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THE HOUSE OF CROMWELL.
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THE
HOUSE OF CROMWELL
H Gcnealooical ftnston? of tbe jfamil\> ano £>escenoants of tbe protector.
JAMES WAYLEN,
Sometime Secretary of Thomas Carlyle.
A NEW EDITION, REVISED
BY
JOHN GABRIEL CROMWELL, M.A. Oxon.,
Hon. Canon of Durham.
LONDON : ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C
1897.
[All rights reserved.)
116279S
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PREFACE
TO THE SECOND EDITION.
IN order to render Mr. Waylen's book more complete and interesting to the general reader, the Publisher has decided to prefix a new chapter designed to trace as far back as possible the family from which the Great Protector derived his origin. He has also added a chapter at the end on the Cromwells in America. The book, which has been revised throughout and very much condensed, now presents the history of the family from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. It may seem proper, but almost unnecessary, for the editor to say that he does not agree with the sentiments of the late Mr. Waylen upon very many subjects.
PREFACE
TO THE FIRST EDITION.
THE following pages arc primarily designed to contain genealogical tables of the Protector Oliver's descendants to the present day, and thus to carry down through another century the family history which terminated in 1785 with the publication of Mark Noble's " History of the Protectoral House." Other miscellaneous matter is added, illustrative of the Protector's character, all which will speak for itself. But the mention of matter, supple- mentary to Mr. Carlyle's collection of the Protector's " Letters and Speeches," claims a few preliminary obser- vations.
About the year 1842, Mr. John Langton Sanford, of the Temple, struck by the astounding discrepancies which had long been conspicuous among the biographers of Oliver Cromwell, resolved to make an independent investigation on his own account, and to commence the task by forming as complete a collection as possible of the hero's letters and speeches. Of these, he had brought together about three hundred, when Mr. Carlyle's work on the same subject came forth to light in 1845. As each collection
viii Preface.
contained documents which were wanting in the other, Mr. Sanford promptly and generously surrendered his own contingent, which accordingly made part of Mr. Carlyle's second edition of 1846. To specify what that contingent supplied would now be a superfluous task ; it may suffice to mention that it included the Clonmacnoise Manifesto — perhaps the most masterly and characteristic specimen on record of Cromwell's polemical discernment.
It is agreeable to add that the results of these studies on Mr. Sanford's own mind were already in felicitous accord- ance with the Carlylean decisions, and had issued, to use his own terms, in a clear conviction that the theory of Cromwell's hypocrisy and selfish ambition was devoid of all support in the real facts. He had learnt also that the lives of Pym, Hampden, and many others of that time, required re-writing quite as much as that of Crom- well ; and he became increasingly solicitous that his ac- cumulated stores " might be moulded into a work supple- mentary to that of Mr. Carlyle, and affording a critical refutation of the large mass of calumnious anecdote which still passes for history in works of such general value and authority as Mr. Forster's " Statesmen of the Common- wealth." Such a work, therefore, appeared in 1858 — the original title of " Life of Oliver Cromwell " being sup- planted by " Studies and Illustrations of the Great Rebel- lion " — and a very fascinating book it is, fully answering the proposed design, without in the smallest degree dis- turbing the majestic supremacy of the Protector. It closes with a graphic account of the fight at Marston Moor, which had never before been rightly adjusted ; and it supplies a few additional letters, which also may now be read in Carlyle's later editions.
But, indeed, that gallant crisis in the fortunes of England and of Europe may well sustain other supplementary illustration besides Mr. Sanford's classic essays. The position which the British Protector appeared to be as-
Preface. ix
suming in the councils of foreign nations when death laid him low is apprehended by very few. Englishmen seem to have forgotten the motives which prompted him to snatch from Papal Spain the port of Dunkirk and adjacent part of Flanders. Nay, the majority of his compatriots seem to have forgotten that he ever held Dunkirk at all.
The loss of Calais was more than redeemed ; and the Protestant ensign, under which Gustavus Adolphus fought and fell, floated over territory torn from Papal Spain. The whole affair was eminently calculated to re-awaken the enthusiasm which the leadership of the Protector had formerly kindled ; for the Flanders campaign, though executed by deputy, was rightly felt to be animated by his spirit. His representatives, meanwhile, at the Gallic Court, where Huguenots had sued in vain, received homage which was withheld from the very Legate of Rome — a strange spectacle, startling to all Europe — alike anomalous, por- tentous, and inexplicable. To many a lip the question must then have risen, which in later years has again and again baffled the logic of Oliver's defamers : Wherein lay the divining power which could thus bring an aspiring Cardinal and a French autocrat under the fascination of a heretical island chieftain, whose political aspirations, all undisguised as they were, were backed by but a very moderate military power ? The answer, surely, is found in the fact, that every step in his career was known to be the expression and outcome of habitual faith in the Unseen. To his Parliaments, and to those who came still more closely in contact with him, it was sufficiently manifest that his every thought was with the Eternal ; but Milton gives us further to understand that the contagion of his spiritual force carried the better part of the nation along with him. Through Lockhart's medium the same sentiment would remotely influence Mazarin, offering a more honourable — and shall we not say rational ? — explanation of his bearing towards the English Protector than the mere vulgar fear
x Preface.
which is all that the Cardinal's enemies can discover in him. The downright integrity and absence of self-seeking of Oliver was a new phenomenon in the history of monarchs, and at the bottom of their hearts the people hailed his advent as that of a practical saviour. In short, " There has not been a supreme governor worth the meal upon his periwig, in comparison, since this spirit fell obsolete," says Carlyle, in his comments on Speech V. There, gentlemen, is that strong enough ? That it will for ever silence his detractors, can hardly be looked for. But it is in the firm belief, that the majority of his country- men are rapidly reaching the same conviction, that the tribute of the following pages has been rendered.
Should it be objected against him, that his organization of parochial religious life was a mongrel affair, let it also be remembered that in the transition age through which the nation was passing it was a matter of exceptional per- plexity. Robert Hall, in many respects a kindred spirit, when repelling on one occasion the notion that any particular form of Church-government was stereotyped for all ages, exclaimed, " That which is best administered is best." That Cromwell's administration of this and every other department was the very best conceivable is not the thing to be proved. That he deemed it the best under the actual circumstances of the hour, and made it the best by the simple force of his personal Christianity, is all that his admirers claim — sufficiently entitling him to the eulogy above expressed, ratified as it is by the testimony of a contemporary who, having, like many others, watched him long and closely, pro- nounced him " the justest of conquerors." (Carrington's " Life of Oliver Cromwell.")
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER
THE HOUSE OK CROMWELL .
I'AGli
I
CHAPTER II.
OLIVER, LORD PROTECTOR .
I9
CHAPTER III.
ROBERT, ELDEST SON OF THE PROTECTOR
CHAPTER IV.
OLIVER, SECOND SON OF THE PROTECTOR
25
CHAPTER V.
RICHARD, THIRD SON OF THE PROTECTOR
28
CHAPTER VI.
HENRY, FOURTH SON OF THE PROTECTOR AND HIS DE
SCENDANTS . . . -43
xii Contents.
CHAPTER VII.
l'AGE
JAMES, FIFTH SON OF THE PROTECTOR . . ,86
CHAPTER VIII.
BRIDGET, ELDEST DAUGHTER OF THE PROTECTOR, AND HER
DESCENDANTS . . . . . 87
CHAPTER IX.
ELIZABETH, THE PROTECTOR'S SECOND DAUGHTER. . IIO
CHAPTER X.
MARY, THE PROTECTOR'S THIRD DAUGHTER . . 115
CHAPTER XI.
FRANCES, THE PROTECTOR'S FOURTH DAUGHTER, AND HER
DESCENDANTS . . . . . I 23
CHAPTER XII.
THE YOUNGER SONS OF SIR HENRY CROMWELL, THE GRAND- FATHER OF THE LORD PROTECTOR OLIVER, AND HIS BROTHERS AND SISTERS . . . . -183
CHAPTER XIII.
SOME ANECDOTES AND TRAITS OF OLIVER CROMWELL . 198
CHAPTER XIV.
THE CROMWELLS OF AMERICA .... 253
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CHAPTER I.
THE HOUSE OF CROMWELL.
A
S early as 1308 we find a nobleman bearing the name of Baron John de Cromwell,* who held the high and responsible office of Constable of the Tower of London. He was regularly sum- moned to Parliament till his death, which occurred in I335« His seat in the country was Tattershall Castle, not far from Boston, in Lincolnshire. He was succeeded by Baron Ralph de Cromwell, who died in 1399 ; by another of the same name, who died in 1419 ; and then by a third of the same name, who died in 1455. This nobleman at- tained to the dignity of Lord High Treasurer of England, under Henry VI., the pious founder and princely benefactor of Eton. In the churchwardens' accounts of the parish of St. Margaret's, Westminster, we find mention of a " Lorde Crumwell " (sic) as a resident f therein in the year 1572.
The investigations made by Mr. Carlyle for his edition of " Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches" led him to conclude that there were other Cromwells in the Fen counties ; and, in his own quaint phraseology, he says that "without any ghost to teach us we can understand
* Vide " Historic Peerage," by Sir Harris Nicholas.
f Vide "Westminster Tobacco-box," by Mr. J. E. Smith, i8S7.
The House of Cromwell.
that the Cromwell kindred all got their name in very old times indeed" from the village of "Cromwell," which lies about five miles north of Newark.
Owing to the industry of an indefatigable antiquary of this generation, Mr. John Phillips, we have been enabled to trace a clear link of connection between one of the lords of Tattershall Castle and a resident near Newark named " John Cromwell." The way in which this dis- covery was made was as follows. Mr. Phillips was fortunate enough to obtain the permission of Earl Spencer, the Lord of the Manor of Wimbledon, to examine carefully the Court Rolls of the manor for the fifteenth century. Therein he discovered numerous entries of the name of " Cromwell." The first of that name mentioned in those old musty documents was one John Cromwell, who is therein stated to have come from Norwell, a village not far from the village of Cromwell. He was a fuller by trade, and he obtained the lease of a fulling-mill for twenty-one years, together with a residence and six acres of land belonging thereto, situate near the river Wandle, in the ancient Manor of Wimbledon. This lease was granted to John Cromwell in the year 1452, by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was then the Lord of the Manor. Now, we happen to know that the custo- dian of the temporalities of the Archbishop at that time was a certain Sir Gervase Clifford, who also held the office of Secretary to the Lord Treasurer Cromwell of Tattershall Castle. It requires no great stretch of imagin- ation to suppose that it was due to the tie of consan- guinity that John Cromwell obtained his lease through the hands of his powerful kinsman's secretary.
It is easy to conjecture that John Cromwell desired to push his fortune by removing from a country village to the immediate neighbourhood of London, where he could pursue his business as a cloth-fuller to greater advantage and profit than he could down in Nottinghamshire. We
The House of Cromwell.
learn that John's father, William Cromwell, held a lease of Palme Hall, at Norwell, and that he was a grandson of William, fourth son of the sixth Ralph de Cromwell, of Lambley, Nottingham. It will not escape the reader's observation that Ralph was the favourite name of the above-mentioned Barons de Cromwell, who resided in Lincolnshire. We may conclude, with every appearance of certainty, that the Cromwells of Lincolnshire had originally sprung from the Cromwells of Nottinghamshire, and that some connection continued to be kept up between the two branches of the family at least down to the middle of the fifteenth century.
Let us see what more can be gleaned about John Cromwell, the cloth-fuller from Norwell. His fulling- mill appears to have stood near the river Wandle, in a lane formerly called Fulling-mill Lane, in the parish of Wandsworth. Here cloth, imported into London from Flanders by London merchants, was brought to be " fulled," and then dyed and finished ready for the cloth fairs held at Smithfield Market. For eight-and-twenty years John Cromwell pursued his business on the Wandle, and appears to have been diligent and successful in his business ; for he acquired, in addition to the lease of his fulling-mill, with land and house adjoining, the copyhold of some land at Putney, which is called "Cromwell's" in the existing Court Rolls of the manor. At his death, which occurred about 1480, he was buried in Wimbledon churchyard, overlooking the Valley of the Wandle. Behind him he left two sons, John and Walter, and one or two daughters. Follow we first the history of John, the eldest son. He became a copyholder of land in the parish of Lambeth, and also of a brewery at Stockwell Green, where he carried on his business as a brewer till his death, in 1523, and was buried in Lambeth church- yard. In the churchwardens' accounts of the parish of Lambeth the following entries occur :
The House of Cromwell.
" 1514. Recd of John Cromwell towards making our suits of vestments 6s 8d.
1515. Recd for the burial of John Cromwell's woman- servant 4d.
152 1. Recd from John Cromwell for reparation of the Church 20s od.
1523. Recd for burial of John Cromwell 8s 6d, and for ringing his knell 6d."
In his will he directed that his body should be buried in the churchyard of " our Lady of Lambithe " (Lam- beth now), that 4s. should be given to the " High Altar " for " tithes and oblations forgotten," that 3s. 4d. should be given to the " fraternity of Sl Christopher," and 6s. 4d. to the reparation of the church. It will be remembered, of course, that a shilling then was worth almost as much as a sovereign now. His two sons followed their father's occupation as brewers, and their names are found, together with that of their distinguished cousin Thomas, amongst the members of the household of Cardinal Wolsey, at Hampton Court, in the subsidy assessment for the year 1526.
******
Having followed far enough the history of the eldest son of John Cromwell of Norwell, let us now fix our attention upon his second son, Walter, for it was through him that the most eminent members of the family derived their origin. To the Court Rolls of the Manor of Wimble- don we are again led by Mr. John Phillips for information. It thence appears that Walter succeeded his father (John) in the business at the fulling-mill on the Wandle ; for when the lease, originally granted to John Cromwell of Norwell, expired, in 1473, it was renewed in favour of his son Walter, who added to the business of a fuller of cloth several other kinds of business. We learn that he held in the parish of Putney several copyhold lands and tene-
The House of Cromwell.
ments, and there he carried on business as a smith, an armourer, a brewer, and a " hostelry-keeper."
In thus combining under one management so many diverse kinds of business, Walter may be almost said to have anticipated some of the big London firms of the nineteenth century.
In his youth he was apprenticed to his maternal uncle, who was a smith and brewer at Putney, and when his apprenticeship expired, he joined his father in conducting the fulling-mill on the Wandle, but did not forget or abandon his original trade as a smith and armourer, and thus he was described in the local records sometimes as a smith, sometimes as a fuller, and sometimes as a brewer. Indeed, in the Court Rolls he is variously entered as "Walter Cromwell otherwise called Walter Smyth," and " Walter Smyth alias Cromwell," and "Walter Cromwell alias Smyth."
It is suggested that the reason why he was sometimes called " Smyth" was because his uncle's name, to whom he was apprenticed, was William Smith, armourer, smith, and brewer, at Putney.
In the parish of Putney, Walter Cromwell held thirty acres of land under the Lord of the Manor of Wimbledon, which had belonged to the successive Archbishops of Canterbury from the days of William the Conqueror. Some of this land is said to have been situated close to the Thames, between the west side of Brewhouse Lane and the east side of Putney Churchyard. His brewery and hostelry were in Brewhouse Lane, and the hostelry was conveniently near to the " hithe," or landing-place, where no doubt a good deal of business was done ; for Putney was always a busy and important place, owing to its being on the direct line of transit between London and West Surrey, while ferry-boats constantly plied between Putney and Fulham, and boats and barges, some filled with rich merchandise and some with pleasure-seekers,
The House of Cromwell.
came up from London and Westminster. For more than a quarter of a century Walter Cromwell is known to have carried on his various kinds of business at Putney, and in 1500 we find that he received a considerable addition to his property in land. For in that year the Court Rolls tell us that " Walter Cromwell, otherwise called Walter Smyth, took of the Lord of the Manor six entire virgats " {i.e., ninety acres) " of land, as well as divers arable lands in Roehampton." After describing fully and minutely the exact situation of all these lands in legal phraseology, the copy of Court Roll concludes by recording that Walter Cromwell was not required to pay anything for all this land, "because the Lord" (of the Manor) "for certain considerations . . . had pardoned payment therefor."
In these quaint words there is something very signifi- cant, and we ask with curiosity what could have been the " certain considerations " that moved Archbishop Morton of Canterbury to make a free grant of ninety acres of land, together with " divers arable lands in Roehampton," to Master Walter Cromwell, in the year of grace 1500. The answer to this question probably will be found in the following facts. The maternal grandfather of Walter Cromwell, like his maternal uncle, was by trade an armourer and smith, and in that capacity he had found employment during the Wars of the Roses amongst the Lancastrian Barons, whose cause he espoused, and whom he accompanied, like a brave man, to the field of battle ; where his strong arms, both as a soldier and a smith, were doubtless very useful. In one of the numerous battles fought during the thirty years' Civil War he was killed, fighting on the Lancastrian side. For services thus rendered by the armourer of Putney, and by his sons, to the great party which eventually placed Henry VII. upon the throne of England, it is conjectured that the Arch- bishop of Canterbury was moved to grant freely those lands in Putney and Roehampton to " Walter Cromwell
The Hotise of Cromwell.
alias Smyth," whose mother was both a daughter and a sister of a Lancastrian armourer. Other reasons likewise may have moved Archbishop Morton to take this course, for it is conjectured that some of those lands had been torn from the Putney armourers by a former Archbishop (Bourchier), who was a strong partisan of the Yorkist cause, and therefore the grant made to Walter Cromwell was probably an act of partial restitution. Be this as it may, we find Walter Cromwell, near the end of his life, in possession of a considerable amount of property at Putney, Wandsworth, and Roehampton, though later on he seems to have lost much of it, and to have died at his cottage on Wimbledon Green, about the year 15 16, and was buried probably in Wimbledon churchyard, beside his father and mother. The reader is doubtless aware that it is next to impossible to give the exact date of the birth, marriage, or death of anybody in England prior to 1538, because before that year there was no regular and systematic registration of births, marriages, and deaths kept in this country. It was Thomas Cromwell who first ordered registers to be kept in all parish churches, and thus instituted that system of registration which con- tinues in force with some alterations at the present day.
Before passing from the biography of Walter Cromwell, it may be mentioned that he twice discharged the office of " Constable of Putney," in 1495 and 1496, a parochial office that in all parishes used to be held in turn by the principal householders in a parish. Three children survived him — Katharine, born about 1477; Thomas, about 1485 ; and Elizabeth, about 1487. Our interest will be with Katharine and Thomas principally.
Place aux dames. The lady must come first, in spite of the fact that her brother afterwards became the most powerful subject of King Henry VIII.
It was in Putney Church, in the year of grace 1494, that Katharine Cromwell, then a young lady about
The House of Cromwell.
eighteen years of age, was married to a young man of Welsh extraction named Morgan Williams. From the issue of this marriage sprang in the fourth generation, as we shall presently see, the renowned Lord Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell.
Morgan Williams was the son of John Williams, who had migrated from the parish of Llanishen, near Cardiff, about the end of the fifteenth century, and took up his abode at Mortlake ; where he married an English wife distantly connected with the Cromwell family at Putney, and pursued the avocations of accountant, land-agent, and lawyer. He seems to have been employed about the Court at Richmond in the time of Henry VII. and Henry VIII., and his eldest son, John Williams, is desig- nated in the record of a lawsuit in the King's Bench as " de Hospice de Regni," i.e., " of the Royal House- hold." In 1515 he was appointed " Yeoman of the Crown " with 6d. a day, thus becoming one of that royal bodyguard, composed of stalwart Welshmen, on whose loyalty the two first Tudor Kings could rely ; and we must never forget that Henry VII. was as much a Welshman as James I. was a Scotchman, and George I. was a German. Welshmen, therefore, were naturally held in favour about the Courts of Henry VII. and his son, bluff King Harry the Eighth.
In due time a son was born as issue of the marriage of Katharine Cromwell and Morgan Williams, and the child was called Richard. Of his early life little is recorded, but we may conjecture, with every probability in our favour, that he joined the royal bodyguard of Welshmen, to which one of his paternal uncles already belonged ; and that it was thus he became so proficient in the use of arms, that at a grand tournament held by the King in 1539 he was* successful in defeating a Mr. Culpeper and two of the bravest foreign champions
* Vide Dugdale's " Baronetage," ii. 370.
The House of Cromwell.
who had been invited from the Continent to take part in the royal festivities. It is said that Henry VIII. was so highly delighted with Richard Cromwell's success in beating the two foreigners, that he knighted him on the spot, gave him a ring from his own finger, and said: " Henceforth thou shalt be my knight." Richard thence- forth, if not before, abandoned his father's surname, Williams, and assumed that of his mother's family, " Cromwell." He had a potent reason for making this change in his name, for by so doing he proclaimed to the courtiers his close kinship to the King's chief adviser and Minister, Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, who had not as yet fallen beneath the royal displeasure. In memory of the great tournament and of its fateful results, Sir Richard Cromwell and his descendants after him adopted as their crest a lion rampant holding up a ring in his right paw.
Leaving for a time the history of Sir Richard, we shall find much to interest us in recovering the story of the early life of his maternal uncle Thomas, the son, as we have seen, of Walter Cromwell of Putney, for it is full of adventure, and not a little romance.
Mr. John Phillips, to whom we are indebted for so many interesting particulars derived from the Court Rolls of Wimbledon Manor, says : " We are inclined to think that Thomas Cromwell, after leaving school, resided at Mortlake with John Williams ; that he assisted him to collect rents and debts on the manor . . . and learnt from him to prepare legal documents for leases and mortgages. ... At Putney he saw and conversed with the merchants who came there to buy wool, and heard much about Italy and other foreign countries." Hence, says Foxe : " A great delight came into his mind to see the world abroad, and to gain experience, whereby he learned such tongues and languages as might better serve his use hereafter."
io The House of Cromwell.
In prosecution of his desire to see " forraine " countries, he passed over sea to the great commercial port of Antwerp, where, says Foxe, " he was retained of the English merchants " (who at that time resided together in a factory for mutual protection and convenience) " to be their dark or secretarie, or in some like condition pertaining to their affaires." When he was thus employed at Antwerp, there arrived two merchants from Boston on their way to Rome, commissioned by their townsmen to solicit from the Pope, Julius II., a renewal of "a pardon," as it was called, to the town of Boston, and to " the brethren and sisters of the gylde of our Lady in Saint Botulph's church at Boston."
