THE PREPARATION FOR THE CIVIL WAR
1629–1640
For the next eleven years Charles ruled without a Parliament.
“Remember,” he had warned the Commons in 1626, “that Parliaments are
altogether in my power for their calling, sitting and dissolution;
therefore as I find the fruits of them good or evil, they are to
continue, or not to be.” He now announced that their fruits were evil,
and that henceforth it would be accounted presumption for anyone to
prescribe to him a time for the calling of another. Henceforth he would
govern by the authority which God had put into his hands, and so order
the state that his people should confess that they lived more happily
and freely than any subjects in the Christian world.
Taxation without parliamentary grant became thereafter the regular
practice. Tonnage and poundage were levied from the merchants as if the
right had never been disputed, and new impositions on trade were added
to the old. Obsolete laws were revived and rigorously executed. In 1630,
the law which required every person possessing an estate worth £40 a
year to take up the honour of knighthood was put in force, and fines to
the amount of £170,000 were levied on those who had omitted to comply
with it. In 1634, the ancient forest laws were revived. Lands were now
declared to be part of the royal forests which for three hundred years
had been outside their boundaries, and landowners were heavily fined for
encroachments.
The knighthood fines affected all the gentry and all men in easy
circumstances; the extension of the forests threatened chiefly the
nobility and persons of quality; the revival of the monopolies aggrieved
all classes alike. The King, it was calculated, got £38,000 a year from
the wine monopolists, the patentees received from the vintners £90,000,
and the vintners raised the price of wine to the consumers so that the
nation paid £360,000. And besides the wine monopoly there were
monopolies of soap, of iron, of tobacco, of salt, of gunpowder, and of
many other commodities.
On the one hand, the King’s financial measures discontented the nation,
and on the other they failed to meet the wants of the Government. In
1635, the ordinary revenue of the Crown was about £600,000, and the
King’s debts were about £1,200,000. When the safety of the seas and the
exigencies of foreign policy required a fleet, it became necessary to
resort to direct taxation, and Ship-money was invented. In 1634, it was
levied on the maritime counties only, and brought in £100,000; in 1635,
it was extended to the inland counties, and produced twice that amount.
It was useless to appeal to the law courts for protection or redress.
The judges, removable at the King’s pleasure, declined to arbitrate
between King and people, and preferred to regard themselves as the
servants of the Crown. When called upon to decide on the lawfulness of
Ship-money, their decision was avowedly dictated by political rather
than legal considerations. One judge declared that the law was the
King’s old and trusty servant, that it was not true that _lex_ was
_rex_, but common and most true that _rex_ was _lex_. Another asserted
that no acts of Parliament could take away the King’s right to command
the persons and the money of his subjects, if he thought a sufficient
necessity existed. It was well said that the reasons alleged by the
judges were such as every man could swear were not law, and that their
logic left no man anything which he might call his own. To enforce his
will, the King had at his disposal, besides the ordinary courts of law,
the exceptional courts which the Tudors had created. Their jurisdiction
was enlarged at the King’s pleasure. In 1632, the powers of the Council
of the North were increased. The Privy Council assumed legislative power
by its proclamations, “enjoining this to the people that was not
enjoined by law, and prohibiting that which was not prohibited by law.”
The Star Chamber enforced the proclamations by fine and imprisonment,
and punished opponents or critics with inordinate severity.[1] The fate
of Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick showed that no profession could exempt
its members from barbarous and ignominious penalties.[2] The fate of
Eliot and his friends proved that the privileges of Parliament were no
protection against the King’s vindictiveness.[3] There were Privy
Councillors who “would ordinarily laugh when the word liberty of the
subject was named,” and to wise men it seemed that the very foundations
of right were in danger of destruction.
Footnote 1:
The Star Chamber was originally a committee of the King’s Council,
which became a separate judicial body during the latter part of the
sixteenth century. It represented the judicial authority of the
Council, had larger powers than the ordinary law courts, and was not
bound by ordinary legal rules in its procedure.
Footnote 2:
William Prynne, a barrister, Henry Burton, a divine, and John
Bastwick, a physician, were sentenced by the Star Chamber in 1637 to
be fined £5000 apiece, to lose their ears, and to be imprisoned for
life for attacks on the bishops and on ecclesiastical innovations.
Footnote 3:
Eliot died in the Tower in November, 1632, a prisoner for his conduct
at the close of the Parliament of 1629. He pleaded privilege and
refused to own the jurisdiction claimed by the law courts. His friends
submitted and were fined.
