CHAPTER XII

THE REPUBLIC AND ITS ENEMIES 1649

The execution of Charles I. was followed by the abolition of monarchy. On February 6, 1649, the House of Commons voted that the House of Lords was useless and dangerous, and that it ought to be abolished. On February 8th, it resolved that the office of a king was unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of this nation. Acts abolishing both followed, and on May 19th a third Act established the English Republic. “England,” it declared, “shall henceforth be governed as a Commonwealth, or a Free State, by the supreme authority of this nation, the representatives of the people in Parliament, and by such as they shall appoint and constitute as ministers under them for the good of the people.” Henceforth all writs were to run in the name of the Keepers of the Liberty of England, and the Great Seal was to bear the picture of the Parliament with the legend, “In the first year of Freedom by God’s blessing restored.”

Exactly what they meant by “a Free State” the founders of the Republic did not explain. Hobbes and Harrington agreed in defining the new government as an oligarchy. A pamphleteer praised it as an aristocracy. But the principles on which it was ostensibly based were the principles of democracy. In their resolutions of January 4, 1649, the House of Commons had declared that the people were, under God, the original of all just power, and had based their claim to override the Lords on that ground. In their declaration of the reasons for establishing a republic, they asserted that kings were officials, instituted by agreement amongst the people they governed, whom the people had therefore a right to dethrone in case of misgovernment. Milton, who became one of the Secretaries of the Council of State, echoed the same principles. In his _Tenure of Kings and Magistrates_, he asserted “that all men were naturally born free, being the image and resemblance of God Himself,” and anticipated Rousseau in tracing the origin of government to a social contract. Yet, in spite of democratic professions, the Republic was simply the rule of the Long Parliament under a new name. All the power which the King and the three estates of the realm had formerly possessed, the little remnant of the House of Commons claimed as its own. All the checks which the existence of King and Lords, or the share of the Church in legislation, had once imposed, were now swept away. The one new institution established was simply a further development of that system of government by committees which the Civil War had made necessary. The Council of State was neither a senate nor a cabinet; it possessed no power either to balance or to control the Parliament, but was only an annually elected committee, to which the Parliament had entrusted executive and administrative duties. Of the forty-one persons composing it, all but ten were members of the Parliament itself.

Thus the Long Parliament possessed an authority which no political assembly in England has ever possessed before or since. Its power of legislation was unlimited. It exercised the executive power indirectly through the Council, and directly through its own resolutions. By interference with private suits, and by the appointment of committees with quasi-judicial functions, it also exercised the judicial power. Its sovereignty was undivided and uncontrolled.

“This was the case of the people of England at that time,” said Cromwell, eight years later, “the Parliament assuming to itself the authority of the three estates that were before. It had so assumed that authority that if any man had come and said, ‘What rules do you judge by?’ it would have answered, ‘Why, we have none. We are supreme in legislature and judicature.’”

What made this authority still more burdensome was that there was no prospect of its ever ending. Instead of sitting for about seven months in the year, as Parliaments do now, it sat all the year round, never taking more than three or four days’ holiday. Moreover, by the Act of May 11, 1641, it could not be adjourned, prorogued, or dissolved, save by its own consent, and though the King, who had passed the act, was dead, it was held to be still in force. So, in Cromwell’s phrase, the country was governed by “a perpetual Parliament always sitting.”

Although the claims of the Long Parliament had reached their highest, the theory on which they rested had ceased to be in accordance with facts. “The Commons of England in Parliament assembled,” said the resolution of the House on January 4, 1649, “_being chosen by and representing the people_, have the supreme power in this nation.” But the House was never less representative than at the moment when it passed this vote. By the expulsion of royalist members during the war, and of Presbyterians in 1648, it had been, as Cromwell said, “winnowed, and sifted, and brought to a handfull.” When the Long Parliament met in November, 1640, it consisted of about 490 members; in January, 1649, those sitting, or at liberty to sit, in the House were not more than ninety. Whole districts were unrepresented. In the list of sitting members given in a contemporary pamphlet, there were none from the counties of Herefordshire, Hertfordshire, Cumberland, and Lancashire, or from any borough within their limits. Wales was represented by three persons, and London by but a single citizen. In later years, a few readmissions and a few new elections swelled the total of sitting members to about 125, but at no date between 1649 and 1653 was the Long Parliament entitled to say that it represented the people. Its power rested not on popular consent, but on the support of the army, and on the superstitious reverence which Englishmen paid even to the shadow of a Parliament.

Politically the all-important question was how long the army would continue to maintain this remnant of the Long Parliament in power. The agreement between the two covered a fundamental difference in their political views. The army regarded the maintenance of the existing assembly as a temporary expedient. The Parliament looked upon itself as a legitimate sovereign with an indefeasible right to rule. By a Free State, the army meant a democracy, and could not understand a republic without republican institutions. Above all it demanded that the new State should be based on a written constitution defining the rights of the governed and the powers of the government. In the Agreement of the People, drawn up in January, 1649, it sketched the outlines of the republic it desired. The Long Parliament was to come to an end in April, 1649. All ratepayers assessed to the relief of the poor, and every man not a menial servant or a pauper, were to have votes. Electoral districts were to be made more equal. Parliaments were to be elected every two years, and not to sit for more than six months in the year, and a Council of State was to hold power when they were not sitting. If the State chose, it might provide for the maintenance of a national Church, but with the exception of Popery and prelacy, all forms of Christianity were to be tolerated. Finally, as a safeguard against arbitrary power, certain fundamental rights were enumerated with which no government might interfere: freedom from impressment, equality before the law, and freedom of worship.

The constitutional scheme of the army was presented to the Parliament on January 20, 1649. They did not ask that it should be imposed on the nation by law, but that it should be tendered to the nation for acceptance. It was to be circulated, somewhat as a petition, amongst the people for signatures, and if most of the supporters of the cause approved of it, steps were to be taken to give it effect. The Parliament received the Agreement with thanks, and laid it aside.

April, 1649, passed and they showed no sign of dissolving. Their feeling on the subject of a new Parliament was well expressed by Harry Marten in 1650. Marten compared the Commonwealth to the infant Moses. When Moses, he said, was found amongst the bulrushes and brought to Pharaoh’s daughter, she took care to find out the child’s mother, and to commit him to her to nurse. The Commonwealth was an infant, of weak growth and very tender constitution; nobody was so fit to nurse it as the mother who brought it forth, and till it had obtained more years and vigour they should not trust it to other hands.

In 1649, there was much to be urged in favour of this view. At home and abroad the young Republic was surrounded by enemies. In England it was threatened by Royalists, Presbyterians, and Levellers; in Europe it had no friends. The execution of Charles I. had excited universal horror amongst foreigners. There was indeed no prospect of the general league of European potentates to punish regicide, for which Royalists hoped, but both governments and peoples were hostile. In Russia, the Czar imprisoned English merchants and confiscated their goods. In Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, ministers preached sermons denouncing the English sectaries, and proving that there was no necessary connection between Protestantism and king-killing. In the United Provinces, where republicans might have expected sympathy, public opinion was equally incensed against them. The States-General addressed Charles II. as King, condoled with him on the death of his father, and allowed Rupert to equip his fleet in Dutch ports. They refused to give audience to Strickland, the English agent in Holland, and declined to recognise the new State. In May, 1649, a special ambassador from England, Dr. Dorislaus, was murdered by Scottish Royalists at The Hague, and though the Dutch Government promised redress, popular feeling secured the escape of the murderers. Much of this hostility was due to the influence of the Stadtholder, William II., whose marriage with Mary, daughter of Charles I., had made the House of Orange the one firm friend of the House of Stuart. William II. helped his brother-in-law with money and advice, and would have done more if he had been able. But Holland, the richest and most powerful of the seven provinces, was opposed to the warlike schemes of the Stadtholder and wished to remain at peace with England.

In France, the King’s death made every Englishman unpopular. The war with Spain and the distractions of France itself prevented Mazarin from assisting Charles II., but he would not recognise the Republic. The relations of England and France grew rapidly worse. The French Government forbade the importation of English draperies; the English replied by prohibiting French wines, woollen goods, and silks. French privateers and even government ships attacked English commerce, and during 1649 and 1650 took English shipping to the amount of five thousand tons, and goods worth half a million. Naturally English merchants made reprisals on French trade. Diplomatic intercourse came to a stop; one French agent was ordered to leave England, a second was turned back at the coast, and a third was dismissed almost as soon as he arrived in the country.

