Part 4

It is difficult for us nowadays to realize how natural it seemed at that time for the Word of the Lord to be quoted and appealed to on every occasion, no matter how trivial, in the lives of sincerely religious men. It is very possible that quite as large a proportion of people nowadays strive to shape their internal lives in accordance with the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule; indeed, it is probable that the proportion is far greater; but professors of religion then carried their religion into all the externals of their lives. Cromwell belonged among those earnest souls who indulged in the very honorable dream of a world where civil government and social life alike should be based upon the Commandments set forth in the Bible. To endeavor to shape the whole course of individual existence in accordance with the hidden or half-indulged law of perfect righteousness, has to it a very lofty side; but if the endeavor is extended to include mankind at large, it has also a very dangerous side: so dangerous indeed that in practice the effort is apt to result in harm, unless it is undertaken in a spirit of the broadest charity and toleration; for the more sincere the men who make it, the more certain they are to treat, not only their own principles, but their own passions, prejudices, vanities, and jealousies, as representing the will, not of themselves, but of Heaven. The constant appeal to the Word of God in all trivial matters is, moreover, apt to breed hypocrisy of that sanctimonious kind which is peculiarly repellent, and which invariably invites reaction against all religious feeling and expression.

At that day Cromwell’s position in this matter was, at its worst, merely that of the enormous majority of earnest men of all sects. Each sect believed that it was the special repository of the wisdom and virtue of the Most High: and the most zealous of its members believed it to be their duty to the Most High to make all other men worship Him according to what they conceived to be His wishes. This was the mediæval attitude, and represented the mediæval side in Puritanism; a side which was particularly prominent at the time, and which, so far as it existed, marred the splendor of Puritan achievement. The nobleness of the effort to bring about the reign of God on earth, the inspiration that such an effort was to those engaged in it, must be acknowledged by all; but, in practice, we must remember that, as religious obligation was then commonly construed, it inevitably led to the Inquisition in Spain; to the sack of Drogheda in Ireland; to the merciless persecution of heretics by each sect, according to its power, and the effort to stifle freedom of thought and stamp out freedom of action. It is right, and greatly to be desired, that men should come together to search after the truth: to try to find out the true will of God; but in Cromwell’s time they were only beginning to see that each body of seekers must be left to work out its own beliefs without molestation, so long as it does not strive to interfere with the beliefs of others.

The great merit of Cromwell, and of the party of the Independents which he headed, and which represented what was best in Puritanism, consists in the fact that he and they did, dimly, but with ever-growing clearness, perceive this principle, and, with many haltings, strove to act up to it. The Independent or Congregational churches, which worked for political freedom, and held that each congregation of Protestants should decide for itself as to its religious doctrines, stood as the forerunners in the movement that has culminated in our modern political and religious liberty. How slow the acceptance of their ideas was, how the opposition to them battled on to the present century, will be appreciated by anyone who turns to the early writings of Gladstone when he was the “rising hope of those stern Tories,” whose special antipathy he afterward became. Even yet there are advocates of religious intolerance, but they are mostly of the academic kind, and there is no chance for any political party of the least importance to try to put their doctrines into effect. More and more, at least here in the United States, Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Gentiles, are learning the grandest of all lessons—that they can best serve their God by serving their fellow-men, and best serve their fellow-men, not by wrangling among themselves, but by a generous rivalry in working for righteousness and against evil.

This knowledge then lay in the future. When Cromwell grew to manhood he was a Puritan of the best type, of the type of Hampden and Milton; sincere, earnest, resolute to do good as he saw it, more liberal than most of his fellow-religionists, and saved from their worst eccentricities by his hard common-sense, but not untouched by their gloom, and sharing something of their narrowness. Entering Parliament thus equipped, he could not fail to be most drawn to the religious side of the struggle. He soon made himself prominent; a harsh-featured, red-faced, powerfully-built man, whose dress appeared slovenly in the eyes of the courtiers—who was no orator, but whose great power soon began to impress friends and enemies alike.

II THE LONG PARLIAMENT AND THE CIVIL WAR

King Charles’s theory was that Parliament had met to grant him the money he needed. The Parliament’s conviction was that it had come together to hold the King and his servants to accountability for what they had done, and to provide safeguards against a repetition of the tyranny of the last eleven years. Parliament held the whip hand, for the King dared not dissolve it until the Scots were paid, lest their army should march at once upon London.

The King had many courtiers who hated popular government, but he had only one great and terrible man of the type that can upbuild tyrannies; and, with the sure instinct of mortal fear and mortal hate, the Commons struck at the minister whose towering genius and unscrupulous fearlessness might have made his master absolute on the throne. A week after the Long Parliament met, in November, 1640, Pym, who at once took the lead in the House, moved the impeachment of Strafford, in a splendid speech which set forth the principles for which the popular party was contending. It was an appeal from the rule of irresponsible will to the rule of law, for the violation of which every man could be held accountable before some tribunal. About the same time Laud was thrown into the Tower; but at the moment there was no thought of taking his life, for the ecclesiastic was not—like the statesman—a mighty and fearsome figure, and though he had done as much evil as his feeble nature permitted, he had unquestionably been far more conscientious than the great Earl. Strafford had sinned against the light, for he had championed liberty until the King paid him his price and made him the most dangerous foe of his former friends. He now defended himself with haughty firmness, and the King strove in every way to help him. But the Commons passed a Bill of Attainder against him: and then Charles committed an act of fatal meanness and treachery. There was not one thing that Strafford had done, save by his sovereign’s wish and in his sovereign’s interest. By every consideration of honor and expediency Charles was bound to stand by him. But the Stuart King flinched. Deeming it for his own interest to let Strafford be sacrificed, he signed the death-warrant. “Put not your trust in Princes,” said the fallen Earl when the news was brought to him, and he went to the scaffold undaunted.

Cromwell showed himself to be a man of mark in this Parliament; but he was not among the very foremost leaders. He had no great understanding of constitutional government, no full appreciation of the vital importance of the reign of law to the proper development of orderly liberty. His fervent religious ardor made all questions affecting faith and doctrine close to him; and his hatred of corruption and oppression inclined him to take the lead whenever any question arose of dealing, either with the wrongs done by Laud in the course of his religious persecutions, or with the irresponsible tyranny of the Star Chamber, and the sufferings of its victims. The bent of Cromwell’s mind was thus shown right in the beginning of his parliamentary career. His desire was to remedy specific evils. He was too impatient to found the kind of legal and constitutional system which could alone prevent the recurrence of such evils. This tendency, thus early shown, explains, at least in part, why it was that later he deviated from the path trod by Hampden, and afterward by Washington and Washington’s colleagues: showing himself unable to build up free government or to establish the reign of law, until he was finally driven to substitute his own personal government for the personal government of the King whom he had helped to dethrone, and put to death. Cromwell’s extreme admirers treat his impatience of the delays and shortcomings of ordinary constitutional and legal proceedings as a sign of his greatness. It was just the reverse. In great crises it may be necessary to overturn constitutions and disregard statutes, just as it may be necessary to establish a vigilance committee, or take refuge in lynch law; but such a remedy is always dangerous, even when absolutely necessary; and the moment it becomes the habitual remedy, it is a proof that society is going backward. Of this retrogression the deeds of the strong man who sets himself above the law may be partly the cause and partly the consequence; but they are always the signs of decay.

The Commons had passed a law authorizing the election of a Parliament at least once in three years: which at once took away the King’s power to attempt to rule without a Parliament; and in May they extorted from the King an act that they should not be dissolved without their own consent. Ship Money was declared to be illegal; the Star Chamber was abolished; and Tonnage and Poundage were declared illegal, unless levied by Act of Parliament. Then the Scotch army was paid off and returned across the Border. The best work of the Commons had now been done, and if they could have trusted the King it would have been well for them to dissolve; but the King could not be trusted, and, moreover, the religious question was pushed to the front. Laud’s actions—actions taken with the full consent and by the advice of the King—had rendered the Episcopal form of Church government obnoxious. The House of Commons was Presbyterian, and it speedily became evident that it wished to establish the Presbyterian system of Church government in the place of Episcopacy; and, moreover, that it intended to be just as intolerant on behalf of Presbyterianism as the King and Laud had been on behalf of Episcopacy. There was a strong moderate party which the King might have rallied about him, but his incurable bad faith made it impossible to trust his protestations. He now made terms with the Scotch, in accordance with which they agreed not to interfere between himself and his English subjects in religious matters. He hoped thereby to deprive the Presbyterian English of their natural allies across the Border. This conduct, of itself, would have inflamed the increasing religious bitterness; but it was raised to madness by the news that came from Ireland at this time.

Inspired by the news of the revolt in Scotland and the troubles in England, the Irish had risen against their hereditary oppressors. It was the revolt of a race which rose to avenge wrongs as bitter as ever one people inflicted upon another; and it was inevitable that it should be accompanied by appalling outrages in certain places. It was on these outrages that the English fixed their eyes, naturally ignoring the generations of English evil-doing which had brought them about. A furious cry for revenge arose. Every Puritan, from Oliver Cromwell down, regarded the massacres as a fresh proof that Roman Catholics ought to be treated, not as professors of another Christian creed, but as cruel public enemies; and their burning desire for vengeance took the form, not merely of hostility to Roman Catholicism, but to the Episcopacy, which they regarded as in the last resort an ally of Catholicism.

