A PARLIAMENTARY CONSTITUTION.
It was all the worse for Oliver from the financial point of view,
that he was now pursuing a foreign policy which--whatever opinion we
may have of it on other grounds--at least increased the burdens of
the nation to a point at which Englishmen began to grow restive. Even
before the signature of the Dutch peace in the spring of 1654, Oliver
had cast about in his mind for a foreign policy, and it was only on
rare occasions that he appears to have contemplated the possibility
of keeping peace with all nations unless he were compelled to engage
in war in defence of the honour or interests of the country. He
seems to have regarded the victorious fleet bequeathed to him by the
Commonwealth and the victorious army which he had done more than any
other man to forge into an instrument of dominion, as inviting him to
choose an enemy to be the object of his defiance, rather than sure
guards for the country which he ruled. The sword itself drew on the
man, and the weakness of the two great Continental nations, France and
Spain, embroiled in an internecine war, each coveting the alliance of
England, and each dreading her enmity, increased its attractive power.
Not that Oliver was without principles underlying his actions. He had
indeed two--not always easily reconcileable. He wanted to increase
the trade of the country by strengthening its maritime power, and he
wanted to uphold the cause of God in Europe by the formation of a great
Protestant alliance against what he believed to be the aggressive
Papacy. This second principle gave to his actions a nobility which only
an honest devotion to higher than material interests can impart, whilst
at the same time it led him into the greatest practical mistakes of his
career, because he was always ready to overestimate the persecuting
tendencies of the Roman Catholic States, which, since the Peace of
Westphalia, had been local and spasmodic, and to overestimate the
strength of religious conviction in the rulers of Protestant States,
as well as to imagine it possible to unite these last in a Protestant
crusade. It was a still more deplorable result that his own character
became somewhat deteriorated by the constant effort to persuade himself
that he was following the higher motives, when in reality material
considerations weighed most heavily in the scale.
In truth, Oliver's day of rule lay between two worlds--the world
in which the existence of Protestantism had been really at stake,
at the time when men so alien from the dogmatism of the sects as
Drake, Raleigh and Sidney had enlisted in its cause--and the world of
trade and manufacture, which was springing into being. Oliver's mind
comprehended both. Doubtless his mind was the roomier that it could
respond to the double current, but it was not to be expected that a
generation whose face was set in the direction of material interests
should be otherwise than impatient of a call to the Heavens to place
themselves on the side of English trade.
During the greater part of 1654 Oliver had been hesitating whether
to ally himself with Spain or with France. For some time he inclined
to the side of Spain. His religious sympathies were touched by the
sufferings of the French Huguenots. The succour which he proposed
to convey to them would have brought him into direct alliance with
Spain, and it was only the revelation of Spanish financial and
military weakness which turned him aside from his project. Then came
a suggestion long weighed and finally taken up, for carrying on war
against the Spanish West Indies. It would be hard to deny that, even in
modern eyes, a _casus belli_, apart from all ideal schemes of weakening
the Government which sheltered the Inquisition, was to be found--not
in the refusal of the Spanish authorities to allow English ships to
trade in the Spanish islands, but in the deliberate seizure of English
ships and the enslavement of English crews guilty of no other crime
than that of being bound for Barbados or for some other English colony.
The strangest part of the matter is that Oliver closed his eyes to the
natural consequence of an attack upon a Spanish colony. He fancied
that it would be still possible to carry out the Elizabethan plan of
keeping peace in Europe and making war in the Indies. He was probably
strengthened in this opinion by the fact that, almost from the first
days of the Commonwealth, a war of reprisals had been going on at sea
with France without disturbing the nominally amicable relations between
the two countries. Why should he not take a West Indian Island as a
reprisal for the seizure of English ships, and peace be maintained with
Spain as if nothing had happened?
Before the end of 1654 two fleets sailed on their several missions.
The one, under Blake, entered the Mediterranean, where he was most
hospitably received by the Governors of the Spanish ports and by the
officials of the Grand Duke of Tuscany at Leghorn. He ransomed a number
of English captives at Algiers, but the Bey of Tunis, some of whose
subjects had recently been sold for galley-slaves to the Knights of
Malta by an English scoundrel, was naturally less compliant. Blake
destroyed nine of his vessels at Porto Farina, but Tunis itself was
inaccessible, and he was unable to recover a single English slave
from that quarter. Penn sailed for Barbados with some 2,500 soldiers
on board under Venables. Both in Barbados and in other English islands
reinforcements were shipped, and with this ill-compounded force a
landing was effected in Hispaniola. The attempt to seize on the city
of San Domingo failed, and the expedition sailed for Jamaica, at that
time little more than a desert island, and established itself in
possession. Some years passed before the colony became self-supporting,
but Oliver was unremitting in his resolution not only to increase
the numbers of the first military settlers, but to supply them with
all things necessary for the foundation of homes in the wilderness.
It was annoying that the first operations in the Spanish West Indies
had opened with a check, but it was doubtless fortunate that the new
English colony was not built up on Spanish foundations. The soldiers
who, on their march towards San Domingo, pelted with oranges an image
of the Virgin which they had torn down from the walls of a deserted
monastery, would hardly have been at their best in the midst of a Roman
Catholic population.
Much to Oliver's surprise, the news of the proceedings of his men in
Hispaniola aroused the bitterest indignation at Madrid, an indignation
already, to some extent, aroused when Blake sailed out through the
Straits of Gibraltar to meet and capture the treasure ships expected
from America. The features of Philip IV. as--thanks to the brush of
Velasquez--they meet us in every noted gallery in Europe, are not
those of a man remarkable for wisdom, but he had none of the lingering
hesitancy of his grandfather, Philip II. He ordered the seizure of the
property of English merchants in Spanish harbours; and Oliver, after
balancing for two years between France and Spain, had the question
decided by his own mistaken belief that the world of Elizabeth remained
unchanged. The breach with Spain necessitated a reconsideration of the
relations between England and France. Ever since his accession to the
Protectorate, Oliver had evaded the demands of the French Ambassador,
Bordeaux, for a cessation of the war of reprisals at sea which had been
bequeathed him by the Commonwealth. As English privateers captured
more prizes than those of the French, he was in no hurry to bring the
situation to an end till he obtained of Mazarin, the virtual ruler of
France, a tacit understanding that the Huguenots should no longer be
maltreated, and an express undertaking to expel from France the English
Royal family and the chief Royalists in attendance on the exiled Court.
Whilst these questions were still under discussion, an event occurred
which, more than any other single action in his life, brought into
relief the higher side of Cromwell's character and policy. In January,
1655, the young Duke of Savoy--or rather his mother, who, though he
had come to years of discretion, acted in his name--ordered that the
Vaudois, whose religion, though now akin to the Protestantism of the
seventeenth century, dated from mediæval times, should be removed from
the plain at the foot of the Piedmontese Valleys into which they had
spread, to the upper and barer reaches, on the pretext that they had
broken the bounds assigned them by his ancestors. In April his troops
entered the valley, slaying and torturing as they went. When the
news reached England in May, Oliver's heart was moved to its depths.
He ordered a day of humiliation to be held, and a house-to-house
visitation to collect money for the sufferers. Upwards of £38,000 was
gathered in the end, the Protector heading the list with £2,000. He
sent a Minister to Turin to remonstrate, but his warmest appeals were
addressed to Mazarin, the all-powerful Minister of Louis XIV., as
some French troops, acting as allies of the Duke in his war against
the Spaniards in Italy, had been concerned in the massacre. Mazarin
was plainly told that there would be no treaty with France till these
massacres were stopped. The French Minister had been so long deluded of
his hope of a treaty that this threat alone might not have terrified
him, but he feared that Oliver would hire the Protestant Swiss to
take part against the Duke of Savoy, and that all thought of fighting
the Spaniards in Italy would have to be laid aside for that year.
Communications passed between Paris and Turin, and the Duke of Savoy
issued his pardon--such was the term employed--to the surviving Vaudois.
