Part 8

A kindred impulse to theirs, moreover, was at work in high places of the army, where it did not forswear the use of a carnal sword. Major-general Harrison was now directing his course by a verse in the prophet Daniel, which promises the kingdom of the world to the saints of the Most High, and was looking to the Rump parliament to introduce this kingdom with all speed. If their factions and worldly interests prevented them from doing so, Cromwell, he held, by some method above that of civil government, could and would. It was not for a constitutional theory or a pagan republicanism that he had been fighting, but for a dominion of grace, and he would not long be still while grandees of parliament, whom God had never owned in war, wrangled over the legal adjustment of his mercies. Overton, the governor of Hull, was the most eminent of those who shared his view, which, however, was but the legitimate doctrine of the military saint.

During more than two years, from the midsummer of 1649 to the autumn of 1651, the republican oligarchy was able to shut its eyes to the real situation. The military spirit was absorbed in the conquest under Cromwell of Ireland and Scotland, and the English royalists, hardly recovered from their crushing failure at home, were watching the fortune of war in these other countries. The only chance for the permanence of republicanism was that it should avail itself of this interval to establish itself on a more popular basis, and initiate practical reforms. If it had had the will or ability to do so, the levelling clamour, which with the return of the army was sure to be heard again, would have had nothing in popular sentiment to appeal to. The name of a ‘free parliament’ had been made to English ears, by the very men to whom it was now a word of ill omen, the familiar symbol of good government. The interference with the ordinary course of justice by special courts and parliamentary committees was a grievance that everyone could understand. An ecclesiastical anarchy, such as the journal of George Fox the quaker exhibits to us, was a scandal that came home to the parochial mind. In an ordinary parish, a presbyterian clergyman would be in possession of the benefice, to attempt {343} an irritating but ineffectual discipline and haggle over tithes, while in the same place there would be a knot of ‘common-prayer men’ with an excluded minister at hand to stimulate their zeal, and a congregation of baptists or independents, who, now that their friends were in power, would see no reason why their enemies should be beneficed. In the absence of any settled rule, each party might hope by local faction or intrigue to get the tithes for itself, and meanwhile would resist the payment of them to its adversaries.

The only hopeful line then for the commonwealth’s men to take would have been to provide for the election of a new parliament by reformed constituencies, to abolish all criminal prosecution not sanctioned by the common-law, to reform chancery and simplify legal process, and to resettle the church on some plan that would admit at least the independents and the ‘moderate’ or anti-prelatist episcopalians, and substitute a fixed salary for tithes. Whether this line was practicable for them is another question. They had no hold on popular feeling; a powerful Scotch army, with the young king in its keeping, was in the field against them, and the presbyterian clergy were praying for its success. Under such circumstances there was much plausibility in Henry Marten’s argument that their ‘commonwealth was yet an infant, of a weak growth and a very tender constitution’; and therefore his opinion was, ‘that nobody could be so fit to nurse it as the mother who brought it forth; and that they should not think of putting it under any other hands till it had obtained more years and vigour.’ Marten, however, had forgotten that the true mother of the republic was not the Rump parliament, but the army, whose maternal discipline, unless some foster-parentage could be found in popular interests, would be too much for the child as soon as it sought to take a way of its own.

The essential difficulty of the situation was aggravated by the oligarchical temper which it bred in the republican leaders. With the best of them this temper took that higher form which appears in Milton’s complaint, [1] that when God has given the victory to a cause in the field of battle, ‘then comes the task to those worthies which are the soul of it, to be sweat and laboured out amidst the throng and noses of vulgar and irrational men.’ Even in this form it cannot face facts, for it is {344} not this pride of exclusion but the higher pride, which can possess itself in sympathy and comprehension, that represents the divine reason in the world. But the pride of protected intellect, once clothed with political power, soon passes into the jealousy of a clique. So it was within our memory in France under the Orleanist régime, and so it was with the leading spirits of the Long parliament. They mistook the success of their military administration for a real faculty of government, and hugged power for its own sake, in the mood of a self-conscious aristocracy of virtue. If this was the case with the best of them, a more vulgar kind of self-interest was sure to prevail among the rest. Thus, though their administration was singularly pure, they got credit even among their best friends, if Milton’s ‘Second defence’ may be taken as expressing his real mind, for a spirit of faction and obstructiveness.

[1] [_Tenure of kings and magistrates_.]

