Part 4

The story of the new-modelling of the army, of the self-denying ordinance, and of the special exemption of Cromwell from its operations, is too well known to need repetition. Two points deserve special notice; one, the long discussion against the imposition of the covenant on the new army, ending in an ordinance of parliament after the army was already formed, that it should be taken by the officers within twenty days, which does not appear to have been ever carried into effect; the other, that the self-denying ordinance, as originally passed by the commons, excluded from military command, during the war, all members of either house of parliament. It would thus have been general and prospective in its operation. In this form, the lords, with judicial blindness, rejected it. The commons then sent it up in a new form, merely discharging from their present commands those who were at present members of either house of parliament. In this form it was passed, and thus when Vane at the end of 1645 carried a measure, declaring vacant the seats of those members who had adhered to the king and ordering them to be filled, the officers of the new-model army were eligible, and elected in large numbers. If the party of the army and the sectaries had not thus gained a footing in the house, the course of history would probably have been very different.

The new-model army went to the war, according to May, the clerk of the Long parliament, ‘without the confidence of their friends and an object of contempt to their enemies.’ [1] Their outward triumph it is needless to describe; we should rather seek to appreciate the nature of the spiritual triumph which the outward one involved. It used to be the fashion to treat the sectarian enthusiasm of the ‘Ironsides’ as created, or at least stimulated, by Cromwell. The army went mad, and it was to gain Cromwell’s private ends. The prevalent conception of our time, that the great men of history have not created popular ideas or events, but merely expressed or {306} realised them with special effect, excludes such a view. The sectarian enthusiasm, as we have seen, was a necessary result of the consciousness of spiritual right elicited by the Reformation, where this consciousness had not, as in Scotland, been early made the foundation of a popular church, but had been long left to struggle in the dark against an unsympathetic clergy and a regulated ceremonial worship. The spirit which could not ‘find itself’ in the authoritative utterance of prelates, or express its yearnings unutterable in a stinted liturgy, was not likely, when war had given it vent and stimulus, to acquiesce in a new uniformity as exact as that from which it had broken. It had tasted a new and dangerous food. Taught as it had been to wait on God, in search for new revelations of him, it now read this lesson by the stronger light of personal deliverances and achievements, and found in the tumultuous experience of war at once the expression and the justification of its own inward tumult.

[1] [_Breviary of the History of the Long Parliament_, Maseres, Tracts, i. 74.]

It is a notion which governs much of the popular thought of the present day, and which the most cultivated ‘men of feeling’ are not ashamed to express, that the world is atheised when we regard it as a universe of general laws, equally relentless or equally merciful to the evil and to the good. If such a notion, through mere impatience of thought, can dominate an educated age, we may well excuse uncultivated men, who clung close to God, for believing him to manifest himself to his favoured people by sudden visitation and unaccountable events. This was indeed the received belief of Christendom at the time of our civil war. The man who was to vindicate a higher reason for God’s providence, and to be called an atheist for doing so, was still at Mr. van den Ende’s school in Amsterdam. It was in the realisation of the belief by individuals that the difference lay. Where the bible was not in the hands of the people, it could be regulated by priests and ceremonial. Elsewhere it was controllable by state-churches, or by ecclesiastical authority, claiming to be _jure divino_ like the presbyterian, and which appealed to popular reason, but to this reason as regulated by fitting education and discipline. Everywhere, in ordinary times, law and custom would put a veil on the face which the believer turned towards God. But now in England the bands were altogether loosed. Enthusiasts who had been waiting darkly on God while he was hidden behind established {307} worships and ministrations of the letter, who had heard his voice in their hearts but seen no sign of him in the world, were now enacting his work themselves, and reading his strange providences on the field of battle. Their own right hand was ‘teaching them terrible things.’ Here was the revelation of the latter days, for which they had been bidden to wait. That which they had sought for literally ‘with strong crying and tears,’ which they had not found in the system of the church, in the reasoning of divines, in the ungodly jangle of the law, was visible and audible in war. There

God glowed above With scarce an intervention ... ... his soul o’er theirs. They felt him, nor by painful reason knew.’ [1]

[1] [ ‘My own East! How nearer God we were. He glows above With scarce an intervention, presses close And palpitatingly, his soul o’er ours! We feel him, nor by painful reason know!’ BROWNING, Luria.]

