beloved son in his dangerous eminence― finally, whose closing wish, when that anxious care had outworn her strength, accorded with her whole modest and tender history, for it implored a simple burial in some country church-yard, rather than those ill-suited trappings of state and ceremony wherewith she feared, and with reason feared, that his highness, the lord protector of England, would have her carried to some royal tomb! There is a portrait of her at Hinchinbrook, which, if that were possible, would increase the interest she inspires, and the respect she claims. The mouth, so small and sweet, yet full and firm as the mouth of a hero. the large melancholy eyes the light pretty hair the expression of quiet affectionateness suffused over the face, which is so modestly enveloped in a white satin hood the simple beauty of the velvet cardinal she wears, and the richness of the small jewel that clasps it-seem to present before the gazer her living and breathing character. On the 25th April, in the year 1599, this excellent woman gave birth to Oliver Cromwell. He was her second son, and the only one of three who lived to manhood; one of her daughters had also died in youth, and the names of the survivors were Elizabeth, Catherine, Margaret, Anna, Jane, and Robina, who, with Oliver, formed the family of Mr. Robert Cromwell.* "Out of the profits of her trade," says a writer in the Biographica Brittannica," and her own small jointure of sixty pounds a year, she provided fortunes for her daughters, sufficient to marry them into good families. The eldest was the wife of Mr. John Desborough, afterwards one of the protector's major-generals; another married, first, Roger Whetstone, esq., and afterwards colonel John Jones, who was executed for being one of the king's judges; the third espoused colonel Valentine Walton, who died in exile; the fourth, Mrs. Robina Cromwell, married, first, Dr. Peter French, and afterwards, Dr. John Wilkins, bishop of Chester, a famous preacher, and a celebrated mathematician. It may not be amiss to add, that an aunt of Cromwell's married Francis Barrington, esq.; another aunt, John Hampden, esq., of Buckinghamshire, by whom she was mother to the famous John Hampden; a third aunt was the wife of Mr. Whaley, and the mother of colonel Whaley, in whose custody the king was, while he remained at Hampton Court. He had two other aunts, but of their marriages we have no account." There are some errors and some omissions in this account. The wife of Desborough was Jane, the fifth daughter (the eldest, Elizabeth, dying unmarried); Catharine, the second, married Jones; Margaret, the third, married Walton; Anna, the fourth, who is omitted by the writer, married John Sewster of Wistow, in Huntingdonshire, esq.; and the sixth and youngest, Robina, married as stated. Four days after his birth, Oliver Cromwell was baptized in the parish church of St. John's, in his native place; his uncle, sir Oliver, after whom he was named*, standing for him at the font. Of his extreme youth, marvellous stories were recollected in his days of power:-not for this, however, to be rejected, since, what has once been believed, should, in all future time, be matter of just concern. When Milton undertook a history of England, he began it with a large collection of traditional fables, because he well knew, that to whatever has been truly believed, however false or fabulous, belong some of the most sacred privileges of truth itself, and that the imagination can never be strongly influenced, without a corresponding and enduring action upon the opinions and the character. The fables of biography may show us, at all events, in what various ways the celebrity of their object has wrought upon his countrymen. From the instant of his birth, according to the traditions of Huntingdon, the peculiar destiny which had marked the infant for its own saved him from all meaner chances.+ A nonjuror, who afterwards purchased and inhabited his father's house, used to assert this destiny to have been nothing less than the devil; and, in proof of the connection, would show, behind the door of the room that Oliver was born in, a curious figure of that personage wrought in the hangings. On the same authority rests the version of one of Oliver's escapes, wonderful as * See Appendix (D.), Sir Oliver Cromwell. In the very curious little volume which I have already had occasion to quote, Heath's Flagellum, it is made matter of reproach against nature, that no portentous omens had ushered the lad into the world. "Fate, he says, "when it had decreed and ordained the unhappy birth of this famoso, by her most secret and hidden malice, brought him into the world without any terrible remark of his portentous life, neither comets, nor earthquakes, nor such like violences of nature, ushering or accompanying him, to the declaring and pointing out that the scourge of the English empire and nation was now born. Thus also she did, by indiscernible methods, train him up to the possession of the throne, and as secretly and cunningly, after all his bloody and most nefarious actions, shift him out of it, and with a blast of her spent fury turned him into his wished for grave." "The latter sentence is somewhat obscure, unless "the blast of her spent fury" is taken to indicate the storm, which actually, on the day of his death, unroofed the houses in London, and tore up trees in the parks. Gulliver's at Brobdignag. "His grandfather, sir Henry Cromwell," so goes the story, "having sent for him to Hinchinbrook, when an infant in arms, a monkey took him from the cradle, and ran with him upon the lead that covered the roofing of the house: alarmed at the danger Oliver was in, the family brought beds to catch him upon, fearing the creature's dropping him ; but the sagacious animal brought the fortune of England' down in safety: so narrow an escape had he, who was doomed to be the conqueror and sovereign magistrate of three mighty nations, from the paws of a monkey.”