Part 13

Cromwell, and later his apologists, insisted that, by delay and by refusing to grant supplies until their grievances were considered, the Parliament was encouraging the spirit of revolt. In reality the spirit of revolt was tenfold increased, not by the Parliament’s action, but by Cromwell’s, in seizing arbitrary power. If he had shown a tenth of the forbearance that Washington showed in dealing with the various Continental Congresses, he would have been readily granted far more power than ever Washington was given. He could easily have settled affairs on a constitutional basis, which would have given him all the power he had any right to ask; for his difficulties in this particular crisis were nothing like so great as those which Washington surmounted. The plea that the safety of the people and of the cause of righteousness depended upon his unchecked control, is a plea always made in such cases, and generally, as in this particular case, without any basis in fact. The need was just the other way.

Contrast Cromwell’s conduct with that of Lincoln, just before his second election as President. There was a time in the summer of 1864 when it looked as if the Democrats would win, and elect McClellan. At that time it was infinitely more essential to the salvation of the Union that Lincoln should be continued in power, than it was to the salvation of the Commonwealth, in 1654, that Cromwell should be continued in power. Lincoln would have been far more excusable than Cromwell if he had insisted upon keeping control. Yet such a thought never entered Lincoln’s head. He prepared to abide in good faith the decision of the people, and one of the most touching incidents of his life is the quiet and noble sincerity with which he made preparations, if McClellan was elected, to advise with him and help him in every way, and to use his own power, during the interval between McClellan’s election and inauguration, in such a manner as would redound most to the advantage of the latter, and would increase, as far as possible, the chance for the preservation of the Union. It was at this time of Cromwell’s life that, at the parting of the ways, he chose the wrong way. Great man though he was, and far though the good that he did out-balanced the evil, yet he lost the right to stand with men like Washington and Lincoln of modern times, and with the very, very few who, like Timoleon, in some measure approached their standard in ancient times.

As the Parliament continued in session, the attitude of the Protector changed from sullen to fierce hostility. It was entitled to sit five months. By a quibble he construed this to mean five lunar months. On January 22, 1655, he dissolved it, after rating it in a long and angry speech. With its dissolution it became evident to the great mass of true liberty-lovers that all hope of real freedom was at an end, and the forces that told for the restoration of the King were increased tenfold in strength. Nevertheless, some of the purest and most ardent lovers of liberty, like Milton, still clung despairingly to the Protector. They recognized that, with all his faults, and in spite of his determination to rule in arbitrary fashion, he yet intended to secure peace, justice, and good government, and, alike in power and in moral grandeur, towered above his only possible alternative, Charles II., as a giant towers above a pigmy.

VI PERSONAL RULE

When Cromwell, in January, 1655, dismissed the first Protectorate Parliament, he left himself nothing to do but to establish his own personal rule; in other words, he became a tyrant. Of course the word cannot be used in the sense we use it in describing Ivan the Terrible, or Agathokles. As each country must, sooner or later, obtain exactly that measure of political freedom to which it is entitled, so, when it falls under a tyranny, the tyranny must be strictly conditioned by the character of the people. Cromwell ruled over Englishmen, not Russians or Greeks, and no Englishman would have tolerated for twenty-four hours what was groaningly borne by Muscovites, who had lost every vestige of manhood beneath the Tartar yoke, or by Syracusans, in the days of the rapid decadence of the Hellenistic world. Cromwell’s government was a tyranny because it was based on his own personal rule, his personal decision as to what taxes should be levied, what ordinances issued, what police measures decreed and carried out, what foreign policy adopted or rejected. He was influenced very much by public opinion, when public opinion found definite expression in the action of a body of legislators or of an assembly of officers; but even in such cases he was only influenced, not controlled. In other words, he had gone back to the theory of government professed by the man he had executed, and by that man’s predecessors. There was, however, the tremendous and far-reaching difference, that, whereas the Stuart kings clung to absolute power for the sake of rewarding favorites and of carrying out policies that were hostile to the honor and interest of England, Cromwell seized it with the sincere purpose of exalting the moral law at home and increasing the honor of England’s name abroad. Moreover, he was in fact what no Stuart was, in anything but name: a “king among men,” and his mighty strength enabled him, at least partially, to realize his purpose.

