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Oliver Cromwell was then in London, having come to town with three wagonloads of wool, but his wits were not woolgathering. Dissenters were not safe. There is a report noted by both Carlyle and Charles Dickens that Cromwell, having sold his wool and also his horses, embarked on a ship with John Hampden, bound for Massachusetts Bay Colony, leaving orders for his family to follow. The ship being searched by spies of Laud, Oliver and John were put ashore and ordered to make haste to their country houses and stay there and cultivate the soil. The King and his Archbishop made a slight lapse in not allowing Oliver and John to depart in peace.

When John Hampden refused to pay ship-money, Laud wanted him publicly whipped. Charles, guessing the temper of the times, allowed the case to go to trial.

Cromwell was a member of the Long parliament that ordered the arrest and trial of Laud. Laud was placed in the Tower in Sixteen Hundred Forty-one, but his trial did not take place until Sixteen Hundred Forty-four. Cromwell argued that anybody who could speak well of Laud must be heard. The trial consumed a year. Laud was found guilty of six hundred counts of gross inhumanity and violation of his priestly oath, and was beheaded with a single stroke of the ax that had severed the head of Raleigh.

At this time Charles was in the field, moving from this point to that, feeling to see if his head was in place, and trying to dodge the Parliamentary armies. Also, at this time, fighting in the ranks of Cromwell, was one John Bunyan, who was to outlive Cromwell, write a book, glorify Bedford Jail and fall a victim to Royal vengeance.

Fate dug down and tapped in Cromwell’s nature great reservoirs of unguessed strength. As Ingersoll said of Lincoln, “He always rose to the level of events.” There is an unanalyzed bit of psychology here: a man is tired, ready to drop out, and lo! circumstances call upon him, and he makes the effort of his life. Beneath all humanity there is a lake of power, as yet untapped.

Cromwell’s greatest successes were snatched from the teeth of defeat. He always had a few extra links to let out. He grew great by doing. When others were ready to quit, he had just begun. Like Paul Jones, when called upon to surrender he shouted back, “Why, sir, by the living God, I have not yet commenced to fight!”

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When conversation lags in Great Britain, or any of her Colonies, the question of whether the execution of Charles the First was justifiable is still debated.

That Charles the First was a saint compared with his son Charles the Second can easily be shown. He was cool, courageous, diplomatic, regular in church attendance, gentle in his family relations. He was objectionable only in his official capacity. He was weak, vacillating and full of duplicity. It is absolutely true that cutting off his head did not increase the sum total of love, beauty, truth, kindness and virtue in the breast of the beefeaters.

England still spends ten times as much for beer as for books, and the religion in which Charles believed is yet the established one. The religion of Cromwell, which represented simple industry, truth, and mutual helpfulness, omitting ritual, is still considered strange, erratic and peculiar.

For fifteen years the rule of Oliver Cromwell in England was supreme. With the help of Admiral Blake he drove the pirates from the Mediterranean, set English captives free, and made Great Britain both respected and feared the round world over. Spain gave way and dipped her colors; Italy paid a long-delayed indemnity of sixty thousand pounds for injuries done to British subjects; Catholic France religiously kept hands off.