ttcSERV&U. (EiirncU llniuciiiity ICtbran; Jltluica. Xciii \linU Elon H. Hoolcar, c.u. 'yi. Date Due 10O » 0-1- J^k " jytt^^^^^^ljCTG Z '. 't} ^ H^°—T^ -^dti-i^^* PRINTED IN (tij CAT. NO. 23233 Cornell University Library DA 426.R78 Oliver Cromwell, 3 1924 027 976 384 'is jm 7 19 30 BS Date Due Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027976384 OLIVER CROMWELL BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT A BOOK-LOVIB'b HOUDATB hi TBI opm TRBOUOH THB BBAIIUAIT WIIiDHBinHa AFBICAM OAMa TRAILS. t Tab. OCTDOOB PABTOCES OF AN AMBBICAlf HOHTEB TBB ROUQB BIDBBB Profuiely lUutlratid THBOUQB VBB BBAHUAN WILDBBMBSS ATBICAM QAia TRAILS OUTOOOB PASmCBB OV AH AMHUCAM HUMTBR LDX-BIBTORniB OF ATRICAM OAMB AMIMAia With Edmund HtUer THB OBKAT ADVBHTXTBB AKBBICA AND THE WORLD WAB BIBTOBT AS LITBBATUBB OUVXB CBOUWBLL IBB BOOBByBLr BOOK. Sileotiou Iron Ik* Writing! ol Thtodora Boourdt THB BLKBOBN EDITION. CoUgctsd WoAf ol Theodore Booievelt. SB Tolunei, lUvitrftted. CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS OLIVER CROMWELL. rr..m ill- iiiirlroil l.y U,,1ktI Wulki-r :il HiiichiiiRlmwkc OLIVER CROMWELL BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT ILLUSTRATED CHARLES SCRIBNERS SONS NEW YORK 1919 w / F\4c\5-S0S Ct^iyriglit, tgoo, h^ Ctarles Sertbntr's SoMt Ctomwdl, our chief of men, who through a cloud Not of war only, but detractions rude, Guided by &ith, and matchless fortitude. To peace and truth, thy glorious way hast ploughed, And on the neck of crowned fortune proud Hast reared God*s trophies, and his work pursued. While Darwen stream, with blood of Scots imbrued, And Dunbar field, resounds thy praises loud, And Worcester's laureate wreath. Yet much remuns To conquer still ; Peace hath her victories No less renowned than War ; new foes arise. Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains. Help us to save fi-ee conscience ftom the paw Of hireling wolves, whose gospel is their maw. — Milton. EmcirnvB Chahbek, Albamy, June, 1900. CONTENTS PAGE I. THE TIMES AND THE MAN .... i II. THE LONG PARLIAMENT AND THE CIVIL WAR 51 III. THE SECOND CIVIL WAR AND THE DEATH OF THE KING 99 IV. THE IRISH AND SCOTCH WARS . .141 V. THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTEC- TORATE 177 VI. PERSONAL RULE zio ILLUSTRATIONS Oliver Cromwell Frontispiece (From Ike porlraii by Robert Walker at Einchingbrooke.) FACING PAGE Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford . . 8 (Proni the miniature at Demnshire House.) Oliver Cromwell 12 (Froni a miniature by Coofer.) Sir John Eliot 16 {From the portrait by Van Somer at Port EHol.) All Saints' Church, Huntingdon . . .24 Cromwell's House at Ely 28 Archbishop Laud 34 (From the portrait at Lambeth Palace, painted by Vandyke.) John Pym 52 (From the portrait by Cornelius Janssen.) Prince Rupert 68 (from the portrait by Vandyke at Binchingbrooke.) Fac-simile of Letter from Oliver Cromwell to Mr. Storie, written January 11, 1635, said to be the earliest extant letter in Cromwell's Hand- writing 74 (from the original in the British Museum.) ILLUSTRATIONS tAcma PAGE John Hampden 80 (Prom (he portrait by Robtrl Walker at Port EUot.) Cromwell's Engagement with the Marquis of Newcastle's Regiment of "Whitecoats" in the Battle of Marston Moor . . .88 King Charles 1 108 (From the replica at the Dresden Gallery, by Sir Peler LOy.) General Sir Thomas Fairfax . . . .116 (From the portrait by Robert Walker at Allkorp.) John Milton 120 (From tke drawing in crayon by Paithorne at Bayfordbury.) The Death Warrant of King Charles I. — Signed by Oliver Cromwell and other members of the court 128 (From tke oritinal in tke library in the Bouse of Lords.) Pride's Purge 136 Interior of Westminster Hall. Where Parliament sat and where King Charles I. was tried and sentenced 140 St. Lawrence's Gate, Drogheda . . . .158 Cromwell Leading the Assault on Drogheda . 164 Seal of the Protectorate 178 (Prom an impression in wax in tke BriUsk Uustnm.) Admiral Robert Blake 184 (From the portrait at Wadham CoUegt, 0:fford.) z ILLUSTRATIONS lAONa PAGE Cromwell Dissolving the Long Parliament . . i86 Oliver Cromwell 190 (FroiR Me Painting ol AlOorp by Robert Walker.) The Second Installation of Cromwell as Protector, in Westminster Hall, June 26, 1657 . . 210 Sir William Waller 216 (From the torlrait by Sir Peter Lely at Goodwood.) Henry Cromwell — Son of the Protector, and Governor of Ireland 220 The Last Charge of the Ironsides . . . 