The one man among them who seems really to have comprehended the situation, was Sir Henry Vane. Shrinking from the touch of military violence, he had withdrawn from parliament after Pride purged it, though the purgation was specially in his interest, and had only been induced to join the council of state at the pressing instance of Cromwell. He at once saw the need of popularising the government, and stirred the question of new elections. A committee for considering the question seems to have been constantly sitting during the first year of the commonwealth, with Vane as its chairman, which reported at the beginning of 1650 in favour of a new parliament of four hundred members, and a re-arrangement of constituencies. A corresponding resolution was voted by the house, but no bill was introduced, and meanwhile Vane’s energies were absorbed by the management of the wars with the Scots and the Hollanders. On this, as on the other pressing questions, parliament could never get beyond the stage of resolutions. It resolved to deal with the question of tithes, to provide for popular education out of ecclesiastical funds, and to simplify the law, but no actual legislation was achieved. Thus by the autumn of 1651 it could take credit for an effective administration of war and finance, and for the introduction of a preaching ministry and schoolmasters into Wales. Towards facing the hostile forces which only slumbered around them, towards meeting the demands of the enthusiasm of reformation to {345} which they owed their temporary power, they had done absolutely nothing. On September 6 they heard the speaker read Cromwell’s account of the battle of Worcester, ‘a mercy’ of which ‘the dimensions are beyond my thoughts,’ ‘it is for aught I know a crowning mercy.’ Cromwell, meanwhile, was riding up to London with a look which Mr. Peters, his chaplain, interpreted, or afterwards believed himself to have interpreted, to mean that he would be king of England yet. At Aylesbury he was met, on behalf of the parliament, by St. John and Whitelock, both special representatives of the lawyer’s desire for ‘settlement,’ and ‘government by a single person,’ with whom, especially with St. John, he had long discourse. On the 16th, we read in Whitelock, he took his seat in the house, and there is the significant addition, ‘the parliament resumed the debate touching a new representative,’ also ‘of an act of oblivion and general pardon, with some expedients for satisfaction of soldiery and the ease of the people.’ The question of settlement was now in the hands of one who would not allow it to tarry.

LECTURE IV.

In the last lecture we saw that the immediate result of Cromwell’s presence in the house after his return from Worcester was the revival of the questions of a new election and a general settlement, which, during the last two years the republican oligarchy, with its head in the bush, had not chosen to face. In pressing these questions Cromwell was true to the instinct of comprehension which had governed his course throughout. It appears from the Memoirs of Berkley, who had been the chief negotiator with him on the king’s behalf in the summer of 1647, that he was then convinced of the difficulty of establishing a government on so narrow a foundation as was afforded either by the army or an oligarchical parliament. His project at that time was to restore the king on the condition of his calling a new parliament, from which he declared royalists should be excluded. This forms the basis of the propositions which the army offered to the king, while he was still in their keeping, and which, with expansion and variation according to circumstance, were pressed upon parliament during the following {346} year. They provide that the sitting parliament should come to an end within a year; that afterwards a parliament should be summoned every two years, to sit for not less than a hundred and twenty, or more than two hundred and forty days; that members should be taken away from the decayed towns, and representation awarded to the several counties according to the amount of taxation. No one who had borne arms for the king was to be eligible to parliament for five years. The old privy council was to be superseded by a council of state, of which the members for the next seven years were to be agreed on at once; after that they were to be nominated by parliament. The coercive jurisdiction of bishops was to be abolished; the use of the common prayer and the taking of the covenant to be alike voluntary. Subject to these conditions the king was to be restored, and a general act of oblivion was to be passed, with power to parliament to except certain persons, not more than five in number, from its benefit.

This document was supposed to come directly from the hand of Ireton, who was more at his ease in composition than Cromwell. As Cromwell says in a letter of this period to his daughter, Ireton’s wife, he writes to her rather than to her husband, ‘for one line of mine begets many of his.’

‘In these declarations and transactions of the army,’ says Whitelock, [1] ‘colonel Ireton was chiefly employed, or took on him the business of the pen.’ He was ‘of a working and laborious brain and fancy, and set himself much upon these businesses, wherein he was encouraged and assisted by lieutenant-general Cromwell, his father-in-law. Having been bred in the Temple, he had a little knowledge of law, which led him into the more errors.’

[1] [ii. 162.]

