While yet an infant, a monkey, which his grandfather kept, stole him from the cradle, and ran with him to the roof of the house. On discovering the dangerous predicament in which young Oliver was placed, the family, in the utmost alarm lest the animal should drop his precious burden hurried out beds on which to catch him. This was unnecessary; his careful, though somewhat equivocal nurse, brought down the child wholly uninjured, though not without exhibiting the startling fact, that the fate of England had been in the paws, if not in the hands of a monkey!
King Charles I. when a boy, travelling from Scotland to London, called at Hinchinbrook, the seat of Sir Oliver Cromwell;—that Kinght to divert the young prince, sent for his nephew, Oliver, that, with his own sons, he might join in sport with his royal highness. They had not, however, been long together before Charles and Oliver disagreed, and as the former was then as weakly, as the latter was strong, the royal visitor had soon the worst of it. Oliver at this early age, with the same disregard for hereditary dignity which marked his future life, and probably with somewhat of an instinctive hostility to royalty, boxed his opponent so severely that the blood flowed from the prince’s nose. When the civil war commenced, this circumstance was not forgotten, but looked upon as an unfavourable open for that monarch.
We shall proceed to take up this extraordinary character at that period when it had attained sufficient maturity to display, in some degree, the impress of the future man. Cromwell was put, at a very early age, to the free grammar school of Huntingdon, where he made but little progress in his education; and was much more remarkable for a stubborn and obstinate temper, than for any