226 Richard Cromwell 232 Oliver Cromwell . . . • i_^. • 240 (Prom the bmt by Bernini.) OLIVER CROMWELL THE TIMES AND THE MAN FOR over a century and a half after his death the memory of the greatest Englishman of the seventeenth century was looked upon with horror by the leaders of English thought, political and literary ; the very men who were carrying to fruition Cromwell's tremendous policies being often utterly ignorant that they were following in his footsteps. At last the scales began to drop from the most far-seeing eyes. Macaulay, with his eminently sane and wholesome spirit, held Cromwell and the social forces for which he stood — Puritanic and otherwise — at their real worth, and his judgment about them was, in all essen- tials, accurate. But the true appreciation of the place held by the greatest soldier-statesman of the seventeenth century began with the publication of his life and letters by Carlyle. The gnarled genius of the man who worshipped the heroes of i: OLIVER CROMWELL the past as intensely as he feared and distrusted the heroes of the present, enabled him to write with a loftiness and intensity that befitted his sub- ject. But Carlyle's singular incapacity to "see veracity," as he would himself have phrased it, made him at times not merely tell half-truths, but deliberately invert the truth. He was of that not uncommon cloistered type which shrinks shud- dering from actual contact with whatever it, in theory, most admires, and which, therefore, is re- duced in self-justification to misjudge and misrep- resent those facts of past history which form prec- edents for what is going on before the author's own eyes. Cromwell lived in an age when it was not pos- sible to realize a government based upon those large principles of social, political, and religious liberty in which — at any rate, during his earlier years — he sincerely believed; but the movement of which he was the head was the first of the great movements which, marching along essentially the same lines, have produced the English-speaking world as we at present know it. This primary fact Carlyle refused to see, or at least to admit As the central idea of his work he states that the Puritanism of the Cromwellian epoch was the " last glimpse of the Godlike vanishing from this England ; conviction and veracity giving place THE TIMES AND THE MAN to hollow cant and formulism. . . . The last of all our Heroisms. . . . We have wandered far away from the ideas which guided us in that century, and indeed which had guided us in all preceding centuries, but of which that century was the ultimate manifestation; we have wan- dered very far; and must endeavor to return and connect ourselves therewith again. ... I will advise my reader to forget the modem meth- ods of reform ; not to remember that he has ever heard of a modern individual called by the name of ' Reformer,' if he would understand what the old meaning of the word was. The Cromwells, Pyms, and Hampdens, who were understood on the Royalist side to be fire-brands of the devil, have had still worse measure from the Dry-as- Dust philosophies and sceptical histories of later times. They really did resemble fire-brands of the devil if you looked at them through specta- cles of a certain color, for fire is always fire ; but by no spectacles, only by mere blindness and wooden - eyed spectacles, can the flame - girt heaven's messenger pass for a poor, mouldy Pedant and Constitution-monger such as these would make him out to be." This is good writing of its kind; but the thought is mere "hollow cant and unveracity;" not only far from the truth, but the direct reverse 3 OLIVER CROMWELL of the truth. It is itself the wail of the pedant who does not know that the flame-girt heaven's messenger of truth is always a mere mortal to those who see him with the actual eyes of the flesh, although mayhap a great mortal ; while to the closet philosopher his quality of flame-girted- ness is rarely visible until a century or thereabouts has elapsed. So far from this great movement, of which Puritanism was merely one manifestation, being the last of a succession of similar heroisms, it had practically very much less connection with what went before than with all that has guided us in our history since. Of course, it is impossible to draw a line with mathematical exactness between the different stages of history, but it is both pos- sible and necessary to' draw it with rough effi- ciency; and, speaking roughly, the epoch of the Puritans was the beginning of the great modem epoch of the English-speaking world — infinitely its greatest epoch. We have not " wandered far from the ideas that guided " the wisest and most earnest leaders in the century that saw Cromwell ; on the contrary, these ideas were themselves very far indeed from those which had guided the Eng- lish people in previous ages, and the ideas that now guide us represent on the whole what was best and truest in the thought of the Puritans. 4 THE TIMES AND THE MAN As for Pym and Hampden, their type had prac- tically no representative in England prior to their time, while all the great legislative reformers since then have been their followers. The Hampden type — ^the purest and noblest of types — reached its highest expression in Washington. Pym, the man of great powers and great services, with a tendency to believe that Parliamentary govern- ment was the cure for all evils, followed to a line " the modern methods of reform," and was exactly the man who, if he had lived in Carlyle's day, Carlyle would have sneered at as a " constitution- monger." It was men of the kind of Hampden and Pym who, before Carlyle's own eyes, were striving in the British Parliament for the reforms which were to carry one stage farther the work of Hampden and Pym ; who were endeavoring to secure for all creeds full tolerance ; to give the people an ever-increasing share in ruling their own