LETTERS LXVII.-LXXIX.

MONRO with the rearward of Hamilton's beaten Army did not march ‘straight back' to Scotland as Turner told us, but very obliquely back; lingering for several weeks on the South side of the Border; collecting remnants of English, Scotch, and even Irish Malignants, not without hopes of raising a new Army from them,―cruelly spoiling those Northern Counties in the interim. Cromwell, waiting first till Lambert with the forces sent in pursuit of Hamilton can rejoin the main Army, moves Northward, to deal with these broken parties, and with broken Scotland generally. The following Thirteen Letters bring him as far as Edinburgh: whither let us now attend him with such lights as they yield.

LETTER LXVII.

OLIVER ST. JOHN, a private friend, and always officially an important man, always on the Committee of Both Kingdoms, Derby-House Committee, or whatever the governing Authority might be, finds here a private Note for himself; one part of which is very strange to us. Does the reader look with any intelligence into that poor old prophetic, symbolic Deathbedscene at Preston? Any intelligence of Prophecy and Symbol, in general; of the symbolic Man-child Mahershalal-hashbaz at Jerusalem, or the handful of Cut Grass at Preston;-of the opening Portals of Eternity, and what last departing gleams

there are in the Soul of the pure and just?-Mahershalalhashbaz (Hasten-to-the-spoil,' so called), and the bundle of Cut Grass are grown somewhat strange to us! Read; and having sneered duly,-consider:

For my worthy Friend, Oliver St. John, Esquire, Solicitor-General: These, at Lincoln's Inn.

DEAR SIR,

Knaresborough, 1st Sept. 1648.'

I can say nothing; but surely the Lord our God is a great and glorious God. He only is worthy to be feared and trusted, and His appearances particularly to be waited for. He will not fail His People. Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord!

Remember my love to my dear brother H. Vane: I pray he make not too little, nor I too much, of outward dispensations:- God preserve us all, that we, in simplicity of our spirits, may patiently attend upon them. Let us all be not careful what men will make of these actings. They, will they, nill they, shall fulfil the good pleasure of God; and we-shall serve our generations. Our rest we expect elsewhere: that will be durable. Care we not for tomorrow, nor for anything. This Scripture has been of great stay to me: read Isaiah Eighth, 10, 11, 14;-read all the Chapter.1

Yes, the indignant symbolic Chapter,' about Mahershalal-hashbaz, and the vain desires of the wicked, is all worth reading; here are the Three Verses referred to, more especially: Take counsel together,' ye unjust, and it shall come to nought; speak the word, and it shall not 'stand. For God is with us.-Sanctify the Lord of Hosts; and let Him 'be your fear, and let Him be your dread. And He shall be for a sanctuary:-but for a stone of stumbling and for a rock of offence to both 'the Houses of Israel; for a gin and for a snare to the inhabitants of

I am informed from good hands, that a poor godly man died in Preston, the day before the Fight; and being sick, near the hour of his death, he desired the woman that cooked to him, To fetch him a handful of Grass. She did so; and when he received it, he asked Whether it would wither or not, now it was cut? The woman said, "Yea." He replied, "So should this Army of the Scots do, and come to nothing, so soon as ours did but appear," or words to this effect; and so immediately died.——

My service to Mr. W. P., Sir J. E., and the rest of our good friends. I hope I do often remember you.

Yours,

OLIVER CROMWELL.

My service to Frank Russel and Sir Gilbert Picker

ing.*

Sir J. E.,' when he received this salutation, was palpable enough; but has now melted away to the Outline of a Shadow !

I

guess him to be Sir John Evelyn of Wilts; and, with greater confidence, Mr. W. P.' to be William Pierpoint, Earl of Kingston's Son, a man of superior faculty, of various destiny and business, called in the Family traditions, Wise William ;' Ancestor of the Dukes of Kingston (Great-grandfather of that Lady Mary, whom as Wortley Montagu all readers still know); and much a friend of Oliver, as we shall transiently see.

• Jerusalem! And many among them shall stumble and fall, and be • broken, and be snared, and be taken.' This last verse, we find, is often in the thoughts of Oliver.

* Ayscough Mss. 4107, f. 94; a Copy by Birch.

LETTER LXVIII.

ANOTHER private Letter: to my Lord Wharton; to congratulate him on some particular mercy,' seemingly the birth of an heir, and to pour out his sense of these great general mercies. This Philip Lord Wharton is also of the Committee of Derby House, the Executive in those months; it is probable1 Cromwell had been sending despatches to them, and had hastily enclosed these private Letters in the Packet.

Philip Lord Wharton seems to have been a zealous Puritan, much concerned with Preachers, Chaplains &c. in his domestic establishment; and full of Parliamentary and Politico-religious business in public. He had a regiment of his own raising at Edgehill Fight; but it was one of those that ran away; whereupon the unhappy Colonel took refuge in a sawpit,' says Royalism confidently, crowing over it without end.2 A quarrel between him and Sir Henry Mildmay, Member for Malden, about Sir Henry's saying, "He Wharton had made his peace at Oxford" in November 1643, is noted in the Commons Journals, iii. 300. It was to him, about the time of this Cromwell Letter, that one Osborne, a distracted King's flunkey, had written, accusing Major Rolf, a soldier under Hammond, of attempting to poison Charles in the Isle of Wight.3 This Philip's patrimonial estate, Wharton, still a Manorhouse of somebody, lies among the Hills on the southwest side of Westmoreland; near the sources of the Eden, the Swale rising on the other watershed not far off. He seems, however, to have dwelt at Upper Winchington, Bucks, 'a seat near Great Wycomb.' He lived to be a Privy Councillor to

1 Commons Journals, vi. 6, 5 September.

2 Wood's Athenæ, iii. 177, and in all manner of Pamphlets elsewhere. Wood, iii. 501; Pamphlets; Commons Journals, &c.

William of Orange.

He died in 1696. Take this other

anecdote, once a very famous one:

'James Stewart of Blantyre in Scotland, son of a Treasurer Stewart, and himself a great favourite of King James, was a

gallant youth; came up to London with great hopes: but a 'discord falling out between him and the young Lord Whar'ton, they went out to single combat each against the other; ' and at the first thrust each of them killed the other, and they ⚫ fell dead in one another's arms on the place."2 The 'place' was Islington fields; the date 8th November, 1609. The tragedy gave rise to much balladsinging and other rumour." Our Philip is that slain Wharton's Nephew.

This Letter has been preserved by Thurloe; four blank spaces ornamented with due asterisks occur in it,- Editor Birch does not inform us whether from tearing off the Seal, or why. In these blank spaces the conjectural sense, which I distinguish here as usual by commas, is occasionally somewhat questionable.

For the Right Honourable the Lord Wharton: These. 'Knaresborough,' 2d September, 1648.

MY LORD,

You know how untoward I am at this business of writing; yet a word. I beseech the Lord make us sensible of this great mercy here, which surely was much more than the sense of it' the House expresseth. I trust to have, through' the goodness of

1 Wood, iv. 407, 542; Fasti, i. 335; Nicolas's Synopsis of the Peerage.

2 Scotstarvet's Staggering State (Edinburgh, 1754, a very curious little Book), p. 32.

3 Bibliotheca Topographica, no. xlix.

4 The House calls it a wonderful great mercy and success,' this