Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/307

Rh ‘A Petition was delivered in the field to the General, in the name of “many well-affected people in Essex”; desiring, That the Army might not be disbanded; in regard the Commonwealth had many enemies, who watched for such an occasion to destroy the good people.’

Such, and still dimmer, is the jotting of dull authentic Bulstrode,—drowning in official oil, and somnolent natural pedantry and fat, one of the remarkablest scenes our History ever had: An Armed Parliament, extra-official, yet not without a kind of sacredness, and an Oliver Cromwell at the head of it; demanding with one voice, as deep as ever spake in England, ‘ Justice, Justice!’ under the vault of Heaven.

That same afternoon, the Army moved on to St. Albans, nearer to London; and from the Rendezvous itself, a joint Letter was despatched to the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, which the reader is now at last to see. I judge it, pretty confidently, by evidence of style alone, to be of Cromwell’s own writing. It differs totally in this respect from any other of those multitudinous Army-Papers; which were understood, says Whitlocke, to be drawn up mostly by Ireton, ‘who had a subtle working brain’; or by Lambert, who also had got some tincture of Law and other learning, and did not want for brain. They are very able Papers, though now very dull ones. This is in a far different style; in Oliver’s worst style; his style when he writes in haste,—and not in haste of the pen merely, for that seems always to have been a most rapid business with him; but in haste before the matter had matured itself for him, and the real kernels of it got parted from the husks. A style of composition like the structure of a block of oak-root,—as tortuous, unwedgeable, and as strong! Read attentively, this Letter can be understood, can be believed : the tone of it, the ‘voice’ of it, reminds us of what Sir Philip Warwick heard; the voice of a man risen justly into a kind of chant,—very dangerous for the City of London at present.