On the earliest opportunity he dismissed them, and had since ruled entirely on his own authority with such help as he might get from the Council of officers.
So when all the ancient landmarks had been carried away, the power of the sword remained standing and the army and their general ruled England; it was a strange ending to the long, earnest, and bloody struggle, an ending neither Pym nor Hampden had ever foreseen, nor Cromwell himself, when the Parliament he was afterwards to break had sent him down to Cambridge to raise a troop for the defiance of the King.
In ruling without a Parliament he was doing what Strafford and Charles had perished for attempting, in keeping a huge standing army (it was now twice the number named in the Instrument) he was doing what no king of England had been permitted to do; he had, in fact, the power at which Charles had aimed, and he had what Charles had never been able to attain—the armed force to maintain him in that power.
When he dealt with the Parliament he had used the methods Strafford would have used had he dared, and he was ruling now with the absolutism which Strafford had always passionately hoped would one day belong to his master.
But what had not been possible to a descendant of many kings, with all tradition behind him, had been achieved easily enough by a soldier produced by a revolution, who had nothing to rely on but the gifts within himself.
Cromwell was too clear-sighted not to discern the illogical position he was occupying, but it did not disturb him, nor did he find it very wonderful; his fatalism (which his enemies termed opportunism) accepted without question all that the Lord should be pleased to send; his enthusiasm for the cause of liberty disguised, even from himself, the arbitrary nature of his authority, and the victorious soldier, who had fought God's battles from Naseby to Worcester, was not to be frightened from the position he held by any malignant talk of his unlawful right. Nor was the wise patriot and ardent statesman to be argued from the point of vantage from whence he could do the best for England.
But the plots, agitations, upheavals, intolerances, and violences about him, even among his own one-time friends (some of whom, including the lofty-minded Vane, were in the Tower), did shake and trouble him. These, more than anything, thwarted him in his honest and strenuous attempt to set up an orderly government on the ruins left by the violence of war and the wreckage of social upheaval.
"I will not have intolerance!" he broke out now, suddenly at his Council. "I say I will not have it—let every man who is not a Prelatist or a Papist—who doth not preach licentious doctrines in the name of Christ—let him worship in peace!"
"In this way many damnable heresies will creep into the land," answered one of the officers.