Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/64

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growing great on their spoil;—and fated, he also, to produce another Malleus Cromwell that smote a thing or two. And so we will leave this matter of the Birth and Genealogy.


CHAPTER IV

EVENTS IN OLIVER’S BIOGRAPHY

The few ascertained, or clearly imaginable, Events in Oliver’s Biography may as well be arranged, for our present purpose, in the form of annals.

1603

Early in January of this year, the old Grandfather, Sir Henry, ‘the Golden Knight,’ at Hinchinbrook, died:[1] our Oliver, not quite four years old, saw funeralia and crapes, saw Father and Uncles with grave faces, and understood not well what it meant,—understood only, or tried to understand, that the good old Grandfather was gone away, and would never pat his head any more. The maternal Grandfather, at Ely, was yet, and for above a dozen years more, living.

The same year, four months afterwards, King James, coming from the North to take possession of the English crown, lodged two nights at Hinchinbrook; with royal retinue, with immense sumptuosities, addressings, knight-makings, ceremonial exhibitions; which must have been a grand treat for little Oliver. His Majesty came from the Belvoir-Castle region, ‘hunting all the way,’ on the afternoon of Wednesday 27th April 1603; and set off, through Huntingdon and Godmanchester, towards Royston, on Friday forenoon.[2] The Cambridge Doctors brought him an Address while here;

  1. Poor Noble, unequal sometimes to the copying of a Parish-register, with his judgment asleep, dates this event 1603-4 (at p. 20, vol. i.), and then placidly (at Pp. 40) states a fact inconsistent therewith.
  2. Stowe’s Chronicle, 812, etc.