God glowed aboveWith scarce an intervention …… his soul o’er theirs.They felt him, nor by painful reason knew.’ [1]
[1] [ ‘My own East!How nearer God we were. He glows aboveWith scarce an intervention, presses closeAnd palpitatingly, his soul o’er ours!We feel him, nor by painful reason know!’BROWNING, Luria.]
Henceforth, whatever authority claimed their submission as divine, must come home to their conscience with a like directness, and this thejus divinumof the presbyterians failed to do. This new spiritual force the ministers had left to itself. While they were wrangling at Westminster or settling warmly into the berths which the episcopal clergy had vacated, it had been gathering strength unheeded. At the outbreak of the war each regiment had a regular minister as its chaplain, but after the battle at Edgehill made it clear that the business would be a longer one than had been expected, these divines, according to Baxter, withdrew either to the assembly or to their livings. Baxter himself lost an opportunity which he afterwards regretted, in declining the chaplaincy of Cromwell’s regiment, ‘which its officers proposed to make a gathered church.’ ’These very men,’ he says, ‘that then invited me to be their pastor, were the men that afterwards headed an army, and were forwardest in all our charges; which made me wish I had gone among them, for all the fire was in one spark.’ [1] The news of the battle of Naseby, however, so far stirred Baxter, then living at Coventry, that he must needs join his old friends, and for two years he moved about with the army, as chaplain to Whalley’s regiment which had been {308} formed out of Cromwell’s. The sectarian spirit he then found too strong for his mild piety to control.
[1] [Reliquiae Baxterianae, p. 51.]
‘We that lived quietly at Coventry did keep to our old principles; we were unfeignedly for king and parliament; we believed the war was only to save the parliament and kingdom from papists and delinquents and to remove the dividers, that the king might return again to his parliament, and that no changes might be made in religion but with his consent. But when I came to the army among Cromwell’s soldiers, I found anew face of things which I never dreamt of. The plotting heads were very hot upon that which intimated their intentions to subvert church and state. Independency and anabaptistry were most prevalent. Antinomianism and arminianism were equally distributed.’
Hot-headed sectaries in the highest places, Cromwell’s chief favourites, were asking what were the lords of England but William the Conqueror’s colonels, or the barons but his majors, or the knights but his captains? ‘plainly showing that thy thought God’s providence would cast the trust of religion and the kingdom upon them as conquerors.’ Of some of these dangerous men, particularly of Harrison and Berry, then reckoned Cromwell’s prime favourites, Baxter gives a more particular account. Berry
‘was a man of great sincerity before the wars, and of very good natural parts, affectionate in religion, and while conversant with humbling providences, doctrines, and company, he carried himself as a great enemy to pride. But when Cromwell made him his favourite and his extraordinary valour met with extraordinary success, and when he had been awhile most conversant with those that in religion thought the old puritan ministers were dull, self-conceited men of a lower form, and that new light had declared I know not what to be a higher attainment, his mind, aim, talk and all were altered accordingly. Being never well studied in the body of divinity or controversy, but taking his light among the sectaries, he lived after as honestly as could be expected in one that taketh error for truth.’
‘Harrison,’ says Baxter, ‘would not dispute with me at all, but he would in good discourse very fluently pour out himself in the extolling of free grace, which was savoury to those that had right principles, though he had some misunderstandings of free grace himself. He was a man of excellent natural parts for affection and oratory; but not well seen in the principles of his religion; of a sanguine {309} complexion, naturally of such a vivacity, hilarity, and alacrity as another man hath when he hath drunken a cup too much; but naturally also so far from humble thoughts of himself, that it was his ruin.’ [1]
[1] [Reliquiae Baxterianae, p. 57.]
One day, during the fight at Langport, Baxter happened to be close to Harrison just as Goring’s army broke before the charge of the Ironsides, and heard him ‘with a loud voice break forth into the praises of God, as if he had been in a rapture.’ [1] Such a temper could only be moderated by one who shared its raptures, its wild energy, its scorn of prescription, and who yet had the practical wisdom, the wider comprehension, of which it was incapable. Such a one was Cromwell, a tumultuous soul, but with a strange method in his tumult. The old notion, that this method consisted in a persistent design of personal aggrandisement, may be taken to have been dispelled once for all by the publication of his letters and speeches. That he was a genuine enthusiast, that he was perfectly sincere in the sense that his real ends were those that he professed, that his own advancement was not his object, but merely the condition or result of his getting work done which others could not do, this is the only theory that will explain the facts, if we include among the facts his own language at times when there can have been no motive for insincerity, and the impression which he made on his contemporaries, not when they looked back on his acts in the light of personal grievance, but at the time when they were done. The life-long hypocrisy which the opposite theory ascribes to him is incompatible with the personal attraction which a revolutionary leader must exercise if he is to do his work. In Napoleon, though he did not so much lead a revolution as turn revolutionary forces to military account, there was no touch of hypocrisy. His hard selfishness and his zeal for the material improvement of European life were equally explicit. The assertion, however, of Cromwell’s unselfish enthusiasm is quite consistent with the imputation to him of much unscrupulousness, violence, simulation, and dissimulation, sins which no one has escaped who ever led or controlled a revolution; from which in times like his no man could save his soul but by such saintly abstraction as Baxter takes credit for to himself, and Mrs. Hutchinson to her husband, which in aspiration to heaven leaves earth to its chance.
[1] [Reliquiae Baxterianae, p. 54.]
{310} When Baxter was with the army he found that ‘Cromwell and his council took on them to join no religious party, but to be for the equal liberty of all.’ This account corresponds with the conception of Cromwell’s views to be gathered from his own letters. His relation to the sectaries was the same practically as we have seen Vane’s to have been more speculatively. Without any of Vane’s theosophy, he had the same open face towards heaven, the same consciousness (or dream, if we like,) of personal and direct communication with the divine, which transformed the ‘legal conscience’ and placed him ‘above ordinance.’ Having thus drunk of the spring from which the sectarian enthusiasm flowed, he had no taste for the reasonings which led it into particular channels, while he had, more than any man of his time, not indeed the speculative, but the political instinct of comprehension. In this spirit he entered on the war, where it soon took practical body from the discovery that ‘men of religion’ alone could fight ‘men of honour,’ and that the men of religion, once in war, inevitably became sectaries. To him, as to his men, the issues of battle were a revelation of God’s purpose; the cause, which in answer to the prayers of his people God owned by fire, had the truejus divinum. The practical danger of such a belief is obvious. To Cromwell is due the peculiar glory, that it never issued, as might have been expected, in fanatic military licence, but was always governed by the strictest personal morality and a genuine zeal for the free well-being of the state and nation.
His extant letters, written during the first years of the war, written, be it remembered, by a farmer-squire, forty-four years old, simply exhibit a man of restless and infectious energy, gathering about him, without reference to birth or creed, the men who had the most active zeal for the common cause and promoting of religion, and gradually, as the work of these men grew in importance and was more visibly owned by God, asserting their claims in a louder key. In their tone they sometimes recall the man who some years before, in a parliamentary committee of enclosures, had defended the cause of some injured countrymen of his with so much passion and so ‘tempestuous a carriage,’ that the chairman had been obliged to reprehend him. Among the most frequent topics are the discouragement of his soldiers by their want of pay and supplies (to be borne in mind with reference {311} to subsequent history), his anxiety for godly men and the offence he was giving by the promotion of men of low birth or sectaries. A letter to his cousin, solicitor-general St. John, may be taken as an instance. It was written during the period of feeble management that preceded the self-denying ordinance, before Vane had got the upper hand in the house. [1]
‘Of all men I should not trouble you with money matters, did not the heavy necessities my troops are in, press upon me beyond measure. I am neglected exceedingly!… If I took pleasure to write to the house in bitterness, I have occasion…. I have minded your service to forgetfulness of my own and soldiers’ necessities…. You have had my money; I hope in God, I desire to venture my skin, so do my men. Lay weight upon their patience; but break it not!… Weak counsels and weak actings undo all! all will be lost, if God help not! Remember who tells you.’
