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YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

THE LIBRARY OF THE
DIVINITY SCHOOL

OLIVER CROMWELL

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OLIVER CROMWELL

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THE RIGHT HON.

JOHN MORLEY

M.P., HON. D.C.L. OXON., LL.D. CAMBRIDGE AND GLASGOW

HonDon
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
1900

First Edition October 1900
Reprinted November 1900
Reprinted December 1900

Edinburgh: T. and A. CoitSTABLfe, Printers to Her Majesty

NOTE.
Everybody who now writes about Cromwell must, apart
from old authorities, begin by grateful acknowledgment 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

VI NOTE.
stream, I had nothing for it but to persevere with as
stout a stroke as I could to the other shore.
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.
J. M.
July 1900.

CONTENTS. BOOK I.
{1599-1642. )
CHAPTER PAGE
PROLOGUE .... .1
I. EARLY LIFE . . . 7
II. THE STATE AND ITS LEADERS . . 20
III. PURITANISM AND THE DOUBLE ISSUE . 43
IV. THE INTERIM . . 63
V. THE LONG PARLIAMENT . . 74
VI. THE EVE OF THE WAR . . 89
VII. THE FIVE MEMBERS— THE CALL TO ARMS . .106
BOOK II.
{1642-5.)
I. CROMWELL IN THE FIELD . . . .119
II. MARSTON MOOR .... 135
III. THE WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY AND THE CONFLICT
OF IDEALS ..... 150
IV. THE NEW MODEL . . . . .170
V. THE DAY OF NASEBY . . . .183
BOOK III.
(1646-9.)
I. THE KING A PRISONER . . . 201
II. THE CRISIS OF 1647 . . . 216
III. THE OFFICERS AS POLITICIANS , . 227
IV. THE KING'S FLIGHT .... 242
V. SECOND CIVIL WAR — CROMWELL IN LANCASHIRE . 251
VI. FINAL CRISIS — CROMWELL'S SHARE IN IT . . 264
VII. THE DEATH OF THE KING . . . .274

Vill CONTENTS.

BOOK IV.
(1649-53.)
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE COMMONWEALTH . . . 287
II. CROMWELL IN IRELAND 297
III. IN SCOTLAND . . 312
IV. FROM DUNBAR TO WORCESTER . . 323
V. CIVIL PROBLEMS AND THE SOLDIER . 332
VI. THE BREAKING OF THE LONG PARLIAMENT . 345
VII. THE REIGN OF THE SAINTS . . . 358

BOOK V.
(1653-8.)
I. FIRST STAGE OF THE PROTECTORATE . 369
II. QUARREL WITH THE FIRST PARLIAMENT . 388
III. THE MILITARY DICTATORSHIP . 398
IV. THE REACTION . . 411
V. CHANGE OF TACK . . 420
VI. KINGSHIP . 435
VII. DOMESTIC TRAITS . 447
VIII. FOREIGN POLICY 455
IX. GROWING EMBARRASSMENTS . .471
X. THE CLOSE . . . 482
INDEX . . . 497

OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK I.
PEOLOGUE.
The figure of Cromwell has emerged from the float
ing mists of time in many varied semblances, from
bloodstained and hypocritical usurper up to tran
scendental 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 that a
written history is capable of producing is nowhere
seen more strongly than in Clarendon's story of the

2 OLIVEE CEOMWELL.
book 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
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 con
servative 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 govern
ment was military and despotic, yet it was regular ;
it was rigid, yet it was no savage tyranny. Ambi
tion 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 Clarendon. As time went on, opinion
slowly widened. By the end of the first quarter
of this century reformers like Godwin, though they
could not forgive Cromwell'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

PEOLOGUE. 3
few excellent pioneers that have swayed a sceptre, peo-
and they almost brought themselves to adopt the'
glowing panegyrics of Milton.
The genius and diligence of Carlyle, aided by the
firm and manly stroke of Macaulay, 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 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 con
structive 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 importunate 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 classifications works havoc
with truth ; and to insist upon long series of un
qualified clenchers in history and biography only

4 OLIVEE CEOMWELL.
book 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
produced 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 single
ness of mind. On the political side it is the same.
It may be that L a man's noblest mistake is to be
before his time.' Yet historic sense forbids us to
judge results by motive, or real consequences by
the ideals and intentions of the actor who pro
duced 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 Re
bellion. 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 con
sulate and empire to Moscow and to Leipsic. 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

PROLOGUE. 5
on the far-off heights whence all the scouring legions PRO-
T AC I 'T"L'1
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 seemed
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 Crom
well. The effective revolution came thirty years
later, and when it came it was no Crornwellian revolu
tion; 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 Restora
tion became a mere shadow of its ancient form. For
two centuries, besides her vast influence as a purely
ecclesiastical organisation, the church was supreme
in the universities, 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
prospered ; but they had little more share in the
government 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
1 Lucretius, ii. 323-332.

6 OLIVEE CEOMWELL.
book history had preappointed for them, into the new
channels which he fondly hoped that he was tracing
with the point of his victorious sword, implies no
blindness either to the gifts of a brave and stead
fast 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.
BAELY LIFE.

' I was by birth a gentleman, living neither in any chap.
considerable height nor yet in obscurity.' Such

was Cromwell's account of himself. He was the 1636^
descendant in the third degree of Richard Crom
well, 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 Wil
liams, the father of Richard, but when the greater
name was assumed seems uncertain. What is cer
tain 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

8 OLIVEE CEOMWELL.
book Golden Knight, so called from his profusion, was
— 'f — • the father of Sir Oliver, a worthy of a prodigal
I642! turn hke himself. Besides Sir Oliver, the Golden
Knight had a younger son, Robert, and Robert
in 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 Styward.
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

EARLY LIFE.

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 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 con
scientious 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

1599-1636.

10 OLIVEE CEOMWELL.
book of which the studious are made. Some faint evi-
/ dence may be traced of progress in mathematics :
1642. 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 con
versation 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 attainments that attract us
in many of those who either fought by his side or who
fought against him. The spirit of the Renaissance
was never breathed upon him. Cromwell had none
of the fine judgment in the arts that made King
Charles one of the most enthusiastic and judicious
collectors of paintings known in his time. We can
not 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 knowledge that he was not ignorant in
anything, yet such an excessive humility as if he
had known nothing, that they frequently resorted

EAELY LIFE. 11
and dwelt with him, as in a college situated
a purer air.' Cromwell was of another type.
Bacon said about Sir Edward Coke that he con- Jg36.
versed with books and not with men, who are
the best books. Of Cromwell the reverse is true ;
for him a single volume comprehended 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 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

12 OLIVEE CEOMWELL.
book Oliver's hints have the root of the matter in them,
— r — - and in this deep sense of education he was himself
1642. 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 connection of the family of Hampden. Eliza
beth 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 White
hall, 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 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

MAERIAGE. 1 3
is no corroborative evidence for them. Wher
ever 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 ex
pression 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 misery was heavy while it lasted. But the

1599-1636.

14 OLIVER CEOMWELL.
instinct of action was born in him, and when the
summons came he met it with all the vigour of
1642! 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 founda
tion. 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 il, 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 im
prisonment 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,

CHOSEN FOR PAELIAMENT. 15
saw at their noble and hardy task the first genera
tion of the champions of the civil rights and -
parliamentary liberties of England. He saw the J||g"
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 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 Wentworth, 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 certain

16 OLIVER CEOMWELL.
book divine in preaching flat popery at St. Paul's Cross,
 ^ — • and had forbidden Cromwell's old master, Dr. Beard,
1642" to reply. The parliament was abruptly dissolved
(March, 1629), and for eleven years no other
was called.
There is no substance in the fable, though so
circumstantially related, that in 1636 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. All the pro
babilities are against it, and there is no evidence for
it. 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.
Children 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

1599-1636.

ST. IVES AND ELY. 17
to an inflammation in his throat.' He had his chap.
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 procured the change. The mayor and
aldermen complained 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 many contradictory asseverations.
We may assume that Cromwell made a stout defence
on the merits, and he appears to have been dis
charged 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

18 OLIVER CROMWELL.
called for his Bible, and desired an honourable
and godly person present to read aloud to him a
1642. 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 and 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 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 kins
man John Hampden was consulting his other kins
man, Oliver St. John, as to resisting the writ of

HIS FIRST LETTER. 19
ship-money. Laud, made Archbishop of Canterbury
in 1633, was busy in the preparation of a new
prayer-book for the regeneration of stubborn Scot
land. Wentworth was fighting his high-handed
battle for a better order in Ireland.

CHAPTER II.
THE STATE AND ITS LEADERS.

book Students of the struggle between monarchy and
 'r  parliament in the seventeenth century have worked
jg^|" hard upon black-letter; on charter, custom, franchise,
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
determination that in their hearts rested on very
different 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 prerogative marked the office of a king when
it was filled by Angevin, by Plantagenet, or by
Tudor ; how the control of parliament over legis
lation 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

QUESTIONS AT ISSUE. 21
the practice of parliament 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 these and the 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
questions 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 responsi
bility 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 assumptions
of authority by the bishops, to reform the idleness
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 statement 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

22 OLIVER CEOMWELL.

book civil troubles in the seventeenth century both these

i
1599-
1642.

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
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 applying 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 disputable
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

KING AND PARLIAMENT. 23
that the base of government should be in the parlia- chap.
ment and in the Commons branch of the parliament. ¦. IL
They claimed for parliament a general competence
in making laws, granting money, levying taxes,
supervising the application of their grants, restrict
ing 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, 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 possession
of concentrated authority and military force, some
times 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 aione excepted — is a blank chapter. Yet

24 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK in spite of the subservient language that was
L natural toward so puissant and successful a ruler
1642 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 afterward 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 organized 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
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
representative 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

KING AND PAELIAMENT. 25
marriage, was a Bourbon on one side and a Medici chap.
on the other, an ardent catholic, and a Hpivntprl . IL
servant of the Holy See. That Charles was ever
near to a change of faith there is no reason what
ever 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 a 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
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 under
standing 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

26 OLIVEE CEOMWELL.
BOOK kind of policy or wisdom, for it asketh a strong
L - wit and a strong heart to know when to tell truth
Ull' 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 which 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 Shakespere.
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 disobliging. ' 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 the queen.
One of the glories of literature is the discourse
in which the mightiest of French divines com-

HENEIETTA MAEIA. 27
memorates the strange vicissitudes of fortune — chap.
the glittering exaltation, the miseries, the daring, v
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 profound. Bossuet, more than a
divine, was moralist, statesman, philosopher, ex
ploring with no mere abstract speculative eye the
thread of continuous purpose in the history of man
kind, but using knowledge, 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 care 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 battle
fields, 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 content 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

28 OLIVER CEOMWELL.
book brought the Rebellion about ? Nay, he cries ; when
. / . / we look at the incredible facility with which religion
1642." was nrst overthrown in that country, then restored,
then overthrown again, by Henry vm., 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 1 The fault was with the
kings themselves. They it was who taught the
nations 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

HENEIETTA MARIA. 29
almoners ; and how the zealous shepherds of the chap.
afflicted catholic flock of whom the world was not v__f!l
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
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 downward, 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 vn., and Catherine of the Bartholomew
massacre. But the queen had none of the depth of
these famous personages. To her, alike as catholic

30 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book and as queen seated on a shaking throne, the choice
— I — ' between bishop and presbyter within a protestant
1 642. communion was matter for contemptuous indifference.
She understood neither her husband's scruples, nor
the motives of his rebellious adversaries. The
sanctity of law and immemorial 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 untrained 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-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 mischievous 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

WENTWORTH. 3 1
black eyes. Besides, her deportment among her chap.
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 required. She was a woman of no manner
of judgment ; 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.' HI.
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 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 of shifting the founda
tion 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 organized authority ; though
he began in opposition, 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 Crom-

32 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK well himself in some of the days to come was
L destined apparently to share and to exemplify.
1642 Wentworth's ideal was centred in a strong state,
exerting power for the common good ; and the main
spring of a strong state must be monarch, not parlia
ment. It was the idea of the time that governing
initiative must come from the throne, with or with
out a check in the people. Happily for us, men of
deeper insight than Wentworth 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 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, unsparing industry
and attention, long-sighted continuity 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.

WENTWORTH. 33
One short scene may suffice to bring him in act chap.
and life before us. The convention of the Irish. IL
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, cer
tainly 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 fraternities
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 canonical obedi
ence to their superiors, they had proceeded in their com
mittee ; 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
C

1642.

34 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK season of the year, would I suffer them to be heard either in
*• convocation or in their pulpits. (Then he gave them five
1599- 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,

WENTWORTH. 35
Chalais, Marillacs, Cinq- Mars, to the scaffold. It is
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.' Strafford 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, his
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 de
clared ascendency in the royal counsels, if ascendency
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 ex
clusively to Irish administration. He does not seem

36 OLIVER CROMWELL.
to have been consulted upon general affairs before
1637, and it was later than this when Charles began
1642! to lean upon him. It was not until 1640 that he
could prevail upon the king to augment his political
authority by making him lord-lieutenant and Earl
of Strafford.
If Strafford was a bad counsellor for the times,
and the queen a worse, Laud, 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 con
tempt for him,' says another, ' than for any character
in history ' (Macaulay). It is pretty safe to be sure
that these slashing superlatives 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 proportions 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 deport
ment ; but he was a hot, indiscreet man, eagerly
pursuing some matters that were either very in
considerable 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

ARCHBISHOP LAUD. 37
time was laid out on these.' The agent of the
Vatican described him as timid, ambitious, incon-'
stant, and therefore ill equipped for great enter
prises. 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 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 malicious, 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

38 OLIVER CROMWELL.
furniture, church apparel, drove English puritanism
frantic. ' It is called superstition nowadays,' Laud
complained, ' for any man to come with more rever
ence 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
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 latitudina-
rianism, and some passages in his own works are con
strued as favouring liberal theology. That liberal

ARCHBISHOP LAUD. 39
theology would have quickly progressed within the chap.
church under Laud's rule, so long as outer uni- >  fi.
formity 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 pres-
byterian 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 hard
to decide ; but we may be sure that if he actively
hated heresies about justification or predestination,
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
contemporary, '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 missionary inspiration of his own, he sought no
saintlier weapons than oppressive statutes and per
secuting 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

40 OLIVER CROMWELL,
book and court had come down. Persecution has often
_; — • won in human history ; often has a violent hand
1642. dashed out the lamp of truth. But the puritan
exodus to New England was a signal, and no states
man 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
parliament 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 acces
sion of Charles. He made his mark early as one who
understood 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 wTord
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
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

PYM. 41
one of those luminous and discerning minds that chap.
have the rare secret in times of high contention ofv
singling out the central issues and choosing the
best battle-ground. Early he perceived and under
stood 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 govern
ment, 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 commonwealths been ever the
most durable and perpetual which have often re
formed and recomposed themselves according to
their first institution and ordinance. 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
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

I

42 OLIVER CROMWELL.

book exists for. He had the double gift, so rare even

among leaders in popular assemblies, of being at
1642! once practical and elevated ; a master of tactics
and organizing arts, and yet the inspirer of solid
and lofty principles. How can we measure the
perversity of a king and counsellors who forced into
opposition a man so imbued with the deep instinct
of government, 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 chap.
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
ascendency 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 indomitable 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

44 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book Netherlands. In 1572 the pious work in France
— r' — • began with the massacre of St. Bartholomew. In
1642. 1588 the Armada appeared in the British Channel
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 that 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
population, 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 Eng
land with dismay filled the pertinacious Pope Urban
vill. 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
first 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

PUEITANISM AND THE DOUBLE ISSUE. 45
Europe. The Thirty Years' War (1618-48) was not chap
in all its many phases a contest of protestant and ¦
catholic, but that tremendous issue was never re
mote or extinct ; and even apart from the important
circumstance that the Elector Palatine had espoused
the daughter of James L, its fluctuations kept up
a strong and constant undercurrent of feeling and
attention in England.

ii.
' 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 condi
tions were twofold, religion strikes the key-note.
Like other movements, the course of the Reforma
tion 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 accord
ing 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 conflagration. In
England the left wing of protestantism was puritan
ism, and puritanism in its turn threw out an ex
treme left with a hundred branches of its own.
The history of Cromwell almost exactly covers

46 OLIVEE CEOMWELL.
this development from the steady-going doctrinal
puritanism that he found prevailing when he first
1642! emerged upon the public scene, down to the faiths
of the hundred and seventy 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 disen
tangle 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 Cromwell the man of his age marched toward
their own ideals of purified life and higher citizen
ship. It is enough here to say in a word that in
the Cromwellian 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 Conscience, the twin pillars of protestant
ism in its fundamental theory, were in practice
hidden out of sight and memory, and, as we shall
see, even Cromwell 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 efferves-

PURITANISM AND THE DOUBLE ISSUE. 47
cence 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 indignant, 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 Cromwellian time were forced into
a brave and energetic conflict against misgovern
ment 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 ' which are always the true cause of the
worst mischiefs of an unregenerate world. Puritan
ism came from the deeps. It was, like Stoicism,
monasticism, Jansenism, even Mohammedanism, 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

48 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK women of many communions and faiths ; it arose
/ in instincts that seldom conquer for more than a
1642. brief season, and yet are never crushed. An ascetic
and unworldly way of thinking about life, a rigorous
moral strictness, the subjugation 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, are easily drowned in re
action, but are 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 ascendency in the protestant
world. He meets us in England, as in Scotland,
Holland, France, Switzerland, and the rising Eng
land across the Atlantic. He was dead (1564) a
generation before Cromwell was born, but his in
fluence 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 con
solidate religious faith. Men take a narrow view
of Calvin when they think of him only as the
preacher of iustification by faith, and the foe of

CALVINISM. 49
sacerdotal mediation. His scheme comprehended chap.
a doctrine that went to the very root of man's — "L,
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 amaz
ing 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 foundations
of the world were laid, it was decreed by counsel
secret to us that some should be chosen out of man
kind to everlasting salvation, and others to curse
and damnation. In the figure of the memorable
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 Fore
knowledge absolute, the strongest of the protestant
fortresses all over the world were founded. Well
might it have been anticipated that fatalism as un
flinching as this would have driven men headlong
into ' desperation and wretchlessness of most unclean
living.' Yet that was no more the actual effect of
the fatalism of St. Paul, Augustine, and Calvin than
D

50 OLIVER CROMWELL.
it was of the fatalism of the Stoics or of Mohammed.
On the contrary, Calvinism exalted its votaries to
1642" 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 endurance, 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? How
ever we may answer all the insoluble practical

CALVINISM. 5 1
enigmas that confronted the Calvinist, just as for chap.
that matter they confront the philosophic necessarian
or determinist of to-day, Calvinism was the general
theory through which 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 superstition or over-belief, as anything imputed

52 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book to the catholics. Science had set up no reign of
; - law, nor hinted a doubt on the probabilities of
}g42' miraculous intervention. No physical theories had
dimmed faith in acts of specific creation ; the aerial
perspective and vistas of time were very primitive.
Whatever 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 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 profaning 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
draft, 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 super-
naturalistic hypothesis, no transcendental symbol
or synthesis, but the Lord of Hosts of the Old
Testament. The saints and puritans were the
chosen people. All the denunciations of the pro
phets against the oppressors of Israel were applied
to the letter against bishops and princes. And
Moses and Joshua, Gideon and Barak, Samson and

CALVINISM. 53
Jephthah, were the antetypes of those who now in chap.
a Christian world thought themselves 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 won
derful 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 is to fear unbelief, self-seeking,
confidence in the arm 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 communion 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 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

54 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book of Dunbar, that marvellous dispensation, that
— ; — * mighty and strange appearance of God's, as a mere
1642! ' 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 beginning of the century, marking there a
liberal and rationalist reaction against Calvinistic
rigour, and they were now welcomed by the
Laudians as bringing a needed keystone to the
quaking double arch of church and state. Armin-
ianism had been condemned at the Synod of Dort
(1619); but as a half-way house between Catholi
cism 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 himself much less with
the theology than with the latent politics of Armin-
ianism, 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

ARMINIANISM. 55
Will; implacable Necessity by room for merciful chap.
Contingency; Man. the Machine by Man the self-s. Iu
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 affini
ties 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 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, concen
tration, resolution, the rival doctrine covered a
wider range of human nature, sounded more abid
ing depths, and comprehended better all the many
varied conditions under which the 'poor worm'
of Calvin and of Cromwell strives to make the

56 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book best of itself and to work out the destinies of its
— ^ — ' tiny day. ' Truth,' said Arminius, ' even theo-
1642. logical 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 theo
logians, 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 conscience, yet he has many a chapter of Western
history on his side. Disputes between orthodox
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

THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 57
for the ambition of statesmen. The rival armies chap.
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
controversies 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 vm. 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 organi
zation. 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

58 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book that the strenuous and powerful character of John
— ^ — - Knox had succeeded in stamping upon Scotland.
1642" 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 puritan
ism is usually supposed to have first taken definite
shape. During the years when Cromwell was
attending to his business at St. Ives, this re
organization 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 com
monalty with the king. Different church questions
hovered in men's minds, sometimes vaguely, some
times 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 ceremonial, 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, —

TEMPORAL POWER AND SPIRITUAL. 59
all these and similar things were matter of pas- chap.
sionate discussion, veiling grave differences of . n1,
faith under what look like mere triflings about in
different form. But the power and station of the
bishop, his temporal prerogative, his coercive juris
diction, his usurping arrogance, his subserviences
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 clergy, in
private morals no less than in public observance, 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 is 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 incontinence. 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 ecclesiastical institution.
Clarendon says of the clergymen of his day in well-
known words, that ' they understand 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.

60 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book The jurisdiction of the court of bishop or arch-
—^  ' deacon did not exceed the powers of a Scottish
1642. kirk-session, but there was the vital difference
that the Scotch court was democratic in the founda
tion 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 Scotland.
Juxon, the Bishop of London, was made 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
that stands 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 dark
ness over the sanctuary of the soul. The king
announces that it is his duty not to suffer un
necessary disputations or questions to be raised.
He commands all further curious search beyond

ECCLESIASTICAL CLAIMS. 61
the true, usual, literal meaning of the articles to be chap.
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 convocation of the bishops
and clergy alone, with license under the king's
broad seal, to do whatever might 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
out of the area of public discussion, while the de
claration 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
intolerable 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 the other. Without a qualm the very parlia
ment that fought with such valour for the Petition

62 OLIVER CROMWELL.
of Right (March 1629) declared that anybody who
should be seen to extend or introduce any opinion,
1642! whether papistical, Arminian, or other, disagreeing
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
designation hardly used, and Cromwell himself at
first reje'cted it, perhaps with the wise instinct of
the practical statesman against being too quick to
assume a compromising badge before occasion
positively forces. He was never much of a demo
crat, 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,
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 chap.
contending with the king outside of parliament. ^_ v_
Acting on this maxim, the popular leaders, with the Jgfa
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 bar
barous 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

64 OLIVER CROMWTELL.
book dignitaries, men of education and learned professions
— 'r — - were set in the pillory, had their ears cut off, their
1642. noses slit, their cheeks branded, were 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 doc
trine that there is a rule of law and a rule of govern
ment, 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 sub-

thorough. 65
scribed in passing the Petition of Right. The chap.
decision against Hampden contained the startling -  ^ 
propositions that no statute can bar a king of his \f$,\
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 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 stumbling ; 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 resist
ance was attempted, or perhaps whispered. Pym
kept unbroken silence. Of Cromwell we have hardly
a glimpse, and he seems to have taken the long years
of interregnum as patiently as most of his neigh
bours. After some short unquietness 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

1599-

66 OLIVER CROMWELL.
eleven years of misgovernment a parliament was
chosen, it was found too moderate for its work.
1642. 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 Reformation
had been a popular movement, springing from new
and deepened religious experience and 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 infatua
tions 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
dangerously loose, slender, troublesome, and un
certain. 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 compulsion 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

THE SCOTCH NATIONAL COVENANT. 67
their kingdom. Almost the whole nation hastened
to subscribe that famous National Covenant (Feb
ruary 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 scorn
ful 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 the storm broke. Nobody cared to know any
thing 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 Scotch affairs
himself, with two or three Scotch 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

1629-
1640.

68 OLIVER CROMWELL.
summoned Strafford to his side from Ireland, and
that haughty counsellor told him that the Scots
1642^ 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. n.
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
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-

THE SHORT PARLIAMENT. 69
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 \Hl~
spirit, but they killed him. The king knew well
what he was doing, and even carried his vindictive-
ness beyond death. Eliot's young son petitioned
the king that he might carry the remains to Corn
wall to lie with those of his ancestors. Charles
wrote on the petition : ' Let 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 repent
ance. 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
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

70 OLIVER CROMWELL.
go before the grant of a shilling either for the
¦ Scotch war or anything else. The claim of parlia-
\l%[ ment 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 emer
gency, 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
argued, must be worse before they could be better.
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).

END OF THE SHORT PARLIAMENT. 71
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, mili
tary, 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 interesting problem for historic rumination.
As it was, the whole policy of Thorough fell into
ruins. The trained bands were called out and

72 • OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK commissions of array were issued, but they only
— ; — - spread distraction. The convocation of the clergy
1642^ heightened the general irritation, not only by con
tinuing against the constitution to sit after the
parliament had disappeared, but by framing new
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 pro
voked much rude anger and derision. This proceed
ing raised in its most direct form the central
question whether under cover of the royal suprem
acy 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 (28th August), occupied New
castle, 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 ascen
dency as the levity of the king could allow. Never
came any man, he says, to so lost a business : the

RUIN OF THOROUGH. 73
army altogether unexercised and unprovided of all chap.
necessaries, the horse all cowardly, a universal  ,-!_
affright in all, a general disaffection to the king's 164V.
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 pres
sure 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 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 appear
ance 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.

book The elections showed how Charles had failed to
— >— ' gauge the humour of his people. Nearly three
\Hl' 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, Shut-
tleworths, Bridgmans, from Lancashire ; Lyttons
and Cecils from Herts ; Derings and Knatchbulls

THE LONG PARLIAMENT. 75
from Kent; Ingrams, Wentworths, Cholmeleys,
Danbys, Fairfaxes, from the thirty seats in York
shire ; Grenvilles, Edgcombes, Bullers, Rolles, i64i."
Godolphins, Vyvyans, Northcotes, Trevors, Carews,
from the four-and-forty boroughs 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 revolu
tionary House of Commons. It was essentially 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 instincts 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 them
selves 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, Falkland,
Digby, and others who in time passed over to the

76 OLIVER CROMWELL.
royal camp. A student of our day has remarked
that these men collectively represented a larger
1642! 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
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 Com
mons, 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 parliament
got really to business, no more than eighteen re
mained. 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,

CROMWELL IN THE HOUSE. 77
Either history or knowledge of human nature might CHAP;
teach us that great nobles often take the popular ^ —
side without dropping any of the pretensions of 16ii
class in their hearts, and it is not mere peevish
ness when the royalist historian says that Lord
Say 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
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.'

