They believed they were indeed the Lord’s chosen people, and that upon them, as conquerors, there devolved the duty of safeguarding the interests of religion and of the Commonwealth. They wished to strike down the Bishops as well as the King; and though most of them were Congregationalists or Baptists, they had already begun to develop plenty of men whose Christianity was of the most heterodox form, or who boldly announced that they had a right to profess any creed, Christian or otherwise, if they so desired. Together with their iron discipline as an army went wide liberty of thought and discussion on all outside matters—religious and political alike—when they were not in the ranks. There were preachers who served with sombre fidelity as privates, but who were fanatical inciters of Republican enthusiasm in every leisure hour, haranguing and exhorting their fellow-soldiers about every political or religious wrong.
King Charles I.
From the replica at the Dresden Gallery, by Sir Peter Lely.
Trouble was brewing between this army and Parliament. The Episcopalians—the Royalists—had left Parliament when the war broke out. The Presbyterians were in complete command. London, which held the purse-strings of the Parliamentary cause, was strongly Presbyterian. Now, the Presbyterians, as the war went on, had grown more and more afraid of their allies, and, indeed, of too decisive a victory over the King. They were just as much bent upon an intolerant uniformity in Church matters as was Laud, though they wished to substitute a different form of Church government, which should rest upon a broader and more popular basis. They wished to make Parliament supreme, but they had no idea of dispensing with the King, and they were exceedingly distrustful of a popular movement which would extend liberty beyond and beneath the classes from which they drew their strength. On the contrary, the army, which represented the Independent movement, was strongly democratic in its tendencies, and was filled with sullen wrath against the King.
Cromwell himself was no theorist; in fact, he was altogether too little of one. He wished to do away with concrete acts of oppression and injustice; he sought to make life easier for any who suffered tangible wrong. Though earnestly bent upon doing justice as he saw it, and desirous to secure the essentials of liberty for the people as a whole, he failed to see that questions of form—that is, of law—in securing liberty might be themselves essential instead of, as they seemed to him, non-essential. He was reluctant to enter into general schemes of betterment, especially if they seemed in any way visionary. But when his feelings were greatly roused over specific cases of wrong-doing or oppression, he sometimes became so wrought up as to advocate reform in language so sweeping that he seemed to commit himself, not only to absolute religious toleration, but to complete political equality. Thus when he broke with Lord Manchester he told him that he hoped “to live to see never a nobleman in England.” In open Parliament he denounced “monarchical government.” He advocated entire religious freedom. In dealing with the army he declared his readiness to maintain the doctrine that “the foundation and the supremacy is in the people—radically in them—and to be set down by them in their representations”—that is, by their representatives in Parliament.
Of course, to make his conduct square with these various utterances, Cromwell would have had to strive for precisely such a government as Washington was able to inaugurate a century and a half later; a government in which there should be complete religious toleration, in which all differences of rank and title should be abolished, and in which the basis of representation in Parliament would have to approach more or less closely to manhood suffrage. Doubtless, there were times when Cromwell ardently wished for such a Government; but it was wholly out of the question to realize it in the middle of the seventeenth century, even in England. Generations had to pass before men could grasp the true principles of religious toleration and political equality in all their bearings; and, like every other man who actually works out great reforms, who actually does signal service in the world, Cromwell had to face facts as they were, and not as bodies of extremists—no matter how good—thought they ought to be.
The best and most high-minded of the Puritan party were now growing to fear lest the Presbyterians should try to perpetuate the old religious oppression under a new name. Milton—with but one exception the greatest poet of the English tongue, a man whose political and social ideas were at least two centuries in advance of his time, but who had the good sense to accept, no matter with what heart-burning, the best possible when he could not get the best—Milton expressed the convictions of his whole party when he said that if “Presbyter was but Priest writ large” the people were no better off than before.
The army began to show openly its spirit of fierce unrest. A very considerable portion avowed extreme republican theories. The Levellers, as they were called, were looked upon in that day, even by advocates of freedom like Cromwell, with great distrust, although the principles they advocated—such as manhood suffrage—are now the commonplaces of American politics. Of course, then they were not commonplaces; they were revolutionary ideas, for the reception of which the mind of the English people was not ready, and therefore it was the duty of men who sought practical reform to refuse to put these schemes into operation.
There were much more extreme and dangerous groups than the mere Republicans; groups of men in whom the desire for religious, political, and moral reform had overstepped the broad, but not always clearly marked, border line which divides sane and healthy fervor from fanaticism. In such troublous times small sects and parties of extremists swarm. Already the foundations were laid for the Fifth Monarchy men, the men who believed that the times were ripe for the installation of the last great world monarchy, the monarchy of which the Saviour himself was to be Ruler; the men who shouted for King Jesus, and were ferociously opposed to everybody who would not advocate the immediate introduction into all mundane affairs of Heaven’s law, as the Fifth Monarchy men chose to interpret it. Of course, men of this type are always to be found in every free government, and aside from their peculiar notions, they may have excellent traits. In peaceful times and places like the United States at the present day, they merely join little extreme parties, and run small, separate tickets on election-day, thereby giving aid, comfort, and amusement to the totally unregenerate. In times of great political convulsion, when the appeal to arms has been made, these harmless bodies may draft into their ranks—as the Fifth Monarchy men did—fierce and dangerous spirits, ever ready to smite down with any weapons the possible good, because it is not the impossible best. When this occurs they need to be narrowly watched.
There are many good people who find it difficult to keep in mind the obvious fact that, while extremists are sometimes men who are in advance of their age, more often they are men who are not in advance at all, but simply to one side or the other of a great movement, or even lagging behind it, or trying to pilot it in the wrong direction.