History of the English People, Volume VI: Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683Green, John Richard
History
History of the English People, Volume VI: Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683
Green, John Richard
Great Britain -- History
Charles was allowed to withdraw his army to Oxford, and even
to reappear unchecked in the field of his defeat.
[Sidenote: Cromwell.]
The quarrel of Cromwell with Lord Manchester at Newbury was destined to
give a new colour to the war. Pym, in fact, had hardly been borne to his
grave in Westminster Abbey before England instinctively recognized a
successor of yet greater genius in the victor of Marston Moor. Born in
the closing years of Elizabeth's reign, the child of a cadet of the
great house of the Cromwells of Hinchinbrook, and of kin, through their
marriages, with Hampden and St. John, Oliver had been recalled by his
father's death from a short stay at Cambridge to the little family
estate at Huntingdon, which he quitted for a farm at St. Ives. We have
seen his mood during the years of personal rule, as he dwelt in
"prolonging" and "blackness" amidst fancies of coming death, the
melancholy which formed the ground of his nature feeding itself on the
inaction of the time. But his energy made itself felt the moment the
tyranny was over. His father had sat, with three of his uncles, in the
later Parliaments of Elizabeth. Oliver had himself been returned to that
of 1628, and the town of Cambridge sent him as its representative to the
Short Parliament as to the Long. It is in the latter that a courtier,
Sir Philip Warwick, gives us our first glimpse of his actual appearance.
"I came into the House one morning, well clad, and perceived a gentleman
speaking whom I knew not, very ordinarily apparelled, for it was a plain
cloth suit, which seemed to have been made by an ill country tailor. His
linen was plain, and not very clean; and I remember a speck or two of
blood upon his little band, which was not much larger than his collar.
His hat was without a hat-band. His stature was of a good size; his
sword stuck close to his side; his countenance swoln and reddish; his
voice sharp and untuneable, and his eloquence full of fervour."
[Sidenote: The Ironsides.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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