VI
PERSONAL RULE
When Cromwell, in January, 1655, dismissed the first Protectorate Parliament, he left himself nothing to do but to establish his own personal rule; in other words, he became a tyrant. Of course the word cannot be used in the sense we use it in describing Ivan the Terrible, or Agathokles. As each country must, sooner or later, obtain exactly that measure of political freedom to which it is entitled, so, when it falls under a tyranny, the tyranny must be strictly conditioned by the character of the people. Cromwell ruled over Englishmen, not Russians or Greeks, and no Englishman would have tolerated for twenty-four hours what was groaningly borne by Muscovites, who had lost every vestige of manhood beneath the Tartar yoke, or by Syracusans, in the days of the rapid decadence of the Hellenistic world. Cromwell’s government was a tyranny because it was based on his own personal rule, his personal decision as to what taxes should be levied, what ordinances issued, what police measures decreed and carried out, what foreign policy adopted or rejected. He was influenced very much by public opinion, when public opinion found definite expression in the action of a body of legislators or of an assembly of officers; but even in such cases he was only influenced, not controlled. In other words, he had gone back to the theory of government professed by the man he had executed, and by that man’s predecessors. There was, however, the tremendous and far-reaching difference, that, whereas the Stuart kings clung to absolute power for the sake of rewarding favorites and of carrying out policies that were hostile to the honor and interest of England, Cromwell seized it with the sincere purpose of exalting the moral law at home and increasing the honor of England’s name abroad. Moreover, he was in fact what no Stuart was, in anything but name: a “king among men,” and his mighty strength enabled him, at least partially, to realize his purpose.
The Second Installation of Cromwell as Protector, in Westminster Hall, June 26, 1657.
Cromwell doubtless persuaded himself that he was endeavoring to secure what would now be called a constitutional government: one which, in his own words, “should avoid alike the extremes of monarchy and democracy.” He was desirous of paying heed to the wishes of those whom he esteemed the wisest and most honest among the people. He had somewhat of that gift for personal popularity which was so marked a feature of Queen Elizabeth—seemingly the only sovereign whom he admired, among all his predecessors. To the last he kept stirring vaguely for a constitutional system; and he sincerely disliked merely arbitrary rule.
But by the time he became Lord Protector he was too impatient of difference of opinion, too doggedly convinced of his own righteousness and wisdom, to be really fit to carry on a free government. He had sought to introduce the reign of the saints; but when, in the Barebones Parliament, he gathered together the very men whom he deemed their arch-representatives, it was only to find, as was of course inevitable, that he and they could not agree as to the method of realizing the reign of the saints in this very material world. Then he sought to secure a government by the representatives of the people: only to find that he got along even less well with them than with the saints. In short, while he had kept his nobility of purpose, his whole character had grown less and less such as to fit him to found a government of the kind toward which his race was dimly striving.
He made varied experiments for the control of England. After the first Protectorate Parliament had been abolished, he established the government of the major-generals, or in other words, purely military rule; dividing England into a dozen districts, with a major-general over each as the ultimate authority. The prime function of the major-generals was to keep order, and they crushed under their iron heels every spark of Royalist insurrection, or of Leveller and Anabaptist uprising. They interfered in civil matters also, and were especially required to see to the rigid observance of the Sabbath, and to suppress all cock-fighting, horse-racing, and kindred sports, as well as to shut up doubtful ale-houses. There certainly never was a more extraordinary despotism than this; the despotism of a man who sought power, not to gratify himself, or those belonging to him, in any of the methods to which all other tyrants have been prone; but to establish the reign of the Lord, as he saw it. Here was a tyrant who used the overwhelming strength of his military force to forbid what he considered profane amusements, and to enforce on one day of the week a system of conduct which was old-Jewish in character. Of course the fact that he meant well, and that his motives were high, did not make it any the easier for the people with whose pleasures and prejudices he thus irritatingly interfered.
The Puritan passion for regulating, not merely the religion, but the morals and manners of their neighbors, especially in the matter of Sunday observance and of pastimes generally, was peculiarly exasperating to men of a more easy-going nature. Even nowadays, the effort for practical reform in American city government is rendered immeasurably more difficult by the fact that a considerable number of the best citizens are prone to devote their utmost energies, not to striving for the fundamentals of social morality, civic honesty, and good government, but, in accordance with their own theory of propriety of conduct, to preventing other men from pursuing what these latter regard as innocent pleasures; while, on the other hand, a large number of good citizens, in their irritation at any interference with what they feel to be legitimate pastimes, welcome the grossest corruption and misrule rather than submit to what they call “Puritanism.” When this happens, before our eyes, we need not wonder that in Cromwell’s day the determination of the Puritans to put down ale-houses and prohibit every type of Sunday pastime, irritated large bodies of the people to the point of longing for the restoration of the Stuarts, no matter what might be the accompanying evils of corruption and tyranny.
The experiment of governing by the major-generals provoked such mutterings of discontent that it had to be abandoned. Another parliament was summoned, and out of this Oliver arbitrarily kept any man whom he did not think ought to come in. It was anything but a radical body, and after declaring against the rule of the major-generals, it offered Oliver the kingship, an offer to which the army objected, and which Oliver, therefore, refused; but even with this subservient assembly Oliver could not get along, and it finally shared the fate of its predecessor. The objection of the army to the kingship, was partly due to the presence of so many Republican zealots in its ranks; but probably the main reason for the objection was that the army, more or less consciously, realized that its own overmastering importance in the commonwealth would vanish as soon as the man it had made supreme by the sword was changed into a constitutional king.
One by one almost all of Oliver’s old comrades and adherents left him, and he was driven to put his own kinsfolk into as many of the higher places, both in the State and the army, as possible; less from nepotism than from the need of having in important positions men who would do his will, without question. Eventually he had to abandon most of the ideas of political liberty which he had originally championed, and, following the path which the Long Parliament had already trod, he finally established a rigid censorship of the press.