for a little period, into some of the dissipations of youth; but if so,
speedily repents, abandons all this: not much above twenty, he is
married, settled as an altogether grave and quiet man. "He pays-back
what money he had won at gambling," says the story;--he does not think
any gain of that kind could be really _his_. It is very interesting,
very natural, this "conversion," as they well name it; this awakening of
a great true soul from the worldly slough, to see into the awful _truth_
of things;--to see that Time and its shows all rested on Eternity, and
this poor Earth of ours was the threshold either of Heaven or of Hell!
Oliver's life at St. Ives and Ely, as a sober industrious Farmer, is it
not altogether as that of a true and devout man? He has renounced the
world and its ways: _its_ prizes are not the thing that can enrich him.
He tills the earth; he reads his Bible; daily assembles his servants
round him to worship God. He comforts persecuted ministers, is fond of
preachers; nay, can himself preach,--exhorts his neighbors to be wise,
to redeem the time. In all this what "hypocrisy," "ambition," "cant," or
other falsity? The man's hopes, I do believe, were fixed on the other
Higher World; his aim to get well _thither_ by walking well through his
humble course in _this_ world. He courts no notice: what could notice
here do for him? "Ever in his great Taskmaster's eye."
It is striking, too, how he comes-out into public view; he, since no
other is willing to come: in resistance to a public grievance. I mean,
in that matter of the Bedford Fens. No one else will go to law with
Authority; therefore he will. That matter once settled, he returns back
into obscurity, to his Bible and his Plough. "Gain influence?" His
influence is the most legitimate; derived from personal knowledge of
him, as a just, religious, reasonable, and determined man. In this way
he has lived till past forty; old age is now in view of him, and the
earnest portal of Death and Eternity; it was at this point that he
suddenly became "ambitious"! I do not interpret his Parliamentary
mission in that way!
His successes in Parliament, his successes through the war, are honest
successes of a brave man; who has more resolution in the heart of him,
more light in the head of him, than other men. His prayers to God; his
spoken thanks to the God of Victory, who had preserved him safe, and
carried him forward so far, through the furious clash of a world all set
in conflict, through desperate-looking envelopments at Dunbar; through
the death-hail of so many battles; mercy after mercy; to the "crowning
mercy" of Worcester fight: all this is good and genuine for a
deep-hearted Calvinistic Cromwell. Only to vain unbelieving Cavaliers,
worshipping not God but their own "lovelocks," frivolities, and
formalities, living quite apart from contemplations of God, living
_without_ God in the world, need it seem hypocritical.
Nor will his participation in the King's death involve him in
condemnation with us. It is a stern business killing of a King! But if
you once go to war with him, it lies _there_; this and all else lie
there. Once at war, you have made wager of battle with him: it is he to
die, or else you. Reconciliation is problematic; may be possible, or,
far more likely, is impossible.
It is now pretty generally admitted that the Parliament, having
vanquished Charles First, had no way of making any tenable arrangement
with him. The large Presbyterian party, apprehensive now of the
Independents, were most anxious to do so; anxious indeed as for their
own existence; but it could not be. The unhappy Charles, in those final
Hampton-Court negotiations, shows himself as a man fatally incapable of
being dealt with. A man who, once for all, could not and would not
_understand_:--whose thought did not in any measure represent to him the
real fact of the matter; nay worse, whose _word_ did not at all
represent his thought. We may say this of him without cruelty, with deep
pity rather: but it is true and undeniable. Forsaken there of all but
the _name_ of Kingship, he still, finding himself treated with outward
respect as a King, fancied that he might play-off party against party,
and smuggle himself into his old power by deceiving both. Alas, they
both _discovered_ that he was deceiving them. A man whose _word_ will
not inform you at all what he means or will do, is not a man you can
bargain with. You must get out of that man's way, or put him out of
yours! The Presbyterians, in their despair, were still for believing
Charles, though found false, unbelievable again and again. Not so
Cromwell: "For all our fighting," says he, "we are to have a little bit
of paper?" No!--
In fact, everywhere we have to note the decisive practical _eye_ of this
man; how he drives toward the practical and practicable; has a genuine
insight into what _is_ fact. Such an intellect, I maintain, does not
belong to a false man: the false man sees false shows, plausibilities,
expediences: the true man is needed to discern even practical truth.
Cromwell's advice about the Parliament's Army, early in the contest, How
they were to dismiss their city-tapsters, flimsy riotous persons, and
choose substantial yeomen, whose heart was in the work, to be soldiers
for them: this is advice by a man who _saw_. Fact answers, if you see
into Fact! Cromwell's _Ironsides_ were the embodiment of this insight of
his; men fearing God; and without any other fear. No more conclusively
genuine set of fighters ever trod the soil of England, or of any other
land.
