was dissolved it had become evident that the navy would ultimately
conquer this peace for England; but the stubborn Dutch had to undergo
several additional defeats before they would come to terms. Blake, the
great admiral, had no particular admiration for Cromwell, but finally
threw in his lot with him on the ground that the fleet had no concern
with politics, and should limit itself strictly to the effort “to keep
foreigners from fooling us.” Monk was the admiral most in view in the
later stages of the Dutch War. When it was over, he was sent back to
keep the Highlands in order, which he and his fellow-Cromwellians did,
with a thoroughness not afterward approached for a century. Scotland was
now definitely united to England.
The new Parliament consisted of 400 members from England, 30 from
Scotland, and 30 from Ireland. They were elected by a general suffrage,
based on the possession of property to the value £200. The Parliament
thus gathered was representative in a very wide sense. Nearly two
hundred years were to elapse before any other as truly representative
was to sit in England. The classes whose inclusion would certainly have
made trouble were excluded; and, while the suffrage had been extended,
and gross inequalities of representation abolished, there had been no
such revolutionary action as suddenly to introduce masses of men
unaccustomed to the exercise of self-government. Indeed, the house had
arbitrarily erased from its roll of membership the names of a few
ultra-Republicans. It was chiefly Cromwell’s own fault that he failed to
get along with this Parliament, and, therefore, failed to put the
government on a permanent basis of orderly liberty.
At the beginning, everything seemed to go well. He opened the Parliament
with one of those noteworthy speeches of which some seventeen have been
preserved; speeches in the proper sense, unquestionably better when
spoken to listeners than when read by critics, but instinct with the
rough power of the speaker, permeated with religious fervor and sincere
striving after the right; and even where the reasoning is most
wrong-headed, containing phrases and sentiments which show the keenest
insight into the needs of the moment, and the needs of eternity as well.
The sentences are often very involved, it being quite evident that the
speeches were not written out, not even deliberately thought out, in
advance; for Oliver, even as he spoke, kept dropping and rejecting such
of his half-finished utterances as did not give sufficiently accurate or
vehement expression to his thought. Yet they contain abundance of the
loftiest thought, expressed in language which merely gains strength from
its rude, vigorous homeliness. For generations after Cromwell’s death,
the polished cynics and dull pedants, who abhorred and misunderstood
him, spoke of his utterances with mixed ridicule and wrath: Hume
hazarding the opinion that if his speeches, letters, and writings, were
gathered together they would form “one of the most nonsensical
collections the world had ever seen.” We could far better afford to lose
every line Hume ever wrote than the speeches of Cromwell.
In his opening address he pointed out that what the nation most needed
was healing and settling; and in a spirit of thoroughly English
conservatism, denounced any merely revolutionary doctrines which would
do away with the security of property, or would give the tenant “as
liberal a fortune” as the landlord. In religious matters also, he
condemned those who could do nothing but cry: “Overturn! Overturn!!
Overturn!!!” and together with his praise of what had been done, and of
the body to which he spoke, he mingled much advice, remarking: “I hope
you will not be unwilling to hear a little again of the sharp as well as
of the sweet.” He exhorted them to go to work in sober earnest; to
remedy in practical shape any wrongs, and to join with him in working
for good government. Unfortunately, he made the mental reservation that
he should be himself the ultimate judge of what good government was.
Equally unfortunately, there was in the House a body of vehement
Republicans who at once denied the legal existence of either Council or
Protector, on the ground that the Long Parliament had never been
dissolved. Of course such an argument was self-destructive, as it told
equally against the legality of the new Parliament in which they sat.
Parliament contented itself with recognizing the Instrument of
Government as only of provisional validity, and proceeded to discuss it,
clause by clause, as the groundwork of a new Constitution. It was
unanimously agreed that Cromwell should retain his power for five years,
but Parliament showed by its actions that it did not intend to leave him
in a position of absolute supremacy. Instantly Oliver interfered, as
arbitrarily as any hereditary King might have done.
He first appeared before the Parliament, and in an exceedingly able
speech announced his willingness to accept a Parliamentary constitution,
provided that it contained four fundamentals not to be overturned by
law. The fundamentals were, first, that the country was to be governed
by a single person, by a single executive, and a Parliament; second,
that Parliaments were not to make themselves perpetual; third, that
liberty of conscience should be respected; fourth, that the Protector
and Parliament should have joint power over the militia.
All four propositions were sound. The first two were agreed to at once,
and the third also, though with some reluctance, the Parliament being
less liberal than the Protector in religious matters. Over the control
of the soldiers there was irreconcilable difference.
Cromwell was not content with arguments. He would not permit any member
to enter the House without signing an engagement not to alter the
government as it had been settled; that is, every member had to
subscribe to the joint government of the Protector and the Parliament. A
hundred members refused to sign. Three-fourths of the House did sign,
and went on with their work.