[1] [Carlyle,Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, No. xvii.]
In the same letter he says, ‘My troops increase. I have a lovely company; you would respect them, did you know them. They are no “anabaptists”; they are honest sober christians; they expect to be used as men.’
Of the way in which this ‘lovely company’ had been got together we have such indications as this in a letter [1] to the Suffolk committee. ‘I beseech you be careful what captains of horse you choose, what men be mounted. A few honest men are better than numbers. If you choose godly honest men to be captains of horse, honest men will follow them…. I had rather have a plain, russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman, and is nothing else. I honour a gentleman that is so indeed.’
[1] [Carlyle,Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, No. xvi.]
In another letter [1] he says, ‘It may be it provokes some spirits to see such plain men made captains of horse. It had been well that men of honour and birth had entered into these employments; but why do they not appear? Who would have hindered them? But seeing it was necessary the work must go on, better plain men than none; but best to have men patient of wants, faithful and conscientious in their employment…. If these men be accounted “troublesome to the country,” I shall be glad you would send them all to me. I’ll bid them welcome. And when they have fought for you, and endured some other difficulties of war {312} which your “honester” men will hardly bear, I pray you then let them go for honest men!’
[1] [Carlyle,Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, No. xviii.]
Writing to a rigid presbyterian general, who had got the ear of the Earl of Manchester, and had suspended an officer for unconformable opinions, he says, [1] ‘The state in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions; if they be willing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies…. I desire you would receive this man into your favour and good opinion. I believe, if he follow my counsel he will deserve no other but respect from you. Take heed of being sharp, or too easily sharpened by others, against those to whom you can object little but that they square not with you in every opinion concerning religion. If there be any other offence to be charged upon him, that must in a judicial way receive determination.’
[1] [Carlyle,Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, No. xx.]
I will quote extracts from other letters of Cromwell, as illustrating the temper in which he won his victories, and his view of them as the consecration of a new military church, having claims that were not to be put by. One is from a letter written just after the battle of Marston Moor, [1] to his brother-in-law, colonel Walton, who had lost a son in it.
‘Truly England and the church of God hath had a great favour from the Lord, in this great victory given unto us, such as the like never was since this war began. It had all the evidences of an absolute victory gained by the Lord’s blessing upon the godly party principally, We never charged, but we routed the enemy…. God made them as stubble to our swords. We charged their regiments of foot with our horse, and routed all we charged. … Sir, God hath taken away your eldest son by a cannon-shot. It brake his leg. We were necessitated to have it cut off, whereof he died. Sir, you know my own trials this way; but the Lord supported me with this, that the Lord took him into the happiness we all pant for and live for. There is your precious child, full of glory, never to know sin or sorrow any more…. Before his death he was so full of comfort that to Frank Russell and myself he could not express it, “It was so great above his pain.” This he said to us. Indeed, it was admirable. A little after, he said one thing lay upon his spirit. I asked him what that was? He told me it was that God had not suffered him to be any more the executioner of his enemies…. Truly he was exceedingly beloved in the army of all that knew him. But {313} few knew him; for he was a precious young man, fit for God. You have cause to bless the Lord. He is a glorious saint in heaven; wherein you ought exceedingly to rejoice. Let this drink up your sorrow; seeing these are not feigned words to comfort you, but the thing is so real and undoubted a truth. … Let this public mercy to the church of God make you to forget your private sorrow.’
[1] [Carlyle,Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, No. xxi.]
The other quotation is from the conclusion of his account of the storming of Bristol, addressed to the Speaker of the house of commons; [2]
‘All this is none other than the work of God. He must be a very atheist that doth not acknowledge it…. Sir, they that have been employed in this service know that faith and prayer obtained this city for you. I do not say ours only, but of the people of God with you and all England over, who have wrestled with God for a blessing in this very thing. Our desires are that God may be glorified by the same spirit of faith by which we ask all our sufficiency, and have received it. It is meet that he have all the praise. Presbyterians, independents, all have here the same spirit of faith and prayer; the same presence and answer; they agree here, have no names of difference; pity it is it should be otherwise anywhere! All that believe have the real unity, which is most glorious; because inward and spiritual, in the body, and to the head. For being united in forms, commonly called uniformity, every Christian will for peace-sake study and do as far as conscience will permit. And for brethren, in things of the mind we look for no compulsion but that of light and reason.’
[1] [Carlyle,Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, No. xxxi.]
With such a spirit and such a cause, with a leader who could so express it, and as it seemed manifestly owned by God, the army rested victoriously from its labours in the field by midsummer 1646. For the next year it was looking on, with an impatience that gradually became unmanageable, while the presbyterian majority in parliament was contriving its suppression. The leaders of this majority were, on the one hand, the lawyers, Holles, Glyn, and Maynard, on the other, the military members, such as Sir Philip Stapleton, who had been removed from their command by the self-denying ordinance. The motives of these men were a mixture of zeal for presbyterian uniformity, fear of unsettling the monarchical basis of government, and animosity to the army, as sectarian, {314} democratic, and generally irreverent to dignities, or, in their language, dangerous to gentry, ministry, and magistracy. The ministry and magistracy of the city backed them, vigorously worrying parliament every week with statements of church grievances. In December, 1646, the lord mayor in person presented a petition, complaining specially of the contempt put on the covenant, and of the growth of heresy and schism, the pulpits being often usurped by preaching soldiers. To cure these evils they pray that the covenant may be imposed on the whole nation, under penalties; that no one be allowed to preach who has not been regularly ordained, and that all separate congregations be suppressed. In answer to this parliament passed an order against lay-preachers, to be enforced by local magistrates, an order not very likely to be effective, when the preachers were soldiers. A glimpse of what was going on is given by an extract from Whitelock’s Memoirs (ii. 104) of about the same date: ‘A minister presented articles to the council of war against a trooper, for preaching and expounding the scripture, and uttering erroneous opinions. The council adjudged that none of the articles were against the law or articles of war, but that only the trooper called the parson “a minister of antichrist;” for which reproach they ordered the trooper to make an acknowledgment; which he did, and was one night imprisoned.’ In contrast with this lenience of the council of war may be placed a declaration of the provincial assembly of the London ministers, which after a denunciation of twelve specific heresies, winds up with the following résumé: [1] ‘We hereby testify our great dislike of prelacy, erastinianism, brownism, and independency, and our utter abhorrency of anti-scripturism, popery, arianism, socinianism, arminianism, antinomianism, anabaptism, libertinism, and familism; and that we detest the error of toleration, the doctrine that men should have liberty to worship God in that manner as shall appear to them most agreeable to the word of God.’ Edwards, in his ‘Gangrena,’ published while this storm was at its height, had been even more minute. He enumerated a hundred and seventy-six erroneous doctrines then prevalent, distributed among sixteen sects, and appealed to parliament, taking warning from the example of Eli, to use coercive power for their suppression, or to put an end to a {315} toleration, ‘at which the dear brethren in Scotland stand amazed,’ and which is ‘eclipsing the glory of the most excellent Reformation.’ To us this agitation has its comic side. To Milton, a competent judge, it was serious enough;
‘Men whose life, learning, faith, and pure intentWould have been held in high esteem with Paul,Must now be named and printed hereticsBy shallow Edwards and Scotch what d’ye call.’
