This holds good of the Puritan party as a whole. It is possible, however, to take too low a view of the judgment of any given section of it. Dr. Gardiner, for instance, somewhat strains the case when he says (Student's History, p. 567) of the Barebone Parliament: "Unfortunately, these godly men [so styled by Cromwell] were the most crotchety and impracticable set ever brought together. The majority wanted to abolish the Court of Chancery without providing a substitute, and to abolish tithes without providing any other means for the support of the clergy." It seems clear that it was the intention of the majority to provide an equivalent for the tithes (see Vaughan, pp. 508, 509; cp. Hallam, ii, 243, 244); and the remark as to the Court of Chancery appears to miss the point. The case against that Court was that it engrossed almost all suits, and yet intolerably delayed them; the proposal was to let the other Courts do the work. Cp. Dr. Gardiner's Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii, 241, 262; and as to the tithes, i, 192; ii, 32, 240, 275, 276.
It would be hard to show that either Cromwell or the men he used and overrode were, under trial, more conscientious than the average public men of later times. Well-meaning he and many of them were; but, then, most men are well-meaning up to their lights; the moral test for all is consistency with professed principle under changing conditions. And hardly one was stedfastly true to the principles he put forward. They prevaricated under pressure—under harder pressure, no doubt—like other politicians, with only the difference that they could cite random texts and "the Lord" in their justification. And inasmuch as their godly strifes were as blind and as insoluble as those of any factions in history, they furnished no aid and no encouragement to posterity to attempt anew the great work of social regeneration. If that is ever to be done, it must be with saner inspiration and better light than theirs. It is time that, instead of extolling them as men of superior moral stature and inspiration, we now realise they brought to a bewildering problem a vain enlightenment.
On this view, it may be noted, we have a sufficient explanation of the dissimulations of which Cromwell was undoubtedly guilty. Between the antiquated asperity of Villemain, who, while extolling his capacity, charges him with fourberie habituelle (Hist. de Cromwell, 5e édit. p. 272), and the foregone condonations of Carlyle, there is a mean of common sense. Cromwell was a man of immense energy and practical capacity, but with no gift for abstract thought, and spellbound by an incoherent creed. Consequently he was bound to come to serious confusion when he had to deal with tense complexities of conduct and violently competing interests. Coming into desperate positions, for which his religion was worse than no preparation, and in which it could not possibly guide him aright, he must needs trip over the snares of diplomacy, and do his equivocations worse than a more intellectual man would. Cromwell's lying sounds the more offensive because of its constant twang of pietism; but that was simply the dialect in which he had been brought up. Had he lived in our day he would have been able to prevaricate with a wider vocabulary, which makes a great difference.
§ 7
Lest such a criticism should be suspected of prejudice, it may be well to note that a contemporary Doctor of Divinity has at some points exceeded it. It is Dr. Cunningham who argues that, in consequence of the Puritan bias leading to a cult of the Old Testament rather than the New, there occurred under Puritan auspices "a retrogression to a lower type of social morality, which showed itself both at home and abroad."[1129] He traces Puritan influence specially "(a) in degrading the condition of the labourer; (b) in reckless treatment of the native [= coloured] races; (c) in the development of the worst forms of slavery."[1130] The present writer, who rarely finds it necessary to oppose a Protestant clergyman on such an issue, is disposed to think the charge overdrawn, for the following reasons: (1) The English treatment of Ireland was to the full as cruel in the Elizabethan period, before Puritanism had gone far, as under Cromwell; (2) the Catholic Spaniards in Mexico and Peru were as cruel as the Puritan colonists in New England. It is true that "in all the terrible story of the dealings of the white man with the savage there are few more miserable instances of cold-blooded cruelty than the wholesale destruction of the Pequod nation—men, women, and children—by the Puritan settlers"[1131] of Connecticut. But when Catholics and pre-Puritan Protestants and Dutch Protestants act similarly, the case is not to be explained on Dr. Cunningham's theory. The fallacy seems to lie in supposing that the New Testament has ever been a determinant in these matters. Mosheim confesses that in the wars of the Crusades the Christians were more ferocious than the Saracens;[1132] and Seneca was at least as humane as Paul.
There is distinct validity, on the other hand, in the charge that Puritanism worsened the life of the working classes, first by taking away their ecclesiastical holidays and gild-festivals, and finally by taking all recreation out of their Sunday. The latter step may be regarded as the assertion of the economic interest of the Protestant clergy against the social needs of their flocks. It was not that the labourers were well off before the Rebellion—here again we must guard against false impressions[1133]—but that "Puritan ascendancy rendered the lot of the labourer hopelessly dull."[1134] There is reason to believe, further, that the Stuart administration, applying the Elizabethan Poor Law, took considerable pains to relieve distress,[1135] and that the Commonwealth, on the contrary, treated the lapsed mass without sympathy;[1136] and it is not unlikely that, as has been suggested, this had something to do with the popular welcome given to the Restoration.[1137] The conclusion is that "neither the personal character nor the political success of the Puritans need lead us to ignore their baleful influence on society,"[1138] which was, in the opinion of Arnold, despite his passion for their favourite literature, to imprison and turn the key upon the English spirit for two hundred years. Here again the impartial naturalist will detect exaggeration, but much less than in the current hyperboles to the contrary.
For the rest, the commercial and industrial drift of England, the resort to the mineral wealth[1139] that was to be the economic basis of later commerce and empire, the pursuit of capitalistic manufacture, the building up of a class living on interest as the privileged class of the past had lived on land monopoly—all went on under Puritanism as under Catholicism,[1140] Anglicanism, Calvinism, Lutheranism. The early Puritans, taking up the Catholic tradition, denounced usury; but the clergy of industrial and burgher-ruled States, beginning with Calvin, perforce receded from that veto.[1141] Even under Elizabeth there was a good deal of banking,[1142] and under Cromwell English merchants and money-dealers had learned all the lessons the Dutch could teach them, weighing the Protector's borrowing credit in the scales of the market as they would any other. The spirit of pitiless commercial competition flourished alike under Roundhead and Cavalier,[1143] save in so far as it was manacled by invidious monopolies; the lust of "empire" was as keen among the middle class in Cromwell's day as in Elizabeth's and our own; and even the lot of the workers began to approximate to its modern aspect through the greater facility of transfer[1144] which followed on the old rigidity of feudal law and medieval usage. The industrial age was coming to birth.
FOOTNOTES:
[1089] Even on this side the king was not fortunate. It would perhaps do him little harm that "he spoke and behaved with indelicacy to ladies in public" (Hallam, citing Milton's Defensio and Warburton's Notes on Clarendon, vii. 626); but his frigidity and haughtiness were more serious matters. He actually caned Vane for entering a room in the palace reserved for persons of higher rank (id., citing Carte's Ormond, i, 356). In the next reign people contrasted his aloofness with his son's accessibility (see Pepys' Diary, passim). Hallam sums up that "he had in truth none who loved him, till his misfortunes softened his temper, and excited sympathy" (10th ed. ii, 226).