such terms, were continually clashing with the people. A government thus
carried on naturally aroused resistance, which often itself took
unjustifiable forms; and this resistance was, in its turn, punished with
revolting brutality. Criticism of Laudian methods, or of existing social
habits, might take scurrilous shape; and then the critic’s ears were
hacked off as he stood in the pillory, or he was imprisoned for life.
[Illustration:
Archbishop Laud.
From the portrait at Lambeth Palace, painted by Vandyke.
By permission of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
]
The great fight was made, not on a religious, but on a purely political
question—that of Ship Money. The king wished to go to war with the
Dutch, and to raise his fleet he issued writs, first to the maritime
counties, and then to every shire in England. He consulted his judges,
who stated that his action was legal: as well they might, for when a
judge disagreed with him on any important point, he was promptly
dismissed from office. But there was one man in the kingdom who thought
differently, John Hampden, a Buckinghamshire ’squire, who had already
once sat as a silent member in Parliament, together with another equally
silent member of the same social standing, his nephew, Oliver Cromwell.
Hampden was assessed at twenty shillings. The amount was of no more
importance than the value of the tea which a century and a half later
was thrown into Boston Harbor; but in each case a vital principle—the
same vital principle—was involved. If the King could take twenty
shillings from Hampden without authority from the representatives of the
people in Parliament assembled, then his rule was absolute: he could do
what he pleased. On the other hand, if the House of Commons could do as
it wished in granting money only for whatever need it chose to recognize
in the kingdom, then the House of Commons was supreme. In Hampden’s view
but one course was possible—he was for the Parliament and the nation
against the King; and he refused to pay the sum, facing without a murmur
the punishment for his contumacy.
The King and his ministers did not flinch from proceeding to any length
against either political or religious opponents. Charles heartily upheld
Laud and Wentworth in carrying out their policy of “thorough”; Laud in
England; Wentworth, after 1633, in Ireland. “Thorough,” in their sense
of the word, meant making the State, which was the King, paramount in
every ecclesiastical and political matter, and putting his interests
above the interests, the principles, and the prejudices of all classes
and all parties; paying heed to nothing but to what seemed right in the
eyes of the sovereign and the sovereign’s chosen advisers. Under
Wentworth’s strong hand a certain amount of material prosperity followed
in Ireland, although chiefly among the English settlers. There was no
such material prosperity in England; 1630, for instance, was a famine
year. The net effect of the policy would in the long run have been to
bring down a freedom-loving people to a lower grade of political and
social development. There was, of course, no oppression in England in
any way resembling such oppression as that which flogged the Dutch to
revolt against the Spaniards. But it was exactly the kind of oppression
which led, in 1776, to the American Revolution. Eliot, Hampden, and Pym,
stood for the principles that were championed by Washington, Patrick
Henry, and the Adamses. The grievances which forced the Long Parliament
to appeal to arms were like those which made the Continental Congress
throw off the sovereignty of George III. In neither case was there the
kind of grinding tyranny which has led to the assassination of tyrants
and the frantic, bloodthirsty uprising of tortured slaves. In each case
the tyranny was in its first stage, not its last; but the reason for
this was simply that a nation of vigorous freemen will always revolt by
the time the first stage has been reached. It was not possible, either
for the Stuart kings or for George III., to go beyond a certain point,
for as soon as that point was reached the freemen were called to arms by
their leaders.
However, there was the greatest reluctance among Englishmen to
countenance rebellion, even for the best of causes. This reluctance was
eminently justifiable. Rebellion, revolution—the appeal to arms to
redress grievances; these are measures that can only be justified in
extreme cases. It is far better to suffer any moderate evil, or even a
very serious evil, so long as there is a chance of its peaceable
redress, than to plunge the country into civil war; and the men who head
or instigate armed rebellions for which there is not the most ample
justification must be held as one degree worse than any but the most
evil tyrants. Between the Scylla of despotism and the Charybdis of
anarchy there is but little to choose; and the pilot who throws the ship
upon one is as blameworthy as he who throws it on the other. But a point
may be reached where the people have to assert their rights, be the
peril what it may; and in Great Britain this point was passed under
Charles I.
The first break came, not in England, but in Scotland. The Scotch
abhorred Episcopacy; whereas the English had no objection whatever to
bishops, so long as the bishops did not outrage the popular religious
convictions. In Scotland the spirit of Puritanism was uppermost, and was
already exhibiting both its strength and its weakness; its sincerity and
its lack of breadth; its stern morality and its failure to discriminate
between essentials and non-essentials; its loftiness of aim and its
tendency to condemn liberality of thought in religion, art, literature,
and science, alike as irreligious; its insistence on purity of life, and
yet its unconscious tendency to promote hypocrisy and to drive out one
form of religious tyranny merely to erect another.
A man of any insight would not have striven to force an alien system of
ecclesiastical government upon a people so stubborn and self-reliant,
who were wedded to their own system of religious thought. But this was
what Laud attempted, with the full approval of Charles. In 1637 he made
a last effort to introduce the ceremonies of the English Church at
Edinburgh. No sooner was the reading of the Prayer-Book begun than the
congregation burst into wild uproar, execrating it as no better than
celebrating mass. It was essentially a popular revolt. The incident of
Jenny Geddes’s stool may be mythical, but it was among the women and men
of the lower orders that the resistance was stoutest. The whole nation
responded to the cry, and hurried to sign a national Covenant, engaging
to defend the Reformed religion, and to do away with all “innovations”;
that is, with everything in which Episcopacy differed from Puritanism
and inclined toward the Church of Rome.
In England and Scotland alike the Church of Rome was still accepted by
the people at large as the most dangerous of enemies. The wonderful
career of Gustavus Adolphus had just closed. The Thirty Years’ War—the
last great religious struggle—was still at its height. If, in France,
the Massacre of St. Bartholomew stood far in the past, the Revocation of
the Edict of Nantes yet lay in the future. The after-glow of the fires
of Smithfield still gleamed with lurid light in each sombre Puritan
heart. The men who, in England, were most earnest about their religion
held to their Calvinistic creed with the utmost sincerity, high purpose,
and self-devotion: but with no little harshness. Theirs was a lofty
creed, but one which, in the revolt against levity and viciousness, set
up a standard of gloom; and, though ready to fight to the death for
liberty for themselves, they had as yet little idea of tolerating
liberty in others. Naturally, such men sympathized with one another, and
the action of the Scotch was heartily, though secretly, applauded by the
stoutest Presbyterians of England. Moreover, while menaced by the common
oppressor, the Puritan independents, who afterward split off from the
Presbyterians, made common cause with them, the irreconcilable
differences between the two bodies not yet being evident.
Soon the Scotch held a general assembly of the Church, composed of both
clerical and lay members, and formally abolished Episcopacy, in spite of
the angry protests of the King. Their action amounted in effect to
establishing a theocracy. They repudiated the unlimited power of the
King and the bishops, as men would do nowadays in like case; but they
declared against liberty of thought and conduct in religious matters,
basing their action on practically the same line of reasoning that
influenced the very men they most denounced, hated, and feared.
[Illustration:
West Tower, Ely Cathedral, from Monastery Close.
]
The King took up the glove which the Scotch had thrown down. He raised
an army and undertook the first of what were derisively known as the
“Bishops’ Wars.” But his people sympathized with the Scotch rather than
with him. He got an army together on the Border, but it would not fight,
and he was forced reluctantly to treat for peace. Then Strafford came
back from Ireland and requested Charles to summon a Parliament so that
he could get funds. In April, 1640, the Short Parliament came together,
but the English spirit was now almost as high as the Scotch in hostility
to the King, and Parliament would not grant anything to the King until
the grievances of the people were redressed. To this demand Charles
would not listen, and the Parliament was promptly dissolved. Then, being
heartened by Laud, and especially by Strafford, Charles renewed the war,
only to see his army driven in headlong panic before the Scotch at
Newburn. The result was that he had to try to patch up a peace under the
direction of Strafford. But the Scotch would not leave the kingdom until
they were paid the expenses of the war. There was no money to pay them,
and Charles had to summon Parliament once more. On November 3, 1640, the
Long Parliament met at Westminster.
When Oliver Cromwell took his seat in the Long Parliament he was
forty-one years old. He had been born at Huntingdon on April 25, 1599,
and by birth belonged to the lesser gentry, or upper middle-class. The
original name of the family had been Williams; it was of Welsh origin.
There were many Cromwells, and Oliver was a common name among them. One
of the Protector’s uncles bore the name, and remained a stanch Loyalist
throughout the Civil War. Oliver’s own father, Robert, was a man in very
moderate circumstances, his estate in the town of Huntingdon bringing an
income of some £300 a year. Oliver’s mother, Elizabeth Steward of Ely,
seems to have been of much stronger character than his father. The
Stewards, like the Cromwells, were “new people,” both families, like so
many others of the day, owing their rise to the spoliation of the
monasteries. Oliver’s father was a brewer, and his success in the
management of the brewery was mainly due to Oliver’s mother. No other
member of Oliver’s family—neither his wife nor his father—influenced him
as did his mother. She was devoted to him, and he, in turn, loved her
tenderly and respected her deeply. He followed her advice when young; he
established her in the Royal Palace of Whitehall when he came to
greatness; and when she died he buried her in Westminster Abbey. As a
boy he received his education at Huntingdon, but when seventeen years
old was sent to Cambridge University. A strong, hearty young fellow;
fond of horse-play and rough pranks—as indeed he showed himself to be
even when the weight of the whole kingdom rested on his shoulders. He
nevertheless seems to have been a fair student, laying the foundation
for that knowledge of Greek literature and the Latin language, and that
fondness for books, which afterward struck the representatives of the
foreign powers at London. In 1617 his father died, and he left
Cambridge. When twenty-one years old he was married in London, to
Elizabeth Bouchier (who was one year older than he was), the daughter of
a rich London furrier. She was a woman of gentle and amiable character,
and though she does not appear to have influenced Cromwell’s public
career to any perceptible extent, he always regarded her with fond
affection, and was always faithful to her.
For twenty years after his marriage he lived a quiet life, busying
himself with the management of his farm. Nine children were born to him,
of whom three sons and five daughters lived to maturity. About this time
his soul was first deeply turned toward religious matters, and, like the
great majority of serious thinkers of the time, he became devoted to the
Puritan theology; indeed no other was possible to a representative of
the prosperous, independent, and religious middle-class, from which all
the greatest Puritan leaders sprang. While a boy Oliver had been sent to
the free school at Huntingdon, and his first training had been received
under its master, the Reverend Thomas Beard, a zealous Puritan and
Reformer, as well as a man of wide reading and sound scholarship, and
lastly, an inflamed hater of the Church of Rome. All his surroundings,
all his memories, were such as to make the future Dictator of England
sincerely feel that the Church of Rome was the arch-antagonist of all,
temporal and spiritual, that he held most dear. In the first place his
ancestors were among those who had profited by the spoliation of the
monasteries; and the only way to avoid uncomfortable feelings on the
part of the spoiler is for him to show—or if this is not possible, to
convince himself that he has shown—the utmost iniquity on the part of
the despoiled. When Oliver was a small boy the Gunpowder Plot shook all
England. When he was a little older Henry of Navarre was stabbed in
Paris; and though Henry was a cynical turncoat in matters of religion,
and a man of the most revolting licentiousness in private life, he was
yet a great ruler of men, and had been one of the props of the
Protestant cause. Before Oliver came of age the Thirty Years’ War had
begun its course. To Oliver Cromwell, warfare against the Church of
Rome, broken by truces which, whether long or short, were intended only
to be breathing-spells, must have seemed the normal state of things.
