‘A Petition was delivered in the field to the General, in the name of “many well-affected people in Essex”; desiring, That the Army might not be disbanded; in regard the Commonwealth had many enemies, who watched for such an occasion to destroy the good people.’[1]
Such, and still dimmer, is the jotting of dull authentic Bulstrode,—drowning in official oil, and somnolent natural pedantry and fat, one of the remarkablest scenes our History ever had: An Armed Parliament, extra-official, yet not without a kind of sacredness, and an Oliver Cromwell at the head of it; demanding with one voice, as deep as ever spake in England, ‘ Justice, Justice!’ under the vault of Heaven.
That same afternoon, the Army moved on to St. Albans, nearer to London; and from the Rendezvous itself, a joint Letter was despatched to the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, which the reader is now at last to see. I judge it, pretty confidently, by evidence of style alone, to be of Cromwell’s own writing. It differs totally in this respect from any other of those multitudinous Army-Papers; which were understood, says Whitlocke, to be drawn up mostly by Ireton, ‘who had a subtle working brain’; or by Lambert, who also had got some tincture of Law and other learning, and did not want for brain. They are very able Papers, though now very dull ones. This is in a far different style; in Oliver’s worst style; his style when he writes in haste,—and not in haste of the pen merely, for that seems always to have been a most rapid business with him; but in haste before the matter had matured itself for him, and the real kernels of it got parted from the husks. A style of composition like the structure of a block of oak-root,—as tortuous, unwedgeable, and as strong! Read attentively, this Letter can be understood, can be believed : the tone of it, the ‘voice’ of it, reminds us of what Sir Philip Warwick heard; the voice of a man risen justly into a kind of chant,—very dangerous for the City of London at present.
- ↑ Whitlocke, p. 255.
