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He had found the way of peace, since he knew that he was a vessel decreed for honour and not for wrath; but with him peace was never a constant mood. For some ten years he seems to have suffered from dark interludes of doubt, and to the end there were times when a cloud would descend upon his spirit and he had to examine himself with a trembling heart to make sure of his calling and election. Yet there were bright seasons even in the deepest gloom when he looked upon life with happy eyes, and found a new glory in a world in whose every detail he saw the love of his Creator. “I live,” he wrote, “in Meshech, 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, to his resting-place. My soul is with the congregation of the first-born, my body rests in hope, and if here I may honour my God either by doing or suffering, I shall be most glad.”^[65]

Oliver had now come to his full strength of body. He stood about five feet ten in height, his shoulders were massive, and he had a noble head thatched with thick brown hair which fell below his collar. There was vitality, and passion, too, in the long thick nose with the 1620-28 wide nostrils, and determination in the large, full-lipped mouth; yet it was an attractive face, for it left a dominant impression of kindly sagacity. In his rough country clothes he must have looked at first sight like any other substantial grazier from the shires, unless the observer had time to mark his brooding, commanding eyes. He was good company, for, though he ate sparingly and drank little but small beer, he could be very merry and join heartily in catches and glees that took his fancy. Indeed in his relaxed moments his mirth was apt to be obstreperous; for he loved horse-play and on occasion could play the buffoon, he was a great laugher, and had a taste for broad country jests and frank country speech. He rode heartily to hounds, whether the quarry were fox or buck, and his hawks were his pride; one of his earliest extant letters is about a falcon that had gone astray, with his name on its varvell.^[66] His manners were simple and his taste unfastidious, for he had never mixed in fine society, or in such lettered circles as Falkland drew around him at Great Tew or Hyde frequented on his first coming to town.

But such a one could not be incurious about the doings of the great world beyond the Ouse or insensitive to social duties. His religion was no fugitive and cloistered thing but the faith of a man-at-arms. Many puritans looked at the light and were dazzled; Oliver looked also at the objects which it lit. He passed from the problem of the relation of man to his Maker, to the problem of the relation of man to the world. He desired to see the earth made an easier place for Christian people, and even in those days he may have dreamed of an England in which might be built Jerusalem. He was to write later: “If any whosoever think the interests of Christians and the interest of the nation inconsistent, I wish my soul may never enter into their secrets.” News came late and slow to Huntingdon, but when it came it was startling enough, and was anxiously discussed in the taverns and by the firesides. In those days England was by no means insular, for many Englishmen saw their own battles being fought in foreign fields. Oliver must NEWS FROM LONDON 1620-28 have followed anxiously the doings on the Continent, the ups and downs of Mansfeld and Christian of Brunswick and the King of Denmark, the victories of Tilly’s Army of the League, and the misfortunes of the Elector of the Palatine and the “Queen of Hearts.” He must have puzzled like other people over James’s blundering foreign policy, and shrunk from his coquettings with Spain, grieved over the misfortunes of the French Huguenots and England’s feeble attempts to protect them, and grown impatient with the follies of Buckingham. Presently the old king died, and the stammering child he remembered long ago at Hinchingbrooke sat on the throne. Two years later the splendid Sir Oliver sold his estate and disappeared from the life of Huntingdon—an event which can have had little bearing on Oliver’s life, since in his new mood he must have seen little of his uncle’s family.

The news from London itself was growing graver. It looked as if the new king were a Rehoboam and not a Solomon. He had got himself a bride—not, to the relief of England, the threatened Infanta of Spain, but a vivacious girl of fifteen with wonderful dark eyes, the king of France’s sister and the daughter of Henry of Navarre. But if her father was Henry her mother had been a Medici, a house on which English eyes looked darkly. She was a catholic, too, and had brought over many papists in her train, and mass was now said regularly in the royal palace. To Huntingdon came only stray gossip but it was disquieting, and Oliver’s distaste was increased, as a serious countryman, for courts and kings. What were these gaudy folk to whom power had been given, and but little wisdom in the use of it? Elizabeth to be sure was “of famous memory,” for she had stood for the freedom of religion and of England. But his recollection of James at Hinchingbrooke was only of a man with thin shanks and padded clothes, a tongue too large for his mouth and a scraggy beard, who gobbled in his talk and had less dignity than his meanest lackey.^[67] Clearly there was no inherent virtue in the regal office.

And the new king, the thin little boy with a Scots 1620-28accent whom he had played with, promised no better. Rumour said that he was cold and hard, that he gave his confidence to the dangerous madcap Buckingham, and that he leaned away from godliness to the side of those who would corrupt the church with mummery. He had called two parliaments and had quarrelled with them. It seemed that he was improvident and always short of money, and, since he had flouted parliament, he was raising supplies by forced loans in each shire. Echoes of speeches in the Commons reached the banks of the Ouse; attacks like Eliot’s on Buckingham and the whole mismanagement overseas—“Our honour is ruined, our ships are sunk, our men perished, not by the enemy, not by chance, but by those we trust”; refusals to vote supplies without assurance of reform; exposures of false doctrine and lying priests. Parliament was the sole defence of the plain man, but it looked as if its very existence were in danger. “Remember” the king had told its members, “that parliaments are altogether in my power for their calling, sitting and dissolution; therefore, as I find the fruits of them good or evil, they are to continue or not to be.” As Oliver discussed public affairs with his graver neighbours, the notion grew in his mind that it was his duty as a Christian and a lover of England to take a hand in this conflict of light and darkness.

Meantime he went on soberly with his farming. Prices were rising, wheat was no longer half a crown a bushel, and he was getting a better return from his land. Religion was his main concern, and one of his duties was to assist the fund for buying in impropriations so as to ensure the appointment of godly ministers, and paying itinerant “lecturers” to preach in neglected parishes. His family was growing fast, for by 1628 he had five children: Robert, whose death at Felsted in 1638 nearly broke his father’s heart; Oliver, who died in the war; Bridget, who was to marry first Ireton and then Fleetwood; Richard, who was to be his father’s successor as Protector; and Henry, who was to be Lord Deputy in MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT 1628 Ireland. He still attended church, his children were duly baptized there, and Richard’s godfather was Henry Downhall who was later on parson of St Ives, but more and more his taste inclined to a different kind of communion. Three days after Henry’s baptism, on January 23rd 1628, Oliver’s fellow-townsmen of Huntingdon returned him to parliament for the borough, his colleague being another old member of Sidney Sussex, James Montague, the third son of the Earl of Manchester.