The hostility of France made Spain comparatively friendly. It did not recognise the Republic, but its ambassador kept up unofficial intercourse with the Council of State, and its Government maintained a real neutrality between English parties. It waited till the permanence of the new government should be assured, and in the meantime declined to help a claimant whose chances of restoration seemed precarious. Cottington and Hyde, the ambassadors whom Charles II. sent to Spain, were received with coldness, and their petitions for assistance rejected. On the other hand, Ascham, the agent of the Commonwealth, was murdered by English Cavaliers as soon as he reached Madrid (May 27, 1650), and only one of his murderers was punished. “I envy those gentlemen,” said the Spanish prime minister, “for having done so noble an action.” Political necessity might force Spain to preserve friendly relations with the Commonwealth, but the feeling of subjects and rulers alike was as hostile as that of the French.

In England itself, the reaction which began when the King became a captive was increased by the manner of his death. Ten days after the execution, there appeared in print the _Eikon Basilike_—the portraiture of King Charles in his solitude and sufferings. The book was really written by Dr. Gauden, but no Cavalier doubted that it contained the King’s thoughts and feelings set down by his own hand. It inspired Royalists with more fervid loyalty; converted the wavering, and touched even the indifferent. The mob began to believe that Charles had been the best of monarchs, and the meekest of martyrs. He was no longer the perfidious tyrant of politicians, but the man with the mild voice and mournful eyes whom dramatists were to glorify. Milton complained that the people, “with a besotted and degenerate baseness of spirit, except some few who yet retain in them the old English fortitude and love of freedom, are ready to fall down flat and give adoration to the image and memory of this man, who hath offered at more cunning fetches to undermine our liberties and put tyranny into an art, than any British king before him.” In his _Eikonoklastes_, he undertook to shatter the idol of “the inconstant, irrational, and image-doting rabble,” but failed altogether.

For the moment, the royalist party was too weak to be a serious danger. In Holland and in France, a crowd of ruined noblemen and battered soldiers waited impatiently for the chance of striking another blow against their conquerors. Already Montrose was enlisting men in Northern Europe for a fresh descent on Scotland. In his lines to the dead King, he had promised to avenge his death.

“I’ll sing thine obsequies in trumpet sounds, And write thine epitaph in blood and wounds.”

Other exiles, with an eye to profit as well as vengeance, took to privateering. From the Irish ports, from the Isles of Man, Jersey, and Scilly, issued swarms of privateers, who infested the Channel and plundered English merchantmen. Nor were more distant seas secure. A few months later Prince Rupert, with what was left of the royal fleet, took a number of prizes in the Atlantic, made a sudden raid into the Mediterranean, intercepted homeward-bound ships off the Azores, and even spread havoc in West Indian waters. “We plough the seas for a subsistence,” wrote one of his officers, “poverty and despair being our companions, and revenge our guide.”

At home, however, the Royalists were crushed and subdued. Some of their leaders were prisoners; others had suffered under the Republic’s High Court of Justice. As a rule, the penalties inflicted on the defeated party were limited to pecuniary fines. Early in the war, the Parliament had resolved to sequestrate all the property of those in arms against it. Subsequently it adopted the plan of compounding with delinquents; that is, allowing a Royalist to redeem his estate on paying a certain proportion of its value. These compositions varied in amount from one-half to one-tenth of the capital value of the property, and were determined according to the position and the criminality of the owner. Under this system, large sums were raised to pay the expenses of the war, but it was less effective as a means of raising revenue than as a method of punishing Royalists. A country gentleman who had melted his plate and felled his oaks to succour the King found himself forced to raise money when money was scarce and land had immensely fallen in value. The fixing of his fine was a long and cumbrous process, and till it was fixed his estate was under sequestration. If he failed to pay his instalments at the right time, or was found to have understated his property, there came a re-assessment of the fine, or a fresh sequestration of the estate. He might long as fervently as ever to see the day when the King would enjoy his own again, but, disarmed and impoverished as he was, he could do little to bring it nearer. Yet many Cavaliers were willing to risk their lives again in the attempt. This section of the party maintained an active correspondence with the exiled Court, and by 1650 a central royalist council was established with agents in every county. But the most sanguine plotters admitted that without some assistance from abroad the party in general was “too extremely awed” to take up arms.

