In the last lecture I followed the course of events to the time
when it became clear that a military republic was the only possible
alternative for an unconditional triumph of Charles. Whether
this republic should be more or less exclusive, depended on the
possibility of bringing the English presbyterians to an understanding
with the erastian or independent party in parliament, and both to
an understanding with the army. During the spring of 1648 we find
Cromwell, true to his instinct of comprehension, working for this
end, and rewarded by all parties with jealousy for his pains. He had
a conference at his house, Ludlow tells us, ‘between those called
the grandees of the house and army, and the commonwealth’s men.’ The
grandees of the house would probably be the original members of the
Long parliament who might be of erastian or independent sympathies,
such as St. John, Nathaniel Fiennes, one or two uninteresting
lords, and perhaps Vane, who was not a declared republican. The
commonwealth’s men, not grandees, would be members elected to fill up
vacancies at the end of 1645, such as Ludlow himself, Hutchinson, and
Thomas Scott, officers of the army, but not of Cromwell’s training.
Marten, though in standing a grandee, headed this republican party.
The grandees, according to Ludlow, with Cromwell at their head, ‘kept
themselves in the clouds, and would not declare their judgments
either for a monarchical, aristocratical, or democratical government,
maintaining that any of them might be good in themselves, or for us,
according as providence should direct us. The commonwealth’s men
declared that monarchy was neither good in itself, nor for us. That
it was not desirable in itself they urged from the eighth chapter
of the 1st book of Samuel, where the choice of a king was charged
upon the Israelites by God himself as a rejection of him.’ That it
was not good ‘for us’ was proved ‘by the infinite mischiefs and
oppressions we had suffered under {324} it and by it; that indeed our
ancestors had consented to be governed by a single person, but with
this proviso, that he should govern according to the direction of
the law, which he always bound himself by oath to perform; that the
king had broken this oath, and therefore dissolved our allegiance,
protection and obedience being reciprocal; that ... it seemed to be a
duty incumbent upon the representatives of the people to call him to
account for the blood shed in the war ... and then to proceed to the
establishment of an equal commonwealth, founded upon the consent of
the people, and providing for the rights and liberties of all men.’
So elaborate an utterance of republican formulae did not look like
conciliation, and finally, says Ludlow, ‘Cromwell took up a cushion
and flung it at my head and then ran downstairs; but I overtook him
with another, which made him hasten down faster than he desired.’
He was not more successful with the presbyterians, whose leaders he
got to confer with the independents, and whom he afterwards addressed
in the city. ‘The city,’ according to a contemporary presbyterian
writer, ‘were now wiser than our first parents, and rejected the
serpent and his subtleties.’ The presbyterian zeal in fact, as it
boasted of itself, would learn nothing by events. During the summer
of 1648, while the army under Cromwell and Ireton was trampling out
the royalist risings and scattering the intrusive Scots (no longer
led by Lesley), Holles availed himself of the absence of the military
members to return to the house and regain his majority. Under his
direction, and at the pressure of the city, negotiations in the
exclusive presbyterian interest were re-opened with the king. These
led to concessions on his part, only made to gain time, which at
last, in the beginning of December, in a house of two hundred and
forty-four, were voted a sufficient basis of agreement. This vote
made the final rent between military and parliamentary power, and
Vane, who more than anyone else dreaded this rent, resisted it to the
utmost. Marten, however, was already bringing up Cromwell from the
north, and Cromwell a few days before had given voice to the ‘great
zeal he found among his officers for impartial justice on offenders.’
Soldiers full of the same zeal were already in the suburbs. The day
after the vote was passed, colonel Pride ‘purged’ the house of the
‘royalising’ members; within two days Cromwell appeared in it arm
in {325} arm with Marten, and the military republic was virtually
established.
It is needless to repeat the story of the king’s trial and execution,
or tell how his judges wore all the dignity of men who believed
themselves in the sight of God and the world to be violating the
false divinity of consecrated custom that a true divinity might
appear, or how Charles, after a few bursts of misplaced contempt or
passion, yet at the last, in Marvell’s words,
‘Nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene,
But with his keener eye
The axe’s edge did try;
Nor called the gods, with vulgar spite,
To vindicate his helpless right;
But bowed his comely head
Down, as upon a bed.’
The new government, in the exhilaration of sudden success, and
conscious that its strength lay in the awe which it inspired, ‘went
on roundly with its business.’ Considering its position, however,
it kept its hands strangely free from blood. It had the temptation,
generally so fatal in times of revolution, of feeling irresistible
force at its command for the moment without the least guarantee of
permanent stability. Yet its severity was confined to inflicting
banishment and confiscation on fifteen magnates who had been
prominent in the second war, to imprisoning a few others, and to
killing Hamilton, Holland, Capel, and colonel Foyer. Of these, Capel
alone, according to the ideas of the time, could have hoped for a
better fate, for he alone was exempt from the charge of treachery,
but the very greatness of his character, as Cromwell with his usual
explicitness stated, made it necessary for the commonwealth that he
should die.
Meanwhile the purged house of commons was constituting itself a
sovereign power. Only such members were re-admitted to it who would
declare dissent from the vote that the king’s concessions afforded
a ground of settlement. First and last about a hundred and fifty
members seem to have been admitted on these terms. Two days after the
king’s death the lords sent a humble message to the commons inviting
them to a conference on the condition of the state. The commons took
no heed of the message, which was {326} repeated several times, till
February 6, when they responded by a vote that the tipper house
was ‘useless, dangerous, and ought to be abolished.’ The next day
‘kingship’ was abolished by a formal vote, and soon afterwards the
executive government was delegated to a council of state of forty
members, to be nominated yearly by the commons. The accessories of
republicanism were arranged mainly by Marten, who clearly did his
work with glee. At his instance the old ‘great seal’ was broken, and
a new one made with the arms of England and Ireland on one side, and
a ‘sculpture or map of the commons sitting’ on the other. Under this
new seal, and under oath to ‘the parliament and people,’ the judges
were to hold their commissions, which six of the twelve agreed to do.
