CHAPTER XII

THE PROTECTORATE

1653-1660

[Sidenote: The Sword unveiled.]

The thin screen which the continuance of a little knot of

representatives had thrown over the rule of the sword was at last torn

away. So long as an assembly which called itself a House of Commons met

at Westminster, men might still cling to a belief in the existence of a

legal government. But now that even this was gone such a belief was no

longer possible. The army itself had to recognize its own position. The

dispersion of the Parliament and of the Council of State left England

without a government, for the authority of every official ended with

that of the body from which his power was derived; and Cromwell, as

Captain-General, was forced to recognize his responsibility for the

maintenance of public order. The one power left in England was the power

of the sword. But, as in the revolution of 1648, so in the revolution of

1653, no thought of military despotism can be fairly traced in the acts

of the general or the army. They were in fact far from regarding their

position as a revolutionary one. Though incapable of justification on

any formal ground, their proceedings since the establishment of the

Commonwealth had as yet been substantially in vindication of the rights

of the country to representation and self-government; and public opinion

had gone fairly with the army in its demand for a full and efficient

body of representatives, as well as in its resistance to the project by

which the Rump would have deprived half England of its right of

election. It was only when no other means existed of preventing such a

wrong that the soldiers had driven out the wrongdoers. "It is you that

have forced me to this," Cromwell exclaimed, as he drove the members

from the House; "I have sought the Lord night and day that He would

rather slay me than put me upon the doing of this work." If the act was

one of violence to the little group who claimed to be a House of

Commons, the act which it aimed at preventing was one of violence on

their part to the constitutional rights of the whole nation. The people

had in fact been "dissatisfied in every corner of the realm" at the

state of public affairs: and the expulsion of the members was ratified

by a general assent. "We did not hear a dog bark at their going," the

Protector said years afterwards. Whatever anxiety may have been felt at

the use which was like to be made of "the power of the sword," was in

great part dispelled by a proclamation of the officers. They professed

that their one anxiety was "not to grasp the power ourselves nor to keep

it in military hands, no not for a day," and their promise to "call to

the government men of approved fidelity and honesty" was to some extent

redeemed by the nomination of a provisional Council of State, consisting

of eight officers of high rank and four civilians, with Cromwell as

their head, and a seat in which was offered, though fruitlessly, to

Vane.

[Sidenote: The Convention.]

The first business of such a body was clearly to summon a new Parliament

and to resign its trust into its hands. But the bill for Parliamentary

reform had dropped with the expulsion of the Rump; and reluctant as the

Council was to summon a new Parliament on the old basis of election, it

shrank from the responsibility of effecting so fundamental a change as

the creation of a new basis by its own authority. It was this difficulty

which led to the expedient of a Constituent Convention. Cromwell told

the story of this unlucky assembly some years after with an amusing

frankness. "I will come and tell you a story of my own weakness and

folly. And yet it was done in my simplicity--I dare avow it was. . . .

It was thought then that men of our own judgement, who had fought in the

wars, and were all of a piece on that account--why, surely, these men

will hit it, and these men will do it to the purpose, whatever can be

desired! And surely we did think, and I did think so--the more blame to

me!" Of the hundred and fifty-six men, "faithful, fearing God, and

hating covetousness," whose names were selected for this purpose by the

Council of State from lists furnished by the Congregational churches,

the bulk were men, like Ashley Cooper, of good blood and "free estates";

and the proportion of burgesses, such as the leather-merchant,

Praise-God Barebones, whose name was eagerly seized on as a nickname for

the body to which he belonged, seems to have been much the same as in

earlier Parliaments. But the circumstances of their choice told fatally

on the temper of its members. Cromwell himself, in the burst of rugged

eloquence with which he welcomed their assembling on the fourth of July,

was carried away by a strange enthusiasm. "Convince the nation," he

said, "that as men fearing God have fought them out of their bondage

under the regal power, so men fearing God do now rule them in the fear

of God. . . . Own your call, for it is of God: indeed it is marvellous,

and it hath been unprojected. . . . Never was a supreme power under such

a way of owning God and being owned by Him." A spirit yet more

enthusiastic appeared in the proceedings of the Convention itself.

[Sidenote: Its work.]

The resignation of their powers by Cromwell and the Council into its

hands left it the one supreme authority; but by the instrument which

convoked it provision had been made that this authority should be

transferred in fifteen months to another assembly elected according to

its directions. Its work was, in fact, to be that of a constituent

assembly, paving the way for a Parliament on a really national basis.

But the Convention put the largest construction on its commission, and

boldly undertook the whole task of constitutional reform. Committees

were appointed to consider the needs of the Church and the nation. The

spirit of economy and honesty which pervaded the assembly appeared in

its redress of the extravagance which prevailed in the civil service,

and of the inequality of taxation. With a remarkable energy it undertook

a host of reforms, for whose execution England has had to wait to our

own day. The Long Parliament had shrunk from any reform of the Court of

Chancery, where twenty-three thousand cases were waiting unheard. The

Convention proposed its abolition. The work of compiling a single code

of laws, begun under the Long Parliament by a committee with Sir Matthew

Hale at its head, was again pushed forward. The frenzied alarm which

these bold measures aroused among the lawyer class was soon backed by

that of the clergy, who saw their wealth menaced by the establishment of

civil marriage and by proposals to substitute the free contributions of

congregations for the payment of tithes. The landed proprietors too rose

against a scheme for the abolition of lay-patronage, which was favoured

by the Convention, and predicted an age of confiscation. The "Barebones

Parliament," as the assembly was styled in derision, was charged with a

design to ruin property, the Church, and the law, with enmity to

knowledge, and a blind and ignorant fanaticism.

[Sidenote: Close of the Convention.]

Cromwell himself shared the general uneasiness at its proceedings. His

mind was that of an administrator rather than that of a statesman,

unspeculative, deficient in foresight, conservative, and eminently

practical. He saw the need of administrative reform in Church and State;

but he had no sympathy whatever with the revolutionary theories which

were filling the air around him. His desire was for "a settlement" which

should be accompanied with as little disturbance of the old state of

things as possible. If Monarchy had vanished in the turmoil of war, his

experience of the Long Parliament only confirmed him in his belief of

the need of establishing an executive power of a similar kind, apart

from the power of the legislature, as a condition of civil liberty. His

sword had won "liberty of conscience"; but, passionately as he clung to

it, he was still for an established Church, for a parochial system, and

a ministry maintained by tithes. His social tendencies were simply those

of the class to which he belonged. "I was by birth a gentleman," he

told a later Parliament, and in the old social arrangement of "a

nobleman, a gentleman, a yeoman," he saw "a good interest of the nation

and a great one." He hated "that levelling principle" which tended to

the reducing of all to one equality. "What was the purport of it," he

asks with an amusing simplicity, "but to make the tenant as liberal a

fortune as the landlord? Which, I think, if obtained, would not have

lasted long. The men of that principle, after they had served their own

turns, would then have cried up property and interest fast enough." To a

practical temper such as this the speculative reforms of the Convention

were as distasteful as to the lawyers and clergy whom they attacked.

"Nothing," said Cromwell, "was in the hearts of these men but 'overturn,

overturn.'" In December however he was delivered from his embarrassment

by the internal dissensions of the Assembly itself. The day after the

decision against tithes the more conservative members snatched a vote by

surprise "that the sitting of this Parliament any longer, as now

constituted, will not be for the good of the Commonwealth, and that it

is requisite to deliver up unto the Lord-General the powers we received

from him." The Speaker placed their abdication in Cromwell's hands, and

the act was confirmed by the subsequent adhesion of a majority of the

members.

[Sidenote: The Instrument of Government.]

The dissolution of the Convention replaced matters in the state in which

its assembly had found them; but there was still the same general

anxiety to substitute some sort of legal rule for the power of the

sword. The Convention had named during its session a fresh Council of

State, and this body at once drew up, under the name of the Instrument

of Government, a remarkable Constitution which was adopted by the

Council of Officers. They were now driven by necessity to the step from

which they had shrunk, that of convening a Parliament on the reformed

basis of representation, though such a basis had no legal sanction. The

House was to consist of four hundred members from England, thirty from

Scotland, and thirty from Ireland. The seats hitherto assigned to small

and rotten boroughs were transferred to larger constituencies, and for

the most part to counties. All special rights of voting in the election

of members were abolished, and replaced by a general right of suffrage,

based on the possession of real or personal property to the value of two

hundred pounds. Catholics and "Malignants," as those who had fought for

the king were called, were excluded for the while from the franchise.

Constitutionally all further organization of the form of government

should have been left to this Assembly; but the dread of disorder during

the interval of its election, as well as a longing for "settlement,"

drove the Council to complete their work by pressing the office of

"Protector" upon Cromwell. "They told me," he pleaded afterwards, "that

except I would undertake the government they thought things would hardly

come to a composure or settlement, but blood and confusion would break

in as before." If we follow however his own statement, it was when they

urged that the acceptance of such a Protectorate actually limited his

power as Lord-General, and "bound his hands to act nothing without the

consent of a Council until the Parliament," that the post was accepted.

The powers of the new Protector indeed were strictly limited. Though the

members of the Council were originally named by him, each member was

irremovable save by consent of the rest: their advice was necessary in

all foreign affairs, their consent in matters of peace and war, their

approval in nominations to the great offices of State, or the disposal

of the military or civil power. With this body too lay the choice of all

future Protectors. To the administrative check of the Council was added

the political check of the Parliament. Three years at the most were to

elapse between the assembling of one Parliament and another, and, once

met, it could not be prorogued or dissolved for five months. Laws could

not be made nor taxes imposed but by its authority, and after the lapse

of twenty days the statutes it passed became laws, even though the

Protector's assent was refused to them. The new Constitution was

undoubtedly popular; and the promise of a real Parliament in a few

months covered the want of any legal character in the new rule. The

Government was generally accepted as a provisional one, which could only

acquire legal authority from the ratification of its acts in the coming

session; and the desire to settle it on such a Parliamentary basis was

universal among the members of the new Assembly which met in September

1654 at Westminster.

[Sidenote: The Parliament of 1654.]

Few Parliaments have ever been more memorable, or more truly

representative of the English people, than the Parliament of 1654. It

was the first Parliament in our history where members from Scotland and

Ireland sate side by side with those from England, as they sit in the

Parliament of to-day. The members for rotten boroughs and

pocket-boroughs had disappeared. In spite of the exclusion of Royalists

and Catholics from the polling-booths, and the arbitrary erasure of the

names of a few ultra-republican members by the Council, the House had a

better title to the name of a "free Parliament" than any which had sat

before. The freedom with which the electors had exercised their right of

voting was seen indeed in the large number of Presbyterian members who

were returned, and in the reappearance of Haselrig and Bradshaw, with

many members of the Long Parliament, side by side with Lord Herbert and

the older Sir Harry Vane. The first business of the House was clearly

to consider the question of government; and Haselrig, with the fiercer

republicans, at once denied the legal existence of either Council or

Protector, on the ground that the Long Parliament had never been

dissolved. Such an argument however told as much against the Parliament

in which they sate as against the administration itself, and the bulk of

the Assembly contented themselves with declining to recognize the

Constitution or Protectorate as of more than provisional validity. They

proceeded at once to settle the government on a Parliamentary basis. The

"Instrument" was taken as the groundwork of the new Constitution, and

carried clause by clause. That Cromwell should retain his rule as

Protector was unanimously agreed; that he should possess the right of

veto or a co-ordinate legislative power with the Parliament was hotly

debated, though the violent language of Haselrig did little to disturb

the general tone of moderation. Suddenly however Cromwell interposed. If

he had undertaken the duties of Protector with reluctance, he looked on

all legal defects in his title as more than supplied by the general

acceptance of the nation. "I called not myself to this place," he urged,

"God and the people of these kingdoms have borne testimony to it." His

rule had been accepted by London, by the army, by the solemn decision of

the judges, by addresses from every shire, by the very appearance of

the members of the Parliament in answer to his writ. "Why may I not

balance this Providence," he asked, "with any hereditary interest?" In

this national approval he saw a call from God, a Divine Right of a

higher order than that of the kings who had gone before.