Henceforth, whatever authority claimed their submission as divine, must come home to their conscience with a like directness, and this the _jus divinum_ of the presbyterians failed to do. This new spiritual force the ministers had left to itself. While they were wrangling at Westminster or settling warmly into the berths which the episcopal clergy had vacated, it had been gathering strength unheeded. At the outbreak of the war each regiment had a regular minister as its chaplain, but after the battle at Edgehill made it clear that the business would be a longer one than had been expected, these divines, according to Baxter, withdrew either to the assembly or to their livings. Baxter himself lost an opportunity which he afterwards regretted, in declining the chaplaincy of Cromwell’s regiment, ‘which its officers proposed to make a gathered church.’ ’These very men,’ he says, ‘that then invited me to be their pastor, were the men that afterwards headed an army, and were forwardest in all our charges; which made me wish I had gone among them, for all the fire was in one spark.’ [1] The news of the battle of Naseby, however, so far stirred Baxter, then living at Coventry, that he must needs join his old friends, and for two years he moved about with the army, as chaplain to Whalley’s regiment which had been {308} formed out of Cromwell’s. The sectarian spirit he then found too strong for his mild piety to control.

[1] [_Reliquiae Baxterianae_, p. 51.]

‘We that lived quietly at Coventry did keep to our old principles; we were unfeignedly for king and parliament; we believed the war was only to save the parliament and kingdom from papists and delinquents and to remove the dividers, that the king might return again to his parliament, and that no changes might be made in religion but with his consent. But when I came to the army among Cromwell’s soldiers, I found anew face of things which I never dreamt of. The plotting heads were very hot upon that which intimated their intentions to subvert church and state. Independency and anabaptistry were most prevalent. Antinomianism and arminianism were equally distributed.’

Hot-headed sectaries in the highest places, Cromwell’s chief favourites, were asking what were the lords of England but William the Conqueror’s colonels, or the barons but his majors, or the knights but his captains? ‘plainly showing that thy thought God’s providence would cast the trust of religion and the kingdom upon them as conquerors.’ Of some of these dangerous men, particularly of Harrison and Berry, then reckoned Cromwell’s prime favourites, Baxter gives a more particular account. Berry

‘was a man of great sincerity before the wars, and of very good natural parts, affectionate in religion, and while conversant with humbling providences, doctrines, and company, he carried himself as a great enemy to pride. But when Cromwell made him his favourite and his extraordinary valour met with extraordinary success, and when he had been awhile most conversant with those that in religion thought the old puritan ministers were dull, self-conceited men of a lower form, and that new light had declared I know not what to be a higher attainment, his mind, aim, talk and all were altered accordingly. Being never well studied in the body of divinity or controversy, but taking his light among the sectaries, he lived after as honestly as could be expected in one that taketh error for truth.’

‘Harrison,’ says Baxter, ‘would not dispute with me at all, but he would in good discourse very fluently pour out himself in the extolling of free grace, which was savoury to those that had right principles, though he had some misunderstandings of free grace himself. He was a man of excellent natural parts for affection and oratory; but not well seen in the principles of his religion; of a sanguine {309} complexion, naturally of such a vivacity, hilarity, and alacrity as another man hath when he hath drunken a cup too much; but naturally also so far from humble thoughts of himself, that it was his ruin.’ [1]

[1] [_Reliquiae Baxterianae_, p. 57.]