78 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book Another recorder of the time describes ' his body
— r — - as well compact and strong ; his stature of the
1642. 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, is 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 masculine
excellence, more able to persuade than to be per
suaded. 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

CROMWELL IN THE HOUSE. 79
in a riotous and warlike manner with sound of chap.
drum and had beaten down the obnoxious fences. - 
Such doings have been often heard of, but perhaps igtii
not half so often as they should have been, even
down to our own day. Lord Manchester, the pur
chaser of the lands enclosed, issued writs against
the offenders, and at the same time both he and
the aggrieved commoners presented petitions to
parliament. Cromwell 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 peti
tioners 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 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 mention 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

80 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK tempestuous, and his behaviour so insolent, that the chair-
L man found himself obliged to reprehend him, and tell him
1599- 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 yet more invigorating education of responsible
contact 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 completed
over two-thirds of his allotted span, and yet he had
never drilled a troop, nor seen a movement in a fight

CROMWELL IN THE HOUSE. 81
or the leaguer of a stronghold or a town. He was chap.
both cautious and daring ; both patient and swift ; ^ V-
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 determined ends, that by those
who love to think the worst was counted as guilty
ambition. The foundation of the whole was a
temperament of energy, vigour, resolution. Crom
well was to show himself one of the men who are
born to force great causes to the proof.
il
Before this famous parliament had been many
days assembled, occurred one of the most dramatic
moments in the history of English freedom. Strafford
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
suffer in his person, his honour, or his fortune.
Strafford, well knowing his peril but undaunted,
quickly posted up to London, resolved to impeach
F

82 OLIVER CEOMWELL.

book his enemies of high treason for inviting the Scots

I.

into the kingdom. Historians may argue forever
1642. 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 it 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-

FALL OF STEAFFORD. 83
tion. Strafford was in the palace at Whitehall chap.
during these proceedings. The news fell like a>  ,J —
thunderbolt upon his friends around him, but he i641"
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 2 (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-

84 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book witness has told us how people began to assemble
— 'r — - at five in the morning, and filled the hall by seven ;
1642! 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
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 archbishop,
who had been impeached a few days after himself.
He was the symbol and impersonation of all that
the realm had for many long 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 benefactor, now
with strange versatility cursed him as a tyrant.
It was the weight of all these converging animo-

FALL OF STRAFFORD. 85

sities that destroyed him. ' Three whole kingdoms,' chap
says a historian of the time, ' were his accusers, and ¦ — A-
eagerly sought in one death a recompense of all 1641^
their sufferings.'
Viewed as a strictly judicial proceeding, the trial
of Strafford was as hollow as the yet more memor
able 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 of the Revolutionary tribunal in Jacobin
Paris at the close of the next century. The charges
were vague, general, and saturated with question
able inference. The evidence, on any rational inter
pretation 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 perhaps even then maintained.
Oliver St. John, in arguing 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

86 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book the opinion of the vast majority of Englishmen,
— 'r — ' were the fundamental liberties of the realm, there
1642. 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 counsels 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 Com
mons when, after fourteen sittings, they began to
fear that impeachment might fail them. They re
sorted to the more drastic proceeding of a bill of
attainder. They were surrounded by imminent
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 Falk
land 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
arguments for merely banishing Strafford, gave him
the pithy reply, ' Stone-dead hath no fellow.'

FALL OF STRAFFORD. 87
Only one man could defeat the bill, and this was chap.
Strafford's master. The king's assent was as neces- ^  ^ —
sary for a bill of attainder as for any other bill, 164X"
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 consider. He sent for various advisers, lay
and episcopal. 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 con
science 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 in. on the
famous occasion in 1800. He urged that though
the king's private conscience might acquit Strafford,
his public conscience ought to yield to the opinion
of the judges. 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
cheerfulness imaginable, in the just acknowledg
ment 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

88 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book multitude. ' Let him,' it is gravely enjoined upon
— 'r — - us, ' who has seen wife and child and all that
1642^ 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 affections.
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 pro
fessed 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 con
federate, 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 WAE.

When Mary Stuart in 1567 rode away a captive chap.
from Carbery 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 Strafford and the
humiliation that his own share in that bitter deed
had left in the heart of the king, darkened what
ever prospect there might at any time have been
of peace between Charles and the parliamentary
leaders. He was one of the men vindictive in pro
portion to their impotence, who are never beaten
with impunity. His thirst for retaliation was un
quenchable, 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 Commission, 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

90 OLIVEE CEOMWELL.

book historians, yet there is much to be said for his

I.

judgment that all the useful and enduring part
1642. 0I> the reforming work of the Long Parliament was
mainly completed within the first 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 persecution 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 judicial blindness to
mistake what was actually passing before their
eyes. They knew of plot upon plot. In April Pym

PEOGEESS OF EEVOLUTION. 91
had come upon one design among the courtiers to chap.
bring up the northern army to overawe the parlia- ¦¦ 
ment. Almost before this was exposed, a second 1641'
conspiracy of court and officers was known to be
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 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 foundation ; 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
uneasiness. 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 com
posed 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 re-

92 OLIVEE CROMWELL.
dressed their wrongs? Why not rest? This was the
question of the indolent, the over-cautious, the
1642. 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 con
tending for pre-eminence 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 to
gether 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 vigor
ous 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

1641.

CHURCH REFORM. 93
station, 'as if he had concealed his faculties until chap.
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 indicated 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 that clamoured for attention
from all the shires and boroughs in the land. He
moved (30 Dec. 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 parlia
ment should meet at least once in three years.
Going deeper, he was one of the secret instigators
of the first parliamentary move of the Root-and-
Branch men against the bishops, and that 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 Crom
well, 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 in
stitutions that were what mattered most, they were
most at sea. The prevailing temper was at first
moderate. To exclude the higher clergy from med
dling as masters in secular afl'airs, to stir up the slack
ness of the lower clergy, to nullify canons imposed
without assent of parliament, to expunge from the
prayer-book things calculated to give offence — such

94 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book were the early demands. A bill passed through the
— r' — - Commons for removing the bishops from the House
1642^ of Lords. The Lords threw it out (June 1 641), 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 government 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 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

DIVISION AMONG THE PATRIOTS. 95
into partisans of the king, and episcopalians became chap.
one with royalists. The wiser divines tried to ^_Z^_
reconcile the rival systems. Usher, Archbishop of 1641'
Armagh, suggested 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 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 senti-

96 OLIVER CROMWELL.
ment and the police feeling for good order, and they
widened the alienation of parliamentary parties.
1642" 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 judg
ment, much independence of character, and ideas
of policy that were coherent and his own. His
intellectual horizons were wide, he had good know
ledge 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

CLARENDON. 97
numbers, but still making itself felt, in the fashion chap.
that has since become the familiar essence of parlia- '
mentary hfe all the world over. As we shall see, "1641-
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 differ
ences 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
G

98 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book powers in the meantime. Cromwell by the side
— '<¦ — - of Pym spoke keenly for it, on the ground that
1642. 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
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 mainte
nance 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 proceeded 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„ im
peachment 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 just as it stood. Suddenly
an earthquake shook the ground on which they
stood, and threw the combatants into unexpected
postures. il
The event that now happened inflamed the
public mind in England with such horror as had
in Europe followed the Sicilian Vespers, or the

THE IRISH REBELLION. 99
massacre of St. Bartholomew, or the slaughter of chap.
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 suffi
ciently clear to any one capable of weighing the
testimony of the time without prejudice of race or
faith ; and they stand out in cardinal importance
in respect both* to leading episodes in the career
of Cromwell, and to the general politics of the
Revolution. The causes of rebellion in Ireland lay deep.
Confiscations 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 aboriginal 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

1599- 1642.

100 OLIVER CROMWELL.
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
(1632-40), 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 exas
perated the old English. The northern Presby
terians resented his proceedings for religious
uniformity. The catholics were at 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

THE IRISH REBELLION. 101
titles of land, were so many lies. No Irish con
spirator 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 excite
ment. No papist conspiracy was needed to account
for what soon happened. When one deep spring
of discontent 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 organization, 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.
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

1641.

102 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK its oppressors. Agrarian wrong, religious wrong,
__;  - insolence of race, now brought forth their poisonous
\q42~ 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 con
tempt of its persecutors. 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 organized 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 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

THE IRISH REBELLION. 103
five-and-twenty thousand during the first three or chap.
four years. The victims of the retaliatory slaughter •  Z^L_
by protestants upon catholics were countless, but 1641'
Sir William Petty thinks that more than half a
million Irish of both creeds perished between 1641
and 1652.
The fated international antipathy between English
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 government of King
George ; or to the rage and horror that swept over
the country for a moment when the tidings of Cawn-
pore 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 governing 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

104 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book must be her accomplice. Sir Phelim O'Neil, the
 ^—j first leader of the Ulster rebellion, declared that
1642! 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
community 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 West
minster were just as . determined to root out
popery in Ireland, as Philip n. had been to root
out Lutheran or Calvinistic 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 subjugation
of England. The king justified such dread by trying
to buy military support from the rebel confederates
by promises that would ha^e gone near to turning
Ireland into a separate catholic state. Meanwhile
we have to think of Ireland as weltering in bottom
less confusion. Parliamentarian protestants were in
the field and royalist protestants, anglicans and
presbyterians ; the Scots settlers to-day standing
for the parliament, to-morrow fighting along with

THE IRISH REBELLION. 105
Ormonde for the king ; the confederate catholics, the chap.
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.

VI.
1641.

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

book The king returned from Scotland in the latter part
— ', — ' of November (1641), baffled in his hopes of aid from
1642! 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 withdrawing 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
characteristic 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

THE GRAND REMONSTRANCE. 107
which it had to wrestle. The most important of chap.
its single clauses was the declaration for church '
conformity. It was a direct challenge not merely \^~
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 pro
posal 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 organization 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. Tumultuous
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

108 OLIVER CROMWELL.
against the bishops and the popish lords. The
bishops themselves were violently hustled, and had
1642. 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
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 swashbuckler
was withdrawn. Then by mysterious changes of
tack he turned first to Pym, next to the heads of
the moderate royalists, Hyde, Falkland, and Cul-
peper. The short history of 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 impossible. No
sooner had he established Falkland and Culpeper in
his council, than suddenly without disclosing 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

THE FIVE MEMBERS. 109
were in the air that Pym and his friends were chap.
• VTT
actually revolving in their minds the impeachment , '
of the queen. Whether the king was misled by }g42.
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 irre
trievable 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. 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 deputa
tion boldly to inform the king that they would take
care that 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

110 OLIVER CROMWELL.
had hardly gained a boat before the king and a band
of rufflers with swords and pistols entered West-
1642.' minster Hall. Passing through them, and accom
panied 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
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 thriUed
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

THE FIVE MEMBERS. Ill
a night of prayers, tears, and groans I was never chap.
present at in all my life : the case was extraordinary, > VIL
and the work was extraordinary.' It was the same J542"
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.

11.
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
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

112 OLIVER CROMWELL.
granted for a time. ' By God, not for an hour ! '
cried Charles. ' You have asked that of me in this
1642! 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 consum
mate mastery of all the better arts of parliamentary
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 uncompromising when essen
tials 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,
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,

RAISING OF THE ROYAL STANDARD. 113
on the evening of a stormy day Charles raised the chap.
royal standard in the courtyard at the top of the '
castle hill at Nottingham. This was the solemn \l^\
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
occasion, 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,
now in his twenty-third year. The boldness,
H

1599-1642.

114 OLIVER CROMWELL.
energy, and military capacity of the young adven
turer were destined to prove one of the most for
midable 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 ' providence 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 ser
vice.' 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 reason
ing, 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

OPINION IN THE COUNTRY. 115
the quarrel should come to a compromise, and not chap.
to the catastrophe of war. Savile said : ' I love '
religion so well, I would not have it put to the \Hl~
hazard of a battle. I love liberty so much, I would
not trust it in the hands of a conqueror ; 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 proclaimed 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 sentiment
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

116 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book remnant of a minority, whether the godly or the
— 't- — ' ungodly, found it best to seek shelter outside. There
1642! were counties where the two sides paired and tried to
play neutral. The line of social cleavage 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 commoners not depend
ent 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 indentations such a line separates royalist
from parliamentary 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.

TEMPER OF THE STRUGGLE. 117
The temper of the time was hard, men were chap.
ready to settle truth by blows, and life as in the *- vn"
middle ages was still held cheap. The cavalier \l%~
was hot, unruly, scornful, with all the feudal readi
ness 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 publi
cans 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 used by Sir William Waller to the brave
Hopton. ' 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

118 OLIVER CROMWELL.
under the burning sun in the West Indies, or to
compulsory service in Venice or an American colony.
1642" Men were killed in cold blood after quarter pro
mised, 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 seven
teenth, or French sansculottes in the eighteenth.
The discipline of the royal forces was bad, for their
organization was loose ; and even if it had been
better, we have little difficulty in painting for our
selves 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.
CHAPTER I.
CROMWELL IN THE FIELD.
It is not within my scope to follow in detail the chap.
military operations of the civil war. For manyv  '<¦ —
months they were little more than a series of con- '1643.
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 henceforth 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

120 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book and hedges, the rivers and strong places of
— ,J — - England. Modern soldiers have noticed as one
1645. 0I" 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 be
sides 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 disorder a whole squadron. A flight of arrows,
again, apart from those whom they killed or
wounded, demoralised the rest as they watched

ARMS AND TACTICS. 121
them hurtling through the air. Extreme conser
vatives made a judicious mixture between the old ¦
time and the new by firing arrows out of muskets. i643"
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 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 main 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 snaphance
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 un
known 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 ineffective
arm upon the field, though it was causing a gradual

122 OLIVER CEOMWELL.
book change in fortifications from walls to earthworks.
IL , At Naseby the king had only two demi-cannon, as
1045" 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 horsemen, either cuirassiers or the newly
introduced species, the dragoons, whom it puzzled
the military writer of that century whether to de
scribe 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 perceived this in anticipation of the
lessons of experience. 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 illus
trate 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

BATTLE OF EDGEHILL. 123
straight turns to left and right, closing and opening chap.
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
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
1 It is hardly possible to take more pains than Mr. Sanford took
(Studies and Illustrations, pp. 521-528) to extract a correct and coherent
story out of irreconcilable authorities.

124 OLIVEE CROMWELL.
book numbers than in their birth and quality, they had
— ^ — - little doubt of making short work of the rebellious
1645. aD-d 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 unbroken. ' 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 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 discharge 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

Cromwell's conversation with hampden. 125
had a very worthy friend then, and he was a very chap.
noble person, and I know his memory is very grateful >  'r —
to all — Mr. John Hampden. At my first going out 1643.
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 service
able to him in bringing such men in as I thought
had a spirit that would do something in the work.
..." Your troops," said I, " 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 to you, they were never beaten, and
wherever they were engaged against the enemy
they beat continually. 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

126 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book obeying magistrates and living under authority — I
— ^ — ' reckon no godliness without that circle ! '
1645. 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 gain-
sayers. Crawford had cashiered or suspended his
lieutenant-colonel for the sore offence of holding
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 judgment;
cannot understand it, if a man notorious for wicked
ness, 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 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.'

HIS LETTER TO CRAWFORD. 127
In laying down to the pragmatical Crawford what chap.
has become a fundamental of free governments, -_^ 
Cromwell probably did not foresee the schism that iGi3~
his maxims would presently create in the Revolu
tionary 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 em
blazoned 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 inspiring 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

128 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK they point with emphasis and colour to a social truth
— ,1 — - that always needs refreshing : ' I had rather have
1645" 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 malignants in Huntingdonshire brought
in. Yet, paid or unpaid, his troops increased. ' A
lovely company,' he calls them ; ' they are no Ana
baptists, 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
organized 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. Thereupon
Cromwell stamps up the aisle with his hat on, call
ing 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.

FIGHT AT GAINSBdROUGH. 129
II.
The time came when the weapon so carefully forged 1643!
and tempered was to be tried. The royalist strong
hold 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 neigh
bourhood 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 (28 July), 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 con
fusion 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

130 OLIVER CROMWELL.
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. Cavendish, the royalist general,
charged and routed the 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 un
expectedly 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 comple
tion, 'giving courage and valour to our men and

AT WINCEBY. 131
officers, that while Major Whalley and Captain chap.
Ayscough, sometimes the one with four troops  ', —
faced the enemy, sometimes the other, to the 1643!
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 gathering 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 the loss of two men.' The
military critic of our own day marks great im
provement between Grantham 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,

132 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK and then at half pistol-shot a second, and his horse
— -^ — - was killed under him. But he took a soldier's
1645. 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 wielding 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 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 in-

ALLIANCE WITH THE SCOTS. 133
eluding Bedford and Northampton. There seemed chap.
also to be a chance of forces being released in >  r' —
Ireland, and of relief coming to the king from 1543
France. The genius of Pym, who had discerned
the vital importance 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 Scotch 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 Scotch 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 of
the difficulties that would arise from divergent aims
in the parties to it, we cannot tell. The military
situation in any case left him no choice, and he was
compelled to pay the price, just as Charles 11. was
when he made his bargain with the Scots seven
years later. That price was the Solemn League and
Covenant (September 1643). This famous engage
ment was forced upon the English. They desired a

134 OLIVER CROMWELL.
merely civil alliance. The Scots, on the other hand,
convinced from their own experience that presby-
16*5" tery 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 government, 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
Englishmen 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, chap.
In the closing days of 1642, Richelieu the dictator-  ,_ -
of Europe had passed away. In a few months he 1644~
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
ascendency 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 an open window while sitting
in his chamber, by the besieged soldiers 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 New
bury (September). 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

136 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book vexed and rough a scene for them, but to whom
— ^ — • history will never grudge her tenderest memories.
1645. Two figures more important than either of these
had also disappeared. Hampden had been mortally
wounded in a skirmish at Chalgrove Field. Then
in December the long strain of heavy anxieties
burdening so many years had brought to an end
the priceless 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, honourable 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 mis
givings about future solutions dulled their sense of
instant needs. Cromwell 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

THE HOUR OF DISCOURAGEMENT. 137
hand. At least one other actor in that scene was chap.
as keenly alive to this as Cromwell, and that was ^_!^_
Charles himself. j^|;
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
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 parlia
ment. Even many that had at the beginning been
their friends, were now saying that Lords and Com
moners 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

138 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book another footing and the war more vigorously fol-
— ^ — • lowed, the people could bear the war no longer,
1645" but would insist upon peace, even rather a dis
honourable 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 affec
tion, 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 that were never likely
to happen. One day they wasted time in de
liberating without coming to a decision, another
day they decided without deliberating. 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 of 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

VICTORIOUS ROYALISTS IN NORTH AND WEST. 139
hundred years before, warned statesmen that there chap.
is no worse thing in all the world than levity. ^— ^ 
' Light men are the very instruments for whatever 1644.
is bad, dangerous, and hurtful ; flee from them like
fire.' Of this evil tribe of Guicciardini's, was Lord
Newcastle ; and too many of Charles's friends, and
in a certain sense even Charles himself, were no
better. All this, however, did not prevent New
castle by his vast territorial influence, popularity,
and spirit, from raising in the great county of York,
in Northumberland, 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 con
fronted 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 opera
tions that the younger Fairfax, the future Lord
General of the parliament, first showed his gallantry,
his dash, his invincible persistency, and his skill.
The royalist commander won a stiff fight at Tad-
caster before the end of the year ; and after alter
nations 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 num
bers, by some disaffection among the officers, and by
occasional lack of bullet, match, and powder, to

140 OLIVER CROMWELL.
force their way over the waste and hilly moors and
to throw themselves into Hull, the only important
1645" place in the county of York now left in the hands of
the parliament.
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 (MayT 1643), leaving the king
master over all the south-west, with the important
exception of Plymouth. The defeat at the engage
ment 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 marked success. Charles was
compelled to raise the siege, and his further advance
was checked by his repulse at Newbury (September
20). The other branch of the combined movement
by which Newcastle was to march south was hardly
so much as seriously attempted.

1643- 1644.

THE SCOTS CROSS THE BORDER. 141
Newcastle's doings in Yorkshire and their sequel chap.
prepared the way for that important encounter a v. Ili
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
Lincolnshire, the borderland between Yorkshire and
the stubborn counties to the south-east. This issue
was settled by the cavalry action at Winceby (ante,
p. 131), where the united forces of Fairfax and
Manchester 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. Newcastle,
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, Man
chester, and the Scots. From April to June he
held out, until the welcome news reached him that
Rupert was advancing to his relief. Fearing 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
largest masses of men that had met as foes on

142 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book English ground since the wars of the Roses. The
— ,1 — - royalist force counted seventeen or eighteen thou-
1645" sand men, the parliamentarians and their Scotch
allies twenty- six or twenty-seven thousand. The
whole were about twice as many as were engaged
at Edgehill. 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 Areola 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 intel
ligible, 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 parlia
mentary forces were drawn up on a ridge sloping
to the moor, the Scottish foot under Leven and
1 Mr. Firth has closely described the evidence and authorities in the
Transactions of Royal Historical Society, vol. xii. See Colonel Hoenig's
Oliver Cromwell, n. Theil, p. 136, and a more important excursus, Bd. ii.
pp. 441-453.

BATTLE OF MARSTON MOOR. 143
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 Fairfax, on the right wing,
was in command of a body of 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 Association,
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 extended 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 21) the two hosts,
with colours flying and match burning, looked each
other in the face. It was a showery summer after
noon. 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

144 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book out of all the corners of England and Scotland, of
— ^ — ' such as had the greatest antipathy to popery and
1645^ 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 New
castle 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 him
self for the evening. He was soon disturbed. At
seven o'clock the flame of battle 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 parliamentary
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

BATTLE OF MAESTON MOOE. 145
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 victory was
theirs, and that ' nothing was to be done but to
kill and take prisoners.' It was admitted by
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
K

146 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book south to York. When he turned back from his
— ^ — - chase, after being unhorsed, severely wounded, and
•1645^ with difficulty rescued from the enemy, he found
that Goring by a charge of savage vigour had
completely broken the main body of the parlia
mentary 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 danger
ous moment has been described by a royalist eye
witness. The runaways 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
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 Crom
well 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

BATTLE OF MARSTON MOOR. 147
rear to the point on their left where Goring had chap.
been stationed before the battle began. ' Here,' . IL
says the scout-master, 'the business of the day, jg4^'
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. ' 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 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.

148 OLIVER CEOMWELL.
book More than three thousand of them a few hours
,' . before had gone into the fight shouting, ' For God
H^] 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 fight
ing for the king. His wife came upon the field the
next morning to search for him. They were strip
ping 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 prince hath not

BATTLE OF MARSTON MOOR. 149
four thousand left. Give glory, all the glory
God.' Without dwelling on the question how much the 1644~
stubborn valour of the Scots under Baillie and
Lumsden against the royalist assaults on the centre
had to do with the triumphant result, stiU to de
scribe 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
calamitous loss of a gallant son upon the battle
field, 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. I.
With the march of these events a march of ideas
proceeded, of no less interest for mankind. The
1645. 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 irrele
vant excursion, but takes us to the heart of the
contention, and to a central epoch in the growth
of the career of Cromwell. The only great pro
testant council ever assembled on English soil has,
for various reasons, lain mostly in the dim back
ground 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 transmigra
tion of men's ideas as the ages pass, its enigmas
are now propounded in many altered shapes.
Still, as we eye these phantoms of old debate,
and note the faded, crumbling vesture in which
1 Since this chapter was first importance in its elucidation of the
printed, Dr. William Shaw has controversies of the Westminster
published his History of the English Assembly, and otherwise. The
Church during the Civil Wars and ' Minutes ' of the Assembly were
under the Commonwealth, a work of published in 1874.

RELIGIOUS FERMENT. 151
once vivid forms of human thought were clad, chap.
we stand closer to the inner mind of the serious ^_^!l_
men and women of that time than when we ponder \%jfc
political discussions either of soldiers or of parlia
ment. The slow fluctuations of the war from Edge-
hill 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 citizen
ship 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 passion
ate 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 (p. 94) 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 instituted 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 Remonstrance of the
winter of 1641, the Commons desired a general
synod of the most grave, pious, learned, and judicious

152 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book divines of this island, to consider all things necessary
— ^ — ' for the peace and good government of the church.
1645. 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
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

1643- 1644.

RELIGIOUS FERMENT. 153
were often more like imprecation than intercession, chap.
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
(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 re
volving 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 dis
putes 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.

154 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK It was nominally composed of one hundred and
— ^ — ' fifty members, including not only Anglicans, but
1645^ 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 reorganization 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 compre
hended in their vast operation. They were in
structed to organize 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
vm. 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 Covenant
in the autumn of 1643, and the entry of the Scots

THE ASSEMBLY OF DIVINES. 155
upon the scene, gave a new turn to religious forces, chap.
and ended in a remarkable transformation of political - /
parties. The Scots had exacted the Covenant from Jg4|"
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 supre
macy, but upon presbytery after the Scottish model
of church government by clerical assemblies.
The divines first met in Henry VH.'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 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. Arrowsmith preached one hour, then a
psalm, thereafter Mr. Vines prayed near two hours,
and Mr. Palmer preached one hour, and Mr. Sea
man 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 con
venience to preach against all sects, especially
baptists and antinomians.' These prodigies of

156 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book physical endurance in spiritual exercises were
— ^ — ' common in those days. Johnston of Warriston,
1645<" 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,
explored creeds and the sources of creeds, knew
man and the heart of man. No Calvin appeared,
nor Knox, nor Wesley, nor Chalmers. Alexander
Henderson 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 con
tribution 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 seventeenth
century as the middle ages of protestantism. Just
as mediaeval schoolmen discussed the nature and
existence of universals in one century, and the mys
teries of immortality and a superhuman First Cause
in another century, so now divines and laymen dis
cussed predestination, justification, election, reproba
tion, and the whole unfathomable body of theological
metaphysics by the same method — verbal logic draw
ing sterile conclusions from untested authority.

