to them. Baxter did not know till afterwards that Colonel William Purefoy, a member of the committee and also a member of Parliament, was a confidant of Cromwell's. Purefoy, as soon as Baxter had spoken what he did of the army, answered him in an imperious manner with the following remarkable words which give a more striking picture than anything I have anywhere else met with of the terms in which Cromwell's officers spoke of him and of the terrible promptitude with which he repressed any symptom of insubordination :-"Let me hear no more of that if Nol Cromwell should hear any soldier speak but such a word, he would cleave his crown. You do them wrong; it is not so.'

"As soon as I came to the army," continues Baxter, "Oliver Cromwell coldly bid me welcome, and never spake one word to me more while I was there; nor even all that time vouchsafed me an opportunity to come to the headquarters where the councils and meetings of the officers were, so that most of my design was thereby frustrated. And his secretary gave out that there was a reformer come to the army to undeceive them, and to save Church and State, with some such other jeers; by which I perceived that all I had said but the night before to the committee was come to Cromwell before me, (I believe by Colonel Purefoy's means :) but Colonel Whalley welcomed me, and was the worse thought on for it by the rest of the cabal. "All those two years that I was in the army," continues Baxter," my old bosom friend, who had lived in my house, and been dearest to me, James Berry, then captain, after colonel and major-general, then lord of the Upper House, who had formerly invited me to Cromwell's troop, did never once invite me to his quarters, nor ever once came to visit 2 Ibid., p. 52.

1 Baxter's Autobiography, p. 52.

"2

me, nor saw me save twice or thrice that we met accidentally." Of this change in his old friend's behaviour towards him Baxter gives the following modest and candid explanation. "He (Berry) was a man, I verily think, of great sincerity before the wars, and of very good natural parts, especially mathematical and mechanical; and affectionate [well affected, or rather zealous] in religion, and he carried himself as a very great enemy to pride. But when Cromwell made him his favourite; and his extraordinary valour was crowned with extraordinary success, and when he had been a while most conversant with those that in religion thought the old puritan ministers were dull, selfconceited men of a lower form, and that new light had declared I know not what to be a higher attainment, his mind, his aim, his talk and all was altered accordingly." "After a little time Colonel Walley," Baxter further says, "though Cromwell's kinsman and commander of the Trusted regiment, grew odious among the sectarian commanders at the head-quarters for my sake; and he was called a Presbyterian, though neither he nor I were of that judgment in several points." "

2

Even among the orthodox of Walley's regiment however there were sectarians. Major Bethel's troop in particular consisted, according to Baxter, of very vehement and dangerous sectaries. One characteristic or mark to detect a sectary, in Baxter's opinion, was the disposition to dispense with vicarious preaching and prayer and thereby to encroach upon his professional functions. Great preachers were those military saints, and the parliamentary army exhibited scenes such as would be sought for in vain in any other age or nation. Of one of those scenes Baxter has preserved a sketch in outline. While he was in Walley's

1 Baxter's Autobiography, p. 57.

2 Ibid., p. 57.

3 Ibid., p. 55.

regiment, and when they were quartered at Agmondesham, in Buckinghamshire, some sectaries of Chesham had appointed a public meeting as for conference; "and this in the church, by the encouragement," says Baxter, "of an ignorant sectarian lecturer, one Bramble, whom they had got in (while Dr. Crook, the pastor, and Mr. Richardson, his curate, durst not interrupt them)." When this public talking day came, Bethel's troopers (then Captain Pitchford's), and other sectarian soldiers, mustered strong in the church. Baxter thought it his duty to be there also, and took "divers sober officers" with him. took the reading pew, and Pitchford's cornet and troopers took the gallery. There was a crowded congregation. The leader of the Chesham men began, and was followed

Baxter

by Pitchford's troopers. Baxter then took up the argument, if such it could be called, in answer to what he designates "the abundance of nonsense which they uttered," and alone disputed against them from morning until almost night.'

Another type of those strange military saints was the gallant soldier and wild enthusiast Thomas Harrison, who has come in for almost as great a share of the Royalist calumny and scurrility as Cromwell himself. For the royalist and later Jacobite writers designate Harrison "that butcher's dog," or "brood of a butcher's mastiff," because he was the son of a grazier, and "bloody," when in fact he was a most humane as well as an honourable man; as they have styled Pride "a drayman" because he was a brewer, and Hewson "a cobbler" because he was a shoemaker. Harrison was a favourite with Cromwell for the same reason that Berry was; because Cromwell naturally esteemed men who were thoroughly fit for their work—

Baxter's Autobiography, p. 56.

men who never turned back from the sword or feared the

face of a mortal enemy. But Harrison's religious enthusiasm was of a far wilder flight than Berry's, whose mind was naturally inclined to mathematical studies. Harrison's imagination like Vane's loved to dwell on the vision of a time when "Christ's saints fitted by Him to sit upon the throne of the same glory with Him, shall likewise be found prepared to bring forth magistracy itself in its right exercise, exactly answering the end for which it was set up by God; and so shall be acknowledged by all the nations of the world, during the thousand years' reign of Christ on earth." 1 Harrison's military life naturally led him more than Vane was led to contemplate the attainment of his millenial paradise through deadly strife with the powers of evil, at the great battle of Armageddon, where the kings of the earth and their armies shall be gathered together to make war against him that sitteth on the white horse, and against his army, and shall be slain with the sword; and the angel standing in the sun shall call all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven to feed on the flesh of kings and captains, of the war-horse and his rider. To men who revelled in such visions as these the dust of battle was the breath of life; and the "iron scourge and torturing hour" of the barbarians' law of treason were the keys that unlocked the gates of an everlasting Paradise.

Baxter describes Harrison as so far differing from the disputatious troopers last mentioned that he would not dispute at all, at least with him.

1 The Retired Man's Meditations, or the Mystery and Power of Godliness shining forth in the living Word, to the unmasking the mystery of iniquity in the most refined and purest

"But he would in good

forms. In which old light is restored, and new light justified. Being the witness which is given to this age. By Henry Vane Knight, 4to, 1655, p. 392.

discourse very fluently pour out himself in the extolling of free grace which was savoury to those that had right principles, though he had some misunderstandings of free grace himself.

He was a man of excellent natural parts for affection and oratory;1 but not well seen in the principles of his religion of a sanguine complexion, naturally of such a vivacity, hilarity, and alacrity as another man hath when he hath drunken a cup too much; but naturally also so far from humble thoughts of himself, that it was his ruin."2 This vivacity and this cheerfulness never deserted Harrison, not even on the scaffold, with a death of torture before him; and combined with his religious enthusiasm they made him fearless and even exulting to the last. He told the sheriff on the day of his execution that he looked upon this as a clear answer to his prayers; "for many a time," said he, "have I begged of the Lord that if he had any hard thing, any reproachful work or contemptible service to be done by his people, that I should be employed in it; and now blessed be the name of God who accounteth me worthy to be put upon this service for my Lord Christ." He told the people round the scaffold, with respect to a shaking in his hands and knees, which being observed gave rise to scoffing in some abject spirits, that the shaking was not from fear of death, but by reason of many wounds he had received in battle and much blood he had lost. "This," added he, "causeth the shaking and weakness in my nerves: I have had it these twelve years; I speak this to the praise and glory of God; He hath carried me above the fear of death: and I value not my life, because I go to my Father, and am assured I shall take it up again. Oh! I have served a good lord and

1 "Affection" seems to be here used 2 Baxter's Autobiography, p. 57. in the sense of zeal.