limited, and his duties probably left him but little leisure. He had leisure, however, to think; for it was during these years, and there is reason to suppose not long after his marriage, that the great religious change passed upon him which coloured his whole life, and, more than anything else, gave consistency and meaning to it. How this change was wrought there remains no means of tracing. There is no record of his spiritual experience at this early period; and we cannot even say whether Sir Philip Warwick's reminiscences of his illness and hypochondria* refer to this or a later time of his life. At the best, these are but vague signs of the great crisis of his spiritual being, whose secret intensity can only be gathered from the fulness of feeling and energy of action which it called forth.

He soon showed the bent of his new impulses. Religious life and earnestness appeared to him all to lie with the persecuted Nonconforming party in the Church. Whether or not any of them had been instrumental in leading him to new thoughts, his sympathies at once gathered round them. His house became a refuge of the Puritan preachers; they met in it for worship, in which he not only joined, but actively participated. He became known as one of the most active of the party, and identified himself with all their movements, appearing personally in their behalf before the Bishop of Lincoln.† From being an idle and boisterous youth, he became in a few years a zealous, religious, leader.

* Dr Simcott, physician, Huntingdon, told Sir Philip that Cromwell was very "splenetic" about this time-that he had been sent for at midnight to see him-that he laboured under the impression he was just about to die-and had "strange fancies about the town-cross."

† Afterwards Archbishop Williams.

E

We can well understand, although we are not able clearly to trace how all this occurred to Cromwell. As soon as he began to seek a sphere of activity in connection with his new convictions, his great energy, and quick sympathies with the common social feeling around him, would naturally drive him into the ranks of Puritanism. Without frivolity, earnest and thorough-going even in his dissipations, with no reverence for conventionalities, but rather a fierce impatience of them, the Court or ecclesiastical party possessed no points of attraction to him. The only feeling that might have bound him to it-the old traditionary loyalty of his family, which had cost his uncle and grandfather so dear-had become weakened by various circumstances, even if its natural influence had not been broken by his disagreement with his uncle. Royalism had lost its old charm; it had widely alienated the national feeling. Spanish intrigues and Laudian ceremonialism had made it especially contemptible with ardent reforming young minds. Puritanism became, by mere force of contrast, the instinctive creed of such minds between the years 1620-30. To one like Cromwell, with a vague, uneasy sense of genius, and a profound feeling of the reality of religion stirring him, it opened up a field of active interest and ambition. Every one of its objects made a claim upon his sympathy and enthusiasm. The privilege of preaching the gospel with as few formalities as possible-the right to a private judgment in matters of conscience-the need of defence against the old Papal spirit of bondage over men's souls and bodies-these were things directly calculated to interest a young Protestant gentleman in the beginning of the seventeenth century. We can

not tell when the great principle of the rights of conscience first impressed Cromwell; but we shall see how early he was excited about Popery, and every attempt to reintroduce it; and how at last, in the days of his power, it was perhaps his highest honour to reach the right meaning of the doctrine of toleration, and nobly to vindicate it against the straitest sect of that very Puritanism which had first practically taught him it.

During these early years of his residence at Huntingdon, six children were born unto him, four of whom were sons, but only two of whom survived, and afterwards reappear in history. With this family growing up around him, and amidst his farming duties, and Puritan interests and associations, he spent this quietest period of his life. Gradually he rose to repute and credit among his fellow-townsmen. Particularly he seems to have concerned himself in the scheme at this time set agoing by some of the wealthy London Puritans for buying-in lay impropriations as they were offered for sale, and from such funds providing lecturers to supply the spiritual destitution prevailing in many parts of the country. This was a favourite scheme of the Puritans; and these lecturers, we have seen, were their favourite preachers. "It is incredible," says Fuller, "what large sums were advanced in a short time towards so laudable an employment." Lecturers spread themselves over the country, especially in the market-towns, where they preached on market-days and on Sunday afternoons; and we shall find immediately how great was Cromwell's interest in their maintenance and work.

* Another son (five in all), and two more daughters, of whom we shall afterwards hear, constituted his family.

His activity and talent were already, in 1625, so well recognised, that it was proposed in that year, when Charles called together his second Parliament, to send him up to Westminster as member for the borough of Huntingdon. The proposal, however, did not on this occasion take effect. In 1628, when Charles, needy for supplies, and unable to find them by other and less constitutional means, called together his third Parliament-the famous Assembly that drew up and passed the Petition of Right-Cromwell was returned as member for Huntingdon. His cousin Hampden was member of this Parliament, and other names no less celebrated-Selden, Elliot, Pym, and Holles. Long afterwards, when the rustic squire from Huntingdon had become the greatest man in England, it was remembered what a rough and clownish appearance he presented at this time; and in the mad days of the Restoration the subject suggested itself to a divine, whose cleverness scarcely redeems the infamy of his sycophancy, as a telling point for a royal sermon. "Who that had beheld such a bankrupt beggarly fellow as Cromwell," says South, preaching before Charles II., "first entering the Parliament House with a threadbare torn coat and a greasy hat, and perhaps neither of them paid for, could have suspected that in the course of so few years he should, by the murder of one king, and the banishment of another, ascend the throne, be invested in the royal robes, and want nothing of the state of a king, but the changing of his hat into a crown!"

"

The first session of this Parliament did not last long,

*South was not yet bishop, but only chaplain to Buckingham when he thus preached before his royal patron. "Odds fish, Lory," exclaimed Charles, after the sermon, "your chaplain must be a bishop. Put me in mind of him at the next vacancy."

but it had been distinguished by various important movements. Among other things that it had taken in hand, was the severe exposure of certain Popish practices on the part of Mainwaring, one of the royal chaplains. Pym led the way in this exposure; and the chaplain, abandoned for the time by his master and Laud, had to submit to the censure of the House. The royal favour, however, was speedily extended to him in compensation. No sooner had Parliament risen than he was promoted. Other circumstances of ill omen had occurred. "Tonnage and poundage" had been levied unwarrantably without Parliamentary consent, and in the very face of the provisions of the Petition of Right; this great remonstrance itself was reported to have been tampered with. Parliament reassembled in the January of the following year, not in the very best of tempers it may be imagined. A committee of religion. was immediately appointed, and a hot and indignant debate ensued as to the Romanising tendencies displayed in high quarters. Hampden had spoken, and when he sat down his cousin for the first time rose and addressed the house. "A harsh and broken voice of astonishing fervour," made a strange contrast to the mild and dignified accents of Hampden. But energy is stamped on every word of the broken and fragmentary record of this first speech of Cromwell. The direction which his sympathies had been taking -his association with Puritan lecturers, the impatience of his stern Protestant feeling, are all apparent. He said "he had heard by relation, from one Dr Beard (his old schoolmaster at Huntingdon), that Dr Alabaster had preached flat Popery at Paul's Cross; and that the Bishop of Winchester (Dr Neile), he had com

* FOSTER.