Until the assembling of this Parliament, every step that Oliver had
taken could be thoroughly justified. He had not played the part of a
usurper. He had been a zealous patriot, working in the interests of the
people; and he had only broken up the Long Parliament when the Long
Parliament had itself become an utterly unrepresentative body. He had
then shown his good faith by promptly summoning a genuinely
representative body. It is possible to defend him even for excluding the
hundred members who declined to subscribe to his theory of the
fundamentals of government. But it is not possible to excuse him for
what he now did. Parliament, as it was left after the Extremists had
been expelled, stood as the only elective body which it was possible to
gather in England that could in any sense be called representative, and
yet agree to work with Cromwell. Had Cromwell not become cursed with the
love of power; had he not acquired a dictatorial habit of mind, and the
fatal incapacity to acknowledge that there might be righteousness in
other methods than his own, he could certainly have avoided a break with
this Parliament. His splitting with it was absolutely needless. It
agreed to confirm his powers for five years, and, as it happened, at the
end of that time he was dead. Even had he lived there could be no
possible excuse for refusing such a lease of power, on the ground that
it was too short; for it was amply long enough to allow him to settle
whatever was necessary to settle.
[Illustration:
The Great Hall, Hampton Court.
In this room the state dinners were given under the Protectorate.
]
Cromwell, and later his apologists, insisted that, by delay and by
refusing to grant supplies until their grievances were considered, the
Parliament was encouraging the spirit of revolt. In reality the spirit
of revolt was tenfold increased, not by the Parliament’s action, but by
Cromwell’s, in seizing arbitrary power. If he had shown a tenth of the
forbearance that Washington showed in dealing with the various
Continental Congresses, he would have been readily granted far more
power than ever Washington was given. He could easily have settled
affairs on a constitutional basis, which would have given him all the
power he had any right to ask; for his difficulties in this particular
crisis were nothing like so great as those which Washington surmounted.
The plea that the safety of the people and of the cause of righteousness
depended upon his unchecked control, is a plea always made in such
cases, and generally, as in this particular case, without any basis in
fact. The need was just the other way.
Contrast Cromwell’s conduct with that of Lincoln, just before his second
election as President. There was a time in the summer of 1864 when it
looked as if the Democrats would win, and elect McClellan. At that time
it was infinitely more essential to the salvation of the Union that
Lincoln should be continued in power, than it was to the salvation of
the Commonwealth, in 1654, that Cromwell should be continued in power.
Lincoln would have been far more excusable than Cromwell if he had
insisted upon keeping control. Yet such a thought never entered
Lincoln’s head. He prepared to abide in good faith the decision of the
people, and one of the most touching incidents of his life is the quiet
and noble sincerity with which he made preparations, if McClellan was
elected, to advise with him and help him in every way, and to use his
own power, during the interval between McClellan’s election and
inauguration, in such a manner as would redound most to the advantage of
the latter, and would increase, as far as possible, the chance for the
preservation of the Union. It was at this time of Cromwell’s life that,
at the parting of the ways, he chose the wrong way. Great man though he
was, and far though the good that he did out-balanced the evil, yet he
lost the right to stand with men like Washington and Lincoln of modern
times, and with the very, very few who, like Timoleon, in some measure
approached their standard in ancient times.
As the Parliament continued in session, the attitude of the Protector
changed from sullen to fierce hostility. It was entitled to sit five
months. By a quibble he construed this to mean five lunar months. On
January 22, 1655, he dissolved it, after rating it in a long and angry
speech. With its dissolution it became evident to the great mass of true
liberty-lovers that all hope of real freedom was at an end, and the
forces that told for the restoration of the King were increased tenfold
in strength. Nevertheless, some of the purest and most ardent lovers of
liberty, like Milton, still clung despairingly to the Protector. They
recognized that, with all his faults, and in spite of his determination
to rule in arbitrary fashion, he yet intended to secure peace, justice,
and good government, and, alike in power and in moral grandeur, towered
above his only possible alternative, Charles II., as a giant towers
above a pigmy.
