One mind in all his letters-At St. Ives and in Whitehall his tone the Noble correspondence with Governor of Edinburgh Castle-Preachers of A scene in Ely Cathedral-Intercession with a Royalist for liberty of Cromwell's view of the inseparability of Temporal and Spiritual things— True heroism of character-The same in triumph and in peril— After Worcester and before Dunbar Admired most where most intimately known-Accounts by Officers of his General estimate of Cromwell by M. Guizot-Of his Contention with the Cromwell's foreign policy-Light thrown upon it by M. Guizot-New Rivalries of De Retz and Mazarin for Cromwell's favour-His attitude. Mazarin no match for Cromwell-Negotiations before the dissolution of Cromwell's alliances-France and Spain-Why France was preferred Cromwell's quarrels with Parliaments of Protectorate-- His Major- M. Guizot's opinion of the Protectorate-Causes of its non-continuance Whitelock's Embassy to Sweden-The project for a Council of all Cromwell's gratitude for Waller's panegyric-His enjoyment of cheerful recreation-His pipe and game at crambo-Taste for music. Alleged domestic infidelities a Royalist slander-Correspondence with his THE DEBATES ON THE GRAND REMONSTRANCE. NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER, 1641. IF the question were put to any thoroughly informed student of our Great Civil War, into what single incident of the period before the actual outbreak would appear to have been concentrated the largest amount of party passion, he could hardly fail at once to single out the Grand Remonstrance. And if he were then asked to name, out of all the party encounters of the time, that of which the subject matter and antecedents have been most unaccountably slurred over by historians, he must perforce give the same answer. It follows that the writers of history have in this case thought of small importance what the men whose deeds they record accounted to be of the greatest, and it will be worth inquiring how far the later verdict is just. Happily, the means exist of forming a judgment as to the particular subject, on grounds not altogether uncertain or unsafe. The Grand Remonstrance itself remains. Under masses of dull and lifeless matter heaped up in Rushworth's ponderous folios, it has lain undisturbed for more than two centuries; but it lives still, even there, for those who care to study its contents, and they who so long have turned away from it unstudied, may at least plead the excuse of the dreary and deterring companionship around it. The truth, however, is, that to the art and disingenuousness of Clarendon it is really due, in this VOL. I. B instance as in so many others, that those who have written on the conflict of parties before the civil war broke out, have been led off to a false issue. He was too near the time of the Remonstrance when he wrote, and he had played too eager a part in the attempt to obstruct and prevent its publication to the people, not to give it prominence in his History; but he found it easier to falsify and misrepresent the debates concerning it, of which there was no published record, than to pass altogether in silence the statements made in it, diffused as they had been, some score of years earlier, over the length and breadth of the land. Indeed it also better served the purpose he had, so to garble and misquote these; and from the fragment of a summary he gave, filling some six pages of the octavo edition of his book, Hume and the historians of the last century derived manifestly the whole of what they knew of the Grand Remonstrance. But even the more careful and less prejudiced historians of our own century have not shown that they knew much more. Upon the debate in the house before it was put to the vote, as referred to by Hyde, all writers have dwelt; and of course every one has copied and reproduced those graphic touches of Philip Warwick, the young courtier and follower of Hyde, in which he gives his version of what the Remonstrance was, how it originated, and what an exciting debate it led to. How some leading men in the house, as he says, jealous of the proposed entertainment to be given by the City to the King on his return from Scotland, had got up an entertainment of their own in the shape of a libel (the Remonstrance, that is), than which fouler or blacker could not be imagined, against his person and government; and how it passed so tumultuously, two or three nights before the King came to town, that at three o'clock in that November morning when they voted it, he thought they would all have sat in the Valley of the Shadow of Death; for they would, like Joab's and Abner's young men, all have catched at each other's locks, and sheathed their swords in each other's |