If Ireton, however, held the pen, the scheme, we may be sure, was Cromwell’s no less than his, and a more statesmanlike plan of reconstruction it is difficult to conceive. If carried out in its completeness it would have given England at once a genuine parliamentary government and a free national church. Two centuries of government by borough-mongering and corruption, of church-statesmanship and state-churchmanship would have been saved. Charles, as we have seen, rejected it, and began his game anew. No such opportunity for reconciliation could ever occur again, but Cromwell’s purpose remained the same, {347} though his mode of executing it varied with events. The anxiety for a settlement which should reconcile the old interests with the new enthusiasm is the key to his subsequent conduct. The reconciliation, for reasons which I have sufficiently described, was, in fact, impossible. The new piece would not fit the old garment. To us, looking backward with historical calmness, it seems well that it would not, for the enthusiasm adjusted to the interests would have been poetry translated into prose. That of which it is the essence to be motive, negative, abstract, would have become fixed, positive, and concrete. The sudden palpable reconciliation of the spirit and the flesh, apparently, perhaps, a spiritualising of the flesh, would have been really a carnalising of the spirit. The hopelessness, however, of the pacification which he contemplated was the tragedy of Cromwell’s later life. In the stress of protecting the ‘godly interest’ against itself, ‘worldly mixtures’ inevitably came to prevail over the pure spiritual fire. To the saints he seemed in serving the Lord’s people to lose his own soul, and his conscience was too sympathetic not to shrink under their judgment. Its burden, perhaps, found voice in his exclamation on his death-bed that ‘he knew he had been in grace _once_.’

There were certain qualities and beliefs in Cromwell, well known in their outward character, which have won for him _par excellence_ the title of hypocrite. Looked at from the inner side, which the preservation of his letters enables us to see, they appear as the plastic medium through which an honest purpose of conciliation worked, and for lack of which the same purpose was inoperative in others. The ultimate spring of his conduct was a belief, wrought to special strength in the formation and triumphant leadership of the sectarian army, that he was the chosen champion of the despised people of the Lord. In the realisation of this belief, it was his habit (in modern language) to wait on events, and to surrender himself to temporary sympathy with men of the most various views. That this sympathy, though sometimes unctuous and exaggerated in expression, was yet perfectly genuine, is proved by its evident infectiousness. Nor was it really deceptive. There is no sign that he ever committed himself to the positive maintenance of the doctrines of the men to whose sympathy he appealed. On the contrary, {348} there is evidence that the protection of the godly interest in its freedom of conscience, by whatever means might be available, was the only line of conduct to which he ever committed himself, and to this he was faithful throughout. He caught eagerly at every element in the character or belief of those with whom he had to do, which might be turned to account for the furtherance of this end. When it ceased to further it, it lost his sympathy. The interpretation which the men whom he thus treated naturally put on his conduct was that he sought to use them for his selfish purposes. But it was just the qualities which ruined his reputation with the less compliant of his contemporaries and with posterity that enabled him to do his work. For his reputation he cared little, for his work much. What we call waiting on events, he called a recognition of the ‘outward dispensations’ of God. His belief that this guidance was divine made him at once more bold and more free from selfish regards in following it. There is a touch of nature in a letter of his to Oliver St. John, written just after his rout of Hamilton’s army. [1]

‘Remember my love to my dear brother, H. Vane. I pray he make not too little, nor I too much, of outward dispensations.... Let us all be not careful what men will make of these actings. They, will they, nill they, shall fulfil the good pleasure of God; and we shall serve our generations. Our rest we expect elsewhere; that will be durable. Care we not for to-morrow, nor for anything.’

[1] [Carlyle, _ib_. No. lxvii.]

This utterance, fresh from the heart, explains the subsequent alienation of Cromwell from Vane and the high republicans. He had the fatalism about him without which nothing great is achieved in times of political crisis; the consciousness of a divine work that must be done through him, though personal peace and honour were wrecked in the doing. They were men of theory and principle, ‘brave men and true.’ but with a sense of what was ‘due to their own reputation,’ or, to speak, more kindly, men who would sacrifice themselves or a nation indifferently to the maintenance of what might merely be a formula. In these days of playing at heroes among the ‘inferior races,’ such men, perhaps, receive less credit than is their due, nor is it my purpose to measure the man of principle against the ‘man of destiny,’ who may be a political gambler, but merely to indicate their inevitable {349} collision. If Cromwell had been a political gambler, he would not have been always showing his hand, nor should we have the strange collection of impromptu letters and speeches, speeches of which ‘he could not recall four words’ after they were spoken, which let us see into the workings of his soul.

In the last lecture I showed that during the interval between the final break of the independents and army with the king, marked by the vote of no more addresses at the beginning of 1648, and his setting out for the extinction of Hamilton, Cromwell was labouring for such a reconciliation of parties as would gain for the inevitable commonwealth a more general support than that of the professed republican clique. The equal impracticability of presbyterians and republicans, or, if we like, their equal devotion to principle, made reconciliation impossible, and the republicans for the time triumphed. Strong in a text of scripture, in a theory of right borrowed from the municipal republics of Holland and Switzerland, they shut their eyes and had their way. Cromwell knew well to what such a spirit must lead, and his irritation at it once broke out in a conversation with Ludlow. ‘They were a proud set of people,’ he said, ‘only considerable in their own conceits.’ For the time, however, he had to leave them to their conceit, that he might crush the common enemy. During the campaign, the direction in which the logic of events, of ‘outward dispensations,’ was leading became more apparent, and the sense of it pervades his letters. The rapture of successful war brought back to him the old enthusiasm, the consciousness of being the chosen leader of the saints. The righteous judge, he thought, had been appealed to in battle, and had shown which cause was his ‘even to amazement and admiration.’

‘Surely, sir,’ he writes to the speaker after the rout at Preston, ‘this is nothing but the hand of God; and wherever anything in this world is exalted, or exalts itself, God will pull it down; for this is the day wherein he alone will be exalted. It is not fit for me to give advice ... more than to pray you, and all that acknowledge God, that they would exalt him, and not hate his people, that are as the apple of his eye, and for whom even kings shall be reproved.’ [1]

[1] [_ib_. No. lxiv.]

The prosaic meaning of these new ‘dispensations,’ we {350} shall say, was that the military excitement against the royal ‘delinquent’ had become uncontrollable, that Hamilton’s invasion, instigated and aided by the royalist presbyterians in England, had rendered their fusion with the commonwealth’s men impossible, and that the republic must represent the latter party and the army alone. This was no doubt the final judgment which Cromwell’s practical insight had unwillingly arrived at. But we do not really understand this judgment or its consequences, till we appreciate the ‘wondrous alchemy’ of the enthusiasm with which it was fused and molten in Cromwell’s own mind. The whole mental process is exhibited in a letter to Colonel Hammond, written when it had become clear that the presbyterian majority in parliament were determined to treat with the king and restore him to London. Its object was to induce Hammond to disregard the impending vote of parliament, which (as we have seen) would have been ruinous to the cause of free conscience, and to give the king up to the army.

‘You say,’ he writes,’ God hath appointed authorities among the nations to which active or passive obedience is to be yielded. This resides in England in the parliament.’ Then comes Cromwell’s reply to this view; ‘Authorities and powers are the ordinance of God. This or that species is of human institution, and limited, some with larger, others with stricter bands, each one according to its constitution. But I do not therefore think the authorities may do _anything_, and yet such obedience be due. All agree that there are cases in which it is lawful to resist.... The query is whether ours be such a case.’ In answer to this query, Cromwell commends to Hammond three considerations; ‘first, whether _salus populi_ be a sound position; secondly, whether in the way in hand’ (_i.e._ by the proposed treaty), ‘really and before the Lord, before whom conscience has to stand, this be provided for; or if the whole fruit of the war is not like to be frustrated, and all most like to turn to what it was, and worse.... Thirdly, whether this army be not a lawful power, called by God to fight against the king upon some stated grounds; and being in power to such ends, may not oppose one name of authority, for those ends, as well as another name, since it was not the outward authority summoning them that by _its_ power made the quarrel lawful, but the quarrel was lawful in itself.... My dear friend, let us look into providences; surely they mean somewhat. {351} They hang so together; have been so constant, so clear, unclouded. Malice, swoln malice against God’s people, now called ‘saints,’ to root out their name; and yet they’ (the saints) ‘getting arms, and therein blessed with defence and more! I desire he that is for a principle of suffering would not too much slight this.... Not the encountering difficulties makes us to tempt God; but the acting before and without faith. If the Lord have in any measure persuaded his people, as generally he hath, of the lawfulness, nay of the _duty_, this persuasion prevailing on the heart is faith; and acting thereupon is acting in faith; and the more the difficulties are, the more the faith.... Have not some of our friends, by their passive principle, ... been occasioned to overlook what is just and honest, and to think the people of God may have as much or more good the one way than the other? Good by this man against whom the Lord hath witnessed; and whom thou knowest!’ [1]

[1] [Carlyle, _ib_. No. lxxxv.]

That the enthusiasm of this letter is sincere it would be hard to dispute; that it might be a dangerous cover for self-deceit, not less so. That in Cromwell, as a matter of fact, it was an expansive element, in which a sympathy with the ‘waiting spirit’ of the sectaries, such as was necessary for their guidance, went along with a prevailing zeal for the ‘_salus populi_’ and a clear judgment of its needs, is the only interpretation that will explain the history as a whole. To the guidance of a man possessing such a strange compound of qualities, it is due that our great religious war ended not simply in blood, but in a real step forwards of English society.