If Englishmen wished to know what the aim of the King’s ministers was
they had only to look across St. George’s Channel. “The King,” wrote
Wentworth from Ireland in 1638, “is as absolute here as any prince in
the world can be.”[4] Parliaments still existed, but the Lord Deputy
managed them as he chose, and, as Pym said, Parliaments without
parliamentary liberties were but plausible ways to servitude. Juries
existed, but when they gave verdicts against the Crown they were fined
for their contumacy. The highest officials and the richest noblemen felt
the weight of Wentworth’s hand, and submitted to do his bidding. Trade
increased, order reigned where it had never reigned before, and the poor
lived freer from the oppressions of the great than the poor in Ireland
had ever dreamt of doing. But not a vestige of self-government remained
save a few idle forms; the government was a machine in which all motion,
all force, came from the royal authority. The people had nothing to do
but to obey the King. “Let them,” said Wentworth, “attend upon his will,
with confidence in his justice, belief in his wisdom, and assurance in
his parental affections,” instead of feeding themselves “with the vain
flatteries of imaginary liberty.”
Footnote 4:
Sir Thomas Wentworth was raised to the peerage July 22, 1628, became
president of the Council of the North in the following December, and
Lord Deputy of Ireland in January, 1632. He was created Earl of
Strafford on January 12, 1640.
Amongst Englishmen the King’s use of his absolute power did not foster
this blind faith in his superior wisdom.
A vigorous foreign policy directed towards national ends might have
reconciled some of his subjects to the substitution of personal rule for
self-government. But Charles had no European policy. When he dissolved
his third Parliament he was at war with France and Spain, and want of
money obliged him to make peace as soon as possible. In European
politics, his only object was to procure the restoration of the
Palatinate to his sister and her children. For this he offered his
alliance simultaneously to Gustavus Adolphus and to Ferdinand II. For
this he negotiated with France and Spain as he negotiated a few years
later with Presbyterians and Independents. His policy was a series of
intrigues which failed, and a succession of bargains in which he asked
much, offered little, and got nothing. As it was purely dynastic in its
aim, and at once unprincipled and unsuccessful, it left him with no ally
in Europe.
One result it had, attributed by panegyrists to his wisdom, and held by
courtiers a compensation for the loss of freedom—England kept out of
war. “It enjoyed,” says Clarendon, “the greatest calm and the fullest
measure of felicity that any people for so long a time together had been
blessed with, to the wonder and envy of all the parts of Christendom.”
The Thirty Years’ War was turning fruitful Germany into a wilderness,
and its cities into heaps of ruins. All other countries were
impoverished or devastated by war, but England was, as it were, “the
garden of Christendom” and “the Exchange of Europe.” “Here,” sang a
poet, “white peace, the beautifullest of things, had fixed her
everlasting nest.” Never had the English Court been gayer, more
brilliant, more luxurious; never were masques and banquets more frequent
than during the crisis of Protestantism in Germany.
“Let the German drum bellow for freedom,” wrote the poet of the Court,
“its noise
“Disturbs not us, nor should divert our joys.”
Puritans felt that these German drums were a call to England to be up
and doing. With anxious or exultant eyes, they followed each turn of
fate in the death-struggle of Catholicism and Protestantism. It cheered
Eliot’s prison in the Tower to think of the progress of “the work
abroad.” When Tilly fled before Gustavus at the Breitenfeld, Eliot cried
that now “Fortune and Hope were met.” When Gustavus fell at Lützen,
every Puritan’s heart sank within him. “Never,” wrote D’Ewes, “did one
person’s death bring so much sorrow to all true Protestant hearts—not
our godly Edward’s, the Sixth of that name, nor our late and heroic
Prince Henry’s—as did the King of Sweden’s at this present.”
It seemed to Puritans as if the same struggle between Protestantism and
Catholicism was beginning even now in England. While the foreign policy
of Charles seemed to them a cowardly desertion of Protestantism, his
ecclesiastical policy seemed an insidious attack upon it, and under
Laud’s influence the ecclesiastical policy of Charles was as uniform and
consistent as his European policy was feeble and irresolute.[5] To
himself, Laud appeared an eminently conservative reformer who sought to
enforce only the discipline of the Church and the ecclesiastical laws of
the State. His object was to bring the Church back to its true
historical position as a branch of the great Catholic Church, and to
purge it of the Calvinistic taint it had contracted since the
Reformation. Not averse to a certain freedom of speculation amongst
learned men, he sought to silence controversial preaching, and was
intolerant of diversity in the forms of worship. Unity of belief was
essential to the existence of a National Church, and the way to it lay
through uniformity, “for unity cannot long continue in the Church when
uniformity is shut out at the church door.” “Decency and an orderly
settlement of the external worship of God in the Church” was his own
definition of the ends for which he laboured.
