During more than two years, from the midsummer of 1649 to the autumn of 1651, the republican oligarchy was able to shut its eyes to the real situation. The military spirit was absorbed in the conquest under Cromwell of Ireland and Scotland, and the English royalists, hardly recovered from their crushing failure at home, were watching the fortune of war in these other countries. The only chance for the permanence of republicanism was that it should avail itself of this interval to establish itself on a more popular basis, and initiate practical reforms. If it had had the will or ability to do so, the levelling clamour, which with the return of the army was sure to be heard again, would have had nothing in popular sentiment to appeal to. The name of a ‘free parliament’ had been made to English ears, by the very men to whom it was now a word of ill omen, the familiar symbol of good government. The interference with the ordinary course of justice by special courts and parliamentary committees was a grievance that everyone could understand. An ecclesiastical anarchy, such as the journal of George Fox the quaker exhibits to us, was a scandal that came home to the parochial mind. In an ordinary parish, a presbyterian clergyman would be in possession of the benefice, to attempt {343} an irritating but ineffectual discipline and haggle over tithes, while in the same place there would be a knot of ‘common-prayer men’ with an excluded minister at hand to stimulate their zeal, and a congregation of baptists or independents, who, now that their friends were in power, would see no reason why their enemies should be beneficed. In the absence of any settled rule, each party might hope by local faction or intrigue to get the tithes for itself, and meanwhile would resist the payment of them to its adversaries.
The only hopeful line then for the commonwealth’s men to take would have been to provide for the election of a new parliament by reformed constituencies, to abolish all criminal prosecution not sanctioned by the common-law, to reform chancery and simplify legal process, and to resettle the church on some plan that would admit at least the independents and the ‘moderate’ or anti-prelatist episcopalians, and substitute a fixed salary for tithes. Whether this line was practicable for them is another question. They had no hold on popular feeling; a powerful Scotch army, with the young king in its keeping, was in the field against them, and the presbyterian clergy were praying for its success. Under such circumstances there was much plausibility in Henry Marten’s argument that their ‘commonwealth was yet an infant, of a weak growth and a very tender constitution’; and therefore his opinion was, ‘that nobody could be so fit to nurse it as the mother who brought it forth; and that they should not think of putting it under any other hands till it had obtained more years and vigour.’ Marten, however, had forgotten that the true mother of the republic was not the Rump parliament, but the army, whose maternal discipline, unless some foster-parentage could be found in popular interests, would be too much for the child as soon as it sought to take a way of its own.
The essential difficulty of the situation was aggravated by the oligarchical temper which it bred in the republican leaders. With the best of them this temper took that higher form which appears in Milton’s complaint, [1] that when God has given the victory to a cause in the field of battle, ‘then comes the task to those worthies which are the soul of it, to be sweat and laboured out amidst the throng and noses of vulgar and irrational men.’ Even in this form it cannot face facts, for it is {344} not this pride of exclusion but the higher pride, which can possess itself in sympathy and comprehension, that represents the divine reason in the world. But the pride of protected intellect, once clothed with political power, soon passes into the jealousy of a clique. So it was within our memory in France under the Orleanist régime, and so it was with the leading spirits of the Long parliament. They mistook the success of their military administration for a real faculty of government, and hugged power for its own sake, in the mood of a self-conscious aristocracy of virtue. If this was the case with the best of them, a more vulgar kind of self-interest was sure to prevail among the rest. Thus, though their administration was singularly pure, they got credit even among their best friends, if Milton’s ‘Second defence’ may be taken as expressing his real mind, for a spirit of faction and obstructiveness.
[1] [Tenure of kings and magistrates.]