A copy of this " pardon " may be seen in Foxe, and very curious are the indulgences and relaxations granted by the Pope to all such as should resort to the Church of St. Botulph at the great Church festivals — indeed, his Holiness promised that they should have " pardon no less than if they themselves personally had visited the stations of Rome." For such a document as this, of course, the Court of Rome would demand a good round sum of money from the merchants who had undertaken the commission to obtain it. Foxe tells us that these Boston merchants felt themselves unequal to the task of " compassing such a weightie piece of worke," and finding that Thomas Cromwell had acquired some skill in the Italian tongue, they induced him to accom- pany them to Rome, and assist them in their weighty business.
By making acceptable presents to the Pope and his courtiers, and by offering for his acceptance some "jolly junkets and fine dishes of jellie made after the best fashion and manner, which to them of Rome was not known nor seene before," Thomas Cromwell and his friends from Boston obtained the coveted "pardon." This was in the year of our Lord 1510, says our historian
The House of Cromweti. 1 1
Foxe. Thomas would then be about twenty-five years of age.
Never had the Court of Rome been more notoriously and shamelessly corrupt than it was at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and Cromwell must have seen and heard strange things about the Pope and Cardinals during his stay at Rome. No doubt his visit to the Eternal City helped to colour many of his opinions and actions in his subsequent career as malleus monachorum in England. Alexander Borgia, one of the most profligate Popes that ever disgraced and polluted an episcopal throne, had died in 1503 after a week's illness, induced by drinking a poisoned cup intended, as was commonly believed, for one of the guests that sat by his side at supper. "The moral degradation into which the Papacy sank under Alexander," says the historian Robertson, " has no parallel either in its earlier or in its later history. . . . The Pope and his children " (the notorious Caesar and Lucretia Borgia) " are accused of profligacy which hesitated at nothing for its gratification, and never scrupled to remove obstacles by murder. The Vatican was polluted by revels and orgies of the most shameless and loathsome obscenity, of which the Pope and his daughter are represented as pleased spectators. A letter of the time paints the morals of the Papal Court in the darkest colours, and speaks of the Pope as a man stained with every vice. . . ." It was during the Papacy of this infamous man that the great Florentine preacher and reformer, Savonarola, was con- demned, after a mock trial before the Papal Commissioners at Florence, to be hanged and burnt, and his ashes to be cast into the Arno.
At the time when Thomas Cromwell (1510) was at Rome, the occupant of the Papal throne was Julius II., a prelate who was accustomed personally to conduct campaigns, sieges, and other military enterprises, which were much more congenial to his taste than the perform-
12 The House of Cromwell.
ance of any episcopal functions. Neither age nor sick- ness could damp his military impetuosity. In the midst of winter he laid siege to the fortress of Mirandola, and in spite of frost and heavy snow he personally super- intended the pointing of his cannon, and gave the word of command for their discharge. Can we be surprised at all, that almost every man who paid a visit to Rome during the Papacy of such Popes as Alexander Borgia, Julius II., and Leo X. should go away from its gates with mingled feelings of disgust and disappointment, as well as with a determination to aid in producing a refor- mation of abuses in the Church ? Undoubtedly such were the impressions made respectively upon Thomas Crom- well, upon Erasmus, and upon Luther by their respective visits to Rome in the opening years of the momentous sixteenth century.
After having remained in Italy for some little time, Thomas Cromwell returned by slow journeys to Antwerp, and afterwards settled (1514) in London as a wool and cloth merchant, and also practised as a lawyer and scrivener in Fenchurch Street. About 1522 he removed from Fenchurch Street to Throgmorton Street, and shortly afterwards took a lease from the Mercers' Company of a mansion called " Great Place," at Stepney. In 1524 he entered the service of the King's chief Minister and favourite, Cardinal Wolsey, by whom he was confidentially employed in prosecuting the Cardinal's great undertaking of building the college of Christ Church at Oxford. In order to acquire sufficient funds for this purpose, the Cardinal employed Cromwell in suppressing a certain number of small monasteries and priories " in divers places of the realm," and their lands were seized for the benefit of the new college. Not many years passed before all the monasteries in England were suppressed by the same hands. His wife, whom he had married soon after he had settled in London, died in 1529, and on July 12
The Hotise of Cromwell. 13
of that year he made his will, which has been printed at the end of the first volume of Froude's " History of England." It may be seen now in the Record Office, with the erasures and interlineations made by the hand of Thomas Cromwell himself. As a proof that he had not been unsuccessful in his pursuits, it may in passing be mentioned that the value of the property included in his will would at the present day be about £36,000. His subsequent history and sudden downfall are so fully recorded in every history of England that we need not further follow his eventful career, which was terminated on Tower Hill by the axe of the executioner on July 28, 1540.
It is now time for us to return to Sir Richard Cromwell and trace the links of connection between him and the Lord Protector of England. As we have seen, he had managed to win the special favour of that most capri- cious monarch Henry VIII., and hence when monasteries and abbeys and priories were suppressed, and their broad acres and immense wealth were seized by the royal hand, Sir Richard's claims were not forgotten by Henry and by his Minister, Thomas Cromwell, the maternal uncle, be it remembered, of Sir Richard. In the county of Huntingdon the monks of Ramsey Abbey had secured the possession of extensive estates and manors, and to Sir Richard and his heirs all those estates were granted by royal favour. Thus he became the possessor of the estates that had formerly belonged to the Abbey of Ramsey, the Convent of Hinchinbrook, and the priories of Saltrey, Huntingdon, and St. Neot's. He was made a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, Constable of Berkeley Castle, and Captain of the Horse sent into France under Sir John Wallop. Like many other English gentlemen of that generation, he seems to have used the stones of the dismantled abbeys and priories for the erection of convenient and comfortable manor-houses at Ramsey and at Hinchinbrook. His
14 The House of Cromwell.
wife was Frances, daughter and co-heiress of Sir Thomas Murfyn, Lord Mayor of London, and by her he had a son, Henry, named, as is conjectured, after the King's majesty. His wife's fortune formed a considerable addition to his great possessions in Huntingdonshire. In due time Henry succeeded his father, and having married Joan, daughter of another Lord Mayor of London — Sir Ralph Warren — was knighted by Queen Elizabeth, and died in 1603. By this marriage with the daughter of a wealthy London mer- chant, no doubt the wealth of the family was still further augmented. Upon account of his great wealth, munifi- cence, and hospitality, Sir Henry was called " the Golden Knight."* His uncommon liberality was long remem- bered and spoken of by the good folk of Ramsey, who had been accustomed to see him throw money out of his coach amongst the crowd as he passed along the street of the little town. When he died, he left the bulk of his estates to his eldest son, Oliver, but he provided, it is said, £500 a year in land for each of his other sons— Robert, Henry, and Philip. Very shortly after Oliver had entered upon possession of his estates at Hinchinbrook, he was called upon to entertain King James I.,f then on his way from Scotland to London, there to be crowned King of England, and so hospitably did the owner of Hinchinbrook enter- tain his Sovereign, that the King, as a mark of royal favour, conferred upon him the honour of knighthood. Thus we see that three members of the family were knighted by three successive Sovereigns — Richard by
* When Queen Elizabeth was returning from Cambridge in 1564, she slept at Hinchinbrook, the seat of Sir Henry Cromwell, and was most handsomely entertained by him. He represented the county of Huntingdon in Parliament in 1563, and was Sheriff of the two counties of Huntingdon and Cambridge in four different years.
f Not only did the worthy Knight entertain his Sovereign and retinue in a princely fashion, but likewise at his departure he made him handsome presents of a "large cup of gold, goodly horses, deep-mouthed hounds, doves, and hawks of excellent wing." These royal visits were expensive luxuries, as we know from other sources.
The House of Cromwell. 15
Henry VIII. , Henry by Queen Elizabeth, and Oliver by James I.
Sir Oliver's first wife was a daughter of Sir Thomas Bromley, Lord Chancellor of England ; and his second wife was the widow of Sir Horace Pallavacini, a wealthy Genoese merchant. He lived to the advanced age of ninety-three, and was buried at Ramsey on August 28, 1655. By his two wives he had a numerous progeny, viz., five daughters and five sons, all of whom, like their father, were distinguished for their loyalty to the crown and their opposition to the Republican party.
One of Sir Oliver's sons, John, was a Captain in a regi- ment of English soldiers sent by James I. to assist in recovering the Palatinate for his son-in-law, and subse- quently he became the Colonel of an English regiment in the service of Holland. Singularly enough, he was selected by the Prince of Wales, then an exile in Holland, to carry letters to Oliver, his cousin, and to intercede with him for sparing the life of the King — but in vain. Another son of Sir Oliver — William — also took service under Frederic, Elector-Palatine, and became a Colonel in his wars for the crown of Bohemia. He also held the office of " carver " in the household of the Princess Elizabeth, wife of Frederic.
No trace of any issue from either John or William has yet been discovered.
So deeply did the elder branch of the family detest the proceedings of their cousin Oliver, the Lord Protector, that some of them dropped the very name of Cromwell, and reverted to the name of Williams. Sir Oliver's ex- treme liberality towards all, from King to peasant, com- pelled him to sell Hinchinbrook in 1627 to Sir Sidney Montague, an ancestor of the Earl of Sandwich ; and later on he had to part with Newport and Easton, in Essex, to Henry Maynard, Esq., an ancestor of the pre- sent Countess of Warwick, to whom Easton Park now
1 6 The House of Cromwell.
(1896) belongs. The exactions and oppressions, more- over, of the Republican party, directed against all rich Royalists, almost ruined old Sir Oliver and his sons, so that nearly all their estates had passed from their hands by the year 1675, when Ramsay became the property of Colonel Titus, author of the famous pamphlet entitled "Killing no Murder."
Henry, the eldest son of Sir Oliver Cromwell, born in 1586, took an active part on the Royalist side in the Great Rebellion, and in consequence his estate was sequestered by the Parliamentary Commissioners ; but his cousin Oliver, the Lord Protector, caused the fine to be remitted and the land to be restored to its owner. Henry sur- vived his father only two years, and died in 1657, leaving several daughters and one son, Henry. His eldest son, James, a Colonel in the Royalist army, had died before his father, without leaving, so far as is known, any issue. He fought on the Royalist side, and commanded a regi- ment of Cavaliers. His other son, Henry, born in 1625, succeeded to the family estate on the death of his father ; retook the name of Williams ; sat in several Parliaments as member for Huntingdonshire, and gave his vote in 1660 for the restoration of Charles II. to the throne of his father. Notwithstanding the leniency shown to him by his cousin, the Lord Protector, so many demands had been made upon his patrimony that he died a poor man in 1673, leaving no son behind him, but a widow in pos- session of a very small jointure. The extensive estates, derived originally from the spoliation of the abbeys, had gradually passed from the hands of the Cromwells, who had been for a hundred years one of the most opulent and important families in Huntingdonshire. It will be noticed that the property had been acquired by a man who belonged to the Reformation party in the sixteenth century, and was lost by men who took the side of the Royalist party in the seventeenth century.
The House of Cromwell. 17
Though the elder branch of the family thus disappeared, there remained numerous representatives of the name, sprung from the three other sons of Sir Henry, " the Golden Knight," namely, Robert, Henry, and Philip. Moreover, the Rev. Mark Noble, in his " Memoirs of the House of Cromwell," published in 1787 (vol. i., p. 81), expressed an opinion that from Francis, the brother of " the Golden Knight," a family descended, who bore the name of Cromwell, alias Williams, and possessed property both in Huntingdonshire and Glamorganshire. Noble expresses himself very positively, saying, " It appears to me almost certain to a demonstration that these are the descendants of Francis Cromwell, Esq., the younger son of Sir Richard." From this family it is quite possible that some of those who bear the name of Cromwell at the present day may have descended, although the genealogical line cannot now be distinctly traced.
From Robert, the second son of Sir Henry, "the Golden Knight," sprang Oliver, the Lord Protector, born in St. John's parish, Huntingdon, on April 25, 1599, and baptized in the parish church on the 29th day of the same month, receiving his name from his uncle and god- father, Sir Oliver, of Hinchinbrook. Into the history of that most remarkable man, who was at once one of the ablest statesmen and one of the most daring, skilful, and successful generals that have ever sprung from the Anglo- Saxon race, it is not intended fully to enter. From the time when he entered Parliament, in 1640, to the day of his death, September 3, 1658, his history forms an im- portant part of the history of England. During those eighteen eventful years he plstyed a conspicuous part — hated and feared by thousands, and admired, almost adored, by at least an equal number. He received his early education at the grammar-school of his native town, and in April, 1616, he entered as an undergraduate at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Upon the death of
The House of Cromwell.
his father, in 1617, he went to study law at Lincoln's Inn, and the most damaging stories were told in after-years by his political enemies respecting this portion of his life. " If his professed enemies be credited," says Noble, " it will appear he had no guard whatever upon his actions at this period." But we cannot believe all that his professed enemies said about him. When his father died, Oliver was only eighteen years of age. At twenty-one he was married in St. Giles's Church, Cripplegate — the church where John Milton was buried. In 1628 he was sent to Parliament as member for the borough of Huntingdon. In 1631 he sold all his property in Huntingdon, and went to St. Ives, where he resided upon a farm till 1636, when he took up his residence at Ely, and farmed some land which had been recently bequeathed to him by his maternal uncle, Sir Thomas Steward. There he continued to reside in a house adjoining St. Mary's Church till 1647, and he seems to have taken an active part in the management of local affairs and charities. In 1640 he took his seat in the famous Long Parliament as member for Cambridge, and then began the long and bitter struggle between King and Parliament.
The history of that fierce struggle, as already remarked, belongs to the general history of England, and does not enter into the plan of this book. The foregoing pages have been written with the object of placing before the reader a succinct account of the House of Cromwell, so far as is known, from the year 1308 to the opening of the great Civil War of the seventeenth century. In the suc- ceeding pages will be found a genealogical account of the descendants of Oliver, the Lord Protector, followed by an account of the male descendants of his uncles, Henry and Philip.
CHAPTER II.
OLIVER, LORD PROTECTOR.
OLIVER CROMWELL, the only surviving son of Mr. Robert Cromwell, of Huntingdon, and Elizabeth Steward, of Ely, was born at Hunt- ingdon, April 25, 1599, and christened in the parish church of St. John, receiving his baptismal name from his uncle and godfather, Sir Oliver Cromwell, of Hinchinbrook, Knight. On August 22, 1620, he was married at St. Giles's Church, Cripplegate, London, to Elizabeth, daughter of Sir James Bourchier, of Felsted, in Essex, Knight, and had issue five sons and four daughters, namely :
Robert, baptized at Huntingdon, October 13, 1621 ; buried at Felsted, May 31, 1639.
Oliver, baptized at Huntingdon, February 6, 1623 ; died of small-pox, 1644.
Richard, who succeeded his father in the Protectorate, born at Huntingdon, October 4, 1626 ; died at Cheshunt, July 12, 1712.
Henry, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, born at Huntingdon, January 20, 1628 ; died at Spinney Abbey, March 23, 1674.
James, baptized at Huntingdon, January S, 1632 ; died in infancy.
20 The House of Cromwell.
Bridget, baptized at Huntingdon, August 4, 1624 ; buried at St. Anne's, Blackfriars, July 1, 1662.
Elizabeth, christened at Huntingdon, July 2, 1629 ; died at Hampton Court, August 6, 1658.
Mary, born at Ely, christened at Huntingdon, Feb- ruary 9, 1637 ; died at Chiswick, March 14, 1713.
Frances, christened at St. Mary's, Ely, December 6, 1638 ; died [at Spinney Abbey ?] January 27, 1721.
Note.— In the above list, and in all subsequent dates throughout this work, the year will be treated as commencing, not (as was the practice in England at the Civil War period) on March 25, but on January 1.
THE PROTECTRESS ELIZABETH.
The scurrilous literature which at the period of the Restoration found a victim in the quiet, dignified Lady Protectress is beneath notice. She was not without annoyance from the Government itself. Even before the King's return the newspapers were charging her with secreting sundry goods at a fruiterer's warehouse near the Three Cranes in Thames Street, including pictures and other royal property, with a view to exportation. And a few weeks later a search-warrant was issued, directing her and her sons to deliver up various deeds and evidences belonging to the Marquis of Worcester. These tribula- tions drew from her the following petition :
" To the King's Most Excellent Majesty.
"The humble petition of Elizabeth Cromwell, widow, — Sheweth, that among the many sorrows wherewith it hath pleased the allwise God to exercise your petitioner, she is deeply sensible of those unjust imputations whereby she is charged of detaining jewels and other goods belonging to your Majesty ; which, besides the disrepute of it, hath exposed her to many violences and losses under pretence of searching for such goods, to the undoing of her in her
Oliver, Lord Protector. 21
estate, and rendering her abode in any place unsafe ; — she being willing to depose upon oath that she neither hath nor knows of any such jewels or goods. And whereas she is able to make it appear by sufficient testi- mony that she hath never intermeddled in any of those public transactions which have been prejudicial to your Majesty's royal father or yourself, and is ready to yield an humble and faithful obedience to your Majesty in your government, — She therefore humbly prays that your Majesty would be pleased to distinguish betwixt the con- cernments of your petitioner and those of her relations who have been obnoxious ; and out of your princely goodness vouchsafe her a protection, without which she cannot expect, now in her old age, a safe retirement in any place of your Majesty's dominions. And she shall ever pray, etc. „ £ Cromwell."
This document is endorsed, " The petition of Old Noll's Wife." As to the venerable lady's whereabouts during this revolution of things, we have but scanty evidence. She had been ordered to quit the Cockpit soon after her son Richard's abdication ; and we can hardly doubt that Henry, whose return from Ireland she was anxiously soliciting, now took her under his protection. Just before the King's arrival, Henry Coventry, writing to the Marquis of Ormond, April 27, says : " Cromwell's widow is stolen out of town, and her nighest friends pretend not to know whither." It has been asserted that for awhile she sought retirement in Wales, and even in Switzerland. All we know for certain is that she eventually found a permanent asylum at Northborough House in North- amptonshire, near Market Deeping, the residence of her son-in-law Claypole (still standing as a farmhouse), and that there she died on November 19, 1665. Further par- ticulars respecting her latter days will occur in the lives of her children, Richard, Mary, and Frances.
J^j., -,-.». a:-, -"s,?-yr»'^r?r;^"",T, ,-':.. ■\;^^^',7.-7^^rggiI-y:i-,-i.j--?.
CHAPTER III.
ROBERT, ELDEST SON OF THE PROTECTOR.
ROBERT was sent, together with his brother Oliver, and perhaps also with Richard, to the free grammar-school of Felsted, then under the management of Mr. Holbeach. This school, which had been founded by Lord Rich in 1564, was then in considerable repute. Drs. John Wallis and Isaac Barrow are said to have received their early education there. But what principally recommended the place to the judgment of Oliver was, no doubt, the circumstance that his sons would there be under the watchful observa- tion of their maternal grandfather, Sir James Bourchier, whose seat, Grandcourts, was in the same parish on the road between Braintree and Felsted. Other neighbouring friends and relatives were the Mashams of Otes. The few scanty notices of this Robert, who was evidently a son after the father's heart, are of a very interesting character. The first occurs in 1638. Cromwell had been making a brief stoppage at Otes, where his cousin, Mrs. St. John, happened also to be paying a visit. Perhaps, as Mr. Carlyle suggests, he may have been taking one of his sons over to Felsted School, and on returning home took occa- sion to ride round by way of Otes and have a talk with his
Robert, Eldest Son of the Protector. 23
pious kinsmen. The discourse passing at that interview had evidently been of a devotional character ; so Mrs. St. John reminds him in a subsequent letter. Cromwell's reply to her is one of his most characteristic epistles ; but the only use we need make of it here is to quote the reference it contains to one of his sons, presumably Robert: "Salute all my friends in that family whereof you are yet a member. I am much bound unto them for their love, I bless the Lord for them, and that my son by their procurement is so well. Let him have your prayers, your counsel ; let me have them."
Seven months later this Robert died at Felsted,* of small-pox, to the unspeakable grief of his father. It was to this event he alluded on his death-bed, when he said, "This text" ["I can do all things through Christ who strengthened me"] "did once save my life, when my eldest son died ; which went as a dagger to my heart ; indeed it did." It was long supposed that the son thus alluded to was young Oliver, who fought by his father's side ; and under this impression Mr. Carlyle inserted the name hypo- thetically into that colloquy, thus : " when my eldest son [poor Oliver] died " — which Monsieur Guizot copying, but failing to mark the doubt, introduced as " mon pauvre Olivier " into his own text, thus treating it as an un- questionable fact. The error had no doubt acquired con- firmation from a passage in the father's letter of condolence to his brother-in-law, Valentine Wauton, who lost a son at Marston Moor. " Sir," says he, " you know my own trials this way " ; and then soon after, recalling his favourite text, he adds, " You may do all things by the strength of Christ. Seek that, and you shall easily bear your trial." He had himself, in fact, just been compelled to put to the test the principle here recommended to his
* The old schoolroom, in which Oliver's sons were taught by Mr. Holbeach, still stands, and now is used as the Sunday-school. The names of many scholars are cut into the old oak wainscot.
24 The House of Cromwell.
brother. It is now fully confirmed that Robert, and not Oliver, was the son whose premature death rose to his memory in the hour of his own closing conflict. The discovery of this interesting fact is due to a writer in the Edinburgh Review, January, 1856, whose narrative is as follows : " In the register of burials in the parish church of Felsted for 1639 occurs this entry :
" Robertus Cromwell Alius honorandi viri Militis Oliveris Cromwell et Elizabeths uxoris ejus sepultus fuit, 31 die Maii. Et Robertus fuit eximie pius juvenis Deum timens supra multos."
CHAPTER IV.
OLIVER, SECOND SON OF THE PROTECTOR.
