Chapter 26

In contrasting Falkland's line of conduct with that of the "Puritans," on the question of the Bishops' Bill and of the impeachment of Laud, Mr. Arnold indicates his impression that all Puritans were on principle enemies, and as a matter of course fanatical enemies, of Episcopacy. But he will find that at this time many Puritans were Low Church Episcopalians, wishing only to moderate the pretensions and curb the authority of the Bishops. Episcopacy is not one of the grievances protested against in the Millenary Petition Sir John Eliot appears to have been as strong an Erastian as Mr. Arnold could desire.

It seems to us hardly possible to draw a sharp line of distinction in any respect, except that of practical ability, between Falkland and Hampden. Falkland failed to understand, while Hampden understood, the character of the King and the full peril of the situation; that was the real difference between the two men. The political and ecclesiastical ideal of both in all probability was pretty much the same. Mr. Arnold chooses to describe Hampden as "seeking the Lord about militia or ship- money," and he undertakes to represent Jesus as "whispering to him with benign disdain." Sceptics, to disprove the objective reality of the Deity, allege that every man makes God in his own image. They might perhaps find an indirect confirmation of their remark in the numerous lives and portraitures of Christ which have appeared of late years, each entirely different from the rest, and each stamped clearly enough with the impress of an individual mind. But where has Hampden spoken of himself as "seeking the Lord about militia or ship-money?" He appears to have been a highly-educated man of the world. In one of his few remaining letters there are recommendations to a friend, who had consulted him about the education of his sons, which seem to blend regard for religion with enlightened liberality of view. If he prayed for support and guidance in his undertakings, surely he did no more than Mr. Arnold himself practically recommends people to do when he urges them to join the Established Church of England. Even should Mr. Arnold light on an authentic instance of Scripture phraseology used by Hampden, or any other Puritan chief, in a way which would now be against good taste, his critical and historical sense will readily make allowance for the difference between the present time and the time when the Bible was a newly-recovered book, and when its language, on the believer's lips and to the believer's ears, was still fresh as the dew of the morning.

It would be even more difficult to separate Falkland's general character from that of Pym, of whose existence Mr. Arnold has shown himself conscious by once mentioning his name. The political philosophy of Pym's speeches is most distinctly constitutional, and we do not see that in point of breadth or dignity they leave much to be desired, while they unquestionably express, in the fullest manner, the mind of a leader of the Puritan party.

Whoever contrasts Falkland with the Puritans will have to encounter the somewhat untoward fact that in his speech against the High Church Bishops, Falkland, if he does not actually call himself a Puritan, twice identifies the Puritan cause with his own. Among the bad objects which he accuses the clergy of advocating in their sermons is "the demolishing of Puritanism and propriety" Again he cries--

"Alas! they whose ancestors in the darkest times excommunicated the breakers of Magna Charta do now by themselves, and their adherents, both write, preach, plot, and act against it, by encouraging Dr. Beale, by preferring Dr. Mainwaring, appearing forward for monopolies and ship- money, and if any were slow and backward to comply, blasting both them and their preferment with the utmost expression of their hatred--the title of Puritans."

These words may help to make Mr. Arnold aware, when he mows down the Puritan party with some trenchant epithet, how wide the sweep of his scythe is, and the same thing will be still more distinctively brought before him by a perusal (if he has not already perused it) of the chapter on the subject in Mr. Sandford's "Studies and Illustrations of the Great Rebellion." It can hardly be necessary to remind him, or any one else, of the portrait of one who was a most undoubted Puritan, drawn by Lucy Hutchinson. If this portrait betrays the hand of a wife, Clarendon's portrait of Falkland betrays the hand of a friend, and even a beloved husband is not more likely to be the object of exaggerated, though sincere praise, than the social head and the habitual host of a circle of literary men. At all events Lucy Hutchinson is painting what she thought a perfect Puritan would be; and her picture presents to us, not a coarse, crop-eared, and snuffling fanatic, but a highly accomplished, refined, gallant, and most "amiable," though religious and seriously-minded gentleman. The Spencerian school of sentiment seems to Mr. Arnold very lovely compared with the men of the New Model Army and their ways. In the general of the New Model Army, Sir Thomas Fairfax, he has a distinct, and we venture to say very worthy, pupil of that school.