A new coinage was also issued with a cross and harp and the motto
‘God with us’ on one side; the arms of England between a laurel and
palm, with the legend ‘Commonwealth of England,’ on the other. At the
same time the royal statues were all taken down, and on the pedestals
was inscribed with the date, ‘Exit tyrannus regum ultimus.’ All these
were the devices of Mr. Henry Marten. A more serious business was the
issue of an ‘engagement’ to the new government. This, though at first
promulgated in a severe retrospective form, was finally reduced to a
promise of fidelity to the ‘commonwealth, as established without king
or lords.’ Without taking this engagement, no one was to have the
benefit of suing another at law, ‘which,’ says Baxter, ‘kept men a
little from contention, and would have marred the lawyers’ trade.’
The question whether Charles deserved his death, is one which even
debating societies are beginning to find unprofitable. His death
was a necessary condition of the establishment of the commonwealth,
which, again, was a necessary result of the strife of forces, or more
properly, the conflict of ideas, which the civil war involved. At
first sight, indeed, it might seem the result merely of accident, or
at any rate of personal action and character, of the military talent
of Cromwell, of the nature of the army which he got together, of the
parliamentary animosities begotten of the self-denying ordinance, of
the foolish confidence of Charles in his ability to shatter the two
parties against each other, and lastly of the resolution of Cromwell
in self-defence to command the situation. Beneath the confused web of
personal relations, {327} however, may be seen the conflict of those
religious ideas which I have spoken of as resulting from the action
of the Reformation on the spirit of Christendom. On the one hand was
the _jus divinum_ of a sacerdotal church; not simply appealing by
ritual or mystery to the devout, but applied at once to strengthen
and justify a royal interest. To this was opposed the _jus divinum_
of the presbyterian discipline, resting, not on priestly authority,
but on the popular conscience, yet claiming to be equally absolute
over body and soul with the other. Their antagonism elicited the
_jus divinum_ of individual persuasion, a right hitherto unasserted
in christendom, which, while the old recognised rights were in the
suspense of conflict, became a might. In the rapture of war it felt
its strength, and a master-hand gave it the form and system which it
lacked. The ancient order, too weak to regulate or absorb it, tried
blindly, while it was still armed and exultant, to crush it, and
itself necessarily fell to pieces in the attempt. But this might of
individual persuasion, though in a revolutionary struggle it could
conquer, was unable to govern. It was a spirit without a body, a
force with no lasting means of action on the world around it. Even at
the present day its office is to work under and through established
usage and interests, rather than to control them. Much less capable
was it of such control, when it was still in the stage of mere
impulse or feeling, with none of the calm comprehension which comes
of developed thought.
When it first faced the world in organic shape as a military
republic, it already presented practical contradictions which
ensured its failure. The republic claimed, and claimed truly, to be
the creation of the impulse of freedom, yet it found nothing but
sullen acquiescence around it; it spoke in the name of the people,
not half of whom, as lady Fairfax said, it represented; it asserted
parliamentary right, though parliament had been ‘purged’ (nearly
clean) to make room for it; it was directed by men of a ‘civil’
spirit, and had civil right to maintain, while it rested on the
support of armed enthusiasts, who cared only for the privilege of
saints. It was, in fact, founded on opinion, the opinion of a few,
brought to sudden strength and maturity, as it might have been in
an Athenian assembly, by debate in and about the parliament and in
the council of the army, but which had {328} no hold either on the
sentiment or the settled interests of the country. In the counties
which throughout the war had served as the screen of London, those,
that is, which formed the eastern association, together with
Buckinghamshire and Berkshire, it seems to have had a certain amount
of genuine support. Here the influence of Cromwell and his immediate
friends, in Berkshire especially the influence of Marten, was strong;
and the sentiment emanating from London, through the pervasive action
of sectarian preachers was quickly felt. Even here, however, the
sympathy was with the new government as a source of religious reform
and protection of tender consciences, rather than as republican;
and close at its doors the commonwealth had evidence of a different
feeling, not only opposed to it, but on which it could not hope to
work. In the spring of 1648, before Cromwell took the field, when the
whole country was simmering with insurrection, the parliament had
been specially troubled with a movement under its own eyes, of which
Whitelock has given a particular account. [1] A petition from Surrey
was brought up by some hundreds of the petitioners in person, that
the king might ‘forthwith be established on his throne, according
to the splendour of his ancestors.’ The petition was not presented
to the commons till the afternoon, ‘when some of the countrymen,
being gotten almost drunk, and animated by the malignants, fell a
quarrelling with the guards, and asked them “why they stood there
to guard a company of rogues.” Then words on both sides increasing,
the countrymen fell upon the guards, disarmed them, and killed one
of them’; till more soldiers were brought up, and the countrymen
dispersed. About the same time there was a ‘high and dangerous riot’
in the city, which began in Moorfields about ‘sporting and tippling
on the Lord’s day,’ contrary to the ordinance of parliament. [2]
For a whole day the rioters seem to have been masters of the city.
They seized the lord mayor’s house, and took thence a ‘drake.’ With
this they ‘possessed a magazine in Leadenhall,’ and then ‘beat drums
on the water to invite the seamen for God and king Charles.’ The
next day a couple of regiments crushed the tumult. All the time a
general lawless riot was spreading over Kent, got up by malignants,
who circulated a rumour that the parliament meant to hang two men in
every town.