Milton's sonnet marks well this highest point of the Protector's action
upon Continental States:--
Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundred fold, who having learnt thy way
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.
In championing the Vaudois, Oliver's Puritanism had served the noblest
interests of humanity. With somewhat of the poet's fervour Milton
saw in the defence of the oppressed victims of the Duke of Savoy a
challenge to the spiritual tyranny of Papal Rome. It made Oliver,
we may be sure, more ready to take up the challenge of Spain, and
to come to terms with the French Government which had spoken on
the side of tolerance. Yet, enthusiastically Puritan as he was, he
could not deal with the external affairs of England from a merely or
even a mainly religious point of view. His position would not allow
it--nor his character. The mingling of spiritual with worldly motives
might produce strange results. At one time it elevated and ennobled
action. At another time the two motives might clash together, the one
frustrating the other. In the stand taken by Oliver on behalf of the
Vaudois, the spiritual had predominated over the material aim. In the
breach with Spain, his belief in the predominance of the religious
motive burnt strongly in Oliver's own mind: it was less conspicuous to
onlookers.
The first result of the quarrel between England and Spain was the
conclusion of a commercial treaty with France, which put an end to the
war of reprisals which had now lasted more than six years. All question
of a closer alliance was reserved, perhaps rather because it demanded
time for consideration than because there was any doubt in Oliver's
mind as to his intention in the matter. Before the war had been far
prolonged the exiled King took refuge in the Spanish Netherlands,
holding close communication with Englishmen who plotted the destruction
of the Protector, whilst privateers issuing from Dunkirk and Ostend
preyed upon English commerce and irritated the London merchants who
had no enthusiasm for a religious war, and who regretted the loss of
their goods seized in Spanish ports. In the spring and summer of 1656
the necessity of doing something against an active enemy established
so near the English coast would have driven Oliver into the arms of
France even if he had not already contemplated such an alliance. Yet
it was during these very months that the desired end seemed to be
eluding his grasp. Mazarin, unwilling to allow an English garrison to
occupy Dunkirk as the price of the Protector's alliance, was doing
his best to come to terms with Spain, which would have enabled him
to dispense with English aid. It was not till the approach of autumn
that the French Minister, discovering that his overtures to Philip
IV. had been made in vain, bowed to the inevitable, and agreed to
hand over Dunkirk to England, if it could be wrested from Spain by
the united effort of the two countries. What a vista was opened up of
vast military and naval expenditure by the mere enunciation of such a
project! The reduction of the army in the summer of 1655 could hardly
be maintained under these altered circumstances; and with an increased
army and navy, what chance was there for that government according to
the Instrument which had been the corner-stone of Oliver's domestic
policy?
The difficulty was the greater because in the summer of 1656 it
appeared that the plan of policing the country by a militia under
Major-Generals had broken down financially. Meetings of officers were
summoned in June to discuss the situation, and though the Protector was
at first inclined to raise fresh taxation on his own sole authority, he
soon recognised that such a step would be too unpopular to meet with
success, and resolved that another Parliament must be summoned. Before
the new Parliament met, Oliver had recourse to one of those startling
privileges which the Instrument might be quoted as having conferred on
his Government. That constitution assigned to the Council the right
of examining and rejecting such members as might be elected without
possessing the qualifications imposed by it on members of Parliament,
a right which the Council now exercised in the rejection of at least
ninety-three hostile members. In the case of Royalists chosen by
constituencies the Council was undoubtedly in the right in annulling
their elections, at least so far as the constitution was concerned.
In refusing admission to Republicans like Scott and Hazlerigg it was
compelled to have recourse to a quibble. It was true that the Council
was empowered by the Instrument to reject members who were not 'of
known integrity'. That body with at least the tacit approval of the
Protector now interpreted those words as giving them power to reject
members not of known integrity to the existing constitution. For
once in his life Oliver demeaned himself to act in the spirit of a
pettifogging attorney. Base as the action was, it was only possible
because the greater number of those admitted to their seats, whether
through the pressure put upon the country by the Major-Generals, or
because they looked with more hopefulness to the Protector, were now
prepared to give him their support. In the speech with which Oliver
opened the session on September 17, he did his best to rouse the
indignation of his hearers against Spain. "Why, truly," he urged, "your
great enemy is the Spaniard. He is a natural enemy. He is naturally so;
he is naturally so throughout--by reason of that enmity that is in him
against whatsoever is of God." It was the key-note of Oliver's feeling
in this matter in his more exalted mood. His sentiments as a patriotic
Englishman found vent in a long catalogue of wrongs suffered at the
hands of Spaniards from Elizabeth's time to his own. His defiance of
Spain was followed by an attack on Charles Stuart,--now dwelling on
Spanish soil, and hopefully looking to Spain for troops to replace
him on the throne--in which he referred to him as 'a captain to lead
us back into Egypt'. Then came a retrospect on the Cavalier plots and
a justification of the Major-Generals, who had been established to
repress them. The war with Spain must be prosecuted vigorously--in
other words, money must be voted to maintain the struggle at home
and abroad. Oliver's speech did not all turn upon what ordinary men
term politics. "Make it a shame," he cried, "to see men bold in sin
and profaneness, and God will bless you. You will be a blessing to
the nation; and by this will be more repairers of breaches than by
anything in the world. Truly these things do respect the souls of men,
and the spirits--which are the men. The mind is the man. If that be
kept pure, a man signifies somewhat; if not, I would very fain see what
difference there is betwixt him and a beast. He hath only some activity
to do some more mischief." It was the voice of the higher--because more
universal--Puritanism which rang in these words, a voice which soared
to worlds above the region of ceremonial form or doctrinal dispute,
echoing, as from the lips of a man of practical wrestlings with the
world, the voice of the imaginative poet who, in the days of his youth,
had taught that
So dear to Heaven is saintly chastity
That, when a soul is found sincerely so,
A thousand liveried angels lackey her,
Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt,
And in clear dream and solemn vision
Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear,
Till oft converse with heavenly habitants
Begin to cast a beam on the outward shape,
The unpolluted temple of the mind,
And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence
Till all be made immortal.
Oliver had to touch earth again with a financial statement and to crave
for Parliamentary supplies. A demand for money was not particularly
welcome to the members, and they preferred to wrangle for some weeks
over the case of James Naylor, a fanatic who had allowed himself to
be greeted as the Messiah by his feminine admirers. In October news
came that Stayner, in command of a detachment from Blake's fleet,
had destroyed or captured a part of the Plate Fleet off the Spanish
coast, and in the following month the carts were rolling through the
London streets on their way to the Tower with silver worth £200,000.
Emboldened by this success, Oliver's confidants brought in a bill
perpetuating the decimation of the Royalists by act of Parliament. The
bill was rejected, and hard words were spoken of the Major-Generals.
Oliver accepted the decision of the House, and the Major-Generals were
withdrawn.
There is good reason to believe that Oliver consented willingly to the
vote. He was never one to persist in methods once adopted, if he could
obtain his larger aims in some other way. The debates had revealed that
the house was divided into two parties, a minority clinging to the army
as a political force, and a majority calling for the establishment of
the government on a civil basis. The latter was even more devoted to
the Protector than the former, and Oliver, who in his heart concurred
with their views, was prepared, as indeed he had been prepared in
1654, to submit the Instrument to revision. The difference was that
he was assured now--as he had not been assured then--that Parliament
would sustain the fundamental principles which he regarded as the most
precious part of the constitution.
In January, 1657, a fresh attempt to assassinate the Protector--this
time by Miles Sindercombe--gave reason, or perhaps excuse, for
loyal demonstrations, and a month later the House entered upon the
discussion of a proposal for a constitutional revision, ultimately
known as _The Humble Petition and Advice_, of which the article which
attracted the most general attention was that which reconstituted the
Kingship in the person of Oliver, with the power of nominating his
own successor. The demand for the revival of the Kingship was no mere
work of zealous flatterers. The crown was held in the House to be the
symbol of civilian as opposed to military government, but for this
reason the offer of it was assailed by the leading officers, headed
by Lambert who, in 1653, had offered the crown to the man to whom he
now refused it. So far as the officers were concerned, they appear to
have been actuated, in part at least, by a dread that a Parliamentary
Protectorate would in the end turn out to be other than a Puritan
Protectorate. Lambert's own motives were somewhat more difficult to
unravel. Possibly he regarded a Kingship by the grace of Parliament
less of a boon than a Kingship by the grace of the army. Still more
probably was he moved by a personal grievance in seeing Fleetwood,
who had now returned from Ireland, higher than himself in the favour
of the Protector, perhaps even in the favour of the army. In any case
he carried on the campaign with consummate skill, keeping aloof from
the constitutional question, and throwing all his strength into the
argument--which the rudest soldier could understand--that the army had
not rejected one king in order to set up another. When he won over
Fleetwood and Desborough, the son-in-law and brother-in-law of the
Protector, to his side, he had practically won the game, especially
as he was able to back a petition against a revival of the Royal
title by the subscription of a hundred officers. Oliver kept up the
negotiation with Parliament as long as he could, but in the end he
refused the crown offered to him rather than alienate the army. The
remaining articles of the Humble Petition and Advice were then agreed
to, and on June 26 Oliver was solemnly installed as Protector, under a
Parliamentary title, with all but Royal pomp at Westminster Hall.
Too much has been made by some modern writers of Oliver's defeat on
the question of the Kingship. The title, as he himself truly said,
would have been but a feather in his cap. It is doubtful whether its
acceptance would have disarmed a single enemy. The rocks upon which
the Protector was running were of a far too substantial character to
be removed by the assumption of an ill-fitting symbol. Whether he wore
a crown or not, no one could have regarded Oliver as Charles I. had
been regarded; or even as William III., who in some sort continued the
Protector's work, came afterwards to be regarded.
Apart from the really unimportant question of the crown, the military
party had for the time been beaten all along the line. Not only had the
Major-Generals disappeared, and Lambert himself, driven to surrender
all his offices, military or civil, retired to the cultivation of
tulips at Wimbledon; but the Humble Petition and Advice, that is
to say, a Parliamentary constitution, had entirely displaced the
Instrument of government as the fundamental law of the three nations.
The more important of the stipulations of the new constitution
were necessarily of the nature of a compromise. In return for the
establishment of a second House composed of his own nominees, the
Protector was able to abandon the claim of the Council to exclude
members of what must now be regarded as the House of Commons--seeing
that a vote with which he was dissatisfied would be of no avail if
it was no more than the vote of a single House. Nor was it only an
occasional check on the old House that he had gained. The new House,
nominated by himself in the first place, was endowed with the right
in the future of excluding from its benches any new member nominated
by himself or by a future Protector. As he took care to name none who
were not strong Puritans and devoted to the Protectorate, he expected
that the new House would be able, for all time, to reject legislation
contrary to the interests of Puritanism or to the Protectoral
constitution. The question of finance, which had wrecked the last
Parliament, was settled in a way equally satisfactory to the Protector.
The number of soldiers to be kept on foot was passed over in silence,
whilst the same sum, £1,800,000, which had been approved by the first
Protectorate Parliament as needful for the wants of the army and navy
together with those of the domestic government, was now granted, not
for five years as had been proposed by the former Parliament, but
till the Protector and the two Houses agreed to alter it. The scheme
by which the Instrument had fixed the strength of the army at 30,000
men, and had then left the Protector and Council free to levy whatever
supplies they thought needful for its support, was deliberately left
out of account. On paper, the terms of agreement showed fairly enough.
England had at last got a constitution which was no production of
a military coterie. Protector and Parliament were at last at one.
Unfortunately, those who had welcomed this fair concord took little
account of the forces which were likely to govern events in the not far
distant future--the force of the army, whose handiwork had been set at
nought--the force of the Parliamentary tradition strengthened by the
work of the Long Parliament--and, above all, the force of discontent
with the shifting sands on which the new Government was built, a
discontent which might easily show itself in a national call for the
restoration of the Stuart King--not because his person was loved, but
because he would bring with him what appeared to be the strong basis of
old use and wont.
Oliver was not wholly absorbed in constitutional struggles or in
foreign conflicts. In administration his Government stands supreme
above all which had preceded it, because no other ruler united so
wide a tolerance of divergencies of opinion with so keen an eye for
individual merit. He could gather round him the enthusiastic Milton to
pen those dignified State Papers in which he announced his resolutions
to the Powers of Europe; Andrew Marvell, the most transparently
honest of men, who, with all his admiration for Oliver, had mingled
in the verses written by him as a panegyric on his patron those lines
recording Charles's dignified appearance on the scaffold, which will be
remembered when all his other writings in prose or verse are forgotten.
In Oliver's Council sat Bulstrode Whitelocke, the somewhat stolid
lawyer, who, too cautious to give a precedent approval to Oliver's
revolutionary acts, was always ready to accept the situation created by
them, and yet sufficiently inspired by professional feeling to resign
his post as Commissioner of the Great Seal rather than accept the
Protector's reforms in the Court of Chancery. There too sat Nathaniel
Fiennes, the second son of Lord Saye and Sele, not indeed a statesman
with broad views, but ready at any moment to pen State papers in
defence of a Government which had rescued him from the neglect into
which he had fallen--probably undeservedly--in consequence of his hasty
surrender of Bristol in the Civil War. Amongst Oliver's diplomatists
were Morland and Lockhart. Amongst his admirals, the honoured Blake
and the ever-faithful Montague. Amongst those who at one time or
another were his chaplains were Owen, the ecclesiastical statesman, and
Howe, whose exemplary piety led him to doubt whether the Protector's
household was sufficiently religious, and whose broad-minded charity
prepared him to abandon the Church of the Restoration, not because it
was un-Puritan, but because it was exclusive.
Yet, after all is said, the list of ancient allies driven by the
Protector from public life, and in some cases actually deprived of
liberty, was even more noteworthy. The most placable of men could
hardly have avoided a quarrel with John Lilburne, of whom it was
said that if he alone were left alive in the world, John would
dispute with Lilburne and Lilburne with John; but it is at least
remarkable that under Oliver's sway Vane, whom he had long dealt
with as a brother; Harrison, who had fought under him from the very
beginning of the Civil War, and who had stood by his side when the
members of the Long Parliament were thrust out of doors; Hazlerigg,
who had kept guard over the English border in the crisis of Dunbar;
Okey, who had led the dragoons at Naseby; Overton, the trusted
Governor of Hull, next to London the most important military post in
England; Lambert, who had taken a foremost part in the preparation
of the Instrument of Government; Cooper, who had been one of his
most trusted councillors--to say nothing of confidants of less
conspicuous note--were either in prison or in disgrace. When the second
Protectorate, as it is sometimes called, was launched on its course,
the only man not connected with the family of the Protector, who
still occupied anything like an independent position, was Monk, the
Governor and Commander-in-Chief in Scotland, and it is probable that
he owed his authority to the distance which kept him from interfering
in English politics. The true explanation appears to be that the men
from whom Oliver parted were men not merely of definite principles, but
of definite ideas. Each one had made up his mind that England was to
be served by the establishment of some particular form of government,
or some particular course of action. Oliver's mind was certainly not
without the guidance of definite principles. He could not conceive it
to be right to abandon religion to men who, whether Episcopalian or
Presbyterian, would impose fetters on the freedom of 'the people of
God'. He could not admit the claim of an hereditary monarch or of an
elected Parliament to decide against the best interests of the country.
