Oliver Cromwell, Esquire, Lieutenant-General, certain Lands and Manors in the Counties of Gloucester, Monmouth, and Glamorgan, late the Earl of Worcester’s, was this day read the third time and, upon the question, passed; and ordered to be sent unto the Lords for their concurrence.’ Oliver himself, as we shall find, has been dangerously sick. This is what Clement Walker, the splenetic Presbyterian, ‘an elderly gentleman of low stature, in a gray suit, with a little stick in his hand,’ reports upon the matter of the Grant:
‘The 7th of March, an Ordinance to settle 2,500l. a-year of Land, out of the Marquis of Worcester’s Estate,—old Marquis of Worcester at Ragland, father of my Lord Glamorgan, who in his turn became Marquis of Worcester and wrote the Century of Inventions,—2,500l. a-year out of this old Marquis’s Estate ‘upon Lieutenant-General Cromwell! I have heard some gentlemen that know the Manor of Chepstow and the other Lands affirm’ that in reality they are worth 5,000l. or even 6,000l. a-year;—which is far from the fact, my little elderly friend! ‘You see,’ continues he, ‘though they have not made King Charles “a Glorious King,”’ as they sometimes undertook, ‘they have settled a Crown-Revenue upon Oliver, and have made him as glorious a King as ever John of Leyden was!’[1]— —A very splenetic old gentleman in gray;—verging towards Pride’s Purge, and lodgment in the Tower, I think! He is from the West; known long since in Gloucester Siege; Member now for Wells; but terminates in the Tower, with ink, and abundant gall in it, to write the History of Independency there.
FOR HIS EXCELLENCY SIR THOMAS FAIRFAX, GENERAL OF THE PARLIAMENTS ARMIES, “AT WINDSOR”: THESE
Sir,—It hath pleased God to raise me out of a dangerous
- ↑ History of Independeney (London, 1648), part i. 83 and 55.
