In the last lecture we saw that the immediate result of Cromwell’s
presence in the house after his return from Worcester was the revival
of the questions of a new election and a general settlement, which,
during the last two years the republican oligarchy, with its head
in the bush, had not chosen to face. In pressing these questions
Cromwell was true to the instinct of comprehension which had governed
his course throughout. It appears from the Memoirs of Berkley, who
had been the chief negotiator with him on the king’s behalf in the
summer of 1647, that he was then convinced of the difficulty of
establishing a government on so narrow a foundation as was afforded
either by the army or an oligarchical parliament. His project at
that time was to restore the king on the condition of his calling a
new parliament, from which he declared royalists should be excluded.
This forms the basis of the propositions which the army offered
to the king, while he was still in their keeping, and which, with
expansion and variation according to circumstance, were pressed
upon parliament during the following {346} year. They provide that
the sitting parliament should come to an end within a year; that
afterwards a parliament should be summoned every two years, to sit
for not less than a hundred and twenty, or more than two hundred and
forty days; that members should be taken away from the decayed towns,
and representation awarded to the several counties according to the
amount of taxation. No one who had borne arms for the king was to be
eligible to parliament for five years. The old privy council was to
be superseded by a council of state, of which the members for the
next seven years were to be agreed on at once; after that they were
to be nominated by parliament. The coercive jurisdiction of bishops
was to be abolished; the use of the common prayer and the taking of
the covenant to be alike voluntary. Subject to these conditions the
king was to be restored, and a general act of oblivion was to be
passed, with power to parliament to except certain persons, not more
than five in number, from its benefit.
This document was supposed to come directly from the hand of Ireton,
who was more at his ease in composition than Cromwell. As Cromwell
says in a letter of this period to his daughter, Ireton’s wife, he
writes to her rather than to her husband, ‘for one line of mine
begets many of his.’
‘In these declarations and transactions of the army,’
says Whitelock, [1] ‘colonel Ireton was chiefly employed,
or took on him the business of the pen.’ He was ‘of a
working and laborious brain and fancy, and set himself
much upon these businesses, wherein he was encouraged
and assisted by lieutenant-general Cromwell, his
father-in-law. Having been bred in the Temple, he had
a little knowledge of law, which led him into the more
errors.’
[1] [ii. 162.]
If Ireton, however, held the pen, the scheme, we may be sure,
was Cromwell’s no less than his, and a more statesmanlike plan
of reconstruction it is difficult to conceive. If carried out
in its completeness it would have given England at once a
genuine parliamentary government and a free national church. Two
centuries of government by borough-mongering and corruption, of
church-statesmanship and state-churchmanship would have been saved.
Charles, as we have seen, rejected it, and began his game anew.
No such opportunity for reconciliation could ever occur again,
but Cromwell’s purpose remained the same, {347} though his mode
of executing it varied with events. The anxiety for a settlement
which should reconcile the old interests with the new enthusiasm is
the key to his subsequent conduct. The reconciliation, for reasons
which I have sufficiently described, was, in fact, impossible. The
new piece would not fit the old garment. To us, looking backward
with historical calmness, it seems well that it would not, for
the enthusiasm adjusted to the interests would have been poetry
translated into prose. That of which it is the essence to be motive,
negative, abstract, would have become fixed, positive, and concrete.
The sudden palpable reconciliation of the spirit and the flesh,
apparently, perhaps, a spiritualising of the flesh, would have been
really a carnalising of the spirit. The hopelessness, however, of
the pacification which he contemplated was the tragedy of Cromwell’s
later life. In the stress of protecting the ‘godly interest’ against
itself, ‘worldly mixtures’ inevitably came to prevail over the pure
spiritual fire. To the saints he seemed in serving the Lord’s people
to lose his own soul, and his conscience was too sympathetic not to
shrink under their judgment. Its burden, perhaps, found voice in
his exclamation on his death-bed that ‘he knew he had been in grace
_once_.’
There were certain qualities and beliefs in Cromwell, well known in
their outward character, which have won for him _par excellence_
the title of hypocrite. Looked at from the inner side, which the
preservation of his letters enables us to see, they appear as the
plastic medium through which an honest purpose of conciliation
worked, and for lack of which the same purpose was inoperative in
others. The ultimate spring of his conduct was a belief, wrought
to special strength in the formation and triumphant leadership of
the sectarian army, that he was the chosen champion of the despised
people of the Lord. In the realisation of this belief, it was his
habit (in modern language) to wait on events, and to surrender
himself to temporary sympathy with men of the most various views.
