OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.
The next morning, the 31st January, the nation awoke a Republic. The
king had died "a traitor" (they said) "to the nation;" and in the
space before his scaffold it had been proclaimed, that whoever
presumed to call his son, Charles Stuart, king, was a traitor to the
Commonwealth. It was a strange, dreary dawning. As I opened my
casement and looked across the black frozen river to London Bridge,
with its "Traitor's Gate" and the towers of Southwark rising above
from the marshy flats beyond, to the one long cold bar of brazen
light which parted the dark clouds on the horizon from the heavy
vault of snowclouds above, everything seemed hard and metallic--the
heavens "iron and brass," the waters steel, the earth and her living
creatures motionless, rigid, as if turned to stone.
What kind of a day was this to be? The king was dead; though the
remains of the Westminster Assembly, and many of the Independent
ministers, and well-nigh all the Parliament had protested against his
execution, and well-nigh all the nation bewailed him. The king was
dead. What authority had sentenced him? and what power was to rule
in his place? Half, at least, of the nation looked on his death as a
murder--but there was to be no mourning; the rest, as the terrible
but victorious close of a terrible conflict--but there was to be no
triumph.
No funeral pomp was to darken the streets that day, as for a king
slain. No triumphal procession was to make them festive, as for an
enemy vanquished. It was to be a day without mark or sign; and yet
since England was first one nation surely such a day had never dawned
on her. "The first day of freedom, by God's blessing restored," said
the Commonwealth coins; the first day of England's widowhood, said
the Royalists, widowed and orphaned at one blow.
Yet there was no disorder, no interruption of employment. The sounds
of day began to awake in the busy city, the cries of countrymen
bringing their vegetables from the fields, the ringing of the hammer
on a forge near our house, the calls of the bargemen and boatmen
locked in by the ice; and then, as the day went on, all distinction
of sound lost in the general hum, like the sound of many waters,
which marks that a great city is awake and at work.
Looking westward, I could see the gardener sweeping the snow from the
walks in the gardens behind Whitehall, as if no terrible black
scaffold had that day to be taken down in front.
Yet, I suppose, in well-nigh every heart, man or woman's, in London
that morning, the first conscious thought was, "the king is dead;"
all the more because there were few lips that would have uttered the
words.
"What are we to do to-day, Leonard?" I said, when we had breakfasted.
"Do! dear heart," quoth he; "it is not thy wont to need thy day's
tasks set thee by any."
"Nay; but to-day seems like a work-day with out work, and a Sabbath
without services," I said.
"There will be a service," he replied. "The great Dr. Owen is to
preach before the Parliament in St. Margaret's Church."
"The Parliament!" I said; thinking pitifully of the fifty members who
still bore the name.
"You scarcely recognize the Rump as the Parliament," he said,
answering my tone rather than my words.
"I scarce know what to recognize or reverence," I said. "I was wont
in the old days at Netherby to think I had politics of my own, and
would have belonged to the country party by free choice, if all
around me had deserted it. But since our own people have split and
divided into so many sections, I begin to fear, after all, it was
nought but a young maid's conceit in me to think I had any
convictions of my own. Aunt Dorothy and the Presbyterians think the
killing of the king a great crime; my father and the old
Parliamentarians think the forcible purging of the Parliament a
manifest tyranny; Roger and the army think these things but the
necessary violence to introduce the new reign of justice and freedom.
But I know not what to believe, or whom to follow. What is to come
next? Who are to rule us? We must have some to honour and obey; if
not the king, and if not the Parliament, then whom?"
"Sweet heart," said he, "if the government of the three kingdoms has
been resting on thy shoulders, no wonder thou art cast down and
weary. But thou and I are among the multitude who are to be
governed, not among the few who govern. Let us be thankful, as good
Mr. Baxter saith, for any government which suffers people to be as
good as they are willing to be. And let us be willing to be as good
as we can. That will give us enough to do."
"But," I said, "all these years we have been learning that the
country is as a great mother who demands fidelity from her most
insignificant child; that Liberty is no mere empty name for
schoolboys to make orations about, and Law no mere confused heap of
technicalities for lawyers to disentangle, but simple sacred
realities mothers are to teach their children to reverence; that the
glory and safety of a nation depends on their political rights being
sacred household words. We have been taught to look to Jewish and
Roman matrons as our examples. Are we to unlearn all this now, and
go back to the old saws we have been taught to think selfish and
base; that politics are to be left to rulers, and laws to lawyers,
and our liberties and rights to whoever will defend or trample on
them?"
"Not go back, I think," he said gently, looking a little surprised at
my vehemence; "only go deeper. Some precious rights, I believe, have
been won. Let us use them. That is the best way to secure them. We
are free to do what good we can, to unloose what burdens, and to hear
and speak what good words we will. Let us use our freedom. No one
can say how long it may last. This morning I must go to visit
Newgate, and other gaols, in which there has been much sickness. For
although the prisons are no longer filled by the Star Chamber, or the
High Commission, they are unhappily still kept too well supplied by a
tyrant more ancient and more universal than these. Moreover, Olive,"
he added, "there is still one sect not tolerated. The number of the
imprisoned Quakers is increasing; and in Newgate there is one poor
Quaker maiden whom I think thou mightest succour. A few days since
thou wert desiring a maiden to wait on the babe. This Quaker maiden
is a composed and gentle creature, and with kind treatment, such as
she would have from thee, might, I think, be led into ways which seem
to us more sober and rational."
My husband's words opened a prospect of abundant work before me.
Already we had four washing-women of four different unpopular
persuasions.
