CHAPTER XIII

Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell. The Battle of Marston Moor.

THE first heroes of the parliament were the Earl of Essex, "the darling of the swordsmen," Sir William Waller, the champion of the Presbyterians, and stout old Skippon, who drilled the train-bands. Then amidst the shock of arms other names were heard ever oftener and louder. Thomas Fairfax, born the same year as Henry Vane, came of an old Yorkshire family, which had given birth to many warriors. His grandfather was the companion in arms of Lord Vere; his granduncle made the first and still the best translation of Tasso. Two of his uncles had met their death in the Thirty Years' War. When a youth of eighteen Thomas Fairfax had seen war along with Turenne at the siege of Bois-le-Duc in the Low Countries, where he suffered from ague, which weakened his health for years after. He married Anne, the daughter of Lord Vere. He had attracted notice by presenting a petition to the king at York, which his majesty had disdainfully rejected. In this family there were none of the distressing divisions of kinsmen which frequently attended the Civil War. All the Fairfaxes took the side of the parliament. With his father, Lord Ferdinando Fairfax, Sir

Thomas was active in rallying the Yorkshire Ridings against the Cavaliers, who were at the beginning better appointed, and under the Marquis of Newcastle drew many hardy recruits from Northumberland.

The Fairfaxes were followed by their tenants and many of the yeomanry, and the rising manufacturing towns of the country. Sir Thomas was a tall man with brown hair, fair complexion, and somewhat high cheek-bones. Accomplished in all military exercises, courteous and generous as he was brave, his skill in war and power of organisation soon marked him as a great leader. Commanding the navigation of the Humber, Hull was of signal value both to the south of Yorkshire and to Lincolnshire, where the forces of the parliament were greater. In the south-eastern counties the Earl of Manchester was entrusted with command by the parliament. A man not born to control, he soon yielded to the ascendency of Oliver Cromwell.

Originally from Glamorganshire and bearing the name of Williams, the Cromwells had been settled for three generations in Huntingdonshire, where they had received grants of church lands in the days of Henry VIII. Robert Cromwell, or Williams, the father of Oliver, was the second son of Sir Henry Cromwell, one of whose daughters was the mother of John Hampden. When seventeen years old Oliver was sent to Cambridge University. It is reported that in his youth he was rough and quarrelsome, and more addicted to field sports than to study, which accounts for his skill shown later in life as a rider, and in the use of weapons.1

1 Without giving credit to the malicious statements of royalist writers,

Going to London to study civil law, Oliver married when twenty-one, the daughter of a city merchant, after which he led a decorous life and consorted with the zealous Puritans. With him religious emotion was too vivid for the haberdashery and posturings of the episcopal church. Sir Philip Warwick has preserved a note of his mental condition when still a private gentleman which is worthy of quotation in full:

"After the rendition of Oxford, I, living some time with Lady Beadle (my wife's sister) near Huntingdon, had occasion to converse with Mr Cromwell's physician, Dr Simcott, who assured me that for many years his patient was a most splenetic man, and had fancies about the cross in that town, and that he had been called up to him at midnight, and such unseasonable hours, very many times, which made him believe he

the assertion that Oliver Cromwell was wild in his youth seems to rest upon some evidence. Sanford (in his Studies and Illustrations of the Great Rebellion, London, 1858, p. 221), quotes a letter written by him to his cousin, the wife of the celebrated Oliver St John: "You know what my manner of life hath been. Oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated light; I was a chief, the chief of sinners. This is true; I hated godliness, yet God had mercy upon me." It needs some straining to get rid of such direct testimony, even though allowance be made for the wont of religious persons to deplore the depravities of their unconverted state. Sir Philip Warwick lived some time in Huntingdon, and conversed with Sir Oliver, the protector's uncle, and with his physician, Dr Simcott. Warwick tells us that "the first years of his manhood were spent in a dissolute course of life, in good fellowship and gaming, which afterwards he seemed very sensible of and sorrowful for, and as if it had been a good spirit that had guided him therein, he used a good method upon his conversion, for he declared that he was ready to make restitution unto any man who would accuse him, or whom he could accuse himself to have wronged."-Memoirs of the Reign of Charles I., p. 276.

Richard Baxter, whom Cromwell invited to be chaplain in his own regiment, writes that Cromwell had been "a prodigal in his youth, and afterwards changed to a zealous religiousness."-See Reliquia Baxteriana, London, 1696, lib. i., p. 98.

OLIVER CROMWELL

223

was then dyeing, and there went a story of him that in the daytime, lying melancholy in his bed, he believed that a spirit appealed to him and told him that he should be the greatest man (not mentioning the word king) in this kingdom, which his uncle, Sir Thomas Steward, who left him all the little estate Cromwell had, told him was traitorous to relate."

It thus appears that Cromwell had a nervous system, susceptible of depression and exaltation beyond normal limits, and that his views of objective realities were liable to be coloured by his mental conceptions. His temper was said by his body servant to be exceedingly fiery, but restrained by his strong religious feelings, and a heart easily excited to pity distress. He first made himself prominent as an opponent of a scheme of the Earl of Bedford for the drainage of the fens because the interests of the dwellers around were not respected. He was elected member for Huntingdon in the parliament of 1628. The same Sir Philip, a gay young courtier, entering the House in the early days of the Long Parliament, was struck by the appearance of a man "in a plain cloth suit which seemed to have been made by an ill country tailor, his hat without a hat-band, his sword stuck close by his side, his voice sharp and untuneable, his eloquence full of fervour," on behalf of a servant of Prynne's, imprisoned for dispersing libels against the queen for her dancing. This uncourtly person was Oliver Cromwell. Sir Philip confesses that he was very much hearkened to. About this time Mr E. Hyde was chairman of a committee to inquire into the enclosure of common wastes by the Earl of Manchester without the consent of the tenants around. Mr O.

Cromwell, a member of the committee, accused Hyde of partialities and discountenancing the witnesses. He angrily replied to the earl's son and his carriage was so tempestuous that the chairman threatened to adjourn the committee and complain next day to the House. Apparently this did not prevent the Earl of Manchester acting along with Cromwell in the common cause, though Cromwell never forgave Hyde, as he assures us.1

As an orator or debater in the Long Parliament, Cromwell could not hope for distinction. Some discourses which he made when protector have come down to us. They are tedious, badly arranged, for the most part poorly expressed, rambling, often almost unintelligible; but by a singular contradiction, no man ever saw more clearly the drift of the events in which he bore a part, nor knew better how to use the hopes, the fears, the passions, and the prejudices of men to his own advantage, or understood more nicely how to lead his adversaries into false positions.

With the Civil War his time had come. He raised a troop of horse from the Puritan yeomanry of the fen country, which soon grew to a regiment. He would only enlist men of good physique, and took care that they should be well mounted and carefully exercised in the use of their weapons and fired with the same religious zeal. Of a powerful and manly figure, with a stern and commanding air, strong and bold in battle, loud and fervid in prayer, Cromwell soon gained a wonderful control over the minds of the troopers who entered his regiment. Such a mixture of Celtic fervour and Saxon steadfastness, such daring and 1 The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, Dublin, 1760, vol. i., p. 79.