There is nothing in this last expedition of his that is noteworthy save its continued misfortunes. It seemed as though when the little Revenge went down, as she did in the midst of the fifty-three Spanish ships which she had fought “for a day and a night,” she had taken her old commander’s good luck down with her. At last on the deadly island of Escudo de Veragua the two guardian demons of El Dorado, fever and dysentry, struck him down with many another of his men. He lived to get away, but not for long, and six days afterwards, when his fleet came to anchor off Puerto Bello, the heroic Little Pirate breathed his last and his gallant soul went to its account, passing away from earth on the very spot that had been the scene of his first sea-fight and his first victory.
IV
OLIVER CROMWELL
“HEALER AND SETTLER”
IV
OLIVER CROMWELL
“He is perhaps the only example which history affords of one man having governed the most opposite events and proved sufficient for the most various destinies.”
No man’s character was ever so completely and so tersely summed up as the great Oliver’s is here in these few words of a critic belonging to another race and nation, and, as regards his varied destinies, it may be added that no man ever was raised up and set to work by the Controller of human destinies as opportunely as he was.
History shows no parallel to it, not even in the oft-quoted story of Cincinnatus, and certainly in all the long array of our rulers there is none other whose story is so crammed with wonders or who crowded so many notable and pregnant acts into the busy days of a few years as this gentleman-farmer of Huntingdonshire, who at forty-three left his farming and vestry-meetings and the like and girded on his sword to go and fight the good fight of freedom, and who at fifty-two laid it aside to prove himself as good a statesman and ruler as he had been soldier and general.
His claim to a foremost place among the Makers of Britain is a twofold one, for he was a restorer, a reinvigorator, as it were, of this realm, as well as a very considerable widener of it. When the futile and inglorious reign of “the most learned fool in Christendom” came to an end, all the brilliant promise of the Elizabethan age had been wofully obscured, and the glories of the great Queen and her pirates looked like those of a summer sun setting behind a bank of fog.
As Macaulay justly put the case: “On the day of the accession of James I. England descended from the rank which she had hitherto held and began to be regarded as a Power hardly of the second order.... He began his administration by putting an end to the war which had raged many years between England and Spain, and from that time he shunned hostilities with a caution which was proof against the insults of his neighbours and the clamour of his subjects.”