[1] [Neal’sPuritans, ii. 265.]
To the sectarian soldiers, who had been fighting, not for a theory of parliamentary right, but for a spiritual freedom which the sacerdotal establishment had not allowed, ‘who knew what they fought for, and loved what they knew,’ it represented a power which threatened to rob them of all for which they had shed their blood. The danger was at its height when the Scotch army was still in England and the king in its keeping. If the king had then closed with the presbyterian offers, he might have returned to London and directed the whole power of parliament (which had still Massey’s soldiers at command), the presbyteries, and the Scotch against the sectarian army. A new and more desperate civil war must have followed, to end probably in a reaction of unlimited royalism. Charles, however, with all his ability, had not enough breadth of view even to play his own game with advantage. He would play off the two parties against each other, without committing himself to either, trusting that while they tore each other to pieces, Montrose’s army and the ‘Irish rebels,’ with whom he had already a treaty, would come in and settle the business in his favour. Thus while he was still with the Scotch, or even before, he was tampering unsuccessfully with Vane and the independents, till at last the Scotch got tired of him, and having received their arrears of pay from the parliament at the beginning of the year 1647, returned back to their own country.
During all this interval, Cromwell was at his place in parliament, watching events. His position was a strong one. The quartering of the army in the midland counties prevented any sudden advance of the Scots on London, and the election of several of his military friends, notably his son-in-law Ireton, to the vacant seats at the end of 1645, established a regular communication between the army and parliament. Among the old members his supporters were chiefly Vane, Marten, and St. John, men in several respects antipathetic to {316} Cromwell and each other, but for the present held together by a common antagonism. Vane’s interest was for freedom of opinion on deep religious grounds. So far he and Cromwell were at one; but Vane had qualities, as appeared in the sequel, which unfitted him to lead a revolution when it took military form. He was reputed physically a coward; he had none of the rough geniality which gives personal influence at such times; military interference and the predominance of an individual were specially abhorrent to him. Marten was of a rougher type. In the earlier stages of the war he alone had avowed republicanism. He was the wit of the house of commons, the one man of the time whose recorded speeches can be read with pleasure. Presbyterian uniformity Marten hated with a hearty hatred, but he was avowedly void of religious feeling, and thus out of sympathy with the moving spirit of the time. On him, even less than on Vane, could Cromwell have any personal hold. In August, 1643, when the house was censuring Mr. Saltmarsh, a minister who had urged that if the king would not grant the parliamentary demands, he and the royal line should be ‘rooted out,’ Marten vindicated him, saying that ‘it were better one family should be destroyed than many.’ Upon this, we are told, there was a storm in the house, and many members ‘urged against the lewdness of Mr. Marten’s life, and the height and danger of his words.’ The indignation was such that he was committed to the tower for a time, and did not resume his seat for a year and a half. St. John was an erastian lawyer, who had pleaded for Hampden in the ship-money business, and was now about head of his profession. There was a darkness both in his skin and his character, which in contrast with his intellectual light won him the nickname of the ‘dark-lantern.’ He was strong for liberty of conscience, but had a lawyer’s belief in the necessity of monarchy, and would always take the shortest road to his end. With him Cromwell’s friendship was personal, and like all his personal friendships, lasting. He was the practical link between the enthusiasm of the military saint and the wisdom of the world. In concert with these men, Cromwell had anxiously watched and hastened the negotiations for the withdrawal of the Scotch. Their withdrawal, however, and the removal of the king in parliamentary custody to Holmby, though it simplified the dangers by which the cause was {317} threatened, by no means removed them. During the first half of 1647, the presbyterian managers were pressing forward their two projects of a reconciliation with the king and the disbanding of the army, necessary for the success of their cause. Their plan for dealing with the army was to send part of it to Ireland, under Massey and Skippon as generals, of whom one was a creature of their own, the other a strong presbyterian; to disband the rest, with the exception of a few regiments that could be managed; and to retain no one except Fairfax above the rank of colonel, a restriction aimed specially at Cromwell. Votes to this effect passed the house in the spring of 1647, not apparently without great pressure from the city, which was constantly presenting petitions against the army and lay preachers, roughly enforced by mobs of apprentices. But meanwhile the army had got a parliament of its own. The several troops in a regiment elected each a representative to form the regimental council, from which again one member was delegated to join the general council of the army. The president of this council seems generally to have been Berry, one of Cromwell’s special friends, whose character we have heard described by Baxter. The army had thus a regular organisation of opinion, and henceforward came to regard itself and to act as the true representative of the ‘godly interest’ in England, sanctioned by a higher than parliamentary authority. At first its demands were modest enough. They were all ready to go to Ireland, if only Cromwell and Fairfax might lead them; they were ready to disband so soon as they should get their arrears of pay and be secured by an act of indemnity against punishment for offences committed during war. The nominal difficulty at last was about the arrears of pay. Parliament would only agree to pay arrears for eight weeks, and the army asserted its claim for at least fifty weeks. Meanwhile the militia of the city had been placed in trusty presbyterian hands; the king had accepted provisionally (with what insincerity his correspondence showed) the preliminary presbyterian propositions, and pressed for a personal treaty. The lords so far assented to this as to vote that he should be brought to Oatlands, in the neighbourhood of London. If once this had been done, he would have been in direct communication with interests hostile to the army, and the fusion of royalism and presbyterianism would for the time have been {318} complete. Holles and his friends thought the prize was within their grasp, and against the discreet advice of Whitelock pressed the disbanding. The tone of the army grew higher, till one day at the beginning of June, news was brought to the parliament that a troop of horse, under one cornet Joyce, had appeared at Holmby and demanded the king of the commissioners. ‘The commissioners,’ in the words of Whitelock, ‘amazed at it, demanded of them what warrant they had for what they did; but they could give no other account but that it was the pleasure of the army.’ The king afterwards asked them for their commission. Joyce answered, ‘that his majesty saw their commission; the king replied that it had the fairest frontispiece of any he ever saw, being five hundred proper men on horseback.’ [1] On the same day that this happened, Cromwell had ridden out of town with one servant to the quarters of the army, just in time to escape forcible detention by Holles’s friends. The plot now thickened. The army had a general rendezvous at Triploe Heath, and greeted the parliamentary commissioner who met them there with cries of ‘justice! justice!’ Thence gradually moving towards London, they sent up articles of charge against Holles and ten other members, for obstructing the business of Ireland, and acting against the army and the liberty of the subject. During two months they waited for the execution of their demands, sending parliament a reminder now and then, but maintaining perfect self-restraint. Holles and his party, on the other hand, showed all the precipitation of weakness. Under their management the authorities of the city got together a loose army of militiamen, of which the command was given to Massey, and organised the mob of apprentices, which finally put so much pressure on parliament that the speaker and many members of both houses took refuge with the army. This was the turning-point. The army, now under parliamentary sanction, easily walked through Massey’s lines, and quartered in the suburbs. The city was in a panic. ‘A great number of people attended at Guildhall. When a scout came in and brought news that the array made a halt, or other good intelligence, they cry “one and all!” But if the scouts reported that the army was advancing nearer them, then they would cry as loud, “Treat, treat, treat!”’ [2] The corporation, {319} its cheap vaunts at an end, sent resolutions to the army in favour of ‘a sweet composure.’ In calm indifference to its good words and its bad, the army on August 6 marched through London, ‘in so orderly and civil a manner, that not the least offence was offered by them to any man in word, action, or gesture.’
