OLIVER CROMWELL
[Illustration:
OLIVER CROMWELL.
From the portrait by Robert Walker at Hinchingbrooke.
By permission of the Earl of Sandwich.
(Probably painted soon after the beginning of the Civil War, when
Cromwell was forty-three or -four years old.)
]
OLIVER CROMWELL
BY
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
ILLUSTRATED
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK 1900
_Copyright, 1900, by
Charles Scribner’s Sons_
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK
Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud
Not of war only, but detractions rude,
Guided by faith, and matchless fortitude,
To peace and truth, thy glorious way hast ploughed,
And on the neck of crownèd fortune proud
Hast reared God’s trophies, and his work pursued,
While Darwen stream, with blood of Scots imbrued,
And Dunbar field, resounds thy praises loud,
And Worcester’s laureate wreath. Yet much remains
To conquer still; Peace hath her victories
No less renowned than War: new foes arise,
Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains.
Help us to save free conscience from the paw
Of hireling wolves, whose gospel is their maw.
—MILTON.
EXECUTIVE CHAMBER, ALBANY,
June, 1900.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE TIMES AND THE MAN 1
II. THE LONG PARLIAMENT AND THE CIVIL WAR 51
III. THE SECOND CIVIL WAR AND THE DEATH OF THE KING 99
IV. THE IRISH AND SCOTCH WARS 141
V. THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE 177
VI. PERSONAL RULE 210
ILLUSTRATIONS
Oliver Cromwell _Frontispiece_
(_From the portrait by Robert Walker at Hinchingbrooke._)
FACING PAGE
Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford 8
(_From the miniature at Devonshire House._)
Oliver Cromwell 12
(_From a miniature by Cooper._)
Sir John Eliot 16
(_From the portrait by Van Somer at Port Eliot._)
All Saints’ Church, Huntingdon 24
Cromwell’s House at Ely 28
Archbishop Laud 34
(_From the portrait at Lambeth Palace, painted by Vandyke._)
West Tower, Ely Cathedral, from Monastery Close 40
John Pym 52
(_From the portrait by Cornelius Janssen._)
Prince Rupert 68
(_From the portrait by Vandyke at Hinchingbrooke._)
Fac-simile of Letter from Oliver Cromwell to Mr. Storie,
written January 11, 1635, said to be the earliest extant
letter in Cromwell’s Handwriting 74
(_From the original in the British Museum._)
John Hampden 80
(_From the portrait by Robert Walker at Port Eliot._)
Cromwell’s Engagement with the Marquis of Newcastle’s Regiment
of “Whitecoats” in the Battle of Marston Moor 88
The City Walls of York, with the Cathedral in the Distance 96
King Charles I. 108
(_From the replica at the Dresden Gallery, by Sir Peter Lely._)
General Sir Thomas Fairfax 116
(_From the portrait by Robert Walker at Althorp._)
John Milton 120
(_From the drawing in crayon by Faithorne at Bayfordbury._)
The Death Warrant of King Charles I.—Signed by Oliver Cromwell
and other members of the court 128
(_From the original in the library in the House of Lords._)
Pride’s Purge 136
Interior of Westminster Hall. Where Parliament sat and where
King Charles I. was tried and sentenced 140
Magdalen Tower, Drogheda 154
St. Lawrence’s Gate, Drogheda 158
Cromwell Leading the Assault on Drogheda 164
The Battle-field of Dunbar 172
Seal of the Protectorate 178
(_From an impression in wax in the British Museum._)
Admiral Robert Blake 184
(_From the portrait at Wadham College, Oxford._)
Cromwell Dissolving the Long Parliament 186
Oliver Cromwell 190
(_From the painting at Althorp by Robert Walker._)
The Clock Tower, Hampton Court 200
The Great Hall, Hampton Court—In this room the state dinners
were given under the Protectorate 206
The Second Installation of Cromwell as Protector,
in Westminster Hall, June 26, 1657 210
Sir William Waller 216
(_From the portrait by Sir Peter Lely at Goodwood._)
Henry Cromwell—Son of the Protector, and Governor of Ireland 220
The Last Charge of the Ironsides 226
Richard Cromwell 232
Exterior of Westminster Hall 236
Oliver Cromwell 240
(_From the bust by Bernini._)
OLIVER CROMWELL
I
THE TIMES AND THE MAN
For over a century and a half after his death the memory of the greatest
Englishman of the seventeenth century was looked upon with horror by the
leaders of English thought, political and literary; the very men who
were carrying to fruition Cromwell’s tremendous policies being often
utterly ignorant that they were following in his footsteps. At last the
scales began to drop from the most far-seeing eyes. Macaulay, with his
eminently sane and wholesome spirit, held Cromwell and the social forces
for which he stood—Puritanic and otherwise—at their real worth, and his
judgment about them was, in all essentials, accurate. But the true
appreciation of the place held by the greatest soldier-statesman of the
seventeenth century began with the publication of his life and letters
by Carlyle. The gnarled genius of the man who worshipped the heroes of
the past as intensely as he feared and distrusted the heroes of the
present, enabled him to write with a loftiness and intensity that
befitted his subject. But Carlyle’s singular incapacity to “see
veracity,” as he would himself have phrased it, made him at times not
merely tell half-truths, but deliberately invert the truth. He was of
that not uncommon cloistered type which shrinks shuddering from actual
contact with whatever it, in theory, most admires, and which, therefore,
is reduced in self-justification to misjudge and misrepresent those
facts of past history which form precedents for what is going on before
the author’s own eyes.
