"See Cromwell damn'd to everlasting fame."
Pope.
It was at this period that Cromwell underwent that memorable struggle
between his ambition and his fears, which ultimately preserved the
monarchy of England in the line of legitimate descent. He tampered with
all parties, and found none hearty in his cause: the best-disposed to
his interests were only passive; but his enemies were implacable. The
popularity of a pamphlet recommending his assassination upon principle,
and declaring that the perpetrator of the deed would deserve the favour
of God and man, destroyed every vestige of his comfort. "He read it, and
was never seen to smile more." With late repentance for his vanity,
which prompted him to excite such furious opposition, he pushed from him
the crown he had courted, when offered by his creatures; but he did it
with an affectation of disdain and self-command, that ill accorded with
his former intrigues to obtain it. All his anxiety was now directed to
the preservation of his joyless life. He had long worn light armour
under his clothes, and carried pistols in his pockets. He seldom lay
twice in the same chamber, or informed any one which apartment he meant
to select. He travelled with extreme rapidity, attended by numerous
guards, and never returned by the way he went. Yet no sooner was one
conspiracy detected, than another was formed; the fanatics were
irreconcileable, and the most worthy and eminent among the dissenters
determined on his overthrow. His old military comrades, Fairfax and
Waller, were bent to destroy him. His treasury was drained by the
rapacity of his numerous spies; and as fines and exactions had been
strained to the utmost, he had no means of replenishing it but by a
recourse to measures similar to those which had overthrown the monarchy;
for his fanatical puppet-shows had brought the name of Parliament into
contempt, and he durst not appeal to the free voice of the nation. I
have already mentioned the disunion of his family, and the desertion of
his kindred and near alliances. Such were the accumulated miseries, such
the soul-harrowing and unremitting sufferings, of this man, whom Europe
considered as the favourite of fortune, and whose extraordinary success
has been urged as a plea against the divine government, and a proof that
the kingdoms of this world are left to the disposal of Satan. Penetrate
the recesses of the tyrant's palace, and it will be seen that enormous
offences, after they have outstripped the power of human punishment,
visit, on the oppressor, their own atrocity, and revenge the wrongs of a
bleeding world by torments more insupportable than any which cruelty can
inflict on others.
Distrusting even his most faithful informers, and jealous of his own
creatures, Cromwell always endeavoured to see every thing with his own
eyes. A little before his unlamented death, two strangers visited the
prison where Neville and Dr. Beaumont were confined. One of them avowed
himself to be the Lord Whitlock, the other passed as his secretary. They
were both masked, and wore long cloaks to conceal their persons. The
secretary was furnished with writing materials; he placed himself at a
table, and affected only to take minutes of the conversation.
Whitlock began with upbraiding the national ingratitude, and
acknowledging its general indisposition to the Protector's vigorous and
successful administration. He insisted that His Highness wished to
conciliate all parties by a mild and impartial government, though the
ample means with which he was furnished, the tried fidelity of the army,
and the respect he was held in by foreign Potentates, prevented him from
needing the friendship of any. But being now past the meridian of life,
he was desirous of leaving the nation whom he had rendered great and
prosperous, in the possession of internal tranquillity. Though
irreconcileable from principle, he regarded the royalists as the most
respectable of his opponents, and "he had ever resisted the advice of
the fanatics, to cut them off by a general massacre." Whitlock then
expressed his hope, that the prisoners condemned the newly-broached
opinion that assassination was allowable, and were disposed to be quiet,
if not contented, under the present government, which would reward such
submission by relaxing the penal statutes now in force against them. Dr.
Beaumont spoke first, and declared that assassination was forbidden by
the general tenor of Scripture. The particular instances now so much
dwelt on, of Jael's killing Sisera, or Judith's Holofernes, could not be
urged in vindication of similar attempts. Both acts were committed
previous to the Christian dispensation, which prescribes submissive
patience under injuries, and overcoming evil with good. Those deeds were
performed under a Divine impetus, and though, by their performance, the
will of God was fulfilled, it is not clear that the perpetrators were
justified in His sight, any more than was Hazael, when (as had been
divinely predicted) he acted as the chastiser of offending Israel.
Neville then took up the argument. He retorted on Whitlock the
expressions used by St. John to procure the condemnation of Lord
Strafford, and asked how they had the effrontery to object to that rule
when employed against themselves. "You have cut off our nobles, our
prelates, and our King," said he, "by that formal and public
assassination, an illegal trial; but we alike abjure your principles and
practice. If I hunt a usurper and tyrant to death, it shall be by
honourable means. If his character deserves no respect, I know what is
due to my own. I hold no tenets in common with regicides. Man cannot
commit a crime that can so far deface the image of his Maker impressed
upon him as to reduce him to the level of a beast of prey. Would that
this unnerved arm had strength, and that this sinking frame were again
erect with youthful vigour, then, if the awakened feelings of the nation
allowed me opportunity to meet, in the field of battle, the brave,
great, wicked man you serve, I would single him out from every opponent;
but were he unarmed, and in my power, I would give him a sword before I
assailed him."
