Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/50

 Esquire, in Ely; an opulent man, a kind of hereditary Farmer of the Cathedral Tithes and Church lands round that city; in which capacity his son, Sir Thomas Steward, Knight, in due time succeeded him, resident also at Ely. Elizabeth was a young widow when Robert Cromwell married her: the first marriage, to one ‘William Lynne, Esquire, of Bassingbourne in Cambridgeshire,’ had lasted but a year: husband and only child are buried in Ely Cathedral, where their monument still stands; the date of their deaths, which followed near on one another, is 1589. The exact date of the young widow’s marriage to Robert Cromwell is nowhere given; but seems to have been in 1591. Our Oliver was their fifth child; their second boy; but the first soon died. They had ten children in all; of whom seven came to maturity, and Oliver was their only son. I may as well print the little Note, smelted long ago out of huge dross-heaps in Noble’s Book, that the reader too may have his small benefit of it.