Footnote 5:
William Laud became Bishop of St. David’s in 1621, Bishop of London in
1628, and Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, but his predominant
influence in the Church dated from the very beginning of the King’s
reign.
To the Puritans, Laud appeared an innovator and a revolutionary. Over
half the country the observances he sought to enforce had fallen into
disuse for years. Each restoration of an authorised form, every revival
of ancient usage, brought the Church nearer to Roman practice, and in
their opinion nearer to Roman doctrine. A bow was not an expression of
reverence, but a confession of idolatry; a surplice, not a few yards of
white linen, but a rag of Rome. Laud’s attempts to silence their
preachers aggravated their suspicion of his motives and confirmed them
in the theory that he was a papist in disguise.
Much of the hostility which Laud brought upon himself was due to the
means which he employed. The King’s authority as supreme governor of the
Church was the instrument by which the State could be used to carry out
the views of a clerical reformer, and he had no scruples about using it.
Laud’s reliance on personal government in matters ecclesiastical allied
him naturally with its supporters in things secular. Absolutism was with
Strafford a political creed, with Laud an ecclesiastical necessity. Each
needed the same tool: one to realise his dream of a well governed
commonwealth, the other to shape a Church that had grown half
Calvinistic into conformity with the Anglican ideal. Each had the same
violent zeal. “Laud,” says James I., “hath a restless spirit, and cannot
see when things are well, but loves to bring matters to a pitch of
reformation floating in his own brain.” Strafford described himself as
one “ever desiring the best things, never satisfied I had done enough,
but did always desire to do better.”
Laud and Strafford were alike in their impatience of opposition, whether
it rose from indolence, corruption, or conscience; whether it pleaded
legal technicalities or constitutional rights. Arbitrary though the
government of Charles was, it was not vigorous enough to satisfy these
two eager spirits. But Strafford’s power to give his views effect was
bounded by the Irish Sea, and outside the ecclesiastical sphere Laud’s
was hampered by conflicting influences. The correspondence of the
Archbishop and the Lord Deputy is full of complaints of the remissness
of the King’s other ministers, and of sighs for the adoption of a system
of “Thorough.”
Opponents of Ship-money and Puritans in general must be put down with a
strong hand. “The very genius of that people,” wrote Strafford, “leads
them always to oppose, as well civilly as ecclesiastically, all that
ever authority ordains for them, but in good truth were they rightly
served they should be whipped home into their right wits.” “It might be
done,” answered Laud, “if the rod were rightly used, but as it is used
it smarts not.” Thus they took sweet counsel together, never dreaming of
“that two-handed engine at the door” which waited to strike them both.
During these eleven years of arbitrary government, Cromwell’s life was
obscure, if not wholly uneventful. It was a period of unconscious
preparation for his future action, a quiet seed-time which bore fruit
hereafter. When the “great, warm, ruffling Parliament” of 1628 ended,
Cromwell returned to his little estate at Huntingdon and busied himself
with his farming. In May, 1631, he sold his property at Huntingdon for
£1800, and rented some grazing lands at St. Ives, about five miles
eastward, and farther down the Ouse. In 1636, Sir Thomas Steward of Ely,
the brother of Cromwell’s mother, died, and Oliver, whom his uncle had
made his heir, succeeded Sir Thomas as farmer of the Cathedral tithes.
He removed to Ely, where he lived in “the glebe house” near St. Mary’s
Church, which continued to be the residence of his wife and children
till 1647. His family now numbered four sons, Robert, Oliver, Richard,
and Henry; and two daughters, Bridget and Elizabeth, all born at
Huntingdon. Two more daughters, Frances and Mary, were born in 1637 and
1638. The house he occupied is still standing; in 1845 it was an
alehouse.
“By no means a sumptuous mansion,” says Carlyle, “but may have
conveniently held a man of three or four hundred a year, with his
family, in those simple times. Some quaint air of gentility still
looks through its ragged dilapidations. It is of two stories, more
properly of one and a half; has many windows, irregular chimneys,
and gables.”
[Illustration:
CROMWELL’S HOUSE, ELY.
(_From a photograph._)
]
Some writers, more especially poets, have spoken of these years of
Cromwell’s life as a time given up entirely to domesticity and
agriculture. Marvell praises the Protector for an early abstention from
public affairs which was by no means voluntary:
“For neither didst thou from the first apply
Thy sober spirit unto things too high;
But in thine own fields exercisedst long
A healthful mind within a body strong.”
