KLIJKE BIBLIOTHEEK O 8702 Oliver Cromwell. Drawn and Engraved by W. Bond, from half length Portrait Painted by Walker in 1655, in the Possession of Oliver Cromwell Esq? Published by Longman Hurst Rees. Orme & Brown.London Jan11820. INTRODUCTION. Ir has been the singular ill fortune of Oliver Cromwell and of his family, that his character hath been left exclusively in the hands of his enemies. The short interval between his death and the Restoration, and the unsettled state of the nation in the intermediate time, left no opportunity for a faithful and impartial history of that extraordinary man. From that time to the present, his memory hath been abused and vilified without any allowance for the peculiar circumstances in which he was placed : his name alone is to this day deemed by many a sufficient description of every thing that is ambitious, hypocritical, and tyrannical: he has been held forth as a composition of every bad quality, without one virtue to counterbalance them. The particular views of all those who took a part in the troubles of the times in which he acted, were frustrated by his ascendancy, and however differing in other respects, they have united in blackening his memory: every trifling or ridiculous story of the supposed irregularities of his youth, and of the imagined tricks and childish follies even of his very infancy, have been eagerly sought for, and, without examination, credited against him. An opinion that his character hath not met with fair treatment, and a hope to place it in the light in which it is conceived it is justly entitled to stand, have given rise to this work; not begun with any view to its publication, but as the amusement of the Writer's leisure hours. To accomplish this object, it became necessary to refer to the history of those eventful and arduous times in which Cromwell lived and acted; and the perusal of the several contemporary histories of those transactions has led to the idea of attempting a short but correct narrative of the principal transactions of those times, by bringing together those histories, and comparing them with each other; and thence endeavouring to produce one, freed from the partialities and prejudices of all parties. With this view, and under these impressions, it becomes proper to commence this work from the accession of King Charles the First. Lord Clarendon, in the introduction to his History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, says, that he shall not lead any man farther back than the beginning of the present reign of King Charles the First; because that he is not so sharp-sighted as those who have discovered this rebellion contriving from, if not before, the death of Queen Elizabeth, and fomented by several princes and great ministers of state in Christendom, to the time it brake out. Neither doth he look back so far as he doth, in this history, because he believes the design to have been even so long then since formed; but that by viewing the tempers, disposition, and habit at that time, of the court and of the country, we may discern the minds of men prepared, of some to act and of others to suffer all that had since happened: the pride of this man, and the popularity of that, the levity of one, and the morosity of another; the excess of the court in the greatest want, and the parsimony and retention of the country in the greatest plenty: the spirit of craft and subtilty in some, and the unpolished integrity of others, too much despising craft or art, and contributing jointly to this mass of confusion now before us. His Lordship accordingly commences his history from the death of King James. Yet Lord Clarendon must have better known the history of his country, than to be ignorant of the discontents of the last, and of the four preceding reigns of Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mary, King Edward the Sixth, and of Henry the Eighth: and those of the last reign in particular, were evidently leading to an open rupture between the King and his subjects. But a faithful narrative of those times does not seem to have been His Lordship's principal object; his work is, under the title of a history, an attempted defence or palliation of all the King's measures, in |