if you meet with one Brittomart, pray send me word how you like him.  I am not displeased that my Lord [Lisle] makes no more haste, for though I am very willing you should go the journey for many reasons, yet two or three months hence, sure, will be soon enough to visit so cold a country, and I would not have you endure two winters in one year.  Besides, I look for my eldest brother and cousin Molle here shortly, and I should be glad to have nobody to entertain but you, whilst you are here.  Lord! that you had the invisible ring, or Fortunatus his wishing hat; now, at this instant, you should be here.

My brother has gone to wait upon the widow homewards,—­she that was born to persecute you and I, I think.  She has so tired me with being here but two days, that I do not think I shall accept of the offer she made me of living with her in case my father dies before I have disposed of myself.  Yet we are very great friends, and for my comfort she says she will come again about the latter end of June and stay longer with me.  My aunt is still in town, kept by her business, which I am afraid will not go well, they do so delay it; and my precious uncle does so visit her, and is so kind, that without doubt some mischief will follow.  Do you know his son, my cousin Harry?  ’Tis a handsome youth, and well-natured, but such a goose; and she has bred him so strangely, that he needs all his ten thousand a year.  I would fain have him marry my Lady Diana, she was his mistress when he was a boy.  He had more wit then than he has now, I think, and I have less wit than he, sure, for spending my paper upon him when I have so little.  Here is hardly room for

Your affectionate
friend and servant.

Letter 11.—­It is a curious thing to find the Lord General’s son among our loyal Dorothy’s servants; and to find, moreover, that he will be as acceptable to Dorothy as any other, if she may not marry Temple.  Henry Cromwell was Oliver Cromwell’s second son.  How Dorothy became acquainted with him it is impossible to say.  Perhaps they met in France.  He seems to have been entirely unlike his father.  Good Mrs. Hutchinson calls him “a debauched ungodly Cavalier,” with other similar expressions of Presbyterian abhorrence; from which we need not draw any unkinder conclusion than that he was no solemn puritanical soldier, but a man of the world, brighter and more courteous than the frequenters of his father’s Council, and therefore more acceptable to Dorothy.  He was born at Huntingdon in 1627, the year of Dorothy’s birth.  He was captain under Harrison in 1647; colonel in Ireland with his father in 1649; and married at Kensington Church, on May 10th, 1653, to Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Francis Russell of Chippenham, Cambridgeshire.  He was made Lord-Deputy in Ireland in 1657, but he wearied of the work of transplanting the Irish and planting the new settlers, which, he writes, only brought him disquiet of body and mind.  This led to his retirement from public life in 1658.  Two years afterwards, at the Restoration, he came to live at Spinney Abbey, near Isham, Cambridgeshire, and died on the 23rd of March 1673.  These are shortly the facts which remain to us of the life of Henry Cromwell, Dorothy’s favoured servant.