THE END OF THE LONG PARLIAMENT
1651–1653
When the Parliament received the news of Worcester, they voted Cromwell
four thousand pounds a year, gave him Hampton Court for a residence, and
sent a deputation to present their thanks. On September 12th, he made a
triumphal entry into London. Hugh Peters, the army chaplain, professed
to perceive a secret exultation in his bearing, and whispered to a
friend that Cromwell would yet make himself king. But Whitelocke
recorded that “he carried himself with great affability, and in his
discourses about Worcester would seldom mention anything of himself, but
mentioned others only, and gave, as was due, the glory of the action to
God.” From his despatch, it was evident that Cromwell regarded the
“crowning mercy” of Worcester not only as the consummation of the work
of war, but as a call to take in hand and accomplish the tasks of peace.
It should provoke the Parliament, he told the Speaker,
“to do the will of Him who has done His will for it and for the
nation—whose good pleasure it is to establish the nation and the
change of government, by making the people so willing to the defence
thereof, and so signally blessing the endeavours of your servants in
this late great work.”
For in spite of its victories the government of the Commonwealth was
essentially a provisional government, and acquiesced in, rather than
accepted by, the nation. Even its adherents felt that something more
permanent and more constitutional must be established in its place, now
that the Civil War was over. In a conference between officers and
members of Parliament, which Cromwell brought about soon after his
return to London, this feeling plainly appeared. The lawyers were all
for some monarchical form of government. Some suggested that the late
King’s third son, the Duke of Gloucester, now twelve years old, should
be made king. The soldiers would not hear of anything that smacked of
monarchy. “Why,” asked Desborough, “may not this as well as other
nations be governed in the way of a republic?” Cromwell said little, and
seemed more anxious to learn what others thought, than to express his
own views. He agreed with the lawyers that “a settlement of somewhat
with monarchical power in it” would be most effectual. He knew that a
strong executive power was needed either for the tasks of peace or war,
but doubted whether a return to the Stuart line was possible. He agreed
with the soldiers that a new Parliament was an immediate necessity, but,
as in 1649, he held that it would be more honourable and more expedient
to induce the Long Parliament to dissolve itself. Publicly and privately
he used all his influence to persuade the House to do so. “I pressed the
Parliament,” he says, “as a member to period themselves, once and again
and again, and ten, nay, twenty times over.” But, in spite of “a long
speech made by his Excellency,” it was only by two votes that the House
resolved to fix a date for its dissolution, and then the date named was
three years distant (November 3, 1654). Cromwell was obliged to resign
himself to the delay, and do what he could for the settlement of the
nation through the instrumentality of the existing Parliament. The task
which was now before him was more difficult than fighting the Irish or
the Scots; more was expected of him, and his power was less.
“Great things,” said a letter to Cromwell, “God has done by you in
war, and good things men expect from you in peace: to break in
pieces the oppressor, to ease the oppressed of their burdens, to
release the prisoners out of bonds, and to relieve poor families
with bread.”
For some months after Worcester, petitions were often addressed directly
to the General and the Army instead of to the Parliament. But all power
was in the hands of the Parliament, and as dangers grew more remote,
this body grew less amenable to the influence of the man who had saved
it. Of the sixty or seventy members who habitually took part in its
proceedings, the ablest were also members of the Council of State,
absorbed in the daily business of administration, and with little energy
left for the consideration of far-reaching legislative plans. Of the
rest, many were engrossed by local affairs, others occupied with their
farms and their merchandise, many building up fortunes by speculating in
confiscated lands. Some few were notoriously corrupt, but partisanship
and favouritism were more general evils than corruption. Vane complained
to Cromwell that some of his colleagues were so obstructive, that
“without continual contestation they will not suffer to be done things
that are so plain that they ought to do themselves.” “How hard and
difficult a matter it was,” said Cromwell himself, “to get anything
carried without making parties, without practices indeed unworthy of a
Parliament.”
Yet difficult though it was, Cromwell and the officers succeeded in
inspiring the Parliament with some portion of their own energy.