THE CONFESSION OF FAITH. 157
Happily it is not our concern to follow the chap.
divines as they went ploughing manfully through- — I^l_
their Confession of Faith. They were far from \6^\
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, Justification,
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 etfocis — 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
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

158 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book in one sense the most lasting and positive product
— ^ — ' of the far-famed Long Parliament that set it up and
1645. 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 govern
ment and submission to discipline ; or to favour
one form, but without compulsion on individuals
who favoured another ? Ought the state to pro
scribe 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-

DEBATES ON CHURCH GOVERNMENT. 159
ground at Westminster, than the contest between chap. TTT
the Assembly of Divines and the parliament. The >  ,—
divines inspired from Scotland insisted that pres- 1644
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
magistrate. The divines contended that pres
bytery and synod were to have the unfettered
right of inflicting spiritual censures, and denying
access to the communion-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 inces
santly 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 Heidelberg 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 happened
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 presby
terian 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

160 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book Westminster, to be careful to suppress all schis-
¦ r - matics, and the mother and foster of all mischief,
1645. 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 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 ques
tion 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, un
just, ungrate, and every way hateful. One Cole
man, 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 Chris
tianity 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

EXECUTION OF LAUD. 161
in an ague, and after four or five days he expired, chap.
' It is not good,' runs the dour comment, ' to stand  ^—
in Christ's way.' The divines were too shrewd not 1644^
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 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 disputing on the ques
tion 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 re
member 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 presbytery 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
L

162 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book been for nearly five years safe under lock and key
—^1  - in the Tower. His claws were effectually clipped,
1645* and it was certain that he would never again be
able to do mischief, or if he were, that such mis
chief 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 de
fended as a great act of retaliation 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 committed 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. Johnson's lines about Rebellion's
vengeful talons seizing 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 overdazzled by the halo of
sanctity in the roundhead.
It was in 1646 that parliament consummated
what would have seemed so extraordinary a revo
lution 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
uniformity that had rooted itself in Scotland, and
had been the centre of the Solemn League and
Covenant, was now nominally established through
out 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

TOLERATION. 163
all her ages. The presbyterian system struck no chap.
abiding root. The Assembly, as a Scottish historian >  r—
has pointedly observed, though called by an English 1344"
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.

hi.
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 respon
sible for order naturally paused before committing
himself 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
possible 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'Hdpital in
France, had not lived for nothing ; and though
Bacon never made religious tolerance a political

164 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book dogma, yet his exaltation of truth, knowledge, and
— r — - wisdom tended to point that way. Nor should we
1645." 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 be
yond theory, presbyterians at Westminster might
have seen both in France and in Holland rival
professions 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 marshals 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 tolera
tion. 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 in France
preached moderation toward the other communion.
It was not French example, but domestic neces
sities, 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. 165
toleration, before the more powerful plea of Roger chap.
Williams ; but the ideas and the practices of - u^
Amsterdam and Leyden had perhaps a wider in- jg^'
fluence than either colonial exiles or homebred
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
Remonstrance 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 please ;
' for we hold it requisite,' they went on to say,
' that there should be throughout the whole realm
a conformity to that order which the laws enjoin
according to the Word of God.' It was the rise of
the independents to political power that made
toleration 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 com
plete and exclusive system, ' and the existence of a
single separatist congregation was at once a blot
on its beauty and a blow at its very basis ' (Shaw).

166 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book Liberty of conscience was in his eyes only liberty
— ^  - of error, and departure from uniformity only meant
1645. a hideous deformity and multiformity of blasphem
ing 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 reluctantly 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. Cromwell's toleration
was different. It came easy to his natural tempera
ment, when practical convenience 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 rela
tion 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

MILTON ON TOLEEATION. 167
government he satisfies as well as Socinus, or Roger chap.
Williams, or any of his age, the test that has been -— ^L_
imposed of making toleration ' at once a moral, a \^'
political, and a theological dogma.' With him the
law of tolerance is no birth of scepticism or languor
or indifference. It is no politician's argument for
reconciling freedom of conscience with public order,
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 fountainhead from which every worthy •
enterprise issues forth is a pious and just honour
ing of ourselves ; it is the sanctity and freedom of
the man's own soul. On this austere self-esteem
the • scornful distinction between lav 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 juris
diction. 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.

168 OLIVEE CEOMWELL.
book Milton's ideas, which were at the heart of Crom-
—~^—> well's vaguer and less firmly moulded thinking,
1645 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
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 hun
dred 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,

1643-
1644.

THE TWO NEW PAETIES. 169
yet from the innate tendency of men to take sides, chap.
By the end of the year of Marston Moor, political ni
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 in
dependents 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.
When it was that Cromwell embraced indepen
dent views of church organization, we cannot with
precision tell, nor does it matter. He deferred
signing the presbyterian covenant as long as pos
sible (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 congregational 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 further than Anglican
intolerance.

CHAPTER IV

THE NEW MODEL.

book Aftee the victory at Marston, followed as it was
^_T__- by the surrender of York, men expected other
1645 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
Committee lose patience, and send a couple of their

ATTACK ON LOED MANCHESTER. 171
members to kindle a little fire in him, just as in the chap.
next century the French Convention used to send  ,-!_
two commissioners to spur on the revolutionary ^45."
generals. ' Destroy but the king's army,' cried
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
advantage 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

172 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book second in command to a general whom he trusts.
— ^ — < What alarmed him was not Manchester's backward-
1645^ ness 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 pro
secute 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 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. Man
chester vehemently 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
nobody was so much against fighting as Cromwell,
and that after Newbury Cromwell, when ordered
to bring up his horse, asked Manchester in a dis
contented 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 quarter of an hour long

1644-
1645.

CROMWELL AND LORD MANCHESTER. 173
against running the risk of an attack. While chap
insinuating now that Manchester had not acted on - IV"
the advice of his councils of war, yet he had at the
time loudly declared that any man was a villain and
a liar who said any such thing. He was always
attributing 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. Montague. Then
he expressed himself with contempt of the West
minster divines, of whom he said that they were
persecutors of honester men than themselves. He
desired to have none in the army but such as were
of the independent judgment, 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 any
body 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 Scotch 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

174 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book and raises differences in the state to the public
— ^ — ' damage. Of this move the Scots were the authors.
i645-" ' Cromwell is no good friend of ours,' they said, ' and
ever since our army came into England he has used
all underhand 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 considered the policy of the thing ?
' I take Lieutenant-General Cromwell,' said White-
locke, ' to be a gentleman of quick and subtle parts,
and one who 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 himself to manage his own defence to
the best advantage.' 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.

BREAKDOWN OF THE MILITARY SYSTEM. 175 CHAP.
II. IV.
A hundred and thirty years' later a civil war again jg4^
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 in., 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
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

176 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book systematically, you must establish your army on
— ,1 — > a permanent and national footing.' What Wash-
1645. ington 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 instruments '
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 complaints from
the country of the intolerable miscarriage of his
troopers ; already great disservice is done to the
parliament by the robbing, spoiling, and plunder
ing 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 misdemeanants.
The sufferings of some parts of the country were
almost unbearable. The heavy exactions of the
Scots in Cumberland and Westmorland for month
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

SUFFERINGS OF THE COUNTRY. 177
charges on the farmers were so heavy that the land- chap.
lord had little or nothing, and was only too glad , IY-
if his tenants could but keep a fire in the farm- \Hf
houses 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
discouraged, being almost useless. Most men that
have estates are betrayed by one side or another,
plundered, sequestered. Trading — the life and
substance 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, in
deed, of misery, upon which all the strokes of
vengeance fell.' A covetous eye had long been
cast upon the endowments 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
M

178 OLIVER CEOMWELL.
book went with designs upon the church lands. And so
/ it was in England now.
wit. '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 stigmatized 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
intrusted to Sir Thomas Fairfax as commander-in-
chief, with liberty to name his own officers subject
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
lieutenant-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 hundred
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-

THE AEMY EEOEGANIZED. 179
farrier could not muster one thousand pounds a chap.
year in land among them. Yet in Fairfax's new ^ — ^ —
army, of the officers of the higher military rank no 1645"
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.
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 satis
faction 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
discipline, 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

1642

180 OLIVEE CEOMWELL.
honest, sober, and right-thinking men, many of
them tractable, ready to hear the truth, and of
1645. 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 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. Ana
baptists, 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, acting
upon Cromwell's argument from the suspicion with
which people looked upon Lords and Commoners 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 composed the House of Lords
threw out this ordinance. 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

THE FIEST SELF-DENYING OEDINANCE. 181
passed in a revised form (April 3), only enacting that chap.
within forty days members of either of the two -_ £^L_
Houses should resign any post that the parliament jg4^"
had intrusted to them. Essex, Manchester, Den
bigh, 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
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. It is in
credible 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

182 OLIVEE CEOMWELL.
book inevitably be recalled. In Cromwell it would have
— ; — - been an incredibly foolish underestimate of himself
i64si 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 com
mand within forty days. Meanwhile he was des
patched 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
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, Cromwell 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.

I.

Aemed puritanism was now first to manifest all its chap.
strength. Faith that the God of Battles was on ^__t: 
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

184 OLIVEE CEOMWELL.
book he took Leicester by storm. The committee at
— ^ — - Westminster were filled with alarm. Was it
1645. possible that he intended an invasion of their
stronghold in the eastern counties ? Fairfax,
who lay before the walls of Oxford, was immedi
ately directed to raise the siege and follow the
king. 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 mistake
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 pres
byterians 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

FIRST MOVEMENTS OF THE CAMPAIGN. 185
are sectaries ; if they do great service, many will chap.'
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 move
ments began to create uneasiness, Fairfax, knowing
Cromwell's value as commander of horse, applied in
haste to the parliament that he should be specially
permitted to serve as lieutenant-general. The
Houses after some demur gave him plenary leave
accordingly. The general despatched constant ex
presses 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 horse
men 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 demonstrations 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 immediately 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

186 OLIVER CROMWELL.
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 com
manded 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 manoeuvres
that preceded the battle, is a matter of much uncer
tainty. One good contemporary authority puts the
parliamentary forces at 11,000, and says that the
two armies were about equal. Mr. Gardiner, on
the other hand, believes the parliamentarians 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 extinc
tion by death or capture of two-thirds of the king's
total force, and no contemporary 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,

NUMBERS ENGAGED. 187
though Fairfax's troops outnumbered the king's,
yet the superiority can hardly have approached the •
proportion 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 prehminary manoeuvres cannot be definitely
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
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 en
tangled evidence, is the simplest view of Fairfax's
position. Cromwell in command of the horse was
stationed on the parliamentary right, and Ireton on

1645.

188 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book the left. The veteran Skippon commanded regiments
— r — < of foot in the centre. On the opposite slope across
i645_" Broadmoor Rupert faced Ireton, and Sir Marmaduke
Langdale, with his northern horse in the doubtful
humour of men who wished to go homeward, faced
Cromwell, while Lord Astley led the infantry in
the centre. Fairfax directed the disposition of his
men, and was conspicuous during the three hours
of the engagement by his energy, vigilance, and
persistence. He was by constitution 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
swords. The royalist infantry pressed Skippon so
hard, that his first line at last gave way and fell
back on the reserve. Ireton, 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

PRELIMINARY MANOEUVRES. 189
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
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

1645.

190 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book rescue. Rupert, like Goring's men at Marston,
— r — ' instead of leaving a detachment to pursue Ireton's
1645. 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
uplifted 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 (Hoenig, 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

CHAEGES OF CEOMWELLIAN HORSE. 191
returning from the baggage -waggons and Naseby chap.
village, with his men and horses exhausted and ¦  ^ —
out of breath. Here the 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 stand
ing 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

192 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book swearing sundry Scotch oaths, cried out, ' Will you
— ^ — - go upon your death in an instant ? ' ' Then,' says
1645. 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 throughout the day with its issue 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.
Toward 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,
heartening 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 organized force that
Charles was able to raise ; it demonstrated that the
New Model had produced an invincible army; it

DEFEAT OF THE KING. 193
transformed the nature of the struggle and the chap.
conditions of the case ; it released new interests > — r —
and new passions; it changed the balance of parties;
and it brought Cromwell into decisive pre-eminence
in all men's minds.

N

194 OLIVER CROMWELL.

II.

1642-1645.

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
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 Commons
should not forget how much the independents had to
do with the victory, and that what the independents
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

1645.

MONTROSE IN SCOTLAND. 195
so many romantic circumstances and rash adventures chap.
down to the rebellion of 1745. - v
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
scuffles between Campbells, Forbeses, Frasers,
Macleans, 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
rushing 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 fantasies 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
confess that, speaking either as a mere soldier or
statesman, I must say that there is no probability
but of my ruin. But as a Christian, I must tell'

196 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book you that God will not suffer rebels and traitors to
— f\ — - prosper, or this cause to be overthrown. And what-
1645. ever personal 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 con
science, 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
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 unforeseen 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, suddenly capitulated and rode
away to Oxford under the humiliating protection of
a parliamentary convoy. 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 sur
prises. That Rupert was too clear-sighted not to

SURRENDER OF BRISTOL. 197
be thoroughly discouraged by the desperate aspect chap.
of the king's affairs is certain, and the military «¦
difficulties of sustaining a long siege were thought, 5'
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 constancy that had yet happened, depriv
ing 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 be
tween the king and his nephews and their partisans.
The feuds and rivalries of parliament at their worst,
were always matched by the more ignoble distrac
tions 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
improved Naseby. ' Faith and prayer,' he tells the
Speaker, ' obtained this city for you. It is meet
that God have all the praise. Presbyterians, inde
pendents, 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,

198 OLIVER CROMWELL.
every Christian will study that. But in things of
the mind we look for no compulsion but that of light
1645." 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 sup
port 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 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 plun
dered ; ' popish books, with copes and such utensils,'
were flung into the purifying flame, and before long

STORM OF BASING HOUSE 199
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 captiye 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 assur
ance 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 Crom
well 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 opera
tions, 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 the day, leaving other things to

1645.

200 OLIVER CROMWELL.
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 inA^estment of Oxford.

BOOK III.
CHAPTER I.
THE KING A PRISONER.
One Sunday at midnight (April 26, 1646), the chap.
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 com
panions, crossed over Magdalen Bridge and passed
out of the gate, leaving behind him for ever the
gray 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 Uxbridge 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 con
ditions. Short of this, he was inclined rather to
cast himself upon the English than to trust his

202 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book countrymen. His choice was probably the wrong
— ' — • one. If he had gone to London he would have had
1649. a better chance than ever came to him again, of
widening the party divisions in the House of Com
mons, 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 Downham. There the disguised king
stayed at a tavern until word came from Montereul
— not very substantial, 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 awakening
more formidable elements. Since then Europe has

THE KING IN THE SCOTTISH QUARTERS. 203
learned, or has not learned, the lesson that revolu
tions 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 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
overboard, 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 unalterable 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

1646.

204 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book they naturally sank to a far lower figure. At least
— fl — - a hundred members were absent in the discharge of
1649. local duties. A hundred more took the side of the
king, and shook the dust of Westminster from off
their feet. On the first Self-denying Ordinance one
hundred and ninety members voted. The appoint
ment 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 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 con
stituencies all the vital issues then open and un
settled, 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 for
ward, 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 revolutionary shades —
Ireton, Ludlow, Hutchinson, Algernon Sidney, Fleet-

1646.

NEW REVOLUTIONARY GENERATION. 205
wood, and Blake. Cromwell, from his success as chap.
commander, his proved experience, and his stern ^
adherence to the great dividing doctrine of tolera
tion, 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 achievement of that age, have made a deeper
mark on historic imagination, but for the pur
poses 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 Nottingham
shire, 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 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. ' Crom-

206 OLIVEE CEOMWELL.
book well had a great opinion of him, and no man could
— <1 — - prevail so much, nor order him so far, as Ireton
1649^ 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 concentra
tion 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 prin
ciples 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
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 presents,
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

IEETON. 207
to January 1647. It made worse the bad feeling chap.
that had for long been growing between the English >  f' 
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 produce a tension 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 1 642 ; in the treaty of Oxford
at the beginning of 1643 ; in the treaty of Uxbridge
in 1644-45, the failure of which led to the New
Model and to Naseby. By the Nineteen Proposi
tions 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 any
where 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.
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

208 OLIVEE CEOMWELL.
book would turn covenanter. Scottish covenanters and
_ , ' - English puritans found themselves confronted by a
1649' 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 conscience.'
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 presby
terian 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 gover
nors, 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 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

CHAELES AND THE CHURCH. 209
in Scotland : there is Christ Jesus thej King, and chap.
his kingdom the kirk, whose subject King James vi. s—^ 
is, and of whose kingdom not a king, not a lord, not lti46'
a head, but a member. ' And they whom Christ
has called and commanded to watch oyer his kirk
and govern his spiritual kingdom, have sufficient
power of him and authority 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 satis
faction." ; 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 " 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
o

210 OLIVER CROMWELL.
•book were perfectly true. In later days the Lord Pro-
— fL-* tector dealt with Mazarin on the basis of toleration
1649." 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 vn., his pre
decessor 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 of Machiavelli. 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 im
possible — to deny his ancestors, to respect the
constitution that stripped him, to love the revolu
tion that destroyed him. How could it be ?
It is beside the mark, again, to lay the blame
upon the absence of a higher intellectual atmo
sphere. It was not a bad intellectual basis that
made the catastrophe certain, but antagonism of
will, the clash of character, the violence of party

POSITION OF THE KING. 211
passion and personality. The king was determined chap.
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. So presbyterians and
independents feared and hated each other, not
merely because each failed in intellectual 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

212 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book his people and parliament, yet he had a chimerical
— ^— ' plan for collecting a new army to crush both
lttt. 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, more
over, that nearly every move in this stealthy game
was more or less well known to all those other
players against whom he had so improvidently
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, farewell for ever. If you have broken
your resolution, nothing but death for me. As long
as the parliament 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

THE QUEEN. 213
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 1646'
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 mis
construction that he seeks to put himself right with
her, by explaining his position about apostolic suc
cession, the divine right of bishops, and the absolute
unlawfulness of presbyterianism, ever the ally and
confederate of rebellion.
Nothing that he was able to do could disarm the
universal anger and suspicion which the. seizure of
the king's papers at Naseby had begun, and the
discovery of a copy of the Glamorgan treaty at
Sligo (October 1645) had carried still deeper. The
presbyterians in their discomfiture openly ex
pressed their fears that the king was now undone
for ever. Charles in a panic offered to hand over
the management 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 pro
mises 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

214 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book war'; as the queen had got the prince into her
— ,- — ' hands, she could make the youth go to mass and
1649" 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 consum
mate Richelieu's great policy in the treaties of West
phalia, were viewed with apprehension by the
English reformers ; for a peace might mean the re
lease both of France and Spain for an attack upon
England in these days of divine wrath and un
searchable judgments 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 oi the independents, so remarkably
shown at Naseby, pursued as it had been against
common opinion at Westminster, became more com
manding 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 pre
vailed. The baffled presbyterians only became the
more embittered. At the end of January 1647, a
new situation became defined. 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

NEW SITUATION DEFINED. 215
the pay that was due to them, marched away to chap.
their homes across the border. Commissioners
from the English parliament took their place as
custodians of the person of the king. By order of
the two Houses, Holmby in the county of North
ampton 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.
book If ever there was in the world a revolution with ideas
_TJ  > as well as interests, with principle and not egotism
1649. f°r ^s 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 conflict of narrow
aristocratic interests with the newly consolidated
supremacy of the monarch. It was not the fore
runner 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

CE0MWELL AS PAETY LEADER. 217
was not above a snowball match against them ; he chap.
was a brisk, energetic, skilful soldier, and he was - IL
an invincible commander. In parliament he made 1647-
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 experts, 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 invaluable,
for even the heated and headlong revolutionary 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 parlia
ment 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

218 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book of the pieces on the political chessboard been more
— r-i — ' perplexed. What Oliver perceived as he scanned
1649! ea°h 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 sus
picious, whose active leaders were independent.
The fervour of the preachers had been waxing hotter
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. Finally, he saw a king beaten in
the field, but still unbending in defence of his
religion, his crown, and his friends, and boldly con
fident 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.

DISPOSITION OF POLITICAL FORCES. 219
There is no other case in history where the victors chap.
in a great civil war were left so entirely without the -— ^ 
power of making their own settlement, and the
vanquished so plainly umpires in their own quarrel.
The beaten king was to have another chance, his
best and his last. Even now if we 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 adver
saries, it might quicken the pulse when he 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 presbyterians
always did what was most sure to cross their own
design and hinder their own aim. These are differ
ences 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 something 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

220 OLIVEE CEOMWELL.
book the burden of intolerable taxation, and the necessity
— fl — - of finding troops for service in Ireland was urgent.
1649~ 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 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,

UNEEST OF THE AEMY. 221
entered into correspondence for concerted action, and chap.
framed new petitions. Three troopers, who brought v_ i^_
a letter with these communications, addressed to 1647-
Cromwell and two of the other generals in parlia
ment, 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 reasonable 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 sober and
respectable miner, ploughman, or carter of to-day.
But the violence of war had hardened their fibre,
had made them rough under contradiction, 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 Holm by 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

222 OLIVEE CEOMWELL.
book Holmby. At daybreak Cornet Joyce made his way
 : — - within the gates at the head of five hundred mounted
1649' 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 respectfully 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 court
yard. ' 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.
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

THE KING EEMOVED FROM HOLMBY. 223
later as a significant coincidence that on the very chap.
evening on which Joyce forced his way into the ¦  n' ..
king's bedchamber, Cromwell, suspecting that the 1647'
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 important 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 retribution
for the violence that has gone before. Purges, pro
scriptions, 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 irre
vocably 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 re
monstrance, 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
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

224 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book of Commons, with Denzil Holies at the head of them
TIT
— v-i — ' (June 16-26). Among the Eleven were men as
1649! 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 parliament,
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 which 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 riverside, 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 gentle
men who that day composed the House of Lords,
forcing them' to cross the obnoxious declaration off
their journals, 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 inviolable
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,

VIOLENCE ON THE PARLIAMENT. 225
drove him back to his chair, and compelled him
to put the question that the king be invited to •
come to London forthwith with honour, freedom, 1647-
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 consider
able 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 parlia
ment, 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 afterward 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
p

226 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book mistook. The soldiers had definitely turned poli-
— fl — - ticians, and even without the experience that
1649^ 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 chap.
revolutionary of the three kingdoms, hardly re- > m'
volutionary at all. Here was little of the rugged, 1647-
dour, and unyielding persistency of the northern
Covenanters, 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 contem
porary, De Retz, is that one becomes answerable
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 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,
and how the main part of his business is in slowly
parrying, turning, managing circumstances for which
he is not any more responsible than he is for his
own existence, and yet which are his masters, and
of 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

228 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book he endeavoured to form an alliance between the
_i^ — ¦ king and the army. All the failures and disasters
164p,' that harassed him from this until the day of his
death, arose from the breakdown of the negotiations
now undertaken. The restoration of Charles i. by
Cromwell would have been a very different thing
from the restoration of Charles n. 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 purposes
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
independent 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 that he could with either. Unfortunately,
he could not bring himself to strike any bargain at

CROMWELL AND THE KING. 229
all, and the chance passed. Cromwell's efforts only chap.
served to weaken his own authority with the army, . n*'
and he was driven to give up hopes of the king, as 1647-
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. 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 representatives ; 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

230 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book ever were by Robespierre or by Jefferson. In truth
— v-l__' the phrase may differ, and the sanctions and the
1649" 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, suffering, 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,
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 temperament
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 possibilities of con
crete 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 con
cerned in politics. The general council of the army,
which was first founded during the summer of 1647,

POLITICAL IDEAS IN THE ARMY. 231
was a mixture of officers and the agents of the chap.
private soldiers. It contained certain of the generals, -  ^—
and four representatives from each regiment, two of 1647'
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 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

232 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book Cromwell as a statesman grappling at the same
— ^ — - moment with presbyterians in parliament, with
1649. extremists in the army, with the king in the closet
— a task for a hero. In manner he was always
what Clarendon calls rough and brisk. He declared
that he and his colleagues were as swift as anybody
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 some
times 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 dis
putes 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 consult. That 's the
question, what 'sfor their good, not what pleases them.'
They might be driven to march on to London, he
told them, but an understanding 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, ivould 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

ATTITUDE OF CROMWELL. 233
earlier, ' that we might remember this always, that chap.
what we gain in a free way, it is better than tivice as >'
much in a forced, and will be more truly ours and
our posterity's.' 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 judgment and
conscience to those ends, against all arbitrary power,
violence, and oppression, and against all particular
parties or interests whatsoever. 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 influence felt in the schemes of
government during the Commonwealth and Pro
tectorate. In these discussions in the autumn of 1647, just
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

234 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book couple of documents, the Case of the Army Stated
— ^ — - and an Agreement of the People — a title that was
1 fid.fi
!649" also given, as I have said, to a document of Lil-
burne'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 pre
tensions 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 consequences, but the ways and means
of accomplishing it. According to reason and judg
ment, were the spirits and temper of the people of
this nation prepared 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 that might have come straight out of

CROMWELL AND THE REPUBLICANS. 235
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
himself, 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 tyrannized 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

1647.