Whitlock walked to the table; but it was evident that he received,
rather than gave, directions. The soul-searching eye of Cromwell peered
through his visor, and turned alternately on Neville and Beaumont.
Though a stranger to the feelings of magnanimity, he honoured its
expressions. He walked towards the captives, removed the shade from his
sickly, care-worn features, and asked how he could make them his
friends.
Neville shrunk aghast, petrified at the aspect of his Sovereign's
murderer. The feelings of a father repressed his maledictions, while he
gazed on him with stern silence as he would on a portentous meteor. Dr.
Beaumont sooner recollected himself. Bowing to Cromwell as to one of
those powers that are ordained by God, he answered that forgiveness and
obedience were duties; but that the feelings of friendship were a
voluntary engagement, and arose from very different motives.
"Your frankness," replied Cromwell, "proves that you well understand my
plain nature and abhorrence of flattery, and my condescension in
visiting you shows I take you to be open, fair enemies, not likely to
engage in conspiracies, or desirous of renewing the times of confusion.
But I would ask, What hope have you left, or what portion, even in its
best days, did your thriftless loyalty acquire you? Eusebius Beaumont it
found an obscure rector, and so it left you; for you could only boast
simplicity of life and doctrine; but court-chaplains, drivellers in
learning, and lewd knaves in manners, were rewarded with stalls and
mitres. You, Allan Neville, were stripped of your patrimony, and
slandered in your reputation, by the injustice of the King for whom you
bled."
Neville started from his indignant reverie. "Were you," said he,
"invested with tenfold terrors, I would not hear this aspersion cast
upon my Sovereign's memory. Injustice consists in knowing what is wrong,
and persisting in doing it. My King was misled, deceived, like myself,
by the viper we both cherished; even by one of those recreants to whom
you owe your exaltation. With double perfidy, you overthrew the King by
attributing to him the crimes of his favourites, and then converted them
into state-engines, first to elevate you to greatness, and afterwards to
convey away the offscourings of the dignity you had soiled. My King was
open to conviction. He knew the fidelity of his soldier, and purposed to
make him ample reparation."
"I have the power," returned Cromwell, "to accomplish those purposes."
"Impossible!" was Neville's reply; "my lands were alienated by a King of
England, and by his lawful successor only can they be restored."
"Are you," returned the Usurper, "aware that you are the only man in
Europe who dares question my power. I visited you with friendly
dispositions, and you receive me with insults."
"When, veiling your dignity with disguises," answered Neville; "you
borrow the occupation of your myrmidons, and steal on the privacies of
those you oppress, can you wonder to hear their imprecations sound in
unison with the clanking of their fetters?"
"I have a will," replied Cromwell, "as stubborn as yours. We will try
for the mastery. What hinders me from laying that head of yours on the
block?"
"--The insufferable goadings of your afflicted conscience, perpetually
whispering that you have shed too much blood already.--Every wrinkle
which care has imprinted on your brow, every tremulous infirmity which
constant watchfulness has introduced into your frame, acting as mementos
that the day of account cannot be far distant.--The iron you wear on
your bosom, that by its stern pressure tells you what you deserve.--The
public clamour, which will not now permit you to immolate the confined
victims whom your own lips have pronounced innocent of recent
provocations, and against whom you dare not revive the charge of
acknowledged resistance, which, by long impunity, you seem to have
pardoned. All these reasons are pledges for our safety. You cannot
further tempt the sufferance of Englishmen. Your declining health makes
you fear to add to the long indictment which your crimes have prepared
against you.
The garlands wither on your brow,
Then boast no more your mighty deeds,
Upon Death's purple altar now,
See where the victor-victim bleeds:
All heads must come to the cold tomb;
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet, and blossom in the dust."[1]
As Neville uttered this bold appeal to the feelings of an alarmed and
conscious villain, a cold shivering ran through the Protector's frame,
and his eye expressed a vain supplication, that it were possible to
exchange his garlands and his glories for those ever-fragrant actions
which blossom on the grave of the just. He strove to rally his air of
moody dignity, to recover the austere deliberate tone of his
expressions; but his manner was embarrassed, and his voice inarticulate.
A groan, such as only tortured guilt can utter, partially relieved his
swollen bosom. "Neville," said he, "I will not expect you to be my
friend; but will you cease to be my enemy?"
"Miserable victim of ambition," said Neville to himself; "how much
happier is my lot than thine!" Cromwell persisted in asking if there was
any favour he would receive at his hand. Neville paused, and answered,
"Yes; liberty."
"And what pledge," said Cromwell, "can you give me that you will not use
freedom to my prejudice?"
"My own honour," returned Neville, "which will never allow me to use the
instrument you put in my hand to destroy you."
"No equivocation!" said Whitlock; "in receiving freedom from His
Highness you acknowledge his authority."