In England their possible allies against the government were the Presbyterians and the Levellers. The Presbyterians were numerous, rich, and powerful. Their strength lay in London, in the large towns, and in Lancashire, but most of the middle classes and the bulk of the beneficed clergy belonged to their party. The Presbyterian clergy had protested loudly against the King’s trial; many of them preached against the Republic, and some were bold enough to pray for Charles II. They condemned the Commonwealth as “an heretical democracy,” and refused the engagement to be faithful to it which Parliament imposed. But beyond this passive resistance few of them went. Cordial co-operation between Presbyterians and Royalists was impossible, for the desires of the parties differed widely. What the Presbyterians wanted was a constitutional monarchy on the basis of the terms offered the King in the Newport treaty; what the Royalists wanted was the restoration of monarchy as it had existed before the war began. One party demanded the establishment of some form of Presbyterianism, the other the maintenance of Episcopacy. In 1648, the distrust and apathy of the Presbyterians had prevented the success of the Royalists, and the same cause prevented their union now. The Royalists distrusted the Presbyterians quite as much. To men like Hyde, they seemed traitors and rebels, whose penitence was hollow, and whose principles were as fatal to monarchy and religion as those of the Independents. By depriving Charles of his kingly power they had made it possible for the Independents to deprive him of his life. A Royalist summed up the share of the two parties by saying that the Independents cut off the King’s head, but the Presbyterians brought him to the block. Adversity might draw Presbyterians and Royalists together; but not till hatred of military rule and dread of anarchy had effaced the memories of the war was their joint action possible.

As little prospect was there of the union of the Levellers with the Royalists. Under the name of Levellers two distinct parties were included, neither of which, however hostile to the existing government, was favourable to monarchy. A small section, calling themselves the true Levellers, demanded sweeping social changes. Without these, said they, the Republic is a mockery. “Unless we that are poor have some part of the land to live upon freely as well as the gentry, it cannot be a free Commonwealth.” At present, they asked for the right to establish themselves on the commons and waste lands, but they dreamed of a socialistic republic in which there would be no private property in land, no buying or selling, and neither rich nor poor.

The majority of the Levellers demanded political changes only, and protested they had no desire “to level men’s estates, destroy property, or make all things common.” What they wanted was to limit the powers of the Government and extend the rights of the individual. The three chief points in their programme were manhood suffrage, annual Parliaments, and complete religious liberty. Their complaint was that the revolution of 1648 had stopped too soon, and that the Republic was not an absolute democracy.

The socialists were harmless dreamers whose doctrines fell on stony ground, but the teaching of the democrats bore abundant fruit. Lilburn, their spokesman, was an effective pamphleteer, a vigorous orator, and a party leader of singular pertinacity and courage. In his struggle with the Government he gave voice not only to the aspirations of his own party, but to the feelings of all the opponents of the Republic. The Government seized his pamphlets, threw him in prison, and put him on trial for treason. It only increased his popularity. When “honest John” denied the right of the sword to dictate laws, and demanded the liberty which was the birthright of every Englishman, no London jury would agree to convict him. He was imprisoned time after time, but it was impossible to suppress him till Parliament passed an act for his banishment (December, 1651).

With so many enemies around them, the founders of the Republic had to deal with a task of extraordinary difficulty. But all the machinery of government was in their hands, and although their supporters were a minority, energy and enthusiasm compensated for lack of numbers. The Council of State consisted of country gentlemen of military or political experience, with a few lawyers, a few merchants, besides three or four professional soldiers. It contained a number of able men, and several statesmen, than whom, as Milton says of Vane, better Senators ne’er held the helm of Rome when the Roman Senate beat back Pyrrhus and Hannibal. The system of governing through committees and boards made it possible to add to each of the bodies entrusted with the management of a department a certain number of outsiders of special knowledge or skill. The administrative business of the Republic was consequently far better conducted than that of the Long Parliament or the monarchy. Royalist pamphleteers represented the men in power as universally corrupt and self-seeking; but with some few exceptions they were men of high character and great disinterestedness. To a foreign observer, hostile rather than friendly, they seemed worthy to exercise power, however defective their title to it might be.

“Not only are they powerful by sea and land,” wrote one of Mazarin’s agents, “but they live without ostentation, without pomp, and without mutual rivalry. They are economical in their private affairs and prodigal in their devotion to public affairs, for which each man toils as if for his private interest. They handle large sums of money, which they administer honestly, observing a strict discipline. They reward well and punish severely.”

The pecuniary resources of the Republic were far greater than any of the Stuarts had ever possessed. The revenue of Charles I., in 1633, was estimated at £618,000. The revenue of the Republic, in 1649, from monthly assessments, customs, excise, fines from delinquents, and sales of confiscated lands amounted to about two millions. But the demands upon the revenue were greater still. The safety of the seas and the possibility of a foreign war made the reorganisation of the navy an immediate necessity. Accordingly, Warwick’s commission as Lord High Admiral was revoked, and the command of the fleet given to three Generals at Sea, Blake, Deane, and Popham. In place of Warwick, the Admiralty Committee of the Council of State exercised a general supervision over naval affairs, but the building of ships, the care of their crews, and all the practical management of the navy were given to a Board of Navy Commissioners taught by service at sea what a fighting fleet required. During the next three years, forty-one new men-of-war were added to the navy, which was further increased by hired merchantmen. The sailors were better fed, better paid, and better cared for than they had been under Charles I., and, moreover, their zeal was stimulated by giving them a third of all the prizes they took. Invasion rapidly became an impossibility, and the dominion of the seas a reality instead of an empty claim.

The army of the Commonwealth, if small for the tasks before it, was amply sufficient to suppress rebellion or prevent invasion. The twenty-one thousand men of the “New Model” had swollen to a host of double that size. The standing army, in 1649, amounted to forty-four thousand men, of whom twelve thousand were destined for the reconquest of Ireland. In character and composition it differed little from the “New Model.” The uniform had become universal, and henceforth redcoat and soldier were synonymous. As the pay of the troops was high, and discharged with comparative regularity, it was no longer necessary to raise recruits by pressing. For the officers the army had become a career, and few retired, unless disabled or cashiered. Officers of all grades were inspired by a certain corporate feeling, and accustomed to act together in politics. But between officers and privates a serious divergence of opinion was beginning to reveal itself. The agitation of the Levellers had found a ready response in the lower ranks of the army. Many of the soldiers demanded, like Lilburn, the immediate realisation of the democratic Republic. Others wanted the re-establishment of the Council of Agitators and the abolition of martial law. As in 1647, reluctance to serve in Ireland and the question of arrears of pay swelled the discontent.

Lilburn seized the opportunity to attack the council of officers, and Cromwell as its guiding spirit. He and his disciples denounced the Lieutenant-General as a tyrant, an apostate, and a hypocrite. “You shall scarce speak to Cromwell about anything,” says one of their pamphlets, “but he will lay his hand on his breast, elevate his eyes, and call God to record. He will weep, howl, and repent, even while he doth smite you under the fifth rib.”

Personal abuse had no effect on Cromwell, but he felt the danger with which this agitation threatened the Republic. Tenaciously attached to the existing social order, he regarded the teaching of the Levellers as calculated to overthrow authority and destroy property. In one of his later speeches he sums up his views on the levelling movement. The distinction between class and class was the corner-stone of society. “A nobleman, a gentleman, a yeoman, that is a good interest of the land and a great one.” But the “levelling principle” tended to reduce all the orders and ranks of men to an equality. Consciously or unconsciously it aimed at that, “for what was the purport of it but to make the tenant as liberal a fortune as the landlord?” The preaching of such a doctrine was a danger to the State “because it was a pleasing voice to all poor men, and truly not unwelcome to all bad men.”

When it came to propagating levelling views in the army, and inciting soldiers to disobey their officers, Cromwell’s way with the ringleaders was short and sharp. In March, 1649, Lilburn and three other incendiaries were brought before the Council of State.

“I tell you,” said Cromwell, thumping the council table, “you have no other way to deal with these men but to break them, or they will break you; yea, and bring all the guilt of the blood and treasure shed and spent in this kingdom upon your heads, and frustrate and make void all that work that, with so many years’ industry, toil, and pains you have done; and therefore I tell you again, you are necessitated to break them.”

Lilburn and his friends went to the Tower, but the effervescence amongst the soldiers still continued. At Salisbury, in May, 1649, three of the regiments selected to go to Ireland broke into open mutiny, and declined to march till the liberties of England were secured. Their watchword was “England’s freedom, soldiers’ rights,” and they expected other regiments to join them. But Cromwell and Fairfax left them no time to gather strength. Hurrying from London to Oxfordshire by forced marches, the two generals fell on the mutineers at Burford, took four hundred prisoners, and scattered the rest. Little blood was shed. Three non-commissioned officers were shot; the rest of the mutineers were told that they deserved to be decimated; nevertheless, they were re-embodied in the ranks, and shipped off to Ireland.

Cromwell did not limit himself to the soldier’s task of striking down the enemies of the cause; he laboured with equal zeal to conciliate doubtful supporters and regain lost friends. Many Independents were willing to accept the Republic, now it was established, if they could do so without approving the method by which it had been brought into being. Cromwell was probably the author of the compromise by which these men were induced to take their seats in the Council of State side by side with the authors of the late revolution. Equally conciliatory was his attitude on the question of the House of Lords. To fanatical republicans like Ludlow, it was a proof of his want of principle that he objected to the abolition of that institution, and wished to retain it as a purely consultative body. In reality, his natural conservatism disinclined him to make more constitutional changes than necessity required, and he sought to keep the support of those few peers who had hitherto stood by the cause. In April, 1649, Cromwell even made overtures to the Presbyterians. He offered, as he had offered in 1647, to consent to the establishment of the Presbyterian system, if there were toleration for men of other creeds who “walked peaceably.” He was willing to consent to the readmission of the members excluded by Pride’s Purge, if they would promise fidelity to the Republic. But the Presbyterians refused his offers.

Of these attempted compromises there is little trace in history, but Cromwell’s letters show his efforts to convert individuals. Robert Hammond and Lord Wharton had once been his comrades in the struggle, but now, as Cromwell put it, they had reasoned themselves out of the Lord’s service. To win them back, it was to faith rather than to reason that he appealed, for that was the way he had quieted his own scruples.

“It were a vain thing,” he told Wharton, “to dispute over your doubts, or undertake to answer your objections. I have heard them all, and I have rest from the trouble of them, and of what has risen in my own heart, for which I desire to be humbly thankful. I do not condemn your reasonings. I doubt them.”

Pride’s Purge and the King’s execution stuck in Wharton’s throat. He condemned the illegality by which the Republic had been established and the character of some of the men concerned.

“It is easy,” replied Cromwell, “to object to the glorious actings of God, if we look too much upon instruments. Be not offended at the manner; perhaps there was no other way left. What if God accepted their zeal as he did that of Phineas, whom reason might have called before a jury?” But above all, “what if the Lord have witnessed His approbation and acceptance to this also—not only by signal outward acts, but to the heart too?”

To Cromwell this union of the outward sign with the inward conviction was something far above argument. The logic of events was the only convincing logic. It was the answer that he had given to Hammond’s doubts in 1648. “Fleshly reasonings ensnare us”; let us see what the purpose of God is, as it is made manifest in events. For as nothing happened but because God willed it should happen, so what men termed events were to the Christian “dispensations,” “manifestations,” “providences,” “appearances of God.” There was no such thing as fate—“that were too paganish a word.” There was no such thing as chance. Every battle was “an appeal to God”—Cromwell often uses that phrase as a synonym for fighting. Victory or defeat was not an accident; it was the working of “the Providence of God in that which is falsely called the chance of war.” Therefore each successive triumph of his cause was a fresh proof of its righteousness. His victories in Ireland became a justification of the Republic. “These,” he told the Speaker, “are the seals of God’s approbation of your great change of government.”

That there was something fatalistic in this belief cannot be denied. Cromwell himself once owns that he was inclined to make too much of “outward dispensations.” But the confidence in his cause which this creed gave was the source of his power over his followers.

“In the high places of the field,” said one of them, “as at Dunbar, Worcester and elsewhere, when he carried his life in his hand, did not his faith then work at a more than ordinary rate? Insomuch that success and victory was in his eye, when fears and despondencies did oppress the hearts of others, and some good men too.”

Whatever happened to himself, the Cause could not fail. “The Cause is of God, and it must prosper.” It was not for the sake of the Cause, but for the sake of his doubting friends that he strove to persuade them. “The Lord hath no need of you,” he tells one. “The work needs you not, but you it,” he tells another. The fear in his mind was only this: “what if my friend should withdraw his shoulder from the Lord’s work through false, mistaken reasonings?” To serve in that work in any station was “more honour than the world can give or show.” “How great is it,” he cries, “to be the Lord’s servant in any drudgery!” How little, then, it matters whether a man is called an apostate or a tyrant, or what reproaches that service brings, what estrangements, what vigils, or what labours. “Let us all be not careful what men will make of these actings. They, will they, nill they, shall fulfill the good pleasure of God, and we shall serve our generations. Our rest we expect elsewhere: that will be durable.”

Therefore, when others faltered and fell behind, Cromwell (in Marvell’s phrase) “marched indefatigably on.” Fortunate was the Republic that in its hour of need it had such a servant. More fortunate would it have been had its rulers realised that the Cause which Cromwell served was not a form of government, but ideal ends compatible with any form. He had sought to find religious and civil liberty in a monarchy; he sought it now in a republic; he was to seek it hereafter in a government which was neither. At present it seemed to him inseparable from the life of the Republic.