PART IV
THE ACHIEVEMENT
"We are Englishmen; that is one good account. And if God give a nation valour and courage, it is honour and a mercy."—Oliver P., 1656, Speech to Parliament, Tuesday, 16th Sept., in the Painted Chamber.
"I was by birth a gentleman living neither in any considerable height nor yet in obscurity. I have been called to several employments in the Nation.... I did endeavour to discharge the duty of an honest man in those services."—Oliver P., ibid., 12th Sept. 1654.
"If my calling be from God and my testimony from the People—only God and the People will take it from me, else I shall not part with it—I should be false to the trust that God hath placed in me, and to the interest of the people of these nations if I should."—Oliver P., ibid.
CHAPTER I
"THE CROWNING MERCY"
On a soft golden blue day in September 1651, when the trees were still in full leafage in the Park, and the river reflected a sky veiled with delicate white clouds, when the last sheaves of corn were standing in the fields beyond St. James's Palace, and the orchards near glowed all red with fruit, a crowd was gathered in the streets of London—a crowd as vast and as excited as that which had waited to hear the verdict on Lord Strafford, or had thronged to witness the awful scene outside Whitehall when the King knelt before the headsman.
On both these occasions the people, if triumphant, in the first instance, were still awestruck and silenced, in the second, by the portents of great events and by the magnitude of the terrible daring of their leaders. Now they were triumphant openly, rejoicing almost light-heartedly; the King had died a traitor's death and the skies had not fallen; other great men had followed him in his final fate, and none had avenged them. The present Charles Stewart, called the King of Scots since his coronation at Scone, was flying the country, a proscribed fugitive; the Commonwealth, proclaimed after the death of the late King, was a year and a half old and had shown no signs of weakness nor unstability, and to-day the people were got together to welcome home the Lord-General, Oliver Cromwell, who was returning after having subdued Ireland and Scotland as those Islands had never yet been subdued.
Fire and sword had swept Ireland from coast to coast; Cromwell had not spared the enemies of the Lord, as Drogheda could witness, Papist priests had been hanged or knocked on the head, Papist garrisons massacred, Papist peasants transported, Papist gentry forbidden their religion, and driven from their estates into the desolate regions of Connaught.