Tradition respecting Oliver Cromwell

The oft-repeated story, that Oliver Cromwell had actually taken his passage in a vessel bound for New England when he was stopped by an Order of Council, is discredited by the most authoritative research, but there is good reason for believing that he at one time fully intended to join the exiles across the Atlantic, and that he would have carried his design into effect, had he failed in his candidature for a seat in the Long Parliament. In the year of the assembling of that memorable parliament, about the time when the newly-elected members were on their toilsome journeys from the provinces to Westminster, the colony of New England was beginning to take shape as an independent Commonwealth; and here, accordingly, a few pages may well be devoted to some account of the losses which Cambridge sustained, and of the corresponding gains of the New World, as the direct result of the long struggle between those opposing theories of government and belief which have thus far demanded so large a share of our attention.

Cambridge and the plantation of VIRGINIA

It is from a very early date in the history of American civilisation that we are able to trace a direct connexion between Cambridge and the colonisation of the New World. That connexion, as it first presents itself, is mainly associated with the plantation of Virginia,—with the generous impulses but highly practical aims of the navigators and explorers of the Elizabethan age.