IV
OLIVER CROMWELL

“He is perhaps the only example which history affords of one man having governed the most opposite events and proved sufficient for the most various destinies.”

No man’s character was ever so completely and so tersely summed up as the great Oliver’s is here in these few words of a critic belonging to another race and nation, and, as regards his varied destinies, it may be added that no man ever was raised up and set to work by the Controller of human destinies as opportunely as he was.

History shows no parallel to it, not even in the oft-quoted story of Cincinnatus, and certainly in all the long array of our rulers there is none other whose story is so crammed with wonders or who crowded so many notable and pregnant acts into the busy days of a few years as this gentleman-farmer of Huntingdonshire, who at forty-three left his farming and vestry-meetings and the like and girded on his sword to go and fight the good fight of freedom, and who at fifty-two laid it aside to prove himself as good a statesman and ruler as he had been soldier and general.

His claim to a foremost place among the Makers of Britain is a twofold one, for he was a restorer, a reinvigorator, as it were, of this realm, as well as a very considerable widener of it. When the futile and inglorious reign of “the most learned fool in Christendom” came to an end, all the brilliant promise of the Elizabethan age had been wofully obscured, and the glories of the great Queen and her pirates looked like those of a summer sun setting behind a bank of fog.

As Macaulay justly put the case: “On the day of the accession of James I. England descended from the rank which she had hitherto held and began to be regarded as a Power hardly of the second order.... He began his administration by putting an end to the war which had raged many years between England and Spain, and from that time he shunned hostilities with a caution which was proof against the insults of his neighbours and the clamour of his subjects.”

How different this from the gallant days of Gloriana and her knights! And yet this poor crowned and sceptred ninny aspired to be a despot even as his son after him did. It is true that these realms were beginning to need a despot and that badly, but not such a one as could ever have been born of that hopeless House of Stuart. A despot who is a strong man may be good or evil as he uses his opportunities and his powers, but the whole stage of history has not yet held a despot who was also a weak man who did not prove himself at once a curse to his country and the world.

The story of the feeble violence and silly cunning with which Charles the First sought to enforce that ridiculous theory of his about the Divine Right of Kings has been too often and too variously told for us to need to trouble with it here. There is a Divine Right of Kings, as the great Oliver was very soon to show with most unmistakable and most unanswerable logic, but the kind of king who really has Divine rights does not usually have them because he is the son of his father, and especially of such a father as James the First of England and Sixth of Scotland.

Our present concern is with the fact that this Empire of ours, in a most critical state of its process of making which came very near to one of unmaking, was saved and transformed from weakness to strength by the substitution of the real despotism of the Lord Protector from the sham or histrionic despotism of Charles the First.

The fact was that the body-corporate of this infant empire was assailed by the worst of all national disorders, internal disintegration. England, the very heart and centre of it, was about to be rent in twain by the frenzied and pitiless talons of civil war, and that is a war in which the right side—which, of course, is always the best side—must not only win, but utterly crush and pulverise the other unless wreck and chaos irretrievable are to follow.

This was the central idea that the Great Oliver grasped just as Edward of the Long Legs had grasped his brilliantly premature idea of the United Kingdom. He was the latest of that series of iron-handed men that had begun with William the Norman. The watchword of his whole public life was “healing and settling.” The wounds of his country had to be healed and its disorders settled, no matter by what means, so long as it was done, and in this deep-rooted conviction we see at a glance his kinship with the other Empire-makers who had gone before him.

Of his early life there is little to be said, though it is noteworthy that he was once fined £10 for neglecting a summons to appear at the King’s coronation and receive the honour of knighthood. He little thought then that he would one day find it his duty to refuse the crown and sceptre of England.

Every one who has read even the school-books knows that when the war actually began all the apparent advantages were on the side of the Royalists. Though the first battles afforded the extraordinary spectacle of mere conflicts of amateur soldiers, few of whom had ever seen a real fight before, the Cavaliers, trained to horsemanship and the use of arms, and versed in all manly sports, made far finer fighting material than the raw levies of the Parliament. Had this difference continued victory must have remained, as it began, with the Royalists, with results to the nation that could hardly have failed to be of the very worst sort. This is what Cromwell himself says on this all-important subject:

“At my first going out into this engagement I saw our men were beaten at every hand. Your troops, said I, are most of them old, decayed serving-men, and tapsters and such kind of fellows, and, said I, their troops are gentlemen’s sons, younger sons and persons of quality. Do you think that the spirits of such base, mean fellows will ever be able to encounter gentlemen that have honour and courage and resolution in them? You must get men of spirit and, take it not ill what I say—I know you will not—of a spirit that is likely to go on as far as gentlemen will go, or else you will be beaten still.”