Cromwell lived in an age when it was not possible to realize a
government based upon those large principles of social, political, and
religious liberty in which—at any rate, during his earlier years—he
sincerely believed; but the movement of which he was the head was the
first of the great movements which, marching along essentially the same
lines, have produced the English-speaking world as we at present know
it. This primary fact Carlyle refused to see, or at least to admit. As
the central idea of his work he states that the Puritanism of the
Cromwellian epoch was the “last glimpse of the Godlike vanishing from
this England; conviction and veracity giving place to hollow cant and
formulism.... The last of all our Heroisms.... We have wandered far away
from the ideas which guided us in that century, and indeed which had
guided us in all preceding centuries, but of which that century was the
ultimate manifestation; we have wandered very far; and must endeavor to
return and connect ourselves therewith again.... I will advise my reader
to forget the modern methods of reform; not to remember that he has ever
heard of a modern individual called by the name of ‘Reformer,’ if he
would understand what the old meaning of the word was. The Cromwells,
Pyms, and Hampdens, who were understood on the Royalist side to be
fire-brands of the devil, have had still worse measure from the
Dry-as-Dust philosophies and sceptical histories of later times. They
really did resemble fire-brands of the devil if you looked at them
through spectacles of a certain color, for fire is always fire; but by
no spectacles, only by mere blindness and wooden-eyed spectacles, can
the flame-girt heaven’s messenger pass for a poor, mouldy Pedant and
Constitution-monger such as these would make him out to be.”
This is good writing of its kind; but the _thought_ is mere “hollow cant
and unveracity;” not only far from the truth, but the direct reverse of
the truth. It is itself the wail of the pedant who does not know that
the flame-girt heaven’s messenger of truth is always a mere mortal to
those who see him with the actual eyes of the flesh, although mayhap a
great mortal; while to the closet philosopher his quality of
flame-girtedness is rarely visible until a century or thereabouts has
elapsed.
So far from this great movement, of which Puritanism was merely one
manifestation, being the last of a succession of similar heroisms, it
had practically very much less connection with what went before than
with all that has guided us in our history since. Of course, it is
impossible to draw a line with mathematical exactness between the
different stages of history, but it is both possible and necessary to
draw it with rough efficiency; and, speaking roughly, the epoch of the
Puritans was the beginning of the great modern epoch of the
English-speaking world—infinitely its greatest epoch. We have not
“wandered far from the ideas that guided” the wisest and most earnest
leaders in the century that saw Cromwell; on the contrary, these ideas
were themselves very far indeed from those which had guided the English
people in previous ages, and the ideas that now guide us represent on
the whole what was best and truest in the thought of the Puritans. As
for Pym and Hampden, their type had practically no representative in
England prior to their time, while all the great legislative reformers
since then have been their followers. The Hampden type—the purest and
noblest of types—reached its highest expression in Washington. Pym, the
man of great powers and great services, with a tendency to believe that
Parliamentary government was the cure for all evils, followed to a line
“the modern methods of reform,” and was exactly the man who, if he had
lived in Carlyle’s day, Carlyle would have sneered at as a
“constitution-monger.” It was men of the kind of Hampden and Pym who,
before Carlyle’s own eyes, were striving in the British Parliament for
the reforms which were to carry one stage farther the work of Hampden
and Pym; who were endeavoring to secure for all creeds full tolerance;
to give the people an ever-increasing share in ruling their own
destinies; to better the conditions of social and political life. In the
great American Civil War the master spirits in the contest for union and
freedom were actuated by a fervor as intense as, and even finer than,
that which actuated the men of the Long Parliament; while in rigid
morality and grim devotion to what he conceived to be God’s bidding, the
Southern soldier, Stonewall Jackson, was as true a type of the “General
of the Lord, with his Bible and his Sword,” as Cromwell or Ireton.
The whole history of the movement which resulted in the establishment of
the Commonwealth of England will be misread and misunderstood if we fail
to appreciate that it was the first modern, and not the last mediæval,
movement; if we fail to understand that the men who figured in it and
the principles for which they contended, are strictly akin to the men
and the principles that have appeared in all similar great movements
since: in the English Revolution of 1688; in the American Revolution of
1776; and the American Civil War of 1861. We must keep ever in mind the
essentially modern character of the movement if we are to appreciate its
true inwardness, its true significance. Fundamentally, it was the first
struggle for religious, political, and social freedom, as we now
understand the terms. As was inevitable in such a first struggle, there
remained even among the forces of reform much of what properly belonged
to previous generations. In addition to the modern side there was a
mediæval side, too. Just so far as this mediæval element obtained, the
movement failed. All that there was of good and of permanence in it was
due to the new elements.