Elsewhere he pictures the ascent of the future general of the Republic:
“From his private gardens, where
He lived reservèd and austere,
As if his highest plot
To plant the bergamot.”
Yet even to these private gardens and sequestered fields the echo of the
German drums must have penetrated, and the Thirty Years’ War must have
stirred Cromwell as it stirred D’Ewes and Eliot. His later life suffices
to prove it. In 1647, when the English Civil War seemed over, Cromwell
thought of taking service in Germany himself. When he became Protector,
his European policy was inspired by the passions of the Thirty Years’
War. Its memories governed his attitude towards Austria and Sweden; he
thought that Leopold I. would be a second Ferdinand II., and dreamt of
finding a new Gustavus in Charles X. But to the Puritan farmer,
prescient of a future struggle, the war was not merely a spectacle but a
military education. Some of the best accounts of the battles and the
mode of fighting of Gustavus were published in England, and between 1630
and 1640 few books were more popular than _The Swedish Intelligencer_
and _The Swedish Soldier_. It cannot be doubted that Cromwell read these
narratives, and absorbed from them that knowledge of military principles
and military tactics which supplied for him the place of personal
experience.
“I find him,” says a modern military writer, “at the very first
entrance into the war acting on principles which past experience had
established, following closely upon just that stage which the art of
war had reached under Gustavus, using the very same moral stimulus
which Gustavus had made so effective, using the very words on one
occasion which Gustavus used on another, and indicating in various
ways that he had most carefully studied the past, though he had not
had the opportunity of doing any peace parade work.”
Cromwell watched the growth of arbitrary government in England with a
still keener interest. In 1630, he was one of the many gentlemen
prosecuted for omitting to go through the ceremony of knighthood, and
finally had to pay ten pounds for his neglect. Presumably he also paid
Ship-money, for there is no mention of his opposition to it amongst the
State papers. If he refused to pay, the sheriff doubtless distrained
upon his goods for the required amount, and there the matter ended. On
another question Cromwell came into conflict with the local authorities,
and was brought into collision with the King’s Council. Up to 1630,
Huntingdon had been an ancient prescriptive corporation, governed by two
bailiffs and a common council of twenty-four inhabitants who were
elected yearly. On July 15, 1630, the town obtained a new charter from
Charles I. “To prevent popular tumult,” the old common council was
dissolved, and the government of the town vested in twelve aldermen
elected for life, with a mayor, chosen annually out of the twelve, and a
recorder. An oligarchy replaced a democracy. The chief agent of this
change seems to have been Mr. Robert Barnard, a barrister who lived at
Huntingdon, had lately bought an estate at Brampton hard by, and
afterwards became Recorder of the town. The old common council had
consented to the change in the government of Huntingdon, but when the
terms of the new charter were examined a widespread discontent was
aroused. Complaints were heard that it gave the mayor and aldermen power
to deprive the burgesses of their rights in the common lands, and to
levy exorbitant fines on burgesses who refused municipal office.
Cromwell had assented to the change, and in the new charter he was
appointed one of the three justices of the peace for the borough. But he
thought these complaints well founded, and made himself the spokesman of
the popular dissatisfaction. Perhaps Cromwell felt that he had been
overreached by Barnard, whom in a later letter he significantly warns
against too much subtlety. In his anger he made “disgraceful and
unseemly speeches” to the new mayor and Barnard, and the corporation
complained to the Privy Council. On November 2, 1630, the council
committed Cromwell and one of his associates to custody. The case was
heard on December 1st and referred to the arbitration of the Earl of
Manchester, who, in his report, blamed Cromwell’s conduct, but ordered
the charter to be amended in three points to meet his objections. The
rights of the poorer burgesses were secured by an order that “the number
of men’s cattle of all sorts which they now keep, according to order and
usage, upon their commons, shall not be abridged or altered.” As to the
personal question Manchester’s report was:
“For the words spoken of Mr. Mayor and Mr. Barnard by Mr. Cromwell,
as they were ill, so they are acknowledged to be spoken in heat and
passion and desired to be forgotten; and I found Mr. Cromwell very
willing to hold friendship with Mr. Barnard, who with a good will
remitting all the unkind passages past, entertained the same. So I
left all parties reconciled.”
This quarrel was doubtless one of the reasons why Cromwell left
Huntingdon. At St. Ives and Ely, he showed the same zeal to defend the
rights of his poorer neighbours. In 1634, a company was incorporated for
the drainage of the fens round Ely, which were known as the Great Level.
The “Adventurers,” who were headed by the Earl of Bedford, were to be
paid by a share of the lands they rescued from the water, and in 1637
the work was declared completed, and the reward claimed. By these
drainage works the commoners lost the rights of pasturage and fishing
they had previously enjoyed, and Cromwell made himself the champion of
their interests against the “Adventurers.”
“It was commonly reported,” says a complaint, “by the commoners in
Ely Fens and the Fens adjoining, that Mr. Cromwell of Ely had
undertaken, they paying him a groat for every cow they had upon the
commons, to hold the drainers in suit of law for five years, and
that in the meantime they should enjoy every foot of their commons.”
In 1638, the King intervened, declared the work of drainage incomplete,
and undertook to complete it himself, announcing that the inhabitants of
the district were to continue in possession of their lands and commons
till the work was really finished. Nothing else is known of Cromwell’s
part in these disputes except a vague story told in the _Memoirs of Sir
Philip Warwick_, that “the vulgar” grew clamorous against the scheme,
and that Mr. Cromwell appeared as the head of their faction. Warwick,
writing long after the events he referred to, assumed as a matter of
course that Cromwell opposed the King, and the mistake found easy
credence.
Some years later, Cromwell came forward in the same way to defend the
rights of his old neighbours at St. Ives. The waste lands at Somersham
near St. Ives had been enclosed without the consent of the commoners and
sold to the Earl of Manchester. When the Long Parliament met, the
aggrieved commoners petitioned the House of Commons for redress. The
Lords intervened with an order in favour of Manchester. The commoners
replied by proceeding “in a riotous and warlike manner” to break down
the hedges and retake possession. Then the Lords sent the trained bands
to reinstate Manchester, and Manchester issued sixty writs against the
commoners. Without seeking to justify the violence of the commoners,
Cromwell got the House of Commons to appoint a committee to consider the
rights of the case. Hyde, its chairman, was greatly scandalised by the
vehemence with which Cromwell advocated the rights of the commoners
before it. Cromwell “ordered the witnesses and petitioners in the method
of their proceeding, and enlarged upon what they said with great
passion.” He reproached the chairman for partiality, used offensive
language to the son of the noble earl who claimed the land, and “his
whole carriage was so tempestuous, and his behaviour so insolent,” that
the chairman threatened to report him to the House.
This persistent championship of the rights of peasants and small
freeholders was the basis of Cromwell’s influence in the eastern
counties. Common rights were something concrete and tangible, which
appealed to many who were not Puritans, and came home to men to whom
parliamentary privileges were remote abstractions. Every village Hampden
looked to Cromwell as a leader, and was ready to follow him. In 1643, a
royalist newspaper nicknamed him “The Lord of the Fens,” but his
popularity with the fenmen began long before the military exploits which
gained him the title.
In a more limited sphere Cromwell was well known as a zealous Puritan,
but his opposition to Laud’s ecclesiastical policy did not bring him
into any general notoriety. Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, was Cromwell’s
kinsman, and lived during these years at Buckden near Huntingdon. He was
wont to relate afterwards that his relative was in those days “a common
spokesman for sectaries, and maintained their part with great
stubbornness.” A part of Laud’s policy to which Cromwell was
particularly hostile was the suppression of lectureships. The Puritans
in the towns, discontented with the negligence of the established clergy
in preaching, or with their doctrine, clubbed together to support
lecturers, that is, clergymen whose sole business was preaching. Most
corporations maintained a lecturer, and in 1625 a small society was
formed for buying up impropriated tithes, and using the proceeds for the
payment of lecturers. Laud sought to suppress these lectureships, and in
1633 the Star Chamber dissolved the Feoffees of Impropriations, and gave
their patronage to the King.
At St. Ives or somewhere else in Huntingdonshire, there was a
lectureship which Cromwell was anxious to keep up. It had been founded
by some London citizens, and in 1636 was in danger of coming to an end
through the stoppage of their subscriptions. Cromwell’s first letter is
an appeal to a forgetful subscriber, worded with singular care and tact.
“Not the least of the good works of your fellow citizens,” he begins,
“is that they have provided for the feeding of souls. Building of
hospitals provides for men’s bodies; to build material temples is
judged a work of piety, but they that procure spiritual food, they
that build up spiritual temples, they are the men truly charitable,
truly pious. Such a work as this was your erecting the lecture.”
He goes on to say that the lecturer is a good and able man, and has done
good work; help him therefore to carry it on.
“Surely, it were a piteous thing to see a lecture fall in the hands
of so many able and godly men, as I am persuaded the founders of
this are; in these times, wherein we see they are suppressed, with
too much haste and violence by the enemies of God his Truth.... To
withdraw the pay is to let fall the lecture; for who goeth to
warfare at his own cost. I beseech you therefore ... let the good
man have his pay. The souls of God’s children will bless you for it
and so shall I.”
The changes which Laud introduced in the externals of worship were as
abhorrent to Cromwell as the suppression of Puritan preaching. “There
were designs,” said Cromwell, looking back on Laud’s policy in 1658,
“to innovate upon us in matters of religion, and so to innovate as
to eat out the core and power and heart and life of all religion, by
bringing on us a company of poisonous popish ceremonies, and
imposing them upon those that were accounted the Puritans of the
nation and professors of religion among us, driving them to seek
their bread in a howling wilderness. As was instanced to our friends
who were forced to fly to Holland, New England, almost anywhither,
to find liberty for their consciences.”
[Illustration:
ST. IVES AND THE RIVER OUSE, AND MEDIÆVAL CHAPEL ON THE BRIDGE.
(_From Pike’s “Oliver Cromwell.”_)
]
A persistent tradition asserts that Cromwell himself thought of
emigrating to New England, and there are many grounds for accepting it
as true.
If he ever entertained such a design, it was probably between 1631 and
1636. When he left Huntingdon in May, 1631, he converted all his landed
property into money, as a man intending to emigrate would naturally do.
The cattle he bought and the lands he hired could be disposed of at
short notice. The time at which this took place renders it more
significant, for in 1630 and 1631 the Puritan exodus was at its height,
and most of the New England colonists came from East Anglia. In March,
1632, the Earl of Warwick granted the old Connecticut patent to Lord Say
and his associates, amongst whom was John Hampden. Nothing can be more
probable than that Cromwell should have thought of settling in a colony
of which his cousin was one of the patentees.
If Cromwell wished to emigrate, what was it that prevented him? The
eighteenth century story that he was on board one of the ships stopped
by order of council in May, 1638, is demonstrably false, for on the
petition of the passengers they were allowed to continue their voyage.
The contemporary story supplies a much more credible explanation. It is
that a kinsman died leaving him a considerable fortune, and this kinsman
is identified with Sir Thomas Steward, whose death took place in
January, 1636. A story which fits in so well with ascertained facts, and
is intrinsically so probable, should not be lightly put aside as a
fiction.
There is another fact in Cromwell’s history during this period of which
one of his letters gives us evidence. If he had ever written an account
of his own early life, little conflicts with local authorities or any
alterations in his worldly fortunes would have seemed to us of less
moment than the change which took place within him. Before 1628 he had
become a professor of religion, and in all externals a Puritan, but by
1638 a formal acceptance of the Calvinistic creed had become the perfect
faith which casts out all fears and doubts. His conversion had been
followed by a time of depression and mental conflict which lasted for
many years. Other Puritans passed through the same struggle. Bunyan
relates how he “fell to some outward reformation in his life,” and his
neighbours thought him to be “a very godly man, a new religious man, and
did marvel to see such a great and famous alteration.” And yet for a
long time afterwards he was “in a forlorn and sad condition,” afflicted
and disquieted by doubts. “How can you tell if you have faith?” said the
inner voices. “How can you tell if you are elected? How if the day of
grace be past and gone?” “My thoughts,” he says, “were like masterless
hell-hounds; my soul, like a broken vessel, driven as with the winds,
and tossed sometimes headlong into despair.”
By some such “obstinate questionings” Cromwell, too, was haunted and
tormented. An unsympathetic physician who knew him at Huntingdon
described him as splenetic and full of fancies; another whom he
consulted at London wrote him down as “valde melancholicus.” A mind
diseased and a soul at war with itself were beyond their art. This
internal conflict was at its height between 1628 and 1636. A friend who
knew Cromwell then, wrote, many years afterwards, the following account
of it:
“This great man is risen from a very low and afflicted condition;
one that hath suffered very great troubles of soul, lying a long
time under sore terrors and temptations, and at the same time in a
very low condition for outward things: in this school of afflictions
he was kept, till he had learned the lesson of the Cross, till his
will was broken into submission to the will of God.” Religion was
thus “laid into his soul with the hammer and fire”; it did not “come
in only by light into his understanding.”
In 1638, at the request of his cousin, Mrs. St. John, Cromwell confided
to her the story of this crisis in his life.
“You know,” he said, “what my manner of life hath been. Oh, I lived
in and loved darkness, and hated light; I was a chief, the chief of
sinners. This is true, I hated godliness, yet God had mercy on me.”
Even now the struggle was not ended. “I live in Meshec, which they
say signifies Prolonging; in Kedar, which signifies Blackness: yet
the Lord forsaketh me not. Though He do prolong, yet He will I trust
bring me to His tabernacle, to His resting-place. My soul is with
the Congregation of the First-born, my body rests in hope.... He
giveth me to see light in His light.”
It would be wrong to take these self-accusings as a confirmation of the
charges which royalist writers brought against Cromwell’s early life.
They refer to spiritual rather than moral failings, perhaps to the love
of the world and its vanities against which he so often warns his
children. They denote a change of feeling rather than a change of
conduct, a rise from coldness to enthusiasm, from dejection to
exaltation.
Full of thankfulness for this deliverance, Cromwell longed to testify to
his faith. “If here I may honour my God, either by doing or suffering, I
shall be most glad. Truly no poor creature hath more cause to put
himself forth in the cause of his God than I have. I have had plentiful
wages beforehand, and I am sure I shall never earn the least mite.” The
time for doing was near at hand, for when he wrote the resistance of the
Scots had begun. The friend quoted before points out how strangely the
turning-point in Cromwell’s spiritual life coincided with the
turning-point in the history of his cause. “The time of his extreme
suffering was when this cause of religion in which we are now engaged
was at its lowest ebb.” When the cause began to prosper, “he came forth
into comfort of spirit and enlargement of estate.” And so “he suffered
and rose with the cause, as if he had one life with it.”
The year 1638 was the turning-point in the history of English
Puritanism. When it began, the King’s power seemed as firmly established
as his heart could desire. The decision of the judges that Ship-money
was lawful gave absolute monarchy a legal basis, and a vantage-ground
for any future demands. The arguments which proved that the King had a
right to levy taxes at will for the support of a navy, justified him, if
he chose, in raising money for the maintenance of an army. Thus royalty,
in Strafford’s phrase, was “for ever vindicated from the conditions and
restraints of subjects.” “All our liberties,” wrote a Puritan lawyer,
“were now at one dash utterly ruined.”
There had been rumours in 1637 of some tumults in Scotland. “Horrible
ado against the bishops for seeking to bring in amongst them our service
book,” wrote Strafford’s news-purveyor to the Lord Deputy, but neither
thought it of much significance. At the end of March, 1638, the Scots
took the Covenant, and the little cloud in the north became a
threatening tempest. If Hampden and his friends could have read Laud’s
letters to Strafford, they would have laughed for joy. In May, the
Archbishop was thoroughly uneasy about “the Scotch business.” “If God
bless it with a good end, it is more than I can hope for. The truth is
that snowball hath been suffered to gather too long.” Ten days after the
decision against Hampden, he was thoroughly alarmed. “It is not the
Scottish business alone that I look upon, but the whole frame of things
at home and abroad, with vast expenses out of little treasure, and my
misgiving soul is deeply apprehensive of no small evils coming on.... I
can see no cure without a miracle.”
Charles was resolved to suppress the resistance of the Scots by arms.
“So long as this Covenant is in force,” he said, “I have no more power
in Scotland than a Duke of Venice, which I will rather die than suffer.”
He sent the Marquis of Hamilton to negotiate with the Scots, “to win
time that they may not commit public follies until I be ready to
suppress them.” But negotiations and intrigues failed to break their
union, and in May, 1639, Charles gathered twenty thousand men and
marched to the border to begin the work of suppression. Alexander
Leslie, a soldier of Gustavus, with an equal force of Scots, barred his
entrance to Scotland. Leslie’s army was well disciplined, well paid, and
well fed; his men “lusty and full of courage, great cheerfulness in the
faces of all.” The King’s troops were ill-armed and ill-provided, and
with no heart in their cause. The English nobility were as half-hearted
as the troops, and the King had emptied his treasury to raise this army.
There was nothing left but to make peace, and on June 24, 1639, the
Treaty of Berwick was signed. If the war had been a farce, the treaty
was high comedy. Everything was forgiven, almost anything was promised.
The King himself played the leading part in the negotiations with the
Scots, who found him “one of the most just, reasonable, sweet persons
they had ever seen.” “His Majesty,” wrote a Scot, “was ever the better
loved of all that heard him, and he likewise was the more enamoured of
us.”
The Scots returned home full of loyalty, with permission to settle their
ecclesiastical affairs in their own General Assembly, and their civil
affairs in their own Parliament. Charles went back to London, and
plotted to nullify his concessions. He refused either to rescind the
acts establishing Episcopacy, or to confirm the acts of the Scottish
Parliament, and summoned Strafford from Ireland to whip the Scots into
their right minds. Strafford had ready both his plan of campaign and his
policy. The English navy was to blockade the Scottish ports and destroy
their trade. The Irish army was to threaten a landing in West Scotland,
or to be transported to Cumberland. The English army was to invade
Scotland and from a fortified camp at Leith keep Edinburgh and the
Lowlands in awe, till the English Prayer-book was accepted and the
bishops restored to their authority; “nay, perchance till I had
conformed that kingdom in all, as well for the temporal as
ecclesiastical affairs, wholly to the government and laws of England;
and Scotland was governed by the King and council of England.”
