FOOTNOTES:

This holds good of the Puritan party as a whole. It is possible, however, to take too low a view of the judgment of any given section of it. Dr. Gardiner, for instance, somewhat strains the case when he says (Student's History, p. 567) of the Barebone Parliament: "Unfortunately, these godly men [so styled by Cromwell] were the most crotchety and impracticable set ever brought together. The majority wanted to abolish the Court of Chancery without providing a substitute,and to abolish tithes without providing any other means for the support of the clergy." It seems clear that it was the intention of the majority to provide an equivalent for the tithes (see Vaughan, pp. 508, 509; cp. Hallam, ii, 243, 244); and the remark as to the Court of Chancery appears to miss the point. The case against that Court was that it engrossed almost all suits, and yet intolerably delayed them; the proposal was to let the other Courts do the work. Cp. Dr. Gardiner'sCommonwealth and Protectorate, ii, 241, 262; and as to the tithes, i, 192; ii, 32, 240, 275, 276.

It would be hard to show that either Cromwell or the men he used and overrode were, under trial, more conscientious than the average public men of later times. Well-meaning he and many of them were; but, then, most men are well-meaning up to their lights; the moral test for all is consistency with professed principle under changing conditions. And hardly one was stedfastly true to the principles he put forward. They prevaricated under pressure—under harder pressure, no doubt—like other politicians, with only the difference that they could cite random texts and "the Lord" in their justification. And inasmuch as their godly strifes were as blind and as insoluble as those of any factions in history, they furnished no aid and no encouragement to posterity to attempt anew the great work of social regeneration. If that is ever to be done, it must be with saner inspiration and better light than theirs. It is time that, instead of extolling them as men of superior moral stature and inspiration, we now realise they brought to a bewildering problem a vain enlightenment.

On this view, it may be noted, we have a sufficient explanation of the dissimulations of which Cromwell was undoubtedly guilty. Between the antiquated asperity of Villemain, who, while extolling his capacity, charges him withfourberie habituelle(Hist. de Cromwell, 5e édit. p. 272), and the foregone condonations of Carlyle, there is a mean of common sense. Cromwell was a man of immense energy and practical capacity, but with no gift for abstract thought, and spellbound by an incoherent creed. Consequently he was bound to come to serious confusion when he had to deal with tense complexities of conduct and violently competing interests. Coming into desperate positions, for which his religion was worse than no preparation, and in which it could not possibly guide him aright, he must needs trip over the snares of diplomacy, and do his equivocations worse than a more intellectual man would. Cromwell's lying sounds the more offensive because of its constant twang of pietism; but that was simply the dialect in which he had been brought up. Had he lived in our day he would have been able to prevaricate with a wider vocabulary, which makes a great difference.

§ 7

Lest such a criticism should be suspected of prejudice, it may be well to note that a contemporary Doctor of Divinity has at some points exceeded it. It is Dr. Cunningham who argues that, in consequence of the Puritan bias leading to a cult of the Old Testament rather than the New, there occurred under Puritan auspices "a retrogression to a lower type of social morality, which showed itself both at home and abroad."[1129]He traces Puritan influence specially "(a) in degrading the condition of the labourer; (b) in reckless treatment of the native [= coloured] races; (c) in the development of the worst forms of slavery."[1130]The present writer, who rarely finds it necessary to oppose a Protestant clergyman on such an issue, is disposed to think the charge overdrawn, for the following reasons: (1) The English treatment of Ireland was to the full as cruel in the Elizabethan period, before Puritanism had gone far, as under Cromwell; (2) the Catholic Spaniards in Mexico and Peru were as cruel as the Puritan colonists in New England. It is true that "in all the terrible story of the dealings of the white man with the savage there are few more miserable instances of cold-blooded cruelty than the wholesale destruction of the Pequod nation—men, women, and children—by the Puritan settlers"[1131]ofConnecticut. But when Catholics and pre-Puritan Protestants and Dutch Protestants act similarly, the case is not to be explained on Dr. Cunningham's theory. The fallacy seems to lie in supposing that the New Testament has ever been a determinant in these matters. Mosheim confesses that in the wars of the Crusades the Christians were more ferocious than the Saracens;[1132]and Seneca was at least as humane as Paul.

There is distinct validity, on the other hand, in the charge that Puritanism worsened the life of the working classes, first by taking away their ecclesiastical holidays and gild-festivals, and finally by taking all recreation out of their Sunday. The latter step may be regarded as the assertion of the economic interest of the Protestant clergy against the social needs of their flocks. It was not that the labourers were well off before the Rebellion—here again we must guard against false impressions[1133]—but that "Puritan ascendancy rendered the lot of the labourer hopelessly dull."[1134]There is reason to believe, further, that the Stuart administration, applying the Elizabethan Poor Law, took considerable pains to relieve distress,[1135]and that the Commonwealth, on the contrary, treated the lapsed mass without sympathy;[1136]and it is not unlikely that, as has been suggested, this had something to do with the popular welcome given to the Restoration.[1137]The conclusion is that "neither the personal character nor the political success of the Puritans need lead us to ignore their baleful influence on society,"[1138]which was, in the opinion of Arnold, despite his passion for their favourite literature, to imprison and turn the key upon the English spirit for two hundred years. Here again the impartial naturalist will detect exaggeration, but much less than in the current hyperboles to the contrary.

