But if it be true that the same motives and the same principles were at work in both nations, and that the like characters were performing in England the parts which they did afterwards in France, by an argument à priori we might be sure that the same revolting crimes and chimerical projects were alike suggested at London as at Paris. Human nature, even in transactions which appear unparalleled, will be found to preserve a regularity of resemblance not always suspected.
The first great tragic act was closely copied by the French: and if the popular page of our history appears unstained by their revolutionary axe, this depended only on a slight accident; for it became a question of “yea” and “nay!” and was only carried in the negative by two voices in the council! It was debated among “the bloody Rump,” as it was hideously designated, “whether to massacre and to put to the sword all the king’s party!”[329] Cromwell himself listened to the suggestion; and it was only put down by the coolness of political calculation—the dread that the massacre would be too general! Some of the Rump not obtaining the blessedness of a massacre, still clung to the happiness of an immolation; and many petitions were presented, that “two or three principal gentlemen of the royal party in each county might be sacrificed to justice, whereby the land might be saved from blood-guiltiness!” Sir Arthur Haslerigg, whose “passionate fondness of liberty” has been commended,[330] was one of the committee of safety in 1647—I too would commend “a passionate lover of liberty,” whenever I do not discover that this lover is much more intent on the dower than on the bride. Haslerigg, “an absurd, bold man,” as Clarendon, at a single stroke, reveals his character, was resolved not to be troubled with king or bishop, or with any power in the state superior to “the Rump’s.” We may safely suspect the patriot who can cool his vehemence in spoliation. Haslerigg would have no bishops, but this was not from any want of reverence for church lands, for he heaped for himself such wealth as to have been nicknamed “the Bishop of Durham!” He is here noticed for a political crime different from that of plunder. When, in 1647, this venerable radical found the parliament resisting his views, he declared that “Some heads must fly off!” adding, “the parliament cannot save England; we must look another way;”—threatening, what afterwards was done, to bring in the army! It was this “passionate lover of liberty” who, when Dorislaus, the parliamentary agent, was assassinated by some Scotchmen in Holland, moved in the house, that “six royalists of the best quality” should be immediately executed! When some northern counties petitioned the Commons for relief against a famine in the land, our Maratist observed, that “this want of food would best defend those counties from Scottish invasion!”[331] The slaughter of Drogheda by Cromwell, and his frightening all London by what Walker calls “a butchery of apprentices,” when he cried out to his soldiers, “to kill man, woman, and child, and fire the city!”[332] may be placed among those crimes which are committed to open a reign of terror—but Hugh Peters’s solemn thanksgiving to Heaven that “none were spared!” was the true expression of the true feeling of these political demoniacs. Cromwell was cruel from politics, others from constitution. Some were willing to be cruel without “blood-guiltiness.” One Alexander Rigby, a radical lawyer, twice moved in the Long Parliament, that those lords and gentlemen who were “malignants,” should be sold as slaves to the Dey of Algiers, or sent off to the new plantations in the West Indies. He had all things prepared; for it is added that he had contracted with two merchants to ship them off.[333] There was a most bloody-minded “maker of washing-balls,” as one John Durant is described, appointed a lecturer by the House of Commons, who always left out of the Lord’s Prayer, “As we forgive them that trespass against us,” and substituted, “Lord, since thou hast now drawn out thy sword, let it not be sheathed again till it be glutted in the blood of the malignants.” I find too many enormities of this kind. “Cursed be he that doeth the work of the Lord negligently, and keepeth back his sword from blood!” was the cry of the wretch, who, when a celebrated actor and royalist sued for quarter, gave no other reply than that of “fitting the action to the word.”[334] Their treatment of the Irish may possibly be admired by a true Machiavelist: “they permitted forty thousand of the Irish to enlist in the service of the kings of Spain and France”—in other words, they expelled them at once, which, considering that our Rumpers affected such an abhorrence of tyranny, may be considered as an act of mercy! satisfying themselves only with dividing the forfeited lands of the aforesaid forty thousand among their own party, by lot and other means. An universal confiscation, after all, is a bloodless massacre. They used the Scotch soldiers, after the battles of Dunbar and Worcester, a little differently—but equally efficaciously—for they sold their Scotch prisoners for slaves to the American planters.[335]
The Robespierres and the Marats were as extraordinary beings, and in some respects the Frenchmen were working on a more enlarged scheme. These discovered that ”the generation which had witnessed the preceding one would always regret it; and for the security of the Revolution, it was necessary that every person who was thirty years old in 1788 should perish on the scaffold!” The anarchists were intent on reducing the French people to eight millions, and on destroying the great cities of France.[336]
Such monstrous persons and events are not credible—but this is no proof that they have not occurred. Many incredible things will happen!
Another disorganising feature in the English Rumpers was also observed in the French Sans-culottes—their hatred of literature and the arts. Hebert was one day directing his satellites towards the Bibliothèque Nationale, to put an end to all that human knowledge had collected for centuries on centuries—in one day! alleging, of course, some good reason. This hero was only diverted from the enterprise by being persuaded to postpone it for a day or two, when luckily the guillotine intervened; the same circumstance occurred here. The burning of the records in the Tower was certainly proposed; a speech of Selden’s, which I cannot immediately turn to, put a stop to these incendiaries. It was debated in the Rump parliament, when Cromwell was general, whether they should dissolve the universities? They concluded that no university was necessary; that there were no ancient examples of such education, and that scholars in other countries did study at their own cost and charges, and therefore they looked on them as unnecessary, and thought them fitting to be taken away for the public use!—How these venerable asylums escaped from being sold with the king’s pictures, as stone and timber, and why their rich endowments were not shared among such inveterate ignorance and remorseless spoliation, might claim some inquiry.
The Abbé Morellet, a great political economist, imagined that the source of all the crimes of the French Revolution was their violation of the sacred rights of property. The perpetual invectives of the Sans-culottes of France against proprietors and against property proceeded from demoralised beings who formed panegyrics on all crimes; crimes, to explain whose revolutionary terms, a new dictionary was required. But even these anarchists, in their mad expressions against property, and in their wildest notions of their “égalité,” have not gone beyond the daring of our own “Rumpers!”
Of those revolutionary journals of the parliament of 1649, which in spirit so strongly resemble the diurnal or hebdomadal effusions of the redoubtable French Hebert, Marat, and others of that stamp, one of the most remarkable is, “The Moderate, impartially communicating Martial Affairs to the Kingdom of England;” the monarchical title our commonwealth men had not yet had time enough to obliterate from their colloquial style. This writer called himself, in his barbarous English, The Moderate! It would be hard to conceive the meanness and illiteracy to which the English language was reduced under the pens of the rabble-writers of these days, had we not witnessed in the present time a parallel to their compositions. “The Moderate!” was a title assumed on the principle on which Marat denominated himself “l’Ami du Peuple.” It is curious that the most ferocious politicians usually assert their moderation. Robespierre, in his justification, declares that Marat “m’a souvent accusé de Modérantisme.” The same actors, playing the same parts, may be always paralleled in their language and their deeds. This “Moderate” steadily pursued one great principle—the overthrow of all property. Assuming that property was the original cause of sin! an exhortation to the people for this purpose is the subject of the present paper:[337] the illustration of his principle is as striking as the principle itself.
It is an apology for, or rather a defence of, robbery! Some moss-troopers had been condemned to be hanged for practising their venerable custom of gratuitously supplying themselves from the flocks and herds of their weaker neighbours: our “Moderate” ingeniously discovers that the loss of these men’s lives is to be attributed to nothing but property. They are necessitated to offend the laws in order to obtain a livelihood!
On this he descants; and the extract is a political curiosity in the French style! “Property is the original cause of any sin between party and party as to civil transactions. And since the tyrant is taken off, and the government altered in nomine, so ought it really to redound to the good of the people in specie; which, though they cannot expect it in few years, by reason of the multiplicity of the gentlemen in authority, command, &c. who drive on all designs for support of the old government, and consequently their own interest and the people’s slavery, yet they doubt not but in time the people will herein discern their own blindness and folly.”