Four Lectures on the English Revolution

by Thomas Hill Green

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

That the enthusiasm of this letter is sincere it would be hard to dispute; that it might be a dangerous cover for self-deceit, not less so. That in Cromwell, as a matter of fact, it was an expansive element, in which a sympathy with the ‘waiting spirit’ of the sectaries, such as was necessary for their guidance, went along with a prevailing zeal for the ‘salus populi’ and a clear judgment of its needs, is the only interpretation that will explain the history as a whole. To the guidance of a man possessing such a strange compound of qualities, it is due that our great religious war ended not simply in blood, but in a real step forwards of English society.

‘God’s providence and necessity, not his own choice,’ as he solemnly said, having forced him to pull down monarchy and put the republic in its place, he once more pressed forward his plan for a general adjustment of interests under a new parliament. The possibility of a settlement, however, which should secure the ‘godly interest,’ was very different now from what it would have been if Charles’s spleen and superstition had permitted him honestly to come to terms in 1647. Then Cromwell had hoped by restoring the king with a council, which might have been under his own direction, to obtain that unity of initiative under a familiar name, which, important at all times, is specially necessary when order is to be rebuilt out of a chaos of factions heated with civil war.

{352} Henceforward there could but be two alternatives. The familiar unity might be obtained, as it was ultimately to be at the blessed Restoration, but only at the cost of an absolute suppression of the ‘godly interest’: or an unfamiliar unity might take its place, but only on the condition of its maintenance by a hand that could hold the sword, and a temper that by either force or sympathy could control the sectaries, a condition which death might at any time remove. The military ecstasy, however, was still strong upon Cromwell, and he had a spirit for the work. In Whitelock’s journal of February 25, [1] not quite a month after the execution of Charles, we read,

‘From the council of state Cromwell and his son Ireton went home with me to supper; where they were very cheerful, and seemed extremely well-pleased; we discoursed together till twelve o’clock at night, and they told me wonderful observations of God’s providence in the affairs of the war, and in the business of the army’s coming to London and seizing the members; in all which were miraculous passages.’

[1] [ii. 540.]

Cromwell had yet to learn that the providence on which he waited wrought by a longer method, because it had a wider comprehension than was dreamt of in the puritan philosophy.

In the following spring Cromwell was appointed to the command of the army that was to conquer Ireland. Thence he was recalled in the summer of 1650, and shortly afterwards was sent into Scotland. Thus till his return from the battle of Worcester in September 1651, he had no chance of pressing his projects of conciliation and reform at the headquarters of government. Such glimpses as we have, however, of his civil activity during this period show a constant tendency in the same direction. It was he who prevailed on Vane to join the council of state, and obtained a modification of the engagement to suit Vane’s views. Thus to restore to the government the ablest civilian of the time, who had a special dislike for military domination, was a strange course if it was his object to clear the way for himself, but a most natural one if his object was general conciliation. Again, in the summer of 1650, when it was proposed to send the army under Fairfax into Scotland, and while Fairfax, ‘being hourly persuaded by the presbyterian ministers and his own lady, who was a great patroness of them,’ was doubting of the justness of the war, and finally resolving to lay down his {353} command, Cromwell was foremost in urging him to retain it. The memoir-writers of the time, interpreting events by the jealousy of later years, treat Cromwell’s earnestness on this occasion as simulated, a piece of the ‘great subtlety with which he now carried himself,’ but what its object might be, if it were simulated, they do not explain. If his object were personal aggrandisement, it is unaccountable that he should go out of his way to put the command of the army in the hands of another. If on the other hand it were a general settlement, it was quite natural that he should seek to conciliate the presbyterian interest to the commonwealth, in the person of the man who alone combined presbyterian sympathies with toleration of the sectaries.

But though Cromwell, during this period, was quite free from the thought which Mr. Peters attributed to him, ‘that he would be king of England yet,’ still the impatience for an establishment of a ‘free church of saints’ in a free state, and the ‘heat of inward evidence’ that he was himself the man to achieve it, was growing constantly stronger in him. He led his army into Ireland, as Joshua into Canaan, and his last letter to the parliament, as he was setting sail from Milford Haven, offered to their consideration the removal of penal statutes that enforce the consciences of honest conscientious men. His conquest of Ireland, and afterwards of Scotland, was achieved in and through a constant fire of enthusiasm.

‘It was set upon some of our hearts,’ he writes after the storm of Tredah, ‘that a great thing should be done, not by power or might, but by the spirit of God. And is it not so, clearly? That which caused your men to storm so courageously, it was the spirit of God, who gave your men courage, and took it away again; and gave the enemy courage, and took it away again; and gave your men courage again, and therewith this happy success.’ [1]