Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/84

 our Oliver. But the usual member in former Parliaments is Sir Oliver, our Oliver’s Uncle. Browne Willis must have made, or have copied, some slip of the pen. Suppose him to have found in some of his multitudinous parchments, an ‘Oliver Cromwell, Knight of the Shire’: and in place of putting in the ‘Sir,’ to have put in ‘Esq.’; it will solve the whole difficulty. Our Oliver, when he indisputably did afterwards enter Parliament, came in for Huntingdon Town; so that, on this hypothesis, he must have first been Knight of the Shire, and then have sunk (an immense fall in those days) to be a Burgh Member; which cannot without other ground be credited. What the original Chancery Parchments say of the business, whether the error is theirs or Browne Willis’s, I cannot decide: on inquiry at the Roll’s Office, it turns out that the Records, for some fifty years about this period, have vanished ‘a good while ago.’ Whose error it may be, we know not; but an error we may safely conclude it is. Sir Oliver was then still living at Hinchinbrook, in the vigour of his years, no reason whatever why he should not serve as formerly; nay, if he had withdrawn, his young Nephew, of no fortune for a Knight of the Shire, was not the man to replace him. The Members for Huntingdon Town in this Parliament, as in the preceding one, are a Mr. Mainwaring and a Mr. St. John. The County Members in the preceding Parliament, and in this too with the correction of the concluding syllable in this, are ‘Edward Montague, Esquire,’ and ‘Oliver Cromwell, Knight.’

In the Ashmole Museum at Oxford stands catalogued a ‘Letter from Oliver Cromwell to Mr. Henry Downhall, at St. John’s College, Cambridge; dated, Huntingdon, 14 October 1626’; which might perhaps, in some very faint way, have elucidated Dr. Simcott and the hypochondrias for us. On applying to kind friends at Oxford for a copy of this Letter, I