[1] [Whitelock, ii. 154.]
[2] [ib. ii. 189.]
The king, now in the hands of the army, had been following its movements, and when it finally established its headquarters at Putney, he was allowed to live in considerable state at Hampton Court, with his own attendants, but under the guard of Colonel Whalley, Cromwell’s trusted cousin. Here he stayed till his flight to Carisbrook in the Isle of Wight, in the following November. Those who explain Cromwell’s life by its result, as a long scheme for his own elevation, suppose that during this period he carried on private negotiations with the king, first perhaps with the view of restoring him to power under his own direction, but afterwards to lure him on to destruction; that with this object he encouraged him by vain hopes to refuse the proposals of parliament, and finally to escape from Hampton, whence by some mysterious means he was guided to an asylum of Cromwell’s own preparing at Carisbrook. Such a view is expressed even in the panegyric of Marvell, written on Cromwell’s return from Ireland in the summer of 1650;
‘What field of all the civil warWhere his were not the deepest scar?And Hampton shows what partHe had of wiser art,
Where, twining subtle fears with hope,He wove a net of such a scopeThat Charles himself might chaseTo Carisbrook’s narrow case;
That thence the royal actor borneThe tragic scaffold might adorn.’
In this, however, as in other cases, history is really less personal and mysterious than is commonly supposed. Cromwell and Ireton doubtless negotiated personally with the king during the summer of this year, but it was on the basis of a public program for resettlement agreed to by the army and communicated to parliament. At the same time the parliament, still presbyterian in feeling, was submitting to the king, in conjunction with the Scots, propositions the {320} same in substance as those which he had rejected when with the Scotch army at Newcastle. One of the essential points in the army’s scheme, of which more will be said afterwards, was that it allowed the use of the Common Prayer, and provided against the compulsory imposition of the covenant. The parliamentary scheme, on the other hand, was conceived in the strict presbyterian sense. When the proposals of the army were publicly presented to Charles in the month of July, he treated them in a way which set the heart of the army against him once for all. Cromwell and Ireton, however, continued to treat with him. They simply wanted to keep him from closing with the presbyterians, not having made up their minds to any further step, while he strangely fancied that he was cajoling them and playing off the army against the parliament. They did not, while treating him with all respect, for a moment lower their tone with him. They would not consent to kiss his hand, and the king himself complained that no promise of favour or decoration could affect them. Their perfect explicitness is witnessed by two opposite authorities, both good, and both on different grounds unfriendly to Cromwell, by Berkley the king’s confidant, and the wife of colonel Hutchinson. By the middle of September they had given up all hopes of him. It is a well-known story that Charles sent a letter to the queen, sewn in the skirt of the messenger’s saddle, in which he said that the army and the Scots were both courting him, and that he should close with the party that bid fairest, probably with the Scots; that Cromwell and Ireton having secret information of this, sat drinking, in the dress of common troopers, at the Blue Boar in Holborn, where the messenger was to put up; that there they seized him, ripped up the skirts of the saddle, and found the letter. This story has received many embellishments, such as that the letter said that Cromwell and Ireton were expecting a silken garter, but would find a hempen cord, but is probably in substance true. There was no need, however, of any such mysterious discovery to satisfy Cromwell and Ireton that the king was playing a double game. With that inability to conceal exultation in his own artifice which was one of his most curious characteristics, he told them so plainly, while they pronounced no less plainly that God had hardened his heart.
While these negotiations were going on, the sectarian {321} enthusiasm of the army was becoming rapidly republican, and worse than this, the republican was but one mode of the ‘levelling spirit,’ the spirit of resentment against ‘gentry, ministry, and magistracy’ in general, which might at any time break into flames. The soldiers had their own printing-press from which pamphlets, voted seditious by the parliament, were constantly issuing. Cromwell and Ireton, at the prayer-meetings of the army, which they were in the habit of attending, could feel its pulse, and tell when the beating of the heart was no longer controllable. They were clearly neither of them republicans of deliberate purpose, but some time during the autumn of 1647 they found that the only way to control the levelling impulse was to yield to the republican. It was probably because they had thus made up their minds that things must be worse before they were better, that they allowed the king a liberty at Hampton, of which he availed himself to come to an understanding with Capel, Ormond, and Lauderdale for a combined royalist rising in England, Ireland, and Scotland. On November 8 he escaped from Hampton, and made for Carisbrook. He preferred this asylum to Scotland under a notion, for which there was clearly some foundation, that he had an interest in the army, and that Hammond, the governor, might be wrought upon.
During the month of October, Cromwell in his place at Westminster was pressing forward the propositions of parliament to the king, and in doing so, he found himself in opposition to the small party of thorough republicans, which consisted chiefly of the newly-elected officers of the army. This has been reckoned a piece of his duplicity, as he must have known, it is said, that the king, relying on his interest elsewhere, would reject the propositions and thus make a final breach with the parliament. It is to be observed, however, that he supported them on two conditions, one that a clause should be inserted securing liberty of conscience, the other that a limit should be put to the duration of the presbyterian government. The real key to his conduct in this crisis, as throughout the subsequent history, is his desire for such a reconciliation of parties as would at once prevent government by a faction and secure the ‘godly interest.’ With this object he sought, without breaking wholly from the moderate presbyterians, to commit parliament to such a {322} policy as would conciliate the milder spirit of the army. The strength of the levelling spirit, which made such conciliation essential, was soon formidably apparent; only the courage and persuasiveness of Cromwell could have held it down. On November 15 the dangerous regiments were ordered to a rendezvous at Ware, where Fairfax and Cromwell met them. A ‘remonstrance’ was read by Fairfax to the troops. It recited their old demands for pay and indemnity and for the calling of a new and free parliament; these Fairfax said that he was willing to support, if the soldiers would promise perfect obedience to his orders. This satisfied all the regiments but one, which showed signs of mutiny. Cromwell then rode along its armed front, looking the men literally in the face. Eleven, whose looks he did not like, he ordered out of the ranks. The men acquiesced. Three were then tried on the field and condemned to die. One only, however, was shot, and the rest pardoned. Thus at the loss of a single life the plague of mutiny was for the time stayed. The secret of the good temper of the army was a renewed assurance that their leaders would not again imperil the cause of the Lord’s people by ‘carnal conferences’ with his crowned enemy.
The king was followed to Carisbrook by four bills, which formed the ultimatum of the parliament. They represent the predominance of independency in the house, which the efforts of Cromwell and his friends had at last attained. They make no more mention of religion, but simply secure the supremacy of the commons. These Charles rejected, while at the same time, swallowing his zeal for bishops and liturgy, he signed a treaty with the Scots, which, at the price of the establishment of presbyterianism, secured him a Scotch army to deliver him from the sectaries and restore him to London on terms that would have made him virtually irresistible. This was the beginning of the end. On January 3, 1648, Cromwell writes to Governor Hammond, evidently in high spirits: ‘The House of Commons is very sensible of the king’s dealings, and of our brethren’s (the Scots), in this late transaction…. It has this day voted as follows: 1st, they will make no more addresses to the king; 2nd, none shall apply to him without leave of the two houses, upon pain of being guilty of high treason; 3rd, they will receive nothing from the king.’ Henceforth there could be but two {323} alternatives. Either the new royalist rising would prevail and restore a short-lived tyranny of presbyters to end in a longer one of priests, or it would fail, and on its wreck be established a military republic.
