The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

A few dates and details make the process dramatically clear. Admiral Blake won his first notable victory over Van Tromp in February, 1653; and in April Cromwell felt himself in a position to expel the recalcitrant Parliament, though that had always specially favoured the navy. In this act he had the general approval of the people;[1105] but he took care to change some of the naval commanders.[1106] The next Parliament was the nominated one called the "Barebones," wherein none were elected, and which went to pieces in the strife of its factions, since even nomination could not secure concord among Puritans. Then came the Parliament of 1654, elected from purged constituencies. From this were excluded a hundred members who refused to sign an engagement not to alter the system in force; and finally the remnant was angrily dissolved, and military rule established under the major-generals. Yet again, in 1656, driven by need of money, the Protector called another packed Parliament, from which he nevertheless lawlessly excluded 102 elected members; and on their protesting there was a distinct increase of the already obvious public displeasure at such repeated acts of tyranny. This was in September; but in October came the news of Stayner's capture of the Spanish treasure-ships; and in November the treasure arrived—what the naval officers had left of it. On this the Parliament promptly voted everything that its master asked for;[1107] new taxes were laid to carry on the wanton war with Spain; and in January 1657 it was proposed to offer him the Crown. Yet when, after a six months' adjournment, that Parliament debated points on which he wanted submission, he furiously dissolved it as he had done its predecessors.

Such is the process of imperialism. With a few more years of ostensibly profitable conquest, Cromwell, acclaimed and urged on in the career of aggression by such different types of poet as Waller[1108] and Marvell,[1109] would as a matter of course have been made king, with the final consent of the army, and would have ruled as the crowned imperator. In that case his Puritanism, instead of putting any conscientious check on his egoism, would have fed it as Mohammed's faith did his.[1110] Thus his early death was one of the important "accidents" of history.[1111]

§ 4

As it was, Cromwell lived only long enough to create an intellectual as well as a conservative reaction. Surprise has been sometimes expressed, and must have been oftener felt, at the virtual High Toryism of the doctrine of Hobbes,[1112] who was so little conservative in his general habit of mind. The truth is that in 1651, or at least in 1660, the monarchism of Hobbes was the ostensible Liberalism of the hour. Parliamentarism had meant first sectarian tyranny, then anarchy, then military despotism; and there was not the slightest prospect of a parliamentary government which should mean religious or intellectual freedom all round. Hobbes would infallibly have been at least thrown into prison by the Long Parliament if in its earlier time of power he had published his remarks on the Pentateuch. They punished for much milder exercises of critical opinion. A strong monarchy was become, from the point of view of many enlightened men, positively the best available security for general freedom of life, at a time when the spirit of religion had multiplied tenfold the normal impulses to social tyranny and furnished the deepest channel of social ill-will compatible with national unity. It lay in Christianity, as it lay earlier in Judaism, to breed an intensity of religious strife such as the pagan world never knew. Various countries had seen sects arise and grapple with each other on the score of this or that interpretation of the Hebrew sacred books, and men of conservative bias felt that they were face to face with insane forces incompatible with a democratic system. Religious lore, above all other learning, could make men more "excellently foolish," as Hobbes put it, than was possible to mere ignorance, making new and uncontrollable motives to disunion.

It is not to be assumed, indeed, that a revolution begun on any motive whatever would have maintained itself at the then developed stage of political intelligence; for the English people, which constantly accuses others of lack of faculty for union, had never shown itself any better fitted for rational compromise than the Irish, given conditions of equal stress. Scandinavian, German, Dutch, English—all the Teutonic sections alike had in all ages shown in the fullest degree the force of the primary passions of self-assertion and mutual repulsion, cordially uniting only, if at all, for purposes of aggression. But in the case under notice it was the religious passions that dug the channels of strife; and they must be held to have added to the volume of blind emotion. Thus intensified, the principle had shown itself potent to wreck any commonwealth; and there remained only the choice between a usurper governing through an army and a "legitimate" monarch governing as of old by way of Parliament and a civil service. Parliament had been the most offensive tyrant of all, for while making most parade of legality it had been the most self-seeking,[1113] and perhaps even the least respectable as regards its personnel. The Liberals of the latter time had their cue given to them by the memorable Falkland, who, grievedly "ingeminating Peace, Peace," had recoiled from the intolerant Puritans, and sadly joined the intolerant Royalists. Macaulay's thrust at him for this,[1114] if technically just, was hardly seemly on the critic's part, for Falkland represented exactly the temper of Macaulay's own politics. He was an ideal Whig of the later school—the very saint of moderation. Falkland had indeed special ground for withdrawal from the Puritan party, in that he was convinced that Hampden and Pym had deceived him as to the king's complicity in the Irish Rebellion and other matters. He had been "persuaded to believe many things which he had since found to be untrue."[1115] But in most things the Puritans must have jarred on him.[1116] Where he had consented to go, albeit deliberately to his death, as a Cavalier, his disciples might well become theoretic monarchists when the whole torrent of public opinion went for the Restoration.