Neither will we blame greatly that word of Cromwell's to them; which was
so blamed: "If the King should meet me in battle, I would kill the
King." Why not? These words were spoken to men who stood as before a
Higher than Kings. They had set more than their own lives on the cast.
The Parliament may call it, in official language, a fighting "_for_ the
King;" but we, for our share, cannot understand that. To us it is no
dilettante work, no sleek officiality; it is sheer rough death and
earnest. They have brought it to the calling forth of _War_; horrid
internecine fight, man grappling with man in fire-eyed rage--the
_infernal_ element in man called forth, to try it by that! _Do_ that
therefore; since that is the thing to be done.--The successes of
Cromwell seem to me a very natural thing! Since he was not shot in
battle, they were an inevitable thing. That such a man, with the eye to
see, with the heart to dare, should advance, from post to post, from
victory to victory, till the Huntingdon farmer became, by whatever name
you might call him, the acknowledged Strongest Man in England, virtually
the King of England, requires no magic to explain it!--
Precisely here, however, lies the rub for Cromwell. His other
proceedings have all found advocates, and stand generally justified; but
this dismissal of the Rump Parliament and assumption of the
Protectorship, is what no one can pardon him. He had fairly grown to be
King in England; Chief Man of the victorious party in England: but it
seems he could not do without the King's Cloak, and sold himself to
perdition in order to get it. Let us see a little how this was.
England, Scotland, Ireland, all lying now subdued at the feet of the
Puritan Parliament, the practical question arose, What was to be done
with it? How will you govern these Nations, which Providence in a
wondrous way has given-up to your disposal? Clearly those hundred
surviving members of the Long Parliament, who sit there as supreme
authority, cannot continue forever to sit. What is to be done?--It was a
question which theoretical constitution-builders may find easy to
answer; but to Cromwell, looking there into the real practical facts of
it, there could be none more complicated. He asked of the Parliament,
What it was they would decide upon? It was for the Parliament to say.
Yet the Soldiers too, however contrary to Formula, they who had
purchased this victory with their blood, it seemed to them that they
also should have something to say in it! We will not "For all our
fighting have nothing but a little piece of paper." We understand that
the Law of God's Gospel, to which He through us has given the victory,
shall establish itself, or try to establish itself, in this land!
For three years, Cromwell says, this question had been sounded in the
ears of the Parliament. They could make no answer; nothing but talk,
talk. Perhaps it lies in the nature of parliamentary bodies; perhaps no
Parliament could in such case make any answer but even that of talk,
talk! Nevertheless the question must and shall be answered. You sixty
men there, becoming fast odious, even despicable, to the whole nation,
whom the nation already calls "Rump" Parliament, _you_ cannot continue
to sit there; who or what, then, is to follow? "Free Parliament," right
of election, constitutional formulas of one sort or the other--the thing
is a hungry fact coming on us, which we must answer or be devoured by
it! And who are you that prate of constitutional formulas, rights of
Parliament? You have had to kill your king, to make pride's purges, to
expel and banish by the law of the stronger whosoever would not let your
cause prosper: there are but fifty or threescore of you left there,
debating in these days. Tell us what we shall do; not in the way of
formula, but of practicable fact!
How they did finally answer, remains obscure to this day. The diligent
Godwin himself admits that he cannot make it out. The likeliest is, that
this poor Parliament still would not, and indeed could not, dissolve and
disperse; that when it came to the point of actually dispersing, they
again, for the tenth or twentieth time, adjourned it--and Cromwell's
patience failed him. But we will take the favorablest hypothesis ever
started for the Parliament; the favorablest, though I believe it is not
the true one, but too favorable.
According to this version: At the uttermost crisis, when Cromwell and
his officers were met on the one hand, and the fifty or sixty Rump
Members on the other, it was suddenly told Cromwell that the Rump in its
despair _was_ answering in a very singular way; that in their splenetic,
envious despair, to keep-out the Army at least, these men were hurrying
through the House a kind of Reform Bill--Parliament to be chosen by the
whole of England; equable electoral division into districts; free
suffrage, and the rest of it! A very questionable, or indeed for _them_
an unquestionable, thing. Reform Bill, free suffrage of Englishmen? Why,
the Royalists, themselves, silenced indeed but not exterminated, perhaps
out_number_ us; the great numerical majority of England was always
indifferent to our cause, merely looked at it and submitted to it. It is
in weight and force, not by counting of heads, that we are the majority!