Over the most questionable as well as the most momentous passage in Falkland's public life, his admirer passes with a graceful literary movement. Falkland was sworn in as a Privy Councillor three days before, and as Secretary of State, four days after, the attempt of the King to seize the Five Members. He was thus, in outward appearance at least, brought into calamitous connection with an act which, as Clarendon sees, was the signal for civil war. Clarendon vehemently disclaims for himself and his two friends any knowledge of the King's design. So far as the more violent part of the proceeding is concerned, we can easily believe him; a woman mad with vindictive arrogance inspired it, and nobody except a madman would have been privy to it; but it is not so easy to believe him with regard to the impeachment, which was in fact an attempt to take the lives of the King's enemies by arraigning them before a political tribunal, hostile to them and favourable to their accuser, instead of bringing them to a fair and legal trial before a jury. By accepting the Secretaryship, Falkland at all events assumed a certain measure of responsibility after the fact for a proceeding which, we repeat, rendered civil war inevitable, because it must have convinced the popular leaders that to put faith in Charles with such councillors as he had about him would be insanity; and that if they allowed Parliament to rise and the Kong to resume the power of the sword, not only would all their work of reform be undone, but the fate of Sir John Eliot would be theirs. Clarendon owns that Hampden's carriage from that day was changed, implying that up to that day it had been temperate; and the insinuation that, beneath the cloak of apparent moderation, Hampden had been secretly breathing counsels of violence into the minds of others deserves no attention, when it comes from a hostile source. Of the purity of Falkland's motives we entertain not the shadow of a doubt; but we venture to think that it is very questionable whether he did right, and this not only on grounds of technical constitutionalism, which in the present day would render imperative the retirement of a Minister whose advice had been so flagrantly disregarded, but on grounds of the most broadly practical kind. He forfeited for ever, not only any influence which he might have retained over the popular leaders, and any access which he might have had to them in their more pacific mood, but probably all real control over the King. Charles was the very last man whom you could afford to allow in the slightest degree to tamper with your honour. It is surely conceivable that the recollection of an unfortunate step, and the sense of a false position, may have mingled with the sorrow caused by the public calamities in the melancholy which drove Falkland to cast away his life.

In the Civil War Falkland was always "ingeminating _Peace, Peace_". Our hearts are with him, but it was of no use. It is an unhappy part of civil wars that there can be no real peace till one party has succumbed: compromise only leads to a renewal of the conflict. There is sense as well as dignity in the deliberate though mournful acceptance of necessity, and the determination to play out the part which could not be declined, expressed in the letter written at the outbreak of the conflict by the Parliamentarian, Sir William Waller, to a personal friend in the other camp:

"My affections to you are so unchangeable that hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person; but I must be true to the cause wherein I serve. The great God, who is the searcher of my heart, knows with what reluctance I go upon this service, and with what perfect hatred I look upon a war without an enemy. The God of peace, in His good time, sent us peace, and in the meantime fit us to receive it! We are both on the stage, and we must act the parts that are assigned us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour, and without personal animosities."

A man in this frame of mind, we submit, was likely to get to the end of a civil war more speedily than a man in the mood, amiable as it was, of Falkland.

Perhaps, after all, the failure, the inevitable failure of Falkland's passionate pleadings for peace may have saved him from a worse doom than death on the field even of civil war. In the case of the Five Members, the King had shown how little regard he had, at least how little regard the mistress of his councils had, for the honour of his advisers. The pair might have used Falkland to lure by the pledge of his high character the leaders of the Parliament into the acceptance of a treaty? which the King, with his notions of divine right, and the Queen with her passionate love of absolute power, would, there can be little doubt, have violated as soon as the army of the Parliament had been disbanded, and the power of the sword had returned into the King's hands. Falkland might have even seen the scaffold erected, through the prostitution of his own honour, for the men whose ardent associate he had been in the overthrow of government by prerogative and in the impeachment of Strafford.

Flinging epithets at Cromwell is a very harmless indulgence of sentiment. His memory has passed unscathed even through the burning eloquence which, from the pulpit of the Restoration, denounced him as "wearing a bad hat, and that not paid for." Since research has placed him before us as he really was, the opinion has been gaining ground that he was about the greatest human force ever directed to a moral purpose; and in that sense, about the greatest man, take him all in all, that ever trod the scene of history. If his entire devotion to his cause, his valour, his magnanimity, his clemency, his fidelity to the public service, his domestic excellence and tenderness are not "conduct," all we can say is, so much the worse for "conduct." The type to which his character belonged, in common with the whole series of historic types, had in it something that was special and transitory, combined with much that, so far as we see, was universal and will endure for ever. It is in failing to note the special and transitory element, and the limitations which it imposed on the hero's greatness, that Carlyle's noble biography runs into poetry, and departs from historic truth. To supply this defect is the proper work of rational criticism; but the criticism which begins with "Philistine" is not likely to be very rational.