That this sympathy, though sometimes unctuous and exaggerated in
expression, was yet perfectly genuine, is proved by its evident
infectiousness. Nor was it really deceptive. There is no sign that he
ever committed himself to the positive maintenance of the doctrines
of the men to whose sympathy he appealed. On the contrary, {348}
there is evidence that the protection of the godly interest in its
freedom of conscience, by whatever means might be available, was
the only line of conduct to which he ever committed himself, and to
this he was faithful throughout. He caught eagerly at every element
in the character or belief of those with whom he had to do, which
might be turned to account for the furtherance of this end. When
it ceased to further it, it lost his sympathy. The interpretation
which the men whom he thus treated naturally put on his conduct was
that he sought to use them for his selfish purposes. But it was just
the qualities which ruined his reputation with the less compliant
of his contemporaries and with posterity that enabled him to do his
work. For his reputation he cared little, for his work much. What
we call waiting on events, he called a recognition of the ‘outward
dispensations’ of God. His belief that this guidance was divine made
him at once more bold and more free from selfish regards in following
it. There is a touch of nature in a letter of his to Oliver St. John,
written just after his rout of Hamilton’s army. [1]
‘Remember my love to my dear brother, H. Vane. I pray
he make not too little, nor I too much, of outward
dispensations.... Let us all be not careful what men will
make of these actings. They, will they, nill they, shall
fulfil the good pleasure of God; and we shall serve our
generations. Our rest we expect elsewhere; that will be
durable. Care we not for to-morrow, nor for anything.’
[1] [Carlyle, _ib_. No. lxvii.]
This utterance, fresh from the heart, explains the subsequent
alienation of Cromwell from Vane and the high republicans. He had the
fatalism about him without which nothing great is achieved in times
of political crisis; the consciousness of a divine work that must
be done through him, though personal peace and honour were wrecked
in the doing. They were men of theory and principle, ‘brave men and
true.’ but with a sense of what was ‘due to their own reputation,’
or, to speak, more kindly, men who would sacrifice themselves or
a nation indifferently to the maintenance of what might merely be
a formula. In these days of playing at heroes among the ‘inferior
races,’ such men, perhaps, receive less credit than is their due, nor
is it my purpose to measure the man of principle against the ‘man
of destiny,’ who may be a political gambler, but merely to indicate
their inevitable {349} collision. If Cromwell had been a political
gambler, he would not have been always showing his hand, nor should
we have the strange collection of impromptu letters and speeches,
speeches of which ‘he could not recall four words’ after they were
spoken, which let us see into the workings of his soul.
In the last lecture I showed that during the interval between the
final break of the independents and army with the king, marked by
the vote of no more addresses at the beginning of 1648, and his
setting out for the extinction of Hamilton, Cromwell was labouring
for such a reconciliation of parties as would gain for the inevitable
commonwealth a more general support than that of the professed
republican clique. The equal impracticability of presbyterians and
republicans, or, if we like, their equal devotion to principle,
made reconciliation impossible, and the republicans for the time
triumphed. Strong in a text of scripture, in a theory of right
borrowed from the municipal republics of Holland and Switzerland,
they shut their eyes and had their way. Cromwell knew well to what
such a spirit must lead, and his irritation at it once broke out in a
conversation with Ludlow. ‘They were a proud set of people,’ he said,
‘only considerable in their own conceits.’ For the time, however, he
had to leave them to their conceit, that he might crush the common
enemy. During the campaign, the direction in which the logic of
events, of ‘outward dispensations,’ was leading became more apparent,
and the sense of it pervades his letters. The rapture of successful
war brought back to him the old enthusiasm, the consciousness of
being the chosen leader of the saints. The righteous judge, he
thought, had been appealed to in battle, and had shown which cause
was his ‘even to amazement and admiration.’
‘Surely, sir,’ he writes to the speaker after the rout
at Preston, ‘this is nothing but the hand of God; and
wherever anything in this world is exalted, or exalts
itself, God will pull it down; for this is the day
wherein he alone will be exalted. It is not fit for me
to give advice ... more than to pray you, and all that
acknowledge God, that they would exalt him, and not hate
his people, that are as the apple of his eye, and for
whom even kings shall be reproved.’ [1]
[1] [_ib_. No. lxiv.]
The prosaic meaning of these new ‘dispensations,’ we {350} shall say,
was that the military excitement against the royal ‘delinquent’ had
become uncontrollable, that Hamilton’s invasion, instigated and aided
by the royalist presbyterians in England, had rendered their fusion
with the commonwealth’s men impossible, and that the republic must
represent the latter party and the army alone. This was no doubt the
final judgment which Cromwell’s practical insight had unwillingly
arrived at. But we do not really understand this judgment or its
consequences, till we appreciate the ‘wondrous alchemy’ of the
enthusiasm with which it was fused and molten in Cromwell’s own mind.
The whole mental process is exhibited in a letter to Colonel Hammond,
written when it had become clear that the presbyterian majority in
parliament were determined to treat with the king and restore him to
London. Its object was to induce Hammond to disregard the impending
vote of parliament, which (as we have seen) would have been ruinous
to the cause of free conscience, and to give the king up to the army.
