Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/51

 This Elizabeth Steward, who had now become Mrs. Robert Cromwell, was, say the genealogists, ‘indubitably descended from the Royal Stuart Family of Scotland’; and could still count kindred with them. ‘From one Walter Steward, who had accompanied Prince James of Scotland, when our inhospitable politic Henry. detained the poor Prince, driven in by stress of weather to him here. Walter did not return with the Prince to Scotland; having ‘fought tournaments,’—having made an advantageous marriage-settlement here. One of his descendants, Robert Steward, happened to be Prior of Ely when Henry. dissolved the Monasteries; and proving pliant on that occasion, Robert Steward, last Popish Prior, became the first Protestant Dean of Ely, and—‘was remarkably attentive to his family,’ says Noble. ‘The profitable Farming of the Tithes at Ely, above mentioned; this, and other settlements, and good dotations of Church lands among his Nephews, were the fruits of Robert Steward’s pliancy on that occasion. The genealogists say, there is no doubt of this pedigree;—and explain in intricate tables, how Elizabeth Steward, Mother of Oliver Cromwell, was indubitably either the ninth, or the tenth, or some other fractional part of half a cousin to Charles Stuart, King of England.

Howsoever related to Charles Stuart or to other parties, Robert Cromwell, younger son of the Knight of Hinchinbrook, brought her home, we see, as his Wife, to Huntingdon, about 1591; and settled with her there, on such portion, with such prospects as a cadet of the House of Hinchinbrook might have. Portion consisting of certain lands and messuages round and in that Town of Huntingdon,—where, in the current name ‘Cromwell’s Acre,’ if not in other names applied to lands and messuages there, some feeble echo of him and his possessions still survives, or seems to survive. These lands he himself farmed: the income in all is guessed or computed to have been about 300l. a-year; a tolerable fortune in those times; perhaps somewhat like 1000l. now. Robert Cromwell’s Father, as we said, and then his elder Brother, dwelt succes-