Politically, the most pressing measure was the grant of an amnesty to
the conquered Royalists. So long as they were liable to punishment and
confiscation for acts done during the last ten years, the wounds of the
Civil War could never be healed. In February, 1652, Cromwell at last
persuaded Parliament to pass an act of pardon for all treasons committed
before the battle of Worcester, but it was unhappily clogged with
exceptions and restrictions which robbed it of much of its efficacy.
More than once during the divisions on the bill, Cromwell was teller
against these restrictions, and bigoted republicans afterwards thought
he did so from sinister motives. He contrived that delinquents should
escape due punishment, wrote Ludlow, “that so he might fortify himself
by the addition of new friends for the carrying on his designs.” To
Cromwell it seemed an act of political expediency. It was necessary, he
held, to be just to Royalists as well as Puritans, to unbelievers as
well as believers; perhaps even more necessary.
“The right spirit,” he added, “was such a spirit as Moses had and Paul
had—which was not a spirit for believers only, but for the whole
people.”
Next in importance to a general amnesty came the Reform of the Law—a
phrase which, in the minds of those who used it, meant not simply legal
changes, but social reforms in general. There was much need of both. The
Civil War had ruined its thousands; society was disorganised by its
consequences: the relations of landlord and tenant, of debtor and
creditor, were complicated by unforeseen calamities; the prisons of
London were crammed with poor debtors, and the country swarmed with
beggars. For the lawyers it was the best possible of worlds, and they
were never more prosperous or more unpopular.
“We cannot mention the Reformation of the Law,” said Cromwell to
Ludlow in 1650, “but the lawyers cry out we mean to destroy
property, whereas the law as it is now constituted serves only to
maintain the lawyers, and to encourage the rich to oppress the
poor.” “Relieve the oppressed,” he urged Parliament in his Dunbar
despatch; “reform the abuses of all professions, and if there be any
one that makes many poor to make a few rich, that suits not a
Commonwealth.”
Parliament had done something already to meet these complaints. In
November, 1650, it had passed an act ordering that all legal proceedings
and documents should be henceforth in English, besides an earlier act
for the relief of poor prisoners. Now it boldly appointed twenty-one
commissioners, chosen outside its own body, with Matthew Hale at their
head, “to consider the inconveniencies of the Law—and the speediest way
to remedy the same,” and to report their proposals to a Committee of the
House itself (January 17, 1652). The commissioners fell roundly to work,
and presented in the next few months drafts of many good bills, some of
which became law during the Protectorate, and others in the present
century. They even took in hand the task of codification, and drew up “a
system of the Law” for the consideration of Parliament.
During this same period the reorganisation of the Church was also
attempted. The Long Parliament had passed acts for the augmentation of
livings, for the punishment of blasphemy, and for the propagation of the
Gospel in Wales and Ireland. But it had abolished Episcopacy without
replacing it by any other system of Church government, and it had
ejected royalist clergymen without providing any machinery for the
appointment of fit successors. In London, in Lancashire, and in a few
other districts, there were voluntary associations of ministers on the
Presbyterian model, but throughout the greater part of England, the
Presbyterian organisation decreed in 1648 had never been actually
established. The Church was a chaos of isolated congregations, in which
a man made himself a minister as he chose, and got himself a living as
he could. The reduction of this chaos to order seemed so difficult a
problem, and beset with so many controversial questions, that Parliament
hesitated to undertake it.
