Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The House of Cromwell: A Genealogical History of the Family and Descendants of the Protector
About the year 1842, Mr. John Langton Sanford, of the Temple, struck by the astounding discrepancies which had long been conspicuous among the biographers of Oliver Cromwell, resolved to make an independent investigation on his own account, and to commence the task by forming as complete a collection as possible of the hero's letters and speeches. Of these, he had brought together about three hundred, when Mr. Carlyle's work on the same subject came forth to light in 1845. As each collectioncontained documents which were wanting in the other, Mr. Sanford promptly and generously surrendered his own contingent, which accordingly made part of Mr. Carlyle's second edition Of 1846. TO specify what that contingent supplied would now be a super?uous task it may suffice to mention that it included the Clonmacnoise Manifesto perhaps the most masterly and characteristic specimen on record of Cromwell's polemical discernment.
It is agreeable to add that the results of these studies on Mr. Sanford's own mind were already in felicitous accord ance with the Carlylean decisions, and had issued, to use his own terms, in a clear conviction that the theory of Cromwell's hypocrisy and selfish ambition was devoid of all support in the real facts. He had learnt also that the lives Of Pym, Hampden, and many others Of that time, required re-writing quite as much as that Of Crom well; and he became increasingly solicitous that his ao cumulated stores might be moulded into a work supple mentary to that of Mr. Carlyle, and affording a critical refutation Of the large mass of calumnious anecdote which still passes for history in works of such general value and authority as Mr. Forster's Statesmen of the Common wealth. Such a work, therefore, appeared in 1858 - the. Original title Of Life of Oliver Cromwell being sup planted by Studies and Illustrations of the Great Rebel lion - and a very fascinating book it is, fully answering the proposed design, without in the smallest degree dis turbing the majestic supremacy of the Protector. It closes with a graphic account of the fight at Marston Moor, which had never before been rightly adjusted and it supplies a few additional letters, which also may now be read in Carlyle's later editions.
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