And I would have preferred choosing a nurse for the babe, on account
of her qualities as a serving-wench, rather than as a Confessor.
Moreover, what he intended to be re-assuring in his description,
alarmed me rather the more. For of all fanatics, I have found gentle
fanatics the most incorrigible, and of all wilful persons, these
whenever "discompose" themselves, or put themselves wrong by losing
their tempers, are certainly the most immovable. However, I
repressed such selfish fears as quite unworthy of Leonard Antony's
wife. And, accordingly, when he returned from the gaol, I was quite
prepared to welcome the Quaker. And so I told him as we joined the
sober throng who were going to hear Dr Owen preach at "Margaret's"
before the Parliament.
A scanty Parliament indeed! No Lords, and about fifty Commons; and
among them scarce one of those whose words and deeds had made its
early years so strong and glorious.
Hampden lay among his forefathers in the church of Great Hampden; Pym
among the kings in Westminster Abbey. Denzil Hollis and Haselrigge
had been expelled from it; old Mr. Prynne, who had been liberated by
its first act, had vehemently denounced its last; even the young Sir
Harry Vane had for the time deserted its austere counsels.
Nevertheless the congregation was great and grave. And when Dr. Owen
spoke, he led our thoughts at once to spheres compared with whose
sublime chronology the length of the longest Parliament is indeed but
as a moment. He came of an ancient Welsh ancestry; his bearing had a
courtly grace; his tall and stately figure had the ease and vigor of
one used to manly exercises; his voice was well-tuned, as the tones
of one who loved music as he did should be; his eyes were dark and
keen.
To the death of the king on that dreadful yesterday he barely
alluded. There was neither regret nor triumph in his discourse. His
exhortations were addressed not to the vanquished, but to the
victorious party. If he alluded at all to the oppressions and vices
of the late government, it was in order to conjure those now in power
not to tread in their steps. His text was: "Let them return unto
thee; but return not thou unto them. And I will make thee unto this
people a fenced brazen wall: and they shall fight against thee, but
they shall not prevail against thee: for I am with thee to save thee
and to deliver thee, saith the Lord."
God's judgments, he said, are a flaming sword turning every way. Not
in one of these ways, but in all, He resists those who resist them.
"How do we spend our thoughts to extricate ourselves from our present
pressures! If this hedge, this pit were passed, we should have
smooth ground to walk on; not considering that God can fill our
safest paths with snares and serpents. Give us peace; give us
wealth; give us to be as we were, with our own, in quietness. Poor
creatures! suppose all these designs were in sincerity; yet if peace
were, and wealth were, and God were not, what would it avail you? In
vain do you seek to stop the streams while the fountains are open;
turn yourselves whither you will, bring yourselves into what
condition you can, nothing but peace and reconciliation with the God
of all these judgments can give you rest in the day of visitation.
You see what variety of plagues are in His hand. Changing of
condition will do no more to the avoiding of them, than a sick man
turning himself from one side of the bed to another; during his
turning he forgets his pain by striving to move; being laid down
again he finds his condition the same as before.
"It was nothing new," he said, "for the instruments of God's greatest
works to be the deepest objects of a professing people's cursings and
revilings. _Men that under God deliver a kingdom may have the
kingdom's curses for their pains_.
"Moses was rewarded for the deliverance of Israel from Korah by being
told 'ye have killed the Lord's people.' Man's condemnation and
God's absolution do not seldom meet on the same person for the same
things. '_Bonus vir Caius Sejanus, sed malus quia Christianus_.'
What precious men should many be, would they let go the work of God
in their generation!
"Yet be tender towards fainters in difficult seasons. God's
righteousness, His kindness, is like a great mountain easy to be
seen. His judgments are like a great deep. Who can look into the
bottom of the sea, or know what is done in the depths thereof? When
first the confederacy was entered into by the Protestant princes
against Charles V., Luther himself was bewildered.
"It is by a small handful, a few single persons--a Moses, a Samuel,
two witnesses--He ofttimes opposes the rage of a hardened multitude.
His judgments ofttimes are the giving up of a sinful people to a
fruitless contending with their own deliverers, if ever they be
delivered. God, indeed, cannot be the author of sin, for He can be
the author of nothing but what hath being in itself (for He works as
the fountain of beings). This sin hath not. It is an aberration.
Man writes fair letters upon a wet paper, and they run all into one
blot; not the skill of the scribe, but the defect in the paper, is
the cause of the deformity. The first cause is the proper cause of a
thing's being; but the second of its being evil." Not, I understood
him to mean, that sin is natural, but that the faculties of nature
are perverted.
Then he fervently warned against fear of man, covetousness, ambition;
against turning to "such ways as God hath blasted before our eyes,
oppression, self-seeking, persecution."
And at the close he said, "All you that are the Lord's workmen, be
always prepared for a storm. Be prepared. The wind blows; a storm
may come."
Opinions about the sermon were various. On the whole I think it was
hardly popular. Some said it was pitiless, that the harshest of his
enemies would not have grudged one generous word for the fallen king.
Others deemed it half-hearted, and declared that if John Knox, or one
of the mighty men of old, had been in the pulpit, they would have
made all true hearts thrill, and all false hearts tremble at the
sentence of terrible justice just executed.
"What was thy mind about it, Olive?" my husband asked, when he, and
Roger, and I had returned to the quiet of our little garden-parlor.
"I thought Dr. Owen very wise," I said, "in that he directed his
discourse to those who were there to hear. I never could see the
profit of denunciations of Popery addressed to those who hate it
enough already; or of arguments addressed to Arminians who are not
present to be crushed; or of railing at people who will not come to
church, for the edification of those who do. It set me questioning
myself whether God is indeed at work among us, and praying that if He
is, none of us may mistake His hand."
