Oliver Cromwell
was sprung from a younger branch of the Cromwells, a family of note and
antiquity in Huntingdonshire, and widely spread through that county and the
whole of the Fenn district. In the more early part of his life he fell into
a state of profound and prolonged melancholy; and it is plain from the
few and disjointed documents which have come down to us, that his mental
faculties were
[Footnote 1: May, 214. Journals, July 18, 19, 27; Aug. 3, 7, 9, 15, 26.
Lords', vi. 149, 158, 175, 184.]
[Sidenote a: A.D. 1643. August.]
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.
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