narrow lanes in St. Ives, by the shore of the black Ouse River,—shall be left to the reader’s imagination. There is in this man talent for farming; there are thoughts enough, thoughts bounded by the Ouse River, thoughts that go beyond Eternity,—and a great black sea of things that he has never yet been able to think.
I count the children he had at this time; and find them six: Four boys and two girls; the eldest a boy of fourteen, the youngest a girl of six; Robert, Oliver, Bridget, Richard, Henry, Elizabeth. Robert and Oliver, I take it, are gone to Felsted School, near Bourchier their Grandfather’s in Essex. Sir Thomas Bourchier the worshipful Knight, once of London, lives at Felsted; Sir William Masham, another of the same, lives at Otes hard by, as we shall see.
Cromwell at the time of writing this Letter was, as he himself might partly think probable, about to quit St. Ives. His mother’s brother Sir Thomas Steward, Knight, lay sick at Ely in those very days. Sir Thomas makes his will in this same month of January, leaving Oliver his principal heir; and on the 30th it was all over, and he lay in his last home: ‘Buried in the Cathedral of Ely, 30 January 1635-6.’
Worth noting, and curious to think of, since it is indisputable: On the very day while Oliver Cromwell was writing this Letter at St. Ives, two obscure individuals, ‘Peter Aldridge and Thomas Lane, Assessors of Shipmoney,’ over in Buckinghamshire, had assembled a Parish Meeting in the Church of Great Kimble, to assess and rate the Shipmoney of the said Parish: there, in the cold weather, at the foot of the Chiltern Hills, ‘11 January 1635,’ the Parish did attend, ‘John Hampden, Esquire,’ at the head of them, and by a Return still extant,[1] refused to pay the same or any portion thereof,—witness the above ‘Assessors,’ witness also two ‘Parish Constables’ whom we remit from such unexpected celebrity. John Hampden’s share for this Parish is thirty-one shillings and sixpence; for
- ↑ Facsimile Engraving of it in Lord Nugent’s Memorials of Hampden (London, 1832), i, 231.
