Four Lectures on the English Revolution

by Thomas Hill Green

If Ireton, however, held the pen, the scheme, we may be sure, was Cromwell’s no less than his, and a more statesmanlike plan of reconstruction it is difficult to conceive. If carried out in its completeness it would have given England at once a genuine parliamentary government and a free national church. Two centuries of government by borough-mongering and corruption, of church-statesmanship and state-churchmanship would have been saved. Charles, as we have seen, rejected it, and began his game anew. No such opportunity for reconciliation could ever occur again, but Cromwell’s purpose remained the same, {347} though his mode of executing it varied with events. The anxiety for a settlement which should reconcile the old interests with the new enthusiasm is the key to his subsequent conduct. The reconciliation, for reasons which I have sufficiently described, was, in fact, impossible. The new piece would not fit the old garment. To us, looking backward with historical calmness, it seems well that it would not, for the enthusiasm adjusted to the interests would have been poetry translated into prose. That of which it is the essence to be motive, negative, abstract, would have become fixed, positive, and concrete. The sudden palpable reconciliation of the spirit and the flesh, apparently, perhaps, a spiritualising of the flesh, would have been really a carnalising of the spirit. The hopelessness, however, of the pacification which he contemplated was the tragedy of Cromwell’s later life. In the stress of protecting the ‘godly interest’ against itself, ‘worldly mixtures’ inevitably came to prevail over the pure spiritual fire. To the saints he seemed in serving the Lord’s people to lose his own soul, and his conscience was too sympathetic not to shrink under their judgment. Its burden, perhaps, found voice in his exclamation on his death-bed that ‘he knew he had been in grace once.’

There were certain qualities and beliefs in Cromwell, well known in their outward character, which have won for him par excellence the title of hypocrite. Looked at from the inner side, which the preservation of his letters enables us to see, they appear as the plastic medium through which an honest purpose of conciliation worked, and for lack of which the same purpose was inoperative in others. The ultimate spring of his conduct was a belief, wrought to special strength in the formation and triumphant leadership of the sectarian army, that he was the chosen champion of the despised people of the Lord. In the realisation of this belief, it was his habit (in modern language) to wait on events, and to surrender himself to temporary sympathy with men of the most various views. That this sympathy, though sometimes unctuous and exaggerated in expression, was yet perfectly genuine, is proved by its evident infectiousness. Nor was it really deceptive. There is no sign that he ever committed himself to the positive maintenance of the doctrines of the men to whose sympathy he appealed. On the contrary, {348} there is evidence that the protection of the godly interest in its freedom of conscience, by whatever means might be available, was the only line of conduct to which he ever committed himself, and to this he was faithful throughout. He caught eagerly at every element in the character or belief of those with whom he had to do, which might be turned to account for the furtherance of this end. When it ceased to further it, it lost his sympathy. The interpretation which the men whom he thus treated naturally put on his conduct was that he sought to use them for his selfish purposes. But it was just the qualities which ruined his reputation with the less compliant of his contemporaries and with posterity that enabled him to do his work. For his reputation he cared little, for his work much. What we call waiting on events, he called a recognition of the ‘outward dispensations’ of God. His belief that this guidance was divine made him at once more bold and more free from selfish regards in following it. There is a touch of nature in a letter of his to Oliver St. John, written just after his rout of Hamilton’s army. [1]

‘Remember my love to my dear brother, H. Vane. I pray he make not too little, nor I too much, of outward dispensations…. Let us all be not careful what men will make of these actings. They, will they, nill they, shall fulfil the good pleasure of God; and we shall serve our generations. Our rest we expect elsewhere; that will be durable. Care we not for to-morrow, nor for anything.’

[1] [Carlyle, ib. No. lxvii.]

This utterance, fresh from the heart, explains the subsequent alienation of Cromwell from Vane and the high republicans. He had the fatalism about him without which nothing great is achieved in times of political crisis; the consciousness of a divine work that must be done through him, though personal peace and honour were wrecked in the doing. They were men of theory and principle, ‘brave men and true.’ but with a sense of what was ‘due to their own reputation,’ or, to speak, more kindly, men who would sacrifice themselves or a nation indifferently to the maintenance of what might merely be a formula. In these days of playing at heroes among the ‘inferior races,’ such men, perhaps, receive less credit than is their due, nor is it my purpose to measure the man of principle against the ‘man of destiny,’ who may be a political gambler, but merely to indicate their inevitable {349} collision. If Cromwell had been a political gambler, he would not have been always showing his hand, nor should we have the strange collection of impromptu letters and speeches, speeches of which ‘he could not recall four words’ after they were spoken, which let us see into the workings of his soul.

