Four Lectures on the English Revolution

by Thomas Hill Green

While these negotiations were going on, the sectarian {321} enthusiasm of the army was becoming rapidly republican, and worse than this, the republican was but one mode of the ‘levelling spirit,’ the spirit of resentment against ‘gentry, ministry, and magistracy’ in general, which might at any time break into flames. The soldiers had their own printing-press from which pamphlets, voted seditious by the parliament, were constantly issuing. Cromwell and Ireton, at the prayer-meetings of the army, which they were in the habit of attending, could feel its pulse, and tell when the beating of the heart was no longer controllable. They were clearly neither of them republicans of deliberate purpose, but some time during the autumn of 1647 they found that the only way to control the levelling impulse was to yield to the republican. It was probably because they had thus made up their minds that things must be worse before they were better, that they allowed the king a liberty at Hampton, of which he availed himself to come to an understanding with Capel, Ormond, and Lauderdale for a combined royalist rising in England, Ireland, and Scotland. On November 8 he escaped from Hampton, and made for Carisbrook. He preferred this asylum to Scotland under a notion, for which there was clearly some foundation, that he had an interest in the army, and that Hammond, the governor, might be wrought upon.

During the month of October, Cromwell in his place at Westminster was pressing forward the propositions of parliament to the king, and in doing so, he found himself in opposition to the small party of thorough republicans, which consisted chiefly of the newly-elected officers of the army. This has been reckoned a piece of his duplicity, as he must have known, it is said, that the king, relying on his interest elsewhere, would reject the propositions and thus make a final breach with the parliament. It is to be observed, however, that he supported them on two conditions, one that a clause should be inserted securing liberty of conscience, the other that a limit should be put to the duration of the presbyterian government. The real key to his conduct in this crisis, as throughout the subsequent history, is his desire for such a reconciliation of parties as would at once prevent government by a faction and secure the ‘godly interest.’ With this object he sought, without breaking wholly from the moderate presbyterians, to commit parliament to such a {322} policy as would conciliate the milder spirit of the army. The strength of the levelling spirit, which made such conciliation essential, was soon formidably apparent; only the courage and persuasiveness of Cromwell could have held it down. On November 15 the dangerous regiments were ordered to a rendezvous at Ware, where Fairfax and Cromwell met them. A ‘remonstrance’ was read by Fairfax to the troops. It recited their old demands for pay and indemnity and for the calling of a new and free parliament; these Fairfax said that he was willing to support, if the soldiers would promise perfect obedience to his orders. This satisfied all the regiments but one, which showed signs of mutiny. Cromwell then rode along its armed front, looking the men literally in the face. Eleven, whose looks he did not like, he ordered out of the ranks. The men acquiesced. Three were then tried on the field and condemned to die. One only, however, was shot, and the rest pardoned. Thus at the loss of a single life the plague of mutiny was for the time stayed. The secret of the good temper of the army was a renewed assurance that their leaders would not again imperil the cause of the Lord’s people by ‘carnal conferences’ with his crowned enemy.

The king was followed to Carisbrook by four bills, which formed the ultimatum of the parliament. They represent the predominance of independency in the house, which the efforts of Cromwell and his friends had at last attained. They make no more mention of religion, but simply secure the supremacy of the commons. These Charles rejected, while at the same time, swallowing his zeal for bishops and liturgy, he signed a treaty with the Scots, which, at the price of the establishment of presbyterianism, secured him a Scotch army to deliver him from the sectaries and restore him to London on terms that would have made him virtually irresistible. This was the beginning of the end. On January 3, 1648, Cromwell writes to Governor Hammond, evidently in high spirits: ‘The House of Commons is very sensible of the king’s dealings, and of our brethren’s (the Scots), in this late transaction…. It has this day voted as follows: 1st, they will make no more addresses to the king; 2nd, none shall apply to him without leave of the two houses, upon pain of being guilty of high treason; 3rd, they will receive nothing from the king.’ Henceforth there could be but two {323} alternatives. Either the new royalist rising would prevail and restore a short-lived tyranny of presbyters to end in a longer one of priests, or it would fail, and on its wreck be established a military republic.

LECTURE III.

