CHAPTER 34 ENGLAND UNDER OLIVER CROMWELL

Before sunset on the memorable day on which King Charles the First was executed, the House of Commons passed an act declaring it treason in any one to proclaim the Prince of Wales - or anybody else - King of England. Soon afterwards, it declared that the House of Lords was useless and dangerous, and ought to be abolished; and directed that the late King's statue should be taken down from the Royal Exchange [证券交易所] in the City [伦敦城] and other public places. Having laid hold of [抓住] some famous Royalists who had escaped from *, and having beheaded the Duke Of Hamilton, Lord Holland, and Lord Capel, in Palace Yard (all of whom died very courageously), they then appointed a Council of State to govern the country. It consisted of forty-one members, of whom five were peers [贵族]. Bradshaw was made president. The House of Commons also re-admitted [重新接纳] members who had opposed the King's death, and made up its numbers to about a hundred and fifty.

But, it still had an army of more than forty thousand men to deal with, and a very hard task it was to manage them. Before the King's execution, the army had appointed some of its officers to remonstrate [make protest] between them and the Parliament; and now the common soldiers [普通士兵] began to take that office upon themselves [他们自己行使权力]. The regiments under orders for Ireland mutinied [被命令去爱尔兰的团叛变了]; one troop of horse [骑兵队] in the city of London seized their own flag, and refused to obey orders. For this, the ringleader [sb who leads a group that is doing sth illegal/wrong] was shot: which did not mend the matter, for, both his comrades and the people made a public funeral for him, and accompanied the body to the grave with sound of trumpets and with a gloomy procession of persons carrying bundles of rosemary [迷迭香] steeped [浸泡] in blood. Oliver was the only man to deal with such difficulties as these [像这样的困难], and he soon cut them short by bursting at midnight into the town of Burford, near Salisbury, where the mutineers were sheltered, taking four hundred of them *ers, and shooting a number of them by sentence of court-martial [军事法庭]. The soldiers soon found, as all men did, that Oliver was not a man to be trifled [心不在焉地考虑] with. And there was an end of the mutiny.

The Scottish Parliament did not know Oliver yet; so, on hearing of the King's execution, it proclaimed the Prince of Wales King Charles the Second, on condition of his respecting the Solemn League and Covenant [盟约]. Charles was abroad at that time, and so was Montrose, from whose help he had hopes enough to keep him holding [掌握] on and off with commissioners [委员] from Scotland, just as his father might have done. These hopes were soon at an end; for, Montrose, having raised [募集] a few hundred exiles in Germany, and landed with them in Scotland, found that the people there, instead of joining him, deserted the country at his approach. He was soon taken *er and carried to Edinburgh. There he was received [招待] with every possible insult, and carried to * in a cart, his officers going two and two [双列纵队] before him. He was sentenced by the Parliament to be hanged on a gallows [绞架] thirty feet high, to have his head set on a spike in Edinburgh, and his limbs distributed in other places, according to the old barbarous manner. He said he had always acted under the Royal orders, and only wished he had limbs enough to be distributed through Christendom, that it might be the more widely known how loyal he had been. He went to the scaffold [绞架; 断头台] in a bright and brilliant dress, and made a bold end at thirty-eight years of age. The breath was scarcely [刚刚] out of his body when Charles abandoned his memory, and denied that he had ever given him orders to rise in his behalf. O the family failing [性格缺陷] was strong in that Charles then!

六级/考研单词: execute, proclaim, princess, abolish, statue, fame, jail, peer, parliament, regiment, obey, illicit, shot, mend, comrade, funeral, grave, trumpet, gloom, procession, bundle, burst, midnight, shelter, trifle, solemn, exile, insult, cart, limb, accord, loyal, bold, scarce, abandon, behalf