Part 98

In the early period of the war, the parliamentary forces were commanded by the Earl of Essex; and Sir Thomas Fairfax was their general at a later stage; but the true leader on that side, for war and for politics alike, was soon found in Oliver Cromwell, a member of Parliament, whose extraordinary capacity was first shown in the military organization of the Eastern Counties, from which he came. After 1645, when the army was remodeled, with Cromwell as second in rank, his real chieftainship was scarcely disguised. The decisive battle of the war was fought that year at Naseby, where the king's cause suffered an irrecoverable defeat.

The Presbyterians of Scotland had now allied themselves with the English Roundheads, on condition that the Church of England should be remodeled in the Presbyterian form. The Puritan majority in Parliament being favorable to that form, a Solemn League and Covenant between the two nations had been entered into, in 1643, and an Assembly of Divines was convened at Westminster to frame the contemplated system of the Church. But the Independents, who disliked Presbyterianism, and who were more tolerantly inclined in their views, had greatly increased in numbers, and some of the stronger men on the Parliament side, including Cromwell, the strongest of all, were among them. This difference brought about a sharp struggle within the popular party for the control of the fruits of the triumph now beginning to seem secure. Under Cromwell, the Army became a powerful organization of religious Independency, while Parliament sustained Presbyterianism, and the two stood against each other as rival powers in the state.

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At the beginning of the year 1646 the fortunes of Charles had fallen very low. His partisan, Montrose, in Scotland, had been beaten; his intrigues in Ireland, for the raising of a Catholic army, had only alarmed and disgusted his English friends; he was at the end of his resources, and he gave himself up to the Scots. The latter, in conjunction with the Presbyterian majority in Parliament, were willing to make terms with him, and restore him to his throne; on conditions which included the signing of the Covenant and the establishing of Presbyterianism in the Churches of both kingdoms. He refused the proposal, being deluded by a belief that the quarrel of Independents and Presbyterians would open his way to the recovery of power without any concessions at all. The Scots then surrendered him to the English, and he was held in confinement by the latter for the next two years, scheming and pursuing intrigues in many directions, and convincing all who dealt with him that his purposes were never straightforward--that he was faithless and false to the core.

Ill-will and suspicion, meanwhile, were widening the breach between Parliament and the Army. Political and religious agitators were gaining influence in the latter and republican ideas were spreading fast. At length (December, 1648), the Army took matters into its own hands; expelled from Parliament those members who favored a reconciliation with the king, on the basis of a Presbyterian establishment of the Church, and England passed under military rule. The "purged" Parliament (or rather the purged House of Commons, which now set the House of Lords aside, declaring itself to be the sole and supreme power in the state) brought King Charles to trial in the following month, before a High Court of Justice created for the occasion. He was convicted of treason, in making war upon his subjects, and was beheaded on the 30th of January, 1649.

The Commonwealth and the Protectorate.

The king being thus disposed of, the House of Commons proclaimed England a Commonwealth, "without a King or House of Lords," took to itself the name of Parliament, and appointed an executive Council of State, forty-one in number. The new government, in its first year, had a rebellion in Ireland to deal with, and sent Cromwell to the scene. He crushed it with a merciless hand. The next year Scotland was in arms, for the late king's son, now called Charles II., who had entered the country, accepted Presbyterianism, and signed the Covenant. Again Cromwell was the man for the occasion, and in a campaign of two months he ended the Scottish war, with such decision that he had no more fighting to do on English or Scottish soil while he lived. There was war with the Dutch in 1652, 1653 and 1654, over questions of trade, and the long roll of English naval victories was opened by the great soldier-seaman, Robert Blake.

But the power which upheld and carried forward all things at this time was the power of Oliver Cromwell, master of the Army, and, therefore, master of the Commonwealth. The surviving fragment of the Long Parliament was an anomaly, a fiction; men called it "the Rump." In April, 1653, Cromwell drove the members of it from their chamber and formally took to himself the reins of government which in fact he had been holding before. A few months later he received from his immediate supporters the title of Lord Protector, and an Instrument of Government was framed, which served as a constitution during the next three years. Cromwell was as unwilling as Charles had been to share the government with a freely elected and representative Parliament. The first House which he called together was dissolved at the end of five months (1655), because it persisted in discussing a revision of the constitution. His second Parliament, which he summoned the following year, required to be purged by the arbitrary exclusion of about a hundred members before it could be brought to due submission. This tractable body then made certain important changes in the constitution, by an enactment called the "Humble Petition and Advice." It created a second house, to take the place of the House of Lords, and gave to the Lord Protector the naming of persons to be life-members of such upper house. It also gave to the Protector the right of appointing his own successor, a right which Cromwell exercised on his death-bed, in 1658, by designating his son Richard.

