In Vane first appears the doctrine of natural right and government
by consent, which, however open to criticism in the crude form of
popular statement, has yet been the moving principle of the modern
reconstruction of Europe. It was the result of his recognition of the
‘rule of Christ in the natural conscience’ in the elemental reason,
in virtue of which man is properly a law to himself. From the same
idea followed the principle of universal toleration, the exclusion
of the magistrate’s power alike from the maintenance and restraint
of any kind of opinion. This principle did not {297} with Vane and
the independents rest, as in modern times, on the slippery foundation
of a supposed indifference of all religious beliefs, but on the
conviction of the sacredness of the reason, however deluded, in every
man, which may be constrained by nothing less divine than itself.
‘The rule of magistracy’ says Vane, ‘is not to intrude
itself into the office and proper concerns of Christ’s
inward government and rule in the conscience, but it
is to content itself with the outward man, and to
intermeddle with the concerns thereof in reference to
the converse which man ought to have with man, upon
the grounds of natural justice and right in things
appertaining to this life.’ [1]
[1] [‘A Retired Man’s Meditations,’ (quoted by Forster, Eminent
British Statesmen, iv. p. 84).]
Nor would he allow the re-establishment under the name of christian
discipline, of that constraint of the conscience which he refused
to the magistrate. Such discipline, he would hold, as he held the
sabbath, to be rather a ‘magistratical institution’ in imitation
of what was ‘ceremonious and temporary’ among the Jews, ‘than that
which hath any clear appointment in the gospel.’ [1] Christ’s spirit
was not bound. A system of truth and discipline had not been written
down once for all in the scriptures, but rather was to be gradually
elicited from the scriptures by the gradual manifestation in the
believer of the spirit which spoke also in them. A ‘waiting,’ seeking
attitude, unbound by rule whether ecclesiastical or secular, was that
which became a spiritual church. The application of this waiting
spirit to practical life is to be found in the policy of Cromwell.
[1] [Sikes, quoted by Forster, ib. p. 81, note.]
It would be unfair to ascribe the theory of Vane in its speculative
fulness to the independents as a body. It seems, however, to be but
the development of the view on which Mr. Robinson had dwelt in his
last words to the settlers of New Plymouth; and, so far as it could
be represented by a sect, it was represented by the independents.
It came before the world, in full outward panoply, in the army of
Cromwell. The history of its inevitable conflict with the spirit of
presbyterianism on the one hand and the wisdom of the world on the
other, of its aberrations and perplexities, of its brief triumph and
final flight into the wilderness, is the history of the rise and fall
of the English commonwealth. I have yet {298} to speak, however, of
the representation of the wisdom of the world in the Long Parliament.
Before the outbreak of the war, as I have explained, Vane was the
only man in the house of commons whose opinions were recognised as
definitely opposed both to episcopacy and presbyterianism. In the
lords his only recognised follower was lord Brook, known to the
readers of Sir Walter Scott as the ‘fanatic Brook,’ really an eminent
scholar and man of letters, who was shot in storming the close at
Lichfield in the first year of the war, leaving as a legacy to the
parliament a plea for freedom of speech and conscience. The majority
of the parliament, however, had no special love for the presbyterian
discipline and theology. Their favour to it was merely negative. They
dreaded arminianism, as notoriously at that time the great weapon in
the hands of the jesuits; they objected to the high episcopacy as
sacerdotal, and as maintaining a jurisdiction incompatible with civil
liberty. In 1641 a modified episcopacy on Usher’s plan was a possible
solution of the difficulty. Each shire was to have a presbytery of
twelve members, with a bishop as president who, ‘with assistance of
some of the presbytery,’ was to ordain, degrade, and excommunicate.
Though the pressure of strife with the king prevented anything being
done to carry out this resolution, it probably represented the views
even of the more advanced parliamentary leaders; but only, however,
as afterwards appeared, on the supposition that the presbyters with
their bishop should be strictly under civil control. The worldly
wisdom of the Long Parliament was, in the party language of the
times, essentially erastian.
As the presbyterian claims mounted higher, this became more apparent.
The calling of the assembly of divines, and the adoption of the
covenant, might seem to give presbyterianism a sufficiently broad
charter of privilege; yet both these steps were taken by parliament
with restrictions which showed its temper. The ordinance which
called the assembly gave it power ‘until further order should
be taken by parliament to confer of such matters concerning the
liturgy, discipline, and government of the church of England, or
the vindicating of the doctrine of the same from false aspersions
and misconstructions, as shall be proposed by both or either house
of parliament, and no other.’ [1] It concludes by providing {299}
that ‘this ordinance shall not give them, nor shall they in this
assembly assume to exercise, any jurisdiction, power, or authority
ecclesiastical whatsoever, or any other power than is herein
particularly expressed.’ This document has nothing revolutionary
about it. It is the natural utterance of what Brook pronounced to
have been an ‘episcopal and erastian parliament of conformists.’
This parliament, however, had soon under military necessity to raise
a spirit which no episcopacy or erastianism could lay. The divines
came to Westminster, according to Brook, all conformists, with the
exception of eight or nine independents. They came, that is, from the
cooling atmosphere of benefices, and had not yet begun to discuss the
liturgy or object to a modified episcopacy. If they came conformists,
however, they did not long remain so. Contact with each other, and
the applause of London congregations, essentially presbyterian in
their sympathies, bred a warmer temper. The introduction of the
Scotch commissioners, and the adoption of the covenant, gave spirit
and strength to their disciplinarian humour, and in a few months,
men who had come to the assembly anxious only for some restraint
on episcopal tyranny, were clamouring for the establishment of
presbyterianism as jure divino.
[1] [Rushworth, June 12. 1643.]
I have spoken of the adoption of the covenant in England as matter
of military necessity. It was the condition of alliance between
parliament and the Scotch; without this alliance the year 1644 would
in all probability have been fatal to the parliamentary cause.
Supposing the Scotch army to have simply held aloof, the royal party
would have been so triumphant in the north as to enable the king to
advance with irresistible force on Lichfield. Till the parliament
had secured it, however, it could not be trusted to stand aloof; it
might at any time have been gained for the king by his consenting, as
he did too late in 1648, to the covenant. The English negotiators,
of whom Vane was the chief, had hoped to secure the alliance by a
merely civil league, and when the Scotch insisted on the adoption of
the religious covenant, they still succeeded in having the document
entitled ‘league and covenant’ instead of ‘covenant’ alone. In later
years, as we shall see, they always insisted on interpreting it as a
league in virtue of which each kingdom was to help the other in the
establishment of what religion it chose, not as binding either to
any particular form. {300} The desirableness of such interpretation
is more obvious than its correctness. By the first and second
clauses, as they originally stood, the covenanters bound themselves
to ‘the preservation of the reformed religion in Scotland,’ and ‘the
reformation of religion in England and Ireland, in doctrine, worship,
discipline and government’; also to the ‘extirpation of prelacy.’
After the words ‘reformation etc.’ Vane procured the insertion of
the qualification ‘according to the word of God,’ in order to avoid
committal to any particular form. To ease the conscience of those
who favoured Usher’s form of episcopacy, prelacy was interpreted to
mean ‘church government by archbishops, bishops, their chancellors
and commissaries, deans, chapters, archdeacons, and all other
ecclesiastical officers depending on that hierarchy.’ This modified
covenant was taken by the parliament and the assembly at Westminster,
and enjoined on every one over the age of eighteen. Practically it
was by no means universally imposed even on the clergy; in Baxter’s
neighbourhood none took it. Still, its operation was to eject from
their livings some two thousand clergymen, whose places were mostly
filled by presbyterians. A shifty and exacting alliance was thus
dearly purchased at the cost of at once spreading loose over the
country an uncontrolled element of disaffection to the parliament,
and giving vent to a spirit of ecclesiastical arrogance which would
soon demand to rule alone. This spirit was not long in showing
itself. The Scotch army entered England at the beginning of 1644,
and throughout that year the kirk, either by petition or through
the commons in England, was pressing for a presbyterian settlement
of church government in England. At last the assembly, still under
special permission from parliament, was allowed to proceed to the
discussion of this question. The first step was to propose a vote in
the assembly that presbyterian government was jure divino. The only
opponents of this decree were the small band of independents headed
by Goodwin, the lay assessors Selden and Whitelock representing
the erastian majority in parliament, whose only clerical supporter
seems to have been Lightfoot the Hebraist. Selden, a layman of vast
ecclesiastical lore, had a way of touching the sorest points of
clerical feeling. In 1618 he had written his great work disproving
the divine origin of tithes, and had been brought, in consequence,
before the {301} High Commission court. There, with the ordinary
suppleness of the erastian conscience, he signed the following
recantation: [1]
‘My good lords, I most humbly acknowledge my error
in publishing the history of tithes, and especially
in that I have at all (by shewing any interpretation
of scripture, or by meddling with councils, canons,
fathers, or by what else soever occurs in it) offered any
occasion of argument against any right of maintenance
jure divino of the ministers of the gospel; beseeching
your lordships to receive this ingenuous and humble
acknowledgment, together with the unfeigned protestation
of my grief, that I have so incurred his majesty’s and
your lordships’ displeasure.’
[1] [Neal, Puritans, i. p. 471.]
The consciousness of debasement does not strengthen one’s affection
for those who have been the occasion of it, and perhaps Selden’s
remembrance of his usage by the ‘old priest’ may not have quickened
his friendship for the ‘new presbyter.’ ‘In the debates of the
divines,’ says Whitelock, ‘Mr. Selden spoke admirably and confuted
divers of them in their own learning. Sometimes when they had cited
a text of scripture to prove their assertion, he would tell them,
“Perhaps in your little pocket bibles with gilt leaves (which they
would often pull out and read) the translation may be thus, but the
Greek or the Hebrew signifies thus and thus,” and so would totally
silence them.’ [1] Whitelock himself opposed much grave law-logic
to the claims of the divines, which he quotes at length in his
memoirs, but his most satisfactory argument, to modern ears, is the
simple one, ‘If this presbyterian government be not jure divino,
no opinion of any council can make it to be what it is not; and if
it be jure divino, it continues so still, although you do not
declare it to be so.’ [2] The divines, however, thought otherwise.
Presbyterianism was duly voted jure divino, and parliament in
1645 was applied to to enforce the jus divinum under pains and
penalties. That the presbyterian jus was divinum parliament
could never be induced to decide. It was very near doing so on one
occasion, when the divines had contrived to bring the question on
in a packed house, but by the skill of sergeant Glyn and Whitelock
in talking against time the danger was averted. At length, however,
under pressure from the Scots and city of London, it established
a presbyterian régime. This régime, {302} never carried out save
in London and Lancashire, was the same in kind as that existing in
Scotland, except that the ‘kirk session’ was called a parochial
presbytery, and the combination of parochial presbyteries not a
presbytery as in Scotland, but a ‘classis.’ This was referred to in
Milton’s lines,
‘To ride us with a classic hierarchy
Taught ye by mere A.S. and Rutherford.’ [3]
It was established, however, with such erastian limitations that
while it excluded the independents, it gave no satisfaction to the
Scots. The independent principle was violated on two points; both by
the subjection of the independent congregation to the ‘classis,’ and
by the method of ordination adopted which recognised the presbyter
as of a distinct order, to be set apart by other presbyters, instead
of as a simple officer appointed by a single congregation. The
thoroughgoing presbyterians were alienated by the refusal to the
church of the absolute power of the keys. The offences for which
the presbyteries were allowed to suspend from the sacrament or
excommunicate were distinctly enumerated, and an ultimate appeal,
in all ecclesiastical cases, was given to the parliament. The whole
system, moreover, was declared for the present merely provisional.
The restrictions at once raised an outcry among the Scots and the
presbyterians of the city, and the assembly itself was bold enough
to vote a condemnation of the clause giving a final appeal to
parliament. A seasonable threat of a praemunire, however, from
the commons, laid the rising dust in the assembly; but the mounting
spirit of the new forcers of conscience was shown in the opposition
made to the petition which the independents offered to parliament,
that their congregations might have the right of ordination within
themselves, and that they might not be brought under the power of
the ‘presbyterian classes.’ It would be tedious to follow the war
of committees, sermons, pamphlets, which this request, modest in
itself, and more modest in form, excited. The assembly, the city, the
Scotch parliament, urged the maintenance of an absolute uniformity.
No plea of conscience was to be listened to. To admit one was to
admit all. The independent claim was schismatic, and, as such,
excluded by the covenant. In the words of a pamphlet of the time; ‘to
let men serve God {303} according to conscience is to cast out one
devil that seven worse may enter.’ The new synod of the city clergy,
meeting at Sion House, petitioned the assembly to oppose with all
their might ‘the great Diana of the independents,’ and not to suffer
their new establishment ‘to be strangled in the birth by a lawless
toleration.’ The language of the Scotch parliament, addressed through
their president to the two houses at Westminster, was specially high
and irritating. ‘It is expected,’ says the president, ‘that the
honourable houses will add the civil sanction to what the assembly
have advised. I am commanded by the parliament of this kingdom to
demand it, and in their name do demand it.’ The temper in which this
demand was made, was shown by a declaration against ‘liberty of
conscience and toleration of sectaries,’ published at the same time
by the Scotch, in which, after taking due note of ‘their own great
services,’ they announce that, ‘being all bound by one covenant, they
will go on to the last man of the kingdom in opposing that party in
England which was endeavouring to supplant true religion by pleading
for liberty of conscience.’ Evidence might be tediously multiplied
to show, that if Marston Moor and Naseby had been won by the Scots
and the trained bands of the city, the civil sword would really have
been applied ‘to force the consciences which Christ set free,’ at a
time when these consciences were at their quickest, to a conformity,
if not more oppressive than that exacted by Laud, yet more fatal to
intellectual freedom.
[1] [Whitelock, Memorials, i. p. 209, Ed. 1853.]
[2] [Whitelock, i. p. 294.]
[3] [On the new forcers of conscience under the Long Parliament.]
Meanwhile the parliamentary erastians had a power at their back, no
child of their own, too strong for the Scots and the assembly, and
soon to prove too strong for parliament itself. The first note of
alarm at this power had been sounded by the wary Scots about the end
of 1644.
‘One evening,’ says Whitelock, ‘Maynard and I were
sent for by the Lord General’ (Essex) ‘to Essex House.
There we found with him the Scotch commissioners, Mr.
Hollis, Sir Philip Stapleton’ (presbyterian leaders in
the commons) ‘and others of his special friends. After
compliments, and that all were set down in council, the
lord chancellor of Scotland was called on to explain the
matter on which he desired the opinion of Maynard and
Whitelock. ‘Ye ken verra weel that lieutenant-general
Cromwell is no friend of ours, and not only is he no
friend to us and to the government of our church, but he
is also no well-wisher to his excellency” {304} (Essex),
“whom you and we all have cause to love and honour; and
if he be permitted to go on his ways, it may endanger
the whole business; therefore we are to advise of some
course to be taken for prevention of this business. Ye
ken verra weel the accord’ ’twixt the two kingdoms, and
the union by the solemn league and covenant, and if any
be an incendiary between the two nations, how he is to
be proceeded against. Now the matter is, wherein we
desire your opinions, what you tak the meaning of this
word incendiary to be, and whether lieutenant-general
Cromwell be not sike an incendiary as is meant thereby,
and which way wad be best to tak to proceed against
him, if he be proved to be sike an incendiary, and that
will clepe his wings from soaring to the prejudice of
our cause. Now, ye may ken that by our laws in Scotland
we clepe him an incendiary whay kindleth coals of
contention in the state to the public damage; whether
your law be the same or not, ye ken best who are mickle
learned therein; and therefore, with the favour of his
excellency, we desire your judgment in these points.”’ [1]
In reply, Maynard and Whitelock, after much disquisition on the
meaning of the word ‘incendiary,’ one ‘not much conversant in our
law,’ explain that lieutenant-general Cromwell is ‘a gentleman of
quick and subtle parts, and one who hath (especially of late) gained
no small interest in the house of commons, nor is he wanting of
friends in the house of peers, nor of abilities in himself to manage
his own defence to the best advantage,’ and that on the whole, till
more particular proof of his incendiarism should be forthcoming,
it would be better not to bring the matter before parliament. The
incendiarism of lieutenant-general Cromwell really consisted in this,
that he had (again to quote Whitelock) ‘a brave regiment of horse of
his countrymen, most of them freeholders, or freeholders’ sons, who
upon matter of conscience engaged in this quarrel. And thus being
well armed within by satisfaction of their own consciences, and
without by good iron arms, they would as one man stand firmly and
charge desperately.’ [2] Nearly every military success of importance
that had been won for the parliament had been won by these soldiers
of conscience, and unhappily their conscience was not of a kind that
would brook presbyterian uniformity. At the time of the conference
at Essex House, {305} Cromwell, with the help of the persuasive arts
of Vane, was moving the parliament, disgusted with the practical
inefficiency of its conservative and presbyterian commanders, to
measures which would give it an army led by officers mostly of his
own training, and fired by that religious inspiration of which
freedom of conscience was the necessary condition.
[1] [Whitelock, i. pp. 343-7.]
[2] [ib. i. p. 209.]
The story of the new-modelling of the army, of the self-denying
ordinance, and of the special exemption of Cromwell from its
operations, is too well known to need repetition. Two points deserve
special notice; one, the long discussion against the imposition of
the covenant on the new army, ending in an ordinance of parliament
after the army was already formed, that it should be taken by the
officers within twenty days, which does not appear to have been ever
carried into effect; the other, that the self-denying ordinance, as
originally passed by the commons, excluded from military command,
during the war, all members of either house of parliament. It would
thus have been general and prospective in its operation. In this
form, the lords, with judicial blindness, rejected it. The commons
then sent it up in a new form, merely discharging from their present
commands those who were at present members of either house of
parliament. In this form it was passed, and thus when Vane at the
end of 1645 carried a measure, declaring vacant the seats of those
members who had adhered to the king and ordering them to be filled,
the officers of the new-model army were eligible, and elected in
large numbers. If the party of the army and the sectaries had not
thus gained a footing in the house, the course of history would
probably have been very different.
The new-model army went to the war, according to May, the clerk of
the Long parliament, ‘without the confidence of their friends and an
object of contempt to their enemies.’ [1] Their outward triumph it is
needless to describe; we should rather seek to appreciate the nature
of the spiritual triumph which the outward one involved. It used to
be the fashion to treat the sectarian enthusiasm of the ‘Ironsides’
as created, or at least stimulated, by Cromwell. The army went mad,
and it was to gain Cromwell’s private ends. The prevalent conception
of our time, that the great men of history have not created popular
ideas or events, but merely expressed or {306} realised them with
special effect, excludes such a view. The sectarian enthusiasm, as we
have seen, was a necessary result of the consciousness of spiritual
right elicited by the Reformation, where this consciousness had
not, as in Scotland, been early made the foundation of a popular
church, but had been long left to struggle in the dark against an
unsympathetic clergy and a regulated ceremonial worship. The spirit
which could not ‘find itself’ in the authoritative utterance of
prelates, or express its yearnings unutterable in a stinted liturgy,
was not likely, when war had given it vent and stimulus, to acquiesce
in a new uniformity as exact as that from which it had broken. It had
tasted a new and dangerous food. Taught as it had been to wait on
God, in search for new revelations of him, it now read this lesson
by the stronger light of personal deliverances and achievements, and
found in the tumultuous experience of war at once the expression and
the justification of its own inward tumult.
[1] [Breviary of the History of the Long Parliament, Maseres,
Tracts, i. 74.]
It is a notion which governs much of the popular thought of the
present day, and which the most cultivated ‘men of feeling’ are
not ashamed to express, that the world is atheised when we regard
it as a universe of general laws, equally relentless or equally
merciful to the evil and to the good. If such a notion, through
mere impatience of thought, can dominate an educated age, we may
well excuse uncultivated men, who clung close to God, for believing
him to manifest himself to his favoured people by sudden visitation
and unaccountable events. This was indeed the received belief
of Christendom at the time of our civil war. The man who was to
vindicate a higher reason for God’s providence, and to be called
an atheist for doing so, was still at Mr. van den Ende’s school in
Amsterdam. It was in the realisation of the belief by individuals
that the difference lay. Where the bible was not in the hands
of the people, it could be regulated by priests and ceremonial.
Elsewhere it was controllable by state-churches, or by ecclesiastical
authority, claiming to be jure divino like the presbyterian, and
which appealed to popular reason, but to this reason as regulated by
fitting education and discipline. Everywhere, in ordinary times, law
and custom would put a veil on the face which the believer turned
towards God. But now in England the bands were altogether loosed.
Enthusiasts who had been waiting darkly on God while he was hidden
behind established {307} worships and ministrations of the letter,
who had heard his voice in their hearts but seen no sign of him in
the world, were now enacting his work themselves, and reading his
strange providences on the field of battle. Their own right hand
was ‘teaching them terrible things.’ Here was the revelation of the
latter days, for which they had been bidden to wait. That which
they had sought for literally ‘with strong crying and tears,’ which
they had not found in the system of the church, in the reasoning of
divines, in the ungodly jangle of the law, was visible and audible in
war. There
God glowed above
With 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 above
With scarce an intervention, presses close
And 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 the jus divinum of 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 true
jus 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 intent
Would have been held in high esteem with Paul,
Must now be named and printed heretics
By shallow Edwards and Scotch what d’ye call.’
[1] [Neal’s Puritans, 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 war
Where his were not the deepest scar?
And Hampton shows what part
He had of wiser art,
Where, twining subtle fears with hope,
He wove a net of such a scope
That Charles himself might chase
To Carisbrook’s narrow case;
That thence the royal actor borne
The 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.