236 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book heat kindled Cromwell. His stroke is not as clean
— <1 — ' as Ireton's, but there is in his words a glow of
1649/ the sort that goes deeper than the sharpest dia
lectic. After a rather cumbrous effort to state the
general case for opportunism, he closes in Ihe
manner of a famous word of Danton's, with a
passionate declaration 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 withdraw 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

ARMY DEBATES. 237
remark that if they went on no quicker with their chap.
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. Cromwell's conclusion
marked his usual urgency for unity, but he stated
it with an uncompromising breadth that is both
new and extremely striking. For his part, he was
anxious that nobody should suppose that he and his
friends were wedded and glued to forms of govern
ment. 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 supre
macy is in the people. With that vain cry so often
heard through history from Pericles downwards,
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 de
stroy 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 Cromwell had now written in his heart
the judgment written of old on the wall against

238 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book Belshazzar. If the army broke, then no anchor
— r- — ' would hold, and once and for all the cause was lost.
1649. 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 up
right 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 argu
ments 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
intelligible 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 intervening 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 pro
perty — if I see the hand of God in it, I hope I shall
with quietness 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
himself. Ireton was an able and whole-hearted
man, but we can see how his doctrine might offer a
1 ' Nee bene promeritis capitur, nee tangitur ira,' ii. 651.

ARMY DEBATES. 239
decorous mask to the hypocrite and the waiter chap.
upon Providence. -  ^_
Colonel Goffe told them that he had been kept 1647'
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 concerns, but they speedily set to work upon
the casual questions, so familiar to ourselves, of
electoral franchise 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
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

240 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book shillings a year ? ' ' But then,' says Ireton, ' if you
— <1 — ' are on natural right, show me what difference lies
1649. 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 English
man 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 fore
seen must happen, if he had enjoyed modern experi
ences 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. 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

ARMY DEBATES. 241
you do not build the fabric of government on consent chap.
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 con
curred 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 suspected
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.'

CHAPTER IV.
THE KING'S FLIGHT.
book The strain of things had now become too intense
in
— 1 — ' to continue. On the evening of the day when
1649" Harrison was declaiming against the man of blood
(November 11), the king disappeared from 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
Cromwell 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
settlement was possible without the king, little
as he could have hoped from any settlement made
with him. Whither could it have been for Crom
well's interest that the king should betake himself?
Not to London, where a royalist tide was flowing
pretty strongly. Still less toward the Scottish

FLIGHT OF THE KING. 243
border, where Charles would begin a new civil chap.
war in a position most favourable to himself.
Flight to France was the only move on the king's
part that 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 n.
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
previous 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 con
siderable 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

244 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book vividly as the king himself, and he knew better
II1- , than Charles the terrible perils of jealousy and
Jg4g' dissension in the only force upon which the cause
could rely. ' For many months,' says Fairfax, ' all
public councils were turned into private" juntos,
which begot greater emulations and jealousies
among them.' Cromwell was the object of attack
from many sides. He was accused of boldly
avowing such noxious principles as these : that
every 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 government 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

CHARLES AT CARISBROOKE. 245
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 refusing 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 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 sup
pressed. 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^he 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.

1647.

246 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book Little more than a week after the treaty had been
— <1 — - signed, a proposal was made in the Commons to
1649. 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 parliament.' 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 bring
ing 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 execu
tive purposes, was at once dissolved, and the new
executive body, now exclusively English, found
itself confronted by Scotland, Ireland, and Wales,
all in active hostility, and by an England smoulder
ing 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 Presby
terian 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

MUTINY AND ROYALIST RISINGS. 247
among them, bade them remove the mutinous chap.
symbol, arrested the ringleaders of those who
refused to obey, and after a drumhead 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
formidable 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 oh what to him were republican chimeras.
Every moment the tide of reaction was rising.
From Christmas (1647) and all through the spring
there were unmistakable signs of popular dis
content. Puritan suppression of old merrymakings
was growing too hard to bear, for the old Adam
was not yet driven out of the free-born English
man 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 out in the city. In the home counties
disorderly crowds shouted for God and King
Charles. Royalist 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.

248 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book In Scotland Hamilton had got the best of Argyle
— <1 — - and the covenanting ultras, in spite of the bitter
1649. and tenacious resistance 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 conference 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 that he saw hanging imminent in thunder
clouds 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.

DIFFICULTIES OF CROMWELL. 249
What is called the second civil war was now chap.
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 per
plexities 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 dissenting 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 that he had shed,

250 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book and all the mischief he had done against the
hi .
— ,1 — - Lord's cause and people in these poor nations.
1649. When this vehement hour of 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 chap.
prisoner at Carisbrooke might well believe that the >  r —
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
parliamentary 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
covenant ; their English confederates, under Lang-
dale, 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

252 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book the king, of humihation for the English parliament,
—^1  - and of final defeat both for the great cause and the
{549' brave men who for nearly twenty years had toiled
and bled for it. For whose sake, then, was 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
temperament to forget that he might peradventure
be misreading 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
unsparing awaited both his person and his cause.
While Cromwell thus went west, Fairfax himself
conducted 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 Lang-
dale 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 Langdale. Three days later, as it happened,

THE CRISIS OF THE REBELLION. 253
Cromwell's operations in Wales came to a successful chap.
end with the capture of Pembroke Castle. He - v"
instantly set his face northward, and by the end 1648'
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
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

254 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book until he found himself in touch with the enemy's
— ^ — • left flank at Preston. Hamilton was no soldier :
1649. 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 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 sur
vivors 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

CROMWELL IN LANCASHIRE. 255
their heels in dogged pursuit, killing and taking chap.
prisoners all the way, though they were only fifty- . Y'
five hundred foot and horse against twice as large 1648-
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 Winwick
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 Crom
well, ' 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. . . . They are the miser-
ablest 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 campaign 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

256 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK by him taken care of, and ' truly he performed more
— ,1 — - than he did capitulate for.'
1649." 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 complete 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 ex
clusion from power of the rival faction of Hamil-
tonians 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.
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

CROMWELL'S VICTORY. 257
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 re
pulse 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 toleration 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,
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
R

1648.

258 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book them all, the Lords regaled themselves by a fierce
— <1 — -attack made upon the absent Cromwell by one who
1649" 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 pre
paring 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 punish
ing 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 punishment 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

OPERATIONS IN PARLIAMENT. 259
still have a chance. They assumed that Charles chap.
would see that here too was a chance for him.
They failed to discern that they had no alternative
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
negotiations 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 appearance 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

260 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK gray, which, making all others very sad, made it
— rJ — - thought that he had sorrow in his countenance,
1649. 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 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
distracted 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.

NEGOTIATIONS AT NEWPORT. 261
A modern student, if he reads the Newport chap.
treaty as a settlement upon paper, may think that ¦¦ V"
it falls little short of the justice of the case. 1648-
Certainly 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 pres
byterian, 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
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 con
cession 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 restraint ; Ormonde should pursue the
way he is in with all possible vigour, and must not
be astonished at any published concessions, for
' they would come to nothing.'

262 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book Watching the proceedings with fierce impatience,
— fl — ' at last the army with startling rapidity brought
1649. 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 remonstrance.
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 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 presenta-

RESOLUTION OF THE ARMY. 263
tion of the difficulties of the hour, it is both just chap.
and penetrating ; 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 disbanded. If that happened its leaders would
be destroyed for what they had done already. If
not, they would be proclaimed as 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.
book It is one of the mortifications of Cromwell's history,
__^_^ that we are unable accurately to trace his share in
1649." 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 prepared it, the diligent inquirer is forced to
confess that there is little evidence to settle what
was the precise part that Cromwell played. This
deep reserve and impenetrable obscurity was un
doubtedly one of the elements of his reputation for
craft and dissimulation. 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 uncontrollably
restive at the slow and tortuous course of the deal
ings 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

VI.
16487

CROMWELL AS AN ONLOOKER. 265
in the fierce language at the memorable prayer- chap.
meeting at Windsor. All this, however, is a long
way from the decision that events were hurrying
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 pretences
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

266 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book own presbyterian settlement in Scotland, throwing
— <1 — - out his guiding principle in a parenthesis of
1649" characteristic 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
understanding between the godly people — Scots,
English, Jews, Gentiles, presbyterians, independents,
anabaptists, 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 in
vasion ? 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 vassalize 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 concerning

LETTER TO HAMMOND. 267
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 1 8-
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,
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 burdens
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

1646-1649.

268 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book of the extreme men as respects both king and
parliament. ' It is true, as you say,' CromweU
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 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.' Crom
well's understanding was far too powerful not to
perceive that salus populi and the rest of it would
serve just as well for Strafford or for Charles as it
served for Ireton and the army, and that usurpation
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 ' providences,'
always his favourite stronghold. 'They hang so

1648.

LETTER TO HAMMOND. 269
together, have been so constant, clear, unclouded.' chap.
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 unmistakable
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 confronted 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, 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 pressing 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 remonstrates 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

270 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK memorable letter 'its cautious obscurity, shadowy
-L^J — -j significance ; its suavity, tenderness, subtlety ; the
1649^ way hi which he alludes to more than he mentions,
suggests more than pronounces his own argumenta
tive 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 represents the literal working of his
own habit and temper ?
When this 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 parlia
ment without him. He had, moreover, given his
parole. When reminded 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 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 the desperate drama in
which every one of the actors — king, parliament,

pride's purge. 271
army, CromweU — seemed as if engaged in a death chap.
struggle with an 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 remon
strance, 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 consultation 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 committee of three members
of the House and three officers of the army was
ordered to settle the means for putting a stop to pro
ceedings 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 Westminster Hall and the lobby,
that 'none might be permitted to pass into the
House, but such as had continued faithful to the

272 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book public interest.' At seven o'clock next morning
— rl — - (December 6) Colonel Pride was at his post in the
1649. 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 Cromwell 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 the prison
of a prince from his grave. He had often revolved
in his mind ' sad stories of the death of kings ' —
of Henry VI., of Edward H. murdered at Berkeley,
of Richard n. 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

THE KING AT WINDSOR. 273
ride of four days (December 19-23) through the chap.
New Forest, Winchester, Farnham, Bagshot, he » — 1-^-
found himself once more at the noblest of the
palaces of the English sovereigns. Here for some
three weeks he passed infatuated hours in the
cheerful confidence that the deadlock was as im
movable 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.
book The Commons meanwhile, duly purged or packed,
, ' - had named a committee to consider the means of
1649' bringing the king to justice, and they passed an
ordinance (January 1, 1 649) 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 parlia
ment and kingdom of England, the ordinance was
sent up to the Lords. The Lords only numbering
twelve on this strange occasion, promptly, passion
ately, 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 (January 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

cromwell's part. 275
met for the first time in the Painted Chamber, chap.
but out of one hundred and thirty-five persons ¦¦
named in the act, 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 for conjectural motives
for conjectural occurrences is waste of time. The
curious delay in his 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

276 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book let the manoeuvres in parliament and camp take
, ' - what course they might. He had no stronger
1649. feeling in emergency than a dread of forestalling
the Lord's leadings. The cloud that wraps
CromweU 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 understanding, his caution, his persistence,
his freedom 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 White
hall,' where Fairfax and he had taken up their
quarters, Cromwell revolved all the perils and
sounded all the depths of the abyss to which neces
sity was hurrying him and the cause. 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 ex
pected to attach to constitutional concessions
granted under duress so dire ? Again, was
monarchy the indispensable key-stone, 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 practic
able, even in the very first step of it, apart from

VII.
1649?

cromwell's deliberations. 277
later consequences ? Or was the temper of the chap.
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 presby
terians. 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 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 ahd
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 oblitera
tion 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

278 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book whose shifty and senseless counsels had plunged
_I^  ¦ the land in bloodshed and confusion, they were
1649! 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 accommodation 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 he 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 design of deposing the king, and disinherit
ing 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

HIS DECISION. 279
once taken was to Cromwell irrevocable. No man chap.
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 Crom
well, Bradshaw, 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
misplaced buffooneries, but they are probably
mythic. It is perhaps true that on the first day of
the trial, looking forth from the Painted Chamber,
he saw the king step from his barge on his way to
Westminster 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.

280 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book This was indeed the question that the king put,
— fl — - and would never let drop. It had been Sidney's
i64g[ 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
notoriously 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 to such a profaning of the forms of justice
as the arraignment of the king. And it is here that

1649.

the king's trial. 281
Butler lets fall the sombre reflection, so poignant to chap.
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 cannot lightly be dis
missed ; but it is hardly the best explanation of
this particular instance. Self-deception 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 sensibility,
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 peremptory
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

282 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book without quarter. Westminster Hall was full of
— ^ — ' soldiery, and resounded with their hoarse shouts for
1649. justice and execution. The king with his hat upon
his head eyed the judges with unaffected 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 exception. For three days (Jan. 20, 22,
23) the altercation went on, as fruitless as it was pain
ful, for the court intended that the king should die.
He was incredulous to the last. On the fourth and
fifth days (Jan. 24-5) 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 settlement
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

execution of the king, 283
after deliberation was refused. The altercations chap.
between the king and Bradshaw were renewed, >  <-l—
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 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 pro
bably all in the building when he arrived, though the
first of them had held stiffly aloof from all the pro
ceedings 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 signature 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 under-world : — ' Then they went into

284 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book the church to make choice of a place for burial.
hi
— rl — • But when they entered into it, which they had
1649 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 under
took to tell them the place, where, he said, " there
was a vault in which King 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

JUDGMENTS ON THE KINGS DEATH. 285
in England rejoice to think of it; they that have chap.
acted in this great business have given a reason v_Z^L_
of their faith in the action, and are ready further 1649'
to do it against all gainsayers ; the execution
was an eminent witness of the Lord for blood-
guiltiness. 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 in
evitable. There is a story that while the corpse
of the king still lay in the gallery at Whitehall,
Cromwell wa,s 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.
Extravagant things have been said about the
execution of the king by illustrious men from
Charles Fox to Carry le. ' 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 Flunkyism universally in this world. Whereof
Flunkyism, 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
unveracity of their own, viler and crueller than

1646-1649.

286 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK any other. In fact, the very contrary of Carlyle's
proposition 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, flunkyism, or whatever else be the right
name of spurious and unmanly sentimentalism,
more lively than is associated 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 him
self 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 punc
tilious demurrers to a revolutionary jurisdiction.
From the first it had been My head or thy head,
and Charles had lost.

BOOK IV.
CHAPTER I.
THE COMMONWEALTH.
The death of the king made nothing easier, and chap.
changed nothing for the better ; it removed no old .  ;__
difficulties, and it added new. Cromwell and his 1649'
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 uni
fication 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

288 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book be abolished. They resolved a couple of days
— tl — - later that experience had shown the office of a
1653" king, and to have the power of the office in any
single person, to be unnecessary, burdensome, and
dangerous, and therefore 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 intrusted. 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 1 9th a final
act was passed proclaiming England to be a free
commonwealth, to be governed by the representa
tives 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 adminis
tering 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 ascendency of the

PROCLAMATION OF A COMMONWEALTH. 289
soldier of which he had then so clearly seen all chap.
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 remained. The royalists, outraged in
their deepest feelings by the death of their lawful
king, had instantly transferred their allegiance with
heightened fervour to his lawful successor. The
presbyterians who were also royalist were ex
asperated 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 legisla
tive 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, com
prised 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
T

290 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK one of the most pressing tasks of the new republic,
— fl — - as afterwards of Cromwell himself, to grapple with
1653. the political danger that overflowed from the heav-
ings of spiritual confusion. A royalist of the time
thus describes the position : — ' The Independents
possessed 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 dis
jointed, so severely watched by both factions, that
it is impossible for them to do anything on their
own score.'
The other two ancient kingdoms that were
joined to the newborn 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 Sciily 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, 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

STATE OF OPINION. 291
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 imputation 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, 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 painfully to wrestle for all
the remainder of his life. The religious enthusiasts,
who formed the second great division of the im
practicable, 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 controlling the forces of a mighty state. Lil-
burne's popularity, which was immense, signified
not so much any general sympathy with his first
principles or his restless politics, as aversion to

1649.

292 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book military rule or perhaps indeed to any rule. If
—^J  - the mutiny spread and the army broke away, the
1653; 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 vin-
dictiveness or panic. Of the very few who suffered
military 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
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 declara
tion : 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

1649.

STATE OF OPINION. 293
Christ is the head Leveller.' (Gooch, p. 220.) Fair- chap.
fax 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 re
sorted 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 regi
cide commonwealth found foes. All the three
kingdoms were in a blaze. The fury of insurrec
tion in Ireland had lent fuel to rebellion in England,
and the flames of rebellion in England might have
been put out, 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.

16491653

294 OLIVER CEOMWELL.
BOOK This strenuous comprehension marked them out as
^ls men of originality, insight, and power. Charles n.
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 conspicuously in the chaotic
scene. Ormonde represented in varied forms the
English interest, one of the most admirably stead
fast, 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. Rinuc-
cini, 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
of the confederate catholics at Kilkenny, in which

SCOTLAND AND IEELAND. 295
the substantial interest was that of the catholic chap.
English of the Pale. Between them and fhpi , L
nuncio little love was lost, for Ireland has never 1649-
been ultramontane. A few days before the death
of the king (Jan. 1649), Ormonde made what
promised 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 pur
suing the same policy on behalf of the Common
wealth 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 ex
plained to the Council of State at Whitehall (Mar.
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 contriving 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

296 OLIVER CEOMWELL.
book rather be overrun with a Scotch interest than an
__YJ  - Irish interest ; and I think of all, this is the most
1653" dangerous.' Stating the same thing differently,
he argued that even Englishmen who were for
a restoration upon terms ought still to resist the
forced imposition of a king upon them either by
Ireland or by Scotland. In other words, the con
test 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.

CEOMWELL IN IEELAND.

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 recognise
that the reasoning faculty in man is good for some
thing. ' 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 scandalous 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 exterminat
ing hapless Indians, English puritans slaying Irish
women at Naseby, the monarchs of the Spanish
Peninsula driving populations of Jews and Moors
wholesale and innocent to exile and despair — all
these would deem themselves entitled to hail their

1649.

298 OLIVEE CEOMWELL.
book hapless victims as blasphemous misbirths of Nature,
— ,1 — . What is the test ? How can we judge ? The
1653." Dithyrambic does not help us. It is not a question
between Action and Rhetoric, but the far profounder
question alike in word and in deed between just
and unjust, rational and shortsighted, cruel and
humane. The parliament faced the Irish danger with
characteristic energy, nor would CromweU accept
the command without characteristic deliberation.
' 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 ex
pedition, 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.

THE DEOGHEDA MASSACEE. 299
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 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 research
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 diffi
cult 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

300 OLIVEE CEOMWELL.
book that they should all be put to the sword. It was
—^ — - done. Then came another order. ' Being in the heat
1653. °f 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 the steeple, fifty were slain and
thirty perished in the flames. Cromwell notes with
particular satisfaction 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.

THE DEOGHEDA MASSACEE. 301
I do not think thirty of the whole number escaped chap.
with their lives.' These 3000 were killed, with a >— ^L_
loss of only sixty-four to those who killed them. 1649'
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 barbarous
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 opera
tions, which must be counted one of* the 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 courageously,
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
contended, that this slaughter was no worse than

302 OLIVEE CEOMWELL.
book some of the worst acts of those commanders in
— fl — - the Thirty Years' War whose names have ever
1653. since stood out in crimson letters on the page
of European history as bywords of cruelty and
savagery. That, after all, is but dubious extenua
tion. 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 extra
ordinary 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
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 Crom
well'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

WEXFORD AND CLONMEL. 303
the head promiscuously, and of the officers who chap.
were killed in cold blood, not a single victim was - IL
likely to have had part or lot in the Ulster atrocities ,649'
of 1641. More than one contemporary authority
(including Ludlow and Clarendon) says the garrison
was mostly English, and undoubtedly a certain con
tingent 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 Kilkenny 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 actu
ally 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. ' 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 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 be
lieve not 20 of ours from first to last of the siege.'
The town was sacked, and priests and friars were

304 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book again knocked on the head, some of them in a
iv. .
— (1 — - protestant chapel which they had been audacious
1 (iAQ J- x t/
1653. 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 Cromwell'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 knocking
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.'
The effect of the massacre of Drogheda was
certainly transient. As we have seen, it did not

WEXFORD AND CLONMEL. 305
frighten the commandant at Wexford, and the chap.
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 sub
sequent 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
u

306 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book company ; — yet we live in His sight, and shall
— <1 — - work the time that is appointed us, and shall rest
1653. after that in peace.'
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 trans
cendental 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 mis
calculation 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 viewT hitting the
nail upon the head, while Oliver goes to work with
a want of insight and knowledge that puts his
Irish statesmanship 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 independency, 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, blaz
ing wTith the polemic of the time. After a profuse

CATHOLIC MANIFESTO. 307
bestowal of truculent compliments, deeply tinged chap.
with what in our days is known as the Orange hue, -
he comes to the practical matter in hand, but not 1650'
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 discontented colonists,
but of catholic and native Ireland. ' Remember,
ye hypocrites, Ireland was once united to England.
Englishmen had good inheritances which many of
them purchased with their money ; they and their
ancestors from you and your ancestors. . . . 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
what 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 un
heard 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 inhabi
tants brooding over their discontents in sullen
indignation, were at any time more true of Ireland
than in these halcyon days of Cromwell's imagina
tion. As if what he calls the equal benefit of the
protection of England had meant anything but

308 OLIVER CROMWELL.

book fraud, chicane, plunder, neglect and oppression,

IV

ending in that smouldering rage, misery, and despair
1653. which Cromwell so ludicrously describes as the deep
peace and union of a tranquil sheepfold, only dis
turbed 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 violating the laws
established. As for the people, what 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 possession 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 undoubted 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

Cromwell's reply. 309
keep out of arms.' It is true enough that the chap.
military conquest of Ireland was an indispensable ^— ,J 
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 military conquest though
tedious be difficult. If the words just quoted were
to have any meaning, Cromwell's policy after the
necessary subjugation of the country, ought to have
been to see that the inhabitants of the country
should enjoy both their religion and their lands in
peace. If he had been strong enough and en
lightened enough to try such a policy as this, there
might have been a Cromwellian settlement indeed.
As it was, the stern and haughty assurances with
which he wound up his declaration ' for the Un
deceiving of Deluded and Seduced People ' were to.
receive a dreadful interpretation, and in this lies the
historic pith of the whole transaction.
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

310 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book the Shannon, to the wasted and desperate wilds of
— ,1 — ' Connaught. Between thirty and forty thousand of
i653." 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 wdth them ; and we know from Thurloe
that ships were made ready for the transportation of
the boys and girls whom Henry was forcibly collect
ing. 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 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

THE CROMWELLIAN SETTLEMENT. 311
realm. But Strafford had a grasp of the complica
tions of social conditions in Ireland to which Cromwell »
could not pretend. He knew the need of time and 1650,
management. He knew the need of curbing the Eng
lish lords. A puritan armed with a musket and the
Old Testament, attempting to reconstruct the foun
dations 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 unmistakably had. ' These poor
people,' he said (Dec. 1649), ' have been accustomed
to as much injustice, tyranny, and oppression from
their landlords, 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
impartially administered here, the foregoing dark
ness 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.

book It was the turn of Scotland next. There the com-
— fl — ' monwealth of England was wholly without friends.
1 fiko
1653. 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 ac
commodation 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
Argyll, 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 presbyterian
king ruling over a presbyterian people, and con
stitutional visions of the sway of the legitimate
line. The spirit of intestine faction was redhot,
but the wiser Scots knew by instinct that the
struggle before them was at bottom as much
a struggle for independent national existence, as

1650.

Cromwell's return from Ireland. 313
it had been in the days of Wallace or Bruce, chap. TTT
Equally the statesmen of the Commonwealth felt •
the impossibility of establishing their own rule
over the host of 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 n. at Edinburgh, the long negotiations
with him in Holland, his surrender to the inexorable
demand that he should censure his father for resist
ing 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

314 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book commander, but too wanting in the sovereign
— <! — ' qualities of decision and initiative to guide the
i6g3" counsels of a revolution, disappeared from con
spicuous 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 satisfaction to that presbyterian
interest against whose active enmity the Common
wealth 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 invasion 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 associa
tion with disloyalty either to his powerful comrade
or to the Commonwealth. Cromwell was at once
(June 26) appointed to be Captain-General and Com-
mander-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,- —

THE SCOTTISH CASE. 315
enjoining a lesson that of all lessons mankind are chap.
at all times least willing to learn, — ' I beseech you, -_!^L_
think it possible you may be mistaken.' He pro- 1650'
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 worship
ping 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
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 in
dwelling 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 than one imposed by Ireland, but if
malignants were destined to win, it were better to

316 OLIVER CROMWELL.

book have a restoration by English cavaliers than by

IV

Scottish presbyters, inflamed by spiritual pride
1653" and sodden in theological arrogance. At a critical
hour six years later, Cromwell deprecated despond
ency, and the argument was as good now as then.
' We are Englishmen ; 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 en
trenched position in Edinburgh, and to force them
to an 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 impossibility,' 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

DUNBAR. 317
the hills that overlook Dunbar, and there Crom
well was hemmed in. The Scots were in high
spirits at thus cutting him off from Berwick. 1650,
'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.' 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 difficulty ; and our
lying here daily consumeth our men, who fall sick
beyond imagination. . . . Whatever becomes of us,

318 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book it will be well for you to get what forces you can
—^J  > together ; and the South to help what they can.
1653* The business nearly concerneth all good people.
If your forces had been here in a readiness to have
fallen upon the back of Copperspath, 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.
Where the purpose is lofty and unselfish, this is
indeed moral greatness.
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 teU 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 in either case 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 min
isters, who were wearied of his triumphant' Fabian
strategy, and could not restrain their exultation 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,

DUNBAR. 319
with another force cutting them off from the south chap.
• TTT
m a position that one man could hold against forty. ¦  rl—
Their minds were full of Saul, Amalekites, Moab-
ites, 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. Cromwell walking about with Lambert, with
a watchful eye for the hills, discerned the unex
pected motions. ' I told the Major-General,' says
Cromwell, ' 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, and these cheerfully
concurred. Leslie's move must mean either an
immediate attack, or a closer blockade ; in either
case, the only chance was to be first to engage.
They determined to fall on at daybreak, though as
it happened the 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
confidence 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

320 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book we might have as easily beaten them as we did
— rl — - James Graham at Philiphaugh, if the officers had
1653." stayed by their troops and regiments.'
The English and the Scots faced one another
across a brook with steep banks, only passable at a
narrow ford, and here the fight was. The rout of
Dunbar has been described once for all by Carry le,
in one of the famous masterpieces of modern letters,
with a force of imagination, a faithfulness in detail,
a moral depth, a poetic beauty, that help to atone
for the perplexing humours and whimsical philo
sophies that mar that fine biography. It is wise
for others not to attempt to turn into poetry the
prose of politics and war. The battle 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 advantage 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 season
ably in, and at the push of pike did repel the
stoutest regiment the enemy 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

DUNBAR. 321
their swords. The best of the enemy's horse being chap.
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 whole story of this memorable hour's
fight as told by the victor. Rushworth, then Crom
well'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 one end to another of them, and

322 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book so left them at the mercy of the foot. The General
iv .
— ,1 — ' himself comes in the rear of our regiment, and
I653' 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 NoU 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
extraordinary 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 the
English did not lose thirty men, or even as Oliver
says in another place, not twenty. They killed
three thousand, and took ten thousand prisoners.

