Works

Edition de Luxe

THE WORKS

OF

LORD MORLEY

IN

FIFTEEN VOLUMES
VOLUME V

OLIVER CROMWELL

BY

JOHN VISCOUNT MORLEY

O.M.

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1921

o

7

COPYRIGHT

NOTE

EVERYBODY who now writes about Cromwell must,
apart from old authorities, begin by grateful acknow-
ledgment of his inevitable debt to the devoted
labours of Mr. Gardiner, our master historian of the
seventeenth century. Hardly less is due in this
special province to the industry and discernment of
Mr. Firth, whose contributions to the Dictionary
of National Biography, as well as his editions of
memoirs and papers of that age, show him, besides
so much else, to know the actors and the incidents
of the Civil Wars with a minute intimacy commonly
reserved for the things of the time in which a man
actually lives.

If I am asked why then need I add a new study of
Oliver to the lives of him now existing from those
two most eminent hands, my apology must be that
I was committed to the enterprise (and I rather
think that some chapters had already appeared)
before I had any idea that these heroes of research
were to be in the biographic field. Finding myself
more than half way across the stream, I had nothing
for it but to persevere with as stout a stroke as I
could to the other shore.

VI

Then there is the brilliant volume of my friend
of a lifetime, Mr. Frederic Harrison. By him my
trespass will, I know, be forgiven on easy terms ;
for the wide compass of his attainments as historian
and critic, no less than his observation of the living
world's affairs, will have long ago discovered to him
that any such career and character as Cromwell's,
like one of the great stock arguments of old-world
drama, must still be capable of an almost endless
range of presentment and interpretation.

July 1900.

In revising this edition, I have added one or two
notes on points raised in Mr. Gardiner's generous
criticism of my book (Contemporary Review) at the
time of its first appearance.

J. M.

April 1904.

CONTENTS

BOOK I

(1599-1642)

CHAP.

PROLOGUE .

I. EARLY LIFE ... ..... 6

II. THE STATE AND ITS LEADERS ..... 17

III. PURITANISM AND THE DOUBLE ISSUE . . . • 37

IV. THE INTERIM . . . . . . . -55

V. THE LONG PARLIAMENT ...... 65

VI. THE EVE OF THE WAR ...... 78

VII. THE FIVE MEMBERS — THE CALL TO ARMS ... 92

BOOK II

(1642-45)

I. CROMWELL IN THE FIELD . . . . . .103

II. MARSTON MOOR ........ 117

III. THE WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY AND THE CONFLICT OF

IDEALS ........ . i^Q

IV. THE NEW MODEL ....... 148

V. THE DAY OF NASEBY ....... 160

vii

PAGE

viii OLIVER CROMWELL

BOOK III

(1646-49)

CHAP.

I. THE KINO A PIIISONER . • • • • J75

II. THE CRISIS OF 1647 . .188

III. THE OFFICERS AS POLITICIANS . . 197

IV. THE KING'S FLIGHT . .210
V. SECOND CIVIL WAR — CROMWELL IN LANCASHIRE . .218

VI. FINAL CRISIS — CROMWELL'S SHARE IN IT . .229

VII. THE DEATH OF THE KINO . . . 238

BOOK IV

(1649-53)

I. THE COMMONWEALTH ... -251

II. CROMWELL IN IRELAND ... . 260

III. IN SCOTLAND . 273

IV. FROM DUNBAR TO WORCESTER . . . . .283
V. CIVIL PROBLEMS AND THE SOLDIER . . . .291

VI. THE BREAKING OF THE LONG PARLIAMENT . . . 302

VII. THE REIGN OF THE SAINTS . . . . -314

BOOK V

(1653-58)

I. FIRST STAGE OF THE PROTECTORATE . . . -325

II. QUARREL WITH THE FIRST PARLIAMENT . . . 342

III. THE MILITARY DICTATORSHIP 351

CONTENTS ix

CHAP. PAGE

IV. THE REACTION 362

V. CHANGE OF TACK ....... 370

VI. KINGSHIP 383

VII. DOMESTIC TRAITS ....... 393

VIII. FOREIGN POLICY ........ 400

IX. GROWING EMBARRASSMENTS . . . . . .414

X. THE CLOSE ......... 423

INDEX 437

BOOK I

(1599-1642)

I

'.

PROLOGUE

THE figure of Cromwell has emerged from the
floating mists of time in many varied semblances,
from blood-stained and hypocritical usurper up to
transcendental hero and the liberator of mankind.
The contradictions of his career all come over again
in the fluctuations of his fame. He put a king to
death, but then he broke up a parliament. He led
the way in the violent suppression of bishops, he
trampled on the demands of presbytery, and set
up a state system of his own ; yet he is the idol
of voluntary congregations and the free churches.
He had little comprehension of that government
by discussion which is now counted the secret of
liberty. No man that ever lived was less of a
pattern for working those constitutional charters
that are the favourite guarantees of public rights
in our century. His rule was the rule of the sword.
Yet his name stands first, half warrior, half saint,
in the calendar of English-speaking democracy.

A foreign student has said that the effect a
written history is capable of producing is nowhere
seen more strongly than in Clarendon's story of the
Rebellion. The view of the event and of the most
conspicuous actors was for many generations fixed
by that famous work. Not always accurate in
every detail, and hardly pretending to be impartial,
yet it presented the great drama with a living vigour,
a breadth, a grave ethical air, that made a profound

i B

2 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOK i

and lasting impression. To Clarendon Cromwell
was a rebel and a tyrant, the creature of personal
ambition, using religion for a mask of selfish and
perfidious designs. For several generations the
lineaments of Oliver thus portrayed were undis-
turbed in the mind of Europe. After the conserva-
tive of the seventeenth century came the greater
conservative of the eighteenth. Burke, who died
almost exactly two centuries after Cromwell was
born, saw in him one of the great bad men of the
old stamp, like Medici at Florence, like Petrucci at
Siena, who exercised the power of the State by force
of character and by personal authority. Cromwell's
virtues, says Burke, were at least some correctives
of his crimes. His government was military and
despotic, yet it was regular ; it was rigid, yet it
was no savage tyranny. Ambition suspended, but
did not wholly suppress, the sentiment of religion
and the love of an honourable name. Such was
Burke's modification of the dark colours of Claren-
don. As time went on, opinion slowly widened. By
the end of the first quarter of last century reformers
like Godwin, though they could not forgive Crom-
well's violence and what they thought his apostasy
from old principles and old allies, and though they
had no sympathy with the biblical religion that was
the mainspring of his life, yet were inclined to place
him among the few excellent pioneers that have
swayed a sceptre, and they almost brought them-
selves to adopt the glowing panegyrics of Milton.

The genius and diligence of Carlyle, aided by
Macaulay's firm and manly stroke, have finally
shaken down the Clarendonian tradition. The
reaction has now gone far. Cromwell, we are told
by one of the most brilliant of living political critics,
was about the greatest human force ever directed
to a moral purpose, and in that sense about the
greatest man that ever trod the scene of history.
Another powerful writer of a different school holds

BOOK i PROLOGUE 3

that Oliver stands out among the very few men
in all history who, after overthrowing an ancient
system of government, have proved themselves
with an even greater success to be constructive and
conservative statesmen. Then comes the honoured
historian who has devoted the labours of a life to
this intricate and difficult period, and his verdict is
the other way. Oliver's negative work endured, says
Gardiner, while his constructive work vanished, and
his attempts to substitute for military rule a better
and a surer order were no more than " a tragedy, a
glorious tragedy." As for those impatient and im-
portunate deifications of Force, Strength, Violence,
Will, which only show how easily hero-worship may
glide into effrontery, of them I need say nothing.
History, after all, is something besides praise and
blame. To seek measure, equity, and balance, is
not necessarily the sign of a callous heart and a mean
understanding. For the thirst after broad classi-
fications works havoc with truth ; and to insist upon
long series of unqualified clenchers in history and
biography only ends in confusing questions that are
separate, in distorting perspective, in exaggerating
proportions, and in falsifying the past for the sake
of some spurious edification of the present.

Of the Historic Sense it has been truly said that
its rise indicates a revolution as great as any pro-
duced by the modern discoveries of physical science.
It is not, for instance, easy for us who are vain of
living in an age of reason, to enter into the mind
of a mystic of the seventeenth century. Yet by
virtue of that sense even those who have moved
furthest away in belief and faith from the books
and the symbols that lighted the inmost soul of
Oliver, should still be able to do justice to his free
and spacious genius, his high heart, his singleness of
mind. On the political side it is the same. It may
be that " a man's noblest mistake is to be before
his time." Yet historic sense forbids us to judge

4 OLIVER CROMWELL

results by motive, or real consequences by the ideals
and intentions of the actor who produced them.

The first act of the revolutionary play cannot
be understood until the curtain has fallen on the
fifth. To ignore the Restoration is to misjudge the
Rebellion. France, a century and more after,
marched along a blood-stained road in a period that
likewise extended not very much over twenty years,
from the calling of the States-General, in 1789,
through consulate and empire to Moscow and to
Leipzig. Only time tells all. In a fine figure the
sublimest of Roman poets paints the struggle of
warrior hosts upon the plain, the gleam of burnished
arms, the fiery wheeling of the horse, the charges that
thunder on the ground. But yet, he says, there is a
tranquil spot on the far-off heights whence all the
scouring legions seem as if they stood still, and all the
glancing flash and confusion of battle as though it
were blended in a sheet of steady flame.1 So history
makes the shifting things seem fixed. Posterity
sees a whole. With the statesman in revolutionary
times it is different. Through decisive moments
that seemed only trivial, and by critical turns that
he took to be indifferent, he explores dark and
untried paths, groping his way through a jungle
of vicissitude, ambush, stratagem, expedient ; a
match for fortune in all her moods ; lucky if now
and again he catch a glimpse of the polar star. Such
is the case of Cromwell. The effective revolution
came thirty years later, and when it came it was no
Cromwellian revolution ; it was aristocratic and not
democratic, secular and not religious, parliamentary
and not military, the substitution for the old
monarchy of a territorial oligarchy supreme alike
in Lords and Commons. Nor is it true to say that
the church after the Restoration became a mere
shadow of her ancient form. For two centuries,
besides her vast influence as a purely ecclesiastical

1 Lucretius, ii. 323-332.

BOOK i PROLOGUE 5

organisation, the church was supreme in the uni-
versities, those powerful organs in English national
life ; she was supreme in the public schools that fed
them. The directing classes of the country were
almost exclusively her sons. The land was theirs.
Dissidents were tolerated ; they throve and pros-
pered ; but they had little more share in the govern-
ment of the nation than if Cromwell had never
been born. To perceive all this, to perceive that
Cromwell did not succeed in turning aside the
destinies of his people from the deep courses that
history had pre -appointed for them into the new
channels which he fondly hoped he was tracing with
the point of his victorious sword, implies no blind-
ness either to the gifts of a brave and steadfast man,
or to the grandeur of some of his ideals of a good
citizen and a well-governed state.

It is hard to deny that wherever force was useless
Cromwell failed ; or that his example would often
lead in what modern opinion firmly judges to be false
directions ; or that it is in Milton and Bunyan rather
than in Cromwell that we seek what was deepest,
loftiest, and most abiding in Puritanism. We look
to its apostles rather than its soldier. Yet Oliver's
largeness of aim ; his freedom of spirit, and the
energy that comes of a free spirit ; the presence of
a burning light in his mind, though the light in our
later times may have grown dim or gone out ; his
good faith, his valour, his constancy, have stamped
his name, in spite of some exasperated acts that it
is pure sophistry to justify, upon the imagination of
men over all the vast area of the civilised world
where the English tongue prevails. The greatest
names in history are those who, in a full career
and amid the turbid extremities of political action,
have yet touched closest and at most points the
wide ever-standing problems of the world, and the
things in which men's interest never dies. Of this
far-shining company Cromwell was surely one.

CHAPTER I

EARLY LIFE

" I WAS by birth a gentleman, living neither in any
considerable height nor yet in obscurity." Such was
Cromwell's account of himself. He was the descend-
ant in the third degree of Richard Cromwell, whose
earlier name was Richard Williams, a Welshman,
from Glamorganshire, nephew, and one of the agents
of Thomas Cromwell, the iron-handed servant of
Henry VIII., the famous sledge-hammer of the
monks. In the deed of jointure on his marriage the
future Protector is described as Oliver Cromwell
alias Williams. Hence those who insist that what is
called a Celtic strain is needed to give fire and speed
to an English stock, find Cromwell a case in point.

Thomas Cromwell's sister married Morgan
Williams, the father of Richard, but when the
greater name was assumed seems uncertain. What
is certain is that he was in favour with Thomas
Cromwell and with the king after his patron's fall,
and that Henry VIII. gave him, among other spoils
of the church, the revenues and manors belonging
to the priory of Hinchinbrook and the abbey of
Ramsey, in Huntingdonshire and the adjacent
counties. Sir Richard left a splendid fortune to an
eldest son, whom Elizabeth made Sir Henry. This,
the Golden Knight, so called from his profusion,
was the father of Sir Oliver, a worthy of a prodigal
turn like himself. Besides Sir Oliver, the Golden
Knight had a younger son, Robert, and Robert in

6

CHAP, i EARLY LIFE 7

turn became the father of the mighty Oliver of
history, who was thus the great-grandson of the
first Richard.

Robert Cromwell married (1591) a young widow,
Elizabeth Lynn. Her maiden name of Steward is
only interesting because some of her stock boasted
that if one should climb the genealogical tree high
enough, it would be found that Elizabeth Steward
and the royal Stewarts of Scotland had a common
ancestor. Men are pleased when they stumble on
one of Fortune's tricks, as if the regicide should
himself turn out to be even from a far-off distance
of the kingly line. The better opinion seems to
be that Steward was not Stewart at all, but only
Norfolk Steward.

The story of Oliver's early life is soon told. He
was born at Huntingdon on April 25, 1599. His
parents had ten children in all ; Oliver was the only
son who survived infancy. Homer has a line that
has been taken to mean that it is bad for character
to grow up an only brother among many sisters ; but
Cromwell at least showed no default in either the
bold and strong or the tender qualities that belong
to manly natures. He was sent to the public school
of the place. The master was a learned and worthy
divine, the preacher of the word of God in the town
of Huntingdon ; the author of some classic comedies ;
of a proof in two treatises of the well-worn proposition
that the Pope is Antichrist ; and of a small volume
called The Theatre of God's Judgments, in which he
collects from sacred and profane story examples of
the justice of God against notorious sinners both
great and small, but more especially against those
high persons of the world whose power insolently
bursts the barriers of mere human justice. The
youth of Huntingdon therefore drank of the pure
milk of the stern word that bade men bind their
kings in chains and their nobles in links of iron.

How long Oliver remained under Dr. Beard, what

8 OLIVER CROMWELL

proficiency he attained in study and how he spent
his spare time, we do not know, and it is idle to guess.
In 1616 (April 23), at the end of his seventeenth
year, he went to Cambridge as a fellow-commoner
of Sidney Sussex College. Dr. Samuel Ward, the
master, was an excellent and conscientious man and
had taken part in the version of the Bible so oddly
associated with the name of King James I. He took
part also in the famous Synod of Dort (1619), where
Calvinism triumphed over Arminianism . His college
was denounced by Archbishop Laud as one of the
nurseries of Puritanism, and there can be no doubt in
what sort of atmosphere Cromwell passed those years
of life in which the marked outlines of character are
unalterably drawn.

After little more than a year's residence in the
university, he lost his father (June 1617). Whether
he went back to college we cannot tell, nor whether
there is good ground for the tradition that after
quitting Cambridge he read law at Lincoln's Inn. It
was the fashion for young gentlemen of the time, and
Cromwell may have followed it. There is no reason
to suppose that Cromwell was ever the stuff of which
the studious are made. Some faint evidence may be
traced of progress in mathematics ; that he knew
some of the common tags of Greek and Roman
history ; that he was able to hold his own in surface
discussion on jurisprudence. In later days when he
was Protector, the Dutch ambassador says that they
carried on their conversation together in Latin. But,
according to Burnet, Oliver's Latin was vicious and
scanty, and of other foreign tongues he had none.
There is a story about his arguing upon regicide
from the principles of Mariana and Buchanan, but
he may be assumed to have derived these principles
from his own mother- wit, and not to have needed
text-books. He had none of the tastes or attain-
ments that attract us in many of those who either
fought by his side or who fought against him.

CHAP, i EARLY LIFE 9

The spirit of the Renaissance was never breathed
upon him. Cromwell had none of the fine judg-
ment in the arts that made King Charles one of
the most enthusiastic and judicious collectors of
paintings known in his time. We cannot think of
Cromwell as of Sir John Eliot, beguiling his heavy
hours in the Tower with Plato and Seneca ; or
Hampden, pondering Davila's new History of the
Civil Wars in France ; or Milton, forsaking the
" quiet air of delightful studies " to play a man's
part in the confusions of his time ; or Falkland, in
whom the Oxford men in Clarendon's immortal
picture " found such an immenseness of wit and such
a solidity of judgment, so infinite a fancy bound in
by a most logical ratiocination, such a vast know-
ledge that he was not ignorant in anything, yet such
an excessive humility as if he had known nothing,
that they frequently resorted and dwelt with him,
as in a college situated in a purer air." Cromwell
was of another type. Bacon said about Sir Edward
Coke that he conversed with books and not with
men, who are the best books. Of Cromwell the
reverse is true ; for him a single volume compre-
hended all literature, and that volume was the
Bible.

More satisfactory than guesses at the extent of
Oliver's education is a sure glimpse of his views upon
education, to be found in his advice, when the time
came, about an eldest son of his own. " I would
have him mind and understand business," he says.
" Read a little history ; study the mathematics and
cosmography. These are good with subordination
to the things of God. . . . These fit for public
services, for which man is born. Take heed of an
unactive, vain spirit. Recreate yourself with Sir
Walter Raleigh's History ; it's a body of History,
and will add much more to your understanding than
fragments of story." " The tree of knowledge,"
Oliver exhorts Richard to bear in mind, " is not

10 OLIVER CROMWELL

literal or speculative, but inward, transforming the
mind to it."

These brief hints of his riper days make no bad
text for an educational treatise. Man is born for
public service, and not to play the amateur ; he
should mind and understand business, and beware
of an unactive spirit ; the history of mankind is to
be studied as a whole, not in isolated fragments ;
true knowledge is not literal nor speculative, but
such as builds up coherent character and grows a
part of it, in conscious harmony with the Supreme
Unseen Powers. All this is not full nor systematic
like Ascham or Bacon or Milton or Locke ; but
Oliver's hints have the root of the matter in them,
and in this deep sense of education he was himself
undoubtedly bred.

His course is very obscure until we touch solid
ground in what is usually one of the most decisive
acts of life. In August 1620, being his twenty-
second year, he was married to Elizabeth Bourchier
at the Church of St. Giles in Cripplegate, London,
where, fifty-four years later, John Milton was buried.
Her father was a merchant on Tower Hill, the owner
of land at Felsted in Essex, a knight, and a connec-
tion of the family of Hampden. Elizabeth Cromwell
seems to have been a simple and affectionate
character, full of homely solicitudes, intelligent,
modest, thrifty, and gentle, but taking no active
share in the fierce stress of her husband's life.
Marriage and time hide strange surprises ; the little
bark floats on a summer bay, until a tornado
suddenly sweeps it out to sea and washes it over
angry waters to the world's end. When all was
over, and Charles II. had come back to Whitehall,
a paper reached the Council Office, and was docketed
by the Secretary of State, " Old Mrs. Cromwell,
Noll's wife's petition." The sorrowful woman was
willing to swear that she had never intermeddled
with any of those public transactions which had been

EARLY LIFE 11

prejudicial to his late or present Majesty, and she
was especially sensitive of the unjust imputation of
detaining jewels belonging to the king, for she knew
of none such. But this was not for forty years.

The stories about Oliver's wicked youth deserve
not an instant's notice. In any case the ferocity of
party passion was certain to invent them. There is
no corroborative evidence for them. Wherever detail
can be tested, the thing crumbles away, like the more
harmless nonsense about his putting a crown on his
head at private theatricals, and having a dream that
he should one day be King of England ; or about
a congenial figure of the devil being represented on
the tapestry over the door of the room in which
Oliver was born. There is, indeed, one of his letters
in which anybody who wishes to believe that in his
college days Oliver drank, swore, gambled, and
practised " uncontrolled debaucheries," may, if he
chooses, find what he seeks. " You know what my
manner of life hath been," he writes to his cousin,
the wife of Oliver St. John, in 1638. " Oh, I lived
in darkness and hated light ; I was the chief of
sinners. This is true ; I hated Godliness, yet God
had mercy on me."

Seriously to argue from such language as this that
Cromwell's early life was vicious, is as monstrous as
it would be to argue that Bunyan was a reprobate
from the remorseful charges of Grace Abounding.
From other evidence we know that Cromwell did not
escape, nor was it possible that he should, from those
painful struggles with religious gloom that at one
time or another confront nearly every type of mind
endowed with spiritual faculty. They have found
intense expression in many keys from Augustine
down to Cowper's Castaway. Some they leave
plunged in gulfs of perpetual despair, while stronger
natures emerge from the conflict with all the force
that is in them purified, exalted, fortified, illumined.
Oliver was of the melancholic temperament, and the

12 OLIVER CROMWELL

misery was heavy while it lasted. But the instinct
of action was born in him, and when the summons
came he met it with all the vigour of a strenuous
faith and an unclouded soul.

After his marriage Cromwell returned to his home
at Huntingdon, and there for eleven years took care
of the modest estate that his father had left. For
the common tradition of Oliver as the son of a brewer
there is nothing like a sure foundation. Robert
Cromwell undoubtedly got his living out of the land,
though it is not impossible that he may have done
occasional brewing for neighbours less conveniently
placed for running water. We may accept or reject
with tolerable indifference. The elder branch of his
family meanwhile slowly sank down in the world,
and in 1627 Hinchinbrook was sold to one of the
house of Montagu, father of the admiral who in days
to come helped to bring back Charles II., and an
uncle of that Earl of Manchester by whose side
Oliver was drawn into such weighty dispute when
the storms of civil war arose. Decline of family
interest did not impair Oliver's personal position in
his town, for in the beginning of 1628 he was chosen
to represent Huntingdon in parliament.

This was the third parliament of the reign, the
great parliament that fought and carried the Petition
of Right, the famous enactment which recites and
confirms the old instruments against forced loan or
tax ; which forbids arrest or imprisonment save by
due process of law, forbids the quartering of soldiers
or sailors in men's houses against their will, and shuts
out the tyrannous decrees called by the name of
martial law. Here the new member, now in his
twenty-ninth year, saw at their noble and hardy task
the first generation of the champions of the civil
rights and parliamentary liberties of England. He
saw the zealous and high-minded Sir John Eliot, the
sage and intrepid Pym, masters of eloquence and
tactical resource. He saw the first lawyers of the

CHAP, i THIRD PARLIAMENT DISSOLVED 13

day — Coke, now nearing eighty, but as keen for the
letter of the law now that it was for the people, as
he had been when he took it to be on the side of
authority; — Glanvil, Selden, "the chief of men
reputed in this land," — all conducting the long
train of arguments legal and constitutional for old
laws and franchises, with an erudition, an acuteness,
and a weight as cogent as any performances ever
witnessed within the walls of the Commons House.
By his side sat his cousin John Hampden, whose
name speedily became, and has ever since remained,
a standing symbol for civil courage and lofty love
of country. On the same benches still sat Went-
worth, in many respects the boldest and most
powerful political genius then in England, now for
the last time using his gifts of ardent eloquence on
behalf of the popular cause.

All the stout-hearted struggle of that memorable
twelvemonth against tyrannical innovation in civil
things and rigorous reaction in things spiritual
Cromwell witnessed, down to the ever-memorable
scene of English history where Holies and Valentine
held the Speaker fast down in his chair, to assert
the right of the House to control its own adjourn-
ment, and to launch Eliot's resolutions in defiance
of the king. Cromwell's first and only speech in
this parliament was the production of a case in
which a reactionary bishop had backed up a cer-
tain divine in preaching flat popery at St. Paul's
Cross and had forbidden Cromwell's old master,
Dr. Beard, to reply. The parliament was abruptly
dissolved (March 1629), and for eleven years no
other was called.

There seems to be no substance in the tale, though
so circumstantially related, that in 1638, in company
with his cousin Hampden, despairing of his country,
he took his passage to America, and that the vessel
was stopped by an order in Council. Whether he
looked to emigration at some other time, we do not

14 OLIVER CROMWELL

know. What is credible enough is Clarendon's story
that five years later, on the day when the Great
Remonstrance was passed, Cromwell whispered to
Falkland that if it had been rejected he would have
sold all he had the next morning, and never have
seen England more, and he knew there were many
other honest men of the same resolution. So near,
the royalist historian reflects, was this poor kingdom
at that time to its deliverance.

His property meanwhile had been increased by
a further bequest of land in Huntingdon from his,
uncle, Richard Cromwell. Two years after his
return from Westminster (1631) he sold his whole
Huntingdon property for eighteen hundred pounds,
equivalent to between five and six thousand to-day.
With this capital in hand he rented and stocked
grazing-lands at the east end of St. Ives some five
miles down the river, and here he remained steadily
doing his business and watching the black clouds
slowly rise on the horizon of national affairs. Chil-
dren came in due order, nine of them in all. He
went to the parish church, "generally with a piece of
red flannel round his neck, as he was subject to an
inflammation in his throat." He had his children
baptized like other people, and for one of them he
asked the vicar, a fellow of St. John's at Cambridge,
to stand godfather. He took his part in the affairs
of the place. At Huntingdon his keen public spirit
and blunt speech had brought him into trouble.
A new charter in which, among other provisions,
Oliver was made a borough justice, transformed an
open and popular corporation into a close one.
Cromwell dealt faithfully with those who had pro-
cured the change. The mayor and aldermen com-
plained to the Privy Council of the disgraceful and
unseemly speeches used to them by him and another
person, and one day a messenger from the Council
carried the two offenders under arrest to London
(November 1630). There was a long hearing with

CHAP. I

ELY 15

many contradictory asseverations. We may assume
that Cromwell made a stout defence on the merits,
and he appears to have been discharged of blame,
though he admitted that he had spoken in heat and
passion and begged that his angry words might
not be remembered against him. In 1636 he went
from St. Ives to Ely, his old mother and unmarried
sisters keeping house with him. This year his
maternal uncle died and left to him the residuary
interest under his will. The uncle had farmed the
cathedral tithes of Ely, as his father had farmed
them before him, and in this position Oliver had
succeeded him. Ely was the home of Cromwell
and his family until 1647.

He did not escape the pang of bereavement : his
eldest son, a youth of good promise, died in 1639.
Long afterward, Oliver lying ill at Hampton Court
called for his Bible, and desired an honourable and
godly person present to read aloud to him a passage
from Philippians : " Not that I speak in respect of
want : for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am
therewith to be content. I know both how to be
abased, and I know how to abound : everywhere and
in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be
hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can
do all things through Christ which strengtheneth
me." After the verses had been read, " This
scripture," said Cromwell, then nearing his own end,
" did once save my life when my eldest son died,
which went as a dagger to my heart, indeed it did."
It was this spirit, praised in Milton's words of music
as his " faith arid matchless fortitude," that bore
him through the years of battle and contention
lying predestined in the still sealed scroll before him.

Cromwell's first surviving letter is evidence alike
in topic and in language of the thoughts on which his
heart was set. A lecturer was a man paid by private
subscribers to preach a sermon after the official
parson had read the service, and he was usually a

16 OLIVER CROMWELL

puritan. Cromwell presses a friend in London for
aid in keeping up a lecturer in St. Ives (1635). The
best of all good works, he says, is to provide for the
feeding of souls. " Building of hospitals provides
for men's bodies ; to build material temples is
judged a work of piety ; but they that procure
spiritual food, they that build up spiritual temples,
they are the men truly charitable, truly pious."
About the same time (1635), Oliver's kinsman John
Hampden was consulting his other kinsman, Oliver
St. John, as to resisting the writ of ship-money.
Laud, made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, was
busy in the preparation of a new prayer-book for
the regeneration of stubborn Scotland. Wentworth
was fighting his high-handed battle for a better order
in Ireland.

CHAPTER II

THE STATE AND ITS LEADERS

STUDENTS of the struggle between monarchy and
parliament in the seventeenth century have worked
hard upon black-letter ; on charter, custom, fran-
chise, tradition, precedent, and prescription, on
which the Commons defended their privileges and
the king defended his prerogatives. How much the
lawyers really founded their case on the precedents
for which they had ransacked the wonderful collec-
tions of Sir Robert Cotton, or how far, on the other
hand, their "pedantry" was a mask for a deter-
mination that in their hearts rested on very differ-
ent grounds, opens a discussion into which we need
not enter here. What the elective element in the
old original monarchy amounted to, and what the
popular element in the ancient deliberative council
amounted to ; what differences in power and pre-
rogative marked the office of a king when it was filled
by Angevin, by Plantagenet, or by Tudor ; how the
control of parliament over legislation and taxation
stood under the first three Edwards and under the
last three Henries ; whether the popular champions
in the seventeenth century were abandoning both
the accustomed theory and the practice of parlia-
ment from Edward I. to the end of Elizabeth ;
whether the real conservative on the old lines of
the constitution was not King Charles himself, — all

n c

18 OLIVER CROMWELL

these and kindred questions, profoundly interesting
as they are, fill little space in the story of Cromwell.
It was not until the day of the lawyers and the
constitutionalists had passed that Cromwell's hour
arrived, and " the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
of custom, law, and statute " vanished from men's
thoughts.

To a man of Cromwell's political mind the ques-
tions were plain and broad, and could be solved
without much history. If the estates of the crown
no longer sufficed for the public service, could the
king make the want good by taxing his subjects at
his own good pleasure ? Or was the charge to be
exclusively imposed by the estates of the realm ?
Were the estates of the realm to have a direct voice
in naming agents and officers of executive power, and
to exact a full responsibility to themselves for all acts
done in the name of executive power ? Was the
freedom of the subject to be at the mercy of arbitrary
tribunals, and were judges to be removable at the
king's pleasure ? What was to be done — and this
came closest home of all — to put down cruel assump-
tions of authority by the bishops, to reform the idle-
ness of the clergy, to provide godly and diligent
preachers, and sternly to set back the rising tide of
popery, of vain ceremonial devices, and pernicious
Arminian doctrine ? Such was the simple state-
ment of the case as it presented itself to earnest and
stirring men. Taxation and religion have ever been
the two prime movers in human revolutions : in the
civil troubles in the seventeenth century both these
powerful factors were combined.

II

In more than one important issue the king un-
doubtedly had the black-letter upon his side, and
nothing is easier than to show that in some of the
transactions, even before actual resort to arms, the

CHAP, ii KING AND PARLIAMENT 19

Commons defied both letter and spirit. Charles was
not an Englishman by birth, training, or temper, but
he showed himself at the outset as much a legalist in
method and argument as Coke, Selden, St. John, or
any Englishman among them. It was in its worst
sense that he thus from first to last played the
formalist, and if to be a pedant is to insist on apply-
ing a stiff theory to fluid fact, no man ever deserved
the name better.

Both king and Commons, however, were well
aware that the vital questions of the future could
be decided by no appeals to an obscure and dis-
putable past. The manifest issue was whether
prerogative was to be the basis of the government
of England. Charles held that it had been always
so, and made up his mind that so it should remain.
He had seen the court of Paris, he had lived for
several months in the court of Madrid, and he
knew no reason why the absolutism of France
and of Spain should not flourish at Whitehall.
More certain than vague influences such as these
was the rising tide of royalism in high places in the
church.

If this was the mind of Charles, Pym and Hamp-
den and their patriot friends were equally resolved
that the base of government should be in the parlia-
ment and in the Commons branch of the parliament.
They claimed for parliament a general competence in
making laws, granting money, levying taxes, super-
vising the application of their grants, restricting
abuses of executive power, and holding the king's
servants answerable for what they did or failed to
do. Beyond all this vast field of activity and power,
they entered upon the domain of the king as head
of the church, and England found herself plunged
into the vortex of that religious excitement which
for a whole century and almost without a break
had torn the Christian world, and distracted Europe
with bloodshed and clamour that shook thrones,

20 OLIVER CROMWELL

principalities, powers, and stirred the souls of men
to their depths.

This double and deep -reaching quarrel, partly
religious, partly political, Charles did not create.
He inherited it in all its sharpness along with the
royal crown. In nearly every country in Europe
the same battle between monarch and assembly
had been fought, and in nearly every case the pos-
session of concentrated authority and military force,
sometimes at the expense of the nobles, sometimes
of the burghers, had left the monarch victorious.
Queen Elizabeth of famous memory — " we need not
be ashamed to call her so," said Cromwell — carried
prerogative at its highest. In the five-and-forty
years of her reign only thirteen sessions of parliament
were held, and it was not until near the close of her
life that she heard accents of serious complaint.
Constitutional history in Elizabeth's time — the
momentous institution of the Church of England
alone excepted — is a blank chapter. Yet in spite
of the subservient language that was natural to-
ward so puissant and successful a ruler as Elizabeth,
signs were not even then wanting that, when the
stress of national peril should be relaxed, arbitrary
power would no longer go unquestioned. The reign
of James was one long conflict. The struggle went
on for twenty years, and for every one of the most
obnoxious pretensions and principles that were after-
ward sought to be established by King Charles, a
precedent had been set by his father.

Neither the temperament with which Charles I.
was born, nor the political climate in which he
was reared, promised any good deliverance from
so dangerous a situation. In the royal council-
chamber, in the church, from the judicial bench,—
these three great centres of organised government,
— in all he saw prevailing the same favour for
arbitrary power, and from all he learned the same
oblique lessons of practical statecraft. On the side

CHAP, ii KING AND PARLIAMENT 21

of religion his subjects noted things of dubious omen.
His mother, Anne of Denmark, though her first
interests were those of taste and pleasure, was
probably at heart a catholic. His grandmother,
Mary Queen of Scots, had been the renowned repre-
sentative and champion of the catholic party in
the two kingdoms. From her and her mother,
Mary of Guise, Charles had in his veins the blood
of that potent house of Lorraine who were in
church and state the standard-bearers of the catholic
cause in France. A few weeks after his accession he
married (May 1625) the sister of the King of France
and daughter of Henry of Navarre. His wife, a girl
of fifteen at the time of her marriage, was a Bourbon
on one side and a Medici on the other, an ardent
catholic, and a devoted servant of the Holy See.
That Charles was ever near to a change of faith there
is no reason whatever to suppose. But he played
with the great controversy when the papal emissaries
round the queen drew him into argument, and he
was as bitterly averse from the puritanic ideas,
feelings, and aspirations of either England or
Scotland, as Mary Stuart had ever been from the
doctrines and discourses of John Knox.

It has been said that antagonism between Charles
and his parliament broke out at once as an historical
necessity. The vast question may stand over, how
far the working of historical necessity is shaped by
character and motive in given individuals. Suppose
that Charles had been endowed with the qualities
of Oliver, — his strong will, his active courage, his
powerful comprehension, above all his perception of
immovable facts, — how might things have gone ?
Or suppose Oliver the son of King James, and that
he had inherited such a situation as confronted
Charles ? In either case the English constitution,
and the imitations of it all over the globe, might
have been run in another mould. As it was, Charles
had neither vision nor grasp. It is not enough to

22 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOK:

say that he was undone by his duplicity. There are
unluckily far too many awkward cases in history
where duplicity has come off triumphant. Charles
was double, as a man of inferior understanding
would be double who had much studied Bacon's
essay on Simulation and Dissimulation, without
digesting it or ever deeply marking its first sentence,
that dissimulation is but a faint kind of policy or
wisdom, for it asketh a strong wit and a strong heart
to know when to tell truth and to do it ; therefore
it is the worst sort of politicians that are the great
dissemblers. This pregnant truth Charles never
took to heart. His fault — and no statesman can
have a worse — was that he never saw things as they
were. He had taste, imagination, logic, but he was
a dreamer, an idealist, and a theoriser, in whom
there might have been good rather than evil if only
his dreams, theories, and ideals had not been out of
relation with the hard duties of a day of storm.
He was gifted with a fine taste for pictures, and
he had an unaffected passion for good literature.
When he was a captive he devoted hours daily not
only to Bishop Andrewes and the Ecclesiastical
Polity of Hooker, but to Tasso, Ariosto, the Faerie
Queene, and above all to Shakespeare.

He was not without the more mechanical qualities
of a good ruler : he was attentive to business,
methodical, decorous, as dignified as a man can
be without indwelling moral dignity, and a thrifty
economist meaning well by his people. His manners
if not actually ungracious were ungenial and dis-
obliging. " He was so constituted by nature," said
the Venetian ambassador, " that he never obliges
anybody either by word or by act." In other words,
he was the royal egotist without the mask. Of
gratitude for service, of sympathy, of courage in
friendship, he never showed a spark. He had one
ardent and constant sentiment, his devotion to his
consort.

CHAP, n HENRIETTA MARIA 23

One of the glories of literature is the discourse in
which the mightiest of French divines commemor-
ates the strange vicissitudes of fortune — the glitter-
ing exaltation, the miseries, the daring, the fortitude,
and the unshaken faith of the queen of Charles I.
As the delineation of an individual it is exaggerated
and rhetorical, but the rhetoric is splendid and pro-
found. Bossuet, more than a divine, was moralist,
statesman, philosopher, exploring with no mere
abstract speculative eye the thread of continuous
purpose in the history of mankind, but using know-
ledge, eloquence, and art to mould the wills of men.
His defence of established order has been called
the great spectacle of the seventeenth century. It
certainly was one of them, and all save narrow
minds will choose to hear how the spectacle in
England moved this commanding genius.

Taking a text that was ever present to him, " Be
wise now therefore, O ye kings : be instructed, ye
judges of the earth," Bossuet treated that chapter
of history in which the life of Henrietta Maria was
an episode, as a lofty drama with many morals of its
own. " I am not a historian," he says, " to unfold
the secrets of cabinets, or the ordering of battlefields,
or the interests of parties ; it is for me to raise
myself above man, to make every creature tremble
under the judgments of Almighty God." Not con-
tent with the majestic commonplaces so eternally
true, so inexorably apt, yet so incredulously heard,
about the nothingness of human pomp and earthly
grandeur, he extracts special lessons from the
calamities of the particular daughter of St. Louis
whose lot inspired his meditations. What had
drawn these misfortunes on the royal house in
England ? Was it inborn libertinism in English
character that brought the rebellion about ? Nay,
he cries ; when we look at the incredible facility
with which religion was first overthrown in that
country, then restored, then overthrown again, by

24 OLIVER CROMWELL

Henry VIIL, by Edward VI., by Mary, by Elizabeth,
so far from finding the nation rebellious, or its
parliament proud or factious, we are driven to
reproach the English people with being only too
submissive. For did they not place their very
faith, their consciences, their souls, under the yoke
of earthly kings ? The fault was with the kings
themselves. They it was who taught the nation
that their ancient catholic creed was a thing to be
lightly flung away. Subjects ceased to revere the
maxims of religion, when they saw them wantonly
surrendered to the passions or the interests of their
princes. Then the great orator, with a command
of powerful stroke upon stroke that presbyterians
in their war with independents might well have
envied, drew a picture of the mad rage of the English
for disputing of divine things without end, without
rule, without submission, men's minds falling head-
long from ruin to ruin. Who could arrest the
catastrophe but the bishops of the church ? And
then turning to reproach them as sternly as he had
reproached their royal masters, it was the bishops,
he exclaimed, who had brought to naught the
authority of their own thrones by openly condemn-
ing all their predecessors up to the very source of
their consecration, up to St. Gregory the Pope and
St. Augustine the missionary monk. By skilfully
worded contrast with these doings of apostate kings
and prelates, he glorified the zeal of Henrietta Maria ;
boasted how many persons in England had abjured
their errors under the influence of her almoners ;
and how the zealous shepherds of the afflicted
catholic flock of whom the world was not worthy,
saw with joy restored the glorious symbols of their
faith in the chapel of the Queen of England, and the
persecuted church that in other days hardly dared
so much as to sigh or weep over its past glory, now
sang aloud the song of Zion in a strange land.

All this effulgence of words cannot alter the fact

HENRIETTA MARIA 25

that the queen was the evil genius of her husband,
and of the nation over whom a perverse fate had
appointed him to rule. Men ruefully observed that
a French queen never brought happiness to England.
To suffer women of foreign birth and alien creed to
meddle with things of state, they reflected, had ever
produced grievous desolation for our realm. Charles
had a fancy to call her Marie rather than Henrietta,
and even puritans had superstition enough to find a
bad omen in a woman's name that was associated
with no good luck to England. Of the many
women, good and bad, who have tried to take part
in affairs of state from Cleopatra or the Queen of
Sheba downwards, nobody by character or training
was ever worse fitted than the wife of Charles I. for
such a case as that in which she found herself.
Henry IV., her father, thought that to change his
Huguenot faith and go to mass was an easy price
to pay for the powerful support of Paris. Her
mother came of the marvellous Florentine house
that had given to Europe such masters of craft as
Cosmo and Lorenzo, Leo X. and Clement VII., and
Catherine of the Bartholomew massacre. But the
queen had none of the depth of these famous person-
ages. To her, alike as catholic and as queen seated
on a shaking throne, the choice between bishop
and presbyter within a protestant communion was
matter for contemptuous indifference. She under-
stood neither her husband's scruples nor the motives
of his adversaries. The sanctity of law and im-
memorial custom, rights of taxation, parliamentary
privilege, Magna Charta, habeas corpus, and all the
other symbols of our civil freedom, were empty
words without meaning to her petulant and un-
trained mind. In Paris by the side of the great
ladies whose lives were passed in seditious intrigues
against Richelieu or Mazarin, Henrietta Maria would
have been in her native element. She would have
delighted in all the intricacies of the web of fine-

26 OLIVER CROMWELL

spun conspiracy in which Maria de' Medici, her
mother, and Anne of Austria, her sister-in-law, and
Mme. de Chevreuse, her close friend and comrade,
first one and then the other spent their restless
days. Habits and qualities that were mischiev-
ous enough even in the galleries of the Louvre,
in the atmosphere of Westminster and Whitehall
were laden with immediate disaster. In intrepidity
and fortitude she was a true daughter of Henry
of Navarre. Her energy was unsparing, and her
courage. Nine times she crossed the seas in storm
and tempest. When her waiting - women were
trembling and weeping, she assured them, with an
air of natural serenity that seemed of itself to bring
back calm, that no queen was ever drowned.

D'Ewes has left a picture of the queen as he saw
her at dinner at Whitehall, long after her marriage :
" I perceived her to be a most absolute delicate lady,
after I had exactly surveyed all the features of her
face, much enlivened by her radiant and sparkling
black eyes. Besides, her deportment among her
women was so sweet and humble, and her speech and
looks to her other servants so mild and gracious, as
I could not abstain from divers deep-fetched sighs,
to consider that she wanted the knowledge of the
true religion." " The queen," says Burnet, " was a
woman of great vivacity in conversation, and loved
all her life long to be in intrigues of all sorts, but was
not so secret in them as such times and affairs re-
quired. She was a woman of no manner of judg-
ment ; she was bad at contrivance, and much worse
in execution ; but by the liveliness of her discourse
she made always a great impression on the king."

in

Just as the historic school has come to an end that
despatched Oliver Cromwell as a hypocrite, so we are
escaping from the other school that dismissed Charles

CHAP, n WENTWORTH 27

as a tyrant, Laud as a driveller and a bigot, and
Wentworth as an apostate. That Wentworth passed
over from the popular to the royalist side, and that
by the same act he improved his fortunes and exalted
his influence, is true. But there is no good reason to
condemn him for shifting the foundation of his views
of national policy. He was never a puritan, and
never a partisan of the supremacy of parliament. By
temperament and conviction he was a firm believer
in organised authority. Though he began in opposi-
tion, his instincts all carried him toward the side of
government ; and if he came round to the opinion
that a single person, and not the House of Commons,
was the vital organ of national authority, this was an
opinion that Cromwell himself in some of the days
to come was destined apparently to share and to
exemplify. Wentworth's ideal was centred in a<
strong state, exerting power for the common good ; \
and the mainspring of a strong state must be
monarch, not parliament. It was the idea of the
time that governing initiative must come from the
throne, with or without a check in the people.
Happily for us, men of deeper insight than Went-
worth perceived that the assertion of the popular
check was at this deciding moment in English history
more important than to strengthen executive power
in the hands of the king. Wentworth, with all the
bias of a man born for government and action, may
easily have come to think otherwise. That he
associated the elevation of his own personality with
the triumph of what he took for the right cause, is a
weakness, if weakness it be, that he shares with some
of the most upright reformers that have ever lived.
It is a chaste ambition if rightly placed, he said at
his trial, to have as much power as may be, that there
may be power to do the more good in the place where
a man lives. The actual possession of power stimu-
lated this natural passion for high principles of
government. His judgment was clear, as his wit

28 OLIVER CROMWELL

and fancy were quick. He was devoted to friends,
never weary of taking pains for them, thinking
nothing too dear for them. If he was extremely
choleric and impatient, yet it was in a large and
imperious way. He had energy, boldness, un-
sparing industry and attention, long-sighted con-
tinuity of thought and plan, lofty flight, and as true
a concern for order and the public service as Pym or
Oliver or any of them.

One short scene may suffice to bring him in act
and life before us. The convention of the Irish
clergy met to discuss the question of bringing their
canons into conformity with those of the English
church. Wentworth writes from Dublin to Laud
(1634) :

The popish party growing extreme perverse in the
Commons House, and the parliament thereby in great
danger to have been lost in a storm, had so taken up my
thoughts and endeavours, that for five or six days it was
not almost possible for me to take an account how business
went amongst them of the clergy. ... At length I got a
little time, and that most happily, to inform myself of the
state of those papers, and found (that they had done divers
things of great inconvenience without consultation with
their bishops). I instantly sent for Dean Andrews, that
reverend clerk who sat forsooth in the chair of this com-
mittee, requiring him to bring along the aforesaid book
of canons. . . . When I came to open the book and run
over their deliberandums in the margin, I confess I was not
so much moved since I came into Ireland. I told him,
certainly not a dean of Limerick, but Ananias had sat in
the chair of that committee ; however sure I was Ananias
had been there in spirit, if not in body, with all the frater-
nities and conventicles of Amsterdam ; that I was ashamed
and scandalised with it above measure. I therefore said
he should leave the book with me, and that I did command
him that he should report nothing to the House until he
heard again from me. Being thus nettled, I gave present
directions for a meeting, and warned the primate (certain
bishops, etc.) to be with me the next morning. Then I
publicly told them how unlike clergymen, that owed canoni-
cal obedience to their superiors, they had proceeded in their

CHAP, ii WENTWORTH 29

committee ; how unheard of a part it was for a few petty
clerks to presume to make articles of faith. . . . But those
heady and arrogant courses, they must know, I was not to
endure ; but if they were disposed to be frantic in this dead
and cold season of the year, would I suffer them to be heard
either in convocation or in their pulpits. (Then he gave
them five specific orders.) This meeting then broke off ; there
were some hot spirits, sons of thunder, amongst them, who
moved that they should petition me for a free synod. But,
in fine, they could not agree among themselves who should
put the bell about the cat's neck, and so this likewise
vanished.

All this marks precisely the type of man required
to deal with ecclesiastics and rapacious nobles alike.
The English colonist and his ecclesiastical con-
federate and ally were the enemy, and nobody has
ever seen this so effectually as Strafford saw it.
Bishops were said to be displaced with no more
ceremony than excisemen. The common impres-
sion of Wentworth is shown in an anecdote about
Williams, afterwards Archbishop of York. When
the court tried to pacify Williams with the promise
of a good bishopric in Ireland, he replied that he had
held out for seven years against his enemies in
England, but if they sent him to Ireland he would
fall into the hands of a man who within seven months
would find out some old statute or other to cut off
his head.

The pretty obvious parallel has often been sug-
gested between Strafford and Richelieu ; but it is
no more than superficial. There is no proportion
between the vast combinations, the immense designs,
the remorseless rigours, and the majestic success
with which the great cardinal built up royal power
in France and subjugated reactionary forces in
Europe, and the petty scale of Wentworth's eight
years of rule in Ireland. To frighten Dean Andrews
or Lord Mountnorris out of their wits was a very
different business from bringing Montmorencys,
Chalais, Marillacs, Cinq-Mars, to the scaffold. It is

30 OLIVER CROMWELL

true that the general aim was not very different.
Richelieu said to the king : "I promised your
Majesty to employ all my industry and all the
authority that he might be pleased to give me to
ruin the Huguenot party, to beat down the pride of
the great, to reduce all subjects to their duty, and
to raise up his name among other nations to the
height at which it ought to be." Straff ord would
have said much the same. He, too, aspired to make
his country a leading force in the councils of Europe,
as Elizabeth had done, and by Elizabeth's patient
and thrifty policy. Unlike his master of flighty and
confused brain, he perceived the need of system and
a sure foundation. Strafford's success would have
meant the transformation of the state within the
three kingdoms, not into the monarchy of the
Restoration of 1660 or of the Revolution of 1688, but
at best into something like the qualified absolutism
of modern Prussia.

As time went on and things grew hotter, Went-
worth's ardent and haughty genius drew him into
more energetic antagonism to the popular claim
and its champions. In his bold and imposing
personality they recognised that all those sinister
ideas, methods, and aims which it was the business
of their lives to overthrow, were gathered up. The
precise date is not easily fixed at which Wentworth
gained a declared ascendancy in the royal counsels,
if ascendancy be the right word for a chief position
in that unstable chamber. In 1632 he was made
Lord Deputy in Ireland, he reached Dublin Castle in
the following year, and for seven years he devoted
himself exclusively to Irish administration. He does
not seem to have been consulted upon general affairs
before 1637, and it was later than this when Charles
began to lean upon him. It was not until 1640 that
he could prevail upon the king to augment his politi-
cal authority by making him Lord-Lieutenant and
Earl of Strafford.

CHAP, n ARCHBISHOP LAUD 31

If Strafford was a bad counsellor for the times,
and the queen a worse, Laud,1 who filled the critical
station of Archbishop of Canterbury, was perhaps
the worst counsellor of the three. Still let us save
ourselves from the extravagances of some modern
history. " His memory," writes one, " is still
loathed as the meanest, the most cruel, and the
most narrow-minded man who ever sat on the
episcopal bench " (Buckle). " We entertain more
unmitigated contempt for him," says another,
" than for any character in history " (Macaulay).
It is pretty safe to be sure that these slashing super-
latives are never true. Laud was no more the
simpleton and the bigot of Macaulay, than he was
the saint to whom in our day Anglican high-fliers
dedicate painted windows, or whom they describe
as Newman did, as being " cast in a mould of pro-
portions that are much above our own, and of a
stature akin to the elder days of the church." Burnet,
who was no Laudian, says that he " was a learned,
a sincere and zealous man, regular in his own life,
and humble in his private deportment ; but he was
a hot, indiscreet man, eagerly pursuing some matters
that were either very inconsiderable or mischievous,
such as setting the communion-table by the east
wall of churches, bowing to it and calling it the altar,
the breaking of lectures, the encouraging of sports
on the Lord's day ; . . . and yet all the zeal and
heat of that time was laid out on these." The agent
of the Vatican described him as timid, ambitious,
inconstant, and therefore ill equipped for great
enterprises. Whitelocke tells us that his father was
anciently and thoroughly acquainted with Laud,
and used to say of him that he was "too full of
fire, though a just and good man ; and that his
want of experience in state matters, and his too
much zeal for the church, and heat if he proceeded

1 For a fearful diatribe against Laud by James Mill, see Bain's Life
of James Mill, p. 290.

32 OLIVER CROMWELL

in the way he was then in, would set this nation
on fire."

It was indeed Laud who did most to kindle the
blaze. He was harder than anybody else both in the
Star Chamber and the High Commission. He had a
restless mind, a sharp tongue, and a hot temper ; he
took no trouble to persuade, and he leaned wholly on
the law of the church and the necessity of enforcing
obedience to it. He had all the harshness that is
so common in a man of ardent convictions, who
happens not to have intellectual power enough to
defend them. But he was no harder of heart than
most of either his victims or his judges. Prynne
was more vindictive and sanguinary than Laud ;
and a Scottish presbyter could be as arrogant and
unrelenting as the English primate. Much of Laud's
energy was that of good stewardship. The reader
who laughs at his injunction that divines should
preach in gowns and not in cloaks, must at least
applaud when in the same document avaricious
bishops are warned not to dilapidate the patrimony
of their successors by making long leases, or taking
heavy fines on renewal, or cutting down the timber.
This was one side of that love of external order,
uniformity, and decorum, which when applied to
rites and ceremonies, church furniture, church
apparel, drove English puritanism 'frantic. " It
is called superstition nowadays," Laud complained,
" for any man to come with more reverence into a
church, than a tinker and his dog into an ale-house."

That he had any leaning towards the Pope is
certainly untrue ; and his eagerness to establish a
branch of the Church of England in all the courts of
Christendom, and even in the cities of the Grand
Turk, points rather to an exalted dream that the
Church of England might one day spread itself as far
abroad as the Church of Rome. Short of this, he
probably aspired to found a patriarchate of the three
kingdoms, with Canterbury as the metropolitan

ARCHBISHOP LAUD 33

centre. He thought the puritans narrow, and the
Pope's men no better. Churchmen in all ages are
divided into those on the one hand who think most
of institutions, and those on the other who think
most of the truths on which the institutions rest,
and of the spirit that gives them life. Laud was
markedly of the first of these two types, and even of
that doctrinal zeal that passed for spiritual unction
in those hot times he had little. Yet it is worth
remembering that it was his influence that overcame
the reluctance of the pious and devoted George
Herbert to take orders. This can hardly have been
the influence of a mean and cruel bigot. Jeremy
Taylor, whose Liberty of Prophesying is one of the
landmarks in the history of toleration, was the client
and disciple of Laud. His personal kindness to
Chillingworth and to John Hales has been taken as
a proof of his tolerance of latitudinarianism, and
some passages in his own works are construed as
favouring liberal theology. That liberal theology
would have quickly progressed within the church
under Laud's rule, so long as outer uniformity was
preserved, is probably true, and an important truth
it is in judging the events of his epoch. At the same
time Laud was as hostile as most contemporary
puritans to doubts and curious search, just as he
shared with his presbyterian enemies their hatred
of any toleration for creed or church outside of the
established fold. He was fond of learning and gave
it munificent support, and he had the merit of doing
what he could to found his cause upon reason.
But men cannot throw off the spirit of their station,
and after all his sheet-anchor was authority. His
ideal has been described as a national church,
governed by an aristocracy of bishops, invested
with certain powers by divine right, and closely
united with the monarchy. Whether his object was
primarily doctrinal, to cast out the Calvinistic spirit,
or the restoration of church ceremonial, it would be

D

34 OLIVER CROMWELL

hard to decide ; but we may be sure that if he
actively hated heresies about justification or pre-
destination, it was rather as breaches of order than
as either errors of intellect or corruptions of soul.

" He had few vulgar or private vices," says a con-
temporary, " and, in a word, was not so much to be
called bad as unfit for the state of England." He was
unfit for the state of England, because, instead of
meeting a deep spiritual movement with a mission-
ary inspiration of his own, he sought no saintlier
weapons than oppressive statutes and persecuting
law-courts. It may be at least partially true that
the nation had been a consenting party to the Tudor
despotism, from which both statute and court had
come down. Persecution has often won in human
history ; often has a violent hand dashed out the
lamp of truth. But the puritan exodus to New
England was a signal, and no statesman ought to
have misread it, that new forces were arising and
would require far sharper persecution to crush them
than the temper of the nation was likely to endure.

In the early stages of the struggle between parlia-
ment and king, the only leader on the popular
side on a level in position with Strafford and Laud
was John Pym, in many ways the foremost of all
our parliamentary worthies. A gentleman of good
family and bred at Oxford, he had entered the House
of Commons eleven years before the accession of
Charles. He made his mark early as one who under-
stood the public finances, and, what was even more
to the point, as a determined enemy of popery.
From the first, in the words of Clarendon, he had
drawn attention for being concerned and passionate
in the jealousies of religion, and much troubled with
the countenance given to the opinions of Arminius.
He was a puritan in the widest sense of that word
of many shades. That is to say, in the expression
of one who came later, " he thought it part of
a man's religion to see that his country be well

CHAP, n

PYM 35

governed," and by good government he meant the
rule of righteousness both in civil and in sacred
things. He wished the monarchy to stand, and the
Church of England to stand ; nor was any man
better grounded in the maxims and precedents that
had brought each of those exalted institutions to
be what it was.

Besides massive breadth of judgment, Pym had
one of those luminous and discerning minds that
have the rare secret in times of high contention of
singling out the central issues and choosing the best
battle-ground. Early he perceived and understood
the common impulse that was uniting throne and
altar against both ancient rights and the social needs
of a new epoch. He was no revolutionist either by
temper or principle. A single passage from one of
his speeches is enough to show us the spirit of his
statesmanship, and it is well worth quoting. " The
best form of government," he said, " is that which
doth actuate and dispose every part and member of
a state to the common good ; for as those parts give
strength and ornament to the whole, so they receive
from it again strength and protection in their several
stations and degrees. If, instead of concord and
interchange of support, one part seeks to uphold an
old form of government, and the other part introduce
a new, they will miserably consume one another.
Histories are full of the calamities of entire states
and nations in such cases. It is, nevertheless,
equally true that time must needs bring about some
alterations. . . . Therefore have those common-
wealths been ever the most durable and perpetual
which have often reformed and recomposed them-
selves according to their first institution and ordi-
nance. By this means they repair the breaches,
and counterwork the ordinary and natural effects of
time."

This was the English temper at its best. Sur-
rounded by men who were often apt to take narrow

36 OLIVER CROMWELL

views, Pym, if ever English statesman did, took
broad ones ; and to impose broad views upon the
narrow is one of the things that a party leader exists
for. He had the double gift, so rare even among
leaders in popular assemblies, of being at once
practical and elevated ; a master of tactics and
organising arts, and yet the inspirer of solid and
lofty principles. How measure the perversity of
king and counsellors who forced into opposition a
man so imbued with the deep instinct of govern-
ment, so whole-hearted, so keen of sight, so skilful
in resource as Pym ?

CHAPTER III

PURITANISM AND THE DOUBLE ISSUE

UNIVERSAL history has been truly said to make a
large part of every national history. The lamp that
lights the path of a single nation receives its kindling
flame from a central line of beacon-fires that mark
the onward journey of the race. The English have
never been less insular in thought and interest than
they were in the seventeenth century. About the
time when Calvin died (1564) it seemed as if the
spiritual empire of Rome would be confined to the
two peninsulas of Italy and Spain. North of the
Alps and north of the Pyrenees the Reformation
appeared to be steadily sweeping all before it. Then
the floods turned back ; the power of the papacy
revived, its moral ascendancy was restored ; the
counter -reformation or the catholic reaction, by
the time when Cromwell and Charles came into the
world, had achieved startling triumphs. The indomi-
table activity of the Jesuits had converted opinion,
and the arm of flesh lent its aid in the holy task of
reconquering Christendom. What the arm of flesh
meant the English could see with the visual eye.
They never forgot Mary Tudor and the protestant
martyrs. In 1567 Alva set up his court of blood in
the Netherlands. In 1572 the pious work in France
began with the massacre of St. Bartholomew. In
1588 the Armada appeared in the British Channel

37

38 OLIVER CROMWELL

for the subjugation and conversion of England. In
1605 Guy Fawkes and his powder-barrels were found
in the vault under the House of Lords. These were
the things that explain the endless angry refrain
against popery, that rings through our seventeenth
century with a dolorous monotony at which modern
indifference may smile, and reason and tolerance
may groan.

Britain and Holland were the two protestant
strongholds, and it was noticed that the catholics in
Holland were daily multiplying into an element of
exceeding strength, while in England, though the
catholics had undoubtedly fallen to something very
considerably less than the third of the whole popu-
lation, which was their proportion in the time of
Elizabeth, still they began under James and Charles
to increase again. People counted with horror in
Charles's day some ninety catholics in places of trust
about the court, and over one hundred and ninety of
them enjoying property and position in the English
counties. What filled England with dismay filled
the pertinacious Pope Urban VIII. with the hope
of recovering here some of the ground that he had
lost elsewhere, and he sent over first Panzani, then
Cuneo, then Rossetti, to work for the reconquest to
Catholicism of the nation whom another Pope a
thousand years before had brought within the
Christian fold. The presence of the Roman agents
at Whitehall only made English protestantism more
violently restive. A furious struggle was raging on
the continent of Europe. The Thirty Years' War
(1618-48) was not in all its many phases a contest of
protestant and catholic, but that tremendous issue
was never remote or extinct ; and even apart from
the important circumstance that the Elector Pala-
tine had espoused the daughter of James I., its
fluctuations kept up a strong and constant under-
current of feeling and attention in England.

CHAP, m DEVELOPMENT OF SECTS 39

n

" The greatest liberty of our kingdom is religion,"
said Pym, and Cromwell's place in history is due to
the breadth with which he underwent this mastering
impression of the time, and associated in his own
person the double conditions, political and moral, of
national advance. Though the conditions were two-
fold, religion strikes the key-note. Like other move-
ments, the course of the Reformation followed the
inborn differences of human temperament, and in
due time divided itself into a right wing and a left.
Passion and logic, the two great working elements
of revolutionary change, often over-hot the one, and
narrow and sophistical the other, carry men along at
different rates according to their natural composition,
and drop them at different stages. Most go to fierce
extremes ; few hold on in the " quiet flow of truths
that soften hatred, temper strife " ; and for these
chosen spirits there is no place in the hour of confla-
gration. In England the left wing of protestantism
was puritanism, and puritanism in its turn threw
out an extreme left with a hundred branches of
its own. The history of Cromwell almost exactly
covers this development from the steady-going
doctrinal puritanism he found prevailing when he
first emerged upon the public scene, down to the
faiths of the countless enthusiastic sects whom he
still left preaching and praying and warring behind
him when his day was over.

In this long process, so extensive and so com-
plicated,— an inter -related evolution of doctrine,
discipline, manners, ritual, church polity, all closely
linked with corresponding changes in affairs of civil
government, — it is not easy to select a leading clue
through the labyrinth. It is not easy to disentangle
the double plot in church and state, nor to fix in a
single formula that wide twofold impulse, religious
and political, under which Cromwell's age, and

40 OLIVER CROMWELL

Cromwell the man of his age, marched toward their
own ideals of purified life and higher citizenship. It
is enough here to say in a word that in the Crom-
wellian period when the ferment at once so subtle
and so tumultuous had begun to clear, it was found
that, though by no direct and far-sighted counsel of
Cromwell's own, two fertile principles had struggled
into recognised life upon English soil — the principle
of toleration, and the principle of free or voluntary
churches. These might both of them have seemed
to be of the very essence of the Reformation ; but,
as everybody knows, Free Inquiry and Free Con-
science, the twin pillars of protestantism in its
fundamental theory, were in practice hidden out of
sight and memory, and, as we shall see, even Crom-
well and his independents shrank from the full
acceptance of their own doctrines. The advance
from the early to the later phases of puritanism
was not rapid. Heated as the effervescence was,
its solid products were slow to disengage themselves.
Only by steps did the new principles of Toleration
and the Free Church find a place even in the two
most capacious understandings of the time — in the
majestic reason of Milton and the vigorous and
penetrating practical perceptions of Cromwell.

Puritanism meanwhile profited by the common
tendency among men of all times to set down what-
ever goes amiss to something wrong in government.
It is in vain for the most part that sage observers like
Hooker try to persuade us that " these stains and
blemishes, springing from the root of human frailty
and corruption, will remain until the end of the
world, what form of government soever take place."
Mankind is by nature too restless, too readily indig-
nant, too hopeful, too credulous of the unknown, ever
to acquiesce in this. But the English Revolution of
the seventeenth century was no mere ordinary case
of a political opposition. The puritans of the Crom-
wellian time were forced into a brave and energetic

CHAP. m CALVINISM 41

conflict against misgovernment in church and state.
But it is to the honour of puritanism in all its phases
that it strove with unending constancy, by the same
effort to pierce inward to those very roots of " human
frailty and corruption " that are always the true
cause of the worst mischiefs of an unregenerate
world. Puritanism came from the deeps. It was,
like Stoicism, monasticism, Jansenism, even Moham-
medanism, a manifestation of elements in human
nature that are indestructible. It flowed from
yearnings that make themselves felt in Eastern
world and Western ; it sprang from aspirations that
breathe in men and women of many communions
and faiths ; it arose in instincts that seldom conquer
for more than a brief season, and yet are never
crushed. An ascetic and unworldly way of think-
ing about life, a rigorous moral strictness, the sub-
jugation of sense and appetite, a coldness to every
element in worship and ordinance external to the
believer's own soul, a dogma unyielding as cast-iron
—all these things satisfy moods and sensibilities in
man that are often silent and fleeting, easily drowned
in reaction, but readily responsive to the awakening
voice.

History, as Dollinger has said, is no simple game
of abstractions ; men are more than doctrines. It
is not a certain theory of grace that makes the
Reformation ; it is Luther, it is Calvin. Calvin
shaped the mould in which the bronze of puritanism
was cast. That commanding figure, of such vast
power, yet somehow with so little lustre, by his
unbending will, his pride, his severity, his French
spirit of system, his gift for government, for legisla-
tion, for dialectic in every field, his incomparable
industry and persistence, had conquered a more
than pontifical ascendancy in the protestant world.
He meets us in England, as in Scotland, Holland,
France, Switzerland, and the rising England across
the Atlantic. He was dead (1564) a generation

42 OLIVER CROMWELL

before Cromwell was born, but his influence was still
at its height. Nothing less than to create in man
a new nature was his far-reaching aim, to regenerate
character, to simplify and consolidate religious faith.
Men take a narrow view of Calvin when they think
of him only as the preacher of justification by faith,
and the foe of sacerdotal mediation. His scheme
comprehended a doctrine that went to the very root
of man's relations with the scheme of universal
things ; a church order as closely compacted as that
of Rome ; a system of moral discipline as concise
and as imperative as the code of Napoleon. He
built it all upon a certain theory of the government
of the universe, which by his agency has exerted an
amazing influence upon the world. It is a theory
that might have been expected to sink men crouching
and paralysed into the blackest abysses of despair,
and it has in fact been answerable for much anguish
in many a human heart. Still Calvinism has proved
itself a famous soil for rearing heroic natures.
Founded on St. Paul and on Augustine, it was in
two or three sentences this : — Before the founda-
tions of the world were laid, it was decreed by
counsel secret to us that some should be chosen out
of mankind to everlasting salvation, and others to
curse and damnation. In the figure of the memor-
able passage of the Epistle to the Romans, as the
potter has power over the clay, so men are fashioned
by antemundane will, some to be vessels of honour
and of mercy, others to be vessels of dishonour and
of wrath. Then the Potter has mercy on whom
he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth.
On this black granite of Fate, Predestination, and
Foreknowledge absolute, the strongest of the pro-
testant fortresses all over the world were founded.
Well might it have been anticipated that fatalism
as unflinching as this would have driven men head-
long into " desperation and wrecklessness of most
unclean living." Yet that was no more the actual

CHAP, m CALVINISM 43

effect of the fatalism of St. Paul, Augustine, and
Calvin than it was of the fatalism of the Stoics or
of Mahomet. On the contrary, Calvinism exalted
its votaries to a pitch of heroic moral energy that
has never been surpassed ; and men who were
bound to suppose themselves moving in chains
inexorably riveted, along a track ordained, by a
despotic and unseen Will before time began, have
yet exhibited an active courage, a resolute endur-
ance, a cheerful self-restraint, an exulting self-
sacrifice, that men count among the highest glories
of the human conscience.

It is interesting to think what is the secret of
this strange effect of the doctrine of fatality ; for
that was the doctrine over which Cromwell brooded
in his hours of spiritual gloom, and on which he
nourished his fortitude in days of fierce duress, of
endless traverses and toils. Is it, as some have said,
that people embraced a rigorous doctrine because
they were themselves by nature austere, absolute,
stiff, just, rather than merciful ? Is it, in other
words, character that fixes creed, or creed that
fashions character ? Or is there a bracing and
an exalting effect in the unrewarded morality of
Calvinism ; in the doctrine that good works done in
view of future recompense have no merit ; in that
obedience to duty for its own sake which, in Calvin
as in Kant, has been called one of the noblest efforts
of human conscience towards pure virtue ? Or,
again, is there something invigorating and inspiring
in the thought of acting in harmony with eternal
law, however grim ; of being no mere link in a chain
of mechanical causation, but a chosen instrument
in executing the sublime decrees of invincible power
and infinite intelligence ? However we may answer
all the insoluble practical enigmas that confronted
the Calvinist, just as for that matter they confront
the philosophic necessarian or determinist of to-day,
Calvinism was the general theory through which

44 OLIVER CROMWELL

Cromwell looked forth upon the world. That he
ever argued it out, or was of a turn of mind for
arguing it out, we need not suppose. Without
ascending to those clouded and frowning heights,
he established himself on the solid rock of Calvinistic
faith that made their base.

Simplification is the key- word to the Reformation,
as it is to every other revolution with a moral core.
The vast fabric of belief, practice, and worship which
the hosts of popes, doctors, schoolmen, founders of
orders, the saints and sages in all their classes and
degrees, had with strong brains and devout hearts
built up in the life and imagination of so many
centuries, was brought back to the ideal of a single
simplified relation — God, the Bible, the conscience of
the individual man, and nothing more nor beyond.
The substitution of the book for the church was the
essence of the protestant revolt, and it was the
essence of Cromwell's whole intellectual being. Like
" the Christian Cicero," twelve centuries before, he
said : " We who are instructed in the science of
truth by the Holy Scriptures know the beginning of
the world and its end."

Cromwell's Bible was not what the Bible is to-day.
Criticism, comparative, chronological, philological,
historical, had not impaired its position as the direct
word of God, a single book, one and whole, one page
as inspired as another, one text as binding as another.
Faith in the literal construction of the word was
pushed to an excess as much resembling a true super-
stition or over-belief, as anything imputed to the
catholics. Science had set up no reign of law, nor
hinted a doubt on the probabilities of miraculous
intervention. No physical theories had dimmed
faith in acts of specific creation ; the aerial perspec-
tive and vistas of time were very primitive. What-
ever happened, great or small, was due to wrath or
favour from above. When an organ was burned
down in the new French church at the Hague, it was

CHAP, m RELIGIOUS LITERALISM 45

an omen of the downfall of popery and prelacy.
When the foreman superintending the building of
a castle for the queen at Bristol fell from a ladder
and broke his neck, it was a stupendous testimony
against the Scarlet Woman. Tiverton, by holding
its market on a Monday, made occasion for pro-
faning the Lord's day, and so the town was burned
to the ground. Fishermen one Sabbath morning,
the sun shining hot upon the water, and a great
company of salmon at play, were tempted to put
forth, and they made a great draught, but God's
judgment did not halt, for never more were fish
caught there, and the neighbouring town was half
ruined. People were tormented by no misgiving,
as Ranke says, how " the secrets of divine things
could be brought into such direct connection with
the complications of human affairs." The God to,
whom Cromwell in heart as in speech appealed, was
no stream of tendency, no supernaturalistic hypo-
thesis, no transcendental symbol or synthesis, but
the Lord of Hosts of the Old Testament. The saints
and puritans were the chosen people. All the de-
nunciations of the prophets against the oppressors
of Israel were applied to the letter against bishops
and princes. And Moses and Joshua, Gideon and
Barak, Samson and Jephthah, were the antetypes of
those who now in a Christian world thought them-
selves called, like those heroes of old time, to stop
the mouths of lions and turn to flight the armies of
the aliens.

Cromwell is never weary of proclaiming that the
things that have come to pass have been the wonder-
ful works of God, breaking the rod of the oppressor.
Great place and business in the world, he says, is not
worth looking after ; he does not seek such things :
he is called to them, and is not without assurance
that the Lord will enable his poor worm to do his)
will and fulfil his generation. The vital thing isf
to fear unbelief, self-seeking, confidence in the arm

46 OLIVER CROMWELL

of flesh, and opinion of any instruments that they
are other than as dry bones. Of dogma he rarely
speaks. Religion to him is not dogma, but com-
munion with a Being apart from dogma. " Seek the
Lord and his face continually," he writes to Richard
Cromwell, his son ; "let this be the business of your
life and strength, and let all things be subservient
and in order to this." To Richard Mayor, the father
of his son's wife, he says : " Truly our work is neither
from our own brains nor from our courage and
strength ; but we follow the Lord who goeth before,
and gather what he scattereth, that so all may
appear to be from him." Such is ever the refrain,
incessantly repeated, to his family, to the parliament,
on the homely occasions of domestic life, in the time
of public peril, in the day of battle, in the day of t
crowning victory ; this is the spirit by which his
soul is possessed. All work is done by a divine
leading. He expresses lively indignation with the
Scottish ministers, because they dared to speak of
the battle of Dunbar, that marvellous dispensation,
that mighty and strange appearance of God's, as a
mere " event." So, too, he warns the Irish that if
they resist they must expect what the providence of
God will cast upon them, " in that which is falsely
called the Chance of War."

in

To displace Calvinism, the aims of Laud and of
wiser men than Laud, required a new spiritual basis,
and this was found in the doctrines of the Dutch
Arminius. They had arisen in Holland at the begin-
ning of the century, marking there a liberal and
rationalist reaction against Calvinistic rigour, and
they were now welcomed by the Laudians as bring-
ing a needed keystone to the quaking double arch
of church and state. Arminianism had been con-
demned at the Synod of Dort (1619) ; but as a half-

CHAP, in ARMINIANISM 47

way house between Catholicism on the one hand and
Calvinism on the other, it met a want in the minds
of a rising generation in England who disliked Rome
and Geneva equally, and sought to found an Anglo-
catholic school of their own. Laud concerned him-
self much less with the theology than with the latent
politics of Arminianism, and in fact he usually denied
that he was an Arminian. He said, as in truth
many others in all times and places might have said,
that the question was one beyond his faculties.
It was as statesman rather than as keeper of the
faith that he discerned the bearings of the great
Dutch heresy, which was to permeate the Church
of England for many a generation to come. In
Arminianism Predestination was countered by Free
Will ; implacable Necessity by room for merciful
Contingency ; Man the Machine by Man the self-
determining agent, using means, observing con-
ditions. How it is that these strong currents and
cross-currents of divinity land men at the two
antipodes in politics, which seem out of all visible
relation with divinity, we need not here attempt
to trace. Unseen, non-logical, fugitive, and subtle
are the threads and fine filaments of air that draw
opinion to opinion. They are like the occult
affinities of the alchemist, the curious sympathies
of old physicians, or the attraction of hidden
magnets. All history shows us how theological
ideas abound in political aspects to match, and
Arminianism, which in Holland itself had sprung
into vogue in connection with the political dispute
between Barneveldt and Prince Maurice, rapidly
became in England the corner-stone of faith in a
hierarchy, a ceremonial church, and a monarchy.
This is not the less true because in time the course
of events drew some of the presbyterian phalanx
further away from Calvinism than they would have
thought possible in earlier days, when, like other
puritans, they deemed Arminianism no better than

48 OLIVER CROMWELL

a fore-court of popery, atheism, Socinianism, and
all the other unholy shrines. To the student of
opinions viewing the theological controversy of
Cromwell's time with impartial eye, it is clear that,
while Calvinism inspired incomparable energy, con-
centration, resolution, the rival doctrine covered a
wider range of human nature, sounded more abiding
depths, and comprehended better all the many
varied conditions under which the " poor worm "
of Calvin and of Cromwell strives to make the best
of itself and to work out the destinies of its tiny day.
" Truth," said Arminius, " even theological truth,
has been sunk in a deep well, whence it cannot be
drawn forth without much effort." This the wise
world has long found out. But these pensive
sayings are ill suited for a time when the naked
sword is out of its sheath. Each side believed that
it was the possessor at least of truth enough to
fight for ; and what is peculiar in the struggle is
that each party and sub-division of a party, from
King Charles down to the Leveller and the Fifth
Monarchy Man, held his ideal of a church inseparably
bound up with his ideal of the rightly ordered state.

IV

In the sardonic dialogue upon these times which
he called Behemoth, Hobbes says that it is not
points necessary to salvation that have raised all
the quarrels, but questions of authority and power
over the church, or of profit and honour to church-
men. In other words, it has always been far less a
question of what to believe, than of whom to believe.
" All human opinions, even those of theologians,
have secret motives in the conduct and character
of those who profess them " (Nisard). Hobbes's
view may be thought to lower the dignity of con-
science, yet he has many a chapter of Western
history on his side. Disputes between orthodox

CHAP, ui THE STATE AND THE CHURCH 49

and heretic have mixed up with mysteries of the
faith all the issues of mundane policy and secular
interest, all the strife of nationality, empire, party,
race, dynasty. A dogma becomes the watchword
of a faction ; a ceremonial rite is made the ensign
for the ambition of statesmen. The rival armies
manoeuvre on the theological or the ecclesiastical
field, but their impulse like their purpose is political
or personal. It was so in the metaphysical conflicts
that tore the world in the third and fourth centuries
of the Christian era, and so it was in the contro-
versies that swept over the sixteenth century and
the seventeenth.

The centre of the storm in England now came to
be the question that has vexed Western Europe for
so many generations down to this hour, the question
who is to control the law and constitution of the
church. The Pope and the Councils, answered the
Guelph ; the emperor, answered the Ghibelline.
This was in the early Middle Age. In England and
France the ruling power adopted a different line.
There, kings and lawyers insisted that it was for
the national or local government to measure and
limit the authority of the national branch of the
church universal. The same principle was followed
by the first reformers in Germany and Switzerland,
and by Henry VIII. and Cranmer. Then came a
third view, not Guelph, nor Ghibelline, nor Tudor.
The need for concentration in religion had not dis-
appeared ; it had rather become more practically
urgent, for schism was followed by heresy and
theological libertinism. Calvin at Geneva, a genera-
tion after Luther, claimed for the spiritual power
independence of the temporal, just as the Pope did,
but he pressed another scheme of religious organ-
isation. Without positively excluding bishops, he
favoured the system by which the spiritual power
was to reside in a council of presbyters, partly
ministers, partly laymen. This was the scheme

£

50 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOK ,

that the strenuous and powerful character of John
Knox had succeeded in stamping upon Scotland.
It was also the scheme that in England was the
subject of the dispute in Elizabeth's time between
Cartwright and Whitgift, and the main contention
of that famous admonition of 1572 in which puri-
tanism is usually supposed to have first taken defi-
nite shape. During the years when Cromwell was
attending to his business at St. Ives, this reorganisa-
tion of the church upon the lines of the presbyterian
churches abroad marked the direction in which
serious minds were steadily looking. But with no
violently revolutionary sense or intention. That
slowly grew up with events. Decentralisation was
the key in church reform as in political reform ; the
association of laity with bishops, as of commonalty
with the king. Different church questions hovered
in men's minds, sometimes vaguely, sometimes with
precision, rising into prominence one day, dwindling
away the next. Phase followed phase, and we call
the whole the puritan revolution, just as we give the
name of puritan alike to Baxter and Hugh Peters,
to the ugly superstition of Nehemiah Wallington
and the glory of John Milton, men with hardly a
single leading trait in common. The Synod of Dort
(1619), which some count the best date for the origin
of puritanism, was twofold in its action : it ratified
election by grace, and it dealt a resounding blow
to episcopacy. Other topics of controversy indeed
abounded as time went on. Vestment and cere-
monial, the surplice or the gown, the sign of the
cross at baptism, altar or table, sitting or kneeling,
no pagan names for children, no anointing of kings
or bishops, — all these and similar things were matter
of passionate discussion, veiling grave differences
of faith under what look like mere triflings about
indifferent form. But the power and station of the
bishop, his temporal prerogative, his coercive juris-
diction, his usurping arrogance, his subserviences

. m TEMPORAL POWER & SPIRITUAL 51

to the crown, were what made men's hearts hot
within them. The grievance was not speculative
but actual, not a thing of opinion but of experience
and visible circumstance.

The Reformation had barely touched the authority
of the ecclesiastical courts, though it had rendered
that authority dependent upon the civil power.
Down to the calling of the Long Parliament, the
backslidings of the laity no less than of the clergy,
in private morals no less than in public observ-
ance, were by these courts vigilantly watched and
rigorously punished. The penalties went beyond
penitential impressions on mind and conscience, and
clutched purse and person. The archdeacon was
the eye of the bishop, and his court was as busy
as the magistrate at Bow Street. In the twelve
months ending at the date of the assembly of the
Long Parliament, in the archdeacon's court in
London no fewer than two thousand persons were
brought up for tippling, sabbath-breaking, and in-
continence. This Moral Police of the Church, as it
was called, and the energy of its discipline, had no
small share in the unpopularity of the whole ecclesi-
astical institution. Clarendon says of the clergymen
of his day in well-known words, that 4i they under- ;
stand the least, and take the worst measure of ;
human affairs, of all mankind that can write and
read." In no age have they been admired as
magistrates or constables. The jurisdiction of the
court of bishop or archdeacon did not exceed the
powers of a Scottish kirk-session, but there was
the vital difference that the Scottish court was
democratic in the foundation of its authority,
while the English court was a privileged annex of
monarchy.

In loftier spheres the same aspirations after
ecclesiastical control in temporal affairs waxed
bold. An archbishop was made chancellor of Scot-
land. Juxon, the Bishop of London, was made

52 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOK i

Lord High Treasurer of England. No churchman,
says Laud complacently, has had it since the time
of Henry the Seventh. The Chief Justice goes down
to the assizes in the west, and issues an injunction
to the clergy to publish certain judicial orders
against feasts and wakes. He is promptly called
up by Laud for encroaching on church jurisdiction.
The king commands the Chief Justice to recall the
orders. He disobeys, and is again brought before
the council, where Laud gives him such a rating
that he comes out in tears.

The issue was raised in its most direct form
(November 1628) in the imperious declaration
prefixed to the thirty-nine articles in the Prayer
Book of this day. The churchgoer of our time, as
in a listless moment he may hit upon this dead page,
should know what indignant fires it once kindled
in the breasts of his forefathers. To them it seemed
the signal for quenching truth, for silencing the
inward voice, for spreading darkness over the
sanctuary of the soul. The king announces that it
is his duty not to suffer unnecessary disputations or
questions to be raised. He commands all further
curious search beyond the true, usual, literal mean-
ing of the articles to be laid aside. Any university
teacher who fixes a new sense to one of the articles
will be visited by the displeasure of the king and the
censure of the church; and it is for the convoca-
tion of the bishops and clergy alone, with licence
under the king's broad seal, to do whatever may be
needed in respect of doctrine and discipline. Shortly
before the accession of Charles, the same spirit of the
hierarchy had shown itself in notable instructions.
Nobody under a bishop or a dean was to presume
to preach in any general auditory the deep points
of predestination, election, reprobation, or of the
universality, resistibility, or irresistibility of divine
grace. But then these were the very points that
thinking men were interested in. To remove them

ECCLESIASTICAL CLAIMS 53

out of the area of public discussion, while the declara-
tion about the articles was meant in due time to
strip them of their Calvinistic sense, was to assert
the royal supremacy in its most odious and intoler-
able shape. The result was what might have been
expected. Sacred things and secular became one
interest. Civil politics and ecclesiastical grew to
be the same. Tonnage and poundage and pre-
destination, ship-money and election, habeas corpus
and justification by faith, all fell into line. The
control of parliament over convocation was as
cherished a doctrine as its control over the ex-
chequer. As for toleration, this had hardly yet
come into sight. Of respect for right of conscience
as a conviction, and for free discussion as a principle,
there was at this stage hardly more on one side than
on the other. Without a qualm the very parliament
that fought with such valour for the Petition of
Right (March 1629) declared that anybody who
should be seen to extend or introduce any opinion,
whether papistical, Arminian, or other, disagree-
ing from the true and orthodox church, should
be deemed a capital enemy of the kingdom and
commonwealth.

It was political and military events that forced a
revolution in ecclesiastical ideas. Changing needs
gradually brought out the latent social applications
of a puritan creed, and on the double base rose a
democratic party in a modern sense, the first in the
history of English politics. Until the middle of the
seventeenth century, independency was a designa-
tion hardly used, and Cromwell himself at first
rejected it, perhaps with the wise instinct of the
practical statesman against being too quick to
assume a compromising badge before occasion posi-
tively forces. He was never much of a democrat,
but the same may be said of many, if not most, of
those whom democracy has used to do its business.
Calvinism and Jacobinism sprang alike from France,

54 OLIVER CROMWELL

from the same land of absolute ideals, and Cromwell
was in time already to hear, in full blast from the
grim lips of his military saints, the rights of man as
all the world knew them so well a hundred and fifty
years later.

CHAPTER IV

THE INTERIM

WENTWORTH said in his early days that it was ill
contending with the king outside of parliament.
Acting on this maxim, the popular leaders, with the
famous exception of Hampden, watched the king's
despotic courses for eleven years (1629-40) without
much public question. Duties were levied by royal
authority alone. Monopolies were extended over all
the articles of most universal consumption. The
same sort of inquisition into title that Wentworth
had practised in Ireland was applied in England,
under circumstances of less enormity, yet so oppres-
sively that the people of quality and honour, as
Clarendon calls them, upon whom the burden of
such proceedings mainly fell, did not forget it when
the day of reckoning came. The Star Chamber, the
Council, and the Court of High Commission, whose
province affected affairs ecclesiastical, widened
the area of their arbitrary jurisdiction, invaded
the province of the regular courts, and inflicted
barbarous punishments. Everybody knows the
cases of Leighton, of Lilburne, of Prynne, Burton,
and Bastwick ; how for writing books against
prelacy, or play-acting, or Romish innovations by
church dignitaries, men of education and learned
professions were set in the pillory, had their ears
cut off, their noses slit, their cheeks branded, were

65

56 OLIVER CROMWELL

heavily fined, and flung into prison for so long as
the king chose to keep them there.

Even these gross outrages on personal right did
less to rouse indignation than the exaction of ship-
money ; nor did the exaction of the impost itself
create so much alarm as the doctrines advanced by
servile judges in its vindication, using " a logic that
left no man anything that he might call his own."
The famous Italian who has earned so bad a name in
the world for lowering the standards of public virtue
and human self-esteem, said that men sooner forget
the slaying of a father than the taking of their
property. But Charles, with the best will to play
the Machiavellian if he had known how, never more
than half learned the lessons of the part.

