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13 Arkwright Road Hampstead N.W.3.
Sept 23. 1934
Dear Mr. Buchan
I presume upon our slight acquaintance to say how much I have enjoyed your appreciation of Cromwell. Clarendon & Morley are warped by politics, & Carlyle by his fanatical admiration of force. You have taken him on the human side, & I am sure it is a far truer way.
I should like to know what women thought of him. I don't remember if Mr. Hutchinson gives him a character. Dorothy Osborne
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might have, but she probably would have done nothing but laugh at his manners. Lady Anne Clifford defied him, but I don't think she knew him, though her cursing hound loving husband Pembroke fought for him.
I should like to hear Mary Boyle (Ctss Warwick) on him. They are my chief friends of that period.
Women are better judges than men of a good man in difficulties, though they don't know a bad man when they see him.
Now I am going to differ.
You speak of Charles I as fascinating.
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2.
I don't believe you're right. I think the cult of Charles was the consequence of his death, & barely existed before that. The enthusiasm of the Cavalier was I think first hatred of Puritan morality, & secondly defence of the Church. Charles himself was a bad third.
He can't have been attractive when he was under Buckingham's thumb, and from 1625 to 1628 he behaved very unchivalrously to his wife, at Buck's dictation.
At that time, the French ambassador wrote that he was more interested in the petty details of his house-
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[house]hold than in the affairs of his kingdom, and the Venetian wrote that he was "reformed by nature as to be unable to oblige any one by word or deed". There is a letter from one of the Sidney ladies to her husband describing a gauche remart of Charles which put her to the blush. She says he tried to be polite, & adds words to the effect that his gaucherie was just like him.
He was an ungenerous enemy & a very doubtful friend.
All the Stuarts had brains & he & Charles II had considerable taste - a quality to which our
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present dynasty has always been a stranger. Charles I was, I suppose, one of the most cultivated men, & the most cultivated prince, in all Europe.
Scientific men like Harvey, & artists, liked him, & to them he was affable & interested in their work, as I expect he was to all his inferiors.
But he was extremely unlike a Cavalier. Sober & strictly virtuous, with an acute legal mind always intent on one object, he can't have had much in common with the typical Cavalier.
And I have always been struck
