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Little has come down to us about the childhood and 1599-1616youth of Oliver. If the Chequers portrait is authentic, he appears at the age of two as a composed child with solemn dark eyes. There are the usual tales of portents and marvels and vaticinations of future greatness, and—from the royalist side—of youthful delinquencies. Though there was little in common between the grave livers of Huntingdon and the glittering household of Hinchingbrooke, the Cromwell family was clannish, and the young Oliver must have been often at his uncle’s house and seen something of its gaieties. It is a pleasant, and by no means fantastic, thought that there he may have met and played with the delicate little boy who was Prince Charles, and who was his junior by a year. He grew up into a strong ruddy lad, long in the trunk and a little short in the legs, with heavy features, auburn hair, blue-grey eyes and a great mole beneath his lower lip. His temper was quick but easily pacified, he was inclined to fits of moodiness, and now and then to bouts of wild merriment.

His country upbringing made him an adept at field CHILDHOOD

1599-1616sports, an expert rider, and one who loved a good horse, a good hawk and a good hound. For the rest he had his education at the town grammar school, a twelfth century building founded by that David Earl of Huntingdon who was afterwards king of Scotland. There he learned his Latin rudiments and something more, for the master was one Thomas Beard, a puritan who had written Latin plays, a tract to prove that the Pope was Antichrist, and a work of some repute in its day, The Theatre of God’s Judgments, the argument of which was that even in this life the wicked were punished and that every event was a direct manifestation of the divine justice. The pupil often felt the weight of the master’s rod, but he seems to have liked and respected him, and to have been influenced by his teaching, for Beard must have implanted in him his sense of God’s intimate governance of the world and the instinct always to look for judgments and providences and signs from on high. This puritan bias was intensified by what he heard at home. Thither in his childhood came news of the Gunpowder Plot, of Prince Henry’s death which saddened all loyal protestants, and of the devious ways of the king. When the boy had a moment to spare from his games and sports, he may have reflected upon the family talk of the outer world, and pictured it as a perpetual battlefield between the awful Jehovah who filled the thoughts of his parents and his schoolmaster, and a being called Mammon, in whose train his uncle Oliver was a noted pursuivant.

On the 23rd of April, 1616, two days before his seventeenth birthday, he journeyed the fifteen miles from Huntingdon to Cambridge and was entered at Sidney Sussex college. It was the day of Shakespeare’s death, a milestone in England’s road from Elizabethan sunlight into the new shadows. Sidney Sussex was a foundation which Laud denounced as a nursery of puritanism, and its master, Samuel Ward, was a stern disciplinarian who had been one of the translators of King James’ Bible. Oliver’s tutor was a certain Richard Howlett, a discreet and moderate man who twenty-two 1616 years later appears in Ireland as dean of Cashel, and won the approval of Archbishop Ussher.^[46]

Cambridge in 1616 was not a place to stir the intellect of a sluggish young squire from the Fenlands. The new learning of the Baconians was still in its infancy, and the fare of the ordinary commoner was still the husks of the Quadrivium. To Milton ten years later the studies were an “asinine feast of sowthistles and brambles,” and the undergraduates were “mocked and deluded with ragged notions and babblements while they expected worthy and delightful knowledge,”^[47] and his third academic “prolusion,” Contra Philosophiam Scholasticam, was a bitter attack upon the whole system. We may be certain that Oliver made no such complaint; nor was he drawn into the little circle of those whom Milton called the “fantasticks,” men like George Herbert who was now a young fellow of Trinity and was soon to be public orator. He had a certain taste for music which never left him; he knew a little Latin, enough to enable him in later life to make shift to converse with foreign envoys, though according to Bishop Burnet he spoke it “very viciously”; and he appears to have been a fair mathematician according to the easy standards of the time. He was also interested in geography, for his family had had their share in merchant-adventures, and he seems to have read a good deal of history, ancient and modern. In particular, with him as with Montrose, Raleigh’s History of the World was a favourite book, and in 1650 we find him bidding his son Richard recreate himself with it—“it’s a body of History, and will add much more to your understanding than fragments of story.”^[48]

Poetry, art and philosophy meant nothing to him, though later he was to develop a taste for pictures, and as for theology he was content with the home product. Clearly he was always an infrequent reader; a proof is that in his letters and speeches he avoids the contemporary habit of quotation, citing only the Scriptures. During his short time at Cambridge he was more concerned CAMBRIDGE 1617 with sport and company than with studies, and the royalist biographer may be trusted who describes him as “one of the chief matchmakers and players of football, cudgels, or any other boisterous sport or game.” The discipline was strict, but it was often defied, and we may assume that Oliver was not slow in breaking bounds. He had a heavy, vigorous body to exercise, and his mind was still in a happy stagnation. He was of the type against which Milton protested in his Vacation Exercise of 1628.

Some people have lately nicknamed me the Lady. But why do I seem to them too little of a man? I suppose because I have never had the strength to drink off a bottle like a prizefighter; or because my hand has never grown horny with holding a plough-handle; or because I was not a farm hand at seven, and so never took a midday nap in the sun—last perhaps because I never showed my virility the way those brothellers do. But I wish they could leave playing the ass as readily as I the woman.