Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

RACHEL HAMMERSLEY

The long-term consequences of this were, according to Macaulay, devastating:

Morals, the great support of Liberty, declined under the government of Cromwell; the religion of the court degenerated into the impious fanaticism of the High Church party; these self-deceivers, instructed by Cromwell, imagined, or pretended to imagine, that their particular interests were inseparable to the interests and the will of the Deity. 7

Even Cromwell’s death did not bring an end to the troubles:

From this state of misery and corruption, into which it was again fallen, England had a pleasing prospect of deliverance, by the death of the usurper and the restoration of the power of the Parliament; but Cromwell’s reign, though short, was sufficiently long to make a perpetual entail of those evils his wicked ambition had occasioned. 8 In her Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke on the Revolution in France , Macaulay reiterated this point: Cromwell, indeed, who deprived his sovereign of life, merely to usurp his power, has, with many people, paid the debt of his crimes, by having, through the general detestation which men conceived of his treachery and tyranny, rendered the Revolution and the Revolutionists odious, and thus paved the way for the restoration of the old government. 9 On the basis of these quotations it would seem that Blair’s assessment that the commonwealthmen were hostile to Cromwell was accurate. Yet, as he noted, there was an exception to this rule in the person of the eccentric bibliophile Thomas Hollis. What makes this particularly curious is that Hollis was a close friend and political ally of Catharine Macaulay. From as early as January 1761, Hollis dined regularly with the Macaulays. 10 He sent Catharine various prints and pamphlets, some of

7 Macaulay, Political Writings , p. 46. 8 Macaulay, Political Writings , p. 46. 9 Macaulay, Political Writings , p. 274. 10 The Diary of Thomas Hollis V from 1759 to 1770 transcribed from the original manuscript in the Houghton Library Harvard University by W. H. Bond (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996), pp. 58, 84, 145.

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