For the rest, the commercial and industrial drift of England, the resort to the mineral wealth[1139]that was to be the economic basis of later commerce and empire, the pursuit of capitalistic manufacture, the building up of a class living on interest as the privileged class of the past had lived on land monopoly—all went on underPuritanism as under Catholicism,[1140]Anglicanism, Calvinism, Lutheranism. The early Puritans, taking up the Catholic tradition, denounced usury; but the clergy of industrial and burgher-ruled States, beginning with Calvin, perforce receded from that veto.[1141]Even under Elizabeth there was a good deal of banking,[1142]and under Cromwell English merchants and money-dealers had learned all the lessons the Dutch could teach them, weighing the Protector's borrowing credit in the scales of the market as they would any other. The spirit of pitiless commercial competition flourished alike under Roundhead and Cavalier,[1143]save in so far as it was manacled by invidious monopolies; the lust of "empire" was as keen among the middle class in Cromwell's day as in Elizabeth's and our own; and even the lot of the workers began to approximate to its modern aspect through the greater facility of transfer[1144]which followed on the old rigidity of feudal law and medieval usage. The industrial age was coming to birth.

FOOTNOTES:[1089]Even on this side the king was not fortunate. It would perhaps do him little harm that "he spoke and behaved with indelicacy to ladies in public" (Hallam, citing Milton'sDefensioand Warburton'sNotes on Clarendon, vii. 626); but his frigidity and haughtiness were more serious matters. He actually caned Vane for entering a room in the palace reserved for persons of higher rank (id., citing Carte'sOrmond, i, 356). In the next reign people contrasted his aloofness with his son's accessibility (seePepys' Diary,passim). Hallam sums up that "he had in truth none who loved him, till his misfortunes softened his temper, and excited sympathy" (10th ed. ii, 226).[1090]That is, in England. In Scotland they did. It is quite clear that the Scotch disaffection dated from Charles's proposal and attempt, at the very outset of his reign, to recover the tithes that had been appropriated by the nobility. (Compare Burton,History of Scotland, v, 270; vi. 45, 75, 77-79, 84, 225; Burnet,Own Time, bk. i, ed. 1838, p. 11; Gardiner,History of England, 1603-1642, vii, 278; Laing,History of Scotland, 2nd ed. iii, 91; Sir James Balfour,Annals of the Stuart Kings, ii, 128; Sir Roger Manley,History of the Rebellions, 1691. p. 7.) This scheme, though dropped, was naturally never renounced in the king's counsels; and the Church riots of 1637, which are specially embalmed in the egregious myth of Jenny Geddes, are explicitly recorded to have been planned by outsiders. See Guthry'sMemoirs, 2nd ed. 1747, p. 23. Burton (vi, 153) rejects this testimony on astonishingly fallacious grounds. Of course, the resentment of English interference with Scotch affairs counted for a great deal.[1091]It is to be remembered, as explaining Charles's sacrifice of Strafford, that the latter was generally detested even at Court (Hallam, ii, 108-10). And at the outset the general hatred of the nobility to Laud was the great cause of Charles's weakness (id.ii, 86). In France, soon afterwards, the aristocratic hatred to Mazarin set up the civil war of the Fronde.[1092]Hallam,Const. Hist.ii, 7.[1093]Id.ii, 10-11.[1094]Id.p. 25. Cp. p. 35.[1095]As to which see Hallam, ii, 81-82.[1096]Cunningham,English Industry and Commerce, ii, 219.[1097]Hallam makes an excellent generalisation of Charles's two contrasted characteristics of obstinacy and pliability. "He was tenacious of ends, and irresolute as to means; better fitted to reason than to act; never swerving from a few main principles, but diffident of his own judgment in its application to the course of affairs" (as cited, ii, 229). He had cause to be so diffident. Hallam more than once observes how bad his judgment generally was.[1098]It is an error to assert, as is often done, that before Carlyle's panegyric the normal English estimate of Cromwell was utterly hostile. Burnet, and even Clarendon and Hume, mixed high praise with their blame; and Macaulay was eloquently panegyrical long before Carlyle. The subject is discussed in the author's article on "Cromwell and the Historians" inEssays in Sociology, vol. 2.[1099]It is to be noted that while he was trampling down all the constitutional safeguards for which he had professed to fight, he kept the English universities on relatively as sound a footing as the army. He thus wrought for the advance of reason in the next generation. But he had his share in the Puritan work of destroying the artistic taste and practice of the nation.[1100]He had, indeed, proposed to the Dutch a joint campaign for the conquest of Spanish America (Gardiner,History of the Commonwealth, ii, 478). But even in that case he would have counted on plunder.[1101]Villemain, however, had previously made some approach to such a view; and Sir John Seeley has left record of how Sir James Stephen suggested to students a research concerning "the buccaneering Cromwell" (Expansion of England, p. 115).[1102]Cromwell's Place in History, pp. 89, 90.[1103]Gardiner,History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate(1897), ii, 475-76. It is startling to contrast this explicit avowal of Dr. Gardiner with the assertion of Dr. Holland Rose (art. in theMonthly Review, July, 1902), that the historian averred to him that English foreign policyalwayscame out well on investigation.[1104]Cromwell's Place in History, p. 97. Cp. p. 101; Burnet,History of his Own Time, bk. i, ed. 1838, pp. 44, 49, 50; Thurloe,State Papers, 1742, vii, 295.[1105]Letter of De Bordeaux to Servien, May 5, 1653, given by Guizot,Histoire de la république d'Angleterre et de Cromwell, tom. i,end.[1106]Letter cited.[1107]Guizot,République d'Angleterre, éd. 1854, ii, 216.[1108]On a War with Spain.Cp. the poem,Upon the Death of the Lord Protector.[1109]Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland.Dryden'sHeroic Stanzason the death of the Protector show how he would have swelled the acclaim.[1110]A similar idea, I find, is well expressed by Seeley,Expansion of England, p. 114.