One day, during the fight at Langport, Baxter happened to be close to Harrison just as Goring’s army broke before the charge of the Ironsides, and heard him ‘with a loud voice break forth into the praises of God, as if he had been in a rapture.’ [1] Such a temper could only be moderated by one who shared its raptures, its wild energy, its scorn of prescription, and who yet had the practical wisdom, the wider comprehension, of which it was incapable. Such a one was Cromwell, a tumultuous soul, but with a strange method in his tumult. The old notion, that this method consisted in a persistent design of personal aggrandisement, may be taken to have been dispelled once for all by the publication of his letters and speeches. That he was a genuine enthusiast, that he was perfectly sincere in the sense that his real ends were those that he professed, that his own advancement was not his object, but merely the condition or result of his getting work done which others could not do, this is the only theory that will explain the facts, if we include among the facts his own language at times when there can have been no motive for insincerity, and the impression which he made on his contemporaries, not when they looked back on his acts in the light of personal grievance, but at the time when they were done. The life-long hypocrisy which the opposite theory ascribes to him is incompatible with the personal attraction which a revolutionary leader must exercise if he is to do his work. In Napoleon, though he did not so much lead a revolution as turn revolutionary forces to military account, there was no touch of hypocrisy. His hard selfishness and his zeal for the material improvement of European life were equally explicit. The assertion, however, of Cromwell’s unselfish enthusiasm is quite consistent with the imputation to him of much unscrupulousness, violence, simulation, and dissimulation, sins which no one has escaped who ever led or controlled a revolution; from which in times like his no man could save his soul but by such saintly abstraction as Baxter takes credit for to himself, and Mrs. Hutchinson to her husband, which in aspiration to heaven leaves earth to its chance.

[1] [_Reliquiae Baxterianae_, p. 54.]

{310} When Baxter was with the army he found that ‘Cromwell and his council took on them to join no religious party, but to be for the equal liberty of all.’ This account corresponds with the conception of Cromwell’s views to be gathered from his own letters. His relation to the sectaries was the same practically as we have seen Vane’s to have been more speculatively. Without any of Vane’s theosophy, he had the same open face towards heaven, the same consciousness (or dream, if we like,) of personal and direct communication with the divine, which transformed the ‘legal conscience’ and placed him ‘above ordinance.’ Having thus drunk of the spring from which the sectarian enthusiasm flowed, he had no taste for the reasonings which led it into particular channels, while he had, more than any man of his time, not indeed the speculative, but the political instinct of comprehension. In this spirit he entered on the war, where it soon took practical body from the discovery that ‘men of religion’ alone could fight ‘men of honour,’ and that the men of religion, once in war, inevitably became sectaries. To him, as to his men, the issues of battle were a revelation of God’s purpose; the cause, which in answer to the prayers of his people God owned by fire, had the true _jus divinum_. The practical danger of such a belief is obvious. To Cromwell is due the peculiar glory, that it never issued, as might have been expected, in fanatic military licence, but was always governed by the strictest personal morality and a genuine zeal for the free well-being of the state and nation.

His extant letters, written during the first years of the war, written, be it remembered, by a farmer-squire, forty-four years old, simply exhibit a man of restless and infectious energy, gathering about him, without reference to birth or creed, the men who had the most active zeal for the common cause and promoting of religion, and gradually, as the work of these men grew in importance and was more visibly owned by God, asserting their claims in a louder key. In their tone they sometimes recall the man who some years before, in a parliamentary committee of enclosures, had defended the cause of some injured countrymen of his with so much passion and so ‘tempestuous a carriage,’ that the chairman had been obliged to reprehend him. Among the most frequent topics are the discouragement of his soldiers by their want of pay and supplies (to be borne in mind with reference {311} to subsequent history), his anxiety for godly men and the offence he was giving by the promotion of men of low birth or sectaries. A letter to his cousin, solicitor-general St. John, may be taken as an instance. It was written during the period of feeble management that preceded the self-denying ordinance, before Vane had got the upper hand in the house. [1]

‘Of all men I should not trouble you with money matters, did not the heavy necessities my troops are in, press upon me beyond measure. I am neglected exceedingly!... If I took pleasure to write to the house in bitterness, I have occasion.... I have minded your service to forgetfulness of my own and soldiers’ necessities.... You have had my money; I hope in God, I desire to venture my skin, so do my men. Lay weight upon their patience; but break it not!... Weak counsels and weak actings undo all! all will be lost, if God help not! Remember who tells you.’

[1] [Carlyle, _Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches_, No. xvii.]

In the same letter he says, ‘My troops increase. I have a lovely company; you would respect them, did you know them. They are no “anabaptists”; they are honest sober christians; they expect to be used as men.’