The general alarms led to passive resistance in
Essex, Devonshire, Oxfordshire. A stout-hearted
merchant of the city of London brought the matter
on a suit for false imprisonment before the King's
Bench. Here one of the judges actually laid down
the doctrine that there is a rule of law and a rule
of government, and that many things which might
not be done by the rule of law may be done by the
rule of government. In other words, law must be
tempered by reason of state, which is as good as to
say, no law. With more solemnity the lawfulness
of the tax was argued in the famous case of John
Hampden for a fortnight (1637) before the twelve
judges in the Exchequer Chamber. The result was
equally fatal to that principle of no taxation without
assent of parliament, to which the king had formally
subscribed in passing the Petition of Right. The
decision against Hampden contained the startling
propositions that no statute can bar a king of his
regality ; that statutes taking away his royal power
in defence of his kingdom are void ; and that the
king has an absolute authority to dispense with
any law in cases of necessity, and of this necessity
he must be the judge. This decision has been

THOROUGH 57

justly called one of the great events of English
history.

Both the system of government and its temper
were designated by Strafford and Laud under the
cant watchword of Thorough. As a system it
meant personal rule in the state, and an authority
beyond the law courts in the church. In respect of
political temper it meant the prosecution of the
system through thick and thin, without fainting or
flinching, without half-measures or timorous stumb-
ling ; it meant vigilance, dexterity, relentless energy.
Such was Thorough. The counter- watchword was
as good. If this was the battle-cry of the court,
Root-and-Branch gradually became the inspiring
principle of reform as it unconsciously drifted into
revolution. Things went curiously slowly. The
country in the face of this conspiracy against law
and usage lay to all appearance profoundly still.
No active resistance was attempted, or perhaps
whispered. Pym kept unbroken silence. Of Crom-
well we have hardly a glimpse, and he seems to have
taken the long years of interregnum as patiently as
most of his neighbours. After some short unquiet-
ness of the people, says Clarendon, " there quickly
followed so excellent a composure throughout the
whole kingdom, that the like peace and tranquillity
for ten years was never enjoyed by any nation." As
we shall see, when after eleven years of misgovern-
ment a parliament was chosen, it was found too
moderate for its work.

It was in his native country that Charles first
came into direct conflict with the religious fervour
that was to destroy him. It only needed a spark
to set in flames the fabric that king and archbishop
were striving to rear in England. This spark flew
over the border from Scotland, where Charles and
Laud played with fire. In Scotland the Reforma-
tion had been a popular movement, springing
from new and deepened religious experience and

58 OLIVER CROMWELL

sense of individual responsibility in the hearts and
minds of the common people. Bishops had not
ceased to exist, but their authority was little more
than shadow. By the most fatal of the many
infatuations of his life, Charles tried (1637) to make
the shadow substance, and to introduce canons and
a service-book framed by Laud and his friends in
England. Infatuation as it was, policy was the
prompter. Charles, Strafford, and Laud all felt that
the bonds between the three kingdoms were danger-
ously loose, slender, troublesome, and uncertain. As
Cromwell too perceived when his time came, so these
three understood the need for union on closer terms
between England, Scotland, and Ireland, and in
accordance with the mental fashion of the time they
regarded ecclesiastical uniformity as the key to
political unity. Some Scottish historians have held
that the royal innovations might have secured
silent and gradual acquiescence in time, if no com-
pulsion had been used. Patience, alas, is the last
lesson that statesmen, rulers, or peoples can be
brought to learn. As it was, the rugged Scots
broke out in violent revolt, and it spread like flame
through their kingdom. Almost the whole nation
hastened to subscribe that famous National Cove-
nant (February 27, 1638), which, even as we read
it in these cool and far-off days, is still vibrating
and alive with all the passion, the faithfulness, the
wrath, that inspired the thousands of stern fanatics
who set their hands to it. Its fierce enumeration
of the abhorred doctrines and practices of Rome, its
scornful maledictions on them, are hot with the
same lurid flame as glows in the retaliatory lists of
heresy issued from age to age from Rome itself.
It is in this National Covenant of 1638 that we find
ourselves at the heart and central fire of militant
puritanism of the seventeenth century.

It is a curious thing that people in England were
so little alive to what was going on in Scotland until

CHAP, iv THE SHORT PARLIAMENT 59

the storm broke. Nobody cared to know anything
about Scotland, and they were both more interested
and better informed as to what was passing in
Germany or Poland than what happened across the
border. The king handled Scottish affairs himself,
with two or three Scottish nobles, and things had
come to extremities before he opened them either
to his counsellors or to the public in England. An
armed force of covenanted Scots was set in motion
toward the border. The king advanced to York,
and there heard such news of the obstinacy of the
rebels, of the disaffection of his own men to the
quarrel, and of mischief that might follow from too
close intercourse between Scots and English, that
in his bewilderment he sanctioned the pacifica-
tion of Berwick (June 1639). Disputes arose upon
its terms ; the Scots stubbornly extended their
demands ; Richelieu secretly promised help. Charles
summoned Strafford to his side from Ireland, and
that haughty counsellor told him that the Scots
must be whipped into their senses again. Then
(March 1640) he crossed back to Ireland for money
and troops. War between the king and his Scots
was certain, and it was the necessities of this war
that led to. the first step in saving the freedom of
England.

ii

The king, in straits that left him no choice, sought
aid from parliament. The Short Parliament, that
now assembled, definitely opens the first great
chapter of Revolution. After twenty years the
Restoration closed it. Eighteen of these years are
the public life of Cromwell. The movement, it is
true, that seemed to begin in 1640, itself flowed
from forces that had been slowly gathering since
the death of Elizabeth, just as the Restoration
closing one chapter prepared another that ended
in 1688. But the twenty years from 1640 to 1660

60 OLIVER CROMWELL

mark a continuous journey, with definite beginning
and end.

Cromwell was chosen one of the two members for
the borough of Cambridge, " the greatest part of the
burgesses being present in the hall." The Short
Parliament sat only for three weeks (April 13 to
May 5), and its first proceeding disclosed that eleven
years had not cooled the quarrel. But the new
parliament was essentially moderate and loyal, and
this, as I have said, is another proof how little of
general exasperation the eleven years of misrule
without a parliament had produced. The veteran
Coke was dead. Went worth from firm friend had
turned fierce enemy. Sir John Eliot was gone. The
rigours of his prison-house in the Tower could not
break that dauntless spirit, but they killed him. The
king knew well what he was doing, and even carried
his vindictiveness beyond death. Eliot's young
son petitioned the king that he might carry the
remains to Cornwall to lie with those of his ancestors.
Charles wrote on the petition : " I«et Sir John
Eliot's body be buried in the parish of that church
where he died " ; and his ashes lay unmarked in
the chapel of the Tower.

Eliot's comrades were left with Pym at their
head, and before long they warned the king in words
destined to bear a terrible meaning that Eliot's
blood still cried for vengeance or for repentance.
The case had to some extent passed out of the
hands of lawyers like Selden, and antiquaries like
Cotton. Burke, in dealing with the American
Revolution, makes some weighty comments upon
the fact that the greater number of the deputies
sent to the first Revolutionary Congress were
lawyers ; and the legal character of the vindication
of civil freedom from the accession of James I. or
earlier, was not wholly lost at Westminster until
the death of Charles I. But just as the lawyers
had eclipsed the authority of the churchmen, so

CHAP, iv END OF SHORT PARLIAMENT 61

now they were themselves displaced by country
gentlemen with gifts of parliamentary statesman-
ship. Of this new type Pym was a commanding
instance. Pym was not below Eliot in zeal, and
he was better than Eliot in measure, in judgment,
and in sagacious instinct for action. He instantly
sounded the note. The redress of grievances must
go before the grant of a shilling either for the Scotch
war or anything else. The claim of parliament over
prerogative was raised in louder tones than had
ever been heard in English constitutional history
before. The king supposed that his proof that the
Scots were trying to secure aid from France would
kindle the flame of old national antipathies. England
loved neither Frenchmen nor Scots. Nations, for
that matter, do not often love one another. But
the English leaders knew the emergency, knew that
the cause of the Scots was their own, and were
as ready to seek aid from Frenchmen as their
successors a generation later were to seek aid from
Dutchmen.1 The perception every hour became
clearer that the cause of the Scots was the cause of
England, and with wise courage the patriots resolved
to address the king against a war with his Scottish
subjects. When this intention reached his ears,
though he must have foreseen a move so certain
to fit the parliamentary tactics of the hour, Charles
flew into a passion, called a council for six o'clock
the next morning, and, apparently with not more
than the hesitating approval of Strafford, hurriedly
determined to dissolve the parliament. As usual
with him, this important decision was due to levity
and not to calculation. Before night he found out
his mistake, and was impatiently asking whether he
could not recall the body that he had just dismissed.
The spirits of his opponents rose. Things, they

1 Pym protested to the French minister in London his zeal for the
interests of France, just as Sidney did later (Cousin, Mme. de Chevreuse,
p. 167, n.).

62 OLIVER CROMWELL

argued, must be worse before they could be better.
This parliament, they said, would never have done
what was necessary to be done. Another parlia-
ment was inevitable ; then their turn at last would
come ; then they would meet the king and his
ministers with their own daring watchword ; then
in good earnest they would press on for Thorough
with another and an unexpected meaning. For
six months the king's position became every day
more desperate. All the wheels of prerogative were
set in motion to grind out gold. The sheriffs and
the bailiffs squeezed only driblets of ship-money.
Even the judges grew uneasy. Charles urged the
city for loans, and threw aldermen into prison for
refusing ; but the city was the puritan stronghold,
and was not to be frightened. He begged from
France, from Spain, from the moneyed men of
Genoa, and even from the Pope of Rome. But
neither pope nor king nor banker would lend to
a borrower who had no security, financial, military,
or political. He tried to debase the coinage, but
people refused in fury to take copper for silver or
threepence for a shilling.

It was idle for Strafford to tell either the London
citizens or the Privy Council of the unsparing devices
by which the King of France filled his treasury.
Whether, if Charles had either himself possessed the
iron will, the capacious grasp, the deep craft and
policy of Richelieu, or had committed himself
wholly into the hands of Strafford, who was endowed
with some of Richelieu's essentials of mastery, the
final event would have been different, is an interest-
ing problem for historic rumination. As it was,
the whole policy of Thorough fell into ruins. The
trained bands were called out and commissions of
array were issued, but they only spread distraction.
The convocation of the clergy heightened the general
irritation, not only by continuing to sit after the
parliament had disappeared, but by framing new

CHAP, iv RUIN OF THOROUGH 63

canons about the eastern position and other vexed
points of ceremony ; by proclaiming the order of
kings to be sacred and of divine right ; and finally
by winding up their unlawful labours with the
imposition upon large orders of important laymen
of an oath never to assent to alter the government
of the church " by archbishops, bishops, deans,
etc." — an unhappy and random conclusion that
provoked much rude anger and derision. This
proceeding raised in its most direct form the cen-
tral question whether under cover of the royal
supremacy the clergy were to bear rule independent
of parliament. Even Laud never carried impolicy
further. Rioters threatened the palace at Lambeth,
and the archbishop though no coward was forced to
flee for refuge to Whitehall. Meanwhile the king's
military force, disaffected, ill-disciplined, ill-paid, and
ill-accoutred, was no match for the invaders. The
Scots crossed the Tyne, beat the English at Newburn
(August 28), occupied Newcastle, and pushed on
to Durham and the Tees. There seemed to be
nothing to hinder their march to London. In
London, wrote an observer, people were distracted
as if the day of judgment were hourly expected.

Charles again recalled Strafford from Ireland, and
that courageous genius acquired as much ascendancy
as the levity of the king could allow. Never came
any man, he says, to so lost a business : the army
altogether unexercised and unprovided of all neces-
saries, the horse all cowardly, a universal affright
in all, a general disaffection to the king's service,
none sensible of his dishonour. Nothing could be
gloomier. A parliament could not be avoided, as
Pym and his friends had foreseen ; and they brought
to bear, both through their allies among the peers
and by popular petitions, a pressure that Charles
was powerless to resist. On the very eve of the final
resolve, the king had some reason to suspect that
what had already happened in Scotland might

64 OLIVER CROMWELL

easily happen in England, and that if he did not
himself call a parliament, one would be held without
him.

The calling of the Long Parliament marked for
the king his first great humiliation. The depth of
the humiliation only made future conflict more
certain. Everybody knew that even without any
deep-laid or sinister design Charles's own instability
of nature, the secret convictions of his conscience,
the intrinsic plausibilities of ancestral kingship, and
the temptation of accident, would surely draw him
on to try his fortune again. What was in appearance
a step toward harmonious co-operation for the good
government of the three kingdoms, was in truth
the set opening of a desperate pitched battle, and
it is certain that neither king nor parliament had
ever counted up the chances of the future. Some
would hold that most of the conspicuous political
contests of history have been undertaken upon the
like uncalculating terms.

CHAPTER V

THE LONG PARLIAMENT

THE elections showed how Charles had failed to
gauge the humour of his people. Nearly three
hundred of the four hundred and ninety members
who had sat in the Short Parliament were chosen
over again. Not one of those who had then made
a mark in opposition was rejected, and the new
members were believed almost to a man to belong
in one degree or another to the popular party. Of
the five hundred names that made up the roll of
the House of Commons at the beginning of the Long
Parliament, the counties returned only ninety-one,
while the boroughs returned four hundred and five,
and it was in the boroughs that hostility to the
policy of the court was sharpest. Yet few of the
Commons belonged to the trading class. It could
not be otherwise when more than four-fifths of the
population lived in the country, when there were
only four considerable towns outside of London,
and when the rural classes were supreme. A glance
at the list shows us Widdringtons and Fenwicks
from Northumberland ; Curzons from Derbyshire ;
Curwens from Cumberland ; Ashtons, Leighs,
Shuttleworths, Bridgmans, from Lancashire ;
Lyttons and Cecils from Herts ; Derings and
Knatchbulls from Kent ; Ingrams, Wentworths,
Cholmeleys, Danbys, Fairfaxes, from the thirty

65 F

66 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOR:

seats in Yorkshire ; Grenvilles, Edgcombes, Bullers,
Rolles, Godolphins, Vyvyans, Trevors, Carews, from
the four-and-forty seats of Cornwall.

These and many another historic name make the
list to-day read like a catalogue of the existing
county families, and it is hardly an exaggeration
to say that the House of Lords now contains
a smaller proportion of ancient blood than the
famous lineages that figure in the roll of the great
revolutionary House of Commons. It was essen-
tially an aristocratic and not a popular house, as
became only too clear five or six years later, when
Levellers and Soldiers came into the field of politics.
The Long Parliament was made up of the very
flower of the English gentry and the educated laity.
A modern conservative writer describes as the
great enigma, the question how this phalanx of
country gentlemen, of the best blood of England,
belonging to a class of strongly conservative in-
stincts and remarkable for their attachment to the
crown, should have been for so long the tools of
subtle lawyers and republican theorists, and then
have ended by acquiescing in the overthrow of the
parliamentary constitution, of which they had
proclaimed themselves the defenders. It is curious
too how many of the leaders came from that ancient
seat of learning which was so soon to become and
for so long remained the centre of all who held for
church and king. Selden was a member for the
University of Oxford, and Pym, Fiennes, Marten,
Vane, were all of them Oxford men, as well as Hyde,
Digby, and others who in time passed over to the
royal camp. A student of our day has remarked that
these men collectively represented a larger relative
proportion of the best intellect of the country, of
its energy and talents, than is looked for now in
the House of Commons. Whatever may be the
reply to the delicate question so stated, it is at
any rate true that of Englishmen then alive and of

CHAP, v THE LONG PARLIAMENT 67

mature powers only two famous names are missing :
Milton and Hobbes. When the parliament opened,
Dryden was a boy at Westminster School ; the
future author of Pilgrim's Progress, a lad of twelve,
was mending pots and kettles in Bedfordshire ; and
Locke, the future defender of the emancipating
principles that now put on practical shape and
power, was a boy of eight. Newton was not born
until 1642, a couple of months after the first clash
of arms at Edgehill.

In the early days of the Rebellion the peers
had work to do not any less important than the
Commons, and for a time, though they had none of
the spirit of the old barons at Runnymede, they were
in tolerable agreement with the views and temper
of the lower House. The temporal peers were a
hundred and twenty-three, and the lords spiritual
twenty-six, of whom, however, when the parlia-
ment got really to business, no more than eighteen
remained. Alike in public spirit and in attainments
the average of the House of Lords was undoubtedly
high. Like other aristocracies in the seventeenth
century, the English nobles were no friends to
high-flying ecclesiastical pretensions, and like other
aristocrats they were not without many jealousies
and grievances of their own against the power of
the crown. Another remark is worth making.
Either history or knowledge of human nature
might teach us that great nobles often take the
popular side without dropping any of the preten-
sions of class in their hearts, and it is not mere
peevishness when the royalist historian says that
Lord Saye and Sele was as proud of his quality and
as pleased to be distinguished from others by his
title as any man alive.

Oliver Cromwell was again returned for the
borough of Cambridge. The extraordinary circum-
stance has been brought out that at the meeting
of the Long Parliament Cromwell and Hampden

68 OLIVER CROMWELL

between them could count no fewer than seventeen
relatives and connections ; and by 1647 the figure
had risen from seventeen to twenty-three. When
the day of retribution came eight years later, out
of the fifty-nine names on the king's death-warrant,
ten were kinsmen of Oliver, and out of the hundred
and forty of the king's judges sixteen were more
or less closely allied to him. Oliver was now in
the middle of his forty-second year, and his days
of homely peace had come once for all to an end.
Everybody knows the picture of him drawn by a
young royalist ; how one morning he " perceived
a gentleman speaking, very ordinarily apparelled
in a plain cloth suit made by an ill country tailor,
with plain linen, not very clean, and a speck or
two of blood upon his little band ; his hat without
a hat-band ; his stature of a good size ; his sword
stuck close to his side ; his countenance swollen
and reddish ; his voice sharp and untuneable, his
eloquence full of fervour. ... I sincerely profess it
lessened much my reverence unto that great council,
for this gentleman was very much hearkened unto."

Another recorder of the time describes " his body
as well compact and strong ; his stature of the
average height ; his head so shaped as you might
see in it both a storehouse and shop of a vast
treasury of natural parts. His temper exceeding
fiery ; but the flame of it kept down for the most
part, as soon allayed with these moral endowments
he had. He was naturally compassionate toward
objects in distress, even to an effeminate measure ;
though God had made him a heart wherein was left
little room for any fear but what was due to Him-
self, of which there was a large proportion, yet did
he exceed in tenderness toward sufferers."

" When he delivered his mind in the House,"
says a third, going beyond the things that catch
the visual eye, " it was with a strong and mascu-
line excellence, more able to persuade than to be

CROMWELL IN THE HOUSE 69

persuaded. His expressions were hardy, opinions
resolute, asseverations grave and vehement, always
intermixed ( Andronicus - like) with sentences of
scripture, to give them the greater weight, and the
better to insinuate into the affections of the people.
He expressed himself with some kind of passion,
but with such a commanding, wise deportment till,
at his pleasure, he governed and swayed the House,
as he had most times the leading voice. Those who
find no such wonders in his speeches may find it in
the effect of them."

We have yet another picture of the inner qualities
of the formidable man, drawn by the skilled pencil
of Clarendon. In the early days of the parliament,
Cromwell sat on a parliamentary committee to
examine a case of enclosure of waste in his native
county. The townsmen, it was allowed, had come
in a riotous and warlike manner with sound of drum
and had beaten down the obnoxious fences. Such
doings have been often heard of, but perhaps not
half so often as they should have been, even down to
our own day. Lord Manchester, the purchaser of
the lands enclosed, issued writs against the offenders,
and at the same time both he and the aggrieved
commoners presented petitions to parliament. Crom-
well moved for a reference to a committee. Hyde
was chairman, and afterwards was often heard to
describe the demeanour of his turbulent colleague.
The scene brings Oliver too vividly before us ever to
be omitted.

" Cromwell," says Hyde, " ordered the witnesses and
petitioners in the method of the proceeding, and seconded
and enlarged upon what they said with great passion ; and
the witnesses and persons concerned, who were a very rude
kind of people, interrupted the council and witnesses on the
other side with great clamour when they said anything that
did not please them ; so that Mr. Hyde was compelled to
use some sharp reproofs and some threats to reduce them
to such a temper that the business might be quietly heard.
Cromwell in great fury reproached the chairman for being

70 OLIVER CROMWELL

partial, and that he discountenanced the witnesses by
threatening them ; the other appealed to the committee,
which justified him, and declared that he behaved himself
as he ought to do ; which more inflamed him [Cromwell],
who was already too much angry. When upon any men-
tion of matter of fact, or the proceeding before and at the
enclosure, the Lord Mandevil desired to be heard, and with
great modesty related what had been done, or explained
what had been said, Mr. Cromwell did answer and reply
upon him with so much indecency and rudeness, and in
language so contrary and offensive, that every man would
have thought that, as their natures and their manners
were as opposite as it is possible, so their interest could
never have been the same. In the end, his whole carriage
was so tempestuous, and his behaviour so insolent, that the
chairman found himself obliged to reprehend him, and tell
him that if he [Cromwell] proceeded in the same manner,
he [Hyde] would presently adjourn the committee, and the
next morning complain to the House of him."

Such was the outer Cromwell.

The twofold impulse of the times has been already
indicated, and here is Cromwell's exposition of it :
" Of the two greatest concernments that God hath
in the world, the one is that of religion and of the
preservation of the professors of it ; to give them
all due and just liberty ; and to assert the truth of
God. The other thing cared for is the civic liberty
and interest of the nation. Which, though it is, and
I think it ought to be, subordinate to the more
peculiar interest of God, yet it is the next best God
hath given men in this world ; and if well cared
for, it is better than any rock to fence men in their
other interests. Besides, if any whosoever think the
interests of Christians and the interest of the nation
inconsistent, I wish my soul may never enter into
their secrets."

Firm in his belief in direct communion with God,
a sovereign power unseen ; hearkening for the divine
voice, his steps guided by the divine hand, yet he
moved full in the world and in the life of the world.
Of books, as we have seen, he knew little. Of the

CHAP, v FALL OF STRAFFORD 71

yet more invigorating education of responsible con-
tact with large affairs, he had as yet had none.
Into men and the ways of men, he had enjoyed no
opportunity of seeing far. Destined to be one of
the most famous soldiers of his time, he had com-
pleted over two-thirds of his allotted span, and yet
he had never drilled a troop, nor seen a movement
in a fight, or the leaguer of a stronghold or a town.
He was both cautious and daring ; both patient
and swift ; both tender and fierce ; both sober and
yet willing to face tremendous risks ; both cool in
head and yet with a flame of passion in his heart.
His exterior rough and unpolished, and with an
odd turn for rustic buffooneries, he had the quality
of directing a steady, penetrating gaze into the
centre of a thing. Nature had endowed him with
a power of keeping his own counsel, that was
sometimes to pass for dissimulation ; a keen eye
for adjusting means to ends, that was often taken
for craft ; and a high-hearted insistence on deter-
mined ends, that by those who love to think the
worst was counted as guilty ambition. The founda-
tion of the whole was a temperament of energy,
vigour, resolution. Cromwell was to show himself
one of the men who are born to force great causes
to the proof.

ii

Before this famous parliament had been many
days assembled, occurred one of the most dramatic
moments in the history of English freedom. Straf-
ford was at the head of the army at York. When
a motion for a grand committee on Irish affairs had
been carried, his friends in London felt that it was
he who was struck at, and by an express they sent
him peremptory warning. His friends at York
urged him to stay where he was. The king and
queen, however, both pressed him to come, and
both assured him that if he came he should not

72 OLIVER CROMWELL

suffer in his person, his honour, or his fortune.
Strafford, well knowing his peril but undaunted,
quickly posted up to London, resolved to impeach
his enemies of high treason for inviting the Scots
into the kingdom. Historians may argue for ever
about the legalities of what had happened, but the
two great actors were under no illusions. The only
question was who should draw his sword first and
get home the swiftest thrust. The game was a
terrible one with fierce stakes, My head or thy head ;
and Pym and Strafford knew it.

The king received his minister with favour, and
again swore that he would protect him. No king's
word was ever worse kept. Strafford next morning
went down to the House of Lords, and was received
with expressions of honour and observance. Un-
luckily for him, he was not ready with his articles
of charge, and in a few hours he was too late. That
afternoon the blow was struck. Pym, who had as
marked a genius for quick and intrepid action as
any man that ever sat in the House of Commons,
rose and said there was matter of weight to be
imparted. The lobby without was quickly cleared,
the door was locked, and the key laid upon the
table. The discussion on Strafford's misdeeds in
Ireland, and in his government as president of the
north, went on until between four and five in the
afternoon. Then Pym, with some three hundred
members behind him, passed through a throng who
had been gathered by the tidings that new things
were on foot, and on reaching the bar of the House
of Lords he told them that by virtue of a command
from the Commons in parliament, and in the name
of all the Commons of England, he accused Thomas,
Earl of Strafford, of high treason, and desired his
committal to prison for a very few days until they
produced the articles and grounds of their accusa-
tion. Strafford was in the palace at Whitehall
during these proceedings. The news fell like a

FALL OF STRAFFORD 73

thunderbolt upon his friends around him, but he
kept a composed and confident demeanour. " I
will go," he said, " and look mine accusers in the
face." " With speed he comes to the House ; he
calls rudely at the door ; the keeper of the black
rod opens ; his lordship, with a proud, glooming
countenance, makes towards his place at the board-
head ; but at once many bid him rid the House."
When the Lords had settled their course, he was
recalled, commanded to kneel at the bar, and
informed of the nature of his delinquency. He
went away in custody. " Thus he, whose greatness
in the morning owned a power over two kingdoms,
in the evening straitened his person betwixt two
walls." From the Tower, whither he was speedily
conveyed, he wrote to his wife :

Albeit all be done against me that art and malice can
devise, with all the rigour possible, yet I am in great inward
quietness, and a strong belief God will deliver me out of all
these troubles. The more I look into my case, the more
hope I have, and sure if there be any honour and justice
left, my life will not be in danger ; and for anything else,
time, I trust, will salve any other hurt which can be done
me. Therefore hold up your heart, look to the children
and your house, let me have your prayers, and at last, by
God's good pleasure, we shall have our deliverance.

The business lasted for some five months. The
actual trial began on March 22 (1641), and went on
for fourteen days. The memorable scene was the
assertion on the grandest scale of the deep-reaching
principle of the responsibility of ministers, and it
was the opening of the last and greatest of the civil
wars within the kingdom. A shrewd eye-witness
has told us how people began to assemble at five
in the morning, and filled the hall by seven ; how
the august culprit came at eight, sometimes excusing
delay by contrariety of wind and tide, in a barge
from the Tower with a guard of musketeers and
halberdiers, and he usually found the king half an

74 OLIVER CROMWELL

hour before him in an unofficial box by the side
of the queen. " It was daily," says Baillie the
covenanter, " the most glorious assembly the isle
can afford ; yet the gravity not such as I expected ;
oft great clamour without about the doors ; in the
intervals while Strafford was making ready for
answers, the Lords got always to their feet, walked
and clattered ; the Lower House men too loud
clattering ; after ten hours, much public eating,
not only of confections but of flesh and bread,
bottles of beer and wine going thick from mouth
to mouth without cups, and all this in the king's
eye."

With the impeachment of Strafford the whole
position comes directly into view. He divided
universal hatred with his confederate the arch-
bishop, who had been impeached a few days after
himself. He was the symbol and impersonation
of all that the realm had for many years suffered
under. In England the name of Strafford stood
for lawless exactions, arbitrary courts, the free
quartering of troops, and the standing menace of
a papist enemy from the other side of St. George's
Channel. The Scots execrated him as the instigator
of energetic war against their country and their
church. Ireland in all its ranks and classes having
through its parliament applauded him as a bene-
factor, now with strange versatility cursed him as
a tyrant. It was the weight of all these converging
animosities that destroyed him. " Three whole
kingdoms," says a historian of the time, " were
his accusers, and eagerly sought in one death a
recompense of all their sufferings."

Viewed as a strictly judicial proceeding, the trial
of Strafford was as hollow as the yet more memorable
trial in the same historic hall eight years later. The
expedients for a conviction that satisfied our Lords
and Commons were little better than the expedients

CHAP, v FALL OF STRAFFORD 75

of the revolutionary tribunal in Jacobin Paris at the
close of the next century. The charges were vague,
general, and saturated with questionable inference.
The evidence, on any rational interpretation of the
facts, was defective at almost every point. That
Strafford had been guilty of treason in any sense in
which a sound tribunal going upon strict law could
have convicted him, nobody now maintains or per-
haps even then maintained. Oliver St. John, in argu-
ing the attainder before the Lords, put the real point.
"Why should he have law himself who would not
that others should have any ? We indeed give
laws to hares and deer, because they are beasts of
chase ; but we give none to wolves and foxes, but
knock them on the head wherever they are found,
because they are beasts of prey." This was the
whole issue — not law, but My head or thy head. In
revolutions it has often been that there is nothing
else for it ; and there was nothing else for it here.
But the revolutionary axe is double-edged, and so
men found it when the Restoration came.

Meanwhile, the one thing for Pym was to make
sure. That Strafford designed to subvert what, in
the opinion of the vast majority of Englishmen,
were the fundamental liberties of the realm, there
was no moral doubt though there was little legal
proof. That he had earned the title of a public
enemy ; that his continued eligibility for a place
in the councils of the king would have been a public
danger, and his escape from punishment a public
disaster ; and that if he had not been himself struck
down, he would have been the first to strike down
the champions of free government against military
monarchy, — these are the propositions that make
the political justification of the step taken by the
Commons when, after fourteen sittings, they began
to fear that impeachment might fail them. They
resorted to the more drastic proceeding of a bill
of attainder. They were surrounded by imminent

76 OLIVER CROMWELL

danger. They knew of plots to bring the royal
army down upon the parliament. They heard
whispers of the intention of the French king to
send over a force to help his sister, and of money
coming from the Prince of Orange, the king's new
son-in-law. Tales came of designs for Strafford's
escape from the Tower. Above all was the peril
that the king, in his desperation and in spite of the
new difficulties in which such a step would land him,
might suddenly dissolve them. It was this pressure
that carried the bill of attainder through parliament,
though Pym and Hampden at first opposed it, and
though Selden, going beyond Hyde and Falkland
who abstained, actually voted against it. Men's
apprehensions were on their sharpest edge. Then
it was that the Earl of Essex, rejecting Hyde's argu-
ments for merely banishing Strafford, gave him the
pithy reply, " Stone-dead hath no fellow."

Only one man could defeat the bill, and this was
Strafford's master. The king's assent was as neces-
sary for a bill of attainder as for any other bill, and
if there was one man who might have been expected
to refuse assent, it was the king. The bill was passed
on a Saturday (May 8). Charles took a day to con-
sider. He sent for various advisers, lay and epis-
copal. Archbishop Usher and Juxon told him, like
honest men, that if his conscience did not consent,
he ought not to act, and that he knew Strafford to
be innocent. In truth Charles a few days before
had appealed to the Lords not to press upon his
conscience, and told them that on his conscience he
could not condemn his minister of treason. Williams,
sharper than his two brother prelates, invented a
distinction between the king's public conscience and
his private conscience, not unlike that which was
pressed upon George III. on the famous occasion
in 1800. He urged that though the king's private
conscience might acquit Strafford, his public con-
science ought to yield to the opinion of the judges.

CHAP, v FALL OF STRAFFORD 77

Strafford had written to him a week before, and
begged him to pass the bill. " Sir, my consent
shall more acquit you herein to God than all the
world can do besides. To a willing man there is
no injury done ; and as by God's grace I forgive
all the world with calmness and meekness of infinite
contentment to my dislodging soul, so, sir, to you
I can give the life of this world with all the cheer-
fulness imaginable, in the just acknowledgment
of your exceeding favours." Little worthy was
Charles of so magnanimous a servant. Attempts
have been made at palliation. The queen, it is
said, might have been in danger from the anger
of the multitude. " Let him," it is gravely enjoined
upon us, " who has seen wife and child and all that
he holds dear exposed to imminent peril, and has
refused to save them by an act of baseness, cast
the first stone at Charles." The equity of history
is both a noble and a scientific doctrine, but its
decrees are not to be settled by the domestic affec-
tions. Time has stamped the abandonment of
Strafford with an ignominy that cannot be washed
out. It is the one act of his life for which Charles
himself professed remorse. « " Put not your trust
in princes," exclaimed Strafford when he learned
the facts. " I dare look death in the face," he said
stoically, as he passed out of the Tower gate to the
block ; "I thank God I am not afraid of death, but
do as cheerfully put off my doublet at this time
as ever I did when I went to my bed." " His
mishaps," said his confederate, Laud, " were that
he groaned under the public envy of the nobles,
and served a mild and gracious prince who knew
not how to be nor to be made great."

CHAPTER VI

THE EVE OF THE WAR

WHEN Mary Stuart in 1567 rode away a captive from
Carberry Hill, she seized the hand of Lord Lindsay,
her foe, and holding it aloft in her grasp, she swore
by it, " I will have your head for this, so assure you."
This was in Guise-Tudor blood, and her grandson's
passion for revenge if less loud was not less deep.
The destruction of Straff ord and the humiliation that
his own share in that bitter deed had left in the
heart of the king darkened whatever prospect there
might at any time have been of peace between
Charles and the parliamentary leaders. He was
one of the men vindictive in proportion to their
impotence, who are never beaten with impunity.
His thirst for retaliation was unquenchable, as the
popular leaders were well aware, as they were well
aware too of the rising sources of weakness in their
own ranks. Seeing no means of escape, the king
assented to a series of reforming bills that swept
away the Star Chamber, the Court of High Com-
mission, the assumed right to levy ship-money,
and the other more flagrant civil grievances of the
reign. The verdicts of Hallam have grown pale in
the flash and glitter of later historians, yet there is
much to be said for his judgment that all the useful
and enduring part of the reforming work of the Long
Parliament was mainly completed within the first

78

CHAP, vi PROGRESS OF REVOLUTION 79

nine months of its existence. These were all
measures obviously necessary for the restoration
or renovation of the constitution, and they stood
the test of altered times. Most of the rest was writ
in water.

Charles went further and into a new region in
agreeing to a law that guaranteed the assembly of a
parliament at least once in three years, whether with
the king's consent or without. Further still he went
when he assented to an act for prolonging the life
of the sitting parliament until it should vote for its
own dissolution (May 11, 1641). Here it was that
reform passed into revolution. To deprive the
monarch of the right of taking the sense of his people
at his own time, and to make dissolution depend
upon an act of parliament passed for the occasion,
was to go on to ground that had never been trodden
before. It convinced the king more strongly than
ever that to save his crown, in the only sense in
which he thought a crown worth wearing, he would
have to fight for it. Yet it was he who had forced
the quarrel to this pitch. Pym, Cromwell, and the
rest were not the men to forget his lawless persecu-
tion of Eliot ; nor that Charles had extinguished
parliaments for eleven years ; nor how, even after
his return to the constitution only the year before,
he had petulantly broken the Short Parliament
after a session of no more than three weeks. It
would have been mere blindness to mistake what
was actually passing before their eyes. They knew
of plot upon plot. In April Pym had come upon
one design among the courtiers to bring up the
northern army to overawe the parliament. Almost
before this was exposed, a second conspiracy of
court and officers was known to be on foot. It was
the Scots who now, as so often, held the key of the
position. Charles's design was manifestly to win
such popularity and influence in Scotland, that he
might be allowed to use the army of that kingdom in

80 OLIVER CROMWELL

concert with his own army in the north of England
to terrify his mutinous parliament and destroy its
leaders. Such a policy was futile from its founda-
tion ; as if the Scots, who cared for their church
far more than they cared for his crown, were likely
to lend themselves to the overthrow of the only
power that could secure what they cherished most,
against an unmasked enmity bent on its destruction.
The defeat of the English parliament must bring
with it the discomfiture of Christ's kirk in Scotland.
In the month of August Charles left London to
visit his northern kingdom. The vigilance of the
parliament men was not for an instant deceived.
They promptly guessed that the purpose of his
journey must be to seek support for reaction, and
his rejection of their remonstrances against his
absence deepened their suspicion.

They had indeed more reasons than this for un-
easiness. The first of those moments of fatigue had
come, that attend all revolutions. At the beginning
of civil discord boldness carries all before it ; but
a settled community, especially one composed of
Englishmen, soon looks for repose. Hopes are seen
to be tinged with illusion, the pulse slackens, and
the fever cools. The nation was after all still royalist,
and had not the king redressed their wrongs ? Why
not rest ? This was the question of the indolent,
the over- cautious, the short-sighted, and the fearful.
Worse than fatigue, the spirit of party now raised
its questionable crest. Philosophers have never
explained how it comes that faction is one of the
inborn propensities of man ; nor why it should
always be that, even where solid reasons are absent,
almost any distinctions, however slender, fleeting,
fanciful, or frivolous, will yet serve to found a party
difference upon. " Zeal for different opinions as
to religion or government, whether those opinions
be practical or speculative ; attachment to different
leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence

CHAP, vi CHURCH REFORM 81

and power ; devotion to persons whose fortunes
have kindled human interests and passions, — these
things have at all times so inflamed men as to render
them far more disposed to vex and oppress each
other than to work together for the common good."
Such is the language of Madison about a singular
law of human things, that has made the spirit of
sect and party the master-key of so many in the
long catalogue of the perversities of history.

It was on the church and its reform that the
strenuous phalanx of constitutional freedom began
to scatter. The Long Parliament had barely been
a month in session before the religious questions
that were then most alive of all in the most vigorous
minds of the time, and were destined to lead, by so
many divisions and subdivisions, to distraction in
counsel and chaos in act, began rapidly to work.
Cromwell did not hold the helmsman's place so
long as Pym survived. Clarendon said of Oliver
that his parts seemed to be raised by the demands
of great station, " as if he had concealed his faculties
until he had occasion to use them." In other words,
Cromwell fixed his eyes upon the need of the hour,
used all his energy and devotion in meeting it, and
let that suffice. Nor in men of action is there any
better mark of a superior mind. But that Cromwell
was " much hearkened to from the first " is indi-
cated by the fact that he was specially placed upon
eighteen of the committees into which the House
divided itself for the consideration of the multitude
of grievances clamouring for attention from all the
shires and boroughs in the land. He moved (Dec.
30, 1640) the second reading of the bill for a sitting
of parliament every year, and he took a prominent
part in the committee which transformed the bill
into an enactment that a parliament should meet
of least once in three years.

Going deeper, he was one of the secret instigators
at the first parliamentary move of the Root-and-

O

82 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOKI

Branch men against the bishops, and this move was
the first step in the development of party spirit
within ranks that had hitherto been staunchly of one
mind. Everybody was in favour of church reform,
but nobody at this stage, and certainly not Cromwell,
had any clear ideas either of the principle on which
reform should proceed, or of the system that ought
to be adopted. On those ecclesiastical institutions
that were what mattered most, they were most at
sea. The prevailing temper was at first moderate.
To exclude the higher clergy from meddling as
masters in secular affairs, to stir up the slackness of
the lower clergy ; to nullify canons imposed without
assent of parliament ; to expunge from the prayer-
book things calculated to give offence — such were
the early demands. A bill passed through the
Commons for removing the bishops from the House
of Lords. The Lords threw it out (June 1641),
and as usual rejection of a moderate reform was
followed by a louder cry for wholesale innovation.
The constitutionalists fell back, and men advanced
to the front with the root of the matter in them.
A month after the Lords refused the bishops bill,
the Commons passed the Root-and-Branch bill.
The Root-and-Branch men, besides denouncing the
liturgy as framed out of the Romish breviary and
mass-book, declared government by bishops to be
dangerous both to church and commonwealth, to
be the main cause and occasion of many foul evils.
Only one thing was to be done with a govern-
ment so evil : with all its dependencies, roots,
and branches, it should be forthwith swept away.
What was to be the substitute, nobody knew, and
when it came to that sovereign and most wholesome
test for all reformers — the conversion of an opinion
into the clauses of a bill — neither Cromwell nor
Vane nor any other of the reformers had anything
practicable to propose.

Root-and-Branch was in time confronted by rival

CHAP, vx DIVISION AMONG THE PATRIOTS 83

proposals for moderate episcopacy. Neither Root-
and-Branch nor moderate episcopacy reached an
effective stage in either House, but the action taken
upon them split the parliament in two, one side for
episcopacy, and the other against it. Such were
the two policies before men on the eve of the civil
war. Then, by and by, this division gradually
adjusted itself with disastrous aptness to the other
and parallel conflict between crown and parliament ;
the partisans of bishops slowly turned into partisans
of the king, and episcopalians became one with
royalists. The wiser divines tried to reconcile the
rival systems. Usher, Archbishop of Armagh, sug-
gested that the bishop should have a council of
elders. Bramhall, his successor in the metropolitan
see, whom Cromwell called the Irish Laud, admitted
the validity of presbyterian orders, and thought the
German superintendents almost as good as bishops.
Baxter, though he afterwards declined a mitre, yet
always held out a hand to prelacy. Leighton, one
of the few wholly attractive characters of those
bitter-flavoured times, was closely intimate with
French Jansenists, of whom Hume truly says that
they were but half catholics ; and Leighton was
wont to declare that he would rather turn one single
man to be truly of a serious mind, than turn a whole
nation to mere outer conformity, and he saw no
reason why there should not be a conjunction
between bishops and elders. For none of these
temperate and healing ideals was the time ripe.
Their journey was swiftly bringing men into a torrid
zone. The Commons resolved that communion-
tables should be removed from the east end of
churches, that chancels should be levelled, that
scandalous pictures of any of the persons of the
Trinity should be taken away, and all images of the
Virgin Mary demolished. The consequence was a
bleak and hideous defacement of beautiful or comely
things in most of the cathedrals and great churches

84 OLIVER CROMWELL

all over England. Altar-rails and screens were
destroyed, painted windows were broken, figures
of stone and marble ground to powder, and pictures
cut into shreds. These vandalisms shocked both
reverential sentiment and the police feeling for
good order, and they widened the alienation of
parliamentary parties. Before the end of the
autumn, Hyde and Falkland had become king's
friends.

Hyde, more familiarly known by his later style of
Lord Clarendon, stands among the leading figures
of the time, with a strong and direct judgment,
much independence of character, and ideas of policy
that were coherent and his own. His intellectual
horizons were wide, he had good knowledge of the
motives of men, and understood the handling of
large affairs. Even where he does not carry us
with him, there is nobody of the time whose opinion
is much better worth knowing. We may even
give him the equivocal credit that is due to the
Clarendonian type of conservative in all times and
places, that if only things could have been different,
he would not have been in the wrong. His ideal in
church and state, viewed in the light of the event,
did not ultimately miscarry. The settlement of
1688 would have suited him well enough, and in
his best days he had much of the temper of Somers.
But he and Falkland had either too little nerve, or
too refining a conscience, or too unstable a grasp,
for the navigation of the racing floods around them.
They were doubtless unwilling converts to the court
party, but when a convert has taken his plunge
he must endure all the unsuspected foolishness and
all the unteachable zealotry of his new comrades—
an experience that has perhaps in all ages given
many a mournful hour to generous natures.

It was now that a majority with a policy found
itself confronted by an opposition fluctuating in
numbers, but still making itself felt, in the fashion

CHAP, vi ATTACK ON THE BISHOPS 85

that has since become the familiar essence of parlia-
mentary life all the world over. As we shall see,
a second and deeper line of party demarcation was
soon to follow. Meanwhile the division between
parties in the Commons was speedily attended by
disagreement between Commons and Lords, and
this widened as the rush of events became more
pressing. Among the Lords, too, Charles now
found friends. It was his own fault if he did not
discover, in the differences among his enemies upon
the church, a chance of recovering his own shattered
authority in the state. To profit by these differences
was his persistent game for seven years to come.
Seldom has any game in political manoeuvre been
more unskilfully played.

The parliament had adjourned early in September,
the king still absent in Scotland. The superintend-
ence of affairs was carried on by a committee, a sort
of provisional government of which Pym was the
mainspring. Hampden had gone to Edinburgh as
a parliamentary commissioner to watch the king.
The two Houses reassembled a few days before the
end of October amid intense disquiet. The growing
tension made the popular leaders at once more
energetic and more deliberate. Shortly before the
adjournment the prayer-book had been attacked,
and Cromwell supported the attack. Bishops still
furnished the occasion, if they were not the cause,
of political action. Root-and-Branch was dropped,
and a bill was renewed for excluding the clergy from
temporal authority and depriving the bishops of
their seats among the Lords. Then followed a bill
for suspending the bishops from parliamentary
powers in the meantime. Cromwell by the side
of Pym spoke keenly for it, on the ground that the
bishops by their six-and-twenty votes should not
be suffered to obstruct the legislative purposes of
a majority of the two Houses.

Charles, writing from Scotland (October), had

86 OLIVER CROMWELL

announced a momentous resolution. " I command
you," he said to his Secretary of State, " to assure all
my servants that I am constant to the discipline and
doctrine of the Church of England established by
Queen Elizabeth and my father, and that I resolve
by the grace of God to die in the maintenance of it."
The pledge was more tragic than perhaps he knew,
but when the time came he redeemed it to the
letter. As a sign that he was in earnest, he pro-
ceeded to fill up five bishoprics that happened to be
vacant, and in four of them he planted divines who
had in convocation been parties to the unlawful
canons on which the Commons were at the moment
founding an impeachment of treason. This was
either one of his many random imprudences, or
else a calculated challenge. Cromwell blazed out
instantly against a step that proclaimed the king's
intention of upholding episcopacy in all its preten-
sions. Suddenly an earthquake shook the ground
on which they stood, and threw the combatants
into unexpected postures.

ii

The event that now happened inflamed the public
mind in England with such horror as had in Europe
followed the Sicilian Vespers, or the massacre of
St. Bartholomew, or the slaughter of the Protestants
in the passes of the Valtelline by the Spanish faction
only twenty-one years before. In November the
news reached London that the Irish had broken out
in bloody rebellion. The story of this dreadful
rising has been the subject of vehement dispute
among historians ever since, and even in our own
day has been discussed with unhistoric heat. Yet
the broad facts are sufficiently clear to any one
capable of weighing the testimony of the time with-
out prejudice of race or faith ; and they stand out
in cardinal importance in respect both to leading

. vi THE IRISH REBELLION 87

episodes in the career of Cromwell, and to the
general politics of the Revolution.

The causes of rebellion in Ireland lay deep. Con-
fiscations and exterminations had followed in deadly
succession, and ever since the merciless suppression
of the rising of the Ulster chieftains in the reign of
Elizabeth, the elements of another violent outbreak
had been sullenly and surely gathering. Enormous
confiscations had been followed by the plantation
of Scotch and English colonists, and the clearance
of the old owners and their people. The colonist
thought no more of rights and customs in the abori-
ginal population, than if they had been the Matabele
or Zulu of a later time. Besides the great sweeping
forfeitures, rapacious adventurers set busily to work
with eagle eyes to find out flaws in men's title to
individual estates, and either the adventurer himself
acquired the estate, or forced the possessor to take
a new grant at an extortionate rent. People were
turned off their land without compensation and
without means of subsistence. Active men left with
nothing to do, and nothing of their own to live upon,
wandered about the country, apt upon the least
occasion of insurrection or disturbance to be heads
and leaders of outlaws and rebels. Strafford (1632-
1640), in spite of his success upon the surface, had
aggravated the evil at its source. He had brought
the finances into good order, introduced discipline
into the army, driven pirates out of the channel,
imported flax-seed from Holland and linen-weavers
from France. But nobody blessed or thanked him,
everybody dreaded the weight of his hand, and in
such circumstances dread is but another word for
hate. The genius of fear had perfected the work
of fear ; but the whole structure of imperial power
rested on shaking bog. The great inquisition into
titles had alarmed and exasperated the old English.
The northern presbyterians resented his proceed-
ings for religious uniformity. The catholics were at

88 OLIVER CROMWELL

heart in little better humour ; for though Strafford
was too deep a statesman to attack them in full
front, he undoubtedly intended in the fulness of time
to force them as well as the presbyterians into the
same uniformity as his master had designed for
Scotland. He would, however, have moved slowly,
and in the meantime he both practised connivance
with the catholic evasion of the law, and encouraged
hopes of complete toleration. So did the king. But
after Strafford had gone to his doom in England,
puritan influences grew more powerful, and the
catholics perceived that all the royal promises of
complete toleration, like those for setting a limit
to the time for inquisition into titles of land, were
so many lies. No Irish conspirator could have laid
the train for rebellion more effectively. If any one
cares to find some more reasonable explanation of
Irish turbulence than the simple theory that this
unfortunate people, in the modern phrase, have a
double dose of original sin, he should read the
story how the O'Byrnes were by chicane, perjury,
imprisonment, martial law, application of burning
gridirons, branding-irons, and strappado, cheated
out of their lands.

While these grievances were rankling all over
Ireland, and the undying animosities of the dis-
possessed chieftains of Ulster were ready to break
into flame, priests and friars from Spain had swarmed
into the land and kindled fresh excitement. No
papist conspiracy was needed to account for what
soon happened. When one deep spring of discon-
tent mounts to a head and overflows, every other
source becomes a tributary. Maddened as they
were by wholesale rapine, driven forth from land
and homes, outraged in every sentiment belonging
to their old rude organisation, it is no wonder if
the native Irish and their leaders of ancient and
familiar name found an added impulse in passion
for their religious faith.

THE IRISH REBELLION 89

At last that happened which the wiser heads had
long foreseen. After many weeks of strange still-
ness, in an instant the storm burst. The Irish in
Ulster suddenly (October 23, 1641) fell upon the
English colonists, the invaders of their lands. The
fury soon spread, and the country was enveloped in
the flames of a conflagration fed by concentrated
sense of ancient wrong, and all the savage passions
of an oppressed people suddenly broken loose upon
its oppressors. Agrarian wrong, religious wrong,
insolence of race, now brought forth their poisonous
fruit. A thousand murderous atrocities were per-
petrated on one side, and they were avenged by
atrocities as hideous on the other. Every tale of
horror in the insurgents can be matched by horror
as diabolic in the soldiery. What happened in 1641
was in general features very like what happened
in 1798, for the same things come to pass in every
conflict where ferocious hatred in a persecuted caste
meets the ferocious pride and contempt of its per-
secutors. The main points are reasonably plain.
There is no question by whom the sanguinary work
was first begun. There is little question that it was
not part of a premeditated and organised design
of indiscriminate massacre, but was inevitably
attendant upon a violent rising against foreign
despoilers. There is no question that though in
the beginning agrarian or territorial, the rising soon
drew after it a fierce struggle between the two rival
Christian factions. There is little question that, after
the first shock, Parsons and his allies in authority
acted on the cynical anticipation that the worse
the rebellion, the richer would be the forfeitures.
There is no question that the enormity of crime
was the subject of exaggeration, partly natural and
inevitable, partly incendiary and deliberate. Nor
finally is there any question that, even without
exaggeration, it is the most barbarous and inhuman
chapter that stains the domestic history of the

90 OLIVER CROMWELL

kingdom. The total number of protestants slain
in cold blood at the outbreak of the rebellion has
been fixed at various figures from four thousand to
forty, and the latest serious estimate puts it at five-
and-twenty thousand during the first three or four
years. The victims of the retaliatory slaughter by
protestants upon catholics were countless, but Sir
William Petty thinks that more than half a million
Irish of both creeds perished between 1641 and 1652.
The fated international antipathy between Eng-
lish and Irish, that .like a volcano is sometimes
active, sometimes smouldering and sullen, now
broke forth in liquid fire. The murderous tidings
threw England into frenzy. It has been compared
to the fury with which the American colonists
regarded the use of Red Indians by the govern-
ment of King George ; or to the rage and horror
that swept over the country for a moment when
the tidings of Cawnpore arrived ; and I need not
describe it. The air was thick, as is the way in
revolutions, with frantic and irrational suspicion.
The catastrophe in Ireland fitted in with the govern-
ing moods of the hour, and we know only too well
how simple and summary are the syllogisms of
a rooted distrust. Ireland was papist, and this was
a papist rising. The queen was a papist, surrounded
at Somerset House by the same black brood as those
priests of Baal who on the other side of St. George's
Channel were described as standing by while their
barbarous flock slew old men and women wholesale
and in cold blood, dashed out the brains of infants
against the walls in sight of their wretched parents,
ran their skeans like Red Indians into the flesh of
little children, and flung helpless protestants by
scores at a time over the bridge at Portadown.
Such was the reasoning, and the damning conclusion
was clear. This was the queen's rebellion, and the
king must be her accomplice. Sir Phelim O'Neil,
the first leader of the Ulster rebellion, declared that

CHAP, vi THE IRISH REBELLION 91

he held a commission from the king himself, and
the story took quick root. It is now manifest that
Charles was at least as much dismayed as any of his
subjects ; yet for the rest of his life he could never
wipe out the fatal theory of his guilt.

That catholic Ireland should prefer the king to
the parliament for a master was to be expected.
Puritanism with the Old Testament in its hand was
never an instrument for the government of a com-
munity predominantly catholic, and it never can be.
Nor was it ever at any time so ill fitted for such
a task as now, when it was passionately struggling
for its own life within the protestant island. The
most energetic patriots at Westminster were just
as determined to root out popery in Ireland, as
Philip II. had been to root out Lutheran or Calvin-
istic heresy in the United Provinces.

The Irish rebellion added bitter elements to
the great contention in England. The parliament
dreaded lest an army raised for the subjugation of
Ireland should be used by the king for the subjuga-
tion of England. The king justified such dread by
trying to buy military support from the rebel con-
federates by promises that would have gone near
to turning Ireland into a separate catholic state.
Meanwhile we have to think of Ireland as welter-
ing in bottomless confusion. Parliamentarian pro-
testants were in the field and royalist protestants,
anglicans and presbyterians ; the Scots settlers
to - day standing for the parliament, to - morrow
fighting along with Ormonde for the king ; the
confederate catholics, the catholic gentry of the
Pale, all inextricably entangled. Thus we shall see
going on for nine desperate years the sowing of the
horrid harvest, which it fell to Cromwell after his
manner to gather in.

CHAPTER VII

THE FIVE MEMBERS THE CALL TO ARMS

THE king returned from Scotland in the latter part
of November (1641), baffled in his hopes of aid from
the Scots, but cheered by the prospect of quarrels
among his enemies at Westminster, expecting to
fish in the troubled waters in Ireland, and bent on
using the new strength that the converts of reaction
were bringing him for the destruction of the popular
leaders. The city gave him a great feast, the crowd
shouted long life to King Charles and Queen Mary,
the church bells rang, wine was set flowing in the
conduits in Cornhill and Cheapside, and he went to
Whitehall in high elation at what he took for counter-
revolution. He instantly began a quarrel by with-
drawing the guard that had been appointed for
the Houses under the command of Essex. Long
ago alive to their danger, the popular leaders had
framed that famous exposition of the whole dark
case against the monarch which is known to history
as the Grand Remonstrance. They now with char-
acteristic energy resumed it. The Remonstrance
was a bold manifesto to the public, setting out
in manly terms the story of the parliament, its
past gains, its future hopes, the standing perils
with which it had to wrestle. The most important
of its single clauses was the declaration for church
conformity. It was a direct challenge not merely

92

CHAP, vii THE GRAND REMONSTRANCE 93

to the king, but to the new party of episcopalian
royalists. These were not slow to take up the
challenge, and the fight was hard. So deep had
the division now become within the walls of the
Commons that the Remonstrance was passed only
after violent scenes and by a narrow majority of
eleven (November 22).

Early in November Cromwell made the first
proposal for placing military force in the hands of
parliament. All was seen to hang on the power of
the sword, for the army plots brought the nearness
of the peril home to the breasts of the popular
leaders. A month later the proposal, which soon
became the occasion of resort to arms though not
the cause, took defined shape. By the Militia Bill
the control and organisation of the trained bands of
the counties was taken out of the king's hands, and
transferred to lords-lieutenant nominated by parlia-
ment. Next the two Houses joined in a declaration
that no religion should be tolerated in either England
or Ireland except the religion established by law.
But as the whirlpool became more angry, bills and
declarations mattered less and less. Each side
knew that the other now intended force. Tumult-
uous mobs found their way day after day to hoot
the bishops at Westminster. Partisans of the king
began to flock to Whitehall, they were ordered
to wear their swords, and an armed guard was
posted ostentatiously at the palace gate. Angry
frays followed between these swordsmen of the king
and the mob armed with clubs and staves, crying
out against the bishops and the popish lords. The
bishops themselves were violently hustled, and had
their gowns torn from their backs as they went into
the House of Lords. Infuriated by these outrages,
they issued a foolish protestation that all done by
the Lords in their absence would be null and void.
This incensed both Lords and Commons and added
fuel to the general flame, and the unlucky prelates

94 OLIVER CROMWELL

were impeached and sent to prison. The king
tried to change the governor of the Tower and to
install a reckless swashbuckler of his own. The
outcry was so shrill that in a few hours the swash-
buckler was withdrawn. Then by mysterious
changes of tack he turned first to Pym, next to the
heads of the moderate royalists, Hyde, Falkland,
and Culpeper. The short history ot the overtures
to Pym is as obscure as the relations between
Mirabeau and Marie Antoinette. Things had in
truth gone too far for such an alliance to be either
desirable or fruitful. Events immediately showed
that with Charles honest co-operation was impos-
sible. No sooner had he established Falkland and
Culpeper in his council, than suddenly, without dis-
closing a word of his design, he took a step which
alienated friends, turned back the stream that was
running in his favour, handed over the strong
fortress of legality to his enemies, and made war
inevitable.

Pym had been too quick for Strafford the autumn
before, and Charles resolved that this time his
own blow should be struck first. It did not fall
upon men caught unawares. For many weeks
suspicion had been deepening that some act of
violence upon the popular leaders was coming.
Suspicion on one side went with suspicion on the
other. Rumours were in the air that Pym and his
friends were actually revolving in their minds the
impeachment of the queen. Whether the king was
misled by the perversity of his wife and the folly
of the courtiers, or by his own too ample share of
these unhappy qualities, he perpetrated the most
irretrievable of all his blunders. A day or two
before, he had promised the Commons that the
security of every one of them from violence should
be as much his care as the preservation of his own
children. He had also assured his new advisers that
no step should be taken without their knowledge.

CHAP, vn THE FIVE MEMBERS 95

Yet now he suddenly sent the Attorney-General to
the House of Lords, there at the table (January 3,
1642) to impeach one of their own number and five
members of the other House, including Pym and
Hampden, of high treason. Holies, Haselrig, and
Strode were the other three. No stroke of state
in history was ever more firmly and manfully
countered. News came that officers had invaded
the chambers of the five members and were sealing
up their papers. The House ordered the immediate
arrest of the officers. A messenger arrived from the
king to seize the five gentlemen. The House sent a
deputation boldly to inform the king that they
would take care the five members should be ready
to answer any legal charge against them.

Next day a still more startling thing was done.
After the midday adjournment, the benches were
again crowded, and the five members were in their
place. Suddenly the news ran like lightning among
them, that the king was on his way from Whitehall
with some hundreds of armed retainers. The five
members were hurried down to the river, and they
had hardly gained a boat before the king and a
band of rufflers with swords and pistols entered
Westminster Hall. Passing through them, and
accompanied by his nephew, the Elector Palatine,
the king crossed the inviolable threshold, advanced
uncovered up the floor of the House of Commons to
the step of the chair, and demanded the five accused
members. He asked the Speaker whether they were
there. The Speaker replied, in words that will
never be forgotten, that he had neither eyes nor
ears nor tongue in that place but as the House might
be pleased to direct. " 'Tis no matter," the king
said. " I think my eyes are as good as another's."
After looking round, he said he saw that all his birds
were flown, but he would take his own course to find
them. Then he stammered out a few apologetic
sentences, and stepping down from the chair marched

96 OLIVER CROMWELL

away in anger and shame through the grim ranks
and amid deep murmurs of privilege out at the door.
His band of baffled cut-throats followed him through
the hall with sullen curses at the loss of their sport.
When next he entered Westminster Hall, he was a
prisoner doomed to violent death. Cromwell was
doubtless present, little foreseeing his own part in a
more effectual performance of a too similar kind in
the same place eleven years hence.

Never has so deep and universal a shock thrilled
England. The staunchest friends of the king were
in despair. The puritans were divided between
dismay, rage, consternation, and passionate resolu-
tion. One of them, writing in after years of his old
home in distant Lancashire, says : "I remember
upon the occasion of King Charles I. demanding
the five members of the House of Commons. Such
a night of prayers, tears, and groans I was never
present at in all my life : the case was extraordinary,
and the work was extraordinary." It was the same
in thousands of households all over the land. The
five members a few days later returned in triumph
to Westminster. The river was alive with boats
decked with gay pennons, and the air resounded
with joyful shouts and loud volleys from the
primitive firearms of the time. Charles was not
there to see or hear. Exactly a week after the
Attorney-General had brought up the impeachment
of the five members, he quitted Whitehall (January
10), and saw it no more until all had come to an end
seven years later.

II

This daring outrage on law, faith, and honour was
a provocation to civil war and the beginning of it.
After such an exploit the defenders of the parlia-
ment would have been guilty of a criminal betrayal,
if they had faltered in facing the issue so decisively
raised. Pym (January 14) moved that the House

CHAP, vn PYM 97

should go into committee on the state of the king-
dom, and Cromwell then moved the consideration
of means to put the kingdom into a posture of
defence. Hampden by and by introduced a motion
to desire the king to put the Tower of London and
other parts of the kingdom, with the militia, into
such hands as the parliament might confide in.
In this way they came to the very essence of the
dispute of the hour. Was the king to retain the
sword ? For some weeks debate went on. It was
suggested to the king that the militia might be
granted for a time. " By God, not for an hour ! "
cried Charles. " You have asked that of me in this
which was never asked of a king, and with which I
will not trust my wife and children."

As the call to arms was every day more plainly
felt to be inevitable, it is no wonder that many men
on the popular side recoiled. The prospect was
dreadful, and even good patriots may well have
asked themselves in anguish whether moderation,
temper, good will, compromise, might not even
now avert it. Pym showed here, as always, a con-
summate mastery of all the better arts of parlia-
mentary leadership. It is not easy to tell exactly
at what moment he first felt that peace with the
king was hopeless, but at any rate he was well
assured that it was so now. As they neared the
edge of the cataract, his instincts of action at once
braced and steadied him. He was bold, prompt,
a man of initiative, resource, and energy without
fever ; open and cogent in argument, with a true
statesman's eye to the demand of the instant, to
the nearest antecedent, to the next step ; willing
to be moderate when moderation did not sacrifice
the root of the matter ; vigorous and uncompromis-
ing when essentials were in jeopardy. Cromwell
too was active both in the House and the country,
little of an orator but a doer.

In April the king demanded admission into Hull,

H

98 OLIVER CROMWELL

valuable for the importation of arms and troops
from abroad. The governor shut the gates and
drew up the bridge. The king proclaimed him a
traitor. This proceeding has always been accounted
the actual beginning of the great civil war. On
August 22, 1642, one of the memorable dates in our
history, on the evening of a stormy day Charles
raised the royal standard in the courtyard at the
top of the castle hill at Nottingham. This was the
solemn symbol that the king called upon his vassals
for their duty and service. Drums and trumpets
sounded, and the courtiers and a scanty crowd of
onlookers threw up their caps, and cried, " God
save King Charles and hang up the Roundheads ! "
But a general sadness, says Clarendon, covered the
whole town. Melancholy men observed many ill
presages, and the king himself appeared more
melancholy than his wont. The standard itself
was blown down by an unruly wind within a week
after it had been set up. This was not the first
time that omens had been against the king. At
his coronation he wore white instead of purple, and
" some looked on it as an ill presage that the king,
laying aside his purple, the robe of majesty, should
clothe himself in white, the robe of innocence, as if
thereby it were foresignified that he should divest
himself of that royal majesty which would keep
him safe from affront and scorn, to rely wholly on
the innocence of a virtuous life, which did expose
him finally to calamitous ruin." Still worse was
the court preacher's text on the same august occa-
sion, chosen from the Book of Revelation : "Be
thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee
a crown of life," — " more like his funeral sermon
when he was alive, as if he were to have none when
he was to be buried."

A day or two after raising the standard, Charles
appointed to be general of the horse Prince Rupert,
the third son of his sister the Queen of Bohemia,

CHAP, vii OPINION IN THE COUNTRY 99

now in his twenty-third year. The boldness, energy,
and military capacity of the young adventurer were
destined to prove one of the most formidable of all
the elements in the struggle of the next three years.
Luckily the intrepid soldier had none of Cromwell's
sagacity, caution, and patience, or else that " provi-
dence which men call the chance of war " might
have turned out differently.

The Earl of Essex, son of Queen Elizabeth's
favourite, was named general of the parliamentary
forces, less for any military reputation than from
his social influence. " He was the man," said the
preacher of his funeral sermon (1646), " to break
the ice and set his first footing in the Red Sea. No
proclamation of treason could cry him down, nor
threatening standard daunt him that in that misty
morning, when men knew not each other, whether
friend or foe, by his arising dispelled the fog, and
by his very name commanded thousands into your
service." Opinion in most of the country was
pretty firm on one side or the other, but it was slow
in mounting to the heat of war. The affair was
grave, and men went about it with argument and
conscience. In every manor-house and rectory and
college, across the counters of shops in the towns,
on the ale-bench in the villages and on the roads,
men plied one another with precedents and analogies,
with Bible texts, with endless points of justice and
of expediency, thus illustrating in this high historic
instance all the strength and all the weakness of
human reasoning, all the grandeur and all the levity
of civil and ecclesiastical passion. Many, no doubt,
shared the mind of Hutchinson's father, who was
staunch to the parliamentary cause but infinitely
desirous that the quarrel should come to a com-
promise, and not to the catastrophe of war. Savile
said : "I love religion so well, I would not have it
put to the hazard of a battle. I love liberty so

100 OLIVER CROMWELL

much, I would not trust it in the hands of a con-
queror ; for, much as I love the king, I should not
be glad that he should beat the parliament, even
though they were in the wrong. My desires are to
have no conquests of either side." Savile was no
edifying character ; but the politician who would
fain say both yes and no stands in every crisis for a
numerous host. On the other hand, human nature
being constant in its fundamental colours, we may
be sure that in both camps were many who pro-
claimed that the dispute must be fought out, and
the sooner the fight began, the sooner would it end.
Enthusiasts for the rights and religion of their
country could not believe, says one of them, that
a work so good and necessary would be attended
with so much difficulty, and they went into it in the
faith that the true cause must quickly win. On the
other side, deep-rooted interests and ancient senti-
ment gathered round the crown as their natural
centre. Selfish men who depended upon the crown
for honours or substance, and unselfish men who
were by habit and connection unalterably attached
to an idealised church, united according to their
diverse kinds in twofold zeal for the king and the
bishops, in the profound assurance that Providence
would speedily lay their persecutors low. Families
were divided, close kinsmen became violent foes,
and brother even slew brother. Some counties
were almost wholly for the king, while others went
almost wholly for the parliament. In either case,
the remnant of a minority, whether the godly or
the ungodly, found it best to seek shelter outside.
There were counties where the two sides paired
and tried to play neutral. The line of social cleav-
age between the combatants was not definite, but
what we are told of Notts was probably true of
other districts, that most of the nobles and upper
gentry were stout for the king, while most of the
middle sort, the able substantial freeholders, and

CHAP, vn TEMPER OF THE STRUGGLE 101

commoners not dependent on the malignants above
them, stood for the parliament.

Speaking broadly, the feeling for parliament was
strongest in London and the east ; the king was
strongest in the west and north. Wherever the
Celtic element prevailed, as in Wales and Cornwall,
the king had most friends, and the same is true
with qualifications in the two other kingdoms of
Scotland and Ireland. Where the population was
thickest, busiest in trade and manufacture, and
wealthiest, they leaned with various degrees of
ardour toward the parliament. Yorkshire was
divided, the cloth towns south of the Aire being
parliamentary. Lancashire, too, was divided, the
east for the parliament, the west for the king. The
historians draw a line from Flamborough Head to
Plymouth, and with some undulations and indenta-
tions such a line separates royalist from parliament-
ary England. In East Anglia opinion was steadfast
through the struggle, but elsewhere it fluctuated
with the fortunes of the war, and the wavering
inclinations of influential gentry. One of the most
important circumstances of the times was that the
fleet (in July 1642) declared for the parliament.

The temper of the time was hard, men were ready
to settle truth by blows, and life, as in the Middle
Ages, was still held cheap. The cavalier was hot,
unruly, scornful, with all the feudal readiness for
bloodshed. The roundhead was keen, stubborn,
dogged, sustained by the thought of the heroes of the
Old Testament who avenged upon Canaanite and
Amalekite the cause of Jehovah. Men lived and
fought in the spirit of the Old Testament and not of
the New. To men of the mild and reflecting temper
of Chillingworth the choice was no more cheerful
than between publicans and sinners on one side, and
scribes and Pharisees on the other. A fine instance
of the high and manly temper in which the best men
entered upon the struggle is to be found in the words

102 OLIVER CROMWELL

used by Sir William Waller to the brave Hopton.
44 God, who is the searcher of my heart," Waller
wrote, " knows with what a sad sense I go upon this
service, and with what a perfect hatred I detest this
war without an enemy ; but I look upon it as sent
from God, and that is enough to silence all passion
in me. . . . We are both upon the stage, and must
act such parts as are assigned us in this tragedy.
Let us do it in a way of honour and without personal
animosities."

On the whole, the contest in England was stained
by few of the barbarities that usually mark a civil
war, especially war with a religious colour upon it.
But cruelty, brutality, and squalor are the essence
of all war, and here too there was much rough work
and some atrocity. Prisoners were sometimes badly
used, and the parliamentary generals sent great
batches of them like gangs of slaves to toil under the
burning sun in the West Indies, or to compulsory
service in Venice or an American colony. Men were
killed in cold blood after quarter promised, and the
shooting of Lucas and Lisle after the surrender of
Colchester in 1648, though it is true that the royalist
officers had surrendered to mercy, that is without
promise of their lives, was still a piece of savagery
for which Fairfax and Ireton must divide the blame
between them. The ruffianism of war could not be
avoided, but it was ruffianism without the diabolic
ferocity of Spaniards in the sixteenth century, or
Germans in the seventeenth, or French sansculottes
in the eighteenth. The discipline of the royal forces
was bad, for their organisation was loose ; and even if
it had been better, we have little difficulty in painting
for ourselves the scenes that must have attended
these roving bands of soldiery, ill-paid, ill-fed, and
emancipated from all those restraints of opinion and
the constable, which have so much more to do with
our self-control than we love to admit. Nor are we
to suppose that all the ugly stories were on one side.

BOOK II

(1642-45)
CHAPTER I

CROMWELL IN THE FIELD

IT is not within my scope to follow in detail the
military operations of the civil war. For many
months they were little more than a series of con-
fused marches, random skirmishes, and casual
leaguers of indecisive places. Of generalship, of
strategic system, of ingenuity in scientific tactics, in
the early stages there was little or none. Soldiers
appeared on both sides who had served abroad, and
as the armed struggle developed, the great changes
in tactics made by Gustavus Adolphus quickly
found their way into the operations of the English
war. He suppressed all caracoling and parade
manoeuvres. Cavalry that had formed itself in as
many as five or even eight ranks deep, was hence-
forth never marshalled deeper than three ranks,
while in the intervening spaces were platoons of foot
and light field-pieces. All this, the soldiers tell us,
gave prodigious mobility, and made the Swedish
period the most remarkable in the Thirty Years'
War. But for some time training on the continent
of Europe seems to have been of little use in the
conflicts of two great bands of military mainly rustic
among the hills and downs, the lanes and hedges,

103

104 OLIVER CROMWELL

the rivers and strong places of England. Modern
soldiers have noticed as one of the most curious
features of the civil war how ignorant each side
usually was of the doings, position, and designs of
its opponents. Essex stumbled upon the king,
Hopton stumbled upon Waller, the king stumbled
upon Sir Thomas Fairfax. The two sides drew up
in front of one another, foot in the centre, horse on
the wings ; and then they fell to and hammered
one another as hard as they could, and they who
hammered hardest and stood to it longest won the
day. This was the story of the early engagements.
Armour was fallen into disuse, partly owing to
the introduction of firearms, partly perhaps for the
reason that pleased King James I., — because besides
protecting the wearer, it also hindered him from
hurting other people. The archer had only just
disappeared, and arrows were shot by the English
so late as at the Isle of Re in 1627. Indeed at the
outbreak of the war Essex issued a precept for
raising a company of archers, and in Montrose's
campaign in Scotland bowmen are often mentioned.
It is curious to modern ears to learn that some of
the strongest laws enjoining practice with bow and
arrow should have been passed after the invention
of gunpowder, and for long there were many who
persisted in liking the bow better than the musket,
for the whiz of the arrow over their heads kept the
horses in terror, and a few horses wounded by arrows
sticking in them were made unruly enough to dis-
order a whole squadron. A flight of arrows, again,
apart from those whom they killed or wounded,
demoralised the rest as they watched them hurtling
through the air. Extreme conservatives made a
judicious mixture between the old time and the new
by firing arrows out of muskets. The gunpowder
of those days was so weak that one homely piece
of advice to the pistoleer was that he should not
discharge his weapon until he could press the barrel

CHAP, i ARMS AND TACTICS 105

close upon the body of his enemy, under the cuirass
if possible ; then he would be sure not to waste his
charge. The old-fashioned musket-rest disappeared
during the course of the war. The shotmen, the
musketeers and harquebusiers, seem from 1644 to
have been to pikemen in the proportion of two to one.
It was to the pike and the sword that the hardest
work fell. The steel head of the pike was well
fastened upon a strong, straight, yet nimble stock of
ash, the whole not less than seventeen or eighteen
feet long. It was not until the end of the century
that, alike in England and France, the pike was laid
aside and the bayonet used in its place. The snap-
hance or flintlock was little used, at least in the early
stages of the war, and the provision of the slow
match was one of the difficulties of the armament.
Clarendon mentions that in one of the leaguers the
besieged were driven to use all the cord of all the
beds of the town, steep it in saltpetre, and serve it
to the soldiers for match. Cartridges though not
unknown were not used in the civil war, and the
musketeer went into action with his match slowly
burning and a couple of bullets in his mouth.
Artillery, partly from the weakness of the powder,
partly from the primitive construction of the
mortars and cannon, was a comparatively ineffec-
tive arm upon the field, though it was causing a
gradual change in fortifications from walls to earth-
works. At Naseby the king had only two demi-
cannon, as many demi-culverins, and eight sakers.
The first weighed something over four thousand
pounds, and shot twenty-four pounds. The demi-
culverin was a twelve- or nine-pounder. The saker
was a brass gun weighing fifteen hundred pounds,
with a shot of six or seven pounds.

It was not, however, upon guns any more than
upon muskets that the English commander of that
age relied in battle for bearing the brunt, whether
of attack or of defence. He depended upon his

106 OLIVER CROMWELL

horsemen, either cuirassiers or the newly introduced
species, the dragoons, whom it puzzled the military
writer of that century whether to describe as horse-
footmen or foot-horsemen. Gustavus Adolphus had
discovered or created the value of cavalry, and in
the English civil war the campaigns were few in
which the shock of horse was not the deciding
element. Cromwell with his quick sagacity per-
ceived this in anticipation of the lessons of experi-
ence. He got a Dutch officer to teach him drill,
and his first military proceeding was to raise a troop
of horse in his own countryside and diligently fit
them for action. As if to illustrate the eternal
lesson that there is nothing new under the sun, some
have drawn a parallel between the cavalry of the
small republics of Greece in the fourth century
before Christ and the same arm at Edgehill ; and
they find the same distinction between the Attic
cavalry and the days of Alexander, as may be traced
between the primitive tactics of Oliver or Rupert
and those of Frederick the Great or Napoleon.

We are then to imagine Oliver teaching his men
straight turns to left and right, closing and opening
their files, going through all the four-and- twenty
postures for charging, ramming, and firing their
pistols, petronels, and dragons, and learning the
various sounds and commands of the trumpet.
" Infinite great," says an enthusiastic horseman of
that time, " are the considerations which dependeth
on a man to teach and govern a troop of horse. To
bring ignorant men and more ignorant horse, wild
man and mad horse, to those rules of obedience
which may crown every motion and action with
comely, orderly, and profitable proceedings — hie
labor, hoc opus est"

Cromwell's troop was gradually to grow into a
regiment of a thousand men, and in every other
direction he was conspicuous for briskness and
activity. He advanced considerable sums from his

CHAP, i EDGEHILL 107

modest private means for the public service. He
sent down arms into Cambridgeshire for its defence.
He boldly seized the magazine in Cambridge Castle
and with armed hand stayed the university from
sending twenty thousand pounds' worth of its gold
and silver plate for the royal use. He was present
at the head of his troop in the first serious trial of
strength between the parliamentary forces under
the Earl of Essex and the forces of the king. The
battle of Edgehill (October 23, 1642) is one of the
most confused transactions in the history of the war,
and its result was indecisive.1 The royalists were
fourteen thousand against ten thousand for the
parliament, and, confiding even less in superior
numbers than in their birth and quality, they had
little doubt of making short work of the rebellious
and canting clowns at the foot of the hill. There
was no great display of tactics on either side.
Neither side appeared to know when it was gaining
and when it was losing. Foes were mistaken for
friends, and friends were killed for foes. In some
parts of the field the parliament men ran away,
while in other parts the king's men were more
zealous for plundering than for fight. When night
fell, the conflict by tacit agreement came to an end,
the royalists suspecting that they had lost the day,
and Essex not sure that he had won it. What is
certain is that Essex's regiment of horse was un-
broken. " These persons underwritten," says one
eye-witness, " never stirred from their troops, but
they and their troops fought till the last minute,"
and among the names of the valiant and tenacious
persons so underwritten is that of Cromwell.

Whether before or after Edgehill, it was about
this time that Cromwell had that famous conversa-
tion with Hampden which stands to this day among

1 It is hardly possible to take more pains than Mr. Sanford took (Studies
and Illustrations, pp. 521-28) to extract a correct and coherent story out
of irreconcilable authorities.

108 OLIVER CROMWELL

the noble and classic commonplaces of English-
speaking democracy all over the globe. " I was a
person," he told his second parliament the year
before he died, " that from my first employment was
suddenly preferred and lifted up from lesser trusts to
greater, from my first being a captain of a troop of
horse, and I did labour as well as I could to dis-
charge my trust, and God blessed me as it pleased
him. And I did truly and plainly, and then in a
way of foolish simplicity as it was judged by very
great and wise men and good men too, desire to make
my instruments help me in that work. . . . I had
a very worthy friend then, and he was a very noble
person, and I know his memory is very grateful to
all — Mr. John Hampden. At my first going out
into this engagement, I saw our men were beaten at
every hand, and desired him that he would make
some additions to my Lord Essex's army, of some
new regiments. And I told him I would be
serviceable to him in bringing such men in as I
thought had a spirit that would do something in
the work. . . . 4 Your troops,' said I, 4 are most of
them old decayed serving men, and tapsters, and
such kind of fellows : and,' said I, ' their troops
are gentlemen's sons and persons of quality. Do
you think that the spirits of such base and mean
fellows will ever be able to encounter gentlemen,
that have honour and courage and resolution in
them ? . . . You must get men of a spirit, and
... of a spirit that is likely to go on as far as
gentlemen will go, or else, I am sure, you will be
beaten still.' . . . He was a wise and worthy
person, and he did think that I talked a good notion,
but an impracticable one. Truly I told him I
could do somewhat in it. I did so, and truly I
must needs say that to you, impute it to what you
please : I raised such men as had the fear of God
before them, and made some conscience of what
they did, and from that day forward, I must say

LETTER TO CRAWFORD 109

to you, they were never beaten, and wherever they
were engaged against the enemy they beat continu-
ally. And truly this is matter of praise to God,
and it hath some instruction in it, to own men who
are religious and godly. And so many of them as
are peaceably and honestly and quietly disposed
to live within government, as will be subject to
those gospel rules of obeying magistrates and living
under authority — I reckon no godliness without that
circle ! "

As the months went on, events enlarged Crom-
well's vision, and the sharp demands of practical
necessity drew him to adopt a new general theory.
In his talk with Hampden he does not actually say
that if men are quietly disposed to live within the
rules of government, that should suffice. But he
gradually came to this. The Earl of Manchester
had raised to be his major-general Lawrence Craw-
ford, afterward to be one of Cromwell's bitter
gainsayers. Crawford had cashiered or suspended
his lieutenant-colonel for the sore offence of hold-
ing wrong opinions in religion. Cromwell's rebuke
(March 1643) is of the sharpest. " Surely you are
not well advised thus to turn off one so faithful in
the cause, and so able to serve you as this man is.
Give me leave to tell you, I cannot be of your judg-
ment ; cannot understand it, if a man notorious
for wickedness, for oaths, for drinking, hath as
great a share in your affection as one who fears an
oath, who fears to sin. Aye, but the man is an
Anabaptist. Are you sure of that ? Admit that
he be, shall that render him incapable to serve the
public ? Sir, the State in choosing men to serve it
takes no notice of their opinions ; if they be willing
faithfully to serve it, that satisfies. I advised you
formerly to bear with men of different minds from
yourself ; if you had done it when I advised you to
do it, I think you would not have had so many
stumbling-blocks in your way. Take heed of being

110 OLIVER CROMWELL

sharp, or too easily sharpened by others, against those
to whom you can object little but that they square not
with you in every opinion concerning matters of
religion."

In laying down to the pragmatical Crawford
what has become a fundamental of free govern-
ments, Cromwell probably did not foresee the schism
that his maxims would presently create in the
Revolutionary ranks. To save the cause was the
cry of all of them, but the cause was not to all of
them the same. Whatever inscription was to be
emblazoned on the parliamentary banners, success
in the field was the one essential. Pym and
Hampden had perceived it from the first appeal to
arms and for long before, and they had bent all their
energies to urging it upon the House and inspir-
ing their commanders with their own conviction.
Cromwell needed no pressure. He not only saw
that without military success the cause was lost,
but that the key to military success must be a
force at once earnest and well disciplined ; and he
applied all the keen and energetic practical qualities
of his genius to the creation of such a force within
his own area. He was day and night preparing the
force that was to show its quality on the day of
Marston Moor. " I beseech you be careful what
captains of horse you choose ; a few honest men are
better than numbers. If you choose godly, honest
men to be captains of horse, honest men will follow
them. It may be that it provokes some spirits to
see such plain men made captains of horse. It
had been well if men of honour and birth had entered
into these employments ; but why do they not
appear ? Who would have hindered them ? But
seeing it was necessary the work should go on,
better plain men than none ; but best to have men
patient of wants, faithful and conscientious in their
employments." Then, in famous words that are
full of life, because they point with emphasis and

CHAP, i FORGING THE WEAPON 111

colour to a social truth that always needs refreshing :
" I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain
that knows what he fights for, and loves what he
knows, than that which you call a gentleman and
is nothing else. I honour a gentleman that is so
indeed." When Manchester's troops joined him,
Cromwell found them very bad, mutinous, and
untrustworthy, though they were paid almost to
the week, while his own men were left to depend on
what the sequestrations of the property of malig-
nants in Huntingdonshire brought in. Yet, paid or
unpaid, his troops increased. " A lovely company,"
he calls them ; " they are no Anabaptists, they
are honest, sober Christians, they expect to be used
like men."

He had good right to say that he had minded the
public service even to forgetfulness of his own and
his men's necessities. His estate was small, yet
already he had given in money between eleven and
twelve hundred pounds. With unwearied zeal he
organised his county, and kept delinquent church-
men in order. " Lest the soldiers should in any
tumultuous way attempt the reformation of the
cathedral [Ely], I require you," writes Cromwell to
a certain Mr. Hitch, " to forbear altogether your
choir service, so unedifying and offensive." Mr.
Hitch, to his honour, stuck to his service. There-
upon Cromwell stamps up the aisle with his hat on,
calling in hoarse barrack tones to Mr. Hitch, " Leave
off your fooling, and come down, sir." Laud
would have said just the same to a puritan prayer-
meeting. Many more things are unedifying and
offensive than Cromwell had thought of, whether
in puritan or Anglican.

II

The time came when the weapon so carefully
forged and tempered was to be tried. The royalist

112 OLIVER CROMWELL

stronghold on the Lincolnshire border was Newark,
and it stood out through the whole course of the
war. It is in one of the incessant skirmishes in the
neighbourhood of Newark or on the Newark roads,
that we have our first vision of Cromwell and his
cavalry in actual engagement. The scene was a
couple of miles from Grantham (May 13, 1643).

Ten weeks later (July 28), a more important
encounter happened at Gainsborough, and Cromwell
has described it with a terseness and force that is
in strange contrast to the turgid and uncouth
confusion of his speeches. Within a mile and a half
of the town they met a body of a hundred of the
enemy's horse. Cromwell's dragoons laboured to
beat them back, but before they could dismount,
the enemy charged and repulsed them. " Then
our horse charged and broke them. The enemy
being at the top of a very steep hill over our heads,
some of our men attempted to march up that hill ;
the enemy opposed ; our men drove them up and
forced their passage." By the time they came up
they saw the enemy well set in two bodies, the horse
facing Cromwell in front, less than a musket-shot
away, and a reserve of a full regiment of horse
behind. " We endeavoured to put our men into as
good order as we could. The enemy in the mean-
while advanced toward us, to take us at dis-
advantage ; but in such order as we were, we charged
their great body, I having the right wing. We
came up horse to horse, where we disputed it with
our swords and pistols a pretty time, all keeping
close order, so that one could not break the other.
At last, they a little shrinking, our men perceiving
it pressed in upon them, and immediately routed
their whole body." The reserve meanwhile stood
unbroken. Cromwell rapidly formed up three of
his own troops whom he kept back from the chase,
along with four troops of the Lincoln men. Caven-
dish, the royalist general, charged and routed the

FIGHT AT GAINSBOROUGH 113

Lincolners. " Immediately I fell on his rear with
my three troops, which did so astonish him that
he gave over the chase and would fain have
delivered himself from me. But I pressing on
forced them down a hill, having good execution of
them ; and below the hill, drove the general with
some of his soldiers into a quagmire, where my
captain slew him with a thrust under his short
ribs."

