To comprehend those works would be impossible without maps and plans;
to take a lively interest in them impossible, likewise, save to an
engineer or a fen-man. Suffice it to say, that in the early part of
the seventeenth century we find a great company of adventurers--more
than one Cromwell among them, and Francis, the great and good Earl of
Bedford, at their head--trying to start a great scheme for draining
the drowned 'middle level' east of the Isle of Ely. How they sent
for Vermuyden, the Dutchman, who had been draining in North
Lincolnshire, about Goole and Axholme Isle; how they got into his
hands, and were ruined by him; how Francis of Bedford had to sell
valuable estates to pay his share; how the fen-men looked on Francis
of Bedford as their champion; how Charles I. persecuted him meanly,
though indeed Bedford had, in the matter of the 'Lynn Law' of 1630,
given way, as desperate men are tempted to do, to something like
sharp practice unworthy of him; how Charles took the work into his
hands, and made a Government job of it; how Bedford died, and the
fen-men looked on him as a martyr; how Oliver Cromwell arose to
avenge the good earl, as his family had supported him in past times;
how Oliver St. John came to the help of the fen-men, and drew up the
so-called 'Pretended Ordinance' of 1649, which was a compromise
between Vermuyden and the adventurers, so able and useful that
Charles II.'s Government were content to call it 'pretended' and let
it stand, because it was actually draining the fens; and how Sir
Cornelius Vermuyden, after doing mighty works, and taking mighty
moneys, died a beggar, writing petitions which never got answered;
how William, Earl of Bedford, added, in 1649, to his father's 'old
Bedford River' that noble parallel river, the Hundred foot, both
rising high above the land between dykes and 'washes,' i.e. waste
spaces right and left, to allow for flood water; how the Great