In November, 1641, the Puritan majority in Parliament passed the Grand Remonstrance—which was a long indictment of Charles’s conduct. Cromwell had now taken his place as among the foremost of the Root and Branch Party, who demanded the abolition of Episcopacy, and whose action drove all those who believed in the Episcopal form of Church government into the party of the King. He threw himself with eager vehemence into the Party of the Remonstrance, and after its bill was passed told Falkland that if it had been rejected by Parliament he would have sold all he had, and never again seen England.

For a moment the Puritan violence, which culminated in the Grand Remonstrance, provoked a reaction in favor of the King; but the King, by another act of violence, brought about a counter-reaction. In January, 1642, he entered the House of Commons, and in person ordered the seizure and imprisonment in the Tower of the five foremost leaders of the Puritan party, including Pym and Hampden. Such a course on his part could be treated only as an invitation to civil war. London, which before had been wavering, now rallied to the side of the Commons; the King left Whitehall; and it was evident to all men that the struggle between him and the Parliament had reached a point where it would have to be settled by the appeal to arms.

In August, 1642, King Charles planted the royal standard on the Castle of Nottingham, and the Civil War began. The Parliamentary forces were led by the Earl of Essex. They included some 20 regiments of infantry and 75 troops of horse, each 60 strong, raised and equipped by its own captain. Oliver Cromwell was captain of the Sixty-seventh Troop, and his kinsfolk and close friends were scattered through the cavalry and infantry. His sons served with or under him. One brother-in-law was quartermaster of his own troop; a second was captain of another troop. His future son-in-law, Henry Ireton, was captain of yet another; a cousin and a nephew were cornets. Another cousin, John Hampden, was colonel of a regiment of foot; so was Cromwell’s close friend and neighbor, the after-time Earl of Manchester, who was much under his influence.

It was nearly a hundred years since England had been the scene of serious fighting, and Scotland had witnessed nothing more than brawls during that time. Elizabeth’s war with Spain had been waged upon the ocean. However, thousands of English and Scotch adventurers had served in the Netherlands and in High Germany under the Dutch and Swedish generals. In both the Royal and Parliamentary armies there was a sprinkling of men—especially in the upper ranks of the officers—who had had practical experience of war on a large scale. The English people offered exceptionally fine material for soldiers; the population was still overwhelmingly rural and agricultural. In the cities the hardy mechanics and craftsmen were accustomed to sports in which physical prowess played a great part. The agricultural classes were far above the peasant serfs of Germany and France; and the gentry and yeomanry were accustomed to the use of the horse and the fowling-piece, and were devoted to field-sports. In courage, in hardihood, in intelligence, the level was high.

Although gunpowder had been in use for a couple of centuries, progress toward the modern arms of precision had been so slow that close-quarter weapons were still, on the whole, superior; and shock tactics rather than fire tactics were decisive. Artillery, though used on the field of battle, was never there a controlling factor, being of chief use in the assault of fortified places. The musketeers took so long to load their clumsy weapons that they could be used to best advantage only when protected, and they played a less important part on a pitched field than the great bodies of pikemen with which they were mingled. In England the cavalry had completely the upper hand of the infantry. It was used, not merely to finish the fight, but to smash unbroken and unshaken bodies of foot; and so great was its value in the open field that every effort was made by the commanders on both sides to keep it at the largest possible ratio to the whole army. Every decisive battle of the Civil War was made such by the cavalry. The arrangement of the armies was, invariably, with the infantry in the centre, the pikemen and the musketeers ordinarily alternating in clumps, while the cavalry was on both wings. The dragoons, though mounted, habitually fought on foot with their fire-pieces. Lancers were rarely used. The heavy cavalry were clad in cuirasses, and armed with long, straight swords and pistols. The light cavalry usually wore the buff coat, sometimes with a breast-piece, always with a helmet; and in addition to their sword and pistols, carried a carbine.

Throughout Europe, at this time, cavalry trusted altogether too much to their clumsy firearms, save when handled by some great natural leader of horse; and, in consequence, on the Continent, the infantry had won the upper hand. But it happened in the English Civil War that the only great leaders developed were cavalrymen; and so the horse retained throughout the mastery over the foot; although, as each arm was always pitted against the same arm in the opposing forces, the struggle frequently wore itself out before the victorious horse and victorious foot, if they belonged to different parties, could fight it out between them.