"May it but have set every heart on the same questioning!" said
Roger. "How can any call those words of Dr. Owen's an uncertain
sound?" he added. "To me every tone was as clear as the
trumpet-signals before a battle. God has sent you deliverance, has
sent you a deliverer, he seemed to me to say, as Moses to Israel in
bondage, as Luther to the Church in bondage. All depends on whether
we acknowledge him--not, indeed, as to the Promised Land being
reached at last, but everything as to when it is reached, everything
as to our reaching it at all. Events seem to me constantly saying to
us, '_If ye will receive it, this is Elias which was for to come_.'"
The revenges of the Commonwealth were few. Three Royalist noblemen
beheaded without torture or insult in Palace Yard. As far as Oliver
Cromwell's rule extended there was not one barbarous execution.
Baiting was not a sport he encouraged, whether of bulls and bears or
of men.
During the ten years of the Commonwealth, the pillory, the
whipping-post, the torture-chamber, were scarcely once used, and not
one Englishman suffered the savage punishment awarded to traitors.
It was difficult to see what most men had to complain of. Good men
of every party but one, the Royalist Episcopal, were encouraged.
Nevertheless, from every party rose murmurs of discontent. Before
the king had been executed four months, General Cromwell had to
subdue opposition in the Parliament, the city, among the peasantry,
in the army itself.
Roger grieved sorely at what he deemed the blindness of the people.
Mr. Baxter preached and wrote against General Cromwell and his
measures, at Kidderminster, to Aunt Dorothy's heart's content,
propounding twenty unanswerable queries to show why none should take
the "Engagement to the Commonwealth now established without King or
Lords," and having in reserve twenty other queries equally
unanswerable.
Colonel Hutchinson, the Republican, forbore not to exhort and rebuke
him, seeing, as Mistress Lucy, his stately wife, said, how "ambition
had ulcerated his heart."
Colonel Rich, Commissary Staines, and Watson, made a design on his
life. The Council would have punished, but the General pardoned
them. Men in general were indeed moved by such generosity. But it
could not "blind" the penetrating eyes of Mistress Lucy Hutchinson,
or of Mr. Baxter. If Oliver did magnanimous deeds in public, it was
"to court popularity;" if little kindly acts in private, it was "to
cajole weak members." If his plans succeeded, it was a "favor of
fortune." If his enemies were vanquished, it was because they were
"slaves or puppets," whom he, with marvelous prescience, had "tempted
to oppose him for the easy glory of knocking them down." If he
pleaded with almost a tearful tenderness against the coldness of old
friends, it was "dissimulation;" if he sought to approve himself to
good men, it was "because his own conscience was uneasy." If he
disregarded their opinions, it was because he was "inflated with
pride, or hardened to destruction."
Yet Roger thought much of this misapprehension would pass away. It
was, he hoped, but the dimness natural to the twilight of this new
dawn.
The greatest dangers to the new liberty, he thought, were from the
hopes which it had created.
The first time this danger opened on me was from a conversation
between Job Forster and Annis Nye.
The gentle Quaker maiden had been installed for some weeks as the
nurse of baby Magdalene, who seemed to find a soothing spell in her
still serene face, and quiet even voice.
As yet, no unusual or alarming symptoms had appeared in Annis,
nothing to indicate her being capable of the offence for which it was
said she had been cast into prison, which was that, one Sunday, she
had confronted a well-known Presbyterian minister in his pulpit, at
the conclusion of a sermon against "the Papal and Prelatical
Antichrist" and in a calm and deliberate voice had denounced him in
face of the indignant congregation as himself a "false priest,"
"hireling shepherd," and "minister of Antichrist."
Yet there was something in her different from any one I had yet seen.
You could by no means be always sure of her responding to converse on
good things; but when she did, it was like some one listening to a
far-off heavenly voice and echoing it, and very beautiful often were
the things she said.
Her neglect of ordinary gestures and titles of respect seemed in no
way disrespectful in her. "Olive Antony" and "Leonard Antony" from
her soft voice had more honour in them than titles at every breath
from ordinary people, and when she called us "thou" and "thee," even
the bad grammar which accompanied the custom had a kind of quaint
grace from her lips. If asked her reasons for these customs she gave
them. These customs were false, she said; a hollow compliance with
the hollow world. The honour was rendered universally, and therefore
insincerely; and to call a single person "you" was an untruth which
"led to great depravation of manners." Having given these reasons,
she never debated the point further; they satisfied her; if they did
not satisfy you, she could not help it.
Occasionally there was inconvenience arising from the difficulty of
knowing when any command might cross the non-observances she held
sacred. Nevertheless, her presence had a kind of hallowing calm in
it which compensated for much.
My husband had sympathy with her sect on account of their large
thoughts of the love of God to mankind. And he said we ought to wait
to see what portion of divine truth or church history it had been
given to the Quakers to unfold, he sharing Mr. Milton's belief, that
truth is found on earth but in fragments either in the world or the
church. So, for the sake of my husband, and the free development of
church history, and a growing love to the maid, I continued to accept
from Annis such services as her conscience permitted, and to make up
the deficiencies myself.
Job Forster, who, for Rachel's sake, had much reverence for feminine
judgment, had frequent converse with Annis when he came to solace
himself with our little Magdalene. For between him and the babe
there was the fullest confidence and love, the little one never
seeming more at home than in his brawny arms.
