Four Lectures on the English Revolution

by Thomas Hill Green

The great interests of the nation at that time may be taken as the landed, the mercantile, and the clerical; and the republic at starting might reckon on hostility from each of them. With the landed interest it dealt at once too severely to have its friendship, and too lightly to crush it. If it had adopted a sweeping measure of confiscation, as other revolutionary governments have done, and as it did itself in Ireland, it might have settled the soldiers on the confiscated lands, thus easing itself of their too obtrusive support, while it established a permanent interest in its favour over the whole country. As it was, the land was only confiscated in a few special cases, when it was given to the various grandees of the parliament, in reward of services, and in return for money spent on the public behalf. The ordinary gentry who had been in arms for the king, ‘delinquents,’ as they were called, were allowed to retain their estates on payment by way of composition of some part of the income. They thus retained their old means of influence, along with a memory of a grievance to intensify their natural royalism. Nor was the trouble got over once for all at the foundation of the commonwealth. The composition paid on the estates was one of the chief sources of revenue, and when, through a Dutch war or the like, the republic was short of money, delinquents were hunted out who had hitherto escaped. Thus the sore was kept running, and if the humbled gentry, like {331} colonel Poyer of Pembroke, were ‘sober and penitent in the morning,’ they were also like him often ‘drunk and full of plots in the afternoon.’ Their meetings for horse-races and cock-fighting were reckoned nurseries of disaffection, and the best security against them was that secrets sworn to over the bottle were not generally well kept.

The royalist squire, when he was not at a cock-fighting, would often have his loyalty fanned by an excluded episcopal clergyman whom he had taken as his chaplain. A large number of the clergy, as we have seen, had been driven from their livings by the imposition of the covenant. A fifth of the yearly income of their several benefices was set apart for the benefit of their families (an example not followed at the ejectment of St. Bartholomew’s day), but the excluded clergy themselves were liable to be driven from their old parishes, and would generally take refuge with the royalist gentry. It would seem indeed that under the commonwealth, which, in England at least, was true to its principle of toleration, there was nothing to prevent an episcopalian clergyman who would recognise the republican government from being presented to a living or from using the Common Prayer in his church. Some residue of the old assembly still sat at Westminster, to examine men who presented themselves for ordination or induction to livings, but they had no power to compel such presentation, and there is no sign that they were uniformly resorted to. From passages in Baxter’s life we may infer that many moderate episcopalians, men, that is, who were in favour, according to the technical language of the time, of compresbyterial, as distinct from prelatical, episcopacy, held benefices under the new régime. Still there were no doubt numbers of excluded ‘prelatical divines’ about the country, and while they were natural enemies of the commonwealth, the presbyterian ministers were not its friends. Whatever was not sectarian in it, was erastian. Its very existence they reckoned a violation of the covenant, and, if its abolition of kingship could have been borne, its refusal to give the presbyteries a coercive jurisdiction, its declared intention to remove all penal ordinances in matters of conscience, they could not brook. They refused to read its ordinances from the pulpit, as had previously been done, they prayed openly against it, and turned the monthly fast into a general exercise of disaffection. The parliament on its part issued stringent {332} injunctions that all ministers should subscribe the engagement of fidelity to the commonwealth, and finding that the monthly fast had become a ‘fast for strife and debate,’ it declared its abolition and appointed fasts of its own on special occasions. The ministers, however, ‘condemned the engagement to the pit of hell’ and shut up the churches on the new fast days. According to Baxter, as a general rule only the sectarians and the old cavaliers, who were seldom ‘sick of the disease of a scrupulous conscience,’ would swallow the engagement. He not only refused it himself, but circulated letters against it among the soldiers, ‘barking monitories and mementoes,’ in Milton’s phrase. Yet he seems to have been left undisturbed, nor except at the universities do we hear of any penalties for the refusal of the engagement being inflicted. The parliament knew that the presbyterian pulpit was the most powerful lever of popular opinion in the country, and showed a magnanimous patience in dealing with it. It put out declarations, promising protection to the ministers in their benefices, and a maintenance of all ordinances that had been made for reformation in doctrine, worship, and discipline, except such as were penal and coercive. At last it passed an order that state affairs were not to be discussed in sermons, and appointed a committee to receive informations against such as disregarded it. The beneficed ministers, however, stimulated by missives from the Scotch kirk, now in arms for Charles II., continued, says the gentle Mrs. Hutchinson, to ‘spit fire out of their pulpits,’ and even the rout of their allies at Dunbar, though it made their tongues less dangerous, did not make them more smooth.

The reason of the case is obvious. It is the true nemesis of human life that any spiritual impulse, not accompanied by clear comprehensive thought, is enslaved by its own realisation. Presbyterianism at the beginning of the war had been a struggling impulse, noble, but not understanding its own nobleness. It had now, with success, hardened into an interest; its inarticulate idea had become a shallow, though articulate formula; and it was seeking to suppress the spiritual force in which it had itself originated. The genuine commonwealth’s men, on the other hand, were still in the stage of the ‘unbodied thought.’ They announced principles. In practice the presbyterian clergy should be supported and well paid, but universal toleration must be maintained, and tithes were {333} declared judaic and objectionable. The offensiveness of such principles did more to provoke the clergy than the excellence of the practice, which Baxter, at least, was obliged to confess, did to conciliate them.

