_The Cavalier poet, born at Loitghborough in Leicestershire in_ 1613,
_son of an usher in a free school there, was sent to Milton's College,
Christ's, at Cambridge in_ 1627, _when he was fifteen years old. Milton
had gone to Christ's two years before, but at the age of seventeen.
Cleveland left Christ's College in_ 1631, _when he took his B.A. degree,
and went to St. John's, of which he was elected a Fellow in March_ 1634.
_He proceeded M.A. in_ 1634, _and studied afterwards both law and
physics, living for nine years at Cambridge. John Cleveland was ejected
from his position as Fellow and Tutor by the Parliamentary visitors in
February_ 1645 _(new style), and was sent to Newark as judge advocate
under Sir Richard Willis, the Governor. After the surrender at Newark,
Cleveland depended upon friendship of cavaliers who gave him hospitality
for his witty companionship, and the good scholarship that made him
valuable as a tutor to their sons, Cleveland, who lives among our poets,
wrote in the first days of his trouble these three prose Characters:--_
THE CHARACTER OF A COUNTRY COMMITTEE-MAN, WITH THE EAR-MARK. OF A
SEQUESTRATOR.
A committee-man by his name should be one that is possessed, there is
number enough in it to make an epithet for legion. He is _persona in
concreto_ (to borrow the solecism of a modern statesman). You may
translate it by the Red Bull phrase, and speak as properly, Enter seven
devils _solus_. It is a well-trussed title that contains both the number
and the beast; for a committee-man is a noun of multitude, he must be
spelled with figures, like Antichrist wrapped in a pair-royal of sixes.
Thus the name is as monstrous as the man, a complex notion of the same
lineage with accumulative treason. For his office it is the Heptarchy,
or England's fritters; it is the broken meat of a crumbling prince, only
the royalty is greater; for it is here, as in the miracle of loaves, the
voider exceeds the bill of fare. The Pope and he ring the changes; here
is the plurality of crowns to one head, join them together and there is
a harmony in discord. The triple-headed turnkey of heaven with the
triple-headed porter of hell. A committee-man is the relics of regal
government, but, like holy relics, he outbulks the substance whereof he
is a remnant. There is a score of kings in a committee, as in the relics
of the cross there is the number of twenty. This is the giant with the
hundred hands that wields the sceptre; the tyrannical bead-roll by which
the kingdom prays backward, and at every curse drops a committee-man.
Let Charles be waived whose condescending clemency aggravates the
defection, and make Nero the question, better a Nero than a committee.
There is less execution by a single bullet than by case-shot.
Now a committee-man is a parti-coloured officer. He must be drawn like
Janus with cross and pile in his countenance, as he relates to the
soldiers or faces about to his fleecing the country. Look upon him
martially, and he is a justice of war, one that hath bound his Dalton up
in buff, and will needs be of the Quorum to the best commanders. He is
one of Mars his lay-elders; he shares in the government, though a
Nonconformist to his bleeding rubric. He is the like sectary in arms, as
the Platonic is in love, keeps a fluttering in discourse, but proves a
haggard in the action. He is not of the soldiers and yet of his flock.
It is an emblem of the golden age (and such indeed he makes it to him)
when so tame a pigeon may converse with vultures. Methinks a committee
hanging about a governor, and bandileers dangling about a furred
alderman, have an anagram resemblance. There is no syntax between a cap
of maintenance and a helmet. Who ever knew an enemy routed by a grand
jury and a _Billa vera?_ It is a left-handed garrison where their
authority perches; but the more preposterous the more in fashion, the
right hand fights while the left rules the reins. The truth is, the
soldier and the gentleman are like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, one
fights at all adventures to purchase the other the government of the
island. A committee-man properly should be the governor's mattress to
fit his truckle, and to new string him with sinews of war; for his chief
use is to raise assessments in the neighbouring wapentake.
The country people being like an Irish cow that will not give down her
milk unless she see her calf before her, hence it is he is the
garrison's dry nurse; he chews their contribution before he feeds them,
so the poor soldiers live like Trochilus by picking the teeth of this
sacred crocodile.
So much for his warlike or ammunition face, which is so preter-natural
that it is rather a vizard than a face; Mars in him hath but a blinking
aspect, his face of arms is like his coat, _partie per pale_, soldier
and gentleman much of a scantling.
Now enter his taxing and deglubing face, a squeezing look like that of
Vespasianus, as if he were bleeding over a close stool.
Take him thus and he is in the inquisition of the purse an authentic
gypsy, that nips your bong with a canting ordinance; not a murdered
fortune in all the country but bleeds at the touch of this malefactor.
He is the spleen of the body politic that swells itself to the
consumption of the whole. At first, indeed, he ferreted for the
parliament, but since he hath got off his cope he set up for himself. He
lives upon the sins of the people, and that is a good standing dish too.
He verifies the axiom, _lisdem nutritur ex quibus componitur_; his diet
is suitable to his constitution. I have wondered often why the plundered
countrymen should repair to him for succour, certainly it is under the
same notion, as one whose pockets are picked goes to Moll Cutpurse, as
the predominant in that faculty.
He outdives a Dutchman, gets a noble of him that was never worth
sixpence; for the poorest do not escape, but Dutch-like he will be
draining even in the driest ground. He aliens a delinquent's estate with
as little remorse as his other holiness gives away an heretic's kingdom,
and for the truth of the delinquency, both chapmen have as little share
of infallibility. Lye is the grand salad of arbitrary government,
executor to the star-chamber and the high commission; for those courts
are not extinct, they survive in him like dollars changed into single
money. To speak the truth, he is the universal tribunal; for since these
times all causes fall to his cognisance, as in a great infection all
diseases turn oft to the plague. It concerns our masters the parliament
to look about them; if he proceedeth at this rate the jack may come to
swallow the pike, as the interest often eats out the principal. As his
commands are great, so he looks for a reverence accordingly. He is
punctual in exacting your hat, and to say right his due, but by the same
title as the upper garment is the vails of the executioner. There was a
time when such cattle would hardly have been taken upon suspicion for
men in office, unless the old proverb were renewed, that the beggars
make a free company, and those their wardens. You may see what it is to
hang together. Look upon them severally, and you cannot but fumble for
some threads of charity. But oh, they are termagants in conjunction!
like fiddlers who are rogues when they go single, and joined in consort,
gentlemen musicianers. I care not much if I untwist my committee-man,
and so give him the receipt of this grand Catholicon.
Take a state martyr, one that for his good behaviour hath paid the
excise of his ears, so suffered captivity by the land-piracy of
ship-money; next a primitive freeholder, one that hates the king because
he is a gentleman transgressing the Magna Charta of delving Adam. Add to
these a mortified bankrupt that helps out his false weights with some
scruples of conscience, and with his peremptory scales can doom his
prince with a _mene tekel_. These with a new blue-stockinged justice,
lately made of a good basket-hilted yeoman, with a short-handed clerk
tacked to the rear of him to carry the knapsack of his understanding,
together with two or three equivocal sirs whose religion, like their
gentility, is the extract of their acres; being therefore spiritual
because they are earthly; not forgetting the man of the law, whose
corruption gives the Hogan to the sincere Juncto. These are the simples
of this precious compound; a kind of Dutch hotch-potch, the Hogan Mogan
committee-man.
The Committee-man hath a sideman, or rather a setter, hight a
Sequestrator, of whom you may say, as of the great Sultan's horse, where
he treads the grass grows no more. He is the State's cormorant, one that
fishes for the public but feeds himself; the misery is he fishes without
the cormorant's property, a rope to strengthen the gullet and to make
him disgorge. A sequestrator! He is the devil's nut-hook, the sign with
him is always in the clutches. There are more monsters retain to him
than to all the limbs in anatomy. It is strange physicians do not apply
him to the soles of the feet in a desperate fever, he draws far beyond
pigeons. I hope some mountebank will slice him and make the experiment.
He is a tooth-drawer once removed; here is the difference, one applauds
the grinder the other the grist. Never till now could I verify the
poet's description, that the ravenous harpy had a human visage. Death
himself cannot quit scores with him; like the demoniac in the gospel, he
lives among tombs, nor is all the holy water shed by widows and orphans
a sufficient exorcism to dispossess him. Thus the cat sucks your breath
and the fiend your blood; nor can the brotherhood of witchfinders, so
sagely instituted with all their terror, wean the familiars.
But once more to single out my embossed committee-man; his fate (for I
know you would fain see an end of him) is either a whipping audit, when
he is wrung in the withers by a committee of examinations, and so the
sponge weeps out the moisture which he had soaked before; or else he
meets his passing peal in the clamorous mutiny of a gut-foundered
garrison, for the hedge-sparrow will be feeding the cuckoo till he
mistake his commons and bites off her head. Whatever it is, it is within
his desert, for what is observed of some creatures that at the same time
they trade in productions three stories high, suckling the first, big
with the second, and clicketing for the third: a committee-man is the
counterpoint, his mischief is superfoetation, a certain scale of
destruction, for he ruins the father, beggars the son, and strangles the
hope of all posterity.