untunable, and his eloquence full of fervour; for the subject matter would not bear much of reason; it being in behalf of a servant of Mr. Prynne's who had dispersed libels against the Queen for her dancing and such like innocent and courtly sports; and he aggravated the imprisonment of this man by the Council-table unto that height that one would have believed the very government itself had been in great danger by it. I sincerely profess it lessened much my reverence unto that great council; for he was very much hearkened unto. And yet I lived to see this very gentleman, whom out of no ill will to him I thus describe, by multiplied good successes, and by real but usurped power, having had a better tailor and more converse among good company, in my own eye, when for six weeks together I was a prisoner in his sergeant's hands, and daily waited at Whitehall, appear of a great and majestic deportment and comely presence.'

It appears, among other things to be gathered from this reminiscence of the not uncandid old royalist, that Cromwell, the destined director and controller of the commencing revolution, showed himself in front of the movement almost as soon as it began; not indeed as yet with the solitary conspicuousness of Mirabeau in the Salle de Menus Plaisirs, at Versailles, on the memorable 23rd of June, 1789, but still as even already an actor and in some sort a leader, not a mere voter or cypher. He not only spoke, we see, but was attentively listened to. The rude fervour and passion of his eloquence found an echo in the strong convictions and excited temper of his audience, and of the time, that made his earnestness a power, a spell. He gave expression and embodiment to the dominant national sentiment; not indeed in musical tones or well-turned periods, but with a voice and manner, with a force of action and kindling of eye, that spoke from the heart to the heart, and evinced both what an intensity of belief was in the man and with what fearlessness, if need were, he would act as well as speak. The reputation, too, of the courage and resources he had already shown as a champion of the public rights had,

as we have seen, gone before him to this wider and higher field; and no doubt, however wild or extravagant his notions might be thought by some, many a suggestion or remark that dropped from him would confirm, with the great majority of his hearers, the favourable impression of his insight and faculty. At all events, that insight and faculty existed, and, whether recognized or not for the present, would be sure, in such a state of things as was now coming on, to make themselves be felt in due time. All old artificial props and ligaments were about to fall off, and older Nature to resume her supremacy and sole dominion, when the strong man would carry it over his fellows by the same law that makes the steel cut through the lead. Not, however, now, at the age to which the world has got, the man whose strength is of fleshly thews and sinews or mere ferocity of disposition, as in the infancy of society, but he of the strong heart united with the strong head. It was an age, as we have said, of deep convictions, which stirred the whole intellectual and spiritual being of men.

It appears from the Notes of the proceedings of the Long Parliament taken by Sir Simond D'Ewes, and now preserved in the British Museum (Harleian MSS. 162-166), that the debate of which Sir Philip Warwick had retained such recollection as we have just read probably took place on the sixth day of the session, Monday the 9th of November, on which day, we are there told, “Mr. Cromwell delivered the petition of John Lilburn." This Lilburn, afterwards famous for his rampant and restless fanaticism, had once been Prynne's amanuensis. No doubt it was in presenting his petition on this Monday, the whole of which is stated to have been spent in hearing grievances, that Cromwell made the fervent speech in the sharp and untunable voice described by Warwick. It was most probably the first time he had spoken.

Another early notice of him occurs in Lord Clarendon's account of his own Life. Among many other committees of which his Lordship, then Mr. Hyde, sat as

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chairman in the beginning of the Long Parliament, was one, he says, upon an enclosure which had been made of some great wastes belonging to some of the Queen's manors without the consent of the tenants, the benefit whereof had been given by the Queen to a servant of near trust, who forthwith sold the lands enclosed to the Earl of Manchester, Lord Privy Seal; who, together with his son Lord Mandevil, were now more concerned to maintain the enclosure; against which, as well the inhabitants of other manors, who claimed common in those wastes, as the Queen's tenants of the same, made loud complaints, as a great oppression, carried upon them with a very high hand, and supported by power." "The Committee," continues Clarendon, "sat in the Queen's Court; and Oliver Cromwell, being one of them, appeared much concerned to countenance the petitioners, who were numerous together with their witnesses; the Lord Mandevil being likewise present as a party, and, by direction of the committee, sitting covered. Cromwell (who had never before been heard to speak in the House of Commons), ordered the wit nesses and petitioners in the method of the proceeding, and seconded and enlarged upon what they said with great passion; and the witnesses and persons concerned, who were a very rude kind of people, interrupted the counsel and witnesses on the other side with great clamour when they said anything that did not please them, so that Mr. Hyde (whose office it was to oblige men of all sorts to keep order) was compelled to use some sharp reproofs and some threats to reduce them to such a temper that the business might be quietly heard. Cromwell in great fury reproached the chairman for being partial, and that he discountenanced the witnesses by threatening them; the other appealed to the committee, which justified him, and declared that he behaved himself as he ought to do, which more inflamed him, who was already too much angry. When, upon any mention of matter of fact, or the proceeding before and at the enclosure, the Lord Mandevil desired to be heard, and with great modesty related what had been