In the last lecture I followed the course of events to the time when it became clear that a military republic was the only possible alternative for an unconditional triumph of Charles. Whether this republic should be more or less exclusive, depended on the possibility of bringing the English presbyterians to an understanding with the erastian or independent party in parliament, and both to an understanding with the army. During the spring of 1648 we find Cromwell, true to his instinct of comprehension, working for this end, and rewarded by all parties with jealousy for his pains. He had a conference at his house, Ludlow tells us, ‘between those called the grandees of the house and army, and the commonwealth’s men.’ The grandees of the house would probably be the original members of the Long parliament who might be of erastian or independent sympathies, such as St. John, Nathaniel Fiennes, one or two uninteresting lords, and perhaps Vane, who was not a declared republican. The commonwealth’s men, not grandees, would be members elected to fill up vacancies at the end of 1645, such as Ludlow himself, Hutchinson, and Thomas Scott, officers of the army, but not of Cromwell’s training. Marten, though in standing a grandee, headed this republican party. The grandees, according to Ludlow, with Cromwell at their head, ‘kept themselves in the clouds, and would not declare their judgments either for a monarchical, aristocratical, or democratical government, maintaining that any of them might be good in themselves, or for us, according as providence should direct us. The commonwealth’s men declared that monarchy was neither good in itself, nor for us. That it was not desirable in itself they urged from the eighth chapter of the 1st book of Samuel, where the choice of a king was charged upon the Israelites by God himself as a rejection of him.’ That it was not good ‘for us’ was proved ‘by the infinite mischiefs and oppressions we had suffered under {324} it and by it; that indeed our ancestors had consented to be governed by a single person, but with this proviso, that he should govern according to the direction of the law, which he always bound himself by oath to perform; that the king had broken this oath, and therefore dissolved our allegiance, protection and obedience being reciprocal; that … it seemed to be a duty incumbent upon the representatives of the people to call him to account for the blood shed in the war … and then to proceed to the establishment of an equal commonwealth, founded upon the consent of the people, and providing for the rights and liberties of all men.’ So elaborate an utterance of republican formulae did not look like conciliation, and finally, says Ludlow, ‘Cromwell took up a cushion and flung it at my head and then ran downstairs; but I overtook him with another, which made him hasten down faster than he desired.’
He was not more successful with the presbyterians, whose leaders he got to confer with the independents, and whom he afterwards addressed in the city. ‘The city,’ according to a contemporary presbyterian writer, ‘were now wiser than our first parents, and rejected the serpent and his subtleties.’ The presbyterian zeal in fact, as it boasted of itself, would learn nothing by events. During the summer of 1648, while the army under Cromwell and Ireton was trampling out the royalist risings and scattering the intrusive Scots (no longer led by Lesley), Holles availed himself of the absence of the military members to return to the house and regain his majority. Under his direction, and at the pressure of the city, negotiations in the exclusive presbyterian interest were re-opened with the king. These led to concessions on his part, only made to gain time, which at last, in the beginning of December, in a house of two hundred and forty-four, were voted a sufficient basis of agreement. This vote made the final rent between military and parliamentary power, and Vane, who more than anyone else dreaded this rent, resisted it to the utmost. Marten, however, was already bringing up Cromwell from the north, and Cromwell a few days before had given voice to the ‘great zeal he found among his officers for impartial justice on offenders.’ Soldiers full of the same zeal were already in the suburbs. The day after the vote was passed, colonel Pride ‘purged’ the house of the ‘royalising’ members; within two days Cromwell appeared in it arm in {325} arm with Marten, and the military republic was virtually established.
It is needless to repeat the story of the king’s trial and execution, or tell how his judges wore all the dignity of men who believed themselves in the sight of God and the world to be violating the false divinity of consecrated custom that a true divinity might appear, or how Charles, after a few bursts of misplaced contempt or passion, yet at the last, in Marvell’s words,
‘Nothing common did or meanUpon that memorable scene,But with his keener eyeThe axe’s edge did try;
Nor called the gods, with vulgar spite,To vindicate his helpless right;But bowed his comely headDown, as upon a bed.’
The new government, in the exhilaration of sudden success, and conscious that its strength lay in the awe which it inspired, ‘went on roundly with its business.’ Considering its position, however, it kept its hands strangely free from blood. It had the temptation, generally so fatal in times of revolution, of feeling irresistible force at its command for the moment without the least guarantee of permanent stability. Yet its severity was confined to inflicting banishment and confiscation on fifteen magnates who had been prominent in the second war, to imprisoning a few others, and to killing Hamilton, Holland, Capel, and colonel Foyer. Of these, Capel alone, according to the ideas of the time, could have hoped for a better fate, for he alone was exempt from the charge of treachery, but the very greatness of his character, as Cromwell with his usual explicitness stated, made it necessary for the commonwealth that he should die.
Meanwhile the purged house of commons was constituting itself a sovereign power. Only such members were re-admitted to it who would declare dissent from the vote that the king’s concessions afforded a ground of settlement. First and last about a hundred and fifty members seem to have been admitted on these terms. Two days after the king’s death the lords sent a humble message to the commons inviting them to a conference on the condition of the state. The commons took no heed of the message, which was {326} repeated several times, till February 6, when they responded by a vote that the tipper house was ‘useless, dangerous, and ought to be abolished.’ The next day ‘kingship’ was abolished by a formal vote, and soon afterwards the executive government was delegated to a council of state of forty members, to be nominated yearly by the commons. The accessories of republicanism were arranged mainly by Marten, who clearly did his work with glee. At his instance the old ‘great seal’ was broken, and a new one made with the arms of England and Ireland on one side, and a ‘sculpture or map of the commons sitting’ on the other. Under this new seal, and under oath to ‘the parliament and people,’ the judges were to hold their commissions, which six of the twelve agreed to do. A new coinage was also issued with a cross and harp and the motto ‘God with us’ on one side; the arms of England between a laurel and palm, with the legend ‘Commonwealth of England,’ on the other. At the same time the royal statues were all taken down, and on the pedestals was inscribed with the date, ‘Exit tyrannus regum ultimus.’ All these were the devices of Mr. Henry Marten. A more serious business was the issue of an ‘engagement’ to the new government. This, though at first promulgated in a severe retrospective form, was finally reduced to a promise of fidelity to the ‘commonwealth, as established without king or lords.’ Without taking this engagement, no one was to have the benefit of suing another at law, ‘which,’ says Baxter, ‘kept men a little from contention, and would have marred the lawyers’ trade.’
