Whereupon the sergeant attending the Parliament opened the doors, and Lieutenant-Colonel Worsley with two files of musketeers entered the House; which Sir Henry Vane observing from his place, said aloud, ‘This is not honest, yea it is against morality and common honesty.’*
Then Cromwell fell a-railing at him, crying out with a loud voice, ‘O Sir Henry Vane, Sir Henry Vane, the Lord deliver me from Sir Henry Vane!’ Then looking upon one of the members, he said, ‘There sits a drunkard;’* and giving much reviling language to others,* he commanded the mace to be taken away, saying, ‘What shall we do with this bauble? here, take it away!’
Cromwell having acted this treacherous and impious part, ordered the guard to see the House clear’d of all the members, and then seized upon the records that were there, and at Mr Scobell’s house.* After which he went to the clerk [Scobell], and snatching the Act of Dissolution, which was ready to pass, out of his hand, he put it under his cloak, and having commanded the doors to be locked up, went away to Whitehall.*
slightly altered
* Sir Henry Vane the Younger (1613–1662), who under Charles I had served one term as the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1636-1637), and supported the creation of Rhode Island Colony and the foundation of Harvard College.
* Thomas Carlyle suggests that Cromwell was pointing to Thomas Chaloner (1602-1660). John Aubrey (1626-1697) wrote of Sir Thomas: “He was as far from a puritan as the East from the West. He was of the natural religion, and of Henry Marten’s gang, and one who loved to enjoy the pleasures of this life.” Henry Marten (1602-1680) was an ardent republican so opposed to any kind of dictatorship that he seriously contemplated assassinating Cromwell.
* We gather from Sir Bulstrode Whitelocke (1605-1675) that Cromwell specifically accused Sir Peter Wentworth (1592-1675) and Henry Marten (1602-1680) of being ‘whore-masters’. Aubrey recalls that Charles I once refused to watch a race in Hyde Park if ‘that whore-master’ Marten was also there. “His father found out a rich wife for him,” Aubrey tells us, “whom he married something unwillingly. He was a great lover of pretty girls, to whom he was so liberal that he spent the greatest part of his estate.” On the other hand: “He was a great and faithful lover of his country, and never got a farthing by the Parliament. He was of an incomparable wit for repartees; not at all covetous; humble, not at all arrogant, as most of them were; a great cultor of justice, and did always in the House take the part of the oppressed”.
* Henry Scobell (?1610-1660), clerk to the Parliament.
* The Reader may have noticed that the famous line “In the name of God, go!” does not occur in Ludlow’s account. In fact, it does not occur in any contemporary account, nor in the fiery speech attributed to Cromwell by one T. Ireton, a correspondent in The Annual Review for 1767. Thomas Carlyle included it in his dramatic narrative, largely cut-and-pasted from older sources, written in 1845. Wherever it originally came from, the line was jerked back into public consciousness by Leo Amery MP, who quoted it when demanding the resignation of beleaguered Prime Minister Sir Neville Chamberlain in 1940.