Admiral Robert Blake.
From the portrait at Wadham College, Oxford.
By permission of the Master of Wadham.
By March, 1653, the Dutch were evidently beaten, and peace was in sight; but before peace came, there was an end of the Rump Parliament. The discontent in the army had steadily increased. They wished a thorough reform in governmental methods; and with the characteristic Puritan habit of thought, wished especially to guarantee the safety of the “Godly interests” by a complete new election. On the other hand, the Parliament was scheming how to yield in name only, and not in fact, and had hit on the device of passing a bill which should continue all the members of the existing Parliament without reëlection; and, moreover, should constitute them a general committee, with full power to pass upon the qualifications of any new members elected. This, of course, amounted to nothing, and the army would not accept it.
Many conferences of the leaders of the two sides were held at Cromwell’s house, the last on the evening of April 19, 1653, young Sir Harry Vane, formerly one of Cromwell’s close friends, being among the number of the Parliamentary leaders. Cromwell, on behalf of his party, warned them that their bill could not be accepted or submitted to, and the Parliamentary leaders finally agreed that it should not be brought up again in the House, until after further conference. But they either did not or could not keep their agreement. The members of the House were obstinately resolved to keep their places—many of them from corrupt motives, for they had undoubtedly made much money out of their positions, through the taxing of delinquents and otherwise. In short, they wished to perpetuate their government, to have England ruled by a little self-perpetuating oligarchy. Next morning, April 20th, Parliament met and the leaders began to hurry the Bill through the House.
Cromwell Dissolving the Long Parliament.
Having commanded the soldiers to clear the hall, he himself went out last, and ordering the doors to be locked, he departed to his lodgings.—Hume and Smollett’s “History.”
They reckoned without their host. Cromwell, sitting in his reception-room, and waiting the return of the conferees of last evening, learned what was going on, and just as he was clad, “in plain black clothes and gray worsted stockings,” followed by a few officers and twenty or thirty stark musketeers, he walked down to the House. There he sat and listened for some time to the debate on the Bill, once beckoning over Harrison, the Republican general, his devoted follower. When the question was put as to whether the Bill should pass, he rose and broke in with one of his characteristic speeches. First, he enumerated the good that had been done by Parliament, and then began to tell them of their injustice, their heed to their own self-interests, their delay to do right. One among his eager listeners called him to order, but no appeal to Parliamentary forms could save the doomed House. “Come, come!” answered Oliver, “we have had enough of this; I will put an end to your prating!” With that he clapped on his hat, stamped on the floor with his feet, and began to rate the Commons as if they were disobedient school-boys. “It is not fit that you should sit here any longer; you have sat too long for any good that you have been doing lately; you shall now give place to better men!” And Harrison called in the musketeers. Oliver then continued, enumerating the sins of the members, some of whom were drunkards, some lewd livers, some corrupt and unjust. The house was on its feet as he lifted the mace, saying: “What shall we do with this bauble? Take it away!” and gave it to a musketeer; and then, turning toward the Speaker: “Fetch him down!” and fetched down he was. Gloomily the members went out, while Cromwell taunted Sir Harry Vane with breaking his promise, ending with: “The Lord deliver me from thee, Sir Harry Vane!” So ended the Long Parliament and, asserted Oliver, “We did not hear a dog bark at their going.”
Tomes have been written to prove whether Oliver was right or wrong in what he did at this time; but the Rump Parliament had no claim to be, either in law or fact, the representative of the English people, or of any part of them that really counted. There was no justification for its continuance, and no good whatever could come from permitting it to exist longer. Its actions, and especially its obstinate determination to perpetuate its own rule, without warrant in law, without the even higher and more perilous warrant of justice and national need, rendered it necessary that it should be dissolved. At the time Cromwell, without doubt, intended that it should be replaced by a genuinely representative body; and if he had possessed the temper, the self-control, the far-sighted patriotism, and the personal disinterestedness which would have enabled him to carry out his intentions in good faith, without thinking of his own interests, he would have rendered an inestimable public service and might have advanced by generations the movement for English liberty.
In other words, if Cromwell had been a Washington, the Puritan Revolution might have been made permanent. His early acts, after the dissolution of the Long Parliament, showed a sincere desire on his part, and on the part of those whose leader he was, to provide some form of government which should secure justice and order, without leaving everything to the will of one man. His first effort was to summon an assembly of the Puritan notables. In the interim he appointed a new Council of State, with himself, as Captain-General, at its head. The fleet, the army, and the Independents generally, all hastened to pledge him their support, and England undoubtedly acquiesced in his action, being chiefly anxious to see whether or not the new Assembly could formulate a permanent scheme of government. If the Assembly and Cromwell together could have done this—that is, could have done work like that of the great Convention which promulgated the Constitution of the United States—all would have gone well.
In criticising Cromwell, however, we must remember that generally in such cases an even greater share of blame must attach to the nation than to the man. Free government is only for nations that deserve it; and they lose all right to it by licentiousness, no less than by servility. If a nation cannot govern itself, it makes comparatively little difference whether its inability springs from a slavish and craven distrust of its own powers, or from sheer incapacity on the part of its citizens to exercise self-control and to act together. Self-governing freemen must have the power to accept necessary compromises, to make necessary concessions, each sacrificing somewhat of prejudice, and even of principle, and every group must show the necessary subordination of its particular interests to the interests of the community as a whole. When the people will not or cannot work together; when they permit groups of extremists to decline to accept anything that does not coincide with their own extreme views; or when they let power slip from their hands through sheer supine indifference; then they have themselves chiefly to blame if the power is grasped by stronger hands. Yet, while keeping all this in mind, it must not be forgotten that a great and patriotic leader may, if the people have any capacity for self-government whatever, help them upwards along their hard path by his wise leadership, his wise yielding to even what he does not like, and his wise refusal to consider his own selfish interests. A people thoroughly unfit for self-government, as were the French at the end of the eighteenth century, are the natural prey of a conscienceless tyrant like Napoleon. A people like the Americans of the same generation can be led along the path of liberty and order by a Washington. The English people, in the middle of the seventeenth century, might have been helped to entire self-government by Cromwell, but were not sufficiently advanced politically to keep him from making himself their absolute master if he proved morally unequal to rising to the Washington level; though doubtless they would not have tolerated a man of the Napoleonic type.
