Oliver Cromwell

by Samuel Rawson Gardiner

The effect of the news which Cromwell from time to time received from the army in England may be traced in the letters written by him at this time. In one which he sent to Hammond on November 6 he justified his dealings with Argyle, suggesting that the example of Scotland, where one Parliament had been dissolved and another had been elected, might be followed in England. In a second letter, written on the 20th, after he had had time to consider the rejection by Charles of the proposal of the army, he replied bitterly to an order of the House to send up Sir John Owen, a prisoner taken in Wales, that he might be banished. Cromwell angrily wrote that those who brought in the Scots had been adjudged traitors by Parliament, 'this being a more prodigious treason than any that had been perfected before; because the former quarrel was that Englishmen might rule over one another, this to vassalise us to a foreign nation, and their fault who have appeared in this summer's business is certainly double theirs who were in the first, because it is the repetition of the same offence against all the witnesses that God has borne, by making and abetting a second war'. "To vassalise us to a foreign nation." Here, in political matters at least, was the head and front of Charles's offending. It was this that finally broke down Cromwell's reluctance to shake himself loose from constituted authority. "God," Hammond had written, "hath appointed authorities among the nations, to which active or passive obedience is to be yielded. This resides in England in the Parliament. Therefore active or passive resistance is forbidden." To this reasoning Cromwell replied, on the 25th, by various arguments, closing with the daring suggestion that the army might, after all, be 'a lawful power called by God to oppose and fight against the King upon some stated grounds; and, being in power to such ends,' might not they oppose 'one name of authority for these ends as well as another name'? Whatever might be the worth of these considerations, no good was to be expected from Charles. "Good," he protested, "by this man against whom the Lord hath witnessed, and whom thou knowest!"

Surely we have here laid bare before us Cromwellian opinion in the making. As in other men, the wish was father to the thought. The desire, whether for private or for public ends, shapes the thoughts, and in Cromwell's case, as the desires swept a wider compass than with most men, the thoughts took a larger scope and, to some extent, jostled with one another. The cloudy mixture would clear itself soon enough.

Meanwhile events followed quickly on one another in the south. Hammond, as too soft-hearted, was removed from Carisbrooke, and on December 1 emissaries from the army removed Charles to Hurst Castle, where he could be more easily isolated. The foremost men in the army talked openly of putting the King to death, and adopted Cromwell's suggestion that Parliament should be forcibly dissolved, and a new one elected in its place. In this sense a Declaration was issued on November 30, and on December 2 the army marched into London. The Commons showed themselves to be unaffected by threats of violence, and voted on the 5th that the King's offers were 'a ground for the House to proceed upon for the settlement of the peace of the kingdom'. The scheme of a dissolution favoured by the army was wrecked on the resistance of the Independent members of the House. There was to be a purge, not a dissolution followed by a general election. The plan thus agreed on was carried into practice on the morning of the 6th, when Colonel Pride stood with a military guard at the door of the House, turning back or arresting the members who had voted for a continuance of the negotiation with the King. When Cromwell returned to Westminster, on the evening of the same day, he declared that he had not 'been acquainted with the design; yet, since it was done, he was glad of it, and would endeavour to maintain it'. As 'Pride's purge' had not been resolved on before the previous night it was physically impossible that he should have been informed of the resolution taken. There can be little doubt that he had given his sanction to the other plan of a dissolution, and had also concurred in the language ascribed to Ireton and Harrison on the previous evening. "Where," they had said of the House, "have we either law, warrant, or commission to purge it, or can anything justify us in doing it but the height of necessity to save the kingdom from a new war that they, with the conjunction of the King, will presently vote and declare for, and to procure a new and free representative, and so successive and free representatives, which this present Parliament will never suffer, and without which the freedoms of the nation are lost and gone!" It will be worth while to remember these words, when the continuance of the now truncated Parliament was at last brought to an end.

It was Cromwell's habit to accept the second best, when the best proved unattainable. As to subjecting the King to a traitor's death, Cromwell, as on so many other occasions, exercised a moderating influence. Ireton, it seems, would have been satisfied if Charles were tried and sentenced, after which he might be left in prison till he consented 'to abandon his negative voice, to part from Church lands' and 'to abjure the Scots'. Cromwell even wanted the trial itself to be deferred. By a small majority the Army Council resolved that Charles's life should be spared. As a last effort in this direction, Lord Denbigh was despatched to Windsor—to which place Charles had been removed—to lay before him conditions on which he might yet be permitted to live. Charles, who cannot but have known the nature of the overtures now brought, refused even to see the messenger. Though no direct evidence has reached us, it can hardly be doubted that the terms offered included the renunciation of the negative voice and the abandonment of the Church, that is to say, of Bishops' lands; in other words, the abandonment of control over legislation and of episcopacy. Here at last Charles found no possibility of evasion, and driven as he was to the wall, the true gold which was in him overlaid by so much ignorance and wrong-headedness revealed itself in all its purity. For him the only question was whether he should betray the ordinance of God in Church and State. The incapable ruler—the shifty intriguer—was at once revealed as the sufferer for conscience' sake.

