Page:Studies in Irish History, 1649-1775 (1903).djvu/76

Cromwell in Ireland that which begins with Gerard in 1654, and ends with Dr. Hewitt and Sir Henry Slingsby in 1658! "His little finger lay heavier upon the Nation," said the people, "than the loins of the late King had lain." And then he died, and there came back to a weary and blood-soaked land—a King.

Cromwell left nothing behind him—no public works, no new system of law, no better tenure of land, no clearer conception of justice. "Nothing cried at his funeral," wrote Evelyn, "but the dogs."

And this—the dismallest failure of English history—is the man in whose praise to-day histories are imagined, and statues inaugurated. Courage, capacity, diligence, and the most dogged and determined resolution—these things he had to an extraordinary degree; but to what end and at what cost did he use them?

It was a cowardly and base act of the Parliament of 1660 to dig up his remains and hang his mouldering body on the gibbet at Tyburn. You are aware of the circumstances which attended that loathsome vengeance. But history has missed one strange coincidence which resulted from it. You remember the choice which Cromwell, in the days of his victory, gave the unfortunate Irish—"Hell or Connaught" I turn to 64