[Sidenote: Cromwell's administration.]

But there was another ground for the anxiety with which Cromwell watched

the proceedings of the Commons. His passion for administration had far

overstepped the bounds of a merely provisional rule in the interval

before the assembling of the Parliament. His desire for "settlement" had

been strengthened not only by the drift of public opinion, but by the

urgent need of every day; and the power reserved by the "Instrument" to

issue temporary Ordinances "until further order in such matters, to be

taken by the Parliament," gave a scope to his marvellous activity of

which he at once took advantage. Sixty-four Ordinances had been issued

in the nine months before the meeting of the Parliament. Peace had been

concluded with Holland. The Church had been set in order. The law itself

had been minutely regulated. The union with Scotland had been brought to

completion. So far was Cromwell from dreaming that these measures, or

the authority which enacted them, would be questioned, that he looked to

Parliament simply to complete his work. "The great end of your meeting,"

he said at the first assembly of its members, "is healing and

settling." Though he had himself done much, he added, "there was still

much to be done." Peace had to be made with Portugal, and alliance with

Spain. Bills were laid before the House for the codification of the law.

The plantation and settlement of Ireland had still to be completed. He

resented the setting these projects aside for constitutional questions

which, as he held, a Divine call had decided, and he resented yet more

the renewed claim advanced by Parliament to the sole power of

legislation. As we have seen, his experience of the evils which had

arisen from the concentration of legislative and executive power in the

Long Parliament had convinced Cromwell of the danger to public liberty

which lay in such a union. He saw in the joint government of "a single

person and a Parliament" the only assurance "that Parliaments should not

make themselves perpetual," or that their power should not be perverted

to public wrong.

[Sidenote: Dissolution of the Parliament.]

But whatever strength there may have been in the Protector's arguments,

the act by which he proceeded to enforce them was fatal to liberty, and

in the end to Puritanism. "If my calling be from God," he ended, "and my

testimony from the People, God and the People shall take it from me,

else I will not part from it." And he announced that no member would be

suffered to enter the House without signing an engagement "not to alter

the Government as it is settled in a single person and a Parliament." No

act of the Stuarts had been a bolder defiance of constitutional law; and

the act was as needless as it was illegal. One hundred members alone

refused to take the engagement, and the signatures of three-fourths of

the House proved that the security Cromwell desired might have been

easily procured by a vote of Parliament. But those who remained resumed

their constitutional task with unbroken firmness. They quietly asserted

their sole title to government by referring the Protector's Ordinances

to Committees for revision, and for conversion into laws. The

"Instrument of Government" was turned into a bill, debated, and after

some serious modifications read a third time. Money votes, as in

previous Parliaments, were deferred till "grievances" had been settled.

But Cromwell once more intervened. The Royalists were astir again; and

he attributed their renewed hopes to the hostile attitude which he

ascribed to the Parliament. The army, which remained unpaid while the

supplies were delayed, was seething with discontent. "It looks," said

the Protector, "as if the laying grounds for a quarrel had rather been

designed than to give the people settlement. Judge yourselves whether

the contesting of things that were provided for by this government hath

been profitable expense of time for the good of this nation." In January

1655, with words of angry reproach he declared the Parliament

dissolved.

[Sidenote: The Major-Generals.]

The dissolution of the Parliament of 1654 was a turning-point in the

relations of England and the army. As yet neither the people nor the

soldiers had fairly recognized the actual state of affairs. From the

revolution of 1648 the sword had been supreme, but its supremacy had

been disguised by the continuance of the Rump. When the Rump was

expelled, the military rule which followed still seemed only

provisional. The bulk of Englishmen and the bulk of the army itself

looked on its attitude as simply imposed on it by necessity, and

believed that with the assembly of a Parliament all would return to a

legal course. But the Parliament had come and gone; and the army still

refused to lay down the sword. On the contrary, it seemed at last to

resolve to grasp frankly the power which it had so long shrunk from

openly wielding. All show of constitutional rule was now at an end. The

Protectorate, deprived by its own act of all chance of legal sanction,

became a simple tyranny. Cromwell professed indeed to be restrained by

the "Instrument": but the one great restraint on his power which the

Instrument provided, the inability to levy taxes save by consent of

Parliament, was set aside on the plea of necessity. "The People," said

the Protector in words which Strafford might have uttered, "will prefer

their real security to forms." That a danger of Royalist revolt existed

was undeniable, but the danger was at once doubled by the general

discontent. From this moment, Whitelock tells us, "many sober and noble

patriots," in despair of public liberty, "did begin to incline to the

king's restoration." In the mass of the population the reaction was far

more rapid. "Charles Stuart," writes a Cheshire correspondent to the

Secretary of State, "hath five hundred friends in these adjacent

counties for every one friend to you among them." But before the

overpowering strength of the army even this general discontent was

powerless. Yorkshire, where the Royalist insurrection was expected to be

most formidable, never ventured to rise at all. There were risings in

Devon, Dorset, and the Welsh Marches, but they were quickly put down,

and their leaders brought to the scaffold. Easily however as the revolt

was suppressed, the terror of the Government was seen in the energetic

measures to which Cromwell resorted in the hope of securing order. The

country was divided into ten military governments, each with a

major-general at its head, who was empowered to disarm all Papists and

Royalists, and to arrest suspected persons. Funds for the support of

this military despotism were provided by an Ordinance of the Council of

State, which enacted that all who had at any time borne arms for the

king should pay every year a tenth part of their income, in spite of the

Act of Oblivion, as a fine for their royalist tendencies. The despotism

of the major-generals was seconded by the older expedients of tyranny.

The ejected clergy had been zealous in promoting the insurrection, and

they were forbidden in revenge to act as chaplains or as tutors. The

press was placed under a strict censorship. The payment of taxes levied

by the sole authority of the Protector was enforced by distraint; and

when a collector was sued in the courts for redress, the counsel for the

prosecution were sent to the Tower.

[Sidenote: Settlement of Scotland.]

If pardon indeed could ever be won for a tyranny, the wisdom and

grandeur with which he used the power he had usurped would win pardon

for the Protector. The greatest among the many great enterprises

undertaken by the Long Parliament had been the union of the three

Kingdoms: and that of Scotland with England had been brought about, at

the very end of its career, by the tact and vigour of Sir Harry Vane.

But its practical realization was left to Cromwell. In four months of

hard fighting General Monk brought the Highlands to a new tranquillity;

and the presence of an army of eight thousand men, backed by a line of

forts, kept the most restless of the clans in good order. The settlement

of the country was brought about by the temperance and sagacity of

Monk's successor, General Deane. No further interference with the

Presbyterian system was attempted beyond the suppression of the General

Assembly. But religious liberty was resolutely protected, and Deane

ventured even to interfere on behalf of the miserable victims whom

Scotch bigotry was torturing and burning on the charge of witchcraft.

Even steady Royalists acknowledged the justice of the Government and the

wonderful discipline of its troops. "We always reckon those eight years

of the usurpation," said Burnet afterwards, "a time of great peace and

prosperity."

[Sidenote: Settlement of Ireland.]

Sterner work had to be done before Ireland could be brought into real

union with its sister kingdoms. The work of conquest had been continued

by Ireton, and completed after his death by General Ludlow, as

mercilessly as it had begun. Thousands perished by famine or the sword.

Shipload after shipload of those who surrendered were sent over sea for

sale into forced labour in Jamaica and the West Indies. More than forty

thousand of the beaten Catholics were permitted to enlist for foreign

service, and found a refuge in exile under the banners of France and

Spain. The work of settlement, which was undertaken by Henry Cromwell,

the younger and abler of the Protector's sons, turned out to be even

more terrible than the work of the sword. It took as its model the

Colonization of Ulster, the fatal measure which had destroyed all hope

of a united Ireland, and had brought inevitably in its train the revolt

and the war. The people were divided into classes in the order of their

assumed guilt. All who after trial were proved to have personally taken

part in the "massacre" were sentenced to banishment or death. The

general amnesty which freed "those of the meaner sort" from all question

on other scores was far from extending to the landowners. Catholic

proprietors who had shown no goodwill to the Parliament, even though

they had taken no part in the war, were punished by the forfeiture of a

third of their estates. All who had borne arms were held to have

forfeited the whole, and driven into Connaught, where fresh estates were

carved out for them from the lands of the native clans. No such doom had

ever fallen on a nation in modern times as fell upon Ireland in its new

settlement. Among the bitter memories which part Ireland from England

the memory of the bloodshed and confiscation which the Puritans wrought

remains the bitterest; and the worst curse an Irish peasant can hurl at

his enemy is "the curse of Cromwell." But pitiless as the Protector's

policy was, it was successful in the ends at which it aimed. The whole

native population lay helpless and crushed. Peace and order were

restored, and a large incoming of Protestant settlers from England and

Scotland brought a new prosperity to the wasted country. Above all, the

legislative union which had been brought about with Scotland was now

carried out with Ireland, and thirty seats were allotted to its

representatives in the general Parliament.

[Sidenote: Settlement of England.]

In England Cromwell dealt with the Royalists as irreconcileable enemies;

but in every other respect he carried fairly out his pledge of "healing

and settling." The series of administrative reforms planned by the

Convention had been partially carried into effect before the meeting of

Parliament in 1654; but the work was pushed on after the dissolution of

the House with yet greater energy. Nearly a hundred ordinances showed

the industry of the Government. Police, public amusements, roads,

finances, the condition of prisons, the imprisonment of debtors, were a

few among the subjects which claimed Cromwell's attention. An ordinance

of more than fifty clauses reformed the Court of Chancery. The anarchy

which had reigned in the Church since the breakdown of Episcopacy and

the failure of the Presbyterian system to supply its place, was put an

end to by a series of wise and temperate measures for its

reorganization. Rights of patronage were left untouched; but a Board of

Triers, a fourth of whom were laymen, was appointed to examine the

fitness of ministers presented to livings; and a Church board of gentry

and clergy was set up in every county to exercise a supervision over

ecclesiastical affairs, and to detect and remove scandalous and

ineffectual ministers. Even by the confession of Cromwell's opponents

the plan worked well. It furnished the country with "able, serious

preachers," Baxter tells us, "who lived a godly life, of what tolerable

opinion soever they were"; and, as both Presbyterian and

Congregationalist ministers were presented to livings at the will of

their patrons, it solved so far as practical working was concerned the

problem of a religious union among Protestants on the base of a wide

variety of Christian opinion. From the Church which was thus reorganized

all power of interference with faiths differing from its own was

resolutely withheld. Save in his dealings with the Episcopalians, whom

he looked on as a political danger, Cromwell remained true throughout to

the cause of religious liberty. Even the Quaker, rejected by all other

Christian bodies as an anarchist and blasphemer, found sympathy and

protection in the Protector. The Jews had been excluded from England

since the reign of Edward the First; and a prayer which they now

presented for leave to return was refused by a commission of merchants

and divines to whom the Protector referred it for consideration. But the

refusal was quietly passed over, and the connivance of Cromwell in the

settlement of a few Hebrews in London and Oxford was so clearly

understood that no one ventured to interfere with them.

