There is another fact in Cromwell’s history during this period of which one of his letters gives us evidence. If he had ever written an account of his own early life, little conflicts with local authorities or any alterations in his worldly fortunes would have seemed to us of less moment than the change which took place within him. Before 1628 he had become a professor of religion, and in all externals a Puritan, but by 1638 a formal acceptance of the Calvinistic creed had become the perfect faith which casts out all fears and doubts. His conversion had been followed by a time of depression and mental conflict which lasted for many years. Other Puritans passed through the same struggle. Bunyan relates how he “fell to some outward reformation in his life,” and his neighbours thought him to be “a very godly man, a new religious man, and did marvel to see such a great and famous alteration.” And yet for a long time afterwards he was “in a forlorn and sad condition,” afflicted and disquieted by doubts. “How can you tell if you have faith?” said the inner voices. “How can you tell if you are elected? How if the day of grace be past and gone?” “My thoughts,” he says, “were like masterless hell-hounds; my soul, like a broken vessel, driven as with the winds, and tossed sometimes headlong into despair.”
By some such “obstinate questionings” Cromwell, too, was haunted and tormented. An unsympathetic physician who knew him at Huntingdon described him as splenetic and full of fancies; another whom he consulted at London wrote him down as “valde melancholicus.” A mind diseased and a soul at war with itself were beyond their art. This internal conflict was at its height between 1628 and 1636. A friend who knew Cromwell then, wrote, many years afterwards, the following account of it:
“This great man is risen from a very low and afflicted condition; one that hath suffered very great troubles of soul, lying a long time under sore terrors and temptations, and at the same time in a very low condition for outward things: in this school of afflictions he was kept, till he had learned the lesson of the Cross, till his will was broken into submission to the will of God.” Religion was thus “laid into his soul with the hammer and fire”; it did not “come in only by light into his understanding.”
In 1638, at the request of his cousin, Mrs. St. John, Cromwell confided to her the story of this crisis in his life.
“You know,” he said, “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 on me.” Even now the struggle was not ended. “I live in Meshec, which they say signifies Prolonging; in Kedar, which signifies Blackness: yet the Lord forsaketh me not. Though He do prolong, yet He will I trust bring me to His tabernacle, to His resting-place. My soul is with the Congregation of the First-born, my body rests in hope.... He giveth me to see light in His light.”
It would be wrong to take these self-accusings as a confirmation of the charges which royalist writers brought against Cromwell’s early life. They refer to spiritual rather than moral failings, perhaps to the love of the world and its vanities against which he so often warns his children. They denote a change of feeling rather than a change of conduct, a rise from coldness to enthusiasm, from dejection to exaltation.
Full of thankfulness for this deliverance, Cromwell longed to testify to his faith. “If here I may honour my God, either by doing or suffering, I shall be most glad. Truly no poor creature hath more cause to put himself forth in the cause of his God than I have. I have had plentiful wages beforehand, and I am sure I shall never earn the least mite.” The time for doing was near at hand, for when he wrote the resistance of the Scots had begun. The friend quoted before points out how strangely the turning-point in Cromwell’s spiritual life coincided with the turning-point in the history of his cause. “The time of his extreme suffering was when this cause of religion in which we are now engaged was at its lowest ebb.” When the cause began to prosper, “he came forth into comfort of spirit and enlargement of estate.” And so “he suffered and rose with the cause, as if he had one life with it.”
The year 1638 was the turning-point in the history of English Puritanism. When it began, the King’s power seemed as firmly established as his heart could desire. The decision of the judges that Ship-money was lawful gave absolute monarchy a legal basis, and a vantage-ground for any future demands. The arguments which proved that the King had a right to levy taxes at will for the support of a navy, justified him, if he chose, in raising money for the maintenance of an army. Thus royalty, in Strafford’s phrase, was “for ever vindicated from the conditions and restraints of subjects.” “All our liberties,” wrote a Puritan lawyer, “were now at one dash utterly ruined.”
There had been rumours in 1637 of some tumults in Scotland. “Horrible ado against the bishops for seeking to bring in amongst them our service book,” wrote Strafford’s news-purveyor to the Lord Deputy, but neither thought it of much significance. At the end of March, 1638, the Scots took the Covenant, and the little cloud in the north became a threatening tempest. If Hampden and his friends could have read Laud’s letters to Strafford, they would have laughed for joy. In May, the Archbishop was thoroughly uneasy about “the Scotch business.” “If God bless it with a good end, it is more than I can hope for. The truth is that snowball hath been suffered to gather too long.” Ten days after the decision against Hampden, he was thoroughly alarmed. “It is not the Scottish business alone that I look upon, but the whole frame of things at home and abroad, with vast expenses out of little treasure, and my misgiving soul is deeply apprehensive of no small evils coming on.... I can see no cure without a miracle.”
Charles was resolved to suppress the resistance of the Scots by arms. “So long as this Covenant is in force,” he said, “I have no more power in Scotland than a Duke of Venice, which I will rather die than suffer.” He sent the Marquis of Hamilton to negotiate with the Scots, “to win time that they may not commit public follies until I be ready to suppress them.” But negotiations and intrigues failed to break their union, and in May, 1639, Charles gathered twenty thousand men and marched to the border to begin the work of suppression. Alexander Leslie, a soldier of Gustavus, with an equal force of Scots, barred his entrance to Scotland. Leslie’s army was well disciplined, well paid, and well fed; his men “lusty and full of courage, great cheerfulness in the faces of all.” The King’s troops were ill-armed and ill-provided, and with no heart in their cause. The English nobility were as half-hearted as the troops, and the King had emptied his treasury to raise this army.