In the last lecture I showed that during the interval between the final break of the independents and army with the king, marked by the vote of no more addresses at the beginning of 1648, and his setting out for the extinction of Hamilton, Cromwell was labouring for such a reconciliation of parties as would gain for the inevitable commonwealth a more general support than that of the professed republican clique. The equal impracticability of presbyterians and republicans, or, if we like, their equal devotion to principle, made reconciliation impossible, and the republicans for the time triumphed. Strong in a text of scripture, in a theory of right borrowed from the municipal republics of Holland and Switzerland, they shut their eyes and had their way. Cromwell knew well to what such a spirit must lead, and his irritation at it once broke out in a conversation with Ludlow. ‘They were a proud set of people,’ he said, ‘only considerable in their own conceits.’ For the time, however, he had to leave them to their conceit, that he might crush the common enemy. During the campaign, the direction in which the logic of events, of ‘outward dispensations,’ was leading became more apparent, and the sense of it pervades his letters. The rapture of successful war brought back to him the old enthusiasm, the consciousness of being the chosen leader of the saints. The righteous judge, he thought, had been appealed to in battle, and had shown which cause was his ‘even to amazement and admiration.’

‘Surely, sir,’ he writes to the speaker after the rout at Preston, ‘this is nothing but the hand of God; and wherever anything in this world is exalted, or exalts itself, God will pull it down; for this is the day wherein he alone will be exalted. It is not fit for me to give advice … more than to pray you, and all that acknowledge God, that they would exalt him, and not hate his people, that are as the apple of his eye, and for whom even kings shall be reproved.’ [1]

[1] [ib. No. lxiv.]

The prosaic meaning of these new ‘dispensations,’ we {350} shall say, was that the military excitement against the royal ‘delinquent’ had become uncontrollable, that Hamilton’s invasion, instigated and aided by the royalist presbyterians in England, had rendered their fusion with the commonwealth’s men impossible, and that the republic must represent the latter party and the army alone. This was no doubt the final judgment which Cromwell’s practical insight had unwillingly arrived at. But we do not really understand this judgment or its consequences, till we appreciate the ‘wondrous alchemy’ of the enthusiasm with which it was fused and molten in Cromwell’s own mind. The whole mental process is exhibited in a letter to Colonel Hammond, written when it had become clear that the presbyterian majority in parliament were determined to treat with the king and restore him to London. Its object was to induce Hammond to disregard the impending vote of parliament, which (as we have seen) would have been ruinous to the cause of free conscience, and to give the king up to the army.

‘You say,’ he writes,’ God hath appointed authorities among the nations to which active or passive obedience is to be yielded. This resides in England in the parliament.’ Then comes Cromwell’s reply to this view; ‘Authorities and powers are the ordinance of God. This or that species is of human institution, and limited, some with larger, others with stricter bands, each one according to its constitution. But I do not therefore think the authorities may do anything, and yet such obedience be due. All agree that there are cases in which it is lawful to resist…. The query is whether ours be such a case.’ In answer to this query, Cromwell commends to Hammond three considerations; ‘first, whether salus populi be a sound position; secondly, whether in the way in hand’ (i.e. by the proposed treaty), ‘really and before the Lord, before whom conscience has to stand, this be provided for; or if the whole fruit of the war is not like to be frustrated, and all most like to turn to what it was, and worse…. Thirdly, whether this army be not a lawful power, called by God to fight against the king upon some stated grounds; and being in power to such ends, may not oppose one name of authority, for those ends, as well as another name, since it was not the outward authority summoning them that by its power made the quarrel lawful, but the quarrel was lawful in itself…. My dear friend, let us look into providences; surely they mean somewhat. {351} They hang so together; have been so constant, so clear, unclouded. Malice, swoln malice against God’s people, now called ‘saints,’ to root out their name; and yet they’ (the saints) ‘getting arms, and therein blessed with defence and more! I desire he that is for a principle of suffering would not too much slight this…. Not the encountering difficulties makes us to tempt God; but the acting before and without faith. If the Lord have in any measure persuaded his people, as generally he hath, of the lawfulness, nay of the duty, this persuasion prevailing on the heart is faith; and acting thereupon is acting in faith; and the more the difficulties are, the more the faith…. Have not some of our friends, by their passive principle, … been occasioned to overlook what is just and honest, and to think the people of God may have as much or more good the one way than the other? Good by this man against whom the Lord hath witnessed; and whom thou knowest!’ [1]