Puritans, and on the facts that Waller had a place in his court (we have evidence, since M. Guizot wrote, that he put no mean value on the poet's famous panegyric'), that Butler was permitted to meditate Hudibras in the house of one of his officers, and that Davenant obtained his permission to open a private theatre for performance of his comedies. He might have added that the Lord Protector had himself a taste for innocent and cheerful recreation; that he had no objection to play at Crambo, or even occasionally smoke a pipe with my Lord Commissioner Whitelocke, who also has left us a pleasant anecdote contrasting his laughter and gaiety to the soldiers with the greater impatience and reserve of Ireton; and that, in the correspondence of one of the Dutch ambassadors, there is a picture of his courteous habits on state occasions, and of the dignified and graceful conduct of his household, which far exceeds, in sober grandeur and worth, any other court circular of that age. "The music played all the "while we were at dinner," says Herr Jongestall," and after, the Lord Protector had us into another room,

1 A brief but remarkable letter was brought to light the other day in which Cromwell, writing from Whitehall in 1655, tells Waller that he has no guilt upon him unless it be "to be "revenged for your soe willinglye "mistakinge mee in your verses ;" and talks of putting Waller to redeem him from himself, as he had already from the world. The great Protector was not insensible to those noble and ever memorable lines. Waller had known well how to make his Panegyric most pleasing to his great kinsman's

ear.

"The Sea's our own, and now all

nations greet

"With bending sails each vessel in our fleet,

"Your power resounds as far as wind can blow,

"Or swelling sails upon the globe

may go

"Whether this portion of the world were rent

"where the Lady Protectress and others came to us, and 66 we had also music and voices."

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To these graces of his private life, and to his domestic love and tenderness, which even his worst enemies have admitted, M. Guizot is of course not slow to pay tribute; but on one point he has suffered himself to be strangely misled. He gravely mentions Cromwell's infidelity to his wife, as if it were an admitted fact, and not a mere royalist slander; and he seems to think that some complaints of her own remain in proof of a well-founded jealousy. Jealousy there may be, in the solitary letter of this excellent woman which has descended to us; but it is the jealousy only of a gentle and sensitive nature, shrinking from the least ruffle or breath of doubt that can come between itself and the beloved. "My dearest," she writes, "I wonder you should blame me for writing no oftener, when I have sent three for one: I cannot but "think they are miscarried. Truly, if I know my own. heart, I should as soon neglect myself as to omit the least thought towards you, when in doing it I must do "it to myself. But when I do write, my dear, I seldom "have any satisfactory answer, which makes me think my writing is slighted; as well it may; but I cannot but "think your love covers my weakness and infirmities. Truly my life is but half a life in your absence." That is not the writing of a woman jealous of anything but the share of her husband's time and care which public affairs steal from her. Most touching, too, is a letter of his own of nearly the same date, written to her from the very midst of the toils and perils of Dunbar; in which he tells her that truly, if he does not love her too well, he thinks he errs not on the other hand much, and assures her that she is dearer to him than any creature. Let M. Guizot

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be well assured that he has here fallen into error.

Of another error into which he has fallen, also connected with the domesticities of Cromwell, we have now, in conclusion, to speak in somewhat more detail. It touches an interesting point in Cromwell's history, and we are happy

By

to be able to remove all further doubt respecting it. none who have yet written on the subject has it been stated correctly.