[1111]As to the element of historic "accident," cp. MM. Langlois and Seignobos,Introduction aux études historiques, 2e éd. p. 253.[1112]Hallam, discriminating the shades of opinion, lays it down that "A favourer of unlimited monarchy was not a Tory, neither was a Republican a Whig. Lord Clarendon was a Tory: Hobbes was not; Bishop Hoadly was a Whig: Milton was not" (History, as cited, iii, 199). But though Hobbes's political doctrine was odious to the Tory clergy, and even to legitimists as such, it certainly made for Toryism in practice. In the words of Green: "If Hobbes destroyed the old ground of royal despotism, he laid a new and a firmer one." Cp. T. Whittaker, inSocial England, iv, 280, 281, as to the conflict between "divine right" royalism and Hobbes's principle of an absolute sovereignty set up by social consent to begin with.[1113]As to the "high pretensions to religion, combined with an almost unlimited rapacity" (Petty) on the part of many leading Puritans, cp. Gardiner,Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii, 167, 172, 187, 194, 302, 358, etc.[1114]In the essay on "Hallam'sConstitutional History" (1828). In theHistorythe verdict is more favourable.[1115]Lives of the Friends of the Lord Chancellor Clarendon, by Lady T. Lewis, i, 70; cited inFalklands, by T.L. (Author ofLife of Sir Kenelm Digby), 1897, pp. 121-22.[1116]On the general question of his course see the defence of T.L. (work cited, p. 129sq.), and that by Mr. J.A. R. Marriott,Life and Times of Viscount Falkland, 2nd. ed. 1908, p. 331sq.[1117]As against from 100 to 140 "neuters" and Royalists, and 170 lawyers or officers (Hallam, ii, 269,note, citing the Clarendon Papers, iii, 443).[1118]Republicans there still were in the reigns of William and Anne (see Hallam, iii, 120, 230; cp. the author's essay on "Fletcher of Saltoun" inOur Corner, Jan., 1888), but they never acted openly as such.[1119]See below, ch. iii, § 2.[1120]E.g., Richard Overton's pamphlet (1646) entitledAn Arrow against all Tyrants and Tyranny, wherein the Original, Rise, Extent, and End of Magisterial Power, the Natural and National Rights, Freedoms, and Properties of Mankind, are discovered and undeniably maintained. Its main doctrines are that "To every individual in nature is given an individual property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any"; and that "no man hath power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man's." See a long and interesting extract in theHistory of Passive Obedience since the Reformation, Amsterdam, 1689, i, 59. As to the other anarchists, of whom Lilburne was not one, see Gardiner,History of the Commonwealth, i, 47, 48.[1121]Cp. Gardiner,Cromwell's Place in History, pp. 37-50;History of the Great Civil War, 1889, ii, 53-55, 310-12; iii, 527. While grudgingly noting his straightforwardness, Dr. Gardiner assumes to discredit Lilburne as impracticable, yet is all the while demonstrating that Cromwell's constructive work utterly collapsed. Lilburne explicitly and accurately predicted that the tyrannies of the newrégimewould bring about the Restoration (Guizot,Histoire de la république d'Angleterre et de Cromwell, ed. Bruxelles, 1854, i, 52).[1122]Dr. Gardiner says he was not, but does not explain away Cromwell's acquiescence. As to the war-spirit in England, see van Kampen,Geschichte der Niederlande, ii, 140, 141.[1123]Guizot,Histoire de la république d'Angleterre et de Cromwell, ed. Bruxelles, 1854, i, 202-11; van Kampen,Geschichte der Niederlande, ii, 150, 151; Davies,History of Holland, 1841, ii, 709.[1124]Guizot, as cited, i, 243.[1125]There is a hardly credible story (Gardiner,History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii, 30) that in supporting Owen's scheme for a liberal religious establishment he declared: "I had rather that Mahometanism were permitted amongst us than that one of God's children should be persecuted." If the story be true, so much the worse for his treatment of Catholics.[1126]Gardiner,Commonwealth and Protectorate, small ed. iv, 118. Dr. Gardiner actually praises Cromwell for "good sense" (p. 98) in seeing that the general plantation decreed by the Declaration of 1653 "was absolutely impracticable." It had been his own decree![1127]Mr. Harrison, as cited, p. 210. Mr. Allanson Picton, in his lectures on theRise and Fall of the English Commonwealth, has with more pains and circumspection sought to make good a similar judgment. But the nature of his performance is tested by his contending on the one hand that the ideal of the Commonwealth was altogether premature, and on the other that Cromwell governed with the real consent of the nation.[1128]Gardiner,Commonwealth and Protectorate, i, 193-96; cp. Whittaker, inSocial England, iv, 288, 289.[1129]Growth of English Industry and Commerce, i, 106.[1130]Id.p. 107.[1131]Id.p. 108, 109, citing Bancroft, i, 401, 402. Seeley ignored these and many other matters when he pronounced that the annals of Greater Britain are "conspicuously better than those of Greater Spain, which are infinitely more stained with cruelty and rapacity." In the usual English fashion, he left out of account, too, the horrors of the English conquests of Ireland.[1132]Ecclesiastical History, 12 cent., pt. i, ch. ii, § 2.[1133]See Rogers,Industrial and Commercial History, p. 13, as to the distress about 1630.[1134]Cunningham, as cited, p. 107.[1135]Redlich and Hirst,Local Government in England, 1903, ii, 361; and Miss Leonard'sEarly History of English Poor Relief, as there cited.[1136]See Child's testimony, cited below, p. 467. That, however, specifies no superiority in the methods of the monarchy.[1137]Redlich and Hirst, as cited, ii, 363,note.[1138]Cunningham, p. 109.[1139]See Rogers,Industrial and Commercial History, p. 4, as to the iron trade.[1140]As to usury in the reign of Henry VII see Busch,England unter den Tudors, i, 257, 389. On the general canonist teaching there is a very thorough research in Prof. Ashley'sIntroduction to Economic History, vol. ii, ch. vi.[1141]Cunningham,Growth of English Industry and Commerce, vol. ii (Modern Times), pp. 74-87.[1142]Id.p. 100.[1143]Id.pp. 87, 88, 102.[1144]Cunningham,op. cit.p. 90. As to the upset of gild monopolies in the sixteenth century, see p. 76.