Within these limits, however, his mind was more elastic than those of
his opponents. Steadied by his high aims, he could vary the methods
with which he combated each evil of the day as it arose. Those who
attached themselves to him in his struggle against the King or against
the different Parliaments of his time, or against the military power,
were as incapable as he was capable of facing round to confront each
new danger as it arose. From the moment that each partial victory was
won, the old friends had to be reasoned with, then discarded, and at
last restrained from doing mischief. As years went on, Oliver, in spite
of the abilities of those still serving under him, became increasingly
an isolated man. Not only did his strong sense of religion in its
Puritan form alienate those who were not Puritans or not religious,
but his frequent changes of attitude bewildered that easy-going mass
of mankind which sticks to its own theory, more especially if its own
interests are embodied in it, and regards all change of political
method as a veil intended to conceal moral turpitude. Oliver had
decidedly lost adherents since the establishment of the Protectorate.
It was probably the increasing sense of the untrustworthiness of
political support, rather than nepotism in its ordinary sense, which
led the Protector to rely more and more on the services of members of
his own family. His younger son, Henry Cromwell, was now Lord Deputy
of Ireland. His son-in-law, Fleetwood, was not only a member of the
Council, but, now that Lambert was in disgrace, the most influential
officer in the army, marked out for its command if Oliver were to
pass away. His brother-in-law, Desborough, occupied a position hardly
inferior. Two other brothers-in-law, Colonel John Jones and Colonel
Valentine Wauton, were members of the Council in England or Ireland.
Lockhart, one of the few Scotchmen who had rallied to the Protectorate,
and who was engaged as a diplomatist in riveting the bonds between
France and England, took to wife the Protector's niece. A son-in-law,
John Claypole, was now Master of the Horse. In the army, Whalley and
Ingoldsby were his cousins. Not one of these, however, failed to occupy
with credit the position he had acquired, whilst Oliver's reluctance
to push forward Richard, the elder of his surviving sons, may be taken
as evidence that his affection for his family did not override his
devotion to the State. Richard's tastes lay in the direction of dogs
and horses. He had recently broken his leg, hunting in the New Forest,
and, upon his recovery, was brought up to Westminster to assume his
place, on the establishment of the second Protectorate. Before that
time, only two of the Councillors not holding other office, Lambert
and Strickland, had received the title of "Lord," probably having it
verbally conferred upon them, and certainly not, as has been sometimes
said, in connection with any Household appointment. Officials of
high rank had--like the Lord Deputy and the Lord Keeper of the old
monarchy--been entitled Lords, as in the case of Whitelocke, now Lord
Commissioner of the Treasury, and Fiennes, Lord Commissioner of the
Great Seal. Gradually usage, quickly sanctioned by official notice,
gave the title of Lord to the Protector's sons and sons-in-law, and
of Lady to his daughters. The Lord Richard was only admitted to the
Council on the last day of 1657, and was treated with some of the
observances due to the heir, but till the last his father held back
from exercising that power of nominating a successor which had been
conferred on him by the latest constitution.
So far as in him lay, Oliver took care that his family should be an
example to all the families in the land. Strict as he was in banishing
not merely vice, but the folly that leads to vice, he was no more
opposed to reasonable amusement than other more sober Puritans of
the day. Music and song had a special charm for him, and amongst
his soldiers he showed his appreciation of a healthy jest, laughing
heartily, for instance, on his way to the campaign of Dunbar, when
one of them slammed an overturned cream-tub on the head of another.
After the victory at Worcester he was heard of in a hawking party
near Aylesbury, and if he prohibited horse-races, together with the
drama, cock-fights and bear-baitings, it was not because he disliked
amusement, but partly because he set himself against the immorality
with which these particular amusements were accompanied, and partly
because the confluence of spectators concealed the assembling of
Royalist and other conspirators. Of horses he was quite as good a
judge as his son Richard, and it was from a spirited pair of runaway
steeds which had been given to him by the Count of Oldenburg that he
nearly met his death in the early days of the Protectorate. Of late
years Oliver's enjoyment of country life had been much curtailed. Other
rulers had been in the habit of making summer progresses which took
them away from business and the life of towns. Oliver--if he invented
nothing else--may be regarded as the inventor of that modified form of
enjoyment to which hard-worked citizens have, in our day, given the
name of the 'week-end'. Liable to assault on every hand, he did not
venture to leave the seat of Government for long, and he found repose
in a weekly visit to Hampton Court, which lasted from Saturday to
Monday, the length of his sojourn being only rarely extended by illness
or some unusual family occurrence.
The domestic life of the Protector was all that might be expected from
a man whose heart was as warm as his spirit was high. In the midst of
his most arduous labours he seldom passed a day, as long as he was at
Whitehall, on which he did not dine and sup in the family circle, and
up till his aged mother's death in 1654 he was in the habit of visiting
her every night before she retired to rest. Of his four daughters two
were already married, the eldest, Bridget, after the death of her first
husband, Ireton, having become the wife of Fleetwood; and the second,
the sprightly and graceful Elizabeth, had married John, otherwise
Lord Claypole, whom the Protector had entrusted with the charge of
his stables, under the style of Master of the Horse. On November 11,
1657, some months after the commencement of the second Protectorate,
Frances, the youngest of the four, was married to Robert Rich, the
grandson of the Earl of Warwick, the Lord High Admiral of the Long
Parliament, and in the following week her sister Mary was married to
Lord Fauconberg. The first of these two marriages was long delayed by
the Protector's doubts as to the character of the suitor, as well as by
his dissatisfaction with the proposed settlement--Oliver's moral sense
once more entwining itself with his practical decisions. It was said at
the time that he valued the Fauconberg alliance more than that with the
Warwick family, as winning over a Royalist peer to his side.
Not one of Oliver's four daughters ever gave their father cause for
real anxiety. Though they were less strenuous than himself and
sometimes needed, in his judgment, to be spurred on to higher spiritual
aims, he never seems to have addressed them otherwise than as those who
were worthy of parental love. If he really preferred Lady Claypole to
his other daughters, it was most likely because she was more sprightly
and less outwardly pious than her sisters. "Your sister Claypole," he
had written to Bridget soon after she had become Ireton's wife, "is, I
trust in mercy, exercised with some perplexed thoughts. She sees her
own vanity and carnal mind; bewailing it. She seeks after--as I hope
also--what will satisfy: and thus to be a seeker is to be of the best
sect next to a finder; and such an one shall every faithful humble
seeker be at the end. Happy seeker, happy finder! Who ever tasted
that the Lord is gracious, without some sense of self, vanity, and
badness? Who ever tasted that graciousness of His, and could go less in
desire--less than pressing after full enjoyment?" Of Bridget herself he
writes with fuller assurance. "Dear Heart," he continues, "press on;
let no husband, let not anything cool thy affections after Christ. I
hope he will be an occasion to inflame them. That which is best worthy
of love in thy husband is that of the image of Christ he bears. Look
on that, and love it best, and all the rest for that. I pray for thee
and him; do so for me." Yet even Bridget was far from answering to the
modern conception of the Puritan lady, as is testified by the splendid
yellow silk petticoat which has been handed down from generation to
generation in the family of her eldest daughter. Nevertheless it was
not Bridget's vanity which was most on her father's mind. Five years
later, in writing to his wife from Edinburgh, he begs her to 'mind
poor Betty,' _i.e._ Elizabeth, Lady Claypole, 'of the Lord's great
mercy,' and to urge her to 'take heed of a departing heart and of being
cozened with worldly vanities and worldly company, which I doubt she
is too subject to'. The liveliness which caused such searchings of
heart was doubtless the tie which bound more firmly Oliver's love to
her. One day we hear of her demurely assuring Whitelocke that it was
fear of his great influence which had caused her father to send him
out of the way to Sweden when he was about to assume the Protectorate.
At another time we are told of her driving with her cousin Ingoldsby
and two of her sisters, all the three ladies dressed in green, whilst
the courtier-like crowd watch their movements and bow as they pass.
