Cromwell said this with perfect sincerity. He felt that he was but a blind instrument in the hands of a higher power. Yet he had shaped the issue of events with such power and had imposed his interpretation of their meaning upon them with such decision, that neither contemporaries nor historians could limit to so little the sphere of his free will.
It was possible to “make too much of outward dispensations,” and Cromwell owned that perhaps he did so. His system of being guided by events instead of revelations did not put an end to the possibility of self-deception, though it made it less likely. “Men,” as Shakespeare says, “may construe things after their fashion clean from the purpose of the things themselves.” But if Cromwell sometimes mistook the meaning of facts he never failed to realise their importance. “If the fact be so,” he once said, “why should we sport with it?” and the saying is a characteristic one. He was therefore more practical and less visionary than other statesmen of his party; more open-minded and better able to adapt his policy to the changing circumstances and changing needs of the times. To many contemporary politicians, the exact carrying out of some cut-and-dried political programme seemed the height of political wisdom. The Levellers with their Agreement of the People and the Scottish Presbyterians with their Covenant are typical examples. The persistent adhesion of the Covenanters to their old formulas, in spite of defeats and altered conditions, Cromwell regarded as blindness to the teaching of events. They were blind to God’s great dispensations, he told the Scottish ministers, out of mere wilfulness, “because the things did not work forth their platform, and the great God did not come down to their minds and thoughts.” He would have felt himself guilty of the same fault if he had obstinately adhered either to a republic or a monarchy under all circumstances. Forms of government were neither good nor bad in themselves. Either form might be good: it depended on the condition of England at the moment, on the temper of the people, on the question which was more compatible with the welfare of the Cause, which more answerable to God’s purpose as revealed in events. It was reported that Cromwell had said that it was lawful to pass through all forms to accomplish his ends, and if “forms” be taken to mean forms of government, and “ends” political aims, there can be no doubt that he thought so. However much he varied his means, his ends remained the same.
To understand what Cromwell’s political aims were, it is necessary to enquire what he meant when he spoke of his discharging his duty to “the interest of the people of God and this Commonwealth.” The order in which he places them is in itself significant. First, he put the duty to a section of the English people; last, the duty to the English people in general. Cromwell was full of patriotic pride. Once, when he was enumerating to Parliament the dangers which threatened the State, he wound up by saying that the enumeration should cause no despondency, “as truly I think it will not; for we are Englishmen: that is one good fact.” “The English,” he said on another occasion, “are a people that have been like other nations, sometimes up and sometimes down in our honour in the world, but never yet so low but we might measure with other nations.” Several times in his speeches he termed the English “the best people in the world.” Best, because “having the highest and clearest profession amongst them of the greatest glory—namely, religion.” Best, because in the midst of the English people there was as it were another people, “a people that are to God as the apple of His eye,” “His peculiar interest,” “the people of God.” “When I say the people of God,” he explained, “I mean the large comprehension of them under the several forms of godliness in this nation”; or, in other words, all sects of Puritans.
To Cromwell the interest of the people of God and the interest of the nation were two distinct things, but he did not think them irreconcilable. “He sings sweetly,” said Cromwell, “that sings a song of reconciliation between these two interests, and it is a pitiful fancy to think they are inconsistent.” At the same time the liberty of the people of God was more important than the civil liberty and interest of the nation, “which is and ought to be subordinate to the more peculiar interest of God, yet is the next best God hath given men in this world.” Religious freedom was more important than political freedom. Cromwell emphatically condemned the politicians who said, “If we could but exercise wisdom to gain civil liberty, religion would follow.” Such men were “men of a hesitating spirit,” and “under the bondage of scruples.” They were little better than the carnal men who cared for none of these things. They could never “rise to such a spiritual heat” as the Cause demanded. Yet the truth was that half the Republican party and an overwhelming majority of the English people held the view which he condemned.
Cromwell wished to govern constitutionally. No theory of the divine right of an able man to govern the incapable multitude blinded his eyes to the fact that self-government was the inheritance and right of the English people. He accepted in the main the first principle of democracy, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, or, as he phrased it, “that the foundation of supremacy is in the people and to be by them set down in their representatives.” More than once he declared that the good of the governed was the supreme end of all governments, and he claimed that his own government acted “for the good of the people, and for their interest, and without respect had to any other interest.” But government for the people did not necessarily mean government by the people. “That’s the question,” said Cromwell, “what’s for their good, not what pleases them,” and the history of the Protectorate was a commentary on this text. Some stable government was necessary to prevent either a return to anarchy or the restoration of the Stuarts. Therefore he was determined to maintain his own government, with the assistance of Parliament if possible, without it if he must. If it became necessary to suspend for a time the liberties of the subject or to levy taxes without parliamentary sanction, he was prepared to do it. In the end the English people would recognise that he had acted for their good. “Ask them,” said he, “whether they would prefer the having of their will, though it be their destruction, rather than comply with things of necessity?” He felt confident the answer would be in his favour.
STATUE OF CROMWELL, BY THORNEYCROFT.
ERECTED AT WESTMINSTER IN 1899.
England might have acquiesced in this temporary dictatorship in the hope of a gradual return to constitutional government. What it could not accept was the permanent limitation of the sovereignty of the people in the interest of the Puritan minority whom Cromwell termed the people of God. Yet it was at this object that all the constitutional settlements of the Protectorate aimed. It was in the interest of this minority that the Instrument of Government restricted the power of Parliament and made the Protector the guardian of the constitution. It was in their interest that the Petition and Advice re-established a House of Lords. That House, as Thurloe said, was intended “to preserve the good interest against the uncertainty of the Commons House,” for, as another Cromwellian confessed “the spirit of the Commons had little affinity with or respect to the Cause of God.”
Cromwell trusted that the real benefits his government conferred would reconcile the majority of the nation to the rule of the minority and “win the people to the interest of Jesus Christ.” Thus the long hostility between the people and “the people of God” would end at last in reconciliation.
It was a fallacious hope. Puritanism was spending its strength in the vain endeavour to make England Puritan by force. The enthusiasm which had undertaken to transform the world was being conformed to it. A change was coming over the party which supported the Protector; it had lost many of the “men of conscience”; it had attracted many of the time-servers and camp-followers of politics; it was ceasing to be a party held together by religious interests, and becoming a coalition held together by material interests and political necessities. Cromwell once rebuked the Scottish clergy for “meddling with worldly policies and mixtures of worldly power” to set up that which they called “the kingdom of Christ,” and warned them that “the Sion promised” would not be built “with such untempered mortar.” He had fallen into the same error himself, and the rule of Puritanism was founded on shifting sands. So the Protector’s institutions perished with him and his work ended in apparent failure. Yet he had achieved great things. Thanks to his sword absolute monarchy failed to take root in English soil. Thanks to his sword Great Britain emerged from the chaos of the civil wars one strong state instead of three separate and hostile communities. Nor were the results of his action entirely negative. The ideas which inspired his policy exerted a lasting influence on the development of the English state. Thirty years after his death the religious liberty for which he fought was established by law. The union with Scotland and Ireland, which the statesmen of the Restoration undid, the statesmen of the eighteenth century effected. The mastery of the seas he had desired to gain, and the Greater Britain he had sought to build up became sober realities. Thus others perfected the work which he had designed and attempted.