Page:Studies in Irish History, 1649-1775 (1903).djvu/23

Cromwell in Ireland broken; they do not want new ones; still less, new ones which are incomparably heavier than the old. In mid-May Cromwell, with Fairfax, Harrison, Waller, Goff and Okey—all but one of them regicides—have to abandon the preparations for the Irish war, and go hunting mutineers from Andover to Oxford. The mutinies are quelled (mainly by a trick on the part of Cromwell, of which you will find scant mention in later histories), but the wrongs from which they spring remain. This Commonwealth—as they call it—has dammed up its wealth in its own House of Commons. The golden stream has not been allowed to descend to the people. Sequestration of royalist lands, sale of crown lands, dean and chapter lands, and forfeited properties, had only made a change of masters; the people —the peasants, the hewers of wood and drawers of water—were poorer than they had ever been before.

This fact is really the keynote to the whole mystery of this great Rebellion and its subsequent flat and ignominious end.

Among the hundred causes and reasons given for this Civil War, the foundation and root cause of the struggle has received little notice. One hundred years earlier the King and his nobles had combined together to rob the Church, 11