The best illustration of the real feeling of the republican clique in London towards the preaching presbyterian royalists is to be found in Milton’s treatise on the ‘Tenure of kings and magistrates,’ written just at this crisis, when he was in constant communication with the chief commonwealth’s men.

‘Divines, if we observe them, have their postures and their motions no less expertly than they that practise feats in the artillery ground. Sometimes they seem, furiously to march on, and presently march counter; by-and-by they stand, and then retreat; or if need be, can face about or wheel in a whole body, with that cunning and dexterity as is almost unperceivable, to wind themselves by shifting ground into places of more advantage. And providence only must be the drum; providence the word of command, that calls them from above, but always to some larger benefice…. For while the hope to be made classic and provincial lords led them on, while pluralities greased them thick and deep, to the shame and scandal of religion, more than all sects and heresies they exclaim against; then to fight against the king’s person, and no less a party of his lords and commons, or to put force on both the houses was good, was lawful, was no resisting of superior powers; they only were powers not to be resisted who countenanced the good, and punished the evil. But now that their censorious domineering is not suffered to be universal, truth and conscience to be freed, tithes and pluralities to be no more, though competent allowance provided, and the warm experience of large gifts, and they so good at taking them, yet now to exclude and seize on impeached members, to bring delinquents without exemption to a fair tribunal by the common law against murder, is to be no less than Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. He who but erewhile in the pulpits was a cursed tyrant, an enemy to God and saints, laden with innocent blood, is now, though nothing penitent, a lawful magistrate, a sovereign lord, the Lord’s anointed, not to be touched, though by themselves imprisoned.’ [1]

[1] [Milton’s Prose Works, ii. pp. 45 and 6, ed. 1848.]

When we reflect that the men of whom this was written were the most active and popular section of the beneficed {334} clergy, and that the other section, the accommodating episcopalians, had been covertly hostile to the parliament all along, we shall appreciate the estrangement of the ideas, that were ruling for the time, from the average sentiment of the country. The only agency through which the government could now hope to work on this sentiment was that of the independents and sectaries, who were unbeneficed, and even the support of the independents was not very hearty, for independency in the larger towns was becoming an ‘interest,’ while that of the sectaries might at any time become unmanageable.

The republic, having thus to reckon on open hostility from the clergy, and on a deeper hatred, tempered with fear, from most of the gentry, had no countervailing influence with the commercial class. This class, which never loves experiments in government, took its political tone largely from the presbyterian preachers; and in the city, as we have seen, gave great strength in the crisis of 1648 to the royalist reaction. The financial necessities, moreover, of an armed republic aggravated the offence of its moral and spiritual innovation. Hitherto the army had been supplied with provisions by a system of free quarter. Its leaders had been quite aware of the popular grievance which this system caused, and which only its admirable discipline prevented from being far greater. The removal of it had been a constant topic in the documents issuing from the army-council; but this implied the introduction of new and heavy taxation. The purged parliament, however, had spirit for the work, and quickly imposed an ‘assessment’ of 90,000_l_. a month (more than 1,000,000_l_. a year). Such a burden was sure to be a permanent source of complaint, but for the present the impressive display of restrained power, with which the new government had begun its rule, and the apprehension that it might be the only present alternative for a worse rule of levellers, had made the city more civil. At the special instance of Cromwell and Vane it advanced money on security of the tax, and the lord mayor, with other city magnates, was placed on the committee of assessment. A prompt suppression of a levelling mutiny by Cromwell, in May 1649, seems for the time to have composed the commercial mind, and a few days after a great banquet was given by the city to the parliament and officers of the army, remarkable chiefly {335} for the description of it by Whitelock, which indicates that in one respect at least, good taste, superior to that of our times, went along with puritan gravity. ‘The feast was very sumptuous, the music only drums and trumpets, no healths drunk, nor any incivility.’ The mercantile interest was further conciliated by an act passed soon afterwards (the beginning of legislation which was gradually to transfer the carrying trade of the world from the Dutch to the English), to the effect that no foreign ship should bring merchandise to England except such as was of the growth or manufacture of the country to which the ship belonged. Still the breach between the high spiritual endeavour on which alone the republic really rested, and the aspiration of the smug citizen who left such endeavour to his minister and to Sundays, was too great for orderly and vigorous administration to fill. The condition of this administration, moreover, was that Cromwell should keep its enemies at a distance.