These wise words, which, by the way, were said to no less a man than John Hampden himself, form a key to all the battles of the Civil War. No sooner did Oliver come on to the field as a plain captain of yeomanry horse than his keen, if untaught, eye instantly recognised the one great virtue and strength of the Royalist party. They had an Idea, a devotion, a principle for the sake of which men were ready to sell their lands, melt their plate, beggar their families, and lose their own lives, and men so equipped could only be successfully met and withstood by men who, as he himself put it in that quaintly eloquent phraseology of his, “made some conscience of what they did,” and thereupon he set himself to find such men and make soldiers of them.

How well he succeeded the following extract from a contemporary news-letter written some ten months after the outbreak of war will sufficiently tell:

“As for Colonel Cromwell”—promotion, it will be seen, was somewhat rapid in those stormy days—“he hath two thousand brave men, well disciplined. No man swears but he pays his twelve pence. If he be drunk he is set in the stocks, or worse. If one calls the other Roundhead he is cashiered; insomuch that the countries where they come leap for joy of them and come in and join with them. How happy it were if all the forces were thus disciplined!”

On the field of Marston Moor, Prince Rupert nicknamed Cromwell “Old Ironsides,” and from that day to this the most invincible troops that ever marched to battle have been named after him. Years afterwards, when his work and theirs was done, their leader was able to say of them: “From that day forward they were never beaten and wherever they were engaged against the enemy they beat continually.”

This is literally true. Whether in skirmish or battle, at home or abroad, whether pitted against the disorderly chivalry of the Loyalists or the rigid discipline of the finest Continental troops; whether storming a breach or bearing the brunt of a half-lost battle, these psalm-singing, hard-hitting Crusaders of the new Church Militant not only were never beaten, but never once failed to hurl the enemy back in confusion and disaster.

In them, in short, that stubborn English valour which has since pushed its way all over the world was first disciplined. They formed the first model ever seen of an English regiment, a combination of many units of strength and valour moving and fighting as one, and the fact that “Old Ironsides” was the first man thus to add discipline to valour is in itself no small portion of his title to fame as an Empire-Maker.

The first occasion on which these Ironsides made their mark in battle is one of even greater importance than the battle itself, for it marks the entrance on to the stage of history of the first regularly disciplined English regiment, the parent of those who, on a thousand fields since then, have proved themselves worthy of their grim but splendid ancestors. It was the first time, too, that they had a chance to try conclusions with Rupert and his Cavaliers, hitherto unconquered and irresistible.

It was July 2, 1644, on a dull and storm-threatening afternoon, that Cavalier and Roundhead first met in a really serious fashion. Compared with what was now to be done Edgehill and all that had come after it had been trifles, for so far the conflicts had been those of amateurs at the art of war, each engaged, as it were, in licking the other into shape, and the conclusion that they now had to try was which of them had got into the best shape. There were about four-and-twenty thousand each of them as they stood through the anxious hours of that summer afternoon on either side of a ditch running across Marston Moor, each watching for a chance to attack, but feeling, no doubt, that the doings of the next few hours would decide an issue which needed a certain amount of thinking over.

The two armies were drawn up upon what is now the regulation pattern, right and left wings and centre. Cromwell with his Ironsides on the left of the Parliamentary army faced Rupert on the right of the Royalists, and he was supported by the infantry of what was then known as the Eastern Association. The King’s centre was held by Newcastle, and against it was the Parliamentary centre reinforced by nine thousand Scots infantry. The Royal left wing was composed of Goring’s cavalry regiments and was faced by the Parliamentary right wing under the two Fairfaxes.

During the afternoon there was an exchange of cannon shots which doesn’t seem to have done very much harm on either side. Prince Rupert, with his usual impetuosity, had been for some hours wanting to get over the ditch and try conclusions with the Ironsides, who were posted on a little eminence amidst standing corn, and who had wiled away the anxious hours of waiting with mutual exhortations and psalm singing, not a little to the amusement of Rupert and his gallant scapegraces, who were yet to learn that these close-cropped, grim-visaged Puritans could ride and fight a great deal better than they could sing.

The King’s older generals, no doubt contemplating Continental etiquette, had decided that it was too late to fight that evening and had withdrawn to their quarters. Cromwell, laughing at etiquette as he did at everything else that was not of practical utility, saw his chance, jumped the ditch, and went hot-footed and hot-handed into Rupert’s ranks. A bullet scored his neck, and hearing some one cry out that he was wounded he shouted: “All’s well. A miss is as good as a mile!” and charged on. Whether or not he was the first to use this now favourite expression I am not able to say, but at least it was characteristic.

The charge was met in a fashion worthy of Rupert and the gallant gentlemen who followed him, and we learn that after the first onset the Ironsides reeled back, but it was only for a moment. Some Scots cavalry came up behind them, they surged forward again, discipline and valour did their work, and a few minutes afterwards Prince Rupert and his merry men had met more than their match, and, ere long, to use his own words, Colonel Cromwell “had scattered them before him like a little dust.” The remnants of them were chased and cut down with a ruthless severity which was then part of the Puritan character, almost to the gates of York, eight miles away.

But Cromwell, profiting by the mistakes which Rupert himself had made in his headlong charges, kept his men well in hand, and when once the Royalist right wing was broken, led them round to see how the battle had gone on the Parliamentary right and centre.

If he had not done so Marston Moor might have replaced Charles Stuart on the throne of England. Goring had broken up Fairfax’s cavalry as completely as Oliver had broken up Rupert’s. He had flung them back upon their infantry supports, breaking these in turn, after which he flung himself with the seemingly triumphant Royalists of the centre on the Scots Infantry, taking them in flank and almost routing them, too. Only three regiments of them out of nine held their ground, the rest had broken and fled, and the Earl of Leven, their leader, was already making the best of his way towards Leeds.

The battle at this moment presented one of the strangest spectacles in the history of warfare. On the one side Prince Rupert with his broken brigades was flying towards the North, on the other Leven and Manchester and Fairfax, believing the day hopelessly lost, were making equal haste towards the South. Such was the juncture at which the Man of Destiny arrived. He was in command of the only really disciplined force on the field.

Mr. Frederic Harrison, in his excellent monograph on Cromwell, thus graphically describes what happened: “In an hour the genius of Cromwell had changed disaster into victory. Launching the Scotch troopers of his own wing against Newcastle’s Whitecoats, and the infantry of the Eastern Association to succour the remnants of the Scots in the centre, he swooped with the bulk of his own cavalry round the rear of the King’s army, and fell upon Goring’s victorious troopers on the opposite side of the field. Taking them in the rear, all disordered as they were in the chase and the plunder, he utterly crushed and dispersed them. Having thus with his own squadron annihilated the cavalry of the enemy’s both wings, he closed round upon the Royalist centre, and there the Whitecoats and the remnants of the King’s infantry were cut to pieces almost to a man.”

Such was Marston Moor, and how completely it was the work of the one man of destiny may be seen in the fact that, complete and crushing as the victory was, its advantages were almost entirely negatived by the incapacity and imbecility of the Parliamentary leaders in the West and South. Every one of any consequence wanted to be supreme leader; no one had either definite plans or the capacity to carry them through; and when at last there was a prospect of bringing matters to an issue on the field of Newberry, the Royalist forces, though half-beaten, were allowed to get away with all their guns, stores, and ammunition in spite of the fact that Manchester was in command of a very superior force.

This was as good as a defeat for the forces of the Parliament, for it was the cause of dividing their councils. Manchester and those who sided with him had apparently begun to fear the terrible earnestness of the Captain of the Ironsides, and were for making peace with the King and patching matters up somehow. But Cromwell, with deeper insight, saw that the quarrel had now gone too far and that it could not stop till one side or the other had had a thorough and decisive beating, and that side he was fully determined should be the King’s.

The dispute ended in the fall of Manchester and the triumph of Cromwell. Then came the reorganisation of the Parliamentary forces under what was at this time the New Model, and this New Model, be it noted, was the first standing army of professional soldiers that the United Kingdom had ever seen. Its nominal Commander-in-Chief was Sir Thomas Fairfax, but its master spirit and guiding genius was Oliver Cromwell.

But meanwhile the tide of Royalism had been on the rise again, sweeping up from the West and South. The armies faced each other on the borders of Leicestershire, but Cromwell was not there. Fairfax, no doubt knowing his own weakness, entreated that he might come and command the horse. He came, and then, as Clarendon pathetically remarks, “the evil genius of the Kingdom in a moment shifted the whole scene,” and it is related that when, after rumours had been for some days flying through both armies as to his arrival, “Old Ironsides” at last came upon the field of action, all the cavalry of the Parliament raised a great shout of joy.

The battle that he came to fight was Naseby, and, saving for the superior discipline displayed on both sides, almost exactly the same things happened as at Marston Moor. Cromwell this time commanded on the right wing, but Rupert was placed at the Royalist’s right, and was therefore opposed, not to Cromwell, but to Ireton, his son-in-law and second self. Once more the left wing of the Parliament was broken and scattered by the furious charge of the gallant Cavaliers, once more the centre under Fairfax was “sore overpressed” and thrown into confusion, and once more Cromwell and his Ironsides, having ridden down everything that opposed them, swung round behind the rear of the victorious Royalists, swooped in a hurricane of irresistible valour and determination on their flanks and rear, turned defeat into victory, and snatched triumph out of disaster.

It is true that even then there seemed so great a chance of the Royalists retrieving the day that Charles, who had put himself at the head of the flower of his cavalry, had thought himself warranted in crying: “One charge more, gentlemen, and the days is ours!” But while he was thinking about this, Cromwell, Fairfax, and Ireton had, by the exercise of almost superhuman energy, reformed the whole of their army, horse, foot, and artillery, into complete battle-array on a new front, and against this the fiery valour of the Cavaliers dashed itself in vain.

Once more valour with generalship had conquered valour without it. The defeat was utter and crushing. For fourteen long miles the pursuit went on and only stayed when the walls of Leicester were in sight. The King’s army was utterly destroyed and he himself never again appeared at the head of a force in the field.

During the twelve months that followed we see the erstwhile Farmer of Huntingdon in a new light as the besieger and reducer of strong places. His methods were logical, effective and, we may fairly add, pitiless. Those days were not these any more than William the Norman’s or Edward Longlegs’ were Cromwell’s, and moreover we must remember that he had set himself with all the strength of his mighty nature to stamping the plague of civil war out of the Three Kingdoms with such dispatch as was possible, and it had got to be done speedily, for outside were the enemies of Britain waiting to take advantage of the weakness that this plague might leave her with.

First he summons the stronghold to surrender, threatening all with the sword. If this is refused he selects his point of attack, batters away at it till he makes a practicable breach, then he gives another chance of surrender, this time with somewhat better terms, but this is the last grace. Refusal now means wave after wave of his irresistible iron and leather-clad soldiery pouring into the breach, till at last all opposition is beaten down and then massacre—for which, it may be added, he and those with him are never at a loss to find a biblical precedent.

The victories that he won by this method were simply amazing. In about sixteen months he was engaged in some sixty battles and sieges, and took fifty fortified towns and cities with over a thousand pieces of artillery, forty thousand stand of arms, and between two and three hundred colours. The end of this wonderful campaign was the Storm of Bristol. This happened on the 10th and 11th of September, 1646. As a feat of warfare it is almost incredible. The second city in the kingdom, defended by properly constructed earthworks and fortifications, and garrisoned by four thousand troops with a hundred and fifty pieces of cannon, was stormed and taken with a loss of under two hundred men!

It reads more like one of Drake’s insolently valiant attacks upon a Spanish treasure-city than a desperate conflict between Englishmen and Englishmen. There can only be one explanation of it, and that explanation is summed up in the two words: Oliver Cromwell. We are bound to grant that the valour was equal on both sides, but equally we are forced to admit that all the genius and generalship were on one.

Looked at from our point of view, there were terrible blemishes on these triumphs. Every advantage was pursued with the unsparing ferocity which was possible only to religious bigotry fired to a white heat. It is only reasonable to suppose that these Puritan champions of the new faith were fired with just the same furious and pitiless zeal as that which inspired the Israelites in their attack on Canaan, or the first armies of Islam in their assaults on the idolaters of the East. They slew and spared not, they hewed their enemies in pieces as Samuel hewed Agag “before the Lord,” and they honestly believed that the Lord looked down with approval on them and their bloody work.

