CHAPTER XVI

THE FOUNDATION OF THE PROTECTORATE 1653

The fall of the Long Parliament was received with general satisfaction. “There was not so much as the barking of a dog or any general and visible repining at it,” said Cromwell afterwards. His words are justified by the facts. Hyde termed it a most popular and obliging act, and the French Ambassador told his Government that nobility and populace universally rejoiced at General Cromwell’s noble deed. Public feeling found vent in ballads. One described the scene of the dissolution, relating what Cromwell had said, and how the members had looked.

“Brave Oliver came to the House like a sprite, His fiery face struck the Speaker dumb, ‘Begone,’ said he, ‘you have sate long enough; Do you mean to sit here until Doomsday come?’”

“Cheer up, kind countrymen, be not dismayed,” sang another street poet, ending every verse with the exultant chorus: “Twelve parliament men shall be sold for a penny.”

For a few weeks, Cromwell was the most popular man in the nation. Royalists whispered that the King would marry Cromwell’s daughter, and that Cromwell would content himself with a dukedom and the viceroyalty of Ireland. A more general belief was that he would assume the crown himself. An enthusiastic partisan hung up in the Exchange a picture of Cromwell crowned, with the invitation underneath:

“Ascend three thrones, great captain and divine, I’ th’ will of God, old Lion, they are thine.”

Cromwell’s own view of his position was that, being Commander-in-chief by Act of Parliament, his commission made him the only constituted authority left standing. His desire was to put an end to this dictatorship as soon as he could. The sword must be divested of all power in the civil administration, and the army leaders must prove to the world that they had not turned out the Long Parliament in order to grasp at power themselves. The army itself accepted Cromwell’s view, but on the nature of the new civil authority to be set up there were two views amongst the officers. For the present, a temporary Council of State, consisting of thirteen persons, most of whom were officers, carried on the daily business of administration.

As to the future, Major-General Lambert advocated one kind of government, and Major-General Harrison another. Lambert was a gentleman of good family, with some political aptitude and some constitutional knowledge, but less of either than he fancied. A dashing leader and a skilful tactician, he was popular because of his gallant bearing and his genial temper, and believed to be honest because he was good-natured. As a politician he was an intriguer, inscrutable, scheming, and insatiably ambitious. Harrison was a man of no birth and little education, bred on perverted prophecies, full of desperate courage and high-flown enthusiasms,—a man born to lead forlorn hopes and die for lost causes, who did both even to the admiration of his enemies. Unselfish in his own aims, he swayed others by his devotion and his zeal. But he was fitter to command the left wing in the battle of Armageddon than to take any part in the government of earthly states.

Lambert wished to entrust power to a small council of ten or twelve. Harrison wished to give it to a larger council of seventy members like the Jewish Sanhedrin. Lambert’s party proposed that the council should be assisted by an elected Parliament, and the authority of both defined by a written constitution. Harrison’s followers wished to dispense with a Parliament altogether. The first adhered to the principles laid down in the Agreement of the People, which they had drawn up four years earlier. The second were inspired by the opinions of the Fifth Monarchy men, and believed that the time had come to realise their hopes. Of the four great monarchies of the world’s history, the Assyrian and the Persian, the Macedonian and the Roman, three had fallen, and the fourth was tottering to its fall. At last, as the prophets had foretold, the monarchy of Christ was to begin, and till He came to reign in person, His saints were to rule for Him. A text which Harrison had often in his mouth was—“The saints shall take the kingdom and possess it.”

When Cromwell dissolved the Long Parliament, he had no definite plan for the future government of England. He was not a Fifth Monarchy man, but he had no faith in paper constitutions. He was convinced that godly men would make the best governors, but he felt that a government somewhat like a Parliament would be most satisfactory to the nation.