[Illustration]
VI
PERSONAL RULE
When Cromwell, in January, 1655, dismissed the first Protectorate
Parliament, he left himself nothing to do but to establish his own
personal rule; in other words, he became a tyrant. Of course the word
cannot be used in the sense we use it in describing Ivan the Terrible,
or Agathokles. As each country must, sooner or later, obtain exactly
that measure of political freedom to which it is entitled, so, when it
falls under a tyranny, the tyranny must be strictly conditioned by the
character of the people. Cromwell ruled over Englishmen, not Russians or
Greeks, and no Englishman would have tolerated for twenty-four hours
what was groaningly borne by Muscovites, who had lost every vestige of
manhood beneath the Tartar yoke, or by Syracusans, in the days of the
rapid decadence of the Hellenistic world. Cromwell’s government was a
tyranny because it was based on his own personal rule, his personal
decision as to what taxes should be levied, what ordinances issued, what
police measures decreed and carried out, what foreign policy adopted or
rejected. He was influenced very much by public opinion, when public
opinion found definite expression in the action of a body of legislators
or of an assembly of officers; but even in such cases he was only
influenced, not controlled. In other words, he had gone back to the
theory of government professed by the man he had executed, and by that
man’s predecessors. There was, however, the tremendous and far-reaching
difference, that, whereas the Stuart kings clung to absolute power for
the sake of rewarding favorites and of carrying out policies that were
hostile to the honor and interest of England, Cromwell seized it with
the sincere purpose of exalting the moral law at home and increasing the
honor of England’s name abroad. Moreover, he was in fact what no Stuart
was, in anything but name: a “king among men,” and his mighty strength
enabled him, at least partially, to realize his purpose.
[Illustration:
The Second Installation of Cromwell as Protector, in Westminster Hall,
June 26, 1657.
]
Cromwell doubtless persuaded himself that he was endeavoring to secure
what would now be called a constitutional government: one which, in his
own words, “should avoid alike the extremes of monarchy and democracy.”
He was desirous of paying heed to the wishes of those whom he esteemed
the wisest and most honest among the people. He had somewhat of that
gift for personal popularity which was so marked a feature of Queen
Elizabeth—seemingly the only sovereign whom he admired, among all his
predecessors. To the last he kept stirring vaguely for a constitutional
system; and he sincerely disliked merely arbitrary rule.
But by the time he became Lord Protector he was too impatient of
difference of opinion, too doggedly convinced of his own righteousness
and wisdom, to be really fit to carry on a free government. He had
sought to introduce the reign of the saints; but when, in the Barebones
Parliament, he gathered together the very men whom he deemed their
arch-representatives, it was only to find, as was of course inevitable,
that he and they could not agree as to the method of realizing the reign
of the saints in this very material world. Then he sought to secure a
government by the representatives of the people: only to find that he
got along even less well with them than with the saints. In short, while
he had kept his nobility of purpose, his whole character had grown less
and less such as to fit him to found a government of the kind toward
which his race was dimly striving.
He made varied experiments for the control of England. After the first
Protectorate Parliament had been abolished, he established the
government of the major-generals, or in other words, purely military
rule; dividing England into a dozen districts, with a major-general over
each as the ultimate authority. The prime function of the major-generals
was to keep order, and they crushed under their iron heels every spark
of Royalist insurrection, or of Leveller and Anabaptist uprising. They
interfered in civil matters also, and were especially required to see to
the rigid observance of the Sabbath, and to suppress all cock-fighting,
horse-racing, and kindred sports, as well as to shut up doubtful
ale-houses. There certainly never was a more extraordinary despotism
than this; the despotism of a man who sought power, not to gratify
himself, or those belonging to him, in any of the methods to which all
other tyrants have been prone; but to establish the reign of the Lord,
as he saw it. Here was a tyrant who used the overwhelming strength of
his military force to forbid what he considered profane amusements, and
to enforce on one day of the week a system of conduct which was
old-Jewish in character. Of course the fact that he meant well, and that
his motives were high, did not make it any the easier for the people
with whose pleasures and prejudices he thus irritatingly interfered.
The Puritan passion for regulating, not merely the religion, but the
morals and manners of their neighbors, especially in the matter of
Sunday observance and of pastimes generally, was peculiarly exasperating
to men of a more easy-going nature. Even nowadays, the effort for
practical reform in American city government is rendered immeasurably
more difficult by the fact that a considerable number of the best
citizens are prone to devote their utmost energies, not to striving for
the fundamentals of social morality, civic honesty, and good government,
but, in accordance with their own theory of propriety of conduct, to
preventing other men from pursuing what these latter regard as innocent
pleasures; while, on the other hand, a large number of good citizens, in
their irritation at any interference with what they feel to be
legitimate pastimes, welcome the grossest corruption and misrule rather
than submit to what they call “Puritanism.” When this happens, before
our eyes, we need not wonder that in Cromwell’s day the determination of
the Puritans to put down ale-houses and prohibit every type of Sunday
pastime, irritated large bodies of the people to the point of longing
for the restoration of the Stuarts, no matter what might be the
accompanying evils of corruption and tyranny.
