Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/321

Rh ''have been examined. Captain Middleton, and some others for him, have made stay thereof hitherto.''

I beseech your Excellency to give order it may be tried on Friday, or Saturday at farthest, if you please; and that so much may be signified to the Advocate.

''Sir I pray excuse my not-attendance upon you. I feared “to” miss the House a day, where it’s very necessary for me to be. I hope your Excellency will be at the Head-quarter tomorrow, where, if God be pleased, I shall wait upon you. I rest, your Excellency’s most humble servant,'' OLIVER CROMWELL.

Captain Middleton and his case have vanished completely out of the records; whether it was tried on Saturday, and how decided, will never now be known. Doubtless Fairfax ‘signified’ somewhat to the Advocate about it, but let us not ask what. ‘The Advocate’ is called ‘John Mills, Esquire, Judge-Advocate’; whose military Law-labours have mostly become silent now. The former Advocate was Dr. Dorislaus; of whom also a word. Dr. Dorislaus, by birth Dutch; appointed Judge-Advocate at the beginning of Essex’s campaignings; known afterwards on the King’s Trial; and finally, for that latter service, assassinated at the Hague, one evening, by certain high-flying Royalist cut-throats, Scotch several of them. The Portraits represent him as a man of heavy, deep-wrinkled, elephantine countenance, pressed down with the labours of life and law; the good ugly man here found his guietus.

The business in the House, ‘where it’s necessary for me to be’ without miss of a sitting, is really important, or at least critical, in these October days: Settlement of Army arrears, duties and arrangements; Tonnage and Poundage; business of the London Violence upon the Parliament (pardoned for the most part); business of Lieutenant-Colonel John Lilburn, now growing very noisy;—above all things, final Settlement