Part 14

It is a relief to turn from the Cromwellian policy in Ireland to the Cromwellian policy in foreign affairs. England never stood higher in her relations with the outside world than she stood under Cromwell; a height all the more noteworthy because it lay between the two abysses marked by the policy of the earlier and the later Stuart kings. The French biographer of the great Turenne, du Buisson, Major of the Regiment de Verdelin, writing in the days of Charles II., when England was despised rather than hated on the Continent, spoke with a mixture of horror and fear of Cromwell, as the man who “_après l’attentat le plus énorme dont on a jamais ouï parler, avoit trouvé le secret de se faire craindre, non seulement des Anglois, mais encore des Princes voisins_.” This was written as expressing the attitude of the power with which he was in alliance, and from it may be gathered how those felt who were opposed to him.

Cromwell’s strong religious feelings and military instincts, alike bade him meddle in the policy of the Continent. The era of the great religious wars was closed. More than a century was to pass before the era of religious persecution was to cease, but the time had gone by when one Christian country would try, by force of arms, to conquer another for the purpose of stamping out its religious belief. Cromwell, however, did not see this, and he naturally chose as his special opponent the power which itself was equally blind to the fact—that is, Spain. Beyond a question, he was influenced partly by the commercial and material interests of England in the policy he pursued, but the religious motive was uppermost in his own mind, and he never could get over the feeling that it ought to be uppermost in the minds of everyone else. The very able Swedish King, Charles X., was then pursuing the fatal policy of the Swedish kings of that century, and was endeavoring to conquer territory at the expense of the Danes and North Germans, instead of establishing, to the east and southeast of the Baltic, a dominion which could hold its own against Russia. Cromwell selected the Swede as the natural enemy of Antichrist, and wished to back him in a general religious war. He was amusingly irritated with the English, because they would not feel as he did, and even more with the Dutch, Danes, and Brandenburgers for declining to let themselves be made the tools of the northern king’s ambition.

The great European struggle of the day, however, was that between Spain and France, and for some time Cromwell hesitated which side to take. He has often been blamed for not striking against France, the rising power, whose then youthful king was at a later day to threaten all Europe, and only to be held in check by coalitions in which England was the chief figure. But, though France persecuted the Huguenots more or less, just as England did the Irish Catholics, she was far more advanced than Spain, which was the most bigoted and reactionary power of Europe, both in religion and in politics. The Spanish empire was still very great. Though her power on sea had gone, on land she had on the whole held her own against the French armies, and, with England as her ally, she might for the time being have remained the leading power of the Continent. This would have been a frightful calamity, and Cromwell was right in throwing the weight of his sword on the other side of the scale.

His decision enabled him to do one of the most righteous of his many righteous deeds. It was at this time that the Duke of Savoy, under ecclesiastical pressure, indulged in dreadful persecutions of the humble Protestants of the Vaudois valleys; persecutions which called forth the noblest of Milton’s sonnets. Oliver interfered, with fiery indignation, on behalf of the Vaudois, threatening that if the persecutions continued he would not only bring the pressure of the English arms to bear, but would hire a great force of mercenaries among the Protestant Swiss to invade the territory of the Duke of Savoy. Largely through the influence of Mazarin he succeeded in having the wrong partially undone; and later, in the middle of the operations against the Spanish armies, he again interfered, effectively, with the Cardinal-Statesman on behalf of his obscure and helpless co-religionists in the remote mountain valleys. This action was purely disinterested; and those who are loudest in their denunciation of Cromwell would do well to remember that, if the European rulers at the end of the nineteenth century had possessed his capacity for generous indignation on behalf of the oppressed, the Armenian massacres either would never have taken place, or would have been followed by the immediate expulsion of the Turk from Europe.

Oliver’s first contest with the Spaniards was carried on by sea, the great Puritan Admiral, Blake, winning renown by his victory over the forts at Santa Cruz, as he had already won renown by the way in which he crushed the forces of Tunis, and for the first time taught the Moors to respect English arms. An expedition against San Domingo by Penn and Venables failed, the English leaders being treacherous and inefficient, but it resulted in the capture of Jamaica and the founding of English power in the West Indies. On land, as the result of the convention with France, the English fleet deprived the Spaniards in the Netherlands of assistance from the sea, while an English force of 6,000 troops, clad in the red uniform which has since become distinctive of the British army, was sent to serve under Turenne. They overthrew the flower of the Spanish infantry, and won the heartiest praise from the great French leader. The help given by Cromwell was decisive; the Spaniards were beaten and forced to make peace. By this peace France became the first power on the Continent, but a power heartily afraid of England while Cromwell lived, and obliged to yield him Dunkirk as the price of his services. The possession of Dunkirk put a complete stop to the piracy which had ravaged British commerce, and gave to Cromwell a foothold on the Continent which rendered him able to enforce from his neighbors whatever consideration the honor and interest of England demanded.