To understand the play of the forces which produced Cromwell and gave
him his chance, we must briefly look at the England into which he was
born.
He saw the light at the close of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in the
last years of the Tudor dynasty, and he grew to manhood during the
inglorious reign of the first English king of the inglorious House of
Stuart. The struggle between the reformed churches and the ancient
church, against which they were in revolt, was still the leading factor
in shaping European politics, though other factors were fast assuming an
equal weight. The course of the Reformation in England had been widely
different from that which it had followed in other European countries.
The followers of Luther and Calvin, whatever their shortcomings—and they
were many and grievous—had been influenced by a fiery zeal for
righteousness, a fierce detestation of spiritual corruption; but in
England the Reformation had been undertaken for widely different reasons
by Henry VIII. and his creatures, though the bulk of their followers
were as sincere as their brethren on the Continent. Henry’s purpose had
been simple, namely, to transfer to himself the power and revenues of
the Papacy, so far as he could seize them, and thus to add to the
spiritual supremacy against which the leaders of the Reformation had
revolted: the absolute sovereignty which the Tudors were seeking to
establish in England. Elizabeth stood infinitely above her father in
most respects; but in religious views they were not far apart, and in
theory they were both believers in absolutism. They had no standing
army, and they were always in want of money, so that in practice they
never ventured seriously to offend the influential and moneyed classes.
But under Henry the misery and suffering of the lower classes became
very great, and the yeomen were largely driven from their lands, while
much of Elizabeth’s own administration consisted of efforts to grapple
with the vagrancy and wretchedness which had been caused by the
degradation of those who stood lowest in the social scale.
When the Stuarts took possession of the throne of England they found a
people which, unlike the peoples of most of the neighboring States, had
not fought out its religious convictions. The Reformation had deeply
stirred men’s souls. Religion had become a matter of vital and terrible
importance to Protestant and to Catholic. Among the extremists, the men
who had given the tone to the Reformation in Germany, Switzerland,
Holland, and Scotland, religion, as they understood it, entered into
every act of their lives. In England there were men of this stamp; but
in the English Reformation they had played a wholly subordinate part;
and indeed had been in almost as great danger as the Catholics. Their
force, therefore, had not spent itself. It had been conserved, in spite
of their desires.
[Illustration:
Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford.
From the miniature at Devonshire House.
By permission of the Duke of Devonshire, K.G.
]
Thus it happened that the high tide of extreme Protestantism was reached
in England, not as in other Protestant countries, in the sixteenth
century, but in the seventeenth. The Stuarts were the only Protestant
kings who were not in religious sympathy with their Protestant subjects.
In theory the Anglican Church of Henry and Elizabeth stood for what we
would now regard as tyranny. What Henry VIII. strove to do with the
Anglican Church is what has actually been done by the Czars with the
Orthodox Church in Russia; but that which was possible with the eastern
Slavs was not possible with the westernmost and freest of the Teutonic
peoples. Yet in the actual event it was probably fortunate that the
English Reformation took the shape it did; for under such conditions it
was not marked by the intense fanaticism of the reformers elsewhere.
The Stuarts not only found themselves masters of a kingdom where,
supposedly, they were spiritually supreme, while actually their claim to
supremacy was certain to be challenged; they also found themselves at
the head of a form of government which was to all appearances despotic,
while the people over whom they bore sway, though slow to object to the
forms, were extremely intolerant of the practices of despotism. The
Tudors were unarmed despots, who disliked the old feudal nobility, and
who found it for their interest to cultivate the commercial classes, and
to form a new nobility of their own, based upon wealth. The men at the
lowest round of the social ladder—the workingmen and farm laborers—were
yet, as they remained for a couple of centuries, so unfit for the work
of political combination that they could be safely disregarded by the
masters of England. At times their discontent was manifested, generally
in the shape of abortive peasant insurrections; but there was never need
to consider them as of serious and permanent importance. The middle
classes, however, had become very powerful, and to their material
interests the Tudors always took care to defer. At the very close of her
reign, Elizabeth, who was at heart as thorough a tyrant as ever lived,
but who possessed that shrewd good sense which, if not the noblest, is
perhaps on the whole the most useful of qualities in the actual workaday
world, found herself face to face with her people on the question of
monopolies; and as soon as she understood that they were resolutely
opposed to her policy, she instantly yielded. In other words, the Tudor
despotism was conditioned upon the despot’s doing nothing of which the
influential classes of the nation—the upper and middle classes—seriously
disapproved; and this the Stuart kings could never understand.
