Part 9

‘God’s providence and necessity, not his own choice,’ as he solemnly said, having forced him to pull down monarchy and put the republic in its place, he once more pressed forward his plan for a general adjustment of interests under a new parliament. The possibility of a settlement, however, which should secure the ‘godly interest,’ was very different now from what it would have been if Charles’s spleen and superstition had permitted him honestly to come to terms in 1647. Then Cromwell had hoped by restoring the king with a council, which might have been under his own direction, to obtain that unity of initiative under a familiar name, which, important at all times, is specially necessary when order is to be rebuilt out of a chaos of factions heated with civil war.

{352} Henceforward there could but be two alternatives. The familiar unity might be obtained, as it was ultimately to be at the blessed Restoration, but only at the cost of an absolute suppression of the ‘godly interest’: or an unfamiliar unity might take its place, but only on the condition of its maintenance by a hand that could hold the sword, and a temper that by either force or sympathy could control the sectaries, a condition which death might at any time remove. The military ecstasy, however, was still strong upon Cromwell, and he had a spirit for the work. In Whitelock’s journal of February 25, [1] not quite a month after the execution of Charles, we read,

‘From the council of state Cromwell and his son Ireton went home with me to supper; where they were very cheerful, and seemed extremely well-pleased; we discoursed together till twelve o’clock at night, and they told me wonderful observations of God’s providence in the affairs of the war, and in the business of the army’s coming to London and seizing the members; in all which were miraculous passages.’

[1] [ii. 540.]

Cromwell had yet to learn that the providence on which he waited wrought by a longer method, because it had a wider comprehension than was dreamt of in the puritan philosophy.

In the following spring Cromwell was appointed to the command of the army that was to conquer Ireland. Thence he was recalled in the summer of 1650, and shortly afterwards was sent into Scotland. Thus till his return from the battle of Worcester in September 1651, he had no chance of pressing his projects of conciliation and reform at the headquarters of government. Such glimpses as we have, however, of his civil activity during this period show a constant tendency in the same direction. It was he who prevailed on Vane to join the council of state, and obtained a modification of the engagement to suit Vane’s views. Thus to restore to the government the ablest civilian of the time, who had a special dislike for military domination, was a strange course if it was his object to clear the way for himself, but a most natural one if his object was general conciliation. Again, in the summer of 1650, when it was proposed to send the army under Fairfax into Scotland, and while Fairfax, ‘being hourly persuaded by the presbyterian ministers and his own lady, who was a great patroness of them,’ was doubting of the justness of the war, and finally resolving to lay down his {353} command, Cromwell was foremost in urging him to retain it. The memoir-writers of the time, interpreting events by the jealousy of later years, treat Cromwell’s earnestness on this occasion as simulated, a piece of the ‘great subtlety with which he now carried himself,’ but what its object might be, if it were simulated, they do not explain. If his object were personal aggrandisement, it is unaccountable that he should go out of his way to put the command of the army in the hands of another. If on the other hand it were a general settlement, it was quite natural that he should seek to conciliate the presbyterian interest to the commonwealth, in the person of the man who alone combined presbyterian sympathies with toleration of the sectaries.

But though Cromwell, during this period, was quite free from the thought which Mr. Peters attributed to him, ‘that he would be king of England yet,’ still the impatience for an establishment of a ‘free church of saints’ in a free state, and the ‘heat of inward evidence’ that he was himself the man to achieve it, was growing constantly stronger in him. He led his army into Ireland, as Joshua into Canaan, and his last letter to the parliament, as he was setting sail from Milford Haven, offered to their consideration the removal of penal statutes that enforce the consciences of honest conscientious men. His conquest of Ireland, and afterwards of Scotland, was achieved in and through a constant fire of enthusiasm.

‘It was set upon some of our hearts,’ he writes after the storm of Tredah, ‘that a great thing should be done, not by power or might, but by the spirit of God. And is it not so, clearly? That which caused your men to storm so courageously, it was the spirit of God, who gave your men courage, and took it away again; and gave the enemy courage, and took it away again; and gave your men courage again, and therewith this happy success.’ [1]

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

During his brief sojourn in London between the two wars it appears from a dialogue with Ludlow [1] that his thoughts were running on the need of swift reforms, especially of the law, and that he ‘was feeding on’ the hundred and tenth psalm; ‘The Lord shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion.... Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power; in the beauties of holiness, from the womb of the morning.’ The experience of the Scotch campaign, full, as he conceived, {354} of miraculous passages, was not likely to temper his consciousness of a divine mission. ‘There may be a spiritual fulness,’ he writes to the general assembly of the kirk, [2] ‘which the world may call drunkenness, as in the second chapter of the Acts.’ In such spiritual fulness he lay on September 2, with a sickly, half-starved army about Dunbar, in the face of an enemy double in number and apparently commanding his position, yet sure, as he says, that just ‘because of their numbers, their advantages, and their confidence, because of our weakness, our strait, we were in the mount, and in the mount the Lord would be seen, and that he would find a way of deliverance for us.’ Through ‘an high, act of the Lord’s providence’ Lesley made a false move, and the way of deliverance was found.

‘It is easy to say,’ he writes to parliament after the victory, ‘the Lord hath done this. It would do you good to see and hear our poor foot go up and down making their boast of God. But it’s in your hands, and by these eminent mercies God puts it more into your hands to give glory to him; to improve your power and his blessings to his praise.... Disown yourselves and own your authority.... Relieve the oppressed, hear the groans of poor prisoners in England. Be pleased to reform the abuses of all professions; and if there be any one that makes many poor to make a few rich’ (a hit at the lawyers), ‘that suits not a commonwealth.’ [3]

[1] [_Memoirs_, p. 123; ed. 1751.]

[2] [Carlyle, _ib_. No. cxxxvi.]

[3] [Carlyle, _ib_. No. cxl.]

It was this exhilaration of energy in the Lord’s work, not a vulgar ambition of kingship, that shone in Cromwell’s countenance as he rode up from Worcester a year later, and that made him press, as we have seen, on the first day when he resumed his seat in the house, for measures of settlement and reform. ‘Peace hath her victories,’ as Milton wrote to him at this time, ‘no less renowned than war,’ but they were to be won not in days but in centuries, and by the energy not of feeling but of thought. He had a temper, he once said of himself, that ‘caused him often to overact business,’ and his trusted ‘son Ireton,’ in whose ‘working brain’ the same plans were combined with a more cautious and calculating temper, was no longer at hand to restrain him. He had died at his post in Ireland three months after the battle of Worcester; his death, we are told, ‘striking a great sadness in Cromwell.’ [1] ‘No man could prevail with him so much or {355} order him so far as Ireton could,’ but there is no reason to think that had Ireton lived he would have altered, though he might sometimes have checked, Cromwell’s career. If Cromwell had died when Ireton did, he would have died like him in the full odour of republican sanctity, and his subsequent breach with the republicans was due to his pressing forward the army project of reform and reconstruction which had first taken shape in Ireton’s brain. In his letter to the parliament after Dunbar he professed a desire (a notable instance of his frankness) not to ‘precipitate them by importunities’ in the work of settlement, and he was true to his profession. For a year and a half, however, from September 16, 1651, to April 20, 1653, he loyally endeavoured to rouse the republican oligarchy to the necessities of the situation. If his importunity was not pressing, that of the people was, and it was clear that the parliament must give some practical ‘reason why’ for its existence, or lose its prestige. Petitions from the country were constantly coming in, all conceived in the ‘levelling’ sense which I described in the last lecture. Their general burden is that tithes may be either abolished as levitical and Romish, or gathered into a common treasury, and then some part of them applied to the maintenance of a godly ministry in each county; that those ‘drunken, malignant, scandalous, and profane ones,’ that go under the name of ministers, be put to work for their living; that justice may be given, not bought, and all matters of _meum_ and _tuum_ determined free, yet by a written law; that some check may be put on the swarms of lawyers, attorneys, and solicitors, nourished with the bread of oppression by long and tedious suits. Sometimes they wax eloquent, hoping that ‘justice may come down like a mighty stream, free for the poorest to resort unto, too strong for the richest to divert.’ The Rump parliament meanwhile, not, we may fairly suppose, considering its previous inaction, without pressure from Cromwell, showed great activity in appointing committees to consider grievances, and in pressing resolutions, which if carried out would have made English law more cheap, and English land more free, than it has ever been since. There was no result however in the way of effective legislation, and the old conviction of the army, that it was the true parliament and judicature of the nation, was beginning to revive. At the end of 1650 letters were read in {356} the house, ‘that officers of the army by commission from Lambert did determine controversies between party and party; wherewith the people were much satisfied with the quick despatch they received with full hearing.’ At the same time petitions were circulating in the army for reform of abuses and a new parliament, in the same tone which had prevailed when the army had before (in the year 1648) been in direct contact with the civil power. The real fact was that the parliament was once more face to face with its true, its sole constituency, the military saints, with whom its conceit of antique republicanism would avail little, unless it could realise in the hard world of ‘interests’ the reforming enthusiasm which had created it. Such realisation, if possible at all, was clearly impossible to an oligarchy which had always been unpopular and was becoming factious.

[1] [Whitelock, iii. p. 371.]

We have not the means of tracing in detail the conduct of Cromwell during this crisis. It is clear that he made no secret of his thoughts. In November 1651 he obtained a vote of the house that it would put a term to its sitting, but only one so remote as November 1654. The next question necessarily was, how should the new election, and the general work of reconstruction, be regulated? That it would require rigorous control in the presence of the royalist gentry and the angry presbyterian clergy, was abundantly clear. Was this control to be in the hands of the Rump oligarchy, disunited, estranged from the army, incapable of swift and secret action as a deliberative assembly must be, or in the hands of a single person who had a name of terror and hope, and to whom the heart of the army was as his own? This was the real question at issue, and at the end of 1651 we find Cromwell, at a conference which he invited between the grandees of parliament and the officers, explicitly stating it. It was as impossible for him now, however, as it had been on a like occasion in 1648, to bring about an understanding. The great lawyers of the house generally were in favour of government by a single person, but only St. John seems to have shared Cromwell’s views as to who the single person should be. Whitelock was in favour of restoring monarchy in the person of the duke of Gloucester. To the enthusiasts of the army the very name of monarchy was blasphemy against Christ, whom they were expecting shortly to restore the kingdom to the saints. The theoretical republicans of {357} the Rump were in favour of constituting themselves a permanent body on the Venetian model, only filling up vacancies as they should occur.

In this dead-lock of conflicting jealousies and opinions the year 1652 passed away, the only vigour being shown in the prosecution of the Dutch war and the settlement of Scotland. Cromwell’s views were well known, and one day when in debate he spoke of Mr. Marten accidentally as ‘Sir Harry,’ Marten interrupted him by saying with a low bow, ‘I always expected when your majesty became king, you would make me a knight.’ He was clearly most unwilling, however, to break with the parliament, which he had absolutely in his hands, and if its leaders could have been induced, recognising their weakness and swallowing their formula, to invest him with a temporary dictatorship, he would have kept them at peace, as he alone had hitherto done, with the army, and worked with them constitutionally for the settlement of the nation. As it was, there are indications that he controlled the discontent of the army as long as he was able. Lambert’s vanity had been rudely affronted by the Rump, and his busy brain was brewing mischief. Harrison was becoming impatient for the inauguration of the ‘fifth monarchy.’ The military saints were finding, as Cromwell afterwards expressed it, that ‘all tenderness was forgotten to the good people, though it was by their hands and their means that the parliament sat where it did.’ ‘The reformation of law,’ he adds, ‘was a thing that many good words were spoken for; but we know that many months together were not sufficient for the settling of one word, “incumbrances.”’ [1]

[1] [Carlyle, _ib_. Speech I.]

By the beginning of the year 1653, Sir Henry Vane, who had hitherto been organising victory for Blake, had become alive to the danger of military domination, which he specially dreaded, and was pressing forward a bill for a new parliament. It was upon this bill that the final rupture with Cromwell took place. In its chief features it corresponded with the petitions of the army and levellers which had been rife in the agitation of 1647-8. There was to be a parliament of four hundred members, who should be distributed among the counties according to wealth and population. In the boroughs there was to be a uniform rental qualification of householders; in the counties such a property qualification {358} as should exclude tenants subject to control. There was to be a freehold qualification of 40_s_., a copyhold of 5_l_., and a leasehold of 20_l_. annual value. This system of distribution and qualification was afterwards adopted by Cromwell, except that he substituted for the property qualifications the uniform, and very high, one of 200_l_. of real or personal estate. Cromwell’s objection to the bill was that it gave the existing members the right both of sitting in the new house without re-election and of deciding on the admissibility of new members. In other words it constituted the Rump a many-headed dictatorship, to regulate the work of reconstruction. To this he opposed a plan of his own for delegating the re-settlement to an assembly of notables, to be specially summoned for the purpose; a plan which we may readily admit was merely meant as such a screen for his own dictatorship as would satisfy the demands of the ‘fifth monarchy’ or republican officers. As usual he behaved with, perfect explicitness. On April 19 he had a conference of members of parliament and officers of the army at his lodgings, and urged the importance of an immediate dissolution and a convocation of notables. St. John was the only civilian who supported him, but according to his own account the meeting closed with an understanding that Vane’s bill should not be pressed. Next morning the conference was renewed, but in the presence of only a few ‘parliament men,’ of whom Whitelock was one. The sequel is best described in his words. [1]

‘Cromwell being informed during this debate that the parliament was sitting, and that it was hoped they would put a period to themselves, which would be the most honourable dissolution for them; hereupon he broke off the meeting, and the members of parliament with him left him at his lodgings and went to the house, and found them in debate of an act, the which would occasion other meetings of them again, and prolong their sitting.’ This was Vane’s bill, which he was pressing through its last stages, in disregard, according to Cromwell, of the pledge given the night before. Colonel Ingoldsby brought word to Cromwell of what the house was doing, ‘who was so enraged thereat, expecting they should have meddled with no other business but putting a period to their sitting without more delay, that he presently commanded some of the officers of the army to fetch a party {359} of soldiers, with whom he marched to the house.’

[1] [iv. p. 4.]

The rest of the story is too familiar to need repetition. It is noticed, however, that he did not introduce the soldiers at once, but sat quietly in his place, till the motion was put from the chair, ‘that the bill do now pass.’ It was then, at the last moment, _i.e._ at which it was possible to stop the establishment of a permanent oligarchy under the forms of law, that he broke into a violent speech, which ended with his calling in the soldiers. His conduct at this crisis, as throughout his public life, corresponded exactly to the account which he gave of it himself. Into parliament, as into battle, he carried the ‘waiting spirit’ in which the sectaries believed. He trusted for guidance to a sudden inspiration interpreting the necessity of events. At last, at the critical point, just when he saw Lesley making a gap in his line at Dunbar, ‘the spirit of God was strong upon him,’ he would no longer consult ‘flesh and blood,’ but took the decisive step. The dissolution of the Rump was clearly inevitable so soon as it broke with and sought to defy its armed constituency, which, as Cromwell had always maintained, was an equally legitimate authority with itself, and far more truly representative. The violence of manner with which Cromwell turned it out and locked the door, of which, says Whitelock, even ‘some of his bravadoes were ashamed,’ is quite unique in his history, and doubtless aggravated the difficulty of subsequent reconciliation with the commonwealth’s men. The best explanation of it is a remark in one of his private letters; ‘I have known my folly do good, when affection (passion) has overcome my reason.’ It is a curious trait in his character, that when wrought up after much hesitation to a decisive act, of which he saw the danger, he gave the loose to that boisterous vehemence for which he had early been noted, but which he could generally suppress. The same trait appears in his behaviour at the signature of the death-warrant of Charles.

He had now to grapple with the question which the Rump had fingered in vain. The Lord’s people were to be saved from themselves, and the interests of the world so reformed and adjusted that it might yield them fit habitation. The task, as I have shown in the previous lectures, was in the nature of the case a hopeless one. The claim of the saints was at once false and self-contradictory; false, for the secular world, which it sought to ignore, had rights no less divine than its own; {360} and self-contradictory, since even amongst the most sectarian of the sectaries it was constantly hardening into authority hostile to the individual persuasion in which it originated. ‘That hath been one of the vanities of our contest. Every sect saith, “Oh, give me liberty.” But give it him, and to the best of his power he will yield it to no one else.’ [1] Cromwell’s labour, however, was not wholly in vain. During five years, by the mere force of his instinct of settlement, his commanding energy, and that absorbing sympathy miscalled hypocrisy, which enabled him to hold the hearts of the sectaries even while he disappointed their enthusiasm, he at least kept the peace between the saints and the world, secured liberty of conscience, and placed it on ground which even the flood of prelatical reaction was not able wholly to submerge. But while protecting the godly interest, he was obliged more and more to silence its pretension. A gradual detachment from the saints, and approximation to the ancient interests, was the necessary policy of his later years.

[1] [Carlyle, _ib_. Speech III.]

The dissolution of the Rump caused no derangement of administration. As captain-general in a council of officers, Cromwell directed all officials to continue their work, and summoned a body of notables to act as a constitutive assembly. The change was generally acceptable to puritan sentiment.

‘I told the parliament,’ said Cromwell afterwards, ‘what I knew better than anyone else, because of my manner of life, which took me up and down the country, thereby giving me to know the temper of all men, that the nation loathed their sitting. I knew it, and when they were dissolved, there was not so much as the barking of a dog, or any general and visible repining at it.’ [1]

[1] [_ib_.]