Meanwhile, the tone of his Court was a model of purity and honesty. Alone among the Courts of Europe in that age, under Cromwell no man could rise who was profligate in private life, or corrupt in public life. How he had risen socially is shown by the fact that his remaining daughters now married into the nobility. His domestic relations were exceptionally tender and beautiful, and his grief at the loss of his mother and his favorite daughter—his favorite son was already dead—was very great. His letters to and about his sons are just what such letters should be. He explains that he does not grudge them “laudable recreations nor honorable carriage in them,” nor any legitimate expense, but that he does emphatically protest against “pleasure and self-satisfaction being made the business of a man’s life.”

The time had now come, however, when Oliver was to leave alike the family for whom he had so affectionately cared, and the nation he had loved and ruled, and go before the God to whom he ever felt himself accountable. When 1658 opened, peace and order obtained at home, and the crown had been put to England’s glory abroad by the victories in Flanders and the cession of Dunkirk. There was not the slightest chance of Cromwell’s hold on the nation being shaken. So far as human eye could see, his policy was sure to triumph, as long as he lived; but he was weakened by his hard and strenuous life, and the fever, by which he had been harassed during his later campaigns, came on him with renewed force. Even his giant strength had been overtaxed by the task of ruling England alone, and, as he conscientiously believed, for her highest interest. Supreme though his triumph seemed to outsiders, he himself knew that he had failed to make the effects of this triumph lasting, though he never seems to have suspected that his failure was due to his incapacity to subordinate his own imperious will so that he might work with others. He saw clearly the chaos into which his death would plunge England, and he did not wish to die; but as he grew weaker he felt that his hour was come, and surrendered himself to the inevitable.

“I would be willing to live to be further serviceable to God and His people,” muttered the dying ruler, showing, as ever, his strange mixture of belief in himself and trust in the Most High; “but my work is done! Yet God will be with His people!”

September came in with a terrible storm, the like of which had rarely been known in England, and as it subsided, on September 3d, the day which had witnessed the victories of Dunbar and Worcester, the soul of the greatest man who has ruled England, since the days of the Conquest, passed quietly away.[2]

Footnote 2:

In the queer little weekly paper “The Commonwealth Mercury,” of the issue “From Thursday September 2d to Thursday September 9th, 1658,” which contains an account of Cromwell’s death and of his son’s installation, it happens that there is also an advertisement of a pamphlet: “A few sighs from Hell, or the Groans of a damned Soul: By that poor servant of Jesus Christ, John Bunyan.” Cromwell, Milton, Bunyan—what can non-Puritan England, of their day, show to match these three names?

With his death came the chaos he had foreseen, though he had not foreseen that it could be averted only by the substitution of some form of self-government by the people, for the arbitrary rule of one man—however great and good that man might be. For a few months his son, Richard, ruled as Protector in his stead, but, the Protectorate having become in effect a despotism, it was sure to slip from any but Oliver’s iron grasp. Richard called a Parliament, but Parliaments had been hopelessly discredited by Oliver’s method of dealing with them. The army revolted, forced the dismissal of the Parliament, and then the abdication of Richard. Richard’s abler brother, Henry, who was governing Ireland as deputy, resigned also, and the Cromwells passed out of history.

For some months there was confusion worse confounded, and the whole nation turned toward Charles II., and the re-establishment of the Stuart kingship. Monk, the ablest of Cromwell’s generals, a soldier who cared little for forms of civil government, who had already fought for the Stuarts against the Parliament, and who would have stood by Richard had Richard possessed the strength to stand by himself, threw his weight in favor of the exiled king, and thereby prevented the slightest chance of opposition. Charles II. returned, greeted with transports of frantic delight by seemingly almost the whole people.

The King and his followers then took revenge on the dead body of the man whose living eyes they had never dared to face. The bones of Cromwell, of his mother, and of Ireton, were disinterred and thrown into a lime-pit; and the head of the great Protector was placed on a pole over Westminster Hall, there to stand for twenty years.