Moreover, apart from the fact that the Stuarts were so much less shrewd
and less able than the Tudors, there was the further fact that
Englishmen as a whole were gradually growing more intolerant, not only
of the practice but of the pretence of tyranny, whether in things
material or in things spiritual. There was a moral awakening which
rendered it impossible for Englishmen of the seventeenth century to
submit to the brutal wrong-doing which marked the political and
ecclesiastical tyranny of the previous century. The career of Henry
VIII. could not have been paralleled in any shape when once England had
begun to breed such men as went to the making of the Long Parliament.
Much of the aspiration after higher things took the form of spiritual
unrest. It must always be remembered that the Protestant sects which
established themselves in the northern half of Europe, although they
warred in the name of religious liberty, had no more conception of it,
as we of this day understand it, than their Catholic foes; and yet it
must also be remembered that the bitter conflicts they waged prepared
the way for the wide tolerance of individual difference in matters of
religious belief which is among the greatest blessings of our modern
life. An American Catholic and an American Protestant of to-day,
whatever the difference between their theologies, yet in their ways of
looking at real life, at its relation to religion, and the relations of
religion and the State, are infinitely more akin to one another than
either is to the men of his religious faith who lived three centuries
ago. We now admit, as a matter of course, that any man may, in religious
matters, profess to be guided by authority or by reason, as suits him
best; but that he must not interfere with similar freedom of belief in
others; and that all men, whatever their religious beliefs, have exactly
the same political rights and are to be held to the same responsibility
for the way they exercise these rights. Few indeed were the men who held
such views at the time when Cromwell was growing to manhood. Holland was
the State of all others in which there was the nearest approach to
religious liberty; and even in Holland the bitterness of the Calvinists
toward the Arminians was something which we can now scarcely understand.
Arminius was no more at home in Geneva than in Rome; and his followers
were prescribed by the most religious people of England, and so far as
might be were driven from the realm. Calvinists and Lutherans felt as
little inclination as Catholics to allow liberty of conscience to
others; and as grotesque a compromise as ever was made in matters
religious was that made in Germany, when it was decided that the peoples
of the various German principalities should in mass accept the faiths of
their respective princes.
[Illustration:
Oliver Cromwell.
From a miniature by Cooper. Here reproduced for the first time.
By permission of Sir Charles Hartopp, Bart.
]
Yet though the Reformers thus strove to establish for their own use the
very religious intolerance against which they had revolted, the mere
fact of their existence nullified their efforts. Sooner or later people
who had exercised their own judgment, and had fought for the right to
exercise it, were sure grudgingly to admit the same right in others.
That time was as yet far distant. In Cromwell’s youth all the leading
Christian churches were fiercely intolerant. Unless we keep in mind that
this was the general attitude, an attitude which necessarily affected
even the greatest men, we cannot do justice to the political and social
leaders of that age when we find them, as we so often do, adopting
toward their religious foes policies from which we, of a happier age,
turn with horror.
In England hatred of Roman Catholicism had become almost interchangeable
with hatred of Spain. Spain had been the one dangerous foe which England
had encountered under the Tudor dynasty, and the only war she had ever
waged into which the religious element entered was the war which put
upon the English roll of honor the names of her great sixteenth-century
seamen, Drake and Hawkins, Howard and Frobisher. Throughout the
sixteenth century Spain had towered above every other power of Europe in
warlike might; and though the Dutch and English sailors had broken the
spell of her invincibility at sea, on shore her soldiers retained their
reputation for superior prowess, in spite of the victories of Maurice of
Orange, until Gustavus Adolphus marched his wonderful army down from the
frozen North. During Cromwell’s youth and early manhood Spain was still
the most powerful and most dreaded of European nations. Her government
had become a mere tyranny; her religion fanatical bigotry of a type more
extreme than any that existed elsewhere, even in an age when all creeds
tended toward fanaticism and bigotry. It was in Spain that the Holy
Inquisition chiefly flourished—one of the most fearful engines for the
destruction of all that was highest in mankind that the world has ever
seen. Catholics were oppressed in England and Protestants in France; but
in each country the persecuted sect might almost be said to enjoy
liberty, and certainly to enjoy peace, when their fate was compared with
the dreadful horrors of torture and murder with which Spain crushed out
every species of heresy within her borders. Jew, Infidel, and
Protestant, shared the same awful doom, until she had purchased complete
religious uniformity at the price of the loss of everything that makes
national life great and noble. The dominion of Spain would have been the
dominion of desolation; her supremacy as baneful as that of the Turk;
and Holland and England, in withstanding her, rendered the same service
to humanity that was rendered at that very time by those nations of
southeastern Europe who formed out of the bodies of their citizens the
bulwark which stayed the Turkish fury.
