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pedantry of a man who, though no great orator1, was probably an excellent specimen of the average member of parliament in his day. For the rest, the Autobiography ends in 1636, some years before he took his seat, with the pathetic mention of the death of the writer's 'sweet and only' surviving son, 'whose delicate favour and bright grey eyes were deeply imprinted in our hearts.'

In contrast to the Autobiography of Sir Simonds d'Ewes may be mentioned that of Sir Henry Slingsby of Scriven, who, after being created a Nova Scotia baronet in 1638, sat for Knaresborough in both the Short and Long parliaments, and in 1641 was one of the fifty-nine members who voted against the bill for the attainder of Strafford. In 1642, he appears to have ceased to attend; but his Diary, which begins in 1638, continues to 1649, the death of Charles I being the last public event noted in it2. Slingsby's estates, though sequestered, were bought in for him by friendly trustees; but he had to live in privacy, and having been involved in a plot for a northern rising, underwent imprisonment at Hull. He was afterwards entrapped into mixing himself up with Ormonde's design, and, after being tried in London, was beheaded on Tower hill, June 1658. His Diary is interesting as exhibiting the life of a country gentleman, as well as on account of its political memoranda. He writes with businesslike directness but not without feeling, and can rise to saying of life here and hereafter 'Every man loves his Inn rather than his home.'

A special interest belongs to the Diary of John Rous, incumbent, from 1625 to 1643, of Santon Downham, Suffolk. John Rous, educated at Emmanuel college, Cambridge, was, for the last third of his life, minister of a village or hamlet adjoining the parish of which his father was rector. Thus, nothing could have been more humdrum than the course of his life; but his Diary, which seems to have been intended entirely for private use, probably gained, rather than lost, from the conditions of his existence. For, while paying much attention to political and religious controversy, he was a lover of literature; and thus he was led to preserve, from no party point of view, an amount of contemporary satirical verse which, considering the limits of his Diary, is curiously large3, besides occasional political and other documents.

1 He mentions with pride the compliments paid to him on one of his speeches by the earl of Holland (vol. II, p. 289).

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He end'd his good life upon the 20th of January, 1648-9, I hear: heu me, quid heu me? humana perpessi sumus.'

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I hate these following, railing rimes

Yet kepe them for president (precedent) of the times' (p. 109).

At the same time, he was a thinking man, and one who expressed his opinions, temperate as they were, with distinctness; so that, notwithstanding his moderation, it is clear that he believed time to be on the side of the parliament rather than on that of the king. What remains of his Diary has, accordingly, a flavour and value of its own, while forming a sort of repertory of contemporary satirical literature.

Leaving aside, as referred to elsewhere in this volume1, the personal records of archbishop Laud, and merely mentioning, together with the vindictive Memoirs of Denzil, lord Holles, the modest account of his own services written by Fairfax, we are constrained to pause on the Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, which, though those of a contemporary, are not always those of an eye-witness; thus, he was in Ireland during the period after Worcester, in which, in his opinion, Cromwell's designs first clearly manifested themselves. Of these designs, and of everything which made for the superiority of the military over the civil power, and of the monarchical over the democratic principle, he was a consistent adversary; and the simple strength of his convictions invests his narrative with a moral interest which neither the dogmatism of some of his later utterances nor his occasional lack of intellectual sincerity can, in the long run, obscure. His censures on Charles I and on Oliver Cromwell necessarily gave rise to a great deal of controversy, including a Just Defence of the Royal Martyr King Charles I from the many false and malicious aspersions in Ludlow's Memoirs, etc. (1699), and a Vindication of Oliver Cromwell from the accusations of Lieutenant General Ludlow (1698). The latter of these tracts was honoured by a brief 'moral' from the pen of Carlyle, who could not, perhaps, be expected to recognise the fact that it is on the completeness with which they are assimilated by 'partly wooden men' that the enduring influence of great currents of opinion 'partly' depends. Ludlow's Memoirs form one of the historical documents of English republicanism.

From a literary point of view, however, no biographical work of the time equals in interest the life of yet another parliamentary officer, written, in this instance, by his wife. The Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, Governor of Nottingham Castle and Town, etc., etc. Written by his Widow Lucy, daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, Governor of the Town, etc., are inseparable from The Life of Mrs Lucy Hutchinson, written by herself, albeit the latter is 1 See ante, chap. VI. 2 See bibliography.

E. L. VII. CH. IX.

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only a fragment. It extends in fact over only a few pages; but it is an excellent piece of writing, descriptive of the authoress's birth and parentage, and giving a curious picture of an overtrained but self-controlled girl who, when about seven years of age, 'had at one time eight tutors in several qualities, languages, music, dancing, writing and needlework, but her genius was quite averse from all her book.' The picture of her mother has much charm, and proves what a woman's kindness can do in any surroundings-for the wife of the governor was 'a mother to all the prisoners that came into the Tower.' The character of her husband which is subjoined, and which she drew up for her children, opens with a nobly worded reference to his dying command to her 'not to grieve at the common rate of desolate women,' and purports to be 'a naked, undressed narrative, speaking the simple truth of him.' But it appears that Mrs Hutchinson was so dissatisfied with what she had written that she made another essay, which, however, her husband's descendant Julius Hutchinson suppressed in favour of what he thought the less laboured and more characteristic effort of the two. It certainly brings out with much force colonel Hutchinson's deep religiosity, his perfect veracity, his piety in his affections-which seemed his most distinctive qualities to his sorrowing widow, who says of herself that 'all that she is now at best is his pale shadow.'

The biography proper of colonel Hutchinson is a work composed with great care and elaboration. We see him at 'Peter House,' where 'he was constant at their chapel,' and 'began to take notice of their stretching superstition to idolatry.' We follow him to Lincoln's inn and witness his courtship, in which he gained the hand of a woman, at first sight terribly superior to himself, 'after about fourteen months' various exercise of his mind, in the pursuit of his love.' Then we have an account of the condition of the kingdom before the outbreak of the civil war-not very original, or more fair in one way than Clarendon's is in another, but of great interest as a direct apology for the puritans. They were not, as they were believed to be, 'an illiterate, morose, melancholy, discontented, crazed sort of men.' On the other hand, the moral purity of the king's court is acknowledged. At the end of this disquisition, the writer refers her readers to May's History, on which, indeed, it is largely based. The account of the civil conflict in Notts (one of the counties whence the godly had to emigrate, and where the castle and adjoining town alone remained in the hands of the parliament) is full of interest. Hutchinson was long in expectation of a siege, first by Newcastle

and then by prince Rupert; but he held his own both against these dangers and against the perpetual worrying of the parliamentary committee, till times changed after Marston moor. Yet his worst troubles began after he had come up to London, as a member of parliament; and his wife's story now has to accompany him through a tortuous course, which, after bringing him into relations of deep mutual distrust with Cromwell, finally exposed him, as one of the 'regicides,' to the vengeance of the restoration. Although, with the skilful aid of his wife's exertions, he escaped with his life and with most of his estate, he became suspect in connection with the so-called Yorkshire plot, and was finally brought home from prison to his grave. His 'murderers,' writes his uncompromising biographer, had confined him in Sandown castle, where 'the place had killed him.'

The character of colonel Hutchinson, as drawn by his widow, need not be accepted exactly as presented by her. It was some time after the outbreak of the civil war that, as he phrases it, he found a clear call from the Lord' to take up arms on the side of his choice; and, again, he retained his seat in the House of Commons even after proceedings to which his wife states him to have objected. According to the same authority, he was a regicide on compulsion; and this, perhaps, made it easier for her, at the restoration, to plead in his name a 'signal' and not inopportune 'repentance.' She may have gone rather far in asserting that 'there was nothing he durst not do but sin against God'; in return her high spirit and enthusiasm, together with her learning and ability, more than justify her husband's dying commendation of her 'above the pitch of ordinary women,' while her heroic devotion to him, during a long succession of perils and trials, entitles her to a place near that of Alcestis among the 'good women' of all time. The form of her book is worthy of its spirit, and contributes to illustrate the supreme force which belonged to religious conceptions and associations as determining conduct in the age of which she was a representative. The dignity of her style does not interfere with its candour; on the other hand, the general sobriety of her narrative is not out of harmony with occasional passages of deep personal feeling and, now and then, of emotion almost passionate in its directness.

The only royalist commander who played an important part in the civil war and of whom a contemporary biography remains to us was not less fortunate than colonel Hutchinson in the fact that this record is from the hand of his wife. The Life of William

Cavendish, duke of Newcastle, too, may be regarded as one of the lesser classics of English biographical literature, and contains, like its counterpart, a supplementary True Relation of the Birth, Breeding and Life of his faithful companion in adversity as well as in prosperity. It is true that many different estimates have been formed by different critics of the literary claims of Margaret, duchess of Newcastle, who, as became a loyal wife, has left behind her a biography of her husband which may be described as ample, but only a brief relation of what was personal to herself. Among her contemporaries, at a season when the university of Cambridge was prostrating itself in corpore before both their graces, Pepys confided to his cipher that the writer of this biography was 'a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman,' and the duke 'an ass to suffer her to write what she writes to him and of him '— for her literary monument to her husband, singularly enough, was erected during his lifetime. On the other hand, Charles Lamb said of the book that 'no casket is rich enough, no casing sufficiently durable, to honour and keep such a jewel,' and indulged in other paradoxes of praise with regard to the letters' of 'that princely woman, the thrice noble Margaret Newcastle.' Her 'output,' if such a phrase be permissible, amounts to thirteen volumes in print besides a great deal more in manuscript, and what is accessible to posterity in prose or verse, and in most known species of either-dramatic, narrative, didactic and, above all, aphoristicreveals, with much queer philosophy and other eccentric cleverness, not a little genuine mother-wit and occasional felicity of gnomic phrase. She cherished a scorn, which she did not care to conceal, for any fetters upon the most active part of her nature, her mind; and, though she had what might be called 'anti-suffragist' leanings, she confessed that in all things, from essays in natural philosophy and plays in which she ignored Aristotle to mere 'accoutrements of habits,' originality was her foible as well as her forte. Thus, while she illustrates the force of natural talent, however thinly beaten out, and the irresistible impulse of the pen2, she proves even more signally the value of that orderly training which she never underwent and openly contemned.

But it is only the biography of her husband and the devotion which it displays that have secured her the niche which she occupies among the unforgotten writers of her age. The first

1 No doubt The ccxi Sociable Letters (1664).

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2 That little wit I have, it delights me to scribble it out and to disperse it about,' Autobiography, p. 307.

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