Job thought Annis "a woman of an understanding heart," and had hopes
of reclaiming her from the error of her way. He did not for a long
time discover that Annis was the most patient of listeners to his
arguments simply as the Cornish cliffs are patient with the beat of
the waves; and that when she "dealt softly" with him, it was not
because she was convinced by his reasoning, but because she
compassionated his blindness.
It was, therefore, with some surprise that I found him one April
evening in 1649 listening with indignant gesticulations to Annis, as
she stood, with clasped hands and eyes looking dreamily forward,
repeating in a low monotonous voice, like a chant, the words,--
"Woe unto those that build with untempered mortar! Woe unto those
that would build the temple of the Lord with the dust of the
battle-field! Woe to those who run to and fro and cry, Lo here! and
Lo there! The kingdom of God cometh not with observation, not with
observation. The kingdom of God is within you, within you, within!"
Her voice died away into a sigh, and I confess it moved me not a
little.
But Job, on whom the words came in the heat of debate, was by no
means calmed thereby.
"It is no fair fight, Mistress Olive," he said, appealing to me; "she
does not know when she is beaten. Only yesterday, she quite gave in,
and had never a word to say, and to-day it's all to be begun over
again. It's them poor honest fellows down in Surrey she means, and
it's a sin to cast up all those Bible texts at them as if they were
blinded persecutors, instead of poor true men striving to hasten the
coming of the Kingdom. Mistress Annis," he concluded, for there was
something in her which compelled from others the titles she refused
to any, "did I not give you chapter and verse until you had never a
word to gainsay? Is it not written so plain, that he who runs may
read, that the Jews are to go in and possess the land, and did I not
show thee that the Saxons are the lost tribes, the descendants of the
Jews?"
But Annis had meekly resumed her knitting, and simply said,--
"A concern was upon my spirit regarding thee. I have spoken; the
rest belongs not to me. There is the Power and the Anointing. But
these are not with me." And she relapsed into silence.
"That is her way, Mistress Olive," exclaimed Job, much ruffled. "You
shall be judge if any rational discourse can proceed on such
principles. You bring forth Scripture enough to silence a council of
rabbis--to say nothing of reasons. She listens as patient as a lamb,
has not a word to answer--and this is the end."
Annis made no defence, she only said,--
"I had hopes, Job Forster, thee had been reached. But it seemeth
otherwise."
For if Annis heeded not the arguments of others, neither did she rely
on her own. Her confidence was not on the power of her words, but on
the Power in and with them. But this Job did not perceive.
"Reached!" he exclaimed, looking hopelessly at me. "She speaks of me
as if I were a babe in swaddling-clothes; and I old enough to be her
grandfather."
"What was the matter in debate?" I asked.
"There was no debate!" said Job, still agitated. "Debates are only
possible with people who are amenable to Scripture and reason. I was
but speaking of the peasants at St. Margaret's Hill in Surrey, and
the great work they are beginning there."
"What great work? Is there some great preacher risen among them?" I
asked, thinking he meant some great work of conversion.
"There is a prophet among them, mistress," said Job solemnly, "by
name Everard, once in the army. The work may seem small to the eye
of flesh. As yet they are but thirty. But the Apostles were but
twelve. And soon they may be thousands."
"But what is the work?" I said.
"Simple work enough," he replied mysteriously. "They began with
digging the ground, and sowing beans therein."
"Surely none will gainsay them," I said, "if it is their own ground
they are digging. But what is to come of beans except the
bean-stalks?"
"It is not exactly their own ground," Job replied; "it is
common-ground. And they invite all men to come and help them to make
the barren land fruitful, and to restore the ancient community of the
fruits of the earth, to distribute to the poor and needy, and to
clothe the naked. Gospel words, Mistress Olive, and gospel deeds,
let the Justices say what they may."
"The Justices interfered, then?" I said.
"Doubtless," he replied. "Justices do, in all the books of the
martyrs I ever read. Justices are a stiff-necked race."
"And so it ended?" I said.
"So it began, Mistress Olive," Job replied mysteriously. "The
country-people also were blinded, and two troops of horse were sent
against them. They were brought before General Fairfax. Master
Everard spoke up to him like a lion, and told him how the Saxon
people were of the race of the Jews, how all the liberties of the
people were lost by the coming of William the Conqueror, and how,
ever since, the people of God had lived under tyranny worse than
their forefathers in Egypt. But that now the time of deliverance was
come, and there had appeared to him a vision, saying, Arise, dig and
plough the earth, and receive the fruits thereof, and restore the
creation to its state before the curse."
"What does General Cromwell say?" I asked.
"He has not yet got the light," replied Job. "But his eyes will be
opened, for he is of them that sigh and cry for the iniquities of the
land. The light must be flashed a little stronger in his face, and
he will see."
"But the General is taking away oppression; he has destroyed
slavery," I said. "And there are so many curses, Job, besides the
thistles and thorns. Yet even our Lord took them not away. How can
these thirty countrymen hope to do it by sowing beans in the Surrey
commons? Our Lord did not take hard things away. He changed them
into blessings. The sweat of the brow, the thistles and all; even
death."
"That is what I was trying to explain to Mistress Annis," replied
Job. "There are the Two Kingdoms. One cometh not with observation;
the other cometh like the lightning which lighteneth from one end of
heaven to the other."
"But I do not see how digging up the Surrey sand-hills is like
either," I said.
"No," said Job, shaking his head pitifully; "I daresay not, Mistress
Olive. Others must do their part of the work first. There are the
'men as trees walking' and there is the 'shining more and more.' But
I did think Mistress Annis would have had understanding. For these
country folk were like to those she calls Friends. They would not
take arms to defend themselves against the powers that be, but would
wait and submit. And when asked why they did not take off their hats
to General Fairfax, they said, Because he was their fellow-creature."
