoughts."

From the hands of Dr. Beard, Oliver Cromwell passed at seventeen to the University of Cambridge, where he was entered at Sidney-Sussex College as a fellow-commoner. He had picked up a respectable stock of Latin, yet preferred his sports to his books. But in June, A.D. 1617, his father died. His good mother found herself still obliged to carry on the brewery, in an age, happily for her business, guiltless of the follies of teetotalism. Her son, instead of helping to work the domestic oar, betook himself to the easier task of assisting to

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sink the family. Abhorring the protracted sermons and dismal practices of the godly people at Huntingdon, he degenerated into a rake of the first water. Few roysterers were a match for him at the boisterous game of quarter-staff. The tinker, or the pedlar, or the cow-doctor of the parish, had an equal welcome to a black eye or a broken skull,-whichever the young spark might happen to inflict, and afterwards heal with deep potations of the maternal ale. What could the poor widow do, in the loneliness of her heart, and with her six young and comely daughters, but apply to those apostles of hypocrisy, who boldly shook the pulpits of their conventicles and the purses of their disciples with weekly hurricanes of faith without works, and the impossibility of falling away from grace? They counselled her to transfer the gay prodigal to London, where he might enter at an inn of court, and apply himself to the study of the law. The fact probably was, that his debaucheries, both as to wine and women, had gone to such a height at Huntingdon, that the credit of the brewery was at stake, to say nothing of the glimmering hope that a change of scene might break off certain inconvenient and dissolute connections, which, so long as they lasted, rendered even external reformation altogether out of the question.

If the Puritans ever slept at all over money-matters, it was with one eye open. Oliver had not mended his manners or morals in the metropolis, as a nominal student in Lincoln's Inn, where, the remainder of his patrimony having been wasted, he attempted to raise further ways and means by drawing upon the indulgent liberality of his uncle Steward. With his godfather at Hinchinbrook he had long quarrelled; but Sir Thomas Steward appears for a time to have bled more freely; at length, however, even this eccentric worthy buttoned up his pockets, and would yield no more. The nephew thereupon immediately applied for a commission of lunacy against his relative and benefactor, whose habits were rather peculiar, although by no means such as to warrant the ground taken up by his ungrateful and ungracious favourite, that he was incapable of managing his own affairs. King Charles refused the application, and is admitted by the admirers of Cromwell to have acted justly in so doing. Soon after reaching his majority, Oliver married an admirable wife in the person of Elizabeth, daughter of Sir James Bourchier, of Halsted in Essex, a kinswoman of the Hampdens. With such plain good sense as to be perfectly contented with a humble station, she had spirit and dignity sufficient for the loftiest. Her felicitous influence assuaged the passions of her husband, lifted him up out of the mire of his profligate courses, and reconciled

him to his family; his house became notorious as a refuge for persecuted Nonconformists and their pastors. Here he practised his first lessons in yoking fanaticism and hypocrisy to the fiery chariot of ambition. Every religious grievance was listened to and brooded over, until it was hatched into some magic talisman for influencing the minds of men. Discourses on knotty texts of Scripture protracted to almost interminable dimensions; details of spiritual experiences, seasoned with such unction and fervour as Bunyan might have conceived or Quarle envied, alternated with the agitations of confession, effusions of tears, and the more substantial relief of hot suppers, sack-possets, and warm nightcaps. The home of the future hero was heated into a religious furnace, in which was forged many a weapon of genius and puritanical power, before which, in after times, his enemies fled from the field of conflict, and his friends bowed down their faces to the ground in respectful or reluctant homage. There was even then no resisting the prowess with which the apparently repentant profligate wrestled in prayer, or unveiled in the mystic pages of prophecy an apocalypse of the New Jerusalem. His eyes were perfect sponges, fountains of pious waters flowing at command, edifying beyond expression the ministers, women, and servants kneeling in amazement around, and weeping themselves into correspondent floods, either in their sincerity or through mere force of sympathy. Such enthusiasm, in ascending to higher and still higher degrees of heat, no doubt produced some temporary state of external purity and improvement. The clouds of smoke generated and developed occasional flames. We find more than one instance of full and fair compensation being rendered by Cromwell to the uttermost of his means for gambling debts; with respect to which his conscience smote him, as he said, for having had recourse to unfair play. His acute understanding quickly discovered the hollowness and tyranny of national episcopacy, revelling as it then did in the plenitude of its pretensions. His fellow-townsmen began to discuss his abilities, whilst they admired or patronised his beer. They drank his health in every pothouse, canted over his last exposition, and at length ripened into realisation an offer which they had volunteered of returning him as their representative at the next election. The attempt was first made in A.D. 1625, and failed; but three years later the star of the brewery culminated, and Oliver Cromwell took his seat at Westminster, in the third Parliament of the unfortunate Charles, as member for the borough of Huntingdon. A family of children had now begun to gather around him.