John Owen, once Cromwell’s chaplain in Ireland, took the duty on
himself, and on February 10, 1652, he and fourteen other ministers
presented to Parliament a comprehensive scheme for the settlement of the
Church. The House answered by referring it to a committee appointed to
consider the better propagation of the Gospel, of which committee
Cromwell was the most important member. Owen’s scheme, like the
Agreement of the People, proposed the continuance of a national Church
with tolerated dissenting bodies existing by its side. The Church was to
be controlled by two sets of commissioners, partly lay and partly
clerical: local commissioners, who were to determine the fitness of all
candidates seeking to be admitted as preachers; itinerant commissioners,
who were to move from place to place ejecting unfit ministers and
schoolmasters. On the limits of the toleration to be granted to
dissenters, the committee was split into two sections. The scheme
proposed that the opponents of the essential principles of the Christian
religion should not be suffered to promulgate their views. When pressed
to define what these principles were, Owen and his friends produced a
list of fifteen fundamentals, the denial of which was to disqualify men
from freedom to propagate their opinions. Cromwell thought these
limitations too restrictive, and wished for a more liberal definition of
Christianity. “I had rather,” he emphatically declared, “that
Mahometanism were permitted amongst us, than that one of God’s children
should be persecuted.” It was in consequence of these debates that
Milton, in May, 1652, addressed to Cromwell the sonnet in which he
adjured him to remember that “peace hath victories no less renowned than
war.”
[Illustration:
REV. JOHN OWEN, D.D.
(_From a painting, possibly by Robert Walker, in the National Portrait
Gallery._)
]
“New foes arise
Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains;
Help us to save free conscience from the paw
Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw.”
But Milton did not share Cromwell’s belief in the necessity of an
Established Church, and it was Vane, not Cromwell, whom he praised as
the statesman who knew the true bounds of either sword, and had learnt
what severed the spiritual from the civil power. By the time the sonnet
to Vane was written, ecclesiastical controversies had fallen into the
background; the short period of peace and reform was over; Cromwell and
Vane alike were forced to turn their attention to the problems of
foreign policy and the tasks of war.
When Cromwell left England in the summer of 1649, all the world seemed
hostile to the Republic. Worcester made Great Britain once more a power
in Europe, and foreign States began to seek the friendship of the
Republic, or at least to fear its enmity.
This great change was chiefly due to Cromwell’s victories. “Truth is,”
wrote Bradshaw to Cromwell after Dunbar, “God’s blessing upon the wise
and faithful conduct of affairs where you are gives life and repute to
all other attempts and actions upon the Commonwealth’s behalf.” Much,
too, was due to the successes of Blake. By the spring of 1652, the navy
had swept royalist privateers from the British seas and the
Mediterranean, and reduced, one after another, all the colonies or
dependencies which refused to submit to the Republic. Rupert’s fleet,
blockaded in Kinsale by Blake from May to November, 1649, could do
nothing to help Ormond in capturing Dublin and Londonderry, or to hinder
Cromwell’s progress in Ireland. When Rupert escaped he made his way to
Lisbon, and under the protection of the King of Portugal refitted his
ships and captured English merchantmen. In March, 1650, Blake appeared
off the mouth of the Tagus, and kept Rupert’s ships cooped up there for
the next six months. At last, in October, 1650, during Blake’s absence,
Rupert put to sea, and entering the Mediterranean began to plunder and
burn English merchantmen. Blake captured or destroyed most of his ships
off Malaga and Cartagena, and with the two which were left him Rupert
took refuge in Toulon. Next came the turn of the islands, which were the
headquarters of the royalist privateers. In May, 1651, Sir John
Grenville surrendered the Scilly Islands to Blake, just in time to
prevent their falling into the hands of a Dutch fleet sent to punish
Grenville’s attacks on Dutch commerce. The Isle of Man fell in October.
In December, Blake captured Jersey and Guernsey, where Sir George
Carteret had carried on the business of piracy on a larger and still
more lucrative scale than Grenville. Finally, in January, 1652, Sir
George Ayscue’s fleet reduced Barbadoes and the West Indian islands,
while in March, Virginia and Maryland gave in their submission. Lords of
all the territories the Stuarts had ruled, and with a stronger army and
fleet than they had ever possessed, the republican leaders were free to
intervene in European politics.
The Thirty Years’ War had ended with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.