The result was a compromise by which a larger and more representative assembly than Harrison had proposed, was called together. In each county the Congregational Churches were asked to nominate suitable persons, and from this list the council of officers selected those it thought fittest. A hundred and forty persons were thus chosen, of whom five represented Scotland, six Ireland, and the rest England. A writ addressed to each person separately, from Oliver Cromwell, Captain-General, recited that he had been nominated by the General with the advice of his council of officers as one of the men to whom the weighty affairs of the Commonwealth were to be entrusted. All were Puritan notables, combining godliness with fidelity to the cause, and described in the writs as “men fearing God and hating covetousness.”

On July 4th, they met at Westminster, and on behalf of the army Cromwell presented them with a deed under his hand and seal, whereby the several persons therein mentioned were constituted the supreme authority. In his opening speech he related the causes which had led to the dissolution of the Long Parliament and their own convocation, adding some advice on the use they were to make of their power. Let them be just and tender to all kinds of Christians, endeavour the promoting of the Gospel, and study to win the support of the nation by their devotion to the public weal. “Convince them that as men fearing God have fought them out of their bondage, so men fearing God do now rule them in the fear of God.” In the war, and in the events which had led to the overthrow of the monarchy, there was “an evident print of providence,” and now the task of government had come to them “by the way of necessity, by the way of the wise providence of God.” “God manifests this to be the day of the power of Christ; having through so much blood, and so much trial as hath been upon these nations, made this to be one of the great issues thereof: to have His people called to the supreme authority.” Let them therefore own their call, for never any body of men had come into the supreme authority in such a way of owning God and being owned by Him.

It was not, said Cromwell, by his own design that this had come to pass.

“I never looked to see such a day as this.... Indeed it is marvellous, and it hath been unprojected. It’s not long since either you or we came to know of it. And indeed this hath been the way God hath dealt with us all along; to keep things from our eyes all along, so that we have seen nothing in all His dispensations long beforehand—which is also a witness, in some measure, to our integrity.”

Since God had brought about so wonderful a thing, why should they not hope for things more wonderful still? “Why should we be afraid to say or think, that this way may be the door to usher in the things that God hath promised and prophesied of, and set the hearts of His people to wait for and expect?” Again and again Cromwell reiterated these hopes. “Indeed I do think somewhat is at the door. We are at the threshold.” “You are at the edge of the promises and prophecies.” He ended by quoting the 68th Psalm as a prophecy of the glory and the triumph of “the Gospel Churches.” “The triumph of that Psalm is exceeding high, and God is accomplishing it.”

The assembly to which he spoke was equally confident that its meeting marked the opening of a new era. “They looked,” as they declared, “for the long-expected birth of freedom and happiness.” “All the world over amongst the people of God” there was “a more than usual expectation of some great and strange changes coming upon the world, which we can hardly believe to be paralleled with any times but those a while before the birth of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.” Full of hope, the assembly set to work to fulfil its mission. It voted itself the title of Parliament, invited Cromwell and four other representative officers to take part in its proceedings, elected a new Council of State, and appointed twelve great Committees for the redress of all kinds of grievances. It took in hand, simultaneously, the reform of the Law and of the Church. The abolition of the Court of Chancery was voted after a single day’s debate. Its delays and costliness had long been a scandal, and it was said that twenty-three thousand causes of five to thirty years’ standing were lying there undetermined. Next came an Act establishing civil marriage, and providing for the registration of births, marriages, and burials. Acts were passed for the relief of prisoners for debt, for the safe custody of idiots and lunatics, and for the removal of some smaller legal abuses. A committee was appointed to codify the Law, and sanguine reformers talked of reducing its great volumes “into the bigness of a pocket book, as it is proportionable in New England and elsewhere.” The Fifth Monarchy preachers at Blackfriars went further, and bade them abolish the law of man, and set up in its place the law of God. They required not a simplification of the laws of England, but a code based on the laws of Moses.