The objection urged by Bolingbroke against Cromwell's foreign policy, on the ground that to unite with France, which was gaining strength, against Spain, which was beginning to decline, was not the way to maintain the balance of power in Europe, is once more reproduced as though it had not been often brought forward and answered. Cromwell was not bound to trouble his head about such a figment of a special diplomacy as the balance of power any more than Shakespeare was bound to trouble his head about Voltaire's rules for the drama. He was the chief and the defender of Protestantism, and as such he was naturally led to ally himself with France, which was comparatively liberal, against Spain, which was the great organ of the Catholic reaction. An alliance with Spain was a thing impossible for a Puritan. Looking to the narrower interest of England, much more was to be gained by a war with Spain than by a war with France, because by a war with Spain an entrance was forced for English enterprise through the barriers which Spanish monopoly had raised against commercial enterprise in America. The security of England appears, in Cromwell's judgment, to have depended on her intrinsic strength, which no one can doubt that, under extraordinary disadvantages, he immensely increased, rather than on the maintenance of a European equilibrium which, as the number of the powers increased, became palpably impracticable. It may be added, that the incipient decline of the double-headed House of Austria, if it is visible to our eyes as we trace back the course of events, can hardly have been visible to any eye at that time, and, what is still more to the purpose, that the dangerous ascendency of Louis XIV. resulted in great measure from the betrayal of England by Charles II., and would have been impossible had, we will not say a second Cromwell, but a Protestant or patriotic monarch, sat on the Protector's throne.

Bolingbroke suggests, and Mr. Arnold embraces the suggestion, that Charles I., by making war on France, showed himself more sagacious with regard to foreign policy than Cromwell. But Mr. Arnold, in recommending Bolingbroke's philosophy to a generation which he thinks has too much neglected it, has discreetly warned us to let his history alone. Charles I., or rather Buckingham, in whose hands Charles was a puppet, made war on Spain, though in the most incapable manner, and with a most ignominious result: he at one time lent the French Government English ships to be used against the Protestants of Rochelle, whose resistance, apart from the religious question, was the one great obstacle to the concentration of the French power; and though he subsequently quarrelled with France, few will believe--assuredly Clarendon did not believe--that among the motives for the change, policy of any kind predominated over the passions and the vanity of the favourite. That Cromwell would have lent a steady and effective support to the Protestants, and thus have prevented the concentration of the French power, is as certain as any unfulfilled contingency can be.

Mr. Arnold is evidently anxious to bring Bolingbroke into fashion. "Hear Bolingbroke upon the success of Puritanism." Hear Lovelace on Dr. Johnson; one critic would be about as edifying as the other. Bolingbroke, a sceptical writer and a scoffer at Anglican doctrine, to say nothing about his morals, allied himself for party purposes with the fanatical clergy of the Anglican Establishment, well represented by Sacheverel, and, to gratify his allies, passed as Minister persecuting laws, about the last of the series, against Nonconformists. This, perhaps, is a proof in a certain way, of philosophic largeness of view. But if Bolingbroke is to be commended to ingenuous youth as a guide superior to party narrowness or bias, it may be well to remember the passage of his letter to Sir William Wyndham, in which he very frankly describes his own aims, and those of his confederates on their accession to office, admitting that "the principal spring of their actions was to have the government of the State in their hands, and that their principal views were the conservation of this power, great employments to themselves, and great opportunities of rewarding those who had helped to raise them, and of hurting those who stood in opposition to them;" though he has the grace to add that with these considerations of party and private interest were intermingled some which had for their object the public good. In another place he avows that he and his party designed "to fill the employments of the kingdom down to the meanest with Tories," by which they would have anticipated, and, indeed, by anticipation outdone, the vilest and most noxious proceeding of the coarsest demagogue who ever climbed to power on the shoulders of faction in the United States. It may be instructive to compare with this the principles upon which public employments were distributed by Cromwell.

It would be out of place to discuss the whole question of the Protector's administration by way of reply to a passing thrust of antipathy. But when judgment is pronounced on his external policy, his critics ought not to leave out of consideration the Union of Scotland and Ireland with England, successfully accomplished by him, repealed by the Restoration, and, like not a few of his other measures, revived and ratified by posterity, after a delay fraught with calamitous consequences in both cases, and which, in the case of Ireland, may perhaps even yet prove fatal.

We cannot help remarking, however, that the ecclesiastical policy of the Protectorate was one which it would be most inconsistent on the part of Mr. Arnold and those who hold the same view with him to decry. It was a national church (to prevent the hasty abolition of which, seems to have been Cromwell's main reason for dissolving the Barebones Parliament) with the largest possible measure of comprehension. To us the weak points of such a policy appear manifest enough, but by Mr. Arnold and those of his way of thinking it ought, if we mistake not, to be respected as an anticipation of their own deal.