destinies ; to better the conditions of social and political life. In the great American Civil War the master spirits in the contest for union and freedom were actuated by a fervor as intense as, and even finer than, that which actuated the men of the Long Parliament; while in rigid morality and grim devotion to what he conceived to be God's bidding, the Southern soldier, Stone- wall Jackson, was as true a type of the " Gen- OLIVER CROMWELL eral of the Lord, with his Bible and his Sword," as Cromwell or Ireton. The whole history of the movement which re- sulted in the establishment of the Commonwealth of England will be misread and misunderstood if we fail to appreciate that it was the first modern, and not the last mediaeval, movement ; if we fail to understand that the men who figured in it and the principles for which they contended, are strictly akin to the men and the principles that have appeared in all similar great movements since : in the English Revolution of 1688; in the American Revolution of 1776; and the Ameri- can Civil War of 1861. We must keep ever in mind the essentially modern character of the movement if we are to appreciate its true inward- ness, its true significance. Fundamentally, it was the first struggle for religious, political, and social freedom, as we now understand the terms. As was inevitable in such a first struggle, there re- mained even among the forces of reform much of what properly belonged to previous generations. In addition to the modern side there was a medi- aeval side, too. Just so far as this mediaeval ele- ment obtained, the movement foiled. All that there was of good and of permanence in it was due to the new elements. To understand the play of the forces which THE TIMES AND THE MAN produced Cromwell and gave him his chance, we must briefly look at the England into which he was born. He saw the light at the close of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in the last years of the Tudor dynasty, and he grew to manhood during the inglorious reign of the first English king of the inglorious House of Stuart. The struggle between the reformed churches and the ancient church, against which they were in revolt, was still the leading fector in shaping European politics, though other factors were fast assuming an equal weight. The course of the Reformation in Eng- land had been widely different from that which it had followed in other European countries. The followers of Luther and Calvin, whatever their shortcomings — and they were many and grievous — had been influenced by a fiery zeal for righteousness, a fierce detestation of spiritual cor- ruption; but in England the Reformation had been undertaken for widely different reasons by Henry VIII. and his creatures, though the bulk of their followers were as sincere as their brethren on the Continent Henry's purpose had been simple, namely, to transfer to himself the power and revenues of the Papacy, so far as he could seize them, and thus to add to the spiritual supremacy against which the leaders of the 7 OLIVER CROMWELL Reformation had revolted : the absolute sov- ereignty which the Tudors were seeking to establish in England. Elizabeth stood infinitely above her father in most respects ; but in religious views they were not far apart, and in theory they were both believers in absolutism. They had no standing army, and they were always in want of money, so that in practice they never ventured seriously to offend the influential and moneyed classes. But under Henry the misery and suffer- ing of the lower classes became very great, and the yeomen were largely driven from their lands, while much of Elizabeth's OAvn administration consisted of efforts to grapple with the vagrancy and wretchedness which had been caused by the degradation of those who stood lowest in the social scale. When the Stuarts took possession of the throne of England they found a people which, unlike the peoples of most of the neighboring States, had not fought out its religious convictions. The Reformation had deeply stirred men's souls. Religion had become a matter of vital and terri- ble importance to Protestant and to Catholic. Among the extremists, the men who had given the tone to the Reformation in Germany, Switz- erland, Holland, and Scotland, religion, as they understood it, entered into every act of their lives 8 Thomas Wentvvorth, Earl of Strafford. From the miniature at iJevonshire House. By perniissKJii of the Duke of Devonshire. K.G. THE TIMES AND THE MAN In England there were men of this stamp ; but in the English Reformation they had played a wholly subordinate part ; and indeed had been in almost as great danger as the Catholics. Their force, therefore, had not spent itself. It had been con- served, in spite of their desires. Thus it happened that the high tide of extreme Protestantism was reached in England, not as in other Protestant countries, in the sixteenth century, but in the seventeenth. The Stuarts were the only Protestant kings who were not in religious sympathy with their Protestant subjects. In theory the Anglican Church of Henry and Elizabeth stood for what we would now regard as tyranny. What Henry