Ar the quiet close of the reign of Elizabeth, and of that eventful sixteenth century, the middle of which had been shaken in England and elsewhere by the tempest of the Reformation, dwelt in the town of Huntingdon Robert Cromwell, second son of Sir Henry Cromwell, the possessor of the neighbouring mansion of Hinchinbrook, even then a distinguished residence, now the seat of the Earls of Sandwich. Sir Henry, styled from his popular qualities the "Golden Knight," lived till 1604, and was succeeded in his estates by his eldest son Sir Oliver, who made a great figure for some twenty years, repeatedly entertaining King James with vast magnificence, but was obliged at last to part with Hinchinbrook about the year 1627, after which he lived in obscurity or retirement till his death in 1655, at the age of ninetythree. The founder of the Cromwell family was a Welsh gentleman of the name of Williams, who married a sister of Thomas Cromwell, the minister and vicar-ge

neral of Henry the Eighth, and whose son laid aside his original name for that of his potent patron and relation. They had only been established at Hinchinbrook for the space of about half a century that had elapsed since then. They had, however, acquired extensive possessions in those parts; so that Sir Henry, beside the principal estate which he left to his heir, is said to have given or bequeathed to each of his four younger sons lands of the value of about 3007. per annum; equivalent to perhaps three or four times the same nominal income now.

Robert's patrimony consisted of some fields in the neighbourhood of Huntingdon, with a house in that town. In this house, the site of which, at least, if not the identical building, tradition can still point out, he resided with his wife, whom he is supposed to have married in 1591. She was the widow of William Lynne, Esq., of Bassingbourne in Cambridgeshire; and, as she is said to have been ninety-four years of age when she died in 1654, she would be thirty-one at the time of this her second marriage. She was born Elizabeth Steward, daughter of William Steward, Esq., sister of Sir Thomas Steward, Knight, both of Ely; and, curiously enough, they trace her descent from Andrew Steward, second son of Alexander, Lord High Steward of Scotland, whose eldest son, James, was father of Walter, Lord High Steward, who married Margery, daughter of Robert Bruce, and so became the progenitor of the Scottish royal line. Mrs. Cromwell and King Charles the First are made out in this way to have been eighth cousins. She and her husband had a family of ten children, three sons and seven daughters; six of the daughters grew up, but only one of the sons, Oliver, the fifth child and second son, born on the 25th of April, 1599.

Almost the single fact in Robert Cromwell's history that has been preserved is that he represented the borough of Huntingdon in the Parliament of 1593. It is also said that he carried on a considerable brewing business; or rather the story is that it was carried on by his wife without his giving himself much trouble about it. It is probable enough that, farming his own ground,

he may have turned part of the produce to account in this way. There is no reason to suppose that he had any of the magnificent and expensive tastes of his elder brother; nor does he appear to have had any ambition beyond the tranquil but obscure respectability of a country gentleman of moderate estate.

By connexion both he and his wife ought naturally, as it would seem, to have been church and king people; Mrs. Cromwell's father, and after him her brother, were large lessees of tithes and church lands under the Dean and Chapter of Ely, and we have seen how devoted a royalist the head of the house of Cromwell was; nevertheless it may be suspected that the future great hero of Puritanism derived the first taint of his principles from his father and mother. There were as yet no actual separatists from the national church; but Robert Cromwell and his wife probably belonged to that more serious portion of the population which first drew off from and then fell upon and overwhelmed the church in the next age. To this party too his schoolmaster belonged, the Reverend Thomas Beard, D.D., Master of Huntingdon Grammar School, to which the boy was sent as a matter of course to learn his Latin and Greek. Good Dr. Beard was probably a friend of the family; there is evidence at least that he continued to be the friend of his pupil, and that the latter had imbibed from him something more than Greek and Latin.

Tradition, however, tells various stories, some of which may be true, or partly true, which would imply that the usual intercourse of near relationship was kept up by Robert Cromwell's family and that of Hinchinbrook, in the time both of his father Sir Henry and of his brother Sir Oliver. When young Oliver was an infant in arms, it is related, having been one day taken to see his grandfather, a monkey somehow or other got hold of him, and ran off with him to the leads on the top of the house; whence, however, after running about with him for some time, the sagacious animal, as if knowing that it had the fortune of England in its keeping, brought down the child in safety, to the great relief

of all the affrighted inmates, who had been crowding around with feather beds and other appliances to break his expected fall. The classical reader will be reminded of Horace's

Non sine diis animosus infans.

Another of these anecdotes may be given in the words of his biographer, the Rev. Mark Noble :-"They have a tradition at Huntingdon that when King Charles I., then Duke of York, in his journey from Scotland to London, in 1604, called in his way at Hinchinbrook, the seat of Sir Oliver Cromwell, that knight, to divert the young prince, sent for his nephew Oliver, that he, with his own sons, might play with his Royal Highness; but they had not been long together before Charles and Oliver disagreed; and, as the former was then as weakly as the latter was strong, it was no wonder that the royal visitor was worsted; and Oliver, even at this age, so little regarded dignity, that he made the royal blood flow in copious streams from the Prince's nose.'

66

66 This," adds Noble, was looked upon as a bad presage for that King when the civil wars commenced." Odd enough, that, when Charles and the Parliament first came to blows in the autumn of 1642, the people of Huntingdon should have foreseen that the King would be worsted, on the strength of his having got a bloody nose from their townsman eight-and-thirty years before!

This story, however, the Reverend biographer does not absolutely vouch for; he gives it, he informs us, "only as the report of the place;" he seems to think it extremely improbable, if not entirely incredible, that Oliver, even at this age, should have "so little regarded dignity;" as if respect for the social distinctions of rank were pre-eminently a little boys' characteristic, or perhaps, a sort of innate idea, or reminiscence of some more glorious state of pre-existence-a gleam of the heaven that "lies about us in our infancy!"

Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day."

"It is more certain," proceeds Noble, recounting these juvenile adventures of his hero, "that Oliver averred that he saw a gigantic figure which came and opened the curtains of his bed, and told him that he should be the greatest person in the kingdom, but did not mention the word king; and, though he [that is, Oliver, not the gigantic phantom] was told of the folly as well as the wickedness of such an assertion, he persisted in it; for which he was flogged by Dr. Beard, at the particular desire of his father; notwithstanding which he would sometimes repeat it to his uncle Steward, who told him it was traitorous to relate it." Cromwell, we are assured in a note, often mentioned this vision "when he was in the height of his glory." The fact, however, does not seem to be one which the Reverend biographer had any means of knowing; and, for our own part, we should consider the whole story rather less certain than either that of his fight with Prince Charles or that of his adventure with the monkey.

The first unquestionable fact of his life, indeed the first thing recorded about him that has much of the look of a genuine fact, after the mere date of his birth, is, that on the 23rd of April, 1616, when he was within two days of having completed his seventeenth year, he was entered of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, under the tuition of Mr. Richard Howlett. The Latin record is still distinctly legible there in the old parchment volume, now for its sake regarded as the greatest curiosity of which the college has to boast. Somebody, half a century later or more, has written under it such an emphatic annotation as had by that time become safe, perhaps was thought to be almost requisite :-Ilic fuit