[Sidenote: Cromwell's foreign policy.]

No part of his policy is more characteristic of Cromwell's mind, whether

in its strength or in its weakness, than his management of foreign

affairs. While England had been absorbed in her long and obstinate

struggle for freedom the whole face of the world around her had changed.

The Thirty Years War was over. The victories of Gustavus, and of the

Swedish generals who followed him, had been seconded by the policy of

Richelieu and the intervention of France. Protestantism in Germany was

no longer in peril from the bigotry or ambition of the House of Austria;

and the Treaty of Westphalia had drawn a permanent line between the

territories belonging to the adherents of the old religion and the new.

There was little danger indeed now to Europe from the great Catholic

House which had threatened its freedom ever since Charles the Fifth. Its

Austrian branch was called away from dreams of aggression in the west to

a desperate struggle with the Turk for the possession of Hungary and the

security of Austria itself. Spain, from causes which it is no part of

our present story to detail, was falling into a state of strange

decrepitude. So far from aiming to be mistress of Europe, she was

rapidly sinking into the almost helpless prey of France. It was France

which had now become the dominant power in Christendom, though her

position was far from being as commanding as it was to become under

Lewis the Fourteenth. The peace and order which prevailed after the

cessation of the religious troubles throughout her compact and fertile

territory gave scope at last to the quick and industrious temper of the

French people; while her wealth and energy were placed by the

centralizing administration of Henry the Fourth, of Richelieu, and of

Mazarin, almost absolutely in the hands of the Crown. Under the three

great rulers who have just been named her ambition was steadily directed

to the same purpose of territorial aggrandizement, and though limited as

yet to the annexation of the Spanish and Imperial territories which

still parted her frontier from the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Rhine, a

statesman of wise political genius would have discerned the beginning of

that great struggle for supremacy over Europe at large which was only

foiled by the genius of Marlborough and the victories of the Grand

Alliance.

[Sidenote: Cromwell and Spain.]

But in his view of European politics Cromwell was misled by the

conservative and unspeculative temper of his mind as well as by the

strength of his religious enthusiasm. Of the change in the world around

him he seems to have discerned nothing. He brought to the Europe of

Mazarin the hopes and ideas with which all England was thrilling in his

youth at the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. Spain was still to him

"the head of the Papal Interest," whether at home or abroad. "The

Papists in England," he said to the Parliament of 1656, "have been

accounted, ever since I was born, Spaniolized; they never regarded

France, or any other Papist state, but Spain only." The old English

hatred of Spain, the old English resentment at the shameful part which

the nation had been forced to play in the great German struggle by the

policy of James and of Charles, lived on in Cromwell, and was only

strengthened by the religious enthusiasm which the success of Puritanism

had kindled within him. "The Lord Himself," he wrote to his admirals as

they sailed to the West Indies, "hath a controversy with your enemies;

even with that Romish Babylon of which the Spaniard is the great

underpropper. In that respect we fight the Lord's battles." What Sweden

had been under Gustavus, England, Cromwell dreamed, might be now--the

head of a great Protestant League in the struggle against Catholic

aggression. "You have on your shoulders," he said to the Parliament of

1654, "the interest of all the Christian people of the world. I wish it

may be written on our hearts to be zealous for that interest." The first

step in such a struggle would necessarily be to league the Protestant

powers together, and Cromwell's earliest efforts were directed to bring

the ruinous and indecisive quarrel with Holland to an end. The

fierceness of the strife had grown with each engagement; but the hopes

of Holland fell with her admiral, Tromp, who received a mortal wound at

a moment when he had succeeded in forcing the English line; and the

skill and energy of his successor, De Ruyter, struggled in vain to

restore her waning fortunes. She was saved by the expulsion of the Long

Parliament, which had persisted in its demand for a political union of

the two countries; and the new policy of Cromwell was seen in the

conclusion of peace. The peace indeed was dearly bought. Not only did

the United Provinces recognize the supremacy of the English flag in the

British seas, and submit to the Navigation Act, but Holland pledged

itself to shut out the House of Orange from power, and thus relieved

England from the risk of seeing a Stuart restoration supported by Dutch

forces.

[Sidenote: War with Spain.]

The peace which was concluded with the Dutch in 1654 was followed by the

conclusion of like treaties with Sweden and with Denmark; and on the

arrival of a Swedish envoy with offers of a league of friendship

Cromwell endeavoured to bring the Dutch, the Brandenburgers, and the

Danes into a confederation of the Protestant powers. His efforts in this

direction however, though they never wholly ceased, remained fruitless;

but the Protector was resolute to carry out his plans single-handed. The

defeat of the Dutch had left England the chief sea-power of the world;

and in the first days of 1655, before the dissolution of the Parliament,

two fleets put to sea with secret instructions. The first, under Blake,

appeared in the Mediterranean, exacted reparation from Tuscany for

wrongs done to English commerce, bombarded Algiers, and destroyed the

fleet with which its pirates had ventured through the reign of Charles

to insult the English coast. The thunder of Blake's guns, every Puritan

believed, would be heard in the castle of St. Angelo, and Rome itself

would have to bow to the greatness of Cromwell. But though no

declaration of war had been issued against Spain, the true aim of both

expeditions was an attack on that power; and the attack proved

singularly unsuccessful. Though Blake sailed to the Spanish coast, he

failed to intercept the treasure fleet from America; and the second

expedition, which made its way to the West Indies, was foiled in a

descent on St. Domingo. It conquered Jamaica in May; but the conquest of

this lesser island, important as it really was in breaking through the

monopoly of the New World in the South which Spain had till now enjoyed,

seemed at the time but a poor result for the vast expenditure of money

and blood. The leaders of the expedition, Blake and Venables, were

committed to the Tower on their return in September; but Cromwell found

himself at war with Spain, and thrown whether he would or no into the

hands of Mazarin.

[Sidenote: Parliament of 1655.]

In October 1655 he was forced to sign a treaty of alliance with France;

while the cost of his abortive expeditions drove him again to face a

Parliament. But Cromwell no longer trusted, as in his earlier

Parliament, to freedom of election. The sixty members who were returned

under the Ordinances of union by Scotland and Ireland were simply

nominees of the Government. Its whole influence was exerted to secure

the return of the more conspicuous members of the Council of State. It

was calculated that of the members returned one-half were bound to the

Government by ties of profit or place. But Cromwell was still

unsatisfied. A certificate of the Council was required from each member

before admission to the House when it met in September 1656; and a

fourth of the whole number returned--one hundred in all, with Haselrig

at their head--were by this means excluded on grounds of disaffection or

want of religion. To these arbitrary acts of violence the House replied

only by a course of singular moderation and wisdom. From the first it

disclaimed any purpose of opposing the Government. One of its earliest

acts provided securities for Cromwell's person, which was threatened by

constant plots of assassination. It supported him in his war policy, and

voted supplies of unprecedented extent for the maintenance of the

struggle. It was this attitude of loyalty which gave force to its steady

refusal to sanction the system of tyranny which had practically placed

England under martial law. In his opening address Cromwell boldly took

his stand in support of the military despotism wielded by the

major-generals. "It hath been more effectual towards the

discountenancing of vice and settling religion than anything done these

fifty years. I will abide by it," he said, with singular vehemence,

"notwithstanding the envy and slander of foolish men. I could as soon

venture my life with it as with anything I ever undertook. If it were to

be done again, I would do it." But no sooner had a bill been introduced

into Parliament to confirm the proceedings of the major-generals than a

long debate showed the temper of the Commons. They had resolved to

acquiesce in the Protectorate, but they were equally resolved to bring

it again to a legal mode of government. This indeed was the aim of even

Cromwell's wiser adherents. "What makes me fear the passing of this

Act," one of them wrote to his son Henry, "is that thereby his Highness'

government will be more founded in force, and more removed from that

natural foundation which the people in Parliament are desirous to give

him, supposing that he will become more theirs than now he is." The bill

was rejected, and Cromwell bowed to the feeling of the nation by

withdrawing the powers of the major-generals.

[Sidenote: Offer of the Crown to Cromwell.]

But the defeat of the tyranny of the sword was only a step towards a far

bolder effort for the restoration of the power of the law. It was no

mere pedantry, still less was it vulgar flattery, which influenced the

Parliament in their offer to Cromwell of the title of king. The

experience of the last few years had taught the nation the value of the

traditional forms under which its liberties had grown up. A king was

limited by constitutional precedents. "The king's prerogative," it was

well urged, "is under the courts of justice, and is bounded as well as

any acre of land, or anything a man hath." A Protector, on the other

hand, was new in our history, and there were no traditional means of

limiting his power. "The one office being lawful in its nature," said

Glynne, "known to the nation, certain in itself, and confined and

regulated by the law, and the other not so--that was the great ground

why the Parliament did so much insist on this office and title." Under

the name of Monarchy, indeed, the question really at issue between the

party headed by the officers and the party led by the lawyers in the

Commons was that of the restoration of constitutional and legal rule. In

March 1657 the proposal was carried by an overwhelming majority, but a

month passed in endless consultations between the Parliament and the

Protector. His good sense, his knowledge of the general feeling of the

nation, his real desire to obtain a settlement which should secure the

ends for which Puritanism fought, political and religious liberty,

broke, in conference after conference, through a mist of words. But his

real concern throughout was with the temper of the army. Under whatever

spurious disguises he cloaked the true nature of his government from the

world, Cromwell knew well that it was a sheer government of the sword,

that he was without hold upon the nation, and that the discontent of

his soldiery would at once shake the fabric of his power. He vibrated to

and fro between his sense of the political advantages of such a

settlement, and his sense of its impossibility in face of the mood of

the army. His soldiers, he said, were no common swordsmen. They were

"godly men, men that will not be beaten down by a worldly and carnal

spirit while they keep their integrity"; men in whose general voice he

recognized the voice of God. "They are honest and faithful men," he

urged, "true to the great things of the Government. And though it really

is no part of their goodness to be unwilling to submit to what a

Parliament shall settle over them, yet it is my duty and conscience to

beg of you that there may be no hard things put upon them which they

cannot swallow. I cannot think God would bless an undertaking of

anything which would justly and with cause grieve them."

[Sidenote: Inauguration of the Protector.]

The temper of the army was soon shown. Its leaders, with Lambert,

Fleetwood, and Desborough at their head, placed their commands in

Cromwell's hands. A petition from the officers to Parliament demanded

the withdrawal of the proposal to restore the Monarchy, "in the name of

the old cause for which they had bled"; and on the eighth of May

Cromwell anticipated the coming debate on this petition, a debate which

might have led to an open breach between the Army and the Commons, by a

refusal of the crown. "I cannot undertake this Government," he said,

"with that title of king; and that is my answer to this great and

weighty business." Disappointed as it was, the Parliament with singular

self-restraint turned to other modes of bringing about its purpose. The

offer of the crown had been coupled with the condition of accepting a

constitution, which was a modification of the Instrument of Government

adopted by the Parliament of 1654, and this Constitution Cromwell

emphatically approved. "The things provided by this Act of Government,"

he owned, "do secure the liberties of the people of God as they never

before have had them." With a change of the title of king into that of

Protector, the Act of Government now became law: and the solemn

inauguration of the Protector by the Parliament on the twenty-sixth of

June was a practical acknowledgement on the part of Cromwell of the

illegality of his former rule. In the name of the Commons the Speaker

invested him with a mantle of State, placed the sceptre in his hand, and

girt the sword of justice by his side. By the new Act of Government

Cromwell was allowed to name his own successor, but in all after cases

the office was to be an elective one. In every other respect the forms

of the older Constitution were carefully restored. Parliament was again

to consist of two Houses, the seventy members of "the other House" being

named by the Protector. The Commons regained their old right of

exclusively deciding on the qualification of their members.

