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Oliver Cromwell

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Title: Oliver Cromwell

Author: Samuel Rawson Gardiner


        
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Language: English

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OLIVER CROMWELL


      *      *      *      *      *      *

WORKS BY SAMUEL RAWSON GARDINER


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[Illustration: Printed in Paris

OLIVER CROMWELL

_From the Original Panel by Samuel Cooper at Sidney Sussex College,
Cambridge._]


OLIVER CROMWELL

by

SAMUEL RAWSON GARDINER, M.A.

Hon. D.C.L. Oxford: Litt.D. Cambridge: LL.D. Edinburgh
Ph.D. Göttingen: Late Fellow of Merton College
Honorary Student of Christ Church
Fellow of King's College, London

With Frontispiece

New Impression







Longmans, Green, and Co.
39 Paternoster Row, London
New York, Bombay, and Calcutta
1909




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER I.
    KING AND PARLIAMENT.                                 1

  CHAPTER II.
    THE NEW MODEL ARMY AND THE PRESBYTERIANS.           56

  CHAPTER III.
    THE NEW MODEL ARMY AND THE KING.                   101

  CHAPTER IV.
    THE LAST YEARS OF THE LONG PARLIAMENT.             166

  CHAPTER V.
    THE NOMINATED PARLIAMENT AND THE PROTECTORATE.     213

  CHAPTER VI.
    A PARLIAMENTARY CONSTITUTION.                      264




PREFACE.


The following work gives within a short compass a history of Oliver
Cromwell from a biographical point of view. The text has been revised
by the author, but otherwise is the same in a cheaper form as that
which was published by Messrs. Goupil with illustrations in their
Illustrated Series of Historical Volumes.




OLIVER CROMWELL.




CHAPTER I.

KING AND PARLIAMENT.


Oliver Cromwell, the future Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of
England, was born at Huntingdon on April 25, 1599, receiving his
baptismal name from his uncle, Sir Oliver Cromwell of Hinchingbrooke, a
mansion hard by the little town. It was at Huntingdon that the father
of the infant, Robert Cromwell, had established himself, farming lands
and perhaps also adding to his income by the profits of a brewhouse
managed by his wife, Elizabeth--a descendant of a middle-class Norfolk
family of Steward--originally Styward--which, whatever writers of
authority may say, was not in any way connected with the Royal House of
Scotland.

"I was," said Cromwell in one of his later speeches, "by birth a
gentleman, living neither in any considerable height nor yet in
obscurity. I have been called to several employments in the nation,
and--not to be overtedious--I did endeavour to discharge the duty of
an honest man in those services to God and His people's interest, and
to the Commonwealth." The open secret of Cromwell's public life is set
forth in these words:--his aim being: first, to be himself an honest
man; secondly, to serve God and the people of God; and thirdly, to
fulfil his duty to the Commonwealth. In this order, and in no other,
did his obligations to his fellow-creatures present themselves to his
eyes. For the work before him it could not be otherwise than helpful
that his position in life brought him into contact with all classes of
society.

What powers and capacities this infant--or indeed any other infant--may
have derived from this or the other ancestor, is a mystery too deep for
human knowledge; but at least it may be noted that the descent of the
Cromwells from Sir Richard Williams, the nephew of Thomas Cromwell,
the despotic Minister of Henry VIII., brought into the family a Welsh
strain which may have shown itself in the fervid idealism lighting up
the stern practical sense of the warrior and statesman.

Of Oliver's father little is known; but his portrait testifies that
he was a man of sober Puritanism, not much given to any form of
spiritual enthusiasm--very unlike his elder brother, Sir Oliver, who
had inherited not only the estate, but the splendid ways of his father,
Sir Henry Cromwell--the Golden Knight--and who, after running through
his property, was compelled to sell his land and to retire into a
more obscure position. As the little Oliver grew up, he had before
his eyes the types of the future Cavalier and Roundhead in his own
family. So far as parental influence could decide the question, there
could be no doubt on which side the young Oliver would take his stand.
His education was carried on in the free school of the town, under
Dr. Beard, the author of _The Theatre of God's Judgments Displayed_,
in which a belief in the constant intervention of Providence in the
punishment of offenders was set forth by numerous examples of the
calamities of the wicked. Though Oliver afterwards learned to modify
the crudeness of this teaching, the doctrine that success or failure
was an indication of Divine favour or disfavour never left him, and he
was able, in the days of his greatness, to point unhesitatingly to the
results of Naseby and Worcester as evidence that God Himself approved
of the victorious cause.

In 1616 Cromwell matriculated at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge,
where his portrait now adorns the walls of the College hall. After a
sojourn of no more than a year, he left the University, probably--as
his father died in that year--to care for his widowed mother and his
five sisters, he himself being now the only surviving son. It is said
that not long afterwards he settled in London to study law, and though
there is no adequate authority for this statement, it derives support
from the fact that he found a wife in London, marrying in 1620, at
the early age of twenty-one, Elizabeth Bourchier, the daughter of a
City merchant. The silence of contemporaries shows that, in an age
when many women took an active part in politics, she confined herself
to the sphere of domestic influence. The one letter of hers that is
preserved displays not merely her affectionate disposition, but also
her helpfulness in reminding her great husband of the necessity of
performing those little acts of courtesy which men engaged in large
affairs are sometimes prone to neglect. She was undoubtedly a model of
female perfection after the Periclean standard.

Of Cromwell's early life for some years after his marriage we have
little positive information. His public career was opened by his
election in 1628 to sit for Huntingdon in the Parliament which insisted
on the Petition of Right. Though his uncle had by this time left
Hinchingbrooke, and could therefore have had no direct influence on the
electors, it is quite likely that the choice of his fellow-townsmen
was, to a great extent, influenced by their desire to show their
attachment to a family with which they had long been in friendly
relation.

Even so, however, it is in the highest degree improbable that Cromwell
would have been selected by his neighbours, to whom every action of
his life had been laid open, unless they had had reason to confide in
his moral worth as well as in his aptitude for public business. Yet
it is in this period of his life that, if Royalist pamphleteers are
to be credited, Cromwell was wallowing in revolting profligacy, and
the charge may seem to find some support from his own language in a
subsequent letter to his cousin, Mrs. St. John: "You know," he wrote,
"what my manner of life hath been. Oh! I lived in and loved darkness,
and hated light. I was a chief--the chief of sinners. This is true,
I hated godliness, yet God had mercy upon me." It has however never
been wise to take the expressions of a converted penitent literally,
and it is enough to suppose that Cromwell had been, at least whilst
an undergraduate at Cambridge, a buoyant, unthinking youth, fond of
outdoor exercise; though, on the other hand, whilst he never attained
to proficiency as a scholar, he by no means neglected the authorised
studies of the place. Much as opinion has differed on every other point
in his character, there was never any doubt as to his love of horses
and to his desire to encourage men of learning. It may fairly be argued
that his tastes in either direction must have been acquired in youth.

One piece of evidence has indeed been put forward against Cromwell. On
the register of St. John's parish at Huntingdon are two entries--one
dated 1621, and the other 1628--stating that Cromwell submitted in
those years to some form of Church censure. The formation of the
letters, however, the absence of any date of month or day, and also the
state of the parchment on which the entries occur, leave no reasonable
doubt that they were the work of a forger. It does not follow that the
forger had not a recollection that something of the kind had happened
within local memory, and if we take it as possible that Cromwell was
censured for 'his deeds,' whatever they may have been, in 1621, and
that in 1628 he voluntarily acknowledged some offence--the wording
of the forged entry gives some countenance to this deduction--may we
not note a coincidence of date between the second entry and one in
the diary of Sir Theodore Mayerne--the fashionable physician of the
day--who notes that Oliver Cromwell, who visited him in September of
that year, was _valde melancholicus_. Even if no heed whatever is to
be paid to the St. John's register, Mayerne's statement enables us
approximately to date that time of mental struggle which he passed
through at some time in these years, and which was at last brought
to an end when the contemplation of his own unworthiness yielded to
the assurance of his Saviour's love. "Whoever yet," he wrote long
afterwards to his daughter Bridget, "tasted that the Lord is gracious,
without some sense of self, vanity and badness?" It was a crisis in his
life which, if he had been born in the Roman communion, would probably
have sent him--as it sent Luther--into a monastery. Being what he was,
a Puritan Englishman, it left him with strong resolution to do his work
in this world strenuously, and to help others in things temporal, as he
himself had been helped in things spiritual.

English Puritanism, like other widely spread influences, was complex
in its nature, leading to different results in different men.
Intellectually it was based on the Calvinistic theology, and many were
led on by it to the fiercest intolerance of all systems of thought
and practice which were unconformable thereto. Cromwell's nature
was too large, and his character too strong, to allow him long to
associate himself with the bigots of his age. His Puritanism--if not as
universally sympathetic as a modern philosopher might wish--was moral
rather than intellectual. No doubt it rendered him impatient of the
outward forms in which the religious devotion of such contemporaries
as George Herbert and Crashaw found appropriate sustenance, but at
the same time it held him back from bowing down to the idol of the
men of his own party--the requirement of accurate conformity to the
Calvinistic standard of belief. It was sufficient for him, if he and
his associates found inspiration in a sense of personal dependence on
God, issuing forth in good and beneficent deeds.

When, in 1628, Cromwell took his seat in the House of Commons he
would be sure of a good reception as a cousin of Hampden. There is,
however, nothing to surprise us in his silence during the eventful
debates on the Petition of Right. He was no orator by nature, though
he could express himself forcibly when he felt deeply, and at this
time, and indeed during the whole of his life, he felt more deeply
on religious than on political questions. The House, in its second
session held in 1629, was occupied during the greater portion of its
time with religious questions, and it was then that Cromwell made his
first speech, if so short an utterance can be dignified by that name.
"Dr. Beard," he informed the House, "told him that one Dr. Alablaster
did at the Spital preach in a sermon tenets of Popery, and Beard being
to repeat the same, the now Bishop of Winton, then Bishop of Lincoln,
did send for Dr. Beard, and charged him as his diocesan, not to preach
any doctrine contrary to that which Alablaster had delivered, and
when Beard did, by the advice of Bishop Felton, preach against Dr.
Alablaster's sermon and person, Dr. Neile, now Bishop of Winton, did
reprehend him, the said Beard, for it."

The circumstances of the time give special biographical importance to
the opening of this window into Cromwell's mind. The strife between
the Puritan clergy and the Court prelates was waxing high. The latter,
whilst anxious to enforce discipline, and the external usages which,
though enjoined in the Prayer Book, had been neglected in many parts of
the country, were at the same time contending for a broader religious
teaching than that presented by Calvin's logic; but knowing that they
were in a comparatively small minority they, perhaps not unnaturally,
fell back on the protection of the King, who was in ecclesiastical
matters completely under the influence of Laud. The result of Charles's
consultations with such Bishops as were at hand had been the issue of
a Declaration which was prefixed to a new edition of the articles, and
is to be found in Prayer Books at the present day. The King's remedy
for disputes in the Church on predestination and such matters was to
impose silence on both parties, and it was in view of this policy
that Cromwell raked up an old story to show how at least twelve years
before, his old schoolmaster, Dr. Beard, had been forbidden to preach
any doctrine but that which the member for Huntingdon stigmatised
as Popish, and this too by a prelate who was now seeking, in a less
direct way, to impose silence on Puritan ministers. Other members of
Parliament had striven to oppose the ecclesiasticism of the Court by
the intolerant assertion that Calvinism alone was to be preached.
Cromwell did nothing of the kind. He did not even say that those who
upheld what he calls 'tenets of Popery' were to be silenced. He merely
asked that those who objected to them might be free to deliver their
testimony in public. There is the germ here of his future liberal
policy as Lord Protector--the germ too of a wide difference of opinion
from those with whom he was at this time acting in concert.[A]

      [A] My argument would obviously not stand if the remainder
          of the speech printed in Rushworth were held to be
          genuine. There is, however, good reason to know that it
          is not (_Hist. of Eng._, 1603-1642, vii., 56, note).

Little as we know of Cromwell's proceedings during the eleven years in
which no Parliament sat, that little is significant. His interference
in temporal affairs was invariably on the side of the poor. In 1630
a new charter was granted to Huntingdon, conferring the government
of the town on a mayor and twelve aldermen appointed for life. To
this Cromwell raised no objection, taking no special delight in
representative institutions, but he protested against so much of the
charter as, by allowing the new corporation to deal at its pleasure
with the common property of the borough, left the holders of rights
of pasture at their mercy; and, heated by a sense of injustice to
his poorer neighbours, he spoke angrily on the matter to Barnard,
the new mayor. Cromwell was summoned before the council, with the
result that the Earl of Manchester, appointed to arbitrate, sustained
his objections, whilst Cromwell, having gained his point, apologised
for the roughness of his speech. It is not unlikely that it was in
consequence of this difference with the new governors of the town that
he shortly afterwards sold his property there, and removed to St.
Ives, where he established himself as a grazing farmer. Nor was he
less solicitous for the spiritual than for the temporal welfare of his
neighbours. Many Puritans were at this time attempting to lessen the
influence of the beneficed clergy, who were, in many places, opposed to
them, by raising sums for the payment of lecturers, who would preach
Puritan sermons without being bound to read prayers before them. The
earliest extant letter of Cromwell's was written in 1636 to a City
merchant, asking him to continue his subscription to the maintenance of
a certain Dr. Wells, 'a man of goodness and industry and ability to do
good every way'. "You know, Mr. Story," he adds, "to withdraw the pay
is to let fall the lecture, and who goeth to warfare at his own cost?"

In 1636 Cromwell removed to Ely, where he farmed the Cathedral tithes
in succession to his maternal uncle, Sir Thomas Steward. Soon after
he was settled in his new home, there were disturbances in the fen
country which the Earl of Bedford and his associates were endeavouring
to drain. On the plea that the work was already accomplished, the new
proprietors ordered the expulsion of cattle from the pastures scattered
amongst the waters. The owners, egged on by one at least of the
neighbouring gentry, tumultuously resisted the attempt to exclude them
from their rights of commonage. We are told, too, that 'it is commonly
reported by the commoners in the said fens and the fens adjoining, that
Mr. Cromwell, of Ely, hath undertaken--they paying him a groat for
every cow they have upon the common--to hold the drainers in writ of
law for five years, and that in the mean time they should enjoy every
foot of their commons'. That Cromwell should have taken up the cause
of the weak, and at the same time should have attempted to serve them
by legal proceedings, whilst keeping aloof from their riotous action,
is a fair indication of the character of the man. No wonder he grew in
popularity, or that in 1640 he was elected by the borough of Cambridge
to both the Parliaments which met in that year.

In the Short Parliament Cromwell sat, so far as we know, as a
silent member. Of his appearance in the Long Parliament we have the
often-quoted description of his personal appearance from a young
courtier. "I came into the House," wrote Sir Philip Warwick, "one
morning well clad, and perceived a gentleman speaking whom I knew
not, very ordinarily apparelled, for it was a plain cloth suit which
seemed to be made by an ill country tailor; his linen was plain, and
not very clean; and I remember a speck or two of blood upon his little
band, which was not larger than his collar. His hat was without a
hat-band. His stature was of a good size; his sword stuck close to
his side; his countenance swollen and reddish, his voice sharp and
untuneable, and his eloquence full of fervour, for the subject matter
would not bear much of reason, it being on behalf of a servant of Mr
Prynne's who had dispersed libels against the Queen for her dancing
and such like innocent and courtly sports; and he aggravated the
imprisonment of this man by the council-table unto that height that
one would have believed the very Government itself had been in great
danger by it. I sincerely profess it lessened much my reverence unto
that great council, for he was very much hearkened unto; and yet I
lived to see this very gentleman whom, by multiplied good escapes,
and by real but usurped power, having had a better tailor, and more
converse among good company, appear of great and majestic deportment
and comely presence." Curiously enough the so-called servant of
Prynne--he was never actually in Prynne's service at all--was no other
than John Lilburne, who was such a thorn in the flesh to Cromwell
in later years. In undertaking the defence of the man who had been
sentenced to scourge and imprisonment for disseminating books held
to be libels by Charles and his ministers, Cromwell announced to his
fellow-members his own political position. In life--and above all in
political life--it is not possible to satisfy those who expect the
actions of any man to be absolutely consistent. Later generations may
be convinced not only that Charles was sincere in following a course
which he believed to be the right one, but that this course commended
itself to certain elements of human nature, and was, therefore, no
mere emanation of his own personal character. It nevertheless remains
that he was far from being strong enough for the place which he had
inherited from his predecessors, and that in wearing the garments of
the Elizabethan monarchy, he was all too unconscious of the work which
the new generation required of him--all too ready to claim the rights
of Elizabeth, without a particle of the skill in the art of government
which she derived from her intimate familiarity with the people over
which she had been called to rule.

Charles's unskilfulness was the more disastrous, as he came to the
throne during a crisis when few men would have been able to maintain
the prestige of the monarchy. On the one hand the special powers
entrusted to the Tudor sovereigns were no longer needed after the
domestic and foreign dangers which occupied their reigns had been
successfully met. On the other hand, a strife between religious parties
had arisen which called for action on lines very different from
those which had commended themselves to Elizabeth. In throwing off
the authority of the Roman See, Elizabeth had the national spirit of
England at her back, whilst in resisting the claims of the Presbyterian
clergy, she had the support of the great majority of the laity. By
the end of her reign she had succeeded in establishing that special
form of ecclesiastical government which she favoured. Yet though the
clergy had ceased to cry out for the supersession of episcopacy by the
Presbyterian discipline, the bulk of the clergy and of the religious
laity were Puritan to the core. So much had been effected by the
long struggle against Rome and Spain and the resulting detestation
of any form of belief which savoured of Rome and Spain. During the
twenty-two years of the peace-loving James, religious thought ceased
to be influenced by a sense of national danger. First one, and then
another--a Bancroft, an Andrewes, or a Laud, men of the college or
the cathedral--began to think their own thoughts, to welcome a wider
interpretation of religious truths than that of Calvin's Institute,
and, above all, to distrust the inward conviction as likely to be
warped by passion or self-interest, and to dwell upon the value of
the external influences of ritual and organisation. To do justice to
both these schools of thought and practice at the time of Charles's
accession would have taxed the strength of any man, seeing how
unprepared was the England of that day to admit the possibility of
toleration. The pity of it was that Charles, with all his fine feelings
and conscientious rectitude, was unfitted for the task. Abandoning
himself heart and soul to the newly risen tide of religious thought,
his imagination was too weak to enable him to realise the strength
of Puritanism, so that he bent his energies, not to securing for his
friends free scope for the exercise of what persuasion was in them, but
for the repression of those whom he looked upon as the enemies of the
Church and the Crown. With the assistance of Laud he did everything in
his power to crush Puritanism, with the result of making Puritanism
stronger than it had been before. Every man of independent mind who
revolted against the petty interference exercised by Laud placed
himself by sympathy, if not by perfect conviction, in the Puritan ranks.

Neither in Elizabeth's nor in Charles's reign was it possible
to dissociate politics from religion. Parliament, dissatisfied
with Charles's ineffectual guidance of the State, was still more
dissatisfied with his attempt to use his authority over the Church to
the profit of an unpopular party. The House of Commons representing
mainly that section of the population in which Puritanism was the
strongest--the country gentlemen in touch with the middle-class in
the towns--was eager to pull down Laud's system in the Church, and to
hinder the extension of Royal authority in the State. To do this it was
necessary not only to diminish the power of the Crown, but to transfer
much of it to Parliament, which, at least in the eyes of its members,
was far more capable of governing England wisely.

