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* CBOMEB. 600 CKOmWELL. placed corrupt administrators by honest olluials; redueed taxes; reformed the army; iiu-reased trade, and greatly extended railway, postal, and telegraph facilities. CROMER, Mahtin (l.-il2-89).' A Polish his- torian, born at Biecz, near Cracow, and educated at the academy in that city. He was secretary to tbe eldest sou of King Sigismund I., and was intrusted with dililomatic missions to Pope Paul V. and to the emperors Charles V. and Ferdinand I. In 1578 he was appointed bishop of Ermcland. His history of Poland, from its beginning to the year loOtJ. Dc Orig'nte et Kebus Gcslis J'oloiioruiii {15.55: frequently reprinted), is a valuable source of information on this sub- ject. Another important work is the geographi- cal and statistical publication Polonia {in Latin, 158li: German trans. 1741). CROMLECH, krom'lek. See Dolmen. CROMP'TON. A town in Lancashire, Eng- land, four miles northeast of Oldham, and eleven miles northeast of Manchester. It has important cotton manufactures. Population, in lUOl, 1.3,400. CROMPTON, Samuel {175.3-1827). An Eng- lish inventor, whose spinning-mule revolutionized the cotton-weaving industry. In his j'outh he was largely occu])icd with weaving at home, and it was the dissatisfaction caused by the machine he used that led to the perfection of his invention in 1779. Xnable to bear the expense of taking out a patent, he exploited his machine by private arrangement with manufacturers, some of whom later denied their obligations to him ; so that for his valuable invention he received less than £70. In 1812, after much labor, he secured from the House of Commons a grant of £5000, the only official recognition bestowed upon him. Consult French. Life and Times of Crompton {London, 18G0). CROMPTON'S SPINNER. See Spinning. CROM'WELL. A dramatic work by Victor Hugo (18-27). It was not intended for the stage. The preface to its first edition has since become famous as containing the breviary of French dramatic 'Romanticism.' CROMWELL, Bartlett (1840—). An .American naval oflicer, born in Nebraska. He attended the "Naval Academy for three years (1857-60). During the Civil War he served in the South Atlantic blockading and Eastern Gulf squadrons, and rose to the rank of lieutenant- conunander. He was promoted connnandcr in 1874. and as such w-as intrusted with the naviga- tion of the flag-ship Ticonderoga during Admiral Schufeldfs voyage around the world in 1879-81. He thereafter successively became captain in 1889, commodore in 1898. and rear-admiral in 1899. After the liberation of Cuba from Spain, Cromwell Aas ordered to take charge of the naval station at Havana. In 1901 he was appointed to the command of the United States fleet in South American waters. CROMWELL, Henry (1028-74). The fourth son of Oliver Cromwell. At the age of sixteen he served as a soldier in the Parliamentary army. In the Barebones Parliament he was one of the six Irish members. In 1055 he went 1o Ireland as a major-general, and was appointed Lord Lieutenant in 1657. His rule was popular, and Jiis moderation to Royalists received the approval of Charles II., who, at the Restoration, confirmed his Irish estates under the Act of Settlement. His latter years were passed as a farmer. His great- grandson, the last representative of the house of Cromwell, died in 1821. CROMWELL, Oliver (1599-1058). Lord Protector of England. He was born at Hunting- don, April 25, 1599, and was the only surviving son and heir of Robert Cromwell and Elizabeth, daughter of William Steward, whose family, tra- dition notwitlistanding, has no connection with the royal house of Stuart. The Cromwell family sprang from Katherine, who was the sister of Thomas Cromwell, the Hammer of the JXonks, and who married jMorgan Williams, a Welsh brewer of means. Their son Richard took the surname Cromwell, and, profiting by his uncle's influence, rose to wealth and honor in the ser"ice of Henry VIII., retaining his sovereign's favor even after his uncle's fall in 1540. The family continued to be prominent from that time, and «as noted for its lavish entertainment of roj-alty, but owing to the extravagance of Oliver's uncle of the same name, the fortunes of the family had been squandered, and in 1627 the family seat at Hinchinbrook was sold to Sir Sidney Montague. Oliver's father was the second son of Heniy, the Golden Knight, and the grandson of Richard {Williams) Cromwell, and he therefore repre- sents a younger brancli of the family, whose in- come was never large. Little is known of Cromwell's early life. He was educated at the free school of Huntingdon under Dr. Thomas Beard, an austere Puritan. In 1616 he entered Sidney Sussex College at Cam- bridge, a stronghold of Puritanism, but soon withdrew, probably owing to his father's death, in 1617. There is no foundation for the reports by royalist biographers of wildness and profligacy in his early years, though he was boisterous and only moderately successful at his studies. He probably studied law for a short time at Lin- coln's Inn. In 1020 he married Elizabeth Bour- chier, daughter of a London merchant, and she seems to have brought him a considerable dowry. The few glimpses that we have of his life before the beginning of his active public career, which may be said to date from the meeting of the Long Parliament in 1640, leave no doubt as to which side- he would espouse in the approaching strug- gle. For some years he was in the throes of a re- ligious conflict, from which he emerged in a trium- phant conversion. Throughout the rest of his life he was deeply religious, an ardent though tolerant Puritan. Tlie earliest letter from his pen which has come down to us (1636) is a solicitation for a subscription to maintain a lectureship, by which means the Puritans supported lU'eachers, owing to the neglect of this function by the established clergy. He was elected to the Parliament of 1628, where his only recorded speech is directed against the opponents of Puritanism. He watched the career of Gustavus Adolphus with eager sympathy, and it is thought that his own early military successes were in part a result of his careful study of Gustavus Adolphus's cam- paigns. He took less interest in purely political matters, but we know of three instances where he championed the poorer inhabitants of his di.s- tricts whose rights of pasturage were threatened. He was fined £10 in lO.'iO for having neglected to be knighted, but we have no rcford of his having resisted the forced loan or the payment of ship- money. Yet there can be no doubt that he was