The Works of Thomas Carlyle/Volume 6/Letter 68

by Thomas Carlyle

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LETTER LXVIII

Another private Letter: to my Lord Wharton; to congratulate him on some ‘particular mercy,‘ seemingly the birth of an heir, and to pour out his sense of these great general mercies. This Philip Lord Wharton is also of the Committee of Derby House, the Executive in those months; it is probable^[1] Cromwell had been sending despatches to them, and had hastily enclosed these private Letters in the Packet.

Philip Lord Wharton seems to have been a zealous Puritan, much concerned with Preachers, Chaplains etc. in his domestic establishment; and full of Parliamentary and Politico-religious business in public. He had a regiment of his own raising at Edgehill Fight; but it was one of those that ran away; whereupon the unhappy Colonel took refuge ‘in a sawpit,‘—says Royalism confidently, crowing over it without end.^[2] quarrel between him and Sir Henry Mildmay, Member for Malden, about Sir Henry’s saying, ‘He Wharton had made his peace at Oxford’ in November 1643, is noted in the Commons Journals, iii. 300. It was to him, about the time of this Cromwell Letter, that one Osborne, a distracted King’s flunky, had written, accusing Major Rolf, a soldier under Hammond, of attempting to poison Charles in the Isle of Wight.^[3]—This Philip’s patrimonial estate, Wharton, still a Manor-house of somebody, lies among the Hills on the southwest side of Westmoreland; near the sources of the Eden, the Swale rising on the other watershed not far off. He seems, however, to have dwelt at Upper Winchington, Bucks, ‘a seat near Great Wycombe.‘ He lived to be a Privy Councillor to William of Orange.^[4] He died in 1696. Take this other anecdote, once a very famous one:

‘James Stewart of Blantyre, in Scotland, son of a Treasurer Stewart, and himself a great favourite of King James, was a gallant youth; came up to London with great hopes: but a discord falling out between him and the young Lord Wharton, they went out to single combat each against the other; and at the first thrust each of them killed the other, and they fell dead in one another’s arms on the place’.^[5] The ‘place’ was Islington Fields; the date 8th November 1609. The tragedy gave rise to much ballad-singing and other rumour.^[6] Our Philip is that slain Wharton’s Nephew.

This Letter has been preserved by Thurloe; four blank spaces ornamented with due asterisks occur in it,—Editor Birch does not inform us whether from tearing-off the Seal, or why. In these blank spaces the conjectural sense, which I distinguish here as usual by commas, is occasionally somewhat questionable.

 

FOR THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE LORD WHARTON: THESE

“Knaresborough,” 2d Sept. 1648.

My Lord,—You know how untoward I am at this business of writing; yet a word. I beseech the Lord make us sensible of this great mercy here, which surely was much more than “the sense of it” the House expresseth^[7]. I trust “to have, through” the goodness of our God, time and opportunity to speak of it to you face to face. When we think of our God, what are we’ Oh, His mercy to the whole society of saints,—despised, jeered saints! Let them mock on. Would we were all saints! The best of us are, God knows, poor weak saints;—yet saints; if not sheep, yet lambs; and must be fed. We have daily bread^[8], and shall have it, in despite of all enemies. There’s enough in our Father’s house, and He dispenseth it.^[9] I think, through these outward mercies, as we call them, Faith, Patience, Love, Hope are exercised and perfected,—yea Christ med, and grows to a perfect man within us. I know not well how to distinguish: the difference is only in the subject, “not in the object”; to a worldly man they are outward, to a saint Christian;—but I dispute not.

My Lord, I rejoice in your particular mercy. I hope that it is so to you. If so, it shall not hurt you; not make you plot or shift for the young Baron to make him great. You will say, ‘He is God’s to dispose of, and guide for’; and there you will leave him.

My love to the dear little Lady, better “to me” than the child. The Lord bless you both. My love and service to all Friends high and low; if you will, to my Lord and Lady Mulgrave and Will Hill. I am truly, your faithful friend and humblest servant,

OLIVER CROMWELL.^[10]

 

During these very days, perhaps it was exactly two days after, ‘on Monday last,‘ if that mean 4th September,^[11]—Monro, lying about Appleby, has a party of horse ‘sent into the Bishopric’; firing divers houses’ thereabouts, and not forgetting to plunder the Lord Wharton’s tenants’ by the road: Cromwell penetrating towards Berwick, yet still at a good distance, scatters this and other predatory parties rapidly enough to Appleby, as it were by the very wind of him; like a coming mastiff smelt in the gale by vermin. They are swifter than he, and get to Scotland, by their dexterity and quick scent, unscathed. ‘Across to Kelso,‘ about September 8th.^[12]

Mulgrave in those years is a young Edmund Sheffield, of whom, except that he came afterwards to sit in the Council of State, and died a few days before the Protector, History knows not much.—‘Will Hill’ is perhaps William Hill, a Puritan Merchant in London, ruined out of a large estate’ by lending for the public service; who, this Summer, and still in this very month, is dunning the Lords and Commons, the Lords with rather more effect, to try if they cannot give him some kind of payment, or shadow of an attempt at payment,—he having long lain in jail for want of his money. A zealous religious, and now destitute and insolvent man; known to Oliver;—and suggests himself along with the Mulgraves by the contrast of ‘Friends high and low.‘ Poor Hill did, after infinite struggling, get some kind of snack at the Bishops’ Lands by and by.^[13]

The ‘young Baron’ now born is father, I suppose,—he or his brother is father^[14],—of the far-famed high-gifted half-delirious Duke of Wharton.

On the 8th of September, Cromwell is at Durham^[15], scaring the Monro fraternity before him; and publishes the following

1. Commons Journals, vi. 6, 5th September.
2. Wood’s Athena, iii. 177, and in all manner of Pamphlets elsewhere.
3. Wood, iii. 501; Pamphlets; Commons Journals, etc.
4. Wood, iv. 407, 542; Fasti, i. 335; Nicolas’s Synopsis of the Peerage.
5. Scotstarvet’s Staggering State (Edinb. 1754, a very curious little Book), p. 32.
6. Bibliotheca Topographica, No xlix.
7. The House calls it a wonderful great mercy and success,‘ this Preston victory (Commons Journals, v. 680);—and then passes on to other matters, not quite adequately conscious that its life had been saved hereby! What fire was blazing, and how high, in Wales, and then in Lancashire, is known only in perfection to those that trampled it out.
8. Spiritual food, encouragemeut of merciful Providence, from day to day.
9. There follows here in the Birch edition: As our eyes’ [seven stars] ‘behinde, then wee can’ [seven stars] we for him’: words totally unintelligible; and not worth guessing at, the original not being here, but only Birch’s questionable reading of it.
10. Thurloe, i. 99.
11. Cromwelliana, p. 45.
12. Rushworth, vii. 1250, 3, 9, 69.
13. Commons Journals, vi. 29, 243.
14. He, Thomas, the one now born; subsequently Marquis, and a man otherwise of distinction; who ‘died 12th April 1715, in the 67th year of his age’: Boyer’s Political State of Great Britain (April 1715, London), p. 305. (Note to Third Edition: communicated by Mr. T. Watts of the British Museum.)
15. Commons Journals, vii. 1260.