And now with your Formulas and Reform Bills, the whole matter sorely won
by our swords, shall again launch itself to sea; become a mere hope, and
likelihood, _small_ even as a likelihood? And it is not a likelihood; it
is a certainty, which we have won, by God's strength and our own right
hands, and do now hold _here_. Cromwell walked down to these refractory
Members; interrupted them in that rapid speed of their Reform
Bill;--ordered them to begone, and talk there no more.--Can we not
forgive him? Can we not understand him? John Milton, who looked on it
all near at hand, could applaud him. The Reality had swept the Formulas
away before it. I fancy, most men who were realities in England might
see into the necessity of that.
The strong daring man, therefore, has set all manner of Formulas and
logical superficialities against him; has dared appeal to the genuine
Fact of this England, Whether it will support him or not? It is curious
to see how he struggles to govern in some constitutional way; find some
Parliament to support him; but cannot. His first Parliament, the one
they call "Barebones' Parliament," is, so to speak, a _Convocation of
the Notables_. From all quarters of England the leading Ministers and
chief Puritan Officials nominate the men most distinguished by religious
reputation, influence, and attachment to the true cause: these are
assembled to shape-out a plan. They sanctioned what was past; shaped as
they could what was to come. They were scornfully called _Barebones'
Parliament_, the man's name, it seems, was not _Barebones_, but
Barbone--a good enough man. Nor was it a jest, their work; it was a most
serious reality--a trial on the part of these Puritan Notables how far
the Law of Christ could become the Law of this England. There were men
of sense among them, men of some quality; men of deep piety I suppose
the most of them were. They failed, it seems, and broke-down,
endeavoring to reform the Court of Chancery! They dissolved themselves,
as incompetent; delivered up their power again into the hands of the
Lord-General Cromwell, to do with it what he liked and could.
What _will_ he do with it? The Lord-General Cromwell,
"Commander-in-chief of all the Forces raised and to be raised"; he
hereby sees himself, at this unexampled juncture, as it were the one
available Authority left in England, nothing between England and utter
Anarchy but him alone. Such is the undeniable Fact of his position and
England's, there and then. What will he do with it? After deliberation,
he decides that he will _accept_ it; will formally, with public
solemnity, say and vow before God and men, "Yes, the Fact is so, and I
will do the best I can with it!" Protectorship, _Instrument of
Government_;--these are the external forms of the thing; worked out and
sanctioned as they could in the circumstances be, by the Judges, by the
leading Official people, "Council of Officers and persons of interest in
the Nation": and as for the thing itself, undeniably enough, at the
pass matters had now come to, there was no alternative but Anarchy or
that. Puritan England might accept it or not; but Puritan England was,
in real truth, saved from suicide thereby!--I believe the Puritan People
did, in an inarticulate, grumbling, yet on the whole grateful and real
way, accept this anomalous act of Oliver's; at least, he and they
together made it good, and always better to the last. But in their
Parliamentary _articulate_ way, they had their difficulties, and never
knew fully what to say to it!--
Oliver's second Parliament, properly his _first_ regular Parliament,
chosen by the rule laid-down in the _Instrument of Government_, did
assemble, and worked;--but got, before long, into bottomless questions
as to the Protector's _right_, as to "usurpation," and so forth; and had
at the earliest legal day to be dismissed. Cromwell's concluding Speech
to these men is a remarkable one. So likewise to his third Parliament,
in similar rebuke for their pedantries and obstinacies. Most rude,
chaotic, all these Speeches are; but most earnest-looking. You would
say, it was a sincere, helpless man; not used to _speak_ the great
inorganic thought of him, but to act it rather! A helplessness of
utterance, in such bursting fulness of meaning. He talks much about
"births of Providence": All these changes, so many victories and events,
were not forethoughts, and theatrical contrivances of men, of _me_ or of
men; it is blind blasphemers that will persist in calling them so! He
insists with a heavy sulphurous, wrathful emphasis on this. As he well
might. As if a Cromwell in that dark, huge game he had been playing, the
world wholly thrown into chaos round him, had _foreseen_ it all, and
played it all off like a precontrived puppet-show by wood and wire!
These things were foreseen by no man, he says; no man could tell what a
day would bring forth: they were "births of Providence." God's finger
guided us on, and we came at last to clear height of victory, God's
Cause triumphant in these Nations; and you as a Parliament could
assemble together, and say in what manner all this could be _organized_,
reduced into rational feasibility among the affairs of men. You were to
help with your wise counsel in doing that. "You have had such an
opportunity as no Parliament in England ever had."
"Christ's Law, the Right and True, was to be in some measure made the
Law of this land. In place of that, you have got into your idle
pedantries, constitutionalities, bottomless cavillings and questionings
about written laws for _my_ coming here;--and would send the whole
matter in Chaos again, because I have no Notary's parchment, but only
God's voice from the battle-whirlwind, for being President among you!
