Four Lectures on the English Revolution

by Thomas Hill Green

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

During his brief sojourn in London between the two wars it appears from a dialogue with Ludlow [1] that his thoughts were running on the need of swift reforms, especially of the law, and that he ‘was feeding on’ the hundred and tenth psalm; ‘The Lord shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion…. Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power; in the beauties of holiness, from the womb of the morning.’ The experience of the Scotch campaign, full, as he conceived, {354} of miraculous passages, was not likely to temper his consciousness of a divine mission. ‘There may be a spiritual fulness,’ he writes to the general assembly of the kirk, [2] ‘which the world may call drunkenness, as in the second chapter of the Acts.’ In such spiritual fulness he lay on September 2, with a sickly, half-starved army about Dunbar, in the face of an enemy double in number and apparently commanding his position, yet sure, as he says, that just ‘because of their numbers, their advantages, and their confidence, because of our weakness, our strait, we were in the mount, and in the mount the Lord would be seen, and that he would find a way of deliverance for us.’ Through ‘an high, act of the Lord’s providence’ Lesley made a false move, and the way of deliverance was found.

‘It is easy to say,’ he writes to parliament after the victory, ‘the Lord hath done this. It would do you good to see and hear our poor foot go up and down making their boast of God. But it’s in your hands, and by these eminent mercies God puts it more into your hands to give glory to him; to improve your power and his blessings to his praise…. Disown yourselves and own your authority…. Relieve the oppressed, hear the groans of poor prisoners in England. Be pleased to reform the abuses of all professions; and if there be any one that makes many poor to make a few rich’ (a hit at the lawyers), ‘that suits not a commonwealth.’ [3]

[1] [Memoirs, p. 123; ed. 1751.]

[2] [Carlyle, ib. No. cxxxvi.]

[3] [Carlyle, ib. No. cxl.]

It was this exhilaration of energy in the Lord’s work, not a vulgar ambition of kingship, that shone in Cromwell’s countenance as he rode up from Worcester a year later, and that made him press, as we have seen, on the first day when he resumed his seat in the house, for measures of settlement and reform. ‘Peace hath her victories,’ as Milton wrote to him at this time, ‘no less renowned than war,’ but they were to be won not in days but in centuries, and by the energy not of feeling but of thought. He had a temper, he once said of himself, that ‘caused him often to overact business,’ and his trusted ‘son Ireton,’ in whose ‘working brain’ the same plans were combined with a more cautious and calculating temper, was no longer at hand to restrain him. He had died at his post in Ireland three months after the battle of Worcester; his death, we are told, ‘striking a great sadness in Cromwell.’ [1] ‘No man could prevail with him so much or {355} order him so far as Ireton could,’ but there is no reason to think that had Ireton lived he would have altered, though he might sometimes have checked, Cromwell’s career. If Cromwell had died when Ireton did, he would have died like him in the full odour of republican sanctity, and his subsequent breach with the republicans was due to his pressing forward the army project of reform and reconstruction which had first taken shape in Ireton’s brain. In his letter to the parliament after Dunbar he professed a desire (a notable instance of his frankness) not to ‘precipitate them by importunities’ in the work of settlement, and he was true to his profession. For a year and a half, however, from September 16, 1651, to April 20, 1653, he loyally endeavoured to rouse the republican oligarchy to the necessities of the situation. If his importunity was not pressing, that of the people was, and it was clear that the parliament must give some practical ‘reason why’ for its existence, or lose its prestige. Petitions from the country were constantly coming in, all conceived in the ‘levelling’ sense which I described in the last lecture. Their general burden is that tithes may be either abolished as levitical and Romish, or gathered into a common treasury, and then some part of them applied to the maintenance of a godly ministry in each county; that those ‘drunken, malignant, scandalous, and profane ones,’ that go under the name of ministers, be put to work for their living; that justice may be given, not bought, and all matters of meum and tuum determined free, yet by a written law; that some check may be put on the swarms of lawyers, attorneys, and solicitors, nourished with the bread of oppression by long and tedious suits. Sometimes they wax eloquent, hoping that ‘justice may come down like a mighty stream, free for the poorest to resort unto, too strong for the richest to divert.’ The Rump parliament meanwhile, not, we may fairly suppose, considering its previous inaction, without pressure from Cromwell, showed great activity in appointing committees to consider grievances, and in pressing resolutions, which if carried out would have made English law more cheap, and English land more free, than it has ever been since. There was no result however in the way of effective legislation, and the old conviction of the army, that it was the true parliament and judicature of the nation, was beginning to revive. At the end of 1650 letters were read in {356} the house, ‘that officers of the army by commission from Lambert did determine controversies between party and party; wherewith the people were much satisfied with the quick despatch they received with full hearing.’ At the same time petitions were circulating in the army for reform of abuses and a new parliament, in the same tone which had prevailed when the army had before (in the year 1648) been in direct contact with the civil power. The real fact was that the parliament was once more face to face with its true, its sole constituency, the military saints, with whom its conceit of antique republicanism would avail little, unless it could realise in the hard world of ‘interests’ the reforming enthusiasm which had created it. Such realisation, if possible at all, was clearly impossible to an oligarchy which had always been unpopular and was becoming factious.

