calm but
earnest review, I may be indulged in recapitulating what, if every body
knows, they know only in a great confusion with other events, which impair
the individual interest.

Of Dixwell, comparatively little is known, save that his first act of
patriotism seems to have consisted in leaving his country. Enough that
he served in the parliamentary army; sat as judge, and stood up as
regicide in that High Court of Treason in Westminster Hall; was one of
Oliver's colonels during the Protectorate; became sheriff of Kent, and
no doubt hanged many a rogue that had a better right to live than
himself; and finally sat in parliament for the same county in 1656.[25]
His experiences after the Restoration are not known, till he emerged in
America almost ten years after the last-mentioned date.

Whalley was among the more notorious of the rebels. He was cousin to
Oliver, and one of the few for whom Oliver sometimes exhibited a savage
sort of affection. He proved himself a good soldier in a bad cause, at
Naseby; and a furious one at Banbury. When the rogues fell out among
themselves, he was the officer that met Cornet Joyce as he was convoying
the king's majesty from Holmby,[26] and offered to relieve the royal
prisoner of his protector; an offer which Charles with great dignity
refused, preferring to let them have all the responsibility in the
matter, and not caring a straw which of the two villains should be his
jailor. At Hampton Court, however, fortune decided in favour of Whalley,
and put the king, for a time, into his power; till like fortune put it
into the king's power to get rid of his brutality by flight, an accident
for which our hero got a hint of displeasure from parliament. Just at
this point Cromwell addressed a letter to his "dear cousin Whalley,"[27]
begging him _not to let_ any thing happen to his majesty; in which his
sincerity was doubtless as genuine as that of certain patriots in the
Pickwick history, who, out of regard to certain voters coming down to
the election, with money in their hands and tears in their eyes,
besought the senior Weller _not to upset_ the whole cargo of them into
the canal at Islington. After getting out of this scrape, and doing the
damning deed that got him into a worse one, he fleshed his sword against
the king's Scottish kinsmen, at Dunbar, where he lost a horse under him,
and received a cut in his wrist,[28] though not severe enough to prevent
his writing a saucy letter to the g