France and Spain were still fighting, but with no great vigour, the one
distracted by the civil wars of the Fronde, the other weak from
misgovernment and the decay of its trade. Each wanted the help of
England, but while Spain had recognised the Republic in December, 1650,
France still delayed, and while Spain had allowed Blake to victual his
fleet in Spanish ports, France gave shelter to Rupert’s ships in its
harbours, and allowed him to sell his prizes there. Not only French
privateers but French men-of-war attacked English commerce in the
Levant; and in France Charles gathered around him the exiled Royalists,
and plotted against the peace of the Republic. At the moment, even
religious as well as political motives favoured an alliance with Spain.
In the Spanish dominions, there were no Protestants left to be
persecuted, but the Huguenots of Southern France, relying upon the
tradition of English policy which had existed since the Reformation,
still looked to their co-religionists in England for support. The wars
of the Fronde supplied a second motive for intervention, and to support
the last defenders of political freedom in France against the
encroachments of a centralising monarchy was a cause which naturally
appealed to enthusiastic republicans. When Condé and the Frondeurs of
Guienne applied to England and Spain for help against Mazarin, Spain
responded at once, and a strong party in the English Council of State
was ready to return a favourable answer. Whether the Spanish or the
French party in that body would gain the upper hand depended largely on
the decision of Cromwell. Ever since Worcester, and indeed earlier,
foreign diplomatists had turned their attention to the General, reported
his casual utterance, and striven to divine his intentions.
People who believed that the Republic would seek to propagate republican
institutions abroad regarded Cromwell as the destined instrument of that
policy. “If he were ten years younger,” Cromwell was rumoured to have
said, “there was not a king in Europe he would not make to tremble,” and
that as he had better motives than the late King of Sweden he believed
himself capable of doing more for the good of nations than the other did
for his own ambition. Marvell hailed him on his return from Ireland as a
deliverer,—one whose future conquests should mark a new era in the
history of all oppressed nations.
“A Cæsar he ere long to Gaul,
To Italy a Hannibal,
And to all states not free
Shall climacteric be.”
Cromwell’s acts, however, showed no trace of the revolutionary zeal
attributed to him. He revealed himself at his first appearance in
foreign politics as a keen and realistic statesman, more anxious to
extend his country’s trade and his country’s territory than to spread
republican principles in foreign parts. The only sentimental
consideration which seemed to move him was sympathy for oppressed
Protestants. He refused the proposals which Condé’s agents made to him
immediately after Worcester, but he did not hesitate to send one
emissary to Paris to negotiate with De Retz, and another to ascertain
the real condition of the south of France. The question how to improve
the position of the Huguenots was the one which interested him most, and
it soon appeared evident that to effect this by an understanding with
the French Government would be easier than to attempt armed intervention
in their favour. From the beginning, therefore, Cromwell showed a
preference for the French rather than the Spanish alliance. In the
spring of 1652, he and two other members of the Council of State opened
a secret negotiation with Mazarin for the cession of Dunkirk. Its
garrison was hard pressed by the Spaniards, and the opinion was that the
French Government, being unable to relieve it, would rather see it in
English than Spanish hands. In April, five thousand English soldiers
were collected at Dover, to be embarked for Dunkirk at a moment’s
notice. But Mazarin refused to pay the price demanded for the English
alliance, and while he hesitated and haggled, the partisans of a Spanish
alliance gained the upper hand in the English Council and the
negotiation was broken off. As France continued its refusal to recognise
the Republic unconditionally, it became necessary to use force. In
September, 1652, Blake swooped down on a French fleet sent to revictual
Dunkirk, took seven ships, and destroyed or drove ashore the rest, with
the result that the besieged fortress surrendered to the Spaniards the
next day. At last, in December, 1652, an ambassador arrived in London
announcing, in the name of Louis XIV., that the union which should exist
between neighbouring states was not regulated by their form of
government, and formally recognising the Commonwealth.
[Illustration:
BUST OF CROMWELL.
ATTRIBUTED TO BERNINI.
(_In the Palace of Westminster, 1899._)
]
Ere this took place, England had become involved in a war with Holland.
The two Protestant Republics seemed created by nature for allies.
England had helped the Dutch to establish their freedom, and Holland had
ever been the chosen refuge of Puritan fugitives. But ever since 1642,
dynastic and commercial causes had driven the two states farther apart.