But not even this orthodoxy as to "hat-honour" moved Annis.
"Not with observation," she said; "not in bean fields, nor
battle-fields, nor in king's palaces. Within you--within!"
Job rose, and gently laying little Magdalene in my arms, took his
hat, and went away without further farewell.
"She will not see the Two Kingdoms," he murmured. "This generation
will have to be roused by louder voices. The foxes must be hunted
with beagles of other make. Those who will not wake at the lark's
singing will be startled when the trumpet peals. Five Monarchies,"
he added, turning to us from the threshold; "Two Kingdoms and Five
Monarchies. Four have been, and are not. One is yet to come; cut
out of the mountain without hands--to crush the remnants of the four
and fill the world. Take heed that ye fail not of the signs of its
coming."
Job's words made me uneasy. They seemed to betray a subterranean
fire of wild hopes, and wild distrusts, and tumultuous purposes,
which might burst up beneath our feet any day anywhere is a volcano
of wilder deeds.
"What does Job mean," I said to my husband afterwards, "by his Fifth
Monarchy and his Kingdom coming like the lightning, and his 'beagles
to hunt foxes'?"
"He means precisely what is endangering the Commonwealth most of all
at this moment," my husband said. "So many evils have been removed,
that sanguine men think it is nothing but faint-heartedness in the
leaders which suffers any to remain. Now that the Star Chamber and
the persecutions are suppressed, they seem to think it is only
Cromwell's half-heartedness that prevents the devil being suppressed
also, instantly, with all his works. Now that fines and persecutions
are swept away, and the laws which sanctioned them, and the men who
made the laws; what, they think, is to hinder poverty being swept
away, and unaccountable inequalities of station, and avarice, and
luxury, and waste, and want, and all the old tangle of too much toil
for some and too much idleness for others? But we must see after
this. There are mischief-makers abroad. 'Free-born John Lilburn' is
scattering fire-brands from his prison in the Tower, about England's
'new chains;' and we must not suffer Job Forster to be among his
victims. To-morrow we will tell Roger of the danger, that he may
counsel Job."
But on the morrow it was too late. In the night (the 23th of April)
there was much stir in the city; sudden sharp alarms of trumpet and
drum, and galloping to and fro of horsemen, not on parade.
A troop of Whalley's regiment, quartered at the Bull Inn, Bishopsgate
mutinied; why, it was not clear, but with some vague intention of
bringing in swiftly the thousand years of liberty and universal
happiness.
General Cromwell and Lord Fairfax extinguished the fire for the time.
Five ringleaders were seized and condemned, and out of them one,
Sergeant Lockyer, was shot the next day in St. Paul's Churchyard.
They were practical times. It mattered very much what people's
opinions were about prophecy, when they expressed them by
insurrections and mutinies.
But, naturally, executions did not alter the convictions of the
people who believed the prophets.
Of all the assemblies the old church and the houses round the
churchyard had witnessed, I think there had scarce been a sadder than
when young Trooper Lockyer was led out there to die. No crime was
laid to his charge, but this unpardonable military crime of mutiny.
He was but twenty-three. At sixteen he had joined the army of
freedom, and had fought bravely in it seven years. Blameless and
brave, all the fervour of his early manhood had burnt pure in
aspirations for a Kingdom of God on earth, a free and holy nation,
where the poor and needy should be judged and saved, and deceit and
violence should cease, and the oppressor should be broken in pieces.
And thousands with him had prayed for it by the camp fires at night,
and had fought for it on many battle-fields by day for seven years.
And the poor and needy had been saved, and deceit and violence
avenged, and many oppressors broken in pieces. The Bible had
promised it, and with prayers and strong right arms they, the army of
freedom, had done it. But the Bible promised more. One set of
workers after another had been set aside, they thought, "as doing the
work of the Lord deceitfully." They were prepared to do it
thoroughly--to pray and fight on till every wrong in England was
redressed, and every chain, new and old, was broken, till every
valley should be exalted, and every mountain and hill should be laid
low, when avarice with its base hoards of gold, and ambition with its
lordly palaces, should vanish, and every home in England should be a
home of plenty and of well-rewarded toil; the praises of God going up
from every holy city and happy hill-side through the land, till the
whole earth stopped to listen, and the thousand years of the better
Eden began.
And for hopes such as these young Trooper Lockyer was led out to die;
for carrying out a little too swiftly what all Christian men hoped to
see; for "doing the Lord's work," "not deceitfully," but too hastily,
at the wrong time, and not altogether in the right way.
There was nothing new to him in facing death. He stood to receive
the fatal volley; and when he fell, the great crowd of men and women
broke into bitter weeping and bewailed him.
That Saturday and Sunday were sad days in the city. There was a
sense of hushed murmurs and tears all around us among the people. We
knew the corpse was being solemnly watched night and day with prayers
weeping in the city. The death of the king, alone and gray-haired,
had smitten the people with awe; the execution of this brave young
soldier touched them with a passionate reverence and pity.
Nothing was to be seen of Job during those days. Roger had seen him
once; but he looked gloomy, and would be drawn into no discourse. He
was among the watchers over the dead, nursing wild hopes of the Fifth
Kingdom, and bitter distrusts of those who hindered its coming.
On Monday the feeling of the people manifested itself in a solemn
procession passing through the city to Westminster.