The Church was taken in hand with the same rough vigour as the Law. A proposal to abolish tithes at once was lost by a few votes, but even its opponents were willing to abolish them if lay tithe-owners were compensated, and if some other maintenance were provided for the clergy. So the whole question was referred to a committee. On the other hand, a resolution abolishing patronage was passed by seventeen votes, and a bill ordered to be drawn up to carry it into effect. There were also persistent rumours of an impending attack on the endowments of the universities, and a large party in the House were opposed to any established Church, or any ministry not dependent on voluntary support. Outside Parliament, the Fifth Monarchy preachers denounced the parochial clergy as “hirelings” and “priests of Baal.” Their sermons described the Church as an “outwork of Babylon,” and a part of the “Kingdom of the Beast.” The great design of Christ, they said, was to destroy all anti-Christian forms and churches and clergy all over the world. Their hymns summoned the faithful to follow the Lord to war.

“The Lord begins to honour us, The Saints are marching on, The sword is sharp, the arrows swift To destroy Babylon.”

In private, the Fifth Monarchy men were caballing to make Harrison Lord General instead of Cromwell.

Cromwell was dissatisfied and alarmed at the conduct of the Little Parliament and its consequences. Instead of promoting the Gospel, they had threatened to deprive its ministers of the means of subsistence. Instead of allaying sectarian strife their policy had embittered it. His own persistent attempts to reconcile religious animosities met with little success. Vainly he arranged conferences between Presbyterian, Independent, and Baptist ministers to persuade them to live harmoniously together. As he complained to his son-in-law, Fleetwood: “Fain would I have my service accepted of the Saints, if the Lord will, but it is not so. Being of different judgments, and those of each sort seeking most to propagate their own, that spirit of kindness that is to all, is hardly accepted of any.” When he tried to mediate between the fighting ecclesiastics, they turned on him as the two Israelites did on Moses, and asked, “Who made thee a prince or a judge over us?” Because he wished to support a national Church the Blackfriars preachers abused him as “The Old Dragon” and “The Man of Sin.” Because he had not called a real Parliament, the Levellers accused him of high treason to “his lords the people of England.” For what he had done and what he had left undone Cromwell was attacked by fanatics of all parties.

At the same time the position of the Republic had changed for the worse since the Little Parliament began to sit. The Dutch war still continued, and though Monk had gained two decisive victories, on June 3rd and July 31st, over the Dutch fleet, peace was still far off. The chief obstacle to it was the exorbitant terms which the Little Parliament demanded, and on this question also Cromwell was at issue with the men now in power. Peace had become a necessity to England as well as Holland, for in September it was discovered that there would be a deficit of over half a million on the estimates for the navy. A new insurrection, fanned by promises of Dutch aid, had broken out in Scotland. In England there was a marked revival of royalist feeling, and a plot for the surprise of Portsmouth had been discovered. The Levellers were once more raising their heads. Lilburn, defying the penalty imposed by the act of banishment, had returned to England, and in August, 1653, he was tried for his contumacy. Crowds flocked to hear him tried, or to rescue him if condemned, and when he was acquitted their shouting was heard a mile off. Even the soldiers set to guard the Court blew their trumpets and beat their drums for joy, and it seemed as if the agitation suppressed in 1649 was beginning again.

Cromwell was now thoroughly disillusioned and began to repent his part in putting the men of the Little Parliament in power.

In later years, when he referred to his experiment, he called it apologetically “a story of my own weakness and folly.”

“And yet,” he said, “it was done in my simplicity. It was thought then that men of our own judgment, who had fought in the wars, and were all of a piece upon that account, why surely these men will hit it, and these men will do it to the purpose, whatever can be desired. And such a company of men were chosen and did proceed to action. And this was the naked truth, that the issue was not answerable to the simplicity and honesty of the design.”

Besides repenting his own act, Cromwell began to doubt his own motives. Was his eagerness to transfer supreme power to others an honest constitutional scruple, or a cowardly evasion of responsibility? Was it not, perhaps, “a desire, I am afraid sinful enough, to be quit of the power God had most clearly by His providence put into my hands before He called me to lay it down; before those honest ends of our fighting were attained and settled.”

