place of it; a little less guilty indeed in one respect, because the other slew the innocent, and this man did but murder a murtherer. Such a protector we have had, as we would have been glad to have changed for any enemy, and rather received a constant Turk, than this every month's apostate; such a protector as man is to his flocks, which he sheers, and sells, or devours himself; and I would fain know, what the wolf, which he protects him from, could do more. Such a protector-and, as I was proceeding, methought his highness began to put on a displeased and threatening countenance, as men use to do when their dearest friends happen to be traduced in their company, which gave me the first rise of jealousy against him; for I did not believe that Cromwell, amongst all his foreign correspondences, had ever held any with angels. However, I was not hardened enough yet to venture à quarrel with him then; and therefore, as I had spoken to the protector himself in Whitehall, I defired him that his highness would please to pardon me, if I had unwittingly spoken any thing to the disparagement of a person, whose relations to his highness I had not the honour to know. At which he told me, that he had no other concernment for his late highness, than as he took him to be the greatest man that ever was of the English nation, if not, said he, of the whole world; which gives me a just title to the defence of his reputation, since I now account myself, as it were, a naturalised English angel, by having had so long the management of the affairs of that country. And pray, countryman, said he, very kindly and very flatteringly, for I would not have you fall into the general error of the world, that detests and decries so extraordinary a virtue; What can be more extraordinary than that a person of mean birth, no fortune, no eminent qualities of body, which have sometimes, or of mind, which have often raised men to the highest dignities, should have the courage to attempt, and the happiness to succeed in so improbable a design, as the destruction of one of the most ancient, and, in all appearance, most solidly founded monarchies upon earth? That he should have the power or boldness to put his prince and master to an open and infamous death? To banish that numerous and strongly allied family? To do all this under the name and wages of a parliament; to trample upon them too as he pleased, and spurn them out of doors when he grew weary of them; to raise up a new and unheard-of monster out of their ashes; to stifle that in the very infancy, and set up himself above all things that ever were called sovereign in England; to oppress all his enemies by arms, and all his friends afterwards by artifice; to serve all parties patiently for a while, and to command them victoriously at last; to over-run each corner of the three nations, and overcome with equal facility both the riches of the south, and the poverty.of the north; to be feared and courted by all foreign princes, and adopted a brother to the gods of the earth; to call together parliaments with a word of his pen, and scatter them again with the breath of his mouth; to be humbly and daily petitioned to, that he would please to be hired, at the rate of two millions a year, to be the master of those who had hired him before to be their servant; to have the estates and lives of three kingdoms as much at his disposal, as was the little inheritance of his father, and to be as noble and liberal in the spending of them; and, lastly, for there is no end of all the particulars of his glory, to bequeath all this with one word to his posterity; to die with peace at home, and triumph abroad; to be buried among kings, and with more than regal solemnity; and to leave a name behind him, not to be extinguished, but with the whole world, which, as it is now too little for his praises, so might have been too for his conquests, if the short line of his human life could have been stretched out to the extent of his immortal designs? By this speech I began to understand perfectly well what kind of angel his pretended highness was; and having fortified myself privately with a short mental prayer, and with the sign of the cross, not out of any superstition to the sign, but as a recognition of my baptism in Christ, I grew a little bolder, and replied in this manner: I should not venture to oppose what you are pleased to say in commendation of the late great, and, I confess, extraordinary person, but that I remember Christ forbids us to give assent to any other doctrine but what himself has taught us, even though it should be delivered by an angel; and if such you be, sir, it may be you have spoken all this rather to try than to tempt my frailty. For sure I am, that we must renounce or forget all the laws of the New and Old Testament, and those which are the foundation of both, even the laws of moral and natural honesty, if we approve of the actions of that man, whom, I suppose, you commend by irony. There would be no end to instance in the particulars of all his wickedness; but to sum up a part of it briefly : What can be more extraordinarily wicked, than for a person, such as yourself qualify him rightly, to endeavour not only to exalt himself above, but to trample upon all his equals and betters? To pretend freedom for all men, and, under the help of that pretence, to make all men his servants? To take arms against taxes of scarce two hundred thousand pounds a year, and to raise them himself to above two millions? To quarrel for the loss of three or four ears, and strike off three or four hundred heads? To fight against an imaginary suspicion of I know not what two thousand guards to be fetched for the king, I know not from whence, and to keep up for himself no less than forty thousand? To pretend the defence of parliaments, and violently to dissolve all, even of his own calling and almost chusing? To undertake the reformation of religion, to rob it even to the very skin, and then to expose it naked to the rage of all sects and heresies? To set up councils of rapine and courts of murder? To fight against the king under a commission for him; to take him forceably out of the hands of those for whom he had conquered him; to draw him into his net, with protestations and vows of fidelity, and when he had eaught him in it, to butcher him, with as little shame as conscience or humanity, in the open