That opportunity is gone; and we know not when it will return. You have
had your constitutional Logic; and Mammon's Law, not Christ's Law, rules
yet in this land. "God be judge between you and me!" These are his final
words to them: Take you your constitution-formulas in your hand; and I
my _in_formal struggles, purposes, realities, and acts; and "God be
judge between you and me!""
We said above what shapeless, involved chaotic things the printed
Speeches of Cromwell are. _Wilfully_ ambiguous, unintelligible, say the
most: a hypocrite shrouding himself in confused Jesuitic jargon! To me
they do not seem so. I will say, rather, they afforded the first
glimpses I could ever get into the reality of this Cromwell, nay into
the possibility of him. Try to believe that he means something, search
lovingly what that may be: you will find a real _speech_ lying
imprisoned in these broken, rude tortuous utterances; a meaning in the
great heart of this inarticulate man! You will, for the first time,
begin to see that he was a man; not an enigmatic chimera, unintelligible
to you, incredible to you. The Histories and Biographies written of this
Cromwell, written in shallow, sceptical generations that could not know
or conceive of a deep, believing man, are far more _obscure_ than
Cromwell's Speeches. You look through them only into the infinite vague
of Black and the Inane. "Heats and jealousies," says Lord Clarendon
himself: "heats and jealousies," mere crabbed whims, theories, and
crotchets; these induced slow, sober, quiet Englishmen to lay down their
ploughs and work; and fly into red fury of confused war against the
best-conditioned of Kings! _Try_ if you can find that true. Scepticism
writing about Belief may have great gifts; but it is really _ultra
vires_ there. It is Blindness laying-down the Laws of Optics.--
Cromwell's third Parliament split on the same rock as his second. Ever
the constitutional Formula: How came _you_ there? Show us some Notary
parchment! Blind pedants:--"Why, surely the same power which makes you
a Parliament, that, and something more, made me a Protector!" If my
Protectorship is nothing, what in the name of wonder is your
Parliamenteership, a reflex and creation of that?--
Parliaments having failed, there remained nothing but the way of
Despotism. Military Dictators, each with his district to _coerce_ the
Royalist and other gainsayers, to govern them, if not by act of
Parliament, then by the sword. Formula shall _not_ carry it, while the
Realty is here! I will go on protecting oppressed Protestants abroad,
appointing just judges, wise managers, at home, cherishing true Gospel
ministers; doing the best I can to make England a Christian England,
greater than old Rome, the Queen of Protestant Christianity; I, since
you will not help me; I while God leaves me life!--Why did he not give
it up; retire into obscurity again, since the Law would not acknowledge
him? cry several. That is where they mistake. For him there was no
giving of it up! Prime Ministers have governed countries, Pitt, Bombal,
Choiseul; and their word was a law while it held: but this Prime
Minister was one that _could not get resigned_. Let him once resign,
Charles Stuart and the Cavaliers waited to kill him; to kill the Cause
_and_ him. Once embarked, there is no retreat, no return. This Prime
Minister could _retire_ no-whither except into his tomb.
One is sorry for Cromwell in his old days. His complaint is incessant of
the heavy burden Providence has laid on him. Heavy; which he must bear
till death. Old Colonel Hutchinson, as his wife relates it, Hutchinson,
his old battle-mate, coming to see him on some indispensable business,
much against his will--Cromwell "follows him to the door," in a most
fraternal, domestic, conciliatory style; begs that he would be
reconciled to him, his old brother-in-arms; says how much it grieves him
to be misunderstood, deserted by true fellow-soldiers, dear to him from
of old: the rigorous Hutchinson, cased in his Republican formula,
sullenly goes his way.--And the man's head now white; his strong arm
growing weary with its long work! I think always, too, of his poor
Mother, now very old, living in that Palace of his; a right brave woman;
as indeed they lived all an honest God-fearing Household there: if she
heard a shot go-off, she thought it was her son killed. He had come to
her at least once a day, that she might see with her own eyes that he
was yet living. The poor old mother!--What had this man gained; what had
he gained? He had a life of sore strife and toil to his last day. Fame,
ambition, place in History? His dead body was hung in chains; his "place
in History"--place in History, forsooth!--has been a place of ignominy,
accusation, blackness, and disgrace; and here, this day, who knows if it
is not rash in me to be among the first that ever ventured to pronounce
him not a knave and liar, but a genuinely honest man! Peace to him. Did
he not, in spite of all, accomplish much for us? _We_ walk smoothly over
his great rough heroic life; step-over his body sunk in the ditch there.
We need not _spurn_ it, as we step on it!--Let the Hero rest. It was not
to _men's_ judgment that he appealed: nor have men judged him very well.
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
Cromwell 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 humor 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
among 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 amid 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.