Cromwell doubtless persuaded himself that he was endeavoring to secure what would now be called a constitutional government: one which, in his own words, “should avoid alike the extremes of monarchy and democracy.” He was desirous of paying heed to the wishes of those whom he esteemed the wisest and most honest among the people. He had somewhat of that gift for personal popularity which was so marked a feature of Queen Elizabeth—seemingly the only sovereign whom he admired, among all his predecessors. To the last he kept stirring vaguely for a constitutional system; and he sincerely disliked merely arbitrary rule.

But by the time he became Lord Protector he was too impatient of difference of opinion, too doggedly convinced of his own righteousness and wisdom, to be really fit to carry on a free government. He had sought to introduce the reign of the saints; but when, in the Barebones Parliament, he gathered together the very men whom he deemed their arch-representatives, it was only to find, as was of course inevitable, that he and they could not agree as to the method of realizing the reign of the saints in this very material world. Then he sought to secure a government by the representatives of the people: only to find that he got along even less well with them than with the saints. In short, while he had kept his nobility of purpose, his whole character had grown less and less such as to fit him to found a government of the kind toward which his race was dimly striving.

He made varied experiments for the control of England. After the first Protectorate Parliament had been abolished, he established the government of the major-generals, or in other words, purely military rule; dividing England into a dozen districts, with a major-general over each as the ultimate authority. The prime function of the major-generals was to keep order, and they crushed under their iron heels every spark of Royalist insurrection, or of Leveller and Anabaptist uprising. They interfered in civil matters also, and were especially required to see to the rigid observance of the Sabbath, and to suppress all cock-fighting, horse-racing, and kindred sports, as well as to shut up doubtful ale-houses. There certainly never was a more extraordinary despotism than this; the despotism of a man who sought power, not to gratify himself, or those belonging to him, in any of the methods to which all other tyrants have been prone; but to establish the reign of the Lord, as he saw it. Here was a tyrant who used the overwhelming strength of his military force to forbid what he considered profane amusements, and to enforce on one day of the week a system of conduct which was old-Jewish in character. Of course the fact that he meant well, and that his motives were high, did not make it any the easier for the people with whose pleasures and prejudices he thus irritatingly interfered.

The Puritan passion for regulating, not merely the religion, but the morals and manners of their neighbors, especially in the matter of Sunday observance and of pastimes generally, was peculiarly exasperating to men of a more easy-going nature. Even nowadays, the effort for practical reform in American city government is rendered immeasurably more difficult by the fact that a considerable number of the best citizens are prone to devote their utmost energies, not to striving for the fundamentals of social morality, civic honesty, and good government, but, in accordance with their own theory of propriety of conduct, to preventing other men from pursuing what these latter regard as innocent pleasures; while, on the other hand, a large number of good citizens, in their irritation at any interference with what they feel to be legitimate pastimes, welcome the grossest corruption and misrule rather than submit to what they call “Puritanism.” When this happens, before our eyes, we need not wonder that in Cromwell’s day the determination of the Puritans to put down ale-houses and prohibit every type of Sunday pastime, irritated large bodies of the people to the point of longing for the restoration of the Stuarts, no matter what might be the accompanying evils of corruption and tyranny.

The experiment of governing by the major-generals provoked such mutterings of discontent that it had to be abandoned. Another parliament was summoned, and out of this Oliver arbitrarily kept any man whom he did not think ought to come in. It was anything but a radical body, and after declaring against the rule of the major-generals, it offered Oliver the kingship, an offer to which the army objected, and which Oliver, therefore, refused; but even with this subservient assembly Oliver could not get along, and it finally shared the fate of its predecessor. The objection of the army to the kingship, was partly due to the presence of so many Republican zealots in its ranks; but probably the main reason for the objection was that the army, more or less consciously, realized that its own overmastering importance in the commonwealth would vanish as soon as the man it had made supreme by the sword was changed into a constitutional king.

One by one almost all of Oliver’s old comrades and adherents left him, and he was driven to put his own kinsfolk into as many of the higher places, both in the State and the army, as possible; less from nepotism than from the need of having in important positions men who would do his will, without question. Eventually he had to abandon most of the ideas of political liberty which he had originally championed, and, following the path which the Long Parliament had already trod, he finally established a rigid censorship of the press.

Yet, though it must be freely admitted that in its later years the government of Cromwell was in form and substance a tyranny, it must be no less freely acknowledged that he used with wisdom and grandeur the power he had usurped. The faults he committed were the faults of the age, rather than special to himself, while his sincerity and honesty were peculiarly his own.