‘You say,’ he writes,’ God hath appointed authorities
among the nations to which active or passive obedience
is to be yielded. This resides in England in the
parliament.’ Then comes Cromwell’s reply to this view;
‘Authorities and powers are the ordinance of God. This
or that species is of human institution, and limited,
some with larger, others with stricter bands, each one
according to its constitution. But I do not therefore
think the authorities may do _anything_, and yet such
obedience be due. All agree that there are cases in which
it is lawful to resist.... The query is whether ours be
such a case.’ In answer to this query, Cromwell commends
to Hammond three considerations; ‘first, whether _salus
populi_ be a sound position; secondly, whether in the way
in hand’ (_i.e._ by the proposed treaty), ‘really and
before the Lord, before whom conscience has to stand,
this be provided for; or if the whole fruit of the war
is not like to be frustrated, and all most like to turn
to what it was, and worse.... Thirdly, whether this army
be not a lawful power, called by God to fight against
the king upon some stated grounds; and being in power
to such ends, may not oppose one name of authority, for
those ends, as well as another name, since it was not
the outward authority summoning them that by _its_ power
made the quarrel lawful, but the quarrel was lawful in
itself.... My dear friend, let us look into providences;
surely they mean somewhat. {351} They hang so together;
have been so constant, so clear, unclouded. Malice, swoln
malice against God’s people, now called ‘saints,’ to root
out their name; and yet they’ (the saints) ‘getting arms,
and therein blessed with defence and more! I desire he
that is for a principle of suffering would not too much
slight this.... Not the encountering difficulties makes
us to tempt God; but the acting before and without faith.
If the Lord have in any measure persuaded his people, as
generally he hath, of the lawfulness, nay of the _duty_,
this persuasion prevailing on the heart is faith; and
acting thereupon is acting in faith; and the more the
difficulties are, the more the faith.... Have not some
of our friends, by their passive principle, ... been
occasioned to overlook what is just and honest, and to
think the people of God may have as much or more good the
one way than the other? Good by this man against whom the
Lord hath witnessed; and whom thou knowest!’ [1]
[1] [Carlyle, _ib_. No. lxxxv.]
That the enthusiasm of this letter is sincere it would be hard to
dispute; that it might be a dangerous cover for self-deceit, not
less so. That in Cromwell, as a matter of fact, it was an expansive
element, in which a sympathy with the ‘waiting spirit’ of the
sectaries, such as was necessary for their guidance, went along with
a prevailing zeal for the ‘_salus populi_’ and a clear judgment of
its needs, is the only interpretation that will explain the history
as a whole. To the guidance of a man possessing such a strange
compound of qualities, it is due that our great religious war ended
not simply in blood, but in a real step forwards of English society.
‘God’s providence and necessity, not his own choice,’ as he solemnly
said, having forced him to pull down monarchy and put the republic
in its place, he once more pressed forward his plan for a general
adjustment of interests under a new parliament. The possibility of a
settlement, however, which should secure the ‘godly interest,’ was
very different now from what it would have been if Charles’s spleen
and superstition had permitted him honestly to come to terms in 1647.
Then Cromwell had hoped by restoring the king with a council, which
might have been under his own direction, to obtain that unity of
initiative under a familiar name, which, important at all times, is
specially necessary when order is to be rebuilt out of a chaos of
factions heated with civil war.
{352} Henceforward there could but be two alternatives. The familiar
unity might be obtained, as it was ultimately to be at the blessed
Restoration, but only at the cost of an absolute suppression of
the ‘godly interest’: or an unfamiliar unity might take its place,
but only on the condition of its maintenance by a hand that could
hold the sword, and a temper that by either force or sympathy
could control the sectaries, a condition which death might at any
time remove. The military ecstasy, however, was still strong upon
Cromwell, and he had a spirit for the work. In Whitelock’s journal of
February 25, [1] not quite a month after the execution of Charles, we
read,
‘From the council of state Cromwell and his son
Ireton went home with me to supper; where they were
very cheerful, and seemed extremely well-pleased; we
discoursed together till twelve o’clock at night, and
they told me wonderful observations of God’s providence
in the affairs of the war, and in the business of the
army’s coming to London and seizing the members; in all
which were miraculous passages.’
[1] [ii. 540.]
Cromwell had yet to learn that the providence on which he waited
wrought by a longer method, because it had a wider comprehension than
was dreamt of in the puritan philosophy.
