THE WEST INDIAN INTEREST.

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forces to die as they could;—and are now lodged in the Tower, as they deserved to be. The Lord Protector, and virtually England with him, had hoped to see the dark empire of bloody Antichristian Spain a little shaken in the West; some reparation got for its inhuman massacrings and long-continued tyrannies, massacrings, exterminations of us, ' at St. Kitts in 1629, at Tortuga in 1637, at Santa Cruz in 1650:' so, in the name of England, had this Lord Protector hoped; and he has now to take his disappointment.

The ulterior history of these Western Affairs, of this new Jamaica under Cromwell, lies far dislocated, drowned deep, in the Slumber-Lakes of Thurloe and Company; in a most dark, stupified, and altogether dismal condition. A history, indeed, which, as you painfully fish it up and by degrees rewaken it to life, is in itself sufficiently dismal. Not much to be intermeddled with here. The English left in Jamaica, the English successively sent thither, prosper as ill as need be; still die, soldiers and settlers of them, at a frightful rate per day; languish, for most part, astonished in their sultry strange new element; and cannot be brought to front with right manhood the deadly inextricable jungle of tropical confusions, outer and inner, in which they find themselves. Brave Governors, Fortescue,

Sedgwick, Brayne, one after the other, die rapidly, of the climate and of broken heart; their life-fire all spent there, in that dark chaos, and as yet no result visible. It is painful to read what misbehaviour there is, what difficulties there are. Almost the one steady light-point in the business is the Protector's own spirit of determination. If England have now a ‘West-India Interest,' and Jamaica be an Island worth something, it is to this Protector mainly that we owe it. Here too, as in former darknesses, Hope shines in him, like a pillar of fire, when it has gone out in all the others.' Having put his hand to this work, he will not for any discouragement turn back. Jamaica shall yet be a colony; Spain and its dark Domdaniel shall yet be smitten to the heart,—the enemies of God and His Gospel, by the soldiers and servants of God. It must, and it shall. We have failed in the West, but not wholly ;

*

in the West and in the East, by sea and by land, as occasion shall be ministered, we will try it again and again. * Reinforcement went on the back of reinforcement, during this Protector's lifetime: a Thousand Irish Girls' went; not to speak of the rogue-and-vagabond species from Scotland,' we can help you' at any time to two or three hundred of these.' And so at length a West-India Interest did take root; and bears spices and poisons, and other produce, to this day.

Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, vol. iv., pp. 38, 53,

QUARTERMASTER SINDERCOMB, THE ASSASSIN.

Miles Sindercomb, now a cashiered Quartermaster living about Town, was once a zealous Deptford lad, who enlisted to fight for Liberty, at the beginning of these Wars. He fought strongly on the side of Liberty, being an earnest fierce young fellow; then gradually got astray into Levelling courses, and wandered ever deeper there, till daylight forsook him, and it became quite dark. He was one of the desperate misguided Corporals, or Quartermasters, doomed to be shot at Burford, seven years ago: but he escaped over night, and was not shot there; took service in Scotland; got again to be Quartermaster; was in the Overton Plot, for seizing Monk and marching into England, lately: whereupon Monk cashiered him and he came to Town; lodged himself here, in a sulky thread-bare manner,-in Alsatia or elsewhere. A gloomy man and Ex-Quartermaster; has become one of Sexby's people, ' on the faith of a Christian King;' nothing now left of him but the fierceness, groping some path for itself in the utter dark. Henry Toope, one of his Highness's Lifeguard: gives us, or will give us, an inkling of Sindercomb; and we know something of his courses and inventions, which are many. He rode in Hyde Park among his Highness's escort, with Sexby; but the deed could not then be done. Leave me the 16007., said he; and I will find a way to do it. Sexby left it him and went abroad.

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QUARTERMASTER SINDERCOMB, THE ASSASSIN.

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Inventive Sindercomb then took a House in Hammersmith; Garden-House, I think, which had a banqueting-room looking into the road;' road very narrow at that part ;-road from Whitehall to Hampton Court on Saturday afternoons. Inventive Sindercomb here set about providing blunderbusses of the due explosive force,―ancient 'infernal machines,' in fact, with these he will blow his Highness's Coach and Highness's self into small pieces, if it please Heaven. It did not please Heaven,—probably not Henry Toope of his Highness's Lifeguard. This first scheme proved a failure.

