THE GREAT CIVIL WAR
"The lawful power of making laws to command whole politic societies
of men, belongeth so properly to the same entire societies, that
for any prince or potentate of what kind soever upon earth, to
exercise the same of himself, and not either by express commission
immediately and personally received from God, or else by authority
derived at the first from their consent, upon whose persons they
impose laws, it is no better than mere tyranny. Laws they are not
therefore which public approbation hath not made so."--HOOKER,
_Ecclesiastical Polity_.
When Chillingworth's great work was published, in 1637, the last of the
Tudors, after having outlived her popularity, had passed to her rest, as
had also her most unworthy successor, whose insolence had outraged, but
whose weakness had strengthened, the awakening spirit of liberty, and
who, as Macaulay well expresses it,[23:1] "was, in truth, one of those
kings whom God seems to send for the express purpose of hastening
revolutions." To him had succeeded his most worthy son: a king whose
perfidy and duplicity were only equalled by his self-complacency and
power of self-deception, who never looked facts in the face, but
placidly expected them to conform to his own petty desires, and whose
dignified death failed to atone for a life devoted to ignoble personal
ends, by crooked ways and treacherous means; a king peculiarly incapable
of taking a broad statesman-like view of any question, who manifested no
thought for the interests of the people of whom he regarded himself as
ruler by right divine, whose futile domestic policy was inspired solely
by considerations for the advancement of his own personal power, whose
feeble and shifty foreign policy was determined only by considerations
for his own family interests, who intrigued with France against Spain,
with Spain against France, with both against Holland, and with Holland
against both, and with France, Spain, Holland, and Rome against his own
subjects, with English Presbyterians against English Independents, with
English Independents against English Presbyterians, and with Irish
Catholics and Scotch Presbyterians against both English Presbyterians
and Independents, and who yet succeeded in deceiving nobody but himself,
and in satisfying nobody, not even himself; a king whose love was far
more dangerous than his hate, a worthy patron of a Buckingham, a Goring,
or of a Laud, but unworthy the genius of a Shaftesbury or the loyal
services of a Verney, a Montrose, or a Worcester; a king, in short,
treacherous to his friends, faithless to his word, who went to his
wedding and came to his throne with a lie on his lips,[24:1] whom, again
to use the words of Macaulay,[24:2] "no law could bind, and whose whole
government was one system of wrong," of whom even the conservative and
partial Hallam is forced to admit[24:3] that "it would be difficult to
name any violation of law he had not committed." Even the famous
Petition of Right, to which some nine years previously, in 1628, he had
given a solemn, though reluctant, consent, had been ruthlessly violated.
Taxes had been levied by the Royal authority; patents of monopoly had
been granted; the course of justice had been tampered with, and judges
arbitrarily deposed; troops had been billeted upon the people; old
feudal usages had been revived for the express purpose of harassing and
defrauding the citizens; and, as if to exhaust every means to sap the
loyalty and wear out the patience of the people, Puritans of every shade
of opinion had not only been silenced but relentlessly persecuted, while
High Church bishops preached passive obedience, declaring the persons
and the property of subjects to be at the absolute disposal of the
sovereign, and in the name of religion inaugurating a systematic attack
on the rights and liberties of the nation.
The people whose representatives a quarter of a century previously, in
1604, had met the insolent claims of James the First with the dignified
rejoinder, that "your Majesty should be misinformed if any man should
deliver that the kings of England have any absolute power in themselves
either to alter religion, or to make any laws concerning the same,
otherwise than in temporal causes by consent of Parliament,"[25:1] were,
however, not easily to be intimidated. Despite a Royal order to adjourn,
the House of Commons of 1629, holding the Speaker by force in the Chair,
supported the immortal Eliot in his last assertion of English liberty,
and by successive resolutions declared that whosoever shall bring in
innovations in religion, or whosoever shall counsel or advise the taking
and levying of the subsidies of tonnage and poundage, not being granted
by Parliament, "a capital enemy to this kingdom and commonwealth," and
any person voluntarily yielding or paying the said subsidies, not being
granted by Parliament, "a betrayer of the liberty of England, and an
enemy to the same."[25:2] Having thus flung their defiance in the face
of the King, the House then voted its own adjournment.