[1] [Whitelock, ii. 313.]
[2] [April 10, Rushworth, vii. 1051.]
{329} If such things could happen where the parliament could make
itself felt most quickly, we may imagine the popular condition in
regions where there was the same ignorance, the same liability to
panic, the same tendency to tippling and gaming not on Sundays only,
for malignants to work on in the interest of ‘God and king Charles,’
and where no voice from the republican headquarters ever penetrated.
‘The inconstant, irrational, image-doting rabble,’ as the proud
republicans called it, which, when the king was being brought from
Newcastle to Holmby, had thronged his path to be touched for the
evil, which eagerly bought up fifty editions in twelve months of
the Eikon Basilikè with the picture of the king at his prayers, was
constant enough in two feelings, of which the republicans would have
done well to take account, a reverence for familiar names, and a
resentment against virtues which profess to be other than customary
and commonplace. It was at once the merit and the weakness of the
commonwealth’s men that they irritated these feelings at every point.
‘Before them shone a glorious world,
Fresh as a banner bright, unfurled
To music suddenly;’ [1]
and they could not wait to attain it by slow accommodations to sense
and habit. They believed that God through them was ‘casting the
kingdoms old into another mould,’ and in the pride of triumphant
reason they took pleasure in trampling on the common feelings and
interests, through which reason must work, if it is to work at all.
In the writings of Milton, the true exponent of the higher spirit
of the republic, we find on the one hand a perfect scorn of the
dignities and plausibilities then as now recognised in England (which
makes him the best study for a radical orator that I am acquainted
with), on the other, a free admission of the sensual degradation of
the people, which estranged them from a government founded on reason.
In the latter respect there is a marked contrast between the language
he held at the beginning of the war, when ‘he saw in his mind a noble
and puissant nation rousing itself like a strong man after sleep,’
and the language of the ‘Eiconoclastes,’ where he admits that the
people ‘with a besotted and degenerate baseness of spirit, except
some few who yet retain in them the old English {330} fortitude and
love of freedom, imbastardised from the ancient nobleness of their
ancestors, are ready to fall flat and give adoration to the image
and memory of this man, who hath more put tyranny into an act than
any British king before him.’ To him, throughout, the puritan war
had seemed a crisis in the long struggle between the spirit and
the flesh, a great effort to reclaim the spirit from ‘the outward
and customary eye-service of the body,’ and a system of political
asceticism was its proper result. Such a system to its believing
supporters was the commonwealth. Its claim was not gradually to
transmute, but suddenly to suppress, the feeling of the many by the
reason of the few; a claim which all the while belied itself, for
it appealed to popular, and even natural right, and which implied
no concrete power of political reconstruction. It was a democracy
without a δημος, [2] it rested on an assertion of the supremacy of
reason, which from its very exclusiveness gave the reason no work to
do.
[1] [Wordsworth, _Ruth_.]
[2] [Greek demos = people, Tr.]
The great interests of the nation at that time may be taken as
the landed, the mercantile, and the clerical; and the republic at
starting might reckon on hostility from each of them. With the landed
interest it dealt at once too severely to have its friendship, and
too lightly to crush it. If it had adopted a sweeping measure of
confiscation, as other revolutionary governments have done, and as
it did itself in Ireland, it might have settled the soldiers on
the confiscated lands, thus easing itself of their too obtrusive
support, while it established a permanent interest in its favour
over the whole country. As it was, the land was only confiscated
in a few special cases, when it was given to the various grandees
of the parliament, in reward of services, and in return for money
spent on the public behalf. The ordinary gentry who had been in arms
for the king, ‘delinquents,’ as they were called, were allowed to
retain their estates on payment by way of composition of some part of
the income. They thus retained their old means of influence, along
with a memory of a grievance to intensify their natural royalism.
Nor was the trouble got over once for all at the foundation of the
commonwealth. The composition paid on the estates was one of the
chief sources of revenue, and when, through a Dutch war or the like,
the republic was short of money, delinquents were hunted out who
had hitherto escaped. Thus the sore was kept running, and if the
humbled gentry, like {331} colonel Poyer of Pembroke, were ‘sober and
penitent in the morning,’ they were also like him often ‘drunk and
full of plots in the afternoon.’ Their meetings for horse-races and
cock-fighting were reckoned nurseries of disaffection, and the best
security against them was that secrets sworn to over the bottle were
not generally well kept.
The royalist squire, when he was not at a cock-fighting, would often
have his loyalty fanned by an excluded episcopal clergyman whom he
had taken as his chaplain. A large number of the clergy, as we have
seen, had been driven from their livings by the imposition of the
covenant. A fifth of the yearly income of their several benefices
was set apart for the benefit of their families (an example not
followed at the ejectment of St. Bartholomew’s day), but the excluded
clergy themselves were liable to be driven from their old parishes,
and would generally take refuge with the royalist gentry. It would
seem indeed that under the commonwealth, which, in England at least,
was true to its principle of toleration, there was nothing to
prevent an episcopalian clergyman who would recognise the republican
government from being presented to a living or from using the Common
Prayer in his church. Some residue of the old assembly still sat at
Westminster, to examine men who presented themselves for ordination
or induction to livings, but they had no power to compel such
presentation, and there is no sign that they were uniformly resorted
to. From passages in Baxter’s life we may infer that many moderate
episcopalians, men, that is, who were in favour, according to the
technical language of the time, of compresbyterial, as distinct from
prelatical, episcopacy, held benefices under the new régime. Still
there were no doubt numbers of excluded ‘prelatical divines’ about
the country, and while they were natural enemies of the commonwealth,
the presbyterian ministers were not its friends. Whatever was not
sectarian in it, was erastian. Its very existence they reckoned a
violation of the covenant, and, if its abolition of kingship could
have been borne, its refusal to give the presbyteries a coercive
jurisdiction, its declared intention to remove all penal ordinances
in matters of conscience, they could not brook. They refused to
read its ordinances from the pulpit, as had previously been done,
they prayed openly against it, and turned the monthly fast into a
general exercise of disaffection. The parliament on its part issued
stringent {332} injunctions that all ministers should subscribe the
engagement of fidelity to the commonwealth, and finding that the
monthly fast had become a ‘fast for strife and debate,’ it declared
its abolition and appointed fasts of its own on special occasions.