Inventive Sindercomb, to justify his 16007., had to try something. He decided to fire Whitehall by night, and have a stroke at his Highness in the tumult. He has a hundred swift horses, two in a stable, up and down:'-set a hundred stout ruffians on the back of these, in the nocturnal fire; and try Thursday, 8th January, 1656-7; that is to be the Night. On the dusk of Thursday, January 8th, he with old-trooper Cecil, his second in the business, attends Public Worship in Whitehall Chapel; is seen loitering there afterwards, 'near the Lord Lambert's seat.' Nothing more is seen of him: but about half-past eleven at night, the sentinel on guard catches a smell of fire;-finds holed wainscots, picked locks; a basket of the most virulent wildfire, 'fit almost to burn through stones,' with lit match slowly creeping towards it, computed to reach it in some half-hour hence, about the stroke of midnight!—His Highness is summoned, the Council is summoned ;-alas, Toope of the Lifeguard is examined, and Sindercomb's lodging is known. Just when the wildfire should have blazed, two Guardsmen wait upon Sindercomb; seize him, not without hard defence on his part, 'wherein his nose was nearly cut off;' bring him to his Highness. Toope testifies; Cecil peaches:inventive Sindercomb has failed for the last time. To the Tower with him, to a jury of his country with him!--The emotion in the Parliament and in the Public, next morning, was great. It had been proposed to ring an alarm at the moment of discovery, and summon the Trainbands; but his Highness would not hear of it.

This Parliament, really intent on settling the Nation, could not want for emotions in regard to such a matter! Parliament adjourns for a week, till the roots of the Plot are investigated somewhat. Parliament, on reassembling, appoints a day of Thanksgiving for the Nation; Friday, come four weeks, which is February 20th, that shall be the general Thanksgiving Day: and in the meantime we decide to go over in a body, and congratulate his Highness. A mark of great respect to him. ****

On Monday 9th February, Sindercomb was tried by a jury in the Upper Bench; and doomed to suffer as a traitor and assassin, on the Saturday following. The night before Saturday his poor Sister, though narrowly watched, smuggled him some poison: he went to bed, saying, "Well, this is the last time I shall go to bed;" the attendants heard him snore heavily, and then cease; they looked, and he lay dead. 'He was of that wretched sect called Soul-Sleepers, who believe that the soul falls asleep at death;' a gloomy, far-misguided man. They buried him on Tower-hill with due ignominy, and there he rests; with none but frantic Anabaptist Sexby, or Deceptive Presbyterian Titus, to sing his praise.

Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, vol. iv., pp. 159, 167.

THE FIFTH-MONARCHY.

At this point [1657] there occurs an extraneous Phenomenon which unexpectedly delays us for a day or two: a rising of the Fifth-Monarchy, namely. The Fifth-Monarchy, while men are meditating earthly Kingship, and Official Persons are about appointing an earthly tyrannous and traitorous King, thinks it ought to bestir itself, now or never;-explodes accordingly, though in a small way; testifying to us how electric this element of England now is.

Thursday, 9th April. The Fifth-Monarchy, headed mainly by one Venner, a Wine-Cooper, and other civic individuals of the old Feak-and-Powel species, whom we have transiently seen emitting soot and fire before now, has for a long while

be

been concocting under ground; and Thurloe and his Highness have had eye on it. The Fifth-Monarchy has decided that it will rise this Thursday; expel carnal sovereignties; and call on the Christian population to introduce a Reign of Christ,— which it is thought, if a beginning were once made, they will very forward to do. Let us rendezvous on Mile-End Green this day, with sword and musket, and assured heart: perhaps General Harrison, Colonel Okey, one knows not who, will join us, perhaps a miracle will be wrought, such as Heaven might work in such a case, and the Reign of Christ actually take effect. Alas! Heaven wrought no miracle: Heaven and his Highness sent a troop of Horse into the Mile-End region, early in the morning; seized Venner, and some Twenty Ringleaders, just coming for the rendezvous; seized chests of arms, many copies of a flaming Pamphlet or War-manifesto with title A Standard set up; seized also a War-flag with Lion Couchant painted on it, Lion of the Tribe of Judah, and this motto, "Who shall rouse him up ?" O Reader, these are not fictions, these were once altogether solid facts in this brick London of ours; ancient resolute individuals, busy with wine-cooperage and otherwise, had entertained them as very practicable things! -But in two days' time, these ancient individuals, and they are all lodged in the Tower; Harrison, hardly connected with the thing, except as a well-wisher, he and others are likewise made secure; and the Fifth-Monarchy is put under lock and key. Nobody was tried for it: Cooper Venner died on the scaffold, for a similar attempt under Charles the Second, some two years hence.

Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, vol. iv., p. 194.

SEA-KING BLAKE.

In those very minutes [20th April, 1657] there goes on far off, on the Atlantic brine, under shadow of the Peak of Teneriffe, one of the fieriest actions ever fought by land or water; this action of the Sea-King Blake, at the Port of Santa Cruz. The case

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