Ceremonial, funereal or festive, was so foreign to our Puritan
people, that the few occasions on which the irrepressible feeling
burst forth into such manifestation had a terrible reality.
A soldier's funeral is heart-stirring enough at any time; but to me,
scarce any procession, before or since, seemed so moving as this
which bore Trooper Lockyer to his grave in Westminster Churchyard.
There were none of the rich or great among them. First, a hundred
men, five or six in file. Then the corpse of the poor brave youth,
with the sword he had long used so well, stained now with blood, and
beside it bundles of rosemary, also dipped in blood. Then the horse
he had ridden to many battle-fields, moving uneasily under his heavy
mourning draperies, and beside it six men pealing on six trumpets the
soldier's knell. Behind, thousands of men, marching slow and silent
in order like soldiers. And after all a crowd of mourning women;
all, men and women, with bunches of black or sea-green ribbon on
their hats and breasts.
At Westminster they were met by thousands more, "of the better sort,"
it was said. And so the young man died, for trying to fulfil men's
best hopes at a wrong time and in a impracticable way, and was
buried, not without honour.
The crime was not one which moved men to vengeance. The doom was one
which moved men much to pity.
So the fire went on spreading in the army. On May the 9th, the
mutinous sea-green ribbons appeared among the soldiers at a review in
Hyde Park.
General Cromwell with one of those speeches of his which critical
gentlemen pronounced so confused, but which those to whom they were
addressed found so plain, made the men in general understand that to
be a soldier meant to obey commands. If they declined to obey, they
should receive arrears of pay and be dismissed. If they decided
still to be soldiers, they must obey, or suffer the penalties of
martial law, under which they had put themselves.
I suppose his words told, as usual, for the sea-green ribbons
disappeared, and no further mutiny followed in London.
Meantime Mr. John Lilburn, for whom General Cromwell had once pleaded
with so vehement a passion when he was Mr. Prynne's servant in danger
of the pillory and the whipping-posts, continued to disperse his
incendiary pamphlets from the cell to which he had been committed in
the Tower. And at length the news came that the conflagration had
burst out in the army in three places at once, two hundred mutineers
at Banbury, at Salisbury a thousand, in Gloucestershire more.
Job Forster had gone westward within those weeks with scarce a word
of farewell to any. With a grave and glooming countenance, and
avoiding all discourse. We feared sorely to hear that he was among
the mutineers.
On Sunday, May the 14th, Roger called to bid us farewell, ready
booted and spurred to ride off with Fairfax and Cromwell and their
troops for Salisbury, to quell the mutiny there.
It was an uneasy Sabbath for us who were left behind. John Lilburn
was in the Tower, and somewhere around the Tower were dwelling the
thousands of grave and determined men who had borne Trooper Lockyer
to his grave scarce a fortnight before. And the only voice which
seemed able to command the stormy waves was out of hearing,
heartening his men on their rapid march through Hampshire towards
Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire; as they tracked the
mutineers northward till they came on them at midnight taking uneasy
rest at Burford.
But London remained quiet, to all outward seeming. Whatever vows
were being made in homes where the "Eikon Basilike" was being read
secretly, with a passionate devotion, together with the proscribed
liturgy, the hopes cherished were of a "blessed restoration" and
"vengeance on bloody usurpers;" or, on the other hand, in homes where
Trooper Lockyer was the martyr, and the hopes were of a speedy
millennium with vengeance on all who hindered it,--they did not
disturb the quiet of that Sabbath. Leonard and I went to the morning
exercise in "Margaret's," and the preaching in the abbey, and Annis
to her obscure meeting of Friends. And little Magdalene welcomed us
back with crowings "significant" (we thought, as my Diary records),
"of a remarkable vivacity of intelligence." And as in the evening we
looked on the Lent-lilies and primroses Aunt Gretel had sent from
Netherby, making the little garden behind the house faintly represent
the woods and fields, it seemed to us that the city had even more
than its usual Sabbath stillness, while we listened to the evening
family psalm rising from the open lattices of many houses around us.
Yet all through that Sabbath-day those who were keeping the peace
with their good swords for us, were chasing the mutineers from county
to county and from town to town, making meanwhile such Sabbath
melodies in their hearts as best they might.
The story of the pursuit I heard afterwards from Job. All through
the Monday the chase went on.
"We thought to cross into Oxfordshire at Newbridge, and join our
fellows at Banbury," said Job. "But they had been before us? the
bridge was guarded. We had to double and swim the river. By this
time it grew dusk, and when we reached the little town of Burford on
Monday evening it grew dark. At the entrance of the street we made a
halt. Little welcome had we found at town or village. The name of
him who was chasing us had been our shield and boast too long not to
weight against us now.
"For the first time these two days since first they came nigh us, we
missed the tramp of the horse in pursuit. Some of us hoped they were
off the scent. Others knew better than to think the General was to
be baffled so. We knew his ways too well. But be that as it might
we were fain to stay. The horses stumbled and would not be spurred
further. We had to cross fifty miles of country that day, to say
nothing of doublings. We turned the poor brutes out to grass in the
meadows by the river, and, wet and weary as we were, turned in to get
such sleep as we might.
"Running away is work that breaks the heart of man and beast, and
Oliver had not used us to it.
"But as midnight boomed out from the tall old steeple, we found what
the silence of the pursuers had meant.
"They had been lying quiet in ambush outside the town. On they came,
clattering into the narrow streets, with the old cries we had joined
in with them so long. It was enough to make any man's heart fail to
have to go against the old watchwords, to which we had charged and
rallied scores of times together. But worse than all was Oliver's
voice. Few of us could stand that. It had been more than a thousand
trumpets to us for years. A few desperate shots were fired, and all
was over. We were caught and clapped up together to await the
sentence. We went to sleep thinking we might yet be the Lord's
handful to bring in the Millennium. We woke up and found we were
nothing better than a lot of traitorous mutineers.