The experiment of governing by the major-generals provoked such
mutterings of discontent that it had to be abandoned. Another parliament
was summoned, and out of this Oliver arbitrarily kept any man whom he
did not think ought to come in. It was anything but a radical body, and
after declaring against the rule of the major-generals, it offered
Oliver the kingship, an offer to which the army objected, and which
Oliver, therefore, refused; but even with this subservient assembly
Oliver could not get along, and it finally shared the fate of its
predecessor. The objection of the army to the kingship, was partly due
to the presence of so many Republican zealots in its ranks; but probably
the main reason for the objection was that the army, more or less
consciously, realized that its own overmastering importance in the
commonwealth would vanish as soon as the man it had made supreme by the
sword was changed into a constitutional king.
One by one almost all of Oliver’s old comrades and adherents left him,
and he was driven to put his own kinsfolk into as many of the higher
places, both in the State and the army, as possible; less from nepotism
than from the need of having in important positions men who would do his
will, without question. Eventually he had to abandon most of the ideas
of political liberty which he had originally championed, and, following
the path which the Long Parliament had already trod, he finally
established a rigid censorship of the press.
Yet, though it must be freely admitted that in its later years the
government of Cromwell was in form and substance a tyranny, it must be
no less freely acknowledged that he used with wisdom and grandeur the
power he had usurped. The faults he committed were the faults of the
age, rather than special to himself, while his sincerity and honesty
were peculiarly his own.
[Illustration:
Sir William Waller.
From the Portrait by Sir Peter Lely at Goodwood.
By permission of the Duke of Richmond and Gordon, K.G.
]
He fairly carried out his pledge of healing and settling, and he put
through a long series of administrative reforms. In England and Wales
his internal administration undoubtedly told for what was of moral and
material advantage to the country; and if there was heavy taxation, at
least it produced visible and tangible results, which was never the case
under the Stuarts, before or after him. Yet his rule could not but
produce discontent. In the first place, the Royalists were not well
treated. In that age the beaten party was expected to pay heavily for
its lack of success, both in purse and in body; and it was not to be
expected that the victorious Puritans should show toward their defeated
foes the generosity displayed by Grant and his fellow-victors in the
American Civil War. In the American Revolution, the Tories were at first
followed with much the same vindictiveness that the Royalists were
followed after King Charles had been brought to the block. But
Washington and all the leading American statesmen disapproved of this,
and after the first heat of passion was over the American Royalists were
allowed precisely the same civil and political rights as their
neighbors. On the contrary, in England, under the Commonwealth, the
Royalists were kept disfranchised, and taxation was arranged so as
always to fall with crushing weight upon them, thus insuring their
permanent alienation. As regards the rest of the people, while there was
considerable interference with political and religious liberty, it was
probably only what the times demanded, and was certainly much less than
occurred in almost any other country. Episcopalians were denied the use
of the Prayer-Book, and, like the Catholics, were given liberty of
conscience only on condition that they should not practise their faith
in public. Irritating though this was, and wrong though it was, it fell
infinitely short of what had been done to Protestants, under Queen Mary,
by the temporarily victorious Catholics, or to Puritans and Catholics
under Queen Elizabeth, or of what was to be done to the Covenanters of
Scotland, under the victorious Episcopalians; but such considerations
would not have altered the discontent, even had the discontented kept
them in mind. When provocation is sufficient to drive a man into
revolution, it matters little in practical politics how much beyond this
point it is carried. The breaking-point is reached sooner in some
nations than in others; but in all strong nations persecution will cause
revolt long before it takes the terrible form given it by Spaniards and
Turks; and, once the war is on, the men who revolt hate any persecutor
so much that there is scant room for intensification of the feeling.
Moreover, instead of the Cromwellian government growing more, it grew
less tolerant of Catholicism and Episcopacy as time went on.
The people at large were peculiarly irritated by what were merely the
defects inevitably incident to the good features of Puritanism in that
age. When faith is very strong and belief very sincere, men must possess
great wisdom, broad charity, and the ability to learn by experience, or
else they will certainly try to make others live up to their own
standards. This would be bad enough, even were the standards absolutely
right; and it is necessarily worse in practice than in theory, inasmuch
as mixed with the right there is invariably an element of what is wrong
or foolish. The extreme exponents and apologists of any fervent creed
can always justify themselves, in the realm of pure logic, for insisting
that all the world shall be made to accept and act up to their
standards, and that they must necessarily strive to bring this about, if
they really believe what they profess to believe. Of course, in
practice, the answer is that there are hundreds of different creeds, or
shades of creeds, all of which are believed in with equal devoutness by
their followers, and therefore in a workaday government it is necessary
to insist that none shall interfere with any other. Where people are as
far advanced in practical good sense and in true religious toleration as
in the United States to-day, the great majority of each creed gradually
grows to accept this position as axiomatic, and the smaller minority is
kept in check without effort, both by law and by public opinion.