In the following spring Cromwell was appointed to the command of
the army that was to conquer Ireland. Thence he was recalled in the
summer of 1650, and shortly afterwards was sent into Scotland. Thus
till his return from the battle of Worcester in September 1651, he
had no chance of pressing his projects of conciliation and reform at
the headquarters of government. Such glimpses as we have, however,
of his civil activity during this period show a constant tendency
in the same direction. It was he who prevailed on Vane to join the
council of state, and obtained a modification of the engagement to
suit Vane’s views. Thus to restore to the government the ablest
civilian of the time, who had a special dislike for military
domination, was a strange course if it was his object to clear the
way for himself, but a most natural one if his object was general
conciliation. Again, in the summer of 1650, when it was proposed to
send the army under Fairfax into Scotland, and while Fairfax, ‘being
hourly persuaded by the presbyterian ministers and his own lady, who
was a great patroness of them,’ was doubting of the justness of the
war, and finally resolving to lay down his {353} command, Cromwell
was foremost in urging him to retain it. The memoir-writers of the
time, interpreting events by the jealousy of later years, treat
Cromwell’s earnestness on this occasion as simulated, a piece of the
‘great subtlety with which he now carried himself,’ but what its
object might be, if it were simulated, they do not explain. If his
object were personal aggrandisement, it is unaccountable that he
should go out of his way to put the command of the army in the hands
of another. If on the other hand it were a general settlement, it
was quite natural that he should seek to conciliate the presbyterian
interest to the commonwealth, in the person of the man who alone
combined presbyterian sympathies with toleration of the sectaries.
But though Cromwell, during this period, was quite free from the
thought which Mr. Peters attributed to him, ‘that he would be king of
England yet,’ still the impatience for an establishment of a ‘free
church of saints’ in a free state, and the ‘heat of inward evidence’
that he was himself the man to achieve it, was growing constantly
stronger in him. He led his army into Ireland, as Joshua into Canaan,
and his last letter to the parliament, as he was setting sail from
Milford Haven, offered to their consideration the removal of penal
statutes that enforce the consciences of honest conscientious men.
His conquest of Ireland, and afterwards of Scotland, was achieved in
and through a constant fire of enthusiasm.
‘It was set upon some of our hearts,’ he writes after
the storm of Tredah, ‘that a great thing should be done,
not by power or might, but by the spirit of God. And is
it not so, clearly? That which caused your men to storm
so courageously, it was the spirit of God, who gave
your men courage, and took it away again; and gave the
enemy courage, and took it away again; and gave your men
courage again, and therewith this happy success.’ [1]
[1] [Carlyle, _ib_. No. cv.]
During his brief sojourn in London between the two wars it appears
from a dialogue with Ludlow [1] that his thoughts were running on
the need of swift reforms, especially of the law, and that he ‘was
feeding on’ the hundred and tenth psalm; ‘The Lord shall send the
rod of thy strength out of Zion.... Thy people shall be willing in
the day of thy power; in the beauties of holiness, from the womb of
the morning.’ The experience of the Scotch campaign, full, as he
conceived, {354} of miraculous passages, was not likely to temper
his consciousness of a divine mission. ‘There may be a spiritual
fulness,’ he writes to the general assembly of the kirk, [2] ‘which
the world may call drunkenness, as in the second chapter of the
Acts.’ In such spiritual fulness he lay on September 2, with a
sickly, half-starved army about Dunbar, in the face of an enemy
double in number and apparently commanding his position, yet sure,
as he says, that just ‘because of their numbers, their advantages,
and their confidence, because of our weakness, our strait, we were
in the mount, and in the mount the Lord would be seen, and that he
would find a way of deliverance for us.’ Through ‘an high, act of
the Lord’s providence’ Lesley made a false move, and the way of
deliverance was found.
‘It is easy to say,’ he writes to parliament after
the victory, ‘the Lord hath done this. It would do
you good to see and hear our poor foot go up and down
making their boast of God. But it’s in your hands, and
by these eminent mercies God puts it more into your
hands to give glory to him; to improve your power and
his blessings to his praise.... Disown yourselves and
own your authority.... Relieve the oppressed, hear the
groans of poor prisoners in England. Be pleased to reform
the abuses of all professions; and if there be any one
that makes many poor to make a few rich’ (a hit at the
lawyers), ‘that suits not a commonwealth.’ [3]
[1] [_Memoirs_, p. 123; ed. 1751.]
[2] [Carlyle, _ib_. No. cxxxvi.]
[3] [Carlyle, _ib_. No. cxl.]
It was this exhilaration of energy in the Lord’s work, not a vulgar
ambition of kingship, that shone in Cromwell’s countenance as he
rode up from Worcester a year later, and that made him press, as we
have seen, on the first day when he resumed his seat in the house,
for measures of settlement and reform. ‘Peace hath her victories,’
as Milton wrote to him at this time, ‘no less renowned than war,’
but they were to be won not in days but in centuries, and by the
energy not of feeling but of thought. He had a temper, he once
said of himself, that ‘caused him often to overact business,’ and
his trusted ‘son Ireton,’ in whose ‘working brain’ the same plans
were combined with a more cautious and calculating temper, was no
longer at hand to restrain him. He had died at his post in Ireland
three months after the battle of Worcester; his death, we are told,
‘striking a great sadness in Cromwell.’ [1] ‘No man could prevail
with him so much or {355} order him so far as Ireton could,’ but
there is no reason to think that had Ireton lived he would have
altered, though he might sometimes have checked, Cromwell’s career.
If Cromwell had died when Ireton did, he would have died like him in
the full odour of republican sanctity, and his subsequent breach with
the republicans was due to his pressing forward the army project of
reform and reconstruction which had first taken shape in Ireton’s
brain. In his letter to the parliament after Dunbar he professed a
desire (a notable instance of his frankness) not to ‘precipitate
them by importunities’ in the work of settlement, and he was true
to his profession. For a year and a half, however, from September
16, 1651, to April 20, 1653, he loyally endeavoured to rouse the
republican oligarchy to the necessities of the situation. If his
importunity was not pressing, that of the people was, and it was
clear that the parliament must give some practical ‘reason why’ for
its existence, or lose its prestige. Petitions from the country
were constantly coming in, all conceived in the ‘levelling’ sense
which I described in the last lecture. Their general burden is that
tithes may be either abolished as levitical and Romish, or gathered
into a common treasury, and then some part of them applied to the
maintenance of a godly ministry in each county; that those ‘drunken,
malignant, scandalous, and profane ones,’ that go under the name
of ministers, be put to work for their living; that justice may be
given, not bought, and all matters of _meum_ and _tuum_ determined
free, yet by a written law; that some check may be put on the swarms
of lawyers, attorneys, and solicitors, nourished with the bread of
oppression by long and tedious suits. Sometimes they wax eloquent,
hoping that ‘justice may come down like a mighty stream, free for the
poorest to resort unto, too strong for the richest to divert.’ The
Rump parliament meanwhile, not, we may fairly suppose, considering
its previous inaction, without pressure from Cromwell, showed
great activity in appointing committees to consider grievances,
and in pressing resolutions, which if carried out would have made
English law more cheap, and English land more free, than it has ever
been since. There was no result however in the way of effective
legislation, and the old conviction of the army, that it was the true
parliament and judicature of the nation, was beginning to revive. At
the end of 1650 letters were read in {356} the house, ‘that officers
of the army by commission from Lambert did determine controversies
between party and party; wherewith the people were much satisfied
with the quick despatch they received with full hearing.’ At the same
time petitions were circulating in the army for reform of abuses and
a new parliament, in the same tone which had prevailed when the army
had before (in the year 1648) been in direct contact with the civil
power. The real fact was that the parliament was once more face to
face with its true, its sole constituency, the military saints, with
whom its conceit of antique republicanism would avail little, unless
it could realise in the hard world of ‘interests’ the reforming
enthusiasm which had created it. Such realisation, if possible at
all, was clearly impossible to an oligarchy which had always been
unpopular and was becoming factious.
[1] [Whitelock, iii. p. 371.]
We have not the means of tracing in detail the conduct of Cromwell
during this crisis. It is clear that he made no secret of his
thoughts. In November 1651 he obtained a vote of the house that it
would put a term to its sitting, but only one so remote as November
1654. The next question necessarily was, how should the new election,
and the general work of reconstruction, be regulated? That it would
require rigorous control in the presence of the royalist gentry and
the angry presbyterian clergy, was abundantly clear. Was this control
to be in the hands of the Rump oligarchy, disunited, estranged from
the army, incapable of swift and secret action as a deliberative
assembly must be, or in the hands of a single person who had a name
of terror and hope, and to whom the heart of the army was as his
own? This was the real question at issue, and at the end of 1651 we
find Cromwell, at a conference which he invited between the grandees
of parliament and the officers, explicitly stating it. It was as
impossible for him now, however, as it had been on a like occasion in
1648, to bring about an understanding. The great lawyers of the house
generally were in favour of government by a single person, but only
St. John seems to have shared Cromwell’s views as to who the single
person should be. Whitelock was in favour of restoring monarchy in
the person of the duke of Gloucester. To the enthusiasts of the
army the very name of monarchy was blasphemy against Christ, whom
they were expecting shortly to restore the kingdom to the saints.
The theoretical republicans of {357} the Rump were in favour of
constituting themselves a permanent body on the Venetian model, only
filling up vacancies as they should occur.
In this dead-lock of conflicting jealousies and opinions the year
1652 passed away, the only vigour being shown in the prosecution
of the Dutch war and the settlement of Scotland. Cromwell’s views
were well known, and one day when in debate he spoke of Mr. Marten
accidentally as ‘Sir Harry,’ Marten interrupted him by saying with
a low bow, ‘I always expected when your majesty became king, you
would make me a knight.’ He was clearly most unwilling, however, to
break with the parliament, which he had absolutely in his hands,
and if its leaders could have been induced, recognising their
weakness and swallowing their formula, to invest him with a temporary
dictatorship, he would have kept them at peace, as he alone had
hitherto done, with the army, and worked with them constitutionally
for the settlement of the nation. As it was, there are indications
that he controlled the discontent of the army as long as he was able.