The one man among them who seems really to have comprehended the situation, was Sir Henry Vane. Shrinking from the touch of military violence, he had withdrawn from parliament after Pride purged it, though the purgation was specially in his interest, and had only been induced to join the council of state at the pressing instance of Cromwell. He at once saw the need of popularising the government, and stirred the question of new elections. A committee for considering the question seems to have been constantly sitting during the first year of the commonwealth, with Vane as its chairman, which reported at the beginning of 1650 in favour of a new parliament of four hundred members, and a re-arrangement of constituencies. A corresponding resolution was voted by the house, but no bill was introduced, and meanwhile Vane’s energies were absorbed by the management of the wars with the Scots and the Hollanders. On this, as on the other pressing questions, parliament could never get beyond the stage of resolutions. It resolved to deal with the question of tithes, to provide for popular education out of ecclesiastical funds, and to simplify the law, but no actual legislation was achieved. Thus by the autumn of 1651 it could take credit for an effective administration of war and finance, and for the introduction of a preaching ministry and schoolmasters into Wales. Towards facing the hostile forces which only slumbered around them, towards meeting the demands of the enthusiasm of reformation to {345} which they owed their temporary power, they had done absolutely nothing. On September 6 they heard the speaker read Cromwell’s account of the battle of Worcester, ‘a mercy’ of which ‘the dimensions are beyond my thoughts,’ ‘it is for aught I know a crowning mercy.’ Cromwell, meanwhile, was riding up to London with a look which Mr. Peters, his chaplain, interpreted, or afterwards believed himself to have interpreted, to mean that he would be king of England yet. At Aylesbury he was met, on behalf of the parliament, by St. John and Whitelock, both special representatives of the lawyer’s desire for ‘settlement,’ and ‘government by a single person,’ with whom, especially with St. John, he had long discourse. On the 16th, we read in Whitelock, he took his seat in the house, and there is the significant addition, ‘the parliament resumed the debate touching a new representative,’ also ‘of an act of oblivion and general pardon, with some expedients for satisfaction of soldiery and the ease of the people.’ The question of settlement was now in the hands of one who would not allow it to tarry.
LECTURE IV.
In the last lecture we saw that the immediate result of Cromwell’s presence in the house after his return from Worcester was the revival of the questions of a new election and a general settlement, which, during the last two years the republican oligarchy, with its head in the bush, had not chosen to face. In pressing these questions Cromwell was true to the instinct of comprehension which had governed his course throughout. It appears from the Memoirs of Berkley, who had been the chief negotiator with him on the king’s behalf in the summer of 1647, that he was then convinced of the difficulty of establishing a government on so narrow a foundation as was afforded either by the army or an oligarchical parliament. His project at that time was to restore the king on the condition of his calling a new parliament, from which he declared royalists should be excluded. This forms the basis of the propositions which the army offered to the king, while he was still in their keeping, and which, with expansion and variation according to circumstance, were pressed upon parliament during the following {346} year. They provide that the sitting parliament should come to an end within a year; that afterwards a parliament should be summoned every two years, to sit for not less than a hundred and twenty, or more than two hundred and forty days; that members should be taken away from the decayed towns, and representation awarded to the several counties according to the amount of taxation. No one who had borne arms for the king was to be eligible to parliament for five years. The old privy council was to be superseded by a council of state, of which the members for the next seven years were to be agreed on at once; after that they were to be nominated by parliament. The coercive jurisdiction of bishops was to be abolished; the use of the common prayer and the taking of the covenant to be alike voluntary. Subject to these conditions the king was to be restored, and a general act of oblivion was to be passed, with power to parliament to except certain persons, not more than five in number, from its benefit.
This document was supposed to come directly from the hand of Ireton, who was more at his ease in composition than Cromwell. As Cromwell says in a letter of this period to his daughter, Ireton’s wife, he writes to her rather than to her husband, ‘for one line of mine begets many of his.’
‘In these declarations and transactions of the army,’ says Whitelock, [1] ‘colonel Ireton was chiefly employed, or took on him the business of the pen.’ He was ‘of a working and laborious brain and fancy, and set himself much upon these businesses, wherein he was encouraged and assisted by lieutenant-general Cromwell, his father-in-law. Having been bred in the Temple, he had a little knowledge of law, which led him into the more errors.’
[1] [ii. 162.]