[1089]Even on this side the king was not fortunate. It would perhaps do him little harm that "he spoke and behaved with indelicacy to ladies in public" (Hallam, citing Milton'sDefensioand Warburton'sNotes on Clarendon, vii. 626); but his frigidity and haughtiness were more serious matters. He actually caned Vane for entering a room in the palace reserved for persons of higher rank (id., citing Carte'sOrmond, i, 356). In the next reign people contrasted his aloofness with his son's accessibility (seePepys' Diary,passim). Hallam sums up that "he had in truth none who loved him, till his misfortunes softened his temper, and excited sympathy" (10th ed. ii, 226).

[1090]That is, in England. In Scotland they did. It is quite clear that the Scotch disaffection dated from Charles's proposal and attempt, at the very outset of his reign, to recover the tithes that had been appropriated by the nobility. (Compare Burton,History of Scotland, v, 270; vi. 45, 75, 77-79, 84, 225; Burnet,Own Time, bk. i, ed. 1838, p. 11; Gardiner,History of England, 1603-1642, vii, 278; Laing,History of Scotland, 2nd ed. iii, 91; Sir James Balfour,Annals of the Stuart Kings, ii, 128; Sir Roger Manley,History of the Rebellions, 1691. p. 7.) This scheme, though dropped, was naturally never renounced in the king's counsels; and the Church riots of 1637, which are specially embalmed in the egregious myth of Jenny Geddes, are explicitly recorded to have been planned by outsiders. See Guthry'sMemoirs, 2nd ed. 1747, p. 23. Burton (vi, 153) rejects this testimony on astonishingly fallacious grounds. Of course, the resentment of English interference with Scotch affairs counted for a great deal.

[1091]It is to be remembered, as explaining Charles's sacrifice of Strafford, that the latter was generally detested even at Court (Hallam, ii, 108-10). And at the outset the general hatred of the nobility to Laud was the great cause of Charles's weakness (id.ii, 86). In France, soon afterwards, the aristocratic hatred to Mazarin set up the civil war of the Fronde.

[1092]Hallam,Const. Hist.ii, 7.

[1093]Id.ii, 10-11.

[1094]Id.p. 25. Cp. p. 35.

[1095]As to which see Hallam, ii, 81-82.

[1096]Cunningham,English Industry and Commerce, ii, 219.

[1097]Hallam makes an excellent generalisation of Charles's two contrasted characteristics of obstinacy and pliability. "He was tenacious of ends, and irresolute as to means; better fitted to reason than to act; never swerving from a few main principles, but diffident of his own judgment in its application to the course of affairs" (as cited, ii, 229). He had cause to be so diffident. Hallam more than once observes how bad his judgment generally was.

[1098]It is an error to assert, as is often done, that before Carlyle's panegyric the normal English estimate of Cromwell was utterly hostile. Burnet, and even Clarendon and Hume, mixed high praise with their blame; and Macaulay was eloquently panegyrical long before Carlyle. The subject is discussed in the author's article on "Cromwell and the Historians" inEssays in Sociology, vol. 2.

[1099]It is to be noted that while he was trampling down all the constitutional safeguards for which he had professed to fight, he kept the English universities on relatively as sound a footing as the army. He thus wrought for the advance of reason in the next generation. But he had his share in the Puritan work of destroying the artistic taste and practice of the nation.

[1100]He had, indeed, proposed to the Dutch a joint campaign for the conquest of Spanish America (Gardiner,History of the Commonwealth, ii, 478). But even in that case he would have counted on plunder.

[1101]Villemain, however, had previously made some approach to such a view; and Sir John Seeley has left record of how Sir James Stephen suggested to students a research concerning "the buccaneering Cromwell" (Expansion of England, p. 115).

[1102]Cromwell's Place in History, pp. 89, 90.

[1103]Gardiner,History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate(1897), ii, 475-76. It is startling to contrast this explicit avowal of Dr. Gardiner with the assertion of Dr. Holland Rose (art. in theMonthly Review, July, 1902), that the historian averred to him that English foreign policyalwayscame out well on investigation.

[1104]Cromwell's Place in History, p. 97. Cp. p. 101; Burnet,History of his Own Time, bk. i, ed. 1838, pp. 44, 49, 50; Thurloe,State Papers, 1742, vii, 295.

[1105]Letter of De Bordeaux to Servien, May 5, 1653, given by Guizot,Histoire de la république d'Angleterre et de Cromwell, tom. i,end.

[1106]Letter cited.

[1107]Guizot,République d'Angleterre, éd. 1854, ii, 216.

[1108]On a War with Spain.Cp. the poem,Upon the Death of the Lord Protector.

[1109]Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland.Dryden'sHeroic Stanzason the death of the Protector show how he would have swelled the acclaim.

[1110]A similar idea, I find, is well expressed by Seeley,Expansion of England, p. 114.

