ouse at
Petworth; the earls of Bedford, Holland, Portland, and Clare, and the
lords Lovelace and Conway, to the king at Oxford. They were ungraciously
received, and most of them returned to the parliament.]

[Footnote 2: The first association was made in the northern counties by the
earl of Newcastle in favour of the king, and was afterwards imitated by
the counties of Devon and Cornwall. The patriots saw the advantage to be
derived from such unions, and formed several among their partisans. The
members bound themselves to preserve the peace of the associated counties;
if they were royalists, "against the malevolent and ambitious persons who,
in the name of the two houses, had embroiled the kingdom in a civil war;"
if they were parliamentarians, "against the papists and other ill-affected
persons who surrounded the king." In each, regulations were adopted, fixing
the number of men to be levied, armed, and trained, and the money which for
that purpose was to be raised in each township.--Rushworth, v. 66, 94-97,
119, 381.]

they were made responsible to no one but the parliament itself. Sir Henry
Vane, with three colleagues from the lower house, hastened to Scotland to
solicit the aid of a Scottish army; and, that London might be secure from
insult, a line of military communication was ordered to be drawn round the
city. Every morning thousands of the inhabitants, without distinction of
rank, were summoned to the task in rotation; with drums beating and colours
flying they proceeded to the appointed place, and their wives and daughters
attended to aid and encourage them during the term of their labour.[a] In a
few days this great work, extending twelve miles in circuit, was completed,
and the defence of the line, with the command of ten thousand men, was
intrusted to Sir William Waller. Essex, at the repeated request of the
parliament, reluctantly signed the commission, but still refused to insert
in it the name of his rival. The blank was filled up by order of the House
of Commons.[1]

Here, however, it is time to call the attention of the reader to the
opening career of that extraordinary man, who, in the course of the next
ten years, raised himself from the ignoble pursuits of a grazier to the
high dignity of lord protector of the three kingdoms. 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