There can be no doubt to an unbiassed mind that at one period he honestly tried for a monarchical settlement of the difficulty. It is equally undeniable that he considered Charles’s double-dealing responsible for what he held to be the unpardonable crime of the Second Civil War and therefore as having incurred for a second time the guilt of blood. That the execution, or murder, of the king met with his entire approval cannot be doubted, since before it happened he said to Algernon Sidney: “I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown upon it.”
So, whether crime or act of justice, it was done, and Cromwell, perhaps more than any one else, was responsible for it.
The next act is the Dictatorship, and the first scene in it the re-conquest of Ireland, with its massacres and bitter, pitiless persecutions in revenge or punishment, as you will, for other massacres which had gone before. It is a piteous story, and one of no great credit to any one, but, to borrow the maxim of Strafford, the former tyrant of Ireland, it was “thorough.” In nine months, with about fifteen thousand men, the Dictator had stamped the Irish rebellion out and made “the curse of Cromwell” a phrase that will dwell on Hibernian lips for many a generation.
But no sooner was the Irish revolt drowned in blood and flame than Prince Charles, afterwards Charles II. of infamous memory, took the Oath to the Covenant, and the Scots rose to support him. Cromwell crossed the Border on July 22, 1650.
As it happened, the Scottish general was Leslie, the old comrade who had fought at his side at Marston Moor. For some weeks the Scots played a waiting game, and Cromwell, with his men wearied and falling sick, and with no other base than his ships on the coast, hurled texts and biblical harangues at the enemy. In fact, as Mr. Harrison cleverly puts it, “it was not so much a battle between two armies as between two rival congregations in arms.”
Leslie and his preachers fired other texts back at him and kept out of his way until the fatal 3rd of September came. By this time Cromwell had only eleven thousand men capable of bearing arms, and they were in no great state for fighting. Leslie had twenty-two or three thousand Scots and all the advantage of the position, but the Fates had already taken the matter into their own hands. On the afternoon of the 2nd, Cromwell saw that the wary Scot, as some say, driven by the frantic exhortation of the preachers, had forsaken his post of vantage. “The Lord hath delivered them into our hands!” he cried, and straightway began to set his battle in order.
The next morning, while it was yet moonlight, they came to blows. In an hour or so it was all over. The Scots fled in utter panic and confusion, “being made by the Lord of Hosts as stubble to our swords,” to use Oliver’s own words. When the rout was at its height the sun rose, scattering the morning mists. “Let God arise and His enemies be scattered!” he shouted exultantly through the roar of the battle, and then—how characteristic it was of the man!—he halted his army in the very moment of triumph and sang the one hundred and seventeenth psalm, beginning: “O praise the Lord all ye people, for His merciful kindness is great towards us!” Then he unleashed his bloodhounds again, and the rest was massacre.
HE HALTED HIS ARMY ... AND SANG THE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEENTH PSALM.
Another year passed in miscellaneous fighting and arguing, slaughter and psalm-singing, and once more the sun of the 3rd of September, Cromwell’s Day of Fate, or, as Byron puts it: