Page:Studies in Irish History, 1649-1775 (1903).djvu/24

Cromwell in Ireland the most active agent in this great conspiracy of plunder being Mr. Thomas Cromwell, the Surrey blacksmith's son. Exactly one hundred years later another great combination or conspiracy arose, this time the object being to rob the King and the nobles, and what was left of the Church. The classes which coalesced for this second confiscation were the two which the intervening century had produced or strengthened—the small country gentleman and the city trader. To both of these classes Oliver Cromwell belonged by birth, by profession, and by instinct.

For twenty years he had been a gentleman farmer and brewer. His grandfather had been a man of large means, but the "prodigious value," which had come to the Cromwell family at the suppression of the monasteries, had as quickly vanished—dissipated by extravagance and wild living. The family had descended in the social scale. Oliver's father, Robert, was a farmer. His mother, Elizabeth Styward, managed a brew-house. Of his five sisters, two at least made low marriages. One was the wife of Desborough, carter, and Councillor of State. Dr. Gardiner has told us that Cromwell's earliest extant letter was written to a city merchant, asking him to continue his subscription to maintain a certain Dr. Wills, a preacher and a "man 12