Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/142

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
110
PART I. BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR
[1641

found no other vestige anywhere in Nature, is presumably a London Puritan concerned in the London Petition and other such matters, to whom the Member for Cambridge, a man of known zeal, good connexion, and growing weight, is worth convincing.

Oliver St. John the Shipmoney Lawyer, now Member for Totness, has lately been made Solicitor-General; on the 2d of February 1640-1, D’Ewes says of him, ‘newly created’;[1] a date worth attending to. Strafford’s Trial is coming on; to begin on the 22d of March: Strafford and Laud are safe in the Tower long since; Finch and Windebank, and other Delinquents in high places, have fled rapidly beyond seas.



IN THE LONG PARLIAMENT

That little Note, despatched by a servant to Swithin’s Lane in the Spring of 1641, and still saved by capricious destiny while so much else has been destroyed,—is all of Autographic that Oliver Cromwell has left us concerning his proceedings in the first three-and-twenty months of the Long Parliament. Months distinguished, beyond most others in History, by anxieties and endeavours, by hope and fear and swift vicissitude, to all England as well as him: distinguished on his part by much Parliamentary activity withal; of which, unknown hitherto in History, but still capable of being known, let us wait some other opportunity of speaking. Two vague appearances of his in that scene, which are already known to most readers, we will set in their right date and place, making them faintly visible at last; and therewith leave this part of the subject.

In D’Ewes’s Manuscript above cited[2] are these words,

  1. Sir Simond D’Ewes’s Notes of the Long Parliament (Harleian Mss., nos. 162-6), fol. 189 a; p. 156 of Transcript penes me.
  2. D’Ewes, fol. 4.