With such dangerous elements all around it, the household of the republic was by no means united in itself. It rested on a temporary coalition between three sets of men, between whom as we have seen there was no real love; the genuine commonwealth’s men, a section of the ‘grandees of the parliament,’ and the leaders of the army. The ‘grandees of the parliament’ had, with scarcely an exception, kept their hands from the death-warrant of Charles. They recognised the new order of things partly to avoid a breach with the army, partly from fear of presbyterian ascendency and an unchecked royalist reaction. So far as they looked ahead at all, they probably contemplated a re-establishment of monarchy in the person of the duke of Gloucester, the late king’s youngest son, whom the parliament had in its keeping. This at least was the case with Whitelock, who was in his way a representative man. On the new council of state (of forty), which included seven peers or eldest sons of peers, five baronets, four knights, and some temporising lawyers, this section had a numerical majority. On the other hand, the stiff republicans were in a decided minority on the council. Only ten regicides were upon it, and from these must be deducted Cromwell and one or two officers whom he could command, and who were not republican on principle. The most eminent of this section were Marten, Bradshaw, Ludlow, and Scott. Bradshaw, a special friend of Milton, had presided at the trial of Charles, {336} in a high beaver hat lined with steel, with the composure, according to Milton, of a man with whom the trial of kings had been the business of life. He was afterwards president of the council of state, where Whitelock, a rival and perhaps jealous lawyer, complains that he did not understand the nature of his office, and made long discourses of his own that no one wanted to hear. Scott had been an officer in the new-model army, but seems already to have been jealous of Cromwell, being one of those men with whom hatred of the ‘rule of a single person’ was a principle of life. In later days, when Monk was supreme, the restoration inevitable, and the republicans fleeing, he stood up in parliament and said that, though he knew not where to hide his head, yet he must say that not his hand only but his heart had been in the execution of Charles. As might be expected, the restoration brought him the honour of martyrdom for his cause. Ludlow was a man of the same temper. His qualities were clearly much valued by Cromwell, and there seems to have been more real friendship between them at this time than Ludlow, looking back upon it from his exile at Vevay in the light of subsequent events, was willing to admit. Marten alone had some touch of the modern French republican about him. We have seen with what zest he arranged the more sensational incidents of the commonwealth. When the motion for the abolition of the house of lords, as ‘useless and dangerous,’ was being discussed, he proposed to substitute the words ‘useless but not dangerous.’ On another occasion, it is said, in drawing up a republican document, he spoke of ‘England being restored to its ancient government of commonwealth,’ and in answer to an objection that a commonwealth never before existed in England, quoted a text which had always puzzled him, where a man blind from his birth was said to be ‘restored’ to the sight he should have had. Under cover of this gaiety, however, and of a life reputed to be lewd, Marten had a strong republican enthusiasm, which he carried with him to his death through an imprisonment of twenty years.

These republicans, one would suppose, must have felt the uneasiness of their position. They had been the first to appeal from the unpurged parliament to the army. Ludlow, indeed, in his memoirs professed to have been shocked when Cromwell, in the spring of 1647, whispered to him in the house {337} that Holles and his party would never leave ‘till the army pulled them out by the ears’; yet by his own confession a few months later, during the treaty of Newport, he urged Ireton to put force on the parliament before Ireton himself was prepared to do so, and Marten had done the like with Cromwell. To the army they had thus appealed, but to the army, now that they were successful, they no longer meant to go. Its enthusiasm was not theirs. They had too much of the ancient Roman in them, Marten, perhaps, rather of the ancient Greek, to sympathise with the ‘foolishness of Christ’ as it was presented in the army. It was not in them that men, whose pastime was preaching and being preached to, who discovered strange lights in their bibles to interpret strange events, could find a natural leader, but in one who in his private prayers would ‘throw himself on his face and pour out his soul with tears for a quarter of an hour,’ who never went into battle without a text to feed on, who sang psalms as he led them to victory. The army, though it had no representative of its peculiar spirit on the council of state except Cromwell, was the real constituency of the republican parliament. It contained dangerous elements over which parliament had not the least control, and which might at any time overturn the parliamentary system. These may be summed up as the spirit of simple military arrogance, represented by Lambert, the levelling spirit represented by Lilburne and Wildman, and the ‘Fifth Monarchy’ spirit represented by Harrison. Lambert appears to have had the most conspicuous military talent of any of Cromwell’s officers. In the critical spring of 1648 he held an independent command in the north of England. He showed great skill in hanging on the skirts of Hamilton’s army before Cromwell joined him, and afterwards headed the pursuit. At Dunbar he led the fatal attack on the Scotch right wing, and next year when Charles was marching to Worcester, hung on his flank with cavalry, as he had before done on Hamilton’s. But as soon as he was off active service, he became mischievous. Vain, restless, and of extravagant habits, he perpetually chafed alike against Cromwell’s control and the authority of the parliament. He alone of the leading officers had never obtained a seat in parliament, and thus never became habituated to its civilising influence. Mrs. Hutchinson, while including him and Cromwell in the same condemnation, admits that there was this difference, {338} that while the one was gallant and great, the other had nothing but an unworthy pride, most insolent in prosperity and as abject and base in adversity.’ The term ‘leveller,’ then as now, was very loosely and ambiguously applied. According to Mrs. Hutchinson, who is a good authority on this point, the nickname was originally given to a: