was not among the very foremost leaders. He had no great understanding
of constitutional government, no full appreciation of the vital
importance of the reign of law to the proper development of orderly
liberty. His fervent religious ardor made all questions affecting faith
and doctrine close to him; and his hatred of corruption and oppression
inclined him to take the lead whenever any question arose of dealing,
either with the wrongs done by Laud in the course of his religious
persecutions, or with the irresponsible tyranny of the Star Chamber, and
the sufferings of its victims. The bent of Cromwell’s mind was thus
shown right in the beginning of his parliamentary career. His desire was
to remedy specific evils. He was too impatient to found the kind of
legal and constitutional system which could alone prevent the recurrence
of such evils. This tendency, thus early shown, explains, at least in
part, why it was that later he deviated from the path trod by Hampden,
and afterward by Washington and Washington’s colleagues: showing himself
unable to build up free government or to establish the reign of law,
until he was finally driven to substitute his own personal government
for the personal government of the King whom he had helped to dethrone,
and put to death. Cromwell’s extreme admirers treat his impatience of
the delays and shortcomings of ordinary constitutional and legal
proceedings as a sign of his greatness. It was just the reverse. In
great crises it may be necessary to overturn constitutions and disregard
statutes, just as it may be necessary to establish a vigilance
committee, or take refuge in lynch law; but such a remedy is always
dangerous, even when absolutely necessary; and the moment it becomes the
habitual remedy, it is a proof that society is going backward. Of this
retrogression the deeds of the strong man who sets himself above the law
may be partly the cause and partly the consequence; but they are always
the signs of decay.
The Commons had passed a law authorizing the election of a Parliament at
least once in three years: which at once took away the King’s power to
attempt to rule without a Parliament; and in May they extorted from the
King an act that they should not be dissolved without their own consent.
Ship Money was declared to be illegal; the Star Chamber was abolished;
and Tonnage and Poundage were declared illegal, unless levied by Act of
Parliament. Then the Scotch army was paid off and returned across the
Border. The best work of the Commons had now been done, and if they
could have trusted the King it would have been well for them to
dissolve; but the King could not be trusted, and, moreover, the
religious question was pushed to the front. Laud’s actions—actions taken
with the full consent and by the advice of the King—had rendered the
Episcopal form of Church government obnoxious. The House of Commons was
Presbyterian, and it speedily became evident that it wished to establish
the Presbyterian system of Church government in the place of Episcopacy;
and, moreover, that it intended to be just as intolerant on behalf of
Presbyterianism as the King and Laud had been on behalf of Episcopacy.
There was a strong moderate party which the King might have rallied
about him, but his incurable bad faith made it impossible to trust his
protestations. He now made terms with the Scotch, in accordance with
which they agreed not to interfere between himself and his English
subjects in religious matters. He hoped thereby to deprive the
Presbyterian English of their natural allies across the Border. This
conduct, of itself, would have inflamed the increasing religious
bitterness; but it was raised to madness by the news that came from
Ireland at this time.
Inspired by the news of the revolt in Scotland and the troubles in
England, the Irish had risen against their hereditary oppressors. It was
the revolt of a race which rose to avenge wrongs as bitter as ever one
people inflicted upon another; and it was inevitable that it should be
accompanied by appalling outrages in certain places. It was on these
outrages that the English fixed their eyes, naturally ignoring the
generations of English evil-doing which had brought them about. A
furious cry for revenge arose. Every Puritan, from Oliver Cromwell down,
regarded the massacres as a fresh proof that Roman Catholics ought to be
treated, not as professors of another Christian creed, but as cruel
public enemies; and their burning desire for vengeance took the form,
not merely of hostility to Roman Catholicism, but to the Episcopacy,
which they regarded as in the last resort an ally of Catholicism.
In November, 1641, the Puritan majority in Parliament passed the Grand
Remonstrance—which was a long indictment of Charles’s conduct. Cromwell
had now taken his place as among the foremost of the Root and Branch
Party, who demanded the abolition of Episcopacy, and whose action drove
all those who believed in the Episcopal form of Church government into
the party of the King. He threw himself with eager vehemence into the
Party of the Remonstrance, and after its bill was passed told Falkland
that if it had been rejected by Parliament he would have sold all he
had, and never again seen England.
For a moment the Puritan violence, which culminated in the Grand
Remonstrance, provoked a reaction in favor of the King; but the King, by
another act of violence, brought about a counter-reaction. In January,
1642, he entered the House of Commons, and in person ordered the seizure
and imprisonment in the Tower of the five foremost leaders of the
Puritan party, including Pym and Hampden. Such a course on his part
could be treated only as an invitation to civil war. London, which
before had been wavering, now rallied to the side of the Commons; the
King left Whitehall; and it was evident to all men that the struggle
between him and the Parliament had reached a point where it would have
to be settled by the appeal to arms.
In August, 1642, King Charles planted the royal standard on the Castle
of Nottingham, and the Civil War began. The Parliamentary forces were
led by the Earl of Essex. They included some 20 regiments of infantry
and 75 troops of horse, each 60 strong, raised and equipped by its own
captain. Oliver Cromwell was captain of the Sixty-seventh Troop, and his
kinsfolk and close friends were scattered through the cavalry and
infantry. His sons served with or under him. One brother-in-law was
quartermaster of his own troop; a second was captain of another troop.
His future son-in-law, Henry Ireton, was captain of yet another; a
cousin and a nephew were cornets. Another cousin, John Hampden, was
colonel of a regiment of foot; so was Cromwell’s close friend and
neighbor, the after-time Earl of Manchester, who was much under his
influence.
It was nearly a hundred years since England had been the scene of
serious fighting, and Scotland had witnessed nothing more than brawls
during that time. Elizabeth’s war with Spain had been waged upon the
ocean. However, thousands of English and Scotch adventurers had served
in the Netherlands and in High Germany under the Dutch and Swedish
generals. In both the Royal and Parliamentary armies there was a
sprinkling of men—especially in the upper ranks of the officers—who had
had practical experience of war on a large scale. The English people
offered exceptionally fine material for soldiers; the population was
still overwhelmingly rural and agricultural. In the cities the hardy
mechanics and craftsmen were accustomed to sports in which physical
prowess played a great part. The agricultural classes were far above the
peasant serfs of Germany and France; and the gentry and yeomanry were
accustomed to the use of the horse and the fowling-piece, and were
devoted to field-sports. In courage, in hardihood, in intelligence, the
level was high.
Although gunpowder had been in use for a couple of centuries, progress
toward the modern arms of precision had been so slow that close-quarter
weapons were still, on the whole, superior; and shock tactics rather
than fire tactics were decisive. Artillery, though used on the field of
battle, was never there a controlling factor, being of chief use in the
assault of fortified places. The musketeers took so long to load their
clumsy weapons that they could be used to best advantage only when
protected, and they played a less important part on a pitched field than
the great bodies of pikemen with which they were mingled. In England the
cavalry had completely the upper hand of the infantry. It was used, not
merely to finish the fight, but to smash unbroken and unshaken bodies of
foot; and so great was its value in the open field that every effort was
made by the commanders on both sides to keep it at the largest possible
ratio to the whole army. Every decisive battle of the Civil War was made
such by the cavalry. The arrangement of the armies was, invariably, with
the infantry in the centre, the pikemen and the musketeers ordinarily
alternating in clumps, while the cavalry was on both wings. The
dragoons, though mounted, habitually fought on foot with their
fire-pieces. Lancers were rarely used. The heavy cavalry were clad in
cuirasses, and armed with long, straight swords and pistols. The light
cavalry usually wore the buff coat, sometimes with a breast-piece,
always with a helmet; and in addition to their sword and pistols,
carried a carbine.
Throughout Europe, at this time, cavalry trusted altogether too much to
their clumsy firearms, save when handled by some great natural leader of
horse; and, in consequence, on the Continent, the infantry had won the
upper hand. But it happened in the English Civil War that the only great
leaders developed were cavalrymen; and so the horse retained throughout
the mastery over the foot; although, as each arm was always pitted
against the same arm in the opposing forces, the struggle frequently
wore itself out before the victorious horse and victorious foot, if they
belonged to different parties, could fight it out between them.
The Civil War opened with just such blundering and indecisive fighting
as marked the opening of the American Civil War two centuries later.
There was no hard and fast line, whether geographically or of caste,
between the two parties; in every portion of England, and in every rank
of society, there were to be found adherents both of the King and of the
Commons; but, as a whole, the east and south of England were for the
Parliament; the north and west were Royalist. The bulk of the
aristocracy stood for the King; the bulk of the lesser gentry and
yeomanry were against him. The revolutionary movement—as in America in
1776—received its main strength from the lesser gentry, small farmers,
tradesmen, and upper-class mechanics and handicraftsmen. In America in
1776 there was no proletariat. So far as there was one in England in
1642, it took no interest in the struggle. The peasantry, the mass of
the agricultural laborers, were inclined toward the King, though the men
immediately above them in social position, who represented the lowest
rank that had political influence, were the other way. The townsmen were
generally for the Parliament.