The question whether Charles deserved his death, is one which even debating societies are beginning to find unprofitable. His death was a necessary condition of the establishment of the commonwealth, which, again, was a necessary result of the strife of forces, or more properly, the conflict of ideas, which the civil war involved. At first sight, indeed, it might seem the result merely of accident, or at any rate of personal action and character, of the military talent of Cromwell, of the nature of the army which he got together, of the parliamentary animosities begotten of the self-denying ordinance, of the foolish confidence of Charles in his ability to shatter the two parties against each other, and lastly of the resolution of Cromwell in self-defence to command the situation. Beneath the confused web of personal relations, {327} however, may be seen the conflict of those religious ideas which I have spoken of as resulting from the action of the Reformation on the spirit of Christendom. On the one hand was thejus divinumof a sacerdotal church; not simply appealing by ritual or mystery to the devout, but applied at once to strengthen and justify a royal interest. To this was opposed thejus divinumof the presbyterian discipline, resting, not on priestly authority, but on the popular conscience, yet claiming to be equally absolute over body and soul with the other. Their antagonism elicited thejus divinumof individual persuasion, a right hitherto unasserted in christendom, which, while the old recognised rights were in the suspense of conflict, became a might. In the rapture of war it felt its strength, and a master-hand gave it the form and system which it lacked. The ancient order, too weak to regulate or absorb it, tried blindly, while it was still armed and exultant, to crush it, and itself necessarily fell to pieces in the attempt. But this might of individual persuasion, though in a revolutionary struggle it could conquer, was unable to govern. It was a spirit without a body, a force with no lasting means of action on the world around it. Even at the present day its office is to work under and through established usage and interests, rather than to control them. Much less capable was it of such control, when it was still in the stage of mere impulse or feeling, with none of the calm comprehension which comes of developed thought.
When it first faced the world in organic shape as a military republic, it already presented practical contradictions which ensured its failure. The republic claimed, and claimed truly, to be the creation of the impulse of freedom, yet it found nothing but sullen acquiescence around it; it spoke in the name of the people, not half of whom, as lady Fairfax said, it represented; it asserted parliamentary right, though parliament had been ‘purged’ (nearly clean) to make room for it; it was directed by men of a ‘civil’ spirit, and had civil right to maintain, while it rested on the support of armed enthusiasts, who cared only for the privilege of saints. It was, in fact, founded on opinion, the opinion of a few, brought to sudden strength and maturity, as it might have been in an Athenian assembly, by debate in and about the parliament and in the council of the army, but which had {328} no hold either on the sentiment or the settled interests of the country. In the counties which throughout the war had served as the screen of London, those, that is, which formed the eastern association, together with Buckinghamshire and Berkshire, it seems to have had a certain amount of genuine support. Here the influence of Cromwell and his immediate friends, in Berkshire especially the influence of Marten, was strong; and the sentiment emanating from London, through the pervasive action of sectarian preachers was quickly felt. Even here, however, the sympathy was with the new government as a source of religious reform and protection of tender consciences, rather than as republican; and close at its doors the commonwealth had evidence of a different feeling, not only opposed to it, but on which it could not hope to work. In the spring of 1648, before Cromwell took the field, when the whole country was simmering with insurrection, the parliament had been specially troubled with a movement under its own eyes, of which Whitelock has given a particular account. [1] A petition from Surrey was brought up by some hundreds of the petitioners in person, that the king might ‘forthwith be established on his throne, according to the splendour of his ancestors.’ The petition was not presented to the commons till the afternoon, ‘when some of the countrymen, being gotten almost drunk, and animated by the malignants, fell a quarrelling with the guards, and asked them “why they stood there to guard a company of rogues.” Then words on both sides increasing, the countrymen fell upon the guards, disarmed them, and killed one of them’; till more soldiers were brought up, and the countrymen dispersed. About the same time there was a ‘high and dangerous riot’ in the city, which began in Moorfields about ‘sporting and tippling on the Lord’s day,’ contrary to the ordinance of parliament. [2] For a whole day the rioters seem to have been masters of the city. They seized the lord mayor’s house, and took thence a ‘drake.’ With this they ‘possessed a magazine in Leadenhall,’ and then ‘beat drums on the water to invite the seamen for God and king Charles.’ The next day a couple of regiments crushed the tumult. All the time a general lawless riot was spreading over Kent, got up by malignants, who circulated a rumour that the parliament meant to hang two men in every town.
[1] [Whitelock, ii. 313.]
[2] [April 10, Rushworth, vii. 1051.]
{329} If such things could happen where the parliament could make itself felt most quickly, we may imagine the popular condition in regions where there was the same ignorance, the same liability to panic, the same tendency to tippling and gaming not on Sundays only, for malignants to work on in the interest of ‘God and king Charles,’ and where no voice from the republican headquarters ever penetrated. ‘The inconstant, irrational, image-doting rabble,’ as the proud republicans called it, which, when the king was being brought from Newcastle to Holmby, had thronged his path to be touched for the evil, which eagerly bought up fifty editions in twelve months of the Eikon Basilikè with the picture of the king at his prayers, was constant enough in two feelings, of which the republicans would have done well to take account, a reverence for familiar names, and a resentment against virtues which profess to be other than customary and commonplace. It was at once the merit and the weakness of the commonwealth’s men that they irritated these feelings at every point.
‘Before them shone a glorious world,Fresh as a banner bright, unfurledTo music suddenly;’ [1]
and they could not wait to attain it by slow accommodations to sense and habit. They believed that God through them was ‘casting the kingdoms old into another mould,’ and in the pride of triumphant reason they took pleasure in trampling on the common feelings and interests, through which reason must work, if it is to work at all. In the writings of Milton, the true exponent of the higher spirit of the republic, we find on the one hand a perfect scorn of the dignities and plausibilities then as now recognised in England (which makes him the best study for a radical orator that I am acquainted with), on the other, a free admission of the sensual degradation of the people, which estranged them from a government founded on reason. In the latter respect there is a marked contrast between the language he held at the beginning of the war, when ‘he saw in his mind a noble and puissant nation rousing itself like a strong man after sleep,’ and the language of the ‘Eiconoclastes,’ where he admits that the people ‘with a besotted and degenerate baseness of spirit, except some few who yet retain in them the old English {330} fortitude and love of freedom, imbastardised from the ancient nobleness of their ancestors, are ready to fall flat and give adoration to the image and memory of this man, who hath more put tyranny into an act than any British king before him.’ To him, throughout, the puritan war had seemed a crisis in the long struggle between the spirit and the flesh, a great effort to reclaim the spirit from ‘the outward and customary eye-service of the body,’ and a system of political asceticism was its proper result. Such a system to its believing supporters was the commonwealth. Its claim was not gradually to transmute, but suddenly to suppress, the feeling of the many by the reason of the few; a claim which all the while belied itself, for it appealed to popular, and even natural right, and which implied no concrete power of political reconstruction. It was a democracy without a δημος, [2] it rested on an assertion of the supremacy of reason, which from its very exclusiveness gave the reason no work to do.
[1] [Wordsworth,Ruth.]
[2] [Greek demos = people, Tr.]
The great interests of the nation at that time may be taken as the landed, the mercantile, and the clerical; and the republic at starting might reckon on hostility from each of them. With the landed interest it dealt at once too severely to have its friendship, and too lightly to crush it. If it had adopted a sweeping measure of confiscation, as other revolutionary governments have done, and as it did itself in Ireland, it might have settled the soldiers on the confiscated lands, thus easing itself of their too obtrusive support, while it established a permanent interest in its favour over the whole country. As it was, the land was only confiscated in a few special cases, when it was given to the various grandees of the parliament, in reward of services, and in return for money spent on the public behalf. The ordinary gentry who had been in arms for the king, ‘delinquents,’ as they were called, were allowed to retain their estates on payment by way of composition of some part of the income. They thus retained their old means of influence, along with a memory of a grievance to intensify their natural royalism. Nor was the trouble got over once for all at the foundation of the commonwealth. The composition paid on the estates was one of the chief sources of revenue, and when, through a Dutch war or the like, the republic was short of money, delinquents were hunted out who had hitherto escaped. Thus the sore was kept running, and if the humbled gentry, like {331} colonel Poyer of Pembroke, were ‘sober and penitent in the morning,’ they were also like him often ‘drunk and full of plots in the afternoon.’ Their meetings for horse-races and cock-fighting were reckoned nurseries of disaffection, and the best security against them was that secrets sworn to over the bottle were not generally well kept.
The royalist squire, when he was not at a cock-fighting, would often have his loyalty fanned by an excluded episcopal clergyman whom he had taken as his chaplain. A large number of the clergy, as we have seen, had been driven from their livings by the imposition of the covenant. A fifth of the yearly income of their several benefices was set apart for the benefit of their families (an example not followed at the ejectment of St. Bartholomew’s day), but the excluded clergy themselves were liable to be driven from their old parishes, and would generally take refuge with the royalist gentry. It would seem indeed that under the commonwealth, which, in England at least, was true to its principle of toleration, there was nothing to prevent an episcopalian clergyman who would recognise the republican government from being presented to a living or from using the Common Prayer in his church. Some residue of the old assembly still sat at Westminster, to examine men who presented themselves for ordination or induction to livings, but they had no power to compel such presentation, and there is no sign that they were uniformly resorted to. From passages in Baxter’s life we may infer that many moderate episcopalians, men, that is, who were in favour, according to the technical language of the time, of compresbyterial, as distinct from prelatical, episcopacy, held benefices under the new régime. Still there were no doubt numbers of excluded ‘prelatical divines’ about the country, and while they were natural enemies of the commonwealth, the presbyterian ministers were not its friends. Whatever was not sectarian in it, was erastian. Its very existence they reckoned a violation of the covenant, and, if its abolition of kingship could have been borne, its refusal to give the presbyteries a coercive jurisdiction, its declared intention to remove all penal ordinances in matters of conscience, they could not brook. They refused to read its ordinances from the pulpit, as had previously been done, they prayed openly against it, and turned the monthly fast into a general exercise of disaffection. The parliament on its part issued stringent {332} injunctions that all ministers should subscribe the engagement of fidelity to the commonwealth, and finding that the monthly fast had become a ‘fast for strife and debate,’ it declared its abolition and appointed fasts of its own on special occasions. The ministers, however, ‘condemned the engagement to the pit of hell’ and shut up the churches on the new fast days. According to Baxter, as a general rule only the sectarians and the old cavaliers, who were seldom ‘sick of the disease of a scrupulous conscience,’ would swallow the engagement. He not only refused it himself, but circulated letters against it among the soldiers, ‘barking monitories and mementoes,’ in Milton’s phrase. Yet he seems to have been left undisturbed, nor except at the universities do we hear of any penalties for the refusal of the engagement being inflicted. The parliament knew that the presbyterian pulpit was the most powerful lever of popular opinion in the country, and showed a magnanimous patience in dealing with it. It put out declarations, promising protection to the ministers in their benefices, and a maintenance of all ordinances that had been made for reformation in doctrine, worship, and discipline, except such as were penal and coercive. At last it passed an order that state affairs were not to be discussed in sermons, and appointed a committee to receive informations against such as disregarded it. The beneficed ministers, however, stimulated by missives from the Scotch kirk, now in arms for Charles II., continued, says the gentle Mrs. Hutchinson, to ‘spit fire out of their pulpits,’ and even the rout of their allies at Dunbar, though it made their tongues less dangerous, did not make them more smooth.
The reason of the case is obvious. It is the true nemesis of human life that any spiritual impulse, not accompanied by clear comprehensive thought, is enslaved by its own realisation. Presbyterianism at the beginning of the war had been a struggling impulse, noble, but not understanding its own nobleness. It had now, with success, hardened into an interest; its inarticulate idea had become a shallow, though articulate formula; and it was seeking to suppress the spiritual force in which it had itself originated. The genuine commonwealth’s men, on the other hand, were still in the stage of the ‘unbodied thought.’ They announced principles. In practice the presbyterian clergy should be supported and well paid, but universal toleration must be maintained, and tithes were {333} declared judaic and objectionable. The offensiveness of such principles did more to provoke the clergy than the excellence of the practice, which Baxter, at least, was obliged to confess, did to conciliate them.
The best illustration of the real feeling of the republican clique in London towards the preaching presbyterian royalists is to be found in Milton’s treatise on the ‘Tenure of kings and magistrates,’ written just at this crisis, when he was in constant communication with the chief commonwealth’s men.
‘Divines, if we observe them, have their postures and their motions no less expertly than they that practise feats in the artillery ground. Sometimes they seem, furiously to march on, and presently march counter; by-and-by they stand, and then retreat; or if need be, can face about or wheel in a whole body, with that cunning and dexterity as is almost unperceivable, to wind themselves by shifting ground into places of more advantage. And providence only must be the drum; providence the word of command, that calls them from above, but always to some larger benefice…. For while the hope to be made classic and provincial lords led them on, while pluralities greased them thick and deep, to the shame and scandal of religion, more than all sects and heresies they exclaim against; then to fight against the king’s person, and no less a party of his lords and commons, or to put force on both the houses was good, was lawful, was no resisting of superior powers; they only were powers not to be resisted who countenanced the good, and punished the evil. But now that their censorious domineering is not suffered to be universal, truth and conscience to be freed, tithes and pluralities to be no more, though competent allowance provided, and the warm experience of large gifts, and they so good at taking them, yet now to exclude and seize on impeached members, to bring delinquents without exemption to a fair tribunal by the common law against murder, is to be no less than Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. He who but erewhile in the pulpits was a cursed tyrant, an enemy to God and saints, laden with innocent blood, is now, though nothing penitent, a lawful magistrate, a sovereign lord, the Lord’s anointed, not to be touched, though by themselves imprisoned.’ [1]
[1] [Milton’s Prose Works, ii. pp. 45 and 6, ed. 1848.]
When we reflect that the men of whom this was written were the most active and popular section of the beneficed {334} clergy, and that the other section, the accommodating episcopalians, had been covertly hostile to the parliament all along, we shall appreciate the estrangement of the ideas, that were ruling for the time, from the average sentiment of the country. The only agency through which the government could now hope to work on this sentiment was that of the independents and sectaries, who were unbeneficed, and even the support of the independents was not very hearty, for independency in the larger towns was becoming an ‘interest,’ while that of the sectaries might at any time become unmanageable.
The republic, having thus to reckon on open hostility from the clergy, and on a deeper hatred, tempered with fear, from most of the gentry, had no countervailing influence with the commercial class. This class, which never loves experiments in government, took its political tone largely from the presbyterian preachers; and in the city, as we have seen, gave great strength in the crisis of 1648 to the royalist reaction. The financial necessities, moreover, of an armed republic aggravated the offence of its moral and spiritual innovation. Hitherto the army had been supplied with provisions by a system of free quarter. Its leaders had been quite aware of the popular grievance which this system caused, and which only its admirable discipline prevented from being far greater. The removal of it had been a constant topic in the documents issuing from the army-council; but this implied the introduction of new and heavy taxation. The purged parliament, however, had spirit for the work, and quickly imposed an ‘assessment’ of 90,000_l_. a month (more than 1,000,000_l_. a year). Such a burden was sure to be a permanent source of complaint, but for the present the impressive display of restrained power, with which the new government had begun its rule, and the apprehension that it might be the only present alternative for a worse rule of levellers, had made the city more civil. At the special instance of Cromwell and Vane it advanced money on security of the tax, and the lord mayor, with other city magnates, was placed on the committee of assessment. A prompt suppression of a levelling mutiny by Cromwell, in May 1649, seems for the time to have composed the commercial mind, and a few days after a great banquet was given by the city to the parliament and officers of the army, remarkable chiefly {335} for the description of it by Whitelock, which indicates that in one respect at least, good taste, superior to that of our times, went along with puritan gravity. ‘The feast was very sumptuous, the music only drums and trumpets, no healths drunk, nor any incivility.’ The mercantile interest was further conciliated by an act passed soon afterwards (the beginning of legislation which was gradually to transfer the carrying trade of the world from the Dutch to the English), to the effect that no foreign ship should bring merchandise to England except such as was of the growth or manufacture of the country to which the ship belonged. Still the breach between the high spiritual endeavour on which alone the republic really rested, and the aspiration of the smug citizen who left such endeavour to his minister and to Sundays, was too great for orderly and vigorous administration to fill. The condition of this administration, moreover, was that Cromwell should keep its enemies at a distance.
With such dangerous elements all around it, the household of the republic was by no means united in itself. It rested on a temporary coalition between three sets of men, between whom as we have seen there was no real love; the genuine commonwealth’s men, a section of the ‘grandees of the parliament,’ and the leaders of the army. The ‘grandees of the parliament’ had, with scarcely an exception, kept their hands from the death-warrant of Charles. They recognised the new order of things partly to avoid a breach with the army, partly from fear of presbyterian ascendency and an unchecked royalist reaction. So far as they looked ahead at all, they probably contemplated a re-establishment of monarchy in the person of the duke of Gloucester, the late king’s youngest son, whom the parliament had in its keeping. This at least was the case with Whitelock, who was in his way a representative man. On the new council of state (of forty), which included seven peers or eldest sons of peers, five baronets, four knights, and some temporising lawyers, this section had a numerical majority. On the other hand, the stiff republicans were in a decided minority on the council. Only ten regicides were upon it, and from these must be deducted Cromwell and one or two officers whom he could command, and who were not republican on principle. The most eminent of this section were Marten, Bradshaw, Ludlow, and Scott. Bradshaw, a special friend of Milton, had presided at the trial of Charles, {336} in a high beaver hat lined with steel, with the composure, according to Milton, of a man with whom the trial of kings had been the business of life. He was afterwards president of the council of state, where Whitelock, a rival and perhaps jealous lawyer, complains that he did not understand the nature of his office, and made long discourses of his own that no one wanted to hear. Scott had been an officer in the new-model army, but seems already to have been jealous of Cromwell, being one of those men with whom hatred of the ‘rule of a single person’ was a principle of life. In later days, when Monk was supreme, the restoration inevitable, and the republicans fleeing, he stood up in parliament and said that, though he knew not where to hide his head, yet he must say that not his hand only but his heart had been in the execution of Charles. As might be expected, the restoration brought him the honour of martyrdom for his cause. Ludlow was a man of the same temper. His qualities were clearly much valued by Cromwell, and there seems to have been more real friendship between them at this time than Ludlow, looking back upon it from his exile at Vevay in the light of subsequent events, was willing to admit. Marten alone had some touch of the modern French republican about him. We have seen with what zest he arranged the more sensational incidents of the commonwealth. When the motion for the abolition of the house of lords, as ‘useless and dangerous,’ was being discussed, he proposed to substitute the words ‘useless but not dangerous.’ On another occasion, it is said, in drawing up a republican document, he spoke of ‘England being restored to its ancient government of commonwealth,’ and in answer to an objection that a commonwealth never before existed in England, quoted a text which had always puzzled him, where a man blind from his birth was said to be ‘restored’ to the sight heshould have had. Under cover of this gaiety, however, and of a life reputed to be lewd, Marten had a strong republican enthusiasm, which he carried with him to his death through an imprisonment of twenty years.
These republicans, one would suppose, must have felt the uneasiness of their position. They had been the first to appeal from the unpurged parliament to the army. Ludlow, indeed, in his memoirs professed to have been shocked when Cromwell, in the spring of 1647, whispered to him in the house {337} that Holles and his party would never leave ‘till the army pulled them out by the ears’; yet by his own confession a few months later, during the treaty of Newport, he urged Ireton to put force on the parliament before Ireton himself was prepared to do so, and Marten had done the like with Cromwell. To the army they had thus appealed, but to the army, now that they were successful, they no longer meant to go. Its enthusiasm was not theirs. They had too much of the ancient Roman in them, Marten, perhaps, rather of the ancient Greek, to sympathise with the ‘foolishness of Christ’ as it was presented in the army. It was not in them that men, whose pastime was preaching and being preached to, who discovered strange lights in their bibles to interpret strange events, could find a natural leader, but in one who in his private prayers would ‘throw himself on his face and pour out his soul with tears for a quarter of an hour,’ who never went into battle without a text to feed on, who sang psalms as he led them to victory. The army, though it had no representative of its peculiar spirit on the council of state except Cromwell, was the real constituency of the republican parliament. It contained dangerous elements over which parliament had not the least control, and which might at any time overturn the parliamentary system. These may be summed up as the spirit of simple military arrogance, represented by Lambert, the levelling spirit represented by Lilburne and Wildman, and the ‘Fifth Monarchy’ spirit represented by Harrison. Lambert appears to have had the most conspicuous military talent of any of Cromwell’s officers. In the critical spring of 1648 he held an independent command in the north of England. He showed great skill in hanging on the skirts of Hamilton’s army before Cromwell joined him, and afterwards headed the pursuit. At Dunbar he led the fatal attack on the Scotch right wing, and next year when Charles was marching to Worcester, hung on his flank with cavalry, as he had before done on Hamilton’s. But as soon as he was off active service, he became mischievous. Vain, restless, and of extravagant habits, he perpetually chafed alike against Cromwell’s control and the authority of the parliament. He alone of the leading officers had never obtained a seat in parliament, and thus never became habituated to its civilising influence. Mrs. Hutchinson, while including him and Cromwell in the same condemnation, admits that there was this difference, {338} that while the one was gallant and great, the other had nothing but an unworthy pride, most insolent in prosperity and as abject and base in adversity.’ The term ‘leveller,’ then as now, was very loosely and ambiguously applied. According to Mrs. Hutchinson, who is a good authority on this point, the nickname was originally given to a:
‘certain sort of public-spirited men,’ who, when the presbyterian and independent factions were at their hottest, ‘declared against the ambition of the grandees of both and against the prevailing partiality, by which great men were privileged to do those things for which meaner men were punished. Many then got shelter in the house and army against their debts, by which others were undone. The lords, as if it were the chief privilege of nobility to be licensed in vice, claimed many prerogatives, which set them out of the reach of common justice, which these good people would have had equally belong to the poorest as well as to the mighty.’ ‘But,’ continues Mrs. Hutchinson, taking a turn at philosophy, ‘as all virtues are mediums and have their extremes, there rose up after under the same name a people who endeavoured the levelling of all estates and qualities, which these sober levellers were never guilty of desiring.’ [1]