Lectures and Essays

by Goldwin Smith

It seems to us hardly possible to draw a sharp line of distinction in any respect, except that of practical ability, between Falkland and Hampden. Falkland failed to understand, while Hampden understood, the character of the King and the full peril of the situation; that was the real difference between the two men. The political and ecclesiastical ideal of both in all probability was pretty much the same. Mr. Arnold chooses to describe Hampden as "seeking the Lord about militia or ship- money," and he undertakes to represent Jesus as "whispering to him with benign disdain." Sceptics, to disprove the objective reality of the Deity, allege that every man makes God in his own image. They might perhaps find an indirect confirmation of their remark in the numerous lives and portraitures of Christ which have appeared of late years, each entirely different from the rest, and each stamped clearly enough with the impress of an individual mind. But where has Hampden spoken of himself as "seeking the Lord about militia or ship-money?" He appears to have been a highly-educated man of the world. In one of his few remaining letters there are recommendations to a friend, who had consulted him about the education of his sons, which seem to blend regard for religion with enlightened liberality of view. If he prayed for support and guidance in his undertakings, surely he did no more than Mr. Arnold himself practically recommends people to do when he urges them to join the Established Church of England. Even should Mr. Arnold light on an authentic instance of Scripture phraseology used by Hampden, or any other Puritan chief, in a way which would now be against good taste, his critical and historical sense will readily make allowance for the difference between the present time and the time when the Bible was a newly-recovered book, and when its language, on the believer's lips and to the believer's ears, was still fresh as the dew of the morning.

It would be even more difficult to separate Falkland's general character from that of Pym, of whose existence Mr. Arnold has shown himself conscious by once mentioning his name. The political philosophy of Pym's speeches is most distinctly constitutional, and we do not see that in point of breadth or dignity they leave much to be desired, while they unquestionably express, in the fullest manner, the mind of a leader of the Puritan party.

Whoever contrasts Falkland with the Puritans will have to encounter the somewhat untoward fact that in his speech against the High Church Bishops, Falkland, if he does not actually call himself a Puritan, twice identifies the Puritan cause with his own. Among the bad objects which he accuses the clergy of advocating in their sermons is "the demolishing of Puritanism and propriety" Again he cries—

"Alas! they whose ancestors in the darkest times excommunicated the breakers of Magna Charta do now by themselves, and their adherents, both write, preach, plot, and act against it, by encouraging Dr. Beale, by preferring Dr. Mainwaring, appearing forward for monopolies and ship- money, and if any were slow and backward to comply, blasting both them and their preferment with the utmost expression of their hatred—the title of Puritans."

These words may help to make Mr. Arnold aware, when he mows down the Puritan party with some trenchant epithet, how wide the sweep of his scythe is, and the same thing will be still more distinctively brought before him by a perusal (if he has not already perused it) of the chapter on the subject in Mr. Sandford's "Studies and Illustrations of the Great Rebellion." It can hardly be necessary to remind him, or any one else, of the portrait of one who was a most undoubted Puritan, drawn by Lucy Hutchinson. If this portrait betrays the hand of a wife, Clarendon's portrait of Falkland betrays the hand of a friend, and even a beloved husband is not more likely to be the object of exaggerated, though sincere praise, than the social head and the habitual host of a circle of literary men. At all events Lucy Hutchinson is painting what she thought a perfect Puritan would be; and her picture presents to us, not a coarse, crop-eared, and snuffling fanatic, but a highly accomplished, refined, gallant, and most "amiable," though religious and seriously-minded gentleman. The Spencerian school of sentiment seems to Mr. Arnold very lovely compared with the men of the New Model Army and their ways. In the general of the New Model Army, Sir Thomas Fairfax, he has a distinct, and we venture to say very worthy, pupil of that school.

Over the most questionable as well as the most momentous passage in Falkland's public life, his admirer passes with a graceful literary movement. Falkland was sworn in as a Privy Councillor three days before, and as Secretary of State, four days after, the attempt of the King to seize the Five Members. He was thus, in outward appearance at least, brought into calamitous connection with an act which, as Clarendon sees, was the signal for civil war. Clarendon vehemently disclaims for himself and his two friends any knowledge of the King's design. So far as the more violent part of the proceeding is concerned, we can easily believe him; a woman mad with vindictive arrogance inspired it, and nobody except a madman would have been privy to it; but it is not so easy to believe him with regard to the impeachment, which was in fact an attempt to take the lives of the King's enemies by arraigning them before a political tribunal, hostile to them and favourable to their accuser, instead of bringing them to a fair and legal trial before a jury. By accepting the Secretaryship, Falkland at all events assumed a certain measure of responsibility after the fact for a proceeding which, we repeat, rendered civil war inevitable, because it must have convinced the popular leaders that to put faith in Charles with such councillors as he had about him would be insanity; and that if they allowed Parliament to rise and the Kong to resume the power of the sword, not only would all their work of reform be undone, but the fate of Sir John Eliot would be theirs. Clarendon owns that Hampden's carriage from that day was changed, implying that up to that day it had been temperate; and the insinuation that, beneath the cloak of apparent moderation, Hampden had been secretly breathing counsels of violence into the minds of others deserves no attention, when it comes from a hostile source. Of the purity of Falkland's motives we entertain not the shadow of a doubt; but we venture to think that it is very questionable whether he did right, and this not only on grounds of technical constitutionalism, which in the present day would render imperative the retirement of a Minister whose advice had been so flagrantly disregarded, but on grounds of the most broadly practical kind. He forfeited for ever, not only any influence which he might have retained over the popular leaders, and any access which he might have had to them in their more pacific mood, but probably all real control over the King. Charles was the very last man whom you could afford to allow in the slightest degree to tamper with your honour. It is surely conceivable that the recollection of an unfortunate step, and the sense of a false position, may have mingled with the sorrow caused by the public calamities in the melancholy which drove Falkland to cast away his life.

In the Civil War Falkland was always "ingeminating Peace, Peace". Our hearts are with him, but it was of no use. It is an unhappy part of civil wars that there can be no real peace till one party has succumbed: compromise only leads to a renewal of the conflict. There is sense as well as dignity in the deliberate though mournful acceptance of necessity, and the determination to play out the part which could not be declined, expressed in the letter written at the outbreak of the conflict by the Parliamentarian, Sir William Waller, to a personal friend in the other camp:

"My affections to you are so unchangeable that hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person; but I must be true to the cause wherein I serve. The great God, who is the searcher of my heart, knows with what reluctance I go upon this service, and with what perfect hatred I look upon a war without an enemy. The God of peace, in His good time, sent us peace, and in the meantime fit us to receive it! We are both on the stage, and we must act the parts that are assigned us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour, and without personal animosities."

A man in this frame of mind, we submit, was likely to get to the end of a civil war more speedily than a man in the mood, amiable as it was, of Falkland.

Perhaps, after all, the failure, the inevitable failure of Falkland's passionate pleadings for peace may have saved him from a worse doom than death on the field even of civil war. In the case of the Five Members, the King had shown how little regard he had, at least how little regard the mistress of his councils had, for the honour of his advisers. The pair might have used Falkland to lure by the pledge of his high character the leaders of the Parliament into the acceptance of a treaty? which the King, with his notions of divine right, and the Queen with her passionate love of absolute power, would, there can be little doubt, have violated as soon as the army of the Parliament had been disbanded, and the power of the sword had returned into the King's hands. Falkland might have even seen the scaffold erected, through the prostitution of his own honour, for the men whose ardent associate he had been in the overthrow of government by prerogative and in the impeachment of Strafford.