ds, for he heaped for himself such wealth as to
have been nicknamed "the Bishop of Durham!" He is here noticed for a
political crime different from that of plunder. When, in 1647, this
venerable radical found the parliament resisting his views, he declared
that "Some heads must fly off!" adding, "the parliament cannot save
England; we must look another way;"--threatening, what afterwards was
done, to bring in the army! It was this "passionate lover of liberty"
who, when Dorislaus, the parliamentary agent, was assassinated by some
Scotchmen in Holland, moved in the house, that "six royalists of the
best quality" should be immediately executed! When some northern
counties petitioned the Commons for relief against a famine in the land,
our Maratist observed, that "this _want of food_ would best defend those
counties from Scottish invasion!"[331] The slaughter of Drogheda by
Cromwell, and his frightening all London by what Walker calls "a
butchery of apprentices," when he cried out to his soldiers, "to kill
man, woman, and child, and fire the city!"[332] may be placed among
those crimes which are committed to open a reign of terror--but Hugh
Peters's solemn thanksgiving to Heaven that "none were spared!" was the
true expression of the true feeling of these political demoniacs.
Cromwell was cruel from politics, others from constitution. Some were
willing to be cruel without "blood-guiltiness." One Alexander Rigby, a
radical lawyer, twice moved in the Long Parliament, that those _lords
and gentlemen_ who were "malignants," should be _sold as slaves to the
Dey of Algiers_, or sent off to the new plantations in the West Indies.
He had all things prepared; for it is added that he had contracted with
two merchants to ship them off.[333] There was a most bloody-minded
"maker of washing-balls," as one John Durant is described, appointed a
lecturer by the House of Commons, who always left out of the Lord's
Prayer, "As we forgive them that trespass against us," and substituted,
"Lord, since thou hast now drawn out thy sword, let it not be sheathed
again till it be glutted in the blood of the malignants." I find too
many enormities of this kind. "Cursed be he that doeth the work of the
Lord negligently, and keepeth back his sword from blood!" was the cry of
the wretch, who, when a celebrated actor and royalist sued for quarter,
gave no other reply than that of "fitting the action to the word."[334]
Their treatment of the Irish may possi