VIII. strove to do with the Anglican Church is what has actually been done by the Czars with the Orthodox Church in Russia; but that which was possible with the east- em Slavs was not possible with the westernmost and freest of the Teutonic peoples. Yet in the actual event it was probably fortunate that the English Reformation took the shape it did ; for under such conditions it was not marked by the intense fanaticism of the reformers elsewhere. The Stuarts not only found themselves masters of a kingdom where, supposedly, they were spirit- ually supreme, while actually their claim to su- premacy was certain to be challenged; they also OLIVER CROMWELL found themselves at the head of a form of govern- ment which was to all appearances despotic, while the people over whom they bore sway, though slow to object to the forms, were extremely intol- erant of the practices of despotism. The Tudors were unarmed despots, who disliked the old feudal nobility, and who found it for their interest to cultivate the commercial classes, and to form a new nobility of their own, based upon wealth. The men at the lowest round of the social ladder — the workingmen and farm laborers — were yet, as they remained for a couple of centuries, so unfit for the work of political combination that they could be safely disregarded by the masters of Eng- land. At times their discontent was manifested, generally in the shape of abortive peasant insur- rections; but there was never need to consider them as of serious and permanent importance. The middle classes, however, had become very powerful, and to their material interests the Tudors always took care to defer. At the very close of her reign, Elizabeth, who was at heart as thorough a tyrant as ever lived, but who possessed that shrewd good sense which, if not the noblest, is perhaps on the whole the most useful of qualities in the actual workaday world, found herself face to face with her people on the question of monop- olies; and as soon as she understood tliat they THE TIMES AND THE MAN were resolutely opposed to her policy, she instantly yielded. In other words, the Tudor despotism was conditioned upon the despot's doing nothing of which the influential classes of the nation — the upper and middle classes — seriously disapproved ; and this the Stuart kings could never understand. Moreover, apart from the fact that the Stuarts were so much less shrewd and less able than the Tudors, there was the further fact that Englishmen as a whole were gradually growing more intoler- ant, not only of the practice but of the pretence of tyranny, whether in things material or in things spiritual. There was a moral awakening which rendered it impossible for Englishmen of the sev- enteenth century to submit to the brutal wrong- doing which marked the political and ecclesiastical tyrarmy of the previous century. The career of Henry VIII. could not have been paralleled in any shape when once England had begun to breed such men as went to the making of the Long Parliament. Much of the aspiration after higher things took the form of spiritual unrest. It must always be remembered that the Protestant sects which estab- lished themselves in the northern half of Europe, although they warred in the name of religious liberty, had no more conception of it, as we of this day understand it, than their Catholic foes; and OLIVER CROMWELL yet it must also be remembered that the bitter conflicts they waged prepared the way for the wide tolerance of individual difference in matters of religious belief which is among the greatest blessings of our modem life. An American Cath- olic and an American Protestant of to-day, what- ever the difference between their theologies, yet in their ways of looking at real life, at its relation to religion, and the relations of religion and the State, are infinitely more akin to one another than either is to the men of his religious feith who lived three centuries ago. We now admit, as a matter of course, that any man may, in religious matters, profess to be guided by authority or by reason, as suits him best; but that he must not interfere with similar freedom of belief in others; and that all men, whatever their religious beliefs, have ex- actly the same political rights and are to be held to the same responsibility for the way they exercise these rights. Few indeed were the men who held such views at the time when Cromwell was grow- ing to manhood. Holland was the State of all others in which there was the nearest approach to religious liberty; and even in Holland the bitter- ness of the Calvinists toward the Arminians was something which we can now scarcely understand. Arminius was no more at home in Geneva than in Rome ; and his followers were prescribed by 12 Oliver CromweU. Fnim a miniaturt; by CuupL-r. Here reproduced for the first time \'.y ]icrriiissi'iii nf Sir Chnrlcs Ilarlupp, Hart. THE TIMES AND THE MAN the most religious people of England, and so far as might be were driven from the realm. Calvin- ists and Lutherans felt as little inclination as Catholics to allow liberty of conscience to others; and as grotesque a compromise as ever was made in matters religious was that made in Germany, when it was decided that the peoples of the various German principalities should in mass accept the faiths of their respective princes. Yet though the Reformers thus strove to estab- lish for their own use the very religious intolerance against which they had revolted, the mere fact of their existence nullified their efforts. Sooner or later people who had exercised their own judg- ment, and had fought for the right to exercise it, were sure grudgingly to admit the same right in others. That time was as yet far distant. In Cromwell's youth all the leading Christian churches were fiercely intolerant. Unless we keep in mind that this was the general attitude, an attitude which necessarily affected even the greatest men, we cannot do justice to the political and social leaders of that age when we find them, as we so ofiien do, adopting toward their religious foes policies from which we, of a happier age, turn with horror. In England hatred of Roman Catholicism had become almost interchangeable with hatred of 13 OLIVER CROMWELL Spain. Spain had been the one dangerous foe which England had encountered under the Tudor dynasty, and the only war she had ever waged into which the religious element entered was the war which put upon the English roll of honor the names of her great sixteenth - century seamen, Drake and Hawkins, Howard and Frobisher. Throughout the sixteenth century Spain had towered above every other power of Europe in warlike might; and though the Dutch and Eng- lish sailors had broken the spell of her invinci- bility at sea, on shore her soldiers retained their reputation for superior prowess, in spite of the victories of Maurice of Orange, until Gustavus Adolphus marched his wonderful army down from the frozen North. During Cromwell's youth and early manhood Spain was still the most powerful and most dreaded of European nations. Her government had become a mere tyranny ; her re- ligion fanatical bigotry of a type more extreme than any that existed elsewhere, even in an age when all creeds tended toward fanaticism and bigotry. It was in Spain that the Holy Inquisi- tion chiefly flourished — one of the most fearful engines for the destruction of all that was highest in mankind that the world has ever seen. Cath- olics were oppressed in England and Protestants in France; but in each country the persecuted 14 THE TIMES AND THE MAN sect might almost be said to enjoy liberty, and certainly to enjoy peace, when their fate was com- pared with the dreadful horrors of torture and murder with which Spain crushed out every spe- cies of heresy within her borders. Jew, Infidel, and Protestant, shared the same awful doom, until she had purchased complete religious uniformity at the price of the loss of everything that makes national life great and noble. The dominion of Spain would have been the dominion of deso- lation ; her supremacy as baneful as that of the Turk; and Holland and England, in withstand- ing her, rendered the same service to humanity that was rendered at that very time by those na- tions of southeastern Europe who formed out of the bodies of their citizens the bulwark which stayed the Turkish fury. But if in her relations to one Catholic nation England appeared as the champion of religious liberty, of all that makes life worth having to the free men who live in free nations, yet in her rela- tions to another Catholic people she herself played the role of merciless oppressor — religious, political, and social. Ireland, utterly foreign in speech and culture, had been ground into the dust by the crushing weight of England's overlordship. Dur- ing centuries chaos had reigned in the island ; the English intruders possessing sufficient power to 15 OLIVER CROMWELL prevent the development of any Celtic national life, but not to change it into a Norman or Eng- lish national life. The English who settled and warred in Ireland felt and acted as the most bar- barous white frontiersmen of the nineteenth cen- tury have acted toward the alien races with whom they have been brought in contact There is no language in which to paint the hideous atrocities committed in the Irish wars of Elizabeth; and the worst must be credited to the highest English officials. In Ireland the antagonism was funda- mentally racial ; whether the sovereign of Eng- land were Catholic or Protestant made little dif- ference in the burden of wrong which the Celt was forced to bear. The first of the so-called plantations by which the Celts were ousted in mass from great tracts of country to make room for English settlers, was undertaken under the Catholic Queen Mary, and the two counties thus created by the wholesale expulsion of the wretch- ed kerne were named in honor of the Queen and of her spouse, the Spanish Philip. Though Phil- ip's bigotry made him the persecutor of heretics, it taught him no mercy toward those of his own faith but of a different nationality, whether Irish or Portuguese. When England became Prot- estant, Ireland stood steadfastly for the old faith ; and religious was added to race hatred. In Spain l6 Sir John Eliot. From the portrait by \'an Somer nt Port Eliot. I'.y penniss (