CHAPTER IV
FROM DUNBAR TO WORCESTER.
For nearly a year after the victory at Dunbar
Cromwell 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 dispatched 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

1651.

324 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book Scotland between Dunbar and Worcester are as
— ,1 — - intricate a.tanede as any in Cromwell's career. The
1 a Aft *~-^
1653" student who unravels them in detail, may easily
convince us what different results might have
followed, 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 pro
fessed 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 themselves
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 church
men haughtily replied, they had not learned to
hang the equity of their cause upon events.

1651.

CONTROVERSY WITH THE SCOTS. 325
' Events,' retorted Oliver, with a scorn more fervid chap.
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 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, Resolu-
tioners, 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 ascendency. 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 confused issues, political and
religious, had by the middle of 1651 become
simplified into the one question of a royalist restora
tion to the throne of the two kingdoms.
The head- quarters of the Scots were at Stirling,

326 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book and here David Leslie repeated the tactics that
— ,  ' had been so triumphant at Edinburgh. Well
1649- ...
1653 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 w^ere 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 and tools, more saddles and pro
visions, 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 in
evitable necessity should try what they could do in
this way. In July Cromwell came at length to a

IV.
165L

MILITARY OPERATIONS. 327
decision. He despatched Lambert with four chap.
thousand men across the Forth to the shores of Fife,
and after Lambert had overcome the stout resistance
of a force of Scots of about equal numbers at Inver-
keithing (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. 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 them
selves foreigners among stolid and scowling natives.

328 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book The Council of State responded to Cromwell's
— fl — ' appeal with extraordinary vigilance, forethought,
1653. 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 calcula
tions, 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 Scot
land. 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
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

IV.
165l7

FROM PERTH TO WORCESTER. 329
up with Lambert's column on August 24. Fleet- chap
wood 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, in. p. 136). The energy of the
Council of State, the skill of Lambert and Harri
son, 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 decisive 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 con
centrated 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 Fleetwood advanced to the
attack, the Scots on the right bank of the Severn

330 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book offered a strong resistance. Cromwell passed a
— ,1 — . mixed force of horse and foot over his Severn
Jess, 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 L, but the re-ar
rangement of the relations of the three kingdoms.

BATTLE OF WORCESTER. 331
Such a distinction is arbitrary or paradoxical.
Neither at Naseby and Preston, nor at Dunbar and •
Worcester, was any indelible stamp impressed upon
the institutions of the realm ; no real incorporation
of Ireland 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 of
order should be preserved to ensure national safety
and progress when affairs had returned to their
normal course. In Ireland this provisional task
was so ill comprehended as to darken all the
future. In Scotland its immediate and positive
results were transient, but there at least no barriers
were raised against the happier relations that were
to come after.

1651.

CHAPTER V.
CIVIL PROBLEMS AND THE SOLDIER.
BOOK When God, said Milton, has given victory to the
— ^- — ' cause, ' then comes the task to those worthies which
1653. 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 withdrawn 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

CIVIL PROBLEMS. 333
the breakers. It was certain that he would be
as active and indefatigable in peace as he had •
proved himself in war ; that energy would never
fail, even if depth of counsel often failed ; that
strenuous watchfulness would never relax, even
though calculations 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
rejoicing. 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

1652.

334 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book absent in any that meddle with affairs of politics
— ,1 — ' and party, he remarked that there would have been
1653" a still mightier crowd to see him hanged. When
ever 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, ' This man will make himself our King,'
and in days to come his present modesty was set
down to 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 Commonwealth
in 1 65 0. 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 Cromwell'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

1652.

VIGOUR OF THE COUNCIL. 335
England. Its protestantism had helped to shut out chap.
the fallen sovereignty from the active sympathy of -
the sacred circle of catholic kings. Cromwell's
military success 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 parliament, 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 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
seamanship, 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
organization was carried through by the vigour,
insight, and adminstrative talents of Vane and the
other men of the parhament, who are now so often

336 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book far too summarily despatched as mere egotists and
— ,1 — - pedants. By the time that Cromwell had effected
!653~ 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 com
mercial 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 repug
nance 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 as
extraordinary that the two republics, threatened
both of them by Stuart interests, by Catholic
interests, 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 allegiance
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, Scot
land and Ireland. Of this dream in shape so
definite nothing could come, and even minor pro
jects of friendship were not discussed without a
degree of friction that speedily passed into down
right animosity. To cripple the naval power of
Holland would at once satisfy the naval pride of
the new commonwealth, remove a source of military

WAR WITH THE DUTCH. 337
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 Navigation 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 Hol
land 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 enemies in neutral ships. War
followed (1652) and was prosecuted by the Common
wealth with intrepidity, decision, and vigour not un
worthy 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 ascendency of England ; that renown be
longs to Vane, the organizer, 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
Y

1652.

1649-1653.

338 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK and England's place in Europe, which began to
ripen in his mind as soon as the stress of war left
his imagination 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 un
settled. Ecclesiastical confusion was complete. The
Westminster divines, after long buffetings from the
Erastian parliament, and the triumphs of the 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

NO PROGRESS IN SETTLEMENT. 339
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 parliament
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. Reheve 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 dissatisfac
tion at the attempted treaty with the king to be
reasonable, and excused the execution done upon
the soldier as absolutely necessary to prevent 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 declara
tion of fidelity to a free and equal Commonwealth
by describing how the substance of what he sought
was a thorough reformation of the clergy and the
law. And he travelled so 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

1652.

340 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book lawyer, and to encourage the rich to oppress the
— ,1 — • poor.' This was in truth the measure of Cromwell's
i653~ 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 ? Crom
well'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 concentra
tion, and too short for the institution of a great
scheme of comprehensive reform. A provisional
government working within the limits of a fixed
period inevitably 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

THE QUESTION OF A CONSTITUTION. 341
know the temper and spirits of all men, and of chap.
the best of men — that the Nation loathed their v__^_
sitting.' 1652-
This was probably true enough ; unfortunately
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 con
ferences, in which he had more faith than the event
ever justified, between prominent men in parliament
and leading officers in the army. He propounded 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

342 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book cut off my head, and perhaps make thee a king ;
— il — - but, mark what I say : You must not be a king, so
l653." 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 held his hand. Desborough and Whalley
could not see why this, as well as other nations,
should not be governed in the way of a republic.
That was the sentiment of the army. Cromwell
thought that it 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 mon
archical 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
perhaps 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 enjoy
ment 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

MILITARY REVOLUTION AT HAND. 343
be. The continuing unsettlement was a call to chap.
him that, like Joshua of old, he had still a portion v v'
of the Lord's work to do and must be foremost in 1652-
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 animosities 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 pro
longing their own 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 scandalous, he said. They were irre
sponsible . and uncontrolled ; 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 constitutional 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

344 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book flinching. For a short time longer the Lord-
— rl — ' General said and did no more, but he and the
1653" army watched the parliament with growing sus
picion and ill-will. A military revolution became
every day more imminent.

VI.

CHAPTER VI.
THE BREAKING OF THE LONG PARLIAMENT.
The military revolution of 1653 is the next tall chap.
landmark after the execution of the king. It is k
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 surmise. But the best opinion
in respect of the revolution of April 1653, seems to
be that the royalists were not wrong who wrote
that Cromwell's authority in the army depended

346 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book much on Harrison and Lambert and their fanatical
— il — ' factions ; that he was forced to go with them in
1653I order to save himself; and that he was the member
of the triumvirate who was 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 Crom
well's proceedings. In the closing months of 1652,
he once more procured occasions of conference
between himself and his officers on the one hand,
and members of parliament on the other. He
besought the parliament 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 exaltation 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

CONFERENCE OF OFFICERS AND MEMBERS. 347
of their own : that the parliament should name a chap.
certain number of men of the right sort, and these ¦¦ VI'
nominees should build a constitution. The parlia- 1653-
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 parliament.
There the plan of the officers, and the rival plan of
Vane and his friends were brought face to 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 vague
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 provisional
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

348 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book government of France. To blame its authors for
iv .
— il — ' fettering the popular choice was absurd in Crom-
1653. well, 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 without 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 repre
sentation 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 disastrous now, as at any moment
since the defeat of 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 experiment. 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 custodians, and it is hard to say that
they were wrong. In judging these events of 1653,
we must look forward 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 parliament 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

CONFLICTING PLANS. 349
when the army cried for a dissolution, they had no chap.
ideas as to the parliament 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 overtook the plan of Cromwell.
Apart from the question of the constitution of
parliament, and perhaps regarding that as second
ary, 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 par
liament of four hundred men executing arbitrary
government, and continuing the existing usurpation
of the duties of the law-courts by legislature and
executive. Undoubtedly ' a horrid degree of arbi
trariness' 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
parliament, one knows not why it should be good for
the no less ' horrid arbitrariness ' of the Protector.
As for the general character of the constitution 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.

350 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book The If conference in Cromwell's apartments at
— ,— - Whitehall on April 19 was instantly followed by one
1 fi4-Q
1653. 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 perfectly 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, 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 parliament altogether, there is no reason to
believe. Long premeditation was never Cromwell's

VI.
1653.

PROCEEDINGS IN THE HOUSE. 351
way. He waited for the indwelling voice, and chap
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 transac
tion 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 presby
tery 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,
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-

352 OLIVER CEOMWELL.
BOOK tracted. Sir Peter Wentworth stood up to answer him, and
- . said that this was the first time that ever he heard such
1649- 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
p?*ating." 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 ivill 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, " It 's 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 com-

THE PARLIAMENT DISPERSED. 353
manded the doors to be locked up, went away to CHAP.
Whitehall.' VL
The fierce work was consummated in the after- 1653'
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 disturbed ;
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 dissolve 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 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
Strafford. 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
manfully contended. For the remnant was the

354 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK quintessence left after a long series of elaborate
— fl — - distillations. They were not presbyterians, moder-
1653~ ates, respectables, bourgeois, pedants, Girondins.
They, or the great majority of them, were the men
who had resisted a continuance of the negotiations
at 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 pro
ceedings of Cromwellian Thorough. They were the
very cream after purification upon purification. 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 expenses,
and prodigal in their devotion to public affairs, for
wThich each one toils as if for his personal interests.
They handle large sums of money, which they
administer honestly.' We cannot suppose 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

A FATAL TRANSACTION. 355
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 without them, for time-serving has its
roots in human nature. The question is what propor
tion the time-servers bore to the whole. There is
no sign that it was large. But whether large or
small, to deal with time-servers is part, and no incon
siderable 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 in
expiable sin of breaking up his party. This was the
gravest of all. This was what made the revolution
of 1653 a turning-point. The presbyterians 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 remnant, 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 1 What was his calculation, or had
he no calculation, of forces, circumstances, in
dividuals, 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

1653.

356 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK was he in truth as improvident as King Charles had
— il — - been when he too marched down the same floor
i653~ 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. 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 parliament
than Cromwell was legal monarch. The constitution
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

OBSERVATIONS. 357
of them angry distrust of Cromwell, in others a chap.
broad resentment at the overthrow of the noblest of^^ 
experiments, and in the largest class of all, deep 16 '
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 impetuous 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 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 that he was
never able to retrieve.

CHAPTER VII.
THE REIGN OF THE SAINTS.
book Cromwell was now the one authority left standing.
T ' - ' By Act of Parliament,' he said, ' I was general of
}ggg" 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, Cromwell 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

1653.

THE NEXT EXPERIMENT. 359
yet it was done in my simplicity, I dare avow it. chap.
It was thought then that men of our judgment, who >.
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, whatever 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 government
needs more than spiritual enthusiasm, that to have
' very scriptural notions ' is not enough for the
reform of stubborn earthy 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 vehemently pressed
upon him. As Ranke puts it, Cromwell viewed his
own ideals not from the point of subjective satisfac
tion, 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

360 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book will and pleasure, helped by the local knowledge
 (1 — - of the congregational churches in the country. The
1653^ 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 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
convention 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

1653.

THE LITTLE PARLIAMENT. 361
shape. It was the curse of Ireland that no such chap.
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
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
regeneration. It hardly deserves to be described
as the greatest attempt ever made in history to
found a civil society on the literal words of scrip
ture, 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

362 OLIVER CROMWELL.

book to stir up the parliament ; he had been their mouth-

IV.

piece to offer their sense for them ; it was the army
1653. f° whom the people had looked, in their dissatis
faction at the breakdown of parliamentary perform
ance. 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 admini
stration. 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 Cromwell was deeply sincere
in this intention of divesting the army of supremacy
in civil affairs, and of becoming himself their servant,
there are few who doubt. But we only vindicate
his sincerity at the cost of his sagacity. The de
struction of the old parliament that had at least
some spark of legislative authority ; the alienation
of almost all the staunchest and ablest partisans of
the scheme of a commonwealth ; the desperate im
probability of attracting any large body of members
by the rule of the saints, all left the new order with
out 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

Cromwell's opening discourse. 363
have his people called to the supreme authority.' chap.
Text upon text is quoted in lyric excitement from '
prophets, psalmists, and apostles, old testament 1653-
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 but
to lead a life of godliness and honesty, let him be
protected.' Toleration was now in CromweU 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 kind
ness for their sore struggles after saving truth, of
compassion for their 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-

364 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK patience that had grown so bitter against the old
— il — ' parliament soon revived against the new conven-
1653. 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 con
vention 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 fanaticism 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 assur
ances of the preachers, that the four monarchies of
Nebuchadnezzar 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
Kingdom of Jesus Christ upon the earth : and this,
no mere reign set up in men's hearts, but a scheme
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

1653.

DISSIPATION OF A DREAM. 365
than with the knave.' The new men at once and chap.
without leave took to themselves the name of* VIL
parliament. 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 sitting, 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 re
quiring 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 resolu
tion that the Court of Chancery should be wholly
taken away and abolished ; 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 com
mittee, without a lawyer upon it, to work on the
reduction of the formless mass of laws, cases, and
precedents, to a code that should be of no greater
bigness than a pocket-book. The power of patrons
to present to livings was taken away, though
patronage was as truly property as land. More

366 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book vital aspects of the church question followed. A
— f- — ' committee reported in favour of the appointment
1653. 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
settlement 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
popularity. 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

END OF THE PARLIAMENT. 367
government of the saints was at least as odious as chap.
the government of the dispossessed Remnant. '
The narrow division on the abolition of tithe I6 3"
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 sur
prise, but accepted the burden of power that the abdi
cation of the parliament had once more laid upon him.

368 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book These proceedings were an open breach with the
-J^l— - Saints, but as has been justly said (Weingarten), this
Jggjj" 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
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 re
volts against the leaden yoke of convention, ordin
ance, institution, in which, whether in individuals
or in a tidal mass of men, the human soul soars
passionately 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 re
action 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, im-
bastardised 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.
CHAPTER I.
FIRST STAGE OF THE PROTECTORATE.

What are all our histories, cried Cromwell in 1655, chap.
what are all our traditions of Actions in former - 
times, but God manifesting himself, that hath }654~
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 in
spired and fore-ordained dispensation ever unfold
ing 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 bless
ing 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. . . .'
2 A

370 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book As England was the home of the Chosen People,
 'r  > so also he read in all the providences of battle
rs" fields from Winceby to Worcester, that he 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 Crom
well. .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 vainly
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 excused himself, saying, ' I
have very little acquaintance 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 super
session of the parliament, though we should
remember that he includes in all the breadth of

MILTON AND CROMWELL. 371
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 freedom, 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 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 re-casting of the fundamental conceptions
of national consciousness and life. The apostle
and the soldier were indeed two men of different

1653.

372 OLIVER CROMWELL.
type, and drew their inspiration from very different
• fountains ; but we may well believe Aubrey when
!658. he says that there were those who came over to
England only to see Oliver Protector and John
Milton.

n.
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
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 and
cloak of black velvet, and with a gold band upon his
hat, was invited by Lambert to take upon himself
the office of Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of
England, Scotland, and Ireland, conformably to the
terms of an Instrument of Government which was
then read. The Lord-General assented, and forth
with 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 bareheaded about
him. The commissioners ceremoniously handed to
him the great seal, and the Lord Mayor proffered
him his sword of office. The Protector returned the
seal and sword, and after he had received the grave
obeisance of the dignitaries around him, the act of

INSTALLED AS LORD PROTECTOR. 373
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 Serjeants 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 constitution thus
founding, though it did not long uphold, the pro
tectorate, 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
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
difference 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 supre
macy, 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

1653.

374 OLIVER CROMWELL.
the dead parliament, that had baffled Pym and
Hyde, that had perplexed Ireton and the officers,
i658" 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 on the
power of the representative legislature. Cromwell,
undoubtedly in earnest as he was in desiring to
restore parliamentary government, and to set effec
tive 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

THE NEW CONSTITUTION. 375
men could not work with the Rump, if they could not CHAP.
work with the Saints, the officers as they rapidly >  'r —
hammered together the Instrument of Govern- i654."
ment 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 hfe. The council had a voice, subject to con
firmation 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 demolishing 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
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 disqualifica-

376 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book tions of the members returned ; and as we shall
— I — ?see, this legalisation of future mutilations of the
1653 •
1658. 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 con
sent, 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 parlia
ment 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 parliament 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 concerning 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 Protector 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 the first
time with authority a principle of toleration. A
public profession of the Christian religion as con-

THE NEW CONSTITUTION. 377
tained in the scriptures was to be recommended as chap.
the faith of these nations, and the teachers of it ¦
were to be confirmed in their subsistence. This
embodies, as the Agreement of the People had
done before, the principles of establishment 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 profession
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 Common
wealth had explicitly disavowed all purpose of letting
loose the golden reins of discipline in church 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 surviv
ing interest, unlike the French constitutions of the
Year Hi., 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 some
times been taken to foreshadow the constitution of
the United States. The American analogy does

378 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book not hold. The Cromwellian separation of executive
—^  > from legislative power was but a fitful and confused
1658[ attempt. Historically, there are no indications that
the framers of the American constitution 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 constitutional debates
of the several States. Nor was it necessary for
the American draftsmen to go back to the Com
monwealth, for their scheme was based upon State
constitutions already subsisting, and it was in them
that they found the principle of fundamentals and
constitutional guarantees not alterable like ordinary
laws. Apart from historical connection the coinci
dences 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. Parliament,
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 accord
ing to Oliver himself only four fundamentals, 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

THE AMERICAN SYSTEM. 379
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.
Hi.
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 re
gulations 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 significant 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 overthrow of
the system consecrated to freedom, and it still
further embittered the enmity of those who through

1654.

380 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book so many vicissitudes had in more hopeful days
— r — ' been Cromwell's closest allies. More far-reaching
1658! and fundamental were the edicts incorporating
Scotland and Ireland in one Commonwealth 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 organizing activity
was the court of chancery. The sixty-seven
clauses reforming chancery are elaborate, but they
show no presiding mind. Imperious provisions,
that every cause must be determined on the day
on which it is set down for hearing, savour more
of the serjeant 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 ap
plication. 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 unfriendly
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

OLIVER AS LEGISLATOR. 381
harshness of the criminal law, and would fain have
mitigated it, but his efforts came to nothing.
Equally ineffectual were his aspirations 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 the judges of assize. Slackness in this vital
department 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
educational. 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
construction was the scheme for the propagation
of religion, and it deserves attention. The dire
controversy that split up the patriot party in

1654.

382 OLIVER CROMWELL.
the first years of the Long Parliament, that
wrecked the throne, that was at the bottom of
1658" the quarrels with the Scots, that inspired the
fatal feud between presbyterian and indepen
dent, 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 uniformity.
The fervid soul of Milton, on the contrary, 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 uncom
promising temper was assuredly not universal even
among independents. Cromwell had never com
mitted 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 dogmatic
nicety as little in religion as he valued constitu
tional precision in politics. His was the cast 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

HIS ECCLESIASTICAL PLANS. 383
for comprehension. Cromwell had served on two
important 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 any
thing else but the Christian religion in general — as
if the Christian religion in general were but some
thing meagre and diminutive. The usual and in
evitable 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 controversy when they were
overtaken by the Restoration. What Cromwell's
ordinance of 1654 did was, upon the principle of the
Instrument, to frame a working system. In sub
stance 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

1653-

384 OLIVER CROMWELL.
is told by Bishop Wilkins, who was the husband of
Cromwell's youngest sister Robina, that the Pro-
1658! tector often said to him that no temporal govern
ment 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
ordinances 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 com
mission of Triers was a smaller commission of
Ejectors, for the converse task of removing ignorant,
negligent, or scandalous persons. The tithe was
maintained and patronage was maintained, only
security was taken for the fitness of the presentee.
No theological tests were prescribed. No particular
church organization was imposed, though episcopacy,
like the Prayer-Book, was forbidden. Of the three
sorts of godly men, said Oliver, presbyterians,
baptists, and independents, so long as a man had
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 practice, outside of London and
Lancashire, where the presbyterianism established

ECCLESIASTICAL PLANS. 385
by the parliament in 1647 had taken root, the estab- chap.
lished church during the protectorate was on the con-  r' —
gregational model, with so much of presbyterianism 1654!
about it as came from free association for discipline
and other purposes. The important feature in
Oliver's establishment 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 elsewhere. 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 presbyterians by toleration. It may well
have been that he determined to set up his system of
church government by the summary way of ordinance
before parliament met, because he knew that no par
liament 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
2 B

386 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book the rule of any one who could deliver them from
 'r — - anarchy. Most ministers took a middle way, and it
1658. was Baxter's own way : — ' I did in open conference
declare Cromwell and his adherents to be guilty of
treason and rebellion, aggravated by perfidiousness
and hypocrisy, but yet 1 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 alehouse 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 himself 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.'

MISCHIEFS OF EJECTION AND EXCLUSION. 387
His ideal was a state church, based upon a com
prehension from which episcopalians were to be <
shut out. The exclusion was fatal to it as a final 1654.'
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 against it, and
the gravest set-off against its indubitable gains.
The mischief had been done in the years, roughly
speaking, from 1643 to 1647, when some two
thousand of the episcopal clergy were turned out
of their churches and homes with many circum
stances of suffering and hardship. The authors of
these hard proceedmgs 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 uppermost, ejected two thousand noncon
formists on the famous day of Saint Bartholomew,
the patron saint of Christian enormities ; and the
nation fell asunder into the two standing camps
of churchman and dissenter, which in their strife
of so many ages 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
imparted to church polity by the presbyterians,
but independents, when in their turn of faction
they grasped power, did nothing to redress the
wrong that their rivals had committed.

CHAPTER II.
QUARREL WITH THE FIRST PARLIAMENT.
book Whitelocke in his mission to Sweden (1653-4) saw
> Oxenstiern, the renowned minister who had played
1658! 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 precedents of such
elections had always proved dangerous and not
peaceable, ever since the choice of Roman emperors
by the legion. 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

FOREIGN JUDGMENTS. 389
title of Marshal of Sweden, because he had risen up chap.
and rescued his country from the bondage and w_r_L_
oppression which the King of Denmark had put \®lf
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 content him.' 'Resolve what you will,'
the queen insisted, ' I believe he resolves to be
king ; and hardly can any power or greatness be
called sufficient, 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 protec
torate, the first of them assembling in 1654 on the
third of September, the famous anniversary day of
the CromweUian 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

390 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book extreme right were not far from royalists, and even
— ,' — - the presbyterians of the centre could have little
less" 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 evidfnt.
They all heard a sermon in Westminster Abbey,
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 charac
teristic note, by declaring his belief that they
represented not only the interests of three great

THE FIRST PARLIAMENT. 391
nations, but the interest of all the Christian world, chap.
This was no rhetorician's phrase, but a vivid' and f. 
unchanging ideal in his mind after he had gained le55
a position lofty enough to open to his gaze the
prospect beyond the English shores. Here hyper
bole ended, and the speech became a protest against
the levelling 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 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 govern
ment of the three kingdoms should be a parlia
mentary 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 parlia
ment supposing 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

392 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK that parliament itself must make it so. A pro-
 'r — - tector by right of the army was as little tolerable
1658. 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 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 keynote 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 Yorkshire, the greatest county in

QUARREL AND PROSCRIPTION. 393
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
fundamental, others were only circumstantial. The
circumstantials 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.' 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 govern
ment 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, Hasel-
rig, and others of that stalwart group, refused to
sign, and went home. Such was the Protector's
short way with a parliamentary opposition.

394 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book The purge was drastic, but it availed little.
— r — • By the very law of its being the parliament went
i65s! 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 Instru
ment, 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 determine 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 wdth heresies, or with the
teaching and discipline of established ministers,
over the head of the Protector. On the all-import
ant chapter of the 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 wras now nearly
twice as many. Parliament here called for a reduc
tion to the legal figure, and laid down general
principles for the future. During his life parliament

CONSTITUTIONAL REVISION. 395
was to have a voice in fixing the numbers of the chap.
armed force ; after his death, it was to decide the >  ,1 —
disposal of it ; and the sum fixed for it was to be 1655.
reconsidered by parliament five years later. In
all this there was nothing unreasonable, if parlia
ment 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 showqd 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 V If he were to yield
up at any time the power of the militia, how could
he do the good he ought, or hinder parliament
from making themselves perpetual, or imposing
what religion they pleased upon men's conscience ?
But all this is the principle of pure absolutism.

