Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/432

398 at Nottingham;—out of which most just durance some pragmatical official, Ashe, Jenner, or another, ‘by what order I know not,’ has seen good to deliver him; him, ‘the desperatest promoter of the Welsh Rebellion amongst them all.’ Such is red-tape even in a Heroic Puritanic Age! No wonder ‘the Officers have a sense of it,’ amounting even ‘to amazement.’ Our blood that we have shed in the Quarrel, this you shall account as nothing, since you so please; but these ‘manifest witnessings of God, so terrible and so just,’—are they not witnessings of God, are they mere sports of chance? Ye wretched infidel red-tape mortals, what will or can become of you? By and by, if this course hold, it will appear that ‘you are no Parliament’; that you are a nameless unbelieving rabble, with the mere title of Parliament, who must go about your business elsewhither, with soldiers’ pikes in your rearward!—

This Lieutenant-General is not without temper, says Mr. Maidston: ‘temper exceeding fiery, as I have known; yet the flame of it kept down for most part, or soon allayed;—and naturally compassionate towards objects in distress, even to an effeminate measure. Though God had made him a heart wherein was left little room for any fear but what was due to God Himself, yet did he exceed in tenderness towards sufferers, —yes, and in rigour against infidel quacks and godless detestable persons, which is the opposite phasis of that, he was by no means wanting!

the Regiments here have petitioned my Lord General against the Treaty’ at Newport, ‘and for Justice and a Settlement of the Kingdom. They desired the Lieutenant-General to recommend their Petition; which he hath done in the Letter following’;—which is of the same date, and goes, in the same bag with that to Jenner and Ashe, just given.