Not only the General, but the officers, too, were dissatisfied with their creation. Apart from political or religious considerations, the proceedings of the Little Parliament seriously affected their interests as soldiers. It had touched their honour and threatened their pockets. A point on which the soldiers were justly sensitive was the strict observance of capitulations with royalist commanders, and in one notorious case articles of surrender had been grossly violated, and the Parliament had refused redress. Great opposition had been made to the renewal of the monthly assessment for the maintenance of the army, and a more equitable way of raising the money had been proposed. The soldiers feared that if this new method were adopted their pay would fall behindhand, and they would be obliged to starve or take free quarters. Still further irritation was caused by a motion that, in view of the pressing needs of the State, and the wealth they had obtained in its service, the higher officers should serve without pay for a whole year.

The discontented officers naturally turned to their General for help. Lambert and his party took up once more the idea of a written constitution. In November, a meeting of officers took place at which Lambert’s scheme was discussed and adopted. It was a first draft of the Instrument of Government, the main difference being that it placed at the head of the State a King instead of a Protector. At the end of the month, it was submitted to Cromwell. “They told me,” he said, “that except I would undertake the government they thought things would hardly come to a settlement, but blood and confusion would break in upon us.” But to all their solicitation he replied with refusals. He had two great objections to accepting their offer. One was the aversion to the title of King, which revealed itself again in 1657. The other was that he had empowered the Little Parliament to sit till the end of 1654, and he was not willing to expel a second Parliament by force of arms. Lambert’s plot was frustrated by the reluctance of the principal actor, and he retired sulkily to the country.

Cromwell still hoped that the Parliament might be induced to adopt a wiser policy. The strength of the two parties in it was very nearly equal, and a few votes might turn the scale in favour of the moderate section. A final battle on the Church question brought about a new trial of strength. On December 2nd, the Committee on Tithes produced a report containing a regular scheme for the reorganisation of the Church. One clause proposed the appointment of itinerant commissioners to eject unfit ministers and fill up vacant livings. Another provided that the present provision for the maintenance of approved ministers should be guaranteed by Parliament. Others affirmed that tithes were legal property, and suggested a plan for their commutation in case of persons who had conscientious scruples about paying them. Over this report the two parties fought for five whole sittings. The question whether the Church should be reformed or disestablished hung on their decision. At last, on Saturday, December 10th, the extremists triumphed, and the first clause of the report was rejected by fifty-six to fifty-four votes. The supporters of the Church regarded the division as fatal to the whole scheme.

Immediately on this defeat, the moderate party in the Parliament and the malcontents amongst the officers came to an agreement. All Sunday the leaders intrigued and negotiated. The one expedient left was to persuade the Parliament to abdicate, and make way for a more capable government. If the difficulty of getting rid of the Parliament was peaceably solved, those who knew Cromwell felt sure he would accept the accomplished fact, and assume the power offered him. The thing was not impossible, if it was properly worked. Some of the majority had voted on side issues; others might be gained over. Absentees were whipped up; waverers were appealed to through their interests or their fears. An argument which weighed with some was, that the army meant to put a stop to the sitting of the Parliament, and that a decent suicide was the only way to avoid a violent end.

On Monday, December 12th, the Moderates rose early and came to the House betimes. As soon as business began, Colonel Sydenham and other leaders of the party rose up and inveighed against the policy of their opponents. They charged them with seeking to destroy the army by not making sufficient and timely provision for its pay, with endeavouring to overthrow the Law, the Clergy, and the property of the subject. In conclusion they moved, “that the sitting of this Parliament any longer, as it is now constituted, will not be for the good of the Commonwealth, and that therefore it is requisite to deliver up to the Lord General Cromwell the powers which they had received from him.”