The marriage of William II. with Mary, daughter of Charles I., had
secured the support of the Stadtholder to Charles I. and Charles II.,
and neutralised the good will of the Dutch republicans. With the death
of William II., in October, 1650, and the practical abolition of the
office of Stadtholder, the republican party gained the ascendancy, and
better relations seemed possible. Six months later, the Commonwealth
sent St. John and Strickland to The Hague to offer on behalf of England,
not merely a renewal of the old amity, but “a more strict and intimate
alliance and union, whereby there may be a more intrinsical and mutual
interest of each in other than hath hitherto been, for the good of
both.” The Dutch were willing to make a close commercial alliance, but
would go no farther, and negotiations were broken off without any
discussion of the “coalescence,” or political union, which the English
ambassadors were empowered to propose. After this failure the commercial
rivalry of the two nations became more acute. “We are rivals,” a member
of the Long Parliament once said, “for the fairest mistress in the
world—trade.” In March, 1651, the Dutch made a treaty with Denmark,
which damaged English trade in the Baltic. In October, England passed
the Navigation Act, which at one stroke barred Dutch commerce with the
English colonies, deprived Dutch fishermen of their market in England,
and threatened to destroy the Dutch carrying trade. The United Provinces
sent ambassadors to negotiate for its repeal, but other questions arose
which complicated the situation still further. There were old disputes
about the acknowledgment of the sovereignty of England in the British
seas, the salute due to the English flag, and the right to exact tribute
for permission to fish. There was a new dispute about the rights of
neutrals. England, practically at war with France, claimed the right of
seizing French goods in Dutch ships, whilst the Dutch put forward the
principle that the flag covered the cargo. Memories of the Amboyna
Massacre, and demands for compensation for old misdeeds of the Dutch in
the East Indies, put fresh obstacles in the way of agreement. Then on
May 12, 1652, came a chance collision between Blake and Tromp, off
Dover, and the two Republics were at war.
To Cromwell, nothing could have been more unwelcome than this war with
the Dutch. He thought England in the right on the questions at issue
between the two states, and when Parliament sent him to investigate the
causes of the fight, he came back convinced that the fault lay with
Tromp and not with Blake. But the war threatened to frustrate for ever
the scheme of a league of Protestant powers which Cromwell cherished in
his heart. “I do not like the war,” he declared to the representatives
of the Dutch congregation in London; “I will do everything in my power
to bring about peace.” In every attempt made to come to terms with the
Dutch, Cromwell headed the peace party, and the negotiations through
unofficial agents, which began in the summer of 1652, were inspired by
him.
At first, the result of the war was favourable to England. The Dutch had
an enormous commerce and a comparatively small navy; England had a large
navy and comparatively little commerce. “The English,” said a Dutchman,
“were attacking a mountain of gold, while the Dutch were attacking a
mountain of iron.” Individually, the English men-of-war were stronger
vessels than the Dutch, and armed with heavier guns. Moreover, English
naval operations were under the direction of one body, whilst the Dutch
were managed by five distinct admiralty boards. Added to this, the
geographical position of England gave it the command of the route by
which Dutch fleets approached their own shores, and while Blake and
Ayscue were free to attack as they chose, the Dutch admirals were
generally hampered by the task of defending large convoys of
merchantmen. In November, 1652, however, Tromp defeated Blake off
Dungeness, and for more than two months the command of the Channel
passed to the Dutch. It was not regained till Blake and Monk defeated
him in a three days’ fight off Portland, in February, 1653. Meanwhile,
in the Mediterranean, one English squadron had been defeated off Elba,
and another was blockaded in Leghorn; the Baltic was closed to English
commerce, Denmark was about to ally itself with Holland to maintain the
exclusion, and 1652 closed gloomily for the Commonwealth.