But if in her relations to one Catholic nation England appeared as the
champion of religious liberty, of all that makes life worth having to
the free men who live in free nations, yet in her relations to another
Catholic people she herself played the rôle of merciless
oppressor—religious, political, and social. Ireland, utterly foreign in
speech and culture, had been ground into the dust by the crushing weight
of England’s overlordship. During centuries chaos had reigned in the
island; the English intruders possessing sufficient power to prevent the
development of any Celtic national life, but not to change it into a
Norman or English national life. The English who settled and warred in
Ireland felt and acted as the most barbarous white frontiersmen of the
nineteenth century have acted toward the alien races with whom they have
been brought in contact. There is no language in which to paint the
hideous atrocities committed in the Irish wars of Elizabeth; and the
worst must be credited to the highest English officials. In Ireland the
antagonism was fundamentally racial; whether the sovereign of England
were Catholic or Protestant made little difference in the burden of
wrong which the Celt was forced to bear. The first of the so-called
plantations by which the Celts were ousted in mass from great tracts of
country to make room for English settlers, was undertaken under the
Catholic Queen Mary, and the two counties thus created by the wholesale
expulsion of the wretched kerne were named in honor of the Queen and of
her spouse, the Spanish Philip. Though Philip’s bigotry made him the
persecutor of heretics, it taught him no mercy toward those of his own
faith but of a different nationality, whether Irish or Portuguese. When
England became Protestant, Ireland stood steadfastly for the old faith;
and religious was added to race hatred. In Spain the Holy Inquisition
was the handmaid of grinding tyranny. In Ireland the Catholic priesthood
was the sole friend, standby, and comforter of a hunted and despairing
people. In the Netherlands and on the high seas Protestantism was the
creed of liberty. In Ireland it was one of the masks worn by the alien
oppressor.
[Illustration:
Sir John Eliot.
From the portrait by Van Somer at Port Eliot.
By permission of the Earl of St. Germans.
]
France was Catholic, but her Catholicism differed essentially from that
of Spain, and during the first part of the seventeenth century was quite
as liberal as the Protestantism of England. When Cromwell was a child
Henry of Navarre was on the French throne, and to him all creeds were
alike. He was succeeded in the actual government of France by the great
Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, who were Statesmen rather than
Churchmen; and under them the French Protestants enjoyed rather more
toleration than was allowed the Catholics of England. The natural foes
of France were the two great Catholic powers of Spain and Austria, ruled
by the twin branches of the House of Hapsburg; and her hostility to them
determined her attitude throughout the Thirty Years’ War.
Meanwhile, Holland was at the height of her power. She had a far greater
colonial empire than England, her commercial development was greater,
and the renown of her war marine higher. Drake and Hawkins had but
singed the beard of the Spanish king, had but plundered his vessels and
harassed his great fleets. Van Heemskirk, Piet Hein, and the elder Tromp
crushed the sea-power of Spain by downright hard fighting in great
pitched battles, and captured her silver fleets entire.
In Great Britain itself—it must be kept in mind that Scotland was as yet
an entirely distinct kingdom, united to England only by the fact that
the same line of kings ruled over both—the difference between the Scotch
and the English, though less in degree, was the same in kind as that
between the English and the Dutch. In Scotland, outside of the
Highlands, the mass of the people were devoted with all the strength of
their intense and virile natures to the form of Calvinism introduced by
Knox. Their Church government was Presbyterian. As both the Presbyterian
ministers and their congregations demanded that the State should be
managed in essentials according to the wishes of the Church, the general
feeling was really in the direction of a theocratic republic, although
the name would have frightened them. In Scotland, as in England, no
considerable body of men had yet grasped the idea that there should be
toleration of religious differences or a divorce between the functions
of the State and the Church. In both countries, as elsewhere at the time
through Christendom, religious liberty meant only religious liberty for
the sect that raised the cry; but, as elsewhere, the mere use of the
name as a banner under which to fight brought nearer the day when the
thing itself would be possible.
In England there was practically peace during the first forty years of
the century, but it was an ignoble and therefore an evil peace. Of
course, peace should be the aim of all statesmen, and is the aim of the
greatest statesman. Nevertheless, not only the greatest statesmen, but
all men who are truly wise and patriotic, recognize that peace is good
only when it comes honorably and is used for honorable purposes, and
that the peace of mere sloth or incapacity is as great a curse as the
most unrighteous war. Those who doubt this would do well to study the
condition of England during the reign of James I., and during the first
part of the reign of Charles I. England had then no standing army and no
foreign policy worthy of the name. The chief of her colonies was growing
up almost against her wishes, and wholly without any help or care from
her. In short, she realized the conditions, as regards her relations
with the outside world and “militarism,” which certain philosophers
advocate at the present day for America. The result was a gradual
rotting of the national fibre, which rendered it necessary for her to
pass through the fiery ordeal of the Civil War in order that she might
be saved.
In every nation there is, as there has been from time immemorial, a good
deal of difficulty in combining the policies of upholding the national
honor abroad, and of preserving a not too heavily taxed liberty at home.
Many peoples and many rulers who have solved the problem with marked
success as regards one of the two conditions, have failed as regards the
other. It was the peculiar privilege of the Stuart kings to fail
signally in both. They were dangerous to no one but their own subjects.
Their government was an object of contempt to their neighbors and of
contempt, mixed with anger and terror, to their own people. They made
amends for utter weakness in the face of a foreign foe by showing
against the free men of their own country that kind of tyranny which
finds its favorite expression in oppressing those who resist not at all,
or ineffectually. They were held on the throne only by a mistaken but
honorable loyalty, and by an unworthy servility; by the strong habits
formed by the customs of centuries; and, most of all, by the wise
distrust of radical innovation and preference for reform to revolution
which gives to the English race its greatest strength.
This last attitude, the dislike of revolution, was entirely wholesome
and praiseworthy. On the other hand, the doctrine of the divine right of
kings, which represented the extreme form of loyalty to the sovereign,
was vicious, unworthy of the race, and to be ranked among degrading
superstitions. It is now so dead that it is easy to laugh at it; but it
was then a real power for evil. Moreover, the extreme zealots who
represented the opposite pole of the political and religious world, were
themselves, as is ordinarily the case with such extremists, the allies
of the forces against which they pretended to fight. From these dreamers
of dreams, of whose “cloistered virtue” Milton spoke with such fine
contempt, the men who possessed the capacity to do things turned
contemptuously away, seeking practical results rather than theoretical
perfection, and being content to get the substance at some cost of form.
As always, the men who counted were those who strove for actual
achievement in the field of practical politics, and who were not misled
merely by names. England, in the present century, has shown how complete
may be the freedom of the individual under a nominal monarchy; and the
Dreyfus incident in France would be proof enough, were any needed, that
despotism of a peculiarly revolting type may grow rankly, even in a
republic, if there is not in its citizens a firm and lofty purpose to do
justice to all men and guard the rights of the weak as well as of the
strong.
James came to the throne to rule over a people steadily growing to think
more and more seriously of religion: to believe more and more in their
rights and liberties. But the King himself was cursed with a fervent
belief in despotism, and an utter inability to give his belief practical
shape in deeds. For half a century the spirit of sturdy independence had
been slowly growing among Englishmen. Elizabeth governed almost under
the forms of despotism; but a despotism which does not carry the sword
has to accommodate itself pretty thoroughly to the desires of the
subjects, once these desires become clearly defined and formulated.
Elizabeth never ventured to do what Henry had done. She left England,
therefore, thoroughly Royalist, devoted to the Crown, and unable to
conceive of any other form of government, but already desirous of seeing
an increase in the power of the people as expressed through Parliament.
James, from the very outset of his reign, pursued a course of conduct
exactly fitted both to irritate the people, with the pretensions of the
Crown, and to convince them that they could prevent these pretensions
from being carried out.
Besides, he offended both their political and their religious feelings.
England had been growing more and more fanatically Protestant; that is,
more and more Puritan. Under Elizabeth there had been more religious
persecution of Puritans, and of Dissenters generally, than of Catholics.
But this could not prevent the growth of the spirit of Puritanism.
During the reign of James there were marked Presbyterian tendencies
visible within the Anglican Church itself, and plenty of Puritans among
her divines. Unfortunately, both Presbyterian and Anglican were then at
one in heartily condemning that spirit of true religious liberty, of
true toleration, which we of to-day in the United States recognize as
the most vital of religious rights. The so-called Independent movement,
from which sprang the Congregational and indeed the Baptist Churches as
we know them to-day, had begun under Elizabeth. Its votaries contended
for what now seems the self-evident right of each congregation, if it so
desires, to decide for itself important questions of doctrine and of
church management. Yet Elizabeth’s ministers had actually stamped this
sect out of existence, with the hearty approval of the wisest men in the
realm and of the enormous majority of the people. Such an act, and,
above all, such approval, shows how long and difficult was the road
which still had to be traversed before the goal of religious liberty was
reached.
The people were relatively less advanced toward religious than toward
political liberty. Nevertheless, they were distinctly in advance of the
King, even in matters religious. The resolute determination to fight for
one’s own liberty of conscience, when it once becomes the characteristic
of the majority, cannot but tend toward securing liberty of conscience
for all; whereas, for one man, who claims supremacy in the Church as
well as overlordship in the State, to seek to impose his will upon
others in matters both spiritual and political, cannot but produce a
very aggravated form of tyranny. The Stuarts represented an extreme,
reactionary type of kingship; a type absolutely alien to all that was
highest and most characteristic in the English character. They possessed
the will to be despots, but neither their own powers nor the tendencies
of the times were in their favor. The tendency was, however, very
strongly in favor of hereditary kingship; so strongly, indeed, that
nothing but the extreme folly as well as the extreme baseness of the
Stuart kings could overcome it. Stability of government, and therefore
order, depends in the last resort upon the ability of the people to come
to a consensus as to where power belongs. This consensus is less a
matter of volition than of long habit, of slow evolution; to Americans
of to-day, the rule of the majority seems part of the natural order of
things, whereas to Russians it seems utterly unnatural, and they could
by no possibility be brought into sudden acquiescence in it. To
Englishmen, in the early decades of the seventeenth century, hereditary
kingship seemed the only natural government, and they could be severed
from this belief only by a succession of violent wrenches.
[Illustration:
All Saints’ Church, Huntingdon.
Containing the registry of Oliver Cromwell’s birth and baptism—a
fac-simile of which is here given. Above the record of his birth
someone had written “England’s plague for five years;” but this is
now partially obliterated.
]
James I. stood for absolutism in Church and State, and quarrelled with
and annoyed his subjects in the futile effort to realize his ideas.
Charles I., whom James had vainly sought to marry to a Spanish princess,
and succeeded in marrying to a French princess (Henrietta Maria), took
up his father’s task. In private life he was the best of the Stuart
kings, reaching about the average level of his subjects. In public life
his treachery, mendacity, folly, and vindictiveness: his utter inability
to learn by experience or to sympathize with any noble ambition of his
country: his readiness to follow evil counsel, and his ingratitude
toward any sincere friend, made him as unfit as either of his sons to
sit on the English throne; and a greater condemnation than this it is
not possible to award. Germany was convulsed by the Thirty Years’ War:
but Charles cared nothing for the struggle, and to her humiliation
England had to see Sweden step to the front as the champion of the
Reformation. At one period Charles even started to help the French king
against the Huguenots, but was brought to a halt by the outburst of
wrath this called forth from his subjects. Once he made feeble war on
Spain, and again he made feeble war on France; but the expedition he
sent against Cadiz failed, and the expedition he sent to Rochelle was
beaten; and he was, in each case, forced to make peace without gaining
anything. The renown of the English arms never stood lower than during
the reigns of the first two Stuarts.
At the outset of his reign Charles sought to govern through Buckingham,
who was entirely fit to be his minister, and, therefore, unfit to be
trusted with the slightest governmental task on behalf of a free and
great people. Under Buckingham the grossest corruption obtained—not only
in the public service, but in the creation of peerages. His whole
administration represented nothing but violence and bribery; and when he
took command of the forces to be employed against Rochelle, he showed
that the list of his qualities included complete military incapacity.
It was after the failure at Rochelle that Charles summoned his third
Parliament. With his first two he had failed to do more than quarrel, as
they would not grant him supplies unless they were allowed the right to
have something to say as to how they were to be used. He had, therefore,
dissolved them, holding that their only function was to give him what
may be needed.
With his third Parliament he got on no better. In it two great men
sprang to the front—Sir Thomas Wentworth, afterward Lord Strafford, and
Sir John Eliot, who had already shown himself a leader of the party that
stood for free representative institutions as against the unbridled
power of the King. Eliot was a man of pure and high character, and of
dauntless resolution, though a good deal of a doctrinaire in his belief
that Parliamentary government was the cure for all the evils of the body
politic. Wentworth, dark, able, imperious, unscrupulous, was a born
leader, but he had no root of true principle in him. At the moment, from
jealousy of Buckingham, and from desire to show that he would have to be
placated if the King were awake to self-interest, he threw all the
weight of his great power on the popular side.
Instead of giving the King the money he wanted, Parliament formulated a
Petition of Right, demanding such elementary measures of justice as that
the King should agree never again to raise a forced loan, or give his
soldiers free quarters on householders, or execute martial law in time
of peace, or send whom he wished to prison without showing the cause for
which it was done. The last was the provision against which Charles
struggled hardest. The Star Chamber—a court which sat without a jury,
and which was absolutely under the King’s jurisdiction—had been one of
his favorite instruments in working his arbitrary will. The powers of
this court were left untouched by the Petition: yet even the service
this court could render him was far less than what he could render
himself if it lay in his power arbitrarily to imprison men without
giving the cause. However, his need of money was so great, and the
Commons stood so firm, that he had to yield, and on June 7th, in the
year 1628, the Petition of Right became part of the law of the land. The
first step had been taken toward cutting out of the English Constitution
the despotic powers which the Tudor kings had bequeathed to their Stuart
successors.
[Illustration:
Cromwell’s House at Ely.
The tall spire is that of St. Mary’s Church, and the Cathedral tower
is seen in the distance.
]
Immediately afterward Buckingham was assassinated by a soldier who had
taken a violent grudge against him, and the nation breathed freer with
this particular stumbling-block removed, while it lessened the strain
between the King and the Commons, who were bent on his impeachment.
There were far more serious troubles ahead. If the King could raise
money without summoning Parliament, he could rule absolutely. If
Parliament could control not only the raising, but the expenditure of
money, it would be the supreme source of power, and the King but a
figure-head; in other words, the government would be put upon the basis
on which it has actually stood during the present century. For many
reigns the Commons had been accustomed to vote to each king for life, at
the outset of his reign, the duties on exports and imports, known as
tonnage and poundage; but during the years immediately past men had been
forced to think much on liberty and self-government. Parliament was in
no mood to surrender absolute power to the King.