"No," returned Neville, "I simply own he has a power to confine me. The
question of right is undetermined. If a Usurper restores me to the free
use of light and air, I need not examine his title before I resume the
enjoyment of those common blessings."
Cromwell addressed Dr. Beaumont: "You belong to a church whose doctrine
is passive obedience. You are not bewildered by this madman's chimeras,
but can prudently estimate the value of our free grace and promised
favour."
"My religion," replied the Doctor, "teaches me to submit to the
dispensations of Providence; but it will not allow me to divide the
spoil with those who have grown mighty on the ruins of my friends."
"Are there no points," again inquired Cromwell, "in which we may agree
to join our common wishes? What if I beseech the Lord to give you the
spirit of wisdom?"
"May he afford you that of consolation," was the emphatical wish of Dr.
Beaumont. Neville waved his hand in silence. "Oh! my friend," said he,
as soon as the Protector and Whitlock had retired, "I have suffered more
than the rack. I have seen the fiend-like face which looked, without
compunction, on the sufferings of the Royal Martyr, and I felt too weak
to revenge his wrongs. Have I not gone too far in saying I would accept
of freedom from his hands?"
"Vengeance for such a crime," replied Dr. Beaumont, "is too vast and
comprehensive to be entrusted to mortal agency. Let us leave it to Him
who claims it as his own prerogative. Murder, perfidy, and treason, will
be remembered when the avenging angel shall visit the sins of man."
Cromwell returned from his insidious visit, disappointed and dejected.
He had failed of the end which he proposed to himself by his
condescension. A reconciliation with two such distinguished Loyalists,
founded on the mutual benefits of submission and restitution, would have
strengthened his government; but he found abstinence from treacherous
hostility was all that his blandishments could obtain, and this he would
owe rather to their own principles of honour and religion than to his
threats or his promises. Though stung to the heart by the bold taunts of
Neville, he could not punish him. The very aspect and figure of the two
venerable sufferers were so fitted to excite sympathy and indignation,
that he durst not expose them on a scaffold, nor could he privately cut
them off. The fate of Syndercome, a daring Anabaptist, who had several
times attempted his life, and, on his trial, persevered in expressing
his determination, if possible, to kill him, alike deterred Cromwell
from bringing his private enemies to the bar of a court of justice, or
resorting to private measures of revenge. He had with difficulty
procured this man's condemnation; but the night previous to his intended
execution he escaped, by suicide, the Protector's power; and so
prejudiced were the populace against their Ruler, that they accused him
of having poisoned the victim he feared to bring to a public death. If
the prosecution of a notorious and avowed ruffian brought him into this
dilemma, what odium would the death of two respectable and aged
Loyalists excite, especially as their story was become public, and the
wrongs of Neville, and the generous friendship of Beaumont, had awakened
a powerful sympathy. Yet his narrow soul could not accede to the
generous alternative of giving them freedom. Pretending that the state
had a claim to the Bellingham-property, he prevented Monthault from
taking any measures to establish the will of the guilty Countess, and
contented himself with keeping the lawful claimant in prison, hoping
that confinement would accelerate the decays of nature, and thus give a
safe quietus to his own fears.
But ere that event happened the Usurper was called to the dreadful
tribunal for which few among the descendants of Adam were apparently
less prepared. His restless, intriguing ambition; the dissimulation and
hypocrisy by which he rose to supreme power; the ability with which he
wielded it; his splendid wretchedness; the terror he excited and felt;
his cruelty and fanaticism, his determined spirit, and occasionally
timid vacillation, read a most impressive lesson to aspiring minds
infatuated by success, and regardless of moral or religious restraints.
O that, in this age of insubordination, selfishness, and enterprise, a
poet would arise, animated with Shakespeare's "Muse of fire," embody the
events of those seventeen years of wo, and invest the detestable
Regicide with the same terrible immortality which marks the murderous
Thane in his progress from obedience and honour to supreme power and
consummate misery!
Nor does the death-bed of Cromwell afford a less useful warning to the
pen of instruction, when she aims at distinguishing true piety from
hypocrisy or fanaticism. It is still doubtful under which of those
counterfeits of religion we must rank this great but wicked man. Yet,
whether he deceived his own soul, or attempted to deceive others;
whether he really believed himself an elected instrument of Providence;
or, having long worn devotion as the mask of ambition, retained it to
the last,--his almost unexampled crimes (so plainly forbidden by that
scripture he had ever on his lips), and the security and confidence of
his last moments, furnish stronger arguments than a thousand volumes of
controversy, to prove the fallacy and danger of those speculative
notions which he patronized, propagated, and exemplified.
[1] The Usurper's terrors at hearing this fine song of Shirley's
is an historical fact. Some of the speeches attributed to him in
this interview, he really used to persons he had confined, and
wished to win over. In the close of his life he grew timid; and,
conscious of being hated, bore insults calmly. Bishop Wren
rejected his offered favours in as strong language as that
attributed to Neville.