GREAT MEN'S SONS.
BY ELBRIDGE S. BROOKS.
THE SON OF CROMWELL.
In the famous old English village of St. Ives—famous because of a certain nursery rhyme concerning a man who, travelling toward the town, met seven wives with their cats and kits—there once lived a farmer who, later in his life, became more famous than St. Ives itself.
Out West they would have called him a ranchman. He was really a cattle farmer, with a big grazing farm that lay along the river Ouse, in what is termed "the fen country" of England. Here, where the Ouse slipped thickly and lazily through those low, green, boggy, marshy fields called the fens, this farmer raised his beef, his pork, and his mutton; and here lived his son Richard, as lazy and sluggish of nature as the river along whose banks he lounged or fished or wandered as a boy, until it was time to send him off to Felsted School, in Essex, where his brothers, before and after him, were placed for such education as those days provided.
A slow, good-natured, easy-going fellow was this boy Dick—"lazy Dick," his father often called him. He was neither as bright in mind or manner as his younger brother Harry, nor as promising a lad as his elder brother Robert. Robin was what this elder brother was called; he was the delight and hope of his fond father—then called by his neighbors "the Lord of the Fens," because of the stand he took against the King's threatened "improvement" of the marshy fen-lands. To-day the world honors and revels that sturdy farmer of the fens as Britain's mightiest man—Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England.
We catch a few glimpses—not many, unfortunately—of the quiet home at St. Ives, in which the Cromwell boys and girls lived. It was a happy and united home, blessed with a mother whom her children revered, and having as its head a father they honored and never dared to disobey.
But fathers in those days—two hundred and fifty years and more ago—though stern in their ways with children, were as fond and as loving as are the fathers of to-day, and Cromwell the farmer, Cromwell the General, Cromwell the Lord Protector, loved his children dearly, and labored for their good alike in the great palace at Whitehall as in the low, timber-framed house upon the one street of St. Ives, where the willows shivered in the wind, and the cattle grazed and fattened upon the wide marshy meadows that lined the sluggish Ouse.
How little Dick Cromwell fared as a boy at St. Ives we have little means of knowing. When he was ten years old—in the year 1636—the Cromwells moved into a bigger house at Ely, fifteen miles away. It was called Ely from the eels that wriggled about in the muddy Ouse, and is that famous cathedral town of the fens where King Canute, who tried to order back the tide, once bade his rowers stop his boat that he might hear the monks of the cathedral sing.
Probably boy Dick thought more of bobbing for eels in the Ouse than of King Canute and the monks; for there were no monks singing in England when Richard Cromwell was a boy. There was soon to be no King in England, either, and in that great uprising against principalities and powers Dick Cromwell's father was to bear an important part.