Priceless treasures of art were destroyed, not only without remorse, but with grim exultation. To them they were abominations of the heathen, just as the Canaanite idols of silver and gold were to the armies of Israel. But however ferociously it was done, the work was done thoroughly, and by August, 1646, the fall of Ragland Castle following on the surrender of Oxford, brought down the curtain on the first act of the Civil War. Charles gave himself up to the Scots at Newark, and Oliver turned to fight the enemies of his own household.

The chief of these enemies, curiously enough, was that same Parliament in whose name he had won all his brilliant triumphs, and a conflict, very interesting to the student of humanity, now began between the Man of Action and one of those Talking Machines which the good Earl Simon some four centuries before had found so singularly ineffective.

There is no need to tell in detail how the struggle went. Every one knows how Cromwell preached and prayed and stormed at the self-sufficient busybodies who thought themselves a power in the land because they called themselves a parliament. Then, seeing that no other method would stop their gabble, he brought in his soldiers and turned them out to talk in the streets or wherever else they could get any one to listen to them, while he went on with his work.

It is not very many years since Thomas Carlyle, who perhaps understood Cromwell better than any other man not living in his own age, was walking over Westminster Bridge with a very distinguished British officer one night when the Mother of Parliaments was busy tearing her hair and rending her garments over some wordy futility or other, and, jerking his thumb towards the lighted windows, he said: “Ah, my lord, I should like to see the good day when you would go in there with a file of Grenadiers as old Noll did with his dragoons and clear that nest of cacklers out. Maybe the nation would get some of its business done then instead of only getting it talked about.”

From this there is a certain moral to be drawn by the wise. For my own part I should dearly love to know with what words old Noll himself would have answered the Sage of Chelsea.

The payment of the Scots’ arrears by the Parliament, their surrender of the king—who, by the way, was a great deal stronger in helpless captivity than he had ever been at the head of an army—and his seizure by Cromwell through the instrumentality of Cornet Joyce and his troop of horse, now led up to a very singular situation. Cromwell, the conqueror, went over to the side of Charles Stuart the captive, and if it had not been for that fatal twist in the king’s moral nature, there is no telling but that he might have been re-seated on a throne supported and surrounded by the pikes and sabres of the Ironsides.

But unhappily for him, it was not in Charles Stuart’s nature to “go straight,” and, in the end, after Cromwell had faced and quelled a mutiny among his own men on his account, he discovered that the king was playing him false, that he did not honestly wish to follow his policy of “healing and settling,” but only to regain his freedom and try the hazard of battle again.

From that moment Cromwell was his unsparing enemy. Now he saw in Charles “The Man of Blood” who, for the sake of a personal aspiration and for personal profit, was eager to once more set his subjects by the ears and light the flame of war from end to end of the country.

West and South and North the Loyalists were arming and rising again and the Scots were marching across the Border, so the Man of Destiny stopped talking and preaching, buckled on his sword and strode out to battle once more.

The first rising was in Wales, and that he crushed as promptly as he did pitilessly. Then he turned with a weary and war-worn army of some seven thousand men, so wasted with marching and privation and sickness that, as a record of the time tells us, “they seemed rather fit for a hospital than a battle,” to face the invading Scots in the North.

He met them at Preston. They were three to one—or rather, to be more exact, twenty-four thousand to seven thousand—well armed and found and confident of victory. Yet never did the military genius of the great Oliver shine out more brilliantly than now. What followed was not a battle; it was an onset, a chase, and a massacre which lasted three days and extended over some thirty miles of country. When it was over Cromwell wrote in one of those marvellous dispatches of his: “We have quite tired our horses in pursuit of the enemy. We have killed and disabled all their foot and left them only some horse. If my horse could but trot after them I would take them all.”

The next act in the swiftly-moving drama was the trial and execution of him who to this day is considered by some to have been a royal martyr, who only exchanged an earthly for a heavenly crown, and by others is looked upon as the man who deliberately made himself guilty of the worst of all blood-guiltiness, the guilt of civil war. That is a matter for each one to decide according to his own convictions, which, be it noted, some two and a half centuries of argument have not yet altered. Here we are only concerned with Cromwell’s share in it.

There can be no doubt to an unbiassed mind that at one period he honestly tried for a monarchical settlement of the difficulty. It is equally undeniable that he considered Charles’s double-dealing responsible for what he held to be the unpardonable crime of the Second Civil War and therefore as having incurred for a second time the guilt of blood. That the execution, or murder, of the king met with his entire approval cannot be doubted, since before it happened he said to Algernon Sidney: “I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown upon it.”