The ministers, however, ‘condemned the engagement to the pit of
hell’ and shut up the churches on the new fast days. According to
Baxter, as a general rule only the sectarians and the old cavaliers,
who were seldom ‘sick of the disease of a scrupulous conscience,’
would swallow the engagement. He not only refused it himself, but
circulated letters against it among the soldiers, ‘barking monitories
and mementoes,’ in Milton’s phrase. Yet he seems to have been left
undisturbed, nor except at the universities do we hear of any
penalties for the refusal of the engagement being inflicted. The
parliament knew that the presbyterian pulpit was the most powerful
lever of popular opinion in the country, and showed a magnanimous
patience in dealing with it. It put out declarations, promising
protection to the ministers in their benefices, and a maintenance
of all ordinances that had been made for reformation in doctrine,
worship, and discipline, except such as were penal and coercive. At
last it passed an order that state affairs were not to be discussed
in sermons, and appointed a committee to receive informations against
such as disregarded it. The beneficed ministers, however, stimulated
by missives from the Scotch kirk, now in arms for Charles II.,
continued, says the gentle Mrs. Hutchinson, to ‘spit fire out of
their pulpits,’ and even the rout of their allies at Dunbar, though
it made their tongues less dangerous, did not make them more smooth.
The reason of the case is obvious. It is the true nemesis of
human life that any spiritual impulse, not accompanied by clear
comprehensive thought, is enslaved by its own realisation.
Presbyterianism at the beginning of the war had been a struggling
impulse, noble, but not understanding its own nobleness. It had
now, with success, hardened into an interest; its inarticulate idea
had become a shallow, though articulate formula; and it was seeking
to suppress the spiritual force in which it had itself originated.
The genuine commonwealth’s men, on the other hand, were still in
the stage of the ‘unbodied thought.’ They announced principles.
In practice the presbyterian clergy should be supported and well
paid, but universal toleration must be maintained, and tithes were
{333} declared judaic and objectionable. The offensiveness of such
principles did more to provoke the clergy than the excellence of the
practice, which Baxter, at least, was obliged to confess, did to
conciliate them.
The best illustration of the real feeling of the republican clique in
London towards the preaching presbyterian royalists is to be found in
Milton’s treatise on the ‘Tenure of kings and magistrates,’ written
just at this crisis, when he was in constant communication with the
chief commonwealth’s men.
‘Divines, if we observe them, have their postures and
their motions no less expertly than they that practise
feats in the artillery ground. Sometimes they seem,
furiously to march on, and presently march counter;
by-and-by they stand, and then retreat; or if need be,
can face about or wheel in a whole body, with that
cunning and dexterity as is almost unperceivable, to
wind themselves by shifting ground into places of
more advantage. And providence only must be the drum;
providence the word of command, that calls them from
above, but always to some larger benefice.... For while
the hope to be made classic and provincial lords led them
on, while pluralities greased them thick and deep, to
the shame and scandal of religion, more than all sects
and heresies they exclaim against; then to fight against
the king’s person, and no less a party of his lords and
commons, or to put force on both the houses was good,
was lawful, was no resisting of superior powers; they
only were powers not to be resisted who countenanced
the good, and punished the evil. But now that their
censorious domineering is not suffered to be universal,
truth and conscience to be freed, tithes and pluralities
to be no more, though competent allowance provided, and
the warm experience of large gifts, and they so good at
taking them, yet now to exclude and seize on impeached
members, to bring delinquents without exemption to a fair
tribunal by the common law against murder, is to be no
less than Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. He who but erewhile
in the pulpits was a cursed tyrant, an enemy to God and
saints, laden with innocent blood, is now, though nothing
penitent, a lawful magistrate, a sovereign lord, the
Lord’s anointed, not to be touched, though by themselves
imprisoned.’ [1]
[1] [Milton’s Prose Works, ii. pp. 45 and 6, ed. 1848.]
When we reflect that the men of whom this was written were the
most active and popular section of the beneficed {334} clergy, and
that the other section, the accommodating episcopalians, had been
covertly hostile to the parliament all along, we shall appreciate
the estrangement of the ideas, that were ruling for the time, from
the average sentiment of the country. The only agency through which
the government could now hope to work on this sentiment was that of
the independents and sectaries, who were unbeneficed, and even the
support of the independents was not very hearty, for independency
in the larger towns was becoming an ‘interest,’ while that of the
sectaries might at any time become unmanageable.
The republic, having thus to reckon on open hostility from the
clergy, and on a deeper hatred, tempered with fear, from most of the
gentry, had no countervailing influence with the commercial class.