Lambert’s vanity had been rudely affronted by the Rump, and his busy
brain was brewing mischief. Harrison was becoming impatient for
the inauguration of the ‘fifth monarchy.’ The military saints were
finding, as Cromwell afterwards expressed it, that ‘all tenderness
was forgotten to the good people, though it was by their hands and
their means that the parliament sat where it did.’ ‘The reformation
of law,’ he adds, ‘was a thing that many good words were spoken for;
but we know that many months together were not sufficient for the
settling of one word, “incumbrances.”’ [1]
[1] [Carlyle, _ib_. Speech I.]
By the beginning of the year 1653, Sir Henry Vane, who had hitherto
been organising victory for Blake, had become alive to the danger of
military domination, which he specially dreaded, and was pressing
forward a bill for a new parliament. It was upon this bill that the
final rupture with Cromwell took place. In its chief features it
corresponded with the petitions of the army and levellers which had
been rife in the agitation of 1647-8. There was to be a parliament of
four hundred members, who should be distributed among the counties
according to wealth and population. In the boroughs there was to be
a uniform rental qualification of householders; in the counties such
a property qualification {358} as should exclude tenants subject
to control. There was to be a freehold qualification of 40_s_., a
copyhold of 5_l_., and a leasehold of 20_l_. annual value. This
system of distribution and qualification was afterwards adopted by
Cromwell, except that he substituted for the property qualifications
the uniform, and very high, one of 200_l_. of real or personal
estate. Cromwell’s objection to the bill was that it gave the
existing members the right both of sitting in the new house without
re-election and of deciding on the admissibility of new members. In
other words it constituted the Rump a many-headed dictatorship, to
regulate the work of reconstruction. To this he opposed a plan of his
own for delegating the re-settlement to an assembly of notables, to
be specially summoned for the purpose; a plan which we may readily
admit was merely meant as such a screen for his own dictatorship
as would satisfy the demands of the ‘fifth monarchy’ or republican
officers. As usual he behaved with, perfect explicitness. On April 19
he had a conference of members of parliament and officers of the army
at his lodgings, and urged the importance of an immediate dissolution
and a convocation of notables. St. John was the only civilian who
supported him, but according to his own account the meeting closed
with an understanding that Vane’s bill should not be pressed. Next
morning the conference was renewed, but in the presence of only a
few ‘parliament men,’ of whom Whitelock was one. The sequel is best
described in his words. [1]
‘Cromwell being informed during this debate that the
parliament was sitting, and that it was hoped they would
put a period to themselves, which would be the most
honourable dissolution for them; hereupon he broke off
the meeting, and the members of parliament with him left
him at his lodgings and went to the house, and found
them in debate of an act, the which would occasion other
meetings of them again, and prolong their sitting.’ This
was Vane’s bill, which he was pressing through its last
stages, in disregard, according to Cromwell, of the
pledge given the night before. Colonel Ingoldsby brought
word to Cromwell of what the house was doing, ‘who was so
enraged thereat, expecting they should have meddled with
no other business but putting a period to their sitting
without more delay, that he presently commanded some
of the officers of the army to fetch a party {359} of
soldiers, with whom he marched to the house.’
[1] [iv. p. 4.]
The rest of the story is too familiar to need repetition. It is
noticed, however, that he did not introduce the soldiers at once,
but sat quietly in his place, till the motion was put from the
chair, ‘that the bill do now pass.’ It was then, at the last moment,
_i.e._ at which it was possible to stop the establishment of a
permanent oligarchy under the forms of law, that he broke into a
violent speech, which ended with his calling in the soldiers. His
conduct at this crisis, as throughout his public life, corresponded
exactly to the account which he gave of it himself. Into parliament,
as into battle, he carried the ‘waiting spirit’ in which the
sectaries believed. He trusted for guidance to a sudden inspiration
interpreting the necessity of events. At last, at the critical point,
just when he saw Lesley making a gap in his line at Dunbar, ‘the
spirit of God was strong upon him,’ he would no longer consult ‘flesh
and blood,’ but took the decisive step. The dissolution of the Rump
was clearly inevitable so soon as it broke with and sought to defy
its armed constituency, which, as Cromwell had always maintained,
was an equally legitimate authority with itself, and far more truly
representative. The violence of manner with which Cromwell turned
it out and locked the door, of which, says Whitelock, even ‘some of
his bravadoes were ashamed,’ is quite unique in his history, and
doubtless aggravated the difficulty of subsequent reconciliation
with the commonwealth’s men. The best explanation of it is a remark
in one of his private letters; ‘I have known my folly do good, when
affection (passion) has overcome my reason.’ It is a curious trait
in his character, that when wrought up after much hesitation to a
decisive act, of which he saw the danger, he gave the loose to that
boisterous vehemence for which he had early been noted, but which he
could generally suppress. The same trait appears in his behaviour at
the signature of the death-warrant of Charles.
He had now to grapple with the question which the Rump had fingered
in vain. The Lord’s people were to be saved from themselves, and
the interests of the world so reformed and adjusted that it might
yield them fit habitation. The task, as I have shown in the previous
lectures, was in the nature of the case a hopeless one. The claim
of the saints was at once false and self-contradictory; false, for
the secular world, which it sought to ignore, had rights no less
divine than its own; {360} and self-contradictory, since even amongst
the most sectarian of the sectaries it was constantly hardening
into authority hostile to the individual persuasion in which it
originated. ‘That hath been one of the vanities of our contest. Every
sect saith, “Oh, give me liberty.” But give it him, and to the best
of his power he will yield it to no one else.’ [1] Cromwell’s labour,
however, was not wholly in vain. During five years, by the mere
force of his instinct of settlement, his commanding energy, and that
absorbing sympathy miscalled hypocrisy, which enabled him to hold the
hearts of the sectaries even while he disappointed their enthusiasm,
he at least kept the peace between the saints and the world, secured
liberty of conscience, and placed it on ground which even the flood
of prelatical reaction was not able wholly to submerge. But while
protecting the godly interest, he was obliged more and more to
silence its pretension. A gradual detachment from the saints, and
approximation to the ancient interests, was the necessary policy of
his later years.
[1] [Carlyle, _ib_. Speech III.]
The dissolution of the Rump caused no derangement of administration.
As captain-general in a council of officers, Cromwell directed all
officials to continue their work, and summoned a body of notables to
act as a constitutive assembly. The change was generally acceptable
to puritan sentiment.
‘I told the parliament,’ said Cromwell afterwards, ‘what
I knew better than anyone else, because of my manner of
life, which took me up and down the country, thereby
giving me to know the temper of all men, that the nation
loathed their sitting. I knew it, and when they were
dissolved, there was not so much as the barking of a dog,
or any general and visible repining at it.’ [1]
[1] [_ib_.]
The addresses of congratulation which came in from all parts of the
country quite bore out this statement. It was not from the pagan
republicanism of the commonwealth-clique that Cromwell had difficulty
to apprehend, but from the smothered fire of the fifth-monarchy
men, with whom the necessities of settlement compelled him, to
break. This soon became apparent in the assembly of notables. They
elected an executive council, of which Cromwell was an ordinary
member, and for five months all went smoothly along. Then the
fifth-monarchy enthusiasm, represented by general Harrison, and
stimulated by anabaptist ministers who met with him ‘at one {361}
Mr. Squib’s house,’ became unmanageable. It fell foul of ‘ministry
and magistracy,’ demanding the simple abolition of tithes and of
the court of chancery, and the establishment of the judicial law of
Moses, to be administered ‘according to the wisdom of any man that
would interpret the text this way or that.’ [1] This led to the
resignation of the assembly, whether under pressure from Cromwell it
is difficult to say, but certainly with his good-will. Henceforth
he let it be known explicitly that the world must have its due and
settled interests be maintained. A few days after the council of
state presented him with an ‘instrument of government,’ establishing
a protectorate with a free parliament, to be elected according to the
original scheme of Ireton, Vane, and Cromwell himself. Under this
instrument he ruled for about four years, when ‘the petition and
advice,’ passed by his second parliament, took its place, which did
not materially alter the system, but put it on a parliamentary basis.
[1] [Carlyle, _ib_. Speech XIII.]
The protectorate must have the credit of having been at least
perfectly true to the great end of settlement, and of having been,
however arbitrary, yet perfectly honest in its arbitrariness. It was
quite free from the jugglery with recognised names and institutions
which is the chosen device of modern despotism. The three points of
the Cromwellian programme--restoration, so far as might be, of the
old constitution, reform of the law, and the protection of the godly
interest--were really inconsistent with each other, for to restore
the constitution was impossible without a restoration of royalism,
and the restoration of royalism meant the subjection of the godly,
while a reformation of the law, not resting on a constitutional
basis, hung only on the thread of a single life. His effort, however,
to govern constitutionally was genuine and persistent. Two conditions
he always announced as fundamental, the sovereignty of the protector,
and the maintenance of liberty of conscience. The protectorate
was ‘what he would be rolled in the grave and covered with infamy
sooner than give up.’ It was for a liberty of conscience, he always
said, better than episcopacy or presbyterianism had allowed, that
the army, the true national representative, had shed its blood. To
surrender it would be to violate his most sacred trust. Subject to
these two conditions he would give parliament its way, but {362} in
the first the republican minority, in the second the presbyterian
majority, would not acquiesce. One of his parliaments imprisoned
Biddle the socinian, the other was very near burning poor James
Nayler, the quaker, but finally let him off with putting him on
the pillory and boring through his tongue. In both cases Cromwell
interfered. The final breach, however, with each of his parliaments
was due to its insisting on a discussion of the basis of government
by a single person. To tolerate this, in the presence of royalist
plots, sanctioned by a proclamation in Charles Stuart’s name for the
assassination of ‘the base mechanic fellow, Oliver Cromwell,’ and of
fifth-monarchy men who were gathering arms to fight for ‘king Jesus’
under the standard of the tribe of Judah, would have been ‘to let all
run back to blood again.’