Whether this thrust under the short ribs was
well done or not by chivalrous rules, has been a
topic of controversy. But the battle was not over.
After an interval the parliamentarians unexpectedly
found themselves within a quarter of a mile of a
body of horse and foot, which was in fact Lord
Newcastle's army. Retreat was inevitable. Lord
Willoughby ordered Cromwell to bring off both
horse and foot. " I went to bring them off ; but
before I returned, divers foot were engaged, the
enemy advancing with his whole body. Our foot
retreated in some disorder. Our horse also came
off with some trouble, being wearied with the long
fight and their horses tired." " But such was the
goodness of God," says another narrator in com-
pletion, " giving courage and valour to our men
and officers, that while Major Whalley and Captain
Ayscough, sometimes the one with four troops faced
the enemy, sometimes the other, to the exceeding
glory of God be it spoken, and the great honour of
those two gentlemen, they with this handful forced
the enemy so, and dared them to their teeth in at
the least eight or nine several removes, the enemy
following at their heels ; and they, though their
horses were exceedingly tired, retreating in order
near carbine-shot of the enemy, who then followed
them, firing upon them ; Colonel Cromwell gather-
ing up the main body, and facing them behind
those two lesser bodies — that in despite of the
enemy we brought off our horse in this order without

I

114 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOK*

the loss of two men." The military critic of our
own day marks great improvement between Gran-
tham and Gainsborough ; he notes how in the
second of the two days there is no delay in forming
up ; how the deployment is rapidly carried out over
difficult ground, bespeaking well- drilled and flexible
troops ; how the charge is prompt and decisive,
with a reserve kept well in hand, and then launched
triumphantly at the right moment ; how skilfully
the infantry in an unequal fight is protected in the
eight or nine moves of its retreat.

At Winceby or Horncastle fight, things were still
better (-October 11, 1643). So soon as the men had
knowledge of the enemy's coming, they were very
full of joy and resolution, thinking it a great mercy
that they should now fight with him, and on they
went singing their psalms, Cromwell in the van.
The royalist dragoons gave him a first volley, as
he fell with brave resolution upon them, and then
at half pistol-shot a second, and his horse was
killed under him. But he took a soldier's horse
and promptly mounting again rejoined the charge,
which " was so home-given, and performed with so
much admirable courage and resolution, that the
enemy stood not another, but were driven back on
their own body."

It was clear that a new cavalry leader had
arisen in England, as daring as the dreaded Rupert,
but with a coolness in the red blaze of battle, a
piercing eye for the shifts and changes in the
fortunes of the day, above all with a power of wield-
ing his phalanx with a combined steadiness and
mobility such as the fiery prince never had.
Whether Rupert or Oliver was first to change
cavalry tactics is, among experts, matter of dispute.
The older way had been to fire a volley before the
charge. The front rank discharged its pistols, then
opened right and left, and the second rank took its
place, and so down to the fifth. Then came the

CHAP, i ALLIANCE WITH THE SCOTS 115

onset with swords and butt-ends of their firearms.
The new plan was to substitute the tactics of the
shock ; for the horse to keep close together, knee to
knee, to face the enemy front to front, and either to
receive the hostile charge in steady strong cohesion,
or else in the same cohesion to bear down on the foe
sword in hand, and not to fire either pistol or carbine
until they had broken through.

After the war had lasted a year and a half, things
looked critical for the parliament. Lincoln stood
firm, and the eastern counties stood firm, but the
king had the best of it both in popular favour and
military position in the north including York, and
the west including Exeter, and the midlands includ-
ing Bedford and Northampton. There seemed also
to be a chance of forces being released in Ireland,
and of relief coming to the king from France. The
genius of Pym, who had discerned the vital import-
ance of the Scots to the English struggle at its
beginning, now turned to the same quarter at the
second decisive hour of peril. He contrived an
alliance with them, raised money for them, made
all ready for their immediate advance across the
border, and so opened what was for more reasons
than one a new and critical chapter in the conflict.

There were many varying combinations between
English and Scottish parties from 1639 down to
Cromwell's crowning victory at Worcester in 1651.
In none of them did the alliance rest upon broad and
real community of aim, sentiment, or policy, and
the result was that Scottish and English allies were
always on the verge of open enmity. The two
nations were not one in temperament, nor spiritual
experience, nor political requirements ; and even
at the few moments when they approached a kind
of cordiality, their relations were uneasy. In Crom-
well this uneasiness was from the first very near
to active resentment. Whether Pym was conscious
how artificial was the combination, or foresaw any

116 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOK n

of the difficulties that would arise from divergent
aims in the parties to it, we cannot tell. The mili-
tary situation in any case left him no choice, and
he was compelled to pay the price, just as Charles
II. was when he made his bargain with the Scots
seven years later. That price was the Solemn
League and Covenant (September 1643). This
famous engagement was forced upon the English.
They desired a merely civil alliance. The Scots, on
the other hand, convinced from their own experi-
ence that presbytery was the only sure barrier of
defence against the return of the Pope and his
legions, insisted that the alliance should be a religious
compact, by which English, Scots, and Irish were to
bind themselves to bring the churches in the three
kingdoms to uniformity in doctrine, church govern-
ment, and form of worship, so that the Lord and
the name of the Lord should be one throughout
the realm. For three years from Pym's bargain
the Scots remained on English ground. The Scots
fought for protestant uniformity, and the English
leaders bowed to the demand with doubtful sincerity
and with no enthusiasm. Puritanism and presby-
terianism were not the same thing, and even English-
men who doubted of episcopacy as it stood made
no secret of their distaste for presbytery in France,
Geneva, the Low Countries, or in Scotland. Many
troubles followed, but statesmanship deals with
troubles as they arise, and Pym's action was a
master-stroke.

CHAPTER II

MARSTON MOOR

IN 1643 notable actors vanished from the scene. In
the closing days of 1642, Richelieu the dictator of
Europe had passed away. In a few months he was
followed by his master, Louis XIII., brother of the
English queen. Louis XIV., then a child five
years old, began his famous reign of seventy-two
many-coloured years, and Mazarin succeeded to
the ascendancy and the policy of which Richelieu
had given him the key. So on our own more dimly
lighted stage conspicuous characters had gone.

Lord Brooke, author of one of the earliest and
strongest attacks upon episcopacy, and standing
almost as high as any in the confidence of the party,
was shot from the central tower of the cathedral
(March 2) by the soldiers besieged in Lichfield Close.
On the other side the virtuous Falkland, harshly
awakened from fair dreams of truth and peace by
the rude clamour and savage blows of exasperated
combatants, sought death in the front rank of the
royal forces at the first battle of Newbury (Sep-
tember). His name remains when all arguments
about him have been rehearsed and are at an end,
—one of that rare band of the sons of time, soldiers
in lost causes, who find this world too vexed and
rough a scene for them, but to whom history will
never grudge her tenderest memories.

Two figures more important than either of these
had also disappeared. Hampden had been mortally

117

118 OLIVER CROMWELL

wounded in a skirmish at Chalgrove Field. Then in
December the long strain of heavy anxieties burden-
ing so many years had brought to an end the price-
less life of Pym, the greatest leader of them all.
With these two the giants of the first generation
fell. The crisis had undergone once more a change
of phase. The clouds hung heavier, the storm was
darker, the ship laboured in the trough. A little
group of men next stood in the front line, honour-
able in character and patriotic in intention, but
mediocre in their capacity for war, and guided
rather by amiable hopes than by a strong - handed
grasp of shifting and dangerous positions. For
them too the hour had struck. Essex, Manchester,
Warwick, were slow in motion without being firm
in conclusion ; just and candid, but with no faculty
of clenching ; unwilling to see that Thorough must
be met by Thorough ; and of that Fabian type
whom the quick call for action instead of inspiring
irritates. Benevolent history may mourn that men
so good were no longer able to serve their time.
Their misfortune was that misgivings about future
solutions dulled their sense of instant needs. Crom-
well had truer impressions and better nerve. The
one essential was that Charles should not come out
master in the military struggle. Cromwell saw that
at this stage nothing else mattered ; he saw that the
parliamentary liberties of the country could have
no safety, until the king's weapon had been finally
struck from his hand. At least one other actor in
that scene was as keenly alive to this as Cromwell,
and that was Charles himself.

It is a mistake to suppose that the patriots and
their comrades had now at their back a nation at red
heat. The flame kindled by the attempted arrest
of the five members, and by the tyranny of the
Star Chamber or of the bishops, had a little sunk.
Divisions had arisen, and that fatal and familiar
stage had come when men on the same side hate one

CHAP, n THE HOUR OF DISCOURAGEMENT 119

another more bitterly than they hate the common foe.
New circumstances evolved new motives. Some
who had been most forward against the king at first
had early fainted by the way, and were now thinking
of pardon and royal favour. Others were men of a
neutral spirit, willing to have a peace on any terms.
Others had got estates by serving the parliament,
and now wished to secure them by serving the king ;
while those who had got no estates bore a grudge
against the party that had overlooked them.

Cromwell in his place warned the House of the
discouragement that was stealing upon the public
mind. Unless, he said, we have a more vigorous
prosecution of the war, we shall make the kingdom
weary of us and hate the name of a parliament. Even
many that had at the beginning been their friends,
were now saying that Lords and Commoners had got
great places and commands and the power of the
sword into their hands, and would prolong the war
in order to perpetuate their own grandeur, just as
soldiers of fortune across the seas spun out campaigns
in order to keep their own employments. If the
army were not put upon another footing and the war
more vigorously followed, the people could bear the
war no longer, but would insist upon peace, even
rather a dishonourable peace than none.

Almost the same reproaches were brought on the
other side. This is the moment when Clarendon
says that it seemed as if the whole stock of affection,
loyalty, and courage that had at first animated
the friends of the king were now quite spent, and
had been followed up by negligence, laziness, in-
advertency, and base dejection of spirit. Mere folly
produced as much mischief to the king's cause as
deliberate villainy could have done. Charles's own
counsels according to Clarendon were as irresolute
and unsteady as his advisers were ill-humoured and
factious. They were all blind to what ought to have
been evident, and full of trepidation about things

120 OLIVER CROMWELL

that were never likely to happen. One day they
wasted time in deliberating without coming to a
decision, another day they decided without delibera-
ting. Worst of all, decision was never followed by
vigorous execution.

At the end of 1642 the king had accounted his
business in Yorkshire as good as done. Here the
great man was the Earl of Newcastle. He was an
accomplished man, the patron of good poets like
Dryden, and bad poets like Shadwell. He wrote
comedies of his own, which according to his wife were
inspired by the pleasant and laudable object of
laughing at the follies of mankind ; and there is a
story, probably apocryphal, of his entertaining at
dinner in Paris no less immortal persons than Hobbes
and Descartes. A sage Italian, dead a hundred
years before, warned statesmen that there is no
worse thing in all the world than levity. " Light
men are the very instruments for whatever is bad,
dangerous, and hurtful; flee from them like fire."
Of this evil tribe of Guicciardini's, was Lord New-
castle ; and too many of Charles's friends, and in a
certain sense even Charles himself, were no better.
All this, however, did not prevent Newcastle by
his vast territorial influence, popularity, and spirit,
from raising in the great county of York, in North-
umberland, Durham, and Westmorland, a force of
nearly seven thousand men. He had seized the
metropolitan city of northern England, and he had
occupied the city on the Tyne from which he took
his title. It was the only great port all the way
from Plymouth to Berwick by which the king
could bring arms and ammunition from the continent
into England. Lord Newcastle was confronted in
Yorkshire by the two Fairfaxes, with many, though
hardly a majority, of the gentry of the county on
their side, and it was in these operations that the
younger Fairfax, the future Lord General of the
parliament, first showed his gallantry, his dash,

CHAP. n ROYALISTS IN NORTH AND WEST 121

his invincible persistency, and his skill. The
royalist commander won a stiff fight at Tadcaster
before the end of the year; and after alternations
of capture and recapture at Bradford, Wakefield, and
Leeds, by the middle of the summer of 1643 he made
himself master of all the towns in the interior of the
county. The Fairfaxes were badly beaten (June 30)
at Adwalton, a ridge above Bradford, and were
driven by their thinned numbers, by some dis-
affection among the officers, and by occasional lack
of bullet, match, and powder, to force their way
over the waste and hilly moors and to throw them-
selves into Hull, the only important place in the
county of York now left in the hands of the parlia-
ment.

All through the summer of 1643 the tide of
victory flowed strong for the king. Newcastle's
successes in Yorkshire accompanied the successes of
Hopton in the west. Lord Stamford, with his army
of seven thousand men, had been beaten out of the
field at Stratton (May 1643), leaving the king master
over all the south-west, with the important excep-
tion of Plymouth. The defeat at the engagement of
Roundway Down (July 13) had broken up Waller's
army. Bristol had fallen (July 26). The movements
of Essex against Oxford, like most of that unlucky
general's operations, had ended in failure, and he
protested to the parliament that he could not carry
on without reinforcements in men and money. It
seemed as if nothing could prevent the triumph of a
great combined operation by which the king should
lead his main army down the valley of the Thames,
while Newcastle should bring his northern force
through the eastern counties and unite with the
king in overpowering London. But the moment
was lost, and the tide turned. For good reasons or
bad, the king stopped to lay siege to Gloucester,
and so gave time to Essex to recover. This was one
of the critical events of the war, as it was Essex's one

122 OLIVER CROMWELL

marked success. Charles was compelled to raise the
siege, and his farther advance was checked by his
repulse at Newbury (September 20). The other
branch of the combined movement by which New-
castle was to march south was hardly so much as
seriously attempted.

Newcastle's doings in Yorkshire and their sequel
prepared the way for that important encounter a
year later, which brought Cromwell into the front
rank of military captains. For most of that year,
from the summer of 1643 to the summer of 1644, the
power of the northern army and the fate of London
and the parliamentary cause turned upon Lincoln-
shire, the borderland between Yorkshire and the
stubborn counties to the south-east. This issue
was settled by the cavalry action at Winceby (ante,
p. 114), where the united forces of Fairfax and Man-
chester met a body of royalist contingents from
Newcastle, Gainsborough, and Lincoln. The same
day that saw the royalist repulse at Winceby, saw
Newcastle raise the siege of Hull. Two months
later the Scots began their march southward, and in
January (1644) they crossed the border. Cromwell
during the spring was occupied in taking fortified
houses, and in other miscellaneous military duties.
He was soon called to a decisive occasion. New-
castle, who for three months had contested the
advance of the Scots, was in April obliged to fall
back on York, where he was gradually closed in by
Fairfax, Manchester, and the Scots. From April
to June he held out, until the welcome news reached
him that Rupert was advancing to his relief. Fear-
ing to be caught between two fires, the parliamentary
generals drew off. By a series of skilful movements,
Rupert joined Newcastle within the walls of York,
and forced him to assent to immediate engagement
with the retreating parliamentarians.

It has been said that the two armies who stood
face to face at Marston (July 2, 1644), were the

CHAP, ii THE SCOTS CROSS THE BORDER 123

largest masses of men that had met as foes on English
ground since the wars of the Roses. The royalist
force counted seventeen or eighteen thousand men,
the parliamentarians and their Scottish allies twenty-
six or twenty -seven thousand. The whole were
about twice as many as were engaged at Edge-
hill. In our generation people may make light of
battles where armies of only a few thousand men
were engaged. Yet we may as well remember that
Napoleon entered Italy in 1796 with only thirty
thousand men under arms. At Arcola and at
Rivoli he had not over fifteen thousand in the field,
and even at Marengo he had not twice as many.
In the great campaign of 1631-32 in the Thirty
Years' War, the Imperialists were twenty - four
thousand foot and thirteen thousand horse, while the
Swedes were twenty-eight thousand foot and nine
thousand horse. As the forces engaged at Marston
were the most numerous, so the battle was the
bloodiest in the civil war. It was also the most
singular, for the runaways were as many on one side
as the other, and the three victorious generals were
all of them fugitives from the field. The general
course of what happened is fairly intelligible, though
in details all is open to a raking fire of historic
doubts.1

The two armies faced one another as usual in two
parallel lines, the foot in the centre and the horse
on the wings. A wide ditch with a hedge on its
southern side divided them. The parliamentary
forces were drawn up on a ridge sloping to the moor,
the Scottish foot under Leven and Baillie stationed
in the centre, with the Yorkshire army under the two
Fairfaxes on the right, and Manchester's army of the
Eastern Association on the left. The younger Fair-
fax, on the right wing, was in command of a body of

1 Mr. Firth has closely described the evidence and authorities in the
Transactions of Royal Historical Society, vol. xii. See Colonel Honig's
Oliver Cromwell, II. Theil, p. 136, and a more important excursus, Bd. ii.
pp. 441-453.

124 OLIVER CROMWELL

horse counted by some at four thousand, of whom
nearly one - third were Scots. On the left wing
Cromwell had between two thousand and twenty-five
hundred of the regular cavalry of the Eastern Associa-
tion, supported by a reserve of about eight hundred
ill-horsed Scots in the rear. Of this force of cavalry,
on which as it happened the fortune of the day was
to depend, David Leslie commanded the Scottish
contingent under Cromwell. The whole line ex-
tended about a mile and a half from right to left, and
the royalist line was rather longer. On the king's
side, Rupert faced Oliver. Newcastle and his main
adviser Eythin faced Leven and Baillie, and Goring
faced the two Fairfaxes. The hostile lines were so
near to one another that, as Cromwell's scout-
master says, " their foot was close to our noses."

So for some five hours (July 2) the two hosts, with
colours flying and match burning, looked each other
in the face. It was a showery summer afternoon.
The parliamentarians in the standing corn, hungry
and wet, beguiled the time in singing hymns. " You
cannot imagine," says an eye-witness, " the courage,
spirit, and resolution that was taken up on both
sides ; for we looked, and no doubt they also, upon
this fight as the losing or gaining the garland. And
now, sir, consider the height of difference of spirits :
in their army the cream of all the papists in England,
and in ours a collection out of all the corners of
England and Scotland, of such as had the greatest
antipathy to popery and tyranny ; these equally
thinking the extirpation of each other. And now
the sword must determine that which a hundred
years' policy and dispute could not do." Five
o'clock came, and a strange stillness fell upon them
all. Rupert said to Newcastle that there would be
no fight that day, and Newcastle rode to his great
coach standing not far off, called for a pipe of tobacco,
and composed himself for the evening. He was
soon disturbed. At seven o'clock the flame of battle

. n BATTLE OF MARSTON MOOR 125

leaped forth, the low hum of the two armed hosts
in an instant changed into fierce uproar, and before
many minutes the moor and the slope of the hill
were covered with bloodshed and disorder. Who
gave the sign for the general engagement we do not
know, and it is even likely that no sign as the result
of deliberate and concerted plan was ever given
at all.

Horse and foot moved down the hill, " like so
many thick clouds." Cromwell, on the parliament-
ary left, charged Rupert with the greatest resolution
that ever was seen. It was the first time that these
two great leaders of horse had ever met in direct
shock, and it was here that Rupert gave to Oliver
the brave nickname of Ironside. As it happened,
this was also one of the rare occasions when Oliver's
cavalry suffered a check. David Leslie with his
Scotch troopers was luckily at hand, and charging
forward together they fell upon Rupert's right flank.
This diversion enabled Oliver, who had been
wounded in the neck, to order his retreating men
to face about. Such a manoeuvre, say the soldiers,
is one of the nicest in the whole range of tactics,
and bears witness to the discipline and flexibility of
Cromwell's force, like a delicate - mouthed charger
with a consummate rider. With Leslie's aid they
put Rupert and his cavalry to rout. " Cromwell's
own division," says the scout-master, " had a hard
pull of it, for they were charged by Rupert's bravest
men both in front and flank. They stood at the
sword's point a pretty while, hacking one another;
but at last he broke through them, scattering them
like a little dust." This done, the foot of their own
wing charging by their side, they scattered the
royalists as fast as they charged them, slashing them
down as they went. The horse carried the whole
field on the left before them, thinking that the vic-
tory was theirs, and that " nothing was to be done
but to kill and take prisoners." It was admitted by

126 OLIVER CROMWELL

Cromwell's keenest partisan that Leslie's chase
of the broken forces of Rupert, making a rally
impossible, was what left Cromwell free to hold his
men compact and ready for another charge. The
key to most of his victories was his care that his
horse, when they had broken the enemy, should not
scatter in pursuit ; the secret, a masterful coolness
and the flash of military perception in the leader,
along with iron discipline in the men.

Unfortunately all had gone wrong elsewhere. On
the parliamentary right the operation as conducted
by Cromwell on the left had been reversed. Sir
Thomas Fairfax charged Goring, as Cromwell and
Leslie charged Rupert, and he made a desperate
fight for it. He cut his way through, chasing a
body of Goring' s force before him on the road south
to York. When he turned back from his chase,
after being unhorsed, severely wounded, and with
difficulty rescued from the enemy, he found that
Goring by a charge of savage vigour had completely
broken the main body of the parliamentary horse on
the right, had driven them in upon their own foot,
and had even thrown the main body of the Scotch
foot into disorder. This dangerous moment has
been described by a royalist eye-witness. The run-
aways on both sides were so many, so breathless,
so speechless, so full of fears, that he would hardly
have known them for men. Both armies were
mixed up together, both horse and foot, no side
keeping their own posts. Here he met a shoal of
Scots, loud in lamentation as if the day of doom
had overtaken them. Elsewhere he saw a ragged
troop reduced to four and a cornet, then an officer
of foot, hatless, breathless, and with only so much
tongue as to ask the way to the next garrison.

In the centre meanwhile the parliamentary force
was completely broken, though the Scotch infantry
on the right continued stubbornly to hold their
ground. This was the crisis of the fight, and the

CHAP, n BATTLE OF MARSTON MOOR 127

parliamentary battle seemed to be irretrievably
lost. It was saved in a second act, by the manful
stoutness of a remnant of the Scots in the centre, and
still more by the genius and energy of Cromwell
and the endurance of his troopers. Many both of
the Scottish and English foot had taken to flight.
Their braver comrades whom they left behind held
firm against assault after assault from Newcastle
and the royalists. Cromwell, having disposed of
Rupert on the left, now swept round in the royalist
rear to the point on their left where Goring had been
stationed before the battle began. " Here," says
the scout-master, " the business of the day, nay, of
the kingdom, came to be determined." Goring's
men, seeing Cromwell's manoeuvre, dropped their
pursuit and plunder, marched down the hill, just as
Fairfax had marched down it an hour before, and
speedily came to the same disaster.

Cromwell, keeping his whole force in hand, and
concentrating it upon the immediate object of
beating Goring, no sooner succeeded than he turned
to the next object, and exerted his full strength
upon that. This next object was now the relief
of the harassed foot in the centre. Attacking in
front and flank, he threw his whole force upon the
royalist infantry of Newcastle, still hard at work on
what had been the centre of the line, supported by
a remnant of Goring's horse. This was the grand
movement which military critics think worthy of
comparison with that decisive charge of Seidlitz
and his five thousand horse, which gained for
Frederick the Great the renowned victory at
Zorndorf. 4 Major - General David Leslie, seeing
us thus pluck a victory out of the enemy's hands,
could not too much commend us, and professed
Europe had no better soldiers ! " Before ten o'clock
all was over, and the royalists beaten from the field
were in full retreat. In what is sometimes too lightly
called the vulgar courage of the soldier, neither side

128 OLIVER CROMWELL

was wanting. Cromwell's was the only manoeuvre
of the day that showed the talent of the soldier's eye
or the power of swift initiative.

More than four thousand brave men lay gory and
stark upon the field under the summer moon. More
than three thousand of them a few hours before had
gone into the fight shouting, " For God and the
king ! " met by the hoarse counter-shout from the
parliamentarians, " God with us ! ': So confident
were each that divine favour was on their side.
At the famed battle of Rocroi the year before,
which transferred the laurels of military superiority
from Spain to France, eight thousand Spaniards
were destroyed and two thousand French, out of a
total force on both sides of some forty-five thousand.

A story is told of Marston, for which there is as
good evidence as for many things that men believe.
A Lancashire squire of ancient line was killed fighting
for the king. His wife came upon the field the next
morning to search for him. They were stripping and
burying the slain. A general officer asked her what
she was about, and she told him her melancholy tale.
He listened to her with great tenderness, and
earnestly besought her to leave the horrid scene.
She complied, and calling for a trooper, he set her
upon the horse. On her way she inquired the name
of the officer, and learned that he was Lieutenant-
General Cromwell.

Cromwell's own references to his first great
battle are comprised in three or four well-known
sentences : "It had all the evidences of an absolute
victory, obtained by the Lord's blessing on the
godly party principally. We never charged but
we routed the enemy. The left wing, which I
commanded, being our own horse, saving a few
Scots in our rear, beat all the prince's horse, and
God made them stubble to our swords. We charged
their regiments of foot with our horse, and routed
all we charged. I believe of twenty thousand the

CHAP, n BATTLE OF MARSTON MOOR 129

prince hath not four thousand left. Give glory, all
the glory to God."

Without dwelling on the question how much the
stubborn valour of the Scots under Baillie and
Lumsden against the royalist assaults on the centre
had to do with the triumphant result, still to describe
a force nearly one -third as large as his own and
charging side by side with himself, as a few Scots in
our rear, must be set down as strangely loose. For
if one thing is more clear than another amid the
obscurities of Marston, it is that Leslie's flank
attack on Rupert while the Ironsides were falling
back was the key to the decisive events that
followed. The only plea to be made is that Oliver
was not writing an official despatch, but a hurried
private letter announcing to a kinsman the calamit-
ous loss of a gallant son upon the battlefield, in
which fulness of detail was not to be looked for.
When all justice has been done to the valour of the
Scots, glory enough was left for Cromwell ; and so,
when the party dispute was over, the public opinion
of the time pronounced.

CHAPTER III

THE WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY AND THE CONFLICT
OF IDEALS

WITH the march of these events a march of ideas
proceeded, of no less interest for mankind. The
same commotion that was fast breaking up the
foundation of the throne, had already shaken down
the church. To glance at this process is no irrelevant
excursion, but takes us to the heart of the conten-
tion, and to a central epoch in the growth of the
career of Cromwell. The only great protestant
council ever assembled on English soil has, for
various reasons, lain mostly in the dim background
of our history.1 Yet it is no unimportant chapter
in the eternal controversy between spiritual power
and temporal, no transitory bubble in the troubled
surges of the Reformation. Dead are most of its
topics, or else in the ceaseless transmigration of men's
ideas as the ages pass, its enigmas are now pro-
pounded in many altered shapes. Still, as we eye
these phantoms of old debate, and note the faded,
crumbling vesture in which once vivid forms of
human thought were clad, we stand closer to the
inner mind of the serious men and women of that

1 Since this chapter was first printed, Dr. William Shaw has published
his History of the English Church during the Civil Wars and under the
Commonwealth, a work of importance in its elucidation of the controversies
of the Westminster Assembly, and otherwise. The " Minutes " of the
Assembly were published in 1874.

130

RELIGIOUS FERMENT 131

time than when we ponder political discussions
either of soldiers or of parliament. The slow
fluctuations of the war from Edgehill to Marston
left room for strange expansions in the sphere of
religion, quite as important as the fortune of battle
itself. In a puritan age citizenship in the secular
state fills a smaller space in the imaginations of
men than the mystic fellowship of the civitas Dei,
the city of God; hence the passionate concern in
many a problem that for us is either settled or
indifferent. Nor should we forget what is a main
element in the natural history of intolerance, that
in such times error ranks as sin and even the most
monstrous shape of sin.

The aggressions of the Commons upon the old
church order had begun, as we saw (pp. 82, 85), by
a demand for the ejectment of the bishops from the
Lords. The Lords resisted so drastic a change in
the composition of their own body (1641). The
tide rose, passion became more intense, judgment
waxed more uncompromising, and at the instigation
of Cromwell and Vane resolute proposals were made
in the Commons for the abolition of the episcopal
office and the transfer to lay commissions, insti-
tuted and controlled by parliament, of episcopal
functions of jurisdiction and ordination. On what
scheme the church should be reconstructed neither
Cromwell nor parliament had considered, any more
than they considered in later years what was to
follow a fallen monarchy. In the Grand Remon-
strance of the winter of 1641, the Commons desired
a general synod of the most grave, pious, learned,
and judicious divines of this island, to consider all
things necessary for the peace and good govern-
ment of the church. It was not until the summer
of 1643 that this synod was at last after half a dozen
efforts actually appointed by parliament.

The flames of fanaticism were blazing with a
fierceness not congenial to the English temper, and

132 OLIVER CROMWELL

such as has hardly possessed Englishmen before or
since. Puritanism showed itself to have a most
unlovely side. It was not merely that controversy
was rough and coarse, though it was not much less
coarse in puritan pulpits than it had been on the
lips of German friars or Jesuit polemists in earlier
stages. In Burton's famous sermon for which he
suffered punishment so barbarous, he calls the
bishops Jesuitical polypragmatics, anti - Christian
mushrooms, factors for anti -Christ, dumb dogs,
ravening wolves, robbers of souls, miscreants.
Even the august genius of Milton could not resist
the virulent contagion of the time. As difficulties
multiplied, coarseness grew into ferocity. A preacher
before the House of Commons so early as 1641 cried
out to them : " What soldier's heart would not
start deliberately to come into a subdued city
and take the little ones upon the spear's point, to
take them by the heels and beat out their brains
against the wall ? What inhumanity and bar-
barousness would this be thought ? Yet if this
work be to revenge God's church against Babylon,
he is a blessed man that takes and dashes the little
ones against the stones." The fiery rage of the old
Red Dragon of Rome itself, or the wild battle-
cries of Islam, were hardly less appalling than these
dark transports of puritan imagination. Even
prayers were often more like imprecation than inter-
cession. When Montrose lay under sentence of
death, he declined the offer of the presbyterian
ministers to pray with him, for he knew that the
address to Heaven would be : " Lord, vouchsafe
yet to touch the obdurate heart of this proud,
incorrigible sinner, this wicked, perjured, traitorous,
and profane person, who refuses to hearken to the
voice of thy kirk." It was a day of wrath, and the
gospel of charity was for the moment sealed.

The ferment was tremendous. Milton, in well-
known words, shows us how London of that time

CHAP. m THE ASSEMBLY OF DIVINES 133

(1644), the city of refuge encompassed with God's
protection, was not busier as a shop of war with
hammers and anvils fashioning out the instruments
of armed justice, than it was with pens and heads
sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching,
and revolving new ideas. Another observer of a
different spirit tells how hardly a day passed (1646)
without the brewing or broaching of some new
opinion. People are said to esteem an opinion a
mere diurnal — after a day or two scarce worth the
keeping. " If any man have lost his religion, let
him repair to London, and I'll warrant him he shall
find it. I had almost said, too, and if any man
has a religion, let him come but hither now, and he
shall go near to lose it." Well might the zealots
of uniformity tremble. Louder and more incessant,
says Baxter, than disputes about infant baptism
or antinomianism, waxed their call for liberty of
conscience, that every man might preach and do
in matters of religion what he pleased. All these
disputes, and the matters of them, found a focus
in the Westminster Assembly of Divines.

It was nominally composed of one hundred
and fifty members, including not only Anglicans,
but Anglican bishops, and comprehending, besides
divines, ten lay peers and twice as many members
of the other House. Eight Scottish commissioners
were included. The Anglicans never came, or else
they immediately fell off ; the laymen, with the
notable exception of Selden, took but a secondary
part ; and it became essentially a body of divines,
usually some sixty of them in attendance. The
field appointed for their toil was indeed enormous.
It was nothing less than the reorganisation of the
spiritual power, subject to the shifting exigencies
of the temporal, with divers patterns to choose
from in the reformed churches out of England.
Faith, worship, discipline, government, were all
comprehended in their vast operation. They were

134 OLIVER CROMWELL

instructed to organise a scheme for a church ; to
compose a directory in place of the Prayer Book ;
to set forth in a confession of faith what men must
believe ; to draw up a catechism for teaching the
true creed. Work that in itself would have sufficed
for giants was complicated by the play of politics
outside and the necessity of serving many changing
masters. The important point is, that their masters
were laymen. The assembly was simply to advise.
Parliament had no more intention of letting the
divines escape its own direct control, than Henry
VIII. or Elizabeth would have had. The assembly
was the creature of a parliamentary ordinance. To
parliament it must report, and without assent of
parliament its proceedings must come to naught.
This was not all. The Solemn League and Cove-
nant in the autumn of 1643, and the entry of the
Scots upon the scene, gave a new turn to religious
forces, and ended in a remarkable transformation
of political parties. The Scots had exacted the
Covenant from the parliamentary leaders as the
price of military aid, and the Covenant meant the
reconstruction of the English Church, not upon the
lines of modified episcopacy or presbytery regulated
by lay supremacy, but upon presbytery after the
Scottish model of church government by clerical
assemblies.

The divines first met in Henry VII. 's chapel
(July 1, 1643), but when the weather grew colder
they moved into the Jerusalem Chamber — that old-
world room, where anybody apt, " in the spacious
circuit of his musing," to wander among far-off
things, may find so many memorable associations,
and none of them more memorable than this. For
most of five years and a half they sat — over one
thousand sittings. On five days in the week they
laboured from nine in the morning until one or two
in the afternoon. Each member received four
shillings a day, and was fined sixpence if he was

CHAP. m THE ASSEMBLY OF DIVINES 135

late for prayers at half -past eight. Not seldom
they had a day of fasting, when they spent from
nine to five very graciously. " After Dr. Twisse
had begun with a brief prayer, Mr. Marshall prayed
large two hours most divinely. After, Mr. Arrow-
smith preached one hour, then a psalm, thereafter
Mr. Vines prayed near two hours, and Mr. Palmer
preached one hour, and Mr. Seaman prayed near
two hours, then a psalm. After Mr. Henderson
brought them to a short, sweet conference of the
heart confessed in the assembly, and other seen
faults to be remedied, and the convenience to preach
against all sects, especially baptists and anti-
nomians." These prodigies of physical endurance
in spiritual exercises were common in those days.
Johnston of Warriston, intending to spend an hour
or two in prayer, once carried his devotions from
six in the morning until he was amazed by the bells
ringing at eight in the evening.

There were learned scholars and theologians, but
no governing churchman of the grand type rose up
among them — nobody who at the same time com-
prehended states and the foundation of states, ex-
plored creeds and the sources of creeds, knew man
and the heart of man. No Calvin appeared, nor
Knox, nor Wesley, nor Chalmers. Alexander Hen-
derson was possessed of many gifts in argument,
persuasion, counsel, but he had not the spirit of
action and command. Sincere presbyterians of
to-day turn impatiently aside from what they call
the miserable logomachies of the Westminster
divines. Even in that unfruitful gymnastic, though
they numbered pious and learned men, they had no
athlete. They made no striking or original contri-
bution to the strong and compacted doctrines of
Calvinistic faith. To turn over the pages of Light-
foot's journal of their proceedings is to understand
what is meant by the description of our seven-
teenth century as the Middle Ages of protestantism.

136 OLIVER CROMWELL

Just as mediaeval schoolmen discussed the nature
and existence of universals in one century, and the
mysteries of immortality and a superhuman First
Cause in another century, so now divines and lay-
men discussed predestination, justification, election,
reprobation, and the whole unfathomable body of
theological metaphysics by the same method-
verbal logic drawing sterile conclusions from un-
tested authority.

Happily it is not our concern to follow the
divines as they went ploughing manfully through
their Confession of Faith. They were far from
accepting the old proposition of Bishop Hall that the
most useful of all books of theology would be one
with the title of " De paucitate credendorum "
of the fewness of the things that a man should
believe. After long and tough debates about the
decrees of election, they had duly passed the heads
of Providence, Redemption, Covenant, Justifica-
tion, Free Will, and a part of Perseverance. And so
they proceeded. The two sides plied one another
with arguments oral and on paper, plea and replica-
tion, rejoinder and rebutter, surrejoinder and sur-
rebutter. They contended, says honest Baillie,
tanquam pro aris et focis — as if for hearth and altar.

It was not until May in 1647 that this famous
exposition of theological truth was submitted to
the House of Commons. By that time parliament,
in deep water, had other things to think of, and the
Westminster Confession never received the sanction
of the state. Nor did the two Catechisms, which,
along with the Confession, are still the standards
not only of the Church of Scotland, but of the great
body of presbyterian churches grouped all over
the English-speaking world, and numbering many
millions of strenuous adherents. The effect of
familiarity with the Shorter Catechism upon the
intellectual character of the Scottish peasantry, and
the connection between presbyterian government

CHAP, m CHURCH GOVERNMENT 137

and a strongly democratic turn of thought and
feeling in the community, are accepted common-
places. Perhaps this fruit of the labours of the
Westminster Assembly, appraise it as we may, was
in one sense the most lasting and positive product
of the far-famed Long Parliament that set it up and
controlled it.

ii

A great group of questions one following another
arose upon the very threshold of the Reformation.
The Pope dislodged, tradition cast forth, the open
Bible placed in the emptied shrine, fresh fountains
of spiritual truth and life unsealed of which all save
the children of reprobation might partake, — a long
campaign of fierce battles was next fought on fields
outside of purely theologic doctrine. What is the
scriptural form of church government — prelacy,
presbytery, or congregational independence ? Who
was to inherit the authority of the courts spiritual
—the civil magistrate or the purified and reconsti-
tuted church ? Ought either bishop or synod to
have coercive jurisdiction against the outward man,
his liberty, life, or estate ? Ought the state to
impose one form of church government upon all
citizens ; or to leave to free choice both form of
government and submission to discipline ; or to
favour one form, but without compulsion on indi-
viduals who favoured another ? Ought the state
to proscribe or punish the practices of any church
or adhesion to any faith ? These were the mighty
problems that had now first been brought to the
front in England by a great revolution, partly
political, partly ecclesiastical, and wholly uncon-
scious, like most revolutions, of its own drift, issues,
and result. Few more determined struggles have
ever been fought on our sacred national battle-
ground at Westminster, than the contest between
the Assembly of Divines and the parliament. The

138 OLIVER CROMWELL

divines inspired from Scotland insisted that pres-
bytery was of divine right. The majority of the
parliament, true to English traditions and instinct,
insisted that all church government was of human
institution and depended on the will of the magis-
trate. The divines contended that presbytery and
synod were to have the unfettered right of inflicting
spiritual censures, and denying access to the com-
munion-table to all whom they should choose to
condemn as ignorant or scandalous persons. The
parliament was as stubborn that these censures
were to be confined to offences specified by law, and
with a right of appeal to a lay tribunal. It was
the mortal battle so incessantly renewed in that age
and since, between the principles of Calvin and
Knox and the principles imputed to Erastus, the
Swiss physician and divine, who had died at Heidel-
berg in 1583.

For ten days at a time the assembly debated the
right of every particular congregation to ordain its
own officers. For thirty days they debated the
proposition that particular congregations ought to
be united under one presbyterian government. In
either case the test was scripture : what had hap-
pened to Timothy or Titus ; how the church of
Antioch had stood to the first church at Jerusalem ;
whether St. Paul had not written to the Philippians
words that were a consecration of presbytery.
The presbyterian majority besought the aid of a
whole army of Dutch orthodox ; they pressed for
letters from France and from Geneva, which should
contain grave and weighty admonitions to the
assembly at Westminster, to be careful to suppress
all schismatics, and the mother and fosterer of all
mischief, the independence of congregations. On
the other hand the half-dozen independents, whom
Cromwell wished to strengthen by the addition of
three divines of the right sort from New England,
kept up a spirited resistance against the driving

CHURCH GOVERNMENT 139

force of the orthodox current. A deliberative
assembly tends to make party spirit obdurate.
" Oh, what may not pride do ! ': cries Baxter ;
" and what miscarriages will not faction hide ! "
The Reconcilers, who called for unity in necessary
things, liberty in things indifferent, and charity in
all things, could not be heard. The breach widened
as time went on, and by 1645 its repair was hopeless.
The conflict in its progress made more definite the
schism between presbyterian and independent. It
was the alliance of independent and Erastian in
parliament that finally baffled the presbyterian
after the Scottish model, and hardened the great
division, until what had been legitimate difference
on a disputable question became mutual hatred
between two infuriated factions. Baillie says of
the independents that it would be a marvel to him
if such men should always prosper, their ways were
so impious, unjust, ungrate, and every way hateful.
One Coleman, an Erastian, gave good men much
trouble by defending, with the aid of better lawyers
than himself, the arguments of the Erastian doctor
against the proposition that the founder of Christi-
anity had instituted a church government distinct
from the civil, to be exercised by the officers of the
church without commission from the magistrates.
Coleman was happily stricken with death ; he fell
in an ague, and after four or five days he expired.
"It is not good," runs the dour comment, " to
stand in Christ's way." The divines were too
shrewd not to perceive how it was the military
weakness of the Scots that allowed the independents
with their heresies to ride rough-shod over them.
If the Scots had only had fifteen thousand men in
England, they said, their advice on doctrine and
discipline would have been followed quickly enough ;
if the Scottish arms had only been successful last
year, there would have been little abstract debating.
" It's neither reason nor religion that stays some

140 OLIVER CROMWELL

men's rage, but a strong army bridling them with
fear." Such were the plain words of carnal wisdom.
A story is told of a Scot and an Englishman dis-
puting on the question of soldiers preaching.
Quoth the Scot, " Is it fit that Colonel Cromwell's
soldiers should preach in their quarters, to take away
the minister's function?" Quoth the Englishman,
" Truly I remember they made a gallant sermon at
Marston Moor ; that was one of the best sermons
that hath been preached in the kingdom." The
fortune of war, in other words, carried with it the
fortunes of theology and the churches.

We need not follow the vicissitudes of party,
or the changing shadows of military and political
events as they fell across the zealous scene. One
incident of the time must be noted. While presby-
tery had been fighting its victorious battle in the
Jerusalem Chamber, the man whose bad steering
had wrecked his church was sent to the block.
The execution of Archbishop Laud (January 10,
1645) is the best of all the illustrations of the hard
temper of the age. Laud was more than seventy
years old. He had been for nearly five years safe
under lock and key in the Tower. His claws were
effectually clipped, and it was certain that he would
never again be able to do mischief, or if he were,
that such mischief as he could do would be too
trivial to be worth thinking of, in sight of such a
general catastrophe as could alone make the old
man's return to power possible. The execution of
Strafford may be defended as a great act of retalia-
tion or prevention, done with grave political purpose.
So, plausibly or otherwise, may the execution of
King Charles. No such considerations justify the
execution of Laud, several years after he had com-
mitted the last of his imputed offences and had been
stripped of all power of ever committing more.
It is not necessary that we should echo Dr. John-
son's lines about Rebellion's vengeful talons seizing

CHAP, m TOLERATION 141

on Laud, while Art and Genius hovered weeping
round his tomb ; but if we rend the veil of romance
from the cavalier, we are bound not to be over-
dazzled by the halo of sanctity in the roundhead.

It was in 1646 that parliament consummated
what would have seemed so extraordinary a revolu-
tion to the patriots of 1640, by the erection of
the presbyterian system of Scotland, though with
marked reservations of parliamentary control, into
the established church of England. The uniform-
ity that had rooted itself in Scotland, and had been
the centre of the Solemn League and Covenant,
was now nominally established throughout the
island. But in name only. It was soon found in
the case of church and state alike, that to make
England break with her history is a thing more
easily said than done, as it has ever been in all her
ages. The presbyterian system struck no abiding
root. The assembly, as a Scottish historian has
pointedly observed, though called by an English
parliament, held on English ground, and composed
of English divines, with only a few Scotsmen among
them, still, as things turned out, existed and
laboured mainly for Scotland.

in

The deliberations of the divines were haunted
throughout by the red spectre of Toleration. For
the rulers of states a practical perplexity rose out
of protestantism. How was a system resting on the
rights of individual conscience and private reason
to be reconciled with either authority or unity ?
The natural history of toleration seems simple, but
it is in truth one of the most complex of all the
topics that engage either the reasoner or the ruler ;
and until nations were by their mental state ready
for religious toleration, a statesman responsible for
order naturally paused before committing himself

142 OLIVER CROMWELL

to a system that might only mean that the members
of rival communions would fly at one another's
throats, like catholics and Huguenots in France,
or Spaniards and Beggars in Holland. In history
it is our business to try to understand the pos-
sible reasons and motives for everything, even for
intolerance.

Religious toleration was no novelty either in
great books or in the tractates of a day. Men of
broad minds, like More in England and L'Hopital
in France, had not lived for nothing ; and though
Bacon never made religious tolerance a political
dogma, yet his exaltation of truth, knowledge, and
wisdom tended to point that way. Nor should we
forget that Cromwell's age is the age of Descartes
and of Grotius, men whose lofty and spacious think-
ing, both directly and indirectly, contributed to
create an atmosphere of freedom and of peace in
which it is natural for tolerance to thrive. To say
nothing of others, the irony of Montaigne in the
generation before Cromwell was born, had drawn
the true moral from the bloodshed and confusion
of the long fierce wars between catholic and
Huguenot. Theories in books are wont to prosper
or miscarry according to circumstances, but beyond
theory, presbyterians at Westminster might have
seen both in France and in Holland rival profes-
sions standing side by side, each protected by the
state. At one moment, in this very era, no fewer
than five protestants held the rank of marshal
of France. The Edict of Nantes, indeed, while it
makes such a figure in history (1598-1685), was
much more of a forcible practical concordat than a
plan reposing on anybody's acceptance of a deliberate
doctrine of toleration. It was never accepted by
the clergy, any more than it was in heart accepted
by the people. Even while the edict was in full
force, it was at the peril of his authority with his
flock that either catholic bishop or protestant pastor

. m TOLERATION 143

in France preached moderation toward the other
communion. It was not French example, but
domestic necessities, that here tardily brought
toleration into men's minds. Helwys, Busher,
Brown, sectaries whose names find no place in
literary histories, had from the opening of the
century argued the case for toleration, before the
more powerful plea of Roger Williams ; but the
ideas and the practices of Amsterdam and Leyden
had perhaps a wider influence than either colonial
exiles or home-bred controversialists, in gradually
producing a political school committed to freedom
of conscience.

The limit set to toleration in the earlier and
unclouded days of the Long Parliament had been
fixed and definite. So far as catholics were con-
cerned, Charles stood for tolerance, and the puritans
for rigorous enforcement of persecuting laws. In
that great protest for freedom, the Grand Remon-
strance itself, they had declared it to be far from
their purpose or desire to let loose the golden reins
of discipline and government in the church, to leave
private persons or particular congregations to take
up what form of divine service they pleased ; " for
we hold it requisite," they went on to say, " that
there should be throughout the whole realm a con-
formity to that order which the laws enjoin accord-
ing to the Word of God." It was the rise of the
independents to political power that made tolera-
tion a party question, and forced it into the salient
and telling prominence that is reserved for party
questions.

The presbyterian majority in principle answered
the questions of toleration and uniformity just as
Laud or the Pope would have answered them — one
church, one rule. The catholic built upon St.
Peter's rock ; the presbyterian built upon scripture.
Just as firmly as the catholic, he believed in a
complete and exclusive system, " and the existence

144 OLIVER CROMWELL

of a single separatist congregation was at once a
blot on its beauty and a blow at its very basis "
(Shaw). Liberty of conscience was in his eyes only
liberty of error, and departure from uniformity
only meant a hideous deformity and multiformity
of blaspheming sects. The independent and the
baptist too were equally convinced of the scriptural
source and the divine right of their own systems.
It was political necessity that drove them reluct-
antly not only to work as partners with Erastian
lawyers in parliament, but to extend the theoretic
basis of their own claim for toleration until it
comprehended the whole swarm of Anabaptists,
Antinomians, Nullifidians, and the rest. Crom-
well's toleration was different. It came easy to
his natural temperament, when practical conven-
ience recommended or demanded it. When he
told Crawford early in the war that the state in
choosing men to serve it takes no notice of their
opinions, he struck the true note of toleration from
the statesman's point of view. His was the practical
temper, which first asks about a thing how far it
helps or hinders the doing of some other given
thing, and the question now with him was whether
tolerance would help or hinder union and force in
military strength and the general objects of the war.
A grander intellect than Cromwell's had entered
the arena, for before the end of the year of Marston
Areopagitica had appeared, the noble English classic
of spiritual and speculative freedom. It was
Milton's lofty genius that did the work of bringing
a great universal idea into active relation with
what all men could understand, and what all
practical men wished for. There were others,
indeed, who set the doctrine of toleration in a fuller
light ; but in Milton's writings on church govern-
ment he satisfies as well as Socinus, or Roger
Williams, or any of his age, the test that has been
imposed of making toleration " at once a moral, a

CHAP, m MILTON ON TOLERATION 145

political, and a theological dogma." With him the
law of tolerance is no birth of scepticism or languor
or indifference. It is no statesman's argument for
reconciling freedom of conscience with public order,
— " toleration being a part," as Burke called it,
" of moral and political prudence." Nor is it a
pungent intellectual demonstration, like Bayle's
half a century later. Intolerance with Milton is
dishonour to the victim, dishonour to the tyrant.
The fountain-head from which every worthy enter-
prise issues forth is a pious and just honouring of
ourselves ; it is the sanctity and freedom of the
man's own soul. On this austere self-esteem the
scornful distinction between lay and cleric is an
outrage. The coercive power of ecclesiastics is an
impious intrusion into the inner sanctuary. Shame
may enter, and remorse and reverence for good
men may enter, and a dread of becoming a lost
wanderer from the communion of the just and
holy may enter, but never the boisterous and
secular tyranny of an unlawful and unscriptural
jurisdiction. Milton's moving argument, at once
so delicate and so haughty, for the rights and self-
respecting obligations of " that inner man which
may be termed the spirit of the soul," is the hidden
mainspring of the revolt against formalism, against
authority, and almost against church organisation
in any of its forms. And it is the true base of
toleration. Alas, even Milton halts and stammers
when he comes to ask himself why, on the same
arguments, popery may not plead for toleration.
Here he can only fall back upon the regulation
commonplaces .

Milton's ideas, which were at the heart of Crom-
well's vaguer and less firmly moulded thinking,
were in direct antagonism to at least three broad
principles that hitherto ruled the minds of men.
These ideas were fatal to Uniformity of belief, not
merely as a thing within reach, but as an object

L

146 OLIVER CROMWELL

to be desired. They shattered and destroyed
Authority, whether of clergy or laity, or of a king
by the grace of God. Finally, they dealt one of
the blows that seem so naturally to mark the course
of all modern revolutions, to History as a moral
power. For it is the essence of every appeal to
reason or to the individual conscience to discard
the heavy woven garments of tradition, custom,
inheritance, prerogative, and ancient institution.
History becomes, in Milton's own exorbitant phrase,
no more than the perverse iniquity of sixteen
hundred years. Uniformity, authority, history -
to shake these was to move the foundations of
the existing world in England. History, however,
shows itself a standing force. It is not a dead, but
a living hand. The sixteen hundred years that
Milton found so perverse had knit fibres into our
national growth that even Cromwell and all the
stern fervour of puritanism were powerless to pluck
out.

IV

Events made toleration in its full Miltonic breadth
the shibboleth. In principle and theory it enlarged
its way both in parliament and the army, in associa-
tion with the general ideas of political liberalism,
and became a practical force. Every war tends to
create a peace party, even if for no other cause,
yet from the innate tendency of men to take sides.
By the end of the year of Marston Moor, political
differences of opinion upon the terms of peace had
become definitely associated with the* ecclesiastical
difference between presbyterian and independent.
The presbyterians were the peace men, and the
independents were for relentless war until the ends
of war should be gained. Henceforth these are the
two great party names, and of the independents
Cromwell's energy and his military success rapidly
made him the most powerful figure.

CHAP, m CROMWELL AN INDEPENDENT 147

When it was that Cromwell embraced indepen-
dent views of church organisation, we cannot with
precision tell, nor does it matter. He deferred
signing the presbyterian covenant as long as possible
(February 1644). He was against exclusion and
proscription, but on grounds of policy, and from no
reasoned attachment to the ideal of a free or con-
gregational church. He had a kindness for zealots,
because zeal, enthusiasm, almost fanaticism, was
in its best shape his own temper, and even in its
worst shape promoted or protected his own policy.
When his policy of war yet hung in the balance, it
was the independents who by their action, views,
and temper created his opportunity. By their
warmth and sincerity they partially impressed him
with their tenets, and opened his mind to a range of
new ideas that lay beyond their own. Unhappily
in practice when the time came, puritan toleration
went little farther than Anglican intolerance.

CHAPTER IV

THE NEW MODEL

AFTER the victory at Marston, followed as it was by
the surrender of York, men expected other decisive
exploits from Lord Manchester and his triumphant
army. He was directed to attend on the motions
of the indomitable Rupert, in whom the disaster
before the walls of York seemed to have stirred fresh
energy. Manchester saw a lion in every path. The
difficulties he made were not devoid of reason, but a
nation in a crisis seeks a general whom difficulties
confront only to be overcome.

Essex (September 1644) had been overtaken by
grievous disaster in the south-west. Escaping by
sea from Plymouth, he left his army to find their way
out by fighting or surrender as best they could. So
great was his influence and popularity, that even
in face of this miscarriage, Essex almost at once
received a new command. Manchester was to
co-operate with him in resisting the king's eastward
march from Cornwall to his fixed headquarters at
Oxford. He professes to obey, but he loiters, delays,
and finds excuses, until even the Derby House Com-
mittee lose patience, and send a couple of their
members to kindle a little fire in him, just as in the
next century the French Convention used to send
two commissioners to spur on the revolutionary
generals. " Destroy but the king's army," cried

148

CHAP, iv ATTACK ON LORD MANCHESTER 149

Waller, " and the work is ended." At length the
forces of Essex, Waller, and Manchester combined,
and attacked the king at Newbury. In this second
battle of Newbury (October 27, 1644), though the
parliamentarians under Manchester and Waller were
nearly two to one, the result was so little conclusive
that the king made his way almost without pursuit
from the field. He even returned within a fortnight,
offered battle once more on the same ground, and
as the challenge was declined returned at his ease
to Oxford.

At length vexation at inactivity and delay grew
so strong that Cromwell (November 25), seizing the
apt moment as was his wont, startled the House by
opening articles of charge against his commander.
Manchester, he said, ever since the victory of Marston
Moor, had acted as if he deemed that to be enough ;
had declined every opportunity of further advan-
tage upon the enemy ; and had lost occasion upon
occasion, as if he thought the king too low and the
parliament too high. No man had ever less in him
than Cromwell of the malcontent subordinate. " At
this time," Waller says of him early in 1645, " he
had never shown extraordinary parts, nor do I
think he did himself believe that he had them ; for
although he was blunt, he did not bear himself with
pride or disdain. As an officer he was obedient, and
did never dispute my orders or argue upon them."
His letters to Fairfax at a later date are a pattern
of the affectionate loyalty due from a man second
in command to a general whom he trusts. What
alarmed him was not Manchester's backwardness in
action, his aversion to engagement, his neglect of
opportunities, but the growing certainty that there
was behind all this half-heartedness some actual
principle of downright unwillingness to prosecute
the war to a full victory, and a deliberate design
not to push the king too hard nor to reduce him
too low. Cromwell recalled many expressions of

150 OLIVER CROMWELL

Manchester that plainly betrayed a desire not to end
the war by the sword, but to make a peace on terms
that were to his own taste. On one occasion the
advocates of a fight urged that to let the king get off
unassailed would strengthen his position at home and
abroad, whereas if they only beat him now, he and
his cause were for ever ruined. Manchester vehe-
mently urged the alternative risks. " If we beat the
king ninety-nine times," he cried, " he will be king
still and his posterity, and we subjects still ; but if
he beat us but once, we shall be hanged and our
posterity undone." " If that be so," said Cromwell,
" why did we take up arms at first ? This is against
fighting ever hereafter. If so, let us make peace, let
it be never so basely."

Recriminations were abundant. The military
question became a party question. It was loudly
flung out that on one of the disputed occasions no-
body was so much against fighting as Cromwell, and
that after Newbury Cromwell, when ordered to bring
up his horse, asked Manchester in a discontented
manner whether he intended to flay the horse, for if
he gave them more work he might have their skins,
but he would have no service. He once made a
speech very nearly a quarter of an hour long against
running the risk of an attack. While insinuating
now that Manchester had not acted on the advice
of his councils of war, yet had he not at the time
loudly declared that any man was a villain and a liar
who said any such thing ? He was always attribut-
ing to himself all the praise of other men's actions.
Going deeper than such stories as these, were the
reports of Cromwell's inflammatory sayings ; as that
he once declared to Lord Manchester his hatred of all
peers, wishing there was never a lord in England,
and that it would never be well till Lord Manchester
was plain Mr. Montagu. Then he expressed him-
self with contempt of the Westminster divines, of
whom he said that they were persecutors of honester

CHAP, iv RECRIMINATIONS 151

men than themselves. He desired to have none in
the army but such as were of the independent judg-
ment, because these would withstand any peace but
such as honest men would aim at. He vowed that
if he met the king in battle, he would as lief fire his
pistol at the king as at anybody else. Of their
brethren the Scots he had used contumelious speech,
and had even said that he would as cheerfully draw
the sword upon them as upon any in the army of
the king.

The exasperation to which events had brought
both the energetic men like Cromwell, and the slower
men like Essex, had reached a dangerous pitch. One
evening, very late, the two lawyers Whitelocke and
Maynard were summoned to attend Lord Essex.
They found the Scottish commissioners with him,
along with Holies, Stapleton, and others of the
presbyterian party. The question was whether by
English law Cromwell could be tried as an incendiary,
as one who kindles coals of contention and raises
differences in the state to the public damage. Of
this move the Scots were the authors. " Cromwell
is no good friend of ours," they said, " and ever since
our army came into England he has used all under-
hand and cunning means to detract from our credit."
He was no friend either to their church. Besides
that, he was little of a well-wisher to the lord-general
whom they had such good reason to love and honour.
Was there law enough in England to clip his wings ?

The lawyers gave a sage reply. English law, they
said, knows, but not very familiarly, the man who
kindles the burning flames of contention. But were
there proofs that Oliver was such an incendiary ? It
would never do for persons of so great honour and
authority as Essex and the Scots to go upon ground
of which they were not sure. Again, had they con-
sidered the policy of the thing ? "I take Lieuten-
ant-General Cromwell," said Whitelocke, " to be a
gentleman of quick and subtle parts, and one who

152 OLIVER CROMWELL

hath, especially of late, gained no small interest
in the House of Commons ; nor is he wanting of
friends in the House of Peers, or of abilities in him-
self to manage his own defence to the best advan-
tage." The bitter Holies and his presbyterian
group were very keen for proceeding : they thought
that there was plenty of evidence, and they did not
believe Cromwell to be so strong in the Commons as
was supposed. In the end it was the Scots who
judiciously saved their English allies from falling
into the scrape, and at two o'clock in the morning
the party broke up. Whitelocke or another secretly
told Cromwell what had passed, with the result that
he only grew more eager than before.

ii

A hundred and thirty years later a civil war again
broke out among the subjects of the British crown.
The issues were not in form the same. Cromwell
fought for the supremacy of parliament within the
kingdom ; Washington fought against the supremacy
of parliament over Englishmen across the Atlantic
Ocean. It is possible that if Charles I. had been
as astute and as unscrupulous as George III., the
struggle on the English ground might have run a
different course. However that may be, in each
case the two wars were in their earlier stages not
unlike, and both Marston Moor and Bunker Hill
rank amongst those engagements that have a lasting
significance in history, where military results were
secondary to moral effect. It was these encounters
that first showed that the champions of the popular
cause intended and were able to make a stand-up
fight against the forces of the monarchy. In each
case the combatants expected the conflict to be
short. In each case the battle of popular liberty
was first fought by weak bodies, ill-paid, ill-disposed
to discipline, mounted on cart-horses and armed

CHAP, iv SUFFERING OF THE COUNTRY 153

with fowling-pieces, mainly anxious to get back to
their homes as soon as they could, and fluctuating
from month to month with the humours, the
jealousies, or the means of the separate counties in
England, or the separate States in America. " Short
enlistments," said Washington, " and a mistaken
dependence on militia, have been the origin of all
our misfortunes ; the evils of a standing army are
remote, but the consequence of wanting one is
certain and inevitable ruin. To carry on the war
systematically, you must establish your army on a
permanent and national footing." What Washing-
ton said in 1776 was just what Cromwell said in
1644.

The system had broken down. Officers com-
plained that their forces melted away, because
men thought they would be better treated in other
counties, and all comers were welcomed by every
association. One general grumbles that another
general is favoured in money and supplies. The
governors of strong towns are in hot feud with the
committee of the town. Furious passages took
place between pressed men and the county com-
mittees. Want of pay made the men sulky and
mutinous, and there were always " evil instru-
ments " ready to trade on such moods.

The Committee of Both Kingdoms write to a
colonel commanding in the west in the year of
Naseby, that they have received very great com-
plaints from the country of the intolerable mis-
carriage of his troopers ; already great disservice
is done to the parliament by the robbing, spoiling,
and plundering of the people, they also giving
extreme offence by their swearing, drinking, and
all kinds of debaucheries. Exemplary punishment
should be inflicted upon such notorious misdemean-
ants. The sufferings of some parts of the country
were almost unbearable. The heavy exactions of
the Scots in Cumberland and Westmorland for month

154 OLIVER CROMWELL

after month brought the inhabitants of those
counties to despair, " and necessity forced the dis-
tressed people in some parts to stand upon their
defence against the taxings and doing of the soldiers."
In Northumberland and Durham the charges on the
farmers were so heavy that the landlord had little
or nothing, and was only too glad if his tenants
could but keep a fire in the farmhouses and save
them from ruin. The Yorkshire men complained
that they were rated in many districts for the
Scottish horse at more than double the value of
their lands in the best times. On each side at this
time the soldiers lived in the main upon plunder.
They carried off cattle and cut down crops. They
sequestered rents and assessed fines. They kept up
a multitude of small forts and garrisons as a shelter
to flying bands, who despoiled the country and
fought off enemies who would fain have done the
same, and could have done no worse.

Apart from the waste and brutality intrinsic in
war, the general breakdown of economic order might
well alarm the instincts of the statesman. " Honest
industry," cried one voice of woe, " is quite dis-
couraged, being almost useless. Most men that
have estates are betrayed by one side or another,
plundered, sequestered. Trading — the life and sub-
stance of thousands — decaying, eaten up with taxes ;
your poor quite ready to famish, or to rise to pull
relief from rich men's hands by violence. Squeezed
by taxes, racked by war, the anvil, indeed, of misery,
upon which all the strokes of vengeance fall." A
covetous eye had long been cast upon the endow-
ments of the church. " The stop of trade here,"
Baillie wrote even so far back as 1641, " has made
this people much poorer than ordinary ; they will
noways be able to bear their burden if the cathedrals
fall not." From its first phases in all countries the
reformation of faith went with designs upon the
church lands. And so it was in England now.

CHAP, iv THE ARMY REORGANISED 155

" You will never get your service done," said
Waller, " until you have an army entirely your own,
and at your own command." This theme was the
prime element in the New Model — the substitution
of one army under a single commander-in-chief,
supported by the parliament, instead of sectional
armies locally levied and locally paid. The second
feature was the weeding out of worthless men, a
process stigmatised by presbyterians out of temper
as a crafty means of filling the army with sectaries, a
vile compound of Jew, Christian, and Turk, mere
tools of usurping ambition. The third was the
change in the command. The new army was
entrusted to Sir Thomas Fairfax as commander-
in-chief, with liberty to name his own officers sub-
ject to ratification by the two Houses. The honest
Skippon, a valiant fighter and a faithful man, was
made major-general, and the higher post of lieu-
tenant-general was left significantly open. The
army of which Essex was lord-general numbered on
paper twenty-five thousand foot and five thousand
horse. In 1644 it was fixed at seven thousand foot
and three thousand five hundred horse. The army
of the New Model was to consist of twenty-two
thousand men in all, fourteen thousand four hun-
dred being foot and the rest horse and dragoons. A
trooper received about what he would have received
for labour at the plough or with the waggon.

The average substantive wealth in the army was
not high. Royalists were fond of taunting them
with their meagre means, and vowed that the whole
pack of them from the lord-general to the horse-
farrier could not muster one thousand pounds a
year in land among them. Yet in Fairfax's new
army, of the officers of the higher military rank no
fewer than thirty out of thirty-seven were men of
good family. Pride the drayman, and Hewson the
cobbler, and Okey the ship-chandler, were among
the minority who rose from the common ranks.

156 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOK*

When Cromwell spoke to Hampden about an army
of decayed serving-men and tapsters, his own men
had never been of the tapster tribe. They were
most of them freeholders and freeholders' sons,
who upon matter of conscience engaged in the
quarrel, and " thus being well armed within by the
satisfaction of their own consciences, and without
by good iron arms, they would as one man stand
firmly and charge desperately."

That was the ideal of the New Model. We
cannot, however, assume that it was easy or possible
to procure twenty thousand men of militant con-
science, willing for the cause to leave farm and shop,
wife and home, to submit themselves to iron dis-
cipline, and to face all the peril of battle, murder,
and sudden death. Even if Cromwell's ideal was
the prevailing type, it has been justly pointed out
that constant pay must have been a taking induce-
ment to volunteers in a time when social disorder
had made work scarce. If we remember, again,
that a considerable portion of the new army were
not even volunteers, but had been impressed against
their will, the influence of puritan zeal can hardly
have been universal, even if it were so much as
general.

Baxter had good opportunity of knowing the
army well, though he did not see with impartial
eyes, and he found abundance of the common
troopers to be honest, sober, and right-thinking
men, many of them tractable, ready to hear the
truth, and of upright intentions. But the highest
places he found filled by proud, self-conceited,
hot-headed sectaries, Cromwell's chief favourites.
Then, in a sentence, he unwittingly discloses why
Cromwell favoured them. " By their very heat
and activity," he says, " they bore down the rest
and carried them along ; these were the soul of the
army, though they did not number one to twenty
in it." In other words, what Baxter says comes to

OH.IV FIRST SELF-DENYING ORDINANCE 157

this, that they had the quality of fire and resolution ;
and fire and resolution are what every leader in a
revolutionary crisis values more than all else, even
though his own enthusiasm in the common cause
springs from other fountains of belief or runs in
other channels. Anabaptists, Brownists, Familists,
and the rest of the many curious swarms from the
puritan hive, none of them repelled Oliver, because
he knew that the fanatic and the zealot, for all their
absurdities, had the root of the matter in them.

There were several steps in the process of military
transformation. In December the Commons, act-
ing upon Cromwell's argument from the suspicion
with which people looked upon Lords and Com-
moners in places of high command, passed the
famous ordinance by which no member of either
House should have any office of civil or military
command. In January the handful who now com-
posed the House of Lords threw out this ordin-
ance. A scheme for the New Model was sent up
to them in February, and in the middle of that
month (1645) the new military constitution was
finally accepted. Six weeks later the Self-denying
Ordinance was brought back and passed in a revised
form (April 3), only enacting that within forty
days members of either of the two Houses should
resign any post that the parliament had entrusted
to them. Essex, Manchester, Denbigh, Warwick,
Waller, resigned without waiting for the forty days.
It must have been an anxious moment, for Essex
was still popular with the great body of the army,
and if he had chosen to defy the ordinance he
might possibly have found support both in public
opinion and in military force. " But he was not
for such enterprises," says Clarendon, with caustic
touch. Honourable and unselfish men have not
been so common in the history of states and armies,
that we need approve the sarcasm.

Cromwell followed a line that was peculiar, but

158 OLIVER CROMWELL

might easily have been foretold. The historian in
our own day tells us that he finds it hard to avoid
the conclusion that Cromwell was ready to sacrifice
his own unique position in the army, and to retire
from military service. This is surely not easy to
believe, any more than it is easy to believe another
story for which the evidence comes to extremely
little, that at another time he meant to take service
in Germany. It is true that in inspiring and
supporting the first version of the Self-denying
Ordinance, Oliver seemed to be closing the chapter
of his own labours in the field. Yet nobody can
deny that his proceedings were oblique.1 It is
incredible that the post of lieutenant-general should
have been left vacant, otherwise than by design.
It is incredible that even those who were most
anxious to pull Cromwell down, should not have
foreseen that if the war was to go on, the most
successful and popular of all their generals would
inevitably be recalled. In Cromwell it would have
been an incredibly foolish under-estimate of himself
to suppose that his own influence, his fierce energy,
his determination, and his natural gift of the
military eye, could all be spared at an hour when
the struggle was drawing to its most hazardous
stage.

What actually happened was this. The second
Self-denying Ordinance was passed on April 3, and
Cromwell was bound to lay down all military
command within forty days. Meanwhile he was
despatched towards the west. The end of the forty
days found him in the Oxford country. The
parliament passed a special ordinance, not without
misgivings in the Lords, extending his employment
for forty days more until June 22. Before the

1 Mr. Gardiner dissents. Cromwell, he says, is not shown to have
had any hand in shaping the details of the Ordinance ; and all that the
omission to name a lieutenant-general proves, is that there were many
influential members of the House who thought that Cromwell should be
kept in his old post.

OH. iv CROMWELL LIEUTENANT-GENERAL 159

expiry of this new term, Fairfax and the officers,
following the Common Council who had demanded
it before, petitioned the Houses to sanction the
appointment of Cromwell to the vacant post of
lieutenant-general with command of the horse.
The Commons agreed (June 10), and Fairfax
formally appointed him. At the moment, Crom-
well had been sent from Oxford (May 26) into the
eastern counties to protect the Isle of Ely. He was
taken by legal fiction or in fact to have complied
with the Self-denying Ordinance by resigning, and
strictly speaking his appointment required the
assent of both Houses. But the needs of the time
were too sharp for ceremony. The campaign had
now begun that almost in a few hours was to end
in the ever-famous day of Naseby.

CHAPTER V

THE DAY OF NASEBY

ARMED puritanism was now first to manifest all its
strength. Faith that the God of Battles was on
their side nerved its chosen and winnowed ranks
with stern confidence. The fierce spirit of the Old
Testament glowed like fire in their hearts. But
neither these moral elements of military force, nor
discipline, technical precision, and iron endurance,
would have sufficed to win the triumph at Naseby
without the intrepid genius of Oliver. This was
the day on which the great soldier was first to show
himself, in modern phrase, a Man of Destiny.

The earliest movements of the campaign of 1645,
which was to end in the destruction of the king's
arms, were confused and unimportant. The Com-
mittee of Both Kingdoms hardly knew what to do
with the new weapon now at their command, and
for many weeks both Fairfax and Cromwell were
employed in carrying out ill-conceived orders in
the west. In May Charles left his headquarters
at Oxford, with a design of marching through the
midlands northward. On the last day of the month
he took Leicester by storm. The committee at
Westminster were filled with alarm. Was it pos-
sible that he intended an invasion of their strong-
hold in the eastern counties ? Fairfax, who lay
before the walls of Oxford, was immediately directed
to raise the siege and follow the king.

160

FIRST MOVEMENTS OF CAMPAIGN 161

The modern soldier is struck all through the war
with the ignorance on both sides of the movements,
plans, and position of the enemy. By June 13 the
two armies were in Northamptonshire, only some
seven miles apart, Fairfax at Guilsborough, Charles
at Daventry ; and yet it was not until the parlia-
mentary scouts were within sight of the royalist
camp that the advance of Fairfax became known.
The royalists undoubtedly made a fatal mistake in
placing themselves in the way of Fairfax after they
had let Goring go ; and the cause of their mis-
take was the hearty contempt entertained by the
whole of them from king to drummer for the raw
army and its clownish recruits. The cavaliers
had amused themselves, we are told, by cutting a
wooden image in the shape of a man, and " in such
a form as they blasphemously called it the god of
the roundheads, and this they carried in scorn and
contempt of our army in a public manner a little
before the battle began." So confident were they
of teaching the rabble a lesson. Doubting friends
thought as ill of the New Model as did overweening
foes. "Their new -modelled army," says Baillie,
like all the presbyterians at this moment hardly
knowing what he ought to wish, " consists for the
most part of raw, unexperienced, pressed soldiers.
Few of the officers are thought capable of their
places ; many of them are sectaries ; if they do
great service, many will be deceived."

Disaster, however, was not to be. Cromwell, as
we have seen, had been ordered off eastward, to
take measures for the defence of the Isle of Ely.
These commands, says a contemporary, " he, in
greater tenderness of the public service than of his
own honour, in such a time of extremity disputed
not but fulfilled." After securing Ely, he applied
himself to active recruiting in Cambridgeshire with
the extraordinary success that always followed his
inspiring energy. As soon as the king's movements

M

162 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOK n

began to create uneasiness, Fairfax, knowing Crom-
well's value as commander of horse, applied in haste
to the parliament that he should be specially per-
mitted to serve as lieutenant-general. The Houses
after some demur gave him plenary leave accord-
ingly. The general despatched constant expresses
to Cromwell himself, to inform him from time to
time where the army was, so that he might know
in case of danger where to join them. When he
found battle to be imminent, Oliver hastened over
the county border as hard as he and six hundred
horsemen with him could ride. They rode into
Fairfax's quarters at six o'clock on the morning of
June 13, and were hailed with the liveliest demon-
strations of joy by the general and his army. " For
it had been observed," says an onlooker of those
days, " that God was with him, and that affairs
were blessed under his hand." He was immedi-
ately ordered to take command of the marshalling
of the horse. There was not an instant to lose, for
before the field-officers could even give a rough
account of the arrangements of the army, the enemy
came on amain in excellent order, while the plan
of the parliamentary commanders was still an
embryo. This was the moment that Cromwell
has himself in glowing phrase described : "I can
say this of Naseby, that when I saw the enemy draw
up and march in gallant order towards us, and we
a company of poor ignorant men, to seek how to
order our battle — the general having commanded
me to order all the horse — I could not, riding alone
about my business, but smile out to God in praises,
in assurance of victory, because God would by
things that are not bring to naught things that are."
The number of men engaged, like the ma-
noeuvres that preceded the battle, is a matter
of much uncertainty. One good contemporary
authority puts the parliamentary forces at 11,000,
and says that the two armies were about equal.

CHAP, v PRELIMINARY MANOEUVRES 163

Gardiner, on the other hand, believes the par-
liamentarians to have been 13,600, and the
royalists only 7500, or not much more than one to
two — a figure that is extremely hard to reconcile
with two admitted facts. One is, that nobody
puts the number of royalist prisoners lower than
four thousand (and one contemporary even makes
them six thousand), while the slain are supposed
to have been not less than one thousand. This
would mean the extinction by death or capture of
two-thirds of the king's total force, and no con-
temporary makes the disaster so murderous as this.
The admission, again, that the royalist cavalry
after the battle was practically intact, increases
the difficulty of accepting so low an estimate for
the total of the king's troops, for nobody puts the
royalist horse under four thousand. The better
opinion undoubtedly seems to be that, though
Fairfax's troops outnumbered the king's, yet the
superiority can hardly have approached the propor-
tion of two to one.

The country was open, and the only fences were
mere double hedges with an open grass track
between them, separating Naseby from Sulby on
the west and Clipston on the east. On the right of
Fairfax's line, where Cromwell and his troopers
were posted, the action of cavalry was much hindered
by rabbit burrows, and at the bottom there was
boggy land equally inconvenient to the horsemen of
the king. The level of the parliamentary position
was some fifty feet, that of the royalist position not
more than thirty, above the open hollow between
them. The slope was from three to four degrees,
thus offering little difficulty of incline to either horse
or foot.

If the preliminary manoeuvres cannot be defin-
itely made out in detail, nor carried beyond a choice
of alternative hypotheses each as good as the other,
the actual battle is as plain as any battle on rather

164 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOKH

meagre and fragmentary reports can be considered
plain. As usual on both sides, the infantry were
posted in the centre, with the cavalry on either
flank. Fairfax seems to have taken up his ground
on the ledge of the hill running from east to west.
Then, possibly at Cromwell's suggestion, he drew
his men back a hundred paces from the ledge, so
as to keep out of the enemy's sight, knowing that
he could recover the advantage when he pleased.
Such, so far as can be made out from very entangled
evidence, is the simplest view of Fairfax's position.
Cromwell in command of the horse was stationed
on the parliamentary right, and Ireton on the left.
The veteran Skippon commanded regiments of
foot in the centre. On the opposite slope across
Broadmoor Rupert faced Ireton, and Sir Marma-
duke Langdale, with his northern horse in the
doubtful humour of men who wished to go home-
ward, faced Cromwell, while Lord Astley led the
infantry in the centre. Fairfax directed the dis-
position of his men, and was conspicuous during
the three hours of the engagement by his energy,
vigilance, and persistence. He was by constitu-
tion a slow-footed man, but when he drew near
action in the field then another spirit came upon
him, men said, and another soul looked out of his
eyes. King Charles, though inferior in military
capacity, was not behind him in either activity or
courage.

The word was on the one side " Mary," the king's
favourite name for the queen ; on the other side,
" God with us." The royalists opening the attack
advanced their whole line a hundred yards or so
across the flat and up the slope toward the opposite
ridge. The parliamentarians came into view upon
the brow from which they had recently retired. In
a few moments the foot in the centre were locked
in stubborn conflict. They discharged their pieces,
and then fell to it with clubbed muskets and with

CH.V CHARGES OF CROMWELLIAN HORSE 165

swords. The royalist infantry pressed Skippon so
hard, that his first line at last gave way and fell
back on the reserve. Ire ton, with his horse on the
parliamentary left, launched one of his divisions to
help the foot on his right, but with little advantage
to them and with disaster to himself. For Rupert,
dashing through the smart musketry fire from
Okey's dragoons posted behind Sulby hedges, came
crashing with irresistible weight upon the other
portion of Ireton's horse on the western slope of the
ridge, broke them up, and pursued the scattered
force toward Naseby village. On the right mean-
while things had gone better, for here Cromwell
stood. He had detailed a force of his cavalry under
Whalley to meet Langdale in front with the royalist
left wing, and he himself swept round on to Lang-
dale's left flank with the main body of his own horse.
Whalley thundering down the slope caught the left
of the opposing horse with terrific impetus, before
the enemy could charge up the higher ground.
Nothing could stand against him. Oliver's charge
on the other flank completed Langdale's ruin, some
of the enemy dashing in headlong flight from the
field, others finding their way to the king's reserve,
and there halting huddled together until they were
by and by re-formed. They were mainly from
Yorkshire and the north, and had gone into battle
with half a heart. Such was Cromwell's first onset.
The main battle was less victorious. The right
of the parliamentary foot stood firm, but the rest
being overpressed gave ground and fell back in dis-
order. The officers made fruitless attempts to check
the confusion of their inexperienced forces, and were
obliged to fall into the reserves with their colours,
" choosing rather to fight and die than to quit the
ground they stood on." It was at this point that
Cromwell executed his second movement ; it was
the crisis of the battle. With singular exactness he
repeated the tactics that had won the memorable

166 OLIVER CROMWELL

day at Marston. There as here — Cromwell's wing
victorious, the other wing worsted, the foot in the
centre hard pressed, Cromwell re-forming to the
rescue. Rupert, like Goring's men at Marston,
instead of leaving a detachment to pursue Ireton's
fugitive horse, and turning to help the king's infantry
in their work at the centre, lost time and a decisive
opportunity. Cromwell, as at Marston, observing
the difficulties of the parliamentary foot, collected
his whole force, save one regiment detailed to watch
or pursue the flight of Langdale's horsemen, formed
them again in line, set a new front toward the left
flank of the enemy's foot, and flung them with up-
lifted right arms and flashing swords to the relief of
the hotly pressed infantry of Fairfax and Skippon.
One of the royalist brigades offered an obstinate
resistance. " The parliamentarians strove hard to
break them, but even the Ironsides could not drive
them in, they standing with incredible courage and
resolution, though we attempted them in flank,
front, and rear." No impression was made until
Fairfax called up his own regiment of foot. Then
the stubborn brigade of royalists gave way, and in a
short time there was little left in the whole of the
field but the remnant of the king's horse. Though
some, says the modern soldier, may hold Marston
to offer a greater variety of striking pictures and
moments of more intensity (Honig i. 203), there is
scarcely a battle in history where cavalry was better
handled than at Naseby. In the tactics of Naseby
this second charge of the Cromwellian horse stands
out conspicuous for skill and vigour.

There was still, however, one more move to make
before victory was secure. Though aware of the
disaster that was overwhelming him, the king strove
bravely to rally the broken horse of his left wing.
He was joined by Rupert, at last returning from the
baggage-waggons and Naseby village, with his men
and horses exhausted and out of breath. Here the

CHAP, v FLIGHT OF THE ROYALISTS 167

royalists made their last stand. It was in vain. The
parliamentary generals with extraordinary alacrity
prepared for a final charge, and their preparation was
hardly made before all was over and the day won.
Ireton, though severely wounded in the beginning of
the battle, had got his men together again, and he
took an active part in the new attack. The parlia-
mentary foot, who had been thrown into disorder by
the first charge, and had then rallied " in a shorter
time than imaginable," now advanced at the top of
their speed to join the horse. For Oliver had got his
force of cavalry once more in hand, and made ready
to bear down on the enemy for a third and final
charge. The horsemen were again drawn up in two
wings within carbine-shot of the enemy, " leaving
a wide space between the wings for the battle of
the foot to fall in. Thereby," says the eye-witness,
" there was framed, as it were in a trice, a second
good battalia at the latter end of the day, which the
enemy perceiving, and that if they stood they must
expect a second charge from our horse, foot, and
artillery (they having lost all their foot and guns
before), and our dragoons having already begun to
fire upon their horse, they not willing to abide a
second shock upon so great disadvantage as there
was like to be, immediately ran away, both fronts
and reserves, without standing one stroke more."
To the king, gallantly heading his line, a curious
and characteristic thing happened. Lord Carnwath
riding by his side suddenly laid his hand upon the
king's bridle, and swearing sundry Scotch oaths,
cried out, " Will you go upon your death in an
instant ? ' " Then," says Clarendon, " before the
king understood what he would have, he turned his
horse round, and upon that they all turned their
horses and rode upon the spur, as if they were every
man to shift for himself."

The fight, which was desperately maintained
at every point while it endured, with its issue

168 OLIVER CROMWELL

often doubtful, lasted three hours. The killed and
wounded and the prisoners were about five thousand.
The Irish camp-followers were slaughtered in cold
blood. All the king's guns, all his waggons and
carriages, his colours and standards were taken, and,
worst of all, his private cabinet containing his most
secret correspondence and papers. This did him
an injury almost as deep as the loss of a battle,
for the letters disclosed his truthlessness and the
impossibility of ever trusting him.

Towards the end of May, Digby writes in one of
his letters, " Ere one month be over, we shall have
a battle of all for all." The prediction came true.
If the battle had gone the other way, Goring and
the king would have marched up to London, heart-
ening their men with the promise of the spoil of
the richest city in the realm, and the presence of
Charles and his army in the metropolis might have
created a situation that nothing could retrieve.
Even now the king had not lost his crown. Time
had still golden opportunities to offer him. Yet
Naseby was one of the decisive battles of English
history. It destroyed the last organised force that
Charles was able to raise ; it demonstrated that the
New Model had produced an invincible army ; it
transformed the nature of the struggle and the
conditions of the case ; it released new interests and
new passions ; it changed the balance of parties ;
and it brought Cromwell into decisive pre-eminence
in all men's minds.

ii

Cromwell's own account of Naseby is the tersest
bulletin on record, but he takes care to draw a
political moral for the hot party struggle then going
on at Westminster. " Honest men," he writes to
the Speaker, " served you faithfully in this action.
Sir, they are trusty ; I beseech you, in the name of

MONTROSE IN SCOTLAND 169

God, not to discourage them. I wish their actions
may beget thankfulness and humility in all that are
concerned in it. He that ventures his life for the
liberty of his country, I wish he trust God for the
liberty of his conscience, and you for the liberty he
fights for." In plainer words, the House of Com-
mons should not forget how much the independents
had to do with the victory, and that what the inde-
pendents fought for was above all else liberty of
conscience.

For the king the darkness was lightened by a
treacherous ray of hope from Scotland. The Scots,
whose aid had been of such decisive value to the
parliament at the end of 1643, on the stricken field
at Marston in the summer of 1644, and in the
seizure of Newcastle three months later, had been
since of little use. At Naseby they had no part
nor lot, and they even looked on that memorable
day with a surly eye : although it had indeed broken
the malignants, it had mightily exalted the indepen-
dents. A force of Scots still remained on English
ground, but they were speedily wanted in their own
country. One of the fiercest of the lesser episodes
of the war happened in Scotland, where in the
northern Highlands and elsewhere the same feeling
for the national line of their princes came into life
among chieftains and clansmen, that survived with
so many romantic circumstances and rash adven-
tures down to the rebellion of 1745.

In August 1644, Montrose, disguised as a groom
and accompanied by two of his friends, rode across
the south-western border from Carlisle and made his
way to Athole. There he was joined by a mixed
contingent of Highlanders and twelve hundred Irish,
lately brought over under Highland leadership into
Argyllshire. This was the beginning of a flame of
royalism that blazed high for a year, was marked by
much savagery and destruction, left three or four
new names upon the historic scroll of the bloody

170 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOK*

scuffles between Campbells, Forbeses, Frasers, Mac-
leans, Macdonalds, Gordons, Ogilvies, Grahams,
and the rest, and then finally died down at the
battle of Philiphaugh. Montrose reached the top of
his success at the engagement of Kilsyth, just two
months after Naseby. In another month the rush-
ing meteor went out. David Leslie, who fought at
Cromwell's side at Marston Moor and was now on
duty in England, took his force up to the border,
crossed the Tweed, found Montrose and his ragged
and scanty force of clansmen encamped at Philip-
haugh, near Selkirk (September 13, 1645), and there
fell suddenly upon them, shattering into empty air
both Montrose's phantasies and the shadowy hopes
of the dreaming king.

