how from the day when high dignitaries and pamphleteers of the Carrion species did their ever-memorable feat at Tyburn, onwards to this day, the progress does not stop.
In 1698[1], one of the earliest words expressly in favour of Cromwell was written by a Critic of Ludlow’s Memoirs. The anonymous Critic explains to solid Ludlow that he, in that solid but somewhat wooden head of his, had not perhaps seen entirely into the centre of the Universe, and workshop of the Destinies; that, in fact, Oliver was a questionable uncommon man, and he Ludlow a common handfast, honest, dull and indeed partly wooden man,—in whom it might be wise to form no theory at all of Cromwell. By and by, a certain ‘Mr. Banks,’ a kind of Lawyer and Playwright, if I mistake not, produced a still more favourable view of Cromwell, but in a work otherwise of no moment; the exact date, and indeed the whole substance of which is hardly worth remembering.[2]
The Letter of ‘John Maidston to Governor Winthrop,’—Winthrop Governor of Connecticut, a Suffolk man, of much American celebrity,—is dated 1659; but did not come into print till 1742, along with Thurloe’s other Papers.[3] Maidston had been an Officer in Oliver’s Household, a Member of his Parliaments, and knew him well. An Essex man he; probably an old acquaintance of Winthrop’s; visibly a man of honest affections, of piety, decorum and good sense. Whose loyalty to Oliver is of a genuine and altogether manful nature,—mostly silent, as we can discern. His Letter gives some really lucid traits of those dark things and times; especially a short portraiture of the Protector himself, which, the more you know him, you ascertain the more to be a likeness. Another Officer of Oliver’s Household, not to be confounded with this Maidston, but a man of similar position and similar moral
- ↑ So dated in Somers Tracts (London, 1811), vi. 416,—but liable to correction if needful. Poor Noble (i. 297) gives the same date, and then placidly, in the next line, subjoins a fact inconsistent with it. As his manner is!
- ↑ Short Critical Review of the Life of Oliver Cromwell, by a Gentleman of the Middle Temple. London, 1739.
- ↑ Thurloe, i. 763-8;—and correct Noble, i. 94.