OLIVER accompanied his brother Robert, as stated above, to Felsted School. On the breaking out of hostilities, that brother having recently died, Oliver was the only one of the sons old enough to bear arms, and he could not have been more than twenty when his name appears as Cornet in Troop Eight of Earl Bedford's Horse. Very few traces of his military career survive, except in the form of a reference to him occurring in Simon Gunton's " History of Peterborough." In that chronicle the elder Cromwell is represented, ac- cording to the usual custom of ignorant church-guides, as having been engaged in the mutilation of the cathedral. Young Oliver's share in the transaction becomes visible through the medium of one of his troopers, who, being about to burn a manuscript relating to the antiquities of the see, was persuaded by Mr. Humphrey Austin, the precentor, to surrender it for the sum of ios., and to ensure its preservation by subscribing an acquittance on the fly-leaf, which Mr. Austin thereupon prefaced by the following "Memorandtn. — This book was hid in the Church by me, Humphrey Austin, February, 1643, and found by one of Colonel Cromwell's soldiers when they pulled down
26 The House of Cromwell.
all the seats in the Choir, 22 April, 1643. And I making inquiry among them for an old Latin Bible which was lost, I found out at last the party who had it, and I gave him for the book ten shillings, as you see by this acquit- tance " [here following].
" I pray let this scripture book alone, for he hath paid me for it, and therefore I would desire you to let it alone. By me Henry Topcliffe, soldier under Captain Cromwell, Colonel Cromwell's son. Therefore I pray you let it alone. Henry Topcliffe. 22 April, 1643."
The book thus rescued was entitled, " The Leger-book of Peterborough," being the annals of the see, compiled by a monk of the establishment named Robert Swapham. We know full well that the Cromwell family, wherever they could make their influence felt throughout the war, rigor- ously discountenanced violations of this kind ; and a letter of the younger Oliver turns up at this very date to corro- borate the fact.
" To the right worshipful and worthy friend Samuel Smythe, Esq., Steward of the City of Norwich.
" Worthy Sir,
" I am sorry that I should have such an occasion to write to Norwich, concerning those which say they came from that noble city which hath furnished our armies (I can speak by experience) with godly men ; but indeed I suppose them rather spurious offspring of some ignoble place. Sir, thus it is, that among honest men, some knaves have been admitted into my troop, who coming with expectation of some base ends but being frustrated of them, and finding that this cause did not nourish their expectations, have to the dishonour of God, and my dis- credit, and their own infamy, deserted the cause and me their captain. Therefore, Sir, look upon them as dis- honourers of God's cause, and high displeasers of my
Oliver, Second Son of the Protector. 27
father, myself, and the whole regiment. In brief, I would desire you to make them severe examples, by taking and returning the arms and horses of all that have not a ticket under my hand, and to clap them up into prison, and inflicting of such punishment as you shall think fit. Es- pecially I desire that you would deal severely with one Robert Waffe [Wasse ?] and Simon Scafe. Pray, Sir, cause to return speedily all that had liberty from me to go to their friends. And likewise I desire you would secure a good horse from some of your malignants to mount one of my soldiers, John Manning, now at Norwich, who was lately taken prisoner by the enemy and by that means destitute. And pray do me the favour to mount such men as this bearer, Richard Waddelow, my clerk, shall procure. And so I rest,
" Yours to command,
" Oliver Cromwell.
" From my quarters at Peterborough, "15 Aug. 1643."
Young Oliver died of small-pox at Newport Pagnell in the second week of March, 1644. He was a very hand- some young gentleman, says the author of the memoir of Richard Cromwell in " Lives and Characters of Illus- trious Persons dying in 171 1." " His father had suddenly summoned him to join the army, and he soon after fell a victim to that complaint in the flower of his youth." In opposition to the quite apocryphal statement contained in the " Squire Papers," the occasion and whereabouts of his death is authoritatively established by a passage in the Parliament Scout, March 15 to 22, 1644 : " Colonel Cromwell is gone with his forces from Burlingham to Stony Stratford and Brickhill, and begins to increase in power. He hath lost his eldest son, who is dead of the small-pox at Newport [Newport Pagnell], a civil young gentleman, and the joy of his father."
CHAPTER V.
RICHARD, THIRD SON OF THE PROTECTOR.
LIKE his two elder brothers, Richard was sent to Felsted School ; after which he resided in the ^j Temple in London during the war, and at the age of twenty was admitted to the Society of Lincoln's Inn. The Protectorate of Great Britain and Ireland, into which he was installed on the death of his father, was a troublous reign of eight months, the story of which would be unsuitable in this place. At the Restoration he fled the kingdom, more out of fear of his creditors than of the King, leaving his wife and children behind him at Hursley Lodge, near Romsey, in Hants. After twenty years' residence abroad in Paris and else- where, he returned to England in 1680 — a period when the increasing unpopularity of Charles II. divested such a step of any great danger — and, under the assumed name of Clarke, either occupied a small estate which he owned at Cheshunt, or shared the roof of his friend, Serjeant Sir Thomas Pengelly (afterwards Chief Baron of the Ex- chequer), whose house was that standing near Cheshunt Church, and subsequently known as the Rectory.* His
* Pengelly House in modern times became the property of a gentleman named Atwood, who bequeathed it for charitable purposes. It was subse- quently used as a school. In l88oit was destroyed by fire ; estimated damage, ;£io,ooo.
Richard, Third Son of the Protector. 29
wife had been dead five years ; his only surviving son was in possession of large property derived from her ; and of his daughters, one was already married to Dr. Gibson (of whom hereafter) ; another was perhaps still living at Hursley; and a third, Dorothy, just then nineteen years of age, was on the point of becoming the wife of John Mortimer, a Somersetshire squire. Richard's return to England at this juncture favours the suggestion that one of the objects he had in view was to be present at the ceremony. The young lady died the following year in childbed. There were now only two daughters and one son, Oliver, remaining out of a family of nine. This son died unmarried in 1705, when the question arose whether the Hursley estate which he inherited from his mother passed directly to his sisters as co-heirs, or to Richard their father for his life. The sisters proposed to compro- mise the affair by paying him an annuity ; but Richard, preferring that the matter should be decided in Chancery, obtained a decree in his own favour.
This affair being settled, Richard appears to have spent a considerable portion of the remaining seven years of his life at Hursley, where in company with his daughters he attended the parish church on Sunday mornings, and in the afternoon rode alone in his coach to a Baptist meeting-house in Romsey. He died at Cheshunt July 12, 1712, and lies buried in the chancel of Hursley Church. His death is said to have taken place in the house of his Cheshunt friend, Pengelly, above mentioned, the counsel who had successfully conducted his cause in 1705, and to whom he was strongly attached. In his will he bequeaths a personal souvenir to his good friend Mrs. Rachel Pengelly. Some other names, too, are mentioned, but his daughters are not referred to. He knew that they would take the Hursley estate after him, and of personal property he probably had but little. He enjoyed, we are told, a good state of health to the last,
3<D The House of Cromwell.
and at fourscore would gallop his horse for several miles together. In person he is described as tall, fair-haired, and " the lively image of his father." A letter of T. Whiston, quoted by Mark Noble, asserts that the Crom- wells as a family possessed great bodily strength, and were of robust constitutions, many of them attaining considerable longevity. On the other hand, it is observable how many of them died in infancy, but this may have been owing to the ignorant medical treatment of those days.
As to his character, Richard has shared in the defa- mation which, more or less, overtook all the members of his family. He is now known to have been an upright, generous, and sagacious man — fully aware that the turbu- lent crew around him when he became Protector had made peace impossible, but resolving at the same time not to shed a drop of blood in defence of a false position. A humane temper is not necessarily a weakness; and cer- tainly John Howe, who knew him well, did not deem him a weak man. On one occasion in after-years, when some person in Mr. Howe's presence charged the ex- Protector with weakness, the venerable divine exclaimed : " How could that man be termed weak who, when the army remonstrance was brought to him by Fleetwood, stood it out all night against the whole Council, and continued the debate till four o'clock in the morning, maintaining that to dissolve that Parliament would be his and their ruin — with none but Thurloe to abet him ?" Dr. Isaac Watts, who in his youthful days was privileged to hold many conversations with Richard Cromwell, testifies that his abilities were by no means contemptible. He further remarks that in all these interviews, the ex- Protector never but on one occasion referred to his former elevation, and then only in a very cursory manner. Another favourable witness was William Tonge, of Denmark Street, Soho, who described to Dr. Thomas
Richard, Third Son of the Protector. 3 1
Gibbons Richard's occasional visits to some friends there, his appearance in a place of worship, his unblemished character, and the pleasantry which characterized his talk. He corroborates Watts's remark about his unwillingness to refer to former times.
John Howe, the divine above mentioned, who had been chaplain in succession to both the Protectors, died in London in 1702. He was visited in his last sickness by Richard Cromwell, then seventy-six years of age, who, hearing that his old friend was near his end, had come up from the country to make him a respectful visit and to take a final farewell. Much serious discourse, we are told, passed between the two patriarchal men, and their parting was solemn and affectionate. When Richard's own end was approaching, some few years later, he said to his two attendant daughters, " Live in love ; I am going to the God of love." His affectionate disposition is revealed in the following letter, written to one of these daughters from the house of his friend, Sir Thomas Pengelly, at Cheshunt, ten years after his return to England.
Richard Cromwell to Mrs. Anne Gibson.
"18 December, 1690.
"Dear,
"Think not that I forget you, though I confess that I have been silent too long in returning and owning that of yours to me. That which was one bar, I knew not, upon Mrs. Abbott's removing, how to send so as my letter might come safe to you. For though we write nothing of State affairs, they being above our providential sphere, yet I am not willing to be exposed ; nor can there be that freedom when we are thoughtful of such restraint as a peeping eye. The hand by which this comes [to you] gave me a hint as if there were some foul play to
32 The House of Cromwell.
letters directed to him [to Pengelly ?] . Dear heart, I thank thee for thy kind and tender expressions to me, and I assure thee (if there had been cause) they would have melted me. There is a great deal of pity, piety, and love. What I had before, was so full that I had not the least room to turn a thought or surmise. But what shall I say ? My heart was full, but now it overflows. You have put joy and gladness into it. How unworthy am I to have such a child ! And I know I may venture to say that the like parallel is not to be found. What I said was experienced matter for information. What you replied was in behalf of those who professed themselves to be the Lord's people ; and they that are truly such are as tender as the apple of His eye. I rejoice in that we both of us love them ; yet we are not to deny our reasons as to the mischiefs some of them have been instrumental [in caus- ing] not only in particular to a family, but in general to the Church of Christ. Besides, what woes are hanging over these nations ! May we not go farther, and bring in all Christendom ? I have been alone thirty years banished and under silence ; and my strength and safety is to be retired, quiet and silent. We are foolish in taking our cause out of the hand of God. Our Saviour will plead, and God will do right [as] He hath promised. Let us join our prayers for faith and patience. If we have heaven, let whoso will, get the world. My hearty, hearty, hearty affection and love to your sister and self. Salute all friends. I rest, commending you to the blessing of the Almighty. Again farewell.
" Your truly loving father,
"R. C.
" Present me to all friends. Landlord and Landlady [the Pengellys] present respects and service."
Note. — In his extant letters he avoids names and places as much as possible, his object being to keep out of harm's way.
Richard, Third Son of the Protector. $3
The few incoherences visible in the above would pro- bably adjust themselves fairly enough, did we know the substance of the letter which brought them forth ; though it is not unlikely that an obscure and involved style would become habitual to one writing under the constant fear of having his letters opened ; to say nothing of his having spoken French for twenty years.
The story of Richard's twenty years' exile is involved in much obscurity. The following document, preserved in the Record Office, may help in some small measure to remove it. It is numbered CLI. 17, State Papers, Domestic, Charles II., and was first brought before the public notice in the AthencBum, April 12, 1862, by Mrs. Everett Green, who opened the subject by stating that during the war with Holland the Government of Charles II., fancying that the English " fanatics " resident abroad were in league with the Provinces against their own country, came to the resolution of fetching them home by a threat of high treason. An Act was thereupon passed, beginning with the direct attainder of three, to wit, Thomas Dolman, James Bampfield, and Thomas Scott ; and further enacting that any others who should refuse to come when summoned would incur the like penalty. This was in 1665, and the next year it became known that a list of fugitives had been nominated, including Richard Cromwell. Mrs. Cromwell, his wife, becoming justly alarmed, sent her agent, William Mum- ford, twice up to London to procure, if possible, the withdrawal of her husband's name from the proclamation. As the opportunity seemed a favourable one for getting at the personal history of the ex-Protector, the agent himself was put under examination, and deposed as follows :
"The examination of William Mumford of Hursley near Winchester Co. Hants, yeoman ; taken this 15 March, 1666, before me Edmund Warcupp Esq. one of his
3
34 The House of Cromwell.
Majesty's Justices of the peace for the said county and liberties. This examinant saith that he is menial servant to Mrs. Dorothy Cromwell, wife to Richard Cromwell, living at Hursley ; and hath belonged to him and to her these eleven years last past, and now manageth Mrs. Cromwell's business in the country or London as her occasions require. He saith that he came to London about five weeks since to apply to Dr. Wilkins to move my Lord Chancellor [Hyde] that Richard Cromwell's name might be omitted in his Majesty's Proclamation to call his English subjects out of France, for that his debts would ruin him in case he should be necessitated to return into England ; and Dr. Wilkins informed this examinant that his lordship the Lord Chancellor told him he knew not of Richard Cromwell's name being at all put into the proclamation, whereupon this examinant immediately returned into the country. But the rumour continuing that Richard Cromwell's name would be in, he returned again to London by his mistress's order yes- terday was three weeks, and then lodged at one William Taste's a baker in Air Street, Piccadilly, and his horse stands at the Bear there ; — that at the first time of this examinant's being in town he received a letter from Richard Cromwell directed to himself but was for Mrs. Cromwell, the contents whereof was complaints for money and condoling for his mother's death ; and saith he knoweth not of any other person, that Richard Cromwell correspondeth with, but this examinant. He further saith, that this examinant's wife's sister Elizabeth Blackstone having by distraction murdered her neighbour's child and been committed to Newgate for the offence, this exam- inant repaired to Newgate to assist her in her distracted condition, and this was all the reason why he went to Newgate. He further saith, that as far as he knows or believes, the said Richard Cromwell doth not hold any intelligence with any Fanatics nor with the King of France
Richard, Third Son of the Protector. 35
or States of Holland ; and that to avoid any jealousy of it, the said Richard Cromwell is by Dr. Wilkins' advice gone or going into Italy or Spain, and that the last letter this examinant sent to him five weeks since was directed to John Clarke at Monsieur Bauvais' in Paris, by which name the said Richard Cromwell now passeth, and doth usually change his name with his dwelling, that he may keep himself unknown beyond the seas, so as to avoid all correspondency or intelligence, which this examinant knows he industriously avoideth ; for during last winter twelve month he lived with the said Richard Cromwell in Paris, and the whole diversion of him there was drawing of landscapes and reading of books ; And he saw no Englishman, Scotch, or Irishman in his company during that whole time, nor any Frenchmen but such as in- structed him in the sciences. This examinant further saith that he hath not any intelligence with any person whatsoever to his knowledge, that doth intend or act anything whatsoever against his Majesty ; and that he conceives himself bound in duty and conscience to dis- cover all traitors or traitorous conspiracies against his Majesty or his Government ; and that the estate of Richard Cromwell in right of his wife is but £600 per annum, and that he knoweth Richard Cromwell is not sixpence the better or richer for being the son of his father, or [for being] the pretended Protector of England ; and that the estate of old Mrs. Cromwell lately deceased was in the hands and management of Jeremy White, chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, and now at Sir John Russell's at Chippenham, who will not come to any account for the same, and who hath not yet conformed. This examinant further saith, that he knoweth not of any person who writes to the said Richard besides this exam- inant and Mrs. Cromwell his wife ; and that he knoweth not nor ever heard, that the Scotch regiment is coming out of France ; and he is certain that the said Richard
11G279S
2,6 The House of Cromwell.
never intended to come over with it, but is gone or going into Spain or Italy as advised. He further saith, that he hath often heard Richard Cromwell pray in his private prayers for his Majesty, praying God to make his Majesty a nursing father to his people, speaking often with great reverence of his Majesty's grace and favour to himself and family in suffering them to enjoy their lives and the little fortunes they have ; And this examinant further saith that he will not meddle any further in the said Richard Crom- well's affairs, if it be any way prejudicial to his Majesty's service ; and that he hath not, nor the said Richard Cromwell, to this examinant's knowledge, acted directly or indirectly anything against his Majesty's Government since his Majesty's happy restoration, and that himself hath taken the Oaths of allegiance and supremacy. And further sayeth not.
" William Mumford.
" (Signed) Edmund Warcupp."
The falsity of Hyde's statement that Richard Crom- well's name was not in the list is proved by another paper endorsed " 26 March, 1666, Names of the fourteen persons to be warned home by a proclamation in pursu- ance of the Act." They were as follows : William Scott, Sir Robert Honeywood, jun., Colonel John Disbrowe, Colonel Kilpatrick, John Grove, Algernon Sydney, Oliver St. John, Richard Steele, Newcomen and Hickman, two ministers, Richard Cromwell, John Phelps, Colonel Cobbett, Richard Deane. On maturer consideration, all these names were withdrawn except five, Richard Crom- well's being one of those withdrawn.
Richard, Third Son of the Protector.
THE PROTECTRESS DOROTHY.
Richard's wife, whom he married in 1649, shortly after the death of Charles I., was Dorothy, eldest daughter and co-heir of Richard Major, a wealthy landowner of Hursley aforesaid, and of Merdon, in Surrey. This was a marriage in which the elder Protector testified unqualified satisfac- tion, on account of the personal piety, not only of the father, but also of " Dear Doll " herself; and the allusions which he makes in his letters to her on-coming family look as though he cherished the hope that his grand- children would sustain his own greatness. The few sur- viving memorials of the lady herself represent her as a prudent, godly, and practical Christian, much devoted to acts of personal charity. For a while she was terribly cast down by the reverse of fortune which drove her hus- band and herself from the palace of Whitehall to the obscurity of the Hursley retreat, an event aggravated simultaneously by the decease of her father, Mr. Major, and the flight of her husband into prolonged exile. It is true, she had her infant family to rear, the birth of her youngest child, Dorothy, occurring just as her husband left the English shore ; but her bright hopes in respect of their future fortunes were utterly dashed, and the chagrin which darkened her own reflections seems traceable in their education. One result of affliction was the strengthen- ing of her Nonconformist principles, and her active bene- volence thenceforward found expression in endeavours to solace and protect divers ministers ejected by the Uni- formity Act of 1662. She died on January 5, 1676, in the forty-ninth year of her age, and lies buried in the chancel of Hursley Church. Her children, nine in number, were as follow-; :
I. Elizabeth, born in 1650. This is "the little brat"
38 The House of Cromwell.
after whose welfare the elder Protector makes inquiry in a letter to Mr. Major on July 17, wherein also he chides the young parents for neglecting to write to him, and says of dear Doll, "I doubt not her husband hath spoiled her. ... I hope you give my son good counsel : I believe he needs it ; he is in the dangerous time of his age, and it's a very vain world." Touching the baby, Mr. Carlyle thinks " the poor little thing must have died soon," and he adds that " in Noble's inexact lists there is no trace of its ever having lived." But Mark Noble is strictly exact in this matter, and gives us all the information we need. Oliver's good wishes, too, were amply fulfilled, for the little Elizabeth outlived all her brothers and sisters, and reached the age of eighty-one. She appointed as executors Richard and Thomas Cromwell, grandsons of Henry, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, desiring them to erect in Hursley Church a monument setting forth all the par- ticulars of the Cromwell and Major alliances, a task which they duteously fulfilled. And as she was the last surviving representative of her father's house, a vast collection of portraits, letters, and other family relics, descended from her to her executors. She will again come under our notice.
II. Anne, born in 1651 ; died in infancy, and was buried at Hursley.
III. A son, baptized at Hursley November 3, 1652 ; buried there in the following month.
IV. Mary, born in 1654, died in infancy ; buried at Hursley.
V. A fourth daughter, born in 1655, lived only twelve days.
VI. Oliver, son and heir, of whom hereafter (p. 41).
VII. Dorothy, born in 1657; died next year during the Protectorate of her father, who prudently refrained from opening the Westminster Abbey vault, and caused the body to be quietly buried at Hursley.
Richard, Third Son of the Protector. 39
VIII. Anna, born in 1659 during her father's Pro- tectorate. She became the wife of Dr. Thomas Gibson, Physician-General of the Army, whom she survived many years. Her own death occurred in 1727, in the sixty- ninth year of her age, and a marble monument in St. George's Chapel in the Foundling Hospital commemo- rates husband and wife. Dr. Gibson by will appointed that after his wife's decease the whole of his property should pass to his nephew, Dr. Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London. The prelate maintained a respectful and intimate correspondence with his widowed aunt so long as she lived, and it is conjectured that the terse and com- prehensive Life of Oliver, which about that period went through so many editions, was the result of his honourable and appreciative attachment to the family. The two surviving sisters — that is to say, Mrs. Gibson and her elder sister, Miss Elizabeth Cromwell — lived together in Bedford Row, and after the death of their only brother, Oliver, must have been very wealthy. We catch an inter- esting glimpse of them in 1719 from the journal of Thomas Hearne, the antiquary, who long resided in St. Edmund Hall, Oxford : " On Saturday, 5 September, came to Oxford two daughters of Richard Cromwell, son of Oliver Cromwell, Protector, one of whom is married to Dr. Gibson, the physician, who wrote 'The Anatomy'; the other is unmarried. They are both Presbyterians, as is also Dr. Gibson, who was with them. They were at the Presbyterian Meeting-house in Oxford on Sunday morning and evening ; and yesterday they and all the gang with them dined at Dr. Gibson's, the Provost of Queen's, who is related to them, and made a great enter- tainment for them, expecting something from them, the physician being said to be worth £30,000. They went from Oxford after dinner." — (" Reliquiae Hearneanae," vol. ii.)
Mr. Hewling Luson (related to Henry's line), of whom
40 The House of Cromwell.
more hereafter, says : "I have been several times in com- pany with these ladies. They were well-bred, well- dressed, stately women, exactly punctilious ; but they seemed, especially Mistress Cromwell, to carry about them a consciousness of high rank, accompanied with a secret dread that those with whom they conversed should not observe and acknowledge it. They had neither the good sense nor the great enthusiasm of Mrs. Bendysh. But as the daughter of Ireton had dignity without pride, the daughters of Richard Cromwell had pride without much dignity."
