other evidence we know that Cromwell did not escape, nor was it possible that he should, from those painful struggles with religious gloom that at one time or another confront nearly every type of mind endowed with spiritual faculty. They have found intense expression in many keys from Augustine down to Cowper's "Castaway." Some they leave plunged in gulfs of perpetual despair, while stronger natures emerge from the conflict with all the force that is in them purified, exalted, fortified, illumined. Oliver was of the melancholic temperament, and the misery was heavy while it lasted. But the instinct of action was born in him, and when the summons came, he met it with all the vigor of a strenuous faith and an unclouded soul.

After his marriage Cromwell returned to his home at Huntingdon, and there for eleven years took care of the modest estate that his father had left. For the common tradition of Oliver as the son of a brewer there is nothing like a sure foundation. Robert Cromwell undoubtedly got his living out of the land, though it is not impossible that he may have done occasional brewing for neighbors less conveniently placed for running water. We may accept or reject with tolerable indifference. The elder branch of his family meanwhile slowly sank down in the world, and in 1627 Hinchinbrook was sold to one of the house of Montagu, father of the admiral, who in days to come helped to bring back Charles II, and an uncle of that Earl of Manchester by whose side Oliver was drawn into such weighty dispute when the storms of civil war rose. Decline of family interests did not impair Oliver's personal position in his town, for in the beginning of 1628 he was chosen to represent Huntingdon in Parliament.

This was the third Parliament of the reign, the great Parliament that fought and carried the Petition of Right, the famous enactment which recites and confirms the old instruments against forced loan or tax; which forbids arrest or imprisonment save by due process of law, forbids the quartering of soldiers or sailors in men's houses against their will, and shuts out the tyrannous decrees called by the name of martial law.

Here the new member, now at the age of twenty-nine, saw at their noble and hardy task the first generation of the champions of the civil rights and parliamentary liberties of England. He saw the zealous and highminded Sir John Eliot, the sage and intrepid

Pym, masters of eloquence and tactical resource. He saw the first lawyers of the day Coke, now nearing eighty, but as keen for the letter of the law now that it was for the people, as he had been when he took it to be on the side of authority; Glanvil, Selden, "the chief of men reputed in this land,"all conducting the long train of arguments, legal and constitutional, for old laws and franchises, with an erudition, an acuteness, and a weight as cogent as any performances ever witnessed within the walls of the Commons House. By his side sat his cousin John Hampden, whose name speedily became, and has ever since remained, a standing symbol for civil courage and lofty love of country. On the same benches still sat Wentworth, in many respects the boldest and most powerful political genius then in England, now for the last time using his gifts of ardent eloquence on behalf of the popular cause.

All the stout-hearted struggle of that memorable twelvemonth against tyrannical innovation in civil things and rigorous reaction in things spiritual Cromwell witnessed, down to the ever-memorable scene in English history where Holles and Valentine held the Speaker fast down in his chair, to assert the right of the House to control its own adjournment, and to launch Eliot's resolutions in defiance of the king. Cromwell's first and only speech in this Parliament was the production of a case in which a reactionary bishop had backed up a certain divine in preaching flat popery at St. Paul's Cross, and had forbidden a Puritan reply. The Parliament was abruptly dissolved (March, 1629), and for eleven years no other was called together.

There is no substance in the fable, though so circumstantially related, that, in 1636, in company with his cousin Hampden, despairing of his country, he took his passage to America, and that the vessel was stopped by an order in Council. All the probabilities are against it, and there is no evidence for it. What is credible enough is Clarendon's story that five years later, on the day when the Great Remonstrance was passed, Cromwell whispered to Falkland that if it had been rejected he would have sold all he had the next morning, and never have seen England more, and he knew there many other honest men of the same resolution. So near, the Royalist historian reflects, was this poor kingdom at that time to its deliverance.

His property meanwhile had been increased by a further bequest of land in Huntingdon from his uncle Richard Crom

well. Two years after his return from Westminster (1631) he sold his whole Huntingdon property for eighteen hundred pounds. With this capital in hand he rented and stocked grazing-lands at the east end of St. Ives, some five miles down the river, and here he remained, steadily doing his business, and watching the black clouds slowly rise on the horizon of national affairs. Children came in due order, nine of them in all. He went to the parish church, "generally with a piece of red flannel round his neck, as he was subject to an inflammation in his throat." He had his children baptized like other people, and for one of them he asked the vicar, a fellow of St. John's at Cambridge, to stand godfather. He took his part in the affairs of the place. At Huntingdon his keen public spirit and blunt speech had brought him into trouble. A new charter in which, among other provisions, Oliver was made a borough justice, transformed an open and popular corporation into a close one. Cromwell dealt