That Cromwell heartily accepted this view of the situation is evident
from his being selected to move the second reading of the Bill for the
revival of annual Parliaments, which, by a subsequent compromise, was
ultimately converted into a Triennial Act ordaining that there should
never again be an intermission of Parliament for more than three years.
The fact that he was placed on no less than eighteen committees in
the early part of the sittings of the Parliaments shows that he had
acquired a position which he could never have reached merely through
his cousinship with Hampden and St. John. That he concurred in the
destruction of the special courts which had fortified the Crown in the
Tudor period, and in the prosecution of Strafford, needs no evidence to
prove. These were the acts of the House as a whole. It was the part he
took on those ecclesiastical questions which divided the House into two
antagonistic parties which is most significant of his position at this
time.

However much members of the House of Commons might differ on the
future government of the Church, they were still of one mind as to
the necessity of changing the system under which it had been of late
controlled. There may have been much to be said on behalf of an
episcopacy exercising a moderating influence over the clergy, and
guarding the rights of minorities against the oppressive instincts of a
clerical majority. As a matter of fact this had not been the attitude
of Charles's Bishops. Appointed by the Crown, and chosen out of one
party only--and that the party of the minority amongst the clergy and
the religious laity--they had seized the opportunity of giving free
scope to their own practices and of hampering in every possible way
the practices of those opposed to them. It was no Puritan, but Jeremy
Taylor, the staunch defender of monarchy and episcopacy, who hit the
nail on the head. "The interest of the bishops," he wrote, "is conjunct
with the prosperity of the King, besides the interest of their own
security, by the obligation of secular advantages. For they who have
their livelihood from the King, and are in expectance of their fortune
from him, are more likely to pay a tribute of exacted duty than others
whose fortunes are not in such immediate dependency on His Majesty.
It is but the common expectation of gratitude that a patron paramount
shall be more assisted by his beneficiaries in cases of necessity than
by those who receive nothing from him but the common influences of
government."

As usual, it was easier to mark the evil than to provide an adequate
remedy. The party which numbered Hyde and Falkland in its ranks, and
which afterwards developed into that of the Parliamentary Royalists,
was alarmed lest a tyrannical episcopacy should be followed by a still
more tyrannical Presbyterian discipline, and therefore strove to
substitute for the existing system some scheme of modified episcopacy
by which bishops should be in some way responsible to clerical
councils. Cromwell was working hand in hand with men who strove to meet
the difficulty in another way. The so-called Root-and-Branch Bill,
said to have been drawn up by St. John, was brought to the House of
Commons by himself and Vane. By them it was passed on to Hazlerigg,
who in his turn passed it on to Sir Edward Dering, by whom it was
actually moved in the House. As it was finally shaped in Committee,
this bill, whilst absolutely abolishing archbishops, bishops, deans
and chapters, transferred their ecclesiastical jurisdiction to bodies
of Commissioners to be named by Parliament itself. Cromwell evidently
had no more desire than Falkland to establish the Church Courts of the
Scottish Presbyterian system in England.

This bill never passed beyond the Committee stage. It was soon
overshadowed by the question whether Charles could be trusted or
not. The discovery of the plots by which he had attempted to save
Strafford's life, and the knowledge that he was now visiting Scotland
with the intention of bringing up a Scottish army to his support
against the Parliament at Westminster strengthened the hands of the
party of Parliamentary supremacy, and left its leaders disinclined
to pursue their ecclesiastical policy till they had settled the
political question in their own favour. Important as Charles's own
character--with its love of shifts and evasions--was in deciding
the issue, it must not be forgotten that the crisis arose from a
circumstance common to all revolutions. When a considerable change is
made in the government of a nation, it is absolutely necessary, if
orderly progress is to result from it, that the persons in authority
shall be changed. The man or men by whom the condemned practices have
been maintained cannot be trusted to carry out the new scheme, because
they must of necessity regard it as disastrous to the nation. The
success of the Revolution of 1688-89 was mainly owing to the fact that
James was replaced by William; in 1641 neither was Charles inclined
to fly to the Continent, nor were the sentiments of either party
in the House such as to suggest his replacement by another prince,
even if such a prince were to be found. All that his most pronounced
adversaries--amongst whom Cromwell was to be counted--could suggest was
to leave him the show and pomp of royalty, whilst placing him under
Parliamentary control and doing in his name everything that he least
desired to do himself. It was a hopeless position to be driven into,
and yet, the feeling of the time being what it was, it is hard to see
that any remedy could be found.

Before Charles returned from Scotland, which he had visited in the vain
expectation of bringing back with him an army which might give him the
control over the English Parliament, an event occurred which brought
to light the disastrous impolicy of his opponents in leaving upon the
throne the man who was most hostile to their ideas. The Irish Roman
Catholic gentry and nobility, having been driven into Royalism by fear
of Puritan domination, had agreed with Charles to seize Dublin and to
use it as a basis from which to send him military aid in his struggle
against the Parliament of England. In October 1641, before they could
make up their minds to act, an agrarian outbreak occurred in Ulster,
where the native population rose against the English and Scottish
colonists who had usurped their lands. The rising took the form of
outrage and massacre, calculated to arouse a spirit of vengeance in
England, even if report had not outrun the truth--much more when
the horrible tale was grossly exaggerated in its passage across the
sea. Before long both classes of Roman Catholic Irishmen, the Celtic
peasants of the North and the Anglo-Irish gentry of the South, were
united in armed resistance to the English Government.

It was a foregone conclusion that an attempt to reconquer Ireland would
be made from England. Incidentally the purpose of doing this brought to
a point the struggle for the mastery at Westminster. If an army were
despatched to Ireland it would, as soon as its immediate task had been
accomplished, be available to strike a decisive blow on one side or the
other. It therefore became all-important for each side to secure the
appointment of officers who might be relied on--in one case to strike
for the Crown, in the other case to strike for the Commons. Pym, who
was leading his party in the House with consummate dexterity, seized
the opportunity of asking, not merely that military appointments
should be subject to Parliamentary control, but that the King should
be asked to take only such councillors as Parliament could approve of.
Cromwell was even more decided than Pym. The King having named five new
bishops, in defiance of the majority of the Commons, it was Cromwell
who moved for a conference with the Lords on the subject, and who, a
few days later, asked for another conference, in which the Lords should
be asked to join in a vote giving to the Earl of Essex power to command
the trained bands south of the Trent for the defence of the kingdom,
a power which was not to determine at the King's pleasure, but to
continue till Parliament should take further order.

Cromwell was evidently for strong measures. Yet there are signs that
now, as at other times in his life, he underestimated the forces
opposed to him. His allies in the Commons, Pym and Hampden at their
head, were now bent on obtaining the assent of the House to the Grand
Remonstrance, less as an appeal to the King than as a manifesto to the
nation. The long and detailed catalogue of the King's misdeeds in the
past raised no opposition. Hyde was as ready to accept it as Pym and
Hampden. The main demands made in it were two: first, that the King
would employ such councillors and ministers as the Parliament might
have cause to confide in; and secondly, that care should be taken
'to reduce within bounds that exorbitant power which the prelates
have assumed to themselves,' whilst maintaining 'the golden reins of
discipline,' and demanding 'a general synod of the most grave, pious,
learned and judicious divines to consider all things necessary for the
peace and good government of the Church'. So convinced was Cromwell
that the Remonstrance would be generally acceptable to the House, that
he expressed surprise when Falkland gave his opinion that it would
give rise to some debate. It was perhaps because the Remonstrance
had abandoned the position of the Root-and-Branch Bill and talked
of limiting episcopacy, instead of abolishing it, that Cromwell
fancied that it would gain adherents from both sides. He forgot how
far controversy had extended since the summer months in which the
Root-and-Branch Bill had been discussed, and how men who believed that,
if only Charles could be induced to make more prudent appointments,
intellectual liberty was safer under bishops than under any system
likely to approve itself to a synod of devout ministers, had now
rallied to the King.

It was, by this time, more than ever, a question whether Charles could
be trusted, and Cromwell and his allies had far stronger grounds in
denying than their opponents had in affirming that he could. After all,
the ecclesiastical quarrel could never be finally settled without
mutual toleration, and neither party was ready even partially to accept
such a solution as that. As for Cromwell himself, he regarded those
decent forms which were significant of deeper realities even to many
who had rebelled against the pedagogic harshness of Laud, as mere
rags of popery and superstition to be swept away without compunction.
With this conviction pressing on his mind, it is no wonder that, when
the great debate was over late in the night, after the division had
been taken which gave a majority of eleven to the supporters of the
Remonstrance, he replied to Falkland's question whether there had been
a debate with: "I will take your word for it another time. If the
Remonstrance had been rejected, I would have sold all I had the next
morning, and never have seen England any more; and I know there are
many other honest men of the same resolution."

There was in Cromwell's mind a capacity for recognising the strength of
adverse facts which had led him--there is some reason to believe[B]--to
think of emigrating to America in 1636 when Charles's triumph appeared
most assured, and which now led him to think of the same mode of escape
to a purer atmosphere if Charles, supported by Parliament, should
be once more in the ascendant. On neither of the two occasions did
his half-formed resolution develop into a settled purpose, the first
time because, for some unknown reason, he hardened his heart to hold
out till better times arrived; the second time because the danger
anticipated never actually occurred.

      [B] See the argument for the probability of the traditional
          story, though the details usually given cannot be true,
          in Mr. Firth's _Oliver Cromwell_, 37.

In the constitutional by-play which followed--the question of the
Bishops' protest and the resistance to the attempt on the five
members--Cromwell took no prominent part, though his motion for an
address to the King, asking him to remove the Earl of Bristol from
his counsels on the ground that he had formerly recommended Charles
to bring up the Northern army to his support, shows in what direction
his thoughts were moving. The dispute between Parliament and King
had so deepened that each side deprecated the employment of force by
the other, whilst each side felt itself justified in arming itself
ostensibly for its own defence. It was no longer a question of
conformity to the constitution in the shape in which the Tudors had
handed it down to the Stuarts. That constitution, resting as it did on
an implied harmony between King and people, had hopelessly broken down
when Charles had for eleven years ruled without a Parliament. The only
question was how it was to be reconstructed. Cromwell was not the man
to indulge in constitutional speculations, but he saw distinctly that
if religion--such as he conceived it--was to be protected, it must be
by armed force. A King to whom religion in that form was detestable,
and who was eager to stifle it by calling in troops from any foreign
country which could be induced to come to his aid, was no longer to be
trusted with power.

So far as we know, Cromwell did not intervene in the debates on the
control of the militia. He was mainly concerned with seeing that the
militia was in a state of efficiency for the defence of Parliament. As
early as January 14, 1642, soon after the attempt on the five members
had openly revealed Charles's hostility, it was on Cromwell's motion
that a committee was named to put the kingdom in a posture of defence,
and this motion he followed up by others, with the practical object
of forwarding repression in Ireland or protection to the Houses at
Westminster. Though he was far from being a wealthy man, he contributed
£600 to the projected campaign in Ireland, and another £500 to the
raising of forces in England. Mainly through his efforts, Cambridge
was placed in a state to defend itself against attack. Without waiting
for a Parliamentary vote, he sent down arms valued at £100. On July 15
he moved for an order 'to allow the townsmen of Cambridge to raise two
companies of volunteers, and to appoint captains over them'. A month
later the House was informed that 'Mr. Cromwell, in Cambridgeshire,
hath seized the magazine in the castle at Cambridge,' that is to say,
the store of arms--the property of the County--ready to be served out
to the militia when called upon for service or training, 'and hath
hindered the carrying of the plate from that University; which, as was
reported, was to the value of £20,000 or thereabouts'. Evidently there
was one member of Parliament prompt of decision and determined in will,
who had what so few--if any--of his colleagues had--the makings of a
great soldier in him.

When at last Essex received the command to create a Parliamentary army,
Cromwell accepted a commission to raise a troop of arquebusiers--the
light horse of the day--in his own county. He can have had no
difficulty in finding recruits, especially as his popularity in the
fen-land had been, if possible, increased by his conduct in a committee
held in the preceding summer, where he bitterly resented an attempt
of the Earl of Manchester to enclose lands in defiance of the rights
of the commoners. He was, however, resolved to pick the sixty men he
needed. We can well understand that in choosing his subordinates he
would be inspired by an instinctive desire to prize those qualities
in his soldiers which were strongly developed in his own character,
in which strenuous activity was upheld by unswerving conviction and
perfervid spiritual emotion. He could choose the better because
he had neighbours, friends and kinsmen from whom to select. The
Quarter-master of his troop was John Desborough, his brother-in-law,
whilst another brother-in-law, Valentine Wauton, though not actually
serving under Cromwell, rallied to his side, and became the captain
of another troop in the Parliamentary army. To the end of his career
Cromwell never forwarded the prospects of a kinsman or friend unless
he was persuaded of his efficiency, though he never shrank from the
promotion of kinsmen whom he believed himself able to trust in order to
shake off the charge of nepotism from himself.

The sobriety of Cromwell's judgment was as fully vindicated by his
choice of the cavalry arm for himself, as by the selection of his
subordinates. If the result of the coming war was to be decided by
superiority in cavalry, as would certainly be the case, the chances
were all in favour of the Royalist gentry, whose very nickname of
'cavaliers' was a presage of victory, and who were not only themselves
familiar with horsemanship from their youth up, but had at their
disposal the grooms and the huntsmen who were attached to their
service. "Your troops," he said some weeks later to his cousin Hampden,
after the failure of the Parliamentary horse had become manifest,
"are most of them old decayed serving men and tapsters, and such kind
of fellows; and their troops are gentlemen's sons and persons of
quality. Do you think the spirits of such base and mean fellows will
ever be able to encounter gentlemen that have honour and courage and
resolution in them?... You must get men of spirit, and, take it not
ill what I say--I know you will not--of a spirit that is likely to go
on as far as gentlemen will go, or else you will be beaten still." The
importance of a good cavalry was in those days relatively much greater
than it is now. A body of infantry composed in about equal proportions
of pikemen and musketeers, the latter armed with a heavy and unwieldy
weapon, only to be fired at considerable intervals, and requiring the
support of a rest to steady it, needed to be placed behind hedges to
resist a cavalry charge. It was a recognised axiom of war that a foot
regiment marching across open country required cavalry as a convoy to
ward off destructive attacks by the enemy's horse. So unquestioned was
the inferiority of infantry, that unless the horsemen who gathered
round Charles's standard when it was displayed on the Castle Hill at
Nottingham could be overpowered, the resistance of the Parliamentary
army could hardly be prolonged for many months. That they were
overpowered was the achievement of Cromwell, and of Cromwell alone.

It was something that Cromwell had gathered round him his sixty
God-fearing men. It was more, that he did not confide, as a mere
fanatic would have done, in their untried zeal. His recruits were
subjected to an iron discipline. The hot fire of enthusiasm for the
cause in which they had been enlisted burnt strongly within them.
They had drawn their swords not for constitutional safeguards, but in
the service of God Himself, and God Himself, they devoutly trusted,
would shelter His servants in the day of battle against the impious
men who were less their enemies than His. It was no reason--so they
learnt from their captain--that they should remit any single precaution
recommended by the most worldly of military experts. Cromwell almost
certainly never told his soldiers--in so many words--to trust in God
and keep their powder dry. Yet, apocryphal as is the anecdote, it
well represents the spirit in which Cromwell's commands were issued.
The very vividness of his apprehension of the supernatural enabled
him to pass rapidly without any sense of incongruity from religious
exhortations to the practical satisfaction of the demands of the
material world.

When on October 23, 1642, the first battle of the war was fought
at Edgehill, Cromwell's troop was one of the few not swept away by
Rupert's headlong charge, probably because coming late upon the field
he did not join the main army till the Royalist horse had ceased to
trouble it. At all events, he took his share in the indispensable
service rendered by the little force of cavalry remaining at Essex's
disposal, when in the opposing ranks there was no cavalry at all. It
was the co-operation of this force which, by assailing in flank and
rear the King's foot regiments, whilst the infantry broke them up in
front, enabled the Parliamentary army to claim at least a doubtful
victory in the place of the rout which would have befallen it if
Rupert, on his late return, had found his master's foot in a condition
to carry on the struggle. Whatever else Cromwell learnt from his first
experience of actual warfare, he had learnt from Rupert's failure
after early success never to forget that headlong valour alone will
accomplish little, and that a good cavalry officer requires to know
when to draw rein, as well as when to charge, and to subordinate the
conduct of the attack in which he is personally engaged to the needs of
the army as a whole.

Many months were to pass away before Cromwell was to measure swords
with Rupert. He remained under Essex almost to the end of the year, and
was present at Turnham Green, when Essex saw Charles, after taking up a
position at Brentford in the hope of forcing a passage to London, march
off to Reading and Oxford without attempting to strike a blow. Towards
the end of 1642, or in the early part of 1643, Cromwell had work
found for him which was eventually to breathe a new spirit into the
Parliamentary army. Enormous as was the advantage which the devotion
of London conferred upon Parliament, London by no means exercised that
supreme influence which was exercised by Paris in the times of the
French Revolution. Both parties, therefore, put forth their efforts
in organising local forces, but of all the local organisations which
were brought into existence, the only one entirely successful was the
Eastern Association, comprising Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridge
and Herts, and that mainly because Cromwell was at hand to keep it
up to the mark. There was to be a general fund at the service of the
association, whilst the forces raised in the several shires of which it
was composed were to be at the disposal of a common committee.

In England generally the first half of 1643 was a time of desultory
fighting, alternating with efforts to make peace without the conditions
which might have brought peace within sight. It was not to be expected
either that Parliament would accept Charles on his own terms, or that
Charles would bow down to any terms which Parliament was likely to
offer. Cromwell, at least, took no part in these futile negotiations,
and did all that in him lay to clear the counties of the Eastern
Association from Royalists, and to put them in a state of defence
against Royalist incursions. At some time later than January 23, and
before the end of February, he was promoted to a colonelcy. In March he
was fortifying Cambridge, and urgently pleading for contributions to
enable him to complete the work. Again we find him sending to arrest
a Royalist sheriff who attempted to collect soldiers at St. Alban's,
and then hurrying to Lowestoft to crush a Royalist movement in the
town. After this no more is heard of Royalism holding up its head in
any corner of the association, and to the end of the war no Royalist
in arms again set foot within it. By the end of May it was joined by
Huntingdonshire, the county of Cromwell's birth.

Cromwell's superabundant energy was employed in other ways than in
contending against armed men. Laud's enforcement of at least external
signs of respect to objects consecrated to religious usage had provoked
a reaction which influenced Puritanism on its least noble side. A
certain Dowsing has left a diary, showing how he visited the Suffolk
churches, pulling down crosses, destroying pictures and tearing up
brasses inscribed with _Orate pro animâ_, the usual expression of
mediæval piety towards the dead. At Cambridge, Cromwell himself,
finding opposition amongst those in authority in the University, sent
up three of the Heads of Houses in custody to Westminster, and on a
cold night in March shut up the Vice-Chancellor and other dignitaries
in the public schools till midnight without food or firing, because
they refused to pay taxes imposed by Parliament.

