THE STUARTS (CONTINUed). THE COMMONWEALTH. Arms of the Lord Protector Cromwell, HE government of England might have been with propriety styled a Commonwealth from the 4th of January, 1649, when the Lower House of Parliament voted that the supreme authority resided in themselves alone as the representatives of the people, but the title was not formally assumed until the day of the murder of King Charles I. The House of Peers, reduced to less than twenty sitting members, was in a few days after voted useless, and all power appeared to reside in the Commons, and a Council of State which they had created. They were, a The members of the first council were, the earls of Denbigh, Mulgrave, Pembroke, Salisbury, lords Gray and Grey of Groby; Sir Thomas Fairfax, Cromwell, Skippon, Ludlow, and Hutchinson, soldiers; Bradshaw, Rolles, St. John, Whitelock, and Wilde, lawyers; Sir Arthur Hasilrigge, Sir Harry Vane, Pennington (formerly lord however, in reality but the puppets of the "grandees of the army," and of these, one man was so conspicuously the chief, that the ensuing ten years may be correctly described as the reign of Oliver Cromwell. This remarkable man, born at Huntingdon, April 25, 1599, was the son of Robert Cromwell, and the grandson of Sir Henry Williams (or Cromwell), of Hinchinbrook, who claimed descent from the ancient princes of Wales. Oliver was in 1616 sent to Sydney Sussex College, Cambridge, and subsequently professed to study the law in London, but was not distinguished for orderly conduct or application in either. He soon retired to the country, and married; obtained, by bequest from an uncle, a considerable addition to his property, and held largely as a lessee from the bishop of Ely. He had now become a Puritan, but was named a justice of the peace for his native town in a new charter granted in 1630. He was member for Huntingdon in the first three parliaments of Charles I., and was a person of sufficient consequence to greatly impede the drainage of the Fen district, which had been granted to the earl of Bedford, with powers which were generally regarded as too extensive. On the failure of his kinsman Hampden's attempt to resist the payment of shipmoney, many Puritan mayor), and nineteen others of less note. The palace of Whitehall was assigned to them; they were to command the army and navy, and to hold office for one year only. With some changes in the men, effected by ballot, this was the executive until Cromwell dispersed the parliament, but that event had been preceded by fierce dissensions between the civilians and the military members. Such seems to have been the view of his cotemporaries; as Whitelock mentions, under date of Dec. 18, 1649, the seizure of "a packet of scandalous books," one of which was named "The Character of King Cromwell." See vol. ii. p. 393. families (Hampden's and Cromwell's among them) attempted to retire to New England, but were obliged to disembark from their ships. Cromwell sat in the Long Parliament as member for Cambridge, and when the civil war broke out he soon distinguished himself by his courage and address. The compact organization of the eastern counties, known as the Association, was mainly his work, although Lord Kimbolton was the nominal head. Cromwell, however, would not long be his subordinate; quarrels ensued, and the result was the Self-denying Ordinanced, which removed Essex and the Presbyterians, remodelled the army, gained the victory of Naseby, and extinguished the war. Fairfax, the lord-general, gave himself blindly up to the bidding of Cromwell, suffered the parliament to be reduced to a mere committee of the army, and saw the king put to death without an effort to save him; but he would not make war on his fellow-Presbyterians of Scotland, and thus resigned his command, which, as a matter of course, became the prize of Cromwell. A short space sufficed for him to overthrow the Irish, the Scots, and the young king himself; when the parliament attempted to reduce the army, they fell also, and Cromwell became lord protector, and aspired to the higher name of king, but this his own officers would not allow him to assume. The republicans, whom Cromwell had overthrown, had governed with vigour, and had raised the reputation of the country abroad; the Protector followed a like course. See vol. ii. p. 437. The principal of these were Desborough, his brother-in-law; Fleetwood, his son-in-law; Lambert, Ludlow, and Harrison. He speedily concluded the Dutch war, on his own terms, saw his alliance sedulously courted by both France and Spain, chastised the insolence of the Barbary corsairs and the petty Italian states, and did much to redeem his declaration that he would make the name of an Englishman as much feared as that of a Roman had ever been." He turned his arms, on no very evident provocation, against the Spaniards, wrested both Jamaica and Dunkirk from them, and captured or destroyed their treasure-ships. He allied himself with France, and obliged the intriguing Mazaring to consent to exclude the royalist exiles, as the price of his assistance in the Low Countries; he also compelled him to protect the Protestant Vaudois 1 against the cruelty of the duke of Savoy, whom he could not himself reach. 1 Foreign conquests had been so long unknown to England, that these acquisitions greatly strengthened his government. Waller, the poet, who from a royalist (see vol. ii. p. 431) had become the panegyrist of the Protector, exclaims:: "Our dying hero from the continent Ravish'd whole towns; and forts from Spaniards reft, As his last legacy to Britain left. The ocean, which so long our hopes confined, Could give no limits to his vaster mind; Our bounds' enlargement was his latest toil, Julius Mazarin, of a Sicilian family, was born in 1602, at Piscina, in the Abbruzzi. By a long course of intrigue he attained the direction of affairs in France, trained up Louis XIV. in ideas of encroachment on his neighbours, and prepared the way for his conquests. His views were less grand than those of Richelieu, but he was at least as cruel, and more cunning. Mazarin became a cardinal, aggrandised his family, and died in 1661, entitled, as his only commendation, to the praise of a patron of letters. Cromwell interested himself warmly in favour of these people. He offered them lands in Ireland, gave £2,000 towards a subscription |
