Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/372

358 which was his principal delight and diversion, it was never known till he was in the coach, which way he would go; and he was still hemmed in by his guards both before and behind; and the coach in which he went was always thronged as full as it could be with his servants, who were armed, and he seldom returned the same way he went, and rarely lodged two nights together in one chamber, but had many furnished and prepared, to which his own key conducted him."

Though this is the statement of an enemy, we can very well believe it, for the life of Oliver had been for years aimed at by assassins, both royalist and republican, by paid bravoes of Charles II., and by fanatics. The fears and anxieties of these various causes would tell strongly as his health failed. He reached his fifty-ninth year in April, and was therefore fast reaching his sixtieth. For fourteen days before the death of lady Claypole, the protector was almost day and night by her bedside, not being able to attend to any business in his deep anxiety. Much has been said of closetings with the lady Claypole on her deathbed, and of her expressing a strong sense of the blood that had been shed, and especially that of the king, and of her having earnestly exhorted him to resign the government and restore the ancient family, and that these expostulations from his dying daughter weighed heavily on his mind. But this is all mere surmise. That lady Claypole might, as a woman, have such conscientious sentiments on the subject is quite possible; but even Clarendon, while favouring the belief, confesses that "nobody was near enough to hear the particulars." That Cromwell, as well as his coadjutors, were honestly convinced that the death of Charles was both just and absolutely necessary, there can be no doubt; yet, even under such circumstances, the beloved props of his house falling around him, and the sentient shadow of his own death drawing near, a man might very well question again, and question gloomily, the grounds of so unexampled a measure as the trial and execution of his king. But that Cromwell did so is mere conjecture; that the loss of his daughter acting on his own failing frame hastened his own decease, there can be no doubt. Lady Claypole died on the 6th of August, and George Fox going to Hampton Court, to represent to Cromwell the persecutions of his friends, on the 20th of that month, met him riding in Hampton Court Park at the head of his life guards, and was so struck with his altered appearance, that he said "he felt a waft of death go forth against him, and when he came up to him he looked like a dead man." On hearing George's statement, he desired him to come to the palace to him; but the next day when he went thither, he was told that he was much worse, and that the physicians were not willing he should speak with him. He died on the 3rd of September, the day of Dunbar and Worcester, the day which he had set down as his fortunate day, and which was in nothing more so than in this last and finishing event. He laid down a burden which he had often said "was too heavy for man," and with the possession of that form of government which he sincerely deemed essential to truth and liberty still in his grasp. It was a form of government which had no foundation in the opinions and convictions of the people at large, and which must sooner or later fall: and the old prejudices in favour of royalty bring back a fresh lesson of martyrdom to its votaries. The dictatorship was at an end; it had been maintained by his own innate vigour, and could only last as long as he did. The day that he died was a day of terrible wind, and his enemies declare that the devil came in it to fetch him away; his friends—that nature could not witness the departure of so great a spirit without marking it with its strong emotion. Many are the sayings of his last hours reported by friends and enemies, but it is certain that he expressed his firm conviction that he died in the unbroken covenant with God. That he had filled him with as much assurance of his pardon and his love as his sold could hold, and that he was a conqueror, and more than a conqueror, through Christ that had strengthened him.

The character of Cromwell has been drawn according to the bias of the various parties who depicted him. With the royalists he was an adventurer and usurper; with the ultra-republicans a traitor. Some have been pleased to regard him as a canting hypocrite, and others as the perfect specimen of a hero and a statesmen. All have been compelled to acknowledge the pre-eminence of his genius and the force of his character. Clarendon, the royalist historian, concludes his portraiture with these remarks:—"In a word, as he was guilty of many crimes against which damnation is denounced, and for which hell-fire is prepared, so he had some good qualities which have caused the memory of some men in all ages to be celebrated, and he will be looked upon by posterity as a brave, wicked man." On the other hand a modern biographer has exalted him to the skies as a perfect saint and demi-god, in whom there is no possible flaw, and whose darkest act has some sublime excuse; but as the same eccentric writer has also placed Mahomet on the pedestal of perfection, and made his mission as sacred as that of our Saviour—an apotheosis which he will doubtless confer on the deistical old tyrant, Frederick of Prussia—his estimate has all the less value. The simple fact is, that Oliver Cromwell was a great man with a great man's faults, but with talents, virtues, and noble intentions which far outweigh them. That he was an earnest and liberty-loving man of the highest purposes and the most enlightened views, few persons can compare his history with those which went I before and came after it without conceding. He was led on by the force of circumstances and the predominance of his genius, to the highest place in his country; and had not the immaturity, in the nation, of the principles on which he and his party acted, compelled him to restrain the wildness of one party, and the despotism of others, he would undoubtedly have left to his country the august legacy of a system of government, such as no country then, and few now have attained to. He was far before his age; and the fact which so strongly attests the virtue and patriotism of the man, is, that he became arbitrary and a dictator to establish, if possible, not a despotism, but a free and tolerant government.

When we compare the lawlessness of the reigns before him, the debauchery and bigotry of those which came after; when we recall the bloody scaffolds, the crowded dungeons, the brandings, the ear-loppings, the nose-slittings, the wholesale ruin of families on account of their religious faith, and all the villainies and merciless oppressions of the