He fairly carried out his pledge of healing and settling, and he put through a long series of administrative reforms. In England and Wales his internal administration undoubtedly told for what was of moral and material advantage to the country; and if there was heavy taxation, at least it produced visible and tangible results, which was never the case under the Stuarts, before or after him. Yet his rule could not but produce discontent. In the first place, the Royalists were not well treated. In that age the beaten party was expected to pay heavily for its lack of success, both in purse and in body; and it was not to be expected that the victorious Puritans should show toward their defeated foes the generosity displayed by Grant and his fellow-victors in the American Civil War. In the American Revolution, the Tories were at first followed with much the same vindictiveness that the Royalists were followed after King Charles had been brought to the block. But Washington and all the leading American statesmen disapproved of this, and after the first heat of passion was over the American Royalists were allowed precisely the same civil and political rights as their neighbors. On the contrary, in England, under the Commonwealth, the Royalists were kept disfranchised, and taxation was arranged so as always to fall with crushing weight upon them, thus insuring their permanent alienation. As regards the rest of the people, while there was considerable interference with political and religious liberty, it was probably only what the times demanded, and was certainly much less than occurred in almost any other country. Episcopalians were denied the use of the Prayer-Book, and, like the Catholics, were given liberty of conscience only on condition that they should not practise their faith in public. Irritating though this was, and wrong though it was, it fell infinitely short of what had been done to Protestants, under Queen Mary, by the temporarily victorious Catholics, or to Puritans and Catholics under Queen Elizabeth, or of what was to be done to the Covenanters of Scotland, under the victorious Episcopalians; but such considerations would not have altered the discontent, even had the discontented kept them in mind. When provocation is sufficient to drive a man into revolution, it matters little in practical politics how much beyond this point it is carried. The breaking-point is reached sooner in some nations than in others; but in all strong nations persecution will cause revolt long before it takes the terrible form given it by Spaniards and Turks; and, once the war is on, the men who revolt hate any persecutor so much that there is scant room for intensification of the feeling. Moreover, instead of the Cromwellian government growing more, it grew less tolerant of Catholicism and Episcopacy as time went on.

The people at large were peculiarly irritated by what were merely the defects inevitably incident to the good features of Puritanism in that age. When faith is very strong and belief very sincere, men must possess great wisdom, broad charity, and the ability to learn by experience, or else they will certainly try to make others live up to their own standards. This would be bad enough, even were the standards absolutely right; and it is necessarily worse in practice than in theory, inasmuch as mixed with the right there is invariably an element of what is wrong or foolish. The extreme exponents and apologists of any fervent creed can always justify themselves, in the realm of pure logic, for insisting that all the world shall be made to accept and act up to their standards, and that they must necessarily strive to bring this about, if they really believe what they profess to believe. Of course, in practice, the answer is that there are hundreds of different creeds, or shades of creeds, all of which are believed in with equal devoutness by their followers, and therefore in a workaday government it is necessary to insist that none shall interfere with any other. Where people are as far advanced in practical good sense and in true religious toleration as in the United States to-day, the great majority of each creed gradually grows to accept this position as axiomatic, and the smaller minority is kept in check without effort, both by law and by public opinion.

In Cromwell’s time, such law did not obtain in any land, and public opinion was not ripe for it. He was far in advance of his fellow-Englishmen. He described their attitude perfectly, and indeed the attitude of all Europe, when he remarked: “Every sect saith, Oh, give me liberty! but, given it and to spare, he will not yield it to anyone else. Liberty of conscience is a natural right, and he that would have it ought to give it.... I desire it from my heart; I have prayed for it; I have watched for the day to see union and right understanding between the Godly people—Scots, English, Jews, Gentiles, Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, and all.”

The whole principle of religious toleration is summed up in these brief sentences. In his higher and better moments, and far more than most men of his generation, Cromwell tried to live up to them. When Mazarin, the great French cardinal, in responding to Cromwell’s call for toleration of the Vaudois, asked toleration for English Catholics, Cromwell answered, truly, that he had done all he could in face of the hostile spirit of the people, and more than had before been done in England. Of course the position of the English Catholics was beyond all comparison better than that of the Vaudois; but in such a controversy the ugly fact was that neither side would grant to others what it demanded for itself. To the most persecuted of all peoples Cromwell did render a signal service. He connived at the settlement of Jews in London, after having in vain sought to bring about their open toleration.