Mr. Luson might have added that they habitually assisted other branches of the family who were in less prosperous circumstances than themselves. When the death of their father had left these two ladies at liberty to dispose of the family estate at Hursley, they sold it to Sir William Heathcote for £34,000 or £35,000, who at once proceeded to pull down the old mansion, and to rebuild it from the very foundations. In 1894 the Hursley estate passed from the Heathcote family into the possession of Mr. Baxendale.
IX. Dorothy, born at Hursley, August 1, 1660. The date of her father's flight from England has been approxi- mately determined by Mark Noble as in July or August — that is to say, some few weeks after King Charles II. 's return, and it seems reasonable to suppose that his object in lingering here so long was to await the issue of this the last birth in the family, and, as it proved to be a girl, to give for the second time the beloved name of Dorothy, which conjecture may be coupled with the other already made, that his return to England in 1680 was in part prompted by the resolution to occupy his paternal place at her wedding. The young lady married John Mor- timer, Esq., of Somersetshire, F.R.S., author of " The Whole Art of Husbandry," published in 1708. He is said to have half ruined himself by experiments in agricultural
Richard, Third Son of the Protector. 4 1
science ; but before this happened his wife had died in child-bed within a year after her marriage. This was on May 14, 16S1. Dorothy therefore is not to be credited with any share in that transaction of her sisters when they disputed their father's rights in 1705.
Oliver Cromwell, only surviving son of the Protector Richard, was born at Hursley in 1656. It was very natural that the elder Protector, after hearing of so many deaths among his grandchildren at Hursley, should express a partiality for one who at last gave fair promise of healthy existence. Little Oliver accordingly was brought up from Hampshire, probably to Hampton Court, and remained there till the deposition of his father, when, together with his sisters, he was sent down to Hursley. Of his early manhood little is known ; but at the period of the Revolution in 1688, being then in possession of the estate, which he inherited from his mother, he came forward with a patriotic proposal to raise a regiment of horse for service in Ireland, if he might be permitted to name his own officers. The politic William may have had no desire at that juncture of affairs to see a rival for popularity in the person of a second Oliver Cromwell, and the offer was declined. It was a like cautious feeling, perhaps, which gave bias to the Election Committee, who in the second year of William and Mary rejected the petition of Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Jervoise, Esquires, when they claimed to have been legally returned for the borough of Lymington. It is well known that the contested elec- tions, whose details crowd the Commons' Journals of that and the succeeding age, were often made to turn on arbitrary, diverse, and obsolete customs prevailing in this or that borough ; so that, as the law of one borough was no law for its neighbour, the returns could be adjusted pretty much as the Government desired.
Mr. Say, the Dissenting minister, to whom we are indebted for so many reminiscences of the family, says
42
The House of Cromwell.
he had seen this Mr. Cromwell, and could testify that he had something of the spirit of his grandfather ; while another contemporary writer adds that "he had his look and genius." But notwithstanding that, like his own father, he presented the marks of robust manhood, he passed away prematurely in 1705 in the fiftieth year of his age, and was buried in the family vault at Hursley. His will, written in 1686, when thirty years old, makes mention of his " honoured father," but the principal money bequests are to his sisters, giving £2,000 to each, if they married in their father's lifetime. Legacies are also left to Benjamin Disbrowe of London, merchant, to Paris Slater and William Wightman of London, William Rudyard of Hackney, Edward Rayner and Mary his wife, John Leigh, Thomas Wade, his cousin Elizabeth Barton, his loving friend Samuel Tomlins, B.D., and Mrs. Anne Thomas.
CHAPTER VI.
HENRY, FOURTH SON OF THE PROTECTOR.
HENRY, like his brothers, received such brief education as the stormy times would permit, at Felsted. He joined his father in arms about the time of the remodelling of the army, being then only sixteen years of age ; and three years afterwards he held either a captaincy in Harrison's regiment or in Sir Thomas Fairfax's Life-Guards. In the summer of 1648 he served under his father in the North of England. Advanced to a colonelcy in February,
1650, he accompanied his father in the short but decisive Irish campaign, being present at the death-bed of his brother-in-law, Henry Ireton, who died at Limerick in
1651. At the age of twenty-five Henry sat in the Bare- bones Parliament in 1653 as a representative of Ireland. On May 10, 1653, he married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Francis Russell of Chippenham, Bart., and on Feb- ruary 22 in the year following entered at Gray's Inn. His subsequent career as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland brought to light all those faculties which proved him the worthy son of such a father. He remained at his post during the two Protectorates, having throughout a sore fight to maintain with fanatics of every class, but harassed prin-
44 The House of Cromwell.
cipally by the difficulty of getting the soldiers' pay from England. Rapin's observation, made after the event, has been accepted by most subsequent historians, namely, that if Henry had succeeded to the Protectorate instead of Richard, the Republican officers would have met their match.
A strong attachment had sprung up between Henry Cromwell and his brother-in-law, Lord Fauconberg, even before they met. Henry and his wife were in Ireland at the time of Fauconberg's marriage with Mary Cromwell ; but from and after that event the letters passing between them were increasingly cordial and confidential. While their brother Fleetwood, in conjunction with Disbrowe, Lambert, Berry, and the rest, were plotting the fall of the Protector Richard, Fauconberg supplied Henry with constant information, and both united in scorn for the fanaticism which in Fleetwood they felt to be but the feeble resurrection of an obsolete creed — the theory, as Henry formulated it, of " Dominion founded in Grace." At the Restoration, Henry retired to the home of his father-in-law, Sir Francis Russell, at Chippenham, in Cambridgeshire, there to await the outcome of the political chaos. After a residence of five or six years at Chippenham, he removed to his own estate at Spinney Abbey near Soham, worth about £500 or £600 a year, which he purchased in 1661, where in rural occupations he passed the remaining nine years of his life. He died on March 23, 1674, of that painful disorder, the stone, in the forty-seventh year of his age, and was buried at Wicken Church, in Cambridge. Though he is styled plain " Henry Cromwell " on his tomb, yet in his will he writes himself " Sir Henry Cromwell of Spinney in Cambridgeshire, Knight," being not unwilling, suggests Noble, to let the world know, when he could not be called to account for it, that he thought it an honour to have received knight- hood from his father. He had also been made one of the
Henry, FourtJi Son of the Protector. 45
Lords of the Upper House in 1657, but his work in Ireland prevented his sitting. In his will he mentions only two names, those of his wife and his eldest son Oliver, to the former of whom he devises all his estates in England and Ireland with absolute power of disposal.
The lands of Cromwell in Mcath and Connaught were confirmed to his trustees by special proviso of the Act of Settlement, but his family seems to have lost them in the next generation.
It may not be left untold that after his retirement into private life he conformed to the Established Church, and that, too, at a period when imprisonment and confiscation were the weapons of the Church's warfare against many of his personal relations and political friends. He had learnt, it is true, during his dictatorship in Ireland the necessity of holding the scales of justice uninfluenced by polemical distinctions ; and it is evident that he acquired during the process much stronger prejudices than his father ever entertained against religious enthusiasts. While this may partly account for his subsequent choice, it is more than probable that his wife's preferences in the same direction operated as a concurrent influence. We are told that an Anglican chaplain was maintained at Spinney Abbey during her widowhood, till the Noncon- formity of the next generation displaced him. On the other hand, Henry had given asylum to Richard Parr, the Vicar of his own parish of Chippenham, when ejected for Nonconformity.
Henry Cromwell's Petition to King Charles II,
" Sheweth,
" That your petitioner doth heartily acquiesce in the providence of God for restoring your Majesty to the government of these nations ; — That all his actions have been without malice cither to the person or to the interest
46 The House of Cromwell.
of your Majesty, but only out of natural duty to his late father ; — That your petitioner did, all the time of his power in Ireland, study to preserve the peace, plenty and splendour of that kingdom, did encourage a learned ministry, giving not only protection but maintenance to several Bishops there ; placed worthy persons in the seats of judicature and magistracy, and to his own great prejudice upon all occasions was favourable to your Majesty's professed friends. He therefore humbly beseeches your Majesty that the tender consideration of the premisses and of the great temptations and necessities your petitioner was under, may extenuate your Majesty's displeasure against him; — and that your Majesty, as a great instance of your clemency and an acknowledgement of the great mercy which your royal self hath received from Almighty God, would not suffer him, his wife and children to perish from the face of the Earth, but rather to live and expiate what hath been done amiss with their future prayers and services for your Majesty. In order whereunto your said peti- tioner humbly offers to your Majesty's most gracious con- sideration, that since he is already outed of about £2,000 per annum which he held in England, and for which £4,000 portion was paid by your petitioner's wife's friends to his late father, he may obtain your Majesty's grant for such lands already in his possession upon a common account with many others in Ireland, as shall by law be adjudged forfeited and in your Majesty's dispose. And forasmuch as your petitioner hath laid out near £6,000 upon the pre- mises, that your Majesty would recommend him to the next Parliament in Ireland to deal favourably with him concerning the same, and according to your petitioner's deportment for the common good of that place. And lastly your petitioner most humbly beseeches your most excellent Majesty, — that no distinction between himself and other your Majesty's good subjects may be branded on him to posterity ; — that so he may without fear, and as
Hewy, Fourth Son of the Protector. 47
well out of interest as duty, serve your Majesty all his days ; who shall ever pray, &c.
" H. Cromwell."
Certificate annexed.
" Whereas we were desired to testify our knowledge concerning the value of the lands to be confirmed to Colonel Henry Cromwell, we do hereby certify as followeth, viz. — That the lands in Ireland possessed by the said Colonel Cromwell on 7 May 1659 were in satisfaction of £12,000 in debentures or near thereabouts ; — That deben- tures were commonly bought and sold for four, five, and six shillings in the pound, few yielding more even in the dearest times. According to which rates the said lands might have been had for between three and four thousand pounds. Which said sum with the improvements by him made thereupon, is as much as the same is now worth to be sold ; and is all we know he hath to subsist upon for himself and family. Given under our hands this 23 Feb- ruary 1661.
" Massereene.
" audley mervyn."
Henry's wife Elizabeth, the daughter of Sir Francis Russell aforesaid, survived her husband thirteen years. Elegant in manners and exemplary in conduct, she was long remembered in the neighbourhood as " the good Lady Cromwell." Her grandson, William Cromwell, of Kirby Street, informed Dr. Gibbons that though, like many others, she had at first entertained a hostile feeling towards the Protector Oliver, yet on becoming his daughter-in-law, closer observation changed her antipathies into affectionate esteem, and led her to regard him as the most amiable of parents. Her death occurred on April 7, 1687, in the fifty-second year of her age ; and her monu- ment, with those of others of the family, is preserved in Wicken Church, Cambridgeshire.
48 The House of Cromwell.
Issue of Henry Cromwell, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and the Lady Elizabeth Russell.
I. Oliver, born in Dublin, 1656 ; died at Spinney Abbey, 1685, in the twenty-ninth year of his age, and, as is supposed, unmarried. The story of the infant's birth is thus recorded in a news-letter of the day : " From Dublin. On the 19th of April my lord Henry Cromwell became the joyful father of a son ; which, as it hath been matter of great joy to us, so I presume it will be welcome news to you. The earnest prayers of good people gave his lord- ship's lady so easy a deliverance that the most part of her ladyship's travail was spent in dispatching letters for England. The joy thereof confined not itself long within the walls of their private family, but was straight blazed by several bonfires throughout the city ; the honest towns- men seeming emulous who should contribute the greatest solemnity for so great a mercy. On the 24th following, the joys were more perfect, there being more congratula- tions for the infant's admission into the Church by baptism than for its entrance into the world by birth ; his lordship having openly in Christ-church offered up his child that day to the Lord in that ordinance, and given it His High- ness's name. Which so heightened the joy of the con- gregation, that I never saw in one meeting more eyes and I believe hearts more intently lifted up in prayer, never heard more passionate praises for a blessing, than on that day ; which gives no small support to my faith that a child of such prayers and praises shall not miscarry."
II. Henry, born in Dublin in 1658 ; of whom hereafter.
III. Francis, born at Chippenham in 1663 ; died un- married in 1719.
IV. Richard, born at Spinney Abbey in 1665 ; died unmarried in London in 1687.
V. William, born at Spinney Abbey in 1667 ; died un- married in the East Indies in 1692.
Henry, Fourth Son of the Protector. 49
VI. Elizabeth, born at Whitehall in 1654 ; died at Chippenham, 1659, in the house of her maternal grand- father, Sir Francis Russell. This is the " Sweet Betty " referred to in Fleetwood's letter to Henry in 1656.
VII. Elizabeth, born just after the decease of the pre- ceding, therefore taking her name. On August 30, 1681, she was married at Dover to William Russell, of Ford- ham, son of Gerard Russell and grandson of Sir William Russell, the first Baronet, consequently first cousin to her mother, the Lady Elizabeth. Of this marriage the issue was fourteen children, but the habits of the parents appear to have been unthrifty. Moving for awhile among the county gentry, and maintaining with that object a style of living far beyond their means, Mr. Russell escaped his creditors only in the grave, and the widow fled with the surviving children to London, where she died in 171 1. Her family was as follows :
I. O' Brian William, born 1684, fate unknown.
II., III., IV., V., VI. Henry, John, William, Edward, Thomas, died young or unmarried, two of them at sea.
VII. Francis, born 1692; became a hosier in London. His son Thomas, born 1724, had issue. William died abroad unmarried, and Rebecca, who died in 1832, by her second husband, William Dyer, of Ilford, Esq., a magistrate and deputy-lieutenant of Essex, left five children, viz. : (1) William Andrew, sometime of 34, Guildford Street, W.C. ; (2) Charles Adams, formerly of Canewdon Hall, Rochford, Essex; (3) Thomas John, in the East India Company's service ; (4) Mary Eliza ; (5) Louisa.
VIII. Mar}-, of whom presently.
IX. Sarah became the wife of Martin Wilkins, a substantial landowner of Soham, whose two children died in infancy.
4
50 The House of Cromwell.
X. Name unknown ; became Mrs. Nelson of Mil- denhall, and had a daughter, the wife of Mr. Redderock, a solicitor of that place, and the mother of several children.
XI. Margaret, of whom presently (p. 52).
Issue of Mary, eldest married daughter of William and Elizabeth Russell of Fordham.
This lady married Mr. Robert D'Aye, of Soham, and long outlived him, her protracted widowhood being passed at Soham, where her poverty was in some measure relieved by an annual grant from the daughters of the ex -Protector, Richard Cromwell, both of whom also bequeathed her a legacy ; but as her own death did not occur till 1765, she must have long survived her bene- factors. Her family consisted of : (1) A son named Russell, who died at sea unmarried ; (2) a daughter married to Mr. Saunders, from whom she separated ; (3) Elizabeth, who introduces us to the
Family of Addison.
Elizabeth D'Aye, by her marriage, in 1762, with Mr. Thomas Addison, of Soham, became the mother of
I. Mary, died in childhood.
II. Elizabeth, the wife of John Hill ; left three sons — John, William, and Eden.
III. Mary Russell, born 1764; became the wife of Mr. Robert Sunman, and died at Lambeth in 1800, having had Mary Addison, who died in youth, and Robert, born in 1786.
IV. and V. Russell and Thomas, twins, born 1767. Thomas died in infancy.
VI. and VII. Frances and William; both died in infancy.
Henry, Fourth Son of the Protector. 5 1
Russell, the only surviving son of this family, died at the age of twenty-five in 1792. His wife Anne outlived him fifty-four years, dying in 1846, at the age of eighty- five. By her he left one son,
William, a surgeon of Soham, where he practised laboriously for more than half a century, being held in great esteem by rich and poor. Beyond this, his life may be described as uneventful, though it is due to him to state that the Cromwell monument, forming so striking an object in Soham Churchyard, and displaying the descent of the Addisons from Henry, the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, downwards, is the expression of his hereditary homage. It has been said that the career of his great progenitor was not often made by Mr. Addison the promi- nent subject of remark, yet the writer of this book well remembers the flashing up of the old fire at an interview held with him many years back, when the old gentleman modestly hinted that the Protector's facial lineaments were not yet obliterated in his descendants. Many will say that his son Thomas, the Ely solicitor, illustrates the fond belief even more than the father did. Mr. Addison died in 1868, having married Anne, daughter of Thomas Fox, of the Newlands, in Curdworth, co. Warwick, farmer, by whom he had three children.
I. Thomas Russell, born 1828, a solicitor practising in Ely.
II. William Oliver Cromwell, born 1832, a solicitor practising at Brierley Hill, co. Stafford, married Charlotte, daughter of Charles Woolverton, of Great Yarmouth, Esq., and has issue : (1) Charles William, 1866; (2) Charlotte Barnby, 1869 ; (3) Frank, 1870; (4) Edith Maud, 1871.
III. Henrietta Fox, married, 1859, to George H. Rust, son of the late Rev. E. Rust D'Eye, of Abbott's Hall, Stowmarket. His children are eleven in number, viz. : (1) Henrietta Fanny, 1862 ; (2) George
52 The House of Cromwell.
Edgar, 1863 ; (3) Agnes Elizabeth, 1864 ; (4) Isabel, 1866 ; (5) Jane Louisa, 1868 ; (6) Henry, 1869 ; (7) Katharine Alice, 1870 ; (8) Evelyn, 1872 ; (9) Anne Georgina, 1874; (10) Mabel, 1875; (11) Emily, 1877.
Issue of Margaret, sixth daughter of William and Elizabeth Russell of Fordham.
She became the wife of Mr. Edward Peachey, and had an only daughter, Elizabeth, whose husband bore the name of Richard Peachey, but was not related to her father's family. By the will of her uncle, Martin Wilkins, who left his real estate to his wife Sarah, some of the lands in Horsecroft and the Great Fen were to descend in reversion to Elizabeth, daughter of Edward and Margaret Peachey, besides a bequest of £"500 and an annuity of £15 till she attained the age of twenty-one. By a codicil to his will, in 1749, the £500 is revoked, she being then the wife of Richard Peachey. This marriage produced three children, viz. :
I. Richard, who died unmarried at the age of twenty.
II. William, who in 1780 was of Cambridge University.
III. Elizabeth, wife of Rev. Mr. Ellis, of Mil- borne, Cambs., and the mother of: (1) Thomas, a solicitor ; (2) William, a surgeon ; (3) Elizabeth, died unmarried ; (4) a daughter married to Mr. Burbage, practising in Leicestershire.
MAJOR HENRY CROiMWELL.
Dismissing the families descended from the daughters of Henry, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, we now revert to his son, Major Henry Cromwell, the only one who carried
Henry, Fourth Son of the Protector. 53
on the name. The politics and religious faith of this gentleman may be gathered from the fact of his marrying a young lady who only the year before had played a more conspicuous part than any other of her sex as intercessor for the victims of Jeffreys' " Bloody Assizes." This was Hannah, the daughter of Benjamin Hewling and grand- daughter of William Kyffin, two names conspicuous among the Nonconformists of that period, and among the adherents of the unfortunate Duke of Monmouth. Her interviews with Churchill and with King James II. in behalf of her brothers, Benjamin and William Hewling, are matters of general history.
She was beyond all doubt a courageous and energetic woman. Nothing short of this conviction would have secured the notice and regard of her Tory aunt, Lady Fauconberg, who was greatly disconcerted at the depressed condition of so many of her relatives. After considerable solicitation, Lady Fauconberg was induced to push her nephew's fortunes in the army, and here we may suitably quote one of her letters as a sample of her style of mind and of her bearing towards her niece Hannah.
"Lady Fauconberg to Henry Cromwell, of Spinney Abbey. To be left with the postmaster of Newmarket, Cambridge- shire.
29 January [1693?].
" Dear Nephew,
" This comes to congratulate with you after your great fright for your excellent wife, for her safe recovery. And I hope, although she has lost her little one, God will bless you both with more. I am very glad to find by my cousin Hewling you design shortly for London, where I hope to see you both, and give thanks for your kind present, which came very safe to my hands. And pray tell my good niece that her good housewifery is both seen and tasted in it, and that it was as good as ever was
54 The House of Cromwell.
eaten. And I must not omit telling you that my lord as well as self returns thanks, and charges me to assure you both of his humble service. All friends here are, I bless God, very well, and present you both with their service. And I am, to my dear niece and yourself, a most affec- tionate aunt and servant.
" M. Fauconberg."
Another fragment of hers, dated 1689, thus refers to her efforts in Major Henry's behalf:
" Dear Nephew,
" I received yours, which this comes in answer to. My lord was on Thursday at Hampton Court, where he spake to the King [William III.] again as for your concerns, and your cousin's [Oliver, son of Richard]. But all the answer he could get was that he wanted money, and at present did not think of raising any more men, — which for your sakes I am concerned for. . . ."
He parted with Spinney Abbey under stress of pecuniary difficulties, and probably lived thereafter an unsettled life in the neighbourhood of London.
It was principally by the influence of the Duke of Ormond that Mr. Cromwell's promotion in the army was at last brought about, " in acknowledgment," as his Grace always declared, " of the great service and benefit which his family had received from Henry Cromwell while Lord- Lieutenant of Ireland." Mr. Cromwell's military status at the time of his death was that of Major of foot in Fielding's Regiment. He was cut off by fever at Lisbon while serving under Lord Galway in the war against Spain in Queen Anne's reign, in 1711, being then in his fifty-fourth year. His widow, who survived him twenty- one years, appears to have resided in or near London, for her burial took place in Bunhill Fields. The portraits of
Henry, Fourth Son of the Protector. 55
herself and of her husband — the latter being represented as a very handsome man — are still extant, being part of the Brantingsay Collection.
Issue of Major Henry Cromwell and Hannah Hewling.
I. Oliver, born at Spinney Abbey in 1687 ; died at Gray's Inn in London at the age of sixteen. This was the fourth Oliver Cromwell who by celibacy or premature death failed to carry on the first Protector's name.