Of one great and irretrievable error Cromwell was guilty--he died before his hour. That his government was taking root is clear from the bearing of Mazarin and Don Lewis De Haro, sufficiently cool judges, towards the Stuart Pretender. The Restoration was a reaction not against the Protectorate but against the military anarchy which ensued. Had Cromwell lived ten years longer, or had his marshals been true to his successor, to his cause, and to their own fortunes, there would have been an end of the struggle against Stuart prerogative, the spirit of Laud would have been laid for ever; the temporal power of ecclesiastics would have troubled no more; the Union with Scotland and Ireland would have remained unbroken; and the genuine representation of the people embodied in the Instrument of Government would have continued to exist, in the place of rotten boroughs, the sources of oligarchy and corruption, of class government and class wars. Let us philosophize about general causes as much as we will, untoward accidents occur: the loss of Pym and Hampden in the early part of the Revolution, and that of Cromwell at its close, may be fairly reckoned as accidents, and they were untoward in the highest degree.

No doubt, while Falkland fits perfectly into the line of English progress and takes his place with obvious propriety among the Saints of Constitutionalism in the vestibule of the House of Commons, while even Hampden finds admission as the opponent of ship-money, the kind veil of oblivion being drawn over the part he played as a leader in the Revolution, Cromwell, though his hold over the hearts of the English people is growing all the time, remains in an uncovenanted condition. The problem of his statue is still, and, so far as England is concerned, seems likely long to be, unsolved. Put him high or low, in the line of kings or out of it, he is hopelessly incongruous, incommensurable, and out of place. He is in fact the man of the New World; his institutions in the main embody the organic principles of New World society: at Washington, not at Westminster should be his statue.

What Puritanism did for England, and what credit is due to it as an element of English character, are questions which cannot be settled by mere assertion, on our side at least. In its highest development, and at the period of its greatest men, it was militant, and everything militant is sure to bear evil traces of the battle. For that reason Christianity has always been in favour of peace and goodwill; let the Regius Professor of Theology at Oxford, in his Christian philosophy of war, be as ingenious and as admirable as he may. But sometimes it is necessary to accept the arbitrament of the sword. It was necessary at Marathon, on the plain of Tours, on the waters which bore the Armada, at Lutzen, at Marston, at Leipsic, at Gettysburg. Darius, the Moors, Philip II., Wallenstein, Prince Rupert, Bonaparte, the Slave-owners, did not offer you the opportunity which you would so gladly have embraced, of a tranquil and amicable discussion among lime-trees and violets. On each occasion the cause of human progress drew along with it plenty of mud and slime, nevertheless it was the cause of human progress. On each occasion the wrong side no doubt had its Falklands, nevertheless it was the wrong side.

In the beginning of the seventeenth century the Reformation was brought to the verge of destruction. When Wallenstein sat down before Stralsund everything was gone but England, Holland, Sweden, and some cantons of Switzerland. In England the stream of reaction was running strong; Holland could not have stood by herself; Sweden was nothing as a power, though it turned out that she had a man. Fortunately the Lambeth Popedom and the Royal Supremacy prevented the English division of the army of Reaction from getting into line with the other divisions and compelled it to accept decisive battle on a separate field against the most formidable soldiers of the Reformation. These soldiers saved Protestantism, which was their first object, and they saved English liberty into the bargain. We who have come after can stand by the battlefield, pouncet-box in hand, and sniff and sneer as much as we will.

Great Tew was an anticipation, for ever beautiful and memorable, of the time when all swords shall be sheathed, and the world shall have entered into final peace. But in its philosophy there were, as the world then was, two defects; it did not reach the people, and it was incapable of protecting its own existence. Laud himself did not care to crush it; he was an ecclesiastical despot rather than a theological bigot; he had a genuine respect for learned men; he preferred winning them by gracious words and preferment to coercing them with the pillory and the shears. But had Laud's system prevailed, there would soon have been an end of the philosophy of Great Tew. Mr. Arnold points to the free thought of Bacon. Nobody in those days scented mischief in the inductive philosophy, while in politics and religion Bacon was scrupulously orthodox. Cromwell's faith was a narrower and coarser thing by far than that of the inmates of the "college in a purer air;" but it brought religion and morality--not the most genial or rational morality, but still morality--into the cottage as well as into the manor-house, and it was able to protect its own existence When it had mounted to power in the person of its chief, the opinions of Great Tew, and all opinions that would abstain from trying to overthrow the Government and restore the tyranny, enjoyed practically larger and more assured liberty than they had ever enjoyed in England before or were destined to enjoy for many a year to come. Falkland, says Mr. Arnold, was in the grasp of _fatality, hence the transcendent interest that attaches to him_. Cromwell, happily for his cause and for his country, was, or felt himself to be, not in the grasp of fatality but in the hand of God.