As to his major-generals of counties, who figure in
most histories of England as so many _Ali Pachas_ that impaled a few
prisoners every morning before breakfast--or rather as so many ogres that
ate up good Christian men, women and children alive, they were
disagreeable people who were disliked much in the same way as our
commissioners of the income-tax were disliked in the memory of us all; and
heartily they would have laughed at the romantic and bloody masquerade in
which they are made to figure in the English histories. What then was the
'tyranny' of Cromwell's government, which is confessedly complained of
even in those days? The word 'tyranny' was then applied not so much to the
mode in which his power was administered (except by the prejudiced)--as to
its origin. However mercifully a man may reign,--yet, if he have no right
to reign at all, we may in one sense call him a tyrant; his power not
being justly derived, and resting upon an unlawful (_i.e._ a military)
basis. As a usurper, and one who had diverted the current of a grand
national movement to selfish and personal objects, Cromwell was and
will be called a tyrant; but not in the more obvious sense of the word.
Such are the misleading statements which disfigure the History of England
in its most important chapter. They mislead by more than a simple error of
fact: those, which I have noticed last, involve a moral anachronism; for
they convey images of cruelty and barbarism such as could not co-exist
with the national civilization at that time; and whosoever has not
corrected this false picture by an acquaintance with the English
literature of that age, must necessarily image to himself a state of
society as rude and uncultured as that which prevailed during the wars of
York and Lancaster--_i.
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