The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

See Gardiner, History of England, 1603-1642, small ed. v, 191, as to Eliot's plans to fit out the fleet by means of "those penalties the Papists have already incurred"—a proposal which, says Dr. Gardiner, "if it had been translated into figures, would have created a tyranny too monstrous to be contemplated with equanimity." And Eliot was all for a persecution of the Arminians (id. vii, 42-43). In 1645 the Corporation of London petitioned Parliament to suppress "all sects without toleration."

Nor were they less oppressive in their fiscal policy. After beginning a revolt against illegal taxation, Pym secured the imposition of taxes on beverages (1643), on flesh, salt, textile goods, and many other commodities, "at the sword's point," against the general resistance of the people.[1096] There were at work a hundred motives of strife; and it was only the preternatural ill-luck or unwisdom of Charles that united Parliament against him so long. It needed all the infatuation of an express training in the metaphysics of divine right to enable a king of England, even after James I, to blunder through the immense network of superstition that hedged him round; indeed, the very intensity of the royalist superstition best explains the royal infatuation. So fixed was the monarchic principle in the minds of the people, who, then as later, swore by monarchy but hated paying for it, that in the earlier years of the struggle not even the zealots could have dreamt of the end that was to be. Regicide entered no man's mind, even as a nightmare.

§ 2

On Charles, as the greatest "architect of ruin" in English political history, psychological interest fastens with only less intensity than on his great antagonist. The astonishing triple portrait by Vandyke reveals, with an audacity that is positively startling when we think of the other effigies by the same artist, a character stamped at once with impotence and untruth. One slight suggestion of strength lies in the look of grave self-esteem—a quality which would in Charles be fostered from the first by his refined revolt from the undignified ways of his father; but it is withal the very countenance of duplicity. Puritan prejudice could not exaggerate the testimony of the daring artist. We seem to understand at once how he deceived and alienated Holland and Spain as well as the parties among his own subjects. And it was the very excess of duplicity, or rather the fatal combination of duplicity with infirmity of purpose,[1097] that destroyed the man. As the war wore on, and above all after it was closed, the discords of the Parliament and the army were such that the most ordinary practical sagacity could have turned them to the triumph of the king's cause. This is the most instructive phase of the Rebellion. The Presbyterian majority which had grown up in Parliament—a growth still imperfectly elucidated—represented only one of the great warring sects of the day; and if, after Independency, led by Cromwell, had come to daggers drawn with the despots of the Commons, Charles had only agreed to any working settlement whatever, he might with perfect confidence have left the conflicting forces to throttle each other afterwards. Any arrangement he might have made, whether with the Presbyterians or with Cromwell, would have broken down of itself, and he might have set up his own polity in the end. But he so enjoyed his intrigues, as it were indemnifying himself by them for his weakness of will, that he thought to triumph by them alone, and would not wait for the slower chemistry of normal political development; so that the Independents, driven desperate by his deceits, had to execute him in self-preservation.

§ 3

As it was, the history of the Rebellion remains none the less the tragi-comedy of the old constitutionalism. Parliament, resisting as illegal the supremacy of the king, went from one illegality to another in resisting him, till his tyrannies became trivial in comparison. And Cromwell, who must have set out with convictions about the sanctity of law, although doubtless fundamentally moved by the all-pervading fear of Popery, was led by an ironical fate, step by step, into a series of political crimes which, if those of Charles deserved beheading, could be coped with only in the medieval hell.

Cp. Hallam, ii, 252; and Cowley's Essays, ed. 1868, p. 139 et seq. To say nothing of Cromwell's illegal exactions, his selling of at least fifty Englishmen into slavery in the West Indies (on which see Cowley, p. 168; Hallam, ii, 271, note; and Carlyle, Letters and Speeches, ed. 1857, iii, 100—where the victims are put at "hundreds")—albeit no worse than the similar selling of Irish and Scotch prisoners—was an act which, if committed earlier by any king, would have covered his name with historical infamy. Prof. Firth points out that the practice began under James I, but it was then applied only to felons and vagrants. Cromwell's example was followed under Charles II with regard to the Covenanting rebels in Scotland; and the plan was again followed in the cases of Monmouth's rebellion and that of 1715. (Cited in note on Lomas's ed. of Carlyle's Cromwell, ii, 438.) As regards Ireland, the selling of prisoners into slavery was not restricted to the case of the survivors of Drogheda (Carlyle's Cromwell, as cited, ii, 53; ed. Lomas, i, 469). It is proved that Cromwell's agents captured not only youths, but girls, for export to the West Indies (Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement, 2nd ed. p. 89); and that the slavery there was of the cruellest sort (Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, ii, 109), though it has to be kept in view that it was not perpetual; the victim being strictly an "indentured labourer," only for a certain number of years at the mercy of his owner (Gardiner, Commonwealth and Protectorate, small ed. iii, 309-10, note; iv, 111-13). Of course the limitation of the term made the servitude all the more severe (Lomas's note cited).

In the end, the Protector terrorised his own law courts as Charles had never dared to do. See Clarendon, bk. xv, ed. Oxford, 1843, p. 862, and Hallam, ii, 253, 271, 272, note. Cromwell's language, as recorded by Clarendon, would startle some of his admirers by its indecency if they took the trouble to read the passage. Cp. Vaughan, Hist. of England under the Stuarts, etc., p. 524 (citing Whitelocke and Ludlow), as to the law courts. Vaughan overlooks the selling of royalists as slaves.

It was small wonder that posterity came to canonise the king; for in terms even of the Roundhead principles of impeachment he was a political saint in comparison with the "usurper." And royalists might well imagine Cromwell as haunted by remorse; for nothing short of the "besotted fanaticism" of which, as Hallam pronounces, he had sucked the dregs, could keep him self-complacent over the retrospect of the Civil War when he was governing by the major-generals, after failing to govern with farcically packed Parliaments. His fanaticism was, of course, in the ratio of his will-power, but each supported the other. The modern exaltation of his character, as against the earlier and rather saner habit of crediting him with great powers, relatively high purposes, and great misdeeds,[1098] has tended to throw in the shade the blazing lesson of his career, which is that, like most of his colleagues, he had set out with no political insight or foresight whatever. His conscientious beginnings are so utterly at issue with his endings that it is indeed almost superfluous to condemn either—as superfluous as to denounce the infatuation of Charles. But it is of importance to remember that his very success as a Carlylean ruler only emphasises the failure of his original politics. He succeeded by way of repudiating nearly every principle on behalf of which he had taken up arms. Even apart from the invigorating spectacle of his executive genius,[1099] he may well stir our sympathy, which is more subtly and deeply exercised by his inner tragedy, by the deadliness of his success in the light of his aims, than by the simpler ill-fortune of Charles. But as politicians our business is not to divide our sympathies between the powerful pietist who was forced to give the lie to his life to save it, and the weak liar who lost his life because he was at bottom faithful to his life's creed. The superiority of Cromwell in strength of will and in administrative faculty is too glaring to need acknowledging; and the lesson that a strong man can tyrannise grossly where a weak man cannot tyrannise trivially, is not one that particularly needs pressing. What it is essential to note is that the course of events which forced and led Cromwell into despotism was for the next generation a strong argument against free Parliamentary government.

Our generation, proceeding mainly on the work of Carlyle, who never really elucidates or even seeks to comprehend political and social developments, has in large part lost sight of the fact that Cromwell was more and more clearly becoming a military despot; and that with twenty more years of life he might have established a new military and naval empire. Yet at the time of his death his financial position was that of a military adventurer at his wits' end, and his unscrupulous attack on Spain was plainly planned by way of coming at money.[1100] Dr. Gardiner, who has been the first English[1101] historian to handle the case with comprehensive insight, rightly compares the position of Cromwell with that of Napoleon. He was in fact just another sample of the recurrent type of the military ruler establishing himself as despot on the ruins of faction. "Except for four months ... the whole of the Protectorate was a time either of war or of active preparation for war; and even during those months the Protector was hesitating, not whether he should keep the peace or not, but merely what enemy he should attack."[1102] Finally he made war on Spain, by the admission of the friendly historian, "after the fashion of a midnight conspirator," deceiving the other side in order to gain a mean advantage.[1103] To such a policy there was no limit in national conscience, any more than in his. He had a standing army of 57,000 men, an immense force for the England of that day; his revenue stood at two millions and a quarter, nearly four times the figure of twenty years before; and still he was in desperate financial straits, his outlays being nearly half a million in excess of the income.[1104] The result was "a war for material gains"; and it consists with all we know of history to say that with continued success in such undertakings during a lengthened life he would have won the mass of his countrymen to his allegiance.