In 1631 Oliver sold his paternal estate in Huntingdon and managed a
rented farm at St. Ives for five years; then he removed to Ely, in the
fen country, and again took up farming, being joined by his mother and
sisters. He served in the great Parliament which passed the Petition of
Right, but played no part of prominence therein: standing stoutly,
however, for Puritanism and Parliamentary freedom. During the ensuing
eleven years of unrest, while all England was making ready for the
impending conflict, Oliver busied himself with his farm and his family.
He showed himself one of the strongest bulwarks of the Puritan
preachers; zealous in the endeavor to further the cause of religion in
every way, and always open to appeals from the poor and the oppressed,
of whom he was the consistent champion. When certain rich men, headed by
the Earl of Bedford, endeavored to oust from some of their rights the
poor people of the fens, Oliver headed the latter in their resistance.
He was keenly interested in the trial of his kinsman, John Hampden, for
refusal to pay the Ship Money; a trial which was managed by the advocate
Oliver St. John, his cousin by marriage.
In short, Cromwell was far more concerned in righting specific cases of
oppression than in advancing the great principles of constitutional
government which alone make possible that orderly liberty which is the
bar to such individual acts of wrong-doing. From the stand-point of the
private man this is a distinctly better failing than is its opposite;
but from the stand-point of the statesman the reverse is true. Cromwell,
like many a so-called “practical” man, would have done better work had
he followed a more clearly defined theory; for though the practical man
is better than the mere theorist, he cannot do the highest work unless
he is a theorist also. However, all Cromwell’s close associations were
with Hampden, St. John, and the other leaders in the movement for
political freedom, and he acted at first in entire accord with their
ideas: while with the religious side of their agitation he was in most
hearty sympathy.
It is difficult for us nowadays to realize how natural it seemed at that
time for the Word of the Lord to be quoted and appealed to on every
occasion, no matter how trivial, in the lives of sincerely religious
men. It is very possible that quite as large a proportion of people
nowadays strive to shape their internal lives in accordance with the Ten
Commandments and the Golden Rule; indeed, it is probable that the
proportion is far greater; but professors of religion then carried their
religion into all the externals of their lives. Cromwell belonged among
those earnest souls who indulged in the very honorable dream of a world
where civil government and social life alike should be based upon the
Commandments set forth in the Bible. To endeavor to shape the whole
course of individual existence in accordance with the hidden or
half-indulged law of perfect righteousness, has to it a very lofty side;
but if the endeavor is extended to include mankind at large, it has also
a very dangerous side: so dangerous indeed that in practice the effort
is apt to result in harm, unless it is undertaken in a spirit of the
broadest charity and toleration; for the more sincere the men who make
it, the more certain they are to treat, not only their own principles,
but their own passions, prejudices, vanities, and jealousies, as
representing the will, not of themselves, but of Heaven. The constant
appeal to the Word of God in all trivial matters is, moreover, apt to
breed hypocrisy of that sanctimonious kind which is peculiarly
repellent, and which invariably invites reaction against all religious
feeling and expression.
At that day Cromwell’s position in this matter was, at its worst, merely
that of the enormous majority of earnest men of all sects. Each sect
believed that it was the special repository of the wisdom and virtue of
the Most High: and the most zealous of its members believed it to be
their duty to the Most High to make all other men worship Him according
to what they conceived to be His wishes. This was the mediæval attitude,
and represented the mediæval side in Puritanism; a side which was
particularly prominent at the time, and which, so far as it existed,
marred the splendor of Puritan achievement. The nobleness of the effort
to bring about the reign of God on earth, the inspiration that such an
effort was to those engaged in it, must be acknowledged by all; but, in
practice, we must remember that, as religious obligation was then
commonly construed, it inevitably led to the Inquisition in Spain; to
the sack of Drogheda in Ireland; to the merciless persecution of
heretics by each sect, according to its power, and the effort to stifle
freedom of thought and stamp out freedom of action. It is right, and
greatly to be desired, that men should come together to search after the
truth: to try to find out the true will of God; but in Cromwell’s time
they were only beginning to see that each body of seekers must be left
to work out its own beliefs without molestation, so long as it does not
strive to interfere with the beliefs of others.