Five sons were born to Cromwell, of whom the youngest, James, born in 1632, certainly died in his infancy, and the eldest, Robert, born in 1621, is supposed in all the biographies not to have survived his childhood. The second son, Oliver, born in 1623, grew to manhood, and his name is to be found enrolled as a cornet in the eighth troop of what was called "Earl Bedford's Horse." He was killed in battle, but in our opinion certainly not so early as appears to be fixed by Mr. Carlyle, who accepts an allusion in a letter of his father's written after Marston Moor, as referring to this loss, which we are about to show might have had quite another reference. Be this as it may, however, all the biographers up to this time have agreed in regard to the eldest, Robert, that what is comprised in Mr. Carlyle's curt notice, " Named for his grand"father. No further account of him. Died before ripe years," -must be taken to express whatever now can be known. Cromwell's only distinct reference to any of his sons while yet in tender years, is contained in a letter addressed to his cousin, Oliver St. John's wife, while she was staying with his friend and relative Sir William Masham, at Otes in Essex; and Mr. Carlyle connects the reference in this letter with the fact that some two or three of Cromwell's sons were certainly educated at the neighbouring public school of Felsted, where their maternal grandfather had his country-seat. But the allusion surely relates specifically to one son, who appears to have been either staying with the Mashams at the time, or the object of some particular care and sympathy on their part. "Salute all my friends in that family whereof you are yet a member. "I am much bound unto them for their love. I bless the "Lord for them! and that my son, by their procurement, "is so well. Let him have your prayers, your counsel."

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Such was the amount of existing information, respecting the two eldest sons of Cromwell, when the biographer of

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the Statesmen of the Commonwealth reproduced from one of the king's pamphlets in the British Museum, a very striking account of the death-bed of the Lord Protector, written by a groom of the chamber in waiting on him. In this, Cromwell was represented calling for his Bible, and desiring those verses from the fourth chapter of the Epistle to the Philippians to be read to him, in which the Apostle speaks of having learned in whatever state he was therewith to be content, for he could do all things through Christ which strengthened him. "Which read,” (the account proceeded) " said he, to use his own words as near as I can remember them, This scripture did once save my life; when my eldest son died; which went as a "dagger to my heart: indeed it did." Naturally enough, this affecting passage was supposed by the writer who reproduced it to relate to his son's death in battle, and Mr. Carlyle arrived also at the same conclusion so confidently, that after "eldest son" he put in "poor Oliver" in reprinting it, at the same time carefully marking the words as an insertion. M. Guizot, however, has gone two steps further, and printed the passage thus: "Ce texte, dit-il, m'a "sauvé une fois la vie, quand mon fils aîné, mon pauvre

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Olivier, fut tué, ce qui me perça le cœur comme un poig"nard." In making this change without the least authority, M. Guizot marked unconsciously the weak point in the supposition he had adopted from others, and on which he was himself too confidently proceeding. If the Protector had really intended his allusion for the son who had been slain in battle, would he not, in place of the simple expression "when my eldest son died," more probably have said just exactly what M. Guizot has thought it necessary to say for him?

We are now in a position to prove that the allusion was not to Oliver, but to Robert; that Robert lived till his nineteenth year; that he was buried at Felsted within seven months of the date of the letter containing the allusion to the kindness of the Mashams respecting him; and that his youth had inspired such promise of a future

1

as might well justify the place in his father's heart kept sacred to his memory as long as life remained. In the register of burials in the parish church of Felsted, under the year 1639, is the following entry: "Robertus Crom"well filius honorandi viri Mtis Oliveris Cromwell et "Elizabethæ uxoris ejus sepultus fuit 31° die Maii. Et "Robertus fuit eximiè pius juvenis deum timens supra "multos." Which remarkable addition to a simple mention of burial, we need hardly point out as of extremely rare occurrence on that most formal of all the pages of history-a leaf of the parish register; where to be born and to die is all that can in justice be conceded to either rich or poor. The friend who examined the original for us could find no other instance in the volume of a deviation from the strict rule. Among all the fathers, sons, and brothers crowded into its records of birth and death, the only vir honorandus is the puritan squire of Huntingdon. The name of the vicar of Felsted in 1639 was Wharton; this entry is in his handwriting, and has his signature appended to it; and let it henceforward be remembered as his distinction, that long before Cromwell's name was famous beyond his native county, he had appeared to this incumbent of a small Essex parish as a man to be honoured.

The tribute to the youth who passed so early away, uncouthly expressed as it is, takes a deep and mournful significance from the words which lingered last on the dying lips of his heroic father. If Heaven had but spared all that gentle and noble promise which represented once the eldest son and successor of Cromwell's