Then we hear of the scornful language in which, with the pride of a
lady by birth as well as by her father's advancement, she accounted
for the absence of the wives of some of the Major-Generals from an
entertainment at which she took part: "I warrant you they are washing
their dishes at home as they used to do". Yet withal she had an open
ear for trouble, and a ready tongue to plead not in vain the cause of
the innocent with her father. By the summer of 1657 her health had been
failing, and at one time her life had been despaired of.
Oliver's own health was far from being such as to promise length of
days. Though he had had no serious illness since the time when his life
was in danger in Scotland after the toils and anxiety of the Dunbar
campaign, short spells of ill-health are frequently mentioned, and the
Venetian Ambassador, presented to him in the autumn of 1655, noticed
the shaking hand with which he held his hat in welcoming him, a symptom
of weakness which left its mark on his hand-writing during the later
period of his life. In the summer of 1657 he was detained at Hampton
Court by illness, apparently of the character of malarial fever, for
more than a week. Yet his spirit was as high, his resolution as strong
as ever. At no time had the state of public affairs made larger demands
upon his mental powers than in the last fourteen months of his life.
It is true that the adoption of the new Parliamentary constitution
had appeared for a moment to have solved the problem of domestic
government, but his sagacity would have been far less than it was if he
had imagined that all his difficulties were at an end.
If, on the other hand, the Protector looked abroad, fortune appeared to
smile. Whilst Parliament was still in session, news arrived that Blake
had destroyed the Spanish treasure fleet under the protection of forts
in the harbour of Santa Cruz in Teneriffe. It was the most hazardous,
and consequently the most glorious action of a noble and patriotic
life. Worn out by toils and exposure, Blake sought and obtained leave
to come home in search of the rest he so sorely needed. Before the
vessel that bore him reached Plymouth his spirit had passed away. The
great admiral was honoured with a public funeral in Westminster Abbey.
Spain, with her supply of treasure from the Indies cut short, was
incapacitated from serious warlike effort, and already the alliance
was forged which was to force her into submission. Even before the
victory was won at Santa Cruz a treaty had been signed between Oliver
and Louis XIV., arranging for a joint attack on the Spanish fortresses
of Dunkirk, Mardyke and Gravelines, the first two to fall to the share
of England, the last to that of France. An English force of 6,000 men
was to be combined with a French force of 20,000, the blockade at sea
being entrusted to an English fleet. Half the English contingent was
at once despatched under Sir John Reynolds, but either the necessities
of war, or the reluctance of Mazarin to carry out his engagements, led
him to prefer the distant siege of Montmédy to an attack on the coast
towns, and it was only after a warm expostulation from the Protector
that measures were taken to carry out the treaty. Of the quality of
the English contingent there could be no doubt. Turenne--whose praise
in military matters was praise indeed--declared that he had never
seen finer troops. As soon as Mazarin was found to be in earnest, the
remaining 3,000 men were despatched to Flanders, and before the end
of October Mardyke was captured and loyally placed in the hands of
an English garrison. Farther than this it was impossible to go at so
advanced a season. In the summer of 1658, the combined armies defeated
the Spaniards on the Dunes, and Dunkirk itself was added to the
possessions of England on the Continent.
The wisdom of a foreign policy which gave England a land-frontier in
Europe has been often discussed, and the conflict of argument has
not yet died away. It is true that in later years this country has
had forced on it the task of securing colonial possessions which,
in some cases for thousands of miles, march with territories held
by independent, and possibly hostile States. There is, however,
no comparison between an enormous territory, such as the Dominion
of Canada, inhabited by an increasing and loyal population, and a
fortified post, such as that of Dunkirk, the inhabitants of which were
alien in race and religion from the English garrison which was to hold
them down, especially as Dunkirk was a mere port on the edge of a
Continent held by great nations, two of which coveted its possession,
and would certainly leave no stone unturned to recover it. The only
parallels in our history worth considering are the occupation of Calais
in the middle ages, and of Gibraltar in modern times. It is idle to
speculate whether, if Dunkirk had not been surrendered amicably to
France by Charles II., it would have undergone the fate of Calais, but
it is not idle to remind ourselves that, whilst Gibraltar is occupied
in order to keep the sea open, and has never been used as a threat to
the independence of Spain, Dunkirk, as we know from Thurloe, to whom
all the secrets of Oliver's mind were revealed, was occupied in the
first place, as a menace to the Dutch maritime power, and in the second
place, to enable England to interfere with effect against either France
or Spain, whilst it was believed by Mazarin that Oliver's main object
was to crush the growing power of France. These pretensions might be
condemned or defended on abstract grounds, leaving out of account any
particular circumstances or any particular time. What is absolutely
certain is that such a policy, if it were to be successful, required
not merely the prolongation of Oliver's life, but the continuation, and
more than the continuation of his military system. At a time when the
English nation--it matters not whether with just cause, or from mere
impatience of a taxation which it was well able to bear--was bitterly
complaining of the heavy burdens imposed by the necessity of keeping
up the existing army, Oliver was embarking on a foreign policy which
would topple down with a crash unless that army were doubled--perhaps
even trebled--to make head against the enemies it would arouse. It
was a policy condemned in advance if only by the desperate financial
embarrassments which must follow in its train, when France was no
longer bound to England by her need of help against Spain. The
hostility of France might indeed be confronted by a Government strong
in the devotion of its people, and in the accumulated wealth of another
half-century of commerce--strong too in an alliance with military
Powers, based on the need of joining in resistance to a common danger.
If Oliver had been granted those twenty more years of life which
enthusiastic worshippers hold necessary for the success of his schemes,
it can hardly be doubted that a European coalition would have been
formed against the Protector long before it was formed against Louis
XIV.
Such a danger, great as it was from the mere political claims of the
Protector, was immensely increased by his attempt to inspire his
foreign policy--hazardous enough in itself--with a moral and religious
sentiment which found but little echo in England, and none whatever on
the Continent. No doubt it was Oliver's highest glory that he aimed
at something more satisfying than the material gain and the material
power which are often held to be the sufficing objects of a nation's
endeavour, and his interference on behalf of the victims of Piedmontese
cruelty has sunk as deeply into the memories of Englishmen as the
massacre of Drogheda has sunk into the memories of Irishmen. It is to
be hoped that no one whose opinion is worth having will ever reproach
Oliver for having sought to use his strength in defence not only of the
power and interests of his country, but also of her honour--an honour
which consists, not in a touchy resentment of slights, but mainly in
her readiness to help in the higher service of mankind beyond her
own borders as well as within them. Yet there is no effort requiring
greater discretion, greater accuracy in ascertaining the relative
importance of complex facts, greater knowledge of the temper of those
who are likely to be affected by the action intended for the benefit of
others.
It was precisely in this direction that Oliver's mind was most
defective. From the beginning of the Protectorate he had overestimated
the danger to Protestantism from the Roman Catholic Powers, and had
striven in vain to form a great Protestant alliance to resist what was
scarcely more than an imaginary danger. The massacre of the Vaudois had
confirmed his belief that the danger was a permanent one, and his war
with Spain had brought him into sharp antagonism with a Roman Catholic
Power of intensest bigotry. We may therefore give full credence to
Thurloe when he adds to the causes which induced Oliver to occupy
Dunkirk, his hope that the possession of the place would be serviceable
to his great design of weakening not merely Spain, but the whole House
of Austria, as being engaged in a conspiracy for the injury and, if
possible, the destruction of Protestantism. That this view of the case
was a gross anachronism, no one familiar with the history of Europe
will now deny. Isolated instances indeed there were--and there were
likely to be more--of the persecution of Protestants by Roman Catholic
Governments, but the tendency to form European alliances on the basis
of religion was a thing of the past. So far indeed as Dunkirk was in
question--and both critics and admirers of the foreign policy of the
Protectorate have been apt to argue as if it concerned France and Spain
alone--Oliver's intentions in this direction are of little interest, as
he did not live long enough even to attempt to make his new port the
basis of a European war. It is in his Baltic policy that the defects of
his method were most clearly revealed.
