The Works of Thomas Carlyle/Volume 6/Letter 27
TO THE SAME; SAME DATE
Sir,—I understand by forty or fifty poor men whom you forced into your House, that you have many there whom you cannot arm, and who are not serviceable to you.
If these men should perish by your means, it were great inhumanity surely. Honour and honesty require this, That though you be prodigal of your own lives, yet not to be so of theirs. If God give you into my hands, I will not spare a man of you, if you put me to a storm.
Roger Burgess, still unawed, refuses; Cromwell waits for infantry from Abingdon ‘till 3 next morning,’ then storms; loses fourteen men, with a captain taken prisoner;—and draws away, leaving Burgess to crow over him. The Army, which rose from Windsor yesterday, gets to Reading this day, and he must hasten thither.[2]
Yesterday, Wednesday, Monthly-fast day, all Preachers, by Ordinance of Parliament, were praying for ‘God’s merciful assistance to this New Army now on march, and His blessing upon their endeavours.’[3] Consider it; actually ‘praying’! It was a capability old London and its Preachers and Populations had; to us the incrediblest.