Everything went off with the precision of a field-day. The debate was very short. One party strove to spin it out till the House grew fuller and their reinforcements came up. The other had resolved to carry the enemy’s position by storm. It was no time to debate, said the Moderates, but to do something to prevent the calamities which threatened the State. Old Rouse, the Speaker, who was in the plot himself, ended the discussion by rising from the chair, and left the House without stopping to put the question or to hear the opponents of the motion. In vain they called to him to stop. Preceded by the mace, and accompanied by the clerk of the House, he marched off with fifty or sixty members to Whitehall. Arrived there, they proceeded to sign their names to a paper returning their powers to Cromwell, and became once more private persons. Eventually about eighty members signed this act of abdication.

About twenty-seven members had stayed behind in the House. They were too few to form a quorum, and could not act as a Parliament. While they were drawing up a protest against the late proceedings, two colonels entered and ordered them to come out. “We are here,” said one of the members, “by a call from the General, and will not come out by your desire unless you have a command from him.” The colonels had no order from Cromwell to produce, but they fetched in two files of musketeers, and the members took the hint.

Cromwell had taken no part in the plot for procuring the abdication of the Little Parliament. “I can say it,” he told the members of the next Parliament, “in the presence of divers persons here who know whether I lie, that I did not know one tittle of that resignation, till they all came and brought it, and delivered it into my hands.” As none of the said persons ever contradicted his statement, it may be accepted as true. It sufficed for him to remain passive, and power came back to his hands by a sort of natural necessity. Once more he was in possession of the dictatorship he had sought to lay down. “My power was again by this resignation as boundless and unlimited as before, all things being subject to arbitrariness, and myself a person having power over the three nations without bound or limit set; all government being dissolved, and all civil administration at an end.” For the second time Lambert and his allies urged Cromwell to accept the government under the constitution which they had drawn up. The difficulty of getting rid of the Little Parliament no longer stood in the way, and the title of King had been replaced by the title of Protector. They also pointed out to him that the acceptance of the Protectorship in no way increased his power. On the contrary, it put an end to his dictatorship, and reduced his power by imposing constitutional restrictions upon its exercise. It bound him to do nothing without the consent of either a Council or a Parliament. Another argument was still more effective. Once more they warned Cromwell, that, unless he would undertake the government, anarchy was inevitable, and made him responsible for the “blood and confusion” which would be the result. After three or four days’ discussion, Cromwell accepted the constitution, to which a general meeting of officers had in the interim given their approval and adhesion. He was solemnly installed as Protector on December 16, 1653, dressed not like a general in scarlet, but like a citizen in a plain black coat, to show all men that military rule was over, and civil government restored.

The new constitution, like the Agreement of the People in 1649, represented the political ideas of the officers of the army. But since 1649 the officers had lost confidence in the people, and they sought now to erect a government based on something firmer than the will of a fickle multitude. A written constitution was asserted to be a better foundation for a government than popular consent, for the express reason that the people would have no power to alter it. There had been enough of commotion, and confusion, and change. “It was high time that some power should pass a decree upon the wavering humours of the people, and say to this nation, as the Almighty Himself said once to the unruly sea: ‘Here shall be thy bounds; hitherto shalt thou come, and no farther.’” This was what Lambert and the officers assumed the right to say when they imposed the “Instrument of Government” upon England.

Throughout its provisions their distrust of the English people is evident. Little boroughs were abolished and constituencies made more equal, but the franchise instead of being extended was restricted. In boroughs, the franchise remained unaltered—that is, the right of election was generally in the hands of the corporation; in counties, the forty-shilling freeholders were abolished, and a new franchise was created, which gave the vote to all men possessing property worth two hundred pounds. Henceforth, therefore, Parliament would represent the opinions and interests of the middle classes.

Distrust of the electors was naturally accompanied by distrust of the representatives. For the future, the legislative and executive powers were to be kept permanently separate. The authority and the duration of Parliament were strictly limited. It was to meet once in three years, but to sit for five months only. It had power to legislate as it thought fit, but its laws must not contravene the provisions of the constitution. Its consent to levy money for extraordinary expenses was necessary, but a constant yearly revenue was to be raised to meet the ordinary charge of civil government, army, and navy, which Parliament had no right to diminish.