In comparing the English Civil War of the seventeenth century with the
American Civil War of the nineteenth, there are some curious points of
similarity, no less than some very sharp contrasts. During the two
centuries there had been a great growth in esteem for fixity of
principle. In the English Civil War nothing was more common than for a
man to change sides, and there was treachery even on the field of battle
itself; whereas, in the American Civil War, though many of the leaders,
like Lee and Thomas, were in great doubt as to the proper course to
follow, yet when sides had once been taken, there was no flinching and
no looking back. Moreover, there was far greater intensity of popular
feeling in the American Civil War; even the States that were divided in
opinion at the outset held no considerable mass of population which did
not soon throw its weight on one side or the other; whereas, in the
English Civil War there were large bodies of men who strove to avoid
declaring for either side. At the very end of the contest, tens of
thousands of persons, mainly peasants, organized under the title of
Clubmen, with the avowed purpose of holding the scales even between the
two sets of combatants, and of looking out for their own interests. The
American Civil War was fought for the right of secession, and efforts
were made—in Kentucky, for instance—to establish the right of a locality
to be neutral. The “state rights” theory reached an almost equal
development in some of the English counties during the Cromwellian
contest. Yorkshire at one time declared for neutrality. The trained
bands of Cornwall, when the Royalist forces were driven back within
their borders, promptly turned out and drove off the pursuing
Parliamentarians, but refused to obey orders to leave the county in
pursuit of their foes, and disbanded to their own homes. Later, they
repeated exactly the same course of procedure. There were at times local
truces, or agreements as to the conditions of the contest in particular
localities.
On both sides “associations” were formed, consisting of special groups
of counties banded together intimately for the purposes of defence. The
most important of these, the Eastern Association, included Cromwell’s
own home, taking in all of the middle East. This region was throughout
the contest the backbone of resistance to the King. Its people were
strongly Puritan in feeling, and it was they who gave Cromwell his
strength: for they gave him his Ironsides; and furnished the famous New
Model for the Parliamentary army which finished the war.
At the outset of the war many of the nobles raised regiments from among
their own tenants, and the armies were of picturesque look, each
regiment having its own uniform. The Guards of Lord Essex adopted the
buff leather coat, which afterward became the uniform of the whole
Roundhead army. Hampden’s regiment was in green; the London trained
bands in bright scarlet. Other regiments were clad in blue or gray. In
the Cavalier army there were foot-guards in white and foot-guards in
red; and among their horse, the Life Guards of the King—composed of
lords and gentlemen who had no separate commands—wore plumed casques
over their long curled locks, embroidered lace collars over their
glittering cuirasses, gay scarfs, gilded sword-belts, and great-boots of
soft leather doubled down below the knee.
The history of the English Civil War, like the history of the American
Revolutionary War and the American Civil War, teaches two lessons.
First, it shows that the average citizen of a civilized community
requires months of training before he can be turned into a good soldier,
and that raw levies—no matter how patriotic—are, under normal
conditions, helpless before smaller armies of trained and veteran
troops, and cannot strike a finishing blow even when pitted against
troops of their own stamp. In the second place it teaches a lesson,
which at first sight seems contradictory of the first, but is in reality
not in the least so; namely, that there is nothing sacrosanct in the
trade of the soldier. It is a trade which can be learned without special
difficulty by any man who is brave and intelligent, who realizes the
necessity of obedience, and who is already gifted with physical
hardihood and is accustomed to the use of the horse and of weapons, to
enduring fatigue and exposure, and to acting on his own responsibility,
taking care of himself in the open.
Cromwell’s troops were not regulars, like the professional soldiers of
the Thirty Years’ War; they were volunteers. After two or three years’
service they became the finest troops that Europe could then show; just
as by 1864 the volunteers of Grant and Lee had reached a grade of
perfection which made them, for their own work, superior to any other of
the armies then in existence.
Under modern conditions, in a great civilized state, the regular army is
composed of officers who have as a rule been carefully trained to their
work; who possess remarkably fine physique, and who are accustomed to
the command of men and to taking the lead in emergencies; and the
enlisted men have likewise been picked out with great care as to their
bodily development; have been drilled until they handle themselves,
their horses, and their weapons admirably, can cook for themselves, and
are trained to the endurance of hardship and exposure under the
conditions of march and battle. An ordinary volunteer or militia
regiment from an ordinary civilized community, on the other hand, no
matter how enthusiastic or patriotic, or how intelligent, is officered
by lawyers, merchants, business men, or their sons, and contains in its
ranks clerks, mechanics, or farmers’ lads of varying physique, who have
to be laboriously taught how to shoot and how to ride, and, above all,
how to cook and to take care of themselves and make themselves
comfortable in the open, especially when tired out by long marches, and
when the weather is bad. At the outset such a regiment is, of course,
utterly inferior to a veteran regular regiment, but after it has been in
active service in the field for a year or two, so that its weak men have
been weeded out, and its strong men have learned their duties—which can
be learned far more rapidly in time of war than in time of peace—it
becomes equal to any regiment. Moreover, if a regular regiment consists
of raw recruits and is officered by men who have learned their
profession only in the barracks and the study and on the parade ground,
it may be a cause of very disagreeable surprise to those who have grown
to regard the word “regular” as a kind of fetich.