396 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book In other words, Cromwell did not in his heart
— 'i- — - believe that any parliament was to be trusted. He
i658" 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 hght 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 parliament
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 discovered
their envy and ambition, and whose faculty it is
by continuing of confusion to support themselves.'
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 grandees

parliament dissolved. 397
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.
book With the dismissal of the first parliament a new era
— 'r — - began. For twenty months the protectorate was
1658! a system of despotic rule, as undisguised as that
of Tudor or Stuart. Yet it was not the dictator
ship 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-

1655.

DANGERS OF THE GOVERNMENT. 399
selves a shade under which weeds and nettles, chap.
briars and thorns, had thriven. They were like a^ Ml
man, he told them, who should protest about his
liberty of 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
foundations 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, encouraged 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 communication with Charles abroad.

400 OLIVER CEOMWELL.
book With the new year, their hopes began to fade. The
— r — 'division common to all conspiracies broke out be-
1658. tween 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 in
surrection would be their own destruction, and
the consolidation 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 insignificant rising has proved
to be the end of a wide-spread and dangerous com
bination. 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 sur
prising York with four thousand men ; when the
time came, a hundred made their appearance, and
in despair they flung away their arms and dis
persed. In Northumberland the cavaliers were
to seize Newcastle and Tynemouth, but here too

III.
1655!

ROYALIST PLOTS. 401
less than a hundred of them ventured to the field, chap
At Rufford in Sherwood Forest there was to have
been a gathering of several hundreds, involving
gentlemen 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 Pro
tector, he declared, if there had been any need,
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.' x
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
1 March 16, 1655. See Mr. Firth's examination of the rising in
Eng. Hist. Rev. 1888, pp. 323-50 ; 1889, pp. 313-38, 525-35.
2 c

402 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book other, was put upon his trial along with a number
_ r! — - of his confederates. It is curious that this was
1658. 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
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 re-statement 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

1655.

CROMWELL S VIGILANCE. 403
came to hear of all the things contrived against chap.
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 answered that he had. But who was it,
asked Cromwell, 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 necessi
ties, 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 royahst in prison in England,
but this was not forthcoming, 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 military 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.

404 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book The upright and blameless Overton was arbitrarily
—^1  - flung into prison without trial, kept there for three
1658. 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 Cromwell. 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 Pro
tector 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 tending to
sedition and subversive of the government. Viola
tion of the spirit and letter of the law could go no
further. They were soon set free, and Cromwell
bore them no malice, but people not unreasonably
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

III.
ibST

QUARRELS WITH THE COURTS. 405
Protector scoffed at Magna Charta with a mock too chap
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 executive, 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 Protector haled him before the
council ; Wentworth said that he had been moved
by his constant principle 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 five by law and rule — yet if a
government in extraordinary circumstances go be
yond 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

406 OLIVER CROMWELL.

book of Necessity for justifying of men's actions, is above

v

all considerations of instituted law, and if this or
1658. 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 disguises 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-

THE MAJOR-GENERALS. 407
sons in this category were to be registered, and if chap.
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-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 important
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 ' deci
mation ' of those against whom after personal inquisi
tion made they chose to set the mark of delinquency
or disaffection. From such persons they were in
structed 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

408 OLIVER CROMWELL.

book some time to complete, but by the last three months

v.

of 1655 it was in full operation.
1658.' Two other remarkable measures of repression
belong to this stern epoch. An edict was passed
for securing the peace of the commonwealth
(November 1655), ordering that no ejected clergy
man should be kept in any gentleman's house as
chaplain or tutor, or teach in a school, or baptize,
or celebrate marriages, or use the Prayer Book.
That 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 experience shows
that nothing is ever so certain to be overdone as
the policy of military repression against civil dis
affection. The second measure was still more signi
ficant of the extent to which despotic reaction was
going in the methods of the government. Orders
were issued that no person whatever 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, ' 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 however without
constant reference to the Protector and Council
for directions how individuals were to be dealt

DECIMATION AND REPRESSION. 409
with. The business of taxing the cavaliers in this chap. TTT
high manner was ' of wonderful acceptation to all -
the parliament party, and men of all opinions joined 1655'
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 submitted
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 Gran
tham 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

410 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book would cause the godly to pour forth prayers and
— !¦ — - tears before the Lord. The officer staunchly replied
1658. 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 discontent was quickened
in all those various organized 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.

1656.

Want of money has ever been the wholesome chap.
check on kings, on parliaments and cabinets, n
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 em
barked, 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

412 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book striving to get into parliament that ever was
— ^ — - known ; every faction is bestirring itself with
1658. aU its might ; and all sorts of discontented
people are incessant in their endeavours. The
major-generals on their side were active in elec
tioneering arts, and their firmly expressed resigna
tion 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 thinks he was 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 thwart
ing, through the peevishness of friends and the dis
affection 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 govern
ment, 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. Des-
borough 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.

THE GENERAL ELECTION. 413
Norfolk was one of the most alarming cases. ' 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 insurrection,
and the county especially so disposed may most
probably begin the scene.' He suggests that pre
parations for calling out the militia would be 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 body
guard ; 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 sword
men, 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

1656.

414 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book out of his pocket the Agreement of the People. He
— il — - told me he would promise me not to disperse any
1658. °f 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
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 remons
trances are addressed to those who think that God
has gone out of parliaments, and that the time for
v 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

HOSTILITY TO THE SWORDMEN. 415
members do what he wants, or else pack them off chap.
home again. All these partisans of abstention — the -  ^Z—
despair of party managers in every age — are faith- 1656'
fully 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 invaded
properties speak ? Did not their affronted repre
sentatives, who had been trodden upon with scorn,
speak ? Did not the blood of many thousands
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 forced from
wives and children, to serve the ambitions 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 ( 2 1 st
August), where he admitted the writing and publish
ing of the Healing Question, though in dark and
mysterious terms, as his manner was. He was

416 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book ordered to give security, refused, and was sent to
— ,1 — - prison at Carisbrooke, where he lay until the end
1658! of fhe 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
supposition 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 sup
pression of disorder, which had made the charge
necessary? Apart from the mere preservation of
the peace, was it not true that the major-generals
had been more effectual for discountenancing vice
and settling religion than anything done these

1656.

Cromwell's second parliament. 417
fifty years ? The mark of the cavalier interest was chap.
.profaneness, disorder and wickedness; the profane v
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, Crom
well 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 opposi
tions 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 men's hearts,
and surrounding the temporal anxieties of the hour
with radiant visions from another sphere for 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
2d

418 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book double admission deserves to be carefully marked — he
— ,1 — - was not much better skilled in arithmetic than he was
less! in law, and his statement of accounts would certainly
not satisfy the standards of a modern exchequer.
Incapacity of legal apprehension, and incapacity in
finance, are a terrible drawback in a statesman with
a new State to build. Before business began, the
Protector took precautions 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 excluded members, of whose fidelity to his
government Cromwell could not be sure, comprised
a faithful remnant of the Long Parliament ; and
they and others, ninety-three in number, signed a
remonstrance in terms that are a strident echo of
the protests that had so often been launched in
old days against the king. Vehemently they de
nounced 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 hundred, two hundred, or three hundred to
depart, and to call the rest a parliament by way

HUNDRED MEMBERS EXCLUDED. 419
of countenancing 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 concernments 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 how little way had even
yet been made by Cromwell in converting popular
opinion to his support.

1656.

CHAPTER V.
CHANGE OF TACK.

book The parliament speedily showed signs that, win-

v.

nowed and sifted as it had been, and loyally as it
1658. always meant to stand to the person of the Pro
tector, 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 corporate self-esteem without which any parlia
ment 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 trans
formation of the ancient realm of England into a
military State, and with this aversion, even from
the early days of barrack debates at Windsor and
Putney, Oliver was in perfect sympathy. Neither

CASE OF JAMES NAYLOR. 421
the habitudes of the camp, nor the fact that his
own power, which he rightly identified with public
order, had always depended and must still depend
upon the army, dulled his instinct or weakened his
desire that the three kingdoms 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 parlia
ment 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 predic
tions 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
unregenerate man. Hence nobody was so infuri
ated as the partisan of private judgment, with those
who carried private judgment beyond a permitted
point.

1656.

1653-

422 OLIVER CROMWELL.
James Naylor was an extreme example of the
mystics whom the hard children of this world dis-
1658. miss 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 en
thusiastic 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. No
body 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 wras a grand im
postor, 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 four
teen, 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 twro 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

CASE OF JAMES NAYLOR. 423
brought back to London, to be put into solitary chap.
confinement with hard labour during the pleasure > V'
of parliament, without use of pen, ink, or paper. 1656'
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 blas
phemy of denying the godhead of Jesus Christ, but
he secluded Biddle from harm by sending 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 assump
tion by parliament of the function of a court of law.
The most ardent friends of parliament 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 yourselves against
one James Naylor ; although we detest and abhor
the giving or occasioning the least countenance to
persons of such opinions and practice. . . .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 consequence
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

1653-

424 OLIVER CROMWELL.
the parliamentary assumption of judicial attributes,
and this became an additional reason for that grand
1658. 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 taken, 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. ' The
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 Cromwell,
' 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.

DEFEAT OF THE MAJOR-GENERALS. 425
So bold a challenge from a parliament in whose chap.
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, sometimes
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 mistake, but he was
not so sure of this as to say it. Ominous things
happened. Desbordugh 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

426 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book strutted in the House in his new finery next day,
— il — - to the great satisfaction and delight of some, and
1658. 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 de
fended 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
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 tell
ing 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

'KILLING no murder.' 427
to circulate, its author had almost succeeded in a chap.
design that would have made pamphlets super- - 
fluous. Sexby, whom Cromwell had described at 1657,
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
(1657), and the Protector's narrow escape made a
profound impression on the public mind. It awoke

428 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book sober men, who are a majority in most countries
_rJ  - when opportunity gives them a chance, to the fact
1658." 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 organization 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 criminal investiga
tion department, was persuaded that stronger hands
and heads were in the plot, and thought of Harrison,
Rich, and Okey. The government 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 prin
ciples. Venner's plot was not of much more serious
consequence than the plot against Charles il. 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

1656.

CHAOS OF THE SECTS. 429
less direct political peril than some of the govern- chap.
ment supposed, but it marked a social chaos without
a 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 gov
ernment. 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 Whitehall,
gave him a handsome feast, and then discharged
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 re
ligion of Christ. In uncouth phrases but with glow
ing souls, they carried to its furthest point the protest
against outer form and ceremonial as degrading 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 authorities, for much

430 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book the same military and political reasons as had made
__r;  > statesmen persecute the Christian professors in the
1658! 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,' 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, " 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
tendering 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 statesman
ship, saw in the Quakers foes of civil government,
and regarded them as the most serious enemies
they had. The chapter of Quaker persecution must

CROMWELL AND THE SECTS. 431
be considered a dark blot on the administration of chap.
the Protectorate, though from no intention in . y'
Cromwell. 1656-
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 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 gentleman 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

432 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book captain of the guard. ' But hold,' said he, ' after
—~il  - what manner do the cavaliers debauch your people ? '
1658! '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 anabap-
tism 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,
like its general reforming influence, is at an end,
and its religious inspirations close.' 1 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 parliament. ' And herein
it is my purpose as soon as I can remove impedi
ments to make a further progress,' but ' I may not
(shall I tell you I cannot) at this juncture of time
answer your call for toleration ; 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
execution of the laws against Jesuits and priests,
and for the conviction of popish recusants. Sensible
1 Weingarten, p. 158.

1656.

THE JEWS. 433
men like Whitelocke protested that it was not chap.
needed, and httle came of it. In 1651 Peters-
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 legislative 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 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 literature against the
cruelty of theological 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 break
ing 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,
2 E

434 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK and they would be all the more likely to be con-
_^J — • verted. Cromwell with great earnestness held the
1658" 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 himselt
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 underestimate 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 the rising spirit of rationalism, and neither
from the liberal Anglicans like Taylor, nor from
the liberal puritans like Cromwell and Milton,
that the central stream of toleration flowed, with
strength enough in time to mitigate law and
pervade national opinion.

CHAPTER VI.
KINGSHIP.
' He entered the sanctuary,' says Cardinal de Retz chap.
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 foundations,
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 opening.
The breakdown of military rule, consternation caused
by plot upon plot, the fact that four years of dictator
ship had brought settlement no nearer, all gave an
irresistible impetus to the desire to try fresh paths.
Sir Christopher Packe, an active and influential re
presentative of the city of London and once Lord
Mayor, startled the House one day (Feb. 23, 1657)
bv asking leave to bring forward a proposal for a new
government, in which the chief magistrate was to

436 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book take upon himself the title of king, and the parlia-
— ,1 — - ment was to consist of two Houses. Violent con-
1658. troversy immediately broke 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 remodeUed, 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 aAvay, and in the new project a clause was
passed against taxation without consent of parlia
ment, 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 recognition of Oliver's
authority. All these high-handed acts, were now

1657.

• KINGSHIP PROPOSED. 437
formally stamped as wrong. It was laid down that chap.
persons legally chosen by free election could only be ' '
excluded from parliament by judgment 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 Cromwell was
whether the greater title did not carry with it
lessened power ; whether, although his style and
dignity were undoubtedly exalted, the exaltation in
substance was not rather that of the parliament.
Assent to a change in name and form was at bottom
a revolution in policy, and in this revolution 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 permeating influence even
through the motions of revolutionary politics. The
lawyers argued for a king, and their points were
cogent. The ' office of a king, they said, is inter
woven with the whole body of the law and the
whole working of national institutions. The pre
rogatives of a king with all their limits and dimen
sions 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

1653

438 OLIVER CROMWELL.
them was a demonstration that the protectorate
had brought a settlement, and this was just what
jess, the protectorate had as yet notoriously 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
he had followed rather than led in all the successive
stages of their revolutionary fervour, whose en
thusiasms 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

ARGUMENTS FOR A KING. 439
person; it would one day bring back the exiled chap.
line. Cromwell dealt very faithfully with them in - VL
reply. He liked the title as little as they liked it, 1657,
a mere feather in a hat, a toy for a child. But
had they not themselves proposed it in the Instru
ment ? Here he glanced at Lambert, formerly the
main author of such a proposal in 1653, and now
in 1657 the main instigator of opposition. Crom
well continued in the same vein of energetic re
monstrance, 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 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

440 OLIVER CROMWELL.
garden of Ludlow's country house at Monkstown
in Dublin Bay. ' You that are here,' he said, ' may
165s! 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 keystone 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
constitution 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 com
pleted 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 White
hall. He replied in a tone of dignity not without
pathos, 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 con
sideration. Then began a series of parleys and
conferences that lasted for the whole of the month
of April, with endless dubitancies, postponements,
and adjournments, iteration and reiteration of argu
ments. Cromwell's speeches were found ' dark and

RESENTMENT OF THE ARMY. 441
promiscuous,' nor can a modern reader wonder ; and
he undoubtedly showed extraordinary readiness in
keeping off the point and baulking the eager inter
locutor. 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 '
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
subverting the old.' He thinks the gaudy feather
in the hat of authority a matter of little concern

1657.

442 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book either way. If the army men were foolish in
— !¦ — - resenting it with so much heat, the heat of those
1658. 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 dissension on the kingship was an ex
plosion 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 justified by the event. When
news of this daring move against both the deter
mination 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 greatest injury they could have

REFUSAL OF THE CROWN. 443
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 West
minster 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 doubt-
ingly 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 places 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 conservative statesman, yet
eulogise with equal fervour the political sagacity of
the army, who as a matter of fact resisted almost

1657.

444 OLIVER CROMWELL.
every conservative step that he wished to take,
while they hurried him on to all those revolutionary
1658." steps to which he was most averse. However' this
may be, we may at least be sure that ' few men were
better judges of what might be achieved by daring,'
and that if he determined 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
Westminster Hall, and under it was placed the
royal Coronation Chair of Scotland wThich had been
brought from the abbey. On the table lay a
magnificent 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

CROMWELL AGAIN INSTALLED. 445
Lord Protector in a purple robe, with a sceptre in chap.
his hand, with the sword of justice girt about him, ^
and his eyes fixed upon the Bible ! Long may you l
enjoy them all to your own comfort and the comfort
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 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 Pnstrument 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 coun
cillor was an oath of allegiance to the person and
authority of the Lord Protector and his successors,

446 OLIVER CROMWELL.

BOOK and he was clothed with the more than regal right

v.

of deciding who the successor should be. On the
1658. 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
documents 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 chap.
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 afterwards 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

448 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book installation in the splendours of Whitehall the aged
— ^ — - woman passed away. ' My Lord Protector's mother,'
1658." writes Thurloe in November, ' of ninety-four years
old, died the last 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

HIS FAMILY. 449
love them very dearly. Truly I am not able as yet to write CHAP.
much. I am weary, and rest, ever thine.' , VI1-
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
purpose, taking life as it came, not shaping it.
When 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 acute-
ness, 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, Fleetwood had married Bridget Crom
well, widow of the brave and keen-witted Ireton.
Elizabeth, said to have been Oliver's favourite
daughter, was married to Claypole, a Northampton
shire gentleman, of respectable family and estate.
These too were staying at the Cockpit in White
hall 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 neces
sity, 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 frequently pray for her and for him. Truly
2 F

450 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK they are dear to me, very dear ; and I am in fear
— ,1 — - lest Satan should deceive them — knowing how
1658." 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
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 re
ligious studies of the place, he helped the produc
tion 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
learning, 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

HIS COURT. 451
at court was like on occasions of state, and the chap.
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 exchanged between
us ; and from thence we were had into a gallery, next the
river, where we walked- with His Highness about half an
hour, and then took our leaves, and were conducted back
ao-ain to our houses, after the same manner as we were
brought.' Baxter teUs 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

452 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK to hear my judgment about liberty of conscience,
— il — ' which he pretended to be most zealous for, before
1658. 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 company 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 dis
course and ecstatic exercises. John Howe who
had first attracted Cromwell by preaching for two
hours, and then turning the hour-glass for a third,
has told us that on a Sunday or a fastday, 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 again into the pulpit, and
prayed for another hour, and gave them another
sermon of about an hour's length ; and then con
cluded 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, adminis
tration. Blake, Monk, Lockhart, Thurloe, are con
spicuous names in a list that might easily be made
longer of men of bold, diligent, and attentive stamp.

AGENTS AND COUNSELLORS. 453
Familiars Cromwell had none. The sage and in- chap.
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 delibera
tions. 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 par
liamentary discussion. But nobody knew better the
value of consultation in good faith, of serious con
ference 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 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

454 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK himself; then he would fall again to his serious
— <1 — - and great business.' This did not prevent persons
1 fi^^ J. A
1658. around him from knowing that whatever resolu
tions 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 pre
sent state of things, and discern the future by a
careful review of the past. ' Oliver Cromwell, who
astonished mankind by his intelligence,' he pro
ceeds, ' 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
satisfaction, and not so much consider others.'

CHAPTER VIII.
FOREIGN POLICY.
We have all learned that no inconsiderable part chap.
of history is a record of the illusions of statesmen.  ,1—
Was Cromwell's foreign policy one of them? To 165s!
the prior question what his foreign policy was, no
single comprehensive answer can be given. It was
mixed ; defensive and aggressive, pacific and warlike ;
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 a precedent, he was compelled to change
alliances, 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.
It proved to be an object that did not happen to fit
in with the nature of things. Unluckily in the
shoals and shifting 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 fea
tures the policy of the Commonwealth before him.1
1 See above iv., chap. v. 334-7.

456 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book What went beyond purely national aims and was
— f — - in a sense his own, however imposing, was of
1658. questionable service either to the State or to the
Cause. At the outset his policy was peace. The Com
monwealth had gone to war with the Dutch, and
Cromwell'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 commercial, 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 conscience 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 consciousness 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 Protector intended to create
a protestant ascendency in continental Europe, and
to assert the rights and claims of English ships and
English trade at sea. The union of all the protes
tant churches had long been a dream of more than
one pious zealot, but Cromwell crystallized the
aspirations after spiritual communion into schemes

PEACE HIS FIRST POLICY. 457
of secular policy. In spirit it was not very unlike chap.
the Arab invaders who centuries before had swept _^L.
into Europe, the sword in one hand and the Koran \Hg
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 greatness and ascendency
(Seeley). There is no reason to think that any
such sacrifice of national happiness to national
ascendency 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 worshippers hold
necessary for the success of his schemes, a European
coalition would have been formed against the Eng
lish 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

458 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book money down. Lambert opposed the policy of ag-
— il — - gression in the Spanish Indies. The scene, he said,
1658! 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 Provi
dence. The design would cost little more than
laying up the ships, and there was a chance of
immense profit. The proceedings 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 ago, 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 Paul Jones's Ranger. But modern public

1654-1658.

DESIGNS FOR THE FLEET. 459
law, such as it was, did not extend to the Spanish chap.
main. It is true that Spain refused to grant free- - y " J "
dom from the inquisition and free sailing in the
West Indies, and these might have been legitimate
grounds of war. But it is hard to contend that
they were the real or the only grounds. His
torians may differ whether the expedition to the
West Indies was a scheme for trade, territorial
aggrandisement, and naked plunder of Spanish
silver ; or only a spirited protestant demonstration
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 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 an
other to the West Indies. In each case the instruc
tions 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,

460 OLIVER CROMWELL.
hoping to retrieve their name, acquired the prize of
Jamaica. These proceedings brought the Protector
1658! directly within the sphere of the great European
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 bar
barous expulsion of Moors and Jews she 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 il, was called by
flatterers, the Great. ' Like a ditch,' said Spanish
humour — 'the more you dig away from it, the greater
1 Corbet's Spanish War, 1585-7, viii-ix. — Navy Records Society, 1898.

WAR WITH SPAIN. 461
the ditch.' The Treaty of Westphalia (1648), the chap.
fruit of the toil, the foresight, and the genius of v vnL
Richelieu, though others gathered it, weakened the J^ss
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. Tra
ditional 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 protes
tant powers were the adversaries 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
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

462 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK pretensions never irritated Mazarin, of whom it has
_^  - been aptly said (Mignet) that his ambition raised
less, 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
between the puritan chief who held the English
to be the chosen people, and the Italian cardi
nal wdio 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 consoli
date 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 friend
ship between 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 themselves 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

MAZARIN. 463
penetrated Cromwell's idea of making himself the chap.
guardian both of the Huguenots in France, and of '
the protestant interest throughout Europe. In the ^ss!
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 Cromwell'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 con
federation of protestant powers, with England at
the head of them and France acting in concert. To
be indifferent to such doings, he said, is a great sin,
and a deeper sin still is it to be blind to them from
policy or ambition. He associated his own person
ality 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 Crom
well 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 magnanimously 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

1653- 1658.

464 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book 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 Pro
tector 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 wras thus reached among the ruling and
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, wTas 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

CASE OF THE VAUDOIS. 465
imagination by the Bartholomew Massacre in chap.
France, of which Burleigh said that it was the '
most horrible crime since the Crucifixion. No \H8]
question of public opinion and no difficulties at the
exchequer prevented 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
weU so far as to sign the treaty of Westminster, but
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 phase 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 preamble
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
2 G

466 OLIVER CROMWELL.
the common enemy to allow the Christian world
at length to enjoy peace. England is to send
1658. 6000 men for the siege of Gravelines, Mardyke, and
Dunkirk, 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
described 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 Pro
tector 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 van
quished, 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 Mardyke was
taken, and then formally handed over to the English
.representative (October 1657). It was the first
foot-hold gained by England on continental 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

ENGLISH TROOPS IN FLANDERS. 467
the English Republic that he had received a call chap.
¦ • • • VIII
from God, but to introduce union and friendship , 1
among the princes of Europe. Cool observers from i658]
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 xil, astounded Europe by
marching twenty thousand men across some thirteen
miles of frozen 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
barbarities in Piedmont. When a new Emperor
came to be chosen, only three of the electors were
protestant, and one of the protestant three actually
voted for the Austrian Leopold. The presence
of Cromwell's troops in Flanders naturally filled

468 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book the Dutch with uneasiness, and inclined one pro-
— il  ' testant republic again to take arms against another.
1658. Finally, to hasten the decline of Spain was directly
to prepare for the ascendency of France; of a country,
that is to say, where all the predominant influences
were catholic, and would inevitably revive in unre
strained 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 preponderance 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 ascendency in
Europe had been less hard to reconcile with actual
conditions than it was, how was he to execute it ?
How was the conversion of England into a crusad
ing military State, and the vast increase 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

FAILURE OF A PROTESTANT LEAGUE. 469
cost of the war with Spain that prevented Oliver chap.
from being able to help the protestant against the v_^_
catholic cantons in Switzerland, zealous as were jggg"
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 ship
ping 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 con
tented people and a settled realm. Cromwell, not
withstanding 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 con
scious author of a broad system of colonial expan
sion. What is undoubtedly true is that such ideas
were then alive. Nor had the famous traditions of
the Elizabethans ever died. The Commonwealth

470 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book from the time of its birth, while Cromwell was still
— r — - engaged in the reduction of Scotland, had shown
1653- 1658. 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 Republic deliber
ately 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, CromweU's
colonial policy was that of his predecessors, 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 tempera
ment we have to take its drawbacks. For his life
time 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 recom
pense. 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 incom
parable 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- chap.
day, they said that every clerk who had read,
Rousseau's New Heloiisa, 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

472 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book House of Lords had been alive, and had also by
— ,1 — - miracle been sincerely in the humour to work for
!65s! national pacification, to restore it might have
tended 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 conviction 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 parliamentary draughtsman. 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 Lock-
hart 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 decided to begin with, whether to make
his Lords strong or weak : strong enough to curb

THE OTHER HOUSE. 473
the Commons, and yet weak enough for the Com- chap.
mons to curb them. The riddle seems unanswered to -
this day. He forgot too that by removing so many 1658"
men of experience and capacity away from the
Commons, he was impairing the strength of his
own government 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 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 re-appeared.
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 government 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 combinations against the pro
testant interest, the discord within that interest

474 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book itself, the danger of a Spanish invasion to restore
_ Y_- the Stuarts, the deadly perils of disunion at home.
\Hf 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 Parliament,
the opposition worked up petitions in the city.
These petitions were designed by the malcontents
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 parliament who
even held commissions from the king. The Pro
tector, 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 WhaUey and Desborough, who were to be
in command of the guard that night. He asked

THE COMMONS RESIST. 475
them if they had heard no news, and on their saying chap.
no, he again asked if they had not heard of a -
petition. He bade them go to Westminster. On 1658-
their way they heard some of the soldiers 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 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-

476 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book fusion ? And if this be so, I do assign it to this
— il — - cause : your not assenting: to what you did invite
1658. me t° hy 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 con
vention. 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, and the constitution
broke down. This 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 ceaseless dissolvents Crom
well heroically persisted, and he kept general
order. Still, in face of such a spectacle and such

1658.