This class, which never loves experiments in government, took its
political tone largely from the presbyterian preachers; and in the
city, as we have seen, gave great strength in the crisis of 1648 to
the royalist reaction. The financial necessities, moreover, of an
armed republic aggravated the offence of its moral and spiritual
innovation. Hitherto the army had been supplied with provisions
by a system of free quarter. Its leaders had been quite aware of
the popular grievance which this system caused, and which only its
admirable discipline prevented from being far greater. The removal
of it had been a constant topic in the documents issuing from the
army-council; but this implied the introduction of new and heavy
taxation. The purged parliament, however, had spirit for the work,
and quickly imposed an ‘assessment’ of 90,000_l_. a month (more than
1,000,000_l_. a year). Such a burden was sure to be a permanent
source of complaint, but for the present the impressive display of
restrained power, with which the new government had begun its rule,
and the apprehension that it might be the only present alternative
for a worse rule of levellers, had made the city more civil. At the
special instance of Cromwell and Vane it advanced money on security
of the tax, and the lord mayor, with other city magnates, was placed
on the committee of assessment. A prompt suppression of a levelling
mutiny by Cromwell, in May 1649, seems for the time to have composed
the commercial mind, and a few days after a great banquet was given
by the city to the parliament and officers of the army, remarkable
chiefly {335} for the description of it by Whitelock, which indicates
that in one respect at least, good taste, superior to that of
our times, went along with puritan gravity. ‘The feast was very
sumptuous, the music only drums and trumpets, no healths drunk, nor
any incivility.’ The mercantile interest was further conciliated by
an act passed soon afterwards (the beginning of legislation which
was gradually to transfer the carrying trade of the world from the
Dutch to the English), to the effect that no foreign ship should
bring merchandise to England except such as was of the growth or
manufacture of the country to which the ship belonged. Still the
breach between the high spiritual endeavour on which alone the
republic really rested, and the aspiration of the smug citizen who
left such endeavour to his minister and to Sundays, was too great for
orderly and vigorous administration to fill. The condition of this
administration, moreover, was that Cromwell should keep its enemies
at a distance.
With such dangerous elements all around it, the household of the
republic was by no means united in itself. It rested on a temporary
coalition between three sets of men, between whom as we have seen
there was no real love; the genuine commonwealth’s men, a section
of the ‘grandees of the parliament,’ and the leaders of the army.
The ‘grandees of the parliament’ had, with scarcely an exception,
kept their hands from the death-warrant of Charles. They recognised
the new order of things partly to avoid a breach with the army,
partly from fear of presbyterian ascendency and an unchecked
royalist reaction. So far as they looked ahead at all, they probably
contemplated a re-establishment of monarchy in the person of the duke
of Gloucester, the late king’s youngest son, whom the parliament had
in its keeping. This at least was the case with Whitelock, who was in
his way a representative man. On the new council of state (of forty),
which included seven peers or eldest sons of peers, five baronets,
four knights, and some temporising lawyers, this section had a
numerical majority. On the other hand, the stiff republicans were
in a decided minority on the council. Only ten regicides were upon
it, and from these must be deducted Cromwell and one or two officers
whom he could command, and who were not republican on principle.
The most eminent of this section were Marten, Bradshaw, Ludlow, and
Scott. Bradshaw, a special friend of Milton, had presided at the
trial of Charles, {336} in a high beaver hat lined with steel, with
the composure, according to Milton, of a man with whom the trial of
kings had been the business of life. He was afterwards president of
the council of state, where Whitelock, a rival and perhaps jealous
lawyer, complains that he did not understand the nature of his
office, and made long discourses of his own that no one wanted to
hear. Scott had been an officer in the new-model army, but seems
already to have been jealous of Cromwell, being one of those men with
whom hatred of the ‘rule of a single person’ was a principle of life.
In later days, when Monk was supreme, the restoration inevitable,
and the republicans fleeing, he stood up in parliament and said
that, though he knew not where to hide his head, yet he must say
that not his hand only but his heart had been in the execution of
Charles. As might be expected, the restoration brought him the honour
of martyrdom for his cause. Ludlow was a man of the same temper.
His qualities were clearly much valued by Cromwell, and there seems
to have been more real friendship between them at this time than
Ludlow, looking back upon it from his exile at Vevay in the light of
subsequent events, was willing to admit. Marten alone had some touch
of the modern French republican about him. We have seen with what
zest he arranged the more sensational incidents of the commonwealth.
When the motion for the abolition of the house of lords, as ‘useless
and dangerous,’ was being discussed, he proposed to substitute the
words ‘useless but not dangerous.’ On another occasion, it is said,
in drawing up a republican document, he spoke of ‘England being
restored to its ancient government of commonwealth,’ and in answer
to an objection that a commonwealth never before existed in England,
quoted a text which had always puzzled him, where a man blind from
his birth was said to be ‘restored’ to the sight he _should have
had_. Under cover of this gaiety, however, and of a life reputed to
be lewd, Marten had a strong republican enthusiasm, which he carried
with him to his death through an imprisonment of twenty years.
These republicans, one would suppose, must have felt the uneasiness
of their position. They had been the first to appeal from the
unpurged parliament to the army. Ludlow, indeed, in his memoirs
professed to have been shocked when Cromwell, in the spring of 1647,
whispered to him in the house {337} that Holles and his party would
never leave ‘till the army pulled them out by the ears’; yet by his
own confession a few months later, during the treaty of Newport, he
urged Ireton to put force on the parliament before Ireton himself
was prepared to do so, and Marten had done the like with Cromwell.