Nor was it only with open enemies that Cromwell and those who
sympathised with him had to deal. Of all forms of war civil strife is
the most hideous, and it is no wonder that the hands of many who had
entered upon it with the expectation that a few months or even weeks
would suffice to crush the King were now slackened. Was it not better,
they asked, to come to terms with Charles than to continue a struggle
which promised to drag out for years? Negotiations opened at Oxford
in the spring failed, indeed, to lead to peace, because neither party
had the spirit of compromise, but they were accompanied or followed by
the defection from the Parliamentary ranks of men who, at the outset,
had stood up manfully against the King, such as Sir Hugh Cholmley,
who hoisted the royal colours over Scarborough Castle, which had been
entrusted to him by the Houses; and the Hothams, father and son, who,
whilst nominally continuing to serve the Parliament, were watching for
an opportunity of profitable desertion. Such tendencies were encouraged
by the vigour with which the King's armies were handled, and the
successes they gained in the early summer. On May 16 the Parliamentary
General, the Earl of Stamford, was defeated at Stratton, with the
result that Sir Ralph Hopton was able to overrun the Western counties
at the head of the Royalist troops, and though defeated on Lansdown by
Sir William Waller, was succoured by a Royalist army which, on July 13,
crushed Waller's army on Roundway Down; whilst on July 26 Bristol was
taken by Rupert, and the whole of the Southern counties thrown open
to the assaults of the King's partisans. Farther east, though Essex
succeeded in capturing Reading, his army melted away before disease
and mismanagement. On June 18 Hampden was mortally wounded at Chalgrove
Field. Lord Fairfax and his son, Sir Thomas Fairfax, were with
difficulty holding their own in the West Riding of Yorkshire against
a Royalist force under the command of the Earl of Newcastle. By the
middle of the year, the Parliamentary armies were threatened with ruin
on almost every side.

The one conspicuous exception to these tales of disaster was found in
the news from the Eastern Association, where Cromwell's vigour upheld
the fight. Yet Cromwell had no slight difficulties against which to
contend. When, by the end of April, he had cleared the shires of the
association from hostile forces, he made his way into Lincolnshire,
and called on the neighbouring military commanders of his own party
to join him in an attack on the Royalist garrison at Newark, from
which parties issued forth to overawe and despoil the Parliamentarians
of the neighbourhood. Those upon whom he called--Sir John Gell at
Nottingham, the Lincolnshire gentry, and Stamford's son, Lord Grey of
Groby, in Leicestershire, were in command of local forces, and placed
the interests of their own localities above the common good. Stamford's
mansion at Broadgates, hard by Leicester, was exposed to attack from
the Royalist garrison at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and consequently Lord Grey
hung back from joining in an enterprise which would leave Leicester at
the mercy of the enemy, and his example was followed in other quarters.
"Believe it," wrote Cromwell wrathfully, "it were better, in my poor
opinion, Leicester were not, than that there should not be found an
immediate taking of the field by our forces to accomplish the common
ends." To subordinate local interests to the 'common ends' was as much
the condition of Cromwell's success as the discipline under which he
had brought the fiery troops under his command.

The result of that discipline was soon to appear. On May 13 he fell
in near Grantham with a cavalry force from Newark far outnumbering
his own. Taking a lesson from Rupert, who had taught him at Edgehill
that the horse, and not the pistol, was the true weapon of the mounted
horseman, he dashed upon the enemy, who weakly halted to receive the
charge, and was thoroughly beaten in consequence. Cromwell, as usual,
piously attributed his success to the Divine intervention. "With this
handful," he wrote "it pleased God to cast the scale."

The success of Cromwell's horse was all the more reason why financial
support should be accorded to its commander. Voluntary contributions
were still the backbone of the resources of Parliament, though a system
of forced payments was being gradually established. "Lay not," wrote
Cromwell to the Mayor of Colchester, "too much on the back of a poor
gentleman who desires, without much noise, to lay down his life and
bleed the last drop to serve the cause and God. I ask not money for
myself; I desire to deny myself, but others will not be satisfied."

Cromwell once more called on the local commanders to gather their
forces, not for an attack on Newark, but for a march into Yorkshire to
the relief of the Fairfaxes. Early in June some 6,000 men were gathered
at Nottingham. Once more the effort came to nothing. The commanders
excused themselves from moving, on the plea that the Fairfaxes did
not need their help. One of their number, the younger Hotham, was
detected in an intrigue with the enemy. Mainly by Cromwell's energy
he was seized, and ultimately, together with his father, was sent
to London, where they were both executed as traitors. In Yorkshire
the tide was running against the Fairfaxes. On June 30 they were
defeated at Adwalton Moor. The whole of the West Riding was lost, and
the commanders forced to take refuge in Hull. Newcastle, with his
victorious army, would soon be heard of in Lincolnshire, where Lord
Willoughby of Parham had lately seized Gainsborough for Parliament.
Among the troops ordered to maintain this advanced position was
Cromwell's regiment, and on July 28 that regiment defeated a strong
body of Royalist horse near Gainsborough. Later in the day news was
brought that a force of the enemy was approaching from the North.
Cromwell, whose cavalry was supported by a body of foot, went out to
meet it, only to find himself face to face with Newcastle's whole
army. Though the Parliamentary infantry took flight at once, the horse
retired by sections, showing a bold front, and regaining the town with
the loss of only two men. This cavalry, which combined the dash of
Grantham with the discipline of Gainsborough, spelt victory for the
Parliamentary side.

Yet, at the moment, the prospect was gloomy enough. On July 30
Gainsborough surrendered, and unless Cromwell's forces could be
augmented, there was little to intervene between Newcastle's army and
London. "It's no longer disputing," wrote Cromwell to the Committee at
Cambridge, "but out instantly all you can. Almost all our foot have
quitted Stamford; there is nothing to interrupt an enemy but our horse
that is considerable. You must act lively. Do it without distraction.
Neglect no means."

Cromwell knew that more than his own name was required to rally the
force needed at this desperate conjuncture. At his instance Parliament
appointed the new Earl of Manchester--who, as Lord Kimbolton, had
been the one member of the House of Lords marked out by the King for
impeachment together with the five members of the House of Commons--as
Commander of the Eastern Association, and ordered an army of 10,000
men to be raised within its limits. Whilst in the South, Essex
raised the siege of Gloucester, and was successful enough at Newbury
to make good his retreat to London, Manchester's new army, in which
Cromwell commanded the horse, defeated a party of Royalists at Winceby,
compelled Newcastle to raise the siege of Hull, and retook Lincoln,
which had fallen into the hands of the enemy. Lincolnshire was now
added to the Eastern Association, the one part of England on which the
eyes of the Parliamentary chiefs could rest with complete satisfaction.

Sooner or later Cromwell would have to face other questions than
those of military efficiency. When Pym and his supporters drew up
the Grand Remonstrance, they did not contemplate the introduction of
any principle of religious liberty. The Church was to be exclusively
Puritan, on some plan to be settled by Parliament upon the advice of an
Assembly of Divines. That Assembly met on July 1, 1643, and if it had
been left to itself, would probably have recommended the adoption of
some non-episcopalian system of Church-government; whilst Parliament,
faithful to the traditions of English governments, would have taken
care that the clergy should be placed under some form of lay government
emanating from Parliament itself. In the summer of 1643 it was
impossible to separate questions of ecclesiastical organisation from
those arising out of the political necessities of the hour. It was
known that Charles was angling for the support of Ireland and Scotland,
and if Parliament was not to be overborne, it was necessary to meet
him on the same ground. In Ireland Charles was fairly successful.
On September 15 his Lord Lieutenant obtained from the Confederate
Catholics, who were in arms against his Government, a cessation of
hostilities, which would enable him to divert a portion of his own
troops to the defence of the King's cause in England; ultimately, as he
hoped, to be followed by an army levied amongst the Irish Catholics.
Charles's attempt to win Scotland to his side was less successful. The
predominant party at Edinburgh was that led by the Marquis of Argyle,
who had climbed to power with the help of the Presbyterian organisation
of the Church, and who justly calculated that, if Charles gained his
ends in England, the weight of his victorious sword would be thrown
into the balance of the party led by the Duke of Hamilton. That party
however, embracing as it did the bulk of the Scottish nobility, would
not only have made short work of Argyle's political dictatorship, but
would have taken good care that the Presbyterian clergy should, in some
way or other, be reduced to dependence on the laity. When, therefore,
English Parliamentary Commissioners arrived in Edinburgh to treat for
military assistance, they were confronted by a demand that they should
accept a document known as the Solemn League and Covenant, binding
England to accept the full Scottish Presbyterian system with its
Church Courts, claiming as by Divine right to settle all ecclesiastical
matters without the interference of the lay government. It is true that
this demand was somewhat veiled in the engagement to reform religion in
the Church of England, 'according to the example of the best reformed
Churches,' so as to bring the Churches in both nations to the nearest
conjunction and uniformity. The leading English Commissioner, however,
the younger Sir Henry Vane, was one of the few Englishmen who at this
time championed a system of religious liberty, and he now succeeded in
keeping a door open by proposing the addition of a few words, declaring
that religion was to be reformed in England according to the Word of
God, as well as by the example of the best reformed Churches. In this
form the Covenant was brought back to Westminster, and in this form it
was sworn to by the members of Parliament, and required to be sworn to
by all Englishmen above the age of eighteen. Few indeed amongst the
members of Parliament willingly placed their necks under the yoke. It
was the price paid for Scottish armed assistance, simply because that
assistance could be had on no other terms. The alliance with the Scots
was the last work of Pym, who died before the Scottish army, the aid of
which he had so dearly purchased, crossed the Borders into England.

There were two ways of opposing the Scottish system of Divine-right
Presbyterianism, the old one of the Tudor and Stuart Kings, placing
the Church under lay control; and the new one, proclaiming the right
of individuals to religious liberty, which was advocated by Vane, and
was in the course of the next few months advocated by a handful of
Independent ministers in the Assembly of divines, and by writers like
Roger Williams and Henry Robinson in the press. Like all new doctrines,
it made its way slowly, and for long appeared to the great majority of
Englishmen to be redolent of anarchy. The freedom from restraint which
every revolution brings, together with the habit of looking to the
Bible as verbally inspired, had led to the growth of sects upholding
doctrines, some of which gave rational offence to men of cultivated
intelligence and encouraged them to look for a remedy to the repressive
action of the State. On the other hand, a small number of men, most
of them attached to the Independent or Baptist bodies, fully accepted
the principle of religious liberty, at least within the bounds of
Puritanism. For the present the question was merely Parliamentary; but
it might easily be brought within the sphere of military influence,
and it was not without significance that, though Essex and Waller, who
had comparatively failed as generals, were on the side of Presbyterian
repression, Cromwell, who had shown himself to be the most successful
soldier in England, declared himself on the side of liberty. In
the sectarian sense indeed, Cromwell never attached himself to the
Independent or to any other religious body. In firm adherence to the
great doctrine of toleration, which spread abroad from the Independents
or from the Baptists, who were but Independents with a special doctrine
added to their tenets, Cromwell was the foremost Independent of the day.

Not that Cromwell indeed reached his conclusions as did Roger Williams,
by the light of pure reason. The rites prescribed in the Prayer Book
were to him a mockery of God. On January 10, 1644, he ordered a
clergyman, who persisted in using the old service in Ely Cathedral,
to leave off his fooling and come down from his place. But he had no
liking for the Covenant, and avoided committing himself to it till the
beginning of February, 1644, when he swore to it on his appointment
as Lieutenant-General in Manchester's army, doubtless laying special
stress in his own mind on the loop-hole offered by Vane's amendment.
The cause of religious liberty appealed to him on practical grounds.
How was he to fight the enemy, unless he could choose his officers for
their military efficiency, and not for their Presbyterian opinions? The
Major-General of Manchester's army--Crawford, a Scot of the narrowest
Presbyterian type--had objected to the promotion of an officer named
Packer, who was an Anabaptist. "Admit he be," wrote Cromwell in reply,
"shall that render him incapable to serve the public?... Sir, the State
in choosing men to serve it takes no notice of their opinions. If they
be willing faithfully to serve it--that satisfies. 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 matters of religion."

It might be that religious liberty would in the long run suffer more
than it would gain from military support, just as the principles of
Andrewes and Laud suffered more than they gained by the support of
Charles. Already the regiments under Cromwell's command swarmed with
enthusiasts who spent their leisure in preaching and arguing on the
most abstruse points of divinity, agreeing in nothing except that
argument was to be met by argument alone. Their iron discipline and
their devotion to the cause permitted a freedom which would have been
a mere dissolvent of armies enlisted after a more worldly system.
As Cromwell stepped more pronouncedly to the front, his advocacy of
religious liberty would become well-nigh irresistible.

On January 19, 1644, the Scottish army, under the Earl of Leven,
crossed the Tweed. Newcastle was pushed back into York, where he was
besieged by the combined forces of Leven and the Fairfaxes. On May 6
Lincoln, which had been regained by the Royalists, was retaken by
Manchester, who together with Cromwell pushed on to join in the siege
of York. Rupert, however, having been sent northward by Charles,
succeeded in raising the siege; and on July 2 a battle was fought on
Marston Moor, in which the Royalist army, successful at first, was
utterly crushed by Cromwell's skill. Having routed Rupert's horse,
he drew bridle and hurried back to the assistance of the Scottish
infantry, which was holding its own against overwhelming numbers of
the enemy. The King's regiments of foot were routed or destroyed by
his impetuous charge. Cromwell had redeemed the day after the three
generals, Leven, Manchester and the elder Fairfax, had fled from that
which they deemed to be a complete disaster. Before long the whole of
the North of England, save a few outlying fortresses, was lost to the
King.

In the South, matters were going badly for Parliament. Waller's
army, checked at Cropredy Bridge, melted away by desertion; whilst
Essex, attempting an inroad into Cornwall, was followed by the King.
Essex himself and his cavalry succeeded in making their escape, but
on September 2 the whole of his infantry surrendered to Charles
at Lostwithiel. Unless Manchester came to the rescue, it would be
impossible to avert disaster. Manchester, however, was hard to move.
Between him and his Lieutenant-General there was no longer that good
understanding which was essential to successful action. Manchester,
longing for peace on the basis of a Presbyterian settlement of the
Church, could not be brought to understand that, whether such an ending
to the war were desirable or not, it could never be obtained from
Charles. Cromwell, on the other hand, aimed at religious toleration
for the sects, and that security which, as his practical nature taught
him, was only attainable by the destruction of the military defences
in which Charles trusted. That those defences were the ramparts of
the city of destruction, he never doubted for an instant. Writing in
his most serious mood immediately after the victory of Marston Moor,
to the father of a youth who had there met his death-wound, his own
losses rose before his mind. Of his four sons, two had already passed
away:--Robert, leaving behind him a memory of unusual piety, had died
in his schoolboy days; whilst Oliver, who had charged and fled at
Edgehill had lately succumbed to small-pox in the garrison at Newport
Pagnell. Yet it was not only to the example of his own sorrow that
Cromwell mainly looked as a balm for a father's bereavement. "Sir," he
wrote, "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'." Between a Cromwell eager to destroy
the enemies of God and a Manchester eager to make peace with those
enemies no good understanding was possible, especially as in the eyes
of Manchester the prolongation of the war meant the strengthening of
that sectarian fanaticism to which Cromwell looked as the evidence of a
vigorous spiritual life.

In Manchester the desire for peace showed itself in sheer reluctance to
make war. Cromwell fumed in vain against the Scots and their resolution
to force their Presbyterianism upon England. "In the way they now carry
themselves," he told Manchester, "pressing for their discipline, I
could as soon draw my sword against them as against any in the King's
army." "He would have," he added at another time, "none in his army
who were not of the Independent judgment, in order that if terms were
offered for a peace such as might not stand with the ends that honest
men should aim at, this army might prevent such a mischief." This
attack on the Scots led to an attack on the English nobility, amongst
whom the sects found scant favour. He hoped, he said in words long
afterwards remembered against him, to 'live to see never a nobleman
in England'. He is even reported to have assured Manchester that it
would never be well till he was known as plain Mr. Montague. Manchester
persisted in doing nothing till a distinct order was given him to march
to the defence of London, now laid open by Essex's mishap.

Manchester's reluctance to engage in military operations was probably
strengthened by the knowledge that Vane, who, since Pym's death in
the winter of 1643, was the most prominent personage amongst the war
party at Westminster, had come down to York, at the time of the siege,
to urge the generals, though in vain, to consent to the deposition of
the King, and he could not but suspect that the arrival of Charles
Louis, Elector Palatine, the eldest surviving son of Charles's sister
Elizabeth, on August 30, had something to do with a design for placing
him on his uncle's throne. The design, if it really existed, came
to nothing, probably because it was hopeless to carry it out in the
teeth of the generals. It was only with the utmost difficulty that
Manchester's hesitation was overcome, and that he was induced to face
Charles's army at Newbury. The battle fought there on October 27 was a
drawn one. That it did not end in a Parliamentary victory was mainly
owing to Manchester's indecision. When, a few days later, the King
reappeared on the scene, he was allowed to relieve Donnington Castle,
in the immediate neighbourhood of Newbury, no attempt whatever being
made to hinder his operations. In the controversy which followed,
Manchester went to the root of the matter when he said, "If we beat
the King ninety and nine times, yet he is King still, and so will
his posterity be after him; but if the King beat us once we shall
all be hanged, and our posterity made slaves". "My Lord," answered
Cromwell, "if this be so why did we take up arms at first? This is
against fighting ever hereafter. If so, let us make peace, be it never
so base." Each of the two men had fixed upon one side of the problem
which England was called upon to solve. Manchester was appalled by the
political difficulty. There stood the Kingship accepted by generation
after generation, fenced about with safeguards of law and custom, and
likely to be accepted in one form or another by generations to come. A
single decisive victory gained by Charles would not only expose those
who had dared to make war on him to the hideous penalties of the law of
treason--but would enable him to measure the terms of submission by his
own resolves. If Manchester had had the power of looking into futurity,
he would have argued that no military success--not even the abolition
of monarchy, and the execution of the monarch--would avail to postpone
the restoration of Charles's heir for more than a little while.

Cromwell's reply did not even pretend to meet the difficulty. It
was not in him to forecast the prospects of kingship in England, or
to vex his mind with the consequences of a problematical Royalist
victory. It was enough for him to grasp the actual situation. It is
true that, at this time, he had not got beyond the position from which
the whole of the Parliamentary party had started at the beginning of
the war--the position that the war must be ended by a compact between
King and Parliament. To Cromwell, therefore, whose heart was set upon
the liberation of those who in his eyes were the people of God, and the
overthrow of ceremonial observances, the immediate duty of the moment
was to secure that, when the time of negotiation arrived, the right
side should be in possession of sufficient military force to enable it
to dictate the terms of peace. It was his part not to consider what the
King might do if he proved victorious, but to take good care that he
was signally defeated. Strange to say, the folly of the Presbyterian
party--strong in the two Houses, and in the support of the Scottish
army--was playing into Cromwell's hands. On November 20, ten days
after Cromwell's altercations with Manchester, Parliament sent to
Oxford terms of peace so harsh as to place their acceptance outside the
bounds of possibility. The royal power was to be reduced to a cipher,
whilst such a form of religion as might be agreed upon by the Houses
in accordance with the Covenant was to be imposed on all Englishmen,
without toleration either for the sects favoured by Cromwell, or for
the Church of Andrewes and Laud which found one of its warmest and most
conscientious supporters in Charles. Every man in the three kingdoms,
including the King himself, was to be bound to swear to the observance
of the Covenant. Such a demand naturally met with stern resistance.
"There are three things," replied Charles, "I will not part with--the
Church, my crown, and my friends; and you will have much ado to get
them from me." It needed no action on the part of Cromwell to secure
the failure of such a negotiation, and, so far as we are aware, no word
passed his lips in public on the subject.