DISSOLUTION. 477
results, it is hardly possible to claim for the chap.
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 insur
rection 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 two 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
government against which they were directed.
This did not lighten the necessity of striking hard
at what Henry Cromwell caUed 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 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 wTas in
their custody at Hull, extracted his secrets from

478 OLIVER CROMWELL.
him by pretending to favour his aims. The high
courts of justice before which these and other
1658. prisoners of the same stamp were arraigned, did
not please steady lawyers like Whitelocke, 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 Crom
well's reign were conducted wdth temper and fair
ness : 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

1658.

FINANCIAL STRAITS. 479
of the Irish themselves. Fleetwood is sure they chap. TAT
spend as little public money except for public needs
as any government ever did ; but their expenses,
he admits, were extraordinary, and could not with
safety be retrenched. In June things are still
declared to be at a standstill. The sums required
could not possibly be supplied without a parlia
ment, and in that direction endless perils lurked.
Truly, I think, says Thurloe, in words that
deserve attention, ' that nothing but some un
expected Providence can remove the present diffi
culties, 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 suggested 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

480 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book everybody knew, must be faced, what gain could
— r — - be expected from throwing the same questions on
1658. 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 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 rugosi
ties ; 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 revolu
tionary 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 in 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

QUESTION OF A NEW PARLIAMENT. 481
mighty personality should be withdrawn. This chap.
judgment from such a man is worth a whole chapter v
of our modern dissertation. It was the whole truth,
to none known better than to the Lord Protector
himself.

2 H

CHAPTER X.
THE CLOSE.
book One parting beam of splendour broke through the
 ^ — > clouded skies. The Protector, in conformity with
i658! 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 Dun
kirk. The famous Turenne was in general com
mand 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

battle of the dunes. 483
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 1658'
compliment that he had never before been 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 eyewitness, ' pike in hand, charged
with such stubborn vigour the eight Spanish
battalions posted on the high ground of the downs,
that in face of musketry fire and stout resistance
the English drove them headlong from their
position.' 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 a,t the hand of the soldier who had trained
that invincible band, and to have felt a thrill of
honourable pride at the gallantry of their country
men. 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
according to treaty to the English, and Lockhart at
once took possession in the name of the Lord Pro
tector. 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
1 Bourelly, Cromwell et Mazarin, p. 261. Cheruel, Hist, de France,
sous Mazarin, iii. 292-5.

484 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK to enable France to recover it by sword or purse,
— !¦ — ' and so in time they did. Meanwhile the Ironsides
1658. 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
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 mili
tary 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 com
posure into the confused and jarring scene. It rather
gave new nourishment to the root of evil. ' The Lord
is pleased to do wonderfully for his Highness,' said
Thurloe after Dunkirk, ' 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 con-

CROMWEL /S PLACE IN EUROPE. 485
stituted the central weakness of the protectorate, chap,
and prevented the real settlement of a governing •  ,—
system. For the Protector himself the civil 1 '
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 himself 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 dauntless sentinel's relief
soon sounded. Death had already this year stricken
his household more than one sore blow. Rich, who
had married Frances Cromwell in November, died
in February. Elizabeth Claypole 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 ceaseless devotion by the bedside of
the dearest of his children. Hewas 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) 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

486 OLIVER cromwMl.
book restored and made further serviceable in this work.
_^J  • Never was there a greater stock of prayers going
i658" 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 confident 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 them he put the moving
question, so deep with penitential meaning, so
pathetic in its humility and misgiving, in its wist
ful recall of the bright bygone dawn of life in the
soul : — ' Tell me, is it possible to fall from grace ? '
' No, it is not possible,' said the minister. ' Then,'
said the dying Cromwell, ' I 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
consoled 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

HIS DEATH. 487
trample on the dust of a poor worm, for they are chap.
thy people too.' All the night of the 2nd <vf\ X"
September he was very restless, and ' there being 1 8'
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 rise 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
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, lawgivers, 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

488 OLIVER CROMWELL.
BOOK date was the anniversary (January 30, 1661) of the
— 1 — ' execution of King Charles twelve years before.
1653
1658. ' 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 West
minster 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 in.,
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
1 So I read Pepys. In any case, however, evidence points to the fact
that the heads were ultimately fixed on the roof outside.

CONCLUSION. 489
was by his military genius, by the might of the chap.
legions that he created and controlled and led to -
victory upon victory ; it was at Marston and Naseby, 1658-
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 swordsman
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 strategist,
the modern expert ranks Cromwell among the fore
most masters of the rough art of war in every branch.
Above all, he created the instrument which in dis
cipline, 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
aspects of his special policies on this occasion or the
other, after we have scanned all the secondary

490 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book features of his rule, this "is still what in a single
—~il — - sentence defines the true place of Cromwell in our
1653- i • ,
1658. 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 contemporaries
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 resource, 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 founda
tions 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 High-
ness's 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 ensigns of supreme power, but the

CONCLUSION. 491
reality of it was not his for a day. The exchequer chap.
was so dilapidated, that he underwent the humilia- . X'
tion of begging Mazarin to lend him fifty thousand 1658-
pounds. The Council of War sought an early
opportunity of setting up their claim to military
predominance. The majority in the new parlia
ment 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 purchase. 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 sympathy 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

492 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book was recalled, — the cavaliers infuriated by old defeat
— ,1 — - and present ruin, the bishops eager to clamber into
1658.' 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, contumelies, and heartsickness of hope
perpetually deferred, had soured him and blotted
out from his mind the principles and aspirations of
the old days when he had stood by the side of Pym
and Hampden against Laud, Strafford, and Charles.
The monarchy 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 cer
tainly 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

1658.

CONCLUSION. 493
themselves, are both less to the ruler's honour chap.
and less likely to last. ' What we gain in a free v
way, it is better than twice as much in a forced,
and will be more truly ours and' our posterity's '
{ante, p. 233) ; and the safest test of any con
stitution is its acceptance 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 the
greatest affairs, we only repeat that he had the
instinct of government, and this is a very different
thing from either a taste for the 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 Race, 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 must ever 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 tests and justifies
all means.

494 OLIVER CROMWELL.
When it is claimed that no English ruler did
more than Cromwell to shape the future of the
1658! land he governed, we run some risk of straining
history only to procure incense for retrograde
ideals. Many would contend that Thomas Crom
well 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 un-
heroic Walpole. The development of the English
constitution has in truth proceeded on lines that
Cromwell profoundly disliked. The idea of a parlia
ment always sitting and actively reviewing the de
tails of administration, was in his sight an intolerable
mischief. It was almost the only system 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 CromweU that Noncon
formity 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 RebeUion and Cromwell
himself had sprung ? It was not a man, not even
such a man as Oliver, it was the same underlying
spiritual forces which made the Rebellion, that also
held fast against the Restoration. It would hardly

CONCLUSION. 495
be more forced to say that Cromwell was the founder chap,
of Nonconformity. -
It has been called a common error of our day to 1658'
ascribe far too much to the designs and the influence
of eminent men, of rulers, and of governments. The
reproach is just and should impress us. The momen
tum 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 have more to do with
the progress of the world's affairs, than the delibe
rate views of even the most determined and far-
sighted of its individual leaders. Thirty years
after the death of the Protector, a more successful
revolution came about. The law was made more
just, the tribunals were purified, the rights of con
science 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
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 distance that the minds of men had travelled.
With the death of Cromwell, though the free

496 OLIVER CROMWELL.
book churches remained as nurseries of stronghearted
— ,1 — • civil feeling, the brief life of puritan theocracy in
165s! England expired. 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 procession of strenuous master-spirits with
Milton and Cromwell at their head. Political ends
miscarry, and the revolutionary leader treads a path
of fire. It is our true wisdom to learn how to
combine sane and equitable historic verdicts on
the event, with a just value in our study of the
actor for those eternal qualities of high endeavour,
on which amid limitless change in fashion, formula,
direction, standard, and ideal, in all times and places
the world's best hopes depend.

END.

INDEX

Ad walton, 139.
Agitators (army representatives),
220-22, 231, 246.
Agreement of the People (1647), 229,
234; (1648), 234; (1649), 234,
374, 445.
American Constitution, Instrument
of Government compared with,
377-8.
Anabaptism, Cromwell's relation to,
432.
Andrews, Dean of Limerick, 33.
Anglican Church —
Arminianism in, 54.
Assumptions of, 21.
Charles i.'s devotion to, 208-9.
Cromwell's attitude towards, 384,
431.
Ecclesiastical courts, 59.
Endowments of, coveted, 177.
Episcopacy, abolition of, proposed,
151 ; excluded from toleration,
377, 383 ; forbidden by ordin
ance, 384, 387.
Influence of, after the Restora
tion, 5.
Reform of, attempted (1641),
93-5.
Westminster Assembly, non-
attendance of Anglicans at,
154.
Anne of Denmark, 24.
Archers, 120.
Areopagitica, 166.
Argyle, Marquis of, Hamilton vic
torious over, 248 ; Cromwell's
bargain with, 256 ; defeat of,
325.
Arminianism denounced at Synod
of Dort, 9 ; Pym's attitude to
wards, 40 ; doctrines of, 54-6 ;
parliamentary declaration against,
62. 9,

Armour, disuse of, 120.
Arms, 120-22.
Army, the —
Agitators, 220-22, 231, 246.
Agreement of the People issued
by (1647), 229, 234.
Case of the Army Stated issued
by, 234.
Control and numbers of, regu
lated by Instrument of Govern
ment, 376, 394; control retained
by Cromwell, 396.
Debates of, 230-31, 233-41.
Depression of, 249.
Disbandment of, attempted, 219-
21, 231.
Heads of the Proposals of, 233,
374.
Legislative incapacity of, 364.
London, march on (1648), 271.
Mutiny in, 246-7.
New Model, composition of, 178-
80 ; contemporary estimates
of, 184.
Parliament threatened by, 225-
226.
Remonstrance presented to parlia-
ment by (1648), 262.
Sickness of, in Ireland, 305.
Temper of, after Naseby, 230.
Artillery, 121-2.
Assassination of Cromwell plotted,
399, 427-8.

Baillie, Boebbt, cited, on Straf
ford's trial, 84 ; on Independents,
160 ; on confiscation of Church
endowments, 177 ; on the New
Model, 184.
 Major-General William, at
Marston, 143, 147 ; ordered to
surrender to Cromwell, 255.
I

498

OLIVER CROMWELL.

Barebones' Parliament. See Little
Parliament.
Basing House, storming of, 198-
199.
Baxter, Richard, ecclesiastical views
of, 95 ; two interviews with
Cromwell, 451-2 ; cited, on re
ligious ferment in 1644, 153 ; on
the New Model, 179-80, 230 ; on
Cromwell's ecclesiastical settle
ment, 385-6.
Beard, Dr., 9, 16.
Behemoth, cited, 56.
Berwick, pacification of, 67 ; Crom
well's recovery of, 256.
Bible, the, Cromwell's acceptance
of, 51-3; Walton's polyglot ver
sion of, 450.
Biddle, John, Cromwell's protection
of, 423.
Blake, Admiral, naval successes
of, 205, 335, 337; ability of,
452 ; sent by Cromwell to
Mediterranean, 459 ; death of,
465.
Bossuet, cited, on Queen Henrietta
Maria, 27-9 ; on universal history,
369.
Bourchier, Elizabeth, wife of Crom
well, 12.
Bradshaw, John, president atCharles'
trial, 279, 282-3; withstands
Cromwell at the dissolution of
Long Parliament, 353 ; in first
parliament of Protectorate, 389 ;
withstands Cromwell's compul
sion of parliament (1654), 393;
Cromwell's efforts against, 416 ;
remains of, desecrated, 488 ;
energy and capacity of, 355.
Bramhall, John, Cromwell's opinion
of, 95.
Bristol, royalist capture of, 140 ;
capitulation of, to Fairfax, 196 ;
Naylor at, 422.
Brooke, Lord, death of, 135.
Bunker Hill, Marston Moor com
pared with, 175.
Burke, Edmund, Cromwell esti
mated by, 2 ; Cromwell and Ire
ton compared with, 233-6.
Burnet, Gilbert, cited, on Cromwell's
Latin, 10; on Henrietta Maria,
31.

Burton, Henry, 63-4, 152.
Butler, Bishop, opinion on Charles'
trial, 280-81.

Calvinism, Arminianism crushed
by, 9 ; scope of, 48-50, 57.
Cambridge, Cromwell at Sydney
Sussex College, 9 ; his repre
sentation of, in Short Parliament,
68 ; in Long Parliament, 77 ; his
activity in (1642), 123.
Carlyle, Thomas, estimate of Crom
well, 3 ; contrast of French
Jacobins and English sectaries,
229 ; estimate of Charles' execu
tion, 285 ; enthusiasm for action
without rhetoric, 297 ; descrip
tion of Dunbar, 320.
Carnwath, Lord, at Naseby, 191,
Case of the Army Stated, 234.
Catholicism —
Court, at, 25, 44.
Cromwell's reply to manifesto of
prelates, 306-9.
France, predominant in, 43-4,
461, 468.
Holland, in, 44.
Ireland, in, 100, 294-5, 424;
Ormonde's Kilkenny treaty,
295.
Laud's attitude towards, 38.
Persecution of, 433.
Toleration denied to, 167, 377,
383, 432.
Cavalry tactics, 119, 122, 131-2,
144-7, 190.
Chalgrove Field, 136.
Chancery, Court of, abolition of,
365 ; Cromwell's attempted re
form of, 380.
Charles I. —
Chronological Sequence of Career.
Attempts religious coercion iu
Scotland, 66 ; persecutes Sir
John Eliot, 69, 90, 297 ; dis
misses Short Parliament, 70 ;
abandons Strafford, 87 ; de
clares adherence to Church of
England, 98 ; returns from
Scotland, 106 ; approaches
parliamentary leaders, 108
impeaches five members, 109
raises royal standard, 113

INDEX.

499

Charles I. — continued.
gains military successes, 140 ;
storms Leicester, 183; Naseby,
188, 191 ; escapes from Ox
ford, 201 ; surrenders to the
Scots, 202 ; considers terms of
settlement, 207 ; at Holmby,
215 ; removed from Holmby,
221-2; escapes from Hampton
Court to Carisbrooke Castle,
242-3 ; concludes secret treaty
with the Scots, 245 ; negotiates
with parliamentary leaders at
Newport, 259-60 ; transferred
to Hurst Castle, 270 ; conveyed
to Windsor, 272 ; trial, 279-83 ;
caution to Duke of Gloucester,
341-2 ; execution and burial,
283-4; Cromwell's judgment of
the execution, 284-5 ; Fox and
Carlyle on the execution, 285 ;
popular sentiment aroused by
the execution, 368.
Personal Characteristics. Appear
ance, 259-60 ; artistic taste,
10, 26 ; blindness to events,
211-12; determination, 195-6,
208, 228, 243 ; devotion to the
queen, 26, 213 ; to the church,
208-9.
General Traits, 22, 24-6, 69,
138, 195, 211-12, 228, 283.
Charles n. — Sent to France, 213 ;
Scottish negotiations with (1650),
313 ; advance from Stirling to
Worcester, 327; flight, 330;
connives at plots to assassinate
Cromwell, 399 ; royalist's inter
view with, at Cologne, 403 ;
restoration of, 492.
Chatham, estimate of Cromwell,
454.
Chillingworth, William, 38, 117,
199.
Church, national (see also Anglican
Church)— Cromwell's importance in his
tory of, 432.
Establishment and endowment
of, provided by Instrument
of Government, 377.
Government of, debated, 158-
60.
Iconoclasm in, 95.

Church, national — continued.
Presbyterian system intro
duced into, 162.
Separation of, from State,
advocated by Milton, 382.
Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of,
banishment of Strafford advo
cated by, 86 ; Charles' overtures
to, 108 ; return of, from exile,
492 ; character of, 96 ; cited —
on Cromwell's characteristics, 2,
92-3 ; on Essex, 181 ; on Inde
pendents and Presbyterians, 2 1 9 ;
on burial of Charles I., 283-4 ;
on Drogheda massacre, 303 ; on
Cromwell's deliberation regard
ing kingship, 441.
Claypole, John, opposes bill re
garding Major-Generals, 425 ;
marriage of, to Elizabeth Crom
well, 449.
Clonmel, siege of, 305.
Coke, Sir Edward, 11, 15, 22, 68,
376.
Colchester, siege of, 118, 252.
Coleman's defence of Erastianism,
160.
Cologne, royalist interview with
Charles n. at, 403.
Committee of both kingdoms, 176,
183, 246.
Commonwealth, proclamation of,
288.
Cony, case of, 404 ; popular sym
pathy with, 412.
Cotton, Sir Robert, 20, 69.
Council of State, establishment of,
288 ; Cromwell's report to, on
Ireland and Scotland, 295 ;
promptitude and efficiency of,
326, 335-7.
Court of High Commission, illegali
ties of, 63 ; abolition of, 89.
Crawford, Lawrence, rebuked by
Cromwell, 126.
Cromwell —
Bridget (daughter of Oliver),
married to Ireton, 206 ; to
Fleetwood, 449.
Elizabeth (daughter of Oliver),
married to Claypole, 449 ;
death of, 485.
 (wife of Oliver), 12.
Frances (daughter of Oliver), 450.

500

OLIVER CROMWELL.

Cromwell — continued.
Henry, Sir (grandfather of
Oliver), 7-8.
Henry (son of Oliver), Cromwell's
instructions to, in Ireland,
310 ; representative of Ireland
in Little Parliament, 360 ;
correspondence with Thurloe,
396, 411-12, 424; financial
straits of, in Ireland, 478 ;
suspicious of combination, 480 ;
comment on Cromwell's posi
tion in London, 439-40 ;
opinion on the kingship, 441-2 ;
estimate of the situation in
1658, 480-81 ; ability of, 390,
449.
Henry, incident of the scarlet
cloak, 425.
Mary (daughter of Oliver),
married to Fauconberg, 450 ;
intercedes for Hewitt, 478.
Oliver —
Chronological Sequence of
Career. — Descent and family,
7-8 ; early life, 8-9, 12-13 ;
marriage, 12 ; religious
gloom, 13; member for
Huntingdon, 14 ; first speech
in Parliament, 16 ; removal
to S. Ives, 16 ; to Ely, 17 ;
dispute over Huntingdon
charter, 17 ; death of eldest
son (1639), 17; member for
Cambridge in Short Parlia
ment, 68 ; in Long Parlia
ment, 77 ; service on Parlia
mentary Committees, 93 ;
Edgehill, 123-4 ; conversa
tion with Hampden on
choice of officers, 124-6 ;
obstruction in Ely Cathedral,
128 ; Marston Moor, 143-9 ;
proposes abolition of episco
pacy, 151 ; attacks Lord
Manchester, 171-3; ap
pointed lieutenant - general
under Fairfax, 182 ; Naseby,
185-91 ; thanked and re
warded by parliament, 200 ;
negotiates with the army
for disbandment, 221, 231 ;
threatens parliament with
military force, 225-6 ; army

Cromwell — continued.
debates, 233-41 ; operations
in South Wales, 252-3;
Preston, 254-6 ; Charles'
trial, 279, 282 ; Irish cam
paign, 299-309 ; thanked
and rewarded by parliament,
313 ; Dunbar, 316-22 ; ill
ness, 323 ; advance to
Perth, 327 ; to Worcester,
328-9 ; battle of Worcester,
329-30; thanked and re
warded by parliament, 333 ;
dissolution of Rump Parlia
ment, 350-53 ; made Lord
Protector (1653), 372-3 ;
legislative activity, 379-86 ;
compulsion of first parlia
ment of Protectorate, 392-3 ;
plot to assassinate, 399 ;
purge of parliament (1656),
418 ; plots to assassinate,
427-8 ; refuses kingship,
443; again installed as Lord
Protector (1657), 444-5; dis
solves second parliament
(1658), 475-6; illness and
death, 485-7 ; remains dese
crated, 488.
Personal Characteristics, etc.
Affection, 447-9, 485.
Appearance and manner,
77-81, 232.
Bible, attitude towards, 51-3.
Broadmindedness, 6, 237.
Caution, 81," 114, 217, 270,
333, 461, 490.
Compassion and tenderness,
8, 81, 255, 363, 447-9.
Constructive statesmanship,
deficiency of, 397, 477.
Courage and fortitude, 6, 8,
18, 81, 217, 318.
Education, views on, 11 ;
furtherance of, 381, 450.
Energy, 6, 81, 93, 182, 217,
333, 470.
Faith, 18, 51-4, 80, 315,
317-18, 369, 485-6.
Finance, incapacity for,
418.
Force, distrust of, 232-3,
492-3.
Form and dogma, indiffer-

INDEX.

501

Cromwell — continued.
ence to, 237, 338, 372,
382.
Geniality, 453.
Honour, 6.
Hopefulness, 186, 317-18,
333, 461.
Impetuosity and passionate-
ness, 17, 79-80, 217, 232,
351, 453.
Jesting, love of, 81, 216.
Legal apprehension, incapa
city of, 418.
Military excellence, 489, ct
passim.
Moderation, 229, 334, 402.
Moral unity, 333.
Music, love of, 450.
Mysticism, 315.
National sentiment, 266,
316.
Order and government, in
stinct for, 381, 406, 437,
493.
Persistency and patience, 6,
114, 182, 279, 461, 485,
490.
Popularity with his troops,
216.
Public opinion, attitude to
wards, 492.
Reserve, 81, 264.
Sagacity, 114, 226, 454;
lack of sagacity, 362.
Speech, style and manner of,
390.
Sport, love of, 450.
Toleration, 126, 166, 194,
197, 205, 363.
Unity, desire for, 232, 237.
Oliver, Sir (uncle of Oliver), 8.
Richard, Sir (great-grandfather
of Oliver), 7.
Richard (son of Oliver), Crom
well's admonition to, 53 ; char
acter aud tastes of, 449, 490-1.
Richard (uncle of Oliver), 16.
Robert (father of Oliver), 8, 14.
Thomas, 7, 494.
Culpeper, 108.

' De paucitate credendoehm,'
157.

De Retz, cited, 227, 356, 435.
Deane, Admiral, 336-7.
Declaration of Right, 495.
Denmark, Anne of, 24 ; Cromwell's
treaty with, 456.
Derby House Committee, 170,
256.
Desborough, John, republican form
of government advocated by, 342 ;
anxiety of, regarding elections,
412 ; introduces bill regarding
Major-Generals, 425 ; opposes
Cromwell's acceptance of king
ship, 442.
D'Ewes, Henrietta Maria described
by, 30-31.
Diggers, 292, 339.
Dort, Synod of, 9, 54, 58.
Drogheda massacre, 299-303.
Dunbar, Cromwell's position at,
317-19; battle of, 320-22; Crom
well's estimate of, 54, 325.
Dunes, battle of the, 483.
Dunkirk, treaty for cession of, 466 ;
captureof, and cession to England,
482-3.
Durham, college at, founded by
Cromwell, 450.

Edgehill, 123-4, 142.
Education, Cromwell's views on,
11 ; his furtherance of, 381,
450.
Ejectors and triers, 384.
Elector Palatine, 110, 197.
Eliot, Sir John, Cromwell contrasted
with, 10 ; resolutions of, put, in
defiance of Charles, 15 ; imprison
ment and death of, 69, 297.
Elizabeth, Queen, Henry Cromwell
knighted by, 7 ; policy of, 23-4,
35, 469 ; Ireland, under, 99 ;
*duplicity of, 210.
Ely, Cromwell's removal to, 17 ;
his defence of, 185 ; his obstruc
tion in the cathedral, 128.
Engagers, 256, 312.
Episcopacy. See Anglican Church.
Erastianism, 159-60.
Essex, Earl of, advocates Strafford's
execution, 86 ; unsuccessful
against Oxford, 140 ; successful
at Gloucester, 140 ; escapes from

502

OLIVER CROMWELL.

Plymouth, 170; Scotch commis
sioners' debate with, on Crom
well's conduct, 173-4; resignation
of, 181 ; characteristics of, 136 ;
contemporary estimate of, 114.
Exeter, capture of, by Fairfax, 199.
Exeter, Lord, inquiry of, on horse-
racing, 409.

Faction, 92.
Fairfax, Sir Thomas, at Marston
Moor, 143, 145-7 ; appointed
parliamentarian commander-in-
chief, 178, 204; petitions for
Cromwell's appointment as lieu
tenant-general, 182; appreciation
of Cromwell, 185 ; at Naseby,
185-8, 190; Bristol capitulates
to, 196 ; successes of, in Devon,
199; at Colchester, 118, 252;
treatment of mutineers, 292 ;
withdraws from prominent posi
tion, 313-14; energy and ability
of, 139, 188,256; scrupulousness
of, 314; otherwise mentioned,
141, 225, 244, 276, 283, 328.
Falkland, Lord, Cromwell con
trasted with, 10 ; abstains from
voting on Strafford's attainder,
86 ; court party supported by,
96; Charles' overtures to, 108;
death of, 135 ; estimate of,
135-6.
Fauconberg, Lord, marriage of, to
Lady Mary Cromwell, 450 ; sent
by Cromwell to Calais, 482-3.
Fifth Monarchy men, 291, 364,
428.
Fleet- Cromwell supported by, 400.
Mutiny in, 246.
Organisation of, by Council of
State, 335.
Parliamentarians supported by,
116.
West Indies expedition, 457-9.
Fleetwood, Charles, advanced views
of, 204 ; negotiates with the
army for disbandment, 221 ;
battle of Worcester, 329-30 ;
opposes Cromwell's acceptance
of kingship, 442 ; married to
Bridget Cromwell, 449 ; tries to

dissuade Cromwell from dis
solving parliament, 475 ; other
wise mentioned, 310, 316, 336,
479.
Fox, Charles, on execution of
Charles I., 285.
 , George, Naylor a disciple of,
422 ; Cromwell's regard for,
430.
France —
Commonwealth recognised by,
335.
Convention of 1793 compared
with the Rump's proposed
constitution, 349.
Cromwell's relations with, 461-
463.
Fronde, the, contrasted with the
Civil War, 216.
Protestantism in, 164.

Gainsborough, cavalry victory at,
129-31.
Gardiner, S. R, cited, 3, 186, 457.
Gerard, Cromwell's assassination
plotted by, 399.
Glamorgan treaty, 213.
Gloucester, siege of, 140.
 Duke of, 341-2, 482.
Godwin, W., estimate of Crom
well, 2.
Goffe, Col., 236, 239, 413.
Goring, Lord, 143, 145-7, 184.
Gowran, surrender of, 304.
Grand Remonstrance, the (1641),
demands of, 106-7, 151-2; In
strument of Government con
trasted with, 377.
Grantham, cavalry skirmish near,
129.
Guizot, cited, 357, 462, 488.
Gustavus Adolphus, influence of,
on military tactics, 119.
 Vasa, position of, compared
with Cromwell's, 388-9.

Hallam on Long Parliament, 89-
90.
Hamilton, James, Duke of, 248,
251-6.
Hammond, Col., Cromwell's letters
to, 265-8.

INDEX.

503

Hampden, John, claims of, 23 ;
ship-money case decided against,
64-5 ; Strafford's attainder op
posed by, 86 ; watches Charles
in Scotland, 97 ; impeached by
Charles, 109 ; proposes parlia
mentary control of militia, 111 ;
Cromwell's advice to, about
officers, 124-6 ; death of, 136 ;
Cromwell contrasted with, 10 ;
otherwise mentioned, 15, 18, 63,
127, 376.
Harrison, Major, Charles conveyed
to Windsor by, 272 ; march on
Worcester, 328-9 ; at dismissal
of Long Parliament, 351-3 ;
member of Little Parliament,
360 ; convention inspired by,
361 ; imprisonment of, 402,
443 ; suspected of designs on
Cromwell, 428 ; extreme views
of, 345, 359 ; Cromwell's regard
for, 429 ; otherwise mentioned,
263, 283.
Haselrig, Sir Arthur, impeached by
Charles, 109 ; in first parliament
of Protectorate, 389 ; withstands
Cromwell's compulsion of parlia
ment, 393 ; influence of, feared
by Whalley, 412.
Heads of the Proposals of the Army,
233, 374.
Healing Question, the, 415.
Henderson, Alexander, 155-6.
Henrietta Maria, Queen, charac
teristics and influence of, 25,
29-31 ; correspondence of, with
Charles, 209, 212-13.
Henry of Navarre, 24, 29, 210.
Herbert, George, Laud's influence
on, 38.
Hewitt, Dr., case of, 477-8.
Hinchinbrook, 7, 14.
Hitch, Mr., Cromwell's dispute
with, 128.
Hobbes, cited, 56, 76, 138.
Holland —
Arminianism in, 54-5.
Catholic influence in, 44.
Cromwell's treaty with, 456.
Hostility between English par
liament and, 290, 336-7, 464.
Wagstaffe's flight to, 401.
War with, 337-8.

Holies, Denzil, Speaker detained
by, 15 ; impeached by Charles,
109; hostility of, to Cromwell,
173-4; Presbyterians led by,
258.
Holmby, Charles I. at, 215 ; his
removal from, 221-2.
Hopton, Ralph, Lord, 117, 140,
199.
Horncastle fight, 131-2.
Howe, John, devotional feats of,
452.
Hull, Charles i. refused entry of,
112 ; Fairfax's withdrawal to,
140 ; siege of, raised by New
castle, 141.
Humble Petition and Advice, nature
of, 377, 445 ; introduction of,
436.
Huntingdon, Cromwell member for,
14 ; charter dispute, 17.
Hurst Castle, 270.
Hyde. See Clarendon.

Independents (see also Puri
tanism) —
Cromwell supported by, 169.
Intolerance of, 433.
Irish policy of, 306.
Long Parliament reinforced by,
204.
Numerical inferiority of, 289.
Presbyterians opposed by, 160,
169, 208, 211, 214, 389-90;
contrasted with, 219.
Instrument of Government —
Adoption of, 372.
American constitution compared
with, 377-8.
Army, control and numbers of,
regulated by, 376, 394.
Cromwell's contravention of,
407.
Fundamentals of, 378, 393.
Provisions of, 375-7, 445.
Remodelling of, 436.
Toleration affirmed by, 376-7,
383.
Inverkeithing, 327.
Ireland —
Catholicism in, 100, 294-5, 424.
Charles i.'s proposed abandon
ment of, 213.

504

OLIVER CROMWELL.

Ireland — continued.
Cromwell's settlement of, 299-
311,331.
Danger to England from, 218.
Henry Cromwell Lord Deputy
of, 449.
Incorporation of, with England,
originated by Long Parliament,
360, 380.
Land settlement scheme for,
380. ap;
O'Neill's importance in, 294.
Ormonde's policy in, 294-5.
Rebellion of 1641, causes of,
99-101 ; scope of, 101-3.
Representation of, in English
parliament, 360 ; parliament
ary influence of, 424.
Rinuccini's aims in, 294.
Risings in, nature of, 400.
Strafford's rule and policy in,
19, 33-6, 63, 100; his un
popularity in, 84, 100.
Ireton, Henry, at Naseby, 187-9,
191, 205 ; at Marston, Gains
borough, and Edgehill, 205 ;
negotiates with the army for
disbandment, 221 ; Heads of the
Proposals of the Army framed
by, 233 ; debates measures with
extremists in the army, 234-40 ;
remonstrance of the army drawn
up by, 262 ; desecration of re
mains of, 488; advanced views
of, 204 ; character and ability
of, 205-6 ; otherwise mentioned,
118, 204, 283, 336.
Irish — camp - followers slain at
Naseby, 192, 297 ; defeat of,
under Montrose, 195 ; English
contrasted with, 226 ; trans
portations of, to Jamaica, 310.
Ironside — origin of nickname, 144.

Jamaica, Irish transportations to,
310; seizure of, 460, 469.
Jefferson, Cromwell contrasted
with, 495.
Jesuits, influence of, 43 ; pro
posed rigorous legislation against,
433.
Jews, position of, under Cromwell,
433-4.

Johnson, Dr., on Laud's execution,
162.
Joyce, Cornet, 222.
Juxon, bishop of London, 60, 87.

Killing no Murder, 426.
Kirk-sessions, powers of, 60.
Knox, John, 58.

Lambert, John, at Dunbar, 319-21;
in Scotland, 325, 327 ; march on
Worcester, 328-9 ; member of
Little Parliament, 360; Instru
ment of Government prepared by,
372 ; resents parliamentary at
tack on Major-Generals, 424 ;
opposes Cromwell's acceptance of
kingship, 438, 442 ; dismissed
by Cromwell, 443 ; opposes ag
gression in West Indies, 458 ;
military talent and ability of,
275, 328, 390; extreme views
of, 346 ; otherwise mentioned,
252, 353, 360, 451, 480.
Langdale, Sir Marmaduke, 188-90,
251-4.
Lansdown, royalist victory at, 140.
Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury,
Sidney Sussex College denounced
by, 9 ; Scotch policy of, 19, 66 ;
Arminianism approved by, 54 ;
Chief Justice censured by, 60 ;
flight of, from Lambeth, 72 ;
Strafford's case estimated by,
88 ; Prynne victimised by, 297 ;
execution of, 161-2, 199 ; charac
teristics of, 37-9 ; estimate of,
by historians, 36-7 ; Bramhall
compared with, by Cromwell,
95.
Lecturers, Cromwell's plea for,
18.
Leicester, storming of, by Charles I.,
184.
Leighton, Alexander, 63-4, 95.
Leven, Lord, 142-3.
Lenthall, William, Speaker of the
House of Commons, withstands
Charles' violation of parlia
mentary privilege, 110 ; joins
the army, 225 ; Cromwell's con
ferences with, 275 ; Cromwell

INDEX.

505

accompanied by, on entering
London, 333 ; monarchy advo
cated by, 341 ; protests against
dissolution of the Rump Par
liament, 352 ; his view of
Cromwell's Chancery ordinance,
380.
Leslie, David, Cromwell supported
by, at Marston Moor, 143-5, 147,
149 ; Montrose defeated by, 195 ;
Cromwell opposed by, in Edin
burgh, 316 ; at Dunbar, 316-19 ;
at Stirling, 326.
Levellers, 233, 238, 240, 291-2,
339.
Lilburne, John, persecution of, 63-4 ;
Agreement of the People drawn
up by (1648), 234;. trial and
acquittal of, 366 ; characteristics
of, 291.
Little Parliament, summoning of,
359-60 ; Scotland and Ireland re
presented in, 360 ; Cromwell's
inaugural address to, 361-3; fidel
ity of, to Cromwell, 364 ; legisla
tive attempts of, 365-6 ; dissolu
tion of, 367.
Lockhart, Sir William, 452, 482-
483.
London, city of —
Army, hostility to, 231 ; disband-
ment of, urged, 220.
Charles I. welcomed by, 106 ;
his cause favoured by (1648),
256.
Cromwell thanked by, for Irish
victories, 313 ; acclaimed by,
after Worcester, 333 ; his vigi
lance over, 403.
Ferment of, in 1644, 153.
Parliamentarians supported by,
116.
Peace desired by, 218.
Petitions presented by, 474.
Presbyterianism strong in, 290,
384-5.
Puritanism strong in, 71.
Riots in (1647), 224; (1648),
247.
Long Parliament —
Calling of, 73.
Charles' attack on five members
of, 109-10.
Composition of, 74-6.

Long Parliament — continued.
Cromwell's relations numerous
in, 77.
Holland, attitude towards, 290,
336-7, 464.
Military force, threatened with,
225-6.
Numbers of, in divisions, in early
days, 203-4; after Pride's
Purge, 287.
Pride's Purge, 271-2, 345.
Lords, House of —
Abolition of, 287-8.
Bishops' exclusion from, proposed,
94, 97, 151.
Charles I., cause of, supported
by, 97, 257 ; ordinance for
impeachment of, rejected by,
274.
Commons supported by (1640),
76 ; in disagreement with, 97,
257, 274.
Insignificance of, in 1647, 203.
Rioters' attack on, 224.
Royalism of, 97, 257, 274.
Strafford, attitude towards, 82-3.
Ludlow, Edmund, comment on the
Drogheda massacre, 302-3 ; com
plaints to Cromwell, 339 ; dis
solution of Rump Parliament
described by, 351-3 ; Cromwell's
overtures to, 480 ; otherwise
mentioned, 204, 278, 336.
Lynn, Elizabeth (wife of Robert
Cromwell), 8.

Magna Charta, Cromwell's mock
at, 405.
Major-Generals, scope of work of,
406-7 ; failure of, 420 ; parlia
mentary decision against, 424-5.
Manchester, Earl of, attacked by
Cromwell, 171-3; resignation of,
181 ; temperament of, 136, 170 ;
otherwise mentioned, 14, 126, 141.
Manning, Cromwell informed of
royalist doings by, 403.
Mardyke, 466.
Marston Moor, battle of, 141-9 ;
moral effect of victory, 161 ;
compared with Bunker Hill, 175 ;
with Naseby, 189-90 ; royalist
rendezvous near site of, 400.

506

OLIVER CROMWELL.

Mary of Guise, 24.
 Stuart, Queen of Scots, 24,
89.
 Tudor, Queen of England,
43.
Mayor, Richard, extract from Crom
well's letter to, 53.
Mazarin, Richelieu succeeded by,
135 ; Scottish intrigues with,
209 ; correspondence with Crom
well regarding toleration for
catholics, 210, 432 ; at Dunkirk,
482 ; idea of, in ceding Dunkirk,
483 ; character and policy of,
461-3.
Mediterranean, English fleet in, 335,
459.
Militia Bill (1641), 107.
Milton, John —
Areopagitica published by, 166.
Church and State, separation
of, advocated by, 382.
Cromwell contrasted with, 10;
advised by, 371.
National sentiment of, 266.
Secretaryship of the Council of
State held by, 370, 408.
Toleration advocated by, 47,
166-8.
Cited — on state of London in
1644, 153; on national free
dom, 229 ; on toil of construc
tive policy, 332 ; on popular
sentiment for Charles I., 368.
Otherwise mentioned, 58, 76, 289,
349, 434, 496.
Mommsen, Sulla compared to Crom
well by, 379.
Monk, General George, 336-7, 360,
452.
Montrose, Marquis of, 153, 195,
211.
Mozley, J. B. — estimate of Crom
well, 270.

Napoleon, numbers under, 142.
Naseby, battle of, 185-94 ; Irish
camp-followers slain after, 192,
297 ; moral effects of victory,
230.
Navarre, Henry of, 24, 29, 210.
Navigation Act (1651), 337, 470.
Navy. See Fleet.

Naylor, James, case of, 422-3.
New England, Puritan exodus to,
40.
New Model. See under Army.
Newark, royalist stronghold at,
129.
Newburn, 72.
Newbury, 135, 140.
Newcastle, royalist port at, 139
Nineteen Propositions of, 207.
Newcastle, Earl of, at Gains
borough, 130 ; besieged in York,
141 ; at Marston Moor, 143-4,
146-7 ; character of, 138-9.
Newman, on Laud, 36.
Newport treaty, terms of, 260-61 ;
Cromwell's view of, 269.

O'Byrnes, treatment of, 101.
Okey, John, social position of, 179 ;
at Naseby, 188; suspected of
designs on Cromwell, 428.
O'Neil, Sir Phelim, 104.
O'Neill, Hugh, 305.
 Owen Roe, 294.
Ormonde, Earl of, Charles' instruc
tions to, 261 ; character and
policy of, 294-5.
Other House, the, 472-4.
Overton, Richard, imprisonment of,
404.
Owen, Dr. John, ecclesiastical
scheme of, adopted by Crom
well, 383.
Oxenstiern, Whitelocke's interview
with, concerning Cromwell, 388.
Oxford —
Charles i.'s escape from, 201.
Essex unsuccessful at, 140.
Surrender of, 202.
Treaty of (1643), 207.
University men in Long Parlia
ment, 75.

Packe, Sir Christopher, proposals
of, 435-6.
Paris, treaty of, 465.
Parliament —
Long, Short, etc. See those titles.
Purges of (1647), 223; Pride's,
271-2,345; (1654), 348, 393-4;
(1656), 348, 418.

INDEX.

507

Peers. See Lords.
Pembroke Castle, Cromwell's cap
ture of, 253.
Penruddock's rising, 401-2.
Perth, Cromwell's advance to,
327.
Petition of Right, 14.
Philip iv. of Spain, 460.
Philiphaugh, 195.
Piedmontese, massacre of, 310,
463.
Portugal, Cromwell's treaty with,
456.
Prelacy. See Anglican Church —
Episcopacy.
Press, censorship of, under parlia
mentarians, 293 ; under Protec
torate, 408.
Presbyterianism —
Charles i.'s dislike of, 208.
England, introduced into, 162.
Kirk-sessions, powers of, 60.
London, strong in, 290, 384-5.
Montrose's dislike of, 153.
Party aspect of, 169, 338.
Presbyterians —
Exasperation of (1649), 289.
Fairfax's position a satisfaction
to, 314.
Independents opposed to, 160,
169, 208, 211, 214, 389-90;
contrasted with, 219.
Toleration opposed by, 165, 257-8.
312, 385.
Preston, battles of, 254-6.
Pride, Col., social position of, 179 ;
Pride's Purge, 271-2, 345; peti
tion of, against Cromwell's accept
ance of kingship, 442.
Propagation of religion, Cromwell's
eagerness for, 381-2, 450.
Protesters, 325.
Prynne, William, 63-4, 297.
Public opinion, Cromwell's attitude
towards, 492.
Punishments, barbarity of, 63-4,
101.
Purges of Parliament. See under
Parliament.
Puritanism (see also Anabaptism
and Independents) —
Aims of, 47-8.
Austerity of, unpopular, 247,
409.

Puritanism — continued.
Exodus of Puritans to New
England, 40.
Intolerance and violence of,
152, 165, 169, 423.
Irish troubles aggravated by,
100.
Legislative incapacity of, 361.
National Covenant the centre
of, 67.
Presbyterianism contrasted
with, 134.
Protestant left wing, 45.
Rise of, 58.
Strength of, 183.
Vagueness in ideas of, 216.
Pym, John, claims of, 23 ; leader
of parliamentary party, 69, 92,
97 ; Strafford impeached by, 82 ;
Strafford's attainder opposed by,
86 ; bill for excluding bishops
from parliament supported by,
98 ; Charles' overtures to, 108 ;
Charles' impeachment of, 109 ;
Scottish treaty concluded by,
133-4 ; death of, 136 ; character
istics and ability of, 40-42, 69,
112; otherwise mentioned, 15,
65, 90, 111, 127, 376.
Quakers, persecutions of, under the
Protectorate, 429-30.

Rainborough, Thomas, Cromwell's
arguments with, 235, 238-9.
Ranke, cited, 324, 335, 359, 464.
Rationalism, toleration sprung from,
434, 495.
Remonstrants, 325.
Resolutioners, 325.
Retz, de, cited, 227, 356, 435.
Rich, Robert, married to Lady
Frances Cromwell, 450; death
of, 485.
Richelieu, Strafford compared with,
34-5 ; Scotland promised aid by,
67 ; Mazarin the successor of,
135 ; treaty of Westphalia due
to, 461.
Rinuccini, papal nuncio in Ireland,
294-5.
Rogers, John, Cromwell's interview
with, 431.

508

OLIVER CROMWELL.

' Root-and-Branch' policy, 65, 93-4,
97.
Roundway Down, 140.
Rouse, John, abdication of Little
Parliament, 367.
Rump Parliament, unpopularity of,
340-41 ; constitutional plans of,
346-9 ; dissolution of, 350-53 ;
estimate of transaction, 353-7.
Rupert, Prince, in York and after,
141, 170; at Marston Moor,
143-6, 149 ; at Naseby, 188-90 ;
Charles' letter to, 195-6 ; escape
of, from Bristol, 196-7 ; naval
operations of, 290 ; temperament
and ability of, 113-14, 132.

Saint Domingo, failure of expedi
tion to, 459.
St. Ives, Cromwell's removal to, 16.
St. John, Oliver, 18, 22, 85, 341,
360.
Salisbury, royalist rising at, 401.
Scotland —
Charles I.'s religious policy in,
66-7 ; visit to, 91.
Charles n.'s arrival in, 313.
Cromwell's appeal to the General
Assembly, 314-15.
England's ignorance of affairs in,
67 ; parliamentary support of,
70 ; danger to England appre
hended from, 218 ; hostility
of, to England (1649-50), 293-4,
312-13 ; incorporation of, with
England, originated by Long
Parliament, 360, 380 ; repre
sentation of, in English par
liament, 360 ; influence of
representatives, 424.
Kirk-sessions, powers of, 60.
Knox's influence in, 58.
Mazarin's dealings with, 209.
National Covenant, inauguration
of, 67.
Pym's treaty with, 133-4, 154-5.
Richelieu's dealings with, 67.
Shorter Catechism's effect on,
157-8.
Strafford's unpopularity in, 84.
Scots —
Advance of, to Durham, 72 ;
over the border (1644), 141 ;

Scots — continued.
sufferings in north of England
under, 176-7.
Charles I., enthusiasm for, 194-5 ;
his surrender to, 202 ; his
abandonment by, 214-15 ; his
secret treaty with, 245 ; his
cause favoured by, 248.
Charles n., negotiations with, in
Holland, 313 ; march south
with, 327.
Committee of both Kingdoms,
represented on, 246.
Cromwell's unpopularity with
Scotch commissioners, 173-4 ;
campaign of 1650, 316-31.
English contrasted with, 226.
Ireland, in, 104.
Sealed Knot, the, 400.
Seekers, 217.
Selby, 141.
Selden, John, 15, 22, 69, 75, 86,
154.
Self-denying Ordinance, 180-81,
204 ; second, 182.
Sexby, Cromwell's assassination
plotted by, 427.
Ship-money, opposition to, 64, 71 ;
abolition of, 89.
Short Parliament, 68-70.
Sidney, Algernon, 204-5, 279.
Sindercombe, Miles, Cromwell's
assassination plotted by, 427.
Skippon, Philip, 178, 188, 221.
Slingsby, Sir Henry, case of, 477-
478.
Solemn League and Covenant,
133-4, 154-5.
Southworth, John, fate of, 433.
Spain —
Commonwealth recognised by,
335.
Cromwell's assurances to, 459 ;
alleged negotiations with, 468.
Hostility of, to England (1656),
460.
War with, 464.
Star Chamber, illegalities of, 63;
abolition, of, 89.
StewardElizabeth, wife of Robert
Cromwell, 8.
Strafford, Thomas Wentworth
Earl of, popular party supported
by, 15 ; rule and policy of, in

INDEX.

509

Ireland, 19, 33-6, 63, 100 ; court
party supported by, 31-2 ; re
call of, from Ireland, 72; im
peachment and death of, 81-8 ;
character and aims of, 31-5 ;
Cromwell compared with, 306,
310-11, 373; otherwise men
tioned, 353, 411.
Stratton, 140.
Sweden- Cromwell's treaty with, 456.
Quarrels of, 467.
Queen Christina of, on Cromwell,
388-9.
Swift, cited, 443, 450.

Tadcaster, 139.
Taylor, Jeremy, 38, 432.
Thirty Years' War, religious ele
ment in, 45 ; numbers of troops
engaged in, 142.
' Thorough,' policy of, 65.
Thurloe, John, correspondence
of, with Henry Cromwell, 396,
411-12, 424; vigilance of, 402,
415 ; hostility of, to Quakers,
430 ; Cromwell's relations with,
453 ; financial straits of, 478-9,
484; cited, 401-2, 407, 448-9,
471 ; otherwise mentioned, 404,
451-2, 468.
Toleration —
Catholicism excluded from, 167,
377, 383, 432.
Cromwell's adherence to, 126,
166, 194, 197, 205, 363.
Instrument of Government's adop
tion of, 376-7, 383.
Milton's view of, 47, 166-8.
Parliamentary attitude towards,
165-6, 421.
Prelacy excluded from, 377,
. 383.
Presbyterian attitude towards,
165, 257-8, 312, 385.
Toleration Act, 495.
Triers and ejectors, 384.
Turenne, Cromwell's veterans
praised by, 466 ; commanding
at Dunkirk, 482.

Ulster rebellion, alleged connec

tion of, with Drogheda massacre,
302.
Usher, Archbishop of Armagh,
87, 95.
Uxbridge, treaty of (1644-5), 207.

Vane, Sir Henry, abolition of
Episcopacy proposed by, 151 ;
Charles' trial disapproved by,
279 ; maritime policy of, 335,
337 ; constitutional scheme of,
347-9 ; withstands Cromwell at
dissolution of Rump Parliament,
352; Scottish policy of, 360;
Healing Question published by,
415 ; imprisonment of, 416 ;
Cromwell's overtures to, 480 ;
energy and capacity of, 355 ;
otherwise mentioned, 75, 412.
Vaudois, case of the, 310, 463.
Venner, plot of, 428.
Vowel, Cromwell's assassination
plotted by, 399.

Wales, Cromwell's operations in,
252-3.
Walker, Clement, on Irish policy of
Independents, 306.
Waller, Sir William, letter of, to
Hopton, 117 ; defeat of, 140 ;
resignation of, 181; Cromwell
described by, 171.
Walton's polyglot Bible, Cromwell's
interest in, 450.
Ward, Dr. Samuel, Cromwell under,
at Cambridge, 9.
Washington, George, Cromwell
compared with, 175-6, 488.
Weingarten, cited, 368, 432.
Wentworth, Sir Peter, Cromwell
rebuked by, at dissolution of
Rump Parliament, 352 ; suit of,
against tax-collector, 405.
 Sir Thomas. See Strafford.
West Indies, English aggression in,
458-9, 464.
Westminster, treaty of, 465.
Westminster Assembly, the, 151,
153-7.
Westphalia, treaty of, 461.
Wexford, sack of, 303-4.
Whalley, Major, at Gainsborough,

510

INDEX.

131 ; at Naseby, 189 ; Crom
well's letter to, regarding
Charles I., 242 ; republican form
of government advocated by,
342 ; horse-racing permitted by,
409 ; anxiety of, on election
prospects, 4i2 ; admission of
Jews advocated by, 433.
Whitelocke, Bulstrode, hostilities
against Cromwell deprecated by,
173-4; monarchy advocated by,
341 ; Cromwell's conversation
with, on inefficiency of Parlia
ment, 343 ; conversation on
Cromwell at Swedish court,
388-9 ; rigorous legislation
against Jesuits opposed by, 433 ;
irregular courts disapproved by,
478 ; cited, on Laud, 37 ; on
Cromwell's geniality, 453.

Wildman, Major John, 235-6, 402.
William HI., Cromwell compared
with, 488.
Williams, Bishop, 87.
 Richard (afterwards Richard
Cromwell), 7.
 Roger, 433.
Wilkins, Bishop, on Cromwell's
view of episcopacy, 384.
Winceby, Cromwell's success at,
131-2, 141.
Winchester, fall of, 198.
Windsor prayer meetings, 249-50.
Winstanley, Gerrard, cited, 292.
Winwick, 255.
Worcester, Cromwell's march to,
328-9 ; battle of, 329-30.
Wright, Peter, fate of, 433.
York, Duke of, 482.

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