Parliamentary restrictions were imposed on the choice of members of the

Council, and Officers of State or of the army. A fixed revenue was voted

to the Protector, and it was provided that no moneys should be raised

but by assent of Parliament. Liberty of worship was secured for all but

Papists, Prelatists, Socinians, or those who denied the inspiration of

the Scriptures; and liberty of conscience was secured for all.

[Sidenote: Cromwell's triumphs.]

The adjournment of the House after his inauguration in the summer of

1657 left Cromwell at the height of his power. He seemed at last to have

placed his government on a legal and national basis. The ill-success of

his earlier operations abroad was forgotten in a blaze of glory. On the

eve of the Parliament's assembly one of Blake's captains had managed to

intercept a part of the Spanish treasure fleet. At the close of 1656 the

Protector seemed to have found the means of realizing his schemes for

rekindling the religious war throughout Europe in a quarrel between the

Duke of Savoy and his Protestant subjects in the valleys of Piedmont. A

ruthless massacre of these Vaudois by the Duke's troops roused deep

resentment throughout England, a resentment which still breathes in the

noblest of Milton's sonnets. While the poet called on God to avenge his

"slaughtered saints, whose bones lie scattered on the Alpine mountains

cold," Cromwell was already busy with the work of earthly vengeance. An

English envoy appeared at the Duke's court with haughty demands of

redress. Their refusal would have been followed by instant war, for the

Protestant Cantons of Switzerland were bribed into promising a force of

ten thousand men for an attack on Savoy. The plan was foiled by the cool

diplomacy of Mazarin, who forced the Duke to grant Cromwell's demands;

but the apparent success of the Protector raised his reputation at home

and abroad. The spring of 1657 saw the greatest as it was the last of

the triumphs of Blake. He found the Spanish Plate fleet guarded by

galleons in the strongly-armed harbour of Santa Cruz; and on the

twentieth of April he forced an entrance into the harbour and burnt or

sank every ship within it. Triumphs at sea were followed by a triumph on

land. Cromwell's demand of Dunkirk, which had long stood in the way of

any acceptance of his offers of aid, was at last conceded; and in May

1657 a detachment of the Puritan army joined the French troops who were

attacking Flanders under the command of Turenne. Their valour and

discipline were shown by the part they took in the capture of Mardyke in

the summer of that year; and still more in the June of 1658 by the

victory of the Dunes, a victory which forced the Flemish towns to open

their gates to the French, and gave Dunkirk to Cromwell.

[Sidenote: Cromwell's theory.]

Never had the fame of an English, ruler stood higher; but in the midst

of his glory the hand of death was falling on the Protector. He had long

been weary of his task. "God knows," he had burst out to the Parliament

a year before, "God knows I would have been glad to have lived under my

woodside, and to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than to have

undertaken this government." Amidst the glory of his aims, Cromwell's

heart was heavy with this sense of failure. Whatever dreams of personal

ambition had mingled with his aim, his aim had in the main been a high

and unselfish one; in the course that seems to modern eyes so strange

and complex he had seen the leading of a divine hand that drew him from

the sheepfolds to mould England into a people of God. What convinced him

that the nation was called by a divine calling was the wonder which men

felt at every step in its advance. The England which he saw around him

was not an England which Pym or Hampden had foreseen, which Vane in his

wildest dreams had imagined, or for which the boldest among the soldiers

of the New Model had fought. Step by step the nation had been drawn to

changes from which it shrank, to principles which it held in horror.

When the struggle began the temper of the men who waged it was a

strictly conservative temper; they held themselves to be withstanding

the revolutionary changes of the king, to be vindicating the existing

constitution both of Church and State. But the strife had hardly opened

when they were drawn by very need to a revolutionary platform. What men

found themselves fighting for at Edgehill and Marston Moor was the

substitution of government by the will of the nation for government by

the will of the king, and a setting aside of the religious compromise

embodied in the Church of the Tudors for a Church which was the mere

embodiment of the Puritan section of the people at large. Defeat drove

England to the New Model; and again it found itself drawn to a new

advance. No sooner was the sword in the hand of the "Godly," than the

conception of religious purity widened into that of religious liberty,

and the thought of a nation self-governed into the dream of a kingdom of

God. Dunbar and Worcester, the strife with the Houses, the final strife

with the king, turned the dream into a practical policy. Every obstacle

fell before it. Episcopal Church and Presbyterian Church alike passed

away. The loyalty of the nation, the stubborn efforts of Cromwell and

Ireton, failed to uphold the Monarchy. Lords and Commons fell in the

very moment of their victory over the king. Desperately as men clung to

the last shadow of a Parliament, the victories of Blake, the

statesmanship of Vane, failed to preserve the life of the Rump. In the

crash of every political and religious institution the Army found itself

the one power in the land, and the dream of its soldiers grew into a

will to set up on earth a Commonwealth of the Saints.

[Sidenote: The Puritan State.]

In this resolve Cromwell was at one with the New Model. Like every

soldier in his army, he held that by the victories God had given them He

had "so called them to look after the government of the land, and so

entrusted them with the welfare of all His people, that they were

responsible for it, and might not in conscience stand still while

anything was done which they thought was against the interest of the

people of God." But he never doubted that the nation would own its

calling as zealously as his soldiers did. He had no wish to change the

outer form of its political or its social life; he would maintain social

distinctions as he would maintain Parliaments. But the old institutions

must be penetrated with a new spirit. Conscience and worship must be

free. Holiness must be the law of England's life. Its rulers must be

found among "godly men," and their rule must be widened beyond the

common sphere of temporal government. The old distinctions of the

secular and the spiritual world must be done away. In public and in

private life the new government must enforce obedience to the will of

God. Socially such a theory seemed realized at last in the

administration of the major-generals. Never had Cromwell been so

satisfied. The "malignants" who had so long trodden pious men under

foot lay helpless at the feet of the godly. The "Cavalier interest,"

which was but "the badge and character of countenancing profaneness,

disorder, and wickedness in all places," was crushed and powerless.

"Christian men" reigned supreme. Cromwell recalled how "it was a shame

to be a Christian within these fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen years in

this nation. It was a shame, it was a reproach to a man; and the badge

of Puritan was put upon it!" But the shame and reproach were now rolled

away. The Puritan was master in the land. All government was in the

hands of godly men. Piety was as needful for an officer in the army, for

a magistrate, for a petty constable, as for a minister of religion. The

aim of the Protector was that England should be ruled and administered

by "the best," by men ruling and administering in the fear of God. In

Church as in State all that such men had longed to do could now be done.

Superstitious usages were driven from the churches. No minister wore a

surplice. No child was signed in baptism with a cross. The very pastimes

of the world had to conform themselves to the law of God. The theatres

were closed. Sunday sports were summarily abolished. There were no more

races, no more bull-baitings, no more cock-fighting, no more dances

under the Maypole. Christmas had to pass without its junketings, or

mummers, or mince-pies.

[Sidenote: Its failure.]

To the eyes of mere zealots the work of Puritanism seemed done. But

Cromwell was no mere zealot. Strangely mingled with the enthusiasm of

his temper was a cool, passionless faculty of seeing things as they

actually were about him; and he saw that in its very hour of triumph the

cause he loved was losing ground. From this effort to turn England into

a kingdom of God England itself stood aloof. Its traditional instincts

were outraged by the wreck of its institutions, its good sense by the

effort to enforce godliness by civil penalties, its self-respect by the

rule of the sword. Never had England shown a truer nobleness than when

it refused to be tempted from the path of freedom even by the genius of

Cromwell, never a truer wisdom than when it refused to be lured from its

tradition of practical politics by the dazzling seductions of the

Puritan ideal. And not only did the nation stand aloof from Cromwell's

work, but its opposition grew hourly stronger. The very forces which

seemed to have been annihilated by the Civil War drew a fresh life from

the national ill-will to their conquerors. Men forgot the despotism of

the Monarchy when the Monarchy and the Parliament lay wrecked in a

common ruin. They forgot the tyranny of Laud when the Church was

trampled under foot by men who trampled under foot the constitution. By

a strange turn of fortune the restoration of the Church and of the Crown

became identified with the restoration of legal government and with the

overthrow of a rule of brute force. And for such a restoration the vast

majority of the nation were longing more and more. The old enmities of

party and sect were forgotten in the common enmity of every party and

every sect to the tyranny of the sword. A new national unity was

revealing itself, as one jarring element after another came in to swell

the mass of the national opposition to the system of the Protectorate.

The moderate Royalist joined hands with the Cavalier, the steady

Presbyterian came to join the moderate Royalist, and their ranks were

swelled at last by the very founders of the Commonwealth. Nothing marked

more vividly the strength of the reaction against the Protector's system

than the union in a common enmity of Vane and Haselrig with the

partizans of the Stuart pretender.

[Sidenote: The Scientific Movement.]

It was the steady rise of this tide of opposition in which Cromwell saw

the doom of his cause. That it could permanently be upheld by the sword

he knew to be impossible. What he had hoped for was the gradual winning

of England to a sense of its worth. But every day the current of opinion

ran more strongly against it. The army stood alone in its purpose.

Papist and sceptic, mystic and ceremonialist, latitudinarian and

Presbyterian, all were hostile. The very pressure of Cromwell's system

gave birth to new forms of spiritual and intellectual revolt. Science,

rationalism, secularism, sprang for the first time into vivid life in

their protest against the forced concentration of human thought on the

single topic of religion, the effort to prison religion itself in a

system of dogma, and to narrow humanity with all its varied interests

within the sphere of the merely spiritual. Nothing is more significant,

though to Cromwell nothing would have been more unintelligible, than the

simple story which tells us how from the vexed problems, political and

religious, of the times, men turned to the peaceful study of the natural

world about them. Bacon had already called men with a trumpet-voice to

such studies; but in England at least Bacon stood before his age. The

beginnings of physical science were more slow and timid there than in

any country of Europe. Only two discoveries of any real value came from

English research before the Restoration: the first, Gilbert's discovery

of terrestrial magnetism in the close of Elizabeth's reign; the next,

the great discovery of the circulation of the blood, which was taught by

Harvey in the reign of James. Apart from these illustrious names England

took little share in the scientific movement of the Continent; and her

whole energies seemed to be whirled into the vortex of theology and

politics by the Civil War.

But the war had not reached its end when, in 1645, a little group of

students were to be seen in London, men "inquisitive," says one of them,

"into natural philosophy and other parts of human learning, and

particularly of what had been called the New Philosophy . . . which from

the times of Galileo at Florence, and Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam)

in England, hath been much cultivated in Italy, France, Germany, and

other parts abroad, as well as with us in England." The strife of the

time indeed aided in directing the minds of men to natural inquiries.

"To have been always tossing about some theological question," says the

first historian of the Royal Society, Bishop Sprat, "would have been to

have made that their private diversion, the excess of which they

disliked in the public. To have been eternally musing on civil business

and the distresses of the country was too melancholy a reflection. It

was nature alone which could pleasantly entertain them in that estate."

Foremost in the group stood Doctors Wallis and Wilkins, whose removal to

Oxford, which had just been reorganized by the Puritan Visitors, divided

the little company in 1648 into two societies, one at the university,

the other remaining at the capital. The Oxford society, which was the

more important of the two, held its meetings at the lodgings of Dr.