He was thus constrained to carry out the reform of law, and the
settlement of religion, by the method of ordinances of council, most
of which were subsequently confirmed by his second parliament. In
this way he reformed chancery and simplified legal procedure. As
regarded the church, since the dissolution of the assembly, there
had been, as I before explained, no regular system, but the only
recognised way of becoming eligible for a benefice was through
presbyterian ordination, though it was probably not uniformly
resorted to. For this Cromwell substituted a board of ordination,
representing presbyterians, independents, and baptist preachers
alike, and containing a certain number of laymen. No one was to have
a claim to levy tithes till approved by this board, which seems,
however, to have had power to delegate its authority to subordinate
boards in the provinces. Other county boards were established for
‘detecting and rejecting scandalous, ignorant, and insufficient
ministers.’ An ordinance for the more equal distribution of church
property completed the ecclesiastical reform.
This scheme was liberally worked, and except to the believers in
the necessity of episcopal ‘succession,’ for which Cromwell had no
bowels, opened a wider door than has been open since. It appears that
episcopalians in Baxter’s sense, and arminians, had now access to
the benefices, though the ordainers might sometimes be more severe
with them than with others. Even the high prelatists, so long as
they kept free from plots, were allowed to form congregations and
use the common prayer, which had never been the case under {363}
the presbyterian régime. Of the fidelity of Cromwell to the work of
reformation and godliness, which he had undertaken to reconcile with
a general settlement, the best evidence is the eye-witness of Baxter
and Burnet; both were royalists, and Baxter, at least, personally
unfriendly to Cromwell.
The unruliness of the elements which Cromwell had wrought into a
system of rational government became sufficiently apparent at his
death. My limits do not allow me to trace minutely the course of
events which led to the restoration. For some time a triangular
contest went on between the junto of officers, headed by Fleetwood
and Lambert, which Cromwell had kept in hand to the last, the court
party of real statesmen, such as Thurloe and Whitelock, who supported
Richard Cromwell, and the republicans headed by Vane and Scott. The
slumbering fanaticism of Fleetwood once more broke out into a zeal
for a dominion of grace. He allowed the officers, whom Cromwell had
kept at their commands at a distance, to get together in London,
and collogue with the more violent clergy. Henry Cromwell, watching
events from Ireland, saw what was coming and warned Fleetwood in a
tone worthy of his father’s son. Fleetwood, however, was deaf to
such advice, and finally combined with the republicans to overthrow
Richard Cromwell and restore the Rump parliament. Tho republicans,
however, though they did not scruple now any more than they had
done in 1648, to apply to the soldiers for support, could not long
agree with them. The Rump soon took courage to cashier the dangerous
officers, and afterwards, at the request of Monk, who was advancing
from Scotland with an army purged of enthusiasts, removed their
regiments from London. The situation was now at Monk’s command. The
presbyterians, still in possession of most of the pulpits, began to
reassert their claims, and Monk, a man without ideas, combined with
them as the stronger party. After a brief saturnalia of ordinances
against quakers and sectaries, they listened to the fair promises of
Charles Stuart, and gave themselves over to a king who was already
a papist, and a court which had but one strong conviction, that
presbyterianism was no religion for a gentleman.
Thus ended, apparently in simple catastrophe, the enterprise of
projecting into sudden reality the impulse of spiritual freedom.
Its only result, as it might seem, had been to {364} prevent the
transition of the feudal into an absolute monarchy, and thus to
prepare the way for the plutocracy under feudal forms which has
governed England since the death of William III. This, however, is
but a superficial view. Two palpable benefits the short triumph
of puritanism did win for England. It saved it from the catholic
reaction, and it created the ‘dissenting bodies.’ If it seems but a
poor change from the fanatic sacerdotalism of Laud to the genteel
and interested sacerdotalism of modern English churchmanship, yet
the fifteen years of vigorous growth which Cromwell’s sword secured
for the church of the sectaries, gave it a permanent force which no
reaction could suppress, and which has since been the great spring
of political life in England. The higher enthusiasm, however, which
breathed in Cromwell and Vane, was not puritanic or English merely.
It belonged to the universal spiritual force which as ecstasy,
mysticism, quietism, philosophy, is in permanent collision with the
carnal interests of the world, and which, if it conquers them for a
moment, yet again sinks under them, that it may transmute them more
thoroughly to its service.
‘Death,’ said Vane on the scaffold, ‘is a little word,
but it is a great work to die.’ So his own enthusiasm
died that it might rise again. It was sown in the
weakness of feeling, that it might be raised in the
intellectual comprehension which is power. ‘The people of
England,’ he said again, ‘have been long asleep. I doubt
they will be hungry when they awake.’
They have slept, we may say, another two hundred years. If they
should yet wake and be hungry, they will find their food in the ideas
which, with much blindness and weakness, he vainly offered them,
cleared and ripened by a philosophy of which he did not dream.