OLIVER CROMWELL 181 " Keep you to true principles of piety, virtue, and honor ; you shall never want a kingdom. " A principal point of your honor will consist in your deferring all respect, love, and protection to your mother, my wife, who hath many ways deserved well of me, and chiefly in this, that having been a means to bless me with so many hopeful children (all which, with their mother, I recommend to your love and care), she hath been content with incomparable magnanimity and patience to suffer both for and with me and you. " Farewell, till we meet, if not on earth, yet in heaven." But Charles was predestined to sorrow. " A tragic face ! " said the sculptor Bernini, as he looked on the triple portrait by Vandyke. Already the shadow of a violent death overclouded those fine, weak features. OLIVER CROMWELL Extracts from " The History of England," by THOMAS B. MACAULAV (1599-1658) A ND now a new and alarming class of symptoms began to appear in the distempered body politic. There had been, from the first, in the Parliamentary party, some men whose minds were set on objects from which the majority of that party would have shrunk with hor- ror. These men were, in religion, Inde- pendents. They conceived that every Christian congregation had, under Christ, supreme jurisdiction in things spiritual ; that appeals to provincial and national synods were scarcely less unscriptural than appeals to the Court of Arches or to the Vatican ; and that popery, prel- acy, and Presbyterianism were merely three forms of one great apostasy. In politics they were, to use the phrase of their time, Root and Branch men, or, to use the kindred phrase of our own time, Radicals. Not content with limiting the power of the monarch, they were desirous to erect a commonwealth on the ruins of the old English polity. At first they had been inconsiderable both in numbers and in weight ; but, before the war had lasted two years, they became not indeed the largest, but the most powerful faction in the country. Some of the old Parliamentary leaders had been removed by death, and others had for-
