[1] [Neal’s Puritans, ii. 265.]
To the sectarian soldiers, who had been fighting, not for a theory of parliamentary right, but for a spiritual freedom which the sacerdotal establishment had not allowed, ‘who knew what they fought for, and loved what they knew,’ it represented a power which threatened to rob them of all for which they had shed their blood. The danger was at its height when the Scotch army was still in England and the king in its keeping. If the king had then closed with the presbyterian offers, he might have returned to London and directed the whole power of parliament (which had still Massey’s soldiers at command), the presbyteries, and the Scotch against the sectarian army. A new and more desperate civil war must have followed, to end probably in a reaction of unlimited royalism. Charles, however, with all his ability, had not enough breadth of view even to play his own game with advantage. He would play off the two parties against each other, without committing himself to either, trusting that while they tore each other to pieces, Montrose’s army and the ‘Irish rebels,’ with whom he had already a treaty, would come in and settle the business in his favour. Thus while he was still with the Scotch, or even before, he was tampering unsuccessfully with Vane and the independents, till at last the Scotch got tired of him, and having received their arrears of pay from the parliament at the beginning of the year 1647, returned back to their own country.
During all this interval, Cromwell was at his place in parliament, watching events. His position was a strong one. The quartering of the army in the midland counties prevented any sudden advance of the Scots on London, and the election of several of his military friends, notably his son-in-law Ireton, to the vacant seats at the end of 1645, established a regular communication between the army and parliament. Among the old members his supporters were chiefly Vane, Marten, and St. John, men in several respects antipathetic to {316} Cromwell and each other, but for the present held together by a common antagonism. Vane’s interest was for freedom of opinion on deep religious grounds. So far he and Cromwell were at one; but Vane had qualities, as appeared in the sequel, which unfitted him to lead a revolution when it took military form. He was reputed physically a coward; he had none of the rough geniality which gives personal influence at such times; military interference and the predominance of an individual were specially abhorrent to him. Marten was of a rougher type. In the earlier stages of the war he alone had avowed republicanism. He was the wit of the house of commons, the one man of the time whose recorded speeches can be read with pleasure. Presbyterian uniformity Marten hated with a hearty hatred, but he was avowedly void of religious feeling, and thus out of sympathy with the moving spirit of the time. On him, even less than on Vane, could Cromwell have any personal hold. In August, 1643, when the house was censuring Mr. Saltmarsh, a minister who had urged that if the king would not grant the parliamentary demands, he and the royal line should be ‘rooted out,’ Marten vindicated him, saying that ‘it were better one family should be destroyed than many.’ Upon this, we are told, there was a storm in the house, and many members ‘urged against the lewdness of Mr. Marten’s life, and the height and danger of his words.’ The indignation was such that he was committed to the tower for a time, and did not resume his seat for a year and a half. St. John was an erastian lawyer, who had pleaded for Hampden in the ship-money business, and was now about head of his profession. There was a darkness both in his skin and his character, which in contrast with his intellectual light won him the nickname of the ‘dark-lantern.’ He was strong for liberty of conscience, but had a lawyer’s belief in the necessity of monarchy, and would always take the shortest road to his end. With him Cromwell’s friendship was personal, and like all his personal friendships, lasting. He was the practical link between the enthusiasm of the military saint and the wisdom of the world. In concert with these men, Cromwell had anxiously watched and hastened the negotiations for the withdrawal of the Scotch. Their withdrawal, however, and the removal of the king in parliamentary custody to Holmby, though it simplified the dangers by which the cause was {317} threatened, by no means removed them. During the first half of 1647, the presbyterian managers were pressing forward their two projects of a reconciliation with the king and the disbanding of the army, necessary for the success of their cause. Their plan for dealing with the army was to send part of it to Ireland, under Massey and Skippon as generals, of whom one was a creature of their own, the other a strong presbyterian; to disband the rest, with the exception of a few regiments that could be managed; and to retain no one except Fairfax above the rank of colonel, a restriction aimed specially at Cromwell. Votes to this effect passed the house in the spring of 1647, not apparently without great pressure from the city, which was constantly presenting petitions against the army and lay preachers, roughly enforced by mobs of apprentices. But meanwhile the army had got a parliament of its own. The several troops in a regiment elected each a representative to form the regimental council, from which again one member was delegated to join the general council of the army. The president of this council seems generally to have been Berry, one of Cromwell’s special friends, whose character we have heard described by Baxter. The army had thus a regular organisation of opinion, and henceforward came to regard itself and to act as the true representative of the ‘godly interest’ in England, sanctioned by a higher than parliamentary authority. At first its demands were modest enough. They were all ready to go to Ireland, if only Cromwell and Fairfax might lead them; they were ready to disband so soon as they should get their arrears of pay and be secured by an act of indemnity against punishment for offences committed during war. The nominal difficulty at last was about the arrears of pay. Parliament would only agree to pay arrears for eight weeks, and the army asserted its claim for at least fifty weeks. Meanwhile the militia of the city had been placed in trusty presbyterian hands; the king had accepted provisionally (with what insincerity his correspondence showed) the preliminary presbyterian propositions, and pressed for a personal treaty. The lords so far assented to this as to vote that he should be brought to Oatlands, in the neighbourhood of London. If once this had been done, he would have been in direct communication with interests hostile to the army, and the fusion of royalism and presbyterianism would for the time have been {318} complete. Holles and his friends thought the prize was within their grasp, and against the discreet advice of Whitelock pressed the disbanding. The tone of the army grew higher, till one day at the beginning of June, news was brought to the parliament that a troop of horse, under one cornet Joyce, had appeared at Holmby and demanded the king of the commissioners. ‘The commissioners,’ in the words of Whitelock, ‘amazed at it, demanded of them what warrant they had for what they did; but they could give no other account but that it was the pleasure of the army.’ The king afterwards asked them for their commission. Joyce answered, ‘that his majesty saw their commission; the king replied that it had the fairest frontispiece of any he ever saw, being five hundred proper men on horseback.’ [1] On the same day that this happened, Cromwell had ridden out of town with one servant to the quarters of the army, just in time to escape forcible detention by Holles’s friends. The plot now thickened. The army had a general rendezvous at Triploe Heath, and greeted the parliamentary commissioner who met them there with cries of ‘justice! justice!’ Thence gradually moving towards London, they sent up articles of charge against Holles and ten other members, for obstructing the business of Ireland, and acting against the army and the liberty of the subject. During two months they waited for the execution of their demands, sending parliament a reminder now and then, but maintaining perfect self-restraint. Holles and his party, on the other hand, showed all the precipitation of weakness. Under their management the authorities of the city got together a loose army of militiamen, of which the command was given to Massey, and organised the mob of apprentices, which finally put so much pressure on parliament that the speaker and many members of both houses took refuge with the army. This was the turning-point. The army, now under parliamentary sanction, easily walked through Massey’s lines, and quartered in the suburbs. The city was in a panic. ‘A great number of people attended at Guildhall. When a scout came in and brought news that the array made a halt, or other good intelligence, they cry “one and all!” But if the scouts reported that the army was advancing nearer them, then they would cry as loud, “Treat, treat, treat!”’ [2] The corporation, {319} its cheap vaunts at an end, sent resolutions to the army in favour of ‘a sweet composure.’ In calm indifference to its good words and its bad, the army on August 6 marched through London, ‘in so orderly and civil a manner, that not the least offence was offered by them to any man in word, action, or gesture.’
[1] [Whitelock, ii. 154.]
[2] [ib. ii. 189.]
The king, now in the hands of the army, had been following its movements, and when it finally established its headquarters at Putney, he was allowed to live in considerable state at Hampton Court, with his own attendants, but under the guard of Colonel Whalley, Cromwell’s trusted cousin. Here he stayed till his flight to Carisbrook in the Isle of Wight, in the following November. Those who explain Cromwell’s life by its result, as a long scheme for his own elevation, suppose that during this period he carried on private negotiations with the king, first perhaps with the view of restoring him to power under his own direction, but afterwards to lure him on to destruction; that with this object he encouraged him by vain hopes to refuse the proposals of parliament, and finally to escape from Hampton, whence by some mysterious means he was guided to an asylum of Cromwell’s own preparing at Carisbrook. Such a view is expressed even in the panegyric of Marvell, written on Cromwell’s return from Ireland in the summer of 1650;
‘What field of all the civil war
Where his were not the deepest scar?
And Hampton shows what part
He had of wiser art,
Where, twining subtle fears with hope,
He wove a net of such a scope
That Charles himself might chase
To Carisbrook’s narrow case;
That thence the royal actor borne
The tragic scaffold might adorn.’
In this, however, as in other cases, history is really less personal and mysterious than is commonly supposed. Cromwell and Ireton doubtless negotiated personally with the king during the summer of this year, but it was on the basis of a public program for resettlement agreed to by the army and communicated to parliament. At the same time the parliament, still presbyterian in feeling, was submitting to the king, in conjunction with the Scots, propositions the {320} same in substance as those which he had rejected when with the Scotch army at Newcastle. One of the essential points in the army’s scheme, of which more will be said afterwards, was that it allowed the use of the Common Prayer, and provided against the compulsory imposition of the covenant. The parliamentary scheme, on the other hand, was conceived in the strict presbyterian sense. When the proposals of the army were publicly presented to Charles in the month of July, he treated them in a way which set the heart of the army against him once for all. Cromwell and Ireton, however, continued to treat with him. They simply wanted to keep him from closing with the presbyterians, not having made up their minds to any further step, while he strangely fancied that he was cajoling them and playing off the army against the parliament. They did not, while treating him with all respect, for a moment lower their tone with him. They would not consent to kiss his hand, and the king himself complained that no promise of favour or decoration could affect them. Their perfect explicitness is witnessed by two opposite authorities, both good, and both on different grounds unfriendly to Cromwell, by Berkley the king’s confidant, and the wife of colonel Hutchinson. By the middle of September they had given up all hopes of him. It is a well-known story that Charles sent a letter to the queen, sewn in the skirt of the messenger’s saddle, in which he said that the army and the Scots were both courting him, and that he should close with the party that bid fairest, probably with the Scots; that Cromwell and Ireton having secret information of this, sat drinking, in the dress of common troopers, at the Blue Boar in Holborn, where the messenger was to put up; that there they seized him, ripped up the skirts of the saddle, and found the letter. This story has received many embellishments, such as that the letter said that Cromwell and Ireton were expecting a silken garter, but would find a hempen cord, but is probably in substance true. There was no need, however, of any such mysterious discovery to satisfy Cromwell and Ireton that the king was playing a double game. With that inability to conceal exultation in his own artifice which was one of his most curious characteristics, he told them so plainly, while they pronounced no less plainly that God had hardened his heart.