the lawful owner, he had thus nefariously attempted to appropriate ! But perhaps the best refutation to this, and all other such malicious inventions, is to be found in the fact, that he was chosen to represent the borough of Huntingdon, both in the first Parliament of Charles I., (anno 1625), and in the third, which met in January, 1628. Had he not himself possessed both property and the esteem of his fellowtownsmen, their suffrages would scarcely have been bestowed upon him; and how contrary a sentiment to that of approbation for a man, who was known to have conspired against the wealth of a near relative, would, in common likelihood, have prevailed amongst the inhabitants of a country borough, the reader will judge. It is tolerably apparent besides, that he owed his second election, equally with the first, to the general estimation in which his character was held; for it is irreconcileable, that the partiality he is said to have evinced for the then comparatively small number of nonconformists and enemies to the court, should alone have once more procured a seat in Parliament for the man, whose conduct in that assembly was so moderate even up to the year 1630, as not to prevent his being then nominated by the King, along with his old master, Dr. Beard, the high-steward, recorder, mayor, &c., for the time being, of the town, justices for the borough of Huntingdon.

In truth, no factious views appear at present to have possessed him; ambition, afterwards so prominent in his character, as yet lay dormant; and his opposition to the measures of the government, in the senate, must be admitted to have been both judicious and temperate, when the government itself manifested no offence at it. All this, however, would not square with the intentions of those, who, in writing his memoirs for courtly readers immediately after the Restoration, were determined to prove him a violent opponent to church and state from the very commencement of his political career. But there are epocha in the characters of men, at which not merely shades of difference, but direct contrasts of colouring, prevail; and in no man, as his future history will show, were such shades and contrasts ever more apparent than in the extraordinary being, whose actions (to develope the truth as to whose real merits,) are about to be submitted to the reader.

CHAPTER II.

FROM THE OPENING OF THE THIRD PARLIAMENT OF CHARLES, TO THE COMMENCEMENT OF CROMWELL'S FORMAL OPPOSITION TO

HIS GOVERNMENT.

Political retrospect-Cromwell's first recorded speech in the house-Charles's dissolution of his third parliament-Despotic conduct-Cromwell resident at St. Ives, as a Farmer -Removes to the Isle of Ely-His religious enthusiasm— Attempts to expatriate, but is prevented-His opposition to the King, arising out of the drainage of the Fens-Becomes popular-Summary of his future character.

VERY Considerable talent, united with much prudent and wholesome respect for the kingly authority, had distinguished the general debates of Charles's two first parliaments; notwithstanding the boldness of their attacks upon some unconstitutional branches of the prerogative-in the preceding reign first generally perceived, in the present first openly declared, to be such -had occasioned inauspicious as peremptory dissolutions of them both. As yet, religion had neither become the stalking-horse of a political faction, nor the watchword of a fanatical democracy. But the king, his ministers, and their supporters in the courts of law, and yet more in the pulpit, had appeared resolved to employ the interval between the assembling of the se

cond and third parliaments, in every possible way calculated to widen the already yawning breach between the people and the crown; and to spread the conviction, that the interests of all classes of subjects, but those who reposed immediately beneath the shade of royalty, were opposed to its growing pretensions. Flaming court sermons, in express approbation of the forced loans, &c. to which Charles had recourse in his pecuniary difficulties, and explicitly declaring the obligation of the people to passive obedience and non-resistance, were rewarded by the speedy advancement of their authors ;* while the re-introduction of many remnants of the old Popish pomp, together with that of several Popish ceremonies, in the prelatical government and liturgical discipline of a church essentially Protestant, and to which as reformed

* One reverend time-server, a Dr. Sibthorpe, even went so far as to say from the pulpit, that in case the sovereign's commands proved contrary to the laws of God, or those of nature, or were actually of impossible execution, the subject must still 'patiently undergo the punishment of disobedience, and so yield a passive, where he cannot yield an active, obedience;' and that the king's command, in imposing loans and taxes, without consent of Parliament, did oblige the subjects' conscience, upon pain of eternal damnation.'-It startled many a modest and pains-taking divine of that day, to observe how quickly church preferment followed the promulgation of the Doctor's political sentiments.

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by their progenitors the people had become cordially attached, occasioned almost universal disgust and disaffection. Charles, though a sincere protestant himself, was inclined by his high notions of prerogative, as already noticed, as well as by the influence of his, queen, who professed the Romish religion, to somewhat more than a simple, rational toleration of the Papists; and the like high monarchical prepossessions in James, and their consonance with the Popish tenets of that period, operated to confound the religion with the policy of these princes in the views of the nation. And thus, may it be observed by the way, did a supposed predilection for Catholicism, uniting with an avowed assumption of arbitrary authority, in James and Charles- of whom the former wrote more learnedly in the defence, and the latter lived more conformably to the rules, of the protestant religion, than any of their contemporary princes in Europe*'-working in conjunction with recollections of the reign of bloody Mary'-engender so unconquerable a dislike to the association of Popery with power, in the breasts of the majority of Englishmen, as has even yet far from altogether lost its pungency. And it must be allowed that this feeling, so long as the profession of Catholicism appeared indis

May. Hist. Long Parliament.

E