The responsible rule of Cromwell, from the expulsion of the Rump and his assumption of the dignity of Lord Protector, covered only the period of five years. But in that brief time he made the world respect the power of England as it had never been respected before. His government at home was as absolute and arbitrary as the government of the Stuarts, but it was infinitely wiser and more just. Cromwell was a statesman of the higher order; a man of vast power, in intellect and will. That he did not belong to the yet higher order of commanding men, whose statesmanship is pure in patriotism and uncolored by selfish aims, is proved by his failure to even plan a more promising settlement of the government of England than that which left it, an anomalous Protectorate, to a man without governing qualities, who happened to be his son.

Restoration of the Stuarts.

Richard Cromwell was brushed aside after eight months of an absurd attempt to play the part of Lord Protector. The officers of the Army and the resuscitated Rump Parliament, between them, managed affairs, in a fashion, for almost a year, and then they too were pushed out of the way by the army which had been stationed in Scotland, under General George Monk. By the action of Monk, with the consent, and with more than the consent, of England at large, the Stuart monarchy was restored. Charles II. was invited to return, and in May, 1660, he took his seat on the re-erected throne.

The nation, speaking generally, was tired of a military despotism; tired of Puritan austerity; tired of revolution and political uncertainty;--so tired that it threw itself down at the feet of the most worthless member of the most worthless royal family in its history, and gave itself up to him without a condition or a guarantee. For twenty-five years it endured both oppression and disgrace at his hands. It suffered him to make a brothel of his Court; to empty the national purse into the pockets of his shameless mistresses and debauched companions; to revive the ecclesiastical tyranny of Laud; to make a crime of the religious creeds and the worship of more than half his subjects; to sell himself and sell the honor of England to the king of France for a secret pension, and to be in every possible way as ignoble and despicable as his father had been arrogant and false. When he died, in 1685, the prospects of the English nation were not improved by the accession of his brother, the Duke of York, who became James II. {1078} James had more honesty than his brother or his father; but the narrowness and meanness of the Stuart race were in his blood. He had made himself intolerable; to his subjects, both English and Scotch, by entering the Catholic Church, openly, while Charles was believed to have done the same in secret. His religion was necessarily bigotry, because of the smallness of his nature, and he opposed it to the Protestantism of the kingdom with a kind of brutal aggressiveness. In the first year of his reign there was a rebellion undertaken, in the interest of a bastard son of Charles II., called Duke of Monmouth; but it was savagely put down, first by force of arms, at Sedgemoor, and afterwards by the "bloody assizes" of the ruthless Judge Jeffreys. Encouraged by this success against his enemies James began to ignore the "Test Act," which excluded Catholics from office, and to surround himself by men of his own religion. The Test Act was an unrighteous law, and the "Declaration of Indulgence" which James issued, for the toleration of Catholics and Dissenters, was just in principle, according to the ideas of later times; but the action of the king with respect to both was, nevertheless, a gross and threatening violation of law. England had submitted to worse conduct from Charles II., but its Protestant temper was now roused, and the loyalty of the subject was consumed by the fierceness of the Churchman's wrath. James' daughter, Mary, and her husband, William, Prince of Orange, were invited from Holland to come over and displace the obnoxious father from his throne. They accepted the invitation, November, 1688; the nation rose to welcome them; James fled,--and the great Revolution, which ended arbitrary monarchy in England forever, and established constitutional government on clearly defined and lasting bases, was accomplished without the shedding of a drop of blood.

The House of Orange and the Dutch Republic.

