Page:Life of Oliver Cromwell.pdf/6

 marshy land with which a large portion of that county is covered. This seat, which was extremely popular, procured for him amongst the country people the title of the "Lord of the Fens." Two years after, he obtained as an Parliament as member for the city of Cambridge; an honour to which the circumstance above alluded to considerably helped him.

That period was now past approaching whose extraordinary events opened wide tire path of ambition to the daring and aspiring soul of Cromwell. In the year 1642, those unhappy differences first arose between the ill advised and ill-fated Charles I. and his Parliament, which led him who is the subject of these pages to a throne, and the king of England to a scaffold. The limits of this little memoir will not admit of our entering at any length into the various causes of this fatal disagreement, they were, however attended with too important results to be passed over altogether in silence.

About the period of the accession of Charles I. to the throne, a violent spirit of republicanism began to evince itself throughout England, together with a strong propensity to abridge the prerogatives of the crown, which had been pushed, in several instances, to an illegal length by Charles's father, James 1. This disposition with which the very first Parliament which Charles summoned was deeply imbued, acquired strength during that unhappy monarch's reign, by the rise of zealous and bigoted religious sectaries, of whose principles the most prominent was a violent aversion to monarchical form of government, which they thought inimical to the natural rights of mankind. Among the early causes of complaint against Charles, was the undue influence which he permit