Charles's resolution was still unshaken. As he
told Digby, if he could not live like a king, he would
die like a gentleman. Six weeks after the fatal
battle he writes to Prince Rupert (Aug. 3) : "I con-
fess that, speaking either as a mere soldier or states-
man, I must say that there is no probability but of
my ruin. But as a Christian, I must tell you that
God will not suffer rebels and traitors to prosper, or
this cause to be overthrown. And whatever per-
sonal punishment it shall please him to inflict upon
me must not make me repine, much less to give over
this quarrel. Indeed, I cannot flatter myself with
expectations of good success more than this, to
end my days with honour and a good conscience,
which obliges me to continue my endeavours, as not
despairing that God may in due time avenge his
own cause. Though I must avow to all my friends
that he that will stay with me at this time, must
expect and resolve either to die for a good cause, or
(which is worse) to live as miserable in maintaining
it as the violence of insulting rebels can make it."

This patient stoicism, which may attract us when
we read about it in a book, was little to the mind of
the shrewd soldier to whom the king's firm words

CHAP, v SURRENDER OF BRISTOL 171

were written. Rupert knew that the cause was lost,
and had counselled an attempt to come to terms. A
disaster only second to Naseby and still more un-
foreseen soon followed. After a series of victorious
operations in the west at Langport, Bridgewater,
Bath, and Sherborne, Fairfax and Cromwell laid
siege to Bristol, and after a fierce and daring storm
(September 10) Rupert, who had promised the king
that he could hold out for four good months, sud-
denly capitulated and rode away to Oxford under
the humiliating protection of a parliamentary con-
voy. The fall of this famous stronghold of the west
was the severest of all the king's mortifications,
as the failure of Rupert's wonted courage was the
strangest of military surprises. That Rupert was
too clear-sighted not to be thoroughly discouraged
by the desperate aspect of the king's affairs is
certain, and the military difficulties of sustaining
a long siege were thought, even by those who had
no reasons to be tender of his fame, to justify the
surrender. The king would listen to no excuses,
but wrote Rupert an angry letter, declaring so
mean an action to be the greatest trial of his con-
stancy that had yet happened, depriving him of his
commissions, and bidding him begone beyond the
seas. Rupert nevertheless insisted on following the
king to Newark, and after some debate was declared
to be free of all disloyalty or treason, but not of
indiscretion. Another quarrel arose between the
king and his nephews and their partisans. The
feuds and rivalries of parliament at their worst,
were always matched by the more ignoble dis-
tractions and jealousies of the court. Suspicions
even grew up that Rupert and Maurice were in a
plot for the transfer of the crown to their elder
brother, the Elector Palatine. That the Elector
had been encouraged in such aspirations by earlier
incidents was true.

Cromwell improved the fall of Bristol as he had

172 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOK*

improved Naseby. " Faith and prayer," he tells
the Speaker, " obtained this city for you. It is
meet that God have all the praise. Presbyterians,
independents, and all here have the same spirit of
faith and prayer, the same presence and answer ;
they agree here, have no names of difference ; pity
it is it should be otherwise anywhere." So he urges
to the end of his despatch. Toleration is the only
key- word. " All that believe have the real unity,
which is most glorious because inward and spiritual.
As for unity in forms, commonly called uniformity,
every Christian will study that. But in things of
the mind we look for no compulsion but that of light
and reason. In other things God hath put the
sword in the hands of the parliament for the terror
of evildoers and the praise of them that do well."
These high refrains were not at all to the taste of the
presbyterian majority, and on at least one occasion
they were for public purposes suppressed.

After Bristol Winchester fell. Then Cromwell sat
down before Basing House, which had plagued and
defied the generals of the parliament for many long
months since 1643. Its valorous defender was Lord
Winchester, a catholic, a brave, pious, and devoted
servant of the royal cause, indirectly known to the
student of English poetry as husband of the young
lady on whose death, fourteen years earlier, Milton
and Ben Jonson had written verses of elegiac grief.
" Cromwell spent much time with God in prayer the
night before the storm of Basing. He seldom fights
without some text of scripture to support him."
This time he rested on the eighth verse of the One
Hundred and Fifteenth Psalm : " They that make
them [idols] are like unto them ; so is every one that
trusteth in them," — with private application to the
theologies of the popish Lord Winchester. " We
stormed this morning," Oliver reports (October 14,
1645), " after six of the clock ; the signal for falling
on was the firing four of our cannon, which being

CHAP, v STORM OF BASING HOUSE 173

done, our men fell on with great resolution and
cheerfulness." Many of the enemy were put to the
sword ; all the sumptuous things abounding in the
proud house were plundered ; ' popish books, with
copes and such utensils," were flung into the purify-
ing flame, and before long fire and destruction had
left only blackened ruins. Among the prisoners was
Winchester himself. In those days the word in
season was held to be an urgent duty. Hugh Peters
thought the moment happy for proving to his
captive the error of his idolatrous ways, just as
Cheynell hastened the end of Chillingworth by
thrusting controversy upon his last hour, and as
Clotworthy teased the unfortunate Laud, at the
instant when he was laying his head upon the block,
with questions upon what his assurance of salvation
was founded. The stout-hearted cavalier of Basing,
after long endurance of his pulpit tormentors, at last
broke out and said that " if the king had no more
ground in England than Basing House, he would
still adventure as he had done, and so maintain it to
the uttermost."

After Basing the king had indeed not very much
more ground in England or anywhere else. This was
the twentieth garrison that had been taken that
summer. Fairfax, who had parted from Cromwell
for a time after the fall of Bristol, pushed on into
Devon and Cornwall, and by a series of rapid and
vigorous operations cleared the royalist forces out
of the west. He defeated Hopton, that good soldier
and honourable man, first at Torrington and then
at Truro, and his last achievement was the capture
of Exeter (April 1646). Cromwell, who had joined
him shortly after the fall of Basing House, was with
the army throughout these operations, watching the
state of affairs at Westminster from a distance, in
a frame of mind shown by the exhortations in his
despatches, and constant to his steadfast rule of
attending with close diligence to the actual duties of

174 OLIVER CROMWELL

the day, leaving other things to come after in their
place. Upon the fall of Exeter, he was despatched
by Fairfax to report their doings to the parliament.
He received the formal thanks of the House of
Commons, as well as a more solid recognition of his
fidelity and service in the shape of estates of the
value of two thousand five hundred pounds a year.
Then Cromwell went back to Fairfax and the invest-
ment of Oxford.

BOOK III

(1646-49)
CHAPTER I

THE KING A PRISONER

ONE Sunday at midnight (April 26, 1646), the king
at Oxford came secretly to an appointed room in
one of the colleges, had his hair and beard cut short,
was dressed in the disguise of a servant, and at three
in the morning, with a couple of companions, crossed
over Magdalen Bridge and passed out of the gate,
leaving behind him for ever the grey walls and
venerable towers, the churches and libraries, the
cloisters and gardens, of the ever - faithful city.
He had not even made up his mind whither to go,
whether to London or to the Scots. Riding through
Maidenhead and Slough, the party reached Ux-
bridge and Hillingdon, and there at last after long
and perplexed debate he resolved to set his face
northward, but with no clear or settled design. For
eight days men wondered whether the fugitive king
lay hidden in London or had gone to Ireland.
Charles was afraid of London, and he hoped that the
French envoy would assure him that the Scots were
willing to grant him honourable conditions. Short
of this, he was inclined rather to cast himself upon
the English than to trust his countrymen. His
choice was probably the wrong one. If he had
gone to London he would have had a better chance
than ever came to him again, of widening the party

175

176 OLIVER CROMWELL

divisions in the House of Commons, and he would
have shown the English that he had that confidence
in their loyalty which at this, as almost at every
other stage, the general body of them were little
likely to disappoint or to betray. After all, it
mattered less where Charles was than what he was.
If, in the language of the time, God had hardened
him, if he was bent on " tinkling on bishops and
delinquents and such foolish toys," he might as
well try his shallow arts in one place as another.
Do what he would, grim men and grim facts had
now fast hold upon him. He found his way to
Harrow, thence to St. Albans, and thence to Down-
ham. There the disguised king stayed at a tavern
until word came from Montereul — not very sub-
stantial, as it proved — that the Scots would give
the assurances that he desired. Ten days after
leaving Oxford Charles rode into the Scottish
quarters at Southwell. He was never a free man
again. Before the end of June, Oxford surrendered.
The generals were blamed for the liberality of the
terms of capitulation, but Cromwell insisted on their
faithful observance, for he knew that the war was
now at an end, and that in civil strife clemency
must be the true policy.

With the close of the war and the surrender of
the person of the king a new crisis began, not less
decisive than that which ended in the raising of the
royal standard four years before, but rapidly open-
ing more extensive ground of conflict and awaken-
ing more formidable elements. Since then Europe
has learned, or has not learned, the lesson that
revolutions are apt to follow a regular order. It
would be a complete mistake, however, to think
that England in 1647 was at all like France after the
return of Bonaparte from his victorious campaigns
in Italy. They were unlike, because Cromwell was
not a bandit, and the army of the New Model was
not a standing force of many tens of thousands

OHAP. i THE NEW SITUATION 177

of men, essentially conscienceless and only existing
for war and conquest. The task was different. No
situations in history really reproduce themselves.
In France the fabric of government had been
violently dashed to pieces from foundation to crest.
Those ideas in men's minds by which national
institutions are moulded, and from which they
mainly draw their life, had become faded and
powerless. The nation had no reverence for the
throne, and no affection either for the king while
he was alive, or for his memory after they had killed
him. Not a single institution stood sacred. In
England, in 1647, no such terrible catastrophe had
happened. A confused storm had swept over the
waters, many a brave man had been carried over-
board, but the ship of state seemed to have ridden
out the hurricane. The king had been beaten, but
the nation never dreamed of anything but monarchy.
The bishops had gone down, but the nation desired
a national church. The lords had dwindled to a
dubious shadow, but the nation cherished its un-
alterable reverence for parliament.

The highest numbers in a division, even in the
early days of the Long Parliament, do not seem to
have gone above three hundred and eighty out of a
total of near five hundred. After the war broke
out they naturally sank to a far lower figure. At
least a hundred members were absent in the dis-
charge of local duties. A hundred more took
the side of the king, and shook the dust of West-
minster from off their feet. On the first Self-denying
Ordinance one hundred and ninety members voted.
The appointment of Fairfax to be commander-in-
chief was carried by one hundred and one against
sixty-nine. The ordinary working strength was
not above a hundred. The weakness of moral
authority in a House in this condition was painfully
evident, but so too were the difficulties in the way
of any remedy. A general dissolution, as if the

N

178 OLIVER CROMWELL

country were in deep tranquillity instead of being
torn and wearied by civil convulsion, was out of the
question. Apart from the technical objection of
calling a new parliament without the king and the
king's great seal, the risk of throwing upon doubtful
constituencies all the vital issues then open and
unsettled was too formidable for any statesman in
his senses to provoke.

The House proceeded gradually, and after Naseby
issued writs in small batches. Before the end of
1646 about two hundred and thirty - five new
members had been returned, and of these the
majority either professed independency or leaned
towards it, or at least were averse to presbyterian
exclusiveness, and not a few were officers in the
army. Thus in all revolutions, as they move
forward, stratum is superimposed above stratum.
Coke, Selden, Eliot, Hampden, Pym, the first
generation of constitutional reformers, were now
succeeded by a fresh generation of various re-
volutionary shades — Ireton, Ludlow, Hutchinson,
Algernon Sidney, Fleetwood, and Blake. Crom-
well, from his success as commander, his proved
experience, and his stern adherence to the great
dividing doctrine of toleration, was the natural
leader of this new and powerful group. Sidney's
stoical death years after on Tower Hill, and Blake's
destruction of the Spanish silver-galleons in the bay
of Santa Cruz, the most splendid naval achieve-
ment of that age, have made a deeper mark on
historic imagination, but for the purposes of the
hour it was Ireton who had the more important
part to play. Ireton, now five-and-thirty, was the
son of a country gentleman in Nottinghamshire,
had been bred at Oxford, and read law in the
Temple. He had fought at Edgehill, had ridden
by Cromwell's side at Gainsborough and Marston
Moor, and, as we have seen, was in command of the
horse on the left wing at Naseby, where his fortune

CHAP, i IRETON 179

was not good. No better brain was then at work
on either side, no purer character. Some found
that he had " the principles and the temper of a
Cassius in him," for no better reason than that he
was firm, never shrinking from the shadow of his
convictions, active, discreet, and with a singular
power of drawing others, including first of all
Cromwell himself, over to his own judgment. He
had that directness, definiteness, and persistency
to which the Pliables of the world often misapply
the ill-favoured name of fanaticism. He was a
man, says one, regardless of his own or any one's
private interest wherever he thought the public
service might be advantaged. He was very active,
industrious, and stiff in his ways and purposes,
says another ; stout in the field, and wary and
prudent in counsel ; exceedingly forward as to the
business of the Commonwealth. " Cromwell had
a great opinion of him, and no man could prevail so
much, nor order him so far, as Ireton could." He
was so diligent in the public service, and so careless
of all belonging to himself, that he never regarded
what food he ate, what clothes he wore, what horse
he mounted, or at what hour he went to rest.
Cromwell good-naturedly implies in Ireton almost
excessive fluency with his pen ; he does not write to
him, he says, because " one line of mine begets
many of his." The framing of constitutions is a
pursuit that has fallen into just discredit in later
days, but the power of intellectual concentration
and the constructive faculty displayed in Ireton's
plans of constitutional revision, mark him as a man
of the first order in that line. He was enough of a
lawyer to comprehend with precision the principles
and forms of government, but not too much of a
lawyer to prize and practise new invention and
resource. If a fresh constitution could have been
made, Ireton was the man to make it. Not less
remarkable than his grasp and capacity of mind

180 OLIVER CROMWELL

was his disinterestedness. When he was serving
in Ireland, parliament ordered a settlement of two
thousand pounds a year to be made upon him.
The news was so unacceptable to him that when he
heard of it, he said that they had many just debts
they had better pay before making any such pres-
ents, and that for himself he had no need of their
land and would have none of it. It was to this
comrade in arms and counsel that Cromwell, a year
after Naseby (1646), gave in marriage his daughter
Bridget, then a girl of two-and-twenty.

The king's surrender to the Scots created new
entanglements. The episode lasted from May 1646
to January 1647. It made worse the bad feeling
that had for long been growing between the English
and the Scots. The religious or political quarrel
about uniform presbytery, charges of military use-
lessness, disputes about money, disputes about the
border strongholds, all worked with the standing
international jealousy to intensify a strain that had
long been dangerous, and in another year in the
play of Scottish factions against one another was to
become more dangerous still.

Terms of a settlement had been propounded to
the king in the Nineteen Propositions of York, on
the eve of the war in 1642 ; in the treaty of Oxford
at the beginning of 1643 ; in the treaty of Ux-
bridge in 1644-45, the failure of which led to the
New Model and to Naseby. By the Nineteen
Propositions now made to him at Newcastle the king
was to swear to the Covenant, and to make all his
subjects do the same. Archbishops, bishops, and
all other dignitaries were to be utterly abolished
and taken away. The children of papists were to
be educated by protestants in the protestant faith ;
and mass was not to be said either at court or
anywhere else. Parliament was to control all the
military forces of the kingdom for twenty years,
and to raise money for them as it might think fit.

CHAP, i CHARLES AND THE CHURCH 181

An immense list of the king's bravest friends was
to be proscribed. Little wonder is it that these
proposals, some of them even now so odious, some
so intolerable, seemed to Charles to strike the crown
from his head as effectually as if it were the stroke
of the axe.

Charles himself never cherished a more foolish
dream than this of his Scottish custodians, that he
would turn covenanter. Scottish covenanters and
English puritans found themselves confronted by a
conscience as rigid as their own. Before the summer
was over the king's madness, as it seemed to them,
had confounded all his presbyterian friends. They
were in no frame of mind to apprehend even dimly
the king's view of the divine right of bishops as the
very foundation of the Anglican Church, and the
one sacred link with the church universal. Yet
they were themselves just as tenacious of the divine
right of presbytery. Their independent enemies
looked on with a stern satisfaction, that was slowly
beginning to take a darker and more revengeful
cast.

In spite of his asseverations, nobody believed
that the king " stuck upon episcopacy for any con-
science." Here, as time was to show, the world
did Charles much less than justice ; but he did not
conceal from the queen and others who urged him
to swallow presbytery, that he had a political no
less than a religious objection to it. " The nature
of presbyterian government is to steal or force the
crown from the king's head, for their chief maxim
is (and I know it to be true) that all kings must
submit to Christ's kingdom, of which they are
the sole governors, the king having but a single
and no negative voice in their assemblies." When
Charles said he knew this to be true, he was thinking
of all the bitter hours that his father had passed in
conflict with the clergy. He had perhaps heard of
the scene between James VI. and Andrew Melvill

182 OLIVER CROMWELL

in 1596 ; how the preacher bore him down, calling
the king God's silly vassal, and, taking him by the
sleeve, told him that there are two kings and two
kingdoms in Scotland : there is Christ Jesus the
King, and his kingdom the kirk, whose subject
King James VI. is, and of whose kingdom not a
king, not a lord, not a head, but a member. " And
they whom Christ has called and commanded
to watch over his kirk and govern his spiritual
kingdom, have sufficient power of him and author-
ity so to do, the which no Christian, king nor
prince, should control and discharge, but fortify
and assist."

The sincerity of his devotion to the church did
not make Charles a plain-dealer. He agreed to
what was proposed to him about Ireland, supposing,
as he told Bellievre, the French ambassador, that
the ambiguous expression found in the terms in
which it was drawn up would give him the means by
and by of interpreting it to his advantage. Charles,
in one of his letters to the queen, lets us see what
he means by an ambiguous expression. "It is
true," he tells her, " that it may be I give them
leave to hope for more than I intended, but my
words are only to endeavour to give them satisfac-
tion." Then he is anxious to explain that though
it is true that as to places he gives them some more
likely hopes, " yet neither in that is there any
absolute engagement, but there is the condition
4 of giving me encouragement thereunto by their
ready inclination to peace ' annexed with it."

It is little wonder that just as royalists took dis-
simulation to be the key to Cromwell, so it has been
counted the master vice of Charles. Yet Charles
was not the only dissembler. At this moment the
Scots themselves boldly declared that all charges
about their dealing with Mazarin and the queen
were wholly false, when in fact they were perfectly
true. In later days the Lord Protector dealt with

CHAP, t POSITION OF THE KING 183

Mazarin on the basis of toleration for catholics, but
his promises were not to be publicly announced.
Revolutions do not make the best soil for veracity.
It would be hard to deny that before Charles great
dissemblers had been wise and politic princes. His
ancestor King Henry VII., his predecessor Queen
Elizabeth of famous memory, his wife's father
Henry IV. of France, Louis XL, Charles V., and
many another sagacious figure in the history of
European states, had freely and effectively adopted
the maxims now commonly named after Machia-
velli. In truth, the cause of the king's ruin lay as
much in his position as in his character. The
directing portion of the nation had made up its
mind to alter the relations of crown and parliament,
and it was hardly possible in the nature of things,
—men and kings being what they are, — that Charles
should passively fall into the new position that his
victorious enemies had made for him. Europe has
seen many constitutional monarchies attempted
or set up within the last hundred years. In how
many cases has the new system been carried on
without disturbing an old dynasty ? We may say of
Charles I. what has been said of Louis XVI. Every
day they were asking the king for the impossible —
to deny his ancestors, to respect the constitution
that stripped him, to love the revolution that
destroyed him. How could it be ?

It is beside the mark, again, to lay the blame upon
the absence of a higher intellectual atmosphere. It
was not a bad intellectual basis that made the cata-
strophe certain, but antagonism of will, the clash of
character, the violence of party passion and person-
ality. The king was determined not to give up what
the reformers were determined that he should not
keep. He felt that to yield would be to betray both
those who had gone before him and his children who
were to come after. His opponents felt that to fall
back would be to go both body and soul into chains.

184 OLIVER CROMWELL

So presbyterians and independents feared and hated
each other, not merely because each failed in in-
tellectual perception of the case of their foe, but
because their blood was up, because they believed
dissent in opinion to mean moral obliquity, because
sectional interests were at stake, and for all those
other reasons which spring from that spirit of sect
and party which is so innate in man, and always
mingles so much evil with whatever it may have of
good.

The undoing of Charles was not merely his turn
for intrigue and double-dealing ; it was blindness to
signs, mismeasurement of forces, dishevelled con-
fusion of means and ends. Unhappily mere foolish-
ness in men responsible for the government of great
states is apt to be a curse as heavy as the crimes of
tyrants. With strange self-confidence, Charles was
hard at work upon schemes and combinations, all
at best most difficult in themselves, and each of
them violently inconsistent with the other. He was
hopefully negotiating with the independents, and at
the same time both with the catholic Irish and with
the presbyterian Scots. He looked to the support
of the covenanters, and at the same time he relied
upon Montrose, between whom and the covenanters
there was now an antagonism almost as vindictive
as a Corsican blood-feud. He professed a desire
to come to an understanding with his people and
parliament, yet he had a chimerical plan for collect-
ing a new army to crush both parliament and
people ; and he was looking each day for the arrival
of Frenchmen, or Lorrainers, or Dutchmen or Danes,
and their march through Kent or Suffolk upon his
capital. While negotiating with men to whom
hatred of the Pope was the breath of their nostrils,
he was allowing the queen to bargain for a hundred
thousand crowns in one event, and a second hundred
in another, from Antichrist himself. He must have
known, moreover, that nearly every move in this

CHAP, i THE QUEEN 185

stealthy game was more or less well known to all
those other players against whom he had so improvi-
dently matched himself.

The queen's letters during all these long months
of tribulation shed as much light upon the character
of Charles as upon her own. Complaint of his lack
of constancy and resolution is the everlasting refrain.
Want of perseverance in his plans, she tells him, has
been his ruin. When he talks of peace with the
parliament she vows that she will go into a convent,
for she will never trust herself with those who will
then be his masters. " If you change again, fare-
well for ever. If you have broken your resolution,
nothing but death for me. As long as the parlia-
ment lasts you are no king for me ; I will not put
my foot in England." We can have no better
measure of Charles's weakness than that in the hour
of adversity, so desperate for both of them, he
should be thus addressed by a wife to whom he
had been wedded for twenty years.

His submission is complete. He will not have a
gentleman for his son's bedchamber, nor Montrose
for his own bedchamber, without her consent. He
will not decide whether it is best for him to make for
Ireland, France, or Denmark, until he knows what
she thinks best. " If I quit my conscience," he
pleads, in the famous sentiment of Lovelace, " how
unworthy I make myself of thy love ! " With that
curious streak of immovable scruple so often found
in men in whom equivocation is a habit of mind and
practice, he had carefully kept his oath never to
mention matters of religion to his catholic queen,
and it is only under stress of this new misconstruc-
tion that he seeks to put himself right with her, by
explaining his position about apostolic succession,
the divine right of bishops, and the absolute un-
lawfulness of presbyterianism, ever the ally and
confederate of rebellion.

Nothing that he was able to do could disarm the

186 OLIVER CROMWELL

universal anger and suspicion which the seizure of
the king's papers at Naseby had begun, and the dis-
covery of a copy of the Glamorgan treaty at Sligo
(October 1645) had carried still deeper. The presby-
terians in their discomfiture openly expressed their
fears that the king was now undone for ever.
Charles in a panic offered to hand over the man-
agement of Ireland to his parliament, thus lightly
dropping the whole Irish policy on which he had
for long been acting, flinging to the winds all his
engagements, understandings, and promises to the
Irish catholics, and handing them over without
conditions to the tender mercies of enemies fiercely
thirsting for a bloody retaliation. His recourse to
foreign powers was well known. The despatch of
the Prince of Wales to join his mother in France was
felt to be the unsealing of "a fountain of foreign
war " ; as the queen had got the prince into her
hands, she could make the youth go to mass and
marry the Duke of Orleans's daughter. Ten thou-
sand men from Ireland were to overrun the Scottish
lowlands, and then to raise the malignant north
of England. The King of Denmark's son was to
invade the north of Scotland with three or four
thousand Dutch veterans. Eight or ten thousand
French were to join the remnant of the royal army
in Cornwall. Even the negotiations that had been
so long in progress at Miinster, and were by and by
to end the Thirty Years' War and consummate
Richelieu's great policy in the treaties of Westphalia,
were viewed with apprehension by the English
reformers ; for a peace might mean the release both
of France and Spain for an attack upon England
in these days of divine wrath and unsearchable judg-
ments against the land. Prayer and fasting were
never more diligently resorted to than now. The
conflict of the two English parties lost none of its
sharpness or intensity. The success of the policy of
the independents, so remarkably shown at Naseby,

CHAP. I

THE SCOTS WITHDRAW

187

pursued as it had been against common opinion at
Westminster, became more commanding with every
new disclosure of the king's designs. In the long
and intricate negotiations with the king and with
the Scots at Newcastle, independent aims had been
justified and had prevailed. The baffled presby-
terians only became the more embittered. At the
end of January 1647, a new situation became
denned. The Scots, unable to induce the king to
make those concessions in religion without which
not a Scot would take arms to help him, and having
received an instalment of the pay that was due to
them, marched away to their homes across the
border. Commissioners from the English parlia-
ment took their place as custodians of the person
of the king. By order of the two Houses, Holmby
in the county of Northampton was assigned to him
as his residence, and here he remained until the
month of June, when once more the scene was
violently transformed.

CHAPTER II

THE CRISIS OF 1647

IF ever there was in the world a revolution with
ideas as well as interests, with principle and not
egotism for its mainspring, it was this. At the
same time as England, France was torn by civil
war, but the civil war of the Fronde was the con-
flict of narrow aristocratic interests with the newly
consolidated supremacy of the monarch. It was
not the forerunner of the French Revolution, with
all its hopes and promises of a regenerated time ;
the Fronde was the expiring struggle of the belated
survivors of the feudal age. The English struggle
was very different. Never was a fierce party
conflict so free of men who, in Dante's blighting
phrase, " were for themselves." Yet much as
there was in the puritan uprising to inspire and
exalt, its ideas, when tested by the pressure of
circumstance, showed themselves unsettled and
vague ; principles were slow to ripen, forces were
indecisively distributed, its theology did not help.
This was what Cromwell, henceforth the great
practical mind of the movement, was now painfully
to discover.

It was not until 1645 that Cromwell had begun to
stand clearly out in the popular imagination, alike
of friends and foes. He was the idol of his troops.
He prayed and preached among them ; he played
uncouth practical jokes with them ; he was not
above a snowball match against them ; he was a

188

CHAP. n CROMWELL AS PARTY LEADER 189

brisk, energetic, skilful soldier, and he was an
invincible commander. In parliament he made
himself felt, as having the art of hitting the right
debating-nail upon the head. The saints had an
instinct that he was their man, and that they could
trust him to stand by them when the day of trial
came. A good commander of horse, say the ex-
perts, is as rare as a good commander-in-chief, he
needs so rare a union of prudence with impetuosity.
What Cromwell was in the field he was in council :
bold, but wary ; slow to raise his arm, but swift
to strike ; fiery in the assault, but knowing when
to draw bridle. These rare combinations were in-
valuable, for even the heated and headlong revolu-
tionary is not sorry to find a leader cooler than
himself. Above all, and as the mainspring of all,
he had heart and conscience. While the Scots are
striving to make the king into a covenanter, and the
parliament to get the Scots out of the country,
and the independents to find means of turning the
political scale against the presbyterians, Cromwell
finds time to intercede with a royalist gentleman
on behalf of some honest poor neighbours who are
being molested for their theologies. To the same
time (1646) belongs that well-known passage where
he says to one of his daughters that her sister
bewails her vanity and carnal mind, and seeks after
what will satisfy : " And thus to be a Seeker is to
be of the best sect next to a Finder, and such an one
shall every faithful, humble seeker be at the end.
Happy seeker, happy finder ! "

In no contest in our history has the disposition of
the pieces on the political chessboard been more per-
plexed. What Oliver perceived as he scanned each
quarter of the political horizon was first a parlia-
ment in which the active leaders were presbyterians,
confronted by an army, at once suspected and
suspicious, whose active leaders were independent.
The fervour of the preachers had been waxing hotter

190 OLIVER CROMWELL

and still hotter, and the angry trumpet sounding a
shriller blast. He saw the city of London, which
had been the mainstay of the parliament in the war,
now just as strenuous for a good peace. He saw
an army in which he knew that his own authority
stood high, but where events were soon to show
that he did not yet know all the fierce undercurrents
and dark and pent-up forces. Besides all this, he
saw a king beaten in the field, but still unbending
in defence of his religion, his crown, and his friends,
and boldly confident that nothing could prevent
him from still holding the scale between the two
rival bands of his triumphant enemies. Outside
this kingdom he saw the combative and dogged
Scots, who had just been persuaded to return to
their own country, still sharply watching English
affairs over the border, and still capable of drawing
the sword for king or for parliament, as best might
suit the play of their own infuriated factions.
Finally there was Ireland, distracted, dangerous,
sullen, and a mainspring of difficulty and confusion,
now used by the parliament in one way against the
army, and now by the king in another way against
both army and parliament. The cause in short,
whether Cromwell yet looked so far in front or not,
was face to face with the gloomy alternatives of a
perfidious restoration, or a new campaign and war
at all hazards.

There is no other case in history where the victors
in a great civil war were left so entirely without the
power of making their own settlement, and the
vanquished left so plainly umpires in their own
quarrel. The beaten king was to have another
chance, his best and his last. Even now if one could
read old history like a tale of which we do not know
the end, whether it should be that sentiment has
drawn the reader's sympathies to the side of the king,
or right reason drawn them to the side of the king's
adversaries, it might quicken the pulse when a man

DISPOSITION OF PARTIES 191

comes to the exciting and intricate events of 1647,
and sees his favourite cause, whichever it chances to
be, trembling in the scale.

Clarendon says that though the presbyterians
were just as malicious and as wicked as the inde-
pendents, there was this great difference between
them, that the independents always did what made
for the end they had in view, while the presby-
terians always did what was most sure to cross their
own design and hinder their own aim. These are
differences that in all ages mark the distinction
between any strong political party and a weak one ;
between powerful leaders who get things done, and
impotent leaders who are always waiting for some-
thing that never happens.

The pressure of the armed struggle with the king
being withdrawn, party spirit in parliament revived
in full vigour. The Houses were face to face with
the dangerous task of disbanding the powerful force
that had fought their battle and established their
authority, and was fully conscious of the magnitude
of its work. To undertake disbandment in England
was indispensable ; the nation was groaning under
the burden of intolerable taxation, and the necessity
of finding troops for service in Ireland was urgent.
The city clamoured for disbandment, and that a
good peace should be made with his Majesty. The
party interest of the presbyterian majority, more-
over, pointed in the same way ; to break up the
New Model, and dispose of as many of the soldiers
as could be induced to re-enlist for the distant wilds
of Ireland, would be to destroy the fortress of their
independent rivals.

There is no evidence that Cromwell took any
part in the various disbanding votes as they passed
through the House of Commons in the early months
of 1647, and he seems to have been slack in his
attendance. No operation was ever conducted
with worse judgment. Instead of meeting the

192 OLIVER CROMWELL

men frankly, parliament chaffered, framed their
act of indemnity too loosely, offered only eight
weeks of pay though between forty and fifty
weeks were overdue, and then, when the soldiers
addressed them, suppressed their petitions or burned
them by the hangman, and passed angry resolutions
against their authors as enemies of the state and
disturbers of the public peace. This is the party
of order all over. It is a curious circumstance that
a proposal should actually have been made in
parliament to arrest Cromwell for complicity in
these proceedings of the army at the moment when
some of the soldiers, on the other hand, blamed
him for stopping and undermining their petitions,
and began to think they had been in too great a
hurry to give him their affections.

The army in their quarters at Saffron Walden
grew more and more restive. They chose agents,
entered into correspondence for concerted action,
and framed new petitions. Three troopers, who
brought a letter with these communications, ad-
dressed to Cromwell and two of the other generals
in parliament, were summoned to the bar, and
their stoutness so impressed or scared the House
that Cromwell and Ireton, Fleetwood and the
sturdy Skippon, were despatched to the army to
feel the ground. They held a meeting in the
church at Saffron Walden, with a couple of hundred
officers and a number of private soldiers, and
listened to their reports from the various regiments.
Nothing was said either about religion or politics ;
arrears were the sore point, and if there were no
better offer on that head, then no disbandment.
The whole scene and its tone vividly recall the
proceedings of a modern trade union in the reason-
able stages of a strike. In temper, habit of mind,
plain sense, and even in words and form of speech,
the English soldier of the New Model two centuries
and a half ago must have been very much like the

CHAP, ii KING REMOVED FROM HOLMBY 193

sober and respectable miner, ploughman, or carter
of to-day. But the violence of war had hardened
their fibre, had made them rough under contra-
diction, and prepared them both for bold thoughts
and bolder acts.

Meanwhile a thing of dark omen happened. At
the beginning of May, while Cromwell was still at
Saffron Walden, it was rumoured that certain foot-
soldiers about Cambridgeshire had given out that
they would go to Holmby to fetch the king. The
story caused much offence and scandal, but it
very soon came true. One summer evening small
parties of horse were observed in the neighbourhood
of Holmby. At daybreak Cornet Joyce made his
way within the gates at the head of five hundred
mounted troopers. Later in the day a report got
abroad that the parliament would send a force to
carry the king to London. Joyce and his party
promptly made up their minds. At ten at night
the cornet awoke the king from slumber, and re-
spectfully requested him to move to other quarters
next day. The king hesitated. At six in the
morning the conversation was resumed. The king
asked Joyce whether he was acting by the general's
commission. Joyce said that he was not, and
pointed as his authority to the five hundred men
on their horses in the courtyard. " As well-written
a commission, and with as fine a frontispiece, as I
have ever seen in my life," pleasantly said Charles.
The king had good reason for his cheerfulness. He
was persuaded that the cornet could not act without
the counsel of greater persons, and if so, this could
only mean that the military leaders were resolved
on a breach with the parliament. From such a
quarrel Charles might well believe that to him
nothing but good could come.

Whether Cromwell was really concerned either
in the king's removal or in any other stage of
this obscure transaction, remains an open question.

o

194 OLIVER CROMWELL

What is not improbable is that Cromwell may have
told Joyce to secure the king's person at Holmby
against the suspected designs of the parliament,
and that the actual removal was prompted on the
spot by a supposed or real emergency. On the
other hand, the hypothesis is hardly any more
improbable that the whole design sprang from the
agitators, and that Cromwell had no part in it. It
was noticed later as a significant coincidence that
on the very evening on which Joyce forced his way
into the king's bed-chamber, Cromwell, suspecting
that the leaders of the presbyterian majority were
about to arrest him, mounted his horse and rode
off to join the army. His share in Joyce's seizure
and removal of the king afterwards is less im-
portant than his approval of it as a strong and
necessary lesson to the majority in the parliament.

So opened a more startling phase of revolutionary
transformation. For Joyce's exploit at Holmby
begins the descent down those fated steeps in
which each successive violence adds new momentum
to the violence that is to follow, and pays retribu-
tion for the violence that has gone before. Purges,
proscriptions, camp courts, executions, major-
generals, dictatorship, restoration — this was the
toilsome, baffling path on to which, in spite of
hopeful auguries and prognostications, both sides
were now irrevocably drawn.

Parliament was at length really awake to the
power of the soldiers, and their determination to
use it. The city, with firmer nerve but still with
lively alarm, watched headquarters rapidly changed
to St. Albans, to Berkhamsted, to Uxbridge, to
Wycombe — now drawing off, then hovering closer,
launching to-day a declaration, to-morrow a remon-
strance, next day a vindication, like dangerous
flashes out of a sullen cloud.

For the first time " purge " took its place in the
political vocabulary of the day. Just as the king

CHAP, n THE FIRST PURGE 195

had attacked the five members, so now the army
attacked eleven, and demanded the ejection of the
whole group of presbyterian leaders from the House
of Commons, with Denzil Holies at the head of
them (June 16-26). Among the Eleven were men
as pure and as patriotic as the immortal Five, and
when we think that the end of these heroic twenty
years was the Restoration, it is not easy to see why
we should denounce the pedantry of the parlia-
ment, whose ideas for good or ill at last prevailed,
and should reserve all our glorification for the army,
who proved to have no ideas that would either
work or that the country would accept. The
demand for the expulsion of the Eleven was the
first step in the path that was to end in the removal
of the Bauble in 1653.

Incensed by these demands, and by what they
took to be the weakness of their confederates in the
Commons, the city addressed one strong petition
after another, and petitions were speedily followed
by actual revolt. The seamen and the watermen
on the river-side, the young men and apprentices
from Aldersgate and Cheapside, entered into one of
the many solemn engagements of these distracted
years, and when their engagement was declared
by the bewildered Commons to be dangerous,
insolent, and treasonable, excited mobs trooped
down to Westminster, made short work of the nine
gentlemen who that day composed the House of
Lords, forcing them to cross the obnoxious declara-
tion off their journals, and tumultuously besieged
the House of Commons, some of them even rudely
making their way, as Charles had done six years
before, within the sacred doors and on to the in-
violable floor, until members drew their swords and
forced the intruders out. When the Speaker would
have left the House, the mob returned to the charge,
drove him back to his chair, and compelled him
to put the motion that the king be invited to

196 OLIVER CROMWELL

come to London forthwith with honour, freedom, and
safety. So readily, as usual, did reaction borrow
at second hand the turbulent ways of revolution.

In disgust at this violent outrage, the Speakers
of the two Houses (July 30), along with a con-
siderable body of members, betook themselves to
the army. When they accompanied Fairfax and
his officers on horseback in a review on Hounslow
Heath, the troopers greeted them with mighty
acclamations of " Lords and Commons and a free
parliament." The effect of the manoeuvres of the
reactionists in the city was to place the army in
the very position that they were eager to take, of
being protectors of what they chose to consider
the true parliament, to make a movement upon
London not only defensible, but inevitable, to force
the hand of Cromwell, and to inflame still higher
the ardour of the advocates of the revolutionary
Thorough. Of the three great acts of military
force against the parliament, now happened the
first (August 1647). The doors were not roughly
closed as Oliver closed them on the historic day in
April 1653, and there was no sweeping purge like
that of Pride in December 1648. Fairfax after-
ward sought credit for having now resisted the
demand to put military violence upon the House,
but Cromwell with his assent took a course that
came to the same thing. He stationed cavalry in
Hyde Park, and then marched down to his place in
the House, accompanied by soldiers, who after he
had gone in hung about the various approaches
with a significance that nobody mistook. The
soldiers had definitely turned politicians, and even
without the experience that Europe has passed
through since, it ought not to have been very hard
to foresee what their politics would be.

CHAPTER III

THE OFFICERS AS POLITICIANS

ENGLAND throughout showed herself the least revolu-
tionary of the three kingdoms, hardly revolution-
ary at all. Here was little of the rugged, dour,
and unyielding persistency of the northern Cove-
nanters, none of the savage aboriginal frenzy of the
Irish. Cromwell was an Englishman all over, and
it is easy to conceive the dismay with which in the
first half of 1647 he slowly realised the existence of
a fierce insurgent leaven in the army. The worst
misfortune of a civil war, said Cromwell's con-
temporary, De Retz, is that one becomes answer-
able even for the mischief that one has not done.
" All the fools turn madmen, and even the wisest
have no chance of either acting or speaking as if they
were in their right wits." In spite of the fine things

O JL i <*

that have been said of heroes, and the might of their !
will, a statesman in such a case as Cromwell's soon ;
finds how little he can do to create marked situations, j
and how the main part of his business is in slowly j
parrying, turning, managing circumstances for which •
he is not any more responsible than he is for his own j
existence, and yet which are his masters, and of J
which he can only make the best or the worst.

Cromwell never showed a more sagacious insight
into the hard necessities of the situation than when
he endeavoured to form an alliance between the
king and the army. All the failures and disasters
that harassed him from this until the day of his
death arose from the breakdown of the negotiations

197

198 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOK in

now undertaken. The restoration of Charles I.
by Cromwell would have been a very different
thing from the restoration of Charles II. by Monk.
In the midsummer of 1647 Cromwell declared that
he desired no alteration of the civil government, and
no meddling with the presbyterian settlement, and
no opening of a way for " licentious liberty under
pretence of obtaining ease for tender consciences."

Unhappily for any prosperous issue, Cromwell
and his men were met by a constancy as fervid as
their own. Charles followed slippery and crooked
paths ; but he was as sure as Cromwell that he had
God on his side, that he was serving divine pur-
poses and upholding things divinely instituted. He
was as unyielding as Cromwell in fidelity to what
he accounted the standards of personal duty and
national well-being. He was as patient as Cromwell
in facing the ceaseless buffets and misadventures
that were at last to sweep him down the cataract.
Charles was not without excuse for supposing that
by playing off army against parliament, and inde-
pendent against presbyterian, he would still come
into his own again. The jealousy and ill - will
between the contending parties was at its height,
and there was no reason either in conscience or in
policy why he should not make the most of that
fact. Each side sought to use him, and from his own
point of view he had a right to strike the best bargain
he could with either. Unfortunately, he could not
bring himself to strike any bargain at all, and the
chance passed. Cromwell's efforts only served to
weaken his own authority with the army, and he was
driven to give up hopes of the king, as he had already
been driven to give up hopes of the parliament.
This was in effect to be thrown back against all his
wishes and instincts upon the army alone, and to
find himself, by nature a moderator with a passion
for order in its largest meaning, flung into the midst
of military and constitutional anarchy.

OH. m POLITICAL IDEAS OF THE ARMY 199

Carlyle is misleading when, in deprecating a
comparison between French Jacobins and English
sectaries, he says that, apart from difference in
situation, " there is the difference between the
believers in Jesus Christ and believers in Jean
Jacques, which is still more considerable." It
would be nearer the mark to say that the sectaries
were beforehand with Jean Jacques, and that half
the troubles that confronted Cromwell and his men
sprang from the fact that English sectaries were
now saying to one another something very like
what Frenchmen said in Rousseau's dialect a
hundred and forty years later. " No man who
knows right," says Milton, " can be so stupid as to
deny that all men were naturally born free." In
the famous document drawn up in the army in the
autumn of 1647, and known (along with two other
documents under the same designation propounded
in 1648-49) as the Agreement of the People, the
sovereignty of the people through their repre-
sentatives ; the foundation of society in common
right, liberty, and safety ; the freedom of every
man in the faith of his religion ; and all the rest of
the catalogue of the rights of man, are all set forth
as clearly as they ever were by Robespierre or by
Jefferson. In truth the phrase may differ, and the
sanctions and the temper may differ ; and yet in
the thought of liberty, equality, and fraternity, in
the dream of natural rights, in the rainbow vision of
an inalienable claim to be left free in life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness, there is something
that has for centuries from age to age evoked
spontaneous thrills in the hearts of toiling, suffer-
ing, hopeful men — something that they need no
philosophic book to teach them.

When Baxter came among the soldiers after
Naseby, he found them breathing the spirit of
conquerors. The whole atmosphere was changed.
They now took the king for a tyrant and an enemy,

200 OLIVER CROMWELL

and wondered only whether, if they might fight
against him, they might not also kill or crush him
—in itself no unwarrantable inference. He heard
them crying out, " What were the lords of England
but William the Conqueror's colonels, or the barons
but his majors, or the knights but his captains ? '
From this pregnant conclusions followed. Logic
had begun its work, and in men of a certain tempera-
ment political logic is apt to turn into a strange
poison. They will not rest until they have drained
first principles to their very dregs. They argue
down from the necessities of abstract reasoning
until they have ruined all the favouring possi-
bilities of concrete circumstance.

We have at this time to distinguish political
councils from military. There was almost from
the first a standing council of war, exclusively
composed of officers of higher rank. This body
was not concerned in politics. The general council
of the army, which was first founded during the
summer of 1647, was a mixture of officers and the
agents of the private soldiers. It contained certain
of the generals, and four representatives from each
regiment, two of them officers and two of them
soldiers chosen by the men. This important
assembly, with its two combined branches, did
not last in that shape for more than a few months.
After the execution of the king, the agitators, or
direct representatives of the men, dropped off or
were shut out, and what remained was a council
of officers. They retained their power until the
end ; it was with them that Cromwell had to deal.
The politics of the army became the governing
element of the situation ; it was here that those new
forces were being evolved which, when the Long
Parliament first met, nobody intended or foresaw,
and that gave to the Rebellion a direction that led
Cromwell into strange latitudes.

Happy chance has preserved, and the industry

ATTITUDE OF CROMWELL 201

of a singularly clear-headed and devoted student
has rescued and explored, vivid and invaluable
pictures of the half -chaotic scene. At Saffron
Walden, in May (1647), Cromwell urged the officers
to strengthen the deference of their men for the
authority of parliament, for if once that authority
were to fail, confusion must follow. At Reading, in
July, the position had shifted, the temperature had
risen, parliament in confederacy with the city had
become the enemy, though there was still a strong
group at Westminster who were the soldiers' friends.
Cromwell could no longer proclaim the authority of
parliament as the paramount object, for he knew ,
this to be a broken reed. But he changed ground
as little as he could and as slowly as he could.

Here we first get a clear sight of the temper of v
Cromwell as a statesman grappling at the same
moment with presbyterians in parliament, with
extremists in the army, with the king in the closet.
It was a taskjpx a hero. In manner he was always
what Clarendon caffs rough and brisk. He declared
that he and his colleagues were as swift as any-
body else in their feelings and desires ; nay, more,
' Truly, I am very often judged as one that goes
too fast that way," and it is the peculiarity of men
like me, he says, to think dangers more imaginary
than real, "to be always making haste, and more
sometimes perhaps than good speed." This is one
of the too few instructive glimpses that we have
of the real Oliver. Unity was first. Let no man
exercise his parts to strain things, and to open
up long disputes or needless contradictions, or to
sow the seeds of dissatisfaction. They might be in
the right or we might be in the right, but if they
were to divide, then were they both in the wrong.
On the merits of the particular question of the
moment, it was idle to tell him that their friends
in London would like to see them march up. " 'Tis
the general good of the kingdom that we ought to

202 OLIVER CROMWELL

consult. Thafs the question, what's for their good,
not what pleases them" They might be driven to
march on to London, he told them, but an under-
standing was the most desirable way, and the other
a way of necessity, and not to be done but
in a way of necessity. What was obtained by
an understanding would be firm and durable.
Things obtained by force, though never so good in
themselves, would be both less to their honour and
less likely to last. " Really, really, have what you
will have ; that you have by force, I look upon as
nothing." " I could wish," he said earlier, " that
we might remember this always, that what we gain in
a free way, it is better than twice as much in a forced,
and will be more truly ours and our posterity^" It is >.
one of the harshest ironies of history that the name
of this famous man, who started on the severest
stage of his journey with this broad and far-reaching
principle, should have become the favourite symbol •
of the shallow faith that force is the only remedy.

The general council of the army at Putney in ;
October and November (1647) became a constituent
assembly. In June Ireton had drawn up for them
a declaration of their wishes as to the " settling of
our own and the king's own rights, freedom, peace,
and safety." This was the first sign of using
military association for political ends. We are not
a mere mercenary army, they said, but are called
forth in defence of our own and the people's just
rights and liberties. We took up arms in judg-
ment and conscience to those ends, against all
arbitrary power, violence, and oppression, and
against all particular parties or interests whatso-
ever. These ideas were ripened by Ireton into the
memorable Heads of the Proposals of the Army, a
document that in days to come made its influ-
ence felt in the schemes of government during the
Commonwealth and Protectorate.

In these discussions in the autumn of 1647, just

CHAP, m CROMWELL AND REPUBLICANS 203

as the Levellers anticipate Rousseau, so do Oliver
and Ireton recall Burke. After all, these are only
the two eternal voices in revolutions, the standing
antagonisms through history between the natural
man and social order. In October the mutinous
section of the army presented to the council a couple
of documents, the Case of the Army Stated and an
Agreement of the People — a title that was also given,
as I have said, to a document of Lilburne's at the
end of 1648, and to one of Ireton's at the beginning
of 1649. Here they set down the military grievances
of the army in the first place, and in the second they
set out the details of a plan of government resting
upon the supreme authority of a House of Commons
chosen by universal suffrage, and in spirit and in
detail essentially republican. This was the strange
and formidable phantom that now rose up before
men who had set out on their voyage with Pym
and Hampden. If we think that the headsman at
Whitehall is now little more than a year off, what
followed is just as startling. Ireton at once declared
that he did not seek, and would not act with those
who sought, the destruction either of parliament or
king. Cromwell, taking the same line, was more
guarded and persuasive. The pretensions and the
expressions in your constitutions, he said, are very
plausible, and if we could jump clean out of one
sort of government into another, it is just possible
there would not have been much dispute. But is
this jump so easy ? How do we know that other
people may not put together a constitution as
plausible as yours ? . . . Even if this were the only
plan proposed, you must consider not only its con-
sequences, but the ways and means of accomplish-
ing it. According to reason and judgment, are the
spirits and temper of the people of this nation pre-
pared to receive and to go along with it ? If he
could see likelihood of visible popular support he
would be satisfied, for, adds Oliver, in a sentence

204 OLIVER CROMWELL

that might have come straight out of Burke, " In
the government of nations, that which is to be
looked after is the affections of the people."

Oliver said something about their being bound
by certain engagements and obligations to which
previous declarations had committed them with the
public. " It may be true enough," cried Wildman,
one of the ultras, " that God protects men in keeping
honest promises, but every promise must be con-
sidered afterward, when you are pressed to keep it,
whether it was honest or just, or not. If it be not
a just engagement, then it is a plain act of honesty
for the man who has made it to recede from his
former judgment and to abhor it." This slippery
sophistry, so much in the vein of King Charles him-
self, brought Ireton swiftly to his feet with a clean
and rapid debating point. " You tell us," he said,
" that an engagement is only binding so far as you
think it honest ; yet the pith of your case against
the parliament is that in ten points it has violated
engagements."

In a great heat Rainborough, likewise an ultra,
followed. You talk of the danger of divisions, but
if things are honest, why should they divide us ?
You talk of difficulties, but if difficulties be all, how
was it that we ever began the war, or dared to look
an enemy in the face ? You talk of innovation upon
the old laws which made us a kingdom from old
time. " But if writings be true, there hath been
many scufflings between the honest men of England
and those that have tyrannised over them ; and if
people find that old laws do not suit freemen as
they are, what reason can exist why old laws should
not be changed to new ? "

According to the wont of debate, Rainborough 's
heat kindled Cromwell. His stroke is not as clean
as Ireton' s, but there is in his words a glow of the
sort that goes deeper than the sharpest dialectic.
After a rather cumbrous effort to state the general

CHAP, m ARMY DEBATES 205

case for opportunism, he closes in the manner of a
famous word of Danton's, with a passionate declara-
tion against divisions : " Rather than I would have
this kingdom break in pieces before some company of
men be united together to a settlement, I will with-
draw myself from the army to-morrow and lay down
my commission ; I will perish before I hinder it."

Colonel Goffe then proposed that there should be
a public prayer-meeting, and it was agreed that the
morning of the next day should be given to prayer,
and the afternoon to business. The lull, edifying
as it was, did not last. No storms are ever harder
to allay than those that spring up in abstract dis-
cussions. Wildman returned to the charge with law
of nature, and the paramount claim of the people's
rights and liberties over all engagements and over
all authority. Hereupon Ireton flamed out just as
Burke might have flamed out : " There is venom and
poison in all this. I know of no other foundation
of right and justice but that we should keep covenant
with one another. Covenants freely entered into
must be kept. Take that away, and what right has
a man to anything — to his estate of lands or to his
goods ? You talk of law of nature ! By the law
of nature you have no more right to this land or
anything else than I have."

Here the shrewd man that is a figure in all public
meetings ancient and modern, who has no relish for
general argument, broke in with the apt remark that
if they went on no quicker with their business, the
king would come and say who should be hanged first.
Ireton, however, always was a man of the last word,
and he stood to his point with acuteness and fluency,
but too much in the vein styled academic. He turns
to the question that was to give so much fuel to
controversy for a hundred years to come — what
obedience men owe to constituted authority. Crom-
well's conclusion marked his usual urgency for unity,
but he stated it with an uncompromising breadth

206 OLIVER CROMWELL

that is both new and extremely striking. For his
part, he was anxious that nobody should suppose
he and his friends were wedded and glued to forms
of government. He wished them to understand that
he was not committed to any principle of legislative
power outside the Commons of the kingdom, or to
any other doctrine than that the foundation and
supremacy is in the people. With that vain cry so
often heard through history from Pericles down-
wards, from the political leader to the roaring winds
and waves of party passion, he appeals to them not to
meet as two contrary parties, but as men desirous
to satisfy each other. This is the clue to Cromwell.
Only unity could save them from the tremendous
forces ranged against them all ; division must destroy
them. Rather than imperil unity, he would go
over with the whole of his strength to the extreme
men in his camp, even though he might not think
their way the best. The army was the one thing
now left standing. The church was shattered.
Parliament was paralysed. Against the king Crom-
well had now written in his heart the judgment
written of old on the wall against Belshazzar. If
the army broke, then no anchor would hold, and
once and for all the cause was lost.

The next day the prayer-meeting had cleared the
air. After some civil words between Cromwell and
Rainborough, Ireton made them another eloquent
speech, where, among many other things, he lays
bare the spiritual basis on which powerful and
upright men like Cromwell rested practical policy.
Some may now be shocked, as were many at that
day, by the assumption that little transient events
are the true measure of the divine purpose. Others
may feel the full force of all the standing arguments
ever since Lucretius, that the nature of the higher
powers is too far above mortal things to be either
pleased or angry with us.1 History is only intelli-

1 " Nee bene promeritis capitur, nee tangitur ira," ii. 651.

CHAP, in ARMY DEBATES 207

gible if we place ourselves at the point of view of
the actor who makes it. Ireton moving clean away
from the position that he had taken up the day
before, as if Oliver had wrestled with him in the inter-
vening night, now goes on : " It is not to me so much
as the vainest or slightest thing you can imagine,
whether there be a king in England or no, or whether
there be lords in England or no. For whatever I
find the work of God tending to, I should quietly
submit to it. If God saw it good to destroy not
only kings and lords, but all distinctions of degrees
—nay, if it go further, to destroy all property — if I
see the hand of God in it, I hope I shall with quiet-
ness acquiesce and submit to it and not resist it."
In other words, do but persuade him that Heaven
is with the Levellers, and he turns Leveller him-
self. Ireton was an able and whole-hearted man,
but we can see how his doctrine might offer a
decorous mask to the hypocrite and the waiter upon
Providence.

Colonel Goffe told them that he had been kept
awake a long while in the night by certain thoughts,
and he felt a weight upon his spirit until he had
imparted them. They turned much upon Antichrist,
and upon the passage in the Book of Revelation
which describes how the kings of the earth have
given up their powers to the Beast, as in sooth the
kings of the earth have given up their powers to the
Pope. Nobody followed Goffe into these high con-
cerns, but they speedily set to work upon the carnal
questions, so familiar to ourselves, of electoral fran-
chise and redistribution of seats — and these two,
for that matter, have sometimes hidden a mystery
of iniquity of their own.

" Is the meaning of your proposal," said Ireton,
" that every man is to have an equal voice in the
election of representors ? " " Yes," replied Rain-
borough ; " the poorest he that is in England hath
a life to live as much as the greatest he, and a man

208 OLIVER CROMWELL

is not bound to a government that he has not had a
voice to put himself under." Then the lawyer rose
up in Ireton. " So you stand," he says, " not on
civil right but on natural right, and, for my part, I
think that no right at all. Nobody has a right to a
share in disposing the affairs of this kingdom unless
he has a permanent fixed interest in the kingdom."
" But I find nothing in the law of God," Rainborough
retorts, " that a lord shall choose twenty burgesses,
and a gentleman only two, and a poor man none.
Why did Almighty God give men reason, if they
should not use it in a voting way unless they have
an estate of forty shillings a year ? ': " But then,"
says Ireton, " if you are on natural right, show me
what difference lies between a right to vote and a
right to subsistence." " Every man is naturally
free," cries one. " How comes it," cries another,
" that one free-born Englishman has property and
his neighbour has none ? Why has not a younger
son as much right in the inheritance as the eldest ? ':
So the modern reader finds himself in the thick of
controversies that have shaken the world from that
far-off day to this.

In such a crisis as that upon which England was
now entering, it is not the sounder reasoning that
decides ; it is passions, interests, outside events, and
that something vague, undefined, curious almost to
mystery, that in bodies of men is called political
instinct. All these things together seemed to
sweep Cromwell and Ireton off their feet. The
Levellers beat them, as Cromwell would assuredly
have foreseen must happen, if he had enjoyed modern
experiences of the law of revolutionary storms.
Manhood suffrage was carried, though Cromwell
had been against it as " tending very much to
anarchy," and though Ireton had pressed to the
uttermost the necessity of limiting the vote to men
with fixed interests. Cromwell now said that he
was not glued to any particular form of government.

CHAP, in ARMY DEBATES 209

Only a fortnight before he had told the House of
Commons that it was matter of urgency to restore
the authority of monarchy, and Ireton had told the
council of the army that there must be king and
lords in any scheme that would do for him. In
July Cromwell had called out that the question is,
what is good for the people, not what pleases them.
Now he raises the balancing consideration that if
you do not build the fabric of government on consent
it will not stand. Therefore you must think of what
pleases people, or else they will not endure what is
good for them. " If I could see a visible presence
of the people, either by subscription or by numbers,
that would satisfy me." Cromwell now (November)
says that if they were free to do as they pleased
they would set up neither king nor lords. Further,
they would not keep either king or lords, if to do
so were a danger to the public interest. Was it
a danger ? Some thought so, others thought not.
For his own part, he concurred with those who
believed that there could be no safety with a king
and lords, and even concurred with them in thinking
that God would probably destroy them ; yet " God
can do it without necessitating us to a thing which is
scandalous, and therefore let those that are of that
mind wait upon God for such a way where the thing
may be done without sin and without scandal too."
This was undoubtedly a remarkable change of
Oliver's mind, and the balanced, hesitating phrases
in which it is expressed hardly seem to fit a con-
clusion so momentous. A man who, even with
profound sincerity, sets out shifting conclusions of
policy in the language of unction, must take the
consequences, including the chance of being sus-
pected of duplicity by embittered adversaries.
These weeks must have been to Oliver the most
poignant hours of the whole struggle, and more than
ever he must have felt the looming hazards of his
own maxim that " in yielding there is wisdom."

p

\

V

CHAPTER IV

THE KING'S FLIGHT

THE strain of things had now become too intense
to continue. On the evening of the day when
Harrison was declaiming against the man of blood
(November 11), the king disappeared frpm Hampton
Court. That his life was in peril from some of the
more violent of the soldiers at Putney half a dozen
miles away, there can be no doubt, though circum-
stantial stories of plots for his assassination do not
seem to be proved. Cromwell wrote to Whalley,
who had the king under his guard, that rumours
were abroad of an attempt upon the king's life,
and if any such thing should be done it would be
accounted a most horrid act. The story that Crom-
well cunningly frightened Charles away, in order
to make his own manoeuvres run smoother, was
long a popular belief, but all the probabilities are
decisively against it. Even at that eleventh hour,
as we see from his language a few days before the
king's flight, Cromwell had no faith that a settle-
ment was possible without the king, little as he could
have hoped from any settlement made with him.
Whither could it have been for Cromwell's interest
that the king should betake himself ? Not to
London, where a royalist tide was flowing pretty
strongly. Still less toward the Scottish border,
where Charles would begin a new civil war in a
position most favourable to himself. Flight to
France was the only move on the king's part that

210

FLIGHT OF THE KING 211

might have mended Cromwell's situation. He could
have done no more effective mischief from France
than the queen had done ; on the other hand, his
flight would have been treated as an abdication,
with as convenient results as followed one-and-forty
years later from the flight of James II.

We now know that Charles fled from Hampton
Court because he had been told by the Scottish
envoys, with whom he was then secretly dealing,
as well as from other quarters, that his life was in
danger, but without any more fixed designs than
when he had fled from Oxford in April of the pre-
vious year. He seems to have arranged to take
ship from Southampton Water, but the vessel never
came, and he sought refuge in Carisbrooke Castle
in the Isle of Wight (November 14, 1647). Here he
was soon no less a prisoner than he had been at
Hampton. As strongly as ever he even now felt
that he held winning cards in his hands. " Sir,"
he had said to Fairfax, " I have as good an interest
in the army as you." Nothing had happened since
then to shake this conviction, and undoubtedly
there was in the army, as there was in parliament,
in the city, and all other considerable aggregates
of the population, a lively and definite hope that
royal authority would be restored. Beyond all this,
Charles confidently anticipated that he could rely
upon the military force of the counter-revolution
in Scotland.

Cromwell knew all these favouring chances as
vividly as the king himself, and he knew better
than Charles the terrible perils of jealousy and dis-
sension in the only force upon which the cause could
rely. " For many months," says Fairfax, " all
public councils were turned into private juntos,
which t^got greater emulations and jealousies
among them." Cromwell was the object of attack
from many sides. He was accused of boldly avow-
ing su,ch noxious principles as these : that every

212 OLIVER CROMWELL

single man is judge of what is just and right as
to the good and ill of a kingdom ; that the interest
of the kingdom is the interest of the honest men in
it, and those only are honest men who go with him ;
that it is lawful to pass through any forms of govern-
ment for the accomplishment of his ends ; that it
is lawful to play the knave with a knave. This
about the knave was only Cromwell's blunt way of
putting the scriptural admonition to be wise as
serpents, or Bacon's saying that the wise man must
use the good and guard himself against the wicked.
He was surrounded by danger. He knew that he
was himself in danger of impeachment, and he
had heard for the first time of one of those designs
for his own assassination, of which he was to know
so much more in days to come. He had been for
five years at too close quarters with death in many
dire shapes, to quail at the thought of it any more
than King Charles quailed.

Cromwell in later days described 1648 as the
most memorable year that the nation ever saw.
" So many insurrections, invasions, secret designs,
open and public attempts, all quashed, in so short
a time, and this by the very signal appearance of
God himself." The first effect, he says, was to
prepare for bringing offenders to punishment and
for a change of government ; but the great thing
was " the climax of the treaty with the king, whereby
they would have put into his hands all that we had
engaged for, and all our security should have been
a little piece of paper." Dangers both seen and
unseen rapidly thickened. The king, while refus-
ing his assent to a new set of propositions tendered
to him by the parliament, had secretly entered into
an engagement with commissioners from the Scots
(December 26, 1647). Here we have one of the
cardinal incidents of the struggle, like the case of
the Five Members, or the closing of the negotiations
with Cromwell. By this sinister instrument, the

CHAP, iv SECRET TREATY WITH SCOTS 213

Scots, declaring against the unjust proceedings of
the English Houses, were to send an army into
England for the preservation and establishment
of religion, and the restoration of all the rights and
revenues of the crown. In return the king was to
guarantee presbytery in England for three years,
with liberty to himself to use his own form of
divine service ; but the opinions and practices of
the independents were to be suppressed. That is,
presbyterian Scot and English royalist were to join
in arms against the parliament, on the basis of
the restoration of the king's claims, the suppression
of sectaries, and the establishment of presbytery
for three years and no longer, unless the king
should agree to an extension of the time. This
clandestine covenant for kindling afresh the flames
of civil war was wrapped up in lead, and buried in
the garden at Carisbrooke.

The secret must have been speedily guessed.
Little more than a week after the treaty had been
signed, a proposal was made in the Commons to
impeach the king, and Cromwell supported it (not
necessarily intending more than deposition) on the
ground that the king, " while he professed with all
solemnity that he referred himself wholly to the
parliament, had at the same time secret treaties
with the Scots commissioners how he might embroil
the nation in a new war and destroy the parlia-
ment." Impeachment was dropped, but a motion
was carried against holding further communications
with the king (January 1648), thus in substance and
for the time openly bringing monarchy to an end.
From the end of 1647, and all through 1648, designs
for bringing the king to justice which had long
existed among a few of the extreme agitators,
extended to the leading officers. The Committee
of Both Kingdoms, in which Scots and English
had united for executive purposes, was at once dis-
solved, and the new executive body, now exclusively

214 OLIVER CROMWELL

English, found itself confronted by Scotland, Ire-
land, and Wales, all in active hostility, and by an
England smouldering in various uncertain stages
of disaffection. A portion of the fleet was already
in revolt, and no one knew how far the mutiny
might go. All must depend upon the army, and
for the presbyterian party the success of the army
would be the victory of a master and an enemy.

At the moment of the flight to Carisbrooke,
Cromwell had sternly stamped out an incipient
revolt. At a rendezvous near Ware two regiments
appeared on the field without leave, and bearing
disorderly ensigns in their hats. Cromwell rode
among them, bade them remove the mutinous
symbol, arrested the ringleaders of those who
refused to obey, and after a drum-head court-
martial at which three of the offenders were con-
demned to death, ordered the three to throw dice
for their lives, and he who lost was instantly shot
(November 15, 1647). Though not more formid-
able than a breakdown of military discipline must
have proved, the political difficulties were much less
simple to deal with. Cromwell had definitely given
up all hope of coming to terms with the king. On
the other hand he was never a republican himself,
and his sagacity told him that the country would
never accept a government founded on what to
him were republican chimeras. Every moment
the tide of reaction was rising. From Christmas
(1647) and all through the spring there were un-
mistakable signs of popular discontent. Puritan
suppression of old merrymakings was growing too
hard to bear, for the old Adam was not yet driven
out of the free-born Englishman by either law or
gospel. None of the sections into which opinion
was divided had confidence in the parliament.
The rumours of bringing the king to trial and
founding a military republic perturbed many and
incensed most in every class. Violent riots broke

DIFFICULTIES OF CROMWELL 215

out in the city. In the home counties disorderly
crowds shouted for God and King Charles. Royal-
ist risings were planned in half the counties in
England, north, west, south, and even east. The
royalist press was active and audacious. In South
Wales the royal standard had been unfurled, the
population eagerly rallied to it, and the strong
places were in royalist hands. In Scotland Hamilton
had got the best of Argyle and the covenanting
ultras, in spite of the bitter and tenacious resist-
ance of the clergy to every design for supporting
a sovereign who was champion of episcopacy ;
and in April the parliament at Edinburgh had
ordered an army to be raised to defend the king
and] the covenant. In face of public difficulties so
overwhelming, Cromwell was personally weakened
by the deep discredit into which he had fallen
among the zealots in his own camp, as the result
of his barren attempt to bring the king to reason.
Of all the dark moments of his life this was perhaps
the darkest.

He tried a sociable conference between the
two ecclesiastical factions, including laymen and
ministers of each, but each went away as stiff and
as high as they had come. Then he tried a con-
ference between the leading men of the army and
the extreme men of the Commonwealth, and they
had a fruitless argument on the hoary theme,
dating almost from the birth of the Western world,
of the relative merits of monarchy, aristocracy,
and democracy. Cromwell wisely declined to
answer this threadbare riddle, only maintaining
that any form of government might be good in
itself or for us, " according as Providence should
direct us " — the formula of mystic days for modern
opportunism. The others replied by passages from
the first book of Samuel, from Kings, and Judges.
We cannot wonder that Cromwell, thinking of the
ruin he saw hanging imminent in thunder-clouds

216 OLIVER CROMWELL

over cause and kingdom, at last impatiently ended
the idle talk by flinging a cushion at Ludlow's head
and running off down the stairs.

What is called the second civil war was now
inevitable. The curtain was rising for the last,
most dubious, most exciting, and most memorable
act of the long drama in which Charles had played
his leading and ill-starred part. Even in the army
men were "in a low, weak, divided, perplexed
condition." Some were so depressed by the refusal
of the nation to follow their intentions for its good,
that they even thought of laying down their arms
and returning to private life. Thus distracted and
cast down, their deep mystic faith drew them to
the oracles of prayer, and at Windsor in April they
began their solemn office, searching out what
iniquities of theirs had provoked the Lord of Hosts
to bring down such grievous perplexities upon
them. Cromwell was among the most fervid, and
again and again they all melted in bitter tears.
Their sin was borne home to them. They had
turned aside from the path of simplicity, and
stepped, to their hurt, into the paths of policy.
The root of the evil was found out in those cursed
carnal conferences with the king and his party,
to which their own conceited wisdom and want of
faith had prompted them the year before. And
so, after the meeting had lasted for three whole
days, with prayer, exhortations, preaching, seeking,
groans, and weeping, they came without a dissent-
ing voice to an agreement that it was the duty of
the day to go out and fight against those potent
enemies rising on every hand against them, and
then it would be their further duty, if ever the
Lord should bring them back in peace, to call
Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account
for all the blood he had shed, and all the mischief
he had done against the Lord's cause and people in
these poor nations. When this vehement hour of

THE WINDSOR MEETINGS 217

exaltation had passed away, many of the warlike
saints, we may be sure, including Oliver himself,
admitted back into their minds some of those
politic misgivings for which they had just shown
such passionate contrition. But to the great
majority it was the inspiration of the Windsor
meetings, and the directness and simplicity of their
conclusion, that gave such fiery energy to the
approaching campaign, and kept alive the fierce
resolve to exact retribution to the uttermost when
the time appointed should bring the arch-delinquent
within their grasp.

CHAPTER V

SECOND CIVIL WAR — CROMWELL IN LANCASHIRE

EVEN as the hour of doom drew steadily nearer, the
prisoner at Carisbrooke might well believe that the
rebels and traitors were hastening to their ruin.
The political paradox grew more desperate as the
days went on, and 'to a paradox Charles looked for
his deliverance. It is worth examining. The par-
liamentary majority hoped for the establishment of
presbytery and the restoration of, the king, and
so did the Scottish invaders. Yet the English
presbyterians were forced into hostility to the
invaders, though both were declared covenanters,
because Scottish victory would mean the defeat of
the parliament. The Scottish presbyterians were
hostile or doubtful, because they found their army
in incongruous alliance with English cavaliers. The
Scots under Hamilton were to fight for the cove-
nant ; their English confederates, under Langdale,
were openly fighting for the antagonistic cause of
church and king, and refused point-blank to touch
the covenant. If the Scotch invaders should win,
they would win with the aid of purely royalist
support in the field, and purely royalist sympathy
in the nation. The day on which they should enter
London would be the day of unqualified triumph
for the king, of humiliation for the English parlia-
ment, and of final defeat both for the great cause
and the brave men who for nearly twenty years had
toiled and bled for it. For whose sake, then, was

218

. v THE CRISIS OF THE REBELLION 219

the presbyterian royalist at Westminster to fast and
pray ? It was the sorest dilemma of his life.

If this was the supreme crisis of the rebellion, it
was the supreme moment for Cromwell. On May 1,
1648, by order of Fairfax and the council of war,
he rode off to South Wales to take command of the
parliamentary forces there. He carried in his breast
the unquenched assurance that he went forth like
Moses or like Joshua, the instrument of the purposes
of the Most High ; but it was not in his tempera-
ment to forget that he might peradventure be mis-
reading the divine counsels, and well he knew that
if his confidence were not made good, he was leaving
relentless foes in the parliament behind him, and
that if he failed in the hazardous duty that had
been put upon him, destruction sure and unspar-
ing awaited both his person and his cause. While
Cromwell thus went west, Fairfax himself con-
ducted a vigorous and decisive campaign in Kent
and Essex, and then (June 13) sat down before
Colchester, into which a strong body of royalists
had thrown themselves, and where they made a
long and stubborn defence. Lambert, with a small
force, was despatched north to meet Langdale and
the northern cavaliers, and to check the advance
of the Scots. Here (July 8) Hamilton crossed the
border at the head of ten thousand men, ill equipped
and ill trained, but counting on others to follow,
and on the aid of three thousand more under Lang-
dale. Three days later, as it happened, Cromwell's
operations in Wales came to a successful end with
the capture of Pembroke Castle. He instantly set
his face northward, and by the end of the month
reached Leicester. The marches were long and
severe. Shoes and stockings were worn out, pay
was many months in arrear, plunder was sternly
forbidden, and not a few of the gallant warriors
tramped barefoot from Wales into Yorkshire. With
fire in their hearts, these tattered veterans carried

220 OLIVER CROMWELL

with them the issue of the whole long struggle and
the destinies of the three kingdoms. The fate of
the king, the power of parliament, the future of
constitutions, laws, and churches, were known to
hang upon the account which these few thousand
men should be able to give of the invaders from over
the northern border. If the parliament had lost
Naseby, the war might still have gone on, whereas
if Hamilton should now reach London, the king
would be master for good.

It was on August 12 that Cromwell joined Lam-
bert on the high fells between Leeds and York, the
united force amounting to some eight thousand men.
Still uncertain whether his enemy would strike
through Yorkshire or follow a western line through
Lancashire and Wales, he planted himself here so
as to command either course. Scouts brought the
intelligence that the Scots and Langdale's force,
afterwards estimated by Oliver at twenty - one
thousand men, were marching southward by way
of Lancashire and making for London. As Crom-
well knew, to hinder this was life and death, and to
engage the enemy to fight was his business at all
cost. Marching through the Craven country down
the valley of the Ribble, he groped his way until he
found himself in touch with the enemy's left flank
at Preston. Hamilton was no soldier : his counsels
were distracted by jealousy and division, national,
political, and religious ; his scouting was so ill done
that he did not know that any serious force was
in his neighbourhood ; and his line extended over
seven leagues from north to south, Preston about
the centre, and the van towards Wigan, with the
Ribble between van and rear. For three days
of hard fighting the battles, named from Preston,
lasted. That they were the result of a deliberately
preconceived flank attack, ingeniously planned from
the outset, is no longer believed. Things are hardly
ever so in war, the military critics say. As in

CHAP, v IN LANCASHIRE 221

politics, Oliver in the field watched the progress of
events, alert for any chance, and ever ready to strike
on the instant when he knew that the blow would
tell. The general idea in what was now done, was
that it would be better to cut off Hamilton from
Scotland, than directly to bar his advance to London.
The first encounter at Preston (August 17) was
the hardest, when English fell upon English. For
four fierce hours Langdale and his north-country
royalists offered " a very stiff resistance " to the
valour and resolution of Cromwell's best troops, and
at this point the Cromwellians were superior in
numbers. At last the royalists broke ; the survivors
scattered north and south, and were no more heard
of. Next day it was the turn of Hamilton and his
Scots. With difficulty they had got across the
Ribble overnight, wet, weary, and hungry, and
Oliver's troopers were too weary to follow them.
At daybreak the Scots pressed on, the Ironsides at
their heels in dogged pursuit, killing and taking
prisoners all the way, though they were only fifty-
five hundred foot and horse against twice as large
a force of Scots. By night, says Oliver, we were
" very dirty and weary, having marched twelve miles
of such ground as I never rode in my life, the day
being very wet." On the third day (August 19)
the contest went fiercely forward. At Win wick the
Scots made a resolute stand for many hours, and for
a time the English gave way. Then they recovered,
and chased the Scots three miles into Warrington.
Hamilton lost heart, and directed Baillie to surrender
his infantry to Cromwell, while he himself marched
on with some three thousand horse over the Cheshire
border into Delamere Forest. " If I had a thousand
horse," wrote Cromwell, " that could but trot thirty
miles, I should not doubt but to give a very good
account of them ; but, truly, we are so harassed and
haggled out in this business that we are not able to
do more than walk at an easy pace after them. . . .

222 OLIVER CROMWELL

They are the miserablest party that ever was ; I
durst engage myself with five hundred fresh horse
and five hundred nimble foot, to destroy them all.
My horse are miserably beaten out, and I have
ten thousand of them prisoners." Hamilton was
presently taken (August 25), and so the first cam-
paign in which Cromwell had held an independent
command-in- chief came to a glorious close. When
next year Hamilton was put upon the trial that
ended in the scaffold, he said of Cromwell that he
was so courteous and civil as to perform more than
he promised, and that acknowledgment was due for
his favour to the poor wounded gentlemen that
were left behind, and by him taken care of, and
" truly he performed more than he did capitulate
for."

The military student counts Preston the finest
exploit of the war, and even pronounces it the mark
of one of those who are born commanders by the
grace of God. At least we may say that in the
intrepid energy of the commander, the fortitude,
stoutness, and discipline of the men, and the
momentous political results that hung upon their
victory, the three days of Preston are among the
most famous achievements of the time. To com-
plete his task, — for he was always full of that instinct
of practical thoroughness which abhors the leaving
of a ragged edge, — Cromwell again turned northward
to clear the border of what had been the rear of
Hamilton's force, to recover the two great border
strongholds of Berwick and Carlisle, and so to
compose affairs in Scotland that the same perilous
work should not need to be done over again. He
bargained with Argyle, who desired nothing better,
for the exclusion from power of the rival faction of
Hamiltonians and Engagers, and left a government
of ultra-presbyterians installed, to the scandal of the
English independents, but in fact Cromwell never
showed himself more characteristically politic.

CONFLICTING INTERESTS 223

The local risings in England had been stamped
out either by the alertness of the parliamentary
authorities on the spot, or by the extraordinary
vigour of the Derby House Committee, which was
mainly independent. Fairfax never showed himself
a better soldier. The city, as important a factor as
the Houses themselves, and now leaning to the king
upon conditions, threatened trouble from time to
time ; but opinion wavered, and in the end the city
made no effective move. The absence of political
agreement among the various elements was reflected
in the absence of royalist concert. The insurrection
in England was too early, or else the advance from
Scotland was too late. By the time when Cromwell
was marching through the Midlands to join Lambert
in Yorkshire, the dead- weight of the majority of
the population, who cared more for quiet than for
either king or parliament, had for the time put out
the scattered fires. The old international antipathy
revived, and even royalists had seen with secret
satisfaction the repulse of the nation who in their
view had sold their king.

Meanwhile in parliament the presbyterians at first
had not known what to wish, but they were now at
no loss about what they had to fear. The paradox
had turned out ill. The invaders had been beaten,
but then the invaders were of their own persuasion,
and the victors were the hated sectaries with tolera-
tion inscribed upon their banners. The soldier's
yoke would be more galling than ever, and the
authority of Cromwell, which had been at its lowest
when he set out for Wales, would be higher than it
had ever been when he should come back from
Scotland.

The Lords had become zealous royalists. They
would not even join the Commons in describing the
invading Scots as enemies. In both Houses the
presbyterians had speedily taken advantage of the
absence of some of the chief independents in the field,

224 OLIVER CROMWELL

and were defiantly flying the old colours. In the
days when Oliver was marching with his Ironsides to
drive back the invasion that would have destroyed
them all, the Lords regaled themselves by a fierce
attack made upon the absent Cromwell by one who
had been a major of his and enjoyed his confidence.
The major's version of the things that Oliver had
said would have made a plausible foundation for an
impeachment, and at the same moment Holies, his
bitterest enemy, came back to Westminster and took
the presbyterian lead. So in the reckless intensity
of party hatred the parliament were preparing for the
destruction of the only man who could save them
from the uncovenanted king. They were as heated
as ever against the odious idea of toleration. On
the day after the departure of Oliver they passed
an ordinance actually punishing with death any one
who should hold or publish not only atheism, but
Arianism or Socinianism, and even the leading
doctrines of Arminians, Baptists, and harmless
Quakers were made penal. Death was the punish-
ment for denying any of the mysteries of the Trinity,
or that any of the canonical books of Old Testament
or New is the word of God ; and a dungeon was the
punishment for holding that the baptism of infants
is unlawful and void, or that man is bound to believe
no more than his reason can comprehend. Our
heroic puritan age is not without atrocious blots.

Nevertheless the parliamentary persecutors were
well aware that no ordinance of theirs, however
savoury or drastic, would be of any avail unless
new power were added to their right arm, and this
power, as things then stood, they could only draw
from alliance with the king. If they could bring
him off from the Isle of Wight to London before
Oliver and his men could return from the north,
they might still have a chance. They assumed that
Charles would see that here too was a chance for
him. They failed to discern that they had no alter-

CHAP, v NEGOTIATIONS AT NEWPORT 225

native between surrendering on any terms to the
king, whose moral authority they could not do
without, and yielding to the army, whose military
authority was ready to break them. So little insight
had they into the heart of the situation, that they
took a course that exasperated the army, while they
persisted in trying to impose such terms upon the
king as nobody who knew him could possibly expect
him to keep. Political incompetency could go no
further, and the same failure inevitably awaited
their designs as had befallen Cromwell when, a year
before, he had made a similar attempt.

On the day after the news of Oliver's success at
Warrington the parliamentary majority repealed the
vote against further addresses to the king, and then
hurried on their proposals for a treaty. The negotia-
tions opened at Newport in the Isle of Wight on
September the 18th, and were spun out until near the
end of November. " They who had not seen the
king," says Clarendon, " for near two years found
his countenance extremely altered. From the time
that his own servants had been taken from him he
would never suffer his hair to be cut, nor cared to
have any new clothes, so that his aspect and appear-
ance was very different from what it had used to be ;
otherwise his health was good, and he was much
more cheerful in his discourses toward all men, than
could have been imagined after such mortification
of all kinds. He was not at all dejected in his spirits,
but carried himself with the same majesty he had
used to do. His hair was all grey, which, making
all others very sad, made it thought that he had
sorrow in his countenance, which appeared only by
that shadow." There he sat at the head of the
council - table, the fifteen commissioners of the
parliament, including Vane and Fiennes, the only
two men of the independent wing, seated at a little
distance below him. Charles showed his usual
power of acute dialectic, and he conducted the

Q

226 OLIVER CROMWELL

proceedings with all the cheerfulness, ease, and
courtly gravity of a fine actor in an ironic play.
The old ground of the propositions at Uxbridge, at
Newcastle, at Oxford, at Hampton Court, was once
more trodden, with one or two new interludes.
Charles, even when retreating, fought every inch
with a tenacity that was the despair of men who
each hour seemed to hear approaching nearer and
nearer the clatter of the Cromwellian troopers.

Church government was now as ever the rock on
which Charles chose that the thing should break
off. Day after day he insisted on the partition of
the apostolic office between bishops and presbyters,
cited the array of texts from the Epistles, and
demonstrated that Timothy and Titus were episcopi
pastorum, bishops over presbyters, and not episcopi
gregis, shepherds over sheep. In all this Charles
was in his element, for he defended tenets that he
sincerely counted sacred. At length after the dis-
tracted parliament had more than once extended
the allotted time, the end came (November 27).
Charles would agree that episcopacy should be
suspended for three years, and that it might be
limited, but he would not assent to its abolition,
and he would not assent to an alienation of the fee
of the church lands.

A modern student, if he reads the Newport
treaty as a settlement upon paper, may think that
it falls little short of the justice of the case. Cer-
tainly if the parties to it had been acting in good
faith, this or almost any of the proposed agreements
might have been workable. As it was, any treaty
now made at Newport must be the symbol of a
new working coalition between royalist and presby-
terian, and any such coalition was a declaration of
war against independents and army. It was to
undo the work of Preston and Colchester, to prepare
a third sinister outbreak of violence and confusion,
and to put Cromwell and his allies back again upon

CHAP, v NEGOTIATIONS AT NEWPORT 227

that sharp and perilous razor-edge of fortune from
which they had just saved themselves.

It was their own fault again if the parliament
did not know that Charles, from the first day of the
negotiations to the last, was busily contriving plans
for his escape from the island. He seems to have
nursed a wild idea that if he could only find his way
to Ireland he might, in conjunction with the ships
from Holland under the command of Rupert, place
himself at the head of an Irish invasion, with better
fortune than had attended the recent invasion of
the Scots. " The great concession I have made
to-day," he wrote to a secret correspondent, " was
merely in order to my escape." While publicly
forbidding Ormonde to go on in Ireland, privately
he writes to him not to heed any open commands
until he has word that the king is free from re-
straint ; Ormonde should pursue the way he is
in with all possible vigour, and must not be aston-
ished at any published concessions, for " they would
come to nothing."

Watching the proceedings with fierce impatience,
at last the army with startling rapidity brought
the elusive conflict to a crisis. A week before the
close of negotiations at Newport, a deputation
from Fairfax and his general council of officers
came up to the House as bearers of a great remon-
strance. Like all that came from the pen of Ireton,
it is powerfully argued, and it is also marked by
his gift of inordinate length. It fills nearly fifty
pages of the parliamentary history, and could not
have been read by a clerk at the table in much less
than three hours. The points are simple enough.
First, it would be stupidity rather than charity to
suppose that the king's concessions arose from inward
remorse or conviction, and therefore to continue to
treat with him was both danger and folly. Second,
he had been guilty of moral and civil acts judged
capital in his predecessors, and therefore he ought

228 OLIVER CROMWELL

to be brought to trial. Other delinquents besides
the king in both wars ought to be executed, and
the soldiers ought to have their arrears paid. This
was the upshot of the document that the body of
officers, some of whom had capital sentence executed
upon themselves in days to come, now in respectful
form presented to the House of Commons.

The majority in the Commons, with a high spirit
that was out of all proportion to their power, insisted
on postponing the consideration of the demands
of " a council of sectaries in arms." In fact they
never would or did consider them, and the giant
remonstrance of the army went into the limbo of
all the other documents in which those times were
so marvellously fertile. As a presentation of the
difficulties of the hour, it is both just and penetrat-
ing ; but these after all were quite as easy to see
as they were hard to overcome. We usually find
a certain amount of practical reason even at the
bottom of what passes for political fanaticism.
What Harrison and his allies saw was, that if king
and parliament agreed, the army would be dis-
banded. If that happened, its leaders would be
destroyed for what they had done already. If not,
they would be proclaimed traitors and hinderers
of the public peace, and destroyed for what they
might be expected to do.

CHAPTER VI

FINAL CRISIS — CROMWELL'S SHARE IN IT

IT is one of the mortifications of Cromwell's history,
that we are unable accurately to trace his share in
the events that immediately preceded the trial of
the king. It was the most critical act of his history.
Yet at nearly every turn in the incidents that pre-
pared it, the diligent inquirer is forced to confess
that there is little evidence to settle what was the
precise part Cromwell played. This deep reserve
and impenetrable obscurity was undoubtedly one
of the elements of his reputation for craft and dis-
simulation. If they do not read a public man in
an open page, men are easily tempted to suspect
the worst.