Neither Cromwell nor his brother-officers had an inkling of this. To them Charles, in refusing this final overture, had asserted his right to be the persecutor of the godly and the obstructor of all beneficent legislation. Their patience was at length exhausted. On January 1, 1649, an ordinance was sent up to the Lords creating a High Court of Justice for the trial of the King, accompanied by a resolution that 'by the fundamental laws of this kingdom it is treason in the King of England for the time being to levy war against the Parliament and Kingdom of England'. 'If any man whatsoever,' said Cromwell when this ordinance was under debate, 'hath carried on the design of deposing the King, and disinheriting his posterity; or, if any man hath yet such a design, he should be the greatest traitor and rebel in the world; but since the Providence of God hath cast this upon us, I cannot but submit to Providence, though I am not yet provided to give you advice'. In the last words were the last symptoms of hesitation on Cromwell's part. Somehow or other all his efforts to save Charles from destruction had failed, and it was as much in Cromwell's nature to attribute the failure to Providence as it was in Charles's nature to regard himself as the earthly champion of the laws of God.

The House of Lords having refused to pass the ordinance, the House of Commons declared 'the people to be, under God, the original of all just power,' and in consequence, 'the Commons of England in Parliament assembled' to be capable of giving the force of law to their enactments. From this time forth the name of an Act was given to the laws passed by a single House. On January 6, such an Act erected a High Court of Justice for the trial of the King, on the ground that he had had a wicked design to subvert his people's rights, and with this object had levied war against them, and also, having been spared, had continued to raise new commotions. Therefore, that no chief officer or magistrate might hereafter presume to contrive the enslaving or destroying of the nation, certain persons were appointed by whom Charles Stuart was to be tried.

Having once given his consent to the trial, Cromwell threw himself into the support of the resolution with all his vigour. "I tell you," he replied to some scruples of young Algernon Sidney on the score of legality, "we will cut off his head with the crown upon it." When a majority of the members of the Court refused to sit; when divisions of opinion arose amongst those who did sit; when difficulties, in short, of any kind arose, it was Cromwell who was ready with exhortation and persuasion to complete the work which they had taken in hand. His arguments appear to have been directed not to the technical point whether Charles had levied war against the nation or not, but to convince all who would listen that there had been a breach of trust in his refusal to do his utmost for the preservation of the people. Charles, on the other hand, maintained, as he was well entitled to do, that he was not being tried by any known law, and that the violence used against him would lead to the establishment of a military despotism over the land. Nothing he could say availed to change the determination of the grim masters of the hour. On January 27 sentence of death was pronounced by Bradshaw, the President of the Court, and on the 30th this sentence was carried into execution on a scaffold erected in front of the Banqueting House of his own palace of Whitehall.

That Cromwell, once his mind made up, had contributed more than any other to this result can hardly be doubted. If we are to accept a traditional story which has much to recommend it, we have something of a key to his state of mind. "The night after King Charles was beheaded," we are told, "my Lord Southhampton and a friend of his got leave to sit up by the body in the Banqueting House at Whitehall. As they were sitting very melancholy there, about two o'clock in the morning, they heard the tread of somebody coming very slowly upstairs. By-and-by the door opened, and a man entered very much muffled up in his cloak, and his face quite hid in it. He approached the body, considered it very attentively for some time, and then shook his head—sighed out the words, 'Cruel necessity!' He then departed in the same slow and concealed manner as he had come. Lord Southhampton used to say that he could not distinguish anything of his face, but that by his voice and gait he took him to be Oliver Cromwell."

Whether there was indeed any such necessity may be disputed for ever, as well as that other question whether the army had a right to force on the trial and execution in the teeth of the positive law of the land. The main issue was whether, whatever positive law might say, a king was not bound by the necessities of his position to be the representative of the nation, acting on its behalf, merging his own interests in those of his people, refusing to coerce them by foreign armies, and owing to them, whenever it became prudent to speak at all, the duty of uttering words of simple truth. So Elizabeth had acted: so Bacon had taught. That Charles's own conduct was moulded on far different principles it is impossible to deny. Confidence in his own wisdom was inherent in his nature, and there is no reason to doubt that he soberly believed his critics and antagonists to be so heated by faction that he was actually unable to do his best for the nation as well as for himself unless he called foreign armies to his aid, and raised false expectations in the hope of throwing off each party with whom he was treating, as soon as a convenient opportunity arrived. Such an attitude could not but engender resistance, and when long persisted in, necessarily called forth an attitude equally unbending. That which to Cromwell was at one time a cruel necessity—at another time a decree of Providence—was but the natural result of the offence given by Charles to men who required plain dealing in a ruler from whom nothing but ill-concealed deceitfulness was to be had. The final struggle had come to be mainly one over the King's retention of the Negative Voice, which, if he had been permitted to retain it, would enable him to hinder all new legislation which did not conform to his personal wishes. No doubt he had both law and tradition on his side, but, on the other hand, his antagonists could plead that the law of the land must depend on the resolution, not of a single person, but of the nation itself.

"Fortunately or unfortunately," I can but repeat here what I have already said elsewhere, "such abstract considerations seldom admit of direct application to politics. It is at all times hard to discover what the wishes of a nation really are, and least of all can this be done amidst the fears and passions of a revolutionary struggle. Only after long years does a nation make clear its definite resolves, and, for this reason, wise statesmen—whether monarchical or republican—watch the currents of opinion, and submit to compromises which will enable the national sentiment to make its way without a succession of violent shocks. Charles's fault lay not so much in his claim to retain the Negative Voice, as in his absolute disregard of the conditions of the time, and of the feelings and opinions of every class of his subjects with which he happened to disagree. Even if those who opposed Charles in the later stages of his career failed to rally the majority of the people to their side, they were undoubtedly acting in accordance with a permanent national demand for that government by compromise which slowly, but irresistibly, developed itself in the course of the century.