In the last lecture I followed the course of events to the time when it became clear that a military republic was the only possible alternative for an unconditional triumph of Charles. Whether this republic should be more or less exclusive, depended on the possibility of bringing the English presbyterians to an understanding with the erastian or independent party in parliament, and both to an understanding with the army. During the spring of 1648 we find Cromwell, true to his instinct of comprehension, working for this end, and rewarded by all parties with jealousy for his pains. He had a conference at his house, Ludlow tells us, ‘between those called the grandees of the house and army, and the commonwealth’s men.’ The grandees of the house would probably be the original members of the Long parliament who might be of erastian or independent sympathies, such as St. John, Nathaniel Fiennes, one or two uninteresting lords, and perhaps Vane, who was not a declared republican. The commonwealth’s men, not grandees, would be members elected to fill up vacancies at the end of 1645, such as Ludlow himself, Hutchinson, and Thomas Scott, officers of the army, but not of Cromwell’s training. Marten, though in standing a grandee, headed this republican party. The grandees, according to Ludlow, with Cromwell at their head, ‘kept themselves in the clouds, and would not declare their judgments either for a monarchical, aristocratical, or democratical government, maintaining that any of them might be good in themselves, or for us, according as providence should direct us. The commonwealth’s men declared that monarchy was neither good in itself, nor for us. That it was not desirable in itself they urged from the eighth chapter of the 1st book of Samuel, where the choice of a king was charged upon the Israelites by God himself as a rejection of him.’ That it was not good ‘for us’ was proved ‘by the infinite mischiefs and oppressions we had suffered under {324} it and by it; that indeed our ancestors had consented to be governed by a single person, but with this proviso, that he should govern according to the direction of the law, which he always bound himself by oath to perform; that the king had broken this oath, and therefore dissolved our allegiance, protection and obedience being reciprocal; that … it seemed to be a duty incumbent upon the representatives of the people to call him to account for the blood shed in the war … and then to proceed to the establishment of an equal commonwealth, founded upon the consent of the people, and providing for the rights and liberties of all men.’ So elaborate an utterance of republican formulae did not look like conciliation, and finally, says Ludlow, ‘Cromwell took up a cushion and flung it at my head and then ran downstairs; but I overtook him with another, which made him hasten down faster than he desired.’

He was not more successful with the presbyterians, whose leaders he got to confer with the independents, and whom he afterwards addressed in the city. ‘The city,’ according to a contemporary presbyterian writer, ‘were now wiser than our first parents, and rejected the serpent and his subtleties.’ The presbyterian zeal in fact, as it boasted of itself, would learn nothing by events. During the summer of 1648, while the army under Cromwell and Ireton was trampling out the royalist risings and scattering the intrusive Scots (no longer led by Lesley), Holles availed himself of the absence of the military members to return to the house and regain his majority. Under his direction, and at the pressure of the city, negotiations in the exclusive presbyterian interest were re-opened with the king. These led to concessions on his part, only made to gain time, which at last, in the beginning of December, in a house of two hundred and forty-four, were voted a sufficient basis of agreement. This vote made the final rent between military and parliamentary power, and Vane, who more than anyone else dreaded this rent, resisted it to the utmost. Marten, however, was already bringing up Cromwell from the north, and Cromwell a few days before had given voice to the ‘great zeal he found among his officers for impartial justice on offenders.’ Soldiers full of the same zeal were already in the suburbs. The day after the vote was passed, colonel Pride ‘purged’ the house of the ‘royalising’ members; within two days Cromwell appeared in it arm in {325} arm with Marten, and the military republic was virtually established.

It is needless to repeat the story of the king’s trial and execution, or tell how his judges wore all the dignity of men who believed themselves in the sight of God and the world to be violating the false divinity of consecrated custom that a true divinity might appear, or how Charles, after a few bursts of misplaced contempt or passion, yet at the last, in Marvell’s words,

‘Nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene,
But with his keener eye
The axe’s edge did try;

Nor called the gods, with vulgar spite,
To vindicate his helpless right;
But bowed his comely head
Down, as upon a bed.’

The new government, in the exhilaration of sudden success, and conscious that its strength lay in the awe which it inspired, ‘went on roundly with its business.’ Considering its position, however, it kept its hands strangely free from blood. It had the temptation, generally so fatal in times of revolution, of feeling irresistible force at its command for the moment without the least guarantee of permanent stability. Yet its severity was confined to inflicting banishment and confiscation on fifteen magnates who had been prominent in the second war, to imprisoning a few others, and to killing Hamilton, Holland, Capel, and colonel Foyer. Of these, Capel alone, according to the ideas of the time, could have hoped for a better fate, for he alone was exempt from the charge of treachery, but the very greatness of his character, as Cromwell with his usual explicitness stated, made it necessary for the commonwealth that he should die.