Wilkins, who had become Warden of Wadham College; and added to the names

of its members that of the eminent mathematician Dr. Ward, and that of

the first of English economists, Sir William Petty. "Our business,"

Wallis tells us, "was (precluding matters of theology and State affairs)

to discourse and consider of philosophical enquiries and such as

related thereunto, as Physick, Anatomy, Geometry, Astronomy, Navigation,

Statics, Magnetics, Chymicks, Mechanicks, and Natural Experiments: with

the state of these studies, as then cultivated at home and abroad. We

then discoursed of the circulation of the blood, the valves in the _venæ

lacteæ_, the lymphatic vessels, the Copernican hypothesis, the nature of

comets and new stars, the satellites of Jupiter, the oval shape of

Saturn, the spots in the sun and its turning on its own axis, the

inequalities and selenography of the moon, the several phases of Venus

and Mercury, the improvement of telescopes, the grinding of glasses for

that purpose, the weight of air, the possibility or impossibility of

vacuities, and Nature's abhorrence thereof, the Torricellian experiment

in quicksilver, the descent of heavy bodies and the degree of

acceleration therein, and divers other things of like nature."

[Sidenote: The Latitudinarians.]

To what great results this protest against the Puritan concentration of

all human thought on spiritual issues was to lead none could foresee.

But results almost as great were to spring from the protest against the

Puritan dogmatism which gave birth to the Latitudinarians. Whatever

verdict history may pronounce on Falkland's political career, his name

must remain memorable in the history of religious thought. A new era in

English theology began with the speculations of the men he gathered

round him in his country house at Great Tew in the years that preceded

the meeting of the Long Parliament. Their work was above all to deny the

authority of tradition in matters of faith, as Bacon had denied it in

matters of physical research; and to assert in the one field as in the

other the supremacy of reason as a test of truth. Of the authority of

the Church, its Fathers, and its Councils, John Hales, a Canon of

Windsor, and a friend of Laud, said briefly, "It is none." He dismissed

with contempt the accepted test of universality. "Universality is such a

proof of truth as truth itself is ashamed of. The most singular and

strongest part of human authority is properly in the wisest and the most

virtuous, and these, I trow, are not the most universal." William

Chillingworth, a man of larger if not keener mind, had been taught by an

early conversion to Catholicism, and by a speedy return, the insecurity

of any basis for belief but that of private judgement. In his "Religion

of Protestants" he set aside ecclesiastical tradition or Church

authority as grounds of faith in favour of the Bible, but only of the

Bible as interpreted by the common reason of men. Jeremy Taylor, the

most brilliant of English preachers, a sufferer like Chillingworth on

the Royalist side during the troubles, and who was rewarded at the

Restoration with the bishopric of Down, limited even the authority of

the Scriptures themselves. Reason was the one means which Taylor

approved of in interpreting the Bible; but the certainty of the

conclusions which reason drew from the Bible varied, as he held, with

the conditions of reason itself. In all but the simplest truths of

natural religion "we are not sure not to be deceived." The deduction of

points of belief from the words of the Scriptures was attended with all

the uncertainty and liability to error which sprang from the infinite

variety of human understandings, the difficulties which hinder the

discovery of truth, and the influences which divert the mind from

accepting or rightly estimating it.

It was plain to a mind like Chillingworth's that this denial of

authority, this perception of the imperfection of reason in the

discovery of absolute truth, struck as directly at the root of

Protestant dogmatism as at the root of Catholic infallibility. "If

Protestants are faulty in this matter [of claiming authority] it is for

doing it too much and not too little. This presumptuous imposing of the

senses of man upon the words of God, of the special senses of man upon

the general words of God, and laying them upon men's consciences

together under the equal penalty of death and damnation, this vain

conceit that we can speak of the things of God better than in the words

of God, this deifying our own interpretations and tyrannous enforcing

them upon others, this restraining of the word of God from that latitude

and generality, and the understandings of men from that liberty wherein

Christ and His apostles left them, is and hath been the only foundation

of all the schisms of the Church, and that which makes them immortal."

In his "Liberty of Prophesying" Jeremy Taylor pleaded the cause of

toleration with a weight of argument which hardly required the triumph

of the Independents and the shock of Naseby to drive it home. But the

freedom of conscience which the Independent founded on the personal

communion of each soul with God, the Latitudinarian founded on the

weakness of authority and the imperfection of human reason. Taylor

pleads even for the Anabaptist and the Romanist. He only gives place to

the action of the civil magistrate in "those religions whose principles

destroy government," and "those religions--if there be any such--which

teach ill life." Hales openly professed that he would quit the Church

to-morrow if it required him to believe that all that dissented from it

must be damned. Chillingworth denounced persecution in words of fire.

"Take away this persecution, burning, cursing, damning of men for not

subscribing the words of men as the words of God; require of Christians

only to believe Christ and to call no man master but Him; let them leave

claiming infallibility that have no title to it, and let them that in

their own words disclaim it, disclaim it also in their actions. . . .

Protestants are inexcusable if they do offer violence to other men's

consciences."

From the denunciation of intolerance the Latitudinarians passed easily

to the dream of comprehension which had haunted every nobler soul since

the "Utopia" of More. Hales based his loyalty to the Church of England

on the fact that it was the largest and the most tolerant Church in

Christendom. Chillingworth pointed out how many obstacles to

comprehension were removed by such a simplification of belief as flowed

from a rational theology, and asked, like More, for "such an ordering of

the public service of God as that all who believe the Scripture and live

according to it might without scruple or hypocrisy or protestation in

any part join in it." Taylor, like Chillingworth, rested his hope of

union on the simplification of belief. He saw a probability of error in

all the creeds and confessions adopted by Christian Churches. "Such

bodies of confessions and articles," he said, "must do much hurt." "He

is rather the schismatic who makes unnecessary and inconvenient

impositions, than he who disobeys them because he cannot do otherwise

without violating his conscience." The Apostles' Creed in its literal

meaning seemed to him the one term of Christian union which the Church

had any right to impose.

[Sidenote: Hobbes.]

The impulse which such men were giving to religious speculation was

being given to political and social inquiry by a mind of far greater

keenness and power. Bacon's favourite secretary was Thomas Hobbes. "He

was beloved by his Lordship," Aubrey tells us, "who was wont to have him

walk in his delicate groves, where he did meditate; and when a notion

darted into his mind, Mr. Hobbes was presently to write it down. And his

Lordship was wont to say that he did it better than any one else about

him; for that many times when he read their notes he scarce understood

what they writ, because they understood it not clearly themselves." The

long life of Hobbes covers a memorable space in our history. He was born

in the year of the victory over the Armada; he died in 1679 at the age

of ninety-two, only nine years before the Revolution. His ability soon

made itself felt, and in his earlier days he was the secretary of Bacon,

and the friend of Ben Jonson and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. But it was

not till the age of fifty-four, when he withdrew to France on the eve of

the great Rebellion in 1642, that his speculations were made known to

the world in his treatise "De Cive." He joined the exiled Court at

Paris, and became mathematical tutor to Charles the Second, whose love

and regard for him seem to have been real to the end. But his post was

soon forfeited by the appearance of his "Leviathan" in 1651; he was

forbidden to approach the Court, and returned to England, where he

appears to have acquiesced in the rule of Cromwell.

[Sidenote: His political speculations.]

The Restoration brought Hobbes a pension; but both his works were

condemned by Parliament, and "Hobbism" became, ere he died, a popular

synonym for irreligion and immorality. Prejudice of this kind sounded

oddly in the case of a writer who had laid down, as the two things

necessary to salvation, faith in Christ and obedience to the law. But

the prejudice sprang from a true sense of the effect which the Hobbist

philosophy must necessarily have whether on the current religion or on

the current notions of political and social morality. Hobbes was the

first great English writer who dealt with the science of government from

the ground, not of tradition, but of reason. It was in his treatment of

man in the stage of human developement which he supposed to precede that

of society that he came most roughly into conflict with the accepted

beliefs. Men, in his theory, were by nature equal, and their only

natural relation was a state of war. It was no innate virtue of man

himself which created human society out of this chaos of warring

strengths. Hobbes in fact denied the existence of the more spiritual

sides of man's nature. His hard and narrow logic dissected every human

custom and desire, and reduced even the most sacred to demonstrations of

a prudent selfishness. Friendship was simply a sense of social utility

to one another. The so-called laws of nature, such as gratitude or the

love of our neighbour, were in fact contrary to the natural passions of

man, and powerless to restrain them. Nor had religion rescued man by

the interposition of a Divine will. Nothing better illustrates the

daring with which the new scepticism was to break through the

theological traditions of the older world than the pitiless logic with

which Hobbes assailed the very theory of revelation. "To say God hath

spoken to man in a dream, is no more than to say man dreamed that God

hath spoken to him." "To say one hath seen a vision, or heard a voice,

is to say he hath dreamed between sleeping and waking." Religion, in

fact, was nothing more than "the fear of invisible powers"; and here, as

in all other branches of human science, knowledge dealt with words and

not with things.

It was man himself who for his own profit created society, by laying

down certain of his natural rights and retaining only those of

self-preservation. A covenant between man and man originally created

"that great Leviathan called the Commonwealth or State, which is but an

artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural,

for whose protection and defence it was intended." The fiction of such

an "original contract" has long been dismissed from political

speculation, but its effect at the time of its first appearance was

immense. Its almost universal acceptance put an end to the religious and

patriarchal theories of society, on which kingship had till now founded

its claim of a Divine right to authority which no subject might

question. But if Hobbes destroyed the old ground of royal despotism, he

laid a new and a firmer one. To create a society at all, he held that

the whole body of the governed must have resigned all rights save that

of self-preservation into the hands of a single ruler, who was the

representative of all. Such a ruler was absolute, for to make terms with

him implied a man making terms with himself. The transfer of rights was

inalienable, and after generations were as much bound by it as the

generation which made the transfer. As the head of the whole body, the

ruler judged every question, settled the laws of civil justice or

injustice, or decided between religion and superstition. His was a

Divine Right, and the only Divine Right, because in him were absorbed

all the rights of each of his subjects. It was not in any constitutional

check that Hobbes looked for the prevention of tyranny, but in the

common education and enlightenment as to their real end and the best

mode of reaching it on the part of both subjects and Prince. And the

real end of both was the weal of the Commonwealth at large. It was in

laying boldly down this end of government, as well as in the basis of

contract on which he made government repose, that Hobbes really

influenced all later politics.

[Sidenote: Cromwell's consciousness of failure.]

That Cromwell discerned the strength of such currents of opinion as

those which we have described may fairly be doubted. But he saw that

Puritanism had missed its aim. He saw that the attempt to secure

spiritual results by material force had failed, as it always fails. It

had broken down before the indifference and resentment of the great mass

of the people, of men who were neither lawless nor enthusiasts, but who

clung to the older traditions of social order, and whose humour and good

sense revolted alike from the artificial conception of human life which

Puritanism had formed, and from its effort to force such a conception on

a people by law. It broke down too before the corruption of the Puritans

themselves. It was impossible to distinguish between the saint and the

hypocrite as soon as godliness became profitable. Ashley Cooper, a

sceptic in religion and a profligate in morals, was among "the loudest

bagpipes of the squeaking train." Even amongst the really earnest

Puritans prosperity disclosed a pride, a worldliness, a selfish hardness

which had been hidden in the hour of persecution. What was yet more

significant was the irreligious and sceptical temper of the younger

generation which had grown up amidst the storms of the Civil War. The

children even of the leading Puritans stood aloof from Puritanism. The

eldest of Cromwell's sons made small pretensions to religion. Milton's

nephews, though reared in his house, were writing satires against

Puritan hypocrisy and contributing to collections of filthy songs. The

two daughters of the great preacher, Stephen Marshall, were to figure as

actresses on the infamous stage of the Restoration. The tone of the

Protector's later speeches shows his consciousness that the ground was

slipping from under his feet. He no longer dwells on the dream of a

Puritan England, of a nation rising as a whole into a people of God. He

falls back on the phrases of his youth, and the saints become again a

"peculiar people," a remnant, a fragment among the nation at large.

[Sidenote: Dissolution of the Parliament.]

But with the consciousness of failure in realizing his ideal of

government the charm of government was gone; and now to the weariness of

power were added the weakness and feverish impatience of disease.

Vigorous and energetic as Cromwell's life had seemed, his health was by

no means as strong as his will; he had been struck down by intermittent

fever in the midst of his triumphs both in Scotland and in Ireland, and

during the past year he had suffered from repeated attacks of it. "I

have some infirmities upon me," he owned twice over in his speech at the

reopening of the Parliament in January 1658, after an adjournment of six

months; and his feverish irritability was quickened by the public

danger. No supplies had been voted, and the pay of the army was heavily

in arrear, while its temper grew more and more sullen at the appearance

of the new Constitution and the reawakening of the Royalist intrigues.

Cromwell had believed that his military successes would secure

compliance with his demands; but the temper of the Commons was even more

irritable than his own. Under the terms of the new Constitution the

members excluded in the preceding year took their places again in the

House; and it was soon clear that the Parliament reflected the general

mood of the nation. The tone of the Commons became captious and

quarrelsome. They still delayed the grant of supplies. Meanwhile a hasty

act of the Protector in giving to his nominees in "the other House," as

the new second chamber he had devised was called, the title of "Lords,"

kindled a strife between the two Houses which was busily fanned by

Haselrig and other opponents of the Government. It was contended that

the "other House" had under the new Constitution simply judicial and not

legislative powers. Such a contention struck at once at Cromwell's work

of restoring the old political forms of English life: and the

reappearance of Parliamentary strife threw him at last, says an observer

at his court, "into a rage and passion like unto madness." What gave

weight to it was the growing strength of the Royalist party, and its

hopes of a coming rising. Such a rising had in fact been carefully

prepared; and Charles with a large body of Spanish troops drew to the

coast of Flanders to take advantage of it. His hopes were above all

encouraged by the strife in the Commons, and their manifest dislike of

the system of the Protectorate. It was this that drove Cromwell to

action. Summoning his coach, by a sudden impulse, the Protector drove on

the fourth of February with a few guards to Westminster; and, setting

aside the remonstrances of Fleetwood, summoned the two Houses to his

presence. "I do dissolve this Parliament," he ended a speech of angry

rebuke, "and let God be judge between you and me."

[Sidenote: Death of Cromwell.]

Fatal as was the error, for the moment all went well. The army was

reconciled by the blow levelled at its opponents, and a few murmurers

who appeared in its ranks were weeded out by a careful remodelling. The

triumphant officers vowed to stand or fall with his Highness. The danger

of a Royalist rising vanished before a host of addresses from the

counties. Great news too came from abroad, where victory in Flanders,

and the cession of Dunkirk in June, set the seal on Cromwell's glory.

But the fever crept steadily on, and his looks told the tale of death to

the Quaker, Fox, who met him riding in Hampton Court Park. "Before I

came to him," he says, "as he rode at the head of his Life Guards, I saw

and felt a waft of death go forth against him, and when I came to him he

looked like a dead man." In the midst of his triumph Cromwell's heart

was heavy in fact with the sense of failure. He had no desire to play

the tyrant; nor had he any belief in the permanence of a mere tyranny.

He clung desperately to the hope of bringing over the country to his

side. He had hardly dissolved the Parliament before he was planning the

summons of another, and angry at the opposition which his Council

offered to the project. "I will take my own resolutions," he said

gloomily to his household; "I can no longer satisfy myself to sit still,

and make myself guilty of the loss of all the honest party and of the

nation itself." But before his plans could be realized the overtaxed

strength of the Protector suddenly gave way. Early in August 1658 his

sickness took a more serious form. He saw too clearly the chaos into

which his death would plunge England to be willing to die. "Do not think

I shall die," he burst out with feverish energy to the physicians who

gathered round him; "say not I have lost my reason! I tell you the

truth. I know it from better authority than any you can have from Galen

or Hippocrates. It is the answer of God Himself to our prayers!" Prayer

indeed rose from every side for his recovery, but death drew steadily

nearer, till even Cromwell felt that his hour was come. "I would be

willing to live," the dying man murmured, "to be further serviceable to

God and His people, but my work is done! Yet God will be with His

people!" A storm which tore roofs from houses, and levelled huge trees

in every forest, seemed a fitting prelude to the passing away of his

mighty spirit. Three days later, on the third of September, the day

which had witnessed his victories of Worcester and Dunbar, Cromwell

quietly breathed his last.

[Sidenote: Richard Cromwell, Protector.]

So absolute even in death was his sway over the minds of men, that, to

the wonder of the excited Royalists, even a doubtful nomination on his

death-bed was enough to secure the peaceful succession of his son,

Richard Cromwell. Many in fact who had rejected the authority of his

father submitted peaceably to the new Protector. Their motives were

explained by Baxter, the most eminent among the Presbyterian ministers,

in an address to Richard which announced his adhesion. "I observe," he

says, "that the nation generally rejoice in your peaceable entrance upon

the government. Many are persuaded that you have been strangely kept

from participating in any of our late bloody contentions, that God might

make you the healer of our breaches, and employ you in that Temple work

which David himself might not be honoured with, though it was in his

mind, because he shed blood abundantly and made great wars." The new

Protector was a weak and worthless man; but the bulk of the nation were

content to be ruled by one who was at any rate no soldier, no Puritan,

and no innovator. Richard was known to be lax and worldly in his

conduct, and he was believed to be conservative and even royalist in

heart. The tide of reaction was felt even in his Council. Their first

act was to throw aside one of the greatest of Cromwell's reforms, and to

fall back in the summons which they issued for a new Parliament on the

old system of election. It was felt far more keenly in the tone of the

new House of Commons when it met in January 1659. The republicans under

Vane, backed adroitly by the members who were secretly Royalist, fell

hotly on Cromwell's system. The fiercest attack of all came from Sir

Ashley Cooper, a Dorsetshire gentleman who had changed sides in the

Civil War, had fought for the King and then for the Parliament, had been

a member of Cromwell's Council, and had of late ceased to be a member of

it. His virulent invective on "his Highness of deplorable memory, who

with fraud and force deprived you of your liberty when living and

entailed slavery on you at his death," was followed by an equally

virulent invective against the army. "They have not only subdued their

enemies," said Cooper, "but the masters who raised and maintained them!

They have not only conquered Scotland and Ireland, but rebellious

England too; and there suppressed a Malignant party of magistrates and

laws."

[Sidenote: Divisions in the army.]

The army was quick with its reply. Already in the preceding November it

had shown its suspicion of the new government by demanding the

appointment of a soldier as General in the place of the new Protector,

who had assumed the command. The tone of the Council of Officers now

became so menacing that the Commons ordered the dismissal of all

officers who refused to engage "not to disturb or interrupt the free

meetings of Parliament." Richard ordered the Council of Officers to

dissolve. Their reply was a demand for the dissolution of the

Parliament; and with this demand, on the twenty-second of April, Richard

was forced to comply. The purpose of the army however was still to

secure a settled government; and setting aside the new Protector, whose

weakness was now evident, they resolved to come to a reconciliation with

the republican party, and to recall the fragment of the Commons whom

they had expelled from St. Stephen's in 1653. The arrangement was

quickly brought about; and in May, of the one hundred and sixty members

who had continued to sit after the king's death, about ninety returned

to their seats and resumed the administration of affairs. The continued

exclusion of the members who had been "purged" from the House in 1648

proved that no real intention existed of restoring a legal rule; and the

soldiers trusted that the Rump whom they had restored to power would be

bound to them by the growing danger both to republicanism and to

religious liberty. But not even their passion for these "causes" could

make men endure the rule of the sword. The House was soon at strife with

the soldiers. In spite of Vane's counsels, it proposed a reform of the

officers, and though a Royalist rising in Cheshire during August threw

the disputants for a moment together, the struggle revived as the danger

passed away. A new hope indeed filled men's minds. Not only was the

nation sick of military rule, but the army, unconquerable so long as it

held together, at last showed signs of division. In Ireland and Scotland

the troops protested against the attitude of their English comrades; and

Monk, the commander of the Scottish army, threatened to march on London

and free the Parliament from their pressure. The knowledge of these

divisions encouraged Haselrig and his coadjutors in the Commons to

demand the dismissal of Fleetwood and Lambert from their commands. They

answered in October by driving the Parliament again from Westminster,

and by marching under Lambert to the north to meet the army under Monk.

[Sidenote: Return of Charles.]

Lambert however suffered himself to be lured into inaction by

negotiations, while Monk gathered a Convention at Edinburgh, and

strengthened himself with money and recruits. His attitude was enough to

rouse England to action. Portsmouth closed its gates against the

delegates of the soldiers. The fleet declared against them. So rapidly

did the tide of feeling rise throughout the country that the army at the

close of December was driven to undo their work by recalling the Rump.

But the concession only aided the force of resistance by showing the

weakness of the tyranny which England was resolute to throw off.

Lambert's men fell from him, and finding his path clear, Monk, without

revealing his purport, advanced rapidly to Coldstream, and crossed the

Border in the first days of 1660. His action broke the spell of terror

which had weighed upon the country. The cry of "A free Parliament" ran

like fire through the country. Not only Fairfax, who appeared in arms in

Yorkshire, but the ships on the Thames and the mob which thronged the

streets of London caught up the cry. Still steadily advancing, but

lavishing protestations of loyalty to the Rump while he accepted

petitions for a "Free Parliament," Monk on the third of February entered

unopposed. From the moment of his entry the restoration of the Stuarts

became inevitable. The army, resolute as it still remained for the

maintenance of "the cause," was deceived by Monk's declarations of

loyalty to it, and rendered powerless by his adroit dispersion of the

troops over the country. At the instigation of Ashley Cooper, those who

remained of the members who had been excluded from the House of Commons

in 1648 again forced their way into Parliament, and at once resolved on

a dissolution and the election of a new House of Commons. The

dissolution in March was followed by a last struggle of the army for its

old supremacy. Lambert escaped from the Tower and called his

fellow-soldiers to arms; but he was hotly pursued, overtaken, and routed

near Daventry; and on the twenty-fifth of April the new House, which

bears the name of the Convention, assembled at Westminster. It had

hardly taken the Solemn League and Covenant which showed its

Presbyterian temper, and its leaders had only begun to draw up terms on

which the king's restoration might be assented to, when they found that

Monk was in negotiation with the exiled Court. All exaction of terms was

now impossible; a Declaration from Breda, in which Charles promised a

general pardon, religious toleration, and satisfaction to the army, was

received with a burst of national enthusiasm; and the old Constitution

was restored by a solemn vote of the Convention, "that according to the

ancient and fundamental laws of this Kingdom, the government is, and

ought to be, by King, Lords, and Commons." The king was at once invited

to hasten to his realm; and on the twenty-fifth of May Charles landed at

Dover, and made his way amidst the shouts of a great multitude to

Whitehall. "It is my own fault," laughed the new king with

characteristic irony, "that I had not come back sooner; for I find

nobody who does not tell me he has always longed for my return."

[Sidenote: Fall of Puritanism.]

In his progress to the capital Charles passed in review the soldiers

assembled on Blackheath. Betrayed by their general, abandoned by their

leaders, surrounded as they were by a nation in arms, the gloomy silence

of their ranks awed even the careless king with a sense of danger. But

none of the victories of the New Model were so glorious as the victory

which it won over itself. Quietly, and without a struggle, as men who

bowed to the inscrutable will of God, the farmers and traders who had

dashed Rupert's chivalry to pieces on Naseby field, who had scattered at

Worcester the "army of the aliens," and driven into helpless flight the

sovereign that now came "to enjoy his own again," who had renewed beyond

sea the glories of Crécy and Agincourt, had mastered the Parliament, had

brought a king to justice and the block, had given laws to England, and

held even Cromwell in awe, became farmers and traders again, and were

known among their fellow-men by no other sign than their greater

soberness and industry. And, with them, Puritanism laid down the sword.

It ceased from the long attempt to build up a kingdom of God by force

and violence, and fell back on its truer work of building up a kingdom

of righteousness in the hearts and consciences of men. It was from the

moment of its seeming fall that its real victory began. As soon as the

wild orgy of the Restoration was over, men began to see that nothing

that was really worthy in the work of Puritanism had been undone. The

revels of Whitehall, the scepticism and debauchery of courtiers, the

corruption of statesmen, left the mass of Englishmen what Puritanism had

made them, serious, earnest, sober in life and conduct, firm in their

love of Protestantism and of freedom. In the Revolution of 1688

Puritanism did the work of civil liberty which it had failed to do in

that of 1642. It wrought out through Wesley and the revival of the

eighteenth century the work of religious reform which its earlier

efforts had only thrown back for a hundred years. Slowly but steadily it

introduced its own seriousness and purity into English society, English

literature, English politics. The history of English progress since the

Restoration, on its moral and spiritual sides, has been the history of

Puritanism.

BOOK VIII

THE REVOLUTION

1660-1760

AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK VIII

The social change of the Restoration is illustrated by the picture of

court life in Anthony Hamilton's "Memoirs of the Count de Grammont," by

the memoirs of Reresby, Pepys, and Evelyn, and the dramatic works of

Wycherly and Etherege. For the general character of its comedy see Lord

Macaulay's "Essay on the Dramatists of the Restoration." The histories

of the Royal Society by Thompson or Wade, with Sir D. Brewster's

"Biography of Newton," preserve the earlier annals of English Science,

which are condensed by Hallam in his "Literary History" (vol. iv.).

Clarendon gives a detailed account of his own ministry in his "Life,"

which forms a continuation of his "History of the Rebellion." The

relations of the Church and the Dissenters during this period may be

seen in Neal's "History of the Puritans," Calamy's "Memoirs of the

Ejected Ministers," Mr. Dixon's "Life of Penn," Baxter's

"Autobiography," and Bunyan's account of his sufferings in his various

works. For the political story of the period as a whole our best

authorities are Bishop Kennet's "Register," and Burnet's lively "History

of my own Times." The memoirs of Sir W. Temple, with his correspondence,

are of great value up to their close in 1679. Mr. Christie's "Life of

Shaftesbury" is a defence, and in some ways a successful defence, of

that statesman's career and of the Whig policy at this time, which may

be studied also in Earl Russell's life of his ancestor, William, Lord

Russell. To these we may add the fragments of James the Second's

autobiography preserved in Macpherson's "Original Papers" (of very

various degrees of value), the "Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland" by

Dalrymple, the first to discover the real secret of the negotiations

with France, M. Mignet's "Négociations relatives à la Succession

d'Espagne," a work indispensable for a knowledge of foreign affairs

during this period, Welwood's "Memoirs," and Luttrell's "Diary."

Throughout the whole reign of Charles the Second Hallam's

"Constitutional History" is singularly judicious and full in its

information. Lingard becomes of importance during this period from the

original materials to which he has had access, as well as from his clear

and dispassionate statement of the Catholic side of the question. Ranke

in his "History of the Seventeenth Century" has thrown great light on

the diplomatic history of the later Stuart reigns: on internal and

constitutional points he is cool and dispassionate but of less value.

The great work of Lord Macaulay, which practically ends at the Peace of

Ryswick, is continued by Lord Stanhope in his "History of England under

Queen Anne," and his "History of England from the Peace of Utrecht." For

Marlborough the main authority must be the Duke's biography by

Archdeacon Coxe with his "Despatches." The character of the Tory

opposition may be studied in Swift's Journal to Stella and his political

tracts, as well as in Bolingbroke's correspondence. The French side of

the war and negotiations has been given by M. Henri Martin ("Histoire de

France") in what is the most accurate and judicious portion of his work.

For the earlier period of the Georges Coxe's "Life of Sir Robert

Walpole," Horace Walpole's "Memoirs of the Reign of George the Second,"

and Lord Hervey's amusing "Memoirs from the Accession of George the

Second to the Death of Queen Caroline," give the main materials on the

one side; Bolingbroke's "Patriot King," his "Letter to Sir W. Wyndham,"

and his correspondence afford some insight into the other. Horace

Walpole's "Letters to Sir Horace Mann" give a minute account of his

father's fall.

For the elder Pitt we have the Chatham Correspondence, a life by

Thackeray, and two brilliant Essays by Lord Macaulay. Another of Lord

Macaulay's Essays may be used with Sir John Malcolm's biography for the

life of Lord Clive and the early history of British India, a fuller

account of which may of course be found in general histories of India,

such as that by James Mill. Carlyle's Frederick the Great contains a

picturesque recital of the Seven Years War, and of England's share in

it; while the earlier relations of England and Frederick may be studied

more coolly and thoroughly in Ranke's "Nine Books of Prussian History,"

published in an English version under the name of his "History of

Prussia." The earlier part of the "Annual Register," which begins in

1758, has been attributed to Burke. Southey's biography, or the more

elaborate life by Tyerman, gives an account of Wesley and the movement

he headed.

CHAPTER I

THE RESTORATION

1660-1667

[Sidenote: The New England.]

The entry of Charles the Second into Whitehall marked a deep and lasting

change in the temper of the English people. With it modern England

began. The influences which had up to this time moulded our history, the

theological influence of the Reformation, the monarchical influence of

the new kingship, the feudal influence of the Middle Ages, the yet

earlier influence of tradition and custom, suddenly lost power over the

minds of men. From the moment of the Restoration we find ourselves all

at once among the great currents of thought and activity which have gone

on widening and deepening from that time to this. The England around us

becomes our own England, an England whose chief forces are industry and

science, the love of popular freedom and of law, an England which

presses steadily forward to a larger social justice and equality, and

which tends more and more to bring every custom and tradition,

religious, intellectual, and political, to the test of pure reason.

Between modern thought, on some at least of its more important sides,

and the thought of men before the Restoration there is a great gulf

fixed. A political thinker in the present day would find it equally hard

to discuss any point of statesmanship with Lord Burleigh or with Oliver

Cromwell. He would find no point of contact between their ideas of

national life or national welfare, their conception of government or the

ends of government, their mode of regarding economical and social

questions, and his own. But no gulf of this sort parts us from the men

who followed the Restoration. From that time to this, whatever

differences there may have been as to the practical conclusions drawn

from them, there has been a substantial agreement as to the grounds of

our political, our social, our intellectual, and religious life. Paley

would have found no difficulty in understanding Tillotson. Newton and

Sir Humphry Davy could have talked together without a sense of

severance. There would have been nothing to hinder a perfectly clear

discussion on government or law between John Locke and Jeremy Bentham.

[Sidenote: The Social Revolt.]

The change from the old England to the new is so startling that we are

apt to look on it as a more sudden change than it really was; and the

outer aspect of the Restoration does much to strengthen this impression

of suddenness. The whole face of England was changed in an instant. All

that was noblest and best in Puritanism was whirled away with its

pettiness and its tyranny in the current of the nation's hate. Religion

had been turned into a system of political and social oppression, and it

fell with that system's fall. Godliness became a byword of scorn;

sobriety in dress, in speech, in manners was flouted as a mark of the

detested Puritanism. Butler in his "Hudibras" poured insult on the past

with a pedantic buffoonery for which the general hatred, far more than

its humour, secured a hearing. Archbishop Sheldon listened to the mock

sermon of a Cavalier who held up the Puritan phrase and the Puritan

twang to ridicule in his hall at Lambeth. Duelling and raking became the

marks of a fine gentleman; and grave divines winked at the follies of

"honest fellows" who fought, gambled, swore, drank, and ended a day of

debauchery by a night in the gutter. Life among men of fashion vibrated

between frivolity and excess. One of the comedies of the time tells the

courtier that "he must dress well, dance well, fence well, have a talent

for love-letters, an agreeable voice, be amorous and discreet--but not

too constant." To graces such as these the rakes of the Restoration

added a shamelessness and a brutality which passes belief. Lord

Rochester was a fashionable poet, and the titles of some of his poems

are such as no pen of our day could copy. Sir Charles Sedley was a

fashionable wit, and the foulness of his words made even the porters of

Covent Garden pelt him from the balcony when he ventured to address

them. The Duke of Buckingham is a fair type of the time, and the most

characteristic event in the Duke's life was a duel in which he

consummated his seduction of Lady Shrewsbury by killing her husband,

while the Countess in disguise as a page held his horse for him and

looked on at the murder.

[Sidenote: The Comedy of the Restoration.]

Vicious as the stage was when it opened its doors again on the fall of

the Commonwealth it only reflected the general vice of the day. The

Comedy of the Restoration borrowed everything from the contemporary

Comedy of France save the poetry, the delicacy, and good taste which

there veiled its grossness. Seduction, intrigue, brutality, cynicism,

debauchery, found fitting expression on the English stage in dialogue of

a studied and deliberate foulness, which even its wit fails to redeem

from disgust. Wycherly, the popular playwright of the time, remains the

most brutal among all dramatists; and nothing gives so damning an

impression of his day as the fact that he found actors to repeat his

words and audiences to applaud them. Men such as Wycherly gave Milton

models for the Belial of his great poem, "than whom a spirit more lewd

fell not from heaven, or more gross to love vice for itself." The

dramatist piques himself on the frankness and "plain dealing" which

painted the world as he saw it, a world of brawls and assignations, of

orgies at Vauxhall and fights with the watch, of lies and

_doubles-ententes_, of knaves and dupes, of men who sold their

daughters, and women who cheated their husbands. But the cynicism of

Wycherly was no greater than that of the men about him; and in mere love

of what was vile, in contempt of virtue and disbelief in purity or

honesty, the king himself stood ahead of any of his subjects.

[Sidenote: The New Rationalism.]

It is easy however to exaggerate the extent of this reaction. So far as

we can judge from the memoirs of the time its more violent forms were

practically confined to the capital and the court. The mass of

Englishmen were satisfied with getting back their Maypoles and

mince-pies; and a large part of the people remained Puritan in life and

belief though they threw aside many of the outer characteristics of

Puritanism. Nor was the revolution in feeling as sudden as it seemed.

Even if the political strength of Puritanism had remained unbroken its

social influence must soon have ceased. The young Englishmen who grew up

in the midst of civil war knew nothing of the bitter tyranny which gave

its zeal and fire to the religion of their fathers. From the social and

religious anarchy around them, from the endless controversies and

discussions of the time, they drank in the spirit of scepticism, of

doubt, of free inquiry. If religious enthusiasm had broken the spell of

ecclesiastical tradition its own extravagance broke the spell of

religious enthusiasm; and the new generation turned in disgust to try

forms of political government and spiritual belief by the cooler and

less fallible test of reason.

It is this rationalizing tendency of the popular mind, this indifference

to the traditions and ideals of the past, this practical and

experimental temper, which found its highest expression in the sudden

popularity of the pursuit of physical science. Of the two little

companies of inquirers whom we have already noticed as gathering at the

close of the Civil War, that which remained in the capital and had at

last been broken up by the troubles of the Second Protectorate was

revived at the Restoration by the return to London of the more eminent

members of the group which had assembled at Oxford. But the little

company of philosophers had hardly begun their meetings at Gresham

College when they found themselves objects of a general interest.

Science suddenly became the fashion of the day. Charles the Second was

himself a fair chymist, and took a keen interest in the problems of

navigation. The Duke of Buckingham varied his freaks of rhyming,

drinking, and fiddling by fits of devotion to his laboratory. Poets like

Dryden and Cowley, courtiers like Sir Robert Murray and Sir Kenelm

Digby, joined the scientific company to which in token of his sympathy

with it the king gave the title of "The Royal Society." The curious

glass toys called Prince Rupert's drops recall the scientific inquiries

which amused the old age of the great cavalry-leader of the Civil War.

Wits and fops crowded to the meetings of the new Society. Statesmen like

Lord Somers felt honoured at being chosen its presidents.

[Sidenote: English Science.]

The definite establishment of the Royal Society in 1662 marks the

opening of a great age of scientific discovery in England. Almost every

year of the half-century which followed saw some step made to a wider

and truer knowledge of physical fact. Our first national observatory

rose at Greenwich, and modern astronomy began with the long series of

observations which immortalized the name of Flamsteed. His successor,

Halley, undertook the investigation of the tides, of comets, and of

terrestrial magnetism. Hooke improved the microscope and gave a fresh

impulse to microscopical research. Boyle made the air-pump a means of

advancing the science of pneumatics, and became the founder of

experimental chymistry. Wilkins pointed forward to the science of

philology in his scheme of a universal language. Sydenham introduced a

careful observation of nature and facts which changed the whole face of

medicine. The physiological researches of Willis first threw light upon

the structure of the brain. Woodward was the founder of mineralogy. In

his edition of Willoughby's "Ornithology," and in his own "History of

Fishes," John Ray was the first to raise zoology to the rank of a

science; and the first scientific classification of animals was

attempted in his "Synopsis of Quadrupeds." Modern botany began with

Ray's "History of Plants," and the researches of an Oxford professor,

Robert Morrison; while Grew divided with Malpighi the credit of founding

the study of vegetable physiology.

But great as some of these names undoubtedly are they are lost in the

lustre of Isaac Newton. Newton was born at Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire

on Christmas Day, 1642, the memorable year which saw the outbreak of the

Civil War. In the year of the Restoration he entered Cambridge, where

the teaching of Isaac Barrow quickened his genius for mathematics, and

where the method of Descartes had superseded the older modes of study.

From the close of his Cambridge career his life became a series of great

physical discoveries. At twenty-three he facilitated the calculation of

planetary movements by his theory of Fluxions. The optical discoveries

to which he was led by his experiments with the prism, and which he

partly disclosed in the lectures which he delivered as Mathematical

Professor at Cambridge, were embodied in the theory of light which he

laid before the Royal Society on becoming a Fellow of it. His discovery

of the law of gravitation had been made as early as 1666; but the

erroneous estimate which was then generally received of the earth's

diameter prevented him from disclosing it for sixteen years; and it was

not till 1687, on the eve of the Revolution, that the "Principia"

revealed to the world his new theory of the Universe.

[Sidenote: The Latitudinarian Theology.]

It is impossible to do more than indicate in such a summary as we have

given the wonderful activity of directly scientific thought which

distinguished the age of the Restoration. But the sceptical and

experimental temper of mind which this activity disclosed was telling at

the same time upon every phase of the world around it. We see the

attempt to bring religious speculation into harmony with the conclusions

of reason and experience in the school of Latitudinarian theologians

which sprang from the group of thinkers that gathered on the eve of the

Civil War round Lord Falkland at Great Tew. With the Restoration the

Latitudinarians came at once to the front. They were soon distinguished

from both Puritans and High Churchmen by their opposition to dogma, by

their preference of reason to tradition whether of the Bible or the

Church, by their basing religion on a natural theology, by their aiming

at rightness of life rather than at correctness of opinion, by their

advocacy of toleration and comprehension as the grounds of Christian

unity. Chillingworth and Taylor found successors in the restless good

sense of Burnet, the enlightened piety of Tillotson, and the calm

philosophy of Bishop Butler. From this moment indeed the work of English

theologians turned from the bold assertion of the supremacy of revealed

truth over natural reason to a more cautious assertion of the essential

harmony of the one with the other. Boyle varied his philosophical

experiments by demonstrations of the unity of dogmatic and natural

religion. So moderate and philosophical was the temper displayed by

Cudworth in his "Intellectual System of the Universe," that the bigots

of his day charged him with the atheistic principles which he was

endeavouring to refute. But the change of tone in the theologians of the

Reformation was itself an indication of the new difficulties which

theology had to meet. The bold scepticism of Hobbes was adopted by

courtiers and politicians. Charles himself was divided between

superstition and Hobbism. Shaftesbury was a Deist. The bulk of the

leading statesmen of the time looked on religious questions in a purely

political light.

[Sidenote: Political Philosophy.]

The impulse which was carrying religious speculation into regions

hitherto strange to it told equally on political and social inquiry. The

researches of Sir Josiah Child, and still more of Sir William Petty, not

only threw light on the actual state of English trade but pointed

forward to the future science of Political Economy. For the moment

however philosophical speculation on the nature of government eclipsed

the interest of statistical research. Though the Restoration brought

Hobbes a pension his two great works were condemned by Parliament, and

Hobbism became ere he died a popular synonym for political as well as

religious immorality. But in spite of the bitter resistance offered to

it his assertion of a rational method of political inquiry superseded

more and more the older doctrines of a religious and traditional polity.

After Clarendon no English statesman really believed in any divine right

of the sovereign he served; and Charles himself probably believed it

still less than his ministers. The fiction of a contract between

governor and governed, on which Hobbes built up his theory of a state,

passed silently into general acceptance. John Locke, the foremost

political thinker of the Restoration, derived political authority like

Hobbes from the consent of the governed, and adopted the common weal as

the end of government. But the practical temper of the time moulded the

new theory into a form which contrasted strangely with that given to it

by its first inventor. The political philosophy of Locke indeed was

little more than a formal statement of the conclusions which the bulk of

Englishmen had drawn from the great struggle of the Civil War. In his

theory the people remain passively in possession of the power which they

have delegated to the Prince, and have the right to withdraw it if it

be used for purposes inconsistent with the end which society was formed

to promote. To the origin of all power in the people, and the end of all

power for the people's good--the two great doctrines of Hobbes--Locke

added the right of resistance, the responsibility of princes to their

subjects for a due execution of their trust, and the supremacy of

legislative assemblies as expressing the voice of the people itself.

It was in this modified and enlarged form that the new political

philosophy found general acceptance after the Revolution of 1688. But

powerful as was its influence in the thirty years which separated that

event from the Restoration it remained during that period an influence

which told but slowly on the people at large. It is indeed this

severance for the time between the thinking classes and the general bulk

of the nation which makes its history so difficult and perplexing. While

sceptics and divines were drifting to questions which involved the very

being of religion itself the mass of Englishmen were still without a

doubt, and dead to every religious struggle save the old struggle of

Protestantism with the Pope. While statesmen and philosophers were

smiling at Sir Robert Firmer and his "Patriarchal Theory of Government,"

the people remained blind to any notion of an original contract, and

every pulpit resounded with the doctrine of a divine right of kings. It

was only by slow steps, and above all by the practical stress of events,

that England was driven forward to religious toleration or to the

establishment of parliamentary government in the place of monarchy.

[Sidenote: The Period of Transition.]

Slowly and gradually however it was driven forward to both. Even at the

outset of the Restoration the temper of England had in fact drifted far

from the past to which it thought to return. The work of the Long

Parliament indeed seemed to be undone when Charles entered Whitehall.

Not only was the Monarchy restored but it was restored without

restriction or condition; and of the two great influences which had

hitherto served as checks on its power, the first, that of Puritanism,

had become hateful to the nation at large, while the second, the

tradition of constitutional liberty, was discredited by the issue of the

Civil War. But, wild as was the tumult of demonstrative loyalty, not one

of the great steps towards constitutional freedom which had been gained

by the patriots of 1641 was really lost. The prerogatives for which

Charles the First had struggled were quietly relinquished by his son.

The very Cavaliers who had welcomed the king to "his own again" never

dreamt of restoring the system of government which their opponents had

overthrown. Twenty years of parliamentary rule, however broken and mixed

with political and religious tyranny, had made the return to ship-money

or monopolies or the Star Chamber impossible. Men had become so

accustomed to freedom that they forgot how recent a thing its

unquestioned existence was. From the first therefore the great

"revolution of the seventeenth century," as it has been called, went

steadily on. The supreme power was gradually transferred from the Crown

to the House of Commons. Step by step Parliament drew nearer to a

solution of the political problem which had so long foiled its efforts,

the problem how to make its will the law of administrative action

without itself undertaking the task of administration. It is only by

carefully fixing our eyes on this transfer of power, and by noting the

successive steps towards its realization, that we can understand the

complex history of the Restoration and the Revolution.

[Sidenote: Charles the Second.]

Changed to the very core, yet hardly conscious of the change, drifting

indeed steadily towards a wider knowledge and a firmer freedom, but

still a mere medley of Puritan morality and social revolt, of

traditional loyalty and political scepticism, of bigotry and free

inquiry, of science and Popish plots, the England of the Restoration was

reflected in its king. What his subjects saw in Charles the Second was a

pleasant, brown-faced gentleman playing with his spaniels, or drawing

caricatures of his ministers, or flinging cakes to the water-fowl in

the park. To all outer seeming Charles was the most consummate of

idlers. "He delighted," says one of his courtiers, "in a bewitching kind

of pleasure called sauntering." The business-like Pepys discovered, as

he brought his work to the Council-board, that "the king do mind nothing

but pleasures, and hates the very sight or thoughts of business." That

Charles had great natural parts no one doubted. In his earlier days of

defeat and danger he showed a cool courage and presence of mind which

never failed him in the many perilous moments of his reign. His temper

was pleasant and social, his manners perfect, and there was a careless

freedom and courtesy in his address which won over everybody who came

into his presence. His education indeed had been so grossly neglected

that he could hardly read a plain Latin book; but his natural quickness

and intelligence showed itself in his pursuit of chymistry and anatomy,

and in the interest he showed in the scientific inquiries of the Royal

Society. Like Peter the Great his favourite study was that of naval

architecture, and he piqued himself on being a clever shipbuilder. He

had some little love too for art and poetry, and a taste for music. But

his shrewdness and vivacity showed themselves most in his endless talk.

He was fond of telling stories, and he told them with a good deal of

grace and humour. He held his own fairly with the wits of his Court, and

bandied repartees on equal terms with Sedley or Buckingham. Even

Rochester in his merciless epigram was forced to own that Charles "never

said a foolish thing." He had inherited in fact his grandfather's gift

of pithy sayings, and his habitual irony often gave an amusing turn to

them. When his brother, the most unpopular man in England, solemnly

warned him of plots against his life, Charles laughingly bade him set

all fear aside. "They will never kill me, James," he said, "to make you

king."