When the negotiations were opened at Newport
Cromwell was on his march into Scotland. He did
not return until the later days of October, when
the army and its leaders had grown uncontroll-
ably restive at the slow and tortuous course of the
dealings between the king and the commissioners
of the parliament. Cromwell had thus been absent
from Westminster for six months, since the time of
his first despatch to put down the royalist rising in
Wales. The stress of actual war had only deepened
the exasperation with which he had watched the
gathering clouds, and which had found expression
in the fierce language at the memorable prayer-
meeting at Windsor. All this, however, is a long
way from the decision that events were hurrying

229

230 OLIVER CROMWELL

on, and from which more rapid and less appre-
hensive minds than his had long ceased to shrink.
With what eyes he watched the new approaches to
the king, he showed in a letter to the Speaker.
After giving his report as a soldier, and showing
that affairs in Scotland were in a thriving posture,
he advances (October 9) on to other ground, and
uses ominous language about " the treachery of
some in England, who had endangered the whole
state and kingdom of England, and who now had
cause to blush," in spite of all the religious pre-
tences by which they had masked their proceedings.
This could only mean his presbyterian opponents.
" But God, who is not to be mocked or deceived,
and is very jealous when his name and religion are
made use of to carry on impious designs, has taken
vengeance on such profanity, even to astonishment
and admiration. And I wish, from the bottom of
my heart, it may cause all to tremble and repent
who have practised the like, to the blasphemy of
his name and the destruction of his people, so as
they may never presume to do the like again,
and I think it is not unseasonable for me to
take the humble boldness to say thus much at this
time."

Writing to Colonel Hammond (November 6), the
custodian of the king, a month later from before
the frowning walls of Pontefract Castle, Cromwell
smiles in good-humoured ridicule at the notion that
it would be as safe to expect a good peace from a
settlement on the base of moderate episcopacy as
of presbytery. At the same time he vindicates his
own presbyterian settlement in Scotland, throwing
out his guiding principle in a parenthesis of charac-
teristic fervour and sincerity. " I profess to thee
I desire from my heart, I have prayed for it, I have
waited for the day to see union and right under-
standing between the godly people — Scots, English,
Jews, Gentiles, presbyterians, independents, ana-

CHAP, vi CROMWELL AS AN ONLOOKER 231

baptists, and all." Still if the king could have
looked over Hammond's shoulder as he read Crom-
well's letter, he would not have seen a single word
pointing to the terrible fate that was now so swiftly
closing upon him. He would have seen nothing
more formidable than a suggestion that the best
course might be to break the sitting parliament
and call a new one. To Charles this would have
little terror, for he might well believe that no
parliament could possibly be called under which
his life would be put in peril.

A few days later Cromwell gave signs of rising
anger in a letter to two members of Parliament,
who inclined to lenient courses toward delinquents.
" Did not the House," he asks, " vote every man a
traitor who sided with the Scots in their late inva-
sion ? And not without very clear justice, this
being a more prodigious treason than any that
hath been perfected in England before, because
the former quarrel was that Englishmen might rule
over one another, this to vassalise us to a foreign
nation." Here was the sting, for we have never
to forget that Oliver, like Milton, was ever English
of the English. Then follow some ominous hints,
though he still rather reports the mind of others
than makes plain his own. " Give me leave to
tell you, I find a sense among the officers concern-
ing such things as the treatment of these men to
amazement, which truly is not so much to see
their blood made so cheap as to see such manifest
witnessings of God, so terrible and so just, no more
reverenced."

To Fairfax on the same day he writes in the
same tone that he finds in the officers a very great
sense of the sufferings of the kingdom, and a very
great zeal to have impartial justice done upon
offenders. " And I must confess," he adds, striking
for the first time a new and dangerous note of his
own, " I do in all from my heart concur with them,

232 OLIVER CROMWELL

and I verily think, and am persuaded, they are
things which God puts into our hearts." But he
still moves very slowly, and follows rather than
leads.

Finally he writes once more to Hammond on
November 25, one of the most remarkable of all the
letters he ever wrote. That worthy soldier had
groaned under the burdens and misgivings of his
position. " Such talk as this," says Cromwell,
" such words as heavy, sad, pleasant, easy, are
but the snares of fleshly reasonings. Call not your
burden sad or heavy ; it is laid on you by One from
whom comes every good and perfect gift, being for
the exercise of faith and patience, whereby in the
end we shall be made perfect. Seek rather whether
there be not some high and glorious meaning in
all that chain of Providence which brought that
Person [the king] to thee, and be sure that this
purpose can never be the exaltation of the wicked."
From this strain of devout stoicism he turns to the
policy of the hour.

Hammond was doubtful about the acts and aims
of the extreme men as respects both king and
parliament. "It is true, as you say," Cromwell
replies, " that authorities and powers are the
ordinance of God, and that in England authority
and power reside in the parliament. But these
authorities may not do what they like, and still
demand our obedience. All agree that there are
cases in which it is lawful to resist. Is ours such a
case ? This, frankly, is the true question." Then
he produces three considerations, as if he were
revolving over again the arguments that were turn-
ing his own mind. First, is it sound to stand on
safety of the people as the supreme law ? Second,
will the treaty between king and parliament secure
the safety of the people, or will it not frustrate the
whole fruit of the war and bring back all to what
it was, and worse ? Third, is it not possible that the

CHAP, vi LETTER TO HAMMOND 233

army, too, may be a lawful power, ordained by God
to fight the king on stated grounds, and that the
army may resist on the same grounds one name
of authority, the parliament, as well as the other
authority, the king ?

Then he suddenly is dissatisfied with his three
arguments. "Truly," he cries, "this kind of reason-
ing may be but fleshly, either with or against, only
it is good to try what truth may be in them."
Cromwell's understanding was far too powerful not
to perceive that solus populi and the rest of it would
serve just as well for Straff ord or for Charles as it
served for Ireton and the army, and that usurpa-
tion by troopers must be neither more nor less hard
to justify in principle than usurpation by a king.
So he falls back on the simpler ground of " provi-
dences," always his favourite stronghold. " They
hang so together, have been so constant, clear,
unclouded." Was it possible that the same Lord
who had been with his people in all their victorious
actings was not with them in that steady and un-
mistakable growth of opinion about the present
crisis, of which Hammond is so much afraid ?
" You speak of tempting God. There are two
ways of this. Action in presumptuous and carnal
confidence is one ; action in unbelief through
diffidence is the other." Though difficulties con-
fronted them, the more the difficulties the more
the faith.

From the point of a modern's carnal reasoning
all this has a thoroughly sophistic flavour, and it
leaves a doubt of its actual weight in Oliver's own
mind at the moment. Nor was his mind really
made up on independent grounds, for he goes on
to say plainly that they in the northern army were
in a waiting posture. It was not until the southern
army put out its remonstrance that they changed.
After that many were shaken. " We could., perhaps,
have wished the stay of it till after the treaty, yet,

234 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOKIH

seeing it is come out, we trust to rejoice in the will
of the Lord, waiting his further pleasure." This
can only mean that Ireton and his party were press-
ing forward of their own will, and without impulse
from Cromwell at Pontefract. Yet it is equally
evident that he did not disapprove. In concluding
the letter he denounces the treaty of Newport as
a " ruining, hypocritical agreement," and remon-
strates with those of their friends who expect good
from Charles — " good by this Man, against whom
the Lord hath witnessed, and whom thou knowest ! "

A writer of a hostile school has remarked in this
memorable letter " its cautious obscurity, shadowy
significance ; its suavity, tenderness, subtlety ;
the way in which he alludes to more than he
mentions, suggests more than pronounces his own
argumentative intention, and opens an indefinite
view, all the hard features of which he softly puts
aside " (J. B. Mozley). Quite true ; but what if
this be the real Cromwell, and represent the literal
working of his own habit and temper ?

When the letter reached the Isle of Wight
Hammond was no longer there. The army had
made up their minds to act, and the blow had
fallen. The fate of the king was sealed. In this
decision there is no evidence that Cromwell had any
share. His letter to Hammond is our last glimpse
of him, and from that and the rest the sounder
conclusion seems to be that even yet he would fain
have gone slow, but was forced to go fast. Charles
might possibly even at the eleventh hour have made
his escape, but he still nursed the illusion that the
army could not crush the parliament without him.
He had, moreover, given his parole. When re-
minded that he had given it not to the army but to
the parliament, his sombre pride for once withstood
a sophism. At break of the winter day (December 1)
a body of officers broke into his chamber, put him
into a coach, conducted him to the coast, and then

OHAP.VI PRIDE'S PURGE 235

transported him across the Solent to Hurst Castle,
a desolate and narrow blockhouse standing at the
edge of a shingly spit on the Hampshire shore.
In these dreary quarters he remained a fortnight.
The last scene was now rapidly approaching of that
desperate drama in which every one of the actors
—king, parliament, army, Cromwell — seemed as if
engaged in a death struggle with some implacable
necessity.

At Westminster, meanwhile, futile proceedings
in the House of Commons had been brought to a
rude close. The House resolved by a large majority
once more (November 30) not to consider the army
remonstrance, and the army promptly replied by
marching into London two days later (December 2).
Two days after that, the House with a long and very
sharp discussion put upon record a protest against
the forcible removal of the king without their know-
ledge or consent. They then proceeded to debate
the king's answers to their commissioners at the Isle
of Wight. A motion was made that the answers
should be accepted, but the motion finally carried
was in the weakened and dilatory form that the
answers " were a ground for the House to proceed
upon for the settlement of the peace of the kingdom "
(December 5). This was the final provocation to
the soldiers. The same afternoon a full consulta-
tion took place between some of the principal officers
of the army and a number of members of parliament.
One side were for forcible dissolution, as Cromwell
had at one time been for it ; the other were for the
less sweeping measure of a partial purge. A com-
mittee of three members of the House and three
officers of the army was ordered to settle the means
for putting a stop to proceedings in parliament, that
were nothing less than a forfeiture of its trust.
These six agreed that the army should be drawn
out next morning, and guards placed in West-
minster Hall and the lobby, that " none might be

236 OLIVER CROMWELL

permitted to pass into the House, but such as had
continued faithful to the public interest." At seven
o'clock next morning (December 6) Colonel Pride
was at his post in the lobby, and before night one
hundred and forty-three members had either been
locked up or forcibly turned back from the doors
of the House of Commons. The same night Crom-
well returned from Yorkshire and lay at Whitehall
where Fairfax already was, — I suppose for the
first time. "There," says Ludlow, "and at other
places, Cromwell declared that he had not been
acquainted with this design, yet, since it was done,
he was glad of it and would endeavour to maintain
it."

The process was completed next day. A week
later (December 15) the council of officers deter-
mined that Charles should be brought to Windsor,
and Fairfax sent orders accordingly. In the depth
of the winter night, the king in the desolate keep on
the sea -shingle heard the clanking of the draw-
bridge, and at daybreak he learned that the re-
doubtable Major Harrison had arrived. Charles
well knew how short a space divides a prince's
prison from his grave. He had often revolved
in his mind " sad stories of the death of kings " —
of Henry VI., of Edward II. murdered at Berkeley,
of Richard II. at Pontefract, of his grandmother at
Fotheringay, — and he thought that the presence of
Harrison must mean that his own hour had now
come for a like mysterious doom. Harrison was no
man for these midnight deeds, though he was fervid
in his belief, and so he told the king, that justice
was no respecter of persons, and great and small
alike must be submitted to the law. Charles was
relieved to find that he was only going " to exchange
the worst of his castles for the best," and after a ride
of four days (December 19-23) through the New
Forest, Winchester, Farnham, Bagshot, he found
himself once more at the noblest of the palaces of

CHAP, vi CHARLES AT WINDSOR 237

the English sovereigns. Here for some three weeks
he passed infatuated hours in the cheerful confidence
that the deadlock was as immovable as ever, that
his enemies would find the knot inextricable, that
he was still their master, and that the blessed day
would soon arrive when he should fit round their
necks the avenging halter.

CHAPTER VII

THE DEATH OF THE KING

THE Commons meanwhile, duly purged or packed,
had named a committee to consider the means of
bringing the king to justice, and they passed an
ordinance (January 1, 1649) for setting up to try him
a High Court of Justice, composed of one hundred
and fifty commissioners and three judges. After
going through its three readings, and backed by a
resolution that by the fundamental laws of the
kingdom it is treason in the king to levy war against
the parliament and kingdom of England, the
ordinance was sent up to the Lords. The Lords
only numbering twelve on this strange occasion,
promptly, passionately, and unanimously rejected it.
The fifty or sixty members who were now the acting
House of Commons, retorted with revolutionary
energy. They instantly passed a resolution (Jan. 4)
affirming three momentous propositions : that the
people are the original of power ; that the Commons
in parliament assembled have the supreme power ;
and that what they enact has the force of law, even
without the consent of either king or lords. Then
they passed their ordinance over again, omitting the
three judges, and reducing the commissioners to one
hundred and thirty-five (January 6). Two days
later the famous High Court of Justice met for the
first time in the Painted Chamber, but out of one
hundred and thirty-five persons named in the act,

238

CHAP, vn CROMWELL'S PART 239

no more than fifty-two appeared, Fairfax, Cromwell,
and Ireton being among them.

We must pause to consider what was the part
that Cromwell played in this tragical unravelling
of the plot. For long it can hardly have been the
guiding part. He was not present when the officers
decided to order the king to be brought from Hurst
Castle to Windsor (December 15). He is known,
during the week following that event, to have been
engaged in grave counsel with Speaker Lenthall and
two other eminent men of the same legal and cautious
temper, as though he were still painfully looking for
some lawful door of escape from an impassable
dilemma. Then he made a strong attempt to defer
the king's trial, until after they had tried other
important delinquents in the second war. Finally
there is a shadowy story of new overtures to the
king made with Cromwell's connivance on the very
eve of the day of fate. On close handling the tale
crumbles into guesswork, for the difference between
a safe and an unsafe guess is not enough to transform
a possible into an actual event ; and a hunt after
conjectural motives for conjectural occurrences is
waste of time. The curious delay in Cromwell's
return to London and the centre of action is not
without significance. He reaches Carlisle on October
14, he does not summon Pontefract until November
9, and he remains before it until the opening of
December. It is hard to understand why he should
not have left Lambert, a most excellent soldier, in
charge of operations at an earlier date, unless he had
been wishful to let the manoeuvres in parliament
and camp take what course they might. He had no
stronger feeling in emergency than a dread of fore-
stalling the Lord's leadings. The cloud that wraps
Cromwell about during the terrible month between
his return from Yorkshire and the erection of the
High Court, is impenetrable ; and we have no better
guide than our general knowledge of his politic

240 OLIVER CROMWELL

understanding, his caution, his persistence, his free-
dom from revengeful temper, his habitual slowness
in making decisive moves.

We may be sure that all through the month, as
" he lay in one of the King's rich beds at Whitehall,"
where Fairfax and he had taken up their quarters,
Cromwell revolved all the perils and sounded all the
depths of the abyss to which necessity was hurrying
the cause and him. What courses were open ? They
might by ordinance depose the king, and then either
banish him from the realm, or hold him for the rest
of his days in the Tower. Or could they try and
condemn him, and then trust to the dark shadow of
the axe upon his prison wall to frighten him at last
into full surrender ? Even if this design prevailed,
what sanctity could the king or his successors be
expected to attach to constitutional concessions
granted under duress so dire ? Again, was monarchy
the indispensable keystone, to lock all the parts of
national government into their places ? If so, then
—the king removed by deposition or by abdication,
— perhaps one of his younger sons might be set up
in his stead with the army behind him. Was any
course of this temporising kind practicable, even
in the very first step of it, apart from later conse-
quences ? Or was the temper of the army too fierce,
the dream of the republican too vivid, the furnace
of faction too hot ? For we have to recollect that
nothing in all the known world of politics is so
intractable as a band of zealots conscious that they
are a minority, yet armed by accident with the
powers of a majority. Party considerations were
not likely to be omitted, and to destroy the king was
undoubtedly to strike a potent instrument out of
the hands of the presbyterians. Whatever reaction
might follow in the public mind would be to the
advantage of royalism, not of presbyterianism, and
so indeed it ultimately proved. Yet to bring the
king to trial and to cut off his head — is it possible to

CHAP, vii CROMWELL'S DELIBERATIONS 241

suppose that Cromwell was blind to the endless
array of new difficulties that would instantly spring
up from that inexpiable act ? Here was the fatal
mischief. No other way may have been conceivable
out of the black flood of difficulties in which the ship
and its fiery crew were tossing, and Cromwell with
his firm gaze had at last persuaded himself that this
way must be tried. What is certain is, that he
cannot have forgotten to count the cost, and he
must have known what a wall he was raising against
that settlement of the peace of the nation for which
he so devoutly hoped.

After all, violence, though in itself always an evil
and always the root of evil, is not the worst of evils,
so long as it does not mean the obliteration of the
sense of righteousness and of duty. And, however
we may judge the balance of policy to have inclined,
men like Cromwell felt to the depth of their hearts
that in putting to death the man whose shifty and
senseless counsels had plunged the land in bloodshed
and confusion, they were performing an awful act
of sovereign justice and executing the decree of the
Supreme. Men like Ludlow might feed and fortify
themselves on misinterpretations of sanguinary texts
from the Old Testament. " I was convinced," says
that hard-tempered man, "that an accommoda-
tion with the king was unjust and wicked in the
nature of it by the express words of God's law ;
that blood defileth the land, and the land cannot be
cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by
the blood of him that shed it." Cromwell was as
much addicted to an apt text as anybody, but the
stern crisis of his life was not to be settled by a single
verse of the Bible. Only one utterance of his at
this grave moment survives, and though in the
highest degree remarkable, it is opaque rather than
transparent. When the ordinance creating the High
Court was before the House of Commons, he said
this : — " If any man whatsoever hath carried on the

R

242 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOK™

design of deposing the king, and disinheriting his
posterity ; or, if any man had yet such a design, he
should be the greatest rebel and traitor in the world ;
but since the providence of God and Necessity hath
cast this upon us, I shall pray God to bless our
counsels, though I be not provided on the sudden
to give you counsel." Providence and Necessity —
that is to say, the purpose of heaven disclosed in the
shape of an invincible problem, to which there was
only one solution, and that a solution imposed by
force of circumstance and not to be defended by mere
secular reasoning.

However slow and painful the steps, a decision
once taken was to Cromwell irrevocable. No man
was ever more free from the vice of looking back,
and he now threw himself into the king's trial at
its final stages with the same ruthless energy with
which he had ridden down the king's men at Marston
or Naseby. Men of virtue, courage, and public
spirit as eminent as his own, stood resolutely aside,
and would not join him. Algernon Sidney, whose
name had been put in among the judges, went into
the Painted Chamber with the others, and after
listening to the debate, withstood Cromwell, Brad-
shaw, and the others to the face, on the double
ground that the king could be tried by no court,
and that by such a court as that was, no man at all
could be tried. Cromwell broke in upon him in
hoarse anger, " I tell you, we will cut off his head
with the crown upon it." "I cannot stop you,"
Sidney replied, " but I will keep myself clean from
having any hand in this business." Vane had been
startled even by Pride's Purge, and though he and
Oliver were as brothers to one another, he refused
either now to take any part in the trial, or ever to
approve the execution afterwards. Stories are told
indicative of Cromwell's rough excitement and mis-
placed buffooneries, but they are probably mythic.
It is perhaps true that on the first day of the trial,

CHAP, vn THE HIGH COURT'S AUTHORITY 243

looking forth from the Painted Chamber, he saw
the king step from his barge on his way to West-
minster Hall, and " with a face as white as the wall,"
called out to the others that the king was coming,
and that they must be ready to answer what was
sure to be the king's first question, namely, by what
authority they called him before them.

This was indeed the question that the king put,
and would never let drop. It had been Sidney's
question, and so far as law and constitution went,
there was no good answer to it. The authority of
the tribunal was founded upon nothing more valid
than a mere resolution, called an ordinance, of some
fifty members — what was in truth little more than
a bare quorum — of a single branch of parliament,
originally composed of nearly ten times as many,
and deliberately reduced for the express purpose of
such a resolution by the violent exclusion a month
before of one hundred and forty-three of its members.
If the legal authority was null, the moral authority
for the act creating the High Court was no stronger.
It might be well enough to say that the people
are the origin of power, but as a matter of fact the
handful who erected the High Court of justice notori-
ously did not represent the people in any sense of
that conjuror's word. They were never chosen by
the people to make laws apart from king and lords ;
and they were now picked out by the soldiers to do
the behest of soldiers.

In short, the High Court of Justice was hardly
better or worse than a drum-head court-martial,
and had just as much or just as little legal authority
to try King Charles, as a board of officers would have
had to try him under the orders of Fairfax or Oliver
if they had taken him prisoner on the field of Naseby .
Bishop Butler in his famous sermon in 1741 on the
anniversary of the martyrdom of King Charles,
takes hypocrisy for his subject, and declares that
no age can show an example of hypocrisy parallel

244 OLIVER CROMWELL

to such a profaning of the forms of justice as the
arraignment of the king. And it is here that Butler
lets fall the sombre reflection, so poignant to all
who vainly expect too much from the hearts and
understandings of mankind, that " the history of
all ages and all countries will show what has been
really going forward over the face of the earth,
to be very different from what has been always
pretended ; and that virtue has been everywhere
professed much more than it has been anywhere
practised." We may, if we be so minded, accept
Butler's general reflection, and assuredly it can-
not lightly be dismissed ; but it is hardly the best
explanation of this particular instance. Self-decep-
tion is a truer as well as a kinder word than hypocrisy,
and here in one sense the institution of something
with the aspect of a court was an act of homage to
conscience and to habit of law. Many must have
remembered the clause in the Petition of Right, not
yet twenty years old, forbidding martial law. Yet
martial law this was and nothing else, if that be the
name for the uncontrolled arbitrament of the man
with the sword.

In outer form as in interior fact, the trial of the
king had much of the rudeness of the camp, little of
the solemnity of a judicial tribunal. That pathetic
element so strong in human nature, save when
rough action summons ; that imaginative sensi-
bility, which is the fountain of pity when there is
time for tears, and leisure to listen to the heart :
these counted for nothing in that fierce and per-
emptory hour. Such moods are for history or for
onlookers in stern scenes, not for the actors.
Charles and Cromwell had both of them long stood
too close to death in many grisly shapes, had seen
too many slaughtered men, to shrink from an
encounter without quarter. Westminster Hall was
full of soldiery, and resounded with their hoarse
shouts for justice and execution. The king with

CHAP, vn THE KING CONDEMNED 245

his hat upon his head eyed the judges with un-
affected scorn, and with unmeaning iteration urged
his point, that they were no court and that he was
there by no law. Bradshaw, the president, retorted
with high-handed warnings to his captive that
contumacy would be of no avail. Cromwell was
present at every sitting with one doubtful excep-
tion. For three days (Jan. 20, 22, 23) the alterca-
tion went on, as fruitless as it was painful, for the
Court intended that the king should die. He was
incredulous to the last. On the fourth and fifth
days (Jan. 24-25) the Court sat in private in the
Painted Chamber, and listened to depositions that
could prove nothing not already fully known.
The object was less to satisfy the conscience of the
court, than to make time for pressure on its more
backward members. There is some evidence that
Cromwell was among the most fervid in enforcing
the point that they could not come to a settle-
ment of the true religion, until the king, the arch
obstructor, was put out of the way. On the next
day (Jan. 26) the Court numbering sixty -two
members adopted the verdict and sentence, that
Charles was a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public
enemy to the good people of this nation, and that
he should be put to death by the severing of his
head from his body. On the 27th an end came to
the proceedings. Charles was for the fourth time
brought into the hall, and amid much noise and
disorder he attempted to speak. He sought an
interview with the Lords and Commons in the
Painted Chamber, but this after deliberation was
refused. The altercations between the king and
Bradshaw were renewed, and after a long harangue
from Bradshaw sentence was pronounced. The
king, still endeavouring in broken sentences to make
himself heard, was hustled away from the hall by
his guards. The composure, piety, seclusion, and
silence in which he passed the three days of life that

246 OLIVER CROMWELL

were left, made a deep impression on the time, and
have moved men's common human-heartedness
ever since. In Charles himself, whether for foe or
friend, an Eliot or a Strafford, pity was a grace
unknown.

On the fatal day (Jan. 30), he was taken to
Whitehall, then more like a barrack than a palace.
Fairfax, Cromwell, Ireton, and Harrison were prob-
ably all in the building when he arrived, though
the first of them had held stiffly aloof from all the
proceedings of the previous ten days. A story was
told afterwards that just before the execution,
Cromwell, seated in Ireton's room, when asked for
a warrant addressed to the executioner (who seems
to have been Brandon, the common hangman),
wrote out the order with his own hand, for signa-
ture by one of the three officers to whom the High
Court had addressed the actual death-warrant.
Charles bore himself with unshaken dignity and
fortitude to the end. At a single stroke the masked
headsman did his work. Ten days later the corpse
was conveyed by a little band of devoted friends
to Windsor, where amid falling flakes of snow they
took it into Saint George's Chapel. Clarendon
stamps upon our memories the mournful coldness,
the squalor, and the desolation like a scene from
some grey underworld : — " Then they went into
the church to make choice of a place for burial.
But when they entered into it, which they had
been so well acquainted with, they found it so altered
and transformed, all tombs, inscriptions, and those
landmarks pulled down, by which all men knew
every particular place in that church, and such a
dismal mutation over the whole, that they knew
not where they were ; nor was there one old officer
that had belonged to it, or knew where our princes
had used to be interred. At last there was a fellow
of the town who undertook to tell them the place,
where, he said, ' there was a vault in which King

CHAP, vn CROMWELL'S OWN VIEW 247

Harry the Eighth and Queen Jane Seymour were
interred.' As near that place as could conveniently
be, they caused the grave to be made. There the
king's body was laid without any words, or other
ceremonies than the tears and sighs of the few
beholders. Upon the coffin was a plate of silver
fixed with these words only — King Charles, 1648.
When the coffin was put in, the black velvet pall
that had covered it was thrown over it, and
then the earth thrown in, which the governor
stayed to see perfectly done, and then took the
keys of the church, which was seldom put to
any use."

Cromwell's own view of this momentous trans-
action was constant. A year later he speaks to
the officers of " the great fruit of the war, to wit,
the execution of exemplary justice upon the prime
leader of all this quarrel." Many months after
this, he talks of the turning-out of the tyrant in
a way which the Christians in after times will
mention with honour, and all tyrants in the world
look at with fear ; many thousands of saints in
England rejoice to think of it ; they that have
acted in this great business have given a reason of
their faith in the action, and are ready further to
do it against all gainsayers ; the execution was an
eminent witness of the Lord for bloodguiltiness.
In a conversation again, one evening, at Edinburgh,
he is said to have succeeded in converting some
hostile presbyterians to the view that the taking
away of the king's life was inevitable. There is a
story that while the corpse of the king still lay in
the gallery at Whitehall, Cromwell was observed
by unseen watchers to come muffled in his cloak to
the coffin, and raising the lid, and gazing on the face
of the king, was heard to murmur several times,
" Cruel necessity." The incident is pretty certainly
apocryphal, for this was not the dialect of Oliver's
philosophy.

248 OLIVER CROMWELL

Extravagant things have been said about the
execution of the king by illustrious men from
Charles Fox to Carlyle. " We may doubt," said
Fox, " whether any other circumstance has served
so much to raise the character of the English nation
in the opinion of Europe." " This action of the
English regicides," says Carlyle, " did in effect
strike a damp like death through the heart of
Flunkeyism universally in this world. Whereof
Flunkeyism, Cant, Cloth-worship, or whatever ugly
name it have, has gone about miserably sick ever
since, and is now in these generations very rapidly
dying." Cant, alas, is not slain on any such easy
terms by a single stroke of the republican heads-
man's axe. As if, for that matter, force, violence,
sword, and axe, never conceal a cant and an un-
veracity of their own, viler and crueller than any
other. In fact, the very contrary of Carlyle's pro-
position as to death and damp might more fairly
be upheld. For this at least is certain, that the
execution of Charles I. kindled and nursed for many
generations a lasting flame of cant, flunkeyism,
or whatever else be the right name of spurious and
unmanly sentimentalism, more lively than is associ-
ated with any other business in our whole national
history.

The two most sensible things to be said about the
trial and execution of Charles I. have often been
said before. One is that the proceeding was an
act of war, and was just as defensible or just as
assailable, and on the same grounds, as the war
itself. The other remark, thought tolerably con-
clusive alike by Milton and by Voltaire, is that the
regicides treated Charles precisely as Charles, if he
had won the game, undoubtedly promised himself
with law or without law that he would treat them.
The author of the attempt upon the Five Members
in 1642 was not entitled to plead punctilious de-
murrers to a revolutionary jurisdiction. From the

CHAP, vn JUDGMENTS ON KING'S DEATH 249

first it had been My head or thy head, and Charles
had lost. " In my opinion," said Alfieri in the
fanciful dedication of his play of Agis to Charles,
" one can in no way make a tragedy of your tragical
death, for the cause of it was not sublime."

BOOK IV

(1649-53)
CHAPTER I

THE COMMONWEALTH

THE death of the king made nothing easier, and
changed nothing for the better ; it removed no old
difficulties, and it added new. Cromwell and his
allies must have expected as much, and they con-
fronted the task with all the vigilance and energy
of men unalterably convinced of the goodness of
their cause, confidently following the pillar of cloud
by day, the pillar of fire by night. Their goal was
the establishment of a central authority ; the
unification of the kingdoms ; the substitution of
a nation for a dynasty as the mainspring of power
and the standard of public aims ; a settlement of
religion ; the assertion of maritime strength ; the
protection and expansion of national commerce.
Long, tortuous, and rough must be the road. A
small knot of less than a hundred commoners
represented all that was left of parliament, and we
have a test of the condition to which it was reduced
in the fact that during the three months after
Pride's Purge, the thirteen divisions that took
place represented an average attendance of less
than sixty. They resolved that the House of Peers
was useless and dangerous and ought to be abolished.
They resolved a couple of days later that experi-
ence had shown the office of a king, and to have the

251

252 OLIVER CROMWELL

power of the office in any single person, to be un-
necessary, burdensome, and dangerous, and there-
fore that this also ought to be abolished. In March
these resolutions were turned into what were called
acts of parliament. A Council of State was created
to which the executive power was entrusted. It
consisted of forty-one persons and was to last a
year, three-fourths of its members being at the
same time members of parliament. Provision was
made for the administration of justice as far as
possible by the existing judges, and without change
in legal principles or judicial procedure. On May
19 a final act was passed proclaiming England to
be a free Commonwealth, to be governed by the
representatives of the people in parliament without
king or House of Lords. Writs were to run in the
name of the Keepers of the Liberties of England.
The date was marked as the First Year of Freedom,
by God's blessing restored.

We can hardly suppose that Cromwell was under
any illusion that constitutional resolutions on paper
could transmute a revolutionary group, installed by
military force and by that force subsisting, into a
chosen body of representatives of the people ad-
ministering a free commonwealth. He had striven
to come to terms with the king in 1647, and had
been reluctantly forced into giving him up in 1648.
He was now accepting a form of government resting
upon the same theoretical propositions that he had
stoutly combated in the camp debates two years
before, and subject to the same ascendancy of the
soldier of which he had then so clearly seen all the
fatal mischief. But Cromwell was of the active,
not the reflective temper. What he saw was that
the new government had from the first to fight for
its life. All the old elements of antagonism re-
mained. The royalists, outraged in their deepest
feelings by the death of their lawful king, had
instantly transferred their allegiance with height-

CHAP, i COMMONWEALTH FACTIONS 253

ened fervour to his lawful successor. The presby-
terians who were also royalist were exasperated
both by the failure of their religious schemes, and
by the sting of political and party defeat. The
peers, though only a few score in number yet
powerful by territorial influence, were cut to the
quick by the suppression of their legislative place.
The episcopal clergy, from the highest ranks in the
hierarchy to the lowest, suffered with natural
resentment the deprivation of their spiritual
authority and their temporal revenues. It was
calculated that the friends of the policy of intoler-
ance were no less than five-sevenths of the people
of the country. Yet the independents, though
so inferior in numbers, were more important than
either presbyterians or episcopalians, for the reason
that their power was concentrated in an omnipotent
army. The movement named generically after
them comprised a hundred heterogeneous shades,
from the grand humanism of Milton, down to the
fancies of whimsical mystics who held that it was
sin to wear garments, and believed that heaven is
only six miles off. The old quarrel about church
polity was almost overwhelmed by turbid tides of
theological enthusiasm. This enthusiasm developed
strange theocracies, nihilisms, anarchies, and it
soon became one of the most pressing tasks of the
new republic, as afterwards of Cromwell himself,
to grapple with the political danger that overflowed
from the heavings of spiritual confusion. A royalist
of the time thus describes the position : — " The
Independents possess all the forts, towns, navy
and treasure ; the Presbyterians yet hold a silent
power by means of the divines, and the interest of
some nobility and gentry, especially in London and
the great towns. His Majesty's party in England
is so poor, so disjointed, so severely watched by
both factions, that it is impossible for them to do
anything on their own score."

254 OLIVER CROMWELL

The other two ancient kingdoms that were
joined to the new - born State of England were
each of them centres of hostility and peril to the
common fabric. On the continent of Europe, the
new rulers of England had not a friend ; even the
Dutch were drawn away from them by a powerful
Orange party that was naturally a Stuart party.
It seemed as if an accident might make a hostile
foreign combination possible, and almost as if only
a miracle could prevent it. Rupert had possessed
himself of a small fleet, the royalists were masters
of the Isle of Man, of Jersey and the Scilly Isles,
and English trade was the prey of their piratical
enterprise. The Commonwealth had hardly counted
its existence by weeks, before it was menaced by
deadly danger in its very foundations, by signs of
an outbreak in the armed host, now grown to over
forty thousand men,1 that had destroyed the king,
mutilated the parliament, and fastened its yoke
alike upon the parliamentary remnant, the council
of state, and the majority of the inhabitants of the
realm. Natural right, law of nature, one He as
good as another He, the reign of Christ and his
saints in a fifth and final monarchy, all the rest
of the theocratic and levelling theories that had
startled Cromwell in 1647, were found to be just
as applicable against a military commonwealth as
against a king by divine right. The cry of the
political leveller was led by Lilburne, one of the
men whom all revolutions are apt to engender—
intractable, narrow, dogmatic, pragmatic, clever
hands at syllogism, liberal in uncharitable imputa-
tion and malicious construction, honest in their
rather questionable way, animated by a pharisaic
love of self -applause which is in truth not any more
meritorious nor any less unsafe than vain love of
the world's applause ; in a word, not without sharp
insight into theoretic principle, and thinking quite
as little of their own ease as of the ease of others,

CHAP, i DANGERS OF THE NEW STATE 255

but without a trace of the instinct for government
or a grain of practical common sense. Such was
Lilburne the headstrong, and such the temper in
thousands of others with whom Cromwell had pain-
fully to wrestle for all the remainder of his life.
The religious enthusiasts, who formed the second
great division of the impracticable, were more
attractive than the scribblers of abstract politics,
but they were just as troublesome. A reflective
royalist or presbyterian might well be excused for
asking himself whether a party with men of this
stamp for its mainspring could ever be made fit
for the great art of working institutions and con-
trolling the forces of a mighty state. Lilburne 's
popularity, which was immense, signified not so
much any general sympathy with his first principles
or his restless politics, as aversion to military rule
or perhaps indeed to any rule. If the mutiny
spread and the army broke away, the men at the
head of the government knew that all was gone.
They acted with celerity and decision. Fairfax
and Cromwell handled the mutineers with firmness
tempered by clemency, without either vindictive-
ness or panic. Of the very few who suffered mili-
tary execution, some were made popular martyrs,
—and this was an indication the more how narrow
was the base on which the Commonwealth had
been reared.

Other dangers came dimly into view. For a
moment it seemed as if political revolution was to
contain the seeds of social revolution ; Levellers
were followed by Diggers. War had wasted the
country and impoverished the people, and one day
(April 1650), a small company of poor men were
found digging up the ground on St. George's Hill in
Surrey, sowing it with carrots and beans, and
announcing that they meant to do away with all
enclosures. It was the reproduction in the seven-
teenth century of the story of Robert Kett of

256 OLIVER CROMWELL

Norfolk in the sixteenth. The eternal sorrows of
the toiler led him to dream, as in the dawn of
the Reformation peasants had dreamed, that the
Bible sentences for them too had some significance.
" At this very day," wrote Gerrard Winstanley,
a neglected figure of those times, " poor people are
forced to work for twopence a day, and corn is dear.
And the tithing priest stops their mouth, and tells
them that ' inward satisfaction of mind ' was meant
by the declaration : The poor shall inherit the
earth. I tell you the Scripture is to be really and
materially fulfilled. You jeer at the name Leveller.
I tell you Jesus Christ is the head Leveller."
(Gooch, p. 220). Fairfax and the Council wisely
made little of the affair, and people awoke to the
hard truth that to turn a monarchy into a free
commonwealth is not enough to turn the purgatory
of our social life into a paradise.

Meanwhile the minority possessed of power
resorted to the ordinary devices of unpopular rule.
They levied immense fines upon the property of
delinquents, sometimes confiscating as much as
half the value. A rigorous censorship of the press
was established. The most diligent care was en-
joined upon the local authorities to prevent trouble-
some public meetings. The pulpits were watched,
that nothing should be said in prejudice of the peace
and honour of the government. The old law of
treason was stiffened, but so long as trial by jury was
left, the hardening of the statute was of little use.
The High Court of Justice was therefore set up to deal
with offenders for whom no law was strong enough.

The worst difficulties of the government, how-
ever, lay beyond the reach of mere rigour of police
at home. Both in Ireland and Scotland the regicide
Commonwealth found foes. All the three kingdoms
were in a blaze. The fury of insurrection in Ireland
had lent fuel to rebellion in England, and the flames
of rebellion in England might have been put out,

CHAP, i SCOTLAND AND IRELAND 257

but for the necessities of revolt in Scotland. The
statesmen of the Commonwealth misunderstood
the malady in Ireland, and they failed to found
a stable system in Britain, but they grasped with
amazing vigour and force the problem of dealing
with the three kingdoms as a whole. This strenu-
ous comprehension marked them out as men of
originality, insight, and power. Charles II. was in
different fashions instantly proclaimed king in both
countries, and the only question was from which
of the two outlying kingdoms would the new king
wage war against the rulers who had slain his
father, and usurped the powers that were by law and
right his own. Ireland had gone through strange
vicissitudes during the years of the civil struggle
in England. It has been said that no human
intellect could make a clear story of the years of
triple and fourfold distraction in Ireland from the
rebellion of 1641 down to the death of Charles I.
Happily it is not necessary for us to attempt the
task. Three remarkable figures stand out con-
spicuously in the chaotic scene. Ormonde repre-
sented in varied forms the English interest — one
of the most admirably steadfast, patient, clear-
sighted and honourable names in the list of British
statesmen. Owen Roe O'Neill, a good soldier, a
man of valour and character, was the patriotic
champion of catholic Ireland. Rinuccini, the Pope's
nuncio, — an able and ambitious man, ultramontane,
caring very little for either Irish landlords or Irish
nationalists, caring not at all for heretical royalists,
but devoted to the interests of his church all over
the world, — was in his heart bent upon erecting a
papal Ireland under the protection of some foreign
catholic sovereign.

All these types, though with obvious differences
on the surface, may easily be traced in Irish affairs
down to our own century. The nearest approach
to an organ of government was the supreme council

s

258 OLIVER CROMWELL

of the confederate catholics at Kilkenny, in which
the substantial interest was that of the catholic
English of the Pale. Between them and the nuncio
little love was lost, for Ireland has never been
ultramontane. A few days before the death of
the king (Jan. 1649), Ormonde made what pro-
mised to be a prudent peace with the catholics
at Kilkenny, by which the confederate Irish were
reconciled to the crown, on the basis of complete
toleration for their religion and freedom for their
parliament. It was a great and lasting misfortune
that puritan bigotry prevented Oliver from pursu-
ing the same policy on behalf of the Commonwealth,
as Ormonde pursued on behalf of the king. The
confederate catholics, long at bitter feud with the
ultramontane nuncio, bade him intermeddle no
more with the affairs of that kingdom ; and a month
after the peace Rinuccini departed.

It was clear that even such small hold as the
parliament still retained upon Ireland was in
instant peril. The old dread of an Irish army being
landed upon the western shores of England in the
royalist interest, possibly in more or less concert
with invaders from Scotland, revived in full force.
Cromwell's view of the situation was explained to
the Council of State at Whitehall (March 23, 1649).
The question was whether he would undertake the
Irish command. " If we do not endeavour to make
good our interest there," he said, after describing
the singular combination that Ormonde was contriv-
ing against them, " we shall not only have our
interests rooted out there, but they will in a very
short time be able to land forces in England. I
confess I had rather be overrun with a Cavalierish
interest than a Scotch interest ; I had rather be
overrun with a Scotch interest than an Irish interest ;
and I think of all, this is the most dangerous."
Stating the same thing differently, he argued that
even Englishmen who were for a restoration upon

THE QUESTION OF UNION 259

terms ought still to resist the forced imposition of a
king upon them either by Ireland or by Scotland.
In other words, the contest between the crown and
the parliament had now developed into a contest,
first for union among the three kingdoms, and next
for the predominance of England within that union.
Of such antique date are some modern quarrels.

CHAPTER II

CROMWELL IN IRELAND

IT is not enough to describe one who has the work
of a statesman to do as "a veritable Heaven's
messenger clad in thunder." We must still recog-
nise that the reasoning faculty in man is good for
something. " I could long for an Oliver without
Rhetoric at all," Carlyle exclaims, " I could long for
a Mahomet, whose persuasive eloquence with wild
flashing heart and scimitar, is : ' Wretched mortal,
give up that ; or by the Eternal, thy maker and
mine, I will kill thee ! Thou blasphemous scandal-
ous Misbirth of Nature, is not even that the kindest
thing I can do for thee, if thou repent not and
alter, in the name of Allah ? ' Even such sonorous
oracles as these do not altogether escape the guilt
of rhetoric. As if, after all, there might not be just
as much of sham, phantasm, emptiness, and lies
in Action as in Rhetoric. Archbishop Laud with
his wild flashing scimitar slicing off the ears of
Prynne, Charles maliciously doing Eliot to death
in the Tower, the familiars of the Holy Office,
Spaniards exterminating hapless Indians, English
puritans slaying Irishwomen at Naseby, the mon-
archs of the Spanish Peninsula driving popula-
tions of Jews and Moors wholesale and innocent to
exile and despair — all these would deem themselves
entitled to hail their hapless victims as blasphemous
misbirths of Nature. What is the test ? How
can we judge ? Dithyrambs are of no use. It is

260

CROMWELL IN IRELAND 261

not a question between Action and Rhetoric, but
the far profounder question alike in word and in
deed between just and unjust, rational and short-
sighted, cruel and humane.

The parliament faced the Irish danger with
characteristic energy, nor would Cromwell accept
the command without characteristic deliberation.
4 Whether I go or stay," he said, "is as God shall
incline my heart." And he had no leading of this
kind, until he had in a practical way made sure
that his forces would have adequate provision, and
a fair settlement of arrears. The departure of
Julius Caesar for Gaul at a moment when Rome
was in the throes of civil confusion has sometimes
been ascribed to a desire to make the west a drill-
ground for his troops, in view of the military
struggle that he foresaw approaching in Italy.
Motives of a similar sort have been invented to
explain Oliver's willingness to absent himself from
Westminster at critical hours. The explanation is
probably as far-fetched in one case as in the other.
The self-interest of the calculating statesman would
hardly prompt a distant and dangerous military
expedition, for Cromwell well knew, as he had
known when he started for Preston in 1648, what
active enemies he left behind him, some in the
ranks of the army, others comprehending the whole
of the presbyterian party, and all embittered by
the triumph of the military force to which instru-
mentally they owed their very existence. The
simplest explanation is in Oliver's case the best.
A soldier's work was the next work to be done, and
he might easily suppose that the God of Battles
meant him to do it. Everybody else supposed the
same.

It was August (1649) before Cromwell embarked,
and before sailing, " he did expound some places
of scripture excellently well, and pertinent to
the occasion." He arrived in Dublin as Lord-

262 OLIVER CROMWELL

Lieutenant and commander of the forces. After a
short time for the refreshment of his weather-beaten
men, he advanced northwards, some ten thousand
strong, to Drogheda, and here his Irish career began
with an incident of unhappy fame. Modern re-
search adds little in the way either of correction
or of amplification to Cromwell's own story. He
arrived before Drogheda on September 3rd, the
memorable date of three other decisive days in his
history. A week later he summoned Ormonde's
garrison to surrender, and receiving no reply he
opened fire, and breached the wall in two places.
The next day, about five in the evening, he began
the storm, and after a hot and stiff defence that
twice beat back 'his veterans, on the third assault,
with Oliver himself at the head of it, they entered
the town and were masters of the royalist entrench-
ments. Aston, the general in command, scoured
up a steep mound, " a place very strong and of
difficult access ; being exceedingly high, having a
good graft, and strongly palisaded." He had some
three hundred men with him, and to storm his
position would have cost several hundreds of lives.
A parley seems to have taken place, and Aston was
persuaded to disarm by a Cromwellian band who
had pursued him up the steep. At this point
Cromwell ordered that they should all be put to
the sword. It was done. Then came another
order. " Being in the heat of action, I forbade them
to spare any that were in arms in the town ; and I
think that night they put to the sword about 2000
men ; divers of the officers and soldiers being fled
over the bridge into the other (the northern) part
of the town." Eighty of them took refuge in the
steeple of St. Peter's church ; and others in the
towers at two of the gates. " Whereon I ordered
the church steeple to be fired, when one of them
was heard to say, ' God damn me, God confound
me ; I burn, I burn.' " Of the eighty wretches in

CHAP, n THE DROGHEDA MASSACRE 263

the steeple, fifty were slain and thirty perished in
the flames. Cromwell notes with particular satis-
faction what took place at St. Peter's church. " It
is remarkable," he says, " that these people had
grown so insolent that the last Lord's Day before
the storm, the protestants were thrust out of the
great church called St. Peter's, and they had public
Mass there ; and in this very place, near 1000 of
them were put to the sword fleeing thither for safety."
Of those in one of the towers, when they submitted,
" their officers were knocked on the head, and every
tenth man of the soldiers killed, and the rest shipped
for the Barbadoes. The soldiers in the other tower
were all spared as to their lives only, and shipped
likewise for the Barbadoes." Even when time
might have been expected to slake the sanguinary
frenzy, officers in hiding were sought out and killed
in cold blood. " All the friars," says Cromwell,
" were knocked on the head promiscuously but
two. The enemy were about 3000 strong in the
town. I believe we put to the sword the whole
number of the defendants. I do not think thirty
of the whole number escaped with their lives."
These 3000 were killed, with a loss of only sixty-
four to those who killed them.

Such is the unvarnished tale of the Drogheda
massacre. Its perpetrator himself felt at the first
moment when " the heat of action " had passed
that it needed justification. " Such actions," he
says, " cannot but work remorse and regret," unless
there be satisfactory grounds for them, and the
grounds that he alleges are two. One is revenge,
and the other is policy. " I am persuaded that this
is a righteous judgment of God upon those bar-
barous wretches, who have imbrued their hands
in so much innocent blood ; and that it will tend
to prevent the effusion of blood in the future."
And then comes a theory of the divine tactics in
these operations, which must be counted one of the

264 OLIVER CROMWELL

most wonderful of all the recorded utterances of
puritan theology. " And now give me leave to
say how it comes to pass that this work is wrought.
It was set upon some of our hearts, that a great
thing should be done, not by power or might, but
by the spirit of God. And is it not so, clearly ?
That which caused your men to storm so courage-
ously, it was the spirit of God, who gave your men
courage and took it away again ; and gave the
enemy courage, and took it away again ; and gave
your men courage again, and therewith this happy
success. And therefore it is good that God alone
have all the glory."

That Cromwell's ruthless severity may have been
justified by the strict letter of the military law of the
time, is just possible. It may be true, as is con-
tended, that this slaughter was no worse than some
of the worst acts of those commanders in the Thirty
Years' War whose names have ever since stood out
in crimson letters on the page of European history
as bywords of cruelty and savagery. That, after
all, is but dubious extenuation. Though he may
have had a technical right to give no quarter where
a storm had followed the refusal to surrender, in
England this right was only used by him once in the
whole course of the war, and in his own defence of
the massacre it was not upon military right that he
chose to stand. The language used by Ludlow
about it shows that even in the opinion of that time
what was done needed explanation. " The slaughter
was continued all that day and the next," he says,
" which extraordinary severity, I presume, was used
to discourage others from making opposition." This,
as we have seen, was one of the two explanations
given by Oliver himself. The general question,
how far in such a case the end warrants the means,
is a question of military and Christian ethics which
it is not for us to discuss here ; but we may remind
the reader that not a few of the most barbarous

WEXFORD AND CLONMEL 265

enormities in human annals have been excused on
the same ground, that in the long run the gibbet,
stake, torch, sword, and bullet are the truest mercy,
sometimes to men's life here, sometimes to their
souls hereafter. No less equivocal was Cromwell's
second plea. The massacre, he says, was a righteous
vengeance upon the wretches who had imbrued
their hands in so much innocent blood in Ulster
eight years before. Yet he must have known that
of the 3000 men who were butchered at Drogheda,
of the friars who were knocked on the head promis-
cuously, and of the officers who were killed in cold
blood, not a single victim was likely to have had part
or lot in the Ulster atrocities of 1641. More than
one contemporary authority (including Ludlow and
Clarendon) says the garrison was mostly English,
and undoubtedly a certain contingent was English
and protestant. The better opinion on the whole
now seems to be that most of the slain men were
Irish and catholic, but that they came from Kil-
kenny and other parts of the country far outside of
Ulster, and so were " in the highest degree unlikely
to have had any hand in the Ulster massacre " of
1641.

Again, that the butchery at Drogheda did actually
prevent in any marked degree further effusion of
blood, is not at all clear. Cromwell remained in
Ireland nine months longer, and the war was not
extinguished for two years after his departure. The
nine months of his sojourn in the country were a
time of unrelaxing effort on one side, and obstinate
resistance on the other. From Drogheda he marched
south to Wexford. The garrison made a good stand
for several days, but at last were compelled to parley.
A traitor during the parley yielded up the castle,
and the Irish on the walls withdrew into the town.
4 Which our men perceiving, ran violently upon the
town with their ladder and stormed it. And when
they were come into the market-place, the enemy

266 OLIVER CROMWELL

making a stiff resistance, our forces broke them ; and
then put all to the sword that came in their way. I
believe in all there was lost of the enemy not many
less than 2000, and I believe not 20 of ours from first
to last of the siege." The town was sacked, and
priests and friars were again knocked on the head,
some of them in a protestant chapel which they had
been audacious enough to turn into a Mass-house.
For all this Cromwell was not directly responsible as
he had been at Drogheda. " Indeed it hath, not
without cause, been set upon our hearts, that we,
intending better to this place than so great a ruin,
hoping the town might be of more use to you and
your army, yet God would not have it so ; but by
an unexpected providence in his righteous justice,
brought a just judgment upon them ; causing them
to become a prey to the soldier, who in their piracies
had made preys of so many families, and now with
their bloods to answer the cruelties which they had
exercised upon the lives of divers poor protestants."
A heavy hand was laid upon southern Ireland all
through Cromwell's stay. Gowran was a strong
castle, in command of Colonel Hamond, a Kentish-
man, a principal actor in the Kentish insurrection
of 1648. He returned a resolute refusal to Crom-
well's invitation to surrender (March 1650). The
batteries were opened, and after a short parley a
treaty was made, the soldiers to have quarter, the
officers to be treated as the victors might think fit.
The next day the officers were shot, and a popish
priest was hanged. In passing, we may ask in face
of this hanging of chaplains and promiscuous knock-
ing of friars on the head, what is the significance of
Cromwell's challenge to produce " an instance of
one man since my coming to Ireland, not in arms,
massacred, destroyed, or banished, concerning the
massacre or destruction of whom justice hath not
been done or endeavoured to be done." *

1 Gardiner, i. 145. Firth's Cromwell, 260.

WEXFORD AND CLONMEL 267

The effect of the massacre of Drogheda was
certainly transient. As we have seen, it did not
frighten the commandant at Wexford, and the
resistance that Cromwell encountered during the
winter at Ross, Duncannon, Waterford, Kilkenny,
and Clonmel was just such as might have been
looked for if the garrison at Drogheda had been
treated like a defeated garrison at Bristol, Bridge-
water, or Reading. At Clonmel, which came last,
the resistance was most obdurate of all. The
bloody lesson of Drogheda and Wexford had not
been learned. " They found in Clonmel, the
stoutest enemy this army had ever met in Ireland ;
and there never was seen so hot a storm, of so long
continuance, and so gallantly defended either in
England or Ireland." This was the work of Hugh
O'Neill, the nephew of Owen Roe. Cromwell lost
over two thousand men. The garrison, running
short of ammunition, escaped in the night, and the
subsequent surrender of the town (May 10, 1650) was
no more than a husk without a kernel.

The campaign made heavy demands upon the
vigour of the parliamentary force. A considerable
part of the army was described as fitter for an
hospital than the field. Not one officer in forty
escaped the dysentery which they called the disease
of the country. Cromwell himself suffered a long
attack of sickness. These distresses and difficulties
much perplexed him. " In the midst of our good
successes," he says, " wherein the kindness and
mercy of God hath appeared, the Lord in wisdom
and for gracious ends best known to himself, hath
interlaced some things which may give us cause of
serious consideration what his mind therein may
be. ... You see how God mingles out the cup unto
us. Indeed we are at this time a crazy company ;
— yet we live in his sight, and shall work the time
that is appointed us, and shall rest after that in
peace."

268 OLIVER CROMWELL

His general policy is set out by Cromwell in a
document of cardinal importance, and it sheds too
much light upon his Irish policy to be passed over.
The catholic prelates met at Clonmacnoise, and
issued a manifesto that only lives in history for the
sake of Cromwell's declaration in reply to it (Jan.
1650). This has been called by our great transcen-
dental eulogist one of the most remarkable state
papers ever published in Ireland since Strongbow
or even since St. Patrick. Perhaps it is, for it
combines in a unique degree profound ignorance of
the Irish past with a profound miscalculation of the
Irish future. " I will give you some wormwood to
bite upon," says Oliver, and so he does. Yet it is
easy now to see that the prelates were in fact from
the Irish point of view hitting the nail upon the
head, while Oliver goes to work with a want of in-
sight and knowledge that puts his Irish statesman-
ship far below Strafford's. The prelates warned
their flocks that union in their own ranks was the
only thing that could frustrate the parliamentary
design to extirpate their religion, to massacre or
banish the catholic inhabitants, and to plant the
land with English colonies. This is exactly what
Clement Walker, the puritan historian of inde-
pendency, tells us. " The independents in the
parliament," he says, " insisted openly to have the
papists of Ireland rooted out and their lands sold
to adventurers." Meanwhile, Oliver flies at them
with extraordinary fire and energy of language,
blazing with the polemic of the time. After a
profuse bestowal of truculent compliments, deeply
tinged with what in our days is known as the Orange
hue, he comes to the practical matter in hand, but
not until he has drawn one of the most daring of
all the imaginary pictures that English statesmen
have ever drawn, not, be it observed, of discon-
tented colonists, but of catholic and native Ireland.
" Remember, ye hypocrites, Ireland was once united

CHAP, n REPLY TO CATHOLIC PRELATES 269

to England. Englishmen had good inheritances
which many of them purchased with their money ;
they and their ancestors from you and your an-
cestors. . . . They lived peaceably and honestly
among you. You had generally equal benefit of the
protection of England with them ; and equal justice
from the laws — saving wnat was necessary for the
state, upon reasons of state, to put upon some few
people apt to rebel upon the instigation of such as
you. You broke the union. You, unprovoked,
put the English to the most unheard of, and most
barbarous massacre . . . that ever the sun beheld."

As if Cromwell had not stood by the side of Pym
in his denunciations of Strafford in all their excess
and all their ignorance of Irish conditions, precisely
for systematic violation of English law and the spirit
of it throughout his long government of Ireland. As
if Clare's famous sentence at the Union a hundred
and fifty years later, about confiscation being the
common title, and the English settlement being
hemmed in on every side by the old inhabitants
brooding over their discontents in sullen indignation,
were at any time more true of Ireland than in these
halcyon days of Cromwell's imagination. As if
what he calls the equal benefit of the protection of
England had meant anything but fraud, chicane,
plunder, neglect and oppression, ending in that
smouldering rage, misery, and despair which Crom-
well so ludicrously describes as the deep peace and
union of a tranquil sheepfold, only disturbed by the
ravening greed of the priestly wolves of Rome.

As for religion, after some thin and heated quib-
bling about the word " extirpate," he lets them
know with all plainness what he means to do. " I
shall not, where I have power, and the Lord is
pleased to bless me, suffer the exercise of the Mass.
Nor suffer you that are Papists, where I can find
you seducing the people, or by any overt act violat-
ing the laws established. As for the people, what

270 OLIVER CROMWELL

thoughts in the matter of religion they have in
their own breasts, I cannot reach ; but shall think
it my duty, if they walk honestly and peaceably,
not to cause them in the least to suffer for the same."
To pretend that he was not " meddling with any
man's conscience " when he prohibited the central
rite of the catholics, and all the ministrations by the
clergy on those occasions of life where conscience
under awful penalties demanded them, was as idle
as if the catholics had pretended that they did not
meddle with conscience if they forbade the posses-
sion or use of the Bible, or hunted puritan preachers
out of all the pulpits.

" We come," he proceeds, " by the assistance of
God to hold forth and maintain the lustre and glory
of English liberty in a nation where we have an un-
doubted right to do it ; wherein the people of Ireland
(if they listen not to such seducers as you are) may
equally participate in all benefits ; to use liberty and
fortune equally with Englishmen if they keep out of
arms." It is true enough that the military conquest
of Ireland was an indispensable preliminary to any
healing policy. Nor in the prostrate and worn-out
condition of Ireland after ten years of such confusion
as has not often been seen on our planet, could mili-
tary conquest though tedious be difficult. If the
words just quoted were to have any meaning, Crom-
well's policy, after the necessary subjugation of the
country, ought to have been to see that the inhabit-
ants of the country should enjoy both their religion
and their lands in peace. If he had been strong
enough and enlightened enough to try such a policy
as this, there might have been a Cromwellian settle-
ment indeed. As it was, the stern and haughty
assurances with which he wound up his declaration
" for the Undeceiving of Deluded and Seduced
People " were to receive a dreadful interpretation,
and in this lies the historic pith of the whole trans-
action.

PERSECUTION IN IRELAND 271

The Long Parliament deliberately contemplated
executions on so merciless a scale that it was not even
practicable. But many hundreds were put to death.
The same parliament was originally responsible for
the removal of the population, not on so wholesale a
scale as is sometimes supposed, but still enormous.
All this Cromwell sanctioned if he did not initiate.
Confiscation of the land proceeded over a vast area.
Immense tracts were handed over to the adventurers
who had advanced money to the government for the
purposes of the war, and immense tracts to the
Cromwellian soldiery in discharge of arrears of pay.
It is estimated that two-thirds of the land changed
hands. The old proprietors were transplanted with
every circumstance of misery to the province west of
the Shannon, to the wasted and desperate wilds of
Connaught. Between thirty and forty thousand of
the Irish were permitted to go to foreign countries,
where they took service in the armies of Spain,
France, Poland. When Jamaica was taken from
Spain in 1655, Oliver, ardent for its successful planta-
tion, requested Henry Cromwell, then in Ireland, to
engage 1500 soldiers to settle, and to send a thousand
Irishwomen with them ; and we know from Thurloe
that ships were made ready for the transportation of
the boys and girls whom Henry was forcibly collecting.
Whether the design was carried further we do not
know. Strange to say, the massacre in the valleys
of Piedmont in 1655 increased the bitterness of the
Dublin government and of the protestant generals
towards the unhappy Irish. Fleetwood says : —
" The officers of the army here are very sensible of
the horrid cruelties in the massacre of the poor
protestants in the Duke of Savoy's dominions. . . .
It was less strange to us when we heard that the
insatiable Irish had a hand in that bloodshed."
The rigours of transplantation waxed more severe.

Of all these doings in Cromwell's Irish chapter,
each of us may say what he will. Yet to every one

272 OLIVER CROMWELL

it will at least be intelligible how his name has come
to be hated in the tenacious heart of Ireland. What
is called his settlement aggravated Irish misery to a
degree that cannot be measured, and before the end
of a single generation events at Limerick and the
Boyne showed how hollow and ineffectual, as well
as how mischievous, the Cromwellian settlement had
been. Strafford too had aimed at the incorporation
of Ireland with England, at plantation by English
colonists, and at religious uniformity within a
united realm. But Strafford had a grasp of the
complications of social conditions in Ireland to
which Cromwell could not pretend. He knew the
need of time and management. He knew the need
of curbing the English lords. A puritan armed with
a musket and the Old Testament, attempting to
reconstruct the foundations of a community mainly
catholic, was sure to end in clumsy failure, and to
this clumsy failure no appreciation of Oliver's
greatness should blind rational men. With him
incorporation of Ireland in a united kingdom meant
the incorporation of the British colony, just as a
southern state was a member of the American
union, to the exclusion of the serf population. One
partial glimpse into the root of the matter he un-
mistakably had. " These poor people," he said
(Dec. 1649), " have been accustomed to as much
injustice, tyranny, and oppression from their land-
lords, the great men, and those who should have
done them right, as any people in that which we call
Christendom. Sir, if justice were freely and im-
partially administered here, the foregoing darkness
and corruption would make it look so much the more
glorious and beautiful, and draw more hearts after
it." This was Oliver's single glimpse of the main
secret of the everlasting Irish question ; it came to
nothing, and no other English ruler had even so
much as this for many generations afterwards.

CHAPTER III

IN SCOTLAND

IT was the turn of Scotland next. There the Com-
monwealth of England was wholly without friends.
Religious sentiment and national sentiment, so far
as in that country they can be conceived apart,
combined against a government that in the first
place sprang from the triumphs of sectaries over
presbyterians, and the violent slaying of a lawful
! Scottish king ; and, in the second place, had
definitely substituted a principle of toleration for
the milk of the covenanted word. Cromwell's
accommodation after Preston, politic as it was at
the moment, had none of the elements of stability.
The pure royalist, the pure covenanter, the men
who were both royalists and fervid presbyterians,
those who had gone with Montrose, those who went
with Argyle, the Engagers whom Cromwell had
routed at Preston, Whiggamores, nobles and clergy,
all abhorred the new English system which dispelled
at the same time both golden dreams of a presby-
terian king ruling over a presbyterian people, and
constitutional visions of the sway of the legitimate
line. The spirit of intestine faction was red-hot, but
the wiser Scots knew by instinct that the struggle
before them was at bottom as much a struggle for
independent national existence as it had been in
the days of Wallace or Bruce. Equally the states-
men of the Commonwealth felt the impossibility
of establishing their own rule over the host of

273 T

274 OLIVER CROMWELL

malcontents in England, until they had suppressed
a hostile Scotland. The alliance between the two
neighbouring nations which ten years before had
arisen from religious feeling in one and military
needs in the other, had now by slow stages become
a struggle for national predominance and a great
consolidated State. The proclamation of Charles II.
at Edinburgh, the long negotiations with him in
Holland, his surrender to the inexorable demand
that he should censure his father for resisting the
reformation, and his mother for being an idolatress,
that he should himself turn covenanter, and finally,
his arrival on the soil of Scotland, all showed that no
time was to be lost if the union of the kingdoms was
to be saved.

An express messenger was sent to Ireland by the
Council of State in March (1650), to let Cromwell
know that affairs were urgent, and that they desired
his presence and assistance. He did not arrive
until the first of June. He was saluted with joyful
acclamation on every side, from the magnanimous
Fairfax down to the multitudes that thronged the
approaches to Westminster. Both parliament and
the city gave him formal thanks for his famous
services in Ireland ; which, being added to the
laurels of his English victories, " crowned him in the
opinion of all the world for one of the wisest and
most accomplished leaders among the present and
past generations." As against a popish Ireland, all
English parties were united.

It was now that Fairfax, the brave and skilful
commander, but too wanting in the sovereign quali-
ties of decision and initiative to guide the counsels
of a revolution, disappeared from conspicuous place.
While Cromwell was in Ireland, Fairfax had still
retained the office of Lord-General, and Cromwell
himself was now undoubtedly sincere in his urgency
that the old arrangement should continue. Among
other reasons, the presence of Fairfax was a satis-

CHAP. m THE SCOTTISH CASE 375

faction to that presbyterian interest against whose
active enmity the Commonwealth could hardly stand.
Fairfax had always shown himself a man of scruple.
After a single attendance he had absented himself
from the trial of the king, and in the same spirit of
scruple he refused the command of the army destined
for the invasion of Scotland, on the ground that in-
vasion would be a breach of the Solemn League and
Covenant. Human probabilities, he said, are not
sufficient ground to make war upon a neighbour
nation. The point may seem minute in modern
eyes ; but in Fairfax at least moral punctilio had no
association with disloyalty either to his powerful
comrade or to the Commonwealth. Cromwell was
at once (June 26) appointed to be Captain-General
and Commander-in- Chief.

The Scottish case was essentially different from
the case of Ireland, and the national quarrel was
definitely described by Oliver. To Ireland he had
gone to exact vengeance, to restore some sort of
framework to a society shattered even to dissolution,
and to wage war against the practice of a hated
creed. Very different from his truculence against
Irish prelates was his earnest appeal to the General
Assembly in Scotland. " I beseech you," he said,
—enjoining a lesson that of all lessons mankind are
at all times least willing to learn, — " I beseech you,
think it possible you may be mistaken." He pro-
tested that they wished well to the honest people
of Scotland as to their own souls, " it being no part
of our business to hinder any of them from wor-
shipping God in that way they are satisfied in their
conscience by the word of God they ought." It was
the political incoherencies of the Scots that forced
the war upon England. They pretended, he told
them, that to impose a king upon England was the
cause of God, and the satisfaction of God's people
in both countries. Yet this king, who now pro-
fessed to submit to the Covenant, had at that very

276 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOK iv

moment a popish army fighting under his orders in
Ireland.

The political exposure was unanswerable, and
Cromwell spared no trouble to bring it home to
the minds of the godly. But the clergy hindered
the passage of these things to the hearts of those to
whom he intended them — a deceived clergy, " med-
dling with worldly policies and mixtures of earthly
power, to set up that which they call the Kingdom
of Christ." Theirs was no Kingdom of Christ, and
if it were, no such means as worldly policy would
be effectual to set it up ; it is the sword of the
Spirit alone that is powerful for the setting up of
that Kingdom. This mystic spirituality, ever the
indwelling essence of Cromwell's faith, struck no
response in the dour ecclesiastics to whom he was
speaking. However all this might be, the battle
must be fought. To have a king imposed by
Scotland would be better, they believed, than one
imposed by Ireland, but if malignants were destined
to win, then it were better to have a restoration
by English cavaliers than by Scottish presbyters,
inflamed by spiritual pride and sodden in theo-
logical arrogance. At a critical hour six years later,
Cromwell deprecated despondency, and the argu-
ment was as good now as then. " We are English-
men ; that is one good fact. And if God give a
nation valour and courage, it is honour and a mercy."
It was upon this national valour and courage that he
now counted, and the crowning mercy of Worcester
in the autumn of 1651 justified him. But many
sombre episodes intervened.

Cromwell (July 22) crossed the northern border
with a force of some sixteen thousand men. For
five weeks, until the end of August, he was involved
in a series of manoeuvres, extremely complicated in
detail, and turning on a fruitless attempt to draw
the Scots out of a strong and skilfully entrenched
position in Edinburgh, and to force them to an

CHAP, m DUNBAR 277

engagement in the open. The general was David
Leslie, who six years ago had rendered such valiant
and timely service on the day of Marston Moor.
He knew that time, weather, and scarcity of supplies
must wear Cromwell out and compel him to recross
the border, and Leslie's skill and steadfastness, in
the absence of any of those rapid and energetic
blows that usually marked Cromwell's operations,
ended in complete success. " There is an impossi-
bility," said Fleetwood, " in our forcing them to
fight — the passes being so many and so great that
as soon as we go on the one side, they go over on
the other." The English force retreated to Dunbar,
a shattered, hungry, discouraged host, some ten or
eleven thousand in number. Leslie with a force
twice as numerous, bent southward to the inland
hills that overlook Dunbar. There Cromwell, en-
camped between the town and the Doon hill, was
effectually blocked. The Scots were in high spirits
at thus cutting him off from Berwick. " In their
presumption and arrogance they had disposed of
us and of their business, in sufficient revenge and
wrath towards our persons ; and had swallowed up
the poor interest of England ; believing that their
army and their king would have marched to London
without any interruption." This was indeed the
issue — a king restored by the ultras of the Scottish
church, with a new struggle in England between
malignants and presbyterians to follow after. " We
lay very near him," says Oliver, " being sensible of
our disadvantage, having some weakness of flesh,
but yet consolation and support from the Lord
himself to our poor weak faith : That because of
their numbers, because of their advantage, because
of their confidence, because of our weakness, because
of our strait, we were in the Mount, and in the
Mount the Lord would be seen ; and that he would
find a way of deliverance and salvation for us ;
and indeed we had our consolations and our hopes."

278 OLIVER CROMWELL

This was written after the event ; but a note written
on September 2 to the governor of Newcastle shows
with even more reality into how desperate a position
he felt that Leslie's generalship had driven him.
" We are upon an engagement very difficult. The
enemy hath blocked up our way at the Pass at
Copperspath, through which we cannot get without
almost a miracle. He lieth so upon the hills, that
we know not how to come that way without diffi-
culty ; and our lying here daily consumeth our men,
who fall sick beyond imagination. . . . Whatever
becomes of us, it will be well for you to get what
forces you can together ; and the South to help
what they can. The business nearly concerneth
all good people. If your forces had been here in a
readiness to have fallen upon the back of Coppers-
path, it might have occasioned supplies to have
come to us. ... All shall work for good. Our
spirits are comfortable, praised be the Lord — though
our present condition be as it is." History possesses
no finer picture of the fortitude of the man of action,
with eyes courageously open to dark facts closing
round him, yet with alacrity, vigilance, and a kind
of cheerful hope, taking thought for every detail of
the business of the day.

Whether Leslie's idea was to allow the English to
retreat until they were engaged in the pass, and then
to fall upon them in the rear ; or to drive them
slowly across the border in humiliation and disgrace,
we cannot tell. No more can we tell for certain
whether Cromwell still held to his first project of
fortifying Dunbar, or intended at all costs to cut his
way through. Leslie had naturally made up his
mind that the English must either move or surrender,
and if he remained on the heights, victory was his.
Unluckily for him, he was forced from his resolve,
either by want of water, provisions, and shelter for
his force ; or else by the impatience of his committee,
mainly ministers, who were wearied of his triumphant

CHAP, m DUNBAR 279

Fabian strategy, and could not restrain their ex-
ultation at the sight of the hated sectaries lying
entrapped at their feet, shut in between the sea at
their back and a force twice as strong as themselves
in front, with another force cutting them off from
the south in a position that ten men could hold
against forty. Their minds were full of Saul,
Amalekites, Moabites, the fords of Jordan, and all
the rest of it, just as Oliver was full of the Mount of
the Lord, taking care, however, never to let texts
do duty for tactics. In an evil moment on the
morning of September 2 the Scots began to descend
the hill and to extend themselves on the ledge of a
marshy glen at the foot, with intention to attack.
Cromwell walking about with Lambert, with a
watchful eye for the hills, discerned the unexpected
motions. " I told the Major-General, " says Crom-
well, " I thought it did give us an opportunity and
advantage to attempt upon the enemy. To which
he immediately replied, that he had thought to have
said the same thing to me. So that it pleased the
Lord to set this apprehension upon both of our
hearts at the instant." They called for Monk ; then
going to their quarters at night they all held a
council of war, and explained their plans to some
of the colonels ; these cheerfully concurred. Leslie's
move must mean either an immediate attack, or a
closer blockade ; in either case, the only chance for
the English was to be first to engage. They deter-
mined to fall on at daybreak, though as it happened
the actual battle did not open before six (Sept. 3).
The weather was wet and stormy. The voice of
prayer and preaching sounding through the night
watches showed the piety and confirmed the con-
fidence of the English troopers. The Scots sought
shelter behind the shocks of corn against the wind
and rain from the sea, instead of obeying the orders
to stand to their arms. " It was our own laziness,"
said Leslie ; "I take God to witness that we might

280 OLIVER CROMWELL

have as easily beaten them as we did James Graham
at Philiphaugh, if the officers had stayed by their
troops and regiments."

The rout of Dunbar has been described by
Carlyle, in one of the famous masterpieces of modern
letters, with a force of imagination, a moral depth, a
poetic beauty, more than atoning for the perplexing
humours and whimsical philosophies that mar this
fine biography. It is wise for others not to attempt
to turn into poetry the prose of politics and war.
The English and the Scots faced one another across
a brook with steep banks, and narrow fords at more
than one place. The first operation was the almost
uncontested passage of Cromwell's forces across the
stream before the Scots were ready to resist them.
The two armies, gradually drawn up in order of
battle, engaged on the Berwick side of the burn, the
English facing the hill, and the Scots facing the sea.1
Then the battle began.

It opened with a cannonade from the English
guns, followed by a charge of horse under Lambert.
The enemy were in a good position, had the advan-
tage of guns and foot against Lambert's horse, and
at first had the best of it in the struggle. Before
the English foot could come up, Cromwell says,
" the enemy made a gallant resistance, and there
was a very hot dispute at swords' point between our
horse and theirs." Then the first line of foot came
up, and " after they had discharged their duty
(being overpowered with the enemy) received some
repulse which they soon recovered. For my own
regiment did come seasonably in, and at the push
of pike did repel the stoutest regiment the enemy

1 The old story was that the real battle consisted in the forced passage
of the stream, but Mr. Firth seems to establish the version above (Trans-
actions of Historical Society, November 16, 1899). Mr. Firth quotes the
tale of a servant of Sir Arthur Haselrig's, who was present at the battle,
how Cromwell " rid all the night before through the several regiments by
torchlight, upon a little Scots nag, biting his lip till the blood ran down his
chin without his perceiving it, his thoughts being busily employed to be
ready for the action now at hand."

CHAP, m DUNBAR 281

had there, which proved a great amazement to the
residue of their foot. The horse in the meantime
did with a great deal of courage and spirit beat back
all opposition ; charging through the bodies of the
enemy's horse and of their foot ; who were after
the first repulse given, made by the Lord of Hosts as
stubble to their swords. The best of the enemy's
horse being broken through and through in less than
an hour's dispute, their whole army being put into
confusion, it became a total rout, our men having
the chase and execution of them near eight miles."
Such is the story of this memorable hour's fight
told by the victor. Rushworth, then Cromwell's
secretary, is still more summary. " About twilight
the General advanced with the army, and charged
them both in the valley and on the hill. The battle
was very fierce for the time ; one part of their
battalion stood very stiffly to it, but the rest was
presently routed. I never beheld a more terrible
charge of foot than was given by our army ; our
foot alone making the Scots foot give ground for
three quarters of a mile together." Whether the
business was finally done by Lambert's second
charge of horse after his first repulse, or whether
Cromwell turned the day by a flank movement of
his own, the authorities do not enable us to settle.
The best of them says this : — " The day broke, and
we in disorder, and the Major-General (Lambert)
awanting, being ordering the guns. The General
was impatient ; the Scots a-preparing to make the
attempt upon us, sounding a trumpet, but soon
desisted. At last the Major-General came, and
ordered Packer, major to the General's regiment,
Gough's and our two foot regiments, to march about
Roxburgh House towards the sea, and so to fall upon
the enemy's flank, which was done with a great deal
of resolution ; and one of the Scots brigades of foot
would not yield, though at push of pike and butt-end
of musket, until a troop of our horse charged from

282 OLIVER CROMWELL

one end to another of them, and so left them at the
mercy of the foot. The General himself comes in the
rear of our regiment, and commands to incline to the
left ; that was to take more ground, to be clear of all
bodies. And we did so, and horse and foot were
engaged all over the field ; and the Scots all in
confusion. And the sun appearing upon the sea, I
heard Noll say, ' Now let God arise, and his enemies
shall be scattered ' ; and he following us as we
slowly marched, I heard him say, ' I profess they
run ! ' and then was the Scots army all in disorder
and running, both right wing and left and main
battle. They routed one another, after we had done
their work on their right wing ; and we coming up
to the top of the hill with the straggling parties that
had been engaged, kept them from bodying."

Cromwell's gazette was peculiar, perhaps not
without a moral for later days. " Both your chief
commanders and others in their several places, and
soldiers also were acted (actuated) with as much
courage as ever hath been seen in any action since
this war. I know they look not to be named, and
therefore I forbear particulars." Nor is a word said
about the precise part taken by himself. An extra-
ordinary fact about the drove of Dunbar is that
though the battle was so fierce, at such close quarters,
and lasted more than an hour, yet according to the
highest account the English did not lose thirty men ;
as Oliver says in another place, not even twenty.
They killed three thousand, and took ten thousand
prisoners.1

1 Mr. Firth explains this as due to the fact that the Scottish infantry
had not in most cases got their matches alight, and so could do no execution
worth mentioning with their fire-arms.

CHAPTER IV

FROM DUNBAB TO WORCESTER

FOR nearly a year after the victory at Dunbar Crom-
well remained in Scotland, and for five months of the
year with short intervals followed by relapses, he
suffered from an illness from which he thought he
should die. On the day after Dunbar he wrote to
his wife : — " My weak faith hath been upheld. I
have been in my inward man marvellously supported,
though I assure thee, I grow an old man, and feel
infirmities of age marvellously stealing upon me.
Would my corruptions did as fast decrease." He
was only fifty years old, but for the last eight years
his labours, hardships, privations, and anxieties had
been incessant and severe. The winter in Ireland
had brought on a long and sharp attack of feverish
ague. The climate of Scotland agreed with him no
better. The baffled marches and counter-marches
that preceded Dunbar, in dreadful weather and
along miry ways, may well have depressed his vital
energies. His friends in London took alarm (Feb.
1651) and parliament despatched two physicians
from London to see him, and even made an order
allowing him to return into England for change of
air. Of this unsolicited permission he did not avail
himself.

Both the political and the military operations in
Scotland between Dunbar and Worcester are as in-
tricate a tangle as any in Cromwell's career. The
student who unravels them in detail may easily

283

284 OLIVER CROMWELL

convince us what different results might have fol-
lowed if military tactics had been other than they
were, or if religious quarrels had been less vivid and
less stubborn. The general outline is fairly plain.
As Ranke says, the struggle was not between two
ordinary armies, but two politico-religious sects. On
both sides they professed to be zealous protestants.
On both sides they professed their conviction of the
immediate intervention of Providence in their affairs.
On both sides a savoury text made an unanswerable
argument, and English and Scots in the seventeenth
century of the Christian era found their morals and
their politics in the tribal warfare of the Hebrews
of the old dispensation. The English likened them-
selves to Israel against Benjamin ; and then to
Joshua against the Canaanites. The Scots repaid
;in the same scriptural coin. The quarrel was
whether they should have a king or not, and whether
there should be a ruling church or not. The rout
of Leslie at Dunbar had thrown the second of these
issues into a secondary place.

In vain did Cromwell, as his fashion was, appeal
to the testimony of results. He could not compre-
hend how men worshipping the God of Israel, and
thinking themselves the chosen people, could so
perversely ignore the moral of Dunbar, and the yet
more eminent witness of the Lord against the family
of Charles for blood-guiltiness. The churchmen
haughtily replied, they had not learned to hang
the equity of their cause upon events. " Events,"
retorted Oliver, with a scorn more fervid than their
own ; " what blindness on your eyes to all those
marvellous dispensations lately wrought in England.
But did you not solemnly appeal and pray ? Did we
not do so too ? And ought not you and we to think
with fear and trembling of the hand of the great
God in this mighty and strange appearance of his,
instead of slightly calling it ' an event ' ? Were not
both your and our expectations renewed from time

CHAP, iv ROYALISM IN SCOTLAND 285

to time, whilst we waited upon God, to see which
way he would manifest himself upon our appeals ?
And shall we after all these our prayers, fastings,
tears, expectations, and solemn appeals, call these
bare ' events ' ? The Lord pity you."

After bitter controversies that propagated them-
selves in Scotland for generations to come, after all
the strife between Remonstrants, Resolutioners, and
Protesters, and after a victory by Lambert over the
zealots of the west, Scottish policy underwent a
marked reaction. Argyle, the shifty and astute
opportunist, who had attempted to combine fierce
covenanters with moderate royalists, lost his game.
The fanatical clergy had been brought down from
the mastery which they had so arrogantly abused.
The nobles and gentry regained their ascendancy.
The king found a large force at last in line upon his
side, and saw a chance of throwing off the yoke of
his presbyterian tyrants. All the violent and con-
fused issues, political and religious, had by the
middle of 1651 become simplified into the one
question of a royalist restoration to the throne of
the two kingdoms.

The headquarters of the Scots were at Stirling,
and here David Leslie repeated the tactics that had
been so triumphant at Edinburgh. Well entrenched
within a region of marsh and moorland, he baffled all
Oliver's attempts to dislodge him or to open the way
to Stirling. The English invaders were again to be
steadily wearied out. Cromwell says : " We were
gone as far as we could in our counsel and action,
and we did say to one another, we knew not what to
do." The enemy was at his " old lock," and with
abundant supplies from the north. " It is our
business still to wait upon God, to show us our
way how to deal with this subtle enemy, which I
hope he will." Meanwhile, like the diligent man of
business that every good general must be, he sends
to the Council of State for more arms, more spades

286 OLIVER CROMWELL

and tools, more saddles and provisions, and more
men, especially volunteers rather than pressed men.
His position was not so critical as on the eve of
Dunbar, but it was vexatious. There was always
the risk of the Scots retiring in detached parties to
the Highlands and so prolonging the war. On the
other hand, if he did not succeed in dislodging the
king from Stirling, he must face another winter
with all the difficulties of climate and health for his
soldiers, and all the expense of English treasure for
the government at Whitehall. For many weeks he
had been revolving plans for outflanking Stirling by
an expedition through Fife, and cutting the king
off from his northern resources. In this plan also
there was the risk that a march in force northward
left the road to England open, if the Scots in their
desperation and fear and inevitable necessity should
try what they could do in this way. In July Crom-
well came at length to a decision. He despatched
Lambert with four thousand men across the Forth
to the shores of Fife, and after Lambert had over-
come the stout resistance of a force of Scots of about
equal numbers at Inverkeithing (July 20), Cromwell
transported the main body of his army on to the
same ground, and the whole force passing Stirling
on the left advanced north as far as Perth. Here
Cromwell arrived on August 1, and the city was
surrendered to him on the following day. This
move placed the king and his force in the desperate
dilemma that had been foreseen. Their supplies
would be cut off, their men were beginning to desert,
and the English were ready to close. Their only
choice lay between a hopeless engagement in the
open about Stirling, and a march to the south. " We
must," said one of them, " either starve, disband,
or go with a handful of men into England. This
last seems to be the least ill, yet it appears very
desperate." That was the way they chose : they
started forth (July 31) for the invasion of England.

CHAP, iv MILITARY OPERATIONS 287

Cromwell, hearing the momentous news, acted with
even more than his usual swiftness, and having
taken Perth on August 2, was back again at Leith
two days later, and off from Leith in pursuit two
days after his arrival there. The chase lasted a
month. Charles and 20,000 Scots took the western
road, as Hamilton had done in 1648. England
was, in Cromwell's phrase, much more unsteady in
Hamilton's time than now, and the Scots tramped
south from Carlisle to Worcester without any signs
of that eager rising against the Commonwealth on
which they had professed to count. They found
themselves foreigners among stolid and scowling
natives. The Council of State responded to Crom-
well's appeal with extraordinary vigilance, fore-
thought, and energy. They despatched letters to
the militia commissioners over England, urging
them to collect forces and to have them in the right
places. They dwelt on the king's mistaken calcu-
lations, how the counties, instead of assisting him
everywhere with the cheerfulness on which he was
reckoning, had united against him ; and how, after
all his long march, scarcely anybody joined him,
" except such whose other crimes seek shelter there,
by the addition of that one more." The Lord-
General making his way south in hard marches by
Berwick, York, Nottingham, was forced to leave
not a few of his veterans on the way, worn out by
sickness and the hardships of the last winter's
campaign in Scotland. These the Council directed
should be specially refreshed and tended.

Cromwell's march from Perth to Worcester, and
the combinations incident to it, have excited the
warm admiration of the military critics of our own
time. The precision of his operations would be
deemed remarkable even in the days of the tele-
graph, and their success testifies to Cromwell's
extraordinary sureness in all that concerned the
movements of horse, as well as to the extraordinary

288 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOK i?

military talent of Lambert, on which he knew that
he could safely reckon. Harrison who had instantly
started after the Scottish invaders upon their left
flank, and Lambert whom Cromwell ordered to hang
upon their rear, effected a junction on August 13.
Cromwell marching steadily on a line to the east,
and receiving recruits as he advanced (from Fairfax
in Yorkshire among others), came up with Lambert's
column on August 24. Fleetwood joined them with
the forces of militia newly collected in the south.
Thus three separate corps, starting from three
different bases and marching at long distances from
one another, converged at the right point, and four
days later the whole army some 30,000 strong lay
around Worcester. " Not Napoleon, not Moltke,
could have done better " (Honig iii. p. 136). The
energy of the Council of State, the skill of Lambert
and Harrison, and above all the staunch aversion
of the population from the invaders, had hardly
less to do with the result than the strategy of Oliver.
It was indispensable that Cromwell's force should
be able to operate at once on both banks of the
Severn. Fleetwood succeeded in crossing Upton
Bridge from the left bank to the right, seven miles
below Worcester, thus securing access to both banks.
About midway between Worcester and Upton, the
tributary Teme flows into the Severn, and the de-
cisive element in the struggle consisted in laying
two bridges of boats, one across the Teme and the
other across the Severn, both of them close to the
junction of the broader stream with the less. This
was the work of the afternoon of September 3, the
anniversary of Dunbar, and it became possible for
the Cromwellians to work freely with a concen-
trated force on either left bank or right. The battle
was opened by Fleetwood after he had transported
one of his wings by the bridge of boats over the
Teme, and the other by Powick Bridge, a short
distance up the stream on the left. As soon as

CHAP, iv BATTLE OF WORCESTER 289

Fleetwood advanced to the attack, the Scots on
the right bank of the Severn offered a strong re-
sistance. Cromwell passed a mixed force of horse
and foot over his Severn bridge to the relief of
Fleetwood. Together they beat the enemy from
hedge to hedge, till they chased him into Worcester.
The scene then changed to the left bank. Charles,
from the cathedral tower observing that Cromwell's
main force was engaged in the pursuit of the Scots
between the Teme and the city, drew all his men
together and sallied out on the eastern side. Here
they pressed as hard as they could upon the reserve
that Cromwell had left behind him before joining
Fleetwood. He now in all haste recrossed the
Severn, and a furious engagement followed, lasting
for three hours at close quarters and often at push
of pike and from defence to defence. The end was
the " total defeat and ruin of the enemy's army ;
and a possession of the town, our men entering at
the enemy's heels and fighting with them in the
streets with very great courage." The Scots fought
with desperate tenacity. The carnage was what it
always is in street warfare. Some three thousand
men lay dead ; twice or even three times as many
were taken prisoners, including most of the men of
high station ; Charles was a fugitive. Not many
of the Scots ever saw their homes again.