"Two days of waiting followed, and they finished the work for most of
us. Some still braved it out, and talked of martyrdom, and of paving
the way to the Kingdom with our corpses. But the greater part were
downcast and heart-stricken, and in sore bewilderment of soul. We
minded Oliver's prayers before so many battles, and the cheer of his
voice in the fight, and his thanksgivings afterwards; and how he had
praised the Lord and praised us, and made as though he owed all to
us, while we felt we owed all under God to him. We minded how he had
never thought it beneath him to write up to Parliament to claim
reward for any faithful service of any among us, and had never
claimed honor or reward for himself. More than one among us minded
how a glance from his eye singled us out, and had made our hearts
swell like a public triumph, though not a soul saw it besides; how it
had been enough reward for any toil to know that the General knew we
had done our best. All of us had heard his cheery voice joining in
joke and laugh, and more than one had heard it in low tones beside
the dying, breathing words which could make a man brave to face the
last enemy of all.
"And now his eyes had rested on us in grave displeasure, and grieved
disappointment. He had thought we knew him, his sorrowful eyes had
said; he had thought we could have trusted him to do the good work,
and would have helped him in it.
"The Royalists hated him, good Mr. Baxter and the Presbyterians
distrusted him, but he had thought we knew him!
"And so we did! And before those two days were over, there were many
among us who would have asked no better from him or from Heaven than
that we might have one chance of following him to the field, and
showing how faithful we could be to him again.
"So we came to the Thursday. The court-martial sat and gave
sentence. Ten out of every hundred of us were doomed to die. We
were taken up to a flat place on the roof of the old church to see
our comrades shot in the church-yard and to abide our turn. Cornet
Thompson came; he and his brother had been at the bottom of it, and
he had no hope of pardon. But he spoke out bravely, and said that
what befell him was just; God did not own the ways he went; he had
offended the General; he asked the people to pray for him; he told
the men who stood ready with loaded guns, when he should hold out his
hands to do their duty. I suppose he gave the sign. I was too sick
at heart to look. But the volley came and he fell. Next came two
corporals--made no sign of fear, said no word of repentance, looked
the men in the face till they gave fire, and fell. Then came Cornet
Dean--confessed he had done wrong, after a short pause received
pardon from the generals. And so we, standing sentenced on the roof
of the old church, waited what would befall us next.
"The shooting was over. Oliver had us called into the church. There
he preached us a sermon none of us are like to forget. Not long nor
under many heads, but home to every heart. Some say the General is
blundering in speech, and no man knows what he would say. We always
knew. And all I knew of the sermon that day, is that blundering or
not, he made us all feel we had blundered sorely as to the Almighty's
purposes--blundered as to him. There were silence enough in the old
church that day, but for the weeping. The sobs of men like some of
ours are catching to listen to; Oliver's Ironsides are not too easily
moved. But that day I believe we all wept together like children.
We had lost our lives and we had them given back to us; we had lost
our way in the wilderness and we had found it again. We had lost our
leader and we had found him, and it will be hard if any noisy talker,
free-born John Lilburn or other, tempt us to leave his lead again.
We Ironsides are not going to use our Captain as the children of
Israel used their Moses. Thank God, we have another chance given us,
and we are ready to follow him to Ireland, or to the world's end.
"The General is breaking the chains fast enough, and opening the
prisons, and breaking in pieces the oppressors. And God forbid we
should hinder him again. And as to the millennium, the Lord must
bring it about in His own way, and in His own time. I for one will
never try to hurry the Almighty again, nor the General."
The Surrey labourers went home to sow beans in their master's fields.
The army Levellers, after being sent for a while to the Devizes, were
restored to their own regiments, and were eager to prove their
fidelity to General Cromwell by following him to the new campaign in
Ireland.
It rejoiced me to hear that Dr. John Owen was going to Ireland as
General Cromwell's chaplain. His strong calm words were such as were
able to move and to quiet men like the Ironsides, who were not to be
stirred with zephyrs, or quieted with sweet murmurs as of a lady's
lute;--words plain and strong as their own armour. The sound of a
trumpet was in them, Job said, and the voice of words.
Often and often his words echoed back to me as we heard them before
the Parliament in St. Margaret's, on the day of humiliation, the 28th
of February.
"How is it that Jesus is in Ireland only as a lion, staining all His
garments with the blood of His enemies, and none to hold Him out as a
lamb sprinkled with His own blood to His friends? Is it the
sovereignty and interest of England that is alone to be there
transacted? For my part, I see no further into the mystery of these
things, but that I could heartily rejoice that, innocent blood being
expiated, the Irish might enjoy Ireland so long as the moon endureth,
so that Jesus Christ might possess the Irish. In this to deal
faithfully with the Lord Jesus--call Him out to the battle, and then
keep away His crown? God hath been faithful in doing great things
for you; be faithful in this one, do your utmost for the preaching of
the gospel in Ireland."*
* "On the sinfulness of Staggering at the Promises."
And again in the great sermon on the shaking of heaven and earth, on
the 19th of April.
"The Lord requireth that in the great things He hath to accomplish in
this generation all His should close with Him; that we be not
sinfully bewildered in our own cares, fears, and follies, but that we
may follow hard after God, and be upright in our generation.