To the army they had thus appealed, but to the army, now that
they were successful, they no longer meant to go. Its enthusiasm
was not theirs. They had too much of the ancient Roman in them,
Marten, perhaps, rather of the ancient Greek, to sympathise with the
‘foolishness of Christ’ as it was presented in the army. It was not
in them that men, whose pastime was preaching and being preached to,
who discovered strange lights in their bibles to interpret strange
events, could find a natural leader, but in one who in his private
prayers would ‘throw himself on his face and pour out his soul with
tears for a quarter of an hour,’ who never went into battle without
a text to feed on, who sang psalms as he led them to victory. The
army, though it had no representative of its peculiar spirit on the
council of state except Cromwell, was the real constituency of the
republican parliament. It contained dangerous elements over which
parliament had not the least control, and which might at any time
overturn the parliamentary system. These may be summed up as the
spirit of simple military arrogance, represented by Lambert, the
levelling spirit represented by Lilburne and Wildman, and the ‘Fifth
Monarchy’ spirit represented by Harrison. Lambert appears to have had
the most conspicuous military talent of any of Cromwell’s officers.
In the critical spring of 1648 he held an independent command in the
north of England. He showed great skill in hanging on the skirts of
Hamilton’s army before Cromwell joined him, and afterwards headed
the pursuit. At Dunbar he led the fatal attack on the Scotch right
wing, and next year when Charles was marching to Worcester, hung on
his flank with cavalry, as he had before done on Hamilton’s. But
as soon as he was off active service, he became mischievous. Vain,
restless, and of extravagant habits, he perpetually chafed alike
against Cromwell’s control and the authority of the parliament.
He alone of the leading officers had never obtained a seat in
parliament, and thus never became habituated to its civilising
influence. Mrs. Hutchinson, while including him and Cromwell in the
same condemnation, admits that there was this difference, {338} that
while the one was gallant and great, the other had nothing but an
unworthy pride, most insolent in prosperity and as abject and base
in adversity.’ The term ‘leveller,’ then as now, was very loosely
and ambiguously applied. According to Mrs. Hutchinson, who is a good
authority on this point, the nickname was originally given to a:
‘certain sort of public-spirited men,’ who, when the
presbyterian and independent factions were at their
hottest, ‘declared against the ambition of the grandees
of both and against the prevailing partiality, by
which great men were privileged to do those things for
which meaner men were punished. Many then got shelter
in the house and army against their debts, by which
others were undone. The lords, as if it were the chief
privilege of nobility to be licensed in vice, claimed
many prerogatives, which set them out of the reach of
common justice, which these good people would have had
equally belong to the poorest as well as to the mighty.’
‘But,’ continues Mrs. Hutchinson, taking a turn at
philosophy, ‘as all virtues are mediums and have their
extremes, there rose up after under the same name a
people who endeavoured the levelling of all estates and
qualities, which these sober levellers were never guilty
of desiring.’ [1]
[1] [_Life of colonel Hutchinson_, ii. 125; ed, 1885.]
This account corresponds with the tenor of the petitions which we
read of as presented to the republican parliament by ‘levellers.’
They are simply a continuation of the agreements and remonstrances
issued by the council of the army during the agitation of 1648, which
in the main no doubt expressed the mind of Cromwell and Ireton.
Their demand is for reforms, which for the most part stood over for
nearly another two hundred years, till they began to be carried out
by the ‘purged parliament’ of 1832. With minor variations according
to circumstances, they pray, firstly, for a cheap and expeditious
process of law, to be the same for all, with no exemptions in
virtue of tenure or privilege; the laws to be written and in
English; secondly, the abolition of all feudal courts, payments, and
privileges; thirdly, the maintenance of the clergy by some other
method than tithes, which, let us remember, were not then commuted,
but were a perpetual source of carnal dispute between the clergy and
the farmers; fourthly, the removal of monopolies, custom-duties, and
excise, and the imposition of equal taxation; fifthly, the abolition
of imprisonment for debt; all {339} estates to be liable for debt,
and the rich not to turn prisons into places of protection; sixthly,
the establishment of perfect freedom of conscience; and seventhly and
lastly comes the demand, which presented the real difficulty, the
dissolution of the sitting parliament, with provision for calling a
new one at regular intervals.
This, we shall agree, is a sufficiently large and reasonable
programme of reform. Sometimes farther details appear, of a kind
which show a curious forecast of modern legislation, such as the
establishment of registers of mortgage and the sale of lands. The
rational desire for reform, however, which these petitions indicate,
was always liable in the army to pass into a spirit of mutiny and
disaffection, or into an ecstatic revolt, such as constantly appeared
in those times against the clothing, literal and metaphorical, with
which custom has covered the nakedness of human life. The grand mover
of the mutinous spirit was John Lilburne, the object of Marten’s
well-known joke, that if he were the only man left in the world, John
would quarrel with Lilburne and Lilburne with John. His obligations
to Cromwell were of long standing. In a tract published in 1647 he
says to Cromwell, ‘You took compassion on me when I was at death’s
door, and in 1640 set me free from the long tyranny of the bishops
and the Star chamber.’ (In 1640 no one will suppose that Cromwell’s
sympathy was other than disinterested.) ‘I have looked on you,’ he
proceeds, ‘as the most absolute, single-hearted great man in England,
untainted and unbiassed with ends of your own.’ He did not long
continue, however, to use this language. He had made himself useful
to Cromwell in the matter of the self-denying ordinance by showing up
certain scandals in connection with the earl of Manchester and other
officers of the original army. This made him many enemies, one of the
obscurer of whom prosecuted him for damaging his character. The case
was decided against Lilburne, who was called on for heavy damages.
He appealed to the parliament, and its disregard of his appeal
was the beginning of a long series of grievances, accumulating in
intensity as grievances do, and gradually drawing within the circle
of his animosity every one who declined to make his vindication the
sole object of political action. Cromwell and Marten seem really
to have done what they could to help him, but he would not wait to
be helped. From time to {340} time a parliamentary committee was
appointed to consider his case, but before anything could be done,
there would appear some violent pamphlet of his against parliament
and its grandees in general, for which he would be lodged in the
tower. ‘Jonah’s cry,’ ‘The oppressed man’s oppression,’ ‘The just
man’s justification,’ ‘Jugglers discovered,’ are among the titles
of his tracts, all most trenchantly written, that appeared during
the military agitation which culminated in the rendezvous at Ware.
Because Cromwell would not break on his account with ‘the grandees
of the parliament’ and the more worldly-wise of the officers, he
became one in Lilburne’s eyes who had bartered his high calling for
the glory of the world. His supposed machinations were exhibited in a
pamphlet published during the first months of the commonwealth, under
the title ‘The hunting of the foxes from Triploe Heath to Whitehall
by five small beagles’; the foremost ‘beagle’ being Lilburne. [1]
It strongly illustrates the freedom of discussion allowed in the
army, which indeed was the condition of its peculiar enthusiasm,
that this and other seditious manifestoes from the same hand, such
as ‘England’s new chains discovered,’ had apparently unchecked
circulation in it, and that at a time when a strong leaven of mutiny
was at work. At three different places in the spring of 1649, in
London, at Banbury, and at Salisbury, while the ‘five beagles’ were
happily under lock and key in the tower, the troops broke into open
revolt. Through want of leaders, and the swift energy of Cromwell,
the revolt was suppressed without bloodshed, and of the captured
mutineers, altogether some two thousand in number, only five were
shot. It is a fact probably unique in military history, that the
one who was shot in London was carried to the grave with military
honours, followed by the whole body of troops quartered about the
city with the ‘levelling’ badges in their hats. The fact is unique
because the army also was unique, being not a mercenary machine, or
even an embodiment of patriotic impulse, but an armed organisation of
opinion.
[1] [“Lilburn” amended to “Lilburne”, twice. Tr.]
Contemporaneously with this outburst of mutiny, the levelling spirit
had taken another direction, sufficiently peaceable, but equally
tending to sap the foundation of a government resting on opinion.
‘In April of the year 1649,’ says Whitelock, [1] ‘the
council of state had intelligence of new {341} levellers
at St. Margaret’s Hill, near Cobham in Surrey, and at
St. George’s Hill, and that they digged the ground and
sowed it with roots and beans; one Everard, once of the
army, is the chief of them.’ A few days after Everard was
brought before the general. He said that he ‘was of the
race of the Jews; that all the liberties of the people
were lost by the coming in of William the Conqueror,
and that ever since the people of God had lived under
tyranny and oppression worse than that of our forefathers
under the Egyptians. But now the time of deliverance was
at hand.... And that there had lately appeared to him
a vision, which bade him arise, and dig and plough the
earth, and receive the fruits thereof; that their intent
is to restore the creation to its former condition....
That they intend not to meddle with any man’s property
... but only with what is common and untilled; ... that
the time will suddenly be that all men shall willingly
come in, and give up their lands and estates, and submit
to this community ..., For money, there was not any need
of it, nor of clothes more than to cover nakedness....
As their forefathers lived in tents, so now it would
be suitable to live in the same,’ with more to the
like effect. ‘I have set down this the more largely,’
adds Whitelock, ‘because it was the beginning of the
appearance of this opinion, and that we might the better
understand and avoid these weak persuasions.’
[1] [iii. p. 17.]
This ‘persuasion,’ ‘weak’ though it might be, was simply an
expression of that individual consciousness of spiritual capacity and
right, which had been strong enough to pull down an ancient church
and monarchy, and was now tearing off the encumbrances by which, as
it seemed, ages of selfish activity had clogged its motion. It was
the sectarian enthusiasm, seeking wildly to withdraw itself from
secular, as it had already done from religious ordinance. Ultimately
clothed and in its right mind under the form of quakerism, it was
to serve as a permanent protest against the plausibilities of the
world, and to supply a constant spring of unconventional beneficence
to English life. Even in this rude agricultural form, which it took
among the diggers on Cobham Heath, it was perfectly peaceable.
‘They would not defend themselves with arms, but would submit unto
authority, and wait till the promised opportunity be offered, which
they conceived to be at hand.’ Their existence, however, showed that
the enthusiasm which {342} had created the commonwealth was taking
the inevitable course which made it useless as a support for any
civil government whatever.
A kindred impulse to theirs, moreover, was at work in high places
of the army, where it did not forswear the use of a carnal sword.
Major-general Harrison was now directing his course by a verse in
the prophet Daniel, which promises the kingdom of the world to the
saints of the Most High, and was looking to the Rump parliament to
introduce this kingdom with all speed. If their factions and worldly
interests prevented them from doing so, Cromwell, he held, by some
method above that of civil government, could and would. It was not
for a constitutional theory or a pagan republicanism that he had
been fighting, but for a dominion of grace, and he would not long
be still while grandees of parliament, whom God had never owned in
war, wrangled over the legal adjustment of his mercies. Overton, the
governor of Hull, was the most eminent of those who shared his view,
which, however, was but the legitimate doctrine of the military saint.
