[Footnote 1:  Clarendon, 323-333.  Northumberland repaired to his house at Petworth; the earls of Bedford, Holland, Portland, and Clare, and the lords Lovelace and Conway, to the king at Oxford.  They were ungraciously received, and most of them returned to the parliament.]

[Footnote 2:  The first association was made in the northern counties by the earl of Newcastle in favour of the king, and was afterwards imitated by the counties of Devon and Cornwall.  The patriots saw the advantage to be derived from such unions, and formed several among their partisans.  The members bound themselves to preserve the peace of the associated counties; if they were royalists, “against the malevolent and ambitious persons who, in the name of the two houses, had embroiled the kingdom in a civil war;” if they were parliamentarians, “against the papists and other ill-affected persons who surrounded the king.”  In each, regulations were adopted, fixing the number of men to be levied, armed, and trained, and the money which for that purpose was to be raised in each township.—­Rushworth, v. 66, 94-97, 119, 381.]

they were made responsible to no one but the parliament itself.  Sir Henry Vane, with three colleagues from the lower house, hastened to Scotland to solicit the aid of a Scottish army; and, that London might be secure from insult, a line of military communication was ordered to be drawn round the city.  Every morning thousands of the inhabitants, without distinction of rank, were summoned to the task in rotation; with drums beating and colours flying they proceeded to the appointed place, and their wives and daughters attended to aid and encourage them during the term of their labour.[a] In a few days this great work, extending twelve miles in circuit, was completed, and the defence of the line, with the command of ten thousand men, was intrusted to Sir William Waller.  Essex, at the repeated request of the parliament, reluctantly signed the commission, but still refused to insert in it the name of his rival.  The blank was filled up by order of the House of Commons.[1]

Here, however, it is time to call the attention of the reader to the opening career of that extraordinary man, who, in the course of the next ten years, raised himself from the ignoble pursuits of a grazier to the high dignity of lord protector of the three kingdoms.  Oliver Cromwell was sprung from a younger branch of the Cromwells, a family of note and antiquity in Huntingdonshire, and widely spread through that county and the whole of the Fenn district.  In the more early part of his life he fell into a state of profound and prolonged melancholy; and it is plain from the few and disjointed documents which have come down to us, that his mental faculties were

[Footnote 1:  May, 214.  Journals, July 18, 19, 27; Aug. 3, 7, 9, 15, 26.  Lords’, vi. 149, 158, 175, 184.]

[Sidenote a:  A.D. 1643.  August.]