* The tradition which saves the daring and reckless young lad from drowning by the providential interference of the curate of Cunnington†, is, perhaps, better worthy of belief; though it might be difficult to say so much of the loyalist addition to the story tagged on after the Restoration that this same worthy curate, at a future period, when kindly called upon by Oliver, in a march at the head of his troops through Huntingdon, and asked if he recollected the service he had done, answered, "Yes, I do; but I wish I had put you in, rather than see you here in arms against your king." The child's temper, it seems admitted on all hands, was wayward and violent ‡, and is said to have broken out on one occasion, when he was yet only five years old, with an ominous forecast of times and deeds to come. The anecdote is told by Noble. "They have a tradition at Huntingdon, says that industrious collector, "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 *The Rev. Dr. Lort's MSS., quoted in Noble, vol. i. p. 92. + Then a Mr. Johnson "From his infancy," says Heath, "to his childhood, he was of a cross and peevish disposition, which, being humoured by the fondness of his mother, made that rough and intractable temper more robust and outrageous in his juvenile years, and adult and masterless at man's estate." as the former was then as weakly as the latter was strong, it was no wonder that the royal visitant 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. This was looked upon as a bad presage for that king when the civil wars commenced. I give this only as the report of the place: thus far is certain, that Hinchinbrook, as being near Huntingdon, was generally one of the resting-places, when any of the royal family were going to or returning from the north of England, or into or from Scotland." An anecdote, which somehow bears upon it the stamp and greatness of reality! If these boys ever met, (and when king James's frequent visits to Hinchinbrook are borne in mind * it is difficult to suppose they did not,) what occurrence so likely as a quarrel, and what result so plain as that the anecdote tells us? The nervous, feeble, tottering infancy † of the shambling king's son, unequally matched against the sturdy little limbs and daring young soul of the man-child of the Huntingdon brewer- yet foolish obstinacy urging the weakness of the one, and a reckless ambition of superiority overcoming the kindness and generosity of the other. The curtain of the future was surely for an instant upraised here! Nor here alone. More signal and direct manifestations were avouched, if still stronger and more widely believed traditions are received. Nor will they be rejected hastily by such as care to penetrate beneath the surface of the character which had lain, as it were, wrapped up even in the very cradle of this child. The supernatural, as it seems to the vulgar, is not always what it seems. The natural, when denied for a time its proper vent, will force itself into the light in many various shapes, which assume a * See Appendix (D.), Sir Oliver Cromwell. It is unnecessary to inform the reader that in the infancy of Charles I. he was unable to stand firmly, owing to the weakness and distortion of the legs which he had inherited from his father, and that in his most vigorous manhood the infirmity was never entirely corrected. Even in the fine equestrian portrait by Vandyke, now at Hampton Court, a curvature at the knee is distinctly visible. fearful aspect from their intensity alone. The tame and common medium of dull and feeble minds is not what the world has distributed among all her sons. Thoughts, as their sufferer has himself described them, "like masterless hell-hounds," roared and bellowed round the cradle of Bunyan; round that of Vane the forms of angels of light seemed to vision the everlasting reign of peace which his virtuous labours would have realised; — and now, round the bed of the youthful Cromwell, played an awful yet delicious dream of personal aggrandisement and power. He had laid himself down one day, it is said, too fatigued with his youthful sports to hope for sleep, when suddenly the curtains of his bed were slowly withdrawn by a gigantic figure which bore the aspect of a woman, and which, gazing at him silently for a while, told him that he should, before his death, be the greatest man in England. He remembered when he told the story — and the recollection marked the current of his thoughts that the figure had not made mention of the word king. The tradition of Huntingdon adds, that although the "folly and wickedness" of such a notion was strongly pointed out to him, the lad persisted in the assertion of its truth for which, "at the particular desire of his father," he was soundly flogged by his schoolmaster. The flogging only impressed the fact more deeply on the young day-dreamer, and betaking himself immediately to his uncle Steward*, for the purpose of unburthening himself once more respecting it, he was told by that worthy kinsman of royalty that it was "traitorous to entertain such thoughts." + This incident in Cromwell's youth was not forgotten in his obscurity to be remembered only in his eminence ; *Sir Thomas Steward. See Appendix (A.). Mention of this matter is thus made in the Flagellum. All the other other accounts give the story as in the text. ""Twas at this time of his adolescency, that he dreamed, or a familiar rather instincted him and put it into his head, that he should be king of England; for it cannot be conceived, that now there should be any such neer resemblance of truth in dreams and divinations (besides, the confidence with which he repeated it, and the difficulty to make him forget the arrogant conceit and opinionated pride he had of himself, seem to evince it was some impulse of a spirit), since they had ceased long ago. However the vision came, most certain it |