From that time events had marched quickly. Those who had played the most
prominent parts in that momentous scene, including Holles, Selden, and
Eliot, had been thrown into prison, the last-named to die there, the
first martyr to the growing cause of civil freedom and religious
liberty. In 1637, the year of the publication of Chillingworth's work,
the whole question of the right to levy taxation was revived by the
demand on the inland counties for ship-money, and the attention of the
whole country attracted to it by the trial of Hampden on his refusal to
pay same. Later in the year, Charles' attempt to alter the
ecclesiastical constitution and form of public worship in Scotland led,
first to discontent, then to riot, and finally to open rebellion. As a
direct consequence, the King, in April 1640, was compelled to call what
from its brief duration is known as the Short Parliament, in which,
thanks to the Parliamentary tactics of Hampden, the design of the Court
Party, to obtain supplies without redressing grievances, was
constitutionally thwarted. On the manifestation of its determination to
redress wrongs and to vindicate the laws, this Parliament was at once
dissolved. The end of the tyranny, however, was fast approaching. In
August of the same year the King marched northward; the Scotch crossed
the border to meet him; on their approach the disaffected English army
was well pleased to fly rather than to fight those whom they were
inclined to regard as deliverers rather than as enemies; a truce was
patched up, and to meet the critical situation the King, in November
1640, found himself compelled to summon his last and most famous
Parliament, known in history as the Long Parliament.
The temper of the new Parliament, in which Pym and Hampden at first
exercised a paramount influence, was very different from that of any of
its predecessors. Recent events had convinced its leading members that
half measures would be worse than useless. During its first session,
Strafford and Laud, the two main supporters of absolute government and
religious tyranny, were impeached and imprisoned; those whom the King
had employed as instruments of oppression were called to account for
their conduct; the Star Chamber, the Court of High Commission and the
Council of York, were abolished; ship-money was declared illegal, and
the judgement in Hampden's case was annulled; the victims of the recent
religious persecutions were set at liberty, and conducted through London
in triumph; old oppressive feudal powers still appertaining to the Crown
were swept away; the King was made to give the judges patents for life
or during good behaviour; the Forest and Stannary Courts were reformed;
Triennial Parliaments were established; and, finally, it was provided
that the Parliament then sitting should not be prorogued or dissolved
save by its own consent.
After the recess the difficulties and dangers of the situation
increased daily. Revolt, popularly regarded as fomented by the Court
Party, had broken out in Ireland; the King, evidently seeking power and
opportunity to retract the concessions he had made, was seeking aid in
all directions--Rome, France, Spain, and was intriguing in Scotland; the
air was full of rumours of a plot of the Court to bring down the army in
the North to overawe the Parliament; and the moderate men,--"that is to
say, men who never go to the bottom of any difficulty," as Gardiner
expresses it,--by whose aid the above changes had been effected, were
inclined to pause, if not to retrace their steps. Under these
circumstances the popular leaders in the House of Commons, in November
1641, framed and passed the Great Remonstrance, which was practically an
address to the nation, to justify their past action and to appeal for
further support. In this famous document all the oppressive and
arbitrary acts of the past fifteen years were narrated in impressive
language; a detailed account was given of the necessary work already
accomplished, of the dangers and difficulties yet to be surmounted,
declaring the purpose of the House to be, not to abolish Episcopacy, but
to reduce the power of the bishops; and, finally, indicating the line of
future constitutional reform by urging that the King should employ no
Ministers save those in whom the Parliament could place confidence.