done, or explained what had been said, Mr. Cromwell did answer and reply upon him with so much indecency and rudeness, and in language so contrary and offensive, that every man would have thought that, as their natures and their manners were as opposite as it is possible, so their interests could never have been the same.' * In the end his whole carriage was so tempestuous, and his behaviour so insolent, that the chairman found himself obliged to reprehend him, and to tell him, if he proceeded in the same manner, he would adjourn the committee, and the next morning complain to the House of him; which he never forgave, and took all occasions afterwards to pursue him with the utmost malice and revenge to his death." Mr. Carlyle concludes, from an examination of the Journals, that these proceedings probably occurred in the beginning of July, 1641, and that they related to the Soke of Somersham, near St. Ives. "Cromwell," he observes, "knew this Soke of Somersham, near St. Ives, very well; knew these poor rustics, and what treatment they had got; and wished, not in the imperturbablest manner it would seem, to see justice done them. Here, too, subtracting the due subtrahend from Mr. Hyde's narrative, we have a pleasant visuality of an old summer-afternoon ' in the Queen's Court' two hundred years ago." Clarendon must have been mistaken (as he often is) in supposing that Cromwell had never yet spoken in the House.

He was soon, however, to make himself sufficiently well known on another scene, and by something more than speaking. Among other notices that we have of him in the momentous year 1642, are the following:

*Lord Mandevil was soon after this summoned to the Upper House, while his father was yet alive, as Baron Montagu of Kimbolton (one of his father's titles); and he is the Lord Kimbolton impeached by the king along with the five members of the House of Commons, whom his majesty attempted to seize on the 4th of January, 1642, and the same who afterwards, when Earl of Manchester, commanded one of the parliamentary armies.

In the beginning of the year he is frequently mentioned as taking a busy and zealous part in the proceedings of the House in relation to the Popish rebellion in Ireland; and in a list, given by Rushworth, dated the 9th of April, he appears as a subscriber of 500l. for relieving the Protestants there.* This fact may be compared with Dugdale's story of his broken fortunes-his low condition," and "mean lodgings," at the time of his election. When the war broke out, or was on the point of breaking out, the member for Cambridge was up and doing among the foremost. The King's commission of array for Leicestershire, the first that he issued, came out on the 12th of June; on the 15th of July D'Ewes records, that "Mr. Cromwell moved that we might make an order to allow the townsmen of Cambridge to raise two companies of Volunteers, and to appoint captains over them;" and on the same day the Journals testify that there was ordered to be repaid to him the sum of 1007., which he had expended in sending down arms into Cambridgeshire, for the defence of that county. Soon after this he appears to have gone down to his county, and to have taken the direction of affairs there into his own hands on the 15th of August it is reported, from the Commission for the Defence of the Kingdom, that" Mr. Cromwell, in Cambridgeshire, has seized the magazine in the Castle at Cambridge, and hath hindered the carrying off the plate from that University, which, as some report, was to the value of 20,000l., or thereabouts ;" and it is ordered that he have indemnity for having so acted. Finally, when the Parliamentary army was raised, and put under the command of the Earl of Essex, in September, Cromwell was made captain of one of the troops of horse (troop sixty-seven); and his eldest son Oliver, now a young man of twenty, cornet in another (troop eight).

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His offer two months before is stated, in words, to have been only 3001.; and the figure in Rushworth may perhaps be a misprint.