grandis ille Impostor, Carnifex perditissimus, &c.,-that is to say, "This was that grand Impostor, that most execrable villain," and so forth. If this gloss has been the means of preserving the original entry from obliteration, we are obliged to the loyal zeal by which it was indicted. It is possible that it was written down partly with this object, the zeal of antiquarianism mixing with that of loyalty.

Cromwell's academic life lasted only above a twelvemonth. His father died in June, 1617, and he returned no more to the University. It is believed that he soon after came up to London; and here authentic history loses sight of him for about three years. It has been commonly stated that he was entered of Lincoln's Inn but his name is not found in the registers either of that or of any of the other inns of court. If he studied the law at all, therefore, it was most probably in some attorney's office, as Shakspeare is supposed by some to have done, as Warburton undoubtedly did. It may be questioned, too, if it was ever intended that he should practise the law as a profession: perhaps his only object, or that of his friends, was that he should merely acquire knowledge enough to enable him to act with credit as a country magistrate. At the same time, the fact of his having had any thing whatever to do with the law while he was in London is as far as possible from being established: the only precise part of the common account, his having been a student of Lincoln's Inn, turns out, as we have seen, to be unfounded. Nay, we have no sufficient evidence, or any thing like sufficient evidence, that these three years were spent by him in London at all. All we have is the assertion of the same writers who report in the same sentence or paragraph the fiction of his having been a student of one of the inns of court. He may have merely visited the metropolis, perhaps several times, while his proper residence was with his mother at Huntingdon. What is positively known is that it was in London he found his wife. On the 22nd of August, 1620, he was married in St. Giles's Church, Cripplegate, to Elizabeth Bourchier, daughter of Sir James Bourchier, Knight, an

eminent merchant of the city, and also the owner of an estate in land, where he usually resided, at Felsted, in Essex. It is said that this marriage was brought about through his relations the Barringtons and Hampdens. One of Cromwell's father's sisters, Joan, had married Sir Francis Barrington, Bart.; another, Elizabeth, was the wife of William Hampden, of Great Hampden, in Bucks, and the mother of the famous patriot, who was therefore first cousin to Cromwell, as he also was to Waller the poet, who was the son of his father's sister. As both the Hampdens and the Barringtons were families of popular politics, it is probable that the Bourchiers, about whom little is known, were of the same side. It is admitted on all hauds that now at least Cromwell fixed himself at Huntingdon.

If we may believe the Royalist writers after the Restoration, he had led up to this date the wildest of lives. Anthony Wood's account, in his Fasti,' is, that "his father dying while he was at Cambridge, he was taken home and sent to Lincoln's Inn to study the common law; but, making nothing of it, he was sent for home by his mother, became a debauchee, and a boisterous and rude fellow." Dugdale, in his Short View of the Troubles in England,' says, "In his youth he was for some time bred up in Cambridge, where he made no great proficiency in any kind of learning; but then and afterwards, sorting himself with drinking companions, and the ruder sort of people, being of a rough and blustering disposition, he had the name of a Roister amongst most that knew him; and by his exorbitances so wasted his patrimony, that, having attempted his uncle Steward for a supply of his wants, and finding that by a smooth way of application to him he could not prevail, he endeavoured by a colour of law to lay hold of his estate, representing him as a person not able to govern it. But therein he failed." Dugdale, by the bye, makes no mention of Cromwell ever having been a student of any of the Inns of Court. But the great authority for these stories is the 'Flagellum James Heath "Carrion Heath," as he has been called,—

