In these same days noisy Lilburn has accused Cromwell of meaning or having meant to make his own bargain with the King, and be Earl of Essex and a great man. Noisy John thinks all great men, especially all Lords, ought to be brought low. The Commons have him at their bar in this month.[1]
Here, by will of the Destinies preserving certain bits of paper and destroying others, there introduces itself a little piece of Domesticity; a small family-transaction, curiously enough peering through by its own peculiar rent, amid these great world-transactions: Marriage-treaty for Richard Cromwell, the Lieutenant-General’s eldest Son.
What Richard has been doing hitherto no Biographer knows. In spite of Noble, I incline to think he too had been in the Army; in October last there are two Sons mentioned expressly as being officers there: ‘One of his Sons, Captain of the General’s Lifeguard; his other Son, Captain of a troop in Colonel Harrison’s Regiment,’—so greedy is he of the Public Money to his own family![2] Richard is now heir-apparent; our poor Boy Oliver therefore, ‘Cornet Oliver,’ we know not in the least where, must have died. ‘It went to my heart like a dagger; indeed it did!’ The phrase of the Pamphlet itself, we observe, is ‘his other Son,’ not ‘one of his other Sons,’ as if there were now but two left. If Richard was ever in the Army, which these probabilities may dimly intimate, the Lifeguard, a place for persons of consequence, was the likeliest for him. The Captain in Harrison’s Regiment will in that case be Henry.—The Cromwell family, as we laboriously guess and gather, has about this time removed to London. Richard, if ever in the Lifeguard, has now quitted it: an idle fellow, who could never relish soldiering in such an