On November 25 Cromwell appeared in Parliament to urge on the one
thing immediately necessary, the forging of an instrument by which
the King might be ruined in the field. The existing military system
by which separate armies, to a great extent composed of local forces,
and therefore unable to subordinate local to national objects, had
been placed under commanders selected for their political or social
eminence, had completely broken down. So well was this recognised that,
two days before Cromwell's arrival at Westminster, a committee had
been appointed without opposition to 'consider of a frame or model of
the whole militia'. It was perhaps to assist the committee to come to
a right conclusion that, upon his arrival at Westminster, Cromwell
indignantly assailed Manchester as guilty of all the errors which had
led to the deplorable result at Newbury. Manchester was not slow in
throwing all the blame on Cromwell, and it seemed as if the gravest
political questions were to be thrust aside by a personal altercation.
So angry were the Scottish members of the Committee of both kingdoms,
a body which had recently been appointed to direct the movements of
the armies, that they won over the Presbyterian leaders, Essex and
Holles, to look favourably on a scheme for bringing an accusation
against Cromwell as an incendiary who was doing his best to divide
the King from his people, and one of the kingdoms from the other. At
a meeting held at Essex House the Scottish Earl of Loudoun asked the
English lawyers present whether an incendiary who was punishable by the
law of Scotland was also punishable by the law of England. The English
lawyers threw cold water on the scheme, Whitelocke asking to see the
evidence on which the charge was founded, whilst Maynard declared that
'Lieutenant-General Cromwell is a person of great favour and interest
with the House of Commons, and with some of the Peers likewise,
and therefore there must be proofs, and the most clear and evident
against him, to prevail with the Parliament to adjudge him to be an
incendiary'. Neither Whitelocke nor Maynard was eager to bell the cat.

Cromwell replied by a renewed attack on Manchester's inefficient
generalship. Yet it was not in accordance with the character of the man
who had stopped the headlong rush of his squadrons at Marston Moor to
allow a great public cause to be wrecked by personal recriminations.
On December 9 Zouch Tate, himself a strong Presbyterian, reported from
a committee which had been appointed to consider the questions at
issue between the two generals, 'that the chief causes of our division
are pride and covetousness'. It is immaterial whether Tate had or had
not come to a previous understanding with Cromwell to damp down the
fires of controversy which threatened to rend the Parliamentary party
into warring factions. What was of real importance is that Cromwell
followed with an admission that, unless the war was brought to a speedy
conclusion, the kingdom would become weary of Parliament. "For what,"
he added, "do the enemy say? Nay, what do many say that were friends
at the beginning of the Parliament? Even this, that the members of
both Houses have got great places and commands and a sword into their
hands, and, what by interest of Parliament, and what by power in the
army, will perpetually continue themselves in grandeur, and not permit
the war speedily to end, lest their own power should determine with it.
This I speak here to our faces is but what others do utter behind our
backs." Then, after calling for the more vigorous prosecution of the
war, and advising that all charges against individual commanders should
be dropped, he proceeded to express a hope that no member of either
House would scruple to abandon his private interests for the public
good. Later in the day, Tate gave point to Cromwell's suggestion by
moving that so long as the war lasted, no member of either House should
hold any command, military or civil, conferred on him by Parliament.
The idea struck root. It satisfied those who misdoubted Essex and
Manchester, as well as those who misdoubted Cromwell. That Cromwell was
in earnest in proposing to exclude himself is evident. The majority
in both Houses was Presbyterian, and if the so-called Self-Denying
Ordinance brought in to give effect to Tate's proposal by refusing to
members of either House the right of holding commands in the army or
offices in the State had been passed in the form in which it was drawn
up, nothing short of a repeal of that ordinance could have enabled him
to command even a single troop.

That a door was left open was entirely the fault of the House of Lords
in rejecting this ordinance on January 13, 1645. By this time both
parties in the Commons were of one mind in pushing on an ordinance for
a new model of the army, from which it would be easy to exclude peers,
whether the Self-Denying Ordinance were passed or no. On January 21
the Commons named Fairfax as General and Skippon as Major-General of
the new army. The post of Lieutenant-General, which carried with it
the command of the Horse, was significantly left open. No legislation
now barred the way to Cromwell's appointment, but the House thought
it desirable to make their action in the matter dependent on the line
finally taken by the Lords. On February 15 the Lords passed the New
Model Ordinance. A few days later, the negotiation with the King which
is known as the Treaty of Uxbridge, came to an end, and Parliament
was now committed to the design of meeting Charles in the field with
an army commanded by professional soldiers, and withdrawn from local
and political influences. In such an army nothing more would be heard
of the dangers of success which had loomed so large before the eye of
Manchester. Apparently to save the Parliamentary officers from the
indignity of tendering the resignation of their commissions, a new
Self-Denying Ordinance was passed on April 3, by which members of
either House were discharged from their military or civil posts within
forty days afterwards. There was nothing to prevent the reappointment
of Cromwell on the one hand, or of Essex or Manchester on the other, if
the two Houses should combine in doing so.




CHAPTER II.

THE NEW MODEL ARMY AND THE PRESBYTERIANS.


The New Model Army had been accepted by both Houses and by both parties
in either House, because in no other way could the difficulties of
the situation be met. The failure of the negotiations at Uxbridge had
convinced the Presbyterians--at least for the moment--that Charles
would give no help towards the settlement of the nation on any basis
that their narrow minds could recognise as acceptable, and if the war
was to be continued, what prospect was there of success under the old
conditions? Nevertheless, the creation of the New Model was, in the
main, Cromwell's work. Men are led by their passions more than by
their reason, and if Cromwell had continued his invectives against
Manchester, he would have roused an opposition which would have left
little chance of the realisation of the hopes which he cherished most
deeply in his heart. All through the discussion he had shown not only a
readiness to sacrifice his own personal interests, but a determination
to avoid even criticism of the actions of his opponents in all matters
of less importance, provided that he had his way in the one thing
most important of all. Without a word of censure he had left the
Presbyterians not only to negotiate with Charles, but to pass votes for
the establishment of intolerant Presbyterianism in England. The skill
with which he avoided friction by keeping himself in the background,
whilst he allowed others to work for him, doubtless contributed much
to his success. It revealed the highest qualities of statesmanship on
the hypothesis that he was acting with a single eye to the public good.
It revealed the lowest arts of the trickster, on the hypothesis that
he was scheming for his own ultimate advantage. As human nature is
constituted, there would be many who would convince themselves that the
lower interpretation of his conduct was the true one.

At all events, the New Model Army was being brought into shape in
the spring of 1645. It was composed partly of men pressed into the
service, partly of soldiers who had served in former armies. That
the Puritan, and even the Independent element, was well represented
amongst the cavalry of which Cromwell's troops formed the nucleus,
there can be little doubt; and even amongst the infantry, the fact
that it could only be recruited from those parts of England which at
that time acknowledged the authority of the Houses, and that in those
counties Puritanism was especially rife, would naturally introduce
into the ranks a considerable number of Puritans, whether Independent
or not. The army, however, was certainly not formed on the principles
which had guided Cromwell in the selection of his first troopers, and
indeed it was impossible to select 30,000 men on the exclusive plan
which had been found possible in the enlistment of a single troop or
a single regiment. What chiefly--so far as the rank and file were
concerned--distinguished the New Model from preceding armies was that
it was regularly paid. Hitherto the soldiers had been dependent on
intermittent Parliamentary grants, or still more intermittent efforts
of local committees. All this was now to be changed. A regular taxation
was assessed on the counties for the support of the new army, and the
constant pay thus secured was likely to put an end to the desertions on
a large scale which had afflicted former commanders, thus rendering it
possible to bring the new force under rigorous discipline, a discipline
which punished even more severely offences against morality than those
directed against military efficiency.

The higher the state of discipline the more important is the selection
of officers; and here at least Cromwell's views had full scope. On
the mere ground that it was desirable to place command in the hands
of those who were most strenuous in the prosecution of the war, the
preference was certain to be given to men who were least hampered by
a desire to make terms with an unbeaten King--in other words, to
Independents rather than to Presbyterians. In another way Cromwell's
ideas were carried out. "I had rather," he had once said, "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 nothing else. I honour
a gentleman that is so indeed." There was no distinction of social
rank amongst the officers of the New Model. Amongst them were men of
old families such as Fairfax and Montague, side by side with Hewson,
the cobbler, and Pride, the drayman. If ever the army should be drawn
within the circle of politics, much would follow from the adoption of a
system of promotion which grounded itself on military efficiency alone.

For the present the services of the new army were required solely
in the field. On April 20 Cromwell, who was permitted to retain his
commission forty days after the ordinance had passed, and whose
allotted term had not yet expired, was sent with his cavalry to sweep
round the King's head-quarters at Oxford in order to break up his
arrangements for sending out the artillery needed by Rupert if he was
again to take the field. Cromwell's movement was completely successful.
He not only scattered a Royalist force at Islip, and captured
Blechington House by sheer bluff, but he swept up all the draught
horses on which Charles had counted for the removal of the guns, and
thus incapacitated the enemy from immediate action. Rupert had to wait
patiently for some time before he could leave his quarters.

It is seldom that men realise at first the necessary consequences of
an important change, and, on this occasion, the Committee of Both
Kingdoms and the Parliament itself were slow to discover that, if the
new army was to achieve victory, its movements must be guided, not by
politicians at Westminster, but by the general in the field. The first
act of the Committee was to send Fairfax with eleven thousand men to
the relief of Taunton, where Blake, who not long before had defended
Lyme against all the efforts of the Royalists to take it, was now
holding out to the last with scanty protection from the fortifications
he had improvised. The Committee's orders, necessary perhaps at first,
were persisted in even after it was known that Charles had been joined
at Oxford by the field army which had hitherto protected the besiegers
of Taunton in the West, and that, whilst a much smaller force than
eleven thousand men would be now sufficient to raise the siege, every
soldier that could be spared was needed farther east. The next blunder
of the Committee was even worse. Charles had marched to the North with
all the force he could gather, in the hope of undoing the consequences
of Marston Moor. If there was one lesson which the Committee ought
to have learnt from the campaign of the preceding year it was that
it is useless to besiege towns whilst the enemy's army remains
unbeaten in the field. Yet when every military consideration spoke
with no uncertain voice for the policy of following up Charles's army
without remission till it had been defeated, the sage Committee-men
at Westminster ordered Fairfax to besiege Oxford. Charles, at liberty
to direct his movements where he would, had been deflected from his
course, and on May 31 had stormed Leicester. The news shook the
Committee's resolution to keep the direction of the army in its own
feeble hands. On June 2 it directed Fairfax to break up the siege of
Oxford. On the 4th a petition from the London Common Council asked
that, though the forty days during which Cromwell kept his appointment
under the Self-Denying Ordinance had now elapsed, he might be placed at
the head of a new army to be raised in the Eastern Association. Another
petition from Fairfax's officers asked that he might be placed in the
vacant lieutenant-generalship. The Commons agreed, but, for the present
at least, the Lords withheld their consent. At a later time, when
events had rendered refusal impossible, the Lords gave their consent
to an appointment for which Cromwell was certainly not disqualified by
anything in the Self-Denying Ordinance in the form in which they had
allowed it to pass; considering that that Ordinance merely demanded
the surrender of his commission, without imposing any bar to his
reappointment.

When on June 14 the army under Fairfax found itself in presence of the
King at Naseby, Cromwell was once more in command of the horse. As
usual in those days the infantry was in the centre. On the two wings
were the cavalry, that on the right under Cromwell in person, that on
the left under Ireton. Ireton was driven back by Rupert, who, having
learned nothing since his headlong charge at Edgehill, dashed in
pursuit without a moment's thought for the fortunes of the remainder
of the King's army. Cromwell, after driving off the horse opposed to
him, drew rein, as he had done at Marston Moor, to watch the sway of
the battle he had left behind him. Seeing his duty clear, he left three
regiments to continue the pursuit, and with the remainder fell upon the
Royalist infantry, and with the help of Fairfax's own foot destroyed or
captured the whole body. Rupert returned too late to do anything but
join Charles in his flight. Five thousand prisoners had been taken, of
whom no less than five hundred were officers, while Charles's whole
train of artillery remained in the hands of the victors. That Cromwell
had contributed more than any other man to this crushing victory was
beyond dispute.

Cromwell, as was his usual habit, ascribed this success to Divine
aid. "I can say this of Naseby," he wrote, "that when I saw the enemy
draw up and march in gallant order towards us, and we a company of
poor ignorant men to seek to order our battle, the General having
commanded me to order all the horse, I could not--riding alone about
my business--but smile out to God praises in assurance of victory,
because God would, by things that are not, bring to naught things that
are, of which I had great assurance--and God did it." No doubt, as has
been said, Cromwell omitted to mention that the Parliamentary army had
numbers on its side--not much less than 14,000, opposed to 7,500. But
it was not the numerical superiority of the Parliamentarians which won
the day. It did not enable Ireton to withstand Rupert, and the infantry
in the centre was already giving way when Cromwell returned to assist
it. It was the discipline rather than the numbers of Cromwell's horse
aided by the superb generalship of their commander that gained the day.
Cromwell, when he wrote of his soldiers as 'poor ignorant men,' was
doubtless glancing back in thought at his own early criticism of the
fugitives at Edgehill. The yeomen and peasants whom he had gathered
round him owed much to discipline and leadership; but they owed much
also to the belief embedded in their hearts that they were fighting in
the cause of God.

After the victory at Naseby the issue of the struggle was practically
decided. There was another fight at Langport, where Fairfax defeated a
force with which Goring attempted to guard the western counties; but
after this the war resolved itself into a succession of sieges which
could end but in one way as Charles had no longer a field army to
bring to the relief of Royalist garrisons. For some months Cromwell,
sometimes in combination with Fairfax, sometimes in temporary command
of a separate force, was untiring in the energy which he threw into
his work. Charles was full of combinations which never resulted in
practical advantage to his cause. At one time his hopes were set upon
Montrose, who, after his brilliant victories, expected to bring an
army of Highlanders to aid of the royal cause. At another time he
looked with equal hopefulness to Glamorgan, who was to conduct an
Irish army to England. Montrose's scheme was wrecked at Philiphaugh,
and Glamorgan's concessions to the Irish Catholics were divulged and
had to be disavowed. On March 31, 1646 Sir Jacob Astley bringing 3,000
men, the last Royalist force in existence, to the relief of Charles at
Oxford, was forced to surrender at Stow-on-the-Wold. "You have done
your work," said the veteran to his captors, "and may go play, unless
you will fall out among yourselves." Though Oxford and Newark were
still untaken, the end of the war was now a mere question of days.

"Honest men," wrote Cromwell to Speaker Lenthall soon after the
victory of Naseby "served you faithfully in this action. Sir, they are
trusty--I beseech you in the name of God, not to discourage them--I
wish this action may beget thankfulness and humility in all that are
concerned in it. He that ventures his life for the liberty of his
country, I wish he trust God for the liberty of his conscience, and
you for the liberty he fights for." "All this," he continued three
months later, in the same strain, after the storm of Bristol, "is none
other than the work of God; he must be a very atheist that doth not
acknowledge it. It may be thought that some praises are due to those
gallant men of whose valour so much mention is made:--Their humble suit
to you and all that have an interest in this blessing is that, in the
remembrance of God's praises, they may be forgotten. It's their joy
that they are instruments of God's glory and their country's good. It's
their honour that God vouchsafes to use them.... 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 had here the same spirit of faith and prayer, the
same presence and answer; they agree here, know 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. As for being united in forms, commonly called
uniformity, every Christian will, for peace sake, study and do as far
as conscience will permit. And from brethren, in things of the mind, we
look for no compulsion but that of light and reason. In other things,
God hath put the sword in the Parliament's hands for the terror of
evil-doers and the praises of them that do well. If any plead exemption
from that, he knows not the Gospel; if any would wring that out of your
hands, or steal it from you, under what pretence soever, I hope they
shall do it without effect."

No words can better depict the state of Cromwell's mind at this time.
Of the religion to which the King and his followers clung there is
no question in his thoughts. He would be unwilling to listen to the
suggestion that it was to be counted as religion in any worthy sense.
Parliament, mutilated as it was, is the authority ordained by God to
keep order in the land. For that very reason Parliament was bound
to allow full liberty to God's children, whatever might be their
differences on matters of discipline or practice. Within the limits
of Puritanism, no intolerance might be admitted. A common spiritual
emotion--not external discipline or intellectual agreement--was
the test of brotherhood. So resolved was the House of Commons to
discountenance this view of the case, that in ordering the publication
of Cromwell's two despatches, it mutilated both of them by the omission
of the passages advocating liberty of conscience.

At the present day we are inclined to blame Cromwell, not for going
too far in the direction of toleration, but for not going far enough.
In the middle of the seventeenth century the very idea of toleration
in any shape was peculiar to a chosen few. That the majority of
the Puritan clergy were bitterly opposed to it affords no matter
for surprise. As men of some education and learning, and with a
professional confidence in the certainty of their own opinions, they
looked with contempt not merely on views different from their own, but
also on the persons who, often without the slightest mental culture,
ventured to produce out of the Bible schemes of doctrine sometimes
immoral, and very often--at least in the opinions of the Presbyterian
divines--blasphemous and profane. Even where this was not the case,
there remained the danger of seeing the Church of England--which was
held to have been purified by the abolition of episcopacy and the
banishment of the ceremonies favoured by the bishops--degenerate
into a chaos in which a thousand sects battled for their respective
creeds, instead of meekly accepting the gospel dealt out to them
by their well-instructed pastors. Richard Baxter was a favourable
specimen of the Presbyterian clergy. Conciliatory in temper, he
was yet an ardent controversialist, and, for a few months after the
battle of Naseby, he accepted the position of chaplain to Whalley's
regiment, with the avowed intention of persuading the sectaries to
abandon their evil ways. He soon discovered that the greater part of
the infantry of the New Model Army was by no means sectarian or even
Puritan in its opinions. "The greatest part of the common soldiers," he
wrote, "especially of the foot, were ignorant men of little religion,
abundance of them such as had been taken prisoners or turned out of
garrisons under the King, and had been soldiers in his army; and these
would do anything to please their officers." In other words, the
sectarian officers could command the services of the army as a whole,
backed as they would be by the most energetic of the private soldiers.
Nor was Baxter longer in discovering that the military preachers
were ready to question received doctrine in politics as well as in
religion. "I perceived," he declared, "they took the King for a tyrant
and an enemy, and really intended to master him, and they thought if
they might fight against him they might kill or conquer him, and if
they might conquer they were never more to trust him further than he
was in their power; and that they thought it folly to irritate him
either by wars or contradictions in Parliament, if so be they must
needs take him for their King, and trust him with their lives when
they had thus displeased him." These audacious reasoners went further
still. "What," they asked, "were the Lords of England but William the
Conqueror's colonels, or the Barons but his majors, or the Knights
but his captains?" "They plainly showed me," complained Baxter, "that
they thought God's providence would cast the trust of religion and the
Kingdom upon them as conquerors; they made nothing of all the most wise
and godly in the armies and garrisons that were not of their way. _Per
fas aut nefas_, by law or without it, they were resolved to take down
not only Bishops and liturgy and ceremonies, but all that did withstand
their way. They ... most honoured the Separatists, Anabaptists and
Antinomians; but Cromwell and his council took on them to join
themselves to no party, but to be for the liberty of all."