A still stronger argument for peace was provided by the internal
condition of England. The war put a stop to all reforms; instead of
progress there was a retrograde movement. The army cost a million and a
half a year, the navy nearly a million; three hundred thousand pounds
were required to build new frigates, and there was a deficit of about
half a million. To meet this expenditure, the Long Parliament fell back
on the old plan and confiscated the estates of about 650 persons, and
applied the proceeds to the maintenance of the navy. Most of the persons
thus sentenced to beggary were insignificant people who had done nothing
deserving such a punishment. The healing policy which Cromwell had
advocated was definitely abandoned, and he was full of indignation at
the injustice he witnessed. “Poor men,” he afterwards said, “were driven
like flocks of sheep by forty in a morning to confiscation of goods and
estates, without any man being able to give a reason why two of them
should forfeit a shilling.”
The reorganisation of the Church ceased to make any progress. Parliament
discussed some of the proposals of Cromwell’s committee, but did
nothing. One of its last acts was to decline to continue the powers of
the Commissioners for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales, appointed
some three years earlier. To Cromwell, this refusal seemed a deliberate
discouragement of “the poor people of God in Wales,” and a clear proof
that men zealous for the spread of religion had little to hope from the
Parliament. “That business,” he said, “to myself and officers was as
plain a trial of their spirits as anything.” As to the reform of the
law, it appeared equally hopeless. Hale’s bills lay neglected on the
table of the House, or, like that for the registration of all titles to
land, were swamped by floods of talk in committee.
“I will not say,” said Cromwell of the Parliament, “that they were
come to an utter inability of working reformation, though I might
say so in regard to one thing—the Reformation of the law, so much
groaned under in the posture it is now. That was a thing we had many
good words spoken for, but we know now that three months together
were not enough for the settling of one word ‘Incumbrances.’”
The army grew more and more impatient. In August, 1652, the council of
officers presented a petition to Parliament demanding that “speedy and
effectual means” should be taken for carrying out a long list of reforms
specified. But for Cromwell they would have included in it the demand
for an immediate dissolution. The House gave the officers good words in
plenty, and told them that the things they asked for were “under
consideration,” but months passed and there were only a few feeble
indications of activity. In October, meetings began between the officers
and the leading members of Parliament.
“I believe,” affirmed Cromwell, “we had at least ten or twelve
meetings, most humbly begging and beseeching of them that by their
own means they would bring forth those good things which had been
promised and expected; that so it might appear that they did not do
them by any suggestion from the army, but from their own ingenuity:
so tender were we to preserve them in the reputation of the people.”
Whitelocke relates an interview between himself and Cromwell, in which
the latter dwelt on the pride, ambition, and self-seeking of the members
of Parliament, their engrossing all places of honour and profit for
themselves and their friends, their delays, their factions, their
injustice and partiality, and their design to perpetuate themselves in
power. It was necessary, continued Cromwell, that there should be some
other authority strong enough to restrain and curb the exorbitances of a
body which claimed supreme power and was so unfit to rule. Whitelocke
hoped that the Parliament would mend its ways, and thought it would be
hard to create such an authority. “What if a man should take upon him to
be king?” asked Cromwell. All Whitelocke could answer was, that if
Cromwell were to take upon himself that title the remedy would be worse
than the disease, and that his best plan was to make terms with Charles
II.
These conferences came to nothing, and in January, 1653, the impatience
of the army grew uncontrollable. The officers held regular meetings at
St. James’s, sent a circular letter to the armies in Ireland and
Scotland, appealed to their fellow soldiers to stand by them, and drew
up threatening addresses to Parliament. Most of the council of officers
would be content with nothing less than an immediate dissolution, and
were ready to effect it by force. Cromwell opposed any resort to
violence, and succeeded, though with difficulty, in holding them back.
To a friend, he complained that he was pushed on by two parties to do an
act, “the consideration of the issue whereof made his hair to stand on
end.” Major-General Lambert headed one party, eager to be revenged on
the House for depriving him of the Lord Deputyship of Ireland. The other
was headed by Major-General Harrison, an honest man, “aiming at good
things,” but too impatient to obtain them “to wait the Lord’s leisure.”
Meanwhile Parliament, thoroughly alarmed by the rising agitation, took
up once more the “Bill for a New Representative,” and began to press it
forward in earnest. They determined what the constituencies should be,
and fixed the qualification for the franchise. By the middle of April,
the bill was nearly through committee, and required nothing but a third
reading to make it law. In the hands of the parliamentary leaders,
however, it had become a scheme for perpetuating themselves in power.
The bill was to be a bill for recruiting the numbers of the House, and
the present members were to keep their seats without the necessity of
re-election. They would be the sole judges of the validity of the votes
given, and the eligibility of the persons chosen. Nor was it only at the
next election that this system of recruiting was to be adopted; it was
to be applied also to all future Parliaments.
To this ingenious scheme the officers of the army had many objections.
One was, that the right of election was too loosely defined, and that
its interpretation was entrusted to men in whom they had no confidence.
They insisted on a political as well as a pecuniary qualification for
the franchise, and complained that neutrals and men who had deserted the
cause would be able to vote. To put power into the hands of such men,
was to throw away the liberties of the nation.
Equally objectionable was the system of election proposed. It gave the
people no real right of choice, but only a seeming right. Leicestershire
might be tired of Haslerig, and Hull have lost confidence in Vane, yet
both must continue to be represented by the men they had chosen in 1640.
Lancashire would cease to be unrepresented, but the members it elected
might be kept out by the veto of men who had practically elected
themselves. Though the army was prepared to restrict the franchise and
limit the choice of the electors, it was not prepared to acquiesce in so
complete a mockery of representative government.
To Cromwell and the constitutional theorists amongst the officers, there
was another insurmountable objection to the bill. What they disliked
most in the rule of the Long Parliament was the union of legislative and
executive power in the hands of a body possessing unlimited authority
and always in session. They wanted short Parliaments, sitting for not
more than six months in the year, and limited in their power as well as
in their duration. What the bill offered instead of the perpetuation of
the Long Parliament, was a succession of perpetual Parliaments, sitting
all the year round, following each other without any interval, and
exercising the same arbitrary power which the Long Parliament had
exercised.
“We should have had fine work then,” said Cromwell.... “A Parliament
of four hundred men, executing arbitrary government without
intermission, except some change of a part of them; one Parliament
stepping into the seat of another, just left warm for them; the same
day that the one left, the other was to leap in.... I thought, and I
think still, that this was a pitiful remedy.”
For these reasons, the officers resolved to prevent the passage of the
bill at any cost. The whole future of the Cause seemed to depend on the
issue.
“We came,” said Cromwell, “to this conclusion amongst ourselves:
That if we had been fought out of our liberties and rights,
necessity would have taught us patience, but to deliver them up
would render us the basest persons in the world, and worthy to be
accounted haters of God and His people.”
Cromwell became reluctantly convinced that if persuasion failed, it was
his duty to use force.
The only hope of an honourable ending of the Long Parliament lay in its
acceptance of a compromise. At a conference with some members on April
19, 1653, Cromwell and the officers proposed an expedient which they
thought would answer: Let the Parliament drop the bill, dissolve itself
at once, and appoint a provisional government. Let the members “devolve
their trust to some well affected men, such as had an interest in the
nation, and were known to be of good affection to the Commonwealth,” and
leave these men “to settle the nation.” “It was no new thing,” said the
officers, “when this land was under the like hurlyburlies,” and they
proved it by historical precedents. The members demurred and argued, but
in the end they promised to think it over and meet the officers for
another conference next day. Vane and others pledged themselves, in the
meantime, to suspend further proceedings on the Bill for a New
Representative, and the officers separated hopefully.
Another parliamentary leader, Sir Arthur Haslerig, whose authority with
the House was equal, if not superior, to Vane’s, had come up from the
country resolved to defeat the compromise. He told his fellow members
vehemently that the work they went about was accursed, and that it was
impossible to devolve their trust. When the House met next day, it
adopted Haslerig’s view, called for the bill, and proceeded to push it
through its last stage regardless of protests. They meant then to
adjourn to November, so that it would be impossible to amend or repeal
the act; to leave the Council of State to carry on the government, and
to make Fairfax General, instead of Cromwell.
