It seemed to Puritans as if the same struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism was beginning even now in England. While the foreign policy of Charles seemed to them a cowardly desertion of Protestantism, his ecclesiastical policy seemed an insidious attack upon it, and under Laud’s influence the ecclesiastical policy of Charles was as uniform and consistent as his European policy was feeble and irresolute.[[5]] To himself, Laud appeared an eminently conservative reformer who sought to enforce only the discipline of the Church and the ecclesiastical laws of the State. His object was to bring the Church back to its true historical position as a branch of the great Catholic Church, and to purge it of the Calvinistic taint it had contracted since the Reformation. Not averse to a certain freedom of speculation amongst learned men, he sought to silence controversial preaching, and was intolerant of diversity in the forms of worship. Unity of belief was essential to the existence of a National Church, and the way to it lay through uniformity, “for unity cannot long continue in the Church when uniformity is shut out at the church door.” “Decency and an orderly settlement of the external worship of God in the Church” was his own definition of the ends for which he laboured.

To the Puritans, Laud appeared an innovator and a revolutionary. Over half the country the observances he sought to enforce had fallen into disuse for years. Each restoration of an authorised form, every revival of ancient usage, brought the Church nearer to Roman practice, and in their opinion nearer to Roman doctrine. A bow was not an expression of reverence, but a confession of idolatry; a surplice, not a few yards of white linen, but a rag of Rome. Laud’s attempts to silence their preachers aggravated their suspicion of his motives and confirmed them in the theory that he was a papist in disguise.

Much of the hostility which Laud brought upon himself was due to the means which he employed. The King’s authority as supreme governor of the Church was the instrument by which the State could be used to carry out the views of a clerical reformer, and he had no scruples about using it. Laud’s reliance on personal government in matters ecclesiastical allied him naturally with its supporters in things secular. Absolutism was with Strafford a political creed, with Laud an ecclesiastical necessity. Each needed the same tool: one to realise his dream of a well governed commonwealth, the other to shape a Church that had grown half Calvinistic into conformity with the Anglican ideal. Each had the same violent zeal. “Laud,” says James I., “hath a restless spirit, and cannot see when things are well, but loves to bring matters to a pitch of reformation floating in his own brain.” Strafford described himself as one “ever desiring the best things, never satisfied I had done enough, but did always desire to do better.”

Laud and Strafford were alike in their impatience of opposition, whether it rose from indolence, corruption, or conscience; whether it pleaded legal technicalities or constitutional rights. Arbitrary though the government of Charles was, it was not vigorous enough to satisfy these two eager spirits. But Strafford’s power to give his views effect was bounded by the Irish Sea, and outside the ecclesiastical sphere Laud’s was hampered by conflicting influences. The correspondence of the Archbishop and the Lord Deputy is full of complaints of the remissness of the King’s other ministers, and of sighs for the adoption of a system of “Thorough.”

Opponents of Ship-money and Puritans in general must be put down with a strong hand. “The very genius of that people,” wrote Strafford, “leads them always to oppose, as well civilly as ecclesiastically, all that ever authority ordains for them, but in good truth were they rightly served they should be whipped home into their right wits.” “It might be done,” answered Laud, “if the rod were rightly used, but as it is used it smarts not.” Thus they took sweet counsel together, never dreaming of “that two-handed engine at the door” which waited to strike them both.

During these eleven years of arbitrary government, Cromwell’s life was obscure, if not wholly uneventful. It was a period of unconscious preparation for his future action, a quiet seed-time which bore fruit hereafter. When the “great, warm, ruffling Parliament” of 1628 ended, Cromwell returned to his little estate at Huntingdon and busied himself with his farming. In May, 1631, he sold his property at Huntingdon for £1800, and rented some grazing lands at St. Ives, about five miles eastward, and farther down the Ouse. In 1636, Sir Thomas Steward of Ely, the brother of Cromwell’s mother, died, and Oliver, whom his uncle had made his heir, succeeded Sir Thomas as farmer of the Cathedral tithes. He removed to Ely, where he lived in “the glebe house” near St. Mary’s Church, which continued to be the residence of his wife and children till 1647. His family now numbered four sons, Robert, Oliver, Richard, and Henry; and two daughters, Bridget and Elizabeth, all born at Huntingdon. Two more daughters, Frances and Mary, were born in 1637 and 1638. The house he occupied is still standing; in 1845 it was an alehouse.

“By no means a sumptuous mansion,” says Carlyle, “but may have conveniently held a man of three or four hundred a year, with his family, in those simple times. Some quaint air of gentility still looks through its ragged dilapidations. It is of two stories, more properly of one and a half; has many windows, irregular chimneys, and gables.”

CROMWELL’S HOUSE, ELY.
(From a photograph.)

Some writers, more especially poets, have spoken of these years of Cromwell’s life as a time given up entirely to domesticity and agriculture. Marvell praises the Protector for an early abstention from public affairs which was by no means voluntary: