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The power, the wealth, and the prosperity of
England daily and almost hourly increased!—the
ravages of war had long since disappeared from her
deep velvet pastures and her happy homes! Every
religion was endured except when its professors
intermeddled in state matters—all parties, whether
cavalier, or Presbyterian, or fifth-monarchist, shared
equally the law's protection, alike relied on the protector's
evenhanded justice! The arts and sciences
were more encouraged; learned and polished scholars
were esteemed at the court of Oliver in higher
and more just repute; morality was more rewarded,
licentiousness and vice more frowned down
than ever they had been before. Nor, though the
court was rigid almost to excess in morals, was its
decorum chilled by any touch of jealous puritanical
moroseness! All innocent amusements were admitted
and enjoyed freely, Cromwell himself keeping
a stud of race-horses, and labouring to promote
in all things lawful—not the mere welfare, but the
happiness and comfort of his meanest subject! No
Christian sect was hindered in its worship or observances;
even the trampled and scorned Israelite
finding an advocate and friend in that great man,
who went so infinitely far in toleration, beyond,

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not his own age alone, but the most liberal usages
of the most tolerant of modern nations. Still did
his cares, his griefs, and his perplexities but multiply!—
no success was enough to please—no general
prosperity enough to satiate the people—craving
eternally the something new—losing the tangible
realities of present in the dim longings after future
happiness—forgetting benefits conferred—ungrateful
for past merits—lightheaded, fickle, and false-hearted.
Day after day new plots broke out; and
though they burst all harmlessly—the veteran bearing
still, as it would seem, a charmed life—every
detected scheme, punished or pardoned, left its deep
sting behind. Cromwell's existence was no longer
healthful—his spirit was no longer, as of yore, elastic
and storm-riding as the eagle's pinion! His
days were spent in bitter, because thankless, labours—
his nights in agonizing apprehensions. It
was not that he trembled—it was not that a vile
and dastard fear of death shook his soul from its
eminence—it was not that he would have doubted
any more to hurl himself in open strife upon the
deadliest hazard now, when the monarch of the
land, than when he fought a simple colonel of the
ironsides—a theme of dread to others—himself
dreading nothing! But it was the suspense—the
doubt—the inability to harbour trust or confidence
in any of those nearest to his person. The gnawing
heart-consuming sense of being undervalued,
dealt with ungratefully, wronged, hated, and betrayed.
Still in the prime of intellectual manhood,
his strong form was bowed and feeble; his hair,
once sable as the raven's wing, thin, weak, and
gray; his piercing eye downcast and veiled, and
his whole aspect that of a man worn out, even by
his own success, spiritless and heartbroken. Parliament
after parliament, convoked to settle the

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provisions of the nation, rebelled against his power,
running, as had their predecessors, wild on abstruse
religious doctrines, and anxious to plunge all things
once more into anarchy, by striving to work out
their frantic phantasies of perfect and unchangeable
republics. Each after each he was compelled, not
for his own sake merely, but for England's, which
else they would assuredly have hurled again into
the abyss of civil discord, to break up and dissolve
them. Nothing could crush the tameless hardihood
with which he bore up, nerved by their very pressure,
against burdens to a slighter intellect wholly
unbearable—conspiracies of enemies, false-heartedness
of friends!—treasons and anarchy at home,
insults and wars abroad! All yielded to the active
vigour with which he sprang to grapple them, but
by that very vigour was his own mighty spirit, like
a bow overstrained by too long tension, despoiled
of its own strength, its pliability, its power of renewed
exertion. The capture of the rich West
Indian isles—the persecutions of the Vaudois, remitted
at the first hint of his potential voice—the
all-important port of Dunkirk, so long the secret
aim of England's politic ambition, ceded to his victorious
arms—cast a bright gleam, indeed, on his
declining years; but it was like the last gleam of
the wintry sunshine, that gilds, but leaves no impress
of its glory on the snow-mantled earth. A
nearer sorrow, a more domestic grief, was destined
to wear through the last link of the corroding chain—
a mere affliction, such as befalls each father of a
family many times in a life, and, for the most,
leaves but slight traces even on minds less firmly
moulded, annihilated the gigantic energies of that
great master spirit which had, throughout its mortal
course, met nothing that could cope with it, nothing
that had not been subdued, enslaved, and

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overwhelmed by its indomitable will. Elizabeth,
his best beloved daughter, a woman of invaluable
worth—modest, and delicate, and feminine, and
gentle; yet of a character the most decisive—a
principle the most undeviating—a permanence and
rectitude of purpose the most immoveable—and,
above all, an influence on her father the most peculiar
and impressive—lay wasting on a bed of
mortal sickness. Throughout the whole of his
broad realms—those realms wherein the sweet
calm home affections have ever flourished the most
greenly—there lived not any father more kind, solicitous,
forbearing, and devoted in his paternal love
than the unconquered victor—the merciless avenger—
the stern judge—the regicide—the ruler! Hard
as he was abroad, cold and unbending in all outward
show, in his domestic hours none were more warm
than he, more playful, or affectionate. Thus constituted
toward all his children, the dearest to his
feelings, as the most prized and valued in his judgment,
was Elizabeth, who now, consumed by an
unnatural and mortal malady, was waning hourly
before his eyes. She was the only one of all his
family—the only one of all his friends—save only
Edgar Ardenne, who had dared ever to remonstrate
with him during the upward course of his ambition.
She had confronted many a time his sophistry with
that most sound of all philosophies, the pure creed
of the Christian—she had rebuked his zealous and
fanatic superstitions with regulated and sincere religion—
she had accused him of that restless and
insatiate ambition, which she perceived, or fancied
she perceived, to be the instigator and the planner,
it might be unsuspected even by himself, of all his
darker actions. She had rebuked him during the
trial—she had besought him, on her bended knees—
before the execution of the king—to spare, not

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his crowned victim only, but his own deathless
fame—his own immortal soul! Her wishes set at
naught, her prayers unheeded, she had not once—
no, not for one brief moment—complained, or murmured,
or revolted! She had not once reproached
him with that which it was now too late to remedy,
but she had ever been the soother of his disquiet
mind, when fits of his accustomed hypochondriasm
had overcome him with remorse, and terror, and,
visions ominous of wo—she had ever been his calm
monitress, inculcating a milder and a holier creed—
exhorting him to penitence, as the sole path to
pardon and to peace. And it was strange that now,
in his most lordly plenitude of power, the two sympathies
which he most keenly felt were toward the
only two of human beings who had seen through—
perceived the earliest, and opposed the latest, the
most darling objects of his soul. Abandoned now
by all—the leader, revered, but loved not by his followers—
the monarch, self-upheld above rebellious
subjects—the master, flattered, and courted, and,
perhaps, betrayed—he clung with a sharp painful
yearning, as to the only feelings of his heart entirely
pure and unmixed with aught worldly, to his
affection for Elizabeth and his regret for Ardenne!
Never, since he had fixed his firm seat on the
bloody throne of Charles, had his most cherished
daughter been what she was in his more innocent
and humbler days. Her smile was as sweet, yet
it was now no longer joyous; and her cheek lost
its roses, and her form its roundness; a glassy film
veiled her soft eye; and he—the father—saw it,
and knew, yet could not reconcile himself to the
approaching wo; and felt himself to be—unutterable
anguish—the slayer of his chosen child. And
seeing, knowing, feeling all this, it was his lot to
deal the last blow to her gentle being, to launch

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the last shaft that should ever rankle in her bosom
with the envenomed barbs of mortal sorrow. Hewet,
who, with Sir Henry Slingsby, had, on most positive,
unquestionable proof, been condemned for conspiracy
against the power and life of Oliver—whom
party prejudice cannot deny to have been guilty of
the intent to kill—an intent hindered only by premature
discovery of their plot—nor the most jealous
scrutiny discover to have been otherwise than justly
executed—had been the preacher on whose ministry
she had for many years attended; had united
her to Claypole by the service of the church; had
been her friend, her comforter, her teacher; and,
looking on him only in these amiable and endearing
lights, Elizabeth forgot to view him as the intended
murderer of her father—argued in his behalf, half
justified his crime under the plea of loyalty to his
true king, prayed zealously and piteously for the
remission of his punishment, and, finding all her
supplications vain, mourned over him with so intense
and terrible a storm of grief, that it half overcome
her intellects, and quite wore out her frail
and fading body. With a dull apathy Oliver heard
at first that her life was despaired of—no sign of
sorrow was displayed, scarcely of sense or feeling—
but after a short space came the revulsion, the
breaking up of all the vain restraints of pride, and
stoicism, and man's affected hardihood—the loosing
of the floodgates of the soul—the awful, vehement
outpourings of a strong man's despair! From that
day forth he left not her bedside, neither by day nor
yet by night, tending her with all a woman's care,
and, more than all, a woman's love. Soothing her
every phantasy—feigning to be, or, it may be, persuading
himself also that he would be, all she could
wish him—praying and weeping with her. Nothing
could be more beautiful, more pious, or

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more touching than the conduct of that gray-haired
usurper, mourning as one that had no hope beyond
her grave, beside his daughter's deathbed. But
wretched as the consolation would have been, to
have caught on his lips her last expiring sigh, to
have felt reflected on his own the last glance of her
glazing eyes—that wretched consolation was denied
to him; for, as the body of his sweet child wasted,
so did her mind wane likewise; and for many days
before the termination of her sufferings she would
at times burst into fits of the most frantic and insane
delirium. These, as the time of her decease
drew nearer, became more and more vehement and
frightful; and it was strange that she, whose pains
had ever seemed less bitter, or, at the least, more
easily endured when her hand rested in her father's—
now, at the sight of him she loved so dearly, nay,
at the mere tones of his voice, or his suppressed
and cautious footstep, started at once into the most
furious paroxysms. “Blood! blood!” she would
shriek, till the whole pile of Hampton court rang
with her awful ravings—“I float, I smother in a
sea—a sea of human blood! Who comes? who
comes? red with the gore of monarchs—red with
the slaughter of the saints? Father?—not father—
no—no—oh, not my father!” and then again
she would take up the cry, “Blood! blood!”
struggling and wrestling on her couch as if amid
the weltering waves, till those who watched about
her were wellnigh distraught with terror, and till the
boldest of her medical attendants, in the most positive
terms, insisted on the absence of the despairing
father from the sick chamber of his child. He
withdrew silently, and with a quiet patience, that
perfectly astonished those acquainted with the imperiousness
of Cromwell's will—but he withdrew
only from her deathbed to lie down upon his own.

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Shattered before by the incessant cares which
he for many months had undergone, the whole
weight of the government resting upon his single
shoulders—relaxed by nervousness, suspicion, superstition,
and remorse—this last blow broke him
down. His old complaint, the ague—which had
attacked him first in Scotland, and shaken, if it had
not actually undermined, his constitution—returned
upon him with redoubled violence, and, in a few
days, brought him down to the very threshold of
that dark house—the grave. But it was not, in
truth, the ailment only of the corporeal shell—it
was the intolerable burden “of that perilous stuff
that weighs upon the heart!”—had the mind been
at ease, the sickness of the body had been of small
account! “The sorrows written on the brain
were not to be razed out, nor the stuffed bosom
cleansed!”—the scabbard, fretted long ago, was
now, at length, worn out by the keen weapon that
lay hid within it—the earthen jar was burst by the
inscrutable workings of the liquor it contained—
the pharos was consumed by the same fire which
had for many a year been the sole agent of its
glory!

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