'To be for the liberty of all' was recognised as being Cromwell's
position. There is every reason to suppose that he had at this time
little sympathy with the aspirations of those who would have made
the army the lever wherewith to obtain political results otherwise
unobtainable. In his Bristol despatch he had pointedly adhered to
the doctrine that the sword had been placed by God in the hands of
Parliament, and for the present he was inclined to look to Parliament
alone for the boon he asked of it. What makes Cromwell's biography
so interesting is his perpetual effort to walk in the paths of
legality--an effort always frustrated by the necessities of the
situation.

It is difficult for us, nursled as we are under a regime of religious
liberty, to understand how hateful Cromwell's proposal was in the eyes
of the vast majority of his contemporaries. Not only did it shock those
who looked down with scorn on the vagaries of the tub-preacher, but
it aroused fears lest religious sectarianism should, by splitting up
the nation into hostile parties, lead the way to political weakness.
To every nation it is needful that there be some bond of common
emotion which shall enable it to present an undivided front against
its enemies, and such a bond was more than ever needful at a time when
loyalty to the throne had been suspended. It was Cromwell's merit to
have seen that this bond would be strengthened, not weakened, by the
permission of divergencies in teaching and practice, so long as there
was agreement on the main grounds of spiritual Puritanism. If on the
one hand he was behind Roger Williams in theoretical conception, he
was in advance of him in his attempt to fit in his doctrines with the
practical needs of his time.

Some assistance Cromwell had from men with whom, on other grounds, he
had little sympathy. The Westminster Assembly of divines, which had
been sitting since 1643, had done its best to impose the Presbyterian
system on England, but in the House of Commons there was a small
group of Erastian lawyers, with the learned Selden at their head,
which was strong enough to carry Parliament with it in resistance
to the imposition upon England of a Scottish Presbyterianism--that
is to say, of an ecclesiastical system in which matters of religion
were to be disposed of in the Church Courts without any appeal to
the lay element in the State; though, on the other hand, it must not
be forgotten that in those very Church Courts the lay element found
its place. The Erastians, however, preferred to uphold the supreme
authority of the laity represented in Parliament--as the lawyers of the
preceding century had upheld the authority of the laity represented
in the King--probably because they knew that the lay members of the
Presbyterian assemblies were pretty sure to fall under the influence
of the clergy. Selden indeed was no admirer of the enthusiasms of the
sects; but his cool, dispassionate way of treating their claims would,
in the end, make for liberty even more certainly than the burning zeal
of a Williams or a Cromwell.

With the surrender of Astley at Stow-on-the-Wold a new situation was
created. The time had arrived to which Cromwell had looked forward
after the second battle of Newbury, the time when Charles--no longer
having any hope of dictating terms to his enemies--would probably be
ready to accept some compromise which might give to Cromwell and the
Independent party that religious freedom which the Presbyterians at
Westminster found it so hard to concede. It did not need a tithe of
Cromwell's sagacity to convince him that a settlement would have a far
greater chance of proving durable if it were honestly accepted by the
King than if it were not. Yet it did not augur well for a settlement
that Charles, knowing that if he remained at Oxford a few weeks would
see him a prisoner in the hands of the army, rode off towards Newark,
which was at that time besieged by the Scots, and on May 5, 1646, gave
himself up to the Scottish commander at Southwell. The Scots having
extracted from him an order to the Governor of Newark to surrender the
place, marched off, with him in their train, to Newcastle, where they
would be the better able to maintain their position against any attack
by the army of the English Parliament. If Charles expected to make the
Scots his tools, he was soon undeceived. He was treated virtually as a
prisoner under honourable restraint, and given to understand that he
was expected to establish Presbyterianism in England.

A few days before Charles left Oxford, Cromwell had come up to
Westminster to take part in the discussions on a settlement which
were certain to follow on the close of the war. He saw his views
better supported in the House of Commons than they had been when he
was last within its walls. A series of elections had taken place to
fill the seats vacated by the expulsion of Royalists, and the majority
of the recruiters--as the new members were called--were determined
Independents, that is to say, favourers of religious liberty within the
bounds of Puritanism. Amongst them were Ireton, who had commanded the
left wing at Naseby, and who was soon to become Cromwell's son-in-law;
Fleetwood, now a colonel in the New Model Army, Blake, the defender
of Taunton, hereafter to be the great admiral of the Commonwealth
and Protectorate, together with other notables of the army. Yet the
Presbyterians still kept a majority in the House. They had already,
on March 14, secured the passing of an ordinance establishing
Presbyterianism in England, though it was to differ from the Scottish
system in that the Church was placed, in the last resort, under the
supreme authority of Parliament. An English Presbyterian could not,
even when we needed Scottish help, conform himself entirely to the
Scottish model. It is true that the ordinance was only very partially
carried out, but there can be little doubt that it would have been
more generally obeyed if the negotiations, which the Parliamentary
majority in accordance with the Scots were conducting with the King at
Newcastle, had been attended with success.

That Cromwell watched these negotiations with the keenest interest
may be taken for granted; but he does not seem to have had any
opportunity, as a simple member of the House, for doing more. We can
indeed only conjecture, though with tolerable certitude, that he was
well pleased with the widening of the breach between the Presbyterians
and the King, caused by the determination of Charles to make no
stipulation which would lead to the abolition of episcopacy. Nor can
he have been otherwise than well pleased when, on January 30, 1647,
the Scottish soldiers, having received part of the sum due to them
for their services in England with promise of the remainder, marched
for Scotland, having first delivered Charles over to commissioners
appointed by the English Parliament, who conducted him to Holmby House
in Northamptonshire, which had been assigned to him by Parliament as a
residence.

At last the time had arrived when a peaceful settlement of the
distracted country appeared to have come in sight and, for the time
at least, the Presbyterians seemed to have the strongest cards in
their hands. They had a majority in Parliament, and it was for
them, therefore, to formulate the principles on which the future
institutions of the country were to be built. That the country was
with them in wishing, on the one hand, for an arrangement in which
the King could reappear as a constitutional factor in the Government,
and, on the other hand, for a total or partial disbandment of the
army and a consequent relief from taxation, can hardly be denied. The
great weakness, and, as it proved, the insuperable weakness of the
Presbyterians lay in the incapacity of their leaders to understand the
characters of the men with whom they had to deal. Right as they were
in their opinion that the nation would readily accept a constitutional
monarchy, it was impossible to persuade them, as was really the
case, that Charles would never willingly submit to be bound by the
limitations of constitutional monarchy, and still less to allow,
longer than he could possibly help, the Church to be modelled after
any kind of Presbyterian system. That he had the strongest possible
conviction on religious grounds that episcopacy was of Divine ordinance
is beyond doubt, and on this point his tenacious, though irresolute,
mind was strengthened by an assurance that in fighting in the cause
of the bishops he was really fighting in the cause of God. Yet the
controversy had a political as well as a religious side. In Scotland
Presbyterianism meant the predominance of the clergy. In England
it would mean the predominance of the country nobility and gentry,
who, either in their private capacity or collectively in Parliament,
presented to benefices, and in Parliament kept the final control over
the Church in their own hands. Episcopacy, on the other hand, meant
that the control over the Church was in the hands of men appointed by
the King.

The folly of the Presbyterians appeared, not in their maintenance of
their own views, but in their fancying that if they could only persuade
Charles to agree to give them their way temporarily, they would have
done sufficient to gain their cause. Early in 1647 they proposed that
Presbyterianism should be established in England for three years, and
that the militia should remain in the power of Parliament for ten. They
could not see that at the end of the periods fixed Charles would have
the immense advantage of finding himself face to face with a system
which had ceased to have any legal sanction. Common prudence suggested
that whatever settlement was arrived at it should, at least, have in
favour of its continuance the presumption of permanency accorded to
every established institution which is expected to remain in possession
of the field till definite steps are taken for its abolition.

It is possible indeed that the Presbyterians calculated on the
unpopularity of episcopacy and of all that episcopacy was likely to
bring with it. It is true that not even an approximate estimate can be
given of the numerical strength of ecclesiastical parties. No religious
census was taken, and there is every reason to believe that, if it had
been taken, it would have failed to convey any accurate information.
There is little doubt that very considerable numbers, probably much
more than a bare majority of the population, either did not care for
ecclesiastical disputes at all, or at least did not care for them
sufficiently to offer armed resistance to any form of Church-Government
or Church-teaching likely to be established either by Parliament or by
King. Yet all the evidence we possess shows the entire absence of any
popular desire amongst the laity outside the families of the Royalist
gentry and their immediate dependants to bring back either episcopacy
or the Prayer Book. Riots there occasionally were, but these were
riots because amusements had been stopped, and especially because the
jollity of Christmas was forbidden; not because the service in church
was conducted in one way or another. It is sometimes forgotten that
the Puritan or semi-Puritan clergy had a strong hold upon the Church
down to the days of Laud, and that the Calvinistic teaching which had
been in favour even with the bishops towards the close of the reign of
Elizabeth had been widely spread down to the same time, so that the
episcopalians could not count on that resistance to organic change
which would certainly have sprung up if the Laudian enforcement of
discipline had continued for seventy years instead of seven.

Whilst episcopacy found its main support in the King, the sects found
their main support in the army, and Parliament at once fell in with
the popular demand for weakening the army. Before February was over,
it had resolved that 6,600 horse and dragoons should be retained in
England, but that, except the men needed for a few garrisons, none of
the infantry of the New Model Army should be kept in the service. Their
place was to be supplied by a militia which, consisting as it did of
civilians pursuing their usual avocations for the greater part of the
year, and, except in times of invasion or rebellion, only called out
for a few days' drill, would be most unlikely to join in any attempt
to cross the wishes of Parliament. Cavalry, moreover, being, in the
long run, unable to act without the support of infantry, the 6,600
horse kept on foot would be powerless to impose a policy by force on
the Parliament. As more than half of the infantry, whose services in
England were no longer required, would be needed to carry on the war in
Ireland, now almost entirely in the hands of the so-called rebels, it
was thought that the number necessary for this purpose would volunteer
for service in that country, and the rest be readily induced to return
amongst the civilian population out of which they had sprung.

Having thus, in imagination, weakened the army as a whole, the
Presbyterian majority proceeded to deal with the officers of
the cavalry destined for service in England. Retaining Fairfax
as Commander-in-Chief, they voted that no officer should serve
under him who refused to take the Covenant, and to conform to the
Church-government established by Parliament. They also voted that,
with the exception of Fairfax, no officer should hold a higher rank
than that of colonel; in other words, they pronounced the dismissal of
Lieutenant-General Cromwell from the service. It was characteristic
of Cromwell that in a letter written by him to Fairfax his personal
grievance finds no place. "Never," he writes, "were the spirits of men
more embittered than now. Surely the Devil hath but a short time. Upon
the Fast-day," he adds in a postscript, "divers soldiers were raised,
as I heard, both horse and foot--near two hundred in Covent Garden--to
prevent us soldiers[C] from cutting the Presbyterians' throats! These
are fine tricks to mock God with." Yet, irritated as he was, he gave no
sign of any thought of resistance. "In the presence of Almighty God,
before whom I stand," he declared to the House, "I know the army will
disband and lay down their arms at your door whenever you will command
them." His own dismissal he took calmly. Towards the end of March he
was in frequent conference with the Elector Palatine who had offered
him a command in Germany, where the miserable Thirty Years' War was
still dragging on, and where the cause of toleration, apparently lost
in England, might possibly be served.

      [C] This is Carlyle's reading, but the original manuscript
          is torn, and what indications there are show that the
          words cannot be 'us soldiers'. But I have no emendation
          to suggest.

The Presbyterian leaders, Holles, Stapleton, Maynard, and the rest
of them, must have flattered themselves that they were at last in
the full career of success. To have Cromwell's word for it that the
army would accept disbandment, and to see the back of the man whom
they most feared, was a double stroke of fortune on which they could
hardly have calculated. In their delight at the good fortune which had
fallen into their laps, they forgot, in the first place, that there
were many officers, besides Cromwell, who mistrusted their policy;
and in the second place that, if these officers were to be deprived
of their influence over the private soldiers, care must be taken to
leave no material grievance of the latter unrelieved. On March 21 and
22 a deputation from Parliament which met forty-three officers in
Saffron Walden Church was told that no one present would volunteer for
Ireland unless a satisfactory answer were given to four questions:
What regiments were to be kept up in England? Who was to command in
Ireland? What was to be the assurance for the pay and maintenance of
the troops going to Ireland? Finally, what was to be done to secure
the arrears due to the men and indemnity for military actions in the
past war which a civil court might construe into robbery and murder? In
addition to these demands, a petition was drawn up in the name of the
soldiers, asking for various concessions, of which the principal ones
concerned the arrears and the indemnity. If the Presbyterian leaders
had been possessed of a grain of common sense, they would have seen
that they could not retain the submission of an army and be oblivious
of its material interests. As it was, they treated the action of the
soldiers as mere mutiny, summoned the leading officers to the bar, and
declared all who supported the petition to be enemies of the State and
disturbers of the peace.

Cromwell's position was one of great difficulty. As a soldier and a
man of order, he abhorred any semblance of mutiny, and he had shown
by his readiness to accept a command in Germany that he had no wish
to redress the balance of political forces by throwing his sword into
the scale; but it did not need his distrust of the political capacity
of the Presbyterian leaders to help him to the conclusion that they
were wholly in the wrong in their method of dealing with the army.
It was not a case in which soldiers refused to obey the commands of
their superiors in accordance with the terms of their enlistment. They
were asked to undertake new duties, and in the case of those who were
expected to betake themselves to Ireland, actually to volunteer for a
new service, and yet, forsooth, they were to be treated as mutineers,
because they asked for satisfaction in their righteous claims.

Cromwell, even if he had wished to oppose the army to the Parliament,
would have had nothing to do but to sit still, whilst his opponents
accumulated blunder after blunder. The House of Commons being unable to
extract any signs of yielding from the officers whom it had summoned
to the bar, sent them back to their posts. It then appointed Skippon,
a good disciplinarian, of no special repute as a general, to command
in Ireland; after which, without offering in any way to meet the
soldiers' demands, it sent a new body of commissioners, amongst whom
was Sir William Waller, a stout adherent of the Presbyterian cause, to
urge on the formation of a new army for Ireland. The commissioners, on
their arrival at Saffron Walden, were not slow in discovering that the
officers did not take kindly to the idea of Skippon's command. "Fairfax
and Cromwell," they shouted, "and we all go." The commissioners gained
the promise of a certain number of officers and soldiers to go to
Ireland; but, on the whole, their mission was a failure. They had not
been empowered to offer payment of arrears, and, as they ought to
have foreseen, the indignation of the large number of soldiers who
complained that they were being cheated of their pay, threw power into
the hands of the minority, known as the "Godly party," which held
forth the doctrine that, now that Parliament was shrinking from the
fulfilment of its duty, it was time for the army to step forward as a
political power, and to secure the settlement of the nation on the
basis of civil and religious liberty. The idea was also entertained
that it would be easier for the army than it had been for Parliament to
come to terms with the King, and that it was for the soldiers to fetch
him from Holmby and to replace him, on fair conditions, on the throne.

Of Cromwell's feelings during these weeks we have little evidence.
From the house which, since the preceding year, he had occupied with
his family in Drury Lane, he watched events, without attempting to
modify them. In the latter part of April both he and Vane, who was
now his fast friend, with a tie cemented by a common interest in
religious liberty, absented themselves, save on a few rare occasions,
from the sittings of Parliament. The incalculable stupidity of the
Presbyterian leaders must have made Cromwell more than ever doubtful
of the possibility of getting from them a remedy for the evils of the
nation. By the end of April it was known that only 2,320 soldiers had
volunteered for Ireland. Then, and not till then, Parliament came to
the conclusion that something ought to be done about the arrears,
and ordered that six weeks' pay should be offered to every disbanded
soldier. It was a mere fraction of what was due, and a soldier need
not be abnormally suspicious to come to the conclusion that, when
once he had left the ranks, his prospect of getting satisfaction for
the remainder of his claim was exceedingly slight. Thus driven to
the wall, eight of the cavalry regiments chose, each of them, two
Agitators, or, as in modern speech they would be styled, Agents, to
represent them in the impending negotiation for their rights, and the
sixteen thus chosen drew up letters to the Generals, Fairfax, Cromwell,
Ireton and Skippon. As the cavalry was the most distinctively political
portion of the army, the writers of these letters for the first time
stepped beyond the bounds of material grievance, complaining of a
design to break and ruin the army, and of the intention of 'some who
had lately tasted of sovereignty to become masters and degenerate into
tyrants'. The House, beyond measure indignant, summoned to the bar
three of the Agitators who brought the letters to Westminster; but on
their refusal to answer questions put to them without order from their
military constituents, sent Cromwell, Ireton and Skippon to assure the
soldiers that they should have the indemnity they craved, together with
a considerable part of their arrears and debentures for the rest.

There is no reason to doubt that Cromwell sympathised with the soldiers
in their desire for a just settlement of their claims, whilst he was
still disinclined to support them in their design of gaining influence
over the Government. When he reached Saffron Walden he found that the
infantry regiments had followed the example of the cavalry, and that
a body of Agitators had been chosen to represent the whole army. The
result of their conferences with the officers was the production of
_A Declaration of the Army_, drawn up on May 16, with which Cromwell
appears to have been entirely satisfied, as, while it insisted on a
redress of practical grievances, it contained no claim to political
influence. If the Houses had frankly accepted the situation, Cromwell
and his colleagues would have succeeded in averting, at least for a
time, the danger of investing the army with political power.

On his return Cromwell found signs that the Parliamentary majority was
even less inclined to do justice to the soldiers than when he had left
Westminster. During his absence, Parliamentary authority to discipline
and train the militia of the City had been given to a committee named
by the Common Council of London. The Common Council was a Presbyterian
body, and its committee proceeded to eject every officer tainted with
Independency. The city militia numbered 18,000 men, and it looked as
if the majority in Parliament was preparing a force which might be
the nucleus of an army to be opposed to the soldiers of Fairfax and
Cromwell. In Scotland, too, there was an army of more than 6,000 men,
under the command of David Leslie--no inconsiderable general--which
might perhaps be brought to the help of the Parliament against its own
soldiers, as Leven's army had, three years before, been brought to its
assistance against the King. Charles, too, on May 12--Cromwell being
still absent from Westminster--had at last replied to the proposals
made to him early in the year, and had offered to concede the militia
for ten years, and a Presbyterian establishment for three, the clergy
being allowed to discuss in the meanwhile the terms of a permanent
settlement. In the very probable event of their disagreeing, it would
be easy for Charles, at the end of the three years, to contend that
episcopacy was again the legal government of the Church--especially
as he was at once to return to Westminster, where he would be able to
exercise all the influence which would again be at his command. On
May 18 this offer was however accepted by the English Presbyterians,
as well as by the Scottish Commissioners, as a fair basis of an
understanding with the King. No wonder that the soldiers took alarm, or
that on the 19th the Agitators issued an appeal to the whole army to
hang together in resistance.

