on Mr. Hampden’s side; and learned Mr. Holborn for three other days;—preserved yet by Rushworth in acres of typography, unreadable now to all mortals. For other learned gentlemen, tough as leather, spoke on the opposite side; and learned judges animadverted;—at endless length, amid the expectancy of men. With brief pauses, the Trial lasted for three weeks and three days. Mr. Hampden became the most famous man in England,[1]—by accident partly. The sentence was not delivered till April 1638; and then it went against Mr. Hampden: judgment in Exchequer ran to this effect, ‘Consideratum est per eosdem Barones, quod predictus Johannes Hampden de iisdem viginti solidis oneretur,’ He must pay the Twenty shillings, ‘et inde satisfaciat.’[2] No hope in Law-Courts, then; Petition of Right and Tallagio non concedendo have become an old song. If there be not hope in Jenny Geddes’s stool, and ‘De’il colic the wame of thee,’ we are in a bad way!—
During which great public Transactions, there had been in Cromwell’s own Fen-country a work of immense local celebrity going on: the actual Drainage of the Fens, so long talked about; the construction, namely, of the great Bedford Level, to carry the Ouse River direct into the sea; holding it forcibly aloft in strong embankments, for twenty straight miles or so; not leaving it to meander and stagnate, and in the wet season drown the country, as heretofore. This grand work began, Dryasdust in his bewildered manner knows not when; but it ‘went on rapidly,’ and had ended in 1637.[3] Or rather had appeared, and strongly endeavoured, to end in 1637; but was not yet by any means settled and ended; the whole Fen-region clamouring that it could not, and should not, end so. In which wide clamour, against injustice done in high places, Oliver Cromwell, as is well known, though otherwise a most private quiet man, saw good to interfere; to give the universal inarticulate clamour a voice, and gain a remedy for