During more than two years, from the midsummer of 1649 to the autumn
of 1651, the republican oligarchy was able to shut its eyes to the
real situation. The military spirit was absorbed in the conquest
under Cromwell of Ireland and Scotland, and the English royalists,
hardly recovered from their crushing failure at home, were watching
the fortune of war in these other countries. The only chance for the
permanence of republicanism was that it should avail itself of this
interval to establish itself on a more popular basis, and initiate
practical reforms. If it had had the will or ability to do so, the
levelling clamour, which with the return of the army was sure to be
heard again, would have had nothing in popular sentiment to appeal
to. The name of a ‘free parliament’ had been made to English ears,
by the very men to whom it was now a word of ill omen, the familiar
symbol of good government. The interference with the ordinary course
of justice by special courts and parliamentary committees was a
grievance that everyone could understand. An ecclesiastical anarchy,
such as the journal of George Fox the quaker exhibits to us, was a
scandal that came home to the parochial mind. In an ordinary parish,
a presbyterian clergyman would be in possession of the benefice, to
attempt {343} an irritating but ineffectual discipline and haggle
over tithes, while in the same place there would be a knot of
‘common-prayer men’ with an excluded minister at hand to stimulate
their zeal, and a congregation of baptists or independents, who,
now that their friends were in power, would see no reason why their
enemies should be beneficed. In the absence of any settled rule,
each party might hope by local faction or intrigue to get the tithes
for itself, and meanwhile would resist the payment of them to its
adversaries.
The only hopeful line then for the commonwealth’s men to take would
have been to provide for the election of a new parliament by reformed
constituencies, to abolish all criminal prosecution not sanctioned
by the common-law, to reform chancery and simplify legal process,
and to resettle the church on some plan that would admit at least
the independents and the ‘moderate’ or anti-prelatist episcopalians,
and substitute a fixed salary for tithes. Whether this line was
practicable for them is another question. They had no hold on popular
feeling; a powerful Scotch army, with the young king in its keeping,
was in the field against them, and the presbyterian clergy were
praying for its success. Under such circumstances there was much
plausibility in Henry Marten’s argument that their ‘commonwealth was
yet an infant, of a weak growth and a very tender constitution’; and
therefore his opinion was, ‘that nobody could be so fit to nurse it
as the mother who brought it forth; and that they should not think of
putting it under any other hands till it had obtained more years and
vigour.’ Marten, however, had forgotten that the true mother of the
republic was not the Rump parliament, but the army, whose maternal
discipline, unless some foster-parentage could be found in popular
interests, would be too much for the child as soon as it sought to
take a way of its own.
The essential difficulty of the situation was aggravated by the
oligarchical temper which it bred in the republican leaders. With
the best of them this temper took that higher form which appears
in Milton’s complaint, [1] that when God has given the victory
to a cause in the field of battle, ‘then comes the task to those
worthies which are the soul of it, to be sweat and laboured out
amidst the throng and noses of vulgar and irrational men.’ Even in
this form it cannot face facts, for it is {344} not this pride of
exclusion but the higher pride, which can possess itself in sympathy
and comprehension, that represents the divine reason in the world.
But the pride of protected intellect, once clothed with political
power, soon passes into the jealousy of a clique. So it was within
our memory in France under the Orleanist régime, and so it was with
the leading spirits of the Long parliament. They mistook the success
of their military administration for a real faculty of government,
and hugged power for its own sake, in the mood of a self-conscious
aristocracy of virtue. If this was the case with the best of them,
a more vulgar kind of self-interest was sure to prevail among the
rest. Thus, though their administration was singularly pure, they got
credit even among their best friends, if Milton’s ‘Second defence’
may be taken as expressing his real mind, for a spirit of faction and
obstructiveness.
[1] [_Tenure of kings and magistrates_.]
The one man among them who seems really to have comprehended the
situation, was Sir Henry Vane. Shrinking from the touch of military
violence, he had withdrawn from parliament after Pride purged it,
though the purgation was specially in his interest, and had only been
induced to join the council of state at the pressing instance of
Cromwell. He at once saw the need of popularising the government, and
stirred the question of new elections. A committee for considering
the question seems to have been constantly sitting during the
first year of the commonwealth, with Vane as its chairman, which
reported at the beginning of 1650 in favour of a new parliament of
four hundred members, and a re-arrangement of constituencies. A
corresponding resolution was voted by the house, but no bill was
introduced, and meanwhile Vane’s energies were absorbed by the
management of the wars with the Scots and the Hollanders. On this, as
on the other pressing questions, parliament could never get beyond
the stage of resolutions. It resolved to deal with the question of
tithes, to provide for popular education out of ecclesiastical funds,
and to simplify the law, but no actual legislation was achieved.
Thus by the autumn of 1651 it could take credit for an effective
administration of war and finance, and for the introduction of a
preaching ministry and schoolmasters into Wales. Towards facing the
hostile forces which only slumbered around them, towards meeting
the demands of the enthusiasm of reformation to {345} which they
owed their temporary power, they had done absolutely nothing. On
September 6 they heard the speaker read Cromwell’s account of
the battle of Worcester, ‘a mercy’ of which ‘the dimensions are
beyond my thoughts,’ ‘it is for aught I know a crowning mercy.’
Cromwell, meanwhile, was riding up to London with a look which Mr.
Peters, his chaplain, interpreted, or afterwards believed himself
to have interpreted, to mean that he would be king of England yet.
At Aylesbury he was met, on behalf of the parliament, by St. John
and Whitelock, both special representatives of the lawyer’s desire
for ‘settlement,’ and ‘government by a single person,’ with whom,
especially with St. John, he had long discourse. On the 16th, we
read in Whitelock, he took his seat in the house, and there is the
significant addition, ‘the parliament resumed the debate touching a
new representative,’ also ‘of an act of oblivion and general pardon,
with some expedients for satisfaction of soldiery and the ease of the
people.’ The question of settlement was now in the hands of one who
would not allow it to tarry.