his flank with cavalry, as he had before done on Hamilton’s. But as soon as he was off active service, he became mischievous. Vain, restless, and of extravagant habits, he perpetually chafed alike against Cromwell’s control and the authority of the parliament. He alone of the leading officers had never obtained a seat in parliament, and thus never became habituated to its civilising influence. Mrs. Hutchinson, while including him and Cromwell in the same condemnation, admits that there was this difference, {338} that while the one was gallant and great, the other had nothing but an unworthy pride, most insolent in prosperity and as abject and base in adversity.’ The term ‘leveller,’ then as now, was very loosely and ambiguously applied. According to Mrs. Hutchinson, who is a good authority on this point, the nickname was originally given to a: ‘certain sort of public-spirited men,’ who, when the presbyterian and independent factions were at their hottest, ‘declared against the ambition of the grandees of both and against the prevailing partiality, by which great men were privileged to do those things for which meaner men were punished. Many then got shelter in the house and army against their debts, by which others were undone. The lords, as if it were the chief privilege of nobility to be licensed in vice, claimed many prerogatives, which set them out of the reach of common justice, which these good people would have had equally belong to the poorest as well as to the mighty.’ ‘But,’ continues Mrs. Hutchinson, taking a turn at philosophy, ‘as all virtues are mediums and have their extremes, there rose up after under the same name a people who endeavoured the levelling of all estates and qualities, which these sober levellers were never guilty of desiring.’ [1] [1] [_Life of colonel Hutchinson_, ii. 125; ed, 1885.]