Contrary to expectation, the debate on the Remonstrance was long and
stormy, and the division--it was only carried in a full House by a
majority of nine--showed plainly that a reaction in favour of the King
had already begun. Charles had now a final opportunity of regaining the
confidence of the representatives of the nation, and for a few days it
seemed as if he were inclined to follow a moderate, dignified and
constitutional course. But for a few days only. On the 3rd of January
1642, without giving a hint of his intentions to the constitutional
Royalists he had so recently called to his councils, and whom he had
faithfully promised to consult on all matters relating to the House of
Commons, he sent down his Attorney-General to impeach the leading
members of the House, Pym, Holles, and Haselrig, at the bar of the
House of Lords, on a charge of high treason. As Macaulay well
says,[28:1] "It would be difficult to find in the whole history of
England such an instance of tyranny, perfidy, and folly." But worse was
to follow. The Commons refused to surrender their members, and Charles
resolved on their forcible arrest on the floor of the House. The
threatened members, however, had been warned, and had taken refuge in
the City of London; their absence, together with the dignified attitude
of the remaining members, prevented the outrage ending in bloodshed: in
a bloodshed the possibility of which it is even to-day impossible to
contemplate with equanimity.
Though the Militia Bill, which would have given Parliament the control
of the armed forces of the nation, was the ostensible, this outrage on
the part of the King was the direct and mediate, cause of the outbreak
of the Civil War. "To be safe from armed violence," the Commons, as far
as the rules of the House would permit, placed themselves under the
protection of the City; and the day previous to the one fixed for their
return to St. Stephen's under the protection of the trained bands of
London, the King left Whitehall, to return to it only to pay the dire
penalty for his past offences. Both sides now actively prepared for the
inevitable struggle. Owing to Pym's forethought, the Tower was
blockaded, and the two great arsenals of Hull and Portsmouth secured for
the Parliament. Owing to the force and boldness of his language, the
House of Lords was scared out of the policy of obstruction it had taken
up. On the avowal by Parliament of the refusal of the governor of Hull
to open the gates to the King, the members of the Royalist party
withdrew from Westminster; and on August 22nd, 1642, the uplifting of
Charles' standard on a hill at Nottingham announced the outbreak of the
Civil War.
On the well-trodden ground of the progress of the war, it is unnecessary
for our purposes to dwell. The issues involved were truly tremendous.
The evolution of the English Constitution had left it undecided to whom
the supreme power in the nation did rightfully accrue: and this was,
perhaps, the most practical question at issue.[29:1] As between
Parliament and King, the question was, whether the supreme power was to
continue to be wielded by a king whose temporal jurisdiction was to be
limited only by ancient laws interpreted by judges of his own creation
and removable at his pleasure, or by the representatives of the nation
in Parliament assembled? It was left to the Model Army to remind the
members of the Long Parliament that their power, as that of "all future
representatives of this nation, is inferior only to theirs who choose
them."[29:2] However, to make both King and Church responsible to
Parliament was, in truth, the one common aim of the whole Parliamentary
party; and, as Gardiner well points out,[29:3] "every year which passed
after the Restoration made it more evident that, for the time at least,
the most substantial gains of the long conflict had fallen to those who
had concentrated their efforts on this object."
Keeping in view the reforms secured during the first session of the Long
Parliament, it may fairly be urged that everything necessary to this end
had been gained prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, everything, of
course, save the control of the sword; and this, if the King could have
been trusted, was not immediately urgent, and would necessarily have
followed the control of the purse. "If the King could have been
trusted!" In these words the key to the whole situation is to be found.
The Parliamentary leaders could not, did not, dared not, trust the
King: hence the power of the sword had to be wrested from his grasp. It
was this that made the Civil War inevitable. It was this that rendered
constitutional government, government by discussion, government by
compromise, impossible. It was this well-grounded and repeatedly
confirmed distrust of the King that, after years of war and repeated and
sincere negotiations, negotiations which only served still further to
reveal his duplicity, made the execution of the King unavoidable. As the
judicial Gardiner well says,[30:1] in summing up the causes which led to
this most solemn, impressive, and instructive event in the whole history
of England--"The situation, complicated enough already, had been still
further complicated by Charles' duplicity. Men who would have been
willing to come to terms with him, despaired of any constitutional
arrangement in which he was to be a factor; and men who had long been
alienated from him were irritated into active hostility. By these he was
regarded with increasing intensity as the one disturbing force with
which no understanding was possible and no settled order consistent. To
remove him out of the way appeared, even to those who had no thought of
punishing him for past offences, to be the only possible road to peace
for the troubled nation."
