ill not go well,
they do so delay it; and my precious uncle does so visit her, and is so
kind, that without doubt some mischief will follow. Do you know his son,
my cousin Harry? 'Tis a handsome youth, and well-natured, but such a
goose; and she has bred him so strangely, that he needs all his ten
thousand a year. I would fain have him marry my Lady Diana, she was his
mistress when he was a boy. He had more wit then than he has now, I
think, and I have less wit than he, sure, for spending my paper upon him
when I have so little. Here is hardly room for

Your affectionate
friend and servant.

_Letter 11._--It is a curious thing to find the Lord General's son among
our loyal Dorothy's servants; and to find, moreover, that he will be as
acceptable to Dorothy as any other, if she may not marry Temple. Henry
Cromwell was Oliver Cromwell's second son. How Dorothy became acquainted
with him it is impossible to say. Perhaps they met in France. He seems
to have been entirely unlike his father. Good Mrs. Hutchinson calls him
"a debauched ungodly Cavalier," with other similar expressions of
Presbyterian abhorrence; from which we need not draw any unkinder
conclusion than that he was no solemn puritanical soldier, but a man of
the world, brighter and more courteous than the frequenters of his
father's Council, and therefore more acceptable to Dorothy. He was born
at Huntingdon in 1627, the year of Dorothy's birth. He was captain under
Harrison in 1647; colonel in Ireland with his father in 1649; and
married at Kensington Church, on May 10th, 1653, to Elizabeth, daughter
of Sir Francis Russell of Chippenham, Cambridgeshire. He was made
Lord-Deputy in Ireland in 1657, but he wearied of the work of
transplanting the Irish and planting the new settlers, which, he writes,
only brought him disquiet of body and mind. This led to his retirement
from public life in 1658. Two years afterwards, at the Restoration, he
came to live at Spinney Abbey, near Isham, Cambridgeshire, and died on
the 23rd of March 1673. These are shortly the facts which remain to us
of the life of Henry Cromwell, Dorothy's favoured servant.

SIR,--I am so far from thinking you ill-natured for wishing I might not
outlive you, that I should not have thought you at all kind if you had
done otherwise; no, in earnest, I was never yet so in love with my life
but that I could have parted with it upon a much less occasion than your
death, and 'twill be no compliment to