II. Benjamin Hewling, born at Spinney Abbey in 1689 ; died at York in 1694.
III. Henry, born at Spinney Abbey in 1692 ; died in infancy.
IV. William, generally known as " Mr. Cromwell of Kirby Street," was born in the parish of Cripplegate, in London, in 1693. Being bred to the law, he passed a considerable portion of his life in Gray's Inn chambers, and it was not till he reached the age of fifty-seven that he married Mary, the daughter of William Sherwill of London, merchant, and the wealthy widow of Thomas Westby, of Linton, Cambs., Esq., consequent on which event he changed his abode to Bocking, in Essex. The lady herself was sixty years of age at the time of this her second marriage, and in the course of two years after the removal to Bocking she died, and Mr. Cromwell thereupon returned to London, and spent the remainder of his days in Kirby Street, Hatton Garden, where his own death occurred in 1772, at the age of seventy-nine. Husband and wife both lie in the family vault in Bunhill Fields. Mrs. Cromwell shortly before her second marriage had, in conjunction with Mrs. Bromsale, built and endowed at Hoxton the row of ten houses long known as " the old maids' almshouses," though, in fact, widows as well as single women were embraced in the charity, the only stipulation being that they were Protestant Dissenters. She thoroughly sympathized in the outspoken Noncon-
56 The House of Cromwell.
formity which distinguished her husband's confession of faith, who for fifty years was a member, and for nearly thirty years a deacon, of the church meeting at Haber- dashers' Hall ; and there his funeral sermon was preached by Dr. Thomas Gibbons. " He appeared," says the Doctor, " to be a Christian indeed ; not only by abstaining from what was gross and scandalous, profane and un- godly, but by a spirituality of temper, and by attention to inward religion and the pulse of his soul towards God ; and, indeed, his sentiments and conduct manifested a happy union of experimental and practical godliness. He met, and no wonder in so long a pilgrimage, very heavy afflictions, but never did I hear him murmur or repine, though I am persuaded he was not without quick and keen sensations. . . . He might have had genteel provision made for him in life beyond what Providence had otherwise given him, if he could have qualified as a member of the Church of England ; but he chose rather to preserve his conscience inviolate, and to re- main a Nonconformist, than advance himself in the world and depart from what appeared to him the line of duty."
Mr. Hewling Luson, a son of Hannah's younger sister, bears a corresponding testimony, speaking of him as " the late Mr. Cromwell of Kirby Street, my near relation, and a most benevolent humble honest man." The journal of Thomas Hollis, the virtuoso, chronicles under date 1762 an interview with " that worthy old gentleman Mr. William Cromwell, the great-grandson of the Protector," by whom he is then introduced to two nieces, Miss Elizabeth and Miss Letitia Cromwell, of Hampstead. The portrait- gallery of these ladies, and their museum of family relics, are then inspected, disclosing a variety of heirlooms, which Mr. Hollis then describes, but which must be left at present till the Brantingsay gallery and other collections of Cromwellian relics claim a final notice.
Henry, Fourth Son of the Protector. 57
Mr. Cromwell was on friendly terms with Henry Crom- well the poet, so well known by his published corre- spondence with Alexander Pope ; and though the family relationship between these two gentlemen was somewhat remote, yet, as they both derived from the knight of Hinchinbrook, they constantly maintained the form of calling one another " cousin." One of William Cromwell's early reminiscences was his having dined at Westminster, when a youth, with his great-uncle, Richard, the ex- Protector. There were present on that occasion, besides himself, Jerry White, the chaplain, and William Penn, the Quaker-founder of Pennsylvania. Mr. Cromwell rendered valuable aid to the compilers of "Thurloe's State Papers " by contributing a large collection of family docu- ments, which had come down to him from the original owners, and which are duly notified in the margin of that work.
V. Richard, fifth son of Major Henry Cromwell and Hannah Hewling, was born at Hackney in 1695, and became an eminent attorney and solicitor in Chancery. In 1723, on his great-grandfather's auspicious day — September 3 — he married Sarah, the daughter of Ebenezer Gatton, of Southwark, who was also the niece, and eventually one of the co-heiresses, of Sir Robert Thornhill, a wealthy attorney of Red Lion Square. The ceremony was performed by Dr. Edmund Gibson, the Lord Bishop of London aforesaid, and the place selected was the chapel connected with the banqueting-house in the palace of Whitehall. Bishop Gibson, whose scholar- ship was of the most varied kind — linguistic, antiquarian, and forensic — was, moreover, what is commonly under- stoodasaliberal-minded Churchman ; while in his character of an official censor he poured through the press an un- ceasing stream of pamphlets and charges, with a view to the reformation of manners, and by his hostility to Court masquerades provoked the enmity of King George II.
58 The House of Cromwell.
Perhaps his admiration for Oliver was an additional stimulus to the royal displeasure.
Mr. Richard Cromwell, after his marriage, continued to reside in London as his place of business, but eventually removed to Hampstead, where he died in 1759, and was buried in the family vault in Bunhill Fields. He had previously erected there an " altar-monument " to receive family inscriptions ; but this relic, like so many others around it, fell a prey to neglect, and the inscriptions are now almost obliterated, excepting the names of his brother William and wife. It has recently received at its foot the words, deeply chiselled, " RICHARD CROM- WELL, HIS VAULT. Restored by the Corporation of London." It must be with reference to this gentlemen that the following letter was published in the Gentleman's Magazine for July, 1777 :
" Mr. Urban,
" In order to render your former, as well as later, accounts of Cromwell's family as perfect as possible, I must observe that there was a Mr. Cromwell, an attorney by profession, with whom I frequently conversed, and who was well known to the old frequenters of Wills' coffee- house, near Lincoln's Inn Gate. I do not know in what degree of consanguinity he stood to Oliver, but that he was a descendant of his family none who saw him could doubt, for he was very like the best pictures of Oliver him- self. He was respected, too, as an honest man ; but he seemed to have only the external marks of his great predecessor. I think about the time ' I missed him at the accustomed tree ' was near twenty years ago, and he then appeared to be about seventy years of age.
" P T "
A subsequent correspondent conjectured that this might have been Henry, the sixth child of Hannah Hewling ;
Henry, Fourth Son of the Protector. 59
but Henry's occupation was not that of the law, nor do the dates fit so well as with Richard. Mr. Richard Cromwell had two sons and four daughters :
I. Robert, born at Bartlett's Buildings. This gentleman inherited, in right of his mother, Sarah Gatton, a moiety of the manor of Cheshunt Park or Brantingsay aforesaid; but dying unmarried in 1762, at the age of thirty-seven, the said moiety went to his sisters ; and the other moiety also came to them eventually through the decease s.p. of their cousin Peter Hynde, only son and heir of Eleanor Gatton.
II. Oliver, died in infancy.
III. Elizabeth, died at Hampstead in 1792.
IV. Anne, died at Berkhampstead in 1777.
V. Eleanor, died in infancy.
VI. Letitia, died at Hampstead, 1789.
The survivors of these ladies, namely, Elizabeth and Letitia, on inheriting their brother Robert's estate, quitted Berkhampstead, and reoccupied the paternal mansion at Hampstead in Middlesex. Among the personal property which in like manner descended to them, they came into possession of a complete museum of historical relics, in- cluding a series of family portraits, dating from the six- teenth century downwards, all which subsequently found a fitting receptacle at Cheshunt. Elizabeth's death is thus recorded in the Gentleman's Magazine for November, 1792 :
"At Hampstead, Mrs. Elizabeth Cromwell, eldest daughter and last surviving child of Mr. Richard Cromwell, grandson of Henry, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. She has left the bulk of her fortune to Mr. Oliver Cromwell, attorney, clerk of the Million Bank ; £500 to the children of Mr. Field of Newington, late an apothecary of Newgate Street, who married her cousin, her uncle Thomas's daughter ; and a handsome legacy to Mrs. Moreland, relict of Richard Hynde, Esq., whose mother was her maternal aunt, and
60 The House of Cromwell.
who with her brother jointly possessed Cheshunt Park, the moiety of which on his death devolved to them, subject to his widow's jointure."
VI. Henry, sixth son of Major Henry Cromwell and Hannah Hewling, born 1698 ; was for some time in partnership with his brother Thomas as a wholesale pro- vision merchant, though he subsequently held a post in the Excise Office. He died unmarried in 1769, and was buried in Bunhill Fields, in the vault of his brother Thomas. The inscriptions on this tomb, like those on Richard's, are now also defaced, but the name HENRY CROMWELL has been recently cut in strong relief, and the following words : " Discovered seven feet beneath the surface, and restored by the Corporation of London, 1869." The ruin which some few years ago had, with increasing rapidity, been overspreading the memorials of Bunhill Fields through overcrowding, was happily brought to an end when all future interments were forbidden. Amongst many others, one of the Cromwell monuments, and also that of Lieu- tenant-General Fleetwood and Lady Hartopp, had gone quite out of sight, although both of them, especially that of Fleetwood, were capacious structures.
VII. Thomas, the only one of the eight sons of Major Henry Cromwell and Hannah Hewling whose descendants survive, of whom presently (p. 61).
VIII. Oliver, born in Gray's Inn in London, in 1704, just after the death of his eldest brother Oliver, and there- fore made to succeed him in name. He, like his father, served in the British Army, and held an ensigncy in an Irish regiment ; but disliking the situation, he resigned his commission, and passed the rest of his life in privacy, dying unmarried in 1748.
IX. Mary, born at Newington Green in i6gi; died un- married in 1731 ; buried in Bunhill Fields.
X. Hannah, born at Hackney in 1697 '■> died unmarried in 1732.
Henry, Fourth Son of the Protector. 6 1
VII. Thomas, seventh son of Major Henry Cromwell and Hannah Hewling, born at Hackney in 1699 ; became, in partnership with his brother Henry, a wholesale pro- vision merchant and sugar -refiner, on Snowhill. On quitting business he retired to Bridgwater Square, dying in 1748 (or 1752 ?), and was buried in Bunhill Fields. He was twice married ; first to Frances, daughter of John Tidman of London, merchant ; and secondly to Mary, daughter of Nicholas Skinner of London, mer- chant, of whom hereafter. The issue of the first marriage were :
Oliver, Henry, Thomas, and Elizabeth, who all died young or unmarried; and Anne, who in 1753 was married at Edmonton to John Field, an apothecary, at that time of Newgate Street, but afterwards of Stoke Newington, of whom hereafter.
Mr. Thomas Cromwell by his second wife, Mary Skinner, had:
I. Oliver, his heir, of whom hereafter.
II. Thomas, who in 1771 or 1773 died in the East India Company's service, just after obtaining a lieu- tenancy.
III., IV., V., VI. Richard, Elizabeth, and Hannah Hewling, who all died young; and Susanna, who for many years lived with her widowed mother in Carey Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, subsequently at Ponders End. Leaving there after her mother's death, she occupied a cottage at Flamstead End in her brother Oliver's parish, and is supposed to have died there unmarried in 1834, but to have been buried in Bun- hill Fields.
As for the widowed mother herself, she survived her husband more than sixty years, reaching at last the patriarchal age of one hundred and four; in fact, she was nearly one hundred and five. About the year 17S3,
62 The House of Cromwell.
being then seventy - four years of age, she quitted London in company with her daughter Susanna, and took up her final residence at Ponders End in the house of her deceased aunt, Lady Collett, who had long been a principal supporter of the Nonconformist interest in that village.
Mrs. Cromwell's communion with her new friends as a church-member was considerably hindered by her loss of hearing, but she found a partial resource in the habitual record of her feelings in the form of a diary which must have covered a vast space of time. This chronicle of her hidden life was destroyed, in fulfilment no doubt of her own wishes ; but a fragment or two from its earlier pages have been rescued, from the tenor of which we may gather that the successive loss of her husband and children had been felt by her as a very sore affliction. Referring to the death of her daughter Elizabeth, above mentioned, who died at the age of thirteen, she makes the following reflection : " My God has seen fit in His infinite wisdom to remove another dear creature-comfort, a first-born ; one whom His grace made to differ, whose early piety appeared in her fear of offending God, her love to every duty of religion, her strict regard to truth, always dutiful, and conscientiously careful against sin. Her life was short, but well improved : she made haste and delayed not to keep the commandments of the Lord. Could I follow my dear delights no farther than the grave, I must sink under my afflictions — to see my comforts dropping off like leaves in autumn, wave after wave rolling over me, and leaving me a lonely survivor. But religion teaches me to converse with things above, leads me to see where real and lasting joys are to be found, and calls me to recol- lect my covenant-engagements. I then resolved to take up my cross." On the death of her husband, in October, 1752, she had written, " . . . . Ere long my change will come. I think I am as weary of sin as of sorrow, though
Henry, Fourth Son of the Protector. 63
Death has been my worst enemy. May his next visit be in mercy, and may every wave of affliction leave me nearer the heavenly shore. Afflictions have drunk up my spirits. Thine arrows stick fast in me, and Thine hand presseth me sore. Therefore is my spirit overwhelmed within me ; my heart within me is desolate. Unless Thy law had been my delight I should have perished in my affliction." She had, however, after her retreat to Ponders End, an abiding consolation in the character and creditable career of her son Oliver, who, residing in the neighbouring parish of Cheshunt, often came over to see her, and was able before she died to invoke her blessing on seven of his own grandchildren. That he also took an interest in the religious community to which his mother was attached is evidenced by the appearance of his name in a subscrip- tion list preserved in the records of that church for en- larging the building in 1815, towards which object " Oliver Cromwell" gives ten guineas, and " Susannah Cromwell" five guineas.
As might have been expected, Mrs. Cromwell's decease at so advanced an age was a very gradual process. Dim- ness of sight, so far as to preclude the faculty of reading, had been added to her other infirmities, so that, shut out from the external world, the attitude of her soul expressed itself in a constant desire to depart, and her attendants on entering her chamber usually found her on her knees. January 29, 1813, saw the close of her long pilgrimage ; and her surviving children, Oliver and Susannah, selected as an appropriate motto for her funeral sermon the dying song of the Apostle Paul, " I have fought the good fight," etc., which sermon, entitled " The Triumph of Faith," was accordingly delivered by John Knight, the then minister of Ponders End Chapel. Her portrait, taken shortly before her death, is in the hands of her descendants, the Prescott family. Mrs. Cromwell, as also her daughter Susanna, who survived her some years, are believed to
64 The House of Cromwell.
have been both buried in Bunhill Fields. We have now to treat of her only surviving son,
OLIVER CROMWELL OF CHESHUNT.
Oliver Cromwell, Esq., born in 1742, commenced life as a solicitor. He practised for many years as a solicitor in Essex Street, Strand, and was also clerk to St. Thomas's Hospital. But on inheriting the Cheshunt estate under the will of his cousins Elizabeth and Letitia, he adopted Brantingsay as his habitual residence.* On August 8, 1771, Mr. Cromwell espoused Mary, daughter and co-heir of Morgan Morse, Esq., and had two sons and a daughter. The first child died in infancy. The birth of the second, named Oliver, is thus recorded in the Annual Register for 1782 : " Birth,— The lady of Oliver Cromwell, Esq., of a son and heir, at his house in Nicholas Lane. This child is the only male heir of the Cromwell family in a lineal descent from the memorable Protector of that name." But little Oliver, alas ! like so many of his predecessors, once more disappointed the hopes of his friends. He lived but three years ; and now the only surviving child was a daughter, Elizabeth Oliveria, born in 1777, and married in 1801 to Thomas Artemidorus Russell, Esq.
Mr. Cromwell of Cheshunt wished his daughter to carry on his name, in accordance with the course usually pursued in such cases, by her husband's adopting the surname and arms of Cromwell, either in addition to, or in exchange for, those of Russell. Such a procedure is technically said to be " by royal permission." The issue of the affair is thus recorded by Mr. Burke, the herald : " Mr. Cromwell wishing to perpetuate the name of his great ancestor,
* This estate is not to be confounded with Theobald's Park, which was never in the possession of the Cromwell family. Theobald's Park and the Manor of Cheshunt belonged to the Prescott family, while Cheshunt or Brantingsay Park and Manor at Theobald's belonged to the Cromwell party. The name was formerly spelt Brantingshaye.
Henry, Fourth Sou of the Protector. 65
applied, it is said, in the usual quarter for permission that his son-in-law should assume the surname of Cromwell ; when, to his astonishment, considering that such requests are usually granted on the payment of certain fees as a matter of course, the permission was refused. Such a course of proceeding is too contemptible for comment."* The credit of the refusal has been variously ascribed to the old King, to the Prince Regent, and to William IV. Sir Robert Heron, writing in 1821, makes mention of it thus : "Within the last two or three years died the last male direct descendant of Oliver Cromwell. He was well known to my father and to Sir Abraham Hume, who lived near him. They represented him as a worthy man of mild manners, much resembling in character his immediate ancestor, Henry, the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. Early in life his pecuniary circumstances were narrowed, but latterly he possessed a comfortable income. He was desirous of leaving his name to his son-in-law Mr. Russell, and applied for his Majesty's permission that Russell should assume it ; but the old King positively refused it, always saying, 'No, no — no more Cromwells ' " (Sir Robert Heron's Notes). Another version of the affair is, that Mr. Cromwell, becoming apprehensive that the change of name might, after all, prove a hindrance rather than otherwise to his grandchildren's advance in life, allowed the matter to remain in abeyance ; but that the scheme was revived by another member of the family in a memorial addressed to William IV., and that it was this King, and not George III., who uttered the energetic veto above recorded.
Mr. Cromwell, to whom we are indebted for the " Memoirs of the Protector Oliver Cromwell and of his Two Sons, Richard and Henry," died on May 31, 1821, at the age of seventy-nine. His excellent wife, whose charitable deeds were long remembered in the neighbour-
* " History of the Commoners," vol. i., p. 433.
66 The House of Cromwell.
hood, lived on to her eighty-seventh year. On Sundays she was in the habit of attending the chapel of the neigh- bouring college (founded by Lady Huntingdon), in which she was joined by her husband and by her sister-in-law, Miss Susanna Cromwell.
The family monument at Cheshunt Church records only the following names :
Oliver Cromwell, Esq., 1821, aged seventy-nine.
Mary Cromwell, his wife, 1831, eighty-seven.
Lieutenant-General Armstrong, his son-in-law, sixty- three.
Thomas Artemidorus Russell, Esq., 1858, eighty- three.
Eliza Oliveria, his wife, 1849, seventy-two.
Artemidorus Cromwell Russell, 1830, twenty-seven.
Avarilla Aphra, his wife, 1827, twenty-one.
John Russell, Esq., 1830, eighty-two.
Eliza, wife of John Henry Cromwell Russell, 1876, seventy.
Family of Russell, of Cheshunt Park.
Elizabeth Oliveria Cromwell, only surviving child of Oliver Cromwell, of Cheshunt, was born in 1777, mar- ried in 1801 to Thomas Artemidorus Russell, of Thurston, co. Hereford, Esq. She died in 1849 at the age of seventy-two, and in her death the English nation had to contemplate the final extinction of the Protector's house- hold inheriting the name of Cromwell by blood. To the present writer, his personal intercourse with the venerable lady is the most interesting fact connected with the labours of this family history. To watch her passing from portrait to portrait through the Brantingsay gallery, and hear her with tremulous voice dwelling on the virtues of each successive representative of the house from the Protector's parents down to her own father, was to become
He7i7y, Fourth Son of the Protector. 67
for awhile the passive recipient of very pleasant sensations — sensations, it may be, too thronging for description, too complex for analysis. By her husband she left nine children :
I. Elizabeth Oliveria, born 1802 ; married 1823 to Frederick Joseph, son of George Frederick Prescott, of Theobalds, Herts, Esq. By her husband, formerly of the War Office, and who died in 1888, aged ninety-one, she became the mother of ten children :
I. Frederick George, born 1824 ; died in infancy.
II. Emma Elizabeth, born 1826 ; married, 1853, to Herbert Calthorpe, son of Lieutenant-Gencral Wil- liam Gardner, R.A., and by him (who died 1857) had, surviving issue, Herbert Prescott, born 1854, and Emma Louisa, born 1S57.
III. George Frederick, Vicar of St. Michael's, Pad dington, M.A. Cantab., born 1827 ; married, 1863 to Sarah, daughter of John Horsley, Esq., Madras Civil Service, and had : Mary, 1864 ; Edward, 1866 Ernest, 1867 ; Mildred, 1871.
IV. Charles Andrew, banker and M.A. Cantab, born 1829 ; married, 1S64, to Emma Catharine daughter of William Harrison, Esq., of Westbourne Terrace, by whom he had four children : Charlotte Cromwell, 1865 ; Charles Cave Cromwell, 1S67, died in childhood; Oliveria Cromwell, 1S72 ; Kenneth Loder Cromwell, 1874.
V. Edward Barker, Captain 33rd Regiment (Wel- lington's), wounded in the Crimea. Medal and clasps. Married, 1857, to Sophia Victoria, daughter of Wil- liam Cox, of Gloucester Crescent, Esq., and has a son, Edward Frederick William, born 185S.
VI. Lucy Esther, born 1833.
VII. Augusta Sophia, born 1835 ; married, 1873, to Robert Burn, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
68 The House of Cromwell.
VIII. Henry Warner, a banker, born 1837.
IX. Edgar Grote, of the Stock Exchange, and B.A. Oxon., born 1839 ; married, 1865, to Jane Katharine, daughter of Edgar Barker, Esq., of Oxford Square, and had seven children : Henry Frederick, 1866 ; Edward Barker, 1867 ; Edgar Evelyn, 1869 ; Mar- garet Oliveria, died in infancy, 1871 ; Herbert, 1872 ; Nelly Margaret, 1875 ; Isabel Katharine, 1878.
X. Oliveria Louisa, born 1842.
II. Artemidorus Cromwell, born 1803; died 1830, having married Avarilla Aphra Armstrong, by whom (who died 1827) ne na-d one daughter, Avarilla Oliveria Crom- well, born 1826 ; married, 1849, to Rev. Paul Bush, of South Luffenham, now [1890] Rector of Duloe, near Liskeard ; died November 25, 1895. By her husband she had issue :
I. Thomas Cromwell, B.A. Oxon, born 1851, Vicar of Camel Queen, Bath.
II. Elizabeth Oliveria, 1852.
III. James Graham, in India, 1854.
IV. Paul Warner, Lieutenant in the Royal Navy, born 1855.
V. Charles Cromwell, in India, born 1857.
VI. Charlotte Mary Avarilla, 1858.
VII. Beatrice Maud, i860.
VIII. Herbert Cromwell, 1861.
IX. Ethel Julia, 1863.
X. Gertrude Harriet Cromwell, 1865.
XI. Mabel Ottley, 1868.
III. Mary Esther, born 1805 ; married, 1832, to General George Andrew Armstrong, of Hereford, In- spector-General of the Hereford Volunteers. She married secondly, in 1836, Thomas Huddlestone, Esq.