[1] [Whitelock, iii. p. 371.]

We have not the means of tracing in detail the conduct of Cromwell during this crisis. It is clear that he made no secret of his thoughts. In November 1651 he obtained a vote of the house that it would put a term to its sitting, but only one so remote as November 1654. The next question necessarily was, how should the new election, and the general work of reconstruction, be regulated? That it would require rigorous control in the presence of the royalist gentry and the angry presbyterian clergy, was abundantly clear. Was this control to be in the hands of the Rump oligarchy, disunited, estranged from the army, incapable of swift and secret action as a deliberative assembly must be, or in the hands of a single person who had a name of terror and hope, and to whom the heart of the army was as his own? This was the real question at issue, and at the end of 1651 we find Cromwell, at a conference which he invited between the grandees of parliament and the officers, explicitly stating it. It was as impossible for him now, however, as it had been on a like occasion in 1648, to bring about an understanding. The great lawyers of the house generally were in favour of government by a single person, but only St. John seems to have shared Cromwell’s views as to who the single person should be. Whitelock was in favour of restoring monarchy in the person of the duke of Gloucester. To the enthusiasts of the army the very name of monarchy was blasphemy against Christ, whom they were expecting shortly to restore the kingdom to the saints. The theoretical republicans of {357} the Rump were in favour of constituting themselves a permanent body on the Venetian model, only filling up vacancies as they should occur.

In this dead-lock of conflicting jealousies and opinions the year 1652 passed away, the only vigour being shown in the prosecution of the Dutch war and the settlement of Scotland. Cromwell’s views were well known, and one day when in debate he spoke of Mr. Marten accidentally as ‘Sir Harry,’ Marten interrupted him by saying with a low bow, ‘I always expected when your majesty became king, you would make me a knight.’ He was clearly most unwilling, however, to break with the parliament, which he had absolutely in his hands, and if its leaders could have been induced, recognising their weakness and swallowing their formula, to invest him with a temporary dictatorship, he would have kept them at peace, as he alone had hitherto done, with the army, and worked with them constitutionally for the settlement of the nation. As it was, there are indications that he controlled the discontent of the army as long as he was able. Lambert’s vanity had been rudely affronted by the Rump, and his busy brain was brewing mischief. Harrison was becoming impatient for the inauguration of the ‘fifth monarchy.’ The military saints were finding, as Cromwell afterwards expressed it, that ‘all tenderness was forgotten to the good people, though it was by their hands and their means that the parliament sat where it did.’ ‘The reformation of law,’ he adds, ‘was a thing that many good words were spoken for; but we know that many months together were not sufficient for the settling of one word, “incumbrances.”’ [1]