of

otherwise entitled 'The Life and Death of Oliver Cromwell, the late Usurper,' first published in 1663, and written in the highest or rather the lowest strain of the dominant political sentiment of that day. He also represents Cromwell, after he returned from London, as having been the nuisance and terror of his native place; his chief associates, we are assured, were tinkers, pedlars, and other such disreputable characters; he had always a quarter-staff in his hand, with which he compelled every one to give way to him; he spent his time chiefly in the public-houses, where, however, he usually neglected to pay his reckoning, so that the innkeepers, it seems, when they saw him coming, would say, "Here comes young Cromwell; shut up your doors;" and, if they made any complaint, the only satisfaction they had was to have their windows smashed. His life was a continued round of drinking, gambling, and all other sorts of dissipation and dissoluteness. To the same effect is the account given by Dr. George Bate, who was Cromwell's physician, but had also previously held the same courtoffice under Charles I., and was afterwards continued in it by Charles II., having managed to acquire in succession the favour of each; not, we may suppose, by letting appear, when he got a new master, that he retained any inconveniently grateful remembrance of his last one, In his Elenchus Motuum,' (or 'Account of the late Commotions') he writes of Cromwell, as the passage has been translated by Harris:- "In his youth he married a gentlewoman, but, by his profuse and luxurious way of living, in a short time he squandered away both his mother's and his wife's estate, so that he was almost reduced to beggary. Afterwards, assuming the behaviour of a penitent, he gave himself wholly up to the hearing of sermons, reading of godly books, and works of mortification; and having got a brewhouse, he applied himself to the brewing trade, and also to husbandry. After that, his uncle, Sir Robert Steward, who had an aversion to him, being reconciled by the means of some clergymen and courtiers, left him his fortune. But, shortly after, having again run out of all, he resolves to

it

go to New England, and prepares all things for that end."

But little or no dependence can be placed upon such loose and incoherent jumbles as all these relations are, Besides the purpose for which they were given to the world by their authors, and the animus that is apparent in them, they are full of inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and can be convicted of falsehood almost as often as they descend to particulars. It may perhaps be admitted to be probable that Cromwell led a careless life, and was guilty of some excesses, for a few years after becoming at so early an age his own master; but even this must be considered to rest not so much upon the testimony of these first ill-informed and worse disposed writers of his life as upon what he says of himself in one of his letters which has been preserved; it is dated Ely, 13th Oct., 1638, and is addressed to his cousin (a daughter of his father's next brother, Henry Cromwell) Mrs. St. John, wife of St. John, afterwards Solicitor-General. Therein he says:-“ You know what my manner of life hath been. Oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated light; I was

chief, the chief of sinners. This is true: I hated godliness, yet God had mercy on me. O the riches of his mercy!" And even these words may mean no more than that he had not always had the same religious convictions, nor lived so strict and serious a life, as now.

The general course of his history is most safely and also most distinctly to be traced, for the twenty years which followed his marriage, by a few well-established facts. He was returned as member for Huntingdon to the parliament which met in March, 1628, Charles the First's third parliament. This single fact may be regarded as disposing of nearly all the exaggerations and rubbish of Bate and Heath: it sufficiently proves at least that he was not at this time a person of either ruined character or ruined fortunes. Yet, to make Bate's account at all consistent or intelligible, we must extend at least the part of it that relates to his extravagance and wasteful habits a good many years beyond this date. That Cromwell was now become zealously

religious or puritanical is proved by an authentic record of a speech which he made in the second session of this parliament, which began in January, 1629. The House had resolved itself into a Grand Committee of Religion, when, on the 11th of February, the member for Huntingdon stood up and said, "He had heard, by relation from one Dr. Beard, that Dr. Alablaster had preached flat Popery at Paul's Cross, and that the Bishop of Winchester had commanded him, as his diocesan, he should preach nothing to the contrary. Mainwaring, so justly censured in this House for his sermons, was by the same bishop's means preferred to a rich living. If these are the steps to church preferment, what are we to expect?" And upon this, as appears by the Journals, the House "ordered Dr. Beard, of Huntingdon, to be written to by the Speaker to come up and testify against the bishop; the order for Dr. Beard to be delivered to Mr. Cromwell." But probably before the reverend doctor could obey this summons, at any rate before the inquiry into the business of Dr. Alablaster and his popish. preaching could be begun, the parliament was put an end to on the 2nd of March.

On the 8th of July in the next year, 1630, he was named, in a new charter granted to the corporation of Huntingdon, a justice of peace for that town, conjointly with Dr. Beard and Robert Bernard, Esq. On the 7th of May, 1631, he sold his property in and near Huntingdon for the sum of 18007., his uncle, styled Sir Oliver Cromwell, alias Williams, and his mother, designated Elizabeth Williams, alias Cromwell, joining with him in the conveyance; the one having some nominal interest in the lands arising out of the nature or form of the original grant by his father-the latter, no doubt, a real interest on account of her jointure. The sum appears small, but hardly so inadequate as that for which the estate of Hinchinbrook had been sold by Sir Oliver a few years before, being only a trifle above 30007. With the 18007. Cromwell stocked a grazing farm at St. Ives, about five miles farther down the river Ouse. It has been remarked, however, that his children continued for