Of course, the hope of social freedom was destined to frustration under the restored monarchy just as before, since there was still no culture force sufficient to purify the animal instinct of antagonism. The Restoration only meant that the Episcopalian dog was uppermost and the Nonconformist under. But all the same, Commonwealth principles were profoundly discredited; and it is notable that never since has Republican principle ostensibly regained in England the stature it had reached in the hotbeds of the Great Rebellion and the Protectorate. The long struggle against the king had educated many of the strivers into democratism, as did the later struggle of the American colonies against George III. Even in the Parliament of Richard Cromwell, after Republican hopes had been so blasted, there were forty-seven avowed Republicans,[1117] the remnant of the breed. With the return of the monarchy it virtually disappears from English politics for a hundred and thirty years;[1118] when again it rises for a moment in the hot air of the French Revolution, only to disappear again for nearly another century. It was after the Rebellion, and not before, that the dogma of divine right became completely current orthodoxy in England.[1119]

§ 5

The collapse of Republicanism meant the collapse of the class politics that had grown up in the war and in the Commonwealth alongside of the creed politics. The creed politics itself, when carried to the lengths of the doctrine of the Independents, meant a challenge to the political system; and among the more advanced reasoners of the period were some who saw that to put down kingly tyranny was of little avail while class inequalities remained. The Long Parliament, though not going this length, went far in the way of putting down some established abuses; and there are many records of a more searching spirit of innovation. It is important to realise that alike under Charles I and Cromwell the Parliaments tended to be partly composed of and ruled by the more audacious spirits of the time, simply because these had the advantage in discussion wherever they were. The incapacity for speech which in later times has made the Conservative party welcome adventurers as its mouthpieces meant the partial obliteration of the conservative class in the early days of unorganised parliamentary strife; and Cromwell's own Parliaments baffled him in virtue of their large elements of upstart intelligence. He himself, having entered the war from a mixture of motives in which there was no idea of social reconstruction, was merely irritated by the ideals of the more radical agitators, which he could not out-argue, but on which he promptly put his foot. It is true that in the immense ferment set up by the Rebellion impracticable ideas abounded, and that they suggested risks of civil anarchy, even as the multitude of sectaries threatened chaos in religion. We find indeed an express affirmation of anarchism in the literature of the period;[1120] and generally the English Revolution had in it most of the subversive elements which later evolved the French, the determining difference being that the English was not attacked from the outside. But there were practical plans also. Lilburne had a really constructive scheme of popular enfranchisement,[1121] which might have built up a democratic force of resistance to royalism as such; but Cromwell, while ready to overthrow any part of the constitution that hampered him, would build up nothing in its place. He would have no alteration of the social structure, save in so far as he must protect his Independents from the Presbyterians and Episcopalians alike. And of course, when his polity fell, the ideals of the independents of politics—who had represented only a tribe of scattered intelligences, much fewer than the mere religious sectaries, who were themselves but a vigorous minority—speedily disappeared from English affairs. The standards of the average orthodox class became the standards of public life.

On the side of international relations, finally, Cromwell and the Commonwealth did nothing to improve politics. Commerce began to spread afresh; and commercial and racial jealousy, under the Puritan as later under the Restoration rule, bred war with the Dutch, just as religious hatreds had made war between England and Spain. The final proof of Cromwell's lack of political wisdom is given in his utterly fantastic scheme for a constitutional union of the English and Dutch republics, a scheme which could not have worked for a week. When this proposal was declined by the Dutch States-General, he seems to have been as ready as any filibuster in England to go to war with the States;[1122] and it is evident that the Navigation Act of 1651 was at once an act of revenge for the insults put upon the English ambassadors by the Dutch Orangeist populace, against the will of the Dutch Government, and a wanton effort to punish the States for declining the Protector's absurd proposals.[1123] The two Protestant republics thereupon grappled like two worrying dogs; and for their first ostensible victory the English Parliament publicly thanked God as unctuously as for any of the victories of the Civil War.[1124] In their hands and Cromwell's international politics sank at once to the normal levels of primitive instinct.

Mr. Frederic Harrison (Cromwell, ch. xiii) glorifies Cromwell's foreign policy on the score that it made England great in the eyes of foreign countries. Exactly so might we eulogise the foreign policy of Louis XIV or Philip II or Napoleon—so long as it succeeded. Cromwell, up to the time when he began to scheme an empire of naval aggression, simply aimed at a Protestant combination as other rulers aimed at Catholic combinations. There was nothing new in the idea; and it would have been astonishing if he had not maintained the naval power of the country. It was to this very end that the luckless Charles imposed his ship-money, which Hampden and his backers refused to pay. As regards home politics, again, Mr. Harrison praises Cromwell for preserving order with unprecedented success, making no allowance for the fact that Cromwell was the first Englishman who governed through a standing army, and making no attempt to refute Ludlow's statements (cited by Hallam, ii, 251, note; cp. Vaughan, p. 524, note) as to the gross tyranny of the major-generals, or to meet the charge against Cromwell of selling scores of royalists into slavery at Barbadoes. Mr. Harrison finally justifies Cromwell's policy in the main on the score of "necessity," despite the proverbial quotation. It was exactly on the plea of necessity that Charles justified himself in his day, when Cromwell joined in resisting him. Mr. Harrison again extols the "generosity" and "moral elevation" of the intervention for the Vaudois, when on the same page he has to admit the infamy of the Cromwellian treatment of Ireland. He sees no incongruity in Milton's emotion over the "slaughtered saints" of Protestantism, while Catholic ecclesiastics were with his approval being slain like dogs. Moral and social science must hold the balances more evenly than this.