The skull of the mighty crown-grasper, before whose untamable soul they had shuddered in terror, was now set on high as a target for the jeering mockery of all who sang the praises of the line of libertines and bigots to whom the English throne had been restored. For twenty-eight shameful years the Restoration lasted; years of misgovernment and persecution at home, of weakness abroad, of oppression of the weak, and obsequious servility to the strong; years when the Court of England—devoid of one spark of true greatness of any kind—was a scene of tawdry and obscene frivolity. Then, once again, the principles for which, in the last analysis, Cromwell and the Puritans stood, triumphed; the Dutch stadtholder came over the narrow seas to ascend the throne of England; and once more the current of her national life set toward political, intellectual, and religious liberty.

Cromwell and the Puritans had gone too far, and the reaction against them had been so violent that those who called William of Orange into England dared not invoke the memory of the mighty dead lest they should hurt the cause of the living. Nevertheless, the Revolution of 1688 was in reality but the carrying on of the work which had been done in the middle of the century. James II. could never have been deposed had not Charles I. been executed. The men of the second Revolution had learned the moderation which the men of the first had lacked. They were careful not to kill the king of whom they wished to rid themselves; for though, by every principle of equity, a tyrant who has goaded his people into Revolution—like the leader of an unjustifiable rebellion—should suffer the fate which he has brought on so many others, yet, as a matter of fact, it is often unwise to treat him as he deserves, because he has become a symbol to his followers, each of whom identifies himself with the man whose cause he has been supporting, and in whose name he has been fighting, and resents, with passionate indignation, any punishment visited upon his chief as a wrong in which he personally shares. The men of 1688 were, as a whole, actuated by far less lofty motives than the men of 1648; but they possessed the inestimable advantages of common-sense, of moderation, of readiness to accept compromises. They made no attempt to realize the reign of the saints upon earth; and therefore they were able to work a permanent betterment in mundane affairs, and to avoid provoking a violent reaction. William, both by position and by temper, was far better fitted than great Oliver to submit to interference with his plans, to get on with representative bodies of freemen, and to make the best he could out of each situation as it arose, instead of indignantly setting his own will above law and above the will of the majority, because for the moment the result might be better for himself and the nation. Speaker Reed once said, that “in the long run, the average sense of the many is better for the many than the best sense of any one man;” and this is undoubtedly true of all people sufficiently high in the scale to be fit for self-government.

Oliver surely strove to live up to his lights as he saw them. He never acted in levity, or from mere motives of personal aggrandizement, and he saw, with sad, piercing eyes, the dangers that rolled around the path he had chosen. He acted as he did because he conscientiously felt that only thus could he meet the needs of the nation. He said to the second Protectorate Parliament: “I am a man standing in the place I am in; which place I undertook, not so much out of hope of doing any good, as out of a desire to prevent mischief and evil—which I did see was imminent on the nation (for we were running along into confusion and disorder, and would have necessarily run into blood).”

We are often told that the best of all possible governments would be a benevolent despotism. Oliver’s failure is a sufficient commentary upon this dictum of the parlor doctrinaires. There never has been, and probably never will be, another despotism where the despot so sincerely strove to do, for a people capable of some measure of freedom, better than they themselves would have done with that freedom. The truth is, that a strong nation can only be saved by itself, and not by a strong man, though it can be greatly aided and guided by a strong man. A weak nation may be doomed anyhow, or it may find its sole refuge in a despot; a nation struggling out of darkness may be able to take its first steps only by the help of a master hand, as was true of Russia, under Peter the Great; and if a nation, whether free or unfree, loses the capacity for self-government, loses the spirit of sobriety and of orderly liberty, then it has no cause to complain of tyranny; but a really great people, a people really capable of freedom and of doing mighty deeds in the world, must work out its own destiny, and must find men who will be its leaders—not its masters. Cromwell could, in all probability, have been such a leader at the end as he was during his early years of public life; and when he permitted himself to fall from the position of a leader among free men, to that of a master over men for whose welfare he sincerely strove, but in whose freedom he did not believe, he marred the great work he had done. Nevertheless, it was a very great work. There are dark blots on his career—especially his Irish policy—but on the whole he was a mighty force for good and against evil, and the good that he did, though buried for the moment with his bones, rose again and has lived for ever since, while the evil has long withered, or is now withering. The English-speaking peoples are free, and for good or for ill hold their destinies in their own hands.

The effect of the attitude which not only the Puritans, but all other Englishmen of every creed, assumed toward Ireland from the days of Queen Mary to the days of King George the Fourth, was such as to steep the island in centuries of misery, and to leave in her people a bitter and enduring hatred against England. Yet this attitude has produced one result of the most unforeseen kind. Had the Irish remained a Celtic nation, separate in speech and government from Great Britain, they could have had no share in the expansion of the English race, or at least could have played only a very subordinate part. As it is, in the great English-speaking commonwealths that have grown up in North America and Australasia, the descendants of the Irish now stand on an exact equality with those of the Scotch and English, and furnish their full proportion of leadership in the government of the communities; while in all these English-speaking countries the Catholic Church has become one of the leading churches and has had its course of development determined by the fact that the controlling force within it has been Irish. The English Protestants failed to impress their creed upon Ireland, but they did impress their language, and did bring Ireland under their own government The strange outcome has been that the creed they hated now flourishes side by side, on equal terms, with the creeds they professed, in the distant continents held in common by their children and by the children of those against whom they warred. In these new continents all, Catholics and Protestants alike, are wedded to the principles of political liberty for which the Puritans fought, and have grown to extend to all creeds the principles of religious liberty in which only the best and most advanced Puritans believed. Let us most earnestly hope that, while avoiding the Puritan fanaticism and intolerance, the Puritan lack of charity and narrowness, we may not lose the Puritan loftiness of soul and stern energy in striving for the right, than which no nation could ever have more precious heritages.

With Oliver’s death his memory passed under a cloud, through which his greatness was to be but dimly seen until generations of men had lived and died. He left many descendants, and there are now in England, and also in America, and possibly Australia, very many men and women, in all ranks of life, who have his blood in their veins—though in the direct line his name has died out. Even during the present century, when among the English upper classes it was still customary to speak of him with horror, his very descendants in certain families felt keen shame for the deeds of their great forefather. With a childishness in no way above that of a Congo savage, it was actually the fashion in some of these families to make the children do penance on the anniversary of the death of Charles II., as a kind of atonement for the deeds of Cromwell. The grotesque nature of this performance is added to by the fact that in that very society a peculiarly high place of honor was accorded to the titled descendants of Charles II. and his mistresses. One hardly knows whether to be most amused or indignant at such fantastic incapacity to appreciate what was really noble and what really ignoble. The men among whom such false conventions obtained could not be expected to see in its true proportions the form of mighty Oliver, looming ever larger across the intervening centuries. Sooner or later, justice will be done him; sooner or later, he will be recognized, not only as one of the greatest of all Englishmen, and by far the greatest ruler of England itself, but as a man who, in times that tried men’s souls, dealt with vast questions and solved tremendous problems; a man who erred, who was guilty of many shortcomings, but who strove mightily toward the light as it was given him to see the light; a man who had the welfare of his countrymen and the greatness of his country very close to his heart, and who sought to make the great laws of righteousness living forces in the government of the world.

THE END.

INDEX

Abolition, in United States, 193

Abolitionists, 103, 192

Adamses, the, 36

Agathokles, 210

Ale-houses, suppressed under Protectorate, 213, 214

Alva, 156

America, Protestants and Catholics in, 12; freedom from militarism in eighteenth century, 19; power of compromise after Revolution, 100; true greatness of, 179; city government in, 214; Cromwell’s descendants in, 239

American Civil War, compared with English Civil Wars, 5, 6, 61, 62; citizen soldiers in, 64; West Point in, 67; cavalry in, 70; compromises after, 102; generosity of victors, 216

American Revolution, War of the, comparisons with English Revolution of 1688, 6; with English Civil Wars, 61; its citizen soldiers, 64; regular soldiery, 91; compromises after, 100; Washington, 101; events preceding, 114; Continental Congress in, 177; clemency following, 217

Americans, majority rule natural to, 25; regicide sentimentalists among, 138; religious toleration, 161; character of, in eighteenth century, 190

Anabaptists, 77, 103, 143, 213, 220

Anglican Church, its Presbyterian trend under Elizabeth, 23; its influence on Charles I.’s Third Parliament, 29

Antichrist, 226

Appomattox, Sheridan at, 171

Argyle, joins Whigamore raid, 130; ally of Cromwell, 131

Armenian massacres, 228

Arminianism, in Holland, 12

Arminius, 12

Army, the Cavalier, 64

Army, American Continental, 102