Such was the battle of Worcester, — as stiff a
contest, says the victor, as ever I have seen. It
was Oliver's last battle, the " Crowning Mercy."
In what sense did this great military event deserve
so high a title ? It has been said, that as a military
commander Cromwell's special work was not the
overthrow of Charles I., but the rearrangement of
the relations of the three kingdoms. Such a dis-
tinction is arbitrary or paradoxical. Neither at
Naseby and Preston, nor at Dunbar and Worcester,
was any indelible stamp impressed upon the institu-
tions of the realm ; no real incorporation of Ireland

u

290 OLIVER CROMWELL

and Scotland took place or was then possible. Here
as elsewhere, what Cromwell's military genius and
persistency secured by the subjugation alike of
king and kingdoms, was that the waves of anarchy
should not roll over the work, and that enough of
the conditions of unity and order should be pre-
served to ensure national safety and progress when
affairs had returned to their normal course. In
Ireland this provisional task was so ill compre-
hended as to darken all the future. In Scotland
its immediate and positive results were transient,
but there at least no barriers arose against happier
relations in time to come.

CHAPTER V

CIVIL PROBLEMS AND THE SOLDIER

WHEN God, said Milton, has given victory to the
cause, " then comes the task to those worthies
which are the soul of that enterprise, to be sweated
and laboured out amidst the throng and noises of
vulgar and irrational men." Often in later days
Cromwell used to declare that after the triumph of
the cause at Worcester, he would fain have with-
drawn from prominence and power. These sighs
of fatigue in strong men are often sincere and always
vain. Outer circumstance prevents withdrawal, and
the inspiring daimon of the mind within prevents
it. This was the climax of his glory. Nine years
had gone since conscience, duty, his country, the
cause of civil freedom, the cause of sacred truth
and of the divine purpose, had all, as he believed,
summoned him to arms. With miraculous con-
stancy victory had crowned his standards. Unlike
Conde, or Turenne, or almost any general that has
ever lived, he had in all these years of incessant
warfare never suffered a defeat. The rustic captain
of horse was Lord- General of the army that he had
brought to be the best-disciplined force in Europe.
It was now to be seen whether the same genius and
the same fortune would mark his handling of civil
affairs and the ship of state plunging among the
breakers. It was certain that he would be as active
and indefatigable in peace as he had proved him-
self in war ; that energy would never fail, even

291

292 OLIVER CROMWELL

if depth of counsel often failed ; that strenuous
watchfulness would never relax, even though calcu-
lations went again and again amiss ; that it would
still be true of him to the end, that " he was a
strong man, and in the deep perils of war, in the
high places of the field, hope shone in him like a
pillar of fire when it had gone out in all others."
A spirit of confident hope, and the halo of past
success — these are two of the manifold secrets of a
great man's power, and a third is a certain moral
unity that impresses him on others as a living whole.
Cromwell possessed all three. Whether he had the
other gifts of a wise ruler in a desperate pass, only
time could show.

The victorious general had a triumphal return.
The parliament sent five of its most distinguished
members to greet him on his march, voted him a
grant of £4000 a year in addition to £2500 voted
the year before, and they gave him Hampton Court
as a country residence. He entered the metropolis,
accompanied not only by the principal officers of the
army, but by the Speaker, the Council of State, the
Lord Mayor, the aldermen and sheriffs, and many
thousand other persons of quality, while an immense
multitude received the conqueror of Ireland and
Scotland with volleys of musketry and loud rejoic-
ing. In the midst of acclamations that Cromwell
took for no more than they were worth, it was
observed that he bore himself with great affability
and seeming humility. With a touch of the irony
that was rare in him, but can never be wholly ab-
sent in any that meddle with affairs of politics and
party, he remarked that there would have been a
still mightier crowd to see him hanged. Whenever
Worcester was talked of, he never spoke of himself,
but talked of the gallantry of his comrades, and gave
the glory to God. Yet there were those who said,
4 This man will make himself our king," and in
days to come his present modesty was set down to

COMMONWEALTH POLICY 293

craft. For it is one of the elements in the poverty
of human nature that as soon as people see a leader
knowing how to calculate, they slavishly assume
that the aim of his calculations can be nothing else
than his own interest. Cromwell's moderation was
in truth the natural bearing of a man massive in
simplicity, purged of self, and who knew far too well
how many circumstances work together for the
unfolding of great events, to dream of gathering all
the credit to a single agent.

Bacon in a single pithy sentence had, in 1606,
foreshadowed the whole policy of the Common-
wealth in 1650. This kingdom of England, he told
the House of Commons, "having Scotland united,
Ireland reduced, the sea provinces of the Low
Countries contracted, and shipping maintained, is
one of the greatest monarchies in forces truly
esteemed that hath been in the world." The
Commonwealth on Cromwell's return from the
" Crowning Mercy " had lasted for two years and
a half (Feb. 1, 1649 -Sept. 1651). During this
period its existence had been saved mainly by Crom-
well's victorious suppression of its foes in Ireland
and in Scotland, and partly by circumstances in
France and Spain that hindered either of the two
great monarchies of Western Europe from armed
intervention on behalf of monarchy in England.
Its protestantism had helped to shut out the fallen
sovereignty from the active sympathy of the sacred
circle of catholic kings. Cromwell's military suc-
cess in the outlying kingdoms was matched by
corresponding progress achieved through the energy
and policy of the civil government at Westminster.
At Christmas 1650, or less than two years after the
execution of Charles, an ambassador from the King
of Spain was received in audience by the parlia-
ment, and presented his credentials to the Speaker.
France, torn by intestine discord and with a more
complex game to play, was slower, but in the winter

294 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOKIV

of 1652 the Commonwealth was duly recognised by
the government of Louis XIV., the nephew (by
marriage) of the king whom the leaders of the
Commonwealth had slain.

Less than justice has usually been done to the
bold and skilful exertions by which the Council of
State had made the friendship of England an object
of keen desire both to France and to Spain. The
creation of the navy, by which Blake and other
of the amphibious sea-generals won some of the
proudest victories in all the annals of English sea-
manship, was not less striking and hardly less
momentous than the creation of the army of the
New Model. For the first time, says Ranke, since
the days of the Plantagenets, an English fleet was
seen (1651) in the Mediterranean, and Blake, who
had never been on the quarter-deck of a man-of-
war until he was fifty, was already only second in
renown to Oliver himself. The task of maritime
organisation was carried through by the vigour,
insight, and administrative talents of Vane and the
other men of the parliament, who are now so often
far too summarily despatched as mere egotists and
pedants. By the time that Cromwell had effected
the subjugation of Ireland which Ireton, Ludlow,
and Fleetwood completed, and the subjugation of
Scotland which Monk 'and Deane completed, he
found that the Council of State had been as active
in suppressing the piratical civil war waged by
Rupert at sea, as he himself had been with his iron
veterans on land. What was more, they had opened
a momentous chapter of maritime and commercial
policy. Ill-will had sprung up early between the
Dutch and English republics, partly from the
dynastic relations between the house of Stuart
and the house of Orange, partly from repugnance
in Holland to the shedding of the blood of King
Charles, and most of all from the keen instincts of
commercial rivalry. It has been justly remarked

WAR WITH THE DUTCH 295

as extraordinary that the two republics, threatened
both of them by Stuart interests, by catholic in-
terests, and by France, should now for the first time
make war on each other. In the days of their
struggle with Spain, the Dutch did their best to
persuade Queen Elizabeth to accept their allegi-
ance and to incorporate the United Provinces in
the English realm. Now, it was statesmen of the
English Commonwealth who dreamed of adding the
Dutch republic to the Union of England, Scotland
and Ireland. Of this dream in shape so definite
nothing could come, and even minor projects of
friendship were not discussed without a degree of
friction that speedily passed into downright ani-
mosity. To cripple the naval power of Holland
would at once satisfy the naval pride of the new
Commonwealth, remove a source of military danger,
and exalt the maritime strength and the commercial
greatness of England. The Navigation Act of 1651
was passed, the one durable monument of republican
legislation. By this famous measure goods were
only to be admitted into England either in English
ships, or else in ships of the country to which the
goods belonged. Whatever else came of it, and its
effects both direct and indirect were deep and far-
reaching for many generations to come, the Naviga-
tion Act made a breach in the Dutch monopoly of
the world's carrying trade. An unfriendly Holland
seemed as direct a peril as the enmity of France or
Spain, and before long it was perceived how easily
a combination between Holland and Denmark, by
closing the gates of the Baltic, might exclude
England from free access to the tar, cordage, and
the other prime requisites for the building and
rigging of her ships. The blow at the Dutch trade
monopoly was a fresh irritant to Dutch pride, already
embittered by the English claim to supremacy and
the outward symbols of supremacy in the narrow
seas, as well as to a right of seizure of the goods of

296 OLIVER CROMWELL

enemies in neutral ships. War followed (1652) and
was prosecuted by the Commonwealth with intre-
pidity, decision, and vigour not unworthy of the
ancient Senate of Rome at its highest. Cromwell
had little share, so far as we are able to discern, in
this memorable attempt to found the maritime
ascendancy of England : that renown belongs to
Vane, the organiser, and to Blake, Deane, and
Monk, the sea-generals.

To Cromwell for the time a war between two
protestant republics seemed a fratricidal war. It
was in conflict with that ideal of religious union and
England's place in Europe, which began to ripen in
his mind as soon as the stress of war left his imagina-
tion free to survey the larger world. Apart from
this, he grudged its consumption of treasure, and
the vast burden that it laid upon the people. He
set the charge at £120,000 a month, or as much as
the whole of the taxes came to, and there was besides
the injury done by war to trade. The sale of church
lands, king's lands, and delinquents' lands did not
suffice to fill the gulf. Embarrassed finance as
usual deepened popular discontent, heightened the
unpopularity of the government, and put off the
day of social and political consolidation. Events
or visions were by and by to alter Cromwell's mind,
not for the better.

In the settlement of the nation no progress was
made. Dangerous reefs still showed at every hand
on the face of the angry sea. The parliament in
1646 had ordered the establishment of the presby-
terian system, but the country was indifferent or
hostile. Classes, elderships, synods were in decay,
even the standard confession of faith was still in
essential articles unconfirmed by law. The fierce
struggle over toleration was still indecisive and
unsettled. Ecclesiastical confusion was complete.
The Westminster divines, after long buffetings from
the Erastian parliament, and the triumphs of the

CHAP, v NO PROGRESS IN SETTLEMENT 297

hated independents, had ceased to sit soon after the
king's death. Presbyterian had become frankly a
name for a party purely political. The state was
as little settled as the church. For the formal
machinery of government Cromwell cared little.
What he sought, what had been deep in his mind
amid all the toils of war, was the opening of a new
way for righteousness and justice. Parliament, the
state, the strength and ordering of a nation, to him
were only means for making truth shine in the souls
of men, and right and duty prevail in their life and
act. " Disown yourselves," he exhorted the parlia-
ment after the victory at Dunbar, " but own your
authority ; and improve it to curb the proud and
insolent, such as would disturb the tranquillity of
England, though under what specious pretences
soever. Relieve the oppressed, hear the groans of
poor prisoners in England. Be pleased to reform
the abuses of all professions ; and if there be any
one that makes many poor to make a few rich, that

; suits not a commonwealth."

In the course of an interview that Cromwell
sought with him, Ludlow hinted pretty plainly the
suspicions that influenced the austere party. They
had not liked the endeavour to come to terms with
the king, and they were shocked by the execution

\ of the mutineer at Ware. Cromwell owned dis-
satisfaction at the attempted treaty with the king

\to be reasonable, and excused the execution done
upon the soldier as absolutely necessary to pre-
vent things from falling into confusion. He then
said that the Lord was accomplishing what was
prophesied in the 110th Psalm, and launched out
for at least an hour, says Ludlow with an audible
moan, in the exposition of that Psalm. Finally he
followed up his declaration of fidelity to a free and
equal Commonwealth by describing how the sub-
stance of what he sought was a thorough reforma-
tion of the clergy and the law. And he travelled so

298 OLIVER CROMWELL

far on the road with the Leveller and the Digger as
to declare that " the law, as it is now constituted,
serves only to maintain the lawyer, and to encourage
the rich to oppress the poor." This was in truth
the measure of Cromwell's ideals of social reform.
Although, however, law-reform and church-reform
were the immediate ends of government in his eyes,
the questions of parliamentary or other machinery
could not be evaded. Was the sitting fragment of
a House of Commons fit to execute these reforms,
or fit to frame a scheme for a future constitution ?
Was it to continue in permanence whole or partial ?
Cromwell's first step on his return was to persuade
a majority to fix a date at which the parliament
should come to an end, and when that was done we
hear little more of him for many months. It was
easy to see what would follow. The date fixed for
the expiry of the parliament was three years off.
The time was too long for effective concentration,
and too short for the institution of a great scheme
of comprehensive reform. A provisional government
working within the limits of a fixed period inevit-
ably works at a heavy disadvantage. Everything
is expected from it, yet its authority is impaired.
Anxiety to secure the future blunts attention to
the urgencies of the present. Men with a turn for
corruption seek to make hay while the sun shines.
Parties are shifting and unstable. The host of men
who are restless without knowing what it is that they
want are never so dangerous. A governing body in
such a situation was certain to be unpopular. " I
told them," said Cromwell afterwards, " for I knew
it better than any one man in the parliament
could know it ; because of my manner of life which
had led me everywhere up and down the nation,
thereby giving me to see and know the temper and
spirits of all men, and of the best of men — that the
Nation loathed their sitting."

This was probably true enough ; unfortunately

CHAP, v QUESTION OF A CONSTITUTION 299

the systems that were now one after another to take
the place of the parliament were loathed just as
bitterly. "It is not the manner of settling these
constitutional things," he said, " or the manner of
one set of men or another doing it ; there remains
always the grand question after that ; the grand
question lies in the acceptance of it by those who
are concerned to yield obedience to it and accept
it." This essential truth of all sound government
he had in the old days proclaimed against the con-
stitution-mongers of the camp, and this was the
truth that brought to naught all the constructive
schemes of the six years before him. For it became
more and more apparent that the bulk of the nation
was quite as little disposed to accept the rule of
the army as the rule of the mutilated parliament.

In December (1651) Cromwell held one of the
conferences, in which he had more faith than the
event ever justified, between prominent men in par-
liament and leading officers in the army. He pro-
pounded the two questions, whether a republic or a
mixed monarchy would be best ; and if a monarchy,
then who should be the king. The lawyers, St. John,
Lenthall, Whitelocke, were of opinion that the laws
of England were interwoven with monarchy. When
King Charles bade farewell to his children at St.
James's Palace on the eve of his execution, he took
the young Duke of Gloucester on his knee, and said
to him, " Mark, child, what I say : they will cut off
my head, and perhaps make thee a king ; but, mark
what I say : You must not be a king, so long as your
brothers Charles and James do live." This very
solution was now favoured by the lawyers, and they
were for naming a period within which the youthful
Duke might come in to the parliament. Cromwell
j held his hand. Desborough and Whalley could not
/ see why this, as well as other nations, should not be
j governed in the way of a republic. That was the
sentiment of the army. Cromwell thought that it

300 OLIVER CROMWELL

would be difficult, and inclined to the belief that,
if it could be done with safety and preservation
of rights both as Englishmen and Christians, " a
settlement with somewhat of monarchical power
in it would be very effectual." When the Duke
of Gloucester was sent abroad, the only chance of
such a settlement went with him.

A little later his reflections brought him to use
words of deeper and more direct import. We need
invoke neither craft nor ambition to explain the rise
of the thought in Cromwell's mind that he was per-
haps himself called to take the place and burden of
chief governor. The providences of ten years had
seemed to mark him as the instrument chosen by
heaven for the doing of a great work. He brooded,
as he told men, over the times and opportunities
appointed to him by God to serve him in ; and he
felt that the blessings of God therein bore testimony
to him. After Worcester, he hoped that he would
be allowed to reap the fruits of his hard labours and
hazards, the enjoyment to wit of peace and liberty,
and the privileges of a Christian and a man. Slowly
he learned, and was earnestly assured by others, that
this could not be. The continuing unsettlement was
a call to him that, like Joshua of old, he had still a
portion of the Lord's work to do and must be fore-
most in its doing.

Walking one November day (1652) in St. James's
Park, he sought a conversation with Whitelocke, who
better than any of those about him represented the
solid prose of the national mind. Cromwell opened
to him the dangers with which their jars and ani-
mosities beset the Cause. Whitelocke boldly told
him that the peril sprang from the imperious temper
of the army. Cromwell retorted that on the contrary
it sprang rather from the members of parliament,
who irritated the army by their self-seeking and
greediness, their spirit of faction, their delay in the
public business, their design for prolonging their own

CHAP, v MILITARY REVOLUTION AT HAND 301

power, their meddling in private matters between
party and party who ought to have been left to the
law-courts. The lives of some of them were scandal-
ous, he said. They were irresponsible and uncon-
trolled ; what was wanted was some authority high
enough to check all these exorbitances. Without
that, nothing in human reason could prevent the
ruin of the Commonwealth. To this invective, not
devoid of substance but deeply coloured by the
soldier's impatience of a salutary slowness in human
affairs, Whitelocke replied by pressing the con-
stitutional difficulty of curbing the parliamentary
power from which they themselves derived their own
authority. Cromwell broke in upon him with the
startling exclamation, " What if a man should take
upon him to be king ? ' The obstacles in the path
were plain enough, and the lawyer set them before
Cromwell without flinching. For a short time
longer the Lord-General said and did no more, but
he and the army watched the parliament with
growing suspicion and ill-will. A military revolu-
tion became every day more imminent.

CHAPTER VI

THE BREAKING OF THE LONG PARLIAMENT

THE military revolution of 1653 is the next tall
landmark after the execution of the king. It is
almost a commonplace, that " we do not know what
party means, if we suppose that its leader is its
master " ; and the real extent of Cromwell's power
over the army is hard to measure. In the spring

(of 1647, when the first violent breach between army
and parliament took place, the extremists swept him
off his feet. Then he acquiesced in Pride's Purge,
but he did not originate it. In the action that
preceded the trial and despatching of the king, it
seems to have been Harrison who took the leading
part. In 1653, Cromwell said, " Major - General
Harrison is an honest man, and aims at good things ;
yet from the impatience of his spirit, he will not
wait the Lord's leisure, but hurries one into that
which he and all honest men will have cause to
repent." If we remember how hard it is to fathom
decisive passages in the history of our own time, we
see how much of that which we would most gladly
know in the distant past must ever remain a sur-
mise. But the best opinion in respect of the revolu-
tion of April 1653 seems to be that the royalists were
not wrong who wrote that Cromwell's authority in
the army depended much on Harrison and Lambert
and their fanatical factions ; that he was forced to
go with them in order to save himself; and that
he was the member of the triumvirate who was

302

CHAP, vi CONFERENCE OF OFFICERS 303

most anxious to wait the Lord's leisure yet a while
longer.

The immediate plea for the act of violence that
now followed is as obscure as any other of Cromwell's
proceedings. In the closing months of 1652, he once
more procured occasions of conference between him-
self and his officers on the one hand, and members of
parliament on the other. He besought the parlia-
ment men by their own means to bring forth of their
own accord the good things that had been promised
and were so long expected, — " so tender were we to
preserve them in the reputation of the people." The
list of " good things " demanded by the army in the
autumn of 1652 hardly supports the modern exalta-
tion of the army as the seat of political sagacity. The
payment of arrears, the suppression of vagabonds,
the provision of work for the poor, were objects easy
to ask, but impossible to achieve. The request for
a new election was the least sensible of all.
\ When it was known that the army was again
(waiting on God and confessing its sinfulness, things
(were felt to look grave. Seeing the agitation, the
parliament applied themselves in earnest to frame a
scheme for a new representative body. The army
believed that the scheme was a sham, and that the
semblance of giving the people a real right of choice
was only to fill up vacant seats by such persons as
the House now in possession should approve. This
was nothing less than to perpetuate themselves in-
definitely. Cromwell and the officers had a scheme
of their own : that the .parliament should name a
certain number of men of the right sort, and these
nominees should build a constitution. The parlia-
ment in other words was to abdicate after calling
a constituent convention. On April 19, a meeting
took place in Oliver's apartment at Whitehall with
a score of the more important members of parlia-
ment. There the plan of the officers and the rival
plan of Vane and his friends were brought face to

304 OLIVER CROMWELL

face. What the exact scheme of the parliament
was, we cannot accurately tell, and we are never
likely to know. Cromwell's own descriptions of it
are yague and unintelligible. The bill itself, when
the evil day came, he carried away with him under
his cloak, and no copy of it survived. It appears,
however, that in Vane's belief the best device for a
provisional government — and no other than a pro-
visional government was then possible — was that
the remnant should continue to sit, the men who
fought the deadly battles at Westminster in 1647
and 1648, the men who had founded the Common-
wealth in 1649, the men who had carried on its
work with extraordinary energy and success for
four years and more. These were to continue to
sit as a nucleus for a full representation, joining to
themselves such new men from the constituencies as
they thought not likely to betray the Cause. On the
whole we may believe that this was perhaps the
least unpromising way out of difficulties where
nothing was very promising. It was to avoid the
most fatal of all the errors of the French Con-
stituent, which excluded all its members from office
and from seats in the Legislative Assembly to whose
inexperienced hands it was entrusting the govern-
ment of France. To blame its authors for fettering
the popular choice was absurd in Cromwell, whose
own proposal, instead of a legislature to be partially
and periodically renewed (if that was really what
Vane meant), was now for a nominated council with-
out any element of popular choice at all. The army,
we should not forget, were even less prepared than
the parliament for anything like a free and open
general election. Both alike intended to reserve
parliamentary representation exclusively to such
as were godly men and faithful to the interests
of the Commonwealth. An open general election
would have been as hazardous and probably as dis-
astrous now, as at any moment since the defeat of

CHAP, vi CONFLICTING PLANS 305

King Charles in the field ; and a real appeal to the
country would only have meant ruin to the Good
Cause. Neither Cromwell nor Lambert nor Harrison
nor any of them dreamed that a parliament to be
chosen without restrictions would be a safe experi-
ment. The only questions were what the restrictions
were to be ; who was to impose them ; who was
to guard and supervise them. The parliamentary
remnant regarded themselves as the fittest custod-
ians, and it is hard to say that they were wrong.
In judging these events of 1653, we must look for-
ward to events three years later. Cromwell had a
parliament of his own in 1654 ; it consisted of 460
members ; almost his first step was to prevent more
than a hundred of them from taking their seats.
He may have been right ; but why was the parlia-
ment wrong for acting on the same principle ? He
had another parliament in 1656, and again he began
by shutting out nearly a hundred of its elected
members. The truth is that when the army cried
for a dissolution, they had no ideas as to the parlia-
ment that was to follow. At least this much is
certain, that whatever failure might have overtaken
the plan of Vane and the parliament, it could not
have been more complete than the failure that over-
took the plan of Cromwell.

Apart from the question of the constitution of
parliament, and perhaps regarding that as secondary,
Cromwell quarrelled with what rightly or wrongly
he describes as the ultimate ideal of Vane and his
friends. We should have had fine work, he said
four years later — a Council of State and a parlia-
ment of four hundred men executing arbitrary
government, and continuing the existing usurpa-
tion of the duties of the law-courts by legislature
and executive. Undoubtedly "a horrid degree of
arbitrariness " was practised by the Rump, but
some allowance was to be made for a government
in revolution ; and if that plea be not good for the

x

306 OLIVER CROMWELL

parliament, one knows not why it should be good
for the no less " horrid arbitrariness " of the Pro-
tector. As for the general character of the constitu-
tion here said to be contemplated by the remnant,
it has been compared to the French Convention of
1793 ; but a less invidious and a truer parallel would
be with the Swiss Confederacy to-day. However
this may be, if dictatorship was indispensable, the
dictatorship of an energetic parliamentary oligarchy
was at least as hopeful as that of an oligarchy of
soldiers. When the soldiers had tried their hands
and failed, it was to some such plan as this that
after years of turmoil and vicissitude Milton turned.
At worst it was no plan that either required or
justified violent deposition by a file of troopers.

The conference in Cromwell's apartments at
Whitehall on April 19 was instantly followed by one
of those violent outrages for which we have to find
a name in the dialect of continental revolution. It
had been agreed that the discussion should be re-
sumed the next day, and meanwhile that nothing
should be done with the bill in parliament. When
the next morning came, news was brought to White-
hall that the members had already assembled, were
pushing the bill through at full speed, and that it
was on the point of becoming law forthwith. At
first Cromwell and the officers could not believe that
Vane and his friends were capable of such a breach
of their word. Soon there came a second messenger
and a third, with assurance that the tidings were
true, and that not a moment was to be lost if the
bill was to be prevented from passing. It is per-
fectly possible that there was no breach of word at
all. The parliamentary probabilities are that the
news of the conference excited the jealousy of the
private members, as arrangements between front
benches are at all times apt to do, that they took
the business into their own hands, and that the
leaders were powerless. In astonishment and anger,

CHAP. VI PROCEEDINGS IN THE HOUSE 307

Cromwell in no more ceremonial apparel than his
plain black clothes and grey worsted stockings,
hastened to the House of Commons. He ordered a
guard of soldiers to go with him. That he rose that
morning with the intention of following the counsels
that the impatience of the army had long prompted,
and finally completing the series of exclusions,
mutilations, and purges by breaking up the parlia-
ment altogether, there is no reason to believe.
Long premeditation was never Cromwell's way.
He waited for the indwelling voice, and more than
once in the rough tempests of his life, that daimonic
voice was a blast of coarse and uncontrolled fury.
Hence came one of the most memorable scenes of
English history. There is a certain discord as to
details among our too scanty authorities — some
even describing the fatal transaction as passing with
much modesty and as little noise as can be imagined.
The description derived by Ludlow who was not
present, from Harrison who was, gathers up all that
seems material. There appear to have been between
fifty and sixty members present.

Cromwell sat down and heard the debate for some time.
Then, calling to Major-General Harrison, who was on the
other side of the House, to come to him, he told him that
he judged the parliament ripe for a dissolution and this to
be the time for doing it. The major-general answered, as he
since told me, " Sir, the work is very great and dangerous :
therefore I desire you seriously to consider of it before you
engage in it." " You say well," replied the general, and
thereupon sat still for about a quarter of an hour. Then,
the question for passing the bill being to be put, he said to
Major-General Harrison, " This is the time : I must do it"
and suddenly standing up, made a speech, wherein he
loaded the parliament with the vilest reproaches, charging
them not to have a heart to do anything for the public
good, to have espoused the corrupt interest of presbytery
and the lawyers, who were the supporters of tyranny and
oppression — accusing them of an intention to perpetuate
themselves in power ; had they not been forced to the passing
of this Act, which he affirmed they designed never to observe,

308 OLIVER CROMWELL

and thereupon told them that the Lord had done with them,
and had chosen other instruments for the carrying on his
work that were more worthy. This he spoke with so much
passion and discomposure of mind as if he had been dis-
tracted. Sir Peter Wentworth stood up to answer him,
and said that this was the first time that ever he heard
such unbecoming language given to the parliament, and
that it was the more horrid in that it came from their
servant, and their servant whom they had so highly
trusted and obliged. But, as he was going on, the general
stepped into the midst of the House, where, continuing
his distracted language, he said, " Come, come : I will put
an end to your prating." Then, walking up and down
the House like a madman, and kicking the ground with
his feet, he cried out, " You are no parliament ; I say you
are no parliament ; I will put an end to your sitting ; call
them in, call them in." Whereupon the sergeant attending
the parliament opened the doors ; and Lieutenant-Colonel
Wolseley, with two files of musketeers, entered the House ;
which Sir Henry Vane observing from his place said aloud,
" This is not honest ; yea, it is against morality and
common honesty." Then Cromwell fell a-railing at him,
crying out with a loud voice, " Oh, Sir Henry Vane, Sir
Henry Vane, the Lord deliver me from Sir Henry Vane ! "
Then, looking to one of the members, he said, " There sits
a drunkard " . . . ; and, giving much reviling language to
others, he commanded the mace to be taken away, saying,
" What shall we do with this bauble ? There, take it away"
He having brought all into this disorder, Major-General
Harrison went to the Speaker as he sat in the chair, and
told him that, seeing things were reduced to this pass, it
would not be convenient for him to remain there. The
Speaker answered that he would not come down unless he
were forced. *' Sir," said Harrison, " I will lend you my
hand " ; and thereupon, putting his hand within his, the
Speaker came down. Then Cromwell applied himself to
the members of the House . . . and said to them, " Ifs you
that have forced me to this, for I have sought the Lord night and
day that he would rather slay me than put me on the doing of
this work ! " [Then] Cromwell . . . ordered the House to
be cleared of all the members . . . ; after which he went
to the clerk, and snatching the Act of Dissolution, which
was ready to pass, out of his hand, he put it under his
cloak, and, having commanded the doors to be locked up,
went away to Whitehall.

CHAP, vi THE PARLIAMENT DISPERSED 309

The fierce work was consummated in the after-
noon. Cromwell heard that the Council of State,
the creation of the destroyed legislature, was sitting
as usual. Thither he repaired with Lambert and
Harrison by his side. He seems to have recovered
composure. " If you are met here as private
persons," Cromwell said, " you shall not be dis-
turbed ; but if as a Council of State, this is no place
for you ; and since you cannot but know what was
done at the House in the morning, so take notice
that the parliament is dissolved." Bradshaw, who
was in the chair, was not cowed. He had not
quailed before a more dread scene with Charles four
years ago. " Sir," he replied, " we have heard
what you did at the House in the morning, and
before many hours all England will hear it ; but,
sir, you are mistaken to think that the parliament
is dissolved ; for no power under heaven can dis-
solve them but themselves ; therefore take you
notice of that."

Whatever else is to be said, it is well to remember
that to condemn the Rump — a name, by the way,
not known until after Cromwell's death — is to go a
long way towards condemning the revolution. To
justify Cromwell's violence in breaking it up, is to
go a long way towards justifying Hyde and even
Straff ord. If the Commons had really sunk into
the condition described by Oliver in his passion,
such ignominy showed that the classes represented
by it were really incompetent, as men like Strafford
had always deliberately believed, to take that
supreme share in governing the country for which
Pym and his generation of reformers had so man-
fully contended. For the remnant was the quint-
essence left after a long series of elaborate distil-
lations. They were not presbyterians, moderates,
respectables, bourgeois, pedants, Girondins. They,
or the great majority of them, were the men who
had resisted a continuance of the negotiations at

310 OLIVER CROMWELL

Newport. They had made themselves accomplices
in Pride's Purge. They had ordered the trial of
the king. They had set up the Commonwealth
without lords or monarch. They were deep in all
the proceedings of Cromwellian Thorough. They
were the very cream after purification upon purifi-
cation. If they could not govern, who could ?

We have seen the harsh complaints of Cromwell
against the parliament in 1652, how selfish its
members were, how ready to break into factions,
how slow in business, how scandalous the lives of
some of them. Yet this seems little better than
the impatient indictment of the soldier, if we re-
member how only a few months before, the French
agent had told Mazarin of the new rulers of the
Commonwealth, " Not only were they powerful by
sea and land, but they live without ostentation.
. . . They were economical in their private ex-
penses, and prodigal in their devotion to public
affairs, for which each one toils as if for his per-
sonal interests. They handle large sums of money,
which they administer honestly." We cannot sup-
pose that two years had transformed such men
into the guilty objects of Cromwell's censorious
attack. Cromwell admitted after he had violently
broken them up, that there were persons of honour
and integrity among them, who had eminently
appeared for God and for the public good both
before and throughout the war. It would in truth
have been ludicrous to say otherwise of a body
that contained patriots so unblemished in fidelity,
energy, and capacity as Vane, Scot, Bradshaw, and
others. Nor is there any good reason to believe
that these men of honour and integrity were a
hopeless minority. We need not indeed suppose
that the Rump was without time-servers. Perhaps
no deliberative assembly in the world ever is with-
out them, for time-serving has its roots in human
nature. The question is what proportion the time-

! OBSERVATIONS 311

servers bore to the whole. There is no sign that
it was large. But whether large or small, to deal «u
with time-servers is part, and no inconsiderable <^
part, of the statesman's business, and it is hard to
see how with this poor breed Oliver could have
dealt worse.

Again, in breaking up the parliament he com-
mitted what in modern politics is counted the
inexpiable sin of breaking up his party. This was
the gravest of all. This was what made the
revolution of 1653 a turning-point. The presby-
terians hated him as the greatest of independents.
He had already set a deep gulf between himself
and the royalists of every shade by killing the
king. To the enmity of the legitimists of a dynasty,
was now added the enmity of the legitimists of
parliament. By destroying the parliamentary rem-
nant, he set a new gulf between himself and most
of the best men on his own side. Where was the
policy ? What foundations had he left himself to
build upon ? What was his calculation, or had he
no calculation, of forces, circumstances, individuals,
for the step that was to come next ? When he
stamped in wrath out of the desecrated House, had
he ever firmly counted the cost ? Or was he in
truth as improvident as King Charles had been
when he too marched down the same floor eleven
years ago ? In one sense his own creed erected
improvidence into a principle. " Own your call,"
he says to the first of his own parliaments, " for it
is marvellous, and it hath been unprojected. It's
not long since either you or we came to know
of it. And indeed this hath been the way God
dealt with us all along. To keep things from our
own eyes all along, so that we have seen nothing in
all his dispensations long beforehand." And there
is the famous saying of his, that " he goes furthest
who knows not where he is going," — of which Retz
said that it showed Cromwell to be a simpleton.

312 OLIVER CROMWELL

We may at least admit the peril of a helmsman
who does not forecast his course.

It is true that the situation was a revolutionary
one, and the remnant was no more a legal parlia-
ment than Cromwell was legal monarch. The con-
stitution had long vanished from the stage. From
the day in May 1641, when the king had assented
to the bill making a dissolution depend on the will
of parliament, down to the days in March 1649
when the mutilated Commons abolished the House
of Lords and the office of a king, story after story
of the constitutional fabric had come crashing to
the ground. The Rump alone was left to stand for
the old tradition of parliament, and it was still
clothed, even in the minds of those who were most
querulous about its present failure of performance,
with a host of venerated associations — the same
associations that had lifted up men's hearts all
through the fierce tumults of civil war. The rude
destruction of the parliament gave men a shock
that awakened in some of them angry distrust of
Cromwell, in others a broad resentment at the
overthrow of the noblest of experiments, and, in
the largest class of all, deep misgivings as to the
past, silent self - questioning whether the whole
movement since 1641 had not been a grave and
terrible mistake.

Guizot truly says of Cromwell that he was one
of the men who know that even the best course in
political action always has its drawbacks, and who
accept without flinching the difficulties that may
be laid upon them by their own decisions. This
time, however, the day was not long in coming
when Oliver saw reason to look back with regret
upon those whom he now handled with such im-
petuous severity. When he quarrelled with the
first parliament of his Protectorate, less than two
years hence, he used his old foes, if foes they were,
for a topic of reproach against his new ones. " I

CHAP, vi OBSERVATIONS 313

will say this on behalf of the Long Parliament, that
had such an expedient as this government [the
Instrument] been proposed to them ; and could
they have seen the cause of God provided for ; and
been by debates enlightened in the grounds of it,
whereby the difficulties might have been cleared to
them, and the reason of the whole enforced, and
the circumstances of time and persons, with the
temper and disposition of the people, and affairs
both abroad and at home might have been well
weighed, I think in my conscience, — well as they
were thought to love their seats — they would have
proceeded in another manner than you have done."
To cut off in a fit of passion the chance of such a
thing was a false step he was never able to retrieve.

CHAPTER VII

THE REIGN OF THE SAINTS

CROMWELL was now the one authority left standing.
" By Act of Parliament," he said, " I was general
of all the forces in the three nations of England,
Scotland and Ireland ; the authority I had in my
hand being so boundless as it was." This unlimited
condition both displeased his judgment and pricked
his conscience ; he protested that he did not desire
to live in it for a single day ; and his protest was
sincere. Yet in fact few were the days during the
five years and a half from the breaking of the
parliament to his death, when the green withes of
a constitution could bind the arms of this heroic
Samson. We have seen how in the distant times
when Charles I. was prisoner at Carisbrooke, Crom-
well not without a visible qualm had brought to
bear upon the scruples of Robert Hammond the
doctrine of the People's Safety being the Supreme
Law. But solus populi is the daily bread of
revolutions. It was the foundation, and the only
foundation, of the Cromwellian dictatorship in all
its changing phases.

After the rude dispersion of the Long Parliament
next came the reign of the saints. No experiment
could have worked worse. Here is Cromwell's rueful
admission. " Truly I will now come and tell you
a story of my own weakness and folly. And yet
it was done in my simplicity, I dare avow it. It
was thought then that men of our judgment, who

314

THE NEXT EXPERIMENT 315

had fought in the wars and were all of a piece
upon that account, surely these men will hit it,
and these men will do it to the purpose, what-
ever can be desired. And truly we did think, and I
did think so, the more blame to me. And such a
company of men were chosen, and did proceed to
action. And this was the naked truth, that the
issue was not answerable to the simplicity and
honesty of the design." Such was Oliver's own
tale related four years afterwards. The discovery
that the vast and complex task of human govern-
ment needs more than spiritual enthusiasm, that
to have " very scriptural notions " is not enough
for the reform of stubborn earthly things, marks
yet another stage in Cromwell's progress. He was
no idealist turned cynic, — that mournful spectacle.
He was a warrior called by heaven, as he believed,
to save civil order and religious freedom, and it
was with this duty heavy on his soul that he watched
the working of the scheme that Harrison had vehe-
mently pressed upon him. As Ranke puts it,
Cromwell viewed his own ideals not from the point
of subjective satisfaction, but of objective necessity ;
and this is one of the marks of the statesman. Or,
if we must use philosophic diction, while the fighting
men of a political party may be wrapped up in the
absolute, the practical leader is bound fast by the
relative.

The company of men so chosen constituted what
stands in history as the Little Parliament, or,
parodied from the name of one of its members,
Barebones Parliament. They were nominated by
Cromwell and his council of officers at their own
will and pleasure, helped by the local knowledge of
the congregational churches in the country. The
writ of summons, reciting how it was necessary to
provide for the peace, safety, and good government
of the Commonwealth, by committing the trust of
such weighty affairs to men with good assurance of

316 OLIVER CROMWELL

love and courage for the interest of God's cause,
was issued in the name of Oliver Cromwell, Captain-
General and Commander-in- Chief. One hundred
and thirty-nine of these summonses went out, and
presently five other persons were invited by the con-
vention itself to join, including Cromwell, Lambert,
and Harrison.

One most remarkable feature was the appearance
for the first time of five men to speak for Scotland
and six men for Ireland. This was the earliest
formal foreshadowing of legislative union. Of the
six representatives of Ireland, four were English
officers, including Henry Cromwell ; and the other
two were English by descent. However devoid of
any true representative quality in a popular sense,
and however transient the plan, yet the presence of
delegates sitting in the name of the two outlying
kingdoms in an English governing assembly was
symbolical of that great consolidating change in the
English state which the political instinct of the men
of the Commonwealth had demanded, and the sword
of Cromwell seemed to have brought within reach.
The policy of incorporation originated in the Long
Parliament. With profound wisdom they had based
their Scottish schemes upon the emancipation of
the common people and small tenants from the
oppression of their lords ; and Vane, St. John,
Lambert, Monk, and others had put the plan into
shape. It was the curse of Ireland that no such
emancipation was tried there. In Scotland the
policy encountered two of the most powerful forces
that affect a civilised society, a stubborn sentiment
of nationality, and the bitter antagonism of the
church. The sword, however, beat down military
resistance, and it was left for the Instrument of
Government in 1653 to adopt the policy that the
Commonwealthsmen had bequeathed to it.

Though so irregular in their source, the nominees
of the officers were undoubtedly for the most part

OH.VH CROMWELL'S OPENING DISCOURSE 317

men of worth, substance, and standing. Inspired
throughout its course by the enthusiastic Harrison,
the convention is the high- water mark of the biblical
politics of the time, of puritanism applying itself
to legislation, political construction, and social re-
generation. It hardly deserves to be described as
the greatest attempt ever made in history to found
a civil society on the literal words of scripture, but
it was certainly the greatest failure of such an
attempt. To the Council Chamber at Whitehall
the chosen notables repaired on the fourth of July
(1653), a day destined a century and more later to
be the date of higher things in the annals of free
government. They seated themselves round the
table, and the Lord-General stood by the window
near the middle of it. The room was crowded with
officers. Cromwell in his speech made no attempt
to hide the military character of the revolution
that had brought them together. The indenture,
he told them, by which they were constituted the
supreme authority, had been drawn up by the
advice of the principal officers of the army ; it was
himself and his fellow officers who had vainly tried
to stir up the parliament ; he had been their mouth-
piece to offer their sense for them ; it was the
army to whom the people had looked, in their
dissatisfaction at the breakdown of parliamentary
performance. Yet the very thinking of an act of
violence was to them worse, he declared, than any
battle that ever they were in, or that could be to
the utmost hazard of their lives. They felt how
binding it was upon them not to grasp at power for
themselves, but to divest the sword of all power in
the civil administration. So now God had called
this new supreme authority to do his work, which
had come to them by wise Providence through weak
hands. Such was his opening story. That Crom-
well was deeply sincere in this intention of divest-
ing the army of supremacy in civil affairs, and of

318 OLIVER CROMWELL

becoming himself their servant, there are few who
doubt. But we only vindicate his sincerity at the
cost of his sagacity. The destruction of the old
parliament that had at least some spark of legis-
lative authority ; the alienation of almost all the
staunchest and ablest partisans of the scheme of
a commonwealth ; the desperate improbability of
attracting any large body of members by the rule
of the saints, all left the new order without moral or
social foundation, and the power of the sword the
only rampart standing.

Meanwhile Oliver freely surrendered himself to
the spiritual raptures of the hour. " I confess I
never looked to see such a day as this, when Jesus
Christ should be so owned as he is this day in this
work. God manifests this to be the day of the
Power of Christ, having through so much blood,
and so much trial as hath been upon these nations,
made this to be one of the great issues thereof ; to
have his people called to the supreme authority."
Text upon text is quoted in lyric excitement from
prophets, psalmists, and apostles, Old Testament
dispensation, and New ; appeals to the examples of
Moses and of Paul, who could wish themselves
blotted out of God's book for the sake of the whole
people ; the verses from James about wisdom from
above being pure and peaceable, gentle and easy to
be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits ; and
then at last the sixty-eighth Psalm with its triumphs
so exceeding high and great.

So far as the speech can be said to have any
single practical note, it is that of Tolerance. " We
should be pitiful . . . that we may have a respect
unto all, and be pitiful and tender towards all
though of different judgments. Love all, tender
all, cherish and countenance all, in all things that
are good. And if the poorest Christian, the most
mistaken Christian, shall desire to live peaceably
and quietly under you — I say, if any shall desire

CHAP, vn DISSIPATION OF A DREAM 319

bat to lead a life of godliness and honesty, let him
be protected." Toleration was now in Cromwell
neither a conclusion drawn out by logical reason,
nor a mere dictate of political expediency. It
flowed from a rich fountain in his heart of sympathy
with men, of kindness for their sore struggles after
saving truth, of compassion for blind stumbles and
mistaken paths.

A few weeks began the dissipation of the dream.
They were all sincere and zealous, but the most
zealous were the worst simpletons. The soldier's
jealousy of civil power, of which Cromwell had
made himself the instrument on the twentieth of
April, was a malady without a cure. The im-
patience that had grown so bitter against the old
parliament soon revived against the new conven-
tion. It was the more unreasonable because the
convention represented the temper and ideas of
the army, such as they were, and the failure of the
convention marks the essential sterility of the army
viewed as a constructive party. Just as it is the
nature of courts of law to amplify the jurisdiction,
so it is the well-known nature of every political
assembly to extend its powers. The moderate or
conservative element seems to have had a small
majority in the usual balance of parties, but the
forward men made up for inferiority in numbers by
warmth and assiduity. The fervour of the forward
section in the parliament was stimulated by fanati-
cism out of doors : by cries that their gold had
become dim, the ways of Zion filled with mourning,
and a dry wind but neither to fan nor to cleanse
upon the land : above all by the assurances of the
preachers, that the four monarchies of Nebuchad-
nezzar and Cyrus, of Alexander and Rome, had
each of them passed away, and that the day had
come for the Fifth and final Monarchy, the King-
dom of Jesus Christ upon the earth : and this, no
mere reign set up in men's hearts, but a scheme

320 OLIVER CROMWELL

for governing nations and giving laws for settling
liberty, property, and the foundations of a common-
wealth.

The fidelity of the convention to Cromwell was
shown by the unanimous vote that placed him on
the Council of State ; but the great dictator kept
himself in the background, and in good faith hoping
against hope he let things take their course. " I am
more troubled now," said he, " with the fool than
with the knave." The new men at once and with-
out leave took to themselves the name of parlia-
ment. Instead of carrying on their special business
of a constituent assembly, they set to work with a
will at legislation, and legislation moreover in the
high temper of Root-and-Branch, for cursed is he
that doeth the work of the Lord negligently. A
bill was run through all its stages in a single sit-
ting, for the erection of a High Court of Justice in
cases where a jury could not be trusted to convict.
Ominous language was freely used upon taxation,
and it was evident that the sacred obligations of
supply and the pay of the soldiers and sailors were
in peril. They passed a law requiring that all good
marriages must take place before a justice of the
peace, after due publication of banns in some open
resort sacred or secular. Of the projects of law
reform inherited from the Long Parliament they
made nonsense. Before they had been a month in
session, they passed a resolution that the Court of
Chancery should be wholly taken away and abol-
ished ; and after three bills had been brought in
and dropped for carrying this resolution into act,
they read a second time a fourth bill for summarily
deciding cases then pending, and arranging that for
the future the ordinary suits in chancery should be
promptly despatched at a cost of from twenty to
forty shillings. They set a committee, without a
lawyer upon it, to work on the reduction of the
formless mass of laws, cases, and precedents, to a

CHAP, vn THE NEW ASSEMBLY AT WORK 321

code that should be of no greater bigness than a
pocket-book. The power of patrons to present to
livings was taken away. More vital aspects of the
church question followed. A committee reported
in favour of the appointment of a body of state
commissioners with power to eject unfit ministers
and fill vacant livings ; and, what was a more
burning issue, in favour of the maintenance of tithe
as of legal obligation. By a majority of two (56
against 54) the House disagreed with the report,
and so indicated their intention to abolish tithe
and the endowment of ministers of religion by
the state. This led to the crisis. The effect of
proceedings so singularly ill devised for the settle-
ment of the nation was to irritate and alarm all
the nation's most powerful elements. The army,
the lawyers, the clergy, the holders of property, all
felt themselves attacked ; and the Lord-General
himself perceived, in his own words afterwards,
that the issue of this assembly would have been
the subversion of the laws, and of all the liberties
of their nation, the destruction of the ministers of
the gospel, in short the confusion of all things ;
and instead of order, to set up the judicial law of
Moses in abrogation of all our administrations.
The design that shone so radiantly five months
before, had sunk away in clouds and vain chimera.
Nor had the reign of chimera even brought popu-
larity. Lilburne, the foe of all government whether
it were inspired by folly or by common sense,
appeared once more upon the scene, and he was put
upon his trial before a court of law for offences of
which he had been pronounced guilty by the Long
Parliament. The jury found him innocent of any
crime worthy of death, and the verdict was received
with shouts of joy by the populace. This was
to demonstrate that the government of the saints
was at least as odious as the government of the
dispossessed Remnant.

322 OLIVER CROMWELL

The narrow division on the abolition of tithe
convinced everybody that the ship was water-
logged. Sunday, December 11, was passed in the
concoction of devices for bringing the life of the
notables to an end. On Monday, the Speaker took
the chair at an early hour, and a motion was
promptly made that the sitting of the parliament
was no longer for the public good, and therefore
that they should deliver up to the Lord- General
the powers they had received from him. An
attempt to debate was made, but as no time was
to be lost, in case of members arriving in numbers
sufficient to carry a hostile motion, the Speaker
rose from his chair, told the sergeant to shoulder
the mace, and followed by some forty members who
were in the secret set forth in solemn procession
to Whitehall. A minority kept their seats, until a
couple of colonels with a file of soldiers came to
turn them out. According to a royalist story, one
of the colonels asked them what they were doing.
" We are seeking the Lord," was the answer.
" Then you should go elsewhere," the colonel replied,
" for to my knowledge the Lord has not been here
these twelve years past." We have Cromwell's
words that he knew nothing of this intention to
resign. If so, the dismissal of the fragment of the
members by a handful of troopers on their own
authority is strange, and shows the extraordinary
pitch that military manners had reached. Oliver
received the Speaker and his retinue with genuine
or feigned surprise, but accepted the burden of
power that the abdication of the parliament had
once more laid upon him.

These proceedings were an open breach with the
saints, but as has been justly said (Weingarten),
this circumstance involves no more contradiction
between the Cromwell of the past and the Protector,
than there is contradiction between the Luther who
issued in 1520 his flaming manifesto to the Christian

CHAP, vn REACTION FROM REVOLT 323

nobles of the German nation, and the Luther that
two years later confronted the misguided men who
supposed themselves to be carrying out doctrines
that they had learned from him. Puritanism, like
the Reformation generally, was one of those revolts
against the leaden yoke of convention, ordinance,
institution, in which, whether in individuals or in
a tidal mass of men, the human soul soars passion-
ately forth toward new horizons of life and hope.
Then the case for convention returns, the need for
institutions comes back, the nature of things will
not be hurried nor defied. Strong reaction followed
the execution of the king. Painfully Milton now,
five years later, bewailed the fact that the people
with " besotted and degenerate baseness of spirit,
except some few who yet retain in them the old
English fortitude and love of freedom, imbastardised
from the ancient nobleness of their ancestors, are
ready to fall flat and give adoration to the image
and memory of this man." These were the two
strong floods between which, in their ebb and flow,
Cromwell found himself caught. His practical eye
discerned it all, and what had happened. Yet this
was perhaps the moment when Cromwell first felt
those misgivings of a devout conscience that inspired
the question put by him on his deathbed, whether
it was certain that a man once in grace must be
always in grace.

BOOK V

(1653-58)
CHAPTER I

FIRST STAGE OF THE PROTECTORATE

WHAT are all our histories, cried Cromwell in 1655,
what are all our traditions of Actions in former
times, but God manifesting himself, that hath
shaken and tumbled down and trampled upon
everything that he had not planted ? It was not
' long after, that Bossuet began to work out the
same conception in the glowing literary form of
the discourse on universal history. What was in
Bossuet the theme of a divine, was in Cromwell the
life-breath of act, toil, hope, submission. For him,
the drama of time is no stage-play, but an inspired
and foreordained dispensation ever unfolding itself
" under a waking and all-searching Eye," and in
this high epic England had the hero's part. " I
look at the people of these nations as the blessing
of the Lord," he said, " and they are a people
blessed by God. ... If I had not had a hope fixed
in me that this cause and this business was of God,
I would many years ago have run from it. ...
But if the Lord take pleasure in England, and if
he will do us good, he is very able to bear us up.
..." As England was the home of the Chosen
People, so also he read in all the providences of
battlefields from Winceby to Worcester, that he

325

326 OLIVER CROMWELL

was called to be the Moses or the Joshua of the
new deliverance.

Milton's fervid Latin appeal of this date did but
roll forth in language of his own incomparable
splendour, though in phrases savouring more of
Pericles or Roman stoic than of the Hebrew sacred
books, the thoughts that lived in Cromwell. Milton
had been made Secretary of the first Council of
State almost immediately after the execution of
the king in 1649, and he was employed in the same
or similar duties until the end of Cromwell and after.
Historic imagination seeks to picture the personal
relations between these two master-spirits, but no
trace remains. They must sometimes have been in
the council chamber together ; but whether they
ever interchanged a word we do not know. When
asked for a letter of introduction for a friend to the
English ambassador in Holland (1657), Milton ex-
cused himself, saying, " I have very little acquaint-
ance with those in power, inasmuch as I keep very
much to my own house, and prefer to do so." A
painter's fancy has depicted Oliver dictating to
the Latin secretary the famous despatches on the
slaughtered saints whose bones lay scattered on the
Alpine mountains cold ; but by then the poet had
lost his sight, and himself probably dictated the
English drafts from Thurloe's instructions, and then
turned them into his own sonorous Latin. He
evidently approved the supersession of the parlia-
ment, though we should remember that he includes
in all the breadth of his panegyric both Bradshaw
and Overton, who as strongly disapproved. He
bids the new Protector to recall the aspect and the
wounds of that host of valorous men who with him
for leader had fought so strenuous a fight for free-
dom, and to revere their shades. Further he adjures
him to revere himself, that thus the freedom for
which he had faced countless perils and borne such
heavy cares, he would never suffer to be either

CHAP, i MILTON AND CROMWELL 327

violated by hand of his, or impaired by any other.
" Thou canst not be free if we are not ; for it is
the law of nature that he who takes away the
liberty of others is by that act the first himself to
lose his own. A mighty task hast thou undertaken ;
it will probe thee to the core, it will show thee as
thou art, thy carriage, thy force, thy weight ;
whether there be truly alive in thee that piety,
fidelity, justice, and moderation of spirit, for which
we believe that God hath exalted thee above thy
fellows. To guide three mighty states by counsel,
to conduct them from institutions of error to a
worthier discipline, to extend a provident care to
furthest shores, to watch, to foresee, to shrink from
no toil, to flee all the empty shows of opulence and
power, — these indeed are things so arduous that,
compared with them, war is but as the play of
children."

Such is the heroic strain in which the man of
high aerial visions hailed the man with strength of
heart and arm and power of station. This Miltonian
glory of words marks the high tide of the advance
from the homely sages of 1640, to the grand though
transient recasting of the fundamental conceptions
of national consciousness and life. The apostle and
the soldier were indeed two men of different type,
and drew their inspiration from very different
fountains ; but we may well believe Aubrey when
he says that there were those who came over to
England only to see Oliver Protector and John
Milton.

ii

Four days sufficed to erect a new government.
The scheme was prepared by the officers, with
Lambert at their head. Cromwell fell in with it,
caring little about formal constitutions either way.
On the afternoon of December 16, 1653, a procession
set out from Whitehall for Westminster Hall. The

328 OLIVER CROMWELL

judges in their robes, the high officers of govern-
ment, the Lord Mayor and the magnates of the
city, made their way amid two lines of soldiers to
the Chancery Court where a chair of state had been
placed upon a rich carpet. Oliver, clad in a suit ^j*
and cloak of black velvet, and with a gold T>ancl
upon his hat, was invited by Lambert to take upon
himself the office of Lord Protector of the Common-
wealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, conform-
ably to the terms of an Instrument of Government
which was then read. The Lord- General assented,
and forthwith took and subscribed the solemn oath
of fidelity to the matters and things set out in the
Instrument. Then, covered, he sat down in the
chair of state while those in attendance stood bare-
headed about him. The commissioners ceremoni-
ously handed to him the great seal, and the Lord
Mayor proffered him his sword of office. The Pro-
tector returned the seal and sword, and after he
had received the grave obeisance of the dignitaries
around him, the act of state ended and he returned
to the palace of Whitehall, amid the acclamations
of the soldiery and the half-ironic curiosity of the
crowd. He was proclaimed by sound of trumpet in
Palace Yard, at the Old Exchange, and in other
places in London, the Lord Mayor attending in his
robes, the sergeants with their maces, and the
heralds in their gold coats. Henceforth the Lord
Protector " observed new and great state, and all
ceremonies and respects were paid to him by all
sorts of men as to their prince." The new consti-
tution thus founding, though it did not long up-
hold, the Protectorate, was the most serious of the
expedients of that distracted time.

The first stage of the Protectorate was in fact a
near approach to a monarchical system very like
that which Strafford would have set up for Charles,
or which Bismarck two hundred years later set up
for the King of Prussia. One difference is that

CHAP, i THE PROTECTOR'S PROBLEMS 329
i

Cromwell honestly strove to conceal from himself

as from the world the purely military foundations

of his power. His social ideal was wide as the

poles from Strafford's, but events forced him round

;to the same political ideal. A more material differ-

jence is that the Protector had a powerful and

.victorious army behind him, and Strafford and his

master had none.

On the breakdown of the Barebones parliament,
the sphinx once more propounded her riddle. How
to reconcile executive power with popular supremacy,
what should be the relations between executive and
legislature, what the relations between the church
and the magistrate, — these were the problems
that divided the dead king and the dead par-
liament, that had baffled Pym and Hyde, that
had perplexed Ireton and the officers, and now
confronted Oliver. It was easy to affirm the
sovereignty of the people as an abstract truth.
But the machinery ? We must count one of the
curiosities of history the scene of this little group
of soldiers sitting down to settle in a few hours the
questions that to this day, after ages of constitution-
mongering and infinitely diversified practice and
experiment all over the civilised world, beset the
path of self-governing peoples. No doubt they had
material only too abundant. Scheme after scheme
had been propounded at Oxford, at Uxbridge, at
Newcastle, at Newport. The army had drawn up
its Heads of Proposals, and these were followed, a
few days before the king was brought to the scaffold,
by the written constitution known as the Agreement
of the People. The officers had well-trodden ground
to go upon, and yet the journey was nearly as obscure
as it had ever been.

In face of the Lord-General, as in face of the
Lord's Anointed, the difficulty was the same, how
to limit the power of the executive over taxation
and an army, without removing all limits to the

330 OLIVER CROMWELL

power of the representative legislature. Cromwell,
undoubtedly in earnest as he was in desiring to
restore parliamentary government, and to set
effective checks on the Single Person, nevertheless
by temperament, by habit of mind engendered of
twelve years of military command, and by his
view of the requirements of the crisis, was the last
man to work a parliamentary constitution. A
limited dictator is an impossibility, and he might
have known it, as Napoleon knew it. If Cromwell
and his men could not work with the Rump, if
they could not work with the saints, the officers as
they rapidly hammered together the Instrument of
Government might have known that no ingenuity
would make their brand-new carpentering water-
tight.

The Magna Charta that now installed Oliver as
Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, and survived
for over three years, though loose enough in more
than one essential particular, was compact. The
government was to be in a single person and a
parliament, but to these two organs of rule was
added a Council of State. This was a very imperfect
analogue of the old Privy Council or of the modern
cabinet. Its members were named in the Act and
sat for life. The Council had a voice, subject to
confirmation by parliament, in appointments to
certain of the high offices. Each of the three powers
was a check upon the other two. Then came the
clauses of a reform bill, and Cromwell has been
praised for anticipating Pitt's proposals for de-
molishing rotten boroughs ; in fact, the reform bill
was adopted bodily from the labours of Ireton,
Vane, and the discarded parliament. The county
franchise was restricted to possessors of property of
two hundred pounds.

The parliament, a single House, was to sit for at
least five months in every three years. This got
rid of Cromwell's bugbear of perpetuity/ The

THE NEW CONSTITUTION 331

Protector if supported by a majority of his Council
could summon a parliament in an emergency, and
in case of a future war with a foreign state he had
no option. Scotland and Ireland were each to send
thirty members. One sub-clause of most equivocal
omen made a majority of the Council into judges
of the qualifications and disqualifications of the
members returned ; and as we shall see, this legal-
isation of future mutilations of the legislature by
the executive did not long remain a dead letter.
Every bill passed by parliament was to be presented
to the Protector for his consent, and if he did not
within twenty days give his consent, then the bill
became law without it, unless he could persuade
them to let it drop. The normal size of the army
and navy was fixed, and a fixed sum was set down
for civil charges. The Protector and Council were
to decide on ways and means of raising the revenue
required, and parliament could neither lower the
charges nor alter ways and means without the
Protector's consent. In case of extraordinary
charge, as by reason of war, the consent of parlia-
ment was needed ; but if parliament were not
sitting, then the Protector with the majority of his
Council had power both to raise money and to make
ordinances, until parliament should take order con-
cerning them. This power of making provisional
laws was not exercised after the assembling of the
first parliament.

The two cardinal questions of control of the
army and the settlement of religion were decided
in a way little dreamed of by Eliot or Coke, by Pym
or Hampden. While parliament was sitting, that
is for five months out of three years, its approval
was required for the disposal of forces by land and
sea ; when parliament was not sitting, the Pro-
tector with the assent of a majority of the Council
could do as he pleased. The religious clauses are
vague, but they are remarkable as laying down for

332 OLIVER CROMWELL

the first time with authority a principle of tolera-
tion. A public profession of the Christian religion
as contained in the scriptures was to be recom-
mended as the faith of these nations, and the
teachers of it were to be confirmed in their sub-
sistence. This embodies, as the Agreement of the
People had done before, the principles of establish-
ment and endowment of some form of national
church. But adherence was not to be compulsory,
and all Christians outside the national communion,
save papists, prelatists, and such as under the pro-
fession of Christ hold forth licentiousness, were to be
protected in the exercise of their own creed. So far
had reformers travelled from the famous section of
the Grand Remonstrance twelve years before, where
the first stout forefathers of the Commonwealth
had explicitly disavowed all purpose of letting
loose the golden reins of discipline in churdi govern-
ment, or leaving private persons to believe and
worship as they pleased. The result reduced this
declaration to little more than the plausible record
of a pious opinion. The independents when they
found a chance were to show themselves as rigorous
if not quite as narrow as other people. Meanwhile,
in excluding the prelatists, time was to show that
they excluded the majority.

The Instrument of Government had a short life,
and not an important one. It has a certain sur-
viving interest, unlike the French constitutions of
the Year III., the Year VIII., and other ephemera
of the same species, .because, along with its sequel
of the Humble Petition and Advice (1657), it is the
only attempt in English history to work in this
island a wholly written system, and because it has
sometimes been taken to foreshadow the constitu-
tion of the United States. The American analogy
does not hold. The Cromwellian separation of
executive from legislative power was but a fitful
and confused attempt. Historically, there are no

THE AMERICAN SYSTEM 333

indications that the framers of the American con-
stitution had the Instrument in their minds, and
there are, I believe, no references to it either in the
pages of the Federalist, or in the recorded constitu-
tional debates of the several States. Nor was it
necessary for the American draftsmen to go back
to the Commonwealth, for their scheme was based
upon state constitutions already subsisting, and it
was in them that they found the principle of funda-
mentals and constitutional guarantees not alterable
like ordinary laws. Apart from historical connec-
tion the coincidences between the Instrument and
the American constitution are very slight, while
the differences are marked. The Protector is to be
chosen by the Council, not by the people. He has
no veto on legislation. His tenure is for life : so is
the tenure of the Council. There is no direct appeal
to the electorate as to any executive office. Parlia-
ment, unlike Congress, is to consist of one House.
The two schemes agree in embodying the principle
of a rigid constitution, but in the Instrument there
are according to Oliver himself only four funda-
mentals, and all the rest is as liable to amendment
or repeal, and in the same way, as any other statute.
This is essentially different from the American
system alike in detail and in principle. Make by
Act an American president master for life, with the
assent of a small council of persons nominated for
life, of the power of the sword, of the normal power
of the purse, of the power of religious establishment,
for thirty-one months out of thirty-six, and then
you might have something like the Instrument of
Government. The fatal passion for parallels has led
to a much more singular comparison. Within the
compass of a couple of pages Mommsen likens the
cynical and bloodthirsty Sulla to Don Juan because
he was frivolous, to George Washington because he
was unselfish, and to Oliver Cromwell because they
both set up or restored order and a constitution.

334 OLIVER CROMWELL

in

In virtue of their legislative capacity Cromwell
and his Council passed more than eighty ordinances
in the eight months between the establishment of
the Protectorate and the meeting of the parliament.
This is commonly called Cromwell's great creative
period, yet in truth the list is but a meagre show
of legislative fertility. Many of them were no more
than directions for administration. Some were
regulations of public police. One of them limited
the number of hackney coaches in London to two
hundred. Duels and challenges were prohibited,
and to kill an adversary in a duel was made a
capital offence. Drunkenness and swearing were
punished. Cock -fighting was suppressed, and so
for a period was horse-racing. There were laws for
raising money upon the church lands, and laws for
fixing excise. Among the earliest and most signi-
ficant was the repeal of the memorable enactment
of the first days of the republic, that required an
engagement of allegiance to the Commonwealth.
This relaxation of the republican test was taken by
the more ardent spirits as stamping the final over-
throw of the system consecrated to freedom, and
it still further embittered the enmity of those who
through so many vicissitudes had in more hopeful
days been Cromwell's closest allies. More far-
reaching and fundamental were the edicts incor-
porating Scotland and Ireland in one Common-
wealth with England, but these were in conformity
with the bill of the Long Parliament in 1652. From
the Long Parliament also descended the policy of
the edict for the settlement of lands in Ireland.
One of the cardinal subjects of the ordinances in
this short period of reforming and organising activity
was the Court of Chancery. The sixty-seven clauses
reforming chancery are elaborate, but they show
no presiding mind. Imperious provisions, that

CHAP, i OLIVER AS LEGISLATOR 335

every cause must be determined on the day on
which it is set down for hearing, savour more of
the sergeant and his guard-room than of a law
court threading its way through mazes of disputed
fact, conflicting testimony, old precedents, new
circumstances, elastic principles, and ambiguous
application. Lenthall, now Master of the Rolls,
vowed that he would be hanged up at the gate of
his own court rather than administer the ordinance.
In revolutionary times men are apt to change their
minds, and he thought better of it. Others were
more constant. It is impossible to read White-
locke's criticisms without perceiving that he and
his brother commissioner of the great seal had good
grounds for their refusal to execute the ordinance.
The judgment of modern legal critics not un-
friendly to Oliver, is that his attempt at chancery
reform shows more zeal than discretion ; that it
substituted hard-and-fast rules for the flexible
system that was indispensable in equity ; that it
was spoiled by lack of moderation. To his honour,
he abhorred the harshness of the criminal law, and
would fain have mitigated it, but his efforts came
to nothing. Equally ineffectual were his aspira-
tions to reform morals and manners by law. The
old Adam in Englishmen was too much for him,
and he might have remembered here especially his
own maxim that all depends on acceptance by the
people.

Cromwell possessed far too much of that instinct
for order and government, which is very narrowly
described when it is called conservative, not to do
his best to secure just administration of the law.
Some of the most capable lawyers of the age were
persuaded to serve in the office of judge, and there
is no doubt that they discharged with uprightness,
good sense, and efficiency both their strictly judicial
duties and the important functions in respect of
general county business which in those days fell upon

336 OLIVER CROMWELL

the judges of assize. Slackness in this vital depart-
ment would speedily have dissolved social order in
a far deeper sense than any political step, even the
execution of a king or the breaking of a parliament.
But whenever what he chose to regard as reason of
state affected him, Cromwell was just as ready to
interfere with established tribunals and to set up
tribunals specially to his purpose, as if he had been
a Stuart or a Bourbon.

One of the strong impulses of the age was educa-
tional. Cromwell was keenly alive to it, and both
in the universities and elsewhere he strove to
further it. Nothing survived the Restoration. Most
important of all Cromwell's attempts at construc-
tion was the scheme for the propagation of religion,
and it deserves attention. The dire controversy
that split up the patriot party in the first years of
the Long Parliament, that wrecked the throne, that
was at the bottom of the quarrels with the Scots,
that inspired the fatal feud between presbyterian
and independent, that occupied the last days of
the Rump, and brought to naught the reign of the
saints, was still the question that went deepest in
social life. The forefathers of the Commonwealth
had sought a state church with compulsory uni-
formity. The fervid soul of Milton, on the con-
trary, was eager for complete dissociation of church
from state, eager " to save free conscience from the
paw Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw."
So were the most advanced men in the parliament
of Barebones. But voluntaryism and toleration in
this uncompromising temper was assuredly not
universal even among independents. Cromwell had
never committed himself to it. In adhesion to the
general doctrine of liberty of conscience, he had
never wavered. Perhaps it was the noblest element
in his whole mental equipment. He valued dog-
matic nicety as little in religion as he valued con-
stitutional precision in politics. His was the cast

CHAP, i OLIVER AS LEGISLATOR 337

of mind to which the spirit of system is in every
aspect wholly alien. The presence of God in the
hearts of men ; the growth of the perfect man
within us ; the inward transformation not by literal
or speculative knowledge, but by participation in
the divine, in things of the mind ; no compulsion
but that of light and reason, — such was ever his
faith. I am not a man, he said, scrupulous about
words or names or such things.

This was the very temper for a comprehensive
settlement, if only the nation had been ripe for
comprehension. Cromwell had served on two im-
portant parliamentary committees on propagation
of the gospel after his return from Worcester.
There on one occasion it pleased somebody on the
committee zealously to argue against a Laodicean
indifferency, professing that he would rather be
a Saul than a Gallio. Then Cromwell made the
vehement declaration that he would rather have
Mahometanism permitted, than that one of God's
children should be persecuted. But the question
of Toleration was one, and that of a state -paid
ministry was another. Toleration with the two
stereotyped exclusions of popery and prelacy, as
we have seen, was definitely adopted, so far as
words went, in two sections of the Instrument of
Government, and so too was the principle of a
public profession of religion to be maintained from
public funds. An episcopal critic was angry at the
amazing fact that in the Magna Charta of the
new constitution there was not a word of churches
or ministers, nor anything else but the Christian
religion in general — as if the Christian religion in
general were but something meagre and diminutive.
The usual and inevitable controversy soon sprang
into bitter life, as to what were the fundamentals
covered by this bland and benignant phrase, and
the divines had not effectually settled their contro-
versy when they were overtaken by the Restoration.

338 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOKV

What Cromwell's ordinance of 1654 did was, upon
the principle of the Instrument, to frame a working
system. In substance he adopted the scheme that
Dr. John Owen, now Dean of Christ Church, had
submitted to the parliament in 1652, and that was in
principle accepted by the Rump in its closing days.
A story is told by Bishop Wilkins, who was the
husband of Cromwell's youngest sister Robina, that
the Protector often said to him that no temporal
government could have a sure support without a
national church that adhered to it, and that he
thought England was capable of no constitution
but episcopacy. The second imputation must be
apocryphal, but Cromwell had undoubtedly by this
time firmly embraced the maxim alike of King
Charles and of the Long Parliament, that the care
of religion is the business of the state. His ordi-
nances institute a double scheme for expelling bad
ministers, and testing the admission of better. No
man was henceforth to be capable of receiving a
stipend who failed to satisfy of his character, con-
versation, and general fitness a commission of
divines and laymen, some forty in number, divines
being to laymen as three to one. By the side of
this commission of Triers was a smaller commis-
sion of Ejectors, for the converse task of removing
ignorant, negligent, or scandalous persons. The
tithe was maintained and patronage was main-
tained, only security was taken for the fitness of
the presentee. No theological tests were prescribed.
No particular church organisation was imposed,
though episcopacy, like the Prayer Book, was for-
bidden. Of the three sorts of godly men, said
Oliver, presbyterians, baptists, and independents,
so long as a man has the root of the matter in him,
it does not concern his admission to a living, to
whatever of the three judgments he may belong.
The parishes were to adopt the presbyterian or
the congregational form as they liked best. In

HIS ECCLESIASTICAL PLANS 339

practice, outside of London and Lancashire, where
the presbyterianism established by the parliament in
1647 had taken root, the established church during
the Protectorate was on the congregational model,
with so much of presbyterianism about it as came
from free association for discipline and other pur-
poses. The important feature in Oliver's establish-
ment was that a man who did not relish the service
or the doctrine or the parson provided for him by
public authority at his parish church, was free to
seek truth and edification after his own fashion else-
where. This wise liberality, which wins Oliver so
many friends to-day, in those times bitterly offended
by establishment the host of settled voluntaries,
and offended the greater host of rigorous presby-
terians by toleration. It may well have been that
he determined to set up his system of church govern-
ment by the summary way of ordinance before
parliament met, because he knew that no parliament
even partially representative would pass it.

We owe the best picture of the various moods
of the pulpit men at this interesting moment to
the profoundest theologian of them all. Baxter
recognised, like other people, that the victorious
revolutionary soldier was now endeavouring to dam
within safe banks the torrent that the revolution
had set running. Now, he says, Cromwell exclaims
against the giddiness of the unruly extremists ;
and earnestly pleads for order and government.
This putting about of the ship's helm affected men's
minds in different ways. Some declared that they
would rather see both tithes and universities thrown
overboard than submit to a treacherous usurpation.
Others said that it was Providence that had brought
the odious necessity about, whoever might be its
instrument ; and necessity required them to accept
the rule of any one who could deliver them from
anarchy. Most ministers took a middle way, and it
was Baxter's own way : — " I did in open conference

340

OLIVER CROMWELL

declare Cromwell and his adherents to be guilty
of treason and rebellion, aggravated by perfidious-
ness and hypocrisy, but yet I did not think it my
duty to rave against him in the pulpit ; and the
rather because, as he kept up his approbation
of a godly life in the general, and of all that was
good except that which the interest of his sinful
cause engaged him to be against ; so I perceived
that it was his design to do good in the main . . .
more than any had done before him." Even against
his will Baxter admits that the scheme worked
reasonably well. Some rigid independents, he says,
were too hard upon Arminians. They were too
long in seeking evidence of sanctification in the
candidate, and not busy enough in scenting out
his Antinomianism or his Anabaptism. Still they
kept the churches free of the heedless pastor whose
notion of a sermon was only a few good words
patched together to talk the people asleep on
Sunday, while all the other days of the week he
would go with them to the ale-house and harden
them in sin. Cromwell himself was an exemplary
patron. " Having near one half of the livings in
England in his own immediate disposal, he seldom
bestoweth one of them upon any man whom him-
self doth not first examine and make trial of in
person, save only that at such times as his great
affairs happen to be more urgent than ordinary, he
useth to appoint some other to do it in his behalf ;
which is so rare an example of piety that the like
is not to be found in the stories of princes."

His ideal was a state church, based upon a
comprehension from which episcopalians were to
be shut out. The exclusion was fatal to it as a
final settlement. The rebellion itself, by arresting
and diverting the liberal movement in progress
within the church when the political outbreak first
began, had for ever made a real comprehension
impossible. This is perhaps the heaviest charge

HIS ECCLESIASTICAL PLANS 341

against it, and the gravest set-off against its in-
dubitable gains.

The mischief had been done in the years, roughly
speaking, from 1643 to 1647, when some two thou-
sand of the episcopal clergy were turned out of their
churches and homes with many circumstances of
suffering and hardship. The authors of these hard
proceedings did not foresee the distant issue, which
made so deep and dubious a mark upon the social
life of England for centuries to come. As soon as
the day of reaction arrived, less than twenty years
later, it brought cruel reprisals. In 1662 the
episcopalians, when the wheel brought them upper-
most, ejected two thousand nonconformists on the
famous day of Saint Bartholomew, who might seem
to be the patron saint of Christian enormities.
The nation fell asunder into the two standing
camps of churchman and dissenter, which in their
protracted strife for superiority on the one hand
and equality on the other, did so much to narrow
public spirit and pervert the noble ideal of national
citizenship. That disastrous direction was first im-
parted to church polity by the presbyterians ; but
independents, when in their turn of faction they
grasped power, did nothing to redress the wrong
committed by their rivals.

CHAPTER II

QUARREL WITH THE FIRST PARLIAMENT

WHITELOCKE in his mission to Sweden (1653-54)
saw Oxenstiern, the renowned minister who had
played so great a part in the history of Gustavus
Adolphus and of the protestant world — one of the
sages, not too many of them on his own showing,
who have tried their hand at the government of
men. The Chancellor inquired about Cromwell's age,
health, children, family, and temper, and said that
the things that he had done argued as much courage
and wisdom as any actions that had been seen for
many years. Still the veteran was not dazzled.
He told Whitelocke that the new Protector's
strength would depend upon the confirmation of
his office by parliament. As it was, it looked to
him like an election by the sword, and the pre-
cedents of such elections had always proved dan-
gerqus and not peaceable, ever since the choice of
Roman emperors by the legions. Christina, the
queen, went deeper, and hit on a parallel more to
the point. Your General, she said, " hath done
the greatest things of any man in the world ; the
Prince of Conde is next to him, but short of him."
Much of his story, she proceeded, " hath some
parallel with that of my ancestor Gustavus the
First, who from a private gentleman of a noble
family, was advanced to the title of Marshal of
Sweden, because he had risen up and rescued his
country from the bondage and oppression which the

342

CHAP, n OPENING OF FIRST PARLIAMENT 343

King of Denmark had put upon them, and expelled
that king ; and for his reward he was at last elected
King of Sweden, and I believe that your General
will be King of England in conclusion." " Pardon
me, Madam," replied the sedate Whitelocke, " that
cannot be, because England is resolved into a
commonwealth ; and my General hath already
sufficient power and greatness, as general of all
their forces both by sea and land, which may con-
tent him." " Resolve what you will," the queen
insisted, " I believe he resolves to be king ; and
hardly can any power or greatness be called suffi-
cient, when the nature of man is so prone as in
these days to all ambition." Whitelocke could only
say that he found no such nature in his General.
Yet it needed no ambition, but only inevitable
memory of near events, to recall to Cromwell the
career of Gustavus Vasa, and we may be sure the
case often flitted through his mind.

Two parliaments were held during the Protect-
orate, the first of them assembling in 1654 on the
third of September, the famous anniversary day of
the Cromwellian calendar. It lasted barely five
months. A glance at the composition of it was
enough to disclose the elements of a redoubtable
opposition. The ghost of the Long Parliament was
there in the persons of Bradshaw, Scot, Haselrig,
and others ; and although Vane was absent, the
spirit of irreconcilable alienation from a personal
government resting on the drawn sword was both
present and active. No royalist was eligible, but
the presbyterians of what would now be called the
extreme right were not far from royalists, and even
the presbyterians of the centre could have little
ardour for a man and a system that marked the
triumph of the hated independents. The material
for combinations unfriendly to the government was
only too evident.

They all heard a sermon in Westminster Abbey,

344 OLIVER CROMWELL

where the Protector had gone in his coach with
pages, lackeys, lifeguards, in full state. Henry
Cromwell and Lambert sat with him bare-headed
in the coach, perhaps in their different ways the
two most capable of all the men about him. After
the sermon they crossed over from the Abbey to
the Painted Chamber, and there Oliver addressed
them in one of his strange speeches, — not coherent,
not smooth, not always even intelligible, but with
a strain of high-hearted fervour in them that pierces
through rugged and uncouth forms ; with the note
of a strong man having great things to say, and
wrestling with their very greatness in saying them ;
often rambling, discursive, and overloaded ; some-
times little better than rigmarole, even though the
rigmarole be lighted now and again with the flash
of a noble thought or penetrating phrase ; marked
by curious admixture of the tone of the statesman's
council-chamber with the tone of the ranter's chapel ;
still impressive by their labouring sincerity, by the
weight of their topics, and by that which is the
true force of all oratory worth talking about, the
momentum of the speaker's history, personality,
and purpose.

The Protector opened on a high and characteristic
note, by declaring his belief that they represented
not only the interests of three great nations, but
the interest of all the Christian world. This was
no rhetorician's phrase, but a vivid and unchanging
ideal in his mind after he had gained a position
lofty enough to open to his gaze the prospect be-
yond the English shores. Here hyperbole ended,
and the speech became a protest against the level-
ling delusions of the saints and the extremists ; a
vindication of the policy of the government in
making peace abroad, and saving treasure and
settling religion at home ; and an exhortation to a
holy and gracious understanding of one another and
of their business. The deeply marked difference in

CHAP, n QUARREL AND PROSCRIPTION 345

tone from the language in which he had opened the
Little Parliament indicates the growing reaction in
the Protector's own mind, and the rapidity with
which he was realising the loud call for conservative
and governing quality in face of the revolutionary
wreckage.

The spectres of old dispute at once rose up.
Those who could recall the quarrel between king
and parliament found that after all nothing was
settled, hardly even so much as that the government
of the three kingdoms should be a parliamentary
government. The mutual suspicions of parliament
and army were as much alive as ever. The members
no sooner returned to their own chamber, than
they began instantly to consider the constitution
under which they existed. In other words, they
took themselves seriously. No parliament sup-
posing itself clothed with popular authority could
have been expected to accept without criticism a
ready-made scheme of government fastened on it
by a military junto. If the scheme was to be
parliamentary, nothing could be more certain than
that parliament itself must make it so. A pro-
tector by right of the army was as little tolerable to
the new parliament, as a king by divine right had
been to the old. They sat there by the authority
of the good people of England, and how could it be
contended that this authority did not include the
right of judging the system on which the good
people of England were henceforth to be governed ?

That was the very ground on which Oliver had
quarrelled with the Rump. He now dealt with the
first parliament of the Protectorate as decisively, if
not quite so passionately, as with the parliament of
the Commonwealth. After constitutional discussion
had gone on for less than a fortnight, members
one morning found Westminster Hall and its
approaches full of soldiers, the door of the House
locked in their faces, and only the gruff explanation

346 OLIVER CROMWELL

that the Protector desired them to meet him in the
Painted Chamber. Here Oliver addressed them in
language of striking force, winding up with an act
of power after the model of Pride's Purge and all
the other arbitrary exclusions. His key-note was
patient and argumentative remonstrance, but he
did not mince his meaning and he took high ground.
He reminded them that it was he who by the
Instrument was laying down power, not assuming
it. The authority he had in his hand, he told them,
was boundless. It was only of his own will that
on this arbitrary power he accepted limits. His
acceptance was approved by a vast body of public
opinion : first by the soldiers, who were a very
considerable part of these nations, when there was
nothing to keep things in order but the sword ;
second by the capital city of London, and by York-
shire, the greatest county in England ; third by
the judges of the land ; and last of all by the
parliament itself. For had not the members been
chosen on a written indenture, with the proviso
that they should not have power to alter the
government by a single person and a parliament ?
Some things in the Instrument, he said, were funda-
mental, others were only circumstantial. The cir-
cumstantials they might try to amend as they
might think best. But the four fundamentals-
government by a single person and a parliament,
liberty of conscience as a natural right, the non-
perpetuation of parliament, the divided or balanced
control of the military forces — these were things
not to be parted with and not to be touched. " The
wilful throwing away of this government, such as
it is, so owned by God, so approved by men, were
a thing which, and in reference not to my good, but
to the good of these nations and of posterity, I can
sooner be willing to be rolled into my grave and
buried with infamy, than I can give my consent
unto."

CHAP, n CONSTITUTIONAL REVISION 347

Then the stroke fell. As they had slighted the
authority that called them, he told them that he
had caused a stop to be put to their entrance
into the parliament House, until they had signed
a promise to be true and faithful to the Lord
Protector and the Commonwealth, and not to alter
the government as settled in a single person and
a parliament. The test was certainly not a narrow
nor a rigid one, and within a few days some 300
out of the 460 subscribed. The rest, including
Bradshaw, Haselrig, and others of that stalwart
group, refused to sign, and went home. Such was
the Protector's short way with a parliamentary
opposition.

The purge was drastic, but it availed little. By
the very law of its being the parliament went on
with the interrupted debate. Ample experience
has taught us since those days that there is no such
favourite battle-ground for party conflict as revision
of a constitution. They now passed a resolution
making believe that Oliver's test was their own.
They affirmed the fundamentals about the double
seat of authority, about Oliver's protectorate for
life, about a parliament every three years, as gravely
as if members had not just signed a solemn promise
not to reject them. Then they made their way
through the rest of the two-and-forty articles of
the Instrument, expanding them into sixty. They
fought the question whether the Protectorate should
be hereditary, and by a large majority decided that
it should not. The province of the Council was
narrowed. Protector and parliament were to deter-
mine in conjunction what composed the doctrines
within the public profession of religion, and what
on the other hand were damnable heresies ; but,
these two things defined, then parliament could pass
bills dealing with heresies, or with the teaching and
discipline of established ministers, over the head of
the Protector. On the all-important chapter of the

348 OLIVER CROMWELL

military forces, the parliament was as much bent
upon extending its association in authority with
the Protector, as the Protector had in old days
been bent upon the same thing in respect of King
Charles. The Instrument set the army at thirty
thousand, but it was now nearly twice as many.
Parliament here called for a reduction to the legal
figure, and laid down general principles for the
future. During his life parliament was to have a
voice in fixing the numbers of the armed force ;
after his death, it was to decide the disposal of it ;
and the sum fixed for it was to be reconsidered
by parliament five years later. In all this there
was nothing unreasonable, if parliament was in
reality to be a living organ. Such was the work
of revision.

It was now that Oliver realised that perhaps he
might as well have tried to live with the Rump.
We have already seen the words in which he almost
said as much. The strange irony of events had
brought him within sight of the doctrines of
Strafford and of Charles, and showed him to have
as little grasp of parliamentary rule and as little
love of it as either of them. He was determined
not to accept the revised constitution. " Though
some may think that it is an hard thing," he said,
" to raise money without parliamentary authority
upon this nation, yet I have another argument to
the good people of this nation, whether they prefer
having their will, though it be their destruction,
rather than comply with things of Necessity."
Then, as to the armed forces, though for the present
that the Protector should have in his power the
militia seems the hardest thing, " yet, if the power
of the militia should be yielded up at such a time
as this, when there is as much need of it to keep
this cause, as there was to get it for the sake of
this cause, what would become of us all ? ': If he
were to yield up at any time the power of the

CHAP, ii PARLIAMENT DISSOLVED 349

militia, how could he do the good he ought, or
hinder parliament from making themselves per-
petual, or imposing what religion they pleased upon
men's conscience ? But all this is the principle of
pure absolutism.

