AN ELECTION TO THE LONG PARLIAMENT.1

[1844.]

ANTHONY WOOD, a man to be depended on for accuracy, states as a fact that John Pym, Clerk of the Exchequer, and others, did, during the autumn of 1640, ride to and fro over England, inciting the people to choose members of their faction. Pym and others. Pym "rode about the country to promote elections of the Puritanical brethren to serve in Parliament; wasted his body much in carrying on the cause, and was himself," as we well know, "elected a Burgess." As for Hampden, he had long been accustomed to ride: "being a person of antimonarchical principles," says Anthony, "he did not only ride, for several years before the Grand Rebellion broke out, into Scotland, to keep consults with the Covenanting brethren there; but kept his circuits to several Puritanical houses in England; particularly to that of Knightley in Northamptonshire," to Fawsley Park, then and now the house of the Knightleys, "and also to that of William Lord Say at Broughton near Banbury in Oxfordshire: "Mr. Hampden might well be on horseback in election-time. These Pyms, these Hampdens, Knightleys were busy riding over England in those months: it is a little fact which Anthony Wood has seen fit to preserve for us.

A little fact, which, if we meditate it, and picture in any measure the general humor and condition of the England that then was, will spread itself into great expanse in our imagination! What did they say, do, think, these patriotic missionaries, "as they rode about the country"? What did they

1 FRASER'S MAGAZINE, No. 178.

2 Wood's Athena (Bliss's edition), iii. 73, 59; Nugent's Hampden, i. 327.

propose, advise, in the successive Town-halls, Country-houses, and "Places of Consult"? John Pym, Clerk of the Exchequer, Mr. Hampden of Great Hampden, riding to and fro, lodging with the Puritan Squires of this English Nation, must have had notable colloquies! What did the Townspeople say in reply to them? We have a great curiosity to know about it: how this momentous General Election, of autumn, 1640, went on; what the physiognomy or figure of it was; how "the remarkablest Parliament that ever sat, the father of all Free British Parliaments, American Congresses and French Conventions, that have sat since in this world," was got together!

To all which curiosities and inquiries, meanwhile, there is as good as no answer whatever. Wood's fact, such as it is, has to twinkle for us like one star in a heaven otherwise all dark, and shed what light it can. There is nothing known of this great business, what it was, what it seemed to be, how in the least it transacted itself, in any town, or county, or locality. James Heath, "Carrion Heath" as Smelfungus calls him, does, in his Flagellum (or Flagitium' as it properly is), writes some stuff about Oliver Cromwell and Cambridge Election; concerning which latter and Cleaveland the Poet there is also another blockheadism on record:- but these, and the like, mere blockheadisms, pitch-dark stupidities and palpable falsities, what can we do with these? Forget them, as soon as possible, to all eternity; that is the evident rule: Admit that we do honestly know nothing, instead of misknowing several things, and in some sense all things, which is a great misfortune in comparison!

Contemporary men had no notion, as indeed they seldom have in such cases, what an enormous work they were going on with; and nobody took note of this election more than of any former one. Besides, if they had known, they had other business than to write accounts of it for us. But how could anybody know that this was to be the Long Parliament, and to

1 Or, Life of Oliver Cromwell (London, 1663): probably, all things considered, the brutalest Platitude this English Nation has to show for itself in writing.

cut his Majesty's head off, among other feats? A very "spirited election," I dare believe:- but there had been another elec tion that same year, equally spirited, which had issued in a Short Parliament, and mere "second Episcopal War." There had been three prior elections, sufficiently spirited; and had issued, each of them, in what we may call a futile shriek; their Parliaments swiftly vanishing again.

Sure enough, from whatever cause it be, the world, as we said, knows not anywhere of the smallest authentic notice concerning this matter, which is now so curious to us, and is partly becoming ever more curious. In the old Memoirs, not entirely so dull when once we understand them; in the multitudinous rubbish-mountains of old Civil-War Pamphlets (some thirty or fifty thousand of them in the British Museum alone, unread, unsorted, unappointed, unannealed!), which will continue dull till, by real labor and insight, of which there is at present little hope, the ten-thousandth part of them be ex tracted; and the nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine parts of them be eaten by moths, or employed in domestic cookery when fuel grows scarce ;- in these chaotic masses of old dull printing there is not to be met with, in long years of manipulation, one solitary trait of any election, in any point of English land, to this same Long Parliament, the remarkablest that ever sat in the world. England was clearly all alive then, — with a moderate crop of corn just reaped from it; and other things not just ready for reaping yet. In Newcastle, in "the Bishopric" and that region, a Scotch Army, bristling with pike and musket, sonorous with drum and psalm-book, all snugly garrisoned and billeted "with £850 a day; " over in Yorkshire an English Army, not quite so snugly; and a "Treaty of Ripon" going on; and immense things in the wind, and Pym and Hampden riding to and fro to hold "consults: " it must have been an election worth looking at! But none of us will see it; the Opacities have been pleased to suppress this election, considering it of no interest. It is erased from English and from human Memory, or was never recorded there, (owing to the stupor and dark nature of that faculty, we may well say). It is a lost election; swallowed in the