William of Orange, who thus acquired a place in the line of English kings, held, at the same time, the nearly regal office of Stadtholder of Holland; but the office had not remained continuously in his family since William the Silent, whose great-grandson he was. Maurice, the son of the murdered William the Silent, had been chosen to the stadtholdership after his father's death, and had carried forward his father's work with success, so far as concerned the liberation of the United Provinces from the Spanish yoke. He was an abler soldier than William, but not his equal as a statesman, nor as a man. The greater statesman of the period was John of Barneveldt, between whom and the Stadtholder an opposition grew up which produced jealousy and hostility, more especially on the part of the latter. A shameful religious conflict had arisen at this time between the Calvinists, who numbered most of the clergy in their ranks, and a dissenting body, led by Jacob Hermann, or Arminius, which protested against the doctrine of predestination. Barneveldt favored the Arminians. The Stadtholder, Maurice, without any apparent theological conviction in the matter, threw his whole weight of influence on the side of the Calvinists; and was able, with the help of the Calvinist preachers, to carry the greater part of the common people into that faction. The Arminians were everywhere put down as heretics, barred from preaching or teaching, and otherwise silenced and ill treated. It is a singular fact that, at the very time of this outburst of Calvinistic fury, the Dutch were exhibiting otherwise a far more tolerant temper in religion than any other people in Europe, and had thrown open their country as a place of shelter for the persecuted of other lands,--both Christian sectaries and Jews. We infer, necessarily, that the bitterness of the Calvinists against the Arminians was more political than religious in its source, and that the source is really traceable to the fierce ambition of Prince Maurice, and the passion of the party which supported his suspicious political aims.

Barneveldt lost influence as the consequence of the Calvinistic triumph, and was exposed helplessly to the vindictive hatred of Prince Maurice, who did not scruple to cause his arrest, his trial and execution (1619), on charges which none believed. Maurice, whose memory is blackened by this great crime, died in 1625, and was succeeded by his half-brother, Frederic Henry. The war with Spain had been renewed in 1621, at the end of the twelve years truce, and more than willingly renewed; for the merchant class, and the maritime interest in the cities which felt secure, preferred war to peace. Under a hostile flag they pushed their commerce into Spanish and Portuguese seas from which a treaty of peace would undoubtedly exclude them; and, so long as Spanish American silver fleets were afloat, the spoils of ocean war were vastly enriching. It was during these years of war that the Dutch got their footing on the farther sides of the world, and nearly won the mastery of the sea which their slower but stronger English rivals wrested from them in the end. Not until the general Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, was a final settlement of issues between Spain and the United Provinces brought about. The freedom and independence of the Provinces, as sovereign states, was then acknowledged by the humbled Spaniard, and favorable arrangements of trade were conceded to them. The southern, Catholic Provinces, which Spain had held, were retained in their subjection to her.

Frederic Henry, the third Stadtholder, was succeeded in 1647 by his son, William II. The latter wasted his short career of less than four years in foolish plotting to revolutionize the government and transform the stadtholdership into a monarchy, supported by France, for the help of which country he seemed willing to pay any base and treasonable price. Dying suddenly in the midst of his scheming, he left an unborn son--the future William III. of England--who came into the world a week after his father had left it. Under these circumstances the stadtholdership was suspended, with strong feelings against the revival of it, resulting from the conduct of William II. The lesser provinces then fell under the domination of Holland--so much so that the name of Holland began soon to be applied to the confederation at large, and is very commonly used with that meaning for a long subsequent time. The chief minister of the Estates of Holland, known as the Grand Pensionary, became the practical head of the federal government. After 1653 the office of Grand Pensionary was filled by a statesman of high ability, John de Witt, the chief end of whose policy appears to have been the prevention of the return of the House of Orange to power. The government thus administered, and controlled by the commercial class, was successful in promoting the general prosperity of the provinces, and in advancing their maritime importance and power. {1079} It conducted two wars with England--one with the Commonwealth and one with the restored monarchy--and could claim at least an equal share of the naval glory won in each. But it neglected the land defense of the country, and was found shamefully unprepared in 1672, when the Provinces were attacked by a villainous combination, formed between Louis XIV. of France and his servile pensioner, Charles II. of England. The republic, humbled and distressed by the rushing conquests of the French, fixed its hopes upon the young Prince of Orange, heir to the prestige of a great historic name, and turned its wrath against the party of De Witt. The Prince was made Stadtholder, despite the opposition of John de Witt, and the latter, with his brother Cornelius, was murdered by a mob at Amsterdam. William of Orange proved both wise and heroic as a leader, and the people were roused to a new energy of resistance by his appeals and his example. They cut their dykes and flooded the land, subjecting themselves to unmeasured loss and distress, but peremptorily stopping the French advance, until time was gained for awakening public feeling in Europe against the aggressions of the unscrupulous French king. Then William of Orange began that which was to be his great and important mission in life,--the organizing of resistance to Louis XIV. Without the foresight and penetration of French designs which he evinced,--without his unflagging exertions for the next thirty years,--without his diplomatic tact, his skill of management, his patience in war, his obstinate perseverance,--it seems to be a certainty that the ambitious "grand monarch," concentrating the whole power of France in himself, would have been able to break the surrounding nations one by one, and they would not have combined their strength for an effective self-protection. The revolution of 1688-9 in England, which gave the crown of that kingdom to William, and his wife Mary, contributed greatly to his success, and was an event nearly as important in European politics at large as it was in the constitutional history of Great Britain.

