Lamford's Gate, riding on the bare back of a horse with
his face to the tail; dismounted at Rockley Gate, and was successively
whipped[f] in five parts of the city. His admirers, however, were not
ashamed of the martyr. On every
[Footnote 1: "This day I and B. went to see Naylor's tongue bored through,
and him marked on the forehead. He put out his tongue very willingly, but
shrinked a little when the iron came upon his forehead. He was pale when he
came out of the pillory, but high-coloured after tongue-boring. He behaved
himself very handsomely and patiently" (p. 266 in Burton's Diary, where the
report of these debates on Naylor occupies one hundred and forty pages).]
[Sidenote a: A.D. 1656. Dec. 6.]
[Sidenote b: A.D. 1656. Dec. 16.]
[Sidenote c: A.D. 1656. Dec. 18.]
[Sidenote d: A.D. 1656. Dec. 27.]
[Sidenote e: A.D. 1657. Jan. 13.]
[Sidenote f: A.D. 1657. Jan. 17.]
occasion they attended him bareheaded; they kissed and sucked his wounds;
and they chanted with him passages from the Scriptures. On his return to
London[a] he was committed to solitary confinement, without pen, ink, or
paper, or fire, or candle, and with no other sustenance than what he
might earn by his own industry. Here the delusion under which he laboured
gradually wore away; he acknowledged that his mind had been in darkness,
the consequence and punishment of spiritual pride; and declared that,
inasmuch as he had given advantage to the evil spirit, he took shame to
himself. By "the rump parliament" he was afterwards discharged; and the
society of Friends, by whom he had been disowned, admitted him again on
proof of his repentance. But his sufferings had injured his health. In 1660
he was found in a dying state in a field in Huntingdonshire, and shortly
afterwards expired.[1]
While the parliament thus spent its time in the prosecution of an offence
which concerned it not, Cromwell anxiously revolved in his own mind a
secret project of the first importance to himself and the country. To his
ambition, it was not sufficient that he actually possessed the supreme
authority, and exercised it with more despotic sway than any of his
legitimate predecessors; he still sought to mount a step higher, to
encircle his brows with a diadem, and to be addressed with the title of
majesty. It could not be, that vanity alone induced him to hazard the
attachment of his friends for the sake of mere parade and empty sound. He
had rendered the more modest title of
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