face of the whole world? To receive a commission for king and parliament, to murder, as I said, the one, and destroy no less impudently the other? To fight against monarchy when he declared for it, and declare against it, when he contrived for it in his own person? To abase perfidiously and supplant ungratefully his own general first, and afterwards most of those officers, who with the loss of their honour, and hazard of their souls, had lifted him up to the top of his unreasonable ambitions? To break his faith with all enemies, and with all friends equally; and to make no less frequent use of the most solemn perjuries than the looser sort of people do of customary oaths? To usurp three kingdoms without any shadow of the least pretensions, and to govern them as unjustly as he got them? To set himself up as an idol (which we know, as St. Paul says, in itself is nothing) and make the very streets of London, like the valley of Hinnom, by burning the bowels of men as a sacrifice to his Moloch-ship? To seek to entail this usurpation upon his posterity, and with it an endless war upon the nation; and lastly, by the severest judgment of Almighty God, to die hardened, and mad, and unrepentant, with the curses of the present age, and the detestation of all to succeed? Though I had much more to say (for the life of man is so short, that it allows not time enough to speak against a tyrant) yet because I had a mind to hear how my strange adversary would behave himself upon this subject, and to give even the devil, as they say, his right, and fair play in a disputation, I stopped here, and expected, not without the frailty of a little fear, that he should have broke into a violent passion in behalf of his favourite; but he on the contrary very calmly, and with the dove-like innocency of a serpent that was not yet warmed enough to sting, thus replied unto me: It is not so much out of my affection to that person whom we discourse of, whose greatness is too solid to be shaken by the breath of any oratory, as for your own sake, honest countryman, whom I conceive to err, rather by mistake than out of malice, that I shall endeavour to reform your uncharitable and unjust opinion. And in the first place I must needs put you in mind of a sentence of the most ancient of the heathen divines, that you men are acquainted withall, Οὐκ ὅσιον κταμένοισιν ἐπ' ἄνδρασιν εὐχεταᾶσθαι, 'Tis wicked with insulting feet to tread And the intention of the reproof there is no less proper for this subject; for it is spoken to a person who was proud and insolent against those dead men, to whom he had been humble and obedient whilst they lived. Your highness may please, said I, to add the verse that follows, as no less proper for this subject: Whom God's just doom and their own sins have sent Already to their punishment. But I take this to be the rule in the case, that, when we fix any infamy upon deceased persons, it should not be done out of hatred to the dead, but out of love and charity to the living, that the curses which only remain in men's thoughts, and dare not come forth against tyrants, because they are tyrants, whilst they are so, may at least be for ever settled and engraven upon their memories, to deter all others from the like wickedness, which else, in the time of their foolish posterity, the flattery of their own hearts, and other men's tongues, would not suffer them to perceive. Ambition is so subtle a temper, and the corruption of human nature so susceptible of the temptation, that a man can hardly resist it, be he never so much forwarned of the evil consequences: much less if he find not only the concurrence of the present, but the approbation too of following ages, which have the liberty to judge more freely. The mischief of tyranny is too great, even in the shortest time that it can continue; it is endless and insupportable, if the example be to reign too, and if a Lambert must be invited to follow the steps of a Cromwell, as well by the voice of honour, as by the sight of power and riches. Though it may seem to some fantastically, yet was it wisely done of the Syracusians, to implead with the forms of their ordinary justice, to condemn and destroy even the statutes of all their tyrants. If it were possible to cut them out of all history, and to extinguish their very names, I am of opinion that it ought to be done; but, since they have left behind them too deep wounds to be ever closed up without a scar, at least let us set such a mark upon their memory, that men of the same wicked inclinations may be no less affrighted with their lasting ignominy, than enticed by their momentary glories. And, that your highness may perceive that I speak not of this out of any private animosity against the person of the late protector, I assure you upon my faith, that I bear no more hatred to his name, than I do to that of Marius or Sylla, who never did me or any friend of mine the least injury; and with that, transported by a holy fury, I fell into this sudden rapture: I. Curs'd be the man (what do I wish? As though The wretch already were not so; But curs'd on let him be) who thinks it brave And great his country to enslave. Who seeks to overpoise alone The balance of a nation; Against the whole but naked state, Who in his own light scale makes up with arms the weight. II. Who of his nation loves to be the first, Who would be rather a great monster, than The son of earth with hundred hands The son of earth again in his earth's womb does lic. What blood, confusion, ruin, to obtain In what oblique and humble creeping wise But even his forked tongue strikes dead, But no guards can oppose assaulting ears, Or undermining tears. No more than doors, or close-drawn curtains keep He sees his slaves without, his tyrant feels within. V. Let, gracious God, let never more thine hand A tyrant is a rod and serpent too, And brings worse plagues than Egypt knew. What rivers stain'd with blood have been? What storm and hail-shot have we seen? What sores deform'd the ulcerous state? What darkness to be felt has buried us of late? VI. How has it snatch'd our flocks and herds away? What croaking sects and vermin has it sent What greedy troops, what armed power, The land which every where they fill? Nor fly they, Lord, away; no, they devour it still. VII. Come the eleventh plague, rather than this should be ; Come sink us rather in the sea. VOL. VII. P |