Born, 1611. Died, 1651. Son of Gervase Ireton, Esq., of Attenborough, Co. Notts. Was a gentleman-commoner, at Trinity College, Oxford. Destined for the bar; but the Civil War breaking out, he obtained a commission in the Parliamentary Army. In 1645 he married at Norton, near Oxford, Bridget, the eldest daughter of Oliver Cromwell, by whom he had one son, and four daughters. In 1649 he was appointed one of the King’s judges, and signed the warrant for his execution. He was a man of undoubted courage, and distinguished himself in numerous engagements, more especially at the battle of Naseby. His views were violently republican, but his integrity stern and uncompromising; no mercenary motives influenced him. Eleven years the junior of Cromwell, and his son-in-law, he dared to differ with him, and to expostulate boldly when he disapproved of the Protector’s conduct. After the battle of Worcester he was offered pecuniary remuneration, with several other members of the Parliamentary Army, but he was disinterested enough to refuse £20,000, and to tell the government roundly, he should be more content to see them paying off the debts they had incurred, than thus disposing of the public money. It was thought that his appointment as Lord Deputy in Ireland, was intended by the Protector to remove him from all possibility of interference with his own proceedings; and there seems little doubt that Ireton, shortly before his death, had contemplated crossing the Channel to speak face to face with his father-in-law, in reference to many measures he disapproved. But he was suddenly seized, and carried off by the Plague, during the siege of Limerick in 1651.
Ireton was held in great esteem by his party and his comrades, and it was said of him that he grafted the soldier on the lawyer, and the statesman on the saint. Cromwell was much affected at his death, and caused the body to be brought over, and deposited with great pomp in Westminster Abbey, in Henry VII.’s Chapel. At the Restoration however, the body was dug up, and hung upon a gibbet at Tyburn.
Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England:
By WALKER.
Half-Length: Oval.
(In Armour, with a Plain Falling Collar.)
Born, 1599. Died, 1658—The only surviving son of Robert Cromwell, by Elizabeth Stewart: born in Huntingdon, named after his uncle, Sir Oliver Cromwell, of Hinchingbrook, where he passed many of his earlier days. Numerous stories are told, (some ridiculed, some generally believed,) of Oliver’s infancy, and boyhood. It is said that on one occasion he was snatched from his cradle by a monkey, who jumping out of the window, scampered over the roof of Hinchingbrook, to the consternation of the family, who stood watching the beast, with great anxiety. Whether or not the monkey felt, that he bore in his arms the future ruler of England, the chronicler does not affirm, but he goes on to relate, that the fears of the relatives were soon appeased by seeing the baby safely restored to his cradle, by the conscientious ape! Another incident connected with Hinchingbrook was more currently believed, viz., that Charles I., when a boy, visited Sir Oliver, on his road from Scotland to London. The good knight sent for his nephew to help him entertain the Prince, which he did by disputing violently with his Royal Highness: a quarrel ensued, and Oliver, being the strongest of the two, caused Charles’s blood to flow, an ominous presage of after times. We do not know how Sir Oliver visited his nephew’s outbreak, but he was a staunch cavalier, and supported the Royalists till his death.
Oliver, when a school-boy, was wilful, and wayward, and fond of wild and sometimes coarse jests. One Christmas night, the revels at Hinchingbrook were interrupted by some unseemly pranks of his conceiving, which called down upon him, a sentence from the Master of Misrule that Sir Oliver ordered into immediate execution, viz., that the young recreant should be subjected then, and there, to a severe ducking in one of the adjoining fishponds. When still a school-boy, another anecdote is told of Oliver; that on awaking from a short sleep, one hot day, he electrified his schoolfellows with the description of a dream, he had had. How a woman of gigantic stature had appeared at the side of his bed, and slowly undrawing the curtains, had announced to him that some day, he would be the greatest man in England—the word “King” did not however pass her lips. The young visionary was rewarded for this lie, (as it was considered) by a severe flogging. A better authenticated story is told of his rescue from drowning, by one Johnson, a citizen of Huntingdon, of whom General Cromwell enquired (when in after years, he marched through his native town, with the army) if he remembered the circumstance: “Yes,” was the indignant reply, “and I wish to my heart I had let you drown, rather than to see you in arms, against your King.”
At the age of seventeen, Oliver Cromwell left the Grammar School, at Huntingdon, and entered Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Both as a school-boy and a collegian he distinguished himself more in athletic sports, than in application to study, and he appears to have led a wild irregular life, according to his own admission, for it is difficult to sift the truth, from the preposterous flattery on the one hand, and the unqualified abuse on the other, which characterise Cromwell’s biographers, according to their political opinions. In recording his own conversion, at the age of twenty years, he says: “Before which time, I hated holiness, and the Word of God.” His mother sent him to study at Lincoln’s Inn, “where,” says Carrington, “he associated with those of the best rank, and quality, and the most ingenious persons, for though not averse to study and contemplation, he seemed rather addicted to conversation, and the reading of men’s characters, than to a continual poring over authors.” On completing his twenty-first year, he married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir James Bourchier, of Felsted, in Essex, a kinswoman of Hampden’s, who brought him a modest dowry, which she nobly relinquished with the additional money he had settled on her for life, to rescue her husband from pecuniary difficulties in after years; a woman of irreproachable life, and unobtrusive manners, who tolerated rather than coveted grandeur, and distinction, an excellent housewife, and a loving help-mate. The newly married pair fixed their residence in Huntingdon, where his mother still lived, and where several children were born to them.