Of the way in which this ‘lovely company’ had been got together we have such indications as this in a letter [1] to the Suffolk committee. ‘I beseech you be careful what captains of horse you choose, what men be mounted. A few honest men are better than numbers. If you choose godly honest men to be captains of horse, honest men will follow them.... I had rather have a plain, russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman, and is nothing else. I honour a gentleman that is so indeed.’

[1] [Carlyle, _Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches_, No. xvi.]

In another letter [1] he says, ‘It may be it provokes some spirits to see such plain men made captains of horse. It had been well that men of honour and birth had entered into these employments; but why do they not appear? Who would have hindered them? But seeing it was necessary the work must go on, better plain men than none; but best to have men patient of wants, faithful and conscientious in their employment.... If these men be accounted “troublesome to the country,” I shall be glad you would send them all to me. I’ll bid them welcome. And when they have fought for you, and endured some other difficulties of war {312} which your “honester” men will hardly bear, I pray you then let them go for honest men!’

[1] [Carlyle, _Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches_, No. xviii.]

Writing to a rigid presbyterian general, who had got the ear of the Earl of Manchester, and had suspended an officer for unconformable opinions, he says, [1] ‘The state in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions; if they be willing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies.... I desire you would receive this man into your favour and good opinion. I believe, if he follow my counsel he will deserve no other but respect from you. Take heed of being sharp, or too easily sharpened by others, against those to whom you can object little but that they square not with you in every opinion concerning religion. If there be any other offence to be charged upon him, that must in a judicial way receive determination.’

[1] [Carlyle, _Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches_, No. xx.]

I will quote extracts from other letters of Cromwell, as illustrating the temper in which he won his victories, and his view of them as the consecration of a new military church, having claims that were not to be put by. One is from a letter written just after the battle of Marston Moor, [1] to his brother-in-law, colonel Walton, who had lost a son in it.

‘Truly England and the church of God hath had a great favour from the Lord, in this great victory given unto us, such as the like never was since this war began. It had all the evidences of an absolute victory gained by the Lord’s blessing upon the godly party principally, We never charged, but we routed the enemy.... God made them as stubble to our swords. We charged their regiments of foot with our horse, and routed all we charged. ... Sir, God hath taken away your eldest son by a cannon-shot. It brake his leg. We were necessitated to have it cut off, whereof he died. Sir, you know my own trials this way; but the Lord supported me with this, that the Lord took him into the happiness we all pant for and live for. There is your precious child, full of glory, never to know sin or sorrow any more.... Before his death he was so full of comfort that to Frank Russell and myself he could not express it, “It was so great above his pain.” This he said to us. Indeed, it was admirable. A little after, he said one thing lay upon his spirit. I asked him what that was? He told me it was that God had not suffered him to be any more the executioner of his enemies.... Truly he was exceedingly beloved in the army of all that knew him. But {313} few knew him; for he was a precious young man, fit for God. You have cause to bless the Lord. He is a glorious saint in heaven; wherein you ought exceedingly to rejoice. Let this drink up your sorrow; seeing these are not feigned words to comfort you, but the thing is so real and undoubted a truth. ... Let this public mercy to the church of God make you to forget your private sorrow.’

[1] [Carlyle, _Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches_, No. xxi.]

The other quotation is from the conclusion of his account of the storming of Bristol, addressed to the Speaker of the house of commons; [2]

‘All this is none other than the work of God. He must be a very atheist that doth not acknowledge it.... Sir, they that have been employed in this service know that faith and prayer obtained this city for you. I do not say ours only, but of the people of God with you and all England over, who have wrestled with God for a blessing in this very thing. Our desires are that God may be glorified by the same spirit of faith by which we ask all our sufficiency, and have received it. It is meet that he have all the praise. Presbyterians, independents, all have here the same spirit of faith and prayer; the same presence and answer; they agree here, have no names of difference; pity it is it should be otherwise anywhere! All that believe have the real unity, which is most glorious; because inward and spiritual, in the body, and to the head. For being united in forms, commonly called uniformity, every Christian will for peace-sake study and do as far as conscience will permit. And for brethren, in things of the mind we look for no compulsion but that of light and reason.’

[1] [Carlyle, _Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches_, No. xxxi.]