Four Lectures on the English Revolution

by Thomas Hill Green

[1] [Carlyle, ib. Speech I.]

By the beginning of the year 1653, Sir Henry Vane, who had hitherto been organising victory for Blake, had become alive to the danger of military domination, which he specially dreaded, and was pressing forward a bill for a new parliament. It was upon this bill that the final rupture with Cromwell took place. In its chief features it corresponded with the petitions of the army and levellers which had been rife in the agitation of 1647-8. There was to be a parliament of four hundred members, who should be distributed among the counties according to wealth and population. In the boroughs there was to be a uniform rental qualification of householders; in the counties such a property qualification {358} as should exclude tenants subject to control. There was to be a freehold qualification of 40_s_., a copyhold of 5_l_., and a leasehold of 20_l_. annual value. This system of distribution and qualification was afterwards adopted by Cromwell, except that he substituted for the property qualifications the uniform, and very high, one of 200_l_. of real or personal estate. Cromwell’s objection to the bill was that it gave the existing members the right both of sitting in the new house without re-election and of deciding on the admissibility of new members. In other words it constituted the Rump a many-headed dictatorship, to regulate the work of reconstruction. To this he opposed a plan of his own for delegating the re-settlement to an assembly of notables, to be specially summoned for the purpose; a plan which we may readily admit was merely meant as such a screen for his own dictatorship as would satisfy the demands of the ‘fifth monarchy’ or republican officers. As usual he behaved with, perfect explicitness. On April 19 he had a conference of members of parliament and officers of the army at his lodgings, and urged the importance of an immediate dissolution and a convocation of notables. St. John was the only civilian who supported him, but according to his own account the meeting closed with an understanding that Vane’s bill should not be pressed. Next morning the conference was renewed, but in the presence of only a few ‘parliament men,’ of whom Whitelock was one. The sequel is best described in his words. [1]

‘Cromwell being informed during this debate that the parliament was sitting, and that it was hoped they would put a period to themselves, which would be the most honourable dissolution for them; hereupon he broke off the meeting, and the members of parliament with him left him at his lodgings and went to the house, and found them in debate of an act, the which would occasion other meetings of them again, and prolong their sitting.’ This was Vane’s bill, which he was pressing through its last stages, in disregard, according to Cromwell, of the pledge given the night before. Colonel Ingoldsby brought word to Cromwell of what the house was doing, ‘who was so enraged thereat, expecting they should have meddled with no other business but putting a period to their sitting without more delay, that he presently commanded some of the officers of the army to fetch a party {359} of soldiers, with whom he marched to the house.’

[1] [iv. p. 4.]

The rest of the story is too familiar to need repetition. It is noticed, however, that he did not introduce the soldiers at once, but sat quietly in his place, till the motion was put from the chair, ‘that the bill do now pass.’ It was then, at the last moment, i.e. at which it was possible to stop the establishment of a permanent oligarchy under the forms of law, that he broke into a violent speech, which ended with his calling in the soldiers. His conduct at this crisis, as throughout his public life, corresponded exactly to the account which he gave of it himself. Into parliament, as into battle, he carried the ‘waiting spirit’ in which the sectaries believed. He trusted for guidance to a sudden inspiration interpreting the necessity of events. At last, at the critical point, just when he saw Lesley making a gap in his line at Dunbar, ‘the spirit of God was strong upon him,’ he would no longer consult ‘flesh and blood,’ but took the decisive step. The dissolution of the Rump was clearly inevitable so soon as it broke with and sought to defy its armed constituency, which, as Cromwell had always maintained, was an equally legitimate authority with itself, and far more truly representative. The violence of manner with which Cromwell turned it out and locked the door, of which, says Whitelock, even ‘some of his bravadoes were ashamed,’ is quite unique in his history, and doubtless aggravated the difficulty of subsequent reconciliation with the commonwealth’s men. The best explanation of it is a remark in one of his private letters; ‘I have known my folly do good, when affection (passion) has overcome my reason.’ It is a curious trait in his character, that when wrought up after much hesitation to a decisive act, of which he saw the danger, he gave the loose to that boisterous vehemence for which he had early been noted, but which he could generally suppress. The same trait appears in his behaviour at the signature of the death-warrant of Charles.

He had now to grapple with the question which the Rump had fingered in vain. The Lord’s people were to be saved from themselves, and the interests of the world so reformed and adjusted that it might yield them fit habitation. The task, as I have shown in the previous lectures, was in the nature of the case a hopeless one. The claim of the saints was at once false and self-contradictory; false, for the secular world, which it sought to ignore, had rights no less divine than its own; {360} and self-contradictory, since even amongst the most sectarian of the sectaries it was constantly hardening into authority hostile to the individual persuasion in which it originated. ‘That hath been one of the vanities of our contest. Every sect saith, “Oh, give me liberty.” But give it him, and to the best of his power he will yield it to no one else.’ [1] Cromwell’s labour, however, was not wholly in vain. During five years, by the mere force of his instinct of settlement, his commanding energy, and that absorbing sympathy miscalled hypocrisy, which enabled him to hold the hearts of the sectaries even while he disappointed their enthusiasm, he at least kept the peace between the saints and the world, secured liberty of conscience, and placed it on ground which even the