The religious issues of the great struggle, however, were by no means so
simple. Episcopacy, as it had existed, had few supporters in England
outside the ranks of the bishops. The Laudian coercion had not only
reawakened slumbering animosities and given renewed vigour to the
Puritan dislike of the forms and ceremonies of the Anglican Church, but
had served to fill men's minds with a healthy, vigorous, and deep-rooted
distrust of ecclesiastical government in any form. To any claims,
whether of kings or of bishops or of presbyters, to rule by Divine
right, the ear of the nation was temporarily closed. If Protestants of
all shades of opinions had learned to distrust Episcopacy, intellectual
men of all shades of religious beliefs, and of none, equally distrusted
Presbyterianism, and feared that the free play of intellectual life
would be as much endangered by the rule of the presbyters as by the
rule of the bishops. We should, however, do well to remember that at the
outbreak of the war most of the great Parliamentary leaders, including
Pym, Hampden, and even Cromwell, had no deep-rooted objection to
Episcopacy as a form of Church government, provided only that it was
controlled by Parliament, and allowed the fullest possible liberty of
conscience. They all shared Pym's expressed conviction that "the
greatest liberty of the kingdom is religion," and seemed to have
inclined toward the ideal of Chillingworth, a full liberty of thought
maintained within the unity of the Church. It was their necessity, not
their will, the necessity to gain the cordial co-operation of the
Scotch, that later compelled them to commit themselves to
Presbyterianism, of their profound distrust of which they gave repeated
proof. And it is worthy of special note that even in the time of their
greatest need the English Parliament, to use Gardiner's words,[31:1]
"was as disinclined as the Tudor kings had ever been to allow the
establishment in England of a Church system claiming to exist by Divine
right, or by any right whatever independent of the State."
That religious conformity was a necessary condition of national unity,
aye, even of national existence, was, however, still accepted as an
axiomatic truth by those whose mental visions were limited by inherited
conceptions. To such as these the only question at issue seems to have
been whether an Episcopalian or a Presbyterian system of Church
government should prevail. Of the claims of those who would bow the head
neither to Rome, to Geneva, nor to Canterbury, who refused to entrust
their conscience to pope, to bishop, or to presbyter, the extreme
adherents of both these systems were probably equally insensible. And
yet it was precisely such men who were to come to the front during the
coming struggle, and who, under the guidance of their great leader, were
to become the champions of that great democratic principle of
toleration, of liberty of conscience, which was the one leading
principle of his life.[31:2] It was precisely such men who were to
proclaim to the rulers of the nation--"That matters of religion and the
ways of God's worship are not at all entrusted by us to any human
power, because therein we cannot remit or exceed a tittle of what our
consciences dictate to be the mind of God without wilful sin." But who
themselves were tolerant enough to be willing that "nevertheless the
public way of instructing the nation (_so it be not compulsive_) is
referred to their discretion."[32:1]
"So it be not compulsive!" in these words we have the key to the
position of the great body of sectarians known under the name of
Independents. They recognised, to use the words of their immortal
leader, that "it's one thing to love a brother, to bear with and love a
person of different judgement in matters of religion; and another thing
to have anybody so far set in the saddle on that account, as to have all
the rest of his brethren at mercy." So it be not compulsive! in these
words, too, we have the secret of their subsequent attitude toward the
Long Parliament and its successors. As Gardiner forcibly expresses
it--"Men who longed for religious toleration with a stern conviction
were impatient of parliamentary majorities working for uniformity." To
their opponents, more especially to those of the strict Presbyterian
school, toleration may have seemed of the devil, incompatible with
individual salvation, and injurious alike to Church and to State; to the
Independents, on the other hand, it was a necessary condition of
continued existence. They had no desire to establish a State Church of
their own; they were not prepared to deny that at least "a public way of
instructing the nation" might be necessary; but they were determined
that any such Church should be tolerant of the claims of men like
themselves, who could not conform their conscience to its requirements.
