"Then it will remain to be seen which is the stronger—Parliament or His Majesty," said John Hampden, and he sighed as if he foresaw ahead a long and bitter struggle. "I tell thee this," he added, with an earnestness almost sad, "that if the people are disappointed of justice on my lord, the King is not safe in his own capital, nor yet the Queen. Thou hast observed, Mr. Cromwell, how well hated the Queen is?"
"A Papist and a Frenchwoman," replied the other, "how could she hope for English loyalty? And she is meddling—of all things the English hate a meddling woman. Her ways might do well in France, but here we like them not. I am sorry for my Lady Strafford," he added irrelevantly, and with a strange note of tenderness in his rough voice. "What are all these issues to her? Yet she must suffer for them. I saw her yesterday, and she was as still for terror as a chased deer fallen spent of breath, and yet had the courage to move and speak with pride, poor gentlewoman!"
"We shall see many piteous things before England be tranquil," returned Mr. Hampden sadly. "Chief among them this discomfiture of patient women. The Lord support them."
They were now at Mr. Cromwell's door.
"Wilt thou come up, my cousin?" he asked, laying a detaining hand on the other's damp coat sleeve.
"This evening hold me excused," answered Mr. Hampden. "I have some country gentlemen at my entertainment, and I would not disappoint them."
So they parted as quietly as if this momentous day had held nothing of note, and Mr. Cromwell went up to his modest chamber and lit the candles and placed them on a writing-table which held a Bible among the quills and papers. He stood for a while thoughtfully; he had flung off his mantle and his hat, and his well-made, strong figure showed erect in a plain, rather ill-cut, suit of dark green cloth, his band and cuffs were of linen, and there was no single ornament nor an inch of lace about his whole attire; indeed, his lack of the ordinary elegancies of a gentleman's costume would have seemed to some an affectation, and to all a sure indication that he had now definitely joined the increasingly powerful Puritan party which had set itself to destroy every vestige of ornament in England—from Bishops to lace handkerchiefs, as their opponents sneeringly remarked. These enemies were not, perhaps, in a humour for sneering to-night when the chief of them lay straightened between prison walls. So thought Mr. Cromwell as he stood thoughtfully before the little table that bore the Bible, and looked down on the closed covers.
Above the table hung a mirror; the glass was old and cracked, and into the frame were stuck various papers which showed how the present possessor of the room disregarded the original use of the mirror. Sufficient of the glass, however, remained unobscured to reflect the head and shoulders of Oliver Cromwell, and this reflection, with the dark background and the blurred surface of the glass, was like a fine portrait, and by reason of the absolute consciousness of the man, like a portrait of his soul as well as of his features.
His expression was at once fierce and tender and deeply thoughtful; the brow, so carelessly shaded by the disordered brown hair, was free from any lines, the grey eyes seemed as if they looked curiously into the future, the lips were lightly set together, and seemed as if they might at any minute quiver into speech, the line of his jaw and cheek had a look of serene fierceness, like the noble idea of strength given by the jaw of a lion.
So he looked, reflected in the old mirror and lit by the two common candles, and if one had suddenly glanced over his shoulder into the glass and seen that face, they would have thought they looked at a painting of abstract qualities, not at a compound human being, at this moment so utterly was his rugged look of strength and fortitude spiritualized by the radiance of the soul within.
Outside the rain fell and there was no sound but the drip of the drops on the sill; the great city was silent after the tumult of the day, most people were eating, sleeping, going their ways as if there was no King humiliated utterly, raging in his chamber; no Queen weeping among her priests; no great man in prison writing to his wife: "Hold up your heart, look to the children and your house, and at last, by God's good pleasure, we shall have our deliverance"; no quiet gentleman from Huntingdon standing in a quiet room and meditating things that would change this city and this land as it had not been changed since it bore the yoke of kingship.
To the many, even to Mr. Pym and Mr. Hampden, the fall of Strafford might seem a tremendous thing, a shrewd blow against tyranny and a daring act, but to this younger man, with his deeper, more mystical, religious fervour, his practical and immeasurable courage, the sweeping aside of the King's favourite was but the first of many acts that would utterly alter the face of England.
Strafford might have gone, but there were other things to go—Papistry, the Star Chamber, ship money, and other civil wrongs, bishops, prayer books, church ornaments and choirs, and other pollutions of the pure faith of Christ, and there was a burning, blazing ideal to be followed—the ideal of what might be made of England in moral worth, in civic liberty, in that domestic dignity and foreign power that had made the reign of Elizabeth Tudor splendid throughout the world.
This might be done; but how was a poor country gentleman, untrained in diplomacy or war, to accomplish it?
How dare he presume that he was meant to accomplish it?
He moved from the table abruptly and, going to the window, rested his head against the frame and stared through the soiled panes into the dark street where the lights glimmered sparsely at long intervals in the heavy winter air.
He recalled and clung to the memory of the vision that he had had in the old barn outside St. Ives; the certainty that he was in covenant with the Lord to do the Lord's work in England had pierced his soul with the same sharpness as a dagger might pierce the flesh. At times the remembered glamour faded, weariness, misgivings, would cloud the glorious conviction—yet deep-rooted in his noble spirit it remained. God had spoken to him and he was to do God's works—but the practical humanity in him, the strong English sense and sound judgment demanded—how?
He was of full middle age and unaccomplished in anything save farming and such knowledge of the law as less than a year's training could give him. His education had been the usual education of a gentleman, but he had less learning than most, for his college days had been short, owing to the death of his father and the sudden call to responsibilities, and he had absolutely no love for any of the arts and sciences. How then was he equipped to combat the immense powers arrayed against him—the King, the Church, immemorial tradition, custom, usage, the weight of aristocracy, the example of Europe—for his design, though yet vague, was to create in England a constitution for Church and State for which he could see no pattern anywhere within the world.
He felt no greatness in himself, he was even doubtful of his own capacity. Though he was already much hearkened to, principally, he thought, by reason of his connexion with Hampden and the vast number of relations he had in the House, still, on the few occasions when he had spoken in public, as when he had taken up the cause of the Fen people in the late question of the drainage scheme, his ardour and impetuosity had gone far to spoil his cause, and he was well behind, in political weight and party influence, such men as Pym and Hampden and even Falkland and Hyde, Holles and Haselrig, Culpeper and Strode.
Yet with trumpet rhythm there beat on his brain—"Something to do and I to do it! Work to be done and I to accomplish it! Something to be gained and I to gain it! The Lord's battles to be fought and I to fight them!"
He moved from the window; the room was cold and the candles burnt with a tranquil frosty light. Mr. Cromwell went to the great book lying between the two plain brass sticks, the only book he ever read, the book in which, to him, was comprised the whole of life and all we know of the earth, of hell, of heaven.
He opened the Bible at random; the thick leaves fell back at the psalms, and his passionate grey eyes fell on a sentence that he read aloud with a deep note of triumph in his heavy masculine voice—
"O help us against the enemy; for vain is the help of man. Through God we shall do great acts: and it