In other words, Cromwell did not in his heart
believe that any parliament was to be trusted. He
may have been right, but then this meant a dead-
lock, and what way could be devised out of it ?
The representatives were assuredly not to blame
for doing their best to convert government by the
sword into that parliamentary government which
was the very object of the civil war, and which was
still both the professed and the real object of
Cromwell himself. What he did was to dissolve
them at the first hour at which the Instrument gave
him the right (January 1655).

A remarkable passage occurs in one of the letters
of Henry Cromwell to Thurloe two years later
(March 4, 1657), which sheds a flood of light on
this side of the Protectorate from its beginning to
the end. The case could not be more wisely pro-
pounded. "I wish his Highness would consider
how casual [incalculable] the motions of a parlia-
ment are, and how many of them are called before
one be found to answer the ends thereof ; and
that it is the natural genius of such great assemblies
to be various, inconsistent, and for the most part
froward with their superiors ; and therefore that
he would not wholly reject so much of what they
offer as is necessary to the public welfare. And
the Lord give him to see how much safer it is to
rely upon persons of estate, interest, integrity, and
wisdom, than upon such as have so amply dis-
covered their envy and ambition, and whose faculty
it is by continuing of confusion to support them-
selves." How much safer, that is to say, to rely
upon a parliament with all its slovenly, slow, and
froward ways, than upon a close junto of military

350 OLIVER CROMWELL

grandees with a standing army at their back. This
is what the nation also thought, and burned into
its memory for a century to come. Here we have
the master-key to Cromwell's failure as constructive
statesman.

CHAPTER III

THE MILITARY DICTATORSHIP

WITH the dismissal of the first parliament a new
era began. For twenty months the Protectorate
was a system of despotic rule, as undisguised as
that of Tudor or Stuart. Yet it was not the
dictatorship of Elizabeth, for Cromwell shared
authority both in name and fact with the Council,
that is, with the leaders of the army. What were
the working relations between Oliver and the
eighteen men who composed his Council of State,
and to what extent his policy was inspired or
modified by them, we cannot confidently describe.
That he had not autocratic power, the episode of
the kingship in 1657 will show us. That his hand
was forced on critical occasions, we know.

The latter half of 1654 has sometimes been called
the grand epoch of Oliver's government. Ireland
and Scotland were in good order ; he had a surplus
in the chest ; the army and navy seemed loyal ;
his star was rising high among the European con-
stellations. But below the surface lurked a thou-
sand perils, and the difficulties of government were
enormous. So hard must it inevitably be to carry
on conservative policy without a conservative base
of operations at any point of the compass. Oliver
had reproached his parliament with making them-
selves a shade under which weeds and nettles, briars
and thorns, had thriven. They were like a man, he
told them, who should protest about his liberty of

351

352 OLIVER CROMWELL

walking abroad, or his right to take a journey,
when all the time his house was in a blaze. The
conspiracies against public order and the founda-
tions of it were manifold. A serious plot for the
Protector's assassination had been brought to light
in the summer of 1654, and Gerard and Vowel, two
of the conspirators, had been put to death for it.
They were to fall upon him as he took his customary
ride out from Whitehall to Hampton Court on a
Saturday afternoon. The king across the water
was aware of Gerard's design, and encouraged him
in it in spite of some of his advisers who thought
assassination impolitic. It was still a device in
the manners of the age, and Oliver's share in the
execution of the king was taken, in many minds to
whom it might otherwise have been repugnant, in
his case to justify sinister retaliation.

The schisms created in the republican camp by
the dispersion of the old parliament and the erection
of the Protectorate, naturally kindled new hopes
in the breasts of the royalists. Charles, with the
sanguine credulity common to pretenders, encour-
aged them. If those, he told them, who wished
the same thing only knew each other's mind, the
work would be done without any difficulty. The
only condition needed was a handsome appearance
of a rising in one place, and then the rest would
assuredly not sit still. All through the last six
months of 1654 the royalists were actively at work,
under the direction of leaders at home in com-
munication with Charles abroad. With the new
year, their hopes began to fade. The division
common to all conspiracies broke out between the
bold men and the prudent men. The royalist
council in England, known as the Sealed Knot,
told the king in February that things were quite
unripe : that no rising in the army was to be looked
for, and this had been the mainstay of their hopes ;
that the fleet was for the usurper ; that insurrec-

ABORTIVE RISINGS 353

tion would be their own destruction, and the con-
solidation of their foes. The fighting section on
the other hand were equally ready to charge the
Sealed Knot with being cold and backward. They
pressed the point that Cromwell had full knowledge
of the plot and of the men engaged in it, and that
it would be harder for him to crush them now than
later. Time would enable him to compose quarrels
in his army, as he had so often composed them
before. In the end the king put himself in the
hands of the forward men, the conspiracy was
pushed on, and at length in March the smouldering
fire broke into a flickering and feeble flame. This
is not the only time that an abortive and insig-
nificant rising has proved to be the end of a wide-
spread and dangerous combination. In Ireland we
have not seldom seen the same, just as in the
converse way formidable risings have followed what
looked like insignificant conspiracies.

The Yorkshire royalists met on the historic
ground of Marston Moor, and reckoned on surpris-
ing York with four thousand men : when the time
came, a hundred made their appearance, and in
despair they flung away their arms and dispersed.
In Northumberland the cavaliers were to seize
Newcastle and Tynemouth, but here too less than
a hundred of them ventured to the field. At
Rufford in Sherwood Forest there was to have been
a gathering of several hundreds, involving gentle-
men of consequence ; but on the appointed day,
though horses and arms were ready, the country
would not stir. At midnight the handful cried in
a fright that they were betrayed, and made off
as fast as they could. Designs were planned in
Staffordshire, Cheshire, Shropshire, but they came
to nothing, and not a blow was struck. Every
county in England, said Thurloe, instead of rising
for them would have risen against them. The
Protector, he declared, if there had been any need,

2A

354 OLIVER CROMWELL

could have drawn into the field within fourteen
days, twenty thousand men, besides the standing
army. " So far are they mistaken who dream that
the affections of this people are towards the House
of Stuart." 1

The only momentary semblance of success was
what is known as Penruddock's rising in the west.
A band of Wiltshire royalists rode into Salisbury,
seized in their beds the judges who happened to be
on circuit, and the wilder blades were even for
hanging them. But they could not get the greasy
caps flung up for King Charles in Wilts, nor did
better success await them in Dorset and Somerset.
They were never more than four hundred. Even
these numbers soon dwindled, and within three or
four days a Cromwellian captain broke in upon
them at South Molton, took most of them prisoners,
and the others made off. Wagstaffe, one of the
two principals, escaped to Holland, and Penruddock,
the other, was put upon his trial along with a
number of his confederates. It is curious that this
was the first time that treason against the govern-
ment had been submitted to juries since 1646, and
the result justified the confident hopes of a good
issue. Thirty-nine offenders were condemned, but
some of them Cromwell reprieved, " his course,"
says Thurloe, " being to use lenity rather than
severity." Only some fourteen or fifteen suffered
death, including Penruddock.

In the army, though there was no disaffection,
a mutinous section was little less busy than the
royalists. Harrison, who had been in charge of
King Charles on his fatal journey from Hurst Castle
to Windsor, was now himself sent a prisoner to
Carisbrooke. Wildman, who had been one of the
extremist agitators so far back as 1647, was arrested,
and the guard found him writing a " declaration of

1 March 16, 1655. See Mr. Firth's examination of the rising in Eng.
Hist. Rev., 1888, pp. 323-350 ; 1889, pp. 313-338, 525-535.

ROYALIST PLOTS 355

the free and well-affected people of England now in
arms against the tyrant Oliver Cromwell, Esquire."
It is no irrational document on the face of it, being
little more than a restatement of the aims of the
revolution for twelve years past. But it is not
always palatable for men in power to be confronted
with their aims in opposition.

The Protector spared no money in acquiring in-
formation. He expended immense sums in secret
service, and little passed in the royalist camp
abroad that was not discovered by the agents of
Thurloe. Cecil and Walsingham were not more
vigilant, or more successful in their watch over
the safety of Elizabeth, than was Cromwell's wise,
trusty, and unwearied Secretary of State. Plotters
were so amazed how the Lord Protector came to
hear of all the things contrived against him, that
they fell back on witchcraft and his familiarity with
the devil. A gentleman got leave to travel, and
had an interview with the king at Cologne one
evening after dark. On his return, he saw the
Protector, who asked him if he had kept his promise
not to visit Charles Stuart. The gentleman an-
swered that he had. But who was it, asked Crom-
well, that put out the candles when you saw Charles
Stuart ? He further startled the traveller by asking
whether Charles had not sent a letter by him. The
gentleman denied, Cromwell took his hat, found a
letter sewn up in the lining of it, and sent him to
the Tower. Cromwell's informant was one Manning,
and this transaction was his ruin. The royalists at
Cologne suspected him, his rooms were searched,
his cyphers discovered, and his correspondence read.
Manning then made a clean breast of it, and excused
his treason by his necessities, and the fact that he
was to have twelve hundred pounds a year from
Cromwell for his work. His only chance of life was
a threat of retaliation by Cromwell on some royalist
in prison in England, but this was not forthcoming,

356 OLIVER CROMWELL

and Manning was shot dead by two gentlemen of
the court in a wood near Cologne.

On every side the government struck vigorous
blows. Especial watch was kept upon London.
Orders were sent to the ports to be on guard against
surprise, and to stop suspected persons. The mili-
tary forces were strengthened. Gatherings were put
down. Many arbitrary arrests were made among
minor persons and major ; and many were sent to
Barbadoes to a condition of qualified slavery. The
upright and blameless Overton was arbitrarily flung
into prison without trial, kept there for three years,
and not released until after Cromwell's death and
the revival of parliament. When that day arrived,
both Thurloe and Barkstead, the governor of the
Tower, quaked for the strong things that they had
done on the personal authority of the Protector.
The stories that came to be told in 1659 are a
considerable deduction from Burke's praise of the
admirable administration of the law under Crom-
well. But though there was lawless severity, it did
not often approach ferocity.

Subterranean plots and the risings of hot-headed
country gentlemen were not all that Cromwell and
the Council had to encounter. The late parliament
had passed no adequate vote of money. The govern-
ment fell back upon its power of raising taxes by
ordinance. The validity of the ordinance was dis-
puted ; the judges inclined to hold the objections
good ; and it looked for a moment as if a general
refusal to pay customs and excise might bring the
whole financial fabric to the ground. The three
counsel for Cony, the merchant who had declined
to pay the customs dues, were summoned before the
Protector and the Council of State. After hearing
what they had to say, Oliver signed a warrant for
their committal to the Tower for using words tend-
ing to sedition and subversive of the government.
Violation of the spirit and letter of the law could

CHAP, m QUARRELS WITH THE COURTS 357

go no further. They were soon set free, and Crom-
well bore them no malice, but people not unreason-
ably saw in the proceeding a strong resemblance to
the old Star Chamber. The judges were sent for,
and humbly said something about Magna Charta.
The Protector scoffed at Magna Charta with a mock
too coarse for modern manners, declared that it
should not control actions which he knew to be
required by public safety, reminded them that it
was he who made them judges, and bade them no
more to suffer the lawyers to prate what it would
not become them to hear. The judges may have
been wrong either in their construction of the
Instrument, or in their view that a section of the
Instrument did not make a good law. But the
committal of three counsel to prison by the execu-
tive, because their arguments were too good to be
convenient, was certainly not good law whatever
else it was. Judges who proved not complaisant
enough were displaced. Sir Peter Wentworth, who
had tried to brave Cromwell at the breaking up of
the Long Parliament, tried to brave him now by
bringing a suit against the tax-collector. The Pro-
tector haled him before the Council ; Wentworth
said that he had been moved by his constant prin-
ciple that no money could be levied but by consent
of parliament. Cromwell commanded him to drop
his suit, and Wentworth submitted.

The Protector never shrank in these days from
putting his defence in all its breadth. " If nothing
should be done," he said with scorn, " but what is
according to law, the throat of the nation may be
cut while we send for some one to make a law. It
is a pitiful notion to think, though it be for ordinary
government to live by law and rule — yet if a govern-
ment in extraordinary circumstances go beyond the
law, it is to be clamoured at and blottered at."
Sometimes he was not afraid to state the tyrant's
plea even more broadly still. " The ground of

358 OLIVER CROMWELL

Necessity for justifying of men's actions, is above
all considerations of instituted law, and if this or any
other State should go about to make laws against
events, against what may happen, then I think it
is obvious to any man they will be making laws
against Providence : events and issues of things
being from God alone, to whom all issues belong."
As if all law were not in its essence a device against
contingent cases. Nevertheless these pious dis-
guises of what was really no more than common
reason of state, just as reason of state is always
used whether by bad men or by good, do not affect
the fact that Cromwell in his heart knew the value
of legality as well as anybody that ever held rule,
only he was the least fortunate of men in effecting
his aim.

" It was now," says Oliver, " we did find out a
little poor invention, which I hear has been much
regretted ; I say there was a little thing invented,
which was the erection of your Major- Generals."
This device had all the virtues of military simplicity.
In the summer and autumn of 1655, England and
Wales were mapped out into a dozen districts.
Over each district was planted a major-general,
Lambert, Desborough, Fleetwood, Skippon, Whalley ,
Barkstead, Goffe, and the rest, all picked veterans
and the trustiest of them. Their first duties were
those of high police, to put down unlawful assemblies
by force ; to disarm papists and persons dangerous
to the peace of the nation ; to exact a bond from
any householder considered to be disaffected for
the good behaviour of his servants, and the servants
were to appear before the major-general or his
deputy wherever and whenever called upon. Per-
sons in this category were to be registered, and if
they changed their abode, the major-general was to
be informed. Anybody coming from beyond the
sea was to report himself, and his later movements
were to be followed and recorded. The major-

CHAP, m DECIMATION AND REPRESSION 359

general was further to keep a sharp eye upon
scandalous ministers, and to see that no disaffected
person should take any share in the education of
youth.

All this, however, was the least material part of
the new policy. The case for the change rested on
the danger of more daring plots and more import-
ant risings, the inadequateness of local justices and
parish constables, the need of the central govern-
ment for hands and eyes of its own, finally on the
shadows of division in the army. There were those
in the late parliament who thought the peril incon-
siderable, but Thurloe tells us that " his Highness
saw a necessity of raising more force, and in every
county, unless he would give up his cause to the
enemy." This involved a new standing militia for
all the counties of England, and that again involved
a new money charge. " What so just as to put the
charge upon those whose disaffection was the cause
of it ? ' Such a plan needed no more than the
" decimation " of those against whom, after per-
sonal inquisition made, they chose to set the mark
of delinquency or disaffection. From such persons
they were instructed to exact one-tenth of their
annual income. For these exactions there was no
pretence of law ; nor could they be brought into
the courts, the only appeal being to the Protector
in Council. The parliament had been dissolved
for meddling with the Instrument of Government.
Yet all this was contrary to the Instrument. The
scheme took some time to complete, but by the
last three months of 1655 it was in full operation.

Two other remarkable measures of repression
belong to this stern epoch. An edict was passed
for securing the peace of the Commonwealth (Nov-
ember 1655), ordering that no ejected clergyman
should be kept in any gentleman's house as chaplain
or tutor, or teach in a school, or baptize, or cele-
brate marriages, or use the Prayer Book. That

360 OLIVER CROMWELL

this was a superfluity of rigour is shown by the
fact that it was never executed. It is probable
that other measures of the time went equally
beyond the real necessities of the crisis, for ex-
perience shows that nothing is ever so certain to
be overdone as the policy of military repression
against civil disaffection. The second measure was
still more significant of the extent to which despotic
reaction was going in the methods of the govern-
ment. Orders were issued that no person what-
ever do presume to publish in print any matter
of public news or intelligence without leave of the
Secretary of State. The result of this was to
reduce the newspaper press in the capital of the
country to a single journal coming out twice a
week under two different names. Milton was still
Latin Secretary, and it was only eleven years since
the appearance of his immortal plea for unlicensed
printing.

" Our ministers are bad," one of the major-
generals reports in 1655, 4t our magistrates idle,
and the people all asleep." The new authorities set
resolutely to work. They appointed Commissioners
to assess the decimation of delinquents, not how-
ever without constant reference to the Protector
and Council for directions how individuals were to
be dealt with. The business of taxing the cavaliers
in this high manner was " of wonderful acceptation
to all the parliament party, and men of all opinions
joined heartily therein." That men of one opinion
should heartily rejoice at the compulsory exaction
of rates and taxes from men of another opinion, is
in accord with human nature : not that the activity
of the major-generals prevented the imposition of
a general property-tax in 1656. The cavaliers sub-
mitted with little ado. Wider irritation was created
by stringent interference with ale-houses, bear-
baiting, and cock-fighting. Lord Exeter came to
ask Whalley whether he would allow the Lady

CHAP, in DECIMATION AND REPRESSION 361

Grantham cup to be run for at Lincoln, for if so,
he would start a horse. " I assured him," reports
Whalley to the Protector, " that it was not your
Highness' intention in the suppressing of horse-
races, to abridge gentlemen of that sport, but to
prevent the great confluences of irreconcilable
enemies " ; and Exeter had his race. Profane and
idle gentry whose lives were a shame to a Christian
Commonwealth were hunted out, and the govern-
ment were adjured to banish them. " We have
imprisoned here," writes the choleric major-general
in Shropshire, " divers lewd fellows, some for having
a hand in the plot, others of dissolute life, as persons
dangerous to the peace of the nation : amongst
others those papists who went a-hunting when they
were sent for by Major Waring ; they are desperate
persons, and divers of them fit to grind sugar-cane
or plant tobacco, and if some of them were sent
into the Indies, it would do much good." One
personage when reprimanded warned the major-
general that if he were sent to prison it would
cause the godly to pour forth prayers and tears
before the Lord. The officer staunchly replied that
thousands of men in tears would never disquiet
him, if he knew that he was doing his duty in the
way of Providence.

The only defence of reason of state is success,
and here the result soon proved to be not success
but failure. While so many individuals and orders
were exasperated, no great class of society was
reconciled. Rigid order was kept, plotters were
cowed, money was squeezed, but the keenest dis-
content was quickened in all those various organ-
ised bodies of men with lively minds and energetic
interests, by whom in the long run effective public
opinion in every community is generated. Oliver
must soon have seen that his change of system
would inevitably cut up his policy of healing and
conciliation by its roots.

CHAPTER IV

THE REACTION

WANT of money has ever been the wholesome check
on kings, on parliaments, on cabinets, and now in
his turn it pinched the Protector. In spite of the
decimation screw, the militia often went short of
their pay, and suffered both trouble and jeers in
consequence. Apart from the cost of domestic
administration, Cromwell had embarked, as we
shall see, on a course of intervention abroad ; and
he was soon in the same straits as those against
which Strafford had long ago warned his master, as
the sure result of a foreign policy to be paid for by
discontented subjects. In June 1656, the Protector
held a conference with his Council and some of the
principal officers of the army. There were those
who advised him to raise money on his own direct
authority by forced loans or general taxation.
There is reason to suppose that Cromwell himself
leaned this way, for before long he chid the officers
for urging the other course. The decision, however,
was taken to call a new parliament.

The election that went forward during the
summer of 1656 had all the rough animation of
the age, and well deserves consideration. Thurloe
writes to Henry Cromwell that there is the greatest
striving to get into parliament that ever was known ;
every faction is bestirring itself with all its might ;
and all sorts of discontented people are incessant in
their endeavours. The major-generals on their side

362

CHAP, iv THE GENERAL ELECTION 363

were active in electioneering arts, and their firmly
expressed resignation to the will of over-ruling
Providence did not hinder the most alert wire-
pulling. They pressed candidates of the right
colour, and gave broad hints as to any who were
not sober and suitable to the present work. Every
single major-general was himself a candidate and
was elected. At Dover the rabble were strong for
Cony, who had fought the case of the customs dues,
and the major-general thought him likely to be
elected unless he could be judiciously " secluded."
At Preston, once the scene of perhaps the most
critical of all Cromwell's victories, the major-general
expected much thwarting, through the peevishness
of friends and the disaffection of enemies. In
Norwich an opposition preacher of great popularity
was forbidden to go into the pulpit. A sharp eye
was kept upon all printed matter finding its way
through the post. Whalley reports that the heart
is sound in what he calls the mediterranean part
of the nation ; people know that money will be
wanted by the government, but they will not
grudge it as the price of a settlement. At the same
time he is unhappy lest Colonel Hutchinson or Sir
Arthur Haselrig should get in, just as his superiors
dreaded the return of Serjeant Bradshaw and Sir
Henry Vane. Desborough is uneasy about the
west, but he makes it his business to strengthen
the hands of the honest sober people, leaving the
issue to the wise Disposer.

Norfolk was one of the most alarming cases.
ic If other counties should do as this," says the
major-general, " it would be a sufficient alarum to
stand upon our guard, the spirit of the people being
most strangely heightened and moulded into a very
great aptness to take the first hint for an insurrec-
tion, and the county especially so disposed may
most probably begin the scene." He suggests that
preparations for calling out the militia would be

364 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOKV

a sensible encouragement for the friends of the
government. At Ipswich, when the writ was read,
somebody rose and complained of the reference to
his Highness's parliament ; the king had never called
it his parliament ; and such an innovation should
be a warning not to vote for swordmen nor for
the Protector's friends ; thereupon another called
out that they were all his friends. One opposition
candidate assured his audience that his Highness
had sent for 3000 Swiss to be his bodyguard ; that
he had secretly sold the trade of England to the
Dutch, and would grant no convoy from Holland ;
that most of the counties in England would bring
up their numbers in thousands, in spite of Oliver
and his redcoats ; and that he would wager his life
that not five hundred in the whole army would
resist them. Another cry was that the free people
of England would have no more swordmen, no
more decimators, nor anybody in receipt of a salary
from the State.

" On Monday last," writes Goffe, " I spoke with
Mr. Cole of Southampton, whom I find to be a
perfect leveller — he is called by the name of Common
Freedom. He told me he was where he was, and
where the army was seven years ago, and pulled
out of his pocket the Agreement of the People. He
told me he would promise me not to disperse any
of those books, and that it was his intention to
live peaceable, for that he knew a war was not so
easily ended as begun. Whereupon with the best
exhortation I could give him, I dismissed him for
the present. . . . Mr. Cole is very angry at the
Spanish war, and saith we deal most ungratefully
with them, for that they were so civil to us in the
time of our late difference, and that all our trade
will be lost."

An energetic manifesto was put out against the
government, stating with unusual force the reasons
why dear Christian friends and brethren should

CHAP, iv AN OPPOSITION MANIFESTO 365

bestir themselves in a day of trouble, rebuke, and
blasphemy ; why they should make a stand for the
pure principles of free-born Englishmen against the
power and pomp of any man, however high he might
bear himself. Half the books in the Old Testament
are made to supply examples and warnings, and
Hezekiah and Sennacherib, Jethro and Moses,
Esther, Uzzah, Absalom, are all turned into lessons
of what a voter should do or abstain from doing.
The whole piece gives an instructive glimpse of the
state of mind of the generation. Earnest remon-
strances are addressed to those who think that God
has gone out of parliaments, and that the time for
Christ's kingdom is come. Others hold that the
Protector had at least given them liberty of con-
science in worshipping God, a thing worth all else
put together, and a thing that parliament might
very likely take away. Some again insist that
elections are of no purpose, because the Protector
with his redcoats will very soon either make mem-
bers do what he wants, or else pack them off home
again. All these partisans of abstention — the des-
pair of party managers in every age — are faithfully
dealt with, and the manifesto closes with the
hackneyed asseverations of all oppositions ancient
and modern, that if only the right sort of parliament
were returned burdens would be eased, trade would
revive, and the honour of the country now lying
in the dust among all nations would be immediately
restored. Did not their imprisoned friends speak ?
Did not their banished neighbours speak ? Did not
their infringed rights speak ? Did not their in-
vaded properties speak ? Did not their affronted
representatives, who had been trodden upon with
scorn, speak ? Did not the blood of many thou-
sands speak, some slain with the sword, others
killed with hunger — witness Jamaica ? Did not
the cries of their honest seamen speak, the wall
and bulwark of our nation, and now so barbarously

366 OLIVER CROMWELL

forced from wives and children, to serve the ambi-
tions and fruitless designs of one man ?

By way of antidote, the major-generals were
armed with letters from the Protector and instruc-
tions from Thurloe, and any one found in possession
of a bundle of the seditious documents was quickly
called to sharp account. Earlier in the summer
Sir Henry Vane had put out a pamphlet without
his name, which at first was popular, and then on
second thoughts was found impracticable, because
it simply aimed at the restoration of the Long
Parliament. Vane was haled before the Council
(21st August), where he admitted the writing and
publishing of the Healing Question, though in dark
and mysterious terms, as his manner was. He was
ordered to give security, refused, and was sent to
prison at Carisbrooke, where he lay until the end
of the year. An attempt was made to punish
Bradshaw by removing him from his office of Chief
Justice of Cheshire, but the Council changed their
mind. The well-directed activity of the major-
general was enough to prevent Bradshaw's return
for that county, and he failed elsewhere. So the
Protector was free of those who passed for the two
leading incendiaries.

The parliament met in September 1656, and
Oliver addressed it in one of his most characteristic
speeches. He appealed at great length to the
hatred of Spain, on the standing ground of its
bondage to the Pope ; for its evil doings upon
Englishmen in the West Indies, for its espousal of
the Stuart interest. Then he turned to the unholy
friendliness at home between papists, all of them
" Spaniolised," and cavaliers ; between some of
the republicans and the royalists ; between some of
the Commonwealth men and some of the mire and
dirt thrown up by the revolutionary waters. He
recalled all the plots and the risings and attempted
risings, and warned them against the indolent sup-

OH. iv CROMWELL'S SECOND PARLIAMENT 367

position that such things were no more than the
nibbling of a mouse at one's heel. For the
major - generals and their decimation of royalist
delinquents, he set up a stout defence. Why
was it not righteous to make that party pay for
the suppression of disorder, which had made the
charge necessary ? Apart from the mere pre-
servation of the peace, was it not true that the
major-generals had been more effectual for dis-
countenancing vice and settling religion than any-
thing done these fifty years ? The mark of the
cavalier interest was profaneness, disorder, and
wickedness ; the profane nobility and gentry, that
was the interest that his officers had been engaged
against. " If it lives in us, I say, if it be in the
general heart, it is a thing I am confident our
liberty and prosperity depend upon — reformation
of manners. By this you will be more repairer of
breaches than by anything in the world. Truly
these things do respect the souls of men and the
spirits — which are the men. The mind is the man.
If that be kept pure, a man signifies somewhat ; if
not, I would very fain see what difference there is
between him and a beast."

In the mighty task that was laid upon them, it
was no neutral or Laodicean spirit that would do.
With the instinct of a moral leader, with something
more than trick of debate or a turn for tactics,
Cromwell told them, " Doubting, hesitating men,
they are not fit for your work. You must not
expect that men of hesitating spirits, under the
bondage of scruples, will be able to carry on this
work. Do not think that men of this sort will ever
rise to such a spiritual heat for the nation as shall
carry you a cause like this ; as will meet all the
oppositions that the devil and wicked men can
make." Then he winds up with three high passages
from the Psalms, with no particular bearing on
their session, but in those days well fitted to exalt

368 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOKV

men's hearts, and surrounding temporal anxieties
of the hour with radiant visions from another sphere
for edification of the diviner mind.

Of the real cause of their assembling, deficit and
debt, the Protector judiciously said little. As he
observed of himself on another occasion — and the
double admission deserves to be carefully marked
— he was not much better skilled in arithmetic
than he was in law, and his statement of accounts
would certainly not satisfy the standards of a
modern exchequer. Incapacity of legal apprehen-
sion, and incapacity in finance, are a terrible draw-
back in a statesman with a new state to build.
Before business began, the Protector took precau-
tions after his own fashion against the opposition
critics. He and the Council had already pondered
the list of members returned to the parliament,
and as the gentlemen made their way from the
Painted Chamber to their House, soldiers were
found guarding the door. There was no attempt
to hide the iron hand in velvet glove. The clerk of
the Commonwealth was planted in the lobby with
certificates of the approval of the Council of State.
Nearly a hundred found no such tickets, and for
them there was no admission. This strong act of
purification was legal under the Instrument, and
the House, when it was reported, was content with
making an order that the persons shut out should
apply to the Council for its approbation. The ex-
cluded members, of whose fidelity to his govern-
ment Cromwell could not be sure, comprised a
faithful remnant of the Long Parliament ; and they
and others, ninety-three in number, signed a re-
monstrance in terms that are a strident echo of the
protests that had so often been launched in old
days against the king. Vehemently they denounced
the practice of the tyrant to use the name of God
and religion and formal fasts and prayer, to colour
the blackness of the fact ; and to command one

OH. iv PARLIAMENTARY REMONSTRANCE 369

hundred, two hundred, or three hundred to depart,
and to call the rest a parliament by way of counte-
nancing his oppression. The present assembly at
Westminster, they protested, sits under the daily
awe and terror of the Lord Protector's armed men,
not daring to consult or debate freely the great con-
cernments of their country, nor daring to oppose his
usurpation and oppression, and no such assembly
can be the representative body of England. We
may be sure that if such was the temper of nearly
one - fourth of a parliament that was itself just
chosen under close restrictions, this remonstrance
gives a striking indication of how little way had
even yet been made by Cromwell in converting
popular opinion to his support.

2B

CHAPTER V

CHANGE OF TACK

THE parliament speedily showed signs that, win-
nowed and sifted as it had been, and loyally as it
always meant to stand to the person of the Protector,
yet like the Long Parliament, like the Barebones
Convention, and like the first parliament under the
Instrument, all of them one after another banished
in disgrace, it was resolved not to be a cypher in
the constitution, but was full of that spirit of cor-
porate self-esteem without which any parliament
is a body void of soul. The elections had taught
them that the rule of the swordmen and the
decimators was odious even to the honest party in
the country. Oliver anxiously watching the signs
of public feeling had probably learned the same
lesson, that his major-generals were a source of
weakness and not of strength to his government.
The hour had come when the long struggle between
army and parliament which in various forms had
covered nine troubled years, was to enter a fresh
and closing phase. The nation whether royalist or
puritan had shown itself as a whole bitterly averse
to the transformation of the ancient realm of
England into a military state, and with this aver-
sion, even from the early days of barrack debates
at Windsor and Putney, Oliver was in perfect sym-
pathy. Neither the habitudes of the camp, nor
the fact that his own power, which he rightly
identified with public order, had always depended

370

CHAP, v CASE OF JAMES NAYLOR 371

and must still depend upon the army, dulled his
instinct or weakened his desire that the three king-
doms should be welded, not into a soldier state,
but into a civil constitution solidly reposing on its
acceptance by the nation. We cannot confidently
divine the workings of that capacious, slow, and
subtle mind, but this quickened perception seems
to be the key to the dramatic episode that was
now approaching.

The opportunity for disclosing the resolve of the
parliament to try a fall with the military power
soon came. It was preceded by an incident that
revealed one of the dangers, so well known to
Oliver, and viewed by him with such sincere alarm,
as attending any kind of free parliament whether
this or another. The general objects of the new
parliament of 1656, like the objects of its immediate
predecessor of 1654, were to widen the powers of
parliament, to limit those of the Protector, to curb
the soldiers, and finally, although this was kept in
discreet shade, to narrow the area of religious
tolerance. A test of tolerance occurred almost at
once. Excesses of religious emotion were always
a sore point with protestant reformers, for all such
excesses seemed a warrant for the bitter predictions
of the catholics at the Reformation, that to break
with the church was to open the floodgates of
extravagance and blasphemy in the heart of un-
regenerate man. Hence nobody was so infuriated
as the partisan of private judgment, with those who
carried private judgment beyond a permitted point.

James Naylor was an extreme example of the
mystics whom the hard children of this world
dismiss as crazy fanatics. For several years he
had fought with good repute in the parliamentary
army, and he was present on the memorable day
of Dunbar. Then he joined George Fox, by and
by carried Quaker principles to a higher pitch, and
in time gave to his faith a personal turn by allowing

372 OLIVER CROMWELL

enthusiastic disciples to salute him as the Messiah.
In October 1656 he rode into Bristol, attended by
a crowd of frantic devotees, some of them casting
branches on the road, all chanting loud hosannas,
several even vowing that he had miraculously raised
them from the dead. For his share in these trans-
actions, Naylor was brought before a committee
of parliament. No sworn evidence was taken.
Nobody proved that he had spoken a word. The
worst that could be alleged was that he had taken
part in a hideous parody. The House found that
he was guilty of blasphemy, that he was a grand
impostor, and a seducer of the people. It was
actually proposed to inflict the capital sentence,
and the offender only escaped death by a majority
of fourteen, in a division of a hundred and seventy-
eight members. The debate lasted over many days.
The sentence finally imposed was this : — To stand
in the pillory two hours at Westminster ; to be
whipped by the hangman from Westminster to the
old Exchange, and there to undergo another two
hours of pillory ; to have his tongue bored through
with a hot iron ; to be branded on the brow with
the letter B ; then to be sent to Bristol, carried on
a horse barebacked with his face to the tail, and
there again whipped in the market-place ; thence
to be brought back to London, to be put into
solitary confinement with hard labour during the
pleasure of parliament, without use of pen, ink, or
paper. So hideous a thing could puritanism be, so
little was there in many respects to choose between
the spirit of Laud and the hard hearts of the people
who cut off Laud's head.

Cromwell showed his noblest quality. The year
before, he had interposed by executive act to
remove John Biddle, charged with Socinian heresy,
from the grasp of the courts. Cromwell denounced
the blasphemy of denying the godhead of Jesus
Christ, but he secluded Biddle from harm by send-

CHAP, v DEFEAT OF MAJOR-GENERALS 373

ing him to Scilly with an allowance of ten shillings
a week and a supply of books. So now in Naylor's
case he hated the cruelty, and he saw the mischief
of the assumption by parliament of the function of
a court of law. The most ardent friends of parlia-
ment must still read with a lively thrill the words
that Oliver now addressed to the Speaker : " Having
taken notice of a judgment lately given by your-
selves against one James Naylor ; although we
detest and abhor the giving or occasioning the least
countenance to persons of such opinions and prac-
tice. . . . Yet we, being interested in the present
government on behalf of the people of these nations ;
and not knowing how far such proceeding, entered
into wholly without us, may extend in the conse-
quence of it — Do desire that the House will let us
know the grounds and reasons whereupon they have
proceeded " (Dec. 12, 1656). This rebuke notwith-
standing, the execrable sentence was carried out to
the letter. It galled Cromwell to find that under
the Instrument he had no power to interfere with
the parliamentary assumption of judicial attributes,
and this became an additional reason for that grand
constitutional revision which was now coming into
sight.

A few days after the disposal of Naylor, a bill
was brought in that raised the great question of
the major-generals, their arbitrary power, and their
unlawful decimations. By the new bill the system
was to be continued. The lawyers argued strongly
against it, and the members of the Council of State
and the major-generals themselves were of course
as strongly for it. The debate was long and heated,
for both sides understood that the issue was grave.
When the final division was takeri, the bill was
thrown out by a majority of 36 in a House of 212.
One curious result of the legislative union of the
three kingdoms of which the world has heard only
too much in later days, was now first noted. 4 The

374 OLIVER CROMWELL

major-generals are much offended at the Irish and
Scottish members, who, being much united, do sway
exceedingly by their votes. I hope it will be for
the best ; or if the proverb be true that the fox
fares best when he is curst, those that serve for
Ireland will bring home some good things for their
country." No catholics were either electors or
eligible, and the Irish who thus helped to hold
the balance were the colonists from England and
Scotland.

" Some gentlemen," Thurloe tells Henry Crom-
well, " do think themselves much trampled upon
by this vote against their bill, and are extremely
sensible thereof." That is to say, most of the
major-generals, with the popular and able Lambert
at their head, recognised that the vote was nothing
less than a formal decision against the army and its
influences. So bold a challenge from a parliament
in whose election and purification they had taken
so prominent a part roused sharp anger, and the
consequences of it were immediately visible in the
next and more startling move. Cromwell's share
in either this first event, or in that which now
followed, is as obscure as his share in the removal
of the king from Holmby, or in Pride's Purge, or in
the resolve to put Charles to death. The impression
among the leaders of the army undoubtedly seems
to have been that in allowing the recent vote, the
Lord Protector had in effect thrown his major-
generals over.

As we are always repeating to ourselves, Crom-
well from 1647 had shown himself ready to follow
events rather than go before. He was sometimes
a constitutional ruler, sometimes a dictator, some-
times the agent of the barrack, each in turn as
events appeared to point and to demand. Now he
reverted to the part of constitutional ruler. The
elections and the parliament showed him that the
"little invention" of the major-generals had been a

CHAP, v " KILLING NO MURDER " 375

mistake, but he was not so sure of this as to say
it. Ominous things happened. Desborough, his
brother-in-law, brought in the bill, but Claypole, his
son-in-law, was the first to oppose it. Another
kinsman in the House denounced the major-generals
roundly. People told him he would get a rating
when next he visited Whitehall. Nothing daunted,
he repaired to the Protector, and stood to what
he had said with papers to prove his case. His
Highness answered him with raillery, and taking a
rich scarlet cloak from his back and gloves from
his hands threw them to his kinsman (Henry
Cromwell), " who strutted in the House in his new
finery next day, to the great satisfaction and delight
of some, and trouble of others." Parliaments are
easily electrified by small incidents, and men felt
that a new chapter was about to open. It was
evident that Cromwell, who had only a few days
before so strongly defended the major-generals, was
now for sailing on a fresh tack.

About this time (May 1657) was published the
pamphlet with the famous title of Killing no Murder.
It sets out with truculent vigour the arguments for
death to tyrants, with a direct and deadly exhorta-
tion to apply them to the case of the Lord Protector.
The arguments had been familiar enough in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ; and though the
writer does not forget Ehud and Eglon, Jehoiada
and Athaliah, he has much to say from pagans like
Aristotle, Tacitus, Cicero, and Machiavelli. " Had
not his Highness," he says, " been fluent in his
tears and had a supple conscience ; and besides
had to do with a people of great faith but little
wit, his courage and the rest of his moral virtues,
with the help of his janissaries, had never been able
so far to advance him out of the reach of justice,
that we should have need to call for any other
hand to remove him but that of the hangman."
The royalists did not conceal their approval of this

376 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOKV

doctrine of dagger and pistol. It is a most excellent
treatise, says Nicholas, the king's Secretary of State.
Cromwell had no more right to law, they said, than
a wolf or a fox ; and the exiles found comfort in
telling one another that the Protector went about
in as much fright as Cain after he had murdered
Abel. A few weeks before this pungent incitement
began to circulate, its author had almost succeeded
in a design that would have made pamphlets super-
fluous. Sexby, whom Cromwell had described at
the opening of the new parliament as a wretched
creature, an apostate from all honour and honesty,
one of the republicans whom Oliver's later pro-
ceedings had turned into a relentless enemy, was
deep in plots with royalists abroad and even with
the Spaniards against the life of the Protector.
Diligent watch was kept upon Sexby, and for long
his foreign employers got nothing for their money.
At length he secured a confederate as determined
as himself and less well known to Thurloe's police,
in Miles Sindercombe, an old trooper of Monk's,
and a hater of tyrants rather after Roman than
Hebrew example. Sindercombe dogged the Pro-
tector with a pistol in his pocket, took a lodging in
the road between Whitehall and Hampton Court
where Oliver passed every week, offered bribes to
the guards, and at last his pertinacity came very
near to success in a plan for setting fire to the
Protector's apartments in Whitehall. He was
arrested, brought before a jury — a substantial body
of men, most of them justices of the peace — and
was condemned. He died in his bed in the Tower
the night before the execution. Sexby said that
the Governor had smothered him, but he afterwards
admitted that this was a fabrication. The evidence
went to show that some mineral poison had been
secretly conveyed to Sindercombe by three women
who had been allowed to visit him.

This dangerous plot was exploded in January

CHAP, v PLOTS 377

1657, and the Protector's narrow escape made a
profound impression on the public mind. It awoke
sober men, who are a majority in most countries
when opportunity gives them a chance, to the fact
that only Oliver's life stood between them and
either anarchy on the one hand, or a vindictive
restoration on the other. Another design of the
same sort came to light not long after. An obscure
design of a few score of the extreme Fifth Monarchy
men was discovered in the east of London in the
month of April. Venner, a cooper, was the leading
spirit ; his confederates were of mean station, and
they appear to have had the same organisation of
circles and centres that marks the more squalid of
modern secret societies. They had no coherent
political ideas, but they spoke desperate things
about the murder of the Protector, and Thurloe,
with the natural instinct of the head of a crim-
inal investigation department, was persuaded that
stronger hands and heads were in the plot, and
thought of Harrison, Rich, and Okey. The govern-
ment had long known all about it, and at the proper
moment laid its hand upon the plotters. The
opponents of the alterations in the government
professed to think that these alterations were the
source of the conspiracy, and tried to make a little
political capital out of the discontent which it
was supposed to indicate in the honest party. The
truth is, says the sage Thurloe, there is a sort of
men who will never rest so long as they see troubled
waters, and suppose a chance of carrying out their
foolish principles. Venner's plot was not of much
more serious consequence than the plot against
Charles II. for which the same Venner was hanged
four years later, but it now heightened the general
excitement.

The confusion of the sects may have involved less
direct political peril than some of the government
supposed, but it marked a social chaos without a

378 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOKV

parallel. Oliver was denounced as the Serpent, the
Beast, the Bastard of Ashdod. The saints, on the
other hand, were engaged on Life and Death to
stand or fall with the Lord Jesus, their Captain-
General on his Red Horse, against the Beast's
government. Cromwell was infinitely patient and
even sympathetic with the most fanatical of them.
He could not bear to quarrel with the brave and
open-hearted Harrison. He sent for him to White-
hall, gave him a handsome feast, and then dis-
charged the duty of a friend by admonishing him
to quit deceitful and slippery ways. Like the
sensible statesman that he was, he always liked to
carry as many of his old friends with him as he
could ; only if they would not go with him, then
he went on alone.

Towards 1654 the Quakers had entered into
history. It was indeed high time, for the worst of
puritanism seemed that in so many of its phases it
dropped out the Sermon on the Mount, and left
the best texts in the New Testament to Arianising
heretics. Militant puritanism was often only half-
Christian. Quakerism has undergone many develop-
ments, but in all of them it has been the most
devout of all endeavours to turn Christianity into
the religion of Christ. In uncouth phrases but with
glowing souls, they carried to its furthest point the
protest against outer form and ceremonial as degrad-
ing to the life of the spirit. They fell in with the
corresponding principle of antagonism to powers and
institutions as hindrances to human freedom. No
other sect so alarmed and exasperated the auth-
orities, for much the same military and political
reasons as had made statesmen persecute the Chris-
tian professors in the early days of imperial Rome.
Cromwell treated them as kindly as he could. He
listened in his chamber at Whitehall with attention
and emotion to one of George Fox's exhortations,
saying, " That is very good," or " That is true,"

CHAP, v CHAOS OF THE SECTS 379

and when they parted Cromwell said to him,
" Come again to my house ; if thou and I were
but an hour of the day together, we should be
nearer one to the other. I wish no more harm to
thee than I do to my own soul." When Fox lay
in prison, a friend went to Cromwell and begged to
be allowed to suffer in his stead. The Protector
answered that it was contrary to the law, " and
turning to his council, ' Which of you,' quoth he,
4 would do as much for me if I were in the same
condition ? '

Notwithstanding his own good-will, the Quakers
suffered much bitter usage from county justices,
from judges, and from military officers. The
Friends complained that justices delighted in tender-
ing to them the oath of abjuration, knowing that
they could not take it, and so designing to make a
spoil of them. " It was never intended for them,"
cried Oliver, " I never so intended it." When they
were harshly punished for refusing to pay their
tithe, Oliver disclaimed all share in such severities,
and assured them that all persecution and cruelty
was against his mind. Thurloe, on the other hand,
who represented that secular spirit which is so apt
to be the counterfeit of statesmanship, saw in the
Quakers foes of civil government, and regarded
them as the most serious enemies they had. The
chapter of Quaker persecution must be considered a
dark blot on the administration of the Protectorate,
though from no intention in Cromwell.

A curious interview is recorded (1654) between
the Protector and some of his angry critics. John
Rogers had denounced him from the pulpit, and
written pamphlets lamenting over Oliver, Lord
Cromwell, from that most useful of all texts, the
everlasting Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin; and for
these and other proceedings he was arrested.
Cromwell admitted Rogers and a crowd of followers
to an audience. Before they reached him they

380 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOKV

were struck, hustled, and abused as a pack of
cursed dogs and damned rogues by the guards
downstairs. When they came to the presence,
" The Great Man had with him two gentlemen
more, who stood by the fireside, and a pistol lay
prepared at the window where he himself at first
was. Then he came to the fireside in great majesty,
without moving or showing the least civility of
a man, though all stood bare to him and gave
respect." Cromwell listened to them with rough
good-nature, trying with homely banter to bring
them to the point. " I believe you speak many
things according to the Gospel, but what you suffer
for is railing and evil-doing," and so forth, like a
good-humoured police magistrate trying to bring
street preachers to reason for blocking the thorough-
fare.

Even with Anglicanism, he was, in spite of the
ordinance of 1656, for fair play. A deputation of
London ministers waited upon the Protector and
complained that the episcopal clergy got their con-
gregations away from them. " Have they so ? " said
Oliver, making as if he would say something to
the captain of the guard. " But hold," said he,
" after what manner do the cavaliers debauch your
people ? " " By preaching," said the ministers.
" Then preach back again," said Oliver, and so left
them to their reflections. Yet Cromwell's tolerance
did not prevent a major-general from sending the
harmless and virtuous Jeremy Taylor arbitrarily to
prison.

Cromwell's importance in church history has been
said to rest on this, that he brought anabaptism or
enthusiasm, one of the marked epochs of that
history, to its close. " In him, its greatest leader,
anabaptism reaches its climax, and yet it is by his
action that anabaptism ceases to be a historic force.
Henceforth it loses the universal significance that
it has possessed for two centuries. Its political,

CHAP, v CROMWELL AND THE SECTS 381

like its general reforming influence, is at an
end, and its religious inspirations close." l When
Mazarin (1656) pressed for the same toleration for
catholics in England as was asked for protestants
abroad, the Protector replied that he believed
Mazarin had less reason to complain of rigour on
men's consciences under him than under the parlia-
ment. " And herein it is my purpose as soon as
I can remove impediments to make a further pro-
gress," but " I may not (shall I tell you I cannot)
at this juncture of time answer your call for tolera-
tion ; I say I cannot, as to a public declaration
of my sense on that point." As constable of the
parish Cromwell's power was only limited by the
council of officers, but national leadership in the
field of opinion he did not possess. In 1655 a
retrograde proclamation was issued for the execu-
tion of the laws against Jesuits and priests, and
for the conviction of popish recusants. Sensible
men like Whitelocke protested that it was not
needed, and little came of it. In 1651 Peter Wright,
a priest, was hanged, drawn, and quartered at
Tyburn, along with a group of ordinary criminals,
for seducing the people, and in 1654 another priest,
John Southworth, an old man of seventy-two,
suffered the same fate for the same offence. In
1657 the independents, whose political existence
had begun with their protest for toleration, passed
an act by which anybody over sixteen suspected of
being a papist might be called upon to abjure the
leading articles of catholic belief, and if he failed
to purge himself should forfeit two-thirds of his
property. From this flagitious law the Protector did
not withhold his assent. It was one of the last legis-
lative performances of the Cromwellian parliament.
The Jews had been banished by law from England
since the end of the thirteenth century, yet it is
pretty certain that their presence was not entirely

1 Weingarten, p. 158.

382 OLIVER CROMWELL

unknown in either country or town. Shakespeare
and Marlowe had made dark figures of them on
the stage, though Shakespeare's glorious humanity
had put into the mouth of Shylock one of the most
pathetic appeals in all literature against the cruelty
of racial and theologic hate. Puritanism itself was
impregnated with ideas, language, argument, and
history, all borrowed from Jewish antiquity and
sacred books. Roger Williams, most unswerving of
the advocates of toleration, argued strongly for
breaking down the wall of superstition between
Jew and Gentile. Stern men like Whalley saw
reasons both of religion and policy why Jews should
be admitted, for they would bring much wealth
into the state, and they would be all the more
likely to be converted. Cromwell with great earnest-
ness held the same view, yet though the question
was debated candidly and without heat, opinion in
his Council was divided. In the end all that he
felt himself able to do was to grant a certain
number of private dispensations to individuals, and
to connive at a small synagogue and a cemetery.
It was enough to show him on the side of freedom,
pity, and light. But the tolerance of the puritanism
around him was still strictly limited. It would be
graceless indeed to under - estimate or forget the
debt we owe to both Quakers and independents :
they it was who at a critical time made liberty of
conscience a broad, an actual, and a fighting issue.
Yet it was from a rising spirit of rationalism, and
neither from liberal Anglicans like Taylor, nor from
liberal puritans like Cromwell and Milton, that the
central stream of toleration flowed, with strength
enough in time to mitigate law and pervade opinion
in the nation.

CHAPTER VI

KINGSHIP

" HE entered the sanctuary," says Cardinal de Retz
of a French politician, " he lifted the veil that
should always cover everything that can be said
or can be believed, as to the right of peoples and
the right of kings — rights that never agree so well
together as in unbroken silence." This was the
root of the difficulties that for nine years baffled
the energy of Cromwell. The old monarchy had a
mystic as well as a historical foundation. The
soldier's monarchy, though Cromwell believed it to
rest upon the direct will of heaven, yet could only
be established on positive and practical founda-
tions, and these must of necessity be laid in face of
jealous discussion, without the curtain of convention
to screen the builders.

Meanwhile a new and striking scene was open-
ing. The breakdown of military rule, consternation
caused by plot upon plot, the fact that four years
of dictatorship had brought settlement no nearer,
all gave an irresistible impetus to the desire to try
fresh paths. Sir Christopher Packe, an active and
influential representative of the city of London
and once Lord Mayor, startled the House one day
(Feb. 23, 1657) by asking leave to bring forward a
proposal for a new government, in which the chief
magistrate was to take upon himself the title of
king, and the parliament was to consist of two
Houses. Violent controversy immediately broke

383

384 OLIVER CROMWELL

out, and Packe was even hustled to the bar to
answer for his boldness. The storm quickly died
down ; he had only precipitated a move for which
the mind of the House was ready ; leave was given
to read his paper ; and the Humble Petition and
Advice, as that paper came in time to be called,
absorbed the whole attention of the public for four
months to come.

That Cromwell should have had no share in such
a step as this may seem incredible in view of the
immense power in his hands, and of his supreme
command over popular imagination. Yet the whole
proceeding was obviously a censure of some of his
most decisive acts. He had applauded the Instru-
ment of Government that had made him Protector.
The Instrument was now to be remodelled, if not
overthrown. He had broken the first parliament
of the Protectorate for wasting its time on constitu-
tional reform ; yet constitutional reform was the
very task that his second parliament was now
setting about more earnestly than ever. He had
tried government by major-generals, and exacted
taxes for which no sanction was given by law.
That system was swept away, and in the new pro-
ject a clause was passed against taxation without
consent of parliament, stringent enough to satisfy
the sternest of popular reformers. Only six months
ago he had shut the doors of the House against a
hundred duly elected members ; and in the previous
parliament he had in the same way insisted that
no member should sit who had not signed a recogni-
tion of Oliver's authority. All these .high-handed
acts were now formally stamped as wrong. It was
laid down that persons legally chosen by free elec-
tion could only be excluded from parliament by judg-
ment and consent of that House whereof they were
members. The substitution of the title of King for
Protector was therefore the least part of the matter.
The real question that must have weighed upon

CHAP, vi KINGSHIP PROPOSED 385

Cromwell was whether the greater title did not carry
with it lessened power ; whether, although his style
and dignity were undoubtedly exalted, the exalta-
tion in substance was not rather that of the parlia-
ment. Assent to a change in name and form was
at bottom a revolution in policy, and in this revolu-
tion with all that it involved, Cromwell slowly,
ponderously, and after long periods of doubt and
misgivings decided to acquiesce. Yet the change
of title was a momentous thing in itself, in the eyes
alike of those who sought it and those who resisted.
The strongest advocates of the kingship were the
lawyers, that powerful profession of which historians
and politicians do not always recognise the permeat-
ing influence even through the motions of revolu-
tionary politics. The lawyers argued for a king,
and their points were cogent. The office of a king,
they said, is interwoven with the whole body of
the law and the whole working of national institu-
tions. The prerogatives of a king with all their
limits and dimensions are well understood, but who
can define the rights or the duties of a Protector ?
The people, again, only love what they know ; and
what they know is the crown, the ancient symbol
of order, unity, and rule. These were sound
arguments, appealing to Cromwell's conservative
instincts. The only argument by which he could
have refuted them was a demonstration that the
Protectorate had brought a settlement, and this
was just what the Protectorate had as yet notori-
ously failed to do. It is impossible not to believe
that in this crisis of things Cromwell had convinced
himself that the lawyers were right.

From the balance of argument he turned, as
statesmen must or should, to the balance of forces ;
to that formidable host of armed men whom he
had welded into the most powerful military instru-
ment in Europe, whom he had led to one victory
after another in nine years of toil and peril, whom

2c

386 OLIVER CROMWELL

he had followed rather than led in all the succes-
sive stages of their revolutionary fervour, whose
enthusiasms were the breath of his nostrils. How
would these stern warriors view the sight of their
chief putting on the mantle of that hated office and
title which they had been taught to regard as the
ensigns of bondage, and against which the Lord
of Hosts had borne such crushing witness ? Well
might Oliver say that he had lived all the latter
part of his life in the fire, in the midst of troubles,
and that all the things together that had befallen
him since he was first engaged in the affairs of the
Commonwealth could not so move his heart and
spirit as did this proposal.

With angry promptness the officers showed their
teeth. Lambert and others of the military leaders
instantly declared against the new design. Within
three days of Packe's announcement, a hundred of
them waited on the Protector, and besought him
not to listen to the proffer of the crown. It would
displease the army and the godly ; it would be a
danger to the nation and to his own person ; it
would 'one day bring back the exiled line. Cromwell
dealt very faithfully with them in reply. He liked
the title as little as they liked it, a mere feather in
a hat, a toy for a child. But had they not them-
selves proposed it in the Instrument ? Here he
glanced at Lambert, formerly the main author of
such a proposal in 1653, and now in 1657 the main
instigator of opposition. Cromwell continued in the
same vein of energetic remonstrance, like a man
wearied, as he said, of being on all occasions made
a drudge. Strangely does he light up the past.
His reply was a double arraignment of himself and
of them for the most important things that both of
them had done. He said it was they who had made
him dissolve the Long Parliament. It was they
who had named the convention that followed, which
went to such fantastic lengths that nobody could

CROMWELL'S REBUKE 387

be sure of calling anything his own. It was they
who had pressed him to starve out the ministers
of religion. Was it not they too who must needs
dissolve the parliament in 1655 for trying to mend
the Instrument, as if the Instrument did not need
to be mended ? They had thought it necessary to
have major-generals, and the major-generals did
their part well. Then after that, nothing would
content them till a parliament was called. He gave
his vote against it, but they were confident that
somehow they would get men chosen to their
heart's desire. How they had failed therein, and
how much the country had been disobliged, was
only too well known. Among other things, this
string of reproaches helps to explain the curious
remark of Henry Cromwell while walking in the.
garden of Ludlow's country house at Monkstown in
Dublin Bay. " You that are here," he said, " may
think that my father has power, but they make a
very kickshaw of him at London."

Oliver's rebuke made the impression that he had
calculated. Time was gained, and a compromise
agreed to. The question of the kingly title was
postponed until the end of the bill, and the rest of
its proposals went forward in order. On any view
this delay on Cromwell's part was a piece of sound
tactics. Those who would not have valued the
other reforms without a king as key-stone of the
reconstructed arch, assented to the reforms in the
hope that kingship would follow. Those who hated
the kingship, pressed for enlargement of the con-
stitution with the hope that the question of the
crown would drop. When the clause was at last
reached (March 25), the title of king was carried by
123 to 62. Operations in the House were completed
by the end of March, and on the last day of the
month (1657) the new constitution engrossed on
vellum was submitted to the Protector at Whitehall.
He replied in a tone of dignity not without pathos,

388 OLIVER CROMWELL

that it was the greatest weight of anything that
was ever laid upon a man ; that he might perhaps
be at the end of his work ; that were he to make a
mistake in judgment here, it were better that he
had never been born ; and that he must take time
for the utmost deliberation and consideration. Then
began a series of parleys and conferences that lasted
for the whole of the month of April, with end-
less dubitancies, postponements, and adjournments,
iteration and reiteration of arguments. Cromwell's
speeches were found " dark and promiscuous," nor
can a modern reader wonder ; and he undoubtedly
showed extraordinary readiness in keeping off the
point and baulking the eager interlocutor. One
passage (April 13) is famous. He told them that
he had undertaken his position originally not so
much out of a hope of doing any good, as from a
desire to prevent mischief and evil. " For truly I
have often thought that I could not tell what my
business was, nor what I was in the place I stood
in, save comparing myself to a good constable set
to keep the peace of the parish." That, he said,
had been his content and satisfaction in all the
troubles he had undergone, that they still had peace.
Nobody any longer doubts that this homely image
was the whole truth. The question was whether
the constable's truncheon should now be struck
from his hand, or more boldly grasped. Time after
time they parted, in the words of Clarendon, " all
men standing at gaze and in terrible suspense
according to their several hopes and fears, till they
knew what he would determine. All the dispute
was now within his own chamber, and there is no
question that the man was in great agony, and in
his own mind he did heartily desire to be king, and
thought it the only way to be safe."

The feeling of his friends may be gathered from
Henry Cromwell, then in Ireland. " I look on some
of them," he said, speaking of the " contrariant "

CHAP, vi OFFICERS OPPOSE KINGSHIP 389

officers, as " vainly arrogating to themselves too
great a share in his Highness' government, and to
have too big an opinion of their own merit in sub-
verting the old." He thinks the gaudy feather in
the hat of authority a matter of little concern either
way. If the army men were foolish in resenting it
with so much heat, the heat of those who insisted
on it was foolish too. Whether the gaudy feather
decked the hat or not, anything would be better
than the loss of the scheme as a whole ; the scheme
was good in itself, and its loss would puff up
the contrariants and make it easier for them, still
remaining in power as they would remain, to have
their own way. It is plain that the present dis-
sension on the kingship was an explosion of griefs
and jealousies that were not new.

At last Cromwell declared to several members,
that he was resolved to accept. Lambert, Des-
borough, and Fleetwood warned him that if he did,
they must withdraw from all public employment,
and that other officers of quality would certainly
go with them. Desborough happening, after he
knew the momentous decision, to meet Colonel
Pride, told him that Cromwell had made up his
mind to accept the crown. " That he shall not,"
said the unfaltering Pride. " Why," asked the other,
" how wilt thou hinder it ? " " Get me a petition
drawn," answered Pride, "and I will prevent it."
The petition was drawn, and on the day when
the House was expecting Oliver's assent, a group
of seven-and-twenty officers appeared at the bar
with the prayer that they should not press the
kingship any further. Pride's confidence in the
effect of a remonstrance from the officers was justi-
fied by the event. When news of this daring move
against both the determination of the Protector,
and the strong feeling of the parliament, reached
Whitehall, Cromwell was reported as extremely
angry, calling it a high breach of privilege, and the

390 OLIVER CROMWELL

greatest injury they could have offered him short
of cutting his throat. He sent for Fleetwood,
reproached him for allowing things to go so far,
while knowing so well that without the assent of
the army he was decided against the kingship ; and
bade him go immediately to Westminster to stay
further proceedings on the petition, and instantly
invite the House to come to Whitehall to hear his
definite reply. They came. He gave his decision
in a short, firm speech, to the effect that if he
accepted the kingship, at the best he should do
it doubtingly, and assuredly whatever was done
doubtingly was not of faith. " I cannot," he said,
"undertake this government with the title of king;
and that is mine answer to this great and weighty
business." This was all he said, but everybody
knew that he had suffered his first repulse, a wound
in the house of his friend. He set his mark on
those who had withstood him, and Lambert was
speedily dismissed. It is not easy to explain why, if
Cromwell did not fear to exile Lambert from place,
as he had not feared to send Harrison to prison,
he should not have held to his course in reliance
on his own authority in the army. Clarendon
supposes his courage for once to have failed, and
his genius to have forsaken him. Swift, in that
whimsical list of Mean and Great Figures made by
several persons in some particular action of their
lives, counts Cromwell a great figure when he quelled
a mutiny in Hyde Park, and a mean one the day
when out of fear he refused the kingship. As usual,
Cromwell was more politic than the army. It is
strange that some who eulogise him as a great con-
servative statesman, yet eulogise with equal fervour
the political sagacity of the army, who as a matter
of fact resisted almost every conservative step that
he wished to take, while they hurried him on to all
those revolutionary steps to which he was most
averse. However this may be, we may at least be

CHAP, vx CROMWELL AGAIN INSTALLED 391

sure that " few men were better judges of what
might be achieved by daring," and that if he deter-
mined that the occasion was not ripe, he must be
assumed to have known what he was about.

The House proceeded with their measure on the
new footing, and on June 26th Oliver was solemnly
installed as Lord Protector under the new law.
Though the royal title was in abeyance, the scene
marked the conversion of what had first been a
military dictatorship, and then the Protectorate of a
republic, into a constitutional monarchy. A rich
canopy was prepared at the upper end of West-
minster Hall, and under it was placed the royal
Coronation Chair of Scotland which had been
brought from the Abbey. On the table lay a mag-
nificent Bible, and the sword and sceptre of the
Commonwealth. When the Lord Protector had
entered, the Speaker in the name of the parliament
placed upon his shoulders a mantle of purple velvet
lined with ermine, girt him with the sword, delivered
into his hands the sceptre of massy gold, and
administered the oath of fidelity to the new con-
stitution. A prayer was offered up, and then
Cromwell amid trumpet blasts and loud shouting
from the people who thronged the hall, took his
seat in the chair, holding the sceptre in his right
hand, with the ambassador of Louis the Fourteenth
on the one side, and the ambassador of the United
Provinces on the other. " What a comely and
glorious sight it is," said the Speaker, " to behold
a Lord Protector in a purple robe, with a sceptre in
his hand, with the sword of justice girt about him,
and his eyes fixed upon the Bible ! Long may you
enjoy them all to your own comfort and the com-
fort of the people of these nations." Before many
months were over, Oliver was declaring to them,
" I can say in the presence of God, in comparison
with whom we are but like poor creeping ants
upon the earth, that I would have been glad to have

392 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOKV

lived under my woodside, to have kept a flock of
sheep, rather than undertake such a government as
this."

The Protectorate has sometimes been treated as
a new and original settlement of the crucial question
of parliamentary sovereignty. On the contrary, the
history of the Protectorate in its two phases, under
the two Instruments of 1653 and 1657 by which it
was constituted, seems rather to mark a progressive
return to an old system than the creation of a new
one. The Agreement of the People (1649) was the
embodiment of the idea of the absolute supremacy
of a single elective House. The Instrument of
Government (1653) went a certain way towards
mitigating this supremacy, by entrusting executive
power to a single person, subject to the assent and
co-operation of a Council itself the creation, at first
direct and afterwards indirect, of the single House.
The Humble Petition and Advice (1657) in effect
restored the principle of monarchy, and took away
from parliament the right in future to choose the
monarch. On him was conferred the further power
of naming the members of the new Second House.
The oath prescribed for a privy councillor was an
oath of allegiance to the person and authority of
the Lord Protector and his successors, and he was
clothed with the more than regal right of deciding
who the successor should be. On the other hand,
the Council or cabinet by whose advice the Lord
Protector was bound to govern, was to be approved
by both Houses, and to be irremovable without the
consent of parliament. The Protectorate then was
finally established, so far as constitutional docu-
ments go and in rudimentary forms, on the same
principles of parliamentary supremacy over the
executive and of ministerial responsibility, that
have developed our modern system of government
by parliamentary cabinet.

CHAPTER VII

DOMESTIC TRAITS

THERE is no sign that the wonderful fortunes that
had befallen him in the seventeen years since he
quitted his woodside, his fields and flocks, had
altered the soundness of Cromwell's nature. Large
affairs had made his vision broader ; power had
hardened his grasp ; manifold necessities of men
and things had taught him lessons of reserve,
compliance, suppleness, and silence ; great station
brought out new dignity of carriage. But the
foundations were unchanged. Time never choked
the springs of warm affection in him, the true
refreshment of every careworn life. In his family
he was as tender and as solicitous in the hour of his
glory as he had been in the distant days at St. Ives
and Ely. It was in the spring of 1654 that he took
up his residence at Whitehall. " His wife seemed
at first unwilling to remove thither, tho' she after-
wards became better satisfied with her grandeur.
His mother, who by reason of her great age was
not so easily flattered with these temptations, very
much mistrusted the issue of affairs, and would be
often afraid when she heard the noise of a musket,
that her son was shot, being exceedingly dissatisfied
unless she might see him once a day at least."
Only six months after her installation in the splen-
dours of Whitehall the aged woman passed away.
" My Lord Protector's mother," writes Thurloe in
November, " of ninety-four years old, died the last

393

394 OLIVER CROMWELL

night, and a little before her death gave my lord
her blessing in these words : — ' The Lord cause his
face to shine upon you, and comfort ye in all your
adversities, and enable you to do great things for
the glory of your most high God, and to be a relief
unto his people ; my dear son, I leave my heart
with thee ; a good-night.' :

His letters to his wife tell their own tale of fond
importunity and affectionate response : —

" I have not leisure to write much," he says to her from
Dunbar. " But I could chide thee that in many of thy
letters thou writest to me, that I should not be unmindful
of thee and thy little ones. Truly if I love you not too well,
I think I err not on the other hand much. Thou art dearer
to me than any creature, let that suffice."

And then he told her, as we have seen, that he was
growing an old man and felt the infirmities of age
marvellously stealing upon him. He was little more
than fifty, and their union had lasted thirty years.
Seven months later he writes to her that he is
increased in strength in his outward man :—

But that will not satisfy me, except I get a heart to love
and serve my heavenly Father better. . . . Pray for me ;
truly I do daily for thee and the dear family, and God
Almighty bless ye all with his spiritual blessings. . . . My
love to the dear little ones ; I pray for grace for them. I
thank them for their letters : let me have them often. . . .
If Dick Cromwell and his wife be with you, my dear love to
them. I pray for them ; they shall, God willing, hear from
me. I love them very dearly. Truly I am not able as yet
to write much. I am weary, and rest, ever thine.

He was ever, says Thurloe, a most indulgent and
tender father. Richard Cromwell, as history well
knows, had little share of the mastering energies
that made his father " chief of men." With none
but respectable qualities, with a taste for hawking,
hunting, and horse-racing, he lacked strenuous pur-
pose, taking life as it came, not shaping it. When

HIS FAMILY 395

the time arrived for his son's marriage, Cromwell,
though plunged deep in public anxieties, did his
share about the choice of a wise connection, about
money, about the life of the young couple, with
prudent care. Henry Cromwell, an active soldier,
an administrator of conspicuous judgment and tact,
and a politician with sense and acuteness, had been
Commander-in-Chief in Ireland since 1655, and his
father thought well enough of him in 1657, though
still hardly thirty, to make him Lord-Deputy in
succession to Fleetwood. Five years before, Fleet-
wood had married Bridget Cromwell, widow of the
brave and keen-witted Ireton. Elizabeth, said to
have been Oliver's favourite daughter, was married
to Claypole, a Northamptonshire gentleman, of
respectable family and estate. These too were stay-
ing at the Cockpit in Whitehall in 1651. " Mind
poor Betty of the Lord's great mercy," writes
Cromwell to her mother. " Oh, I desire her not
only to seek the Lord in her necessity, but in deed
and in truth to turn to the Lord ; and to take heed
of a departing heart, and of being cozened with
worldly vanities and worldly company, which I
doubt she is too subject to. I earnestly and fre-
quently pray for her and for him. Truly they are
dear to me, very dear ; and I am in fear lest Satan
should deceive them — knowing how weak our hearts
are, and how subtle the Adversary is, and what way
the deceitfulness of our hearts and the vain world
make for his temptations."

Not long after the establishment of the second
Protectorate, the two youngest daughters made
matches which were taken by jealous onlookers to
be still further signs of the growth of Cromwell's
reactionary ambition. Lady Mary, now twenty,
married Lord Fauconberg, and Lady Frances in the
same month married Robert Rich, grandson and
heir of the Earl of Warwick. Swift tells Stella
how he met Lady Fauconberg at a christening in

396 OLIVER CROMWELL

1710, three years before her death. He thought
her extremely like her father's pictures.

The Protector delighted in music, was fond of
hawking, hunting, coursing, liked a game of bowls,
and took more than a sportsman's pleasure in fine
horses. There is little evidence that he was other
than indifferent to profane letters, but as Chancellor
of the University of Oxford he encouraged the
religious studies of the place, he helped the pro-
duction of Walton's polyglot Bible, and he set up
a college at Durham. Cromwell had compass of
mind enough to realise the duty of a state to learn-
ing, but the promotion of religion was always his
commanding interest, and for learning that did not
directly make towards religion he was not likely to
have much regard.

Precisians found the court at Whitehall frivolous
and lax, but what they called frivolity was nothing
worse than the venial sin of cheerfulness. One of
the Dutch ambassadors in 1654 describes what life
at court was like on occasions of state, and the
picture is worth reproducing :—

. . . The Master of the Ceremonies came to fetch us in
two coaches of His Highness about half an hour past one,
and brought us to Whitehall, where twelve trumpeters were
ready, sounding against our coming. My lady Nieuport
and my wife were brought to His Highness presently . . .
who received us with great demonstration of amity. After
we staid a little, we were conducted into another room,
where we found a table ready covered. His Highness sat
on one side of it alone ; my lord B., N., and myself at the
upper end, and Lord President Lawrence and others next
to us. There was in the same room another table covered
for other lords of the council and others. At the table of
my Lady Protectrice dined my lady N., my wife, my lady
Lambert, my lord Protector's daughter, and mine. The
music played all the while we were at dinner. The Lord
Protector [then] had us into another room, where the lady
Protectrice and others came to us : where we had also
music, and wine, and a psalm sung which His Highness gave
us, and told us it was yet the best paper that had been

CHAP, vn HIS COURT 397

exchanged between us ; and from thence we were had into
a gallery, next the river, where we walked with His High-
ness about half an hour, and then took our leaves, and were
conducted back again to our houses, after the same manner
as we were brought.

Baxter tells a less genial story. Cromwell after
hearing him preach sent for him. The great divine
found him with Broghill, Lambert, and Thurloe.
Cromwell " began a long and tedious speech of God's
providence in the change of government, and how
God had owned it, and what great things had been
done at home and abroad in Spain and Holland."
Lambert fell asleep. Baxter attacked the change
of government, and Cromwell with some passion
defended it. " A few days after, he sent for me
again to hear my judgment about liberty of con-
science, which he pretended to be most zealous for,
before almost all his privy council ; where, after
another slow tedious speech of his, I told him a
little of my judgment. And when two of his com-
pany had spun out a great deal more of the time
in such-like tedious, but more ignorant speeches,
some four or five hours being spent, I told him that
if he would be at the labour to read it, I could tell
him more of my mind in writing in two sheets,
than in that way of speaking in many days." And
this in truth we may well believe. It was the
age of long discourse and ecstatic exercises. John
Howe, who had first attracted Cromwell by preach-
ing for two hours and then turning the hour-glass
for a third, has told us that on a Sunday or a
fast-day, he began about nine in the morning, with
a prayer for about quarter of an hour, in which he
begged a blessing on the work of the day, and
afterwards expounded a chapter for about three
quarters ; then prayed for an hour, preached for
another hour, and prayed for half an hour : then he
retired to refresh himself for quarter of an hour or
more, the people singing all the while, and then came

398 OLIVER CROMWELL

again into the pulpit, and prayed for another hour,
and gave them another sermon of about an hour's
length ; and then concluded towards four o'clock
with a final half-hour of prayer.

Cromwell had that mark of greatness in a ruler,
that he was well served. No prince had ever
abler or more faithful agents, in arms, diplomacy,
administration. Blake, Monk, Lockhart, Thurloe,
are conspicuous names in a list that might easily
be made longer of bold, diligent, and attentive men.
Familiars Cromwell had none. The sage and in-
defatigable Thurloe, who more closely than any of
the others resembled the deep-browed counsellors
that stood around the throne of Elizabeth, came
nearest to the heart of the Protector's deliberations.
Thurloe tells us of himself that he always distrusted
his own counsels, when they sprang from moments
of despondency — an implication of the truth that
wisdom goes with cheerfulness, of which Cromwell
was most likely the inspirer. The extent and
manner of his resort to advice is no small measure
of the fitness of a man for large affairs. Oliver was
not of the evil Napoleonic build. He was liable to
bursts of passion, he had his moods, he was unwisely
and fatally impatient of parliamentary discussion.
But nobody knew better the value of consultation
in good faith, of serious conference among men
sincerely bent on common aims, of the arts of
honest persuasion as distinguished from cajolery.
Of that pettish egotism which regards a step taken
on advice as a humiliation, he had not a trace ;
he was a man. There are no signs that he ever
had, what even strong men have not always been
without, a taste for sycophants. Whitelocke has
described how upon great businesses the Protector
was wont to advise with himself, Thurloe, and a
few others ; how he would shut himself up with
them for three or four hours together, " would
sometimes be very cheerful, and laying aside his

CHAP, vn AGENTS AND COUNSELLORS 399

greatness would be exceedingly familiar, and by way
of diversion would make verses with them, and every
one must try his fancy. He commonly called for
tobacco, pipes, and a candle, and would now and
then take tobacco himself ; then he would fall again
to his serious and great business." This did not
prevent persons around him from knowing that
whatever resolutions his Highness took would be
his own. Chatham, inveighing against Lord North
in 1770, charged him with being without that
sagacity which is the true source of information,—
sagacity to compare causes and effects, to judge of
the present state of things, and discern the future
by a careful review of the past. " Oliver Crom-
well, who astonished mankind by his intelligence,"
Chatham proceeds, " did not derive it from spies in
the cabinet of every prince in Europe ; he drew it
from the cabinet of his own sagacious mind." Yet
there is a passage in a letter from Thurloe to Henry
Cromwell not many weeks before the end, where
that faithful servant regrets his master's too ready
compliance. " His Highness finding he can have
no advice from those he most expected it from,
saith he will take his own resolutions, and that he
cannot any longer satisfy himself to sit still, and
make himself guilty of the loss of all the honest
party ; and truly I have long wished that his
Highness would proceed according to his own satis-
faction, and not so much consider others."

CHAPTER VIII

FOREIGN POLICY

WE have all learned that no inconsiderable part of
history is a record of the illusions of statesmen.
Was Cromwell's foreign policy one of them ? To
the prior question what his foreign policy was, no
single comprehensive answer can be given. It was
mixed ; defensive and aggressive, pacific and war-
like ; zeal for religion and zeal for trade ; pride of
empire, and a steadfast resistance to a restoration
of the royal line by foreign action. Like every other
great ruler in intricate times and in a situation
without precedent, he was compelled to change alli-
ances, weave fresh combinations, abandon to-day
the ardent conception of yesterday. His grand
professed object was indeed fixed : the unity
of the protestant interest in Christendom, with
England in the van. Characteristically Cromwell
had settled this in his mind by impulse and the
indwelling light. Unluckily, in the shoals and shift-
ing channels of international affairs, the indwelling
light is but a treacherous beacon. So far as purely
national aims were concerned, Cromwell's external
policy was in its broad features the policy of the
Commonwealth before him.1 What went beyond
purely national aims and was in a sense his own,
however imposing, was of questionable service either
to the state or to the Cause.

At the outset his policy was peace. The Common-

1 See above, Book IV. chap. v. pp. 293-296.
400

CHAP, vm PEACE HIS FIRST POLICY 401

wealth had gone to war with the Dutch, and Crom-
well's first use of his new power was to bring the
conflict to an end (April 1654). His first boast
to his parliament was that he had made treaties
not only with Holland, but with Sweden, Denmark,
and Portugal. These treaties were essentially com-
mercial, but they implied general amity, which in
the Dutch case did not go very deep. " Peace,"
said Oliver, using the conventional formula since
worn so painfully threadbare on the eve of every
war by men armed to the teeth, " peace is desirable
with all men, so far as it may be had with con-
science and honour." As time went on, designs
shaped themselves in his mind that pointed not to
peace but to energetic action. He went back to
the maritime policy of the Long Parliament. Even
in coming to terms with the Dutch in 1654, he had
shown a severity that indicated both a strong con-
sciousness of mastery, and a stiff intention to use it
to the uttermost. This second policy was a trunk
with two branches, a daring ideal with a double
aspect, one moral, the other material. The Pro-
tector intended to create a protestant ascendancy
in continental Europe, and to assert the rights and
claims of English ships and English trade at sea.
The union of all the protestant churches had long
been a dream of more than one pious zealot, but
Cromwell crystallised the aspirations after spiritual
communion into schemes of secular policy. In
spirit it was not very unlike the Arab invaders
who centuries before had swept into Europe, the
sword in one hand and the Koran in the other, to
conquer and to convert. If he had only lived, we
are told, his continental policy might have been
the rudiment of something great, the foundation of
a protestant and military state that might have
been as powerful as the Spanish monarchy at the
beginning of the century, and might have opened
for England an age if not of happiness, yet of vast

2D

402 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOKV

greatness and ascendancy (Seeley). There is no
reason to think that any such sacrifice of national
happiness to national ascendancy was ever a true
account of Oliver or of his ideals. Those baleful
policies were left for the next generation and Louis
XIV., the solar orb now first diffusing its morning
glow above the horizon. Justly has it been said
(Gardiner), that if Oliver had been granted those
twenty years more of life, that enthusiastic wor-
shippers hold necessary for the success of his
schemes, a European coalition would have been
formed against the English Protector as surely as
one was formed against Louis of France.

When peace was made with the Dutch (April
1654) the government found themselves with one
hundred and sixty sail of " brave and well-appointed
ships swimming at sea." The Protector and his
Council held grave debate whether they should be
laid up or employed in some advantageous design,
and against which of the two great crowns, France
or Spain, that design should be directed ; or whether
they would not do better to sell their friendship to
both the powers for a good sum of money down.
Lambert opposed the policy of aggression in the
Spanish Indies. The scene, he said, was too far off ;
the difficulties and the cost had not been thought
out ; it would not advance the protestant cause ; we
had far more important work at home — the reform
of the law, the settlement of Ireland, and other
high concernments. Whether Lambert here stood
alone, or held views that were shared by colleagues
on the Council, we cannot say. Cromwell argued,
on the other hand, that God had brought them
there to consider the work that they might do all
over the world as well as at home, and if they
waited for a surplus they might as well put off that
work for ever. Surely the one hundred and sixty
ships were a leading of Providence. The design
would cost little more than laying up the ships, and

CHAP, vm DESIGNS FOR THE FLEET 403

there was a chance of immense profit. The pro-
ceedings of the Spaniard in working his silver mines,
his shipping and trans-shipping, his startings and
his stoppages, his management of trade-winds and
ocean currents in bringing the annual treasure home
—all these things were considered with as much
care as in the old days a couple of generations
before, when Drake and Hawkins and the rest carried
on their mighty raids against the colonial trade of
Spain, and opened the first spacious chapter in the
history of the maritime power of England. From the
point of view of modern public law, the picture of
the Council of State with Oliver at the head of the
board discussing the feasibility of seizing the West
Indies, is like so many hearty corsairs with pistols,
cutlasses, and boarding caps revolving their plans
in the cabin of the Red Rover or other pirate craft.
But modern public law, such as it was, did not ex-
tend to the Spanish Main. It is true that Spain
refused to grant freedom fronTTKeThquisition and
free sailing in the West Indies, and these might
have been legitimate grounds for war. But it is
hard to" contend that they were the real or the only
grounds. Historians may differ whether the ex-
pedition to the West Indies was a scheme for trade,
territorial aggrandisement, and naked plunder of
Spanish silver ; or only a spirited protestant de-
monstration in force. Carnal and spiritual were
strangely mingled in those times. " We that look
to Zion," wrote a gallant anabaptist admiral of the
age, " should hold Christian communion. We have
all the guns aboard." Whether as substance of the
policy or accident, plunder followed.

To disarm the Spanish king's suspicion, the Pro-
tector wrote to assure him that the despatch of the
fleet to the Mediterranean implied no ill intent to
any ally or friend, " in the number of which we
count your Majesty" (Aug. 5, 1654). Yet if the
king could have heard the arguments at the Council

404 OLIVER CROMWELL

of State, he might have thought that this amicable
language hardly answered to the facts. Cromwell's
earliest move in his new line was to despatch Blake
with one strong fleet to the Mediterranean (October),
and Penn and Venables (December 1654) with
another to the West Indies. In each case the
instructions were not less explicit against French
ships than Spanish. Blake alarmed France and
Spain, menaced the Pope, and attacked the Barbary
pirates. The expedition against Saint Domingo was
a failure : it was ill-found, ill-conceived, and ill-led.
Before returning in disgrace, the commanders,
hoping to retrieve their name, acquired the prize
of Jamaica. These proceedings brought the Pro-
tectoF3irectly within the sphere of the great Euro-
pean conflict of the age, and drew England into the
heart of the new distribution of power in Europe
that marked the middle epoch of the seventeenth
century. From the Elizabethan times conflict on
the high seas had ranked as general reprisal and
did not constitute a state of war, nor did it neces-
sarily now. The status of possessions over sea was
still unfixed.1 Cromwell, however, had no right to
be surprised when Philip chose to regard aggression
in the Indies as justifying declaration of war in
Europe. A further inconvenient consequence was
that Spain now began warmly to espouse the cause
of the exiled line, and in the spring of 1656, Philip
IV. formally bound himself to definite measures for
the transport of a royalist force from Flanders to
aid in an English restoration.

The power of Spain had begun to shrink with
the abdication of Charles V. (1556). Before the
middle of the seventeenth century Portugal had
broken off ; revolt had shaken her hold in Italy ;
Catalonia was in standing insurrection ; the United
Provinces had finally achieved their independence ;
by the barbarous expulsion of Moors and Jews she

1 Corbett's Spanish War, 1585-87, viii.-ix. — Navy Records Society, 1898.

CHAP, vm ENGLAND, SPAIN, AND FRANCE 405

lost three millions of the best of her industrial
population ; her maritime supremacy was at an
end. Philip IV., the Spanish sovereign from a little
time before the accession of Charles I. in England
to a little time after the restoration of Charles II.,
was called, by flatterers, the Great. " Like a ditch,"
said Spanish humour — " the more you dig away
from it, the greater the ditch." The treaty of
Westphalia (1648), the fruit of the toil, the fore-
sight, and the genius of Richelieu, though others
gathered it, weakened the power of the Germanic
branch of the House of Hapsburg, and Mazarin, the
second of the two famous cardinals who for forty
years governed France, was now in the crisis of his
struggle with the Spanish branch. In this long
struggle between two states, each torn by intestine
dissension as well as by an external enemy, the
power of England was recognised as a decisive
factor after the rise of the republic ; and before
Cromwell assumed the government, Spain had
hastened to recognise the new Commonwealth.
Cromwell, as we have seen, long hesitated between
Spain and France. Traditional policy pointed to
France, for though she was predominantly catholic,
yet ever since the days of Francis I., the greatest of
her statesmen, including Henry IV. and Richelieu,
had favoured the German princes and the protestant
powers, from no special care for the reformed faith,
but because the protestant powers were the adver-
saries of the emperor, the head of the catholic party
in Europe.

Mazarin endeavoured to gain Cromwell, from the
moment of his triumphant return from Worcester.
It is the mark of genius to be able to satisfy new
demands as they arise, and to play new parts with
skill. Expecting to deal with a rough soldier whom
fortune and his sword had brought to the front,
Mazarin found instead of this a diplomatist as wary,
as supple, as tenacious, as dexterous, as capable of

406 OLIVER CROMWELL

large views, as incapable of dejection, as he was
all these things himself. The rude vigour of the
English demands and the Lord Protector's haughty
pretensions never irritated Mazarin, of whom it has
been aptly said (Mignet) that his ambition raised
him above self-love, and that he was so scientifically
cool that even adversaries never appeared to him
in the light of enemies to be hated, but only as
obstacles to be moved or turned. It was at one
time even conjectured, idly enough, that Mazarin
designed to marry one of his nieces to the second
son of Oliver. For years the match went on be-
tween the puritan chief who held the English to be
the chosen people, and the Italian cardinal who
declared that though his language was not French,
his heart was. Mazarin's diplomacy followed the
vicissitudes of Cromwell's political fortune, and the
pursuit of an alliance waxed hotter or cooler, as the
Protector seemed likely to consolidate his power or
to let it slip. Still both of them were at bottom
men of direct common sense, and their friendship
stood on nearly as good a basis for six or seven
years, as that which for twenty years of the next
century supported the more fruitful friendship be-
tween Sir Robert Walpole and Cardinal Fleury. A
French writer, eminent alike as historian and actor
in state affairs, says of these negotiations that it is
the supreme art of great statesmen to treat business
simply and with frankness, when they know that
they have to deal with rivals who will not let them-
selves be either duped or frightened (Guizot). The
comment is just. Cromwell was harder and less
pliant, and had nothing of the caress under which
an Italian often hides both sense and firmness.
But each was alive to the difficulties of the other,
and neither of them expected short cuts or a straight
road. Mazarin had very early penetrated Crom-
well's idea of making himself the guardian both of
the Huguenots in France, and of the protestant

CHAP, vm THE PIEDMONTESE MASSACRE 407

interest throughout Europe. In the spring of 1655
the massacre of the protestants in the Piedmontese
valleys stirred a wave of passion in England that
still vibrates in Milton's sonnet, and that by Crom-
well's impressive energy was felt in Europe. At no
other time in his history did the flame in his own
breast burn with an intenser glow. The incident
both roused his deepest feelings and was a practical
occasion for realising his policy of a confederation
of protestant powers, with England at the head of
them and France acting in concert. To be in-
different to such doings, he said, is a great sin, and
a deeper sin still is it to IDC blind to them from policy
or ambition. He associated his own personality
with the case, in a tone of almost jealous directness
that struck a new note. No English ruler has ever
shown a nobler figure than Cromwell in the case of
the Vaudois, and he had all the highest impulses
of the nation with him. He said to the French
ambassador that the woes of the poor Piedmontese
went as close to his heart as if they were his own
nearest kin ; and he gave personal proof of the
sincerity of his concern by a munificent contribution
to the fund for the relief of the martyred population.
Never was the great conception of a powerful state
having duties along with interests more magnani-
mously realised. It was his diplomatic pressure
upon France that secured redress, though Mazarin,
not without craft, kept for himself a foremost place.
Now was the time when the Council of State
directed their secretary to buy a new atlas for their
use, and to keep the globe always standing in the
council chamber. The Venetian representative in
London in 1655 declares that the court of the
Protector was the most brilliant and most regarded
in all Europe : six kings had sent ambassadors and
solicited his friendship. The glory of all this in the
eyes of Cromwell, like its interest in history, is the
height that was thus reached among the ruling and

408 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOK v

established forces of Europe by protestantism. The
influence of France, says Ranke, had rescued pro-
testantism from destruction ; it was through Crom-
well that protestantism took up an independent
position among the powers of the world. A posi-
tion so dazzling was a marvellous achievement of
force and purpose, if only the foundation had been
sounder and held better promise of duration.

The war with Spain in which England was now
involved by her aggression in the West Indies, roused
little enthusiasm in the nation. The parliament did
not disapprove the war, but showed no readiness to
vote the money. The Spanish trade in wine, oil,
sugar, fruit, cochineal, silver, was more important to
English commerce than the trade with France. It
is worthy of remark that the Long Parliament had
directed its resentment and ambition against the
Dutch, and displayed no ill-will to Spain ; and much
the same is true of the Little Parliament and even of
Cromwell himself in early stages. The association
of France in the mind of England with Mary Stuart,
with the queen of Charles I., and with distant
centuries of bygone war, was some set-off to the
odium that surrounded the Holy Office, the sombre
engine of religious cruelty in the Peninsula ; and
the Spanish Armada was balanced in popular im-
agination by the Bartholomew Massacre in France,
of which Burleigh said that it was the most horrible
crime since the Crucifixion. No question of public
opinion and no difficulties at the exchequer pre-
vented the vigorous prosecution of the war. Blake,
though himself a republican, served the Protector
with the same patriotic energy and resource that
he had given to the Commonwealth until, after the
most renowned of all his victories, and worn out
by years of service, the hero died on reaching
Plymouth Sound (1657).

By October of 1655 Mazarin had brought Crom-
well so far as to sign the treaty of Westminster, but

CHAP, vrn TREATY WITH MAZARIN 409

the treaty did not go to the length of alliance. The
two powers agreed to keep the peace among the
mariners of their respective countries, who had in
fact for years been in a state of informal war ; to
suppress obnoxious port dues and duties of customs ;
and otherwise to introduce better order into their
maritime affairs. By a secret article, political exiles
were to be sent out of both the contracting countries.
The treaty relieved Mazarin of his anxieties on the
side of England, and brought him a step nearer to
his great object of imposing peace upon Spain.

It was not until March 23, 1657, that the next
step was taken, and the treaty of Paris concluded.
This marked again a new pnase of the Protector's
policy, for he now at last directly bound himself to
active participation in the play of European politics,
and he acquired a continental stronghold. The pre-
amble of the new treaty states with sonorous and
edifying decorum that the intention of the very
Christian King and the Lord Protector, moved by
their singular love of public tranquillity, is to compel
the common enemy to allow the Christian world at
length to enjoy peace. England is to send 6000
men for the siege of Gravelines, Mardyke, and Dun-
kirk, as well as a fleet to support them on the
coast. When these strong places have been re-
covered from the Spanish, the two last named are
to be handed over to the Protector. Mazarin de-
scribed the English alliance as the best day's work
of his life, and begged his assailants at the Vatican
and in Paris to remember that the Protector had
his free choice between France and the cession of
Dunkirk on the one hand, and Spain and the cession
of Calais on the other, and that only the new treaty
had averted the choice that would have been the
wrong choice for France.

The English force was duly despatched. The
young French king with lively curiosity reviewed
the iron men by whom his kinsman had been

410 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOKV

vanquished, dethroned, and put to death. Turenne,
the famous marshal, a protestant with the blood
of the House of Orange in his veins, but destined
to a strange conversion and to be the instrument
of one of the great public crimes of the century,
pronounced the Cromwellian contingent to be the
finest troops in the world. After some delay Mar-
dyke was taken, and then formally handed over
to the English representative (October 1657). It
was the first foothold gained by England on con-
tinental soil since the loss of Calais in the time of
Queen Mary a hundred years before. Dunkirk was
left until the next season. The glory then won by
English arms belongs to a further page.

At the end of 1655, Cromwell told the agent
from the Great Elector that it was not only to rule
over the English Republic that he had received a
call from God, but to introduce union and friend-
ship among the princes of Europe. Cool observers
from Venice, who knew thoroughly the ground that
the Protector knew so little, predicted in 1655 that
his vast and ill - conceived designs must end in
spreading confusion all over Christendom. These
designs made little progress. The Great Elector
remonstrated. He warned Cromwell's ambassador
that in the present state of Europe the interest of
protestantism itself required them to follow safe
rather than specious counsels, and to be content
with trying to secure freedom of conscience by
treaty. Instead of a grand protestant league against
the German branch of the House of Austria, what
Oliver saw with perplexity and anger was violent
territorial conflict among the Baltic protestant
powers themselves. The Swedish king, the Danish
king, the Great Elector, were all in hot quarrel
with one another — the quarrel in which Charles X.,
grandson of Gustavus Adolphus, and grandfather of
Charles XII., astounded Europe by marching twenty
thousand men across some thirteen miles of frozen

UI ENGLISH TROOPS IN FLANDERS 411

sea on the path of territorial conquest. The dream
of Charles, from whom Cromwell hoped so much,
was not religious, but the foundation of a new
Gothic Empire. Even anabaptists were not more
disappointing at home than were the northern
powers abroad. Even the protestant cantons of
Switzerland did not help him to avenge the bar-
barities in Piedmont. When a new Emperor came
to be chosen, only three of the electors were pro-
testant, and one of the protestant three actually
voted for the Austrian Leopold. The presence of
Cromwell's troops in Flanders naturally filled the
Dutch with uneasiness, and inclined one protest-
ant republic again to take arms against another.
Finally, to hasten the decline of Spain was directly
to prepare for the ascendancy of France ; of a
country, that is to say, where all the predominant
influences were catholic, and would inevitably revive
in unrestrained force as soon as the monarchy was
once secure. Bolingbroke mentions a tradition of
which he had heard from persons who lived in
those days, and whom he supposes to have got it
from Thurloe, that Cromwell was in treaty with
Spain and ready to turn his arms against France at
the moment when he died. So soon, it is inferred,
did he perceive the harm that would be done to
the general interest of Europe by that French pre-
ponderance which his diplomacy had made possible
and his arms had furthered. But, they say, to do
great things a man must act as though he would
never die, and if Cromwell had only lived, Louis
XIV. would never have dared to revoke the Edict of
Nantes. This is problematical indeed. If the view
ascribed to Cromwell by some modern admirers was
really his, it must rank among the contradictory
chimeras that not seldom haunt great minds.
Suppose that Cromwell's scheme of protestant
ascendancy in Europe had been less hard to recon-
cile with actual conditions than it was, how was he

412 OLIVER CROMWELL

to execute it ? How was the conversion of England
into a crusading military state, and the vast in-
crease of taxation necessary to support such a
state, calculated to give either popularity or
strength to a government so precarious and so
unstable, that after five years of experiment upon
experiment it could exist neither with a parliament
nor without one ? It was the cost of the war with
Spain that prevented Oliver from being able to
help the protestants against the catholic cantons
in Switzerland, zealous as were his sympathies.
And one ground of his anxiety to possess Dunkirk
was trade antagonism to the Dutch, who were at
least as good protestants as the English. Oliver's
ideal was not without a grandeur of its own, but it
was incongruous in its parts, and prolonged trial of
it could only have made its unworkableness more
manifest.

" You have accounted yourselves happy," said
the Protector in his speech in January 1658, " in
being environed by a great ditch from all the world
beside. Truly you will not be able to keep your
ditch nor your shipping, unless you turn your ships
and shipping into troops of horse and companies of
foot, and fight to defend yourselves on terra firma."
The great Elizabeth, like Lambert at Cromwell's
own council-table, believed in the policy of the
ditch and " the felicity of full coffers," and she left
a contented people and a settled realm. Cromwell,
notwithstanding all the glory of his imperial vision
of England as a fighting continental state, was in
fact doing his best to prevent either content or the
settlement of his own rule in the island whence
alone all this splendour must first radiate.

To turn to another branch of external policy.
The future growth of vast West Indian interests, of
which the seizure of Jamaica was the initial step,
has made it possible to depict Cromwell as the
conscious author of a broad system of colonial

m COLONIAL EXPANSION 413

expansion. What is undoubtedly true is that such
ideas were then alive. Nor had the famous tradi-
tions of the Elizabethans ever died. The Common-
wealth from the time of its birth, while Cromwell
was still engaged in the reduction of Scotland, had
shown the same vigour in the case of insurgent
colonies, as against royalist foes in waters nearer
home, or against the forces of distraction in the
two outlying kingdoms. The Navigation Act, which
belongs to the same date, has been truly described
as designed among other nearer objects to strengthen
the hold of England on her distant possessions,
though it is perhaps a reading of modern phrases
into old events, to say that the statesmen of the re-
public deliberately designed to show that England
was to be not merely a European power, but the
centre of a world-wide empire. Be this as it may,
Cromwell's colonial policy was that of his pre-
decessors, as it was that of the statesmen who
followed him. He watched the colonies in a rational
and conciliatory spirit, and attended with energy
to the settlement of Jamaica, though some of his
expedients were too hurried to be wise. With the
energetic temperament we have to take its draw-
backs. For his lifetime little came of his zealous
hopes for the West Indies, and English merchants
thought bitterly on their heavy losses in the Spanish
trade for which a barren acquisition seemed a sorry
recompense. Colonial expansion came, and it came
in spite of the misgivings of interested traders or
the passing miscalculations of statesmen. It had
its spring in the abiding demands of national
circumstance ; in the continuous action of economic
necessities upon a national character of incompar-
able energy and adventure. Such a policy was not,
and could not be, the idea of one man, or the mark
of a single generation.

CHAPTER IX

GROWING EMBARRASSMENTS

IN France, a century and a quarter after Cromwell's
day, they said that every clerk who had read
Rousseau's New Helo'isa, every schoolmaster who
had translated ten pages of Livy, every journalist
who knew by heart the sophisms of the Social Con-
tract, was sure that he had found the philosopher's
stone and was instantly ready to frame a constitu-
tion. Our brave fathers of the Cromwellian times
were almost as rash. There is no branch of political
industry that men approach with hearts so light,
and yet that leaves them at the end so dubious and
melancholy, as the concoction of a Second Chamber.
Cromwell and his parliament set foot on this pons
asinorum of democracy, without a suspicion of its
dangers.

The Protector made it a condition at his confer-
ences in the spring of 1657, that if he was to go on
there must be other persons interposed between
him and the House of Commons. To prevent
tumultuary and popular spirits he sought a screen.
It was granted that he should name another House.
Nothing seemed simpler or more plausible, and yet
he was steering straight upon reefs and shoals. A
mistake here, said Thurloe, will be like war or
marriage : it admits of no repentance. If the old
House of Lords had been alive, and had also by
miracle been sincerely in the humour to work for
national pacification, to restore it might have tended

414

CHAP, ix THE OTHER HOUSE 415

to union. As it was, to call out of empty space an
artificial House, without the hold upon men's minds
of history and ancient association, without defined
powers, without marked distinction of persons or
interests, and then to try to make it an effective
screen against an elected House to whose assent it
owed its own being, was not to promote union but
directly to provoke division and to intensify it.
Confident in his own good faith, and with a con-
viction that to frame laws in view of contingent
possibilities has a tincture of impiety in it as a
distrust of Providence, Cromwell never thought out
the scheme ; he left it in the Humble Petition and
Advice with leaks, chinks, and wide apertures that
might horrify the newest apprentice of a parlia-
mentary draftsman. The natural result followed.
The new House was not to be more than seventy
in number nor less than forty, to be named by the
Protector and approved by the House of Commons ;
a place in it was not hereditary ; and it received
no more impressive title than the Other House.
Cromwell selected a very respectable body of some
sixty men, beginning with his two sons, Richard
and Henry, and including good lawyers, judges,
generals, and less than a dozen of the old nobles.
Some of the ablest, like Lockhart and Monk and
Henry Cromwell, were absent from England, and
all of the old nobles save five held aloof. Like
smaller reformers since, Cromwell had never de-
cided, to begin with, whether to make his Lords
strong or weak : strong enough to curb the Com-
mons, and yet weak enough for the Commons to
curb them. The riddle seems unanswered to this
day. He forgot too that by removing so many
men of experience and capacity from the Commons,
he was impairing the strength of his own govern-
ment at the central point of attack. Attack was
certain, for on the opening of the second session of
his second parliament (Jan. 20, 1658) the ninety

416 OLIVER CROMWELL

members whom he had shut out from the first session
were to be admitted. Some of them after much
consideration deemed it their duty " to leave that
tyrant and his packed convention to stand upon
his sandy foundation," but the majority seem to
have thought otherwise and they reappeared.

The looseness of the constituting document made
the business of an opposition easy, if it were in-
clined to action. One clause undoubtedly enacted
that no standing law could be altered, and no new
law made, except by Act of Parliament. As a
previous clause had defined a parliament to consist
of two Houses, this seemed to confer on the Other
House a co-ordinate share in legislation. On the
other hand, the only section dealing with the specific
attributes of the new House regards it as a court of
civil and criminal appeal, and the opposition argued
that the Other House was to be that and nothing
else. It was here, and on the question of govern-
ment by a single House, that the ground of party
battle was chosen. Cromwell's enemies had a slight
majority. After the debate had gone on for four
days, he addressed them in an urgent remonstrance.
He dwelt on the alarming state of Europe, the com-
binations against the protestant interest, the dis-
cord within that interest itself, the danger of a
Spanish invasion to restore the Stuarts, the deadly
perils of disunion at home.

The House was deaf. For ten days more the
stubborn debate on the name and place of the Other
House went on. Stealthy attempts were made to
pervert the army in the interest of a republican
revival. As in the old times of the Long Parlia-
ment, the opposition worked up petitions in the
city. These petitions were designed by the mal-
contents to serve as texts for motions and debates
in favour of returning to a pure commonwealth.
On the other wing there were some in the parlia-
ment who even held commissions from the king.

CHAP, ix THE COMMONS RESIST 417

The Protector, well aware of all that was on foot,
at last could endure it no more. In opening the
session he had referred to his infirmity of health,
and the labour of wrestling with the difficulties of
his place, as Maidstone says, " drank up his spirits,
of which his natural constitution yielded a vast
stock." Royalists consoled themselves with stories
that he was not well in mind or body ; that his
mutinous officers vexed him strangely ; and that
he was forced to take opium to make him sleep.
The story of the circumstances of the last dealings
of Oliver with a parliament was related as follows :—
A mysterious porter brought letters addressed to
the Protector. Thurloe directed Maidstone, the
steward, to take them to his Highness. The door
of the apartment was closed, but on his knocking
very hard, Cromwell cried out angrily to know who
was there. Presently he unbarred the door, took
the letters, and shut himself in again. By and by
he sent for Whalley and Desborough, who were to
be in command of the guard that night. He asked
them if they had heard no news, and on their saying
no, he again asked if they had not heard of a
petition. He bade them go to Westminster. On
their way they heard some of the soldiery using
disaffected words. This they immediately reported,
and Oliver told them to change the ordering of the
guards for the night. The next morning (Feb. 4),
before nine o'clock he called for his breakfast, telling
Thurloe, who chanced to be ill, that he would go to
the House, at which Thurloe wondered why his
Highness resolved so suddenly. He did not tell
him why, but he was resolved to go. " And when
he had his meal, he withdrew himself, and went the
back way, intending alone to have gone by water ;
but the ice was so as he could not ; then he came
the foot way, and the first man of the guard he
saw he commanded him to press the nearest coach,
which he did, with but two horses in it, and so he

2E

418 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOK v

went with not above four footmen, and about five
or six of the guards to the House ; after which,
retiring into the withdrawing room, drank a cup of
ale and ate a piece of toast. Then the lord Fiennes,
near to him, asked his Highness what he intended ;
he said he would dissolve the House. Upon which
the lord Fleetwood said, I beseech your Highness
consider first well of it ; it is of great consequence.
He replied, You are a milksop : by the living God
I will dissolve the House. (Some say he iterated
this twice, and some say it was, As the Lord
liveth.) "

His speech was for once short and concentrated,
and he did not dissemble his anger. " What is like
to come upon this," he concluded, " the enemy being
ready to invade us, but our present blood and con-
fusion ? And if this be so, I do assign it to this
cause : your not assenting to what you did invite
me to by your Petition and Advice, as that which
might prove the settlement of the nation. And if
this be the end of your sitting, and this be your
carriage, I think it high time that an end be put to
your sitting. And I so dissolve this parliament.
And let God be judge between you and me." To
which end, says one report, many of the Commons
cried Amen.

Cromwell's government had gone through six
stages in the five years since the revolution of 1653.
The first was a dictatorship tempered by a military
council. Second, while wielding executive power as
Lord-General, he called a parliamentary convention.
Third, the convention vanished, and the soldiers
installed him as Protector under the Instrument.
Fourth, the system under the Instrument broke
down, and for months the Protectorate again meant
the personal rule of the head of the army. Fifth,
the rule of the major-generals broke down, and was
followed by a kind of constitutional monarchy.
Sixth, the monarch and the parliament quarrelled,

BLOWS AT CONSPIRACY 419

and the constitution broke down. The succession
of expedients and experiments may have been
inevitable in view of the fundamental dislocation
of things after rebellion and war. It is true that
religious visionaries, hot-headed political theorists,
the rivalries of men and factions, the clash of solid
underlying interests, all worked to break down the
fabric as fast as it was reared. Against these cease-
less dissolvents Cromwell heroically persisted, and
he kept general order. Still, in face of such a
spectacle and such results, it is hardly possible to
claim for the triumphant soldier a high place in the
history of original and creative statesmanship.

The Protector next flung himself into the work
of tracking out the conspirators. That the design
of a Spanish invasion to fit in with domestic
insurrection would hopelessly miscarry, may have
been probable. That the fidelity of the army could
be relied upon, he hardly can have doubted. But
a ruler bearing all the responsibilities of a cause
and a nation, cannot afford to trust to the chapter
of accidents. We who live nearly three centuries off
cannot pretend to measure the extent of the danger,
but nobody can read the depositions of witnesses in
the cases of the spring of 1658, without feeling the
presence of mischief that even the most merciful
of magistrates was bound to treat as grave. The
nation showed no resentment against treasonable
designs ; it was not an ordered and accepted govern-
ment against which they were directed. This did
not lighten the necessity of striking hard at what
Henry Cromwell called these recurring anniversary
mischiefs. Examples were made in the persons of
Sir Henry Slingsby, Dr. Hewitt, and some obscurer
persons. Hewitt was an episcopal clergyman, an
acceptable preacher to those of his own way of
thinking, a fervent royalist : the evidence is strong
that he was deep in Stuart plots. Slingsby 's case
is less clear. That he was a royalist and a plotter

420 OLIVER CROMWELL

is certain, but the evidence suggests that there was
some ugly truth in what he said on his trial that
he was " trepanned " by agents of the government
who, while he was in their custody at Hull, ex-
tracted his secrets from him by pretending to favour
his aims. The High Courts of Justice before which
these and other prisoners of the same stamp were
arraigned, did not please steady lawyers like White-
locke, but the Protector thought them better fitted to
terrify evil-doers than an ordinary trial at common
law. Though open to all the objections against
special criminal tribunals, the High Courts of Justice
during Cromwell's reign were conducted with temper
and fairness : they always had good lawyers among
them, and the size of the court, never composed of
less than thirty members, gave it something of the
quality of trial by jury. It is said that Hewitt
had privately performed the service according to
the Anglican rite at the recent marriage of Mary
Cromwell with Lord Fauconberg, and that the
bride interceded for his life, but the Protector was
immovable, and both Slingsby and Hewitt were
sent to the scaffold (June 1658). Plots were once
more for a season driven underground. But it is
impossible that the grim circumstances of their
suppression could have helped the popularity of
the government.

Meanwhile the Protectorate was sinking deeper
and deeper into the bog of financial difficulty. " We
are so out at the heels here," Thurloe says in April,
" that I know not what we shall do for money."
At the end of the month, he reports that the
clamour for money both from the sea and land
is such that they can scarce be borne. Henry
Cromwell, Lord-Deputy in Ireland since November,
is in the last extremity. Hunger, he says, will
break through stone walls, and if they are kept so
bare, they will soon have to cease all industry and
sink to the brutish practices of the Irish themselves.

CHAP, ix ATTEMPTS AT SETTLEMENT 421

Fleetwood is sure they spend as little public money
except for public needs as any government ever
did ; but their expenses, he admits, were extra-
ordinary and could not with safety be retrenched.
In June things are still declared to be at a stand-
still. The sums required could not possibly be
supplied without a parliament, and in that direction
endless perils lurked. Truly, I think, says Thurloe,
in words that deserve attention, " that nothing but
some unexpected Providence can remove the present
difficulties, which the Lord it may be will afford us,
if He hath thoughts of peace towards us." By
July things are even worse, " our necessities much
increasing every day."

Cromwell threw the deliberations on the subject
of a parliament on to a junto of nine. What was
the parliament to do when it should meet ? How
was the government to secure itself against cavaliers
on one hand, and commonwealth ultras on the
other ? For the cavaliers some of the junto sug-
gested an oath of abjuration and a fine of half their
estates. This was not very promising. The cavaliers
might take the oath, and yet not keep it. To
punish cavaliers who were innocent, for the sins
of the plotters, would be recognised as flagrantly
unjust ; and as many of the old cavaliers were now
dead, it was clearly impolitic by such injustice to
turn their sons into irreconcilables. The only thing
in the whole list of constitutional difficulties on
which the junto could agree, was that the Protector
should name his successor. If this close council
could only come to such meagre conclusion upon
the vexed questions inseparable from that revision
which, as everybody knew, must be faced, what
gain could be expected from throwing the same
questions on the floor of a vehemently distracted
parliament ? There is reason even for supposing
that in his straits Oliver sounded some of the
republicans, including men of such hard grit as

422 OLIVER CROMWELL

Ludlow and Vane. Henry Cromwell was doubtful
and suspicious of any such combination, and laid
down the wholesome principle in party concerns,
" that one that runs along with you may more
easily trip up the heels, than he that wrestles with
you." We go wrong in political judgment if we
leave out rivalries, heart-burnings, personalities,
even among leading men and great men. History
is apt to smooth out these rugosities ; hero-worship
may smooth them out ; time hides them ; but
they do their work. Less trace of personal jealousy
or cabal is to be found in the English rebellion than
in almost any other revolutionary movement in
history, and Cromwell himself was free from these
disfigurements of public life. Of Lambert, fine
soldier and capable man as he was, we cannot
affirm so much, and he had confederates. Henry
Cromwell's clear sight never failed him, and he
perceived that the discussion was idle. " Have
you, after all," he asks of Thurloe, " got any settle-
ment for men to swear to ? Does not your peace
depend upon his Highness' life, and upon his
peculiar skill and faculty and personal interest in
the army as now modelled and commanded ? I
say, beneath the immediate hand of God, if I know
anything of the affairs of England, there is no other
reason why we are not in blood at this day." In
other words, no settlement was even now in sight,
and none was possible if Cromwell's mighty per-
sonality should be withdrawn. This judgment from
such a man is worth a whole chapter of our modern
dissertation. It was the whole truth, to none known
better than to the Lord Protector himself.

CHAPTER X

THE CLOSE

ONE parting beam of splendour broke through the
clouded skies. The Protector, in conformity with
the revised treaty made with France in March (1658),
had despatched six thousand foot, as well as a naval
contingent, to be auxiliaries to the French in an
attack by land and sea upon Dunkirk. The famous
Turenne was in general command of the allied forces,
with Lockhart under his orders at the head of the
English six thousand. Dramatic elements were not
wanting. Cardinal Mazarin was on the field, and
Louis the Fourteenth, then a youth of twenty, was
learning one of his early lessons in the art of war.
In the motley Spanish forces confronting the French
king, were his cousins the Duke of York and the
Duke of Gloucester, the two sons of Charles the
First, and, like Louis himself, grandsons of Henry
of Navarre. Along with the English princes were
the brigades of Irish and royalist English who had
followed the fortunes of the exiled line, and who
now once more faced the ever- victorious Ironsides.
Cromwell sent Fauconberg, his new son-in-law, to
Calais with letters of salutation and compliment to
the French king and his minister, accompanied by
a present of superb English horses. The emissary
was received with extraordinary courtesies alike
by the monarch and the cardinal, and the latter
even conducted him by the hand to the outer
door, a compliment that he had never before been

423

424 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOK v

known to pay to the ambassador of any crowned
head.

The battle of the Dunes (June 14) was fought
among the sandhills of Dunkirk, and ended in the
destruction of the Spanish army. " The English,"
says a French eye-witness, " pike in hand, charged
with such stubborn vigour the eight Spanish bat-
talions posted on the high ground of the downs,
that in face of musketry fire and stout resistance
the English drove them headlong from their posi-
tion." These were the old or natural Spaniards as
distinguished from Walloon and German, and were
the flower of the Spanish army. Their position was
so strong that Lockhart at first thought it desperate ;
and when all was over, he called it the hottest
dispute that he had ever seen. The two Stuart
princes are said to have forgotten their wrongs at
the hand of the soldier who had trained that
invincible band, and to have felt a thrill of honour-
able pride at the gallantry of their countrymen.
Turenne's victory was complete, and in a week
Dunkirk surrendered. Then came a bitter moment
for the French. The king received Dunkirk from
the Spaniards, only to hand over the keys accord-
ing to treaty to the English, and Lockhart at once
took possession in the name of the Lord Protector.
Mazarin knew the price he was paying to be
tremendous. The French historians 1 think that he
foresaw that English quarrels would one day be
sure to enable France to recover it by sword or
purse, and so in time they did. Meanwhile the
Ironsides gave the sage and valiant Lockhart trouble
by their curiosity about the unhallowed churches of
the Scarlet Lady. They insisted on keeping their
heads covered ; some saw in the sacred treasures
good material for loot ; and one of them nearly
caused a violent affray by lighting his pipe at a

1 Bourelly, Cromwell et Mazarin, p. 261. Ch6ruel, Hist, de France sous
Mazarin, iii. 292-295.

CHAP. X CROMWELL'S PLACE IN EUROPE 425

candle on the altar where a priest was saying mass.
But Lockhart was strict, and discipline prevailed.
Hardly less embarrassing than want of reverence in
the soldiery were the long discourses with which
Hugh Peters, the Boanerges of the military pulpit,
would fain have regaled his singular ally, the
omnipotent cardinal. Louis XIV. despatched a
mission of much magnificence bearing to Cromwell
a present of a sword of honour with a hilt adorned
with precious gems. In after days, when Louis had
become arch-persecutor and the shining champion
of divine right, the pride of the Most Christian King
was mortified by recollecting the profuse compli-
ments that he had once paid to the impious regicide.
The glory of their ruler's commanding place in
Europe gratified English pride, but it brought no
composure into the confused and jarring scene. It
rather gave new nourishment to the root of evil.
44 The Lord is pleased to do wonderfully for his
Highness," said Thurloe after Dunkirk, 44 and to
bless him in his affairs beyond expression," but he
speedily reverts to the grinding necessity of putting
affairs on some better footing. Men with cool heads
perceived that though continental acquisitions might
strengthen our security in one way, yet by their
vast cost they must add heavily to the financial
burdens that constituted the central weakness of
the Protectorate, and prevented the real settlement
of a governing system. For the Protector himself
the civil difficulties against which he had for seven
years with such manful faith and heroic persistency
contended, were now soon to come to an end. He
told his last parliament that he looked upon him-
self as one set on a watch-tower to see what may
be for the good of these nations, and what may be
for the preventing of evil. The hour of the daunt-
less sentinel's relief soon sounded. Death had
already this year stricken his household more than
one sore blow. Rich, who had married Frances

426 OLIVER CROMWELL

Cromwell in November, died in February. Eliza-
beth Clay pole lost her youngest son in June. All
through the summer Elizabeth herself was torn by
a cruel malady, and in August she died at Hampton
Court. For many days her father, insensible even
to the cares of public business, watched with cease-
less devotion by the bedside of the dearest of his
children. He was himself ill with gout and other
distempers, and his disorders were aggravated by
close vigils and the depth of his affliction. A low
fever seized him, presently turning to a dangerous
ague. He met his Council from time to time and
attended to affairs as long as he was able. It was
in these days (Aug. 20, 1658) that George Fox met
him riding into Hampton Court, " and before I
came to him," says the mystic, " as he rode at the
head of his lifeguard I saw and felt a waft of death
go forth against him." A little later he was taken
to London, and while St. James's was being made
ready, he stayed at Whitehall. He quitted it no
more. " He had great discoveries of the Lord to
him in his sickness, and had some assurances of his
being restored and made further serviceable in this
work. Never was there a greater stock of prayers
going for any man than there is now going for him,
and truly there is a general consternation upon the
spirits of all men, good and bad, fearing what may
be the event of it, should it please God to take his
Highness at this time. Men's hearts seemed as
sunk within them." When the great warrior knew
that the end was sure, he met it with the con-
fident resignation of his faith. He had seen death
too often and too near to dread the parting hour
of mortal anguish. Chaplains, preachers, godly
persons, attended in an adjoining room, and came in
and out as the heavy hours went on, to read the
Bible to him or to pray with him. To one of these
he put the moving question, so deep with penitential
meaning, so pathetic in its humility and misgiving,

CHAP, x HIS DEATH 427

in its wistful recall of the bright bygone dawn of
life in the soul : — " Tell me, is it possible to fall
from grace ? y " No, it is not possible," said the
minister. " Then," said the dying Cromwell, " /
am safe, for I know that I -was once in grace."

With weighty repetitions and great vehemency of
spirit he quoted the texts that have awed or con-
soled so many generations of believing men. In
broken murmurs of prayer, he besought the favour
of heaven for the people ; that they might have
consistency of judgment, one heart, and mutual
love ; that they and the work of reformation might
be delivered. " Thou hast made me, though very
unworthy, a mean instrument to do them some
good, and thee service ; and many of them have
set too high a value upon me, though others wish
and would be glad of my death. Pardon such as
desire to trample on the dust of a poor worm, for
they are thy people too." All the night of the
2nd of September he was very restless, and " there
being something to drink offered him, he was
desired to take the same and to endeavour to
sleep ; unto which he answered, ' It is not my design
to drink or to sleep, but my design is to make what
haste I can to be gone.' ' On Monday, the 30th of
August, a wild storm had raged over land and sea,
and while Cromwell was slowly sinking, the days
broke upon houses shattered, mighty trees torn up
by the roots, foundered ships, and drowning men.
Friday, the 3rd of September, was the anniversary
of two of his most famous victories. It was just
eight years since with radiant eye he had watched
the sun shine forth over the glistening waters at
Dunbar, and seen the scattering of the enemies of
the Lord. Now he lay in the stupor of helpless
death, and about four o'clock in the afternoon his
days came to their end.

His remains were privately interred in Henry the
Seventh's chapel three weeks later, and for a couple

428 OLIVER CROMWELL BOOKV

of months a waxen effigy in robes of state with
crown and sceptre was exhibited at Somerset House.
Then (Nov. 23) the public funeral took place with
profuse and regal pomp, and amid the princes, law-
givers, and warriors who have brought renown and
power to the name of England, the dust of Cromwell
lay for a season in the great time-hallowed Minster.
In little more than two years the hour of venge-
ance struck, and a base and impious revenge it
proved. A unanimous resolution of the House of
Commons directed the savage ceremonial, and the
date was the anniversary (January 30, 1661) of the
execution of King Charles twelve years before. " It
was kept as a very solemn day of fasting and prayer.
This morning the carcases of Cromwell, Ireton, and
Bradshaw (which the day before had been brought
from the Red Lion Inn, Holborn) were drawn upon
a sledge to Tyburn [a stone's throw from where the
Marble Arch now stands], and then taken out of
their coffins, and in their shrouds hanged by the
neck until the going down of the sun. They were
then cut down, their heads taken off, and their
bodies buried in a grave under the gallows. The
coffin in which was the body of Cromwell was a
very rich thing, very full of gilded hinges and nails."
The three heads were fixed upon poles, and set up
at the southern end of Westminster Hall, where
Pepys saw them four days after on the spot at
which the regicides had judged the king.1

To imply that Cromwell stands in the line of
European dictators with Charles V. or Louis XIV.
or Napoleon is a hyperbole that does him both less
than justice and more. Guizot brings us nearer to
the truth when he counts Cromwell, William III.,

1 So I read Pepys. In any case, however, evidence points to the fact
that the heads were ultimately fixed on the roof outside.

CHAP, x CONCLUSION 429

and Washington as chiefs and representatives of
sovereign crises that have settled the destinies of
nations. When we go on to ask what precisely was
Cromwell's share in a mission so supreme, the
answer, if we seek it away from the prepossessions
of modern controversy, is not hard to discern. It
was by his military genius, by the might of the
legions that he created and controlled and led
to victory upon victory ; it was at Marston and
Naseby, at Preston and Worcester, in Ireland and
at Dunbar, that Cromwell set his deep mark on the
destinies of England as she was, and of that vaster
dominion into which the English realm was in the
course of ages to be transformed. He was chief of
a party who shared his own strong perception that
neither civil freedom nor political could be made
secure without the sword, and happily the swords-
man showed himself consummate. In speed and
vigour, in dash and in prudence, in force of shock
and quick steadiness of recovery ; in sieges, marches,
long wasting campaigns, pitched engagements ; as
commander of horse, as tactician, and as strate-
gist, the modern expert ranks Cromwell among
the foremost masters of the rough art of war in
every branch. Above all, he created the instrument
which in discipline, skill, and those highest military
virtues that come of moral virtues, has never been
surpassed.

In our own half-century now closing, alike in
Western Europe and across the Atlantic, the torch
of war has been lighted rather for Unity of race or
state, than for Liberty. Cromwell struck for both.
It was his armed right hand that crushed the
absolutist pretensions alike of crown and mitre, and
then forced the three kingdoms into the mould of
a single state. It was at those decisive moments
when the trembling balance hung on fortune in the
battlefield, that the unconquerable captain turned
the scale. After we have discussed all the minor

430 OLIVER CROMWELL

aspects of his special policies on this occasion or
the other, after we have scanned all the secondary
features of his rule, this is still what in a single
sentence defines the true place of Cromwell in our
history.

Along with that paramount claim, he performed
the service of keeping a provisional form of peace,
and delivering the nation from the anarchy in which
both order and freedom would have been submerged.
He made what some of the best of his contem-
poraries thought dire mistakes ; he forsook many
principles in his choice of means, which he intended
to preserve in working out the end; and many
of his difficulties were of his own creation. Yet
watchfulness, self-effacement, versatility, and re-
source, for the time and on the surface repaired all,
and as " constable of the parish " his persistency
was unfaltering and unmatched. In the harder
task of laying the foundations of a deeper order that
might be expected to stand after his own imperious
control should be withdrawn, he was beaten. He
hardly counted on more. In words already quoted,
" I did out of necessity," he said, " undertake that
business, not so much out of a hope of doing any
good, as out of a desire to prevent mischief and
evil. ' ' He reared no dam nor bulwark strong enough
to coerce either the floods of revolutionary faction
or the reactionary tides that came after. " Does
not your peace," as Henry Cromwell asked, " depend
upon his Highness' life, and upon his peculiar skill
and faculty and personal interest in the army ? ' ' That
is to say, the Protectorate was no system, but only
the transitory expedient of individual supremacy.

Richard Cromwell, it is true, acceded without
opposition. For a few months the new Protector
bore the outward ensigjns of supreme power, but the
reality of it was not his for a day. The exchequer
was so dilapidated, that he underwent the humilia-
tion of begging Mazarin to lend him fifty thousand

CONCLUSION 431

pounds. The Council of War sought an early
opportunity of setting up their claim to military
predominance. The majority in the new parliament
was undoubtedly favourable at first to Richard and
his government, but a constitution depending for
its life on the fluctuations of majority and minority
in incessant divisions in the lobbies of a House of
Commons, was evidently not worth a month's pur-
chase. Authority in the present was sapped and
dislodged by arraigning it in the past. Financial
deficit and abuses in administration were exposed
to rigorous assault. Prisoners of state, committed
on no more lawful warrant than the Protector's will,
were brought up to the bar from the Tower and
strong places elsewhere, attended by applauding
crowds, and were received with marks of sym-
pathy for the victim and resentment against the
dead oppressor. Dunkirk, Jamaica, the glories of
Blake, the humiliation of Spain, went for nothing
against the losses of trade. The struggle between
parliament and army, so long quelled by the iron
hand of Oliver, but which he was never able to
bring to enduring adjustment, broke into flame.
Richard Cromwell, a man of honour and sense, but
without the prestige of a soldier, succumbed and
disappeared (May 1659). The old quarrel between
military power and civil fought itself to an end, in
one of those squalid scenes of intrigue, egotism,
mutual reproach, political impotency, in which so
many revolutions since have expired. Happily no
blood was shed. Then the ancient line was recalled,
—the cavaliers infuriated by old defeat and present
ruin, the bishops eager to clamber into their thrones
again, the bulk of the nation on the same side. At
the new king's right hand was Clarendon ; but
fourteen years of exile, with all its privations, con-
tumelies, and heart - sickness of hope perpetually
deferred, had soured him and blotted out from his
mind the principles and aspirations of the old days

432 OLIVER CROMWELL

when he had stood by the side of Pym and Hampden
against Laud, Strafford, and Charles. The mon-
archy no doubt came back with its claims abated.
So much the sword of Oliver had made safe. But
how little had been permanently done for that
other cause more precious in Oliver's sight than
everything besides, was soon shown by the Act of
Uniformity, the Test Act, the Conventicle Act, the
Five Mile Act, and all the rest of the apparatus of
church privilege and proscription.

It is hard to resist the view that Cromwell's
revolution was the end of the mediaeval, rather than
the beginning of the modern era. He certainly
had little of the faith in progress that became the
inspiration of a later age. His respect for Public
Opinion — supposed to be the driving force of modern
government — was a strictly limited regard. In one
sense he was no democrat, for he declared, as we
have seen, that the question is not what pleases
people, but what is for their good. This came
rather near to Charles's words as he stood upon the
scaffold, that the people's liberty lay in the laws,
" not their having a share in government ; that is
nothing pertaining to them." But then, on the
other hand, Cromwell was equally strong that things
obtained by force, though never so good in them-
selves, are both less to the ruler's honour and less
likely to last. " What we gain in a free way, it is
better than twice as much in a forced, and will be
more truly ours and our posterity's " (ante, p. 202) ;
and the safest test of any constitution is its accept-
ance by the people. And again, " It will be found
an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of
his natural liberty upon a supposition he may abuse
it." The root of all external freedom is here.

In saying that Cromwell had the spirit, insight,
and grasp that fit a man to wield power in high
affairs, we only repeat that he had the instinct of
government, and this is a very different thing from

CHAP, x CONCLUSION 433

either a taste for abstract ideas of politics, or the
passion for liberty. The instinct of order has been
as often the gift of a tyrant as of a hero, as common
to some of the worst hearts in human history as to
some of the best. Cromwell was no Frederick the
Great, who spoke of mankind as diese verdammte
Rasse, that accursed tribe. He belonged to the
rarer and nobler type of governing men, who see
the golden side, who count faith, pity, hope among
the counsels of practical wisdom, and who for
political power seek a moral base. This is a key to
men's admiration for him. His ideals were high,
his fidelity to them, though sometimes clouded, was
still abiding, his ambition was pure. Yet it can
hardly be accident that has turned him into one of
the idols of the school who hold, shyly as yet in
England, but nakedly in Germany, that might is a
token of right, and that the strength and power of
the state is an end that at once tests and justifies
all means.

When it is claimed that no English ruler did
more than Cromwell to shape the future of the land
he governed, we run some risk of straining history
only to procure incense for retrograde ideals. Many
would contend that Thomas Cromwell, in deciding
the future of one of the most powerful standing
institutions of the country, exercised a profounder
influence than Oliver. Then, if Cromwell did little
to shape the future of the church of England,
neither did he shape the future of the parliament of
England. On the side of constitutional construction,
unwelcome as it may sound, a more important place
belongs to the sage and steadfast, though rather
unheroic Walpole. The development of the English
constitution has in truth proceeded on lines that
Cromwell profoundly disliked. The idea of a par-
liament always sitting and actively reviewing the
details of administration was in his sight an in-
tolerable mischief. It was almost the only system

2F

434 OLIVER CROMWELL

against which his supple mind, so indifferent as it
was to all constitutional forms, stood inflexible.
Yet this, for good or ill, is our system to-day, and
the system of the wide host of political communities
that have followed our parliamentary model. When
it is said again, that it was owing to Cromwell that
Nonconformity had time to take such deep root
as to defy the storm of the Restoration, do we not
overlook the original strength of all those giant
puritan fibres from which both the Rebellion and
Cromwell himself had sprung ? It was not a man,
not even such a man as Oliver, it was the same
underlying spiritual forces that made the Rebellion,
which also held fast against the Restoration. It
would hardly be more forced to say that Cromwell
was the founder of Nonconformity.

It has been called a common error of our day to
ascribe far too much to the designs and the influ-
ence of eminent men, of rulers, and of governments.
The reproach is just and should impress us. The
momentum of past events ; the spontaneous impulses
of the mass of a nation or a race ; the pressure of
general hopes and fears ; the new things learned in
the onward and diversified motions of " the great
spirit of human knowledge," — all these have more
to do with the progress of the world's affairs than
the deliberate views of even the most determined
and far-sighted of its individual leaders. Thirty
years after the death of the Protector, a more suc-
cessful revolution came about. The law was made
more just, the tribunals were purified, the rights of
conscience received at least a partial recognition,
the press began to enjoy a freedom for which Milton
had made a glorious appeal, but which Cromwell
never dared concede. Yet the Declaration of Right
and the Toleration Act issued from a stream of
ideas and maxims, aims and methods that were
not puritan. New tributaries had already swollen
the volume and changed the currents of that broad

CHAP, x CONCLUSION 435

confluence of manners, morals, government, belief,
on whose breast Time guides the voyages of man-
kind. The age of Rationalism with its bright lights
and sobering shadows had begun. Some ninety
years after 1688, another revolution followed in the
England across the Atlantic, and the gulf between
Cromwell and Jefferson is measure of the vast dis-
tance the minds of men had travelled. With the
death of Cromwell, though the free churches re-
mained as nurseries of strong-hearted civil feeling,
the brief life of puritan theocracy in England ex-
pired. It was a phase of a movement that left an
inheritance of many noble thoughts, the memory of
a brave struggle for human freedom, and a pro-
cession of strenuous master-spirits with Milton and
Cromwell at their head. Political ends miscarry,
and the revolutionary leader treads a path of fire.
True wisdom is to learn how we may combine sane
verdicts on the historic event, with a just estimation
in the actor of those qualities of high endeavour on
which, amid incessant change of formula, direction,
fashion, and ideal, the world's best hopes in every
age depend.

2F2

INDEX

Adwalton, 121

Agitators (army representatives),

192-4, 200, 213

Agreement of the People (1647), 199,
203 ; (1648), 203 ; (1649), 203,
329, 392

American Constitution, Instrument
of Government compared with,
333
Anabaptism, Cromwell's relation to,

380-81

Andrews, Dean of Limerick, 28
Anglican Church —
Arminianism in, 46-7
Assumptions of, 18
Charles I.'s devotion to, 182
Cromwell's attitude towards, 338,

380

Ecclesiastical courts, 51
Endowments of, coveted, 154
Episcopacy, abolition of, pro-
posed, 131 ; excluded from
toleration, 332, 337 ; forbidden
by ordinance, 338, 341
Influence of, after the Restora-
tion, 4-5

Reform of, attempted (1641), 81-4
Westminster Assembly, non-
attendance of Anglicans at, 133
Anne of Denmark, 21
Archers, 104
Areopagitica, 144

Argyle, Marquis of, Hamilton vic-
torious over, 215 ; Cromwell's
bargain with, 222 ; defeat of,
285

Arminianism denounced at Synod
of Dort, 8 ; Pym's attitude to-
wards, 34 ; doctrines of, 46-7 ;
parliamentary declaration against,
53

Armour, disuse of, 104
Arms, 104-6
Army, the —

Agitators, 192-4, 200, 213
Agreement of the People issued by
(1647), 199, 203

Army, the — continued

Case of the Army Stated issued by,

203
Control and numbers of, regulated

by Instrument of Government,

331, 348 ; control retained by

Cromwell, 348-9
Debates of, 199-200, 202-9
Depression of, 216
Disbandment of, attempted, 191-

193, 201
Heads of the Proposals of, 202,

329

Legislative incapacity of, 319
London, march on (1648), 235
Mutiny in, 214
New Model, composition of, 155-

157 ; contemporary estimates

of, 161

Parliament threatened by, 196
Remonstrance presented to par-
liament by (1648), 227-8
Sickness of, in Ireland, 267
Temper of, after Naseby, 199-

200

Artillery, 105

Assassination of Cromwell plotted,
352, 376-7

Baillie, Robert, cited, on Straf-
ford's trial, 74 ; on independents,
139 ; on confiscation of church
endowments, 154 ; on the New
Model, 161

Major-General William, at

Marston, 123, 124, 127 ; ordered
to surrender to Cromwell, 221

Barebones Parliament. See Little
Parliament

Basing House, storming of, 172-3

Baxter, Richard, ecclesiastical views
of, 83 ; two interviews with
Cromwell, 897 ; cited, on re-
ligious ferment in 1644, 133 ; on
the New Model, 156, 199; on
Cromwell's ecclesiastical settle-
ment, 339-40

437 2F3

438

OLIVER CROMWELL

Beard, Dr., 7, 13

Behemoth, cited, 48

Berwick, pacification of, 59 ; Crom-
well's recovery of, 222

Bible, the, Cromwell's acceptance
of, 44-6 ; Walton's polyglot ver-
sion of, 396

Biddle, John, Cromwell's protection
of, 372-3

Blake, Admiral, naval successes of,
178, 294, 296 ; ability of, 398 ;
sent by Cromwell to Mediter-
ranean, 404 ; death of, 408

Bossuet, cited, on Queen Henrietta
Maria, 23-4; on universal history,
325

Bourchier, Elizabeth, wife of Crom-
well, 10

Bradshaw, John, president at
Charles' trial, 242, 245 ; with-
stands Cromwell at the dissolu-
tion of Long Parliament, 309 ; in
first parliament of Protectorate,
343 ; withstands Cromwell's com-
pulsion of parliament (1654), 347 ;
Cromwell's efforts against, 366 ;
remains of, desecrated, 428 ;
energy and capacity of, 310

Bramhall, John, Cromwell's opinion
of, 83

Bristol, royalist capture of, 121 ;
capitulation of, to Fairfax, 171 ;
Naylor at, 372

Brooke, Lord, death of, 117

Bunker Hill, Marston Moor com-
pared with, 152-3

Burke, Edmund, Cromwell esti-
mated by, 2 ; Cromwell and
Ireton compared with, 203-5

Burnet, Gilbert, cited, on Crom-
well's Latin, 8 ; on Henrietta
Maria, 26

Burton, Henry, 55, 132

Butler, Bishop, opinion on Charles'
trial, 244

Calvinism, Arminianism crushed
by, 8 ; scope of, 41-4, 49

Cambridge, Cromwell at Sidney
Sussex College, 8 ; his repre-
sentation of, in Short Parliament,
60 ; in Long Parliament, 67 ; his
activity in (1642), 107

Carlyle, Thomas, estimate of Crom-
well, 2 ; contrast of French
Jacobins and English sectaries,
199 ; estimate of Charles' execu-
tion, 248 ; enthusiasm for action
without rhetoric, 260 ; descrip-
tion of Dunbar, 280

Carnwath, Lord, at Naseby, 167
Case of the Army Stated, 203
Catholicism —

Court, at, 21, 38

Cromwell's reply to manifesto of
prelates, 268-70

France, predominant in, 37-8,
405, 411

Holland, in, 38

Ireland, in, 87, 257-8, 374;
Ormonde's Kilkenny treaty,
258

Laud's attitude towards, 32

Persecution of, 381

Toleration denied to, 145, 332,

337, 381
Cavalry tactics, 103, 105-6, 114-15,

125-7, 166

Chalgrove Field, 118
Chancery, Court of, abolition of,

320 ; Cromwell's attempted re-
form of, 334-5
Charles I. —

Chronological Sequence of Career.
Attempts religious coercion in
Scotland, 57-8 ; persecutes Sir
John Eliot, 60, 79, 260 ; dis-
misses Short Parliament, 61 ;
abandons Strafford, 76-7 ; de-
clares adherence to Church
of England, 86 ; returns from
Scotland, 92 ; approaches par-
liamentary leaders, 94 ; im-
peaches five members, 95 ;
raises royal standard, 98 ; gains
military successes, 121 ; storms
Leicester, 160 ; Naseby, 164,
167 ; escapes from Oxford,
175 ; surrenders to the Scots,
176 ; considers terms of settle-
ment, 180 ; at Holmby, 187 ;
removed from Holmby, 193-4 ;
escapes from Hampton Court
to Carisbrooke Castle, 210-11 ;
concludes secret treaty with the
Scots, 212-13 ; negotiates with
parliamentary leaders at New-
port, 225-6 ; transferred to
Hurst Castle, 234-5 ; conveyed
to Windsor, 236 ; trial, 242-5 ;
caution to Duke of Gloucester,
299 ; execution and burial,
246-7 ; Cromwell's judgment of
the execution, 247 ; Fox and
Carlyle on the execution, 248 ;
popular sentiment aroused by
the execution, 323

Personal Characteristics. Appear-
ance, 225 ; artistic taste, 9,
22 ; blindness to events, 184-5 ;

INDEX

439

Charles I. — continued

determination, 170-71, 181, 198,
211; devotion to the queen, 22,
185 ; to the church, 181
General Trails, 19, 20-22, 60, 119,
170-71, 184-5, 198, 246

Charles II. — Sent to France, 186;
Scottish negotiations with (1650),
257, 274 ; advance from Stirling
to Worcester, 286-7 ; flight, 289 ;
connives at plots to assassinate
Cromwell, 352 ; royalist's inter-
view with, at Cologne, 355 ; re-
storation of, 431

Chatham, estimate of Cromwell,
399

Chillingworth, William, 83, 101, 173

Church, national (see also Anglican

Church)—
Cromwell's importance in history

of, 380-81

Establishment and endowment of,
provided by Instrument of Gov-
ernment, 332

Government of, debated, 137-9
Iconoclasm in, 83-4
Presbyterian system introduced

into, 141

Separation of, from state, advo-
cated by Milton, 336

Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of,
banishment of Strafford advo-
cated by, 76 ; Charles' overtures
to, 94 ; return of, from exile, 431 ;
character of, 84-5 ; cited — on
Cromwell's characteristics, 2, 81 ;
on Essex, 157 ; on independents
and presbyterians, 191 ; on burial
of Charles I., 246-7 ; on Drogheda
massacre, 265 ; on Cromwell's
deliberation regarding kingship,
388-9

Claypole, John, opposes bill regard-
ing Major-Generals, 375 ; marri-
age of, to Elizabeth Cromwell,
395

Clonmel, siege of, 267

Coke, Sir Edward, 9, 13, 19, 60,
331

Colchester, siege of, 102, 219

Coleman's defence of Erastianism,
139

Cologne, royalist's interview with
Charles II. at, 355

Committee of Both Kingdoms, 153,
160, 213

Commonwealth, proclamation of,
252

Cony, case of, 356 ; popular sym-
pathy with, 363

Cotton, Sir Robert, 17, 60
Council of State, establishment of,
252 ; Cromwell's report to, on
Ireland and Scotland, 258 ;
promptitude and efficiency of,
285, 294-6

Court of High Commission, illegali-
ties of, 55 ; abolition of, 78
Crawford, Lawrence, rebuked by

Cromwell, 109-10
Cromwell —

Bridget (daughter of Oliver),
married to Ireton, 180 ; to
Fleetwood, 395

Elizabeth (daughter of Oliver),
married to Claypole, 395 ;
death of, 426

(wife of Oliver), 10

Frances (daughter of Oliver), 425-

426
Henry, Sir (grandfather of

Oliver), 6

Henry (son of Oliver), Cromwell's
instructions to, in Ireland, 271 ;
representative of Ireland in
Little Parliament, 316 ; cor-
respondence with Thurloe, 349-
350, 362-3, 374, 422 ; financial
straits of, in Ireland, 420 ; sus-
picious of combination, 422 ;
comment on Cromwell's posi-
tion in London, 387 ; opinion
on the kingship, 388-9 ; esti-
mate of the situation in 1658,
422 ; ability of, 344, 395
Henry, incident of the scarlet

cloak, 375

Mary (daughter of Oliver), mar-
ried to Fauconberg, 395 ; in-
tercedes for Hewitt, 420
Oliver —

Chronological Sequence of Career.
Descent and family, 6-7 ;
early life, 7-8, 10-11 ; marri-
age, 10 ; religious gloom, 11-
12 ; member for Hunting-
don, 12 ; dispute over Hun-
tingdon charter, 14 ; first
speech in Parliament, 13 ;
removal to St. Ives, 14 ; to
Ely, 15 ; death of eldest son
(1639), 15 ; member for
Cambridge in Short Parlia-
ment, 60 ; in Long Parlia-
ment, 67-8 ; service on par-
liamentary committees, 81 ;
Edgehill, 107 ; conversation
with Hampden on choice of
officers, 108-9 ; obstruction
in Ely Cathedral, 111 ; Mars-

440

OLIVER CROMWELL

Cromwell — continued

ton Moor, 124-9 ; proposes
abolition of episcopacy, 131 ;
attacks Lord Manchester,
149-50 ; appointed lieuten-
ant-general under Fairfax,
159 ; Naseby, 162-8 ; thanked
and rewarded by parliament,
174 ; negotiates with the
army for disbandment, 192,
201-2 ; threatens parliament
with military force, 195-6 ;
army debates, 201-9 ; opera-
tions in South Wales, 219 ;
Preston, 220-22 ; Charles'
trial, 242-3, 245 ; Irish cam-
paign, 261-72 ; thanked and
rewarded by parliament, 274 ;
Dunbar, 277 - 82 ; illness,
283 ; advance to Perth, 286 ;
to Worcester, 287-8 ; battle
of Worcester, 288-9 ; thanked
and rewarded by parliament,
292 ; dissolution of Rump
Parliament, 306-10 ; made
Lord Protector (1653), 327-8 ;
legislative activity, 334-40 ;
compulsion of first parlia-
ment of Protectorate, 345-7 ;
plot to assassinate, 352 ;
purge of parliament (1656),
368 ; plots to assassinate,
376-7 ; refuses kingship, 390 ;
again installed as Lord Pro-
tector (1657), 391 ; dissolves
second parliament (1658),
418-19 ; illness and death,
425-7 ; remains desecrated,
428

Personal Characteristics, etc.
Affection, 393-5, 426
Appearance and manner, 68-

71, 201
Bible, attitude towards, 44-

46

Broad-mindedness, 5, 206
Caution, 71, 99, 189, 234, 292,

405, 430
Compassion and tenderness,

7, 71, 222, 318, 393-5
Constructive statesmanship,

deficiency of, 349-50, 419
Courage and fortitude, 5, 7,

15, 71, 189, 278
Education, views on, 9-10 ;

furtherance of, 336, 396
Energy, 5, 71, 81, 158, 189,

291, 414
Faith, 15, 44-6, 70, 276, 277-8,

325, 425-7

Cromwell — con tinued

Finance, incapacity for, 368
Force, distrust of, 202, 432
Form and dogma, indiffer-
ence to, 206, 297, 327, 336-7
Geniality, 398-9
Honour, 5
Hopefulness, 162, 277-8, 292,

405-6

Impetuosity and passionate-
ness, 14, 69-70, 189, 201,
307-8, 398

Jesting, love of, 71, 188
Legal apprehension, incapa-
city of, 335, 368
Military excellence, 429, el

passim

Moderation, 198, 293, 354
Moral unity, 292
Music, love of, 396
Mysticism, 276
National sentiment, 231, 276
Order and government, in-
stinct for, 335, 357-8, 385,
432-3

Persistency and patience, 5,
99, 158, 198, 242, 405, 425,
430
Popularity with his troops,

188

Public opinion, attitude to-
wards, 432
Reserve, 71, 229
Sagacity, 99, 197, 399 ; lack

of sagacity, 318
Speech, style and manner of,

344

Sport, love of, 396
Toleration, 109-10, 144, 168-

169, 172, 178, 318-19
Unity, desire for, 201, 205
Oliver, Sir (uncle of Oliver), 6
Richard, Sir (great-grandfather of

Oliver), 6

Richard (son of Oliver), Crom-
well's admonition to, 46 ; char-
acter and tastes of, 394, 430-
431

Richard (uncle of Oliver), 14
Robert (father of Oliver), 7, 12
Thomas, 6, 433
Culpeper, 94

" De paucitate credendorum," 136
De Retz, cited, 197, 311, 383
Deane, Admiral, 294, 296
Declaration of Right, 434
Denmark, Anne of, 21 ; Crom-
well's treaty with, 401
Derby House Committee, 148, 223

INDEX

441

Desborough, John, republican form
of government advocated by,
299 ; anxiety of, regarding elec-
tions, 363 ; introduces bill regard-
ing Major-Generals, 375 ; opposes
Cromwell's acceptance of king-
ship, 389

D'Ewes, Henrietta Maria described
by, 26

Diggers, 255, 298

Dort, Synod of, 8, 46, 50

Drogheda massacre, 262-5

Dunbar, Cromwell's position at,
277-9 ; battle of, 279-82 ; Crom-
well's estimate of, 46, 284

Dunes, battle of the, 424

Dunkirk, treaty for cession of, 409 ;
capture of, and cession to Eng-
land, 423-5

Durham, college at, founded by
Cromwell, 396

Edgehill, 107-8, 123

Education, Cromwell's views on, 9-
10 ; his furtherance of, 336, 396

Ejectors and triers, 338

Elector Palatine, 95, 171

Eliot, Sir John, Cromwell contrasted
with, 9 ; resolutions of, put, in
defiance of Charles, 13 ; imprison-
ment and death of, 60, 260

Elizabeth, Queen, Henry Cromwell
knighted by, 6 ; policy of, 20, 30,
412 ; Ireland under, 87 ; dupli-
city of, 183

Ely, Cromwell's removal to, 15 ;
his defence of, 161 ; his obstruc-
tion in the cathedral, 111

Engagers, 222, 273

Episcopacy. See Anglican Church

Erastianism, 137-8

Essex, Earl of, advocates Straf-
ford's execution, 76 ; unsuccessfu
against Oxford, 121 ; successful
at Gloucester, 121 ; escapes froml
Plymouth, 148 ; Scottish com-
missioners' debate with, on Crom-
well's conduct, 151-2 ; resigna-
tion of, 157 ; characteristics of,
118 ; contemporary estimate of, 99

Exeter, capture of, by Fairfax, 174

Exeter, Lord, inquiry of, on horse-
racing, 360-61

Faction, 80-81

Fairfax, Sir Thomas, at Marston
Moor, 123-4, 126, 127 ; appointed
parliamentarian commander-in-
chief, 155, 177 ; petitions for
Cromwell's appointment as lieu-

tenant-general, 159 ; apprecia-
tion of Cromwell, 162 ; atNaseby,
162-4, 166 ; Bristol capitulates
to, 171 ; successes of, in Devon,
173 ; at Colchester, 102, 219 ;
treatment of mutineers, 255 ;
withdraws from prominent posi-
tion, 274 ; energy and ability of,
120, 164, 223 ; scrupulousness of,
275 ; otherwise mentioned, 122,
196, 211, 240, 246, 288

Falkland, Lord, Cromwell con-
trasted with, 9 ; abstains from
voting on Strafford's attainder,
76 ; court party supported by,
84 ; Charles' overtures to, 94 ;
death of, 117 ; estimate of, 117

Fauconberg, Lord, marriage of, to
Lady Mary Cromwell, 395 ; sent
by Cromwell to Calais, 423

Fifth Monarchy men, 254, 319, 377

Fleet —

Cromwell supported by, 352

Mutiny in, 214

Organisation of, by Council of

State, 294
Parliamentarians supported by,

101
West Indies expedition, 402-4

Fleetwood, Charles, advanced views
of, 178 ; negotiates with the
army for disbandment, 192 ;
battle of Worcester, 288-9 ; op-
poses Cromwell's acceptance of
kingship, 389 ; married to Bridget
Cromwell, 395 ; tries to dissuade
Cromwell from dissolving parlia-
ment, 418-19 ; otherwise men-
tioned, 271, 277, 294, 421

Fox. Charles, on execution of
Charles I., 248

, George, Naylor a disciple of,

371 ; Cromwell's regard for,
378-9

France —

Commonwealth recognised by,

294

Convention of 1793 compared
with the Rump's proposed con-
stitution, 306

Cromwell's relations with, 405-8
Fronde, the, contrasted with the

Civil War, 188
Protestantism in, 142-3

Gainsborough, cavalry victory at,

112-14

Gardiner, S. R., cited, 8, 163, 402
Gerard, Cromwell's assassination

plotted by, 352

442

OLIVER CROMWELL

Glamorgan treaty, 186
Gloucester, siege of, 121

, Duke of, 299-300, 423

Godwin, W., estimate of Cromwell,

2

Goffe, Col., 205, 207, 364
Goring, Lord, 124, 126, 127, 161
Gowran, surrender of, 266
Grand Remonstrance, the (1641),
demands of, 92-3, 131 ; Instru-
ment of Government contrasted
with, 332
Grantham, cavalry skirmish near,

112

Guizot, cited, 312, 406, 428
Gustavus Adolphus, influence of, on
military tactics, 103

Vasa, position of, compared

with Cromwell's, 342-3

Hallani on Long Parliament, 78

Hamilton, James, Duke of, 215,
218-22

Hammond, Col., Cromwell's letters
to, 230-33

Hampden, John, claims of, 19 ;
ship-money case decided against,
56-7 ; Strafford's attainder op-
posed by, 76 ; watches Charles
in Scotland, 85 ; impeached by
Charles, 95 ; proposes parlia-
mentary control of militia, 97 ;
Cromwell's advice to, about
officers, 107-8 ; death of, 117-18 ;
Cromwell contrasted with, 9 ;
otherwise mentioned, 13, 16, 55,
110, 331

Harrison, Major, Charles conveyed
to Windsor by, 236 ; march on
Worcester, 288 ; at dismissal of
Long Parliament, 307-9 ; member
of Little Parliament, 316 ; con-
vention inspired by, 317 ; im-
prisonment of, 354, 390 ; sus-
pected of designs on Cromwell,
377 ; extreme views of, 302, 315 ;
Cromwell's regard for, 378 ; other-
wise mentioned, 228, 246

Haselrig, Sir Arthur, impeached by
Charles, 95 ; in first parliament
of Protectorate, 343 ; withstands
Cromwell's compulsion of parlia-
ment, 347 ; influence of, feared
by Whalley, 363

Heads of the Proposals of the Army,
202, 329

Healing Question, the, 366

Henderson, Alexander, 135

Henrietta Maria, Queen, charac-

teristics and influence of, 21,

23-6 ; correspondence of, with

Charles, 182, 185
Henry of Navarre, 21, 25, 183
Herbert, George, Laud's influence

on, 33

Hewitt, Dr., case of, 419, 420
Hinchinbrook, 6, 12
Hitch, Mr., Cromwell's dispute with,

111

Hobbes, cited, 48, 67, 120
Holland —

Arminianism in, 46-7

Catholic influence in, 38

Cromwell's treaty with, 401

Hostility between English parlia-
ment and, 254, 294-5, 408

Wagstaffe's flight to, 354

War with, 295-6, 401
Holies, Denzil, Speaker detained by,

13 ; impeached by Charles, 95 ;

hostility of, to Cromwell, 151 ;

presbyterians led by, 224
Holmby, Charles I. at, 187 ; his

removal from, 193-4
Hopton, Ralph, Lord, 102, 121, 173
Horncastle fight, 114
Howe, John, devotional feats of,

397-8
Hull, Charles I. refused entry of,

97-8 ; Fairfax's withdrawal to,

121 ; siege of, raised by New-
castle, 122
Humble Petition and Advice, nature

of, 332, 392 ; introduction of,

384
Huntingdon, Cromwell member for,

12 ; charter dispute, 14
Hurst Castle, 235
Hyde. See Clarendon

Independents (see also Puritan-
ism)—

Cromwell supported by, 147

Intolerance of, 381

Irish policy of, 268

Long Parliament reinforced by,
178

Numerical inferiority of, 253

Presbyterians opposed by, 139,
147, 181, 183-4, 186-7, 343;
contrasted with, 191
Instrument of Government —

Adoption of, 328

American constitution compared
with, 332-3

Army, control and numbers of,
regulated by, 331-2, 348

Cromwell's contravention of, 359

Fundamentals of, 333, 346

INDEX

443

Instrument of Government — contd.
Provisions of, 330-33, 392
Remodelling of, 384
Toleration affirmed by, 332, 337
Inverkeithing, 286
Ireland —

Catholicism in, 88, 257-8, 374
Charles I.'s proposed abandon-
ment of, 186
Cromwell's settlement of, 261-72,

290

Danger to England from, 190
Henry Cromwell Lord-Deputy of,

395

Incorporation of, with England,
originated by Long Parliament,
316, 334

Land settlement scheme for, 334
O'Neill's importance in, 257
Ormonde's policy in, 227, 257-

258
Rebellion of 1641, causes of, 87-9 ;

scope of, 89-90

Representation of, in English par-
liament, 316 ; parliamentary
influence of, 374
Rinuccini's aims in, 257
Risings in, nature of, 353
Stratford's rule and policy in, 16,
28-30, 55, 87-8 ; his unpopu-
larity in, 74, 87-8

Ireton, Henry, at Naseby, 165, 166,
167, 178 ; at Marston, Gains-
borough, and Edgehill, 178 ;
negotiates with the army for
disbandment, 192 ; Heads of the
Proposals of the Army framed
by, 202 ; debates measures with
extremists in the army, 203-8 ;
remonstrance of the army drawn
up by, 227 ; desecration of re-
mains of, 428 ; advanced views
of, 178 ; character and ability of,
178-80 ; otherwise mentioned,
102, 178, 246, 294
Irish — camp-followers slain at Nase-
by, 168, 260; defeat of, under
Montrose, 169 ; English con-
trasted with, 197 ; transporta-
tions of, to Jamaica, 271
Ironside — origin of nickname, 125

Jamaica, Irish transportations to,

271 ; seizure of, 404, 412
Jefferson, Cromwell contrasted with,

435
Jesuits, influence of, 37 ; proposed

rigorous legislation against, 381
Jews, position of, under Cromwell,

382

Johnson, Dr., on Laud's execution,

140-41

Joyce, Cornet, 193-4
Juxon, bishop of London, 51-2, 76

Killing no Murder, 375
Kirk-sessions, powers of, 51
Knox, John, 50

Lambert, John, at Dunbar, 279-81 ;
in Scotland, 285, 286 ; march on
Worcester, 288 ; member of Little
Parliament, 316 ; Instrument of
Government prepared by, 328 ;
resents parliamentary attack on
Major-Generals, 374 ; opposes
Cromwell's acceptance of king-
ship, 386, 389 ; dismissed by
Cromwell, 390 ; opposes aggres-
sion in West Indies, 402 ; military
talent and ability of, 239, 288,
344 ; extreme views of, 302 ;
otherwise mentioned, 219, 309,
316, 397, 422

Langdale, Sir Marmaduke, 164-6,
218-21

Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury,
Sidney Sussex College denounced
by, 8 ; Scotch policy of, 16, 58 ;
Arminianism approved by, 46-7 ;
Chief Justice censured by, 52 ;
flight of, from Lambeth, 63 ;
Stratford's case estimated by,
77 ; Prynne victimised by, 260 ;
execution of, 140-41, 173 ; char-
acteristics of, 81-4 ; estimate of,
by historians, 31 ; Bramhall com-
pared with, by Cromwell, 83

Lecturers, Cromwell's plea for, 16

Leicester, storming of, by Charles I.,
160

Leighton, Alexander, 56, 83

Leven, Lord, 123, 124

Lenthall, William, Speaker of the
House of Commons, withstands
Charles' violation of parliament-
ary privilege, 95 ; joins the army,
195-6 ; Cromwell s conferences
with, 239 ; Cromwell accom-
panied by, on entering London,
292 ; monarchy advocated by,
299 ; protests against dissolution
of the Rump Parliament, 308 ;
his view of Cromwell's Chancery
ordinance, 335

Leslie, David, Cromwell supported
by, at Marston Moor, 124-6, 127,
129 ; Montrose defeated by, 170 ;
Cromwell opposed by, in Edin-

444

OLIVER CROMWELL

burgh, 277 ; at Dunbar, 277-80 ;

at Stirling, 285
Levellers, 203, 207, 208, 298,

254-5
Lilburne, John, persecution of, 55 ;

Agreement of the People drawn

up by (1648), 203 ; trial and

acquittal of, 321 ; characteristics

of, 254
Little Parliament, summoning of,

315-16 ; Scotland and Ireland

represented in, 316 ; Cromwell's

inaugural address to, 317-19 ;

fidelity of, to Cromwell, 320;

legislative attempts of, 320-21 ;

dissolution of, 322
Lockhart, Sir William, 398, 423,

424
London, city of —

Army, hostility to, 201 ; dis-
bandment of, urged, 191

Charles I. welcomed by, 92 ; his
cause favoured by (1648),
223

Cromwell thanked by, for Irish
victories, 274 ; acclaimed by,
after Worcester, 292 ; his vigil-
ance over, 356

Ferment of, in 1644, 132-3

Parliamentarians supported by,
101

Peace desired by, 190

Petitions presented by, 416

Presbyterianism strong in, 253,
339

Puritanism strong in, 62

Riots in (1647), 195; (1648),

214-15
Long Parliament —

Calling of, 63-4

Charles' attack on five members
of, 95-6

Composition of, 65-7

Cromwell's relations numerous in,
67-8

Holland, attitude towards, 254,
295, 408

Military force, threatened with,
195-6

Numbers of, in divisions, in early
days, 177 ; after Pride's Purge,
251

Pride's Purge, 325-6, 302
Lords, House of —

Abolition of, 251, 252

Bishops' exclusion from, pro-
posed, 82, 85, 131

Charles I., cause of, supported by,
85, 223 ; ordinance for im-
peachment of, rejected by, 238

Lords, House of — continued

Commons supported by (1640),
67 ; in disagreement with, 85,
223, 238

Insignificance of, in 1647, 177
Rioters' attack on, 195
Royalism of, 85, 223, 238
Strafford, attitude towards, 72-
73

Ludlow, Edmund, comment on the
Drogheda massacre, 264, 265 ;
complaints to Cromwell, 297 ;
dissolution of Rump Parliament
described by, 307-8 ; Cromwell's
overtures to, 422 ; otherwise
mentioned, 178, 241, 294

Lynn, Elizabeth (wife of Robert
Cromwell), 7

Magna Charta, Cromwell's mock
at, 357

Major-Generals, scope of work of,
358-9 ; failure of, 370 ; parlia-
mentary decision against, 373-4

Manchester, Earl of, attacked by
Cromwell, 149-50 ; resignation of,
157 ; temperament of, 118, 148 ;
otherwise mentioned, 12, 109, 122

Manning, Cromwell informed of
royalist doings by, 355-6

Mardyke, 409

Marston Moor, battle of, 122-9 ;
moral effect of victory, 140 ;
compared with Bunker Hill, 152-
153 ; with Naseby, 166 ; royalist
rendezvous near site of, 353

Mary of Guise, 21

Stuart, Queen of Scots, 21,

78

Tudor, Queen of England, 37

Mayor, Richard, extract from Crom-
well's letter to, 46

Mazarin, Richelieu succeeded by,
117 ; Scottish intrigues with,
182 ; correspondence with Crom-
well regarding toleration for
catholics, 182, 381 ; at Dunkirk,
423 ; idea of, in ceding Dunkirk,
424 ; character and policy of,
405-7

Mediterranean, English Fleet in,
294, 403-4

Militia Bill (1641), 93

Milton, John —

Areopagitica published by, 144
Church and State, separation of,

advocated by, 336
Cromwell contrasted with, 9 ;

advised by, 326-7
National sentiment of, 231

INDEX

445

Milton, John — continued

Secretaryship of the Council of

State held by, 326, 360
Toleration advocated by, 40, 144-

146

Cited — on state of London in
1644, 132-3 ; on national free-
dom, 199 ; on toil of construc-
tive policy, 291 ; on popular
sentiment for Charles I., 323
Otherwise mentioned, 50, 67, 253,

306, 382, 435

Mommsen, Sulla compared to Crom-
well by, 333
Monk, General George, 294, 296,

316, 398
Montrose, Marquis of, 132, 169-70,

184

Mozley, J. B., estimate of Cromwell
by, 234

Napoleon, numbers under, 123
Naseby, battle of, 162-9 ; Irish
camp-followers slain after, 168,
260; moral effects of victory, 199-
200

Navarre, Henry of, 21, 25, 183
Navigation Act (1651), 295, 413
Navy. See Fleet
Naylor, James, case of, 371-3
New England, puritan exodus to, 34
New Model. See under Army
Newark, royalist stronghold at, 112
Newburn, 63
Newbury, 117, 122
Newcastle, royalist port at, 120 ;

Nineteen Propositions of, 180-81
Newcastle, Earl of, at Gains-
borough, 113 ; besieged in York,
122 ; at Marston Moor, 124, 127 ;
character of, 120
Newman, on Laud, 31
Newport treaty, terms of, 226-7 ;
Cromwell's view of, 234

O'Byrnes, treatment of, 88

Okey, John, social position of, 155 ;
at Naseby, 165 ; suspected of
designs on Cromwell, 377

O'Neil, Sir Phelim, 90-91

O'Neill, Hugh, 267
, Owen Roe, 257

Ormonde, Earl of, Charles' instruc-
tions to, 227 ; character and policy
of, 257-8

Other House, the, 415-16

Overton, Richard, imprisonment of,
356

Owen, Dr. John, ecclesiastical
scheme of, adopted by Cromwell,
338

Oxenstiern, Whitelocke's interview
with, concerning Cromwell, 342

Oxford-
Charles I.'s escape from, 175
Essex unsuccessful at, 121
Surrender of, 176
Treaty of (1643), 180
University men in Long Parlia-
ment, 66

Packe, Sir Christopher, proposals
of, 383-4

Paris, treaty of, 409

Parliament —

Long, Short, etc. See those titles
Purges of (1647), 194-5 ; Pride's,
235-6, 302 ; (1654), 305, 847 ;
(1656), 305, 368

Peers. See Lords

Pembroke Castle, Cromwell's cap-
ture of, 219

Penruddock's rising, 354

Perth, Cromwell's advance to, 286-
287

Petition of Right, 12

Philip IV. of Spain, 405

Philiphaugh, 170

Piedmontese, massacre of, 271, 407

Portugal, Cromwell's treaty with,
401

Prelacy. See Anglican Church —
Episcopacy

Press, censorship of, under parlia-
mentarians, 256 ; under Protect-
orate, 360

Presbyterianism —

Charles I.'s dislike of, 181
England, introduced into, 141
Kirk-sessions, powers of, 51
London, strong in, 253, 339
Montrose's dislike of, 132
Party aspect of, 146, 297

Presbyterians —

Exasperation of (1649), 252-3
Fairfax's position a satisfaction

to, 274-5

Independents opposed to, 189,
147, 181, 183-4, 186-7, 343 ;
contrasted with, 191
Toleration opposed by, 143-4, 224,
273, 339

Preston, battles of, 220-22

Pride, Col., social position of, 155 ;
Pride's Purge, 235-6, 302 ; peti-
tion of, against Cromwell's ac-
ceptance of kingship, 889

446

OLIVER CROMWELL

Propagation of religion, Cromwell's
eagerness for, 336-7, 396

Protesters, 285

Prynne, William, 55-6, 260

Public opinion, Cromwell's attitude
towards, 432

Punishments, barbarity of, 55-6, 88,
372

Purges of Parliament. See under
Parliament

Puritanism (see also Anabaptism and

Independents) —
Aims of, 40-41

Austerity of, unpopular, 214, 360
Exodus of puritans to New Eng-
land, 34
Intolerance and violence of, 132,

143, 147, 372

Irish troubles aggravated by, 88
Legislative incapacity of, 317
National Covenant the centre of,

58
Presbyterianism contrasted with,

116

Protestant left wing, 39
Rise of, 50
Strength of, 160
Vagueness in ideas of, 188

Pym, John, claims of, 19 ; leader
of parliamentary party, 61, 81,
85 ; Strafford impeached by, 72 ;
Straff ord's attainder opposed by,
76 ; bill for excluding bishops
from parliament supported by,
85 ; Charles' overtures to, 94 ;
Charles' impeachment of, 95 ;
Scottish treaty concluded by, 115-
116 ; death of, 118 ; character-
istics and ability of, 34-6, 61, 97 ;
otherwise mentioned, 12, 57, 79,
96, 110, 331

Quakers, persecutions of, under the
Protectorate, 378-9

Rainborough, Thomas, Cromwell's
arguments with, 204, 206, 207-8

Ranke, cited, 284, 294, 315, 408

Rationalism, toleration sprung from,
382, 435

Remonstrants, 285

Resolutioners, 285

Retz, de, cited, 197, 311, 383

Rich, Robert, married to Lady
Frances Cromwell, 395 ; death
of, 425-6

Richelieu, Strafford compared with,
29-30 ; Scotland promised aid by,
59 ; Mazarin the successor of,

117 ; treaty of Westphalia due
to, 405

Rinuccini, papal nuncio in Ireland,
257

Rogers, John, Cromwell's interview
with, 379-80

" Root-and-Branch " policy, 57, 81-
83, 85

Roundway Down, 121

Rump Parliament, unpopularity of,
298-9 ; constitutional plans of,
303-6 ; dissolution of, 306-9 ;
estimate of transaction, 309-13

Rupert, Prince, in York and after,
122, 148 ; at Marston Moor, 124-7,
129 ; at Naseby, 164, 165, 166 ;
Charles' letter to, 170-71 ; escape
of, from Bristol, 171 ; naval opera-
tions of, 254 ; temperament and
ability of, 98-9, 114

Saint Domingo, failure of expedi-
tion to, 404

St. Ives, Cromwell's removal to, 14
St. John, Oliver, 16, 19, 75, 299, 316
Salisbury, royalist rising at, 354
Scotland —

Charles I.'s religious policy in,

57-9 ; visit to, 79-80
Charles II.'s arrival in, 274
Cromwell's appeal to the General

Assembly, 275-6

England's ignorance of affairs in,
58-9 ; parliamentary support
of, 61 ; danger to England ap-
prehended from, 190 ; hostility
of, to England (1649-50), 256,
273-4 ; incorporation of, with
England, originated by Long
Parliament, 316, 334 ; repre-
sentation of, in English parlia-
ment, 316 ; influence of repre-
sentatives, 373-4
Kirk-sessions, powers of, 51
Knox's influence in, 50
Mazarin's dealings with, 182
National Covenant, inauguration

of, 58

Pym's treaty with, 115-16, 134
Richelieu's dealings with, 59
Shorter Catechism's effect on, 186-

137

Strafford's unpopularity in, 74
Scots —

Advance of, to Durham, 63 ; over
the border (1644), 122 ; suffer-
ings in north of England under,
153-4

Charles I., enthusiasm for, 169;
his surrender to, 176 ; his

INDEX

447

Scots — continued

abandonment by, 187 ; his
secret treaty with, 212-13 ; his
cause favoured by, 215
Charles II., negotiations with, in
Holland, 274 ; march south
with, 287
Committee of Both Kingdoms,

represented on, 213
Cromwell's unpopularity with
Scottish commissioners, 151 ;
campaign of 1650, 276-90
English contrasted with, 197
Ireland, in, 91

Sealed Knot, the, 352-3

Seekers, 189

Selden, John, 13, 19, 60, 66, 76, 133

Self-denying Ordinance, 157-8, 177 ;
second, 158

Sexby, Cromwell's assassination
plotted by, 376

Ship-money, opposition to, 56, 62 ;
abolition of, 78

Short Parliament, 59-60

Sidney, Algernon, 178, 242

Sindercombe, Miles, Cromwell's as-
sassination plotted by, 376

Skippon, Philip, 155, 165, 192

Slingsby, Sir Henry, case of, 419-20

Solemn League and Covenant, 116,
134

Southworth, John, fate of, 381

Spain —

Commonwealth recognised by,

293
Cromwell's assurances to, 403 ;

alleged negotiations with, 411
Hostility of, to England (1656),

404
War with, 408-9

Star Chamber, illegalities of, 55 ;
abolition of, 78

Steward, Elizabeth, wife of Robert
Cromwell, 7

Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, Earl
of, popular party supported by,
13 ; -rule and policy of, in Ireland,
16, 28-30, 55, 87-8 ; court party
supported by, 27 ; recall of, from
Ireland, 63 ; impeachment and
death of, 72-7 ; character and
aims of, 27-30 ; Cromwell com-
pared with, 268, 272, 328-9;
otherwise mentioned, 309, 362

Stratton, 121

Sweden —

Cromwell's treaty with, 401
Quarrels of, 410

Queen Christina of, on Cromwell,
842-3

Swift, cited, 390, 395-6

Tadcaster, 121

Taylor, Jeremy, 33, 380

Thirty Years' War, religious ele-
ment in, 38 ; numbers of troops
engaged in, 123

" Thorough," policy of, 57

Thurloe, John, correspondence of,
with Henry Cromwell, 849-50,
362-8, 374, 399, 422 ; vigilance
of, 355, 366 ; hostility of, to
Quakers, 379 ; Cromwell's rela-
tions with, 898 ; financial straits
of, 420-21, 425 ; cited, 354, 859,
393-4, 414 ; otherwise mentioned,
356, 398, 399, 411

Toleration —

Catholicism excluded from, 145,

332, 337, 381
Cromwell's adherence to, 109-10,

144, 168-9, 172, 178, 318-19
Instrument of Government's adop-
tion of, 332, 337
Milton's view of, 40, 144-6
Parliamentary attitude towards,

143-4, 371

Prelacy excluded from, 332, 337
Presbyterian attitude towards,
143-4, 224, 273, 339

Toleration Act, 434

Triers and ejectors, 338

Turenne, Cromwell's veterans
praised by, 410 ; commanding
at Dunkirk, 423

Ulster rebellion, alleged connec-
tion of, with Drogheda massacre,
265

Usher, Archbishop of Armagh, 76,
83

Uxbridge, treaty of (1644-5), 180

Vane, Sir Henry, abolition of
episcopacy proposed by, 131 ;
Charles' trial disapproved by,
242 ; maritime policy of, 294,
296 ; constitutional scheme of,
303-4 ; withstands Cromwell at
dissolution of Rump Parliament,
308 ; Scottish policy of, 316 ;
Healing Question published by,
366 ; imprisonment of, 366 ;
Cromwell's overtures to, 422 ;
energy and capacity of, 310 ;
otherwise mentioned, 66, 363

Vaudois, case of the, 271, 407

Venner, plot of, 377

Vowel, Cromwell's assassination
plotted by, 352

448

OLIVER CROMWELL

Wales, Cromwell's operations in,
219

Walker, Clement, on Irish policy of
independents, 268

Waller, Sir William, letter of, to
Hopton, 102 ; defeat of, 121 ;
resignation of, 157 ; Cromwell
described by, 149

Walton's polyglot Bible, Cromwell's
interest in, 396

Ward, Dr. Samuel, Cromwell under,
at Cambridge, 8

Washington, George, Cromwell com-
pared with, 152-3, 429

Weingarten, cited, 322, 381

Wentworth, Sir Peter, Cromwell re-
buked by, at dissolution of Rump
Parliament, 308 ; suit of, against
tax-collector, 357

Sir Thomas. See Strafford

West Indies, English aggression in,
403,408

Westminster, treaty of, 408-9

Westminster Assembly, the, 131,
133-7

Westphalia, treaty of, 405

Wexford, sack of, 265-6

Whalley, Major, at Gainsborough,
112 ; atNaseby, 165 ; Cromwell's
letter to, regarding Charles I.,
210 ; republican form of govern-
ment advocated by, 299 ; horse-
racing permitted by, 360-61 ;
anxiety of, on election prospects,

363 ; admission of Jews advo-
cated by, 382

Whitelocke, Bulstrode, hostilities
against Cromwell deprecated by,
151-2 ; monarchy advocated by,
299 ; Cromwell's conversation
with, on inefficiency of Parlia-
ment, 300-301 ; conversation on
Cromwell at Swedish court, 342-
343 ; rigorous legislation against
Jesuits opposed by, 381 ; irregu-
lar courts disapproved by, 420 ;
cited, on Laud, 31-2 ; on Crom-
well's geniality, 398

Wildman, Major J., 204, 205, 354-5

William III., Cromwell compared
with, 428

Williams, Bishop, 76

, Richard (afterwards Richard

Cromwell), 6

, Roger, 382

Wilkins, Bishop, on Cromwell's view
of episcopacy, 338

Winceby, Cromwell's success at,
114, 122

Winchester, fall of, 172

Windsor prayer meetings, 216-17

Winstanley, Gerrard, cited, 256

Winwick, 221

Worcester, Cromwell's march to,
287-8 ; battle of, 288-90

Wright, Peter, fate of, 381

York, Duke of, 423

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