With the right to lay taxes and to supervise the expenditure of
money—that is, to conduct the government—was intertwined the question of
religion. The mass of Englishmen adhered rather loosely to the Anglican
communion, and were not extreme Puritans; on certain points, however,
they were tinged very deeply with Calvinism. They were greatly angered
by the attitude of those bishops, who under the lead of Laud showed
themselves more hostile to Protestant than to Catholic dogmas. These
bishops preached not only that the views in Church matters held by the
bulk of Englishmen were wrong, but furthermore that it was the duty of
every subject to render entire obedience to the sovereign, no matter
what the sovereign did, and they insisted that parliaments were of right
mere ciphers in the State. Such doctrines were not only irritating from
the theological stand-point; they also struck at the root of political
freedom. The religious antagonism was accentuated by the fact that at
this time the Protestant cause in Germany had touched the lowest point
it ever reached during the Thirty Years’ War, and the anger and alarm of
the English Protestants, as they saw the Calvinists and Lutherans of
Denmark and North Germany overcome, were heightened by the indifference,
if not satisfaction, with which the King and the bishops looked at the
struggle.
In 1629 the Commons, under the lead of Eliot and Pym, took advanced
ground alike on the questions of religion and of taxation. Pym was
supplementing Eliot’s work, which was to make the House of Commons the
supreme authority in England, by striving to associate together a
majority of the members for the achievement of certain common objects;
in other words, he was laying the foundation of party government. Under
the lead of these two men, the first two Parliamentary and popular
leaders in the modern sense, the House of Commons passed resolutions
demanding uniformity in religious belief throughout the kingdom and
condemning every innovation in religion, and declaring enemies to the
kingdom and traitors to its liberties whoever advised the levying of
tonnage and poundage without the authority of Parliament, or whoever
voluntarily paid those duties. The first clause hit Catholics and
Dissenters alike, but was especially aimed at the bishops and their
followers, who stood closest to the King; and the second was, of course,
intended to transfer the sovereignty from the King to Parliament—in
other words, from the King to the people. Charles met the challenge by
dissolving Parliament. Eleven years were to pass before another met.
Meantime, the King governed as a despot; and it must be remembered that
when he deliberately chose thus to govern as a despot, responsible to no
legal tribunal, he at once threw his subjects back on the only remedies
which it is possible to enforce against despotism—deposition or death.
Charles was bitterly angry at the sturdy independence shown by the
Commons, and marked out for vengeance those who had been foremost in
thwarting his wishes. His course was easy. The Petition of Right
formulated a principle, but as yet it offered no safeguard against an
unscrupulous king; while the Star Chamber court, and the other judges
for that matter, held office at his pleasure, and acted as his
subservient tools in fining and imprisoning merchants who refused
payment of the duties, or men whose acts or words the king chose to
consider seditious. Eliot and some of his fellow-members were thrown
into prison because of the culminating proceedings in Parliament.
Eliot’s comrades made submission and were released, but Eliot refused to
acknowledge that the King, through his courts, had any right to meddle
with what was done in Parliament. He took his stand firmly on the ground
that the King was not the master of Parliament, and of course this could
but mean ultimately that Parliament was master of the King. In other
words, he was one of the earliest leaders of the movement which has
produced English freedom and English government as we now know them. He
was also its martyr. He was kept in the Tower without air or exercise
for three years, the King vindictively refusing to allow the slightest
relaxation in his confinement, even when it brought on consumption. In
December, 1632, he died; and the King’s hatred found its last expression
in denying to his kinsfolk the privilege of burying him in his Cornish
home.
Charles set eagerly to work to rule the kingdom by himself. To the
Puritan dogma of enforced unity of religious belief—utterly mischievous,
and just as much fraught with slavery to the soul in one sect as
another—he sought, through Laud, to oppose the only less mischievous,
because silly, doctrine of enforced uniformity in the externals of
public worship. Laud was a small and narrow man, hating Puritanism in
every form, and persecuting bitterly every clergyman or layman who
deviated in any way from what he regarded as proper ecclesiastical
custom. His tyranny was of that fussy kind which, without striking
terror, often irritates nearly to madness. He was Charles’s instrument
in the effort to secure ecclesiastical absolutism.
The instrument through which the King sought to establish the royal
prerogative in political affairs was of far more formidable temper.
Immediately after the dissolution of Parliament Wentworth had obtained
his price from the King, and was appointed to be his right-hand man in
administering the kingdom. A man of great shrewdness and insight, he
seems to have struggled to govern well, according to his lights; but he
despised law and acted upon the belief that the people should be slaves,
unpermitted, as they were unfit, to take any share in governing
themselves. After a while Laud was made archbishop; and Wentworth was
later made Lord Strafford.