To create a home of liberty out of the England of the Tudors and the
Stuarts, of Laud and of Prynne, was a task beyond even their powers. But
whatever they may have failed to accomplish, they saved England from the
ecclesiastical tyranny Presbyterianism at that time involved, and raised
the standard of liberty and toleration, which during the great struggle
obtained a hold of the mind of the nation such as it never had before,
but never entirely lost again.
At the very outbreak of the Civil War, Cromwell's aim had been to find
"men who know what they fight for, and love what they know,--men as had
the fear of God before them, as made some conscience of what they
did."[33:1] Such men soon gathered round the great Independent, and he
moulded them into the famous Ironsides, by whose aid he turned the tide
of defeat at Marston Moor, and gained the glorious victories of Naseby,
Preston, Dunbar, and Worcester. Such men stood by his side at the
momentous Army Council at Windsor, May 1st, 1648, when it was solemnly
resolved, "not any dissenting," "that it was our duty, if ever the Lord
brought us back again in peace, to call Charles Stuart, that man of
blood, to account for the blood he had shed, and mischief he had done to
his utmost, against the Lord's cause and people in these poor
nations."[33:2] It was such men who, on December 6th, 1648, to save the
kingdom from a new war or from a peace destructive of everything they
had fought for,[33:3] purged the House of Commons of its "malignant"
members; and who cut the Gordian knot of the difficulties that beset the
nation by bringing the King, who seemed to them to stand in the way of
any and every satisfactory settlement, to trial and execution (January
30th, 1649). Moreover, it was such men who most heartily concurred with
the resolution of the House of Commons (February 7th, 1649), "That it
has been found by experience ... that the office of a king in this
nation, and to have the power thereof in any single person, is
unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and
public interests of the people of this nation, and therefore ought to be
abolished." And, finally, it was such men who were the main supporters
of the Council of State to whom, on February 13th, 1649, under the
control of the House of Commons, was entrusted full executive authority
over the home and foreign affairs of the nation.
FOOTNOTES:
[23:1] Macaulay's _Essays_, "John Hampden."
[24:1] In 1624, Charles had voluntarily sworn to the House of Commons
that if he married a Roman Catholic "it should be of no advantage to the
recusants at home." In the autumn of the same year, on his betrothal to
Henrietta Maria, sister to the King of France, he solemnly swore to
grant the very condition he had previously solemnly sworn never to
concede. He came to the throne early in the following year, 1625.
[24:2] _Loc. cit._
[24:3] _Constitutional History_, vol. ii. p. 81.
[25:1] The Apology of the Commons, 1604. See Gardiner's _History of
England_, 1603-1642, vol. i. pp. 180-185.
[25:2] _Ibid._ vol. vii. pp. 72-76.
[28:1] _Loc. cit._
[29:1] This was the point of view taken at the time by the Levellers,
the most active and progressive politicians of the period. In a "Humble
Petition of thousands of well affected people inhabiting the City of
London," presented September 11th, 1648, the petitioners address the
House of Commons as "the supreme authority of England," and desire it so
to consider itself. They complain that the Commons have declared their
intention not to alter the ancient government of King, Lords and
Commons, "not once mentioning, in case of difference, which of them is
supreme, but leaving that point, which was the chiefest cause of all our
public differences, disturbances, wars, and miseries, as uncertain as
ever." See _Clarke Papers_, vol. ii. p. 76.
[29:2] See "The Agreement of the People for a firm and present peace,"
as presented to the Council of the Army, October 28th, 1647. Reprinted
at the end of the third volume of Gardiner's _History of the Civil War_.
[29:3] _History of the Civil War_, vol. ii. p. 67.
[30:1] _History of the Civil War_, vol. iv. pp. 327-328.
[31:1] _History of the Civil War_, vol. iii. p. 95.
[31:2] See Appendix B.
[32:1] "The Agreement of the People for a firm and present peace."
(Italics are ours.)
[33:1] See Carlyle's _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches_, part ii. p. 135,
and part x. p. 255.
[33:2] See Gardiner's _History of the Civil War_, vol. iv. pp. 120-121.
[33:3] Cromwell seems early to have foreseen and guarded against such a
contingency. See Gardiner, _ibid._ vol. ii. p. 25.