The skull of the mighty crown-grasper, before whose untamable soul they had shuddered in terror, was now set on high as a target for the jeering mockery of all who sang the praises of the line of libertines and bigots to whom the English throne had been restored. For twenty-eight shameful years the Restoration lasted; years of misgovernment and persecution at home, of weakness abroad, of oppression of the weak, and obsequious servility to the strong; years when the Court of England—devoid of one spark of true greatness of any kind—was a scene of tawdry and obscene frivolity. Then, once again, the principles for which, in the last analysis, Cromwell and the Puritans stood, triumphed; the Dutch stadtholder came over the narrow seas to ascend the throne of England; and once more the current of her national life set toward political, intellectual, and religious liberty.
Cromwell and the Puritans had gone too far, and the reaction against them had been so violent that those who called William of Orange into England dared not invoke the memory of the mighty dead lest they should hurt the cause of the living. Nevertheless, the Revolution of 1688 was in reality but the carrying on of the work which had been done in the middle of the century. James II. could never have been deposed had not Charles I. been executed. The men of the second Revolution had learned the moderation which the men of the first had lacked. They were careful not to kill the king of whom they wished to rid themselves; for though, by every principle of equity, a tyrant who has goaded his people into Revolution—like the leader of an unjustifiable rebellion—should suffer the fate which he has brought on so many others, yet, as a matter of fact, it is often unwise to treat him as he deserves, because he has become a symbol to his followers, each of whom identifies himself with the man whose cause he has been supporting, and in whose name he has been fighting, and resents, with passionate indignation, any punishment visited upon his chief as a wrong in which he personally shares. The men of 1688 were, as a whole, actuated by far less lofty motives than the men of 1648; but they possessed the inestimable advantages of common-sense, of moderation, of readiness to accept compromises. They made no attempt to realize the reign of the saints upon earth; and therefore they were able to work a permanent betterment in mundane affairs, and to avoid provoking a violent reaction. William, both by position and by temper, was far better fitted than great Oliver to submit to interference with his plans, to get on with representative bodies of freemen, and to make the best he could out of each situation as it arose, instead of indignantly setting his own will above law and above the will of the majority, because for the moment the result might be better for himself and the nation. Speaker Reed once said, that “in the long run, the average sense of the many is better for the many than the best sense of any one man;” and this is undoubtedly true of all people sufficiently high in the scale to be fit for self-government.
Oliver surely strove to live up to his lights as he saw them. He never acted in levity, or from mere motives of personal aggrandizement, and he saw, with sad, piercing eyes, the dangers that rolled around the path he had chosen. He acted as he did because he conscientiously felt that only thus could he meet the needs of the nation. He said to the second Protectorate Parliament: “I am a man standing in the place I am in; which place I undertook, not so much out of hope of doing any good, as out of a desire to prevent mischief and evil—which I did see was imminent on the nation (for we were running along into confusion and disorder, and would have necessarily run into blood).”
Exterior of Westminster Hall.
After Charles II. succeeded to the throne, the bones of Cromwell were disinterred and his head exposed upon a pole over Westminster Hall, almost on the identical spot where the Cromwell statue, shown in the right of the drawing, has just been erected.
We are often told that the best of all possible governments would be a benevolent despotism. Oliver’s failure is a sufficient commentary upon this dictum of the parlor doctrinaires. There never has been, and probably never will be, another despotism where the despot so sincerely strove to do, for a people capable of some measure of freedom, better than they themselves would have done with that freedom. The truth is, that a strong nation can only be saved by itself, and not by a strong man, though it can be greatly aided and guided by a strong man. A weak nation may be doomed anyhow, or it may find its sole refuge in a despot; a nation struggling out of darkness may be able to take its first steps only by the help of a master hand, as was true of Russia, under Peter the Great; and if a nation, whether free or unfree, loses the capacity for self-government, loses the spirit of sobriety and of orderly liberty, then it has no cause to complain of tyranny; but a really great people, a people really capable of freedom and of doing mighty deeds in the world, must work out its own destiny, and must find men who will be its leaders—not its masters. Cromwell could, in all probability, have been such a leader at the end as he was during his early years of public life; and when he permitted himself to fall from the position of a leader among free men, to that of a master over men for whose welfare he sincerely strove, but in whose freedom he did not believe, he marred the great work he had done. Nevertheless, it was a very great work. There are dark blots on his career—especially his Irish policy—but on the whole he was a mighty force for good and against evil, and the good that he did, though buried for the moment with his bones, rose again and has lived for ever since, while the evil has long withered, or is now withering. The English-speaking peoples are free, and for good or for ill hold their destinies in their own hands.
The effect of the attitude which not only the Puritans, but all other Englishmen of every creed, assumed toward Ireland from the days of Queen Mary to the days of King George the Fourth, was such as to steep the island in centuries of misery, and to leave in her people a bitter and enduring hatred against England. Yet this attitude has produced one result of the most unforeseen kind. Had the Irish remained a Celtic nation, separate in speech and government from Great Britain, they could have had no share in the expansion of the English race, or at least could have played only a very subordinate part. As it is, in the great English-speaking commonwealths that have grown up in North America and Australasia, the descendants of the Irish now stand on an exact equality with those of the Scotch and English, and furnish their full proportion of leadership in the government of the communities; while in all these English-speaking countries the Catholic Church has become one of the leading churches and has had its course of development determined by the fact that the controlling force within it has been Irish. The English Protestants failed to impress their creed upon Ireland, but they did impress their language, and did bring Ireland under their own government The strange outcome has been that the creed they hated now flourishes side by side, on equal terms, with the creeds they professed, in the distant continents held in common by their children and by the children of those against whom they warred. In these new continents all, Catholics and Protestants alike, are wedded to the principles of political liberty for which the Puritans fought, and have grown to extend to all creeds the principles of religious liberty in which only the best and most advanced Puritans believed. Let us most earnestly hope that, while avoiding the Puritan fanaticism and intolerance, the Puritan lack of charity and narrowness, we may not lose the Puritan loftiness of soul and stern energy in striving for the right, than which no nation could ever have more precious heritages.
With Oliver’s death his memory passed under a cloud, through which his greatness was to be but dimly seen until generations of men had lived and died. He left many descendants, and there are now in England, and also in America, and possibly Australia, very many men and women, in all ranks of life, who have his blood in their veins—though in the direct line his name has died out. Even during the present century, when among the English upper classes it was still customary to speak of him with horror, his very descendants in certain families felt keen shame for the deeds of their great forefather. With a childishness in no way above that of a Congo savage, it was actually the fashion in some of these families to make the children do penance on the anniversary of the death of Charles II., as a kind of atonement for the deeds of Cromwell. The grotesque nature of this performance is added to by the fact that in that very society a peculiarly high place of honor was accorded to the titled descendants of Charles II. and his mistresses. One hardly knows whether to be most amused or indignant at such fantastic incapacity to appreciate what was really noble and what really ignoble. The men among whom such false conventions obtained could not be expected to see in its true proportions the form of mighty Oliver, looming ever larger across the intervening centuries. Sooner or later, justice will be done him; sooner or later, he will be recognized, not only as one of the greatest of all Englishmen, and by far the greatest ruler of England itself, but as a man who, in times that tried men’s souls, dealt with vast questions and solved tremendous problems; a man who erred, who was guilty of many shortcomings, but who strove mightily toward the light as it was given him to see the light; a man who had the welfare of his countrymen and the greatness of his country very close to his heart, and who sought to make the great laws of righteousness living forces in the government of the world.
Oliver Cromwell.
From the bust by Bernini, presented to the House of Commons by Charles Wertheimer, Esq.
From a photograph, by permission of the donor.