Page:Studies in Irish History, 1649-1775 (1903).djvu/18

Cromwell in Ireland the daughter of a city merchant; threw up the law and went back to Huntingdon, where he farmed and brewed with indifferent success for some eight or ten years. That is all that is known with any certainty of the first half of the life of, perhaps, the most extraordinary man ever born in England.

His parentage deserves notice. He derived the name Cromwell from the maternal side. A certain Morgan Williams, a Welshman, married the sister of the famous, or infamous, Thomas Cromwell—Henry the Eighth’s head monk-killer and monastery-destroyer. Richard, the son of Morgan Williams, assumed the name Cromwell on receiving a grant of all the lands belonging to the monks in Huntingdon, which, we read, were “of prodigious value.” The grandson of this man, Richard Morgan, alias Cromwell, was the father of Oliver.

The intervening links in the family resided chiefly at Hinchinbrooke, “where had been a house of nuns.” Reading this entry, a doggerel epitaph on the walls of one of the old Hampshire Minsters comes back to mind. It runs thus:—

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