Nevertheless, when Cromwell reappeared in the House on May 21, and read
out the joint report of the deputation, he was able to declare his
belief that the army would disband, though it would refuse to volunteer
for Ireland. At first the House seemed ready to take the reasonable
course, approving of an ordinance granting the required indemnity, and
favourably considering another to provide a real and visible security
for so much of the arrears as was left unpaid. At the same time the
arrears to be given in hand were raised from the pay of six weeks
to that of eight. Yet whatever the Presbyterians might offer, they
were unable to trust the army, and on the 23rd they discussed with
Lauderdale, who was in England as a Scottish member of the Committee
of Both Kingdoms, and Bellièvre, who was the Ambassador of the King
of France, a scheme for bringing a Scottish army into England. Talk
about securing the King's person, which had prevailed in some regiments
a short time before, had come to their ears, and furnished them with
the excuse that they were but anticipating their opponents. They
accordingly proposed to counteract this design by removing Charles
either to some English town, or even to Scotland. Their hopes of being
able to carry out this daring project were the higher as Colonel
Graves, who commanded the guard at Holmby, was himself a Presbyterian
on whom they could depend to carry out their instructions.

Though nothing was absolutely settled, the conduct of the House
of Commons reflected the policy of its leaders. It dropped its
consideration of the ordinance assigning security for the soldiers'
arrears and resolved to proceed at once to disband the army, beginning
on June 1. The announcement of this resolution brought consternation
to those who were doing their best to keep the soldiers within the
bounds of obedience. "I doubt," wrote the author of a letter which was
probably addressed by Ireton to his father-in-law, "the disobliging of
so faithful an army will be repented of; provocation and exasperation
make men think of what they never intended. They are possessed, as far
as I can discern, with this opinion that if they be thus scornfully
dealt with for their faithful services whilst the sword is in their
hands, what shall their usage be when they are dissolved?" Two days
later, another writer, speaking of the commissioners appointed by
Parliament to disband the regiments, added the prophetic words: "They
may as well send them among so many bears to take away their whelps".
It was perfectly true. When on June 1 the commissioners attempted to
disband Fairfax's regiment at Chelmsford, it broke into mutiny and
marched for Newmarket, where Fairfax had appointed a rendezvous to
consider the situation. It was not that the mass of the army had any
inclination to interfere in politics. "Many of the soldiers," wrote
the commissioners, "being dealt with, profess that money is the only
thing they insist upon, and that four months' pay would have given
satisfaction."

Such an event could not but drive Cromwell to reconsider his position.
Whether he liked it or not, the army had, through the bungling of the
Presbyterian leaders, broken loose from the authority of Parliament. It
was impossible for him to give his support to Parliament when it was
about, with the aid of the Scottish army, to restore the King on terms
which, whether the King or the Presbyterians gained the upper hand
in the game of intrigue which was sure to follow, could only end in
the destruction of that religious liberty for the sects which, though
without legal sanction, had been gained as a matter of fact. Yet the
alternative seemed to be the abandonment of the country to military
anarchy, or if that were averted to the sway of the army over the
State. Only one way of escape from the dilemma presented itself, and
that way Cromwell seized.

Cromwell, it must once more be said, was no Republican or Parliamentary
theorist. Parliament was to him mainly an authority under which he
had fought for the great ends he had in view. Now that it had sunk
to be no more than a tool in the hands of politicians who, aiming at
the establishment of an ecclesiastical despotism, could think of no
better means wherewith to compass their evil ends than the rekindling
of the conflagration of civil war with the aid of a Scottish army and
of French diplomacy, and who had proved themselves bunglers in their
own noxious work, it was necessary to look about for some fresh basis
of authority, which would save England from the danger of falling
under the sway of a Prætorian guard. Nor was that basis far to seek.
Cromwell had fought the King unsparingly--not to destroy him, but to
reduce him to the acceptance of honourable terms. The terms which the
Presbyterians had offered to Charles had not been honourable. They had
demanded that he should proscribe his own religion and impose upon his
subjects an ecclesiastical system which he believed to be hateful to
God and man. Was this to be the result of all the blood and treasure
that had been expended? What if the King could be won to bring back
peace and good government to the land by fairer treatment and by the
restoration of his beneficent authority? The call for a restoration of
the King to power did not arise merely from the monarchical theories
of a few enthusiasts. It was deeply rooted in the consciousness of
generations. A few years before it had been inconceivable to Englishmen
that order could be maintained without a king, and with the great mass
of Englishmen this view was still prevalent. We can hardly go wrong if
we suppose that Cromwell shared the hope that Charles, by more generous
treatment than that which Parliament had accorded to him, would allow
the chiefs of the army to mediate between him and Parliament, and
consent to accept the restitution of so much of his authority as would
safeguard the religious and political development of the country on
the lines of reform rather than on those of revolution. If this, or
anything like this, was to be accomplished, the conjuncture would admit
of no delay. In a few days--perhaps in a few hours--the plans of the
Presbyterian leaders would be matured, and Charles would be spirited
away from Holmby, either to be hurried off to Scotland, or to be placed
under the care of the new Presbyterian militia in London. The commander
of the guard at Holmby, Colonel Graves, was prepared to carry out any
instructions which might reach him from his leaders at Westminster. Not
only this, but on May 31, the day before the meeting at Chelmsford,
a Parliamentary committee had issued orders to seize the artillery
of the army at Oxford, and thus to weaken its powers of action as a
military force. The situation was one which, by the necessity of the
case, must have occupied the attention of the Agitators, and though no
certainty is to be reached, it is probable that it was with them that
the plan adopted originated rather than with Cromwell. Again and again
in the course of his career he will be found hanging back from decisive
action involving a change of front in his political action, and there
is every indication that, on this occasion too, he accepted--and that
not without considerable hesitation--a design which had been formed by
others.

Such hesitation, however, was with him perfectly consistent with the
promptest and most determined action when the time for hesitation
was at an end. On May 31, the day on which the order for seizing the
artillery at Oxford was despatched from London, a meeting was held at
Cromwell's house in Drury Lane, at which was present a certain Cornet
Joyce, who had apparently been authorised by the Agitators to secure
the artillery at Oxford, and then to proceed to Holmby to hinder the
removal of the King by the Presbyterians, if not to carry him off to
safer quarters. For such an action as this the Agitators, as they well
knew, had no military authority to give, and for that authority it
was useless to apply to Fairfax, who, much as he sympathised with the
soldiers in their grievances, had none of the revolutionary decision
required by the situation. Cromwell, whose general approbation had
probably been secured beforehand, now gave the required instructions,
and Joyce was able to set out with the assurance that he was about to
act under the orders of the Lieutenant-General.

There is reason to believe that Cromwell's instructions only gave
authority for the removal of the King from Holmby conditionally on its
appearing that he could in no other way be preserved from abduction by
the Presbyterians. When on June 1 Joyce arrived at Oxford, he found
that the garrison had resolved to refuse the delivery of the guns, and
on the following day he marched on to Holmby with some 500 horsemen
at his back. On his arrival Graves took to flight, and the garrison
of the place at once fraternised with the new-comers. In the early
morning of the 3rd Joyce, followed by his men, was let in by a back
door asserting that he had come to hinder a plot 'to convey the King
to London without directions of the Parliament'. "His mission," he
further stated, was "to prevent a second war discovered by the design
of some men privately to take away the King, to the end he might side
with that intended army to be raised; which, if effected, would be the
utter undoing of the kingdom." To this profession his actions were
suitable. During the whole of the day he remained quiet, never hinting
for an instant that he had any intention of doing more than preserve
the King's person against violence. In the course of the day, however,
he took alarm at some rumours of an impending attack, and made up his
mind, probably nothing loth, that the danger could only be met by
removing the King to safer quarters. About half-past ten at night he
roused Charles from his slumbers, invited him to follow him on the
following morning, and on giving assurances that no harm would follow
received the promise he required. On the morning of the 4th, as Charles
stepped from the door of the house, he was confronted by Joyce and his
500 troopers. The King at once asked whether Joyce had any commission
for what he was doing. "Here," replied Joyce, turning in the saddle as
he spoke, and pointing to the soldiers he headed, "is my commission. It
is behind me." "It is a fair commission," replied Charles, "and as well
written as I have seen a commission in my life: a company of handsome,
proper gentlemen, as I have seen a great while." Having selected
Newmarket as his place of residence, Charles not unwillingly, as it
seemed, set out in this strange companionship. On that very morning, or
on the previous evening, Cromwell, feeling himself no longer safe at
Westminster, slipped away and rode off to join the army at Newmarket.
Both Fairfax and Cromwell declared for the King's return to Holmby,
no doubt considering Joyce's removal of the King to be unnecessary,
and, under the circumstances, unauthorised. It was only on Charles's
positive refusal to return that he was allowed to continue his journey.

It would not be long before the army would have to experience the
difficulties which beset a negotiation with Charles. It had first
to come to an understanding with Parliament. Before Cromwell's
arrival, the Agitators had presented to Fairfax a representation of
their old complaints, accompanied with a reminder to Parliament that
some particular persons--the Presbyterian leaders were evidently
aimed at--had been to blame. In another declaration, known as _A
Solemn Engagement of the Army_, these complaints were more forcibly
reiterated, with the addition, first of a demand for the erection
of a Council of the army, composed partly of officers and partly of
Agitators; and secondly, of a vindication of the army from harbouring
wild schemes, 'such as to the overthrow of magistracy, the suppression
or hindering of Presbytery, the establishment of Independent
government, or the upholding of a general licentiousness in religion
under pretence of liberty of conscience'. That these two clauses were
added under Cromwell's influence--if not by his own pen--can hardly be
doubted. On the one hand, if the army was to intervene in politics,
it must speak through some organ, having, as far as possible, the
character of a political assembly; and, on the other hand, it must be
made clear to all that its aims were as little subversive as possible.
If the Presbyterians would acknowledge that their designs had met with
an insuperable obstacle, and would resign power into hands more likely
to use it with prudence, the crisis might be tided over without leaving
behind it more evil consequences than were necessarily connected with
the intervention of an armed force.

Unhappily the Presbyterians were the most unlikely persons in the
world to grasp the realities of the situation. They firmly believed,
not only that their cause was just, but that the army--without a
shadow of excuse--had deliberately, even before the London militia had
been reorganised, plotted the seizure of the King's person, with the
object of establishing anarchy in the Church and military despotism
in the State. Each party, in short, was convinced that it was acting
on the defensive; and, in politics, as in all other spheres of life,
results are to be traced less to facts which actually exist than to
the assumptions relating to those facts in the minds of the actors.
Parliament actively pursued its preparations for resistance, planning
the formation of the nucleus of a fresh army at Worcester, and granting
permission to the City to raise cavalry as well as infantry. The
soldiers were undoubtedly right in holding that nothing less than the
outbreak of another civil war was impending.

Before the irrevocable step was taken, Parliament sent commissioners to
persuade the army to disband on the payment of an additional £10,000.
On the 10th, the commissioners finding the soldiers at a rendezvous on
Triploe Heath were received by a general refusal to accept the terms
till they had been examined by the new Army Council. The army then
significantly marched to Royston, several miles on the road to London.
In the evening a letter was sent off to the magistrates of the City,
the chief supporters of the new Presbyterian military organisation.
It can hardly be questioned that this letter represented the ideas
at that time entertained by Cromwell, or that in great part, if not
entirely, it was written by him. Striving to blind himself to the
fact that he was heading military resistance to the civil power,
he announced that those in whose name he spoke were acting, not as
soldiers, but as Englishmen. "We desire," he proceeded, "a settlement
of the kingdom and of the liberties of the subject according to the
votes and declarations of Parliament which, before we took up arms,
were by Parliament used as arguments and inducements to invite us and
divers of our dear friends out--some of whom have lost their lives in
this war, which being by God's blessing finished, we think we have as
much right to demand and see a happy settlement, as we have to our
money, or the other common interest of soldiers that we have insisted
upon." Then followed a renewal of the protest that the army had no wish
to introduce licentious liberty, or to subvert the Civil Government.
"We profess," continued Cromwell, "as ever in these things, when the
State has once made a settlement, we have nothing to say, but submit or
suffer. Only we could wish that every good citizen and every man that
walks peacefully in a blameless conversation, may have liberties and
encouragements, it being according to the just policy of all States,
even to justice itself." Then followed the practical conclusion. "These
things are our desires--beyond which we shall not go, and for the
obtaining these things we are drawing near your city--declaring with
all confidence and assurance that, if you appear not against us in
these our just desires, to assist that wicked party that would embroil
us and the kingdom, neither we nor our soldiers shall give you the
least offence." Should things proceed otherwise, it would not be the
army that would give way. "If after all this," continued Cromwell,
"you, or a considerable number of you, be seduced to take up arms in
opposition to, or hindrance of these our just undertakings, we hope, by
this brotherly premonition, we have freed ourselves from all that ruin
which may befall that great and populous city; having hereby washed our
hands thereof."

The army marched, and the City at once made its submission. The bare
facts of the case told heavily against Cromwell in the eyes of those
whose schemes he had frustrated. In May he had protested that the army
would disband at a word from Parliament, and had renounced all thought
of bringing military force to control affairs of State. In June he had
made himself the leader of the army to disperse a force which was being
raised by the orders of Parliament. The very words in which he, writing
in the army's name, had announced his decision must also have told
against him. It would have been far better if he had simply announced
that the new circumstances which had arisen had forced upon him the
conviction that he had gone too far and had driven him to acknowledge
to himself and others that obedience to a Parliament might have its
limits, and that those limits had now been reached. The line, it would
have been easy to say, must be drawn when Parliament was preparing
civil war, not in defence of the rights of Englishmen, but to impose
upon the country a system alien to its habits with the assistance of
a Scottish army. Unhappily it was in Cromwell's nature to meet the
difficulty in another way. When most inconsistent he loved to persuade
himself that he had always been consistent, and in taking refuge in
the statement that the army put forward its claim to be heard as
Englishmen rather than as soldiers, he committed himself to a doctrine
so manifestly absurd that it could only be received with a smile of
contemptuous disbelief. Cromwell, in fact, stood at the parting of
the ways. For him there was but one choice--the choice between entire
submission to Parliamentary authority and the establishment of military
control. No wonder that he instinctively shrunk from acknowledging,
even to himself, the enormous importance of the step he was taking:
still less wonder that he did not recognise in advance the unavoidable
consequences of the choice--the temporary success which follows in the
wake of superior force, and the ultimate downfall of the cause which
owes its acceptance to such means.

The immediate results developed themselves without long delay. The
army, doing its best to carry on the work of violence under legal
forms, proceeded to charge eleven of the leading Presbyterian members
with attempting to throw the kingdom into fresh war, as well as with
other misdemeanours. The accused persons retaliated by pressing
forward their scheme for gaining the assistance of a Scottish army,
and for bringing up English forces devoted to their cause against the
army under Fairfax and Cromwell. Fairfax and Cromwell were too near
the centre of affairs to be so easily baffled by specious words. On
June 26 a menacing letter from the army made the eleven members feel
that their position was untenable, and voluntarily--so at least they
asserted--they withdrew from their seats in Parliament. Who could now
doubt that--under the thinnest of veils--the army had taken the supreme
control of the government into its hands?




CHAPTER III.

THE NEW MODEL ARMY AND THE KING.


In his desire to escape from the undoubted evils of military
government, Cromwell had the best part of the army behind him. Nor
did it, at the moment, appear very difficult to attain this object by
coming to terms with the King, especially as the army leaders were
prepared to make concessions to Charles's religious scruples. Claiming
freedom for themselves in matters of conscience, they were ready to
concede it in return, and, for the first time since he had ridden
out of Oxford, Charles was allowed to receive the ministrations of
his own chaplains, and to join in offering prayer and praise in the
familiar language of the Prayer Book of the Church. It was a long step
towards the settlement of that religious question which had created so
impassable a gulf between the King and the Presbyterians.

The constitutional question remained to be discussed, and the burden
of framing terms to bind the King fell upon Cromwell's son-in-law,
Ireton, rather than upon Cromwell himself. Cromwell indeed would never
have consented to see Charles replaced in the old position, but he
was unskilled in constitutional niceties, and he left such details to
others. The main difficulty of the situation was not long in revealing
itself. Charles, who had been removed to Windsor, talked as if the
dispute between the Houses and the soldiers might be referred to his
decision. "Sir," replied Ireton, "you have an intention to be the
arbitrator between Parliament and us; and we mean to be it between
your Majesty and Parliament." It was not that there was any definite
constitutional idea in Charles's mind. With him it was rather a matter
of feeling than of reason that he could occupy no other place in the
State than that which tradition confirmed by his own experience had
assigned to the man who wore the crown. For him as for another as weak
for all purposes of government, as richly endowed with the artistic
temperament as himself,

      Not all the waters of the salt, salt sea
      Could wash the balm from an anointed King.

Under whatever forms, Parliamentary or constitutional, he and no other
was to be the supreme arbiter, empowered to speak in due season the
decisive word--always just, always in the right. What was passing
before his eyes did but confirm him in his delusion. There had been
a quarrel between army and Parliament. Where was it to end unless he
sat in judgment to dispense equity to both? Against that will--call
it firm or obstinate, as we please--so inaccessible to the teaching
of facts, so clinging to the ideas which had inspired his life, the
pleadings of Cromwell and Ireton would be vain.

Of this Cromwell had no suspicion. He had never had personal dealings
with the King, and had little insight into his peculiar character. On
July 4 he saw him at Caversham, where Charles had been established,
in order that he might be near Reading, now the head-quarters of the
army. He fell at once under the charm of Charles's gracious manner, and
fancied that a few days would bring about an agreement. In full accord
with Fairfax, he hoped to establish the throne on a constitutional and
Parliamentary basis. Neither Charles nor any of those who were under
his influence could understand the sincerity of this purpose. The
French Ambassador, Bellièvre, seems to have sounded Cromwell on the
object of his ambition, and to have received the memorable reply: "No
one rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going". To Sir John
Berkeley, an ardent Royalist, Cromwell explained that the army asked
only 'to have leave to live as subjects ought to do, and to preserve
their consciences,' thinking that no man could enjoy his estates unless
the King had his rights. Probably Cromwell, in his conversation, had
emphasised the points which the army was willing to concede, and had
minimised those on which it expected Charles to yield. Charles, at
all events, was so convinced that the officers were prepared, almost
unconditionally, to restore him to his former power, that he gave it as
a reason for distrusting them, that they had not asked him for personal
favours in return. There can be no doubt that Cromwell refrained at
this time from pressing the King hardly. He was present at the meeting
of Charles with his children, now permitted to visit him for the first
time since the beginning of the civil war. Himself a devoted father,
he was touched by the affecting scene. The King, he told Berkeley, was
the 'uprightest and most conscientious man of his three kingdoms'. Yet
he was too keen-sighted to be blind to the other side of his character.
He wished, he said, that his Majesty would be more frank and not so
strictly tied to narrow maxims.