"God does not care to set His people to work in the dark. They are
the children of light, and they are no deeds of darkness which they
have to do. He suits their light to their labour. The light of
every age is the forerunner of the work of every age.
"Every age hath its peculiar work, hath its peculiar light. The
peculiar light of this generation is the discovery which the Lord
hath made to His people of the mystery of civil and ecclesiastical
tyranny.
"The works of God are vocal-speaking works. They may be heard, and
read, and understood. Now what, I pray, are the works He is bringing
forth upon the earth? What is He doing in our own and the
neighbouring nations? Show me the potentate on earth that hath a
peaceable molehill to build a habitation upon. Are not all the
controversies, or most of them, that are now disputed in letters of
blood among the nations somewhat of a distinct constitution from
those formerly under debate? those tending thereof to the power and
splendour of single persons, and these to the interest of the many.
Is not the hand of the Lord in all this? Is not the voice of Christ
in the midst of all this tumult? What speedy issue all this will be
driven to, I know not: so much is to be done as requires a long
space. Though a tower may be pulled down faster than it was set up,
yet that which hath been building a thousand years is not like to go
down in a thousand days.
"Let the professing people that are among us look well to themselves.
'The day is coming that will burn like an oven.' Dross will not
stand this day. We have many a hypocrite yet to be uncased. Try and
search your hearts; force not the Lord to lay you open to all.
"Be loose from all shaken things. You see the clouds return after
the rain; one storm on the neck of another. 'Seeing that all these
things must be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in
all holy conversation?' Let your eyes be upwards, and your hearts be
upwards, and your hands be upwards, that you be not moved at the
passing away of shaken things. I could encourage you by the glorious
issue of all these shakings, whose foretaste might be as marrow to
your bones, though they should be appointed to consumption before the
accomplishment of it.
"See the vanity and folly of such as labour to oppose the bringing of
the kingdom of the Lord Jesus! Canst thou hinder the rain from
falling? Canst thou stop the sun from rising? Surely with far more
ease mayest thou stop the current and course of nature than the
bringing in of the kingdom of Christ in righteousness and peace.
Some are angry, some are troubled, some are in the dark, some full of
revenge; but the truth is, whether they will hear, or whether they
will forbear, Babylon shall fall, and all the glory of the earth be
stained, and the kingdoms become the kingdoms of our Lord Jesus
Christ."*
* "On the Shaking of Heaven and Earth."
On the 7th of June, Dr. Owen preached again at "Margaret's" before
the Parliament, on the great thanksgiving day, when the city feasted
the Parliament, and distributed £100 to feast the poor.
Aunt Gretel and my father, who had come up from Netherby, heard him,
with us. About the same time, Annis Nye returned from one of the two
"threshing-floors,"* where the "Friends" had been suffered publicly,
by "searching words," to sift the chaff from the wheat; and a
"prelatical" friend of ours came in to tell us of his having joined
in the ancient Common Prayer at St. Peter's Church on Paul's wharf,
and heard good Archbishop Ussher preach.
* These two threshing floors are first spoken of a few years later,
in 1655.
Whereon Aunt Gretel, who (believing far more in the power of light
than in that of darkness) was ever wont to be seeing the clouds
breaking, before others could, remarked to me,--
"Surely, sweet heart, the years of peace are already in sight.
Quakers, Prelatists, and Puritans free to do what good they can in
their different ways, what is that but the lion lying down with the
lamb?"
"Ah, sister Gretel," said my father, "lions and lambs have lain down
together in cages, with the keeper's eye on them, many a time before
now, when they were well fed, and could not help it. It remains to
be seen what they will do when the keeper's eye is removed. General
Cromwell saith all sects cry for liberty when they are oppressed, but
he never yet met with any that would allow it to any one else when
they were in power."
And as we passed the kitchen door on our way upstairs, we heard
sounds of scarcely millennial debate.
I am afraid Annis Nye had been taking a feminine advantage of the
failure of her antagonist's cause to remind him how she had
forewarned him. For Job was saying,--
"Convinced we are not to look for the Fifth Monarchy because we poor
soldiers blundered about the ways and the times! As little as a man
would be convinced the sun was never to rise because some idle
watch-dog waked him up too soon by baying at the moon. Moved from
the error of my ways! Moved at farthest from the First of
Thessalonians to the Second. Not a whit farther. But that folks
should call themselves Friends of Truth, who are not to be brought
round by chapter and verse, is a marvel. General Cromwell knows what
he is about in letting such have their 'threshing-floors.' There are
those that think another sort of threshing-floor might be best to
sift such chaff away. Eden is before us, Mistress Annis; before as
well as behind. And the best Paradise is to come."
"The lion and the lamb are scarcely at peace yet, sister Gretel!"
said my father.
But when we were all seated together in the parlour that evening, my
father said,--
"How many hearts, like Job Forster's, have believed they saw the
breaking of the dawn, which was to usher in the golden age, when it
was only the breaking forth of the moon from the clouds, or perhaps
only the deepening of the darkness, which they thought must be the
darkest hour preceding the dawn. The Thessalonians of old; the early
Church in her persecutions; Gregory the Great at the breaking up of
the Empire; the Middle Ages in the year One Thousand, with a
trembling expectation which led men, not indeed to sow beans on
commons to make the whole earth fruitful, but to sow nothing,
believing that earth's last harvest was at hand."
"Yet were they far wrong?" said my husband. "The moonlight and the
morning both draw their light from the sun. The dawn shows that he
is coming, but all light worth the name testifies that he is. In the
moon, which dimly lights our night, it is already day. So that the
moonlight, in truth, is as sure a promise of the day as the dawn."