The policy of Sweden had long been directed to the acquisition of
possessions on the opposite coast of the Baltic, a policy which Oliver
had more recently followed on a smaller scale with regard to the lands
beyond the Channel. With a territory more thinly populated and poorer
than that of England, the Kings of Sweden had, like the Commonwealth
and Protectorate, gathered an army too large to be supported except by
offensive war. The command of the Baltic Sea was the object in view,
and in 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years' War, Sweden found herself
in possession, not merely of Finland and the coast districts as far
south as Riga, but of Western Pomerania, of the port of Wismar and of
the secularised Bishoprics of Bremen and Verden. It was a policy even
more provocative than that pursued by Oliver, because it concerned
not merely the possession of a solitary point beyond the sea, but the
possession of territories commanding the mouths of such rivers as the
Oder, flowing into the Baltic, and the Elbe and the Weser, flowing
into the North Sea. In 1655 the warrior-king, Charles X., who in the
year before had succeeded to the Swedish throne upon the abdication of
Christina, plunged into a war with Poland, which threatened to give him
the command of the Vistula as well. In all this England had an interest
because it was of great importance to her that the whole trade of the
Baltic, whence she derived the materials without which she would have
been unable to send her fleets to sea, should not pass entirely into
the hands of one great military Power. It was this view of the case
which commended itself to the Dutch, and led in 1656 to their sending a
fleet into the Baltic to preserve the independence of Dantzic. Such a
view could not be lost sight of by Oliver, but it was not in his nature
to content himself with the chase after purely material interests.
Ever since the summer of 1655, when Charles X. made overtures for his
alliance, the Protector had been striving to give to it the character
of a general Protestant League for the purpose of striking a blow at
the German branch of the House of Austria.
Oliver's whole scheme can only be described as the product of
consummate ignorance--ignorance in supposing that Charles X.,
aggressive, self-centred and careless of everything but his own
interests as a king and as a soldier, was another Gustavus Adolphus--or
rather another such disinterested enthusiast as Gustavus Adolphus
appeared in the imagination of Englishmen--ignorance too in fancying
that either Austria and Poland on the one hand, or Brandenburg and
Denmark on the other, were likely to govern their movements by
religious rather than by political motives.
The crisis came in 1657, the year in which Oliver was raised by
Parliament to the constitutional Protectorate. Charles X. having
secured a hold on the mouth of the Vistula by his occupation of Western
Prussia had naturally become an object of suspicion to Frederick
William of Brandenburg--the Great Elector, as he was subsequently
styled--who saw with displeasure the growing power of Sweden on the
Baltic coast and who was urged by every consideration of policy to
secure for himself the strip of land which intervened between part
of his own possessions and the sea. Frederick III. of Denmark again,
fearing the ultimate loss of his own territory beyond the Sound, took
the opportunity of declaring against Charles, and both Brandenburg and
Denmark, Protestant as they were, looked for the support of Leopold,
who had just succeeded to the Austrian hereditary estates. Leopold,
however, instead of hurrying to the assistance of these two States, was
held back by purely political interests, and showed little inclination
to assist them. Charles X. took the opportunity and led his army
through Holstein into Schleswig and Jutland without difficulty, thus
gaining possession of the whole of the Continental States of the King
of Denmark.
The Swedish King had been ready to fool Oliver to the top of his bent.
Though he had nothing of the spirit of the crusader, he was quite
prepared to gain what advantage he could out of Oliver's enthusiasm.
Happily for England, he had rejected the Protector's proposal--made
in the spring of 1657--to take over the secularised Archbishopric of
Bremen as a security for a loan, the Archbishopric being required by
Oliver as a basis for an advance into Germany in an attack upon the
German Catholic States, a project far more unwise than the occupation
of the Flemish ports, and one which, if it had been carried into
effect, would have left little room for Oliver's panegyrists to dwell
upon the excellence of his foreign policy. For the remainder of the
year Charles was quite ready to discuss the Protestant alliance, if
only he were not required to carry it into immediate action. No doubt
he would be ready at some future time to attack Austria or any other
country if there was anything to be gained by it. For the present he
was occupied with his quarrel with Denmark, and till that had been
brought to a conclusion, there was nothing else to be done.
It was at this moment that Oliver opened the second session of his
second Parliament. Full of satisfaction with his own foreign policy,
he was also full of grieved surprise at the misconduct of Frederick
of Denmark and of Frederick William of Brandenburg, who, not without
the good will of the Dutch Republic, had thrown themselves in the path
of the new Gustavus Adolphus. Within a few days of the opening of the
session, Oliver held up to Parliament a picture of Papal Europe seeking
'everywhere Protestants to devour'. "What is there in all the parts
of Europe," he asked at last, "but a consent, a co-operating, at this
very time and season, to suppress everything that stands in the way
of the Popish powers?" "I have," he added, "I thank God, considered,
and I would beg you to consider a little with me, what that resistance
is that is likely to be made to this mighty current which seems to
be coming from all parts upon all Protestants? Who is there that
holdeth up his head to oppose this danger? A poor prince; indeed poor;
but a man in his person as gallant, and truly I think I may say, as
good as any these last ages have brought forth; and a man that hath
adventured his all against the Popish interest in Poland, and made his
acquisition still good for the Protestant religion. He is now reduced
into a corner; and what addeth to the grief of all--more grievous than
all that hath been spoken of before--I wish it may not be too truly
said--is, that men of our religion forget this and seek his ruin."
The cause of Charles X. had become very dear to Oliver, and ought, he
imagined, to be very dear to the English people. The 'Popish plot'
against the Swedish king loomed largely in his eyes. "It is a design,"
he continued, "against your very being; this artifice, and this complex
design against the Protestant interest--wherein so many Protestants
are not so right as were to be wished! If they can shut us out of the
Baltic Sea,"--with Oliver the consideration of material prosperity was
never far distant from his spiritual enthusiasm--"and make themselves
masters of that, where is your trade? Where are your materials to
preserve your shipping? Where will you be able to challenge any right
by sea, or justify yourselves against a foreign invasion on your own
soil? Think upon it; this is the design! I believe if you will go and
ask the poor mariner in his red cap and coat, as he passeth from ship
to ship, you will hardly find in any ship but they will tell you this
is designed against you. So obvious is it, by this and other things,
that you are the object; and, in my conscience, I know not for what
else, but because of the purity of the profession amongst you, who have
not yet made it your trade to prefer your profit before your godliness,
but reckon godliness the greater gain."
It was Oliver's head--not his heart--that was at fault. But a few days
after these words were spoken, Charles X. was tramping with his army
over the ice of the two Belts, in that marvellous march which landed
him in Zealand, and compelled Frederick III. to sign the Treaty of
Roeskilde which abandoned to Sweden the Danish possessions to the
east of the Sound. What then were Oliver's Ambassadors doing when
that treaty was negotiating? They were but arguing as any Dutchman or
Brandenburger might have argued, on behalf of the material interests
of their own country. They favoured Charles's wish to annex the Danish
provinces beyond the Sound, because it would leave the passage into the
Baltic under the control of two Powers instead of one. They opposed
his wish to annex more than two provinces of Norway, in order that the
monopoly of the timber trade might not fall into his hands. Of the
Protestant alliance not a word was spoken.
For all that, the Protestant alliance had not passed out of Oliver's
mind. Now that Denmark was crushed, Charles professed himself to be
quite ready to attack Leopold of Austria, if only he were allowed to
crush Brandenburg first; and in May an English Ambassador was sent
to Berlin to plead with the Elector of Brandenburg to join England
and Sweden against Leopold, to whose support Frederick William was
looking against an unprovoked attack from Charles. Happily for England,
Frederick William refused to countenance this insane proposal, and
in August Charles renewed the war against Denmark, with a fixed
determination to bring the whole of the Scandinavian territory under
his own sway, before he involved himself in those further complications
in Germany, in which Oliver, supported by Mazarin, was anxious to
involve him. "France," said the King of Sweden, "wants to limit me
and to prescribe the course I am to take, and England attempts to do
the same, but I will put myself in a position to be independent of
their orders." His Ministers spoke even more openly of their future
plans. When Denmark and Norway had been annexed, and the Baltic brought
under the undisputed control of Sweden, Courland and West Prussia must
inevitably pass into their master's hands. Then with an army of 40,000
men, supported by a navy of 100 ships, the Swedish army would march
through Germany into Italy, visit the Pope, and plunder Rome. "Their
first thought is pillage," added the French Ambassador who reported
these vapourings perhaps not without exaggeration. Charles X. was a
great soldier, but he was by no means the oppressed saint of Oliver's
imagination.
