ee, and I
would not have thee swerve or lose any glorious opportunity the
Lord puts into thy hand. The Lord be thy counsellor. Dear
Robin, I rest thine,

"OLIVER CROMWELL."

For ourselves, we cannot read this, and other letters breathing the same
spirit, without being convinced that Cromwell fully shared in those
fanatical sentiments which prompted the army to insist upon the king's
death. A contemporary account, from which Mr Carlyle, some pages before
this letter occurs, has quoted largely, represents this chief of the
Puritans in exactly the same point of view. The officers of the army had
made certain overtures to the king, certain efforts at a reconciliation,
which had been fruitless; and which had been, moreover, attended with
much division and contention amongst themselves. They had turned aside,
it seems, from "that path of _simplicity_ they had been blessed in, to
walk in a _politic_ path," and were, accordingly, afflicted, "as the
wages of their backsliding hearts," with tumults, and jealousies, and
divisions. But the godly officers, says the pious record of Adjutant
Allen, met at _Windsor Castle_! "and there we spent one day together in
prayer; inquiring into the causes of that sad dispensation. And, on the
morrow, we met again in the morning; where many spake from the Word and
prayed; and the then Lieutenant-General Cromwell did press very
earnestly on all there present, to a thorough consideration of our
actions as an army, and of our ways particularly as private Christians;
to see if any iniquity could be found in them; and what it was; that, if
possible, he might find it out, and so remove the cause of such sad
rebukes as were upon us, (by reason of our iniquities, as we judged,) at
that time. And the way, more particularly, the Lord led us to herein was
this: to look back and consider what time it was when, with joint
satisfaction, we could last say, to the best of our judgments, The
presence of the Lord was amongst us, and rebukes and judgments were not,
as then, upon us.... By which means we were, by a gracious hand of the
Lord, led to find out the very steps, (as were all there jointly
convinced,) by which we had departed from the Lord, and provoked Him to
depart from us, which we found to be those cursed carnal conferences,
our own conceited wisdom, our fears, and want of faith, had prompted us,
the year before, to entertain with the king and his party. And at this
time, and on