Strafford’s first step on reaching England was to procure the summoning
of a Parliament. No Englishman, he thought, could refuse to give his
money to the King in such an extremity, against so foul a rebellion. If
any man resisted, he should be “laid by the heels,” till he learnt to
obey and not to dispute. But he repudiated the suggestion that the King
had lost the affections of his people. In April, the Parliament met; its
members were described as sober and dispassionate men of whom very few
brought ill purposes with them. Amongst them was Cromwell, whose
opposition to the “Adventurers” for the drainage of the fens had gained
him a seat for the borough of Cambridge. All these sober and
dispassionate men united in demanding the restoration of Parliament to
its proper place in the constitution. Pym enumerated all the grievances
in Church and State, and asserted that their source was the intermission
of parliaments, for Parliament was the soul of the body politic. The
Commons answered the King’s demand for money by saying that “till the
liberties of the House and the kingdom were cleared they knew not
whether they had anything to give, or no.” Charles tried to bargain with
them, and offered to abolish Ship-money if they gave him £840,000 in
return. They demanded not only the abolition of Ship-money but the
abolition of the new military charges which the King had imposed on the
counties for the support of their train-bands. Hearing that they meant
to invite the Lords to make a joint protest against the intended war
with the Scots, Charles cut short their project by a sudden dissolution
(May 5, 1640). At this stroke moderate men were filled with melancholy,
but the faces of the opposition leaders showed “a marvellous serenity.”
The cloudy countenance of Cromwell’s cousin, St. John, was lit with an
unusual light. “All was well,” he said; “things must be worse before
they could be better, and this Parliament would never have done what was
necessary to be done.”
With or without Parliament’s aid, Charles was resolved to force the
Scots to submission. Some of his council, knowing the emptiness of the
exchequer, urged him to stand on the defensive.
“No defensive war,” cried Strafford; “go on vigorously or let them
alone. The King is loose and absolved from all rules of government.
In an extreme necessity you may do all that your power admits.
Parliament refusing, you are acquitted towards God and man. You have
an army in Ireland you may employ here to reduce this kingdom. One
summer well employed will do it.”
At every step, however, the old difficulties gathered round the King’s
path. London refused a loan; France and Spain would lend nothing; even
the Pope was applied to for men and money, but in vain. Not a tenth of
the Ship-money imposed was paid, and Coat- and Conduct-money were
universally refused. In his desperation, Charles thought of debasing the
coinage and seizing the bullion which the Spanish Government had sent to
England to be coined. The military outlook was equally depressing, for
the army was smaller and worse than the army of 1639. The general of the
cavalry at Newcastle described his task as teaching cart-horses military
evolutions, and men fit for Bedlam and Bridewell to keep the ten
commandments. The commander of the infantry in Yorkshire answered, that
his mutinous train-bands were the arch-knaves of the country. Of this
army, on August 18th, Strafford, half dead but indomitable, was
appointed commander-in-chief.
Only a touch was needed to make the fabric of absolutism collapse. As
the commander-in-chief was struggling towards his army in a litter,
Leslie crossed the Tweed with twenty-five thousand Scots. On August
28th, he forced the passage of the Tyne at Newburn, driving before him
the three thousand foot and fifteen hundred horse who strove to defend
it. Newcastle was evacuated; Northumberland and Durham fell into
Leslie’s power; Strafford met his beaten troops streaming back into
Yorkshire with the Scots close on their heels. “Never came any man to so
lost a business,” cried the unhappy statesman. It was not only that the
army was untrained, necessitous, and cowardly, but the whole country was
apathetic or hostile. “An universal affright in all, a general
disaffection to the King’s service, none sensible of his dishonour.”
With desperate energy Strafford laboured to reorganise his shattered
forces, and to keep the Scots out of Yorkshire. At his breath the dying
loyalty of the country flashed up into a momentary blaze. It seemed as
if the Scottish invasion might revive the forgotten hostility of the two
nations.
Vain labours and vainer hopes. Twelve peers presented a petition
demanding peace and a Parliament, and another to the same purpose came
in from the City of London. Charles called a Council of Peers to patch
up a truce with the Scots, and announced to them the summons of a
Parliament for November 3rd. Absolutism had had its day.
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