Already Cromwell's apparent devotion to the King's person was not
unnaturally drawing forth harsh criticisms from those who failed to
understand the essential unity underlying divergencies in his action.
Some at least amongst the Agitators were joining the Presbyterians
in sarcasms directed against the man who was everything by turns;
who had at one time taken the Covenant--at another time accepted the
disbandment of the army; at another time again had made himself the
instrument of the army in its resistance of disbandment. Cromwell took
no notice of such calumnies. He was more concerned with the eagerness
of the Agitators to march upon Westminster with the object of forcing
the Houses to condemn the eleven members who were again stirring,
and of crushing the discontent which was simmering amongst the City
population. Happily the mere threat of force had been sufficient, and
Parliament virtually abandoned its hostile attitude by naming Fairfax
Commander-in-chief of all the forces in the country. Would it be so
easy to deal with Charles? By July 23, _The Heads of the Proposals_,
probably drawn up by Ireton--who, of all the officers, was the most
versed in constitutional lore--with the assistance of Colonel Lambert,
having been adopted by the Army Council, were submitted to the King.
So far as religion was concerned, they anticipated the settlement
of the Revolution of 1688, leaving all forms of worship--including
that of the condemned Prayer Book--to the voluntary choice of the
worshipper. So far as politics were concerned, provision was to be
made, not merely for making the King responsible to Parliament, but
for making Parliament responsible to the people. There were to be
biennial Parliaments, elected by enlarged constituencies, and a Council
of State was to be formed, to whose consent in important matters the
King was to bow. The first Council was to remain in office for at least
seven years. How it was to be nominated after that was left uncertain,
probably till the question had been threshed out in discussion with
the King. The army leaders had yet to discover how little profit such
a discussion would bring. Charles was not prepared to abandon his old
position for that of constitutional King, limited, as he had never been
limited before, by opposing forces. If he had spoken his objections
clearly out it would have been easy to criticise him as one who was
blind to the forces which were governing events: it would have been
impossible to hold him morally at fault. The course which he took
could not but lead to disaster. Listening to the army leaders, he yet
conspired against them, still placing his hopes on the assistance of
a Scottish army, and speculating on the chances of a breach between
the army on the one side and the Parliament and the City on the
other, which would enable him to grasp the reins of power under the
old conditions. "I shall see them glad ere long," he told Berkeley,
"to accept more equal terms." He even went so far as to imagine
that Fairfax and Cromwell were to be bribed by offers of personal
advantage to re-establish his fallen throne on other terms than those
now offered to him. "You cannot," he told them, "do without me. You
will fall into ruin if I do not sustain you." He was partly supported
by his knowledge that though the City authorities had yielded to the
sway of the army, the City apprentices were in a state of disquiet
and had broken into the House of Commons, compelling the members to
vote a series of Presbyterian resolutions in defiance of the army. In
misplaced confidence in this movement in the City, Charles entered
into communication with Lauderdale, the ablest member of a body of
Scottish Commissioners who had recently arrived nominally to urge the
King to accept the Parliamentary terms, but in reality to negotiate
a separate agreement between the Scots and the King. Charles eagerly
closed with their proposals and allowed Lauderdale to send a message
to Edinburgh urging the equipment of a Scottish army for the invasion
of England. Unluckily for him, mob-violence was a feeble reed on which
to lean. The Speaker of the two Houses, together with the Independent
members, took refuge with the army, and the army treating them as
the genuine Parliament reconducted them to Westminster. On August 6
Fairfax was named by the reconstituted Parliament Constable of the
Tower, which though it had hitherto been guarded by the citizens was
from henceforward to be garrisoned by a detachment of the army, whilst
another detachment was left at Westminster as a guard to the Houses.
The remainder of the soldiers, to show their power, tramped through the
City, passing out by London Bridge on the march to Croydon--Cromwell
riding at the head of the cavalry.

What could be the possible end of such demonstrations? Every time
they were employed, the appeal to force was placed more clearly
in evidence, in spite of all efforts to minimise it. Scarcely had
the regiments filed out of the City when the Presbyterian majority
reasserted itself in Parliament. On the other hand, the Agitators
raised their voices for a purge of Parliament which would thrust out
those members who had sat and voted under the influence of the mob.
Cromwell was growing impatient. "These men," he said of the eleven
members, some of whom had returned to their seats when the House was
under the dominion of the mob, "will never leave till the army pull
them out by the ears." "I know nothing to the contrary," he said on
another occasion, speaking of Holles and Stapleton, "but that I am as
well able to govern the kingdom as either of them." On this, the eleven
members left their seats for good and all, six of them taking refuge on
the Continent. Yet the majority in the Commons was Presbyterian still,
and refused to vote at the dictation of the army. Cromwell's patience
was exhausted. On August 20 he brought a cavalry regiment into Hyde
Park in order to obtain a vote that the proceedings of the House, in
the absence of the Speaker, had been null and void. Under this threat,
the majority gave way, and Cromwell, who had the whole army behind him,
gained his immediate end. Once more he was drifting forwards in the
direction of that military despotism which neither he nor his comrades
desired to establish.

The one way of escape still lay in an understanding with the King. With
the King, however, no agreement was possible. Charles, hopelessly at
fault in his judgment of passing events, stood aloof in the assurance
that the strife amongst the opponents would serve but to weaken both.
In the negotiations carried on with the army simultaneously with the
latest Parliamentary struggle, he fought every point stubbornly.
To extricate themselves from this difficulty, Cromwell and Ireton
joined in a vote for resuscitating the Newcastle propositions, and
allowed Charles to be formally requested to give his consent to
those extravagant Presbyterian demands. Charles, driven to the wall,
expressed his preference for _The Heads of the Proposals_. Cromwell and
Ireton contrived to persuade themselves that he was in earnest, and
gave their support to the King's demand for a personal negotiation with
Parliament on that basis.

Under these circumstances the Independent party and the army split
in two. The greater number of the superior officers, together with
the Parliamentary leaders of the party, Vane, St. John and Fiennes,
supported Cromwell and Ireton in an attempt to persuade Parliament to
open the negotiations asked for by the King. As was not unnatural,
there were others, Rainsborough in the army, and Marten in the House
of Commons, who gathered round them a new Republican party, declaring
it useless to enter into a fresh discussion with Charles, and
even talking of imprisoning him in some fortress. Coalescing with
the Presbyterians, who wished merely to summon Charles to accept a
selection from the Newcastle Propositions, they beat Cromwell on the
vote, in spite of his warning that by disowning the King they were
playing into the hands of men who 'were endeavouring to have no other
power to rule but the sword'. Inside and outside the House Cromwell
was denounced as a mere time-server, who had no other end in view
but his own interests. Cromwell's only answer was to urge Charles
more pressingly than before to make the concessions without which his
restoration to any kind of authority was out of the question. Conscious
of his own integrity, he still hoped for the best, even from Charles.
"Though it may be for the present," he wrote to a friend, "a cloud may
be over our actions to those who are not acquainted with the grounds
of them, yet we doubt not God will clear our integrity and innocence
from any other ends we aim at but His glory and the public good." Yet
September passed away, and Charles had made no sign.

Charles's silence did but strengthen the party amongst the soldiers
which aimed at cutting the political knot with the sword. In the Army
Council indeed Cromwell was still predominant, and on October 6 it
agreed to meet on the 14th, to formulate terms which the King might
be able to accept. In the interval everything was done to come to a
private understanding with Charles. Charles, however, was trusting to
the probable Scottish invasion, and saw in the events taking place more
closely under his eyes no more than a chance of discrediting Cromwell
and his associates. When the Army Council met on the 14th, the subject
of continuing the negotiations had to be dropped. The position was well
explained in a letter from a Royalist. "The secret disposition," he
wrote, "is that there is no manner of agreement between the King and
the army; all this negotiation having produced no other effect but to
incline some of the chief officers not to consent to his destruction,
which I believe they will not, unless they be over-swayed; but cannot
observe that they are so truly the King's as that they will pass the
Rubicon for him, which if they could do, considering the inclination
of the common soldiers, and generally of the people they might do
what they would; but they are cold, and there is another faction of
desperate fellows as hot as fire."

Almost, if not altogether, in despair, Cromwell sought a compromise
with the Presbyterians on the basis of the temporary establishment of
Presbyterianism as the national religion, with as large a toleration
as he could persuade them to grant. When the House of Commons refused
to extend toleration to the worship authorised by the Prayer Book, it
was obvious that the scheme was not one which had a chance of obtaining
the assent of Charles. Cromwell's hope of uniting Parliament and army
in bringing pressure upon the King was as completely frustrated as his
former hope of bringing about an understanding between the King and
the army. His impotence could not but give encouragement to the other
'faction of desperate fellows as hot as fire' to demand a settlement
on quite another basis from that on which Cromwell and the other army
leaders had vainly attempted to found a Government.

In all his efforts, Cromwell's aim had been to strengthen the chances
in favour of the new toleration by intertwining it with the old
constitutional pillars of King and Parliament. His schemes, based as
they were on a thoroughly political instinct which warned him against
the danger of cutting the State adrift from its moorings, had broken
down mainly in consequence of the resistance of the King. It was but
natural that earnest men should seek new modes of gaining their ends
when the old ones proved ineffective. As the years of revolution passed
swiftly on, new and more drastic schemes appeared upon the surface,
not, as is often said, because in some unexplained way revolutions tend
in themselves to strengthen the hands of extreme men, but because the
force of conservative resistance calls forth more violent remedies.
The misgovernment of Buckingham and Laud had fostered the Parliamentary
idea. The resistance of Parliament to toleration had led to the
conception by the army leaders of the idea of Parliamentary reform,
and now the failure of those leaders produced the plan of founding a
government not on institutions sanctified by old use and wont, but on a
totally new democratic system. Outside the army, the main supporter of
the new principles was John Lilburne, who had been a lieutenant-colonel
in Manchester's army before the formation of the New Model, a man
litigious and impracticable, but public-spirited and prepared to accept
the consequences of his actions on behalf of his fellow-citizens or
of himself. During the troubles he spent a great part of his life in
prison, and at the present time he had been more than a year in the
Tower. He had a large following in the army, and early in October five
regiments deposed their Agitators, and choosing new ones, set them to
draw up a political manifesto which, under the name of _The Case of the
Army Truly Stated_, was laid before Fairfax on the 18th.

The new thing in this scheme of the recently elected Agitators was
not that they proposed to fix the institutions of the State by means
of written terms. That had been done again and again by Parliament in
various propositions submitted to Charles since the commencement of
the Civil War, and more recently by the army leaders in _The Heads
of the Proposals_. What was new was that they proposed in the first
place to secure religious freedom and other rights by the erection of
a paramount law unalterable by Parliament; and in the second place to
establish a single House of Parliament--all mention of King or House
of Lords was avoided--with full powers to call executive ministers
to account--a House which was to be elected by manhood suffrage--an
innovation which they justified on the ground that 'all power is
originally and essentially in the whole body of the people of this
nation'. It was a complete transition from the principles of the
English Revolution to those of the French.

Against the foundation of a government on abstract principles,
Cromwell's whole nature--consonant in this with that of the vast
majority of the English people--rose in revolt. On the 20th he
poured out his soul in the House of Commons in a three-hours' speech
in praise of monarchy, urging the House to build up the shattered
throne, disclaiming on behalf of the whole body of officers any
part in the scheme of the party of the new Agitators, who were now
beginning to be known as Levellers. It was to no purpose. Monarchy
without a King was itself but an abstract principle, and Charles would
accept no conditions which would not leave him free to shake off any
constitutional shackles imposed upon him. Only four days before
the delivery of Cromwell's speech, Charles had assured the French
Ambassador that he trusted in the divisions in the army, which would be
sure to drive one or other of the disputants to his side.

The immediate result of Charles's resolution to play with the great
questions at issue was an attempt by Cromwell and the officers to
come to terms with the Levellers. On October 28 a meeting of the Army
Council was held in Putney Church, to which several civilian Levellers
were admitted, the most prominent of whom was Wildman, formerly a major
in a now-disbanded regiment. Fairfax being out of health, Cromwell
took the chair. The Agitators put the question in a common-sense
form. "We sought," one of them said, "to satisfy all men, and it was
well; but, in going to do it, we have dissatisfied all men. We have
laboured to please the King; and, I think, except we go about to cut
all our throats, we shall not please him; and we have gone to support
a House which will prove rotten studs.[D] I mean the Parliament, which
consists of a company of rotten members." Cromwell and Ireton--they
continued--had attempted to settle the kingdom on the foundations of
King and Parliament, but it was to be hoped that they would no longer
persist in this course. Ireton could but answer that he would never
join those who refused to 'attempt all ways that are possible to
preserve both, and to make good use, and the best use that can be of
both, for the kingdom'. The practical men had become dreamers, whilst
the dreamers had become practical men. The Levellers, at least, had a
definite proposal to make, whilst Cromwell and Ireton had none. Since
the appearance of _The Case of the Army_, the Agitators had reduced its
chief requirements into a short constitution of four articles, which
they called _The Agreement of the People_, intending, it would seem, to
send it round the country for subscription, thus submitting it to what,
in modern days, would be called a plebiscite, though apparently it was
to be a plebiscite in which only affirmative votes were to be recorded.
Nothing could be more logical than this attempt to find a basis of
authority in the popular will, if the other basis of authority, the
tradition of generations, was to be of necessity abandoned.

      [D] _I.e._ props.

Cromwell, of all men in the world, was reduced to mere negative
criticism. The proposal of the Agitators, he admitted, was plausible
enough. "If," he said, "we could leap out of one condition into another
that had so precious things in it as this hath, I suppose there would
not be much dispute; though perhaps some of these things may be well
disputed; and how do we know if, whilst we are disputing these things,
another company of men shall gather together, and they shall put out
a paper as plausible as this? I do not know why it may not be done
by that time you have agreed upon this, or got hands to it, if that
be the way; and not only another and another, but many of this kind;
and if so, what do you think the consequence would be? Would it not be
confusion?... But truly I think we are not only to consider what the
consequences are ... but we are to consider the probability of the ways
and means to accomplish it, that is to say that, according to reason
and judgment, the spirits and temper of this nation are prepared to
receive and go along with it, and that those great difficulties which
lie in our way are in a likelihood to be either overcome or removed.
Truly to anything that's good, there's no doubt on it, objections may
be made and framed, but let every honest man consider whether or no
these be not very reasonable objections in point of difficulty; and
I know a man may answer all difficulties with faith, and faith will
answer all difficulties really where it is, as we are very apt all of
us to call faith that perhaps may be but carnal imagination and carnal
reasoning."

Not a word had Cromwell to say on behalf of any possible understanding
with the King. All that he could do was to stave off a declaration in
favour of the establishment of a democratic Republic, by proposing
that the Army Council should reduce into formal shape the engagements
entered upon at Newmarket and Triploe Heath. As those engagements
had been put forward as demands to Parliament--not to the King,
this suggestion at least thrust aside for the time being the thorny
question of the possibility of coming to an understanding with Charles.
Cromwell's proposal, however, was not likely to secure unanimity.
Wildman, on behalf of the Levellers, refused to be bound by engagements
which he personally held to be unjust. On this Cromwell asked for
the appointment of a committee to examine this question, as well as
any others upon which there was a difference of opinion. He pleaded
with his audience not to approach the matters in controversy 'as two
contrary parties'. His hearers were in no temper to profit by the
suggestion. Wildman threw out a hint that if Parliament were to patch
up an arrangement with the King, it would detract from natural right.
The expression at once divided the assembly into two camps. Ireton
declared that there was no such thing as natural right. Cromwell asked
for the appointment of a committee to discuss the questions that
had been raised about the engagements of the army. A Captain Audley
sensibly urged the controversialists to remember that it was no time
for empty disputation. "If we tarry long," he said, "the King will
come and say who will be hanged first." Neither Audley's judicious
remark, nor Cromwell's words thrown in from time to time in favour
of peace, could stop the wrangle, which at least served to draw from
Cromwell the nearest approach he ever made to the enunciation of a
constitutional principle. Though the Council of the Army, he declared,
was not 'wedded and glued to forms of government,' it was prepared
to maintain the doctrine that 'the foundation and the supremacy is
in the people--radically in them--and to be set down by them in
their representations,' in other words by their representatives in
Parliament. To conciliate this doctrine with the upholding of the
ancient constitution, reformed indeed, but unaltered in its main
features, was the problem which the nation solved for itself in 1689,
but which neither the nation nor Cromwell could contrive to solve so
long as Charles I. refused to face the teaching of events.

On the following day, after a prayer-meeting held in compliance with a
suggestion from the pious Colonel Goffe, the Army Council met again,
to resolve, after long debate, to lay aside the consideration of the
engagements of the army and to proceed at once to the examination
of _The Agreement of the People_. This determination was a check to
Cromwell, who had proposed the committee. It was not long before his
prudence was justified. A debate sprang up on the question of manhood
suffrage, claimed by the Levellers as being in accordance with natural
right, and rejected by their opponents, to whom natural right was
a mere absurdity. After a fierce dispute, Cromwell did his best to
persuade the meeting to avoid abstract considerations, and to content
itself with the discussion of such questions as whether the existing
franchise could be in any way improved. His characteristic tendency
to look to the preservation of ancient rights finding no scope in any
possible scheme for the retention of the monarchy, fixed itself on the
question of the constitution of Parliament. Colonel Rainsborough, who,
on questions relating to Parliamentary elections, was the chief speaker
on the side of the Levellers, proposed an appeal from the Army Council
to the Army at large. His proposal found no support and the Council
broke up without coming to a decision.

After this Cromwell had his way. On the 30th the committee which he
suggested, and on which both parties were represented, met to consider
the points at issue. The constitutional scheme to which its assent was
given followed the lines of _The Heads of the Proposals_ more than
those of _The Agreement of the People_. It proposed reforms, not an
entire shifting of the basis of government. Above all, it adhered to
the view that the new constitution should come into existence by an
agreement between King and Parliament--not by an appeal to the natural
rights of man. In the long run Cromwell was justified by the event. On
no other basis would the distressed nation find rest. His wisdom so far
as present results were concerned was less conspicuous.

The next meeting of the Army Council was held under discouraging
circumstances. Charles, who had for some time been established at
Hampton Court, had refused to renew the parole which he had given, and
it had been found necessary to strengthen his guards. Though there
was no accurate knowledge at Putney of his intrigue with the Scots,
enough had leaked out to raise grave suspicion, and when, on November
1, Cromwell again took the chair, he called on those present to 'speak
their experiences as the issue of what God had given in answer to
their prayers'. The result was distinctly unfavourable to the King.
One said that the negative voice of the King and Lords must be taken
away; another that he could no longer pray for the King; a third that
their liberties must be recovered by the sword. Cromwell did his best
to stem the tide. Pointing out, just as a modern historian might do,
that there had been faults on both sides, he called on 'him that was
without sin amongst them to cast the first stone'. He then turned to
the more practical question of the difficulty of maintaining discipline
in the army, if the authority of Parliament were shut off. "If there
be no Parliament," he argued, "they are nothing, and we are nothing
likewise." Though Cromwell was not yet prepared to strike at the King,
he no longer regarded his comprehension in the new constitution as
absolutely essential. He was even ready to accept the new democratic
basis of _The Agreement of the People_, if there should be a wide
demand for it. He must look, he said, for 'a visible presence of the
people, either by subscriptions or numbers--for in the government of
nations that which is to be looked after is the affections of the
people'. For the present, however, he seemed most inclined to trust
in Parliament as the source of authority. On one thing he was clear,
that the discipline of the army must not be ruined by such an appeal
to the general body of the soldiers in support of the Agreement as
Rainsborough had contemplated. "I must confess," he said, "that I have
a commission from the General, and I understand what I am to do by it.
I shall conform to him according to the rules and discipline of war ...
and therefore I conceive it is not in the power of any particular men,
or any particular man in the army, to call a rendezvous of a troop, or
regiment, or in the least to disoblige the army from the commands of
the General.... Therefore I shall move what we shall centre upon. If it
have but the face of authority, if it be but a hare swimming over the
Thames I will take hold of it rather than let it go."

