impaired, that he tormented himself with groundless apprehensions of impending death, on which account he was accustomed to require the attendance of his physician at the hour of midnight, and that his imagination conjured up strange fancies about the cross in the market-place at Huntingdon,[1] hallucinations which seem to have originated in the intensity of his religious feelings, for we are assured that “he had spent the days of his manhood in a dissolute course of life in good fellowship and gaming;"[2] or, as he expresses it himself, he had been “a chief, the chief of sinners, and a hater of godliness.”  However, it pleased “God the light to enlighten the darkness” of his spirit, and to convince him of the error and the wickedness of his ways; and from the terrors which such conviction engendered, seems to have originated that aberration of intellect, of which he was the victim during great part of two years.  On his recovery he had passed from one extreme to the other, from the misgivings of despair to the joyful assurance of salvation.  He now felt that he was accepted by God, a vessel of election to work the work of God, and bound through gratitude “to put himself forth in the cause of the Lord."[3] This flattering belief, the

[Footnote 1:  Warwick’s Memoirs, 249.  Warwick had his information from Dr. Simcott, Cromwell’s physician, who pronounced him splenetic.  Sir Theodore Mayerne was also consulted, who, in his manuscript journal for 1628, describes his patient as valde melancholicus.—­Eliis, Orig.  Letters, 2nd series, iii. 248.]

[Footnote 2:  Warwick, 249.]

[Footnote 3:  In 1638 he thus writes of himself to a female saint, one of his cousins:  “I find that God giveth springs in a dry barren wilderness, where no water is.  I live, you know where, in Meshec, which they say signifies prolonging,—­in Kedar, which signifies blackness.  Yet the Lord forsaketh me not, though he do prolong.  Yet he will, I trust, bring me to his tabernacle, his resting place.”  If the reader wish to understand this Cromwellian effusion, let him consult the Psalm cxix. in the Vulgate., or cxx. in the English translation.  He says to the same correspondent, “You know what my manner of life hath been.  Oh!  I lived in and loved darkness, and hated light.  I was a chief, the chief of sinners.  This is true.  I hated godliness.  Yet God had mercy on me.  Oh, the riches of his mercy!”—­Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches by Carlyle, i. 121.  Warwick bears testimony to the sincerity of his conversion; “for he declared he was ready to make restitution to any man who would accuse him, or whom he could accuse himself to, to have wronged.”—­Warwick, 249.]

fruit of his malady at Huntingdon, or of his recovery from it, accompanied him to the close of his career:  it gave in his eyes the sanction of Heaven to the more questionable events in his life, and enabled him to persevere in habits of the most fervent devotion, even when he was plainly following the unholy suggestions of cruelty, and duplicity, and ambition.