So, whether crime or act of justice, it was done, and Cromwell, perhaps more than any one else, was responsible for it.

The next act is the Dictatorship, and the first scene in it the re-conquest of Ireland, with its massacres and bitter, pitiless persecutions in revenge or punishment, as you will, for other massacres which had gone before. It is a piteous story, and one of no great credit to any one, but, to borrow the maxim of Strafford, the former tyrant of Ireland, it was “thorough.” In nine months, with about fifteen thousand men, the Dictator had stamped the Irish rebellion out and made “the curse of Cromwell” a phrase that will dwell on Hibernian lips for many a generation.

But no sooner was the Irish revolt drowned in blood and flame than Prince Charles, afterwards Charles II. of infamous memory, took the Oath to the Covenant, and the Scots rose to support him. Cromwell crossed the Border on July 22, 1650.

As it happened, the Scottish general was Leslie, the old comrade who had fought at his side at Marston Moor. For some weeks the Scots played a waiting game, and Cromwell, with his men wearied and falling sick, and with no other base than his ships on the coast, hurled texts and biblical harangues at the enemy. In fact, as Mr. Harrison cleverly puts it, “it was not so much a battle between two armies as between two rival congregations in arms.”

Leslie and his preachers fired other texts back at him and kept out of his way until the fatal 3rd of September came. By this time Cromwell had only eleven thousand men capable of bearing arms, and they were in no great state for fighting. Leslie had twenty-two or three thousand Scots and all the advantage of the position, but the Fates had already taken the matter into their own hands. On the afternoon of the 2nd, Cromwell saw that the wary Scot, as some say, driven by the frantic exhortation of the preachers, had forsaken his post of vantage. “The Lord hath delivered them into our hands!” he cried, and straightway began to set his battle in order.

The next morning, while it was yet moonlight, they came to blows. In an hour or so it was all over. The Scots fled in utter panic and confusion, “being made by the Lord of Hosts as stubble to our swords,” to use Oliver’s own words. When the rout was at its height the sun rose, scattering the morning mists. “Let God arise and His enemies be scattered!” he shouted exultantly through the roar of the battle, and then—how characteristic it was of the man!—he halted his army in the very moment of triumph and sang the one hundred and seventeenth psalm, beginning: “O praise the Lord all ye people, for His merciful kindness is great towards us!” Then he unleashed his bloodhounds again, and the rest was massacre.

Another year passed in miscellaneous fighting and arguing, slaughter and psalm-singing, and once more the sun of the 3rd of September, Cromwell’s Day of Fate, or, as Byron puts it:

“His day of double victory and death,”

dawned, this time over Worcester, the scene of “the Crowning Mercy.” The same miracles of generalship were accomplished, the same tremendous victory was won at a ridiculously small expense—under two hundred men to conquer an entrenched army of fifteen thousand—and this was the end of the fighting at home.

But meanwhile there was fighting abroad, and, more than that, the fame of the great Oliver and his marvellous doings had been ringing from end to end of Europe. As Clarendon, the historian of the Royalists, candidly admits: “His greatness at home was but a shadow of the glory he had abroad.” The mastery of the seas was wrenched out of the hands of the Dutch by Blake, the sea-power of England was organised as its land-power was, and Britain rose at a bound from the degradation to which she had sunk under the first Stuart to the proud position of the first naval and military Power of the world, and the greatest ministers and monarchs in Europe, even the Pope himself, were forced to respect the prowess and cringe for the friendship of the Farmer of Huntingdon.

If, as has been aptly suggested, the great Oliver could have lived to an age which is now a normal one for statesmen, the disgraceful and ruinous interval occupied by the reigns of the second Charles and the second James might have been spared with all their infamy and national loss, and William of Orange might worthily have continued the work which Cromwell so well began. But the time was not yet, and so it was not to be. The great ideal of his life, a Protestant Alliance, was never realised. His last days were days of darkness and suffering, social, mental, and physical.

Once more the Day of Fate came round, and between three and four in the afternoon the watchers by his bedside heard him sigh deeply and heavily. Some say that he whispered: “My work is done!”—and then he died. This may be fact or fancy, but, be that as it may, no man had a better right to pass out of the mystery of the things that are into the mystery of the things that are to be with such words on his lips than Oliver Cromwell, General, Statesman, and King in everything but the empty name.