It was hard, indeed, in those days, to say where the face of authority
was to be found, and Cromwell was far from being able to solve the
question. The most innocent suggestion made by his opponents was that
the army must purge Parliament and declare the King responsible for
the ruin of the country. Goffe declared that it had been revealed to
him that the sin of the army lay in its tampering with God's enemies,
in other words, with Charles. Cromwell struck in with an expression of
distrust in personal revelations. He himself, he explained, was guided
by God's dispensations, that is to say, in more modern phrase, by the
requirements of the situation. He acknowledged that danger was to be
apprehended from the King and House of Lords, and that it was not his
intention 'to preserve the one or the other with a visible danger and
destruction to the people and the public interest'. On the other hand,
he refused to accept it as certain that God had determined to destroy
King and Lords, though he thought it probable that it was so. In the
end, the constitutional discussion was transferred to a committee.

For a right judgment of Cromwell's character and habits of procedure
no evidence exists of such importance as that which has been thus
summarised. Here at least is laid bare before us his reluctance to
abandon an untenable position, long after it has become clear to more
impatient spirits that it has become untenable. Yet his hesitation is
not based on any timorous reluctance to act. It arises from his keen
sense of the danger of any alternative policy, a sense which will be
overmastered as soon as action in one direction or the other becomes a
manifest necessity. On November 8, seeing that the Levellers were bent
on pushing forward their proposal of manhood suffrage, he obtained a
vote from the Army Council directing that both officers and Agitators
should be sent back to their regiments. There can be little doubt
that the danger was greater than was thus indicated, and that there
was truth in a story which charged the Levellers with intending, at
this time, to purge the Parliament and to bring the King to trial. On
the 11th, at all events, the brave but fanatical Colonel Harrison was
calling for the prosecution of the King, and on the same day Cromwell
sent to Whalley, who commanded the guard at Hampton Court, to provide
against any attempt on Charles's person. Similar warnings had reached
Charles himself, and on the evening of the same day he quietly made his
escape. On the 14th, after the failure of a scheme for the provision
of a vessel from Southampton to carry him to France, he reached
Carisbrooke, where the Governor of the Castle was Robert Hammond,
Cromwell's cousin. Cromwell's first task was to ensure the discipline
of the army. His persistent efforts to keep up negotiation with the
King had exposed him to the distrust of the Levellers, and it is said
that some of them had resolved to murder him in his bed. There was no
time to be lost. On the 15th a rendezvous of a third part of the army
was to be held on Corkbush Field, not far from Ware, and there could be
no doubt that the Levellers would make desperate attempts to seduce
the regiments from their military obedience. To meet the danger, a
manifesto was issued in the name of Fairfax and the Army Council, in
which Fairfax offered to give his support to the early dissolution of
Parliament and to a plan for making the House of Commons 'as near as
may be, an equal representative of the people that are to elect'. For
the rest, every soldier would be expected to sign a form of adhesion to
the General and the Council. Speaking broadly, the conflict was between
the men who knew the importance of maintaining the discipline of the
army, and those who would reduce it to an armed mob eager to compel
Parliament to adopt the democratic system of _The Agreement of the
People_. On the 15th the soldiers gathered to the appointed rendezvous
on Corkbush Field, where most of the regiments, with more or less
reluctance, submitted to their officers. Two, those of Harrison and
Robert Lilburne, both of which had been ordered elsewhere, mutinously
made their appearance with copies of _The Agreement of the People_ in
their hats, as well as the motto "England's Freedom! Soldiers' Rights!"
A few words from Fairfax reduced Harrison's regiment to obedience.
Cromwell, finding that Lilburne's men defied his order to remove the
papers from their hats, rode into the ranks with his sword drawn, on
which the regiment, with one accord, did as it was bidden. Three of
the ringleaders were condemned to death by a court-martial held on
the spot, and then ordered to throw dice for their lives. He who threw
lowest was shot in the presence of the whole force, and the mutiny was
brought to an end.

By this time the weary round of negotiation was beginning afresh.
Charles sent up new proposals to the Parliament, proposals which, if he
were in earnest, might possibly serve as a foundation for an agreement.
It concerned Parliament and army alike to discover whether Charles, who
for many months had shown no sign of eagerness for settlement, was now
aiming at anything more than an excuse to enable him to gain time for
an arrangement with the Scots. So suspicious had the officers grown
that Ireton was heard to say that if peace were to be made between King
and Parliament, he hoped it would be such as that the army 'might,
with a safe conscience, fight against both'. If we are to believe a
story, told indeed only after the Restoration, but which has inherent
probability in it, Cromwell and Ireton, having reason to suppose that
a letter from Charles to the Queen would be carried by a man who was
to stay the night at the Blue Boar in Holborn, disguised themselves
as troopers, and waited in the inn drinking beer till the messenger
arrived. Then, ripping up his saddle, they found the expected letter,
from which they learnt that 'the King had acquainted the Queen that he
was now courted by both the factions, the Scotch Presbyterians and the
army, and which bid fairest for him should have him, but he thought
he should close with the Scots sooner than the other'. According to
another account, the letter also assured Henrietta Maria that she need
not concern herself about any concessions he might make, as 'he should
not look upon himself as obliged to keep any promises made so much on
compulsion whenever he had power enough to break them'.

Whatever may be the exact truth about the intercepted letter, it is
exceedingly likely that Cromwell, in some way or other, received
intelligence which confirmed his growing belief in Charles's
untrustworthiness. This view of the case is confirmed by the fact
that, not long after, the Parliament prepared four Bills, not as a
basis of a settlement, but as a test to show whether Charles was in
earnest or not, principally by asking him to abandon his control over
the militia. On the other hand Charles so misconceived his position
as to send Berkeley to Fairfax with a request that he would support
him in asking for a personal treaty unfettered by any conditions
whatsoever. When, on November 28, Berkeley arrived at head-quarters,
Fairfax briefly referred him to Parliament, whilst neither Cromwell nor
Ireton would enter into conversation with him. To the soldiers who had
mistrusted him Cromwell professed 'that the glories of this world had
so dazzled his eyes that he could not discern clearly the great works
the Lord was doing; that he was resolved to humble himself, and desired
the prayers of the saints, that God would be pleased to forgive his
self-seeking'. On the following morning he sent a message to Berkeley
in a more worldly strain, bidding him 'be assured he would serve His
Majesty as long as he could do it without his own ruin, but desired
that he would not expect that he should perish for his sake'. Such at
least was the form given to the message by Berkeley when he wrote his
Memoirs at a later date, and we may at least take it as established
that Cromwell made it clear to Charles that, after what had happened,
it was perfectly hopeless to expect the army to bring pressure on
Parliament in his favour.

Charles turned to the Scots. There were two parties in Scotland--the
party of the ministers of the Kirk, headed by the Marquis of Argyle,
and the party of the nobility, headed by the Duke of Hamilton, of which
the leading members were the Duke's brother, the Earl of Lanark, and
the Earl of Lauderdale, both of whom, like many other Scottish nobles,
had thrown themselves into the Presbyterian movement so long as it was
directed against Bishops, but had rallied to the Crown as soon as the
Ministers strove to make themselves independent of the nobility. It was
this latter party that was represented by the Scottish Commissioners
in England, and on December 26 Charles signed an agreement with
them--_The Engagement_, as it was called--which gave him his own way
in England, allowing him to put an end to all toleration of the sects,
and to grant a dominant position to Presbyterians for three years
only. Against the English Parliament and the army the Scots were to
claim for the Crown the power over the militia, the control over the
Great Seal, the bestowal of honours and offices, the choice of Privy
Councillors, and the negative voice in Parliament. In support of this
settlement, which included a disbandment of the army and a dissolution
of Parliament, a Scottish army was to march into England. Of all the
Scotsmen embarked in this scheme, the only man of marked ability was
Lauderdale, and though no direct evidence exists on the subject, it
seems likely enough that the Engagement was mainly, if not altogether,
his work. If the suggestion be accepted that the picture by Janssen in
the possession of the present Duke, in which a paper is being handed
by Lauderdale to Lanark, represents the transference of the Engagement
from the former to the latter, it would lend additional strength to the
supposition founded on the relative intellectual powers of the two men.
However this may be, it is certain that two days after the signature of
_The Engagement_, Charles rejected the Four Bills which had been laid
before him by the English Parliament, thus showing his own belief that
it was no longer needful for him to keep up even the semblance of an
understanding with the Houses at Westminster.

That the result of a successful Scottish invasion would be to restore
Charles to the throne on the old conditions, and to sweep away
everything for which any English party had struggled, can hardly be
doubted. It is true that _The Engagement_ was buried in the garden
of Carisbrooke Castle, and that not a word of its contents reached
any English ears. Yet from the rejection of the Four Bills, following
on the visit of the Scottish Commissioners to Carisbrooke, it was
evident that some dangerous project was on foot, and even those who
had welcomed a Scottish army in 1643, when it invaded England at their
bidding, were likely to be scandalised at the intervention of another
Scottish army in opposition to themselves. To Cromwell and to the
soldiers of every grade, the prospect of seeing those objects for which
they had shed their blood wrenched from them by a Scottish invasion,
was peculiarly offensive. In the army all quarrels were hushed and all
offences pardoned in face of the obvious danger. What was more, the
leading officers assured Parliament that the army might be relied upon
against the invaders. The extreme Levellers indeed continued to regard
Cromwell as a time-server and a hypocrite, and some even of those who
were ready to accept his co-operation were somewhat suspicious. "If
you prove not an honest man," said Hazlerigg to him, "I will never
trust a fellow with a great nose for your sake."

Under the circumstances Charles's Royalist friends were sent away from
Carisbrooke, and he himself, after a futile attempt to escape, treated
as a prisoner under lock and key. A vote that no further addresses
should be made to the King passed the Commons. For some time the
Lords refused their concurrence, and it was only on a threat of the
intervention of the army that they gave way. After the struggle was at
an end, two regiments occupied Whitehall and the Mews. The supremacy
of the army in the State was growing more pronounced as each political
difficulty arose. There are good reasons for believing that before
the end of January, 1648, Cromwell, to whom the interference of the
army in politics was almost as objectionable as the establishment of
a democracy on abstract principles, proposed to transfer the Crown
from Charles to the Prince of Wales; preserving the office whilst
changing the persons. No proposal could have been more statesmanlike;
but, unhappily, it was not possible to carry it into effect. The
whole of the Royal family was too exasperated against the enemies of
its head to lend itself to such a transaction. There can be no doubt
that Cromwell had, by this time, abandoned all thought of looking to
Charles as the basis of the political settlement he desired. About
the end of February a letter from Charles to the Queen was intercepted
which convinced those into whose hands it fell that the writer was
preparing to take the aggressive against his opponents. Early in
February Cromwell was found amongst the supporters of a Parliamentary
declaration intended to uphold the vote of No Addresses, in which
Charles's misdemeanours were set forth at length, somewhat in the
fashion of the Grand Remonstrance. His attempt to bring into England
Germans, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Lorrainers, and Danes as well as
Irishmen was one of the principal counts against him. Cromwell is even
said to have 'made a severe invective against monarchical government,'
though it is probable that his argument was directed less against a
hereditary chief-magistracy bound by constitutional limitations than
against a system under which the King retained the ultimate decision
of all questions in his own hands. At all events, he refused to commit
himself absolutely to Republicanism, thereby exasperating those who,
like Marten, and even his own bosom friend--the younger Vane--had come
to the conclusion that, in the England of that day, a Republic was the
only alternative to an absolute monarchy.

It was about this time that a meeting took place, the proceedings
at which were recorded by Edmund Ludlow, himself a Republican or
Commonwealth's-man--to use the term in use amongst contemporaries.
Anxious to bring men of different opinions into line against Charles,
Cromwell gave a dinner to the leaders of the various parties, after
which a conference was held in which, according to Ludlow, Cromwell and
his friends 'kept themselves in the clouds, and would not declare their
judgments either for a monarchical, aristocratical or democratical
government, maintaining that any of them might be good in themselves,
or for us according as Providence should direct us'. The old difference
of opinion between the men of practice and the men of theory was, on
this occasion, aggravated by the fact that many theoretical upholders
of a Commonwealth drew the very practical conclusion that not only were
Charles's subjects absolved from their allegiance, but that it was the
duty of Parliament to call the King to account for the blood that had
been shed in England in consequence of his misdeeds. The conference
begun in the interests of peace bade fair to lead to open division, and
Cromwell, to silence angry vituperation, flung a cushion at Ludlow's
head and ran downstairs. Ludlow in his turn threw the cushion back at
Cromwell, and, as he proudly boasted, 'made him hasten down faster than
he desired'. A rough piece of horseplay, it at all events served its
purpose in quieting a strife which, every minute that it lasted, was
doing injury to the cause which Cromwell desired to serve.

At no time did Cromwell fix beforehand the methods by which he
intended to work, though he never had any doubt of the object against
which his energies were to be directed. He had contended first against
irresponsible monarchical power, then in turn against military anarchy,
Presbyterian tyranny, the political supremacy of the army, and abstract
theories of government. He was ready to meet each danger as it arose,
with the help of all who, whatever their opinions on other points might
be, were ready to join him in attacking the abuse which he wished at
the time to abate. If, like Ludlow, they persisted in looking too far
ahead, there was nothing for it but to silence them, if it were but by
flinging cushions at their heads.

In the Spring of 1648 Cromwell and his political allies had thus
to deal with a very complicated situation. They had to face not
merely Charles's intrigue with the Scots, but also the widely spread
discontent in England. Especially in the towns, men were weary of
military dictation, and of the increased taxation by which the army
was supported. Parliament too was as unpopular as the army. Englishmen
were no less weary of the prolonged uncertainty which neither army nor
Parliament seemed capable of bringing to an end. In their longing for
a settled government, a considerable part of the population turned
their eyes to the throne, as the ancient basis of authority and order.
If England had been polled, there would probably have been a large
majority in favour of Charles's restoration to power, and yet, it was
precisely amongst those whose system was most democratic that the most
intense opposition to a restoration was to be found.

To Cromwell, man of order and discipline as he was, a restoration
unaccompanied with security against the old mischief was intolerable.
Of his own disinterestedness he gave at this time undeniable proof.
Parliament having granted him lands valued at £1,680 a year, proceeded
to reduce his pay at the same time that it reduced that of other
officers, by the large sum of £1,825. Far from taking umbrage at this
diminution of his income, he presented not less than £5,000 to the
public cause, and also abandoned the arrears due to him, which at that
time amounted to £1,500. Certainly dangers were gathering thickly.
An intercepted letter from the King's agent at the Hague disclosed
Charles's expectation to be succoured not only by an Irish army but
by a Dutch one. Common prudence taught Cromwell to do everything in
his power to conciliate any party that might stand by his side against
so extensive a combination. When his scheme for placing the Prince of
Wales on the throne was revived about the middle of March, some of
the Episcopal clergy preferred an understanding with the army to an
understanding with the Scots. Towards the end of the month, Cromwell
was still in negotiation with members of the Royalist party, the
purport of which it is impossible to define, but which probably had its
rise in his persistent desire to maintain royalty in some shape or form
as a basis of order. It is at least certain that he gained much obloquy
from his own party. "I know," he wrote to a friend, "God has been above
all ill reports, and will in His own time vindicate me. I have no cause
to complain." It was never Cromwell's way to answer calumny by a public
explanation of his conduct.

At last, however, Cromwell came to the conclusion that nothing was to
be hoped from an understanding with the Royalists; and it therefore
became more necessary to secure the co-operation of the English
Presbyterians. An attempt to win the City Magistrates by concessions
was, however, promptly repulsed. On April 6 it became known in London
that Charles had all but succeeded in effecting his escape, and on
the 9th a City mob was rushing westwards along the Strand with the
intention of overpowering the soldiers at Whitehall and the Mews. A
charge of cavalry ordered by Cromwell drove them back, but it was not
till the following day that the tumult was suppressed. All this while
the Hamilton party, which was keen for an invasion of England, was
gaining strength in Scotland. So black did the outlook become that
one more appeal was made to the King, and there are strong reasons
for believing that he was warned that, if he persisted in refusing
compliance to the demands made upon him--whatever they may have
been--Parliament would proceed, on April 24, to depose him, and to
crown the Duke of York, who was still in their hands, as James II.
Charles replied by sanctioning a plan for his son's escape, and before
the appointed day arrived the boy was well on his way to the Continent.

The first resistance to Parliament came from an unexpected quarter.
As early as on February 22, Colonel Poyer, the Governor of Pembroke
Castle, had refused to deliver up his charge till his arrears had
been paid, and on March 23 he had proceeded to seize the town. At
first no more than a local difficulty was apprehended, and Colonel
Horton was despatched to suppress the rising. On his arrival he wrote
that he was likely to have the whole of South Wales on his hands.
Almost at the same time it was known at Westminster that a Scottish
army was actually to be raised. Presbyterian as was the majority of
the English Parliament, it had no mind to have even its favourite
religion established by an invading army of Scots, especially as that
army would be the army of the Scottish nobility, who were supposed
not to feel any warm attachment to the Presbyterian cause except
so far as their own interests were connected with it. It was the
hesitation of the English Presbyterians between their political and
their ecclesiastical aims which alone could have given a free hand to
Fairfax and Cromwell. It was Cromwell who, seconded by Vane, carried
a vote in the House for granting concessions which the City under
the pressure of the recent intelligence, was now prepared to accept
as satisfactory. A further vote that the House would not alter the
fundamental government of the kingdom by King, Lords and Commons, was
supported by the leading Independents. The House then proceeded to
declare itself ready to concur in a settlement on the ground of the
propositions laid before the King at Hampton Court, that is to say, on
the ground of the establishment of Presbyterianism without any liberty
of conscience whatsoever. Whether Cromwell was in his place when the
last two votes were taken is uncertain. At all events we can hardly
be wrong in supposing that he had no objection to the Presbyterians
amusing themselves with another hopeless negotiation whilst the army
took the field. He had had too much experience of Charles's character
as a diplomatist to imagine that he was likely to aim at anything more
than hoodwinking his opponents till the time came when he might deem it
advisable to hoodwink his allies.

Cromwell's presence was imperatively needed at head-quarters, which
were now established at Windsor. He found the army in an agitated
condition, and we may well believe that his own feelings were no
less agitated. The peaceful settlement which he had so long pursued
seemed farther off than ever, and he can have brought with him no
friendly thoughts of a King who would neither accept reasonable terms
for himself, nor abdicate in favour of those who would. On April 29
the chief men of the army held a prayer-meeting to inquire 'into the
causes of that sad dispensation,' and in a discussion which followed
on the 30th Cromwell urged those present thoroughly to consider their
actions as an army and their conduct as private Christians, that they
might discover the cause of 'such sad rebukes' as were upon them by
reason of their iniquities. That day no definite result was arrived
at, but on the next, news having arrived that the forces in Wales had
suffered a check, Fairfax ordered Cromwell to take the command in those
parts. Before Cr

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