There can be little doubt that the maintenance of a war in the heart of
Germany, even with a Swedish ally, would have been far beyond Oliver's
means. The occupation of the Flemish ports had taxed his resources to
the uttermost. In the speech in which he had sung the high praises of
the Swedish king, he had been obliged to plead the necessities of the
army as a ground for his demand for fresh supplies. The pay of the army
was far in arrear, and it was on the army that he depended to keep down
hostile parties at home and to stave off a Royalist attack from abroad.
Nor was that army needed for purposes of mere defence. Picturing to
himself the majority of the Continental nations as actuated by a wild
desire to assail England, he inferred that attack was the best defence.
"You have counted yourselves happy," he said to Parliament, "in being
environed with a great ditch from all the world beside. Truly you will
not be able to keep your ditch, nor your shipping, unless you turn your
ships and shipping into troops of horse and companies of foot; and
fight to defend yourselves on _terra firma_."
This then was what Oliver's much-lauded foreign policy had come
to--more regiments, and even higher taxation than what the vast
majority of Englishmen believed to be far too high already. A great
Continental war, with all its risks and burdens, was dangled before the
eyes of a Parliament to which such an outlook had no attractions. That
Parliament was no longer the body which had voted the new constitution.
Not only were there now two Houses, but the composition of the older
House had been significantly altered. The most determined supporters of
the Protectorate had been withdrawn to occupy the benches of the new
House, whilst the clause of _The Humble Petition and Advice_, which
prohibited the Protector from ever again excluding members duly elected
from what had now become the House of Commons, opened its doors to
his most determined enemies. The men who now found their way to their
seats, such as Hazlerigg and Scott, were opposed heart and soul to the
whole system of the Protectorate, and longed for the re-establishment
of Parliamentary supremacy. Such men were the more dangerous because
they were sufficiently versed in Parliamentary tactics to know the
advantage of a rallying cry which would bring the lukewarm to their
side. The powers and attributes of the other House were ill-defined
in the constitutional document to which it owed its birth, and it was
easy to gain adherents by urging that it was not entitled either to the
name or the privileges of the House of Lords of the Monarchy. After
some days of wrangling, the Protector resolved to put an end to the
debates. It was hard, he complained, to have accepted a constitutional
settlement on the invitation of that very Parliament, and then to have
it brought into question. "I can say," he continued, "in the presence
of God--in comparison with whom we are but like poor creeping ants upon
the earth--I would have been glad to have lived under my wood side
to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than to have undertaken such a
government as this. But undertaking it by the advice and petition of
you, I did look that you who had offered it unto me should make it
good."
Such language must appear to those who judge by the recorded words and
actions of this Parliament to be without adequate justification. It is
undeniable that the constitution contained no definition of the powers
of the new House, and if there had been no other than the ostensible
question at issue, it would have been unreasonable in Oliver to hurry
on a crisis before attempting, directly or indirectly, to suggest terms
of compromise. As a matter of fact this question of the other House was
very far from covering the whole ground of debate. A petition to which
thousands of signatures were appended was being circulated in the City,
asking for a complete restitution of Parliamentary supremacy and--no
doubt to catch the support of a certain section of the army--for an
enactment that no officer or soldier should be cashiered without the
sentence of a court martial. Oliver was perfectly right in holding
that the attack on the other House was equivalent to an assault on the
constitutional Protectorate. He had himself looked to that House as
restoring to him in another form the powers which he had abandoned when
he let fall the Instrument. By keeping in his own hands the selection
of its members, and providing that that House should have a veto on
subsequent nominations--the principle of inheritance being totally
excluded--he imagined that he had sufficiently provided for the future.
His objects in so doing may be taken as those set forth by a writer who
had ample means of gathering his intentions. "It was no small task for
the Protector to find idoneous men for this place, because the future
security of the honest interest seemed--under God--to be laid up in
them; for by a moral generation, if they were well chosen at the first,
they would propagate their own kind, when the single person could not,
and the Commons, who represented the nation, would not, having in them
for the most part the spirit of those they represent, which hath little
affinity with a respect of the cause of God." It is easy to criticise
such a principle from a modern point of view. Yet if the morality of
Oliver's political actions are ever to be judged fairly, it must never
be forgotten that the right of an honest Government to prevent the
people from injuring themselves by out-voting the saner members of the
community was--rather than any democratic or Parliamentary theory--the
predominant note of his career. It is this at least which explains his
assent to the choice of the nominated Parliament, as well as his breach
with the Parliaments which he dismissed in 1655 and 1658.
Such views could not but lead the Protector to a breach with his second
Parliament as well. The men who were grumbling at the insolence of his
new lords were, as he well knew, prepared to follow up their attack by
another more directly aimed at his own authority. The remainder of the
Protector's speech is only intelligible on this supposition. Professing
his intention to stand by the new constitution, he accused his
opponents of a design to subvert it. "These things," he asseverated,
"lead to nothing else but to the playing of the King of Scots' game--if
I may so call him--and I think myself bound before God to do what I can
to prevent it; and if this be so, I do assign it to this cause--your
not assenting to what you did invite me to by your Petition and Advice,
as that which might prove the settlement of the nation; and if this
be the end of your sitting, and this be your carriage, I think it
high time that an end be put to your sitting. And I do dissolve this
Parliament! And let God be judge between you and me!"
No man knew better than Oliver the weight of the blow that had fallen
on him. His attempt to govern constitutionally with a Parliamentary
constitution had proved as impracticable as his attempt to govern
constitutionally with a military constitution. For a whole week he shut
himself up, meditating apart from his Council on the means of repairing
the disaster. Only once during the whole time did he even appear in
his family circle. Then after prolonged consultation with advisers
gathered from far and near, he resolved to summon another Parliament
to meet in that very spring. He at least would stand firmly by the
constitution to which he had sworn, and he could but hope that the
nation would be equally loyal when the choice between ordered liberty
and the unrestricted government of a single House was fairly set before
the electors. It was the remedy applied afterwards by William III. to a
similar mischief, and not applied in vain.
Unfortunately for Cromwell the circumstances were not the same. It
is unnecessary here to discuss the relative merits of written and
unwritten constitutions on the one hand, or of a dominant Parliament
and a dominant executive on the other. The one form of government or
the other may be desirable in different nations or at different times.
The one thing needful is that the institutions of a nation, whatever
they be, shall be supported by the national sentiment. It was this
that Oliver had never succeeded in evoking, because he had never
appealed to it, and he was hardly likely to succeed in evoking it now.
He could, for a time--and only for a time--rule England with an army.
He could not rule it with a piece of paper. At no long distance, as he
already saw, the unchecked supremacy of Parliament would bring back
the Stuarts, because the traditional hold of the old monarchy upon
the minds of men was the only power capable of keeping in check alike
the tyranny of the army, and the anarchy which could not but arise
if contending parties were left to struggle for the mastery without
fear of military intervention. Oliver's own power for good was growing
feebler. Financial embarrassments gathered round him. The sailors and
soldiers went unpaid, even though Bremen had not been occupied and no
English army was struggling--it can hardly be doubted--towards certain
defeat in the heart of Germany.
The Parliament he contemplated never came into existence. Another great
Royalist plot took up for a time all the energies of the Government.
Oliver, with his usual clemency, contented himself with two executions,
those of Dr. Hewit and Sir Henry Slingsby, whilst three more victims
expiated their share in a project for raising a tumult in London. Once
again affairs appeared to take a more favourable turn. The victory of
the Dunes, in which the French army, aided by 6,000 English troops,
overthrew the Spaniards, was won on June 4, whilst the surrender of
Dunkirk on the 14th, together with the subsequent gains of the allies
in Flanders put out of the question any landing of the exiled King in
England with Spanish aid. The thought of bringing a new Parliament
together might seem capable of realisation under these happy auspices,
and preparations were made for its meeting in November.
Whether that Parliament, if ever it had met, would have supported the
Protectorate more firmly than its predecessors, is a question which can
never be answered. All that can be said is that the radical elements
of the situation remained unchanged. Oliver had been deeply saddened
by his failure, and his anxious thoughts told on his already enfeebled
health. Death had been busy in his family circle. Young Rich, the newly
wedded husband of his daughter Frances, died in February.[E] On August
6 his best-beloved daughter, Lady Claypole, passed away after a long
and painful illness. Oliver's sorrowing vigils by her bedside broke
down what remained to him of bodily endurance. Now and again indeed
he was able to take the air, and on one of these occasions George Fox
coming to talk with him on the persecutions of the Friends, marked the
changed expression of his face. "Before I came to him," noted Fox,
"as he rode at the head of his life-guard, I saw and felt a waft of
death go forth against him; and when I came to him he looked like a
dead man." On August 24 the Protector moved to Whitehall. The ague from
which he suffered increased in violence. On Sunday, August 29, prayers
were offered up in the churches for his recovery. The following day
was the day of that great storm which fixed itself in the memory of
that generation. The devil, said the Cavaliers, had come to fetch home
the soul of the murderer and tyrant. Around the bedside of the dying
potentate more friendly eyes were keeping watch. "The doctors," wrote
Thurloe to Henry Cromwell far away in Ireland, "are yet hopeful that
he may struggle through it, though their hopes are mingled with much
fear." Twenty-four hours later the hopeful signs were still dwelt on.
"The Lord," wrote Fleetwood, "is pleased to give some little reviving
this evening; after a few slumbering sleeps, his pulse is better."
Scriptural words of warning and comfort were constantly on the sick
man's lips. "It is a fearful thing," he three times repeated, "to
fall into the hands of the living God." The anxious questioning was
answered by his strong assurance of mercy. "Lord," he muttered, as the
evening drew in, "though I am a miserable and wretched creature, I am
in covenant with Thee through grace, and I may, I will come to Thee for
Thy people. Thou hast made me, though very unworthy, a mean instrument
to do them some good, and Thee service, and many of them have set too
high a value upon me, though others wish, and would be glad of my
death. Lord, however Thou do dispose of me, continue and go on to do
good for them. Give them consistency of judgment, one heart, and mutual
love; and go on to deliver them, and with the work of reformation, and
make the name of Christ glorious in the world. Teach those who look too
much on Thy instruments to depend more upon Thyself. Pardon such as
desire to trample upon the dust of a poor worm, for they are Thy people
too. And pardon the folly of this short prayer; even for Jesus Christ's
sake. And give us a good night, if it be Thy pleasure. Amen."
[E] Her second marriage with Sir John Russell took place
after the Restoration.
Before long hope ceased to be possible. Oliver himself knew that his
life was rapidly drawing to an end. "I would," he said, "be willing to
be further serviceable to God and His people, but my work is done." A
few more prayers, a few more words, and on September 3, the anniversary
of Dunbar and Worcester, as well as of the hopeful meeting of his first
Parliament, the tried servant of God and of his country entered into
the appointed rest from all his labours.
The man--it is ever so with the noblest--was greater than his work.
In his own heart lay the resolution to subordinate self to public
ends, and to subordinate material to moral and spiritual objects of
desire. His work was accomplished under the conditions to which all
human effort is subject. He was limited by the defects which make
imperfect the character and intellect even of the noblest and the
wisest of mankind. He was limited still more by the unwillingness of
his contemporaries to mould themselves after his ideas. The blows that
he had struck against the older system had their enduring effects.
Few wished for the revival of the absolute kingship, of the absolute
authority of a single House of Parliament, or of the Laudian system of
governing the Church. In the early part of his career Oliver was able
to say with truth of his own position: "No one rises so high as he who
knows not whither he is going". The living forces of England--forces
making for the destruction of those barriers which he was himself
breaking through, buoyed him up--as a strong and self-confident
swimmer, he was carried onward by the flowing tide. In the latter
portion of the Protector's career it was far otherwise. His failure to
establish a permanent Government was not due merely to his deficiency
in constructive imagination. It was due rather to two causes: the
umbrage taken at his position as head of an army whose interference in
political affairs gave even more offence than the financial burdens it
imposed on a people unaccustomed to regular taxation; and the reaction
which set in against the spiritual claims of that Puritanism of which
he had become the mouthpiece. The first cause of offence requires
no further comment. As for the second, it is necessary to lay aside
all sectarian preoccupations, if ever a true historic judgment is
to be formed. It was no reaction against the religious doctrines or
ecclesiastical institutions upheld by the Protector that brought about
the destruction of his system of government. It is in the highest
degree unlikely that a revolution would ever have taken place merely
to restore episcopacy or the Book of Common Prayer. So far as the
reaction was not directed against militarism, it was directed against
the introduction into the political world of what appeared to be too
high a standard of morality, a reaction which struck specially upon
Puritanism, but which would have struck with as much force upon any
other form of religion which, like that upheld by Laud, called in the
power of the State to enforce its claims.
Nor is this all that can be said. Even though Oliver was in his own
person no sour fanatic, as Royalist pamphleteers after the Restoration
falsely asserted; it is impossible to deny that he strove by acts of
government to lead men into the paths of morality and religion beyond
the limit which average human nature had fixed for itself. In dealing
with foreign nations his mistake on this head was more conspicuous,
because he had far less knowledge of the conditions of efficient action
abroad than he had at home. It may fairly be said that he knew less of
Scotland than of England, less of Ireland than of Great Britain, and
less of the Continent than of any one of the three nations over which
he ruled. It has sometimes been said that Oliver made England respected
in Europe. It would be more in accordance with truth to say that he
made her feared.
It is unnecessary here to pursue this subject further. The development
of this theme is for the historian of England rather than for the
biographer of the Protector. Oliver's claim to greatness can be
tested by the undoubted fact that his character receives higher and
wider appreciation as the centuries pass by. The limitations on his
nature--the one-sidedness of his religious zeal, the mistakes of his
policy--are thrust out of sight, the nobility of his motives, the
strength of his character, and the breadth of his intellect, force
themselves on the minds of generations for which the objects for which
he strove have been for the most part attained, though often in a
different fashion from that which he placed before himself. Even those
who refuse to waste a thought on his spiritual aims remember with
gratitude his constancy of effort to make England great by land and
sea; and it would be well for them also to be reminded of his no less
constant efforts to make England worthy of greatness.
Of the man himself, it is enough to repeat the words of one who knew
him well: "His body was well compact and strong; his stature under six
feet--I believe about two inches--his head so shaped as you might see
it a store-house and shop both--of a vast treasury of natural parts.
His temper exceeding fiery, as I have known; but the flame of it kept
down for the most part, or soon allayed with those moral endowments
he had. He was naturally compassionate towards objects in distress,
even to an effeminate measure; though God had made him a heart wherein
was left little room for any fear but was due to Himself, of which
there was a large proportion--yet did he exceed in tenderness towards
sufferers. A larger soul, I think, hath seldom dwelt in a house of
clay."
ABERDEEN: THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
* * * * * *
Transcribers' note:
A table of contents was added by the transcriber.
Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant
preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected. Many missing periods, and a
few missing commas, were silently added where extra spacing indicated
they should have been printed.
Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.