The Civil War opened with just such blundering and indecisive fighting as marked the opening of the American Civil War two centuries later. There was no hard and fast line, whether geographically or of caste, between the two parties; in every portion of England, and in every rank of society, there were to be found adherents both of the King and of the Commons; but, as a whole, the east and south of England were for the Parliament; the north and west were Royalist. The bulk of the aristocracy stood for the King; the bulk of the lesser gentry and yeomanry were against him. The revolutionary movement—as in America in 1776—received its main strength from the lesser gentry, small farmers, tradesmen, and upper-class mechanics and handicraftsmen. In America in 1776 there was no proletariat. So far as there was one in England in 1642, it took no interest in the struggle. The peasantry, the mass of the agricultural laborers, were inclined toward the King, though the men immediately above them in social position, who represented the lowest rank that had political influence, were the other way. The townsmen were generally for the Parliament.

In comparing the English Civil War of the seventeenth century with the American Civil War of the nineteenth, there are some curious points of similarity, no less than some very sharp contrasts. During the two centuries there had been a great growth in esteem for fixity of principle. In the English Civil War nothing was more common than for a man to change sides, and there was treachery even on the field of battle itself; whereas, in the American Civil War, though many of the leaders, like Lee and Thomas, were in great doubt as to the proper course to follow, yet when sides had once been taken, there was no flinching and no looking back. Moreover, there was far greater intensity of popular feeling in the American Civil War; even the States that were divided in opinion at the outset held no considerable mass of population which did not soon throw its weight on one side or the other; whereas, in the English Civil War there were large bodies of men who strove to avoid declaring for either side. At the very end of the contest, tens of thousands of persons, mainly peasants, organized under the title of Clubmen, with the avowed purpose of holding the scales even between the two sets of combatants, and of looking out for their own interests. The American Civil War was fought for the right of secession, and efforts were made—in Kentucky, for instance—to establish the right of a locality to be neutral. The “state rights” theory reached an almost equal development in some of the English counties during the Cromwellian contest. Yorkshire at one time declared for neutrality. The trained bands of Cornwall, when the Royalist forces were driven back within their borders, promptly turned out and drove off the pursuing Parliamentarians, but refused to obey orders to leave the county in pursuit of their foes, and disbanded to their own homes. Later, they repeated exactly the same course of procedure. There were at times local truces, or agreements as to the conditions of the contest in particular localities.

On both sides “associations” were formed, consisting of special groups of counties banded together intimately for the purposes of defence. The most important of these, the Eastern Association, included Cromwell’s own home, taking in all of the middle East. This region was throughout the contest the backbone of resistance to the King. Its people were strongly Puritan in feeling, and it was they who gave Cromwell his strength: for they gave him his Ironsides; and furnished the famous New Model for the Parliamentary army which finished the war.

At the outset of the war many of the nobles raised regiments from among their own tenants, and the armies were of picturesque look, each regiment having its own uniform. The Guards of Lord Essex adopted the buff leather coat, which afterward became the uniform of the whole Roundhead army. Hampden’s regiment was in green; the London trained bands in bright scarlet. Other regiments were clad in blue or gray. In the Cavalier army there were foot-guards in white and foot-guards in red; and among their horse, the Life Guards of the King—composed of lords and gentlemen who had no separate commands—wore plumed casques over their long curled locks, embroidered lace collars over their glittering cuirasses, gay scarfs, gilded sword-belts, and great-boots of soft leather doubled down below the knee.

The history of the English Civil War, like the history of the American Revolutionary War and the American Civil War, teaches two lessons. First, it shows that the average citizen of a civilized community requires months of training before he can be turned into a good soldier, and that raw levies—no matter how patriotic—are, under normal conditions, helpless before smaller armies of trained and veteran troops, and cannot strike a finishing blow even when pitted against troops of their own stamp. In the second place it teaches a lesson, which at first sight seems contradictory of the first, but is in reality not in the least so; namely, that there is nothing sacrosanct in the trade of the soldier. It is a trade which can be learned without special difficulty by any man who is brave and intelligent, who realizes the necessity of obedience, and who is already gifted with physical hardihood and is accustomed to the use of the horse and of weapons, to enduring fatigue and exposure, and to acting on his own responsibility, taking care of himself in the open.

Cromwell’s troops were not regulars, like the professional soldiers of the Thirty Years’ War; they were volunteers. After two or three years’ service they became the finest troops that Europe could then show; just as by 1864 the volunteers of Grant and Lee had reached a grade of perfection which made them, for their own work, superior to any other of the armies then in existence.