IV. John Henry Cromwell, of Sittingbourne, born 1806 ; married, 1832, to Eliza, only daughter of Maurice
Henry, Fourth Son of the Protector. 69
Lievesley, Esq., and had one daughter : Eliza Clementina Frances Cromwell, born 1835.
V. Thomas Artemidorus Cromwell, born 1808 ; died in infancy.
VI. Thomas Artemidorus, born 1810 ; married 1862 ; died 1863.
VII. Letitia Cromwell, born 1812 ; married, 1847, to Frederick Whitfield, of 4, Vane Street, Bath, M.D., and had two daughters : Amy, 1848, and Elizabeth (?). Mrs. Whitfield died in 1863.
VIII. Charles William Cromwell, born 1814; died
1859.
IX. Emma Bridget, born 1816 ; married, 1834, to Captain Richard Warner, 5th Foot, a descendant of Sir Thomas Warner, who, as one of the early explorers of Antigua, obtained a grant of land there from James I., who also presented him with the celebrated ring which Queen Elizabeth had given to Essex. This gem, we are informed, belonged originally to Mary, Queen of Scots, and King James's gift of it to Sir Thomas Warner was designed as an especial mark of favour. Since that time it has descended from father to son in the elder branch of the Warner family. Captain Richard Warner died 1863. The issue of the above marriage was as follows :
I. Ashton Cromwell, born 1835. He served through- out the Indian Mutiny campaign in 1857-58, received a medal with clasps for " Defence of Lucknow " and " Lucknow," and a brevet majority ; retired from the 20th Hussars in 1868 ; appointed Chief Constable of Bedfordshire in 1871. Major Warner, married first — 1S68 — Anne Geraldine, only daughter of M. B. Jeffreys, Esq., and by her (who died 1871) had one son, Ashton Darell Cromwell, who died in infancy. He married secondly — 1872 — Florence Louisa, fourth daughter of the late W. Stapleton Piers, Esq., and grand-daughter of Sir John Bennett Piers, of Trister-
yo The House of Cromwell.
nagh Abbey, co. Westmeath, Bart., and has issue : Bridget Nora Cromwell, 1874 ; Lionel Ashton Piers, 1875 ; Marjorie Ellin, 1877 ; Esther Hastings, 1878.
II. Richard Edward, born 1836; married, 1864, to Mary Jametta Hale, daughter of Major Constantine Yeoman, of Sibron, and had issue : Constance Emma Cromwell, Leonard Ottley, Mary Challoner, Basil Hale, Richard Cromwell, Lawrence Dundas, Wynyard Alexander, Marmaduke.
III. Wynyard Huddleston, named after his uncle, General Wynyard, of the Grenadier Guards, who distinguished himself in the Crimea. He married Jane, daughter of Mr. Bell, of the Civil Service, East India Company.
We now pass to the families deriving from Anne Crom- well (p. 61).
Family of Field.
Anne, only surviving daughter of Thomas Cromwell, of Bridgwater Square, by his first marriage, married, in 1753, at Edmonton, John Field, an apothecary, at that time of Newgate Street, but afterwards of Stoke Newington. There is reason to think that this was a union prompted by cordiality of religious sentiment, the Fields being of a Puritan stock, and Mr. Field himself attached to Stoke Newington society. Mr. Field, whose medical practice was extensive, was the founder, in 1765, of the London Annuity Society, established for the benefit of the widows of its members. This institution, now located at 3, Ser- geants' Inn, possesses half-length portraits of himself and of his son Henry, who succeeded him professionally. His living presence, we are told, was a familiar and grate- ful object to all the dwellers in and about Stoke Newing- ton, who believed his good nature to be inexhaustible, the capacious coach in which he performed the daily journey
Henry, Fourth Son of the Protector. 7 1
into town being apparently at the service of the public, for while his personal friends occupied the interior, some poor neighbour was generally to be seen on the box. The religious coterie of that suburban district, clustering round the household of the ex-General Fleetwood, will be noticed more at large hereafter. Mr. Field's intercourse must have been with their succeeding generation. His own ancestry derived from Cockenhoe, in Herts, where he was born in 1719. His death occurred in 1796, the year before that of his wife. Their children now to be noticed are nine in number :
I. Henry, an apothecary, born September 29, 1755, rose to high esteem among the brethren of his profession, as testified by the offices which from time to time he filled. In 1807 he was elected apothecary to Christ's Hospital. He was also lecturer and treasurer to the Society of Apothecaries, one of the Board of Health in 1831 for prevention of cholera, the city of London pre- senting him with a silver centre for his table. He was also for many years treasurer of the London Annuity Society for the benefit of widows of apothecaries, in Chat- ham Place, Blackfriars, which his father had founded. Among his writings may be mentioned " Memoirs of the Botanick Garden " at Chelsea. He maintained his powers till his eighty-third year, when he died at Woodford, Essex, December 19, 1837, and was buried at Cheshunt. His portrait was painted for the Apothecaries by R. Pickersgill, and for the Annuity Society by Samuel Lane, and an engraving from the latter was so skilfully executed by Charles Turner that the family regard it as a better likeness than the original painting. Mr. Field married, on September 2, 1784, Esther, daughter of E. Barron, of Woolacre House, near Deptford, Esq., and by her (who died January 16, 1834) kft s^x sons ar*d two daughters :
I. Henry Cromwell, born 1785. Succeeded to his father's professional position in Newgate Street, and
72 The House of Cromwell.
became chairman of the Court of Examiners of the Apothecaries' Company. His personal tastes took an artistic turn, and led to his becoming an occasional exhibitor at the Royal Academy. Shortly before his death he was preparing, in co-operation with the chaplain of Charterhouse, a book in illustration of that establishment. It was whilst in the discharge of his duty as resident medical officer there that his death occurred instantaneously in 1840. He was buried in the vault of Charterhouse Chapel. He married his cousin Anne, daughter of Thomas Gwinnel, of whom hereafter.
II. Barron, born October 23, 1786; died s.p. April 11, 1846, at his residence at Meadfoot House, Torquay. He entered the Inner Temple 1809, and was called to the Bar on June 23, 1814. He became Advocate - Fiscal at Ceylon, Chief Justice in New South Wales, and finally Chief Justice at Gibraltar. It was at Gibraltar that the late Earl of Beaconsfield, then a young man on his travels, met the Chief Justice in 1830. He characteristically describes the Judge-Advocate as " noisy, obtrusive, jargonic, a true lawyer, ever illustrating the obvious, explaining the evident, and expatiating on the commonplace." Like his brother, he sought and found a solatium in studies less rigid than the law. Dramatic literature became his favourite pursuit. He was an intimate friend of Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Crabb Robinson, and for a time held the post of theatrical critic for the Times. He edited some of the issues of the Shakspeare Society, and was meditating a complete collection of Heywood's works with a biography at the time of his own decease. His widow, Jane, daughter of Mr. Carncroft, whom he had married in 1816, died at Wimbledon in 1878, aged eighty- six.
Henry, Fourth Son of the Protector. jt>
III. Francis John, born 1791; died suddenly, in 1857, at his residence, 88, Chester Place, Regent's Park. He held in the India House the office of Accountant-General, and was the last of that title. He married, 1841, Anne, daughter of Edward Barron, of Northiam, in Sussex. Charles Lamb, in one of his letters to Bernard Barton, while humorously re- cording his neglect of some of the details of social life, says: "All the time I was at the East India House I never mended a pen. When I write to a great man at the Court end, he opens with surprise upon a naked note such as Whitechapel people inter- change, with no sweet degrees of envelope. I never enclosed one bit of paper in another, nor understood the rationale of it. Once only I sealed with borrowed wax, to set Sir Walter Scott a-wondering, signed with the Imperial quartered arms of England, which my friend Field bears in compliment to his descent in the female line from Oliver Cromwell. It must have set his antiquarian curiosity upon watering " (Talfourd's " Life and Letters of Lamb").
IV. Esther, born 1792, resided near her brother, Frederick Field, the Rector of Reepham, in Norfolk, and died 1871.
V. Edmund, born 1799, a Russia merchant of the hrm of Brandt and Co., retired to Hastings, where he became active in works of benevolence and in pictorial studies. He died in 1880.
VI. Frederick, born in London July 20, 1801. In 1824 he was elected Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, in company with T. B. Macaulay. Among his private pupils was F. D. Maurice. He was Rector, first of Great Saxham, Suffolk, and after- wards, from 1842, of Reepham, Norfolk. He resigned this living in 1863, and removed to Norwich, where he continued to reside till his death, which occurred
74 The House of Cromwell.
on April ig, 1885. His name is inseparably con- nected with Chrysostom and Origen, and his edition of Origen's " Hexapla " is recognised as the most important contribution to Patristic theology which has appeared for a century.
VII. Marriott, born 1803, emigrated to America, where he was drowned. His taste was for music, but he also produced three poems, entitled "Job," " Ecclesiastes," and the " Story of Esther."
VIII. Maria Letitia, born 1805, has long con- stituted one of the Field colony at Hastings.
II. Oliver, born 1761, left Worcester for America in 1799, and died at New York in 1835. His wife was Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Gittings, of Shropshire. Their family when they left England were very young ; of these, Oliver died in childhood. Of the survivors, John, Joseph, and Thomas, two of them and the mother paid a visit to England many years ago, but are now [1879], together with their sisters, believed to have all married in America.
III. John, born 1764, commenced business as a Russia merchant, but discovered before long a remarkable aptitude for astronomy and the construction of scientific apparatus. These qualities, combined as they were with a character for high integrity, becoming known to the Government, his services were secured for the Royal Mint, where he held the office of Umpire between the several departments on the precious metals passing between the officers and the Bank of England. Among his mechanical inventions, some of which were adopted in America and France, may be mentioned a counting -machine and an improved system of assay-beams and weights. He died, in 1843, at his residence, Bayswater Hill, in his seventy-ninth year. His portrait, reminding one of Pascal, is in the possession of his son Henry. He married Mary, only
Henry, Fourth Sou of the Protector. 75
child of Charles Pryer, of Tichfield, Hants, Esq., and by her, who died 1859, nacl eight children :
I., II., and III. Henry, Charles, and Frederick, who all died young of typhus fever.
IV. Henry William, born 1803. Was for fifty-one years an able servant of the Crown at the Mint, and about seven years ago retired to his estate of Munster Lodge, on the banks of the Thames, near Tedding- ton. He entered the Mint at the age of sixteen, at the time of Lord Maryborough's Mastership, and assisted at the great recoinage, then in progress. The chemical skill which he inherited from his father eventually found fuller scope when, in 1850, he suc- ceeded to the office of Queen's Assay -Master (an ancient appellation subsequently disused). This was also the period of Sir John Herschell's appointment to the Mastership, marking an economical crisis in the history of that establishment, which was long remembered as "the revolution of '51." In the labora- tory Mr. Field was ever Sir John's able auxiliary, more especially when it was resolved to establish and apply more incontrovertible tests to the quality of bullion devoted to coinage. The scientific details of Mr. Field's new system of working the assays cannot here be displayed ; it must suffice to say they re- ceived Herschell's emphatic approbation. A parting message which came from his old friend many years after will form a suitable voucher. " I am suffering," says Sir John, " under an attack of bronchitis which has lasted me all the winter, so excessively severe that I can hardly hold the pen, which must excuse the brevity of this, and being now in my eightieth year, I can hope for no relief. I shall retain, how- ever, to the last a pleasing recollection of aid and support I received from you during the period of my administration of the Mint. And I know you will
j 6 The House of Cromwell.
believe me ever, my dear sir, yours most truly, J. F. W. Herschell." — Mr. Field, in 1840, married Anna, daughter of T. Mills, of Coval Hall, Chelms- ford, and Vicar of Hellions-Bumpstead, Essex, and by her, who died in 1868, had:
I. Mary Hester Katherine, born 1841 ; married, 1864, to Arthur Evershed, of Ampthill, M.D., and has issue seven children.
II. Katharine Anne Russell, born 1842 ; married, 1866, to William Henry Snelling of the Admiralty, of Ashton Lodge, Selhurst, Esq., and has issue.
III. Harriet Elizabeth Pryer, born 1843.
IV. Frances Anna Ollyffe, born 1847.
V. Henry Cromwell Beckwith, of Trinity Col- lege, Cambridge, Curate of St. Jude's, Liverpool ; born 1850.
VI. Letitia Eliza, married, 1876, to Ralph Thomas, of Doughty Street, solicitor, and has issue.
VII. Minnie, died 1878.
V. Emma Katharine, born 1809, lived with her widowed mother at Notting Hill, and after her mother's decease removed to Barnes.
VI. Charles Frederick, born 1813 ; held office in the Admiralty ; married, in 1868, Flora Helen, daughter of Charles A. Elderton of the Bengal Medical Staff, and had issue : (1) Charles John Elderton, 1869 ; (2) Flora Georgiana, 1870 ; (3) Oliver Cromwell, 1871 ; (4) Katharine Mary Ida, 1875.
VII. Oliver Cromwell, born 1815, a Commander in the Royal Navy, having much in common with his renowned ancestor ; a man of energy, humanity, and prompt action, shown on various occasions in the rescuing of wrecked crews during his several voyages to and from India. His wife died in 1884.
Henry, Fourth Son of the Protector. yy
VIII. Samuel Pryer, M.A., of Trinity College, Cambridge, Vicar of Sawbridgeworth, born in 1816 ; died 1878 ; so devoted to the study of ecclesiastical architecture that he lavished much of his income in restoring the church fabrics successively under his care. By his wife, Jane, daughter of Admiral Sir W. H. Pierson, of Langton, Hants, he had four children: (1) Cyril, in the Royal Marines; (2) Bertha; (3) Oliver, in New Zealand ; (4) Maud, died 1885.
IV. William, fourth son of John Field and Anne Cromwell, born 1767; died 1851 ; of Learn, near Warwick. In accordance with the Calvinistic theology of his parents, he was educated as a Protestant Dissenting minister, first at Daventry and afterwards at Homerton ; but adopting Unitarian principles, he was ordained by Dr. Priestley and Mr. Belsham to the pastorate of the ancient Presbyterian congregation of High Street Chapel in Warwick, and with this was combined for twenty-two years the over- sight of a similar community at Kenilworth. He early displayed that literary power, both political and polemical, which he was ever afterwards prompt to wield in the advocacy of popular rights, and which resulted in a vast variety of pamphlets belonging chiefly to the period of Lord Grey's first Reform Bill. Other works from his pen are the Life of his friend, Dr. Parr of Hatton, and an " Account of the Town and Castle of Warwick." His activity also resulted in the establishment of a public library, and of the Warwick Advertiser. His portrait, painted by Henry Wyatt, and exhibited in 1838, has been well engraved in large quarto by Charles Turner. The Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson gives us a glimpse of the domestic life of this family in 1839. ^r- Robinson had been spending a fortnight with his friends, the Masqueriers, of Leamington, and adds: "This excursion has left several very agreeable recollections. Among them the most promi- nent was my better acquaintance with the Field family. I
7$ The House of Cromwell.
then knew Edwin Field chiefly as the junior partner of Edgar Taylor, who was at that time approaching the end of an honourable and useful life. Mr. and Mrs. Field senior were then living in an old-fashioned country-house between Leamington and Warwick. He had long been the minister at Warwick, and also kept a highly-respect- able school. He was known by a Life of Dr. Parr, whose intimate friendship he enjoyed. His wife was also a very superior woman ; I had already seen her in London. I heard Mr. Field preach on July 21 ; his sermon was sound and practical, opposed to metaphysical divinity. He treated it as an idle question (he might have said, a mischievous subtlety), whether works were to be con- sidered as a justifying cause of salvation, or the certain consequence of a genuine faith " (vol. hi., 178). The lady here mentioned was Mary, daughter (by his first wife, Elizabeth North) of William Wilkins, Baptist minister of Bourton-on-the-Water. She was married to Mr. Field in 1803, and died in 1848, having had thirteen children, eleven of whom survived their parents in 1851, namely:
I. Edwin Wilkins, born 1804, an eminent solicitor, practising first in Bedford Row, and afterwards in Lincoln's Inn Fields. His life will be given presently. He married, first, Mary Sharpe, niece of Samuel Rogers, the poet, and had one son named Rogers, after this great-uncle. Mr. Field married, secondly, Letitia, daughter of Robert Kinder of London, Esq., who died in 1890, aged eighty-eight. She became the mother of seven children, namely : (1) Basil, 1834, successor to his father ; (2) Allan, 1835, married Miss Phillips, and has five daughters ; (3) Walter, 1837, an eminent landscape and genre painter, married Miss Cookson, daughter of W. Strickland Cookson, solicitor, and has seven children ; (4) Mary, 1839; (5) Grace, 184 1 ; (6) Susan, 1843 ; (7) Emily, 1845.
II. Arthur, born 1806, died unmarried about (1845?)
Henry, Fourth Son of the Protector. 79
III. John Hampden, born 1807; settled and married in America.
IV. Emma, born 1809; died 1816.
V. Ferdinand Emmans, born 1810 ; a merchant in Birmingham.
VI. Laura, born 181 1 ; married \V. Langmead of Plymouth, and died 1879.
VII. Algernon Sidney, born 1813 ; a solicitor at Leamington, and clerk of the peace for Warwickshire ; married Sarah Martin, of Birmingham, and has issue three sons and two daughters. The two daughters both married, the latter in 1886.
VIII. Alfred, born 1814 ; merchant in New York, where he married the daughter of another emigrant, viz., Charlotte Errington, whose father, a native of Yarmouth in Suffolk, left England in consequence of failure in business. Miss Errington's mother, named Notcutt, was descended from an old Puritan family long known at Ipswich in Suffolk. Alfred Field had issue one son, named Henry Cromwell, and one daughter, named Rosa.
IX. Caroline, born 1816 ; married Reginald A. Parker, solicitor, and has seven children.
X. Alice, born 1817.
XI. Lucy, born 1821 ; died 1822.
XII. Horace, born 1823 ; architect; married Chris- tina, daughter of Edward White, of Glasgow, and had two children.
XIII. Leonard, born 1824; barrister.
V. Anne, eldest daughter of John Field and Anne Cromwell ; born 1756 ; died 1820, having married in 1787 Thomas Gwinnel, of Worcester, merchant. Mr. Gwinnel, who died in 1818, aged sixty-eight, left fivechildren, namely :
I. Thomas Cromwell, a solicitor at Worcester ; died 1835.
8o The House of Cromwell.
II. Anne Sophia ; married her cousin, Henry Crom- well Field.
III. Amelia ; lived at Hastings with her cousin, Letitia Field.
IV. Diana ; married Mr. Roberts, of Worcester.
V. Eliza ; married Patrick Johnston, of the firm of Praed, Fane and Johnston, bankers in Fleet Street. Their children are : (i) Patrick, a solicitor (both he and his wife died July, 1884, and were buried at Thames Ditton) ; (2) Janet Eliza ; (3) Henry Crom- well, in Holy Orders (subsequently of 163, Ladbroke Grove Road, and chaplain of Kensal Green Cemetery ; he died 1892, aged fifty-seven) ; (4) Thomas, of Kingston-on-Thames.
VI. Letitia, second daughter of John Field and Anne Cromwell, became the second wife of Rev. William Wilkins, of Bourton-on-the-Water, and had four children,
viz. :
I. William, who died young.
II. Letitia ; married William Kendall, of Bourton, solicitor, by whom she has six children : Herbert William, Amelia Letitia, Edmund, Agnes, Harriet, Henry.
III. Henry Field, a solicitor at Chipping-Norton ; married Miss Spence, of that place.
IV. Harriet, married George Tilsley, a solicitor at Chipping-Norton.
VII., VIII., IX. Elizabeth, Sophia, Mary, three unmarried daughters of John Field and Anne Cromwell. Elizabeth died at Stoke Newington, 1781, aged twenty-two ; buried at Cheshunt. Mary, who resided at Worcester, died in 1840.
Life of Edwin Wilkins Field.
If Edwin Field was not a statesman in the popular sense, he was the stimulating agent in bringing about
Henry, Fourth Son of the Protector. 81
many reforms for which professed statesmen have reaped the credit. Yet neither was he a law-reformer only ; he was a man of unbounded sympathies, and his Cromwellian energy was combined with versatile capacity.
Born at Learn, near Warwick, on October 12, 1804, and educated at his father's school, he was articled, on March 19, 1821, to Taylor and Roscoe, of King's Bench Walk, in the Temple. He was admitted attorney and solicitor in the Michaelmas term, 1825. He joined his fellow-clerk, William Sharpe, to form the firm of Sharpe and Field, in Broad Street, Cheapside, but in 1835 Taylor, who was then alone, took Sharpe and Field into partnership with him. The office of the firm was long in Bedford Row, but was subsequently removed to Lincoln's Inn Fields. " I remember as if it were yesterday," says he in after- life, " my good old father's wistful look as he left me there. That look has stood me in fast stead many a time since." His first action in life was to repay that father the expenses incurred in his outsetting. The father refused, but the pious dexterity of the son contrived to fulfil the intention. This generous impulse was the animus which pervaded all his subsequent schemes. His object was to make the practice of the law square with consciences as upright and scrupulous as his own. To become a law-reformer was therefore with him a moral necessity, and to see those reforms carried to a triumphant issue was but the fair reward of one who thought it more heroic to abolish abuses than to run away from them. His first essays in the Legal Observer had reference to the law respecting marriages abroad between English subjects within the prohibited degrees. This was in 1840 ; but his grand attack during the same year was directed against the Court of Chancery, and the Six-Clerks and Sworn- Clerks Office in particular. Lords Brougham and Cottenham had begun to clear the ground, but the crisis was not precipitated until Mr. Field led the public voice.
6
82 The House of Cromwell,
Details cannot be enlarged on here, but the judgment of contemporaries may establish the verdict. Spence, in his " Equity Jurisprudence," says : " To Mr. Field's exertions, enforced by Mr. Pemberton, the Court of Chancery is in great part indebted for the late improvements." John Wainewright, formerly one of the sworn clerks, and now [1879] taxing-master, says in a letter written since Mr. Field's death that his friend was " the first person who practically brought about this change." And Robert Bayley Follett, also a taxing-master, says : "I always considered the abolition of the Six-Clerks Office due to E. W. Field."
The removal of one monster grievance ensures the fall of many parasitical institutions. In 1844 Field was in communication with the Board of Trade on the subject of a winding-up Act for joint-stock companies. The Act of 1848 substantially embodied the proposals contained in a draft Bill laid before the legal adviser of the Board of Trade on April 27, 1846, by Field and his friend Rigge, who had formerly been in his office. His views on the question of legal remuneration were practically embodied in the Act of 1870. Mr. Field had abundance of work before him ; but success had now energized his arm and inspired his friends with confidence. After the year 1840 there was scarcely a Royal Commission or Parliamentary Committee on Chancery reform or general legal questions before which he was not called upon to give evidence. Extracts from the list of his published writings may serve as an index to his subsequent services. Thus, in the Westminster Review, February, 1843, we have : " Recent and Future Law Reforms," "Judicial Procedure a Single and Inductive Science "; in the Law Review, August, 1848, " Comparative Anatomy of Judicial Procedure," reprinted in the New York Evening Post. Mr. Field also wrote papers, etc., " On the Right of the Public to form Limited- Liability Partnerships, and on the Theory, Practice, and
Henry, Fourth Son of the Protector. 83
Costs of Commercial Charters"; "On the Roots and Evils of the Law " ; " Economical Considerations on the Autocracy of the Bar, and on the System of Prescribed Tariffs for Legal Wages." A paper was read by him at Manchester in 1857, entitled "What should a Minister of Justice do ?" ; one before the Metropolitan and Provincial Law Association, held in London, 1859, on " Legal Educa- tion and the Comparative Anatomy of Legal, Medical, and other Professional Education"; he had also some correspondence with C. G. Loring, the eminent American advocate, on the present relations between Great Britain and the United States ; and " On the Property of Married Women," published in the Times.
Brought up among the English Presbyterians, Mr. Field was not disposed to sit down quietly under the partial legislation which was still enforced against Unitarians under cover of the notorious Lady Hewley case, and accordingly, by the Dissenters' Chapels Bill of 1844, he upset that legislation for ever. This is quickly told, but the struggle while it lasted was arduous, and to many appeared hopeless. Even his constant friend and ally, Crabb Robinson, despaired of attacking entrenched orthodoxy ; but a band of resolute men, who for many months sat on the question de die in diem, had at length a long conference with the Minister, Sir Robert Peel, Mr. Field acting as spokesman. Sir Robert, though a political opponent, promptly undertook to make it a Government measure ; while the elaborate historical argument with which Mr. Gladstone swayed the Commons on that occasion was mainly furnished by Mr. Field.
It was Mr. Field's belief that few schemes would more tend to simplify and quicken legal operations than the concentration of all the courts of justice and offices of the law into one building. For thirty years before the passing of the Courts of Justice Building Act of 1865, he had urged the measure ; and when at last a Royal Commission
84 The House of Cromwell.
was issued to obtain and approve a plan upon which the new Courts should be built, it was natural that her Majesty should appoint " her trusty and well-beloved Edwin Wil- kins Field to be the secretary to the Commission." For his arduous duties in this capacity, extending over three years, embracing a thorough mastery of the details of the vast fabric, preparing instructions for the competing architects, and drawing up elaborate reports, Mr. Field refused all remuneration. But the firm of which he was the head were appointed by the Board of Works solicitors for acquiring the new site ; and under his vigorous super- intendence a very short time sufficed to clear the ground for an architectural pile which will not be complete with- out some artistic memorial of the enthusiastic secretary.
He was an ardent lover of Nature, and of the pictorial renderings by which true poetry alone can apprehend her. Much of the interest which, as a member of the Council of University College, he took in that institution, assumed this form, as shown in his co-operating with Henry Crabb Robinson in the formation of the Flaxman Gallery, and the establishment of the Slade School of Art, in all which, as well as in the legislation which from time to time he put into motion for the furtherance of art and its pro- fessors, his advice and assistance were spontaneous. " No labour," says he, " that I can ever give on this subject will repay the obligations I am under to art and to artists for a great deal of the pleasure of my life. I reverence art. I look upon it as one of the divinest gifts of our nature. Develop a love of art in every way. It will give you new eyes wherewith to draw in and make part of yourself the very beauty of Nature, and new, un- dreamt-of capacities for enjoying it. It will assuredly improve and elevate your character." Accustomed as he was to be consulted in matters of taste, it awoke no suspicion when Mr. T. Cobb, one of his former clerks, asked him one day what painter he would recommend
Henry, Fourth Son of the Protector. 85
under the following circumstances : A number of clerks in a London office had subscribed to get the portrait of their master executed in the best style, and it was thought they could not have a better adviser than Mr. Field. After a little further explanation he replied : " Watson Gordon is your man." " But, sir," said Cobb, " Sir Watson paints only in Edinburgh, and we doubt whether his sitter would consent to travel so far." " Then," rejoined Mr. Field, " tell the young men to drag him there. He ought to be proud of such a request." In due time Mr. Field was himself requested to go to Edinburgh and sit to Sir Watson Gordon for a painting to be pre- sented to Mrs. Field. " Congratulate me," he wrote to Crabb Robinson. " A hundred of my old clerks have subscribed to have my portrait painted — men I have tyrannized over — bullied — taken the praise from, which they really had earned — who knew every bit of humbug in me — no sense of favours to come. Regard from such a body is worth having." The picture is now at the family residence at Squire's Mount, Hampstead, with the names of the hundred subscribers displayed on the frame. Another characteristic likeness is preserved in a picture painted by his son Walter — a river scene, in which Mr. Field, together with part of his family, is represented in the enjoyment of one of his favourite pursuits — that of boating on the Thames. It has been said of him that " not Izaac Walton loved his favourite river more than Mr. Field loved the Thames." Like the painter Turner, he descried in its varied aspects suggestive material for boundless poetry ; and in order fully to drink in its in- fluences, he took for holiday purposes a lease of the Mill House, Cleve, near Goring. Yet the Thames became the disastrous scene of his death. On July 30, 1871, the boat in which he was sailing with two of his clerks was upset by a gale of wind. One of the party, named Ellwood, as well as Mr. Field himself, was a swimmer ; the third who
86 The House of Cromwell.
could not swim, was the sole survivor. And all that this survivor could recollect about the affair was that he had at first gone down, but afterwards found himself sup- ported by his two friends, who held on to the boat, and were making for the shore ; that eventually Mr. Ellwood sank, and soon afterwards Mr. Field also. Five days later, at the Highgate Cemetery, Edwin Field was laid in a vault next to that in which sleeps his friend Henry Crabb Robinson. His age was sixty-seven. The above facts are derived from " A Memorial " drawn up by his friend Thomas Sadler, Ph.D., and published by Mac- millan in 1872, abounding with anecdotes and details of a highly interesting nature, but far too copious for adoption in this place. It may also be here stated that notices of the various members of the Field family will be found scattered up and down the biographies of Crabb Robinson, Serjeant Talfourd, and Charles Lamb.
J
CHAPTER VII.
JAMES, FIFTH SON OF THE PROTECTOR.
AMES, named after his maternal grandfather, Sir James Bourchier ; was baptized January 8, 1632, at St. John's Church in Huntingdon, where also he was buried on the following day.
CHAPTER VIII.
BRIDGET, ELDEST DAUGHTER OF THE PROTECTOR.
BAPTIZED at St. John's Church, Huntingdon, August 5, 1624, Bridget was married first to Henry Ireton in 1646, and secondly to Charles Fleetwood, probably in the early part of 1652. Her marriage with Ireton took place just before the com- pletion of the first Civil War, while Fairfax was investing the city of Oxford ; and at Holton St. Bartholomew, some six miles distant from the walls, and conjectured to have been the General's headquarters, the marriage is thus chronicled in the parish register : " 15 June, 1646. Henry Ireton, Commissary-General to Sir Thomas Fairfax, and Bridget, daughter to Oliver Cromwell, Lieutenant-General of the Horse to the said Sir Thomas Fairfax, were married by Mr. Dell in the Lady Whorvvood's house in Holton. Alban Eales, rector." Dell was Fairfax's chaplain. The ancient manor-house, which was surrounded by a moat, was taken down in 1804, and the present mansion built upon its site.
Henry Ireton, descended from a good family, seated at Attenborough, co. Nottingham, born 161 1, was educated at Oxford (Trinity College) and the Middle Temple. He was brought up to the law, but when the civil contests
88 The House of Cromwell.
commenced, his Puritan and patriotic principles found more congenial play in the Parliament's army, where the inflexible character of his mind acted as a buttress and stimulant even to that of Cromwell. Strong sympathies early drew the men together, and during the principal passages of the war they acted in concert. After the King's death Ireton accompanied his father-in-law to Ireland, and being left by him there in the capacity of Lord-Deputy, he completed the subjugation of the natives with rare vigour and ability. Having crowned his career with the capture of Limerick in 1651, he was seized with a pestilential disease, and died there, in the presence of his brother-in-law, Henry Cromwell, sincerely lamented by the Republicans, who revered him as a soldier, a states- man, and a saint. He received a public funeral in West- minster Abbey, Oliver Cromwell walking as chief mourner, attended by several members of Parliament. The House passed a Bill for settling an estate of £2,000 per annum on the widow and children, a gift which had, in fact, been offered a few months previously to Ireton himself, but which he had nobly refused, urging that the Parliament had many just debts which he desired they would pay before they made any such presents. For himself, he had no need of their land, and would be far better pleased to see them doing the service of the nation than so liberal in disposing of the public treasure. " And truly," adds his friend Ludlow, " I believe he was in earnest, for as he was always careful to husband those things that belonged to the State to the best advantage, so was he most liberal in employing his own purse and person in the public service " (Ludlow's " Memoirs," i. 286).
At the Restoration of Charles II., Ireton's body, like that of his father-in-law and of Bradshaw, was taken from its tomb in Westminster Abbey and hung on the Tyburn gallows. The sermon preached at his funeral in West- minster Abbey by Dr. John Owen, February 6, 1652, con-
Bridget, Eldest Daughter of the Protector. 89
tains a fitting eulogium of him, and with the recital of the dedication of that performance to Henry Cromwell his character may be dismissed. The text was from Daniel xii. 13 : " But go thou thy way till the end be, for thou shalt rest and stand in thy lot at the end of the days."
(Slightly Abridged.)
" To the Honourable and my very worthy friend, Colonel Henry Cromwell.
"Sir,
" The ensuing sermon was preached upon as sad an occasion as on any particular account hath been given to this nation in this our generation. It is now published at the desire of very many who love the savour of that perfume which is diffused with the memory of the noble person particularly mentioned herein. It was in my thoughts to direct it immediately to her [the widow] who was most nearly concerned in him ; but, having observed how near she hath been to be swallowed up of sorrow, and with what slow progress He who took care to seal up instruction to her soul by all dispensations hath given her hitherto towards a conquest thereof, I was not willing to offer a new occasion to the multitude of her perplexed thoughts. In the meantime, sir, these lines are to you. Your near relation to that rare example of righteousness, faith, holiness, zeal, courage, self-denial, love to his country, wisdom and industry, the mutual tender affec- tion between you whilst he was living, your presence with him in his last trial and conflict, your design of looking into and following his steps and purpose in the work of God and his generation, as such an accomplished pattern as few ages have produced the like — [all these] did easily induce me hereunto. I have nothing to express concern- ing yourself, but only my desires that your heart may be fixed to the Lord God of your fathers, and that in the
90 The House of Cromwell.
midst of all the temptations and opposition wherewith your pilgrimage will be attended, you may be carried on and established in your inward subjection to, and outward contending for, the kingdom of the Dearly Beloved of our souls, not fainting nor waxing weary until you also receive your dismission to rest for your lot in the end of the days. " Sir, your most humble and affectionate servant,
"John Owen."
Upon Ireton's death, Cromwell fixed upon Charles Fleetwood to marry his widow. The Fleetwoods, deriving from an ancient stock in Lancashire, had recently made rapid progress in honours. Charles was the third son of Sir Miles Fleetwood, of Aldwinkle, Northamptonshire. In the Civil War the family became, like many others, divided, for while Sir William Fleetwood, of Aldwinkle, suffered for the King, his brother Charles was in the opposite ranks, becoming Oliver Cromwell's son-in-law and Commander-in-Chief of the Forces in England, and both were nominated lords in his Upper House — nay, it has always been a sort of conjectural creed with many that Oliver designed Charles Fleetwood as successor to himself in the Protectorate, but that the instrument or will to that effect was not discoverable when wanted. Is it not Lord Broghill who unhesitatingly declares that such was the case, and that the fair spoiler who discovered and burnt the document was one of the Protector's own daughters ?
What sort of Protector Fleetwood would have made it were vain to surmise. Entertaining in theory many of the maxims of his father-in-law, he was totally wanting in moral ascendency and personal prowess. He witnessed the elevation of his pacific nephew, Richard Cromwell, with impatience, and it was the factious course which he thereupon thought fit to pursue, which drew from Henry (then in Ireland) the memorable and oft-quoted letter,
Bridget, Eldest Daughter of the Protector. 9 1
exposing the folly and wickedness of using the army in defence of any sectional form of faith.
When at last the factions of the hour had exhausted themselves, and the return of Charles II. became inevit- able, Fleetwood's Puritan principles and theoretic objec- tions to the kingly office made him still hesitate to adopt those conciliatory measures by which other prominent agents mitigated the coming wrath.
There was one respect in which he could look back on the late upturnings without any remorse. The part which he had himself borne in them was marked throughout by perfect disinterestedness. Expressing once to Henry his unwillingness to aid out of the public purse a distant relative whom he calls " poor Cromwell," he frankly adds : "You in part know my estate and condition. I cannot make an advantage of my public employments as many have [done], or others suppose I do. Neither am I solicitous about this business. I have sufficient cause from experience to trust the Lord with children whom I shall leave behind me. His blessing with a little is great riches " (Thurloe, vii. 595).
Dr. Watts tells us, too, that his name was held in honour among the Churches.
Not having been implicated in the trial and death of Charles I., the penalty which overtook him was limited to degradation and partial confiscation. He passed from the activities of a camp to the social obscurity of a meek Dissenter in the suburban region of Stoke Newington. That place thus became early conspicuous as the chosen asylum of some of the more wealthy Puritan families ; and the fines levied there on the Fleetwoods, Hartopps, and others of their non-conforming associates amounted in no long time to six or seven thousand pounds. Meanwhile, his Royalist father, Sir William, resumed his ancient position at Court in the capacity of cup-bearer to the restored monarch.
92 The House of Cromwell.
But it was not to Stoke Newington that Charles Fleet- wood first fled to escape the returning torrent of royalism. He was naturally attracted to Feltwell St. Mary, in Norfolk, where an estate had descended to his first wife or her heirs. This first wife was Frances, sole daughter and eventual heiress of Thomas Smith, of Whinston, in Norfolk, Esq., and Fleetwood's retirement to this place may be reasonably regarded as contemporary with the death of his second wife, Bridget Cromwell. Having reached this point, it will be best, before proceeding further with Fleetwood's own affairs, to conclude the personal history of that excellent lady.
Bridget Cromwell belonged to the Puritan party par excellence, to which result the characters of both her husbands greatly contributed. The confederacy of Henry Ireton, Charles Fleetwood, Edmund Ludlow, John Hutch- inson, and their associates, most of them being Baptists, represented the root and branch section of the anti- monarchists. Ludlow ardently admired Bridget's first husband, but could never be reconciled to her father ; while Mrs. Colonel Hutchinson's memoir betrays the same envious spirit against the entire family of the Protector, always excepting her dear friend Bridget. " Oliver's wife and children," says she, " were setting up for principality, which suited no better with any of them than scarlet on the ape. Only to speak the truth of Oliver himself, he had much natural greatness, and well became the place he had usurped. His daughter Fleetwood was humbled, and not exalted with these things ; but the rest were insolent fools."
There was no lack of cordiality between Bridget and her father, however much her own familiar friends might misunderstand him. She became, too, the mother of a daughter, the renowned Mrs. Bendysh, who, more than any other person in the succeeding generation, judged him aright and reflected his character. Fortunately there are
Bridget, Eldest Daughter of the Protector. 93
sufficient materials in Oliver's correspondence to illustrate his estimate of Bridget's piety and his care to foster it. The first letter to be noticed was sent to her a few months after her first marriage, and constitutes one of the choicest gems of the Cromwellian biography. The " sister Clay- pole " referred to was Elizabeth Cromwell, who had also been very recently married.
" For my beloved daughter Bridget Ireton, at Cornbury the General's Quarters.
" London, 25 October, 1646.
" Dear Daughter.
" I write not to thy husband, partly to avoid trouble, for one line of mine begets many of his, which I doubt makes him sit up too late ; partly because I am myself indisposed at this time, having some other considerations. Your friends at Ely are well. Your sister Claypole is, I trust, in mercy exercised with some perplexed thoughts. She sees her own vanity and carnal mind ; bewailing it. She seeks after, as I hope also, what will satisfy. And thus to be a seeker, is to be of the best sect next to a finder ; and such an one shall every faithful humble seeker be at the end. Happy seeker, happy finder ! Who ever tasted that the Lord is gracious, without some sense of self vanity and badness ? Who ever tasted that gracious- ness of His, and could go less in desire, — less than pressing after full enjoyment ? Dear heart, press on. Let not husband, let not any thing cool thy affections after Christ. I hope he [thy husband] will be an occasion to inflame them. That which is best worthy of love in thy husband is that of the image of Christ he bears. Look on that and love it best, and all the rest for that. I pray for thee and him. Do so for me. My service and dear affections to the General [Fairfax] and Generaless. I hear she is very kind to thee. It adds to all other obligations. " I am, thy dear Father,
" Oliver Cromwell."
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In the next extant letter she is addressed, not as the wife of Ireton, but as that of Fleetwood, on her second arrival in Ireland. It is not difficult to see that this second visit had something depressing about it. Her first experiences of Irish life had been in company with the gallant Ireton, but now her heart seems to have been yearning for the children whom we judge to have been left behind her in England. Whatever it was, her father evidently felt that there was need for solace and encouragement. But, first of all, he seeks to silence her groundless anxieties, as though she were the victim of penal discipline. "The voice of fear," says he, " is, If I had done this, or avoided that, how well it had been with me. (This I know hath been her vain reasoning.) Whereas, love argueth on this wise, What a Christ have I. — What a Father in and through Him. — What a name hath my Father, merciful, gracious, long suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin. What a nature hath my Father. He is love, free in it, unchangeable, infinite. What a Covenant between Him and Christ for all the seed, for every one ; wherein He undertakes all, and the poor soul nothing. And shall we seek for the root of our comforts within ourselves ? Acts of obedience are not perfect, and therefore yield not perfect grace. Faith, as an act, yields it not but only as it carries us into Him who is our perfect rest and peace, in whom we are accounted of and received by the Father even as Christ himself. This is our high calling. Rest we here, and here only." He concludes by assuring her that her two children, " the boy and Betty, are very well." The boy is Henry Ireton ; but Betty may be either Elizabeth or Bridget.
A third letter from her father, dated two years later and directed to Fleetwood, is in a similar strain as concerning herself, and need not therefore be quoted. On returning to England with her husband and the infant children born to them in Dublin, she had to witness during the next three
Bridget, Eldest Daughter of the Protector. 95
years her father's death and the downfall of his family. Amid the national confusions which prepared the way for the Restoration, she did her utmost to sustain her husband in some sort of consistent action, but his scrupulous con- science proved a very intractable factor in that whirlpool and conflict of second-rate men. Edmund Ludlow has recorded a scene in which with tears she besought his counsel and aid. It has been said that she disapproved of her father's elevation to the supreme power ; and very possibly she may in former years have entertained theo- retical objections to such a measure, especially when she lived in companionship with Ireton. The place of her death is uncertain, but her burial is recorded at St. Anne's, Blackfriars, July 1, 1662. Few, if any, of her letters survive, except the following one which she sent back from England to her brother Henry, when he superseded her own husband, Fleetwood, in the government of Ireland.
Mrs. Bridget Fleetwood to Henry Cromwell, Lord-Deputy in Ireland, date 1657 (?).
" Dear Brother,
" I am very unfit and unapt to write, and yet I would not altogether neglect to stir up that affection which ought to be betwixt so near relations, and is very apt to decay. I blame none but myself. I desire rather so to do than to lay it upon others, or to be a judge of others. I could wish there had not been so much occasion of the contrary, wherein my corrupt heart hath taken advantage. I desire to be humbled for it, and not to give way, whatever others' unkindness may be, to weaken that love and affection which ought to be and is the desire of my soul to defend and nourish in me towards yourself, though it may be not much cared for. Yet, however, I shall labour to be found in my duty, which is to be,
" Your dear and affectionate sister,
" Bridget Fleetwood."
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Abstract of the Will of General Fleetwood, recorded in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury , J anuary 10, 1690.
" I, Charles Fleetwood of Stoke Newington in the County of Middlesex, Esq. being through the mercy of the Lord in health and memory, do make &c. First, I commend my soul and spirit into the hands of my gracious God and father through our Lord Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit enabling me to lay hold upon the imputed righteousness of Christ for my justification, and in virtue of that righteousness do I hope to stand at the great day of the Lord. My body to be buried in the same grave or as near as may be to my last dear wife. Debts, wages, &c. to be paid within one year of death. To my daughter the Lady Elizabeth Hartopp £100 as a last expression of my thankfulness for the constant dear love and duty she hath always manifested unto me. I give unto dear daughter Carter £100. To my cousin Mary Waterson £20 over and above the £"20 which my last dear wife owed her by bond which I now direct my executor to pay. To Anne Pace £10 for myself and £10 more which my last wife gave her [two devises left blank, follow]. I give to the poor distressed people of God £200 such as my executor with two of my trustees hereafter named (Sir John Hartopp to be one) shall think fit objects of charity. £10 to be paid to the poor of that society with whom I have had Christian communion in the Gospel, — as also £6 to my antient friend James Berry Esq. and £3 to Mr. Howard minister of the Gospel and to Mr. Thomas Taylor minister of the Gospel at Cambridge and Mr. Pelloe minister of the Gospel at Sudbury, and £2 to any others that I shall name in a paper behind me. I give and devise to Sir John Hartopp bart., Samuel Desborrow doctor of physic, Captain John Nicholas, and Nathaniel Gould merchant their heirs and assigns all my manor or lordship of Burrough alias Burrough-Castle, Co. Suffolk,
Bridget, Eldest Daughter of the Protector. 97
in trust to pay legacies &c. and afterwards to convey the same to my son and heir Smyth Fleetwood and his heirs for ever. To each of my said trustees £5 for mourning. And whereas there is a debt due to me from my son Bendysh, my will is that my executor shall not demand the said debt till God shall in His providence make a comfortable provision for his wife and children. My son Smyth Fleetwood to be sole executor — Signed 10 January 1690 — in presence of Edward Terry, Mary Waterson, John Wealshdale. Proved by Smyth Fleetwood in P. C. C. 2 November 1692. Registered 'Fane' 201." — Notes and Queries, May 4, 1872.
In accordance with the above will, General Fleetwood was buried in his wife's tomb in Bunhill Fields.
Children of the Protector's daughter Bridget by Henry Ireton, her first husband.
I. Henry, who married Katharine, daughter of the Right Hon. Henry Powle, Speaker of the House of Commons in 1689 and Master of the Rolls. He became Lieutenant-Colonel of Dragoons, and Gentleman of the Horse to William III., but died without issue.
II. Elizabeth, born about 1647. A brief reference to her childhood occurs in a letter sent in 165 1 by Oliver St. John "to his kinsman Oliver Cromwell," then command- ing in Ireland: "Tell my cousin Ireton that his wife breeds Betty up in the Popish religion to worship images, and that [which] she now worships teacheth her to frown." What this playful sarcasm indicates we can only conjecture. In 1674 she was married to Thomas Polhill, of Otford, co. Kent, Esq.
Family of Polhill.
The issue of the marriage of Elizabeth Ireton and Mr. Polhill consisted of three sons : (1) David, of whom pre-
7
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sently ; (2) Henry, who died in his father's life-time ; (3) Charles, a Smyrna merchant, born 1679 > died s.p. 1755, having married Martha, daughter of Thomas Streat- feild, of Sevenoaks.
David, of Cheapstead, in Kent, born in 1675 ; M.P. for the county, then for Bramber, and finally for Rochester, which city he represented till he reached the age of seventy-nine. This is the gentleman whom Daniel De Foe memorialized as the leader of the Kentish Petitioners of 1701, a body of five delegates who, in the reign of William III., presented a remonstrance to the Houses condemnatory of their subservience to the Court of France, the other names being Thomas Colepepper, William Colepepper, William Hamilton, and Justinian Champneys, Esquires. For this they were committed to the Gatehouse, and kept prisoners for a week ; but their return into Kent resembled the march of conquerors. Polhill was met at Blackheath by five hundred horsemen, and escorted to his house at Otford ; the other four were met at Rochester by nearly half the county, and from thence on to Maidstone, where flowers were strewn in their path, and all the church bells set a-ringing. A con- temporary print is preserved in the Polhill family contain- ing the portraits of the five patriots.
Mr. Polhill was thrice married — first to Elizabeth Trevor ; secondly, to Gertrude, sister of Thomas Hollis, Duke of Newcastle ; and, thirdly, to Elizabeth, daughter of John Borrett, of Shoreham ; the last became the mother of four sons and one daughter. In these sons and daughters were united not only the blood of Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton, but also that of the patriot, John Hampden, for Elizabeth Borrett's mother was the daughter of Sir John Trevor, of Denbighshire, by Ruth, eldest daughter of John Hampden. The names of these children were Charles, Thomas, Henry, John, and Eliza- beth, all of whom died unmarried exceot
Bridget, Eldest Daughter of the Protector. 99
Charles, of Cheapstead, and afterwards of Otford ; married, first, Tryphena Penelope, daughter of Sir John Shelley, of Mitchel Grove, Sussex, bart., and by her had one daughter, Tryphena Penelope, who married George Stafford, and had two sons, Charles and Thomas George. Mr. Polhill by his second wife, Patience Has- well, had seven children : George, his successor ; Charles, who died unmarried ; David, died in infancy ; Patience, unmarried ; a second David, unmarried ; Thomas Alfred, lost in the South Seas from the Guardian (Captain Rion) ; Francis, Comptroller of the Customs at Monserrat, in the West Indies, died 1839. Mr. Polhill died in 1805, and was succeeded by his eldest son,
George, who married Mary, daughter of Robert Porteus, and grand-niece of Dr. Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London, and died in 1839. Their children were : (1) Charles, who married Sarah Marshall, and had two daughters, Beatrice Mary, born 1867, married, 1888, to Alfred George Streatfield Beadnell, and has one son, Montgomery Polhill Beadnell, and Elizabeth Mary, born 1868, married, 1890, to Robert Brownell Dobble, has issue one daughter, Sybil Mary ; (2) Mary Elizabeth Campbell, died 1884 ; (3) Frederick Campbell, of Sundridge, Seven- oaks, curate of Hever, which post he resigned in 1850 ; (4) George, died in 1892 ; (5) Henry Western Onslow, rector of Ashurst, Kent, married to Miss Frances Charlotte Streatfield. The seat of the Polhills contains a valuable collection of the portraits of their illustrious ancestry, including many full lengths.
III. — Jane, second daughter of Bridget Cromwell and Henry Ireton ; born about 1648 ; married, 1668, Richard Lloyd, of St. James's, Duke's Place, Esq., widower, and had an only child, Jane, wife in 1710 of Nicholas (or Henry) Morse, Esq. Issue of this marriage were four sons : David, Henry, Nicholas, Daniel. There were also three daughters : Elizabeth, Jane, and Anne, of whom
IOO
The House of Cromwell.
the eldest married Mr. Oyle, a physician, and became the mother of Elizabeth, married to Samuel Codrington ; Jane, the second daughter, became Mrs. Burroughs ; and Anne, the youngest daughter, became Mrs. Roberts.
After the death of Richard Lloyd, his widow (Jane aforesaid) married Mr. William Barnard. The descendants of this marriage are set out below :
William Barnard, of Penning- ton and Longthorpe, colonel ; b. 1634; m. 1680; d. 1709; bur. at Pennington.
;Jane, relict of Richard Lloyd, and dau. of Henry Ireton, by Bridget, eldest dau. of Oliver Cromwell.
William Barnard, b. 1685 ;= d. 1775 ; bur. at Great El- lingham, Norfolk.
William Barnard, b. at Rock- land, Norfolk, 1 709; d. Sept., 1788; bur. at Old Meeting, Norwich.
;Mary, dau. and heir of Jas. Corsbie, of the family of Corsbie, of Corsbie Castle, Berwickshire ; b. at Ashwellthorpe, 1714; d. 21 May, 1801 ; bur. at Old Meeting, Norwich.
Thomas Barnard, b. 18 Dec.,=j=Ann, youngest dau. and co-heir of
1757 ; mar. at Sudbury, May, 1789; d. 1 April, 1833.
Samuel and Deborah Stott, of St. Edmundsbury, Suffolk ; b. 10 Mar., 1758 ; d. 11 Nov., 1811.
Alfred Barnard, b. 14 Feb. ,=j=Frances Katherine, eldest dau. and co-heir of
1793; mar. 10 Nov., 1817 ; d. 4 July, 1835 ; bur. at Octa- gon Chapel, Norwich.
Francis Smith, of Norwich (descendant of Robert Pierrepont, 1st Earl of Kingston-upon- Hull), and Sarah (Marsh) ; b. 7 May, 1796 ; d. 20 Jan., 1869 ; bur. in the Rosary, Norwich.
Alfred Francis Barnard, b. at Norwich,1 4 Jan., 1821 ; mar. in London, 5 Jan., 1854; d. in London, 14 Sept., 1894; bur. at Highgate Cemetery.
:Mary Hog, eldest dau. of Thos. Cal- vert Girtin and Rachel (Haward), and grand-dau. of Thomas Girtin, the water-colour painter ; b. 20 Jan., 1829.
Francis Pierrepont Barnard, son and heir, of=Eliza Smith, eldest dau. and St. Mary's Abbey, Windermere ; M.A. Oxon ; co-heir of William Pollard, some time headmaster of Reading School, J. P., of St. Mary's Abbey, Berks; b. 27 Nov. 1854; mar. at Winder- Windermere, mere, 15 April, 1884.
Touching the four sons of Mr. Morse aforesaid, nothing seems recoverable unless we make an exception in favour of the third named, and regard him as the Nicholas Morse who was Governor of Madras in the middle of the last
Bridget, Eldest Daughter of the Protector. 101
century, and whose daughter, Amelia, married Henry Vansittart, Governor of Bengal, and father of Nicholas, the first Lord Bexley. It may suffice to add that the claim which the Vansittart family have long asserted, touching their descent from the Protector through Henry Ireton and Nicholas Morse, has every right to be accepted as legitimate, the only difficulty in the way being that Mark Noble gives " Moore " instead of " Morse " as the name of Jane Lloyd's husband. That this is an error, occasioned by the resemblance of the two words in manuscript, hardly admits of a doubt. It is also to be noted that the lady who about the same time, viz., in 1771, became the wife of the last Oliver Cromwell, Esq., was named Mary Morse, indicative at least of friendly relations existing between families so named.
Amelia Morse, the wife of Governor Henry Vansittart aforesaid, died in 1818 at her house on Blackheath, aged eighty. Her husband had long been dead, having perished at a comparatively early age on his passage to India in the A urora frigate.
Nicholas Vansittart, Baron Bexley, was the second son of Henry Vansittart, the Governor of Bengal. Lord Bexley was born in 1766, four years before his father's death at sea. In 17S4 he went to Christchurch, Oxford, and in 1791 was called to the Bar in Lincoln's Inn. He entered the House as member for Hastings, and in 1801 was entrusted with a special mission to Copenhagen. The Danes, overawed by Napoleon, refused at that time to entertain an English ambassador, and on returning home, Mr. Vansittart became joint Secretary of the Treasury, which office he held till the Addington Ministry resigned in 1804. Under Lord Liverpool he became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1812, and held the post for twenty-one years. In 1823 he obtained his peerage and a seat in the Cabinet, and took little share afterwards in public affairs, dying in 1851, at the age of eighty-five, at his residence of
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Footscray, near Bexley, in Kent. He married in 1806 the Hon. Katharine Isabella Eden, second daughter of William, first Lord Auckland ; but by her, who died four years after- wards, he left no issue, whereupon the barony of Bexley be- came extinct, and a pension of £3,000 lapsed to the Crown.
IV. — Bridget, third daughter of Bridget Cromwell and Henry Ireton ; born about the year 1650. The biography of this lady, as heretofore given, simply consists of three different sketches, supplied respectively by Samuel Say, a Dissenting minister, by Dr. J. Brooke, and by her relation, Mr. Hewling Luson. In the following version an attempt has been made to impart greater completeness to the account by blending these three narratives. Bridget, together with one or two others of the family, appears to have been left under the care of their grandmother, the Protectress, when their own mother went to Ireland with her second husband, Fleetwood, in 1652. Her grandfather's death occurred before she was ten years of age ; that of her mother followed four years later ; so that she must have had an unquiet time of it before she settled down with her sisters beneath the roof of their step-father, Fleetwood, in the nonconforming atmosphere of Stoke Newington. Here she passed four or five years of her life, till her marriage in 1669 with Thomas Bendysh, of Gray's Inn and of Southtown, Yarmouth, Esq., a distant relative of Sir Thomas Bendysh, who had served as Ambassador to Turkey both from Charles I. and from the Protector Oliver. Soon after her marriage she settled at South- town, near Yarmouth, where her husband owned farms and salt-mines. It would be highly interesting, were the materials extant, to trace the early married life of this excellent lady.
Samuel Say, the earliest of Mrs. Bendysh's biographers, had many opportunities of knowing her intimately, for he had not only been pastor of a church in the neighbouring town of Ipswich, but he married a relative of Mr. Carter,
Bridget, Eldest Daughter of the Protectoi'. 103
of Yarmouth, the husband of Mary Fleetwood ; moreover, he had been a fellow-student with Dr. Watts. Here is his description of her personal appearance :
"As Mrs. Bendysh in the features of her face exactly resembled the best picture of her grandfather Oliver which I have ever seen, and which is now at Rosehall, in the possession of Sir Robert Rich, so she seems also as exactly to resemble him in the cast of her mind — a person of great presence and majesty, heroic courage and indefatigable industry, and with something in her countenance and manner that at once attracts and commands respect the moment she appears in company."
Dr. J. Brooke, of Norwich, another of her biographers, whose testimony is of a later date, remarks : "There was something in her person when she was dressed and in company that could not fail of attracting at once the notice and respect of any strangers that entered the room wherever she was, though the company were ever so numerous, and though many of them might be more splendid in their appearance. Splendid, indeed, she never was, her highest dress being a plain silk ; but it was usually of the richest sort, though, as far as I can remem- ber, of what is called a quakers colour ; and she wore besides a kind of black silk hood or scarf that I rarely, if ever, observed to be worn by ladies of her time ; and though hoops were in fashion long before her death, nothing, I suppose, could have induced her to wear one. I can so far recollect her countenance as to confirm what is observed by Mr. Say of her likeness to the best pictures of Oliver ; and she no less resembled him in the qualities of enterprise, resolution, courage, and enthusiasm."
The narrative of Mr. Hewling Luson, the third of her biographers, who, like Dr. Brooke, knew her only in advanced life, presents us with a similar picture. Luson's mother was a younger sister of Hannah Hewling (Mrs. Henry Cromwell), and the sympathy which Mrs. Bendysh
104 The House of Cromwell.
felt for the fate of her brothers fully accounts for the frequency of her visits to the elder Mr. Luson's house. "I was young," says Hewling Luson — "not more than sixteen — when Mrs. Bendysh died, yet she came so often to my father's house that I remember her person, her dress, her manner, and her conversation, which were all strikingly peculiar, with great precision, and I have heard much more of her than I have seen. She was certainly, both without and within, in her person and in her spirit, exactly like her grandfather, the Protector. Her features, the turn of her face, and the expression of her counten- ance, all agree very exactly with the excellent pictures I have seen of the Protector in the Cromwell family ; and whoever looks upon the print prefixed to the octavo ' Life of Cromwell,' said to be published by the late Bishop Gibson about the year 1725, which exactly agrees with these pictures, will have a clear idea of Mrs. Bendysh's person, if their imaginations can add a female dress, a few years in age, and a very little softening of the features. I refer to that print because the fine engraving of Crom- well in the Houbraken Collection bears very little resem- blance to the pictures in the Cromwell family, and no resemblance at all to Mrs. Bendysh. . . . She had strong and masculine sense, a free and spirited elocution, much knowledge of the world, great dignity in her manner, and a most engaging address. The place of her residence was called the Salt Pans [near Yarmouth]. In this place, which is quite open to the road, I have often seen her in the morning, stumping about with an old straw hat on her head, her hair about her ears, without stays, and when it was cold an old blanket about her shoulders and a staff in her hands — in a word, exactly accoutred to mount the stage as a witch in ' Macbeth.' Yet if at such a time she were accosted by any person of rank or breeding, the dignity of her manner and politeness of style, which nothing could efface, would instantly break through the
Bridget, Eldest Daughter of the Protector. 105
veil of debasement which concealed her native grandeur, and a stranger to her customs might become astonished to find himself addressed by a princess while he was look- ing at a mumper. Mrs. Bendysh resembled the Protector in nothing more than in that restless, unabated activity of spirit, which, by the coincidence of a thousand favourable circumstances, conducted him to the summit of power and of fame, but entangled her, generally unfavoured by success, in a thousand embarrassments and disgraces. Yet she never fainted, nor was wear)'. One prospect lost, another still she gained, and the enthusiasm of her faith kept pace with, or, to speak more truly, far outran the activity of her mind. . . . She had one constant, never- failing resource against the vexation of disappointments, for as she determined, at all events, to serve the Lord with gladness, her way was to rejoice at everything as it arrived. If she succeeded, she was thankful for that ; and if she suffered adversity, which was generally her lot, she was vastly more thankful for that, and she so managed that her spiritual joys always encreased with her outward sufferings. . . . Mrs. Bendysh's religion was in the highest strain of Calvinistic enthusiasm, and Dr. Owen in his writings was her spiritual guide. She no more doubted the validity of her election to the kingdom of heaven than Squire Wilkes doubts the validity of his for the county of Middlesex. But her enthusiasm never carried her to greater lengths of extravagance than in the justification of her grandfather, of whose memory she was passionately fond. It, however, unfortunately happened that her fancy led her to defend him exactly in that part of his character which was least defensible. She valued him, no doubt, very highly as a General and politician, but she had got it fixed in her head that this kind of fame was vain and worthless when compared with the greater glory of his saintship. . . . Now, it could not but happen that for five hundred who might be pre-
106 The House of Cromwell.
vailed with to receive Oliver as a great General, not five could be found who would admit him to be a great saint, and this constant kicking against Oliver's saintship wrought the good lady sore travail."
" This extraordinary woman," says Dr. Brooke, "wanted only to have acted in a superior sphere to be ranked by historians among the most admirable heroines. . . . She lived through what the Dissenters but too justly called the troublous times, when the penal laws against con- venticles were strained to their utmost rigour. The preaching of this sect was then held in the closest con- cealment, and the preachers went in momentary danger of being dragged out by spies and informers to heavy fines and severe imprisonment. With these spies and in- formers she maintained a perpetual war. This kind of bustle was in all respects in the true taste of her spirit. I have heard many stories of her dealings with these un- gracious people. Sometimes she circumvented and out- witted them, and sometimes she bullied them, and the event generally was that she got the poor parson out of their clutches. Upon these occasions and upon all others when they could express their attachment to her, Mrs. Bendysh was sure of the common people. She was, as she deserved to be, very dear to them. When she had money, she gave it freely to such as wanted ; and when she had none, which was pretty often the case, they were sure of receiving civility and commiseration. She practised an exalted humanity. If in the meanest sick- room she found the sufferer insufficiently attended, she turned attendant herself, and would sit hours in the poorest chamber to administer support or consolation to the afflicted. In this noble employment she passed much of her time." She was in the secret of the Revolution of 1688, and would go into shops in different parts of the town under pretence of cheapening silks or other goods, and on coming out to her coach take occasion to drop
Bridget, Eldest Daughter of the Protector. 107
bundles of papers to prepare the minds of the people for that happy event, for she might safely be trusted with any secret, were it ever so important. After the accession of William and Mary, she was presented to the Queen by Archbishop Tillotson with a view to the settlement of a pen- sion, to enable her to support in some creditable measure the dignity which she had tasted in early days ; but the death of both prelate and Queen defeated that design.
Mrs. Bendysh's husband had died on April 27, 1707, and was buried in St. Nicholas Church, Yarmouth, where she erected a monument to his memory. She survived him twenty-two years, dying in 1729 at the age of eighty. She was buried at Yarmouth, having had two sons and one daughter, viz. :
1. Thomas, who died in the West Indies. His first wife was the mother of his only son, Ireton, a young man of great promise, whose early death was much lamented. His second wife was Katharine Smith, of Colskirk, near Fakenham, a lady of property ; but extravagant habits darkened their remaining history. The fate of this family was no doubt one of the sorrows of old Mrs. Bendysh.
2. Bridget, lived and died at the paternal seat of Southtown. She died at Yarmouth, unmarried, in 1736, aged sixty-four.
3. Henry, of Bedford Row, London, where he died in 1740 ; married Martha Shute, sister of the first Viscount Harrington, and had (1) Henry, of Chingford, and of the Salt-pans at Southtown, died unmarried in 1753, when the name of Bendysh became extinct in this branch of the family ; (2) Mary, married to William Berners, of whom presently; (3) Elizabeth, married, 1756^0 John Hagar, of Waresley Park, son of Admiral Hagar.
Family of Berners.
Mary, grand-daughter of Bridget Bendysh, and William Berners her husband both died in 1783. Their surviving
108 The House of Cromwell.
children were : (i) Charles, of whom presently ; (2) Henry, rector of Hambledon, near Henley-on-Thames, had one child (Emma) by his wife, Elizabeth Weston.
Charles, born 1740 ; married Katharine, daughter of John Laroche, of Egham, M.P. for Bodmin, and had issue :
(1) Charles, his heir, who, dying unmarried in 1831, was succeeded by his brother ; (2) Henry Denny ; (3) William, a London banker, married Rachel Jarrett, of Freemantle, in Hampshire, and had William, a captain in the horse artillery, Henry, married to Miss Saunders, and Arthur ; (4) Martha, married to Herbert Newton Jarrett, of Jamaica, Esq., and died 1831.
Mr. Charles Berners, died 1S15, and was succeeded, first by his son Charles, secondly by his second son,
Rev. Henry Denny Berners, LL.B., Archdeacon of Suffolk. By his wife Dinah, daughter of John Jarret, Esq., he had issue : (1) John, born 1800, died s.p. ; (2) Hugh, born 1801, Captain R.N., married, 1832, Julia, daughter of John Ashton, of the Grange, Cheshire, died at Wolverstone, in Suffolk, in 1891, aged eighty-nine ; he had a son and three daughters ; (3) Ralph, born 1803, rector of Harkstead and Erwarton, in Suffolk, married, 1831, Eliza, daughter of Sir Cornelius Cuyler, of Welwyn, bart., and had three sons and two daughters ; (4) Alice, died unmarried, 1820.
Children of Bridget Cromwell by her second husband, Charles Fleetwood.
By Bridget Cromwell, Fleetwood was the father of
I. Cromwell Fleetwood, born about 1653 ; married
in 1679 to Elizabeth Nevill, of Little Berkhampstead,
Hertfordshire ; administration of his goods was granted
September 20, 1688. He seems to have died without issue.
Bridget, Eldest Daughter of the Protector. 109
II.