News came to Cromwell at Whitehall that the House was proceeding with
all speed upon the Bill fora New Representative. Till a second and a
third messenger confirmed the tidings, he could not believe “that such
persons would be so unworthy.” Then he hurried down to the House,
dressed as he was, not like a general or a soldier, but like an ordinary
citizen, “clad in plain black clothes with grey worsted stockings,” and
sat down, as he used to do, “in an ordinary place.” For a quarter of an
hour he sat still, listening to the debate, until the Speaker was about
to put the question whether the bill should pass. Cromwell turned to
Major-General Harrison, whispered “This is the time I must do it,” and,
rising in his place, put off his hat and addressed the House. At first,
and for a good while, he spoke in commendation of the Parliament,
praising its labours and its care for the public good. Then he changed
his note, and told the members of their injustice, their delays of
justice, their self-interest, and other faults. As his passion grew, he
put his hat on his head, strode up and down the floor of the House, and,
looking first at one, then at another member, chid them soundly, naming
no names, but showing by his gestures whom he meant. These were corrupt,
those scandalous in their lives, that man fraudulent, that an unjust
judge. “Perhaps you think,” he said, “that this is not parliamentary
language; I confess it is not; neither are you to expect any such from
me. You are no Parliament, I say you are no Parliament. I will put an
end to your sitting.” “Call them in,” he cried, turning to Harrison, and
at the word Harrison went out and brought back twenty or thirty
musketeers of Cromwell’s own regiment from the lobby. Only a show of
force was needed. Cromwell pointed to the Speaker in his chair, and said
to Harrison, “Fetch him down.” The Speaker refused to leave the chair
unless he were forced. “Sir,” said Harrison, “I will lend you my hand,”
and putting his hand in Lenthall’s he helped him to the floor. Sidney,
who sat next the chair that day, declined to move. “Put him out,”
ordered Cromwell; so Harrison and an officer laid their hands on his
shoulders and led him towards the door. Then, looking scornfully at the
mace on the table, Cromwell exclaimed, “What shall we do with this
bauble?” and, calling a soldier, said, “Here, take it away.”
After the mace and the Speaker were gone, all the members left the
House. As they went out, Cromwell turned to them and cried: “It is you
that have forced me to this, for I have sought the Lord night and day,
that He would rather slay me than put me upon the doing this work.”
Addressing Vane by name, he reproached him with his broken faith, adding
that he might have prevented this, but he was a juggler and had no
common honesty. Then, taking the bill from the hands of the clerk of the
House, he ordered the doors to be locked, and went away.
It remained still to dissolve the Council of State which the Parliament
had appointed. In the afternoon, Cromwell came to the Council, and told
its members that if they were met as private persons they should not be
disturbed; but if as a council, it was no place for them, and they were
to take notice that the Parliament was dissolved.
“Sir,” replied John Bradshaw, “we have heard what you did at the
House this morning, and before many hours all England will hear it;
but you are mistaken to think that the Parliament is dissolved; for
no power under heaven can dissolve them but themselves: therefore,
take you notice of that.”
Bradshaw was right: the ideal of constitutional government which the
Long Parliament represented would prove stronger in the end than
Cromwell’s redcoats. That Parliament had all the faults with which
Cromwell charged it; but for Englishmen it meant inherited rights,
“freedom broadening slowly down,” and all that survived of the supremacy
of law. With its expulsion, the army flung away the one shred of
legality with which it had hitherto covered its actions. Henceforth,
military force must put its native semblance on, and appear in its
proper shape. Henceforth, Cromwell’s life was a vain attempt to clothe
that force in constitutional forms, and make it seem something else, so
that it might become something else. Yet was there not also something to
be hoped from a policy which took its stand on realities instead of
legal fictions?
[Illustration:
CROMWELL COAT-OF-ARMS.
]
[Illustration]