Cromwell in Ireland
as was never before heard," which the multitude | had sent out from its heart five months before, as the axe fell upon the King's neck, might again have been repeated. A month earlier, when Cromwell and his officers had been feasted at the Grocer's Hall, after the loan of £120,000 for the Irish War had been concluded with the City Companies, so hostile was the feeling of the people against the regicides that the cooks who prepared the dinner had to be sworn not to poison the meats they were preparing; and the 4400 which, as Carlyle suggests, were given in charity to the poor on this occasion "that they also might dine," had other purpose than charity in its gift. For these dull multitudes had already found in their common-sense practical way the truth of all this business. These colonels and captains—described: by the pressman, "the meanest whereof, a commander or esquire in stately habit"—had, as the people well knew, been penniless adventurers dressed in drab and fustian a few years earlier—one a butcher, another a cobbler, another a carter. Cromwell himself, the late bankrupt brewer of Huntingdon, has his manors now in Hantshire, Monmouth, and Gloucestershire. Harrison, the butcher's son, (who on this day of departure for Ireland has, together with Cromwell and three
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