THE

CHARACTER OF CROMWELL

AND OF

HIS TIMES.

CROMWELL was lineally descended from the family of Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, and Prime Minister to Henry VIII. In the seventeenth year of his age we find him entered as a gentleman commoner of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Four years later, he married the eldest daughter of Sir John Bouchier; and if we except the short time during which he represented the borough of Huntingdon, his native town, in the parliament of 1628, the interval from his twentieth to his fortieth year was given to the duties of private life in that place, at St. Ives, and in the Isle of Ely. In the last two places he was employed in agricultural pursuits. During the whole of that interval his conduct in his family relations appears to have been, as it always continued to be, highly exemplary and affectionate. The stories circulated concerning his early profligacy, though not without some foundation, were in a much greater degree the invention of his enemies, or mistakes resulting from a misapprehension of the language in which, as a zealous puritan, he was accustomed to express b

VOL. I.

himself, with regard to the depravity of his nature while a stranger to those views of Christianity by which that class of professors were distinguished. In literature, to which he never made the slightest pretension, his attainments were not so contemptible, probably, as those of many who were forward to sneer at his deficiencies in that respect. According to Waller, the poet, who was his kinsman, he possessed a sound acquaintance with the historians of Greece and Rome; and we learn from Whitelock, that he was capable of holding a discourse in Latin with the Swedish ambassador.

It thus appears, as stated by Cromwell to his parliament, in 1654, that he "was by birth a gentleman, neither living in any considerable height, nor yet in obscurity." In the parliament of 1628, inquiries were instituted concerning Sibthorpe, Cozens, Montague, and Manwaring, court divines who had made themselves conspicuous by their opposition to the puritans, their abuse of the Reformation, and their extravagant doctrines in favour of the power of the crown. It was reported to the house of commons by a committee, that the censures which the parliament had passed on these delinquents were remitted, or in process of remission, through the influence of the Bishop of Winchester; and that Manwaring in particular had obtained the reward of his zeal in the cause of popish doctrine and arbitrary power, by being placed in possession of a rich living. Cromwell, now in the twenty-eighth year of his age, was a member of this committee; and in addressing the House on the matter of the report, said, "that to his knowledge it was the practice of the Bishop of Winchester to bestow his countenance on men whose preaching was flat popery;' and he wished to know what the effect was likely to be if the publishing of such doctrines was allowed to become, as in the case