[1120] E.g., Richard Overton's pamphlet (1646) entitled An Arrow against all Tyrants and Tyranny, wherein the Original, Rise, Extent, and End of Magisterial Power, the Natural and National Rights, Freedoms, and Properties of Mankind, are discovered and undeniably maintained. Its main doctrines are that "To every individual in nature is given an individual property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any"; and that "no man hath power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man's." See a long and interesting extract in the History of Passive Obedience since the Reformation, Amsterdam, 1689, i, 59. As to the other anarchists, of whom Lilburne was not one, see Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth, i, 47, 48.
[1121] Cp. Gardiner, Cromwell's Place in History, pp. 37-50; History of the Great Civil War, 1889, ii, 53-55, 310-12; iii, 527. While grudgingly noting his straightforwardness, Dr. Gardiner assumes to discredit Lilburne as impracticable, yet is all the while demonstrating that Cromwell's constructive work utterly collapsed. Lilburne explicitly and accurately predicted that the tyrannies of the new régime would bring about the Restoration (Guizot, Histoire de la république d'Angleterre et de Cromwell, ed. Bruxelles, 1854, i, 52).
[1122] Dr. Gardiner says he was not, but does not explain away Cromwell's acquiescence. As to the war-spirit in England, see van Kampen, Geschichte der Niederlande, ii, 140, 141.
[1123] Guizot, Histoire de la république d'Angleterre et de Cromwell, ed. Bruxelles, 1854, i, 202-11; van Kampen, Geschichte der Niederlande, ii, 150, 151; Davies, History of Holland, 1841, ii, 709.
[1124] Guizot, as cited, i, 243.
[1125] There is a hardly credible story (Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii, 30) that in supporting Owen's scheme for a liberal religious establishment he declared: "I had rather that Mahometanism were permitted amongst us than that one of God's children should be persecuted." If the story be true, so much the worse for his treatment of Catholics.
[1126] Gardiner, Commonwealth and Protectorate, small ed. iv, 118. Dr. Gardiner actually praises Cromwell for "good sense" (p. 98) in seeing that the general plantation decreed by the Declaration of 1653 "was absolutely impracticable." It had been his own decree!
[1127] Mr. Harrison, as cited, p. 210. Mr. Allanson Picton, in his lectures on the Rise and Fall of the English Commonwealth, has with more pains and circumspection sought to make good a similar judgment. But the nature of his performance is tested by his contending on the one hand that the ideal of the Commonwealth was altogether premature, and on the other that Cromwell governed with the real consent of the nation.
[1128] Gardiner, Commonwealth and Protectorate, i, 193-96; cp. Whittaker, in Social England, iv, 288, 289.
[1129] Growth of English Industry and Commerce, i, 106.