The great merit of Cromwell, and of the party of the Independents which
he headed, and which represented what was best in Puritanism, consists
in the fact that he and they did, dimly, but with ever-growing
clearness, perceive this principle, and, with many haltings, strove to
act up to it. The Independent or Congregational churches, which worked
for political freedom, and held that each congregation of Protestants
should decide for itself as to its religious doctrines, stood as the
forerunners in the movement that has culminated in our modern political
and religious liberty. How slow the acceptance of their ideas was, how
the opposition to them battled on to the present century, will be
appreciated by anyone who turns to the early writings of Gladstone when
he was the “rising hope of those stern Tories,” whose special antipathy
he afterward became. Even yet there are advocates of religious
intolerance, but they are mostly of the academic kind, and there is no
chance for any political party of the least importance to try to put
their doctrines into effect. More and more, at least here in the United
States, Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Gentiles, are learning the
grandest of all lessons—that they can best serve their God by serving
their fellow-men, and best serve their fellow-men, not by wrangling
among themselves, but by a generous rivalry in working for righteousness
and against evil.
This knowledge then lay in the future. When Cromwell grew to manhood he
was a Puritan of the best type, of the type of Hampden and Milton;
sincere, earnest, resolute to do good as he saw it, more liberal than
most of his fellow-religionists, and saved from their worst
eccentricities by his hard common-sense, but not untouched by their
gloom, and sharing something of their narrowness. Entering Parliament
thus equipped, he could not fail to be most drawn to the religious side
of the struggle. He soon made himself prominent; a harsh-featured,
red-faced, powerfully-built man, whose dress appeared slovenly in the
eyes of the courtiers—who was no orator, but whose great power soon
began to impress friends and enemies alike.
II
THE LONG PARLIAMENT AND THE CIVIL WAR
King Charles’s theory was that Parliament had met to grant him the money
he needed. The Parliament’s conviction was that it had come together to
hold the King and his servants to accountability for what they had done,
and to provide safeguards against a repetition of the tyranny of the
last eleven years. Parliament held the whip hand, for the King dared not
dissolve it until the Scots were paid, lest their army should march at
once upon London.
The King had many courtiers who hated popular government, but he had
only one great and terrible man of the type that can upbuild tyrannies;
and, with the sure instinct of mortal fear and mortal hate, the Commons
struck at the minister whose towering genius and unscrupulous
fearlessness might have made his master absolute on the throne. A week
after the Long Parliament met, in November, 1640, Pym, who at once took
the lead in the House, moved the impeachment of Strafford, in a splendid
speech which set forth the principles for which the popular party was
contending. It was an appeal from the rule of irresponsible will to the
rule of law, for the violation of which every man could be held
accountable before some tribunal. About the same time Laud was thrown
into the Tower; but at the moment there was no thought of taking his
life, for the ecclesiastic was not—like the statesman—a mighty and
fearsome figure, and though he had done as much evil as his feeble
nature permitted, he had unquestionably been far more conscientious than
the great Earl. Strafford had sinned against the light, for he had
championed liberty until the King paid him his price and made him the
most dangerous foe of his former friends. He now defended himself with
haughty firmness, and the King strove in every way to help him. But the
Commons passed a Bill of Attainder against him: and then Charles
committed an act of fatal meanness and treachery. There was not one
thing that Strafford had done, save by his sovereign’s wish and in his
sovereign’s interest. By every consideration of honor and expediency
Charles was bound to stand by him. But the Stuart King flinched. Deeming
it for his own interest to let Strafford be sacrificed, he signed the
death-warrant. “Put not your trust in Princes,” said the fallen Earl
when the news was brought to him, and he went to the scaffold undaunted.
[Illustration:
John Pym.
From the portrait by Cornelius Janssen at the Victoria and Albert
Museum, South Kensington.
]