In Scotland, the rule of the Protector wrought unmixed good. There was no persecution and no interference with religious liberty, save in so far as the restraint of persecution and intolerance could itself be called such. Monk, and Dean, after him, as Cromwell’s lieutenants, did excellent work, and even cautiously endeavored to mitigate the horrors of the persecutions for witchcraft—for these horrible manifestations of superstition were then in full force in Scotland, even more than in either old or New England.

On the whole, then, England and Scotland fared well under Oliver Cromwell—“Old Noll,” as he was affectionately called by his mainstay, the army. In Ireland, the case was different. Materially, even in Ireland, the conditions greatly improved during the Protectorate, because order was rigidly preserved and law enforced; and any system which secured order and law was bound to bring about a temporary bettering of conditions when contrasted with the frightful anarchy which had preceded it. Anarchy always serves simply as the handmaiden of despotism, as those who bring it about should know. But the religious element in the Irish problem rendered it insoluble by the means then adopted for its solution. Cromwell was not responsible for introducing the methods known by his name. They were the methods then universally in use by the representatives of every victorious nationality or religion, in dealing with a beaten foe. The only difference was that Cromwell’s immense energy and power enabled him to apply them with dreadful effectiveness.

In England, Cromwell stood for religious toleration, so far as he was able. Fanatics who thought themselves incarnations of the Saviour, or prophets of a new dispensation, or who indulged in indecent or seditious conduct, or who disturbed the public peace by breaking into regular churches, of course had to be suppressed. Nowadays, most offenders of this type would be ignored, and, if not, they would simply be arrested by the police, in the course of the ordinary exercise of the police power, just as any other disturbers of the peace are arrested. In those days, however, such offenders would have been punished with death in Spain, Italy, or Austria; and, indeed, in most continental countries. In the England of Cromwell, they were merely temporarily imprisoned. The attitude of mind, both of the public generally and of the best and most religious people, toward Unitarians, Socinians, and those who would nowadays be called Free-Thinkers, was purely mediæval; and even Cromwell could only moderate the persecution to which they were subjected. But these were minor exceptions. For the majority of the people in England, there was religious liberty; and for the bulk of the minority, though there was not complete religious liberty, there was a nearer approach to it than obtained in Continental Europe.

In Ireland, on the other hand, the public exercise of the faith of the enormous majority was prohibited, and their religious teachers expelled. There is a popular belief that under Cromwell all Irishmen were expelled from three-fourths of the island, and driven into Connaught, their places being taken by English and Scotch immigrants. While exceedingly cruel, this would have been an understandable policy, and would have resulted in the substitution of one race and one creed for another race and another creed throughout the major part of the island. What was actually done, however, combined cruelty with ultimate inefficiency; it caused great immediate suffering, while perpetuating exactly the conditions against which it was supposed to provide. The Catholic landholders were, speaking generally, driven into Connaught, and the priests expelled, while the peasants, laborers, and artisans were left as they were, but of course deprived of all the leadership which could give them a lift upward. In Ulster there had been a considerable substitution of one race for the other, among the actual tillers and occupiers of the soil. Under Cromwell, the change elsewhere consisted in the bringing in of alien landlords. In other words, to the already existing antagonism of race, creed, and speech, was added the antagonism of caste. The property-holder, the landlord, the man of means, was an Englishman by race and speech, and a Protestant by faith; while the mass of the laborers roundabout him were Catholic Celts who spoke Erse. Ultra admirers of Cromwell and the Puritans have actually spoken as if this plan, provided only that it had been allowed to work long enough, would have produced a Puritan Ireland. There was never the remotest chance of its producing such an effect. The mass of the Irish, when all their native teachers were removed, did gradually tend to adopt English as their tongue, but their devotion to their own faith, and their hatred of English rule, were merely intensified; while the course of the governing race was such as absolutely to insure the land troubles which have riven Ireland up to the present day. The very unedifying intolerance of the Protestant sects toward one another was manifested as strongly in Cromwell’s time as later. It must be said for him that he did not, like his successors for generations, shape English policy toward Ireland on the lines of Spain’s policy toward her own colonies, and oppress the Protestant descendants of the English in Ireland only less than the native Irish themselves; but the great central fact remains that his Irish policy was one of bitter oppression, and that the abhorrence with which the Irish, to this day, speak of “the curse o’ Crummle,” is historically justifiable.