gone on quietly enough, as far as fighting with any foreign enemy
went, but for getting into trouble with the Dutch, who in the
spring of the year one thousand six hundred and fifty-one sent a
fleet into the Downs under their ADMIRAL VAN TROMP, to call upon
the bold English ADMIRAL BLAKE (who was there with half as many
ships as the Dutch) to strike his flag. Blake fired a raging
broadside instead, and beat off Van Tromp; who, in the autumn, came
back again with seventy ships, and challenged the bold Blake – who
still was only half as strong – to fight him. Blake fought him all
day; but, finding that the Dutch were too many for him, got quietly
off at night. What does Van Tromp upon this, but goes cruising and
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boasting about the Channel, between the North Foreland and the Isle
of Wight, with a great Dutch broom tied to his masthead, as a sign
that he could and would sweep the English of the sea! Within three
months, Blake lowered his tone though, and his broom too; for, he
and two other bold commanders, DEAN and MONK, fought him three
whole days, took twenty-three of his ships, shivered his broom to
pieces, and settled his business.
Things were no sooner quiet again, than the army began to complain
to the Parliament that they were not governing the nation properly,
and to hint that they thought they could do it better themselves.
Oliver, who had now made up his mind to be the head of the state,
or nothing at all, supported them in this, and called a meeting of
officers and his own Parliamentary friends, at his lodgings in
Whitehall, to consider the best way of getting rid of the
Parliament. It had now lasted just as many years as the King’s
unbridled power had lasted, before it came into existence. The end
of the deliberation was, that Oliver went down to the House in his
usual plain black dress, with his usual grey worsted stockings, but
with an unusual party of soldiers behind him. These last he left
in the lobby, and then went in and sat down. Presently he got up,
made the Parliament a speech, told them that the Lord had done with
them, stamped his foot and said, ‘You are no Parliament. Bring
them in! Bring them in!’ At this signal the door flew open, and
the soldiers appeared. ‘This is not honest,’ said Sir Harry Vane,
one of the members. ‘Sir Harry Vane!’ cried Cromwell; ‘O, Sir
Harry Vane! The Lord deliver me from Sir Harry Vane!’ Then he
pointed out members one by one, and said this man was a drunkard,
and that man a dissipated fellow, and that man a liar, and so on.
Then he caused the Speaker to be walked out of his chair, told the
guard to clear the House, called the mace upon the table – which is
a sign that the House is sitting – ‘a fool’s bauble,’ and said,
‘here, carry it away!’ Being obeyed in all these orders, he
quietly locked the door, put the key in his pocket, walked back to
Whitehall again, and told his friends, who were still assembled
there, what he had done.
They formed a new Council of State after this extraordinary
proceeding, and got a new Parliament together in their own way:
which Oliver himself opened in a sort of sermon, and which he said
was the beginning of a perfect heaven upon earth. In this
Parliament there sat a well-known leather-seller, who had taken the
singular name of Praise God Barebones, and from whom it was called,
for a joke, Barebones’s Parliament, though its general name was the
Little Parliament. As it soon appeared that it was not going to
put Oliver in the first place, it turned out to be not at all like
the beginning of heaven upon earth, and Oliver said it really was
not to be borne with. So he cleared off that Parliament in much
the same way as he had disposed of the other; and then the council