Again, a volunteer regiment may have the wisdom to select officers for
the highest positions who know how to handle men, who have seen actual
soldiering, who possess natural capacity for leadership, eagerness to
learn, and the good sense to know their own shortcomings; and the rank
and file may be men of adventurous temper, already skilful riflemen, and
of great bodily hardihood, accustomed to exposure, accustomed to
cook—that is to say, to take care of their stomachs—to live in the open,
to endure hardship and fatigue, and to take advantage of cover in
battle. Such a regiment, especially if raised on the frontier, may, from
the outset, prove itself equal to or better than any ordinary regular
regiment—as has recently been shown by our troops in the Philippines, by
the Australians and Canadians in South Africa, and, above all, by the
Boers; and as was shown nearly a century ago by Hofer’s Tyrolese and
Andrew Jackson’s backwoodsmen. Of course, no good traits will avail in
the least if men are possessed with the belief that they cannot be
taught anything, if they are not eager to obey and to learn; or if they
do not possess a natural fighting edge.
So it is with the men in high command. The careful training in body and
mind, and especially in character, gained in an academy like West Point,
and the subsequent experience in the field, endow the regular officer
with such advantages that, in any but a long war, he cannot be overtaken
even by the best natural fighter. In the American Civil War, for
instance, the greatest leaders were all West Pointers. Yet even there,
by the end of the contest both armies had produced regimental, brigade,
and division commanders, who though originally from civil life, had
learned to know their business exactly as well as the best regular
officers; and there was at least one such commander—Forrest—who, in his
own class, was unequalled. If in a war the regular officers prove to
have been trained merely to the pedantry of their profession, and do not
happen to number men of exceptional ability in their ranks, then sooner
or later the men who are born soldiers will come to the front, even
though they have been civilians until late in life.
None of the men on the Parliamentary side who had received their
training in the Continental armies amounted to much. On the Royalist
side the only professional soldier who made his mark was Rupert; and
Rupert, after a year or two, was decisively beaten by Cromwell—a great
natural military genius, who, although a civilian till after forty,
showed an astonishing aptitude in grasping the essentials of his new
profession. His only military rival in the war was Montrose, who was
also not a professional soldier.
[Illustration:
Prince Rupert.
From the portrait by Vandyke at Hinchingbrooke.
By permission of the Earl of Sandwich.
]
In September King Charles had gathered a force of 10,000 men at
Nottingham, while Essex was getting together a larger army not far off,
at Northampton. The wealth of the kingdom was with the Parliament, which
also possessed the arsenal, the fleet, and the principal ports. On the
other hand, man for man, the King’s troops were superior to the
Parliament’s, especially in the most dreaded arm of the service, the
horse. The fervid zealots who, like John Bunyan, entered the
Parliamentary army, were never in the majority, and needed peculiar
training to bring out their remarkable soldierly qualities. The sober,
thrifty, religious middle class—which was the backbone of the
Parliamentary strength—had no special aptitude for military service. If
its members could once be put in the army and kept there a sufficient
length of time, their qualities made them excellent soldiers; but, as a
whole, they were not men of very adventurous temper, and had had no such
training in arms, or in the sports akin to war, as inclined them to rush
into the army. On the other hand, the Royalist nobles and squires, and
their game-keepers, grooms, and hard-riding kinsmen, with their taste
for field-sports, their love of adventure, and their high sense of
warlike honor, made splendid material out of which to organize an army,
and especially cavalry. In consequence, for the first half of the war
the Royalist cavalry was overwhelmingly superior to the Parliamentary
cavalry, composed as it was of men bought with the money of the
_bourgeoisie_, who had no particular heart in their work; who were timid
horsemen and unskilled swordsmen. The difference in favor of the
Royalist horse was as marked as the superiority of the Confederate horse
in the American Civil War, under leaders like Stuart, Morgan, and Basil
Duke; until time was afforded, in the one case for the growth of
Cromwell, in the other for the development of leaders like Sheridan and
Wilson.
Cromwell had already shown himself very active. He had seized the
magazine of the Castle of Cambridge, and secured the University plate,
which was being sent to the King. He had raised volunteers and expended
money freely out of his own scanty means. His troop of horse was, from
the beginning, utterly different from most of the Parliamentary cavalry;
it was composed of his own neighbors, yeomen and small farmers, hard,
serious men, whose grim natures were thrilled by the intense earnestness
of their leader, and whom he steadily drilled into good horsemanship and
swordsmanship. His chaplains always played an important part; one of
them, Hugh Peters, was a man of mark, who joined ability to high
character.
The King’s cavalry was led by Prince Rupert, a dashing swordsman and
horseman, a born cavalry leader, who, though only twenty-three, had
already learned his trade in the wars of the Continent. Rupert opened
the real fighting, scattering a large body of Parliamentary horse in
panic rout when he struck them near Powick, on the Severn.