The Protector possessed the executive power, but his authority was limited also. Except when bills contained something contrary to the constitution, he had no right to veto them. In domestic administration and in foreign affairs, he could not act without the consent of the Council; in taxation and for the employment of the army, he needed the consent of Parliament or Council. The members of the new Council were, in Cromwell’s phrase, “the trustees of the Commonwealth in the intervals of Parliament,” and possessed far more power than the Council of State erected in 1649. The councillors, most of whom were appointed by the “Instrument” itself, held office for life, and in their hands lay the choice of the Protector’s successor.

The object of this complicated system of checks and balances was to prevent either Parliament or Protector from becoming absolute, and to render religious liberty unassailable. None knew better than the leaders of the army how slight a hold upon the nation the principle of toleration had obtained, or how little religious parties were willing to accept it. “This hath been one of the vanities of our contest,” said Cromwell. “Every sect saith, ‘Oh give me liberty,’ but give it him and to his power he will not yield it to anybody else.” For the ingenious political devices of the constitution the Protector cared very little, but the religious settlement was a settlement after his own heart. There was to be a national Church, maintained for the present by tithes, in the future, it was hoped, by some better way. Outside the Church, there was to be full liberty of worship for those who did not belong to it, “provided they did not abuse their liberty to the civil injury of others, or to the actual disturbance of the public peace.” But this liberty was not to extend to Popery or Prelacy, which were politically dangerous, or “to such as under the profession of Christ hold forth and practise licentiousness.”

This was the religious freedom which ever since 1647 the army had demanded, and had at last realised. Yet in spite of all the new constitution promised, there was little prospect that it would obtain the acceptance of the nation. England was the last country in which the attempt to transform a military dictatorship into a sort of constitutional government was likely to succeed.

At the moment, however, the only opposition there was came from the Fifth Monarchy men—hostile to anything which resembled a monarchy or an established Church. Harrison refused to act under the Protector’s Government, and was deprived of his commission. Fifth Monarchy preachers raged against the Protector from the pulpit. One called him “the dissemblingest perjured villain in the world.” Another identified him with the Little Horn in Daniel’s prophecy, which was to make war against the Saints and to be destroyed by them.

Their ravings only strengthened Cromwell’s position. What England wanted was a government which would maintain order and preserve property. The interests which the Little Parliament had imperilled welcomed Cromwell’s accession to power. His elevation was a bargain, says Ludlow, with the corrupt part of the clergy and the lawyers; he became their Protector and they the humble supporters of his tyranny. So evident was the advantage which Cromwell derived from the events of the last few months that what had happened was freely attributed to his profound statecraft. All was a pageant played by Cromwell, thought Baxter, in order to make his soldiers out of love with democracy and to render his usurpation necessary. He was resolved we should be saved by him or perish.

“He made more use of the wild-headed sectaries than barely to fight for him. They now serve him as much by their heresies, their enmity to learning and ministry, their pernicious demands which tend to confusion, as they had done before by their valour in the field. He can now conjure up at pleasure some terrible apparition of Agitators, Levellers, and such like, who, as they affrighted the King from Hampton Court, shall affright the people to fly to him for refuge: that the hand that wounded may heal them.”

Hitherto Cromwell had been the destroyer of old institutions. Now he came forward as the saviour of society. England, therefore, submitted to his government without resistance and without enthusiasm, but with a general feeling of relief. The conversion of the monarchy into a republic had been violent and bloody; the transition from the Republic to the Protectorate was as peaceful as one of the ordinary operations of nature. As such, Waller celebrated it in his poem to Cromwell.

“Still as you rise, the State exalted too Finds no distemper while ’tis changed by you, Changed like the world’s great scene when without noise The rising sun night’s vulgar lights destroys.”