faithfully with those who had procured the change. The mayor and aldermen complained to the Privy Council of the disgraceful and unseemly speeches used to them by him and another person, and one day a messenger from the Council carried the two offenders under arrest to London (November, 1630). There was a long hearing with many contradictory asseverations. We may assume that Cromwell made a stout defense on the merits, and he appears to have been discharged of blame, though he admitted that he had spoken in heat and passion, and begged that his angry words might not be remembered against him. In 1636 he went from St. Ives to Ely, his old mother and unmarried sisters keeping house with him. This year his maternal uncle died and left to him the residuary interest under his will. The uncle had farmed the cathedral tithes of Ely, as his father had farmed them before him, and in this position Oliver had succeeded him. Ely was the home of Cromwell and his familyuntil 1647.

II. THE LAWS, THE KING, AND THE QUEEN.

STUDENTS of the struggle between monarchy and Parliament in the seventeenth century have worked hard upon black-letter; on charter, custom, franchise, tradition, precedent, and prescription, on which the Commons defended their privileges, and the king defended his prerogatives. How much the lawyers really founded their case on the precedents for which they had ransacked the wonderful collections of Sir Robert Cotton, or how far, on the other hand, their "pedantry" was a mask for a determination that in their hearts rested on very different grounds, opens a discussion into which we need not enter here. What the elective element in the old original monarchy amounted to, and what the popular element in the ancient deliberative council amounted to; what differences in power and prerogative marked the office of a king when it was filled by Angevin, by Plantagenet, or by Tudor; how the control of Parliament over legislation and taxation stood under the first three Edwards and under the last three Henrys; whether the popular champions in the seventeenth century were abandoning both the accustomed theory and the practice of Parliament from Edward I to the end of Elizabeth; whether the real conservative on the old lines of the constitution was not King Charles himself,-all these, and the kindred questions, profoundly interesting as they are, fill little space in the story of Cromwell. It was not until the day of the lawyers and the constitutionalists had passed that Cromwell's hour arrived, and "the meager, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law, and statute" vanished from men's thoughts.

In the time of Washington the questions of the constitutional right of Parliament to impose taxing laws upon the English colonists in Massachusetts or Virginia rapidly lost all living significance. The unwritten law was on the side of King George, but liberty was on the side of the colonists, and liberty they were resolutely determined to conquer. The constitutional case of the seventeenth century is more complex and goes deeper; still, the situation in this aspect of it was not unlike. "It was for the Commons," says the historian, "to take up the part which had been played by the barons who had resisted John, and by the earls who had resisted Edward. Here and there, it might be, their case was not without a flaw; but the spirit of the old constitution was on their side" (Gardiner).

In a constitution mainly unwritten, as was that of England on the accession of Charles I, it is in the spirit of it that men seek the root of the matter. Nearly all those chief articles of government which are now firm as adamant were at that moment vague, fluctuating, mutable, and open to infinite and legitimate contention.

To a man of Cromwell's political mind the questions were plain and broad, and could be solved without much history. If the estates of the crown no longer sufficed for the public service, could the king make the want good by taxing his subjects at his own good pleasure? Or was the charge to be exclusively imposed by the estates of the realm? Were the estates of the realm to have a direct voice in naming agents and officers of executive power, and to exact a full responsibility to themselves for all acts done in the name of executive power? Was the freedom of the subject to be at the mercy of arbitrary tribunals, and were judges to be removable at the king's pleasure? What was to be done

and this came closest home of all-to put down cruel assumptions of authority by the bishops, to reform the idleness of the clergy, to provide godly and diligent preachers, and sternly to set back the rising tide of popery, of vain ceremonial devices and pernicious Arminian doctrine? Such was the simple statement of the case as it presented itself to earnest and stirring men. Taxation and religion have ever been the two prime movers in human revolutions; in the civil troubles in the seventeenth century both those powerful factors were combined.

In more than one important issue the king undoubtedly had the black-letter upon his side, and nothing is easier than to show that in some of the transactions, even before actual resort to arms, the Commons defied both letter and spirit. Charles was not an Englishman by birth, training, or temper, but he showed himself at the outset as much a legalist in method and argument as Coke, Selden, St. John, or any Englishman among them. It was in its worst sense that he thus from first to last played the formalist, and if to be a pedant is to insist on applying a stiff theory to fluid fact, no man ever deserved the name better. Both king and Commons, however, were well aware that the vital questions of the future could be decided by no appeals to a disputable past. The manifest issue was whether prerogative was to be the basis of the government of England. Charles held that it had been always so, and made up his mind that so it should remain. He had seen