[1111]As to the element of historic "accident," cp. MM. Langlois and Seignobos,Introduction aux études historiques, 2e éd. p. 253.

[1112]Hallam, discriminating the shades of opinion, lays it down that "A favourer of unlimited monarchy was not a Tory, neither was a Republican a Whig. Lord Clarendon was a Tory: Hobbes was not; Bishop Hoadly was a Whig: Milton was not" (History, as cited, iii, 199). But though Hobbes's political doctrine was odious to the Tory clergy, and even to legitimists as such, it certainly made for Toryism in practice. In the words of Green: "If Hobbes destroyed the old ground of royal despotism, he laid a new and a firmer one." Cp. T. Whittaker, inSocial England, iv, 280, 281, as to the conflict between "divine right" royalism and Hobbes's principle of an absolute sovereignty set up by social consent to begin with.

[1113]As to the "high pretensions to religion, combined with an almost unlimited rapacity" (Petty) on the part of many leading Puritans, cp. Gardiner,Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii, 167, 172, 187, 194, 302, 358, etc.

[1114]In the essay on "Hallam'sConstitutional History" (1828). In theHistorythe verdict is more favourable.

[1115]Lives of the Friends of the Lord Chancellor Clarendon, by Lady T. Lewis, i, 70; cited inFalklands, by T.L. (Author ofLife of Sir Kenelm Digby), 1897, pp. 121-22.

[1116]On the general question of his course see the defence of T.L. (work cited, p. 129sq.), and that by Mr. J.A. R. Marriott,Life and Times of Viscount Falkland, 2nd. ed. 1908, p. 331sq.

[1117]As against from 100 to 140 "neuters" and Royalists, and 170 lawyers or officers (Hallam, ii, 269,note, citing the Clarendon Papers, iii, 443).

[1118]Republicans there still were in the reigns of William and Anne (see Hallam, iii, 120, 230; cp. the author's essay on "Fletcher of Saltoun" inOur Corner, Jan., 1888), but they never acted openly as such.

[1119]See below, ch. iii, § 2.

[1120]E.g., Richard Overton's pamphlet (1646) entitledAn Arrow against all Tyrants and Tyranny, wherein the Original, Rise, Extent, and End of Magisterial Power, the Natural and National Rights, Freedoms, and Properties of Mankind, are discovered and undeniably maintained. Its main doctrines are that "To every individual in nature is given an individual property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any"; and that "no man hath power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man's." See a long and interesting extract in theHistory of Passive Obedience since the Reformation, Amsterdam, 1689, i, 59. As to the other anarchists, of whom Lilburne was not one, see Gardiner,History of the Commonwealth, i, 47, 48.

[1121]Cp. Gardiner,Cromwell's Place in History, pp. 37-50;History of the Great Civil War, 1889, ii, 53-55, 310-12; iii, 527. While grudgingly noting his straightforwardness, Dr. Gardiner assumes to discredit Lilburne as impracticable, yet is all the while demonstrating that Cromwell's constructive work utterly collapsed. Lilburne explicitly and accurately predicted that the tyrannies of the newrégimewould bring about the Restoration (Guizot,Histoire de la république d'Angleterre et de Cromwell, ed. Bruxelles, 1854, i, 52).

[1122]Dr. Gardiner says he was not, but does not explain away Cromwell's acquiescence. As to the war-spirit in England, see van Kampen,Geschichte der Niederlande, ii, 140, 141.

[1123]Guizot,Histoire de la république d'Angleterre et de Cromwell, ed. Bruxelles, 1854, i, 202-11; van Kampen,Geschichte der Niederlande, ii, 150, 151; Davies,History of Holland, 1841, ii, 709.

[1124]Guizot, as cited, i, 243.

[1125]There is a hardly credible story (Gardiner,History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii, 30) that in supporting Owen's scheme for a liberal religious establishment he declared: "I had rather that Mahometanism were permitted amongst us than that one of God's children should be persecuted." If the story be true, so much the worse for his treatment of Catholics.

[1126]Gardiner,Commonwealth and Protectorate, small ed. iv, 118. Dr. Gardiner actually praises Cromwell for "good sense" (p. 98) in seeing that the general plantation decreed by the Declaration of 1653 "was absolutely impracticable." It had been his own decree!

[1127]Mr. Harrison, as cited, p. 210. Mr. Allanson Picton, in his lectures on theRise and Fall of the English Commonwealth, has with more pains and circumspection sought to make good a similar judgment. But the nature of his performance is tested by his contending on the one hand that the ideal of the Commonwealth was altogether premature, and on the other that Cromwell governed with the real consent of the nation.

[1128]Gardiner,Commonwealth and Protectorate, i, 193-96; cp. Whittaker, inSocial England, iv, 288, 289.

[1129]Growth of English Industry and Commerce, i, 106.

[1130]Id.p. 107.

[1131]Id.p. 108, 109, citing Bancroft, i, 401, 402. Seeley ignored these and many other matters when he pronounced that the annals of Greater Britain are "conspicuously better than those of Greater Spain, which are infinitely more stained with cruelty and rapacity." In the usual English fashion, he left out of account, too, the horrors of the English conquests of Ireland.

[1132]Ecclesiastical History, 12 cent., pt. i, ch. ii, § 2.

[1133]See Rogers,Industrial and Commercial History, p. 13, as to the distress about 1630.

[1134]Cunningham, as cited, p. 107.

[1135]Redlich and Hirst,Local Government in England, 1903, ii, 361; and Miss Leonard'sEarly History of English Poor Relief, as there cited.

[1136]See Child's testimony, cited below, p. 467. That, however, specifies no superiority in the methods of the monarchy.

[1137]Redlich and Hirst, as cited, ii, 363,note.

[1138]Cunningham, p. 109.

[1139]See Rogers,Industrial and Commercial History, p. 4, as to the iron trade.

[1140]As to usury in the reign of Henry VII see Busch,England unter den Tudors, i, 257, 389. On the general canonist teaching there is a very thorough research in Prof. Ashley'sIntroduction to Economic History, vol. ii, ch. vi.

[1141]Cunningham,Growth of English Industry and Commerce, vol. ii (Modern Times), pp. 74-87.

[1142]Id.p. 100.

[1143]Id.pp. 87, 88, 102.

[1144]Cunningham,op. cit.p. 90. As to the upset of gild monopolies in the sixteenth century, see p. 76.

FROM THE RESTORATION TO ANNE

§ 1

The broad outcome of the monarchic restoration under Charles II is the intensifying of the royalist sentiment by way of reaction from the Rebellion and the autocracy of the Protector. It has been held that had Richard Cromwell had the energy of his father he might easily have maintained his position, so quietly was his accession at first accepted; and no doubt his irresolution made much of the difference between success and failure; but nothing can be clearer than the leaning of the mass of the people to the "lawful" dynasty. It is a proof of Cromwell's complete dislocation of the old state of touch between the official classes and the public,[1145]that the army leaders had no misgivings when they commenced to intrigue against Richard, and that Monk was so slow to declare for the king when the event showed how immense was the royalist preponderance. During the Rebellion, London, led by the Puritans, had dominated the country; under the Protectorate, town and country were alike dominated by a selected official and military class, representing a minority with military force to impose its rule. As soon as this class began to disrupt in factions, the released play of common sentiment began to carry all forward on a broad tide towards a Restoration; the only footing on which the English people could yet unite being one of tradition and superstition. The anarchy of a State still unfitted for republican government had before brought about the Protectorate: it now led back to the monarchy. And that the new monarchy did not become as absolute as the contemporary rule of Louis XIV was solely owing to the accident of the later adhesion of the restored dynasty to the Church of Rome, which the mass of the people feared more than they did even the prospect of another Civil War. It was the memory of the Fronde that enabled Louis to override the remains of the French constitution and set up an autocracy; and the same force was now at workin England. It was the memory of the Civil War that made the people so much more forbearing with the new king, when his private adhesion to the Catholic Church became generally suspected,[1146]than their fathers had been with his father. By temperament and from experience they were disposed to do anything for the throne; but the general fear of Popery on the one hand, and the special royalist aversion to the Puritan sects on the other, plunged the State into a new ferment of ecclesiastical politics, the strifes of which so far absorbed the general energy that ill-luck in the commercial wars with Holland seems to have been almost a necessary result, even had the king ruled well. Not that the generation of Charles II was a whit less bent on dominion and acquisition than the decade of the Protectorate.

In this new situation, under a king too little devoted to his trade to choose really sagacious courses, but too shrewd to ruin himself, occur the beginnings of parliamentary statesmanship, in the modern sense of government in harmony with the Crown. The powerful administration of Strafford had been a matter of helping the Crown to resist Parliament. The very capable though unforeseeing statesmanship of the Pyms and Hampdens of the Long Parliament, again, was a matter of resisting the Crown; and with Shaftesbury such resistance recurred; but the indolence of the king, joined with his sense of the dangers of the old favouritism, gave rise to the principle of Ministerial Government before partisan Cabinets had come into existence. Clarendon had in him much of the constitutionalist temper. Shaftesbury, however, was better qualified both by training and parts for the task of statesmanship in a stormy and unscrupulous generation. Read dispassionately, his story is seen to be in the main what his careful vindicator would make it—that of a man of average moral quality, with exceptional energy and resource. The legend of his wickedness[1147]is somewhat puzzling, in view of his staunch hostility to Romanism, and of his political superiority to the famous Deist statesman of the next generation, Bolingbroke, who has been so little blackened in comparison. A reasonable explanation is that Shaftesbury was damned by the Church for resisting the king, while Bolingbroke's services to the Church covered his multitude of sins. But the idle rumours ofShaftesbury's debauchery[1148]apparently damaged him with the Protestant Dissenters, and his wickedly reckless policy over the Popish Plot might easily secure him a share in the infamy which is the sole association of the name of Titus Oates. Here also, however, he has been calumniated. Burnet, though plainly disliking him, says nothing of debauchery in his life, and declined to believe, when Charles suggested it, that he had any part in trumping up the falsehoods about the Plot.[1149]

There can be no reasonable doubt that Shaftesbury honestly believed there was a great danger of the re-establishment of Popery, and it is not at all improbable that he credited some of the tales told, as Lord Russell solemnly testified at the scaffold that he for his part had done. To acquit Russell and criminate Shaftesbury is possible only to those who have made up their minds before trying the case. It is practically certain, moreover, that some vague Catholic plotting really did take place;[1150]and in the then posture of affairs nothing was more likely. Shaftesbury, like the other capable statesmen of the Restoration, was in favour of toleration of the Dissenters; but like all other Protestant statesmen of the age, he thought it impossible to tolerate Catholicism. Nor can it well be doubted that had Charles or James been able to establish the Roman system, it would have gone hard with Protestantism. It is true that the only exhibition thus far of the spirit of tolerance in Protestant and Catholic affairs in France and England had been on the part of Richelieu towards the Huguenots, themselves intensely intolerant; but it could not reasonably be supposed that an English Catholic king or statesman, once well fixed in power, would have the wisdom or forbearance of Richelieu. The two systems, in fine, aimed at each other's annihilation; and Shaftesbury simply acted, politically that is, as the men of the First Rebellion would have done in similar circumstances. Instead of dismissinghim as a mere scoundrel, we are led to realise how imperfectly moralised were all the men of his age in matters of religion and racial enmity. The friend of Locke can hardly have been a rascal.

For the rest, he was admitted even by the malicious and declamatory Dryden to have been a just Chancellor; it is proved that he opposed the Stop of the Exchequer; and he sharply resisted the rapacity of the royal concubines. In his earlier policy towards Holland he conformed odiously enough to the ordinary moral standard of the time[1151]in politics, a standard little improved upon in the time of Palmerston, and not discarded by those Englishmen who continue to talk of Russia as England's natural enemy, or by those who speak of Germany as a trade rival that must be fought to a finish. His changes of side between the outbreak of the Rebellion and his death, while showing the moral and intellectual instability of the period, were not dishonourable, and are not for a moment to be compared with those of Dryden, most unstable of all men of genius, whose unscrupulous but admirably artistic portrait of the statesman has doubtless gone far to keep Shaftesbury's name in disesteem. It may be, again, that his sufficient wealth takes away somewhat from the merit of his steadfast refusal of French bribes; but the fact should be kept in mind,[1152]as against the other fact that not only the king and some of the Opposition but Algernon Sidney took them.[1153]On the whole, Shaftesbury was the most tolerable of the Ministers of his day, though his animus against Catholicism made him grossly unscrupulous toward individual Catholics; and his miscalculation of possibilities, in clinging to the scheme of giving Monmouth the succession, finally wrecked his career. He had almost no alternative, placed and principled as he was, save to call in the Prince of Orange; and this would really have been at that moment no more feasible a course than it was to declare Monmouth the heir, besides being more hazardous, in that William was visibly less easy to lead. Of Shaftesbury, Burnet admits that "his strength lay in the knowledgeof England"; and when he took a fatal course, it was because the whole situation was desperate. His fall measures not so much the capacity of Charles as the force which the royalist superstition had gathered.

§ 2

This growth can be traced in the clerical literature of the time. The conception of a "divine right" inhering in kings by heredity—a conception arising naturally as part of the general ethic of feudal inheritance—had been emphasised on the Protestant side in England[1154]by way of express resistance to the Papacy, which from the time of Gregory VII had been wont in its strifes with emperors and kings to deny their divine right and to assert its own, formally founding the latter, however, on the "natural" right inherent in masses of men to choose their own rulers, even as the citizens of Rome had been wont to elect the Popes.[1155]The total effect of the English Rebellion was to give an immense stimulus to the high monarchic view, not now as against the Papacy, but as against Parliament. When the learned Usher drew up at the request of Charles I his treatise[1156]onThe Power communicated by God to the Prince, and the Obedience required of the Subject, he proceeded almost wholly on arguments from the Scriptures and the Fathers; not that there were not already many deliverances from modern authorities on the point, but that these evidently had not entered into the ordinary stock of opinion. On the papal side, from Thomas Aquinas[1157]onwards, the negative view had been carefully set forth, not merely as a papal claim, but also as an obvious affirmation of the ancient "law of nature." Thus the Spanish Jesuit Suarez (1548-1617) had in hisTractatus de Legibus, while deriving all law from the will of God, expressly rejected the doctrine that the power of rule inheres by succession in single princes. Such power,he declared, "by its very nature, belongs to no one man, but to a multitude of men,"[1158]adding a refutation of the patriarchal theory which "might have caused our English divines to blush before the Jesuit of Granada."[1159]At the beginning of the seventeenth century, again, while leading Englishmen were affirming divine right, the German Protestant Althusius, Professor of Law at Herborn, publishing hisPolitica methodice digesta(1603), declares in a dedication to the States of Friesland that the supreme power lies in the people.[1160]Hooker, too, had stamped the principle of "consent" with his authority, very much as did Suarez.[1161]

But the compiler ofThe History of Passive Obedience since the Reformation,[1162]after showing that the tenet[1163]had been held by dozens of Protestant divines and jurists after the Reformation, and even strongly affirmed by Nonconformists, is able to cite nearly as many assertions of it in the reign of Charles II as in the whole preceding period. The clergy were, indeed, able to show that the principle of non-resistance had been a common doctrine up to the Great Rebellion; and, though the contrary view was on the whole more common,[1164]it well illustrates the instinctive character of political movement that the democratic doctrine had followed the course of action step by step, and not preceded it. There had been resistance before the right to resist was formulated in the schools. And Bishop Guthry records that at the General Assembly in Edinburgh in January, 1645, "everyone had in his hand that book lately published by Mr. Samuel Rutherford, entitledLex Rex, which was stuffed with positions that in the time of peace and order would have been judged damnable treasons; yet were now so idolised that, whereas in the beginning of the work Buchanan's treatise,De Jure Regni apud Scotos, was looked upon as an oracle, this coming forth, it was slighted as not anti-monarchical enough, and Rutherford'sLex Rexonly thought authentic."[1165]So Milton's answer to Salmasius,vindicating the right of rebellion as inherent in freemen, marks the high tide of feeling that sustained the foremost regicides. But in the nature of the case the feeling swung as far the other way when they had touched their extreme limit of action; and when the royalist cause came in the ascendant, the monarchical principle was perhaps more passionately cherished in England than in any of the other European States.[1166]How it normally worked may be seen in Dryden's sycophantic dedication[1167]of hisAll for Loveto Lord Danby (1678), sinking as it does to the extravagant baseness of the declaration that "every remonstrance of private men has the seed of treason in it." It was in this very year that Charles and Danby made the secret treaty with France, the revelation of which by Louis soon afterwards brought Danby to the Tower; and Danby it was who three years before carried through the House of Lords a bill to make all placemen declare on oath that they considered all resistance to the king unlawful.

The handful of remaining republicans and political Liberals, appealing as they did to tradition in their treatises against the traditional pleadings of the Churchmen and royalists, could have no appreciable influence on the public, because the mere spirit of tradition, when not appealed to as the sanction of a living movement of resistance, must needs make for passivity. Algernon Sidney's posthumous folio on Government in answer to Filmer'sPatriarcha, arguing the question of self-governmentversusdivine right, and going over all the ground from Nimrod downwards, point by point, is a far greater performance than Filmer's; and Locke in turn brought a still greater power of analysis to bear on the same refutation; but it is easy to see that Filmer's is the more readable book, and that with its straightforward dogmatism it would most readily convince the average Englishman. Nor was the philosophy all on one side, though Filmer has ten absurdities for the other's one, and was so unguarded as to commit himself to the doctrine that the possession of power gives divine right, no matter how come by. Sidney himself always argued that "Vertue" entitled men to superior power; and though he might in practice have contended that the choice of the virtuous should be made by the people, his proposition pointed rather plainly back to Cromwell, acclaimed byMilton as the worthiest to bear rule. And to be governed by a military autocrat, however virtuous and capable, was as little to the taste of that generation as it was to the taste of Carlyle's. Even a clergyman could see that the political problem was really one of the practical adjustment of crude conflicting interests, and that there could easily be as much friction under a virtuous monarch as under a dissolute one. The conscientiousness of the first Charles had wrought ruin, where the vicious indolence of the second steered safely.

As Filmer and Sidney, besides, really agreed in awarding "the tools to him who could handle them," and as the most pressing practical need was to avoid civil war, the solution for most people was the more clearly a "loyal" submission to the reigning house; and no amount of abstract demonstration of the right of self-government could have hindered the habit of submission from eating deeper and deeper into the national character if it were not for the convulsion which changed the dynasty and set up a deep division of "loyalties," keeping each other in check. In the strict sense of the term there was no class strife, no democratic movement, no democratic interest; indeed, no ideal of public interest as the greatest good of the whole. Thus Harrington'sOceana, with its scheme of "an equal Commonwealth, a Government established upon an equal Agrarian, arising into the Superstructures of three Orders, the Senat debating and proposing, the People resolving, and the Magistracy executing by an equal Rotation through the suffrage of the People given by the Ballot"[1168]—this conception, later pronounced by Hume "the only valuable model of a commonwealth that has yet been offered to the public,"[1169]although the same critic exposed its weakness—was in fact as wholly beside the case as the principle of the Second Coming. No man desired the proposed ideal; and the very irrelevance of the systematic treatises strengthened the case for use and wont. The political discussions, being thus mostly in the air, could serve only to prepare leading men to act on certain principles should events forcibly lead up to new action. But the existing restraints on freedom did not supply sufficient grievance to breed action. The dissenters themselves were almost entirely resigned to their ostracism; and the preponderance of the Church and the Tory party was complete.

Luckily the political fanaticism of Charles I reappeared in hisson James; and that king's determination to re-establish in his realm the Church of his devotion served to break a spell that nothing else could have shattered.[1170]The very Church which had been assuring him of his irresistibility, having to choose between its own continuance and his, had perforce to desert him; and the old panic fear of Popery, fed by the spectacle of Jeffreys' Bloody Assize, swept away the monarch who had aroused it. He would have been an energetic king; his naval Memoirs exhibit zeal and application to work; and he had so much of rational humanity in him that in Scotland he pointed out to the popes of Presbyterianism how irrational as well as merciless was their treatment of sexual frailty. But his own fanaticism carried him athwart the superstition which would have sufficed to make him a secure despot in all other matters; and when the spirit of freedom seemed dying out in all forms save that of sectarian zealotry, his assault on that brought about the convulsion which gave it fresh chances of life.

§ 3

While practical politics was thus becoming more and more of a stupid war of ecclesiastical prejudices, in which the shiftiest came best off, and even theoretic politics ran to a vain disputation on the purposes of God towards Adam, some of the best intelligence of the nation, happily, was at work on more fruitful lines. The dire results of the principles which had made for union and strife of late years, drove thoughtful men back on a ground of union which did not seem to breed a correlative malignity.[1171]It was in 1660, the year of the Restoration, that the Royal Society was constituted; but its real beginnings lay in the first years of peace under Cromwell, when, as Sprat records, a "candid, unpassionate company" began to meet at Oxford in the lodgings of Dr. Wilkins, of Wadham College,[1172]to discuss questions of natural fact. "The University had, at the time, many Members of its own, who had begun a free way of reasoning; and was also frequented by some gentlemen, of Philosophical Minds, whom the misfortunes of the Kingdom, and the security and ease of a retirement amongst Gowns-men, had drawnthither."[1173]In constituting the Society, the associates "freely admitted men of different religions, countries, and professions of life," taking credit to themselves for admitting an intellectual shopkeeper, though "the far greater number are Gentlemen, free, and unconfined."[1174]Above all things they shunned sectarian and party feeling. "Their first purpose was no more then onely the satisfaction of breathing a freer air, and of conversing in quiet one with another, without being ingag'd in the passions and madness of that dismal Age;"[1175]and when they formally incorporated themselves it was expressly to discuss "things and not words."

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