Germany after the Thirty Years War.

In a natural order of things, Germany should have supplied the main resistance to Louis XIV. and held his unscrupulous ambition in check. But Germany had fallen to its lowest state of political demoralization and disorder. The very idea of nationality had disappeared. The Empire, even collapsed to the Germanic sense, and even reduced to a frame and a form, had almost vanished from practical affairs. The numerous petty states which divided the German people stood apart from one another, in substantial independence, and were sundered by small jealousies and distrusts. Little absolute principalities they were, each having its little court, which aped, in a little way, the grand court of the grand monarch of France--central object of the admiration and the envy of all small souls in its time. Half of them were ready to bow down to the splendid being at Versailles, and to be his creatures, if he condescended to bestow a nod of patronage and attention upon them. The French king had more influence among them than their nominal Emperor. More and more distinctly the latter drew apart in his immediate dominions as an Austrian sovereign; and more and more completely Austrian interests and Austrian policy became removed and estranged from the interests of the Germanic people. The ambitions and the cares of the House of Hapsburg were increasingly in directions most opposite to the German side of its relations, tending towards Italy and the southeast; while, at the same time, the narrow church influence which depressed the Austrian states widened a hopeless intellectual difference between them and the northern German people.

Brandenburg.--Prussia.

The most notable movements in dull German affairs after the Peace of Westphalia were those which connected themselves with the settling and centering in Brandenburg of a nucleus of growing power, around which the nationalizing of Germany has been a crystalizing process ever since. The Mark of Brandenburg was one of the earliest conquests (tenth century) of the Germans from the Wends. Prussia, afterwards united with Brandenburg, was a later conquest (thirteenth century) from Wendish or Slavonic and other pagan inhabitants, and its subjugation was a missionary enterprise, accomplished by the crusading Order of Teutonic Knights, under the authority and direction of the Pope. The Order, which held the country for more than two centuries, and ruled it badly, became degenerate, and about the middle of the fifteenth century it was overcome in war by Casimir IV. of Poland, who took away from it the western part of its territory, and forced it to do homage to him for the eastern part, as a fief of the Polish crown. Sixty years later, the Reformation movement in Germany brought about the extinguishment of the Teutonic Order as a political power. The Grand Master of the Order at that time was Albert, a Hohenzollern prince, belonging to a younger branch of the Brandenburg family. He became a Lutheran, and succeeded in persuading the Polish king, Sigismund I., to transfer the sovereignty of the East Prussian fief to him personally, as a duchy. He transmitted it to his descendants, who held it for a few generations; but the line became extinct in 1618, and the Duchy of Prussia then passed to the elder branch of the family and was united with Brandenburg. The Mark of Brandenburg had been raised to the rank of an Electorate in 1356 and had been acquired by the Hohenzollern family in 1417. The superior weight of the Brandenburg electors in northern Germany may be dated from their acquisition of the important Duchy of Prussia; but they made no mark on affairs until the time of Frederick William I., called the Great Elector, who succeeded to the Electorate in 1640, near the close of the Thirty Years War. In the arrangements of the Peace of Westphalia he secured East Pomerania and other considerable additions of territory. In 1657 he made his Duchy of Prussia independent of Poland, by treaty with the Polish king. In 1672 and 1674 he had the courage and the independence to join the allies against Louis XIV., and when the Swedes, in alliance with Louis, invaded his dominions, he defeated and humbled them at Fehrbellen, and took from them the greater part of their Pomeranian territory. When the Great Elector died, in 1688, Brandenburg was the commanding North-German power, and the Hohenzollern family had fully entered on the great career it has since pursued.

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Frederick William's son Frederick, with none of his father's talent, had a pushing but shallow ambition. He aspired to be a king, and circumstances made his friendship so important to the Emperor Leopold I. that the latter, exercising the theoretical super-sovereignty of the Cæsars, endowed him with the regal title. He was made King of Prussia, not of Brandenburg, because Brandenburg stood in vassalage to the Empire, while Prussia was an independent state.

Poland and Russia.