The earl of Bedford and other noblemen of the day had, some seven or eight years before, proposed a scheme for draining the extensive fens which in those days covered some millions of acres of the finest plains in the counties of Cambridge, Huntingdon, Northampton, and Lincoln. The good work had now advanced to a certain extent that part of it, in fact, properly called the Bedford Level, and containing nearly 400,000 acres, had been completed-when it was found necessary to call in other aid to the project, and a proposition was made to the crown, offering a fair proportion of the land for its countenance, assistance, and authority, in the completion of the whole. . Up to this point all had gone on well: the scheme included in itself unquestionably a large share of public advantage, and its chief projector was a nobleman of wide and deserved popularity—but from the instant of the royal interference all kinds of differences and contentions were introduced. A parcel of court-commissionersofficers ever hateful in that day, and with reason, to the wretched and oppressed commonalty — arrived in the districts, held courts for the adjudication of claims connected in any way with the property, decided all the questions in the king's favour of course, and, it is even said, proposed to dispute with lord Bedford and the other originators of the undertaking their retention of 95,000 acres of the land already recovered, in compensation of the venture they had undergone.* Whether the latter allegations are true or false, it is not doubted that the occasion was at once seized by the king's officers as an admirable one for enriching the then most needy exchequer, and that, with this view, several acts of injustice were threatened. The common people began to murmur-to complain loudly to clamour for justice- to threaten in their turn. Meetings were held; and at one of them a powerful auxiliary suddenly appeared in the person of Oliver * Life and Times of Cromwell, by Thomas Cromwell, p. 68. Cromwell. From that instant the scheme became thoroughly hopeless. With such desperate determination he followed up his purposeso actively traversed the district and inflamed the people every where so passionately described the greedy claims of royalty, the gross exactions of the commission, nay, the very questionable character of the improvement itself, even could it have gone on unaccompanied by incidents of tyranny,to the small proprietors insisting that their poor claims would be merely scorned in the new distribution of the property reclaimed, to the labouring peasants that all the profit and amusement they had derived from commoning in those extensive wastes were about to be snatched for ever from them, that, before his almost single individual energy, king, commissioners, noblemenprojectors, all were forced to retire, and the great project, even in the state it then was, fell to the ground. This matter has been variously described; but in the account just given, an attempt has been made to reconcile the discrepancies that have appeared in other descriptions of it. It seems clear to me, from all the documents that afford us information*, that the scheme had proceeded, entirely unopposed by the people, till * Even sir P. Warwick's account, though for many reasons coloured to the author's purpose, offers no violent contradiction to it. He writes: — "The earl of Bedford, and divers of the principal gentlemen, whose habitations confined upon the fens, and who, in the heat of summer, saw vast quantities of lands which the fresh waters overflowed in the winter, lie dry and green, or drainable whether it was publick spirit, or private advantage, which led them thereunto, a stranger cannot determine - they make propositions unto the king to issue out commissions of sewers to drain those lands, and offer a proportion freely to be given to the crown for its counte nance and authority therein and as all these great and publick works must necessarily concern multitudes of persons, who will never think they have exact justice done to them for that small pretence of right they have unto some commons; so the commissioners, let them do what they can, could never satisfy such a body of men. And now the king is declared the principal undertaker for the draining; and by this time the vulgar are grown clamorous against these first popular lords and undertakers, who had joined with the king in the second undertaking, though they had much better provisions for them than their interest was ever before: and the commissioners must by multitudes and clamours be withstood; and, as a head of this faction, Mr. Cromwell, in the year 1639, at Huntingdon, appears : which made his activity so well known to his friend and kinsman, Mr. Hampden, that he gave a character of Cromwell, of being an active person, and one that would sit well at the mark." See also Camden's Britannia, by Gibson, i. 489, 490.; also Dugdale, p. 460. on the completion of the Bedford Level the name and interest of the king became involved in it— that Cromwell then saw the advantage which might be taken of the popular discontent awakened by the latter circumstance, and availed himself of it accordingly—that when he moved in it first it might merely have been with a view to support and protect the threatened rights of the popular nobleman who was the chief projector, but that, in the course of his opposition, he saw an irresistible opportunity of impressing with a sense of his influence not only large masses of the small proprietors and of the lower orders of discontented men whose rights and pleasures were now found to be endangered by the scheme, but also of exhibiting that influence to the country at large in the defeat not only of king and commissioners, but of the entire scheme itself—and that, before this temptation, every consideration of the real utility and the many beneficial tendencies the undertaking involved, vanished altogether. A pure motive of good may have engaged him first, but it was certainly a mixed motive of evil and good that shaped his ultimate course. Let the facts which I shall now state prove this, if further proof is wanted. In the year 1649 the Long Parliament passed an act for “ draining the great level of the Fens," and in the preamble of that act it is stated, "that whereas the said great level, by reason of frequent overflowings of the rivers . . . has been of small and uncertain profit, but (if drained) may be improved and made profitable, and of great advantage to the commonwealth, and the particular owners, &c. . . . And whereas Francis, late earl of Bedford, did undertake the said work, and had 95,000 acres, parcel of the said great level, decreed and set forth, in October, in the thirteenth year of the reign of the late king Charles, in recompence thereof; and he and his participants, and their heirs and assigns, have made a good progress therein, with expense of great and vast sums of money; but by reason of some late interruptions, the works there made have fallen into decay: be it therefore enacted and ordained, that William, now earl of Bedford, &c. in recompence of the aforesaid charge and adventure, and for bearing the charge of draining, and maintaining the works from time to time, shall have and enjoy the said whole 95,000 acres." Now the chief advocate of this measure in the house was no other than "lieutenantgeneral Cromwell," whose name afterwards appears as a commissioner "to hear, determine, order, adjudge, and execute, all such things as are prescribed by this act." Circumstances had changed a little! It was not undeserving of praise in Cromwell, however, to seek thus to repair the temporary obstruction he had offered to an undertaking of general advantage, and in his former opposition to which he had supposed himself sanctioned by the consideration of higher objects and efforts that then claimed the influence such opposition gave him. For his influence in all the districts around Huntingdon and Ely was now indeed supreme. The "Lord of the Fens" was the name the common people worshipped him by.t Some of the parliamentary chiefs congratulated Hampden on the great position of popularity his kinsman had achieved, and suggested various places he might offer himself for in the ensuing parliament; if, as was then generally supposed, his uncle's influence was too strong for his success in Huntingdon. He is indeed, returned the sagacious Hampden, an active man, a man "to sit well to the mark," for the other matter, he and his kinsman had already taken council. The writs appeared, returnable in November, 1640, and Cromwell offered himself at once for Cambridge. He was encountered by a formidable opposition, headed by John Cleaveland, the well-known poet, who was at that time a tutor of St. John's, and a man of considerable influence, all of which he levelled in every possible way against Cromwell. The contest was obstinately *He passed another act for the same purpose on the 26th of May, 1654, during his own protectorate. † Mercurius Aulicus, November 5. 1643. fierce, and ended in Cromwell's return at last, by the majority of a single vote. That vote, exclaimed Cleaveland-or at least his friends affirm he exclaimed this "that vote, that single vote, hath ruined both church and kingdom." Cromwell remembered the disservice in after years, and paid it back with interest by means of his majorgenerals of the protectorate. Cleaveland was arrested by those worthies at Haynes, and sent to prison in Yarmouth. I cannot resist inserting here the reasons which were given by them for this step, from the state documents of the time. The first was, that he lived in utter obscurity in the house of a royalist, very few persons of the neighbourhood knowing that there was such a man resident amongst them! the second was, that he possessed great abilities, and was able to do considerable disservice! and a third reason for his imprisonment was, that he wore good clothes, though, as he confessed, he had no estate but 201. per annum, allowed him by two gentlemen, and 301. by the person in whose house he resided, and whom he assisted in his studies! He would, it is said, have been released, had he possessed any property upon which the commissioners could have fixed an assessment. Yet Cleaveland had possibly the advantage after all, for his good spirits never forsook him, and there was light enough in his prison to enable him to write out that definition of a protector, which not uncharacteristically illustrates, as we shall find, some passages in Cromwell's history. "What's a Protector? He's a stately thing, He's a brass farthing, stamped with a crown, A tragic actor, Cæsar in a clown! A bladder blown with others' breath puft full- Æsops proud Ass vail'd in the Lion's skin, The Brewer's with the King's arms quartered. |