dark deeps: premit atra Nox. Black Night; and this one fact of Anthony Wood's more or less faintly twinkling there!

In such entire darkness, it was a welcome discovery which the present Editor made, of certain official or semi-official Documents, legal testimonies and signed affidavits, relative to the Election for Suffolk, such as it actually showed itself to men's observation in the Town of Ipswich on that occasion: Documents drawn up under the exact eye of Sir Simonds D'Ewes, High-Sheriff of Suffolk; all carefully preserved these two centuries, and still lying safe for the inspection of the curious among the Harley Manuscripts in the British Museum. Sir Simonds, as will be gradually seen, had his reasons for getting these Documents drawn up; and luckily, when the main use of them was over, his thrifty historical turn of mind induced him to preserve them for us. A man of sublime Antiquarian researches, Law-learning, human and divine accomplishments, and generally somewhat Grandisonian in his ways; a man of scrupulous Puritan integrity, of high-flown conscientiousness, exactitude and distinguished perfection; ambitious to be the pink of Christian country-gentlemen and magistrates of counties; really a most spotless man and High-Sheriff: how shall he suffer, in Parliament or out of it, to the latest posterity, any shadow from election-brabbles or the like indecorous confusion to rest on his clear-polished character? Hence these Documents; - for there had an unseemly brabble, and altercation from unreasonable persons, fallen out at this Election, which "might have ended in blood," from the nose or much deeper, had Sir Simonds been a less perfect HighSheriff! Hence these Documents, we say; and they are preserved to us.

The Documents, it must be at once owned, are somewhat of the wateriest: but the reader may assure himself they are of a condensed, emphatic, and very potent nature, in comparison with the generality of Civil-War documents and records! Of which latter indeed, and what quality they are of, the human mind, till once it has earnestly tried them, can form no manner of idea. We had long heard of Dulness, and

thought we knew it a little; but here first is the right dead Dulness, Dulness its very self! Ditch-water, fetid bilge-water, ponds of it and oceans of it; wide-spread genuine Dulness, without parallel in this world: such is the element in which that history of our Heroic Seventeenth Century as yet rots and swims! The hapless inquirer swashes to and fro, in the sorrow of his heart: if in an acre of stagnant water he can pick up half a peascod, let him thank his stars!

This Editor, in such circumstances, read the D'Ewes Documents, and re-read them, not without some feeling of satis faction. Such as they are, they bring one face to face with an actual election, at Ipswich, "in Mr. Hambie's field, on Monday the 19th of October, 1640, an extreme windy day." There is the concrete figure of that extreme windy Monday, Monday gone Two hundred and odd years: the express image of Old Ipswich, and Old England, and that Day; exact to Nature herself, — though in a most dark glass, the more is the pity! But it is a glass; it is the authentic mind, namely, or seeing-faculty, of Sir Simonds D'Ewes and his Affidavitmakers, who did look on the thing with eyes and minds, and got a real picture of it for themselves. Alas, we too could see it, the very thing as it then and there was, through these men's poor limited authentic picture of it here preserved for us, had we eyesight enough;-a consideration almost of a desperate nature! Eyesight enough, O reader: a man in that case were a god, and could do various things!

We will not overload these poor Documents with commentary. Let the public, as we have done, look with its own eyes. To the commonest eyesight a markworthy old fact or two may visibly disclose itself; and in shadowy outline and sequence, to the interior regions of the seeing-faculty, if the eyesight be beyond common, a whole world of old facts, an old contemporary England at large, as it stood and lived, on that "extreme windy day," may more or less dimly suggest themselves. The reader is to transport himself to Ipswich; and, remembering always that it is two centuries and four years ago, look about him there as he can. Some opportunity for getting these poor old Documents copied into modern hand