minded to send off to the King, now at York, and evidently intending war. Oliver’s dragoons searched with due rigour for the arms; while the Captain respectfully conversed with his Uncle; and even ‘insisted’ through the interview, say the old Books, ‘on standing uncovered’: which latter circumstance may be taken as an astonishing hypocrisy in him, say the old blockhead Books. The arms, munitions, furnishings were with all rigour of law, not with more rigour and not with less, carried away; and Oliver parted with his Uncle, for that time, not ‘craving his blessing,‘ I think, as the old blockhead Books say; but hoping he might, one day, either get it or a better than it, for what he had now done. Oliver, while in military charge of that country, had probably repeated visits to pay to his Uncle; and they know little of the man or of the circumstances, who suppose there was any likelihood or any need of either insolence or hypocrisy in the course of these.
As for the old Knight, he seems to have been a man of easy temper; given to sumptuosity of hospitality; and averse to severer duties.[1] When his eldest son, who also showed a turn for expense, presented him a schedule of debts, craving aid towards the payment of them, Sir Oliver answered with a bland sigh, ‘I wish they were paid.’ Various Cromwells, sons of his, nephews of his, besides the great Oliver, took part in the Civil War, some on this side, some on that, whose indistinct designations in the old Books are apt to occasion mistakes with modern readers. Sir Oliver vanishes now from Hinchinbrook, and all the public business records, into the darker places of the Fens. His name disappears from Willis:—in the next Parliament, the Knight of the Shire for Huntingdon becomes, instead of him, ‘Sir Capell Bedall, Baronet.’ The purchaser of Hinchinbrook, Sir Sidney Montague, was brother of the first Earl of Manchester, brother of the third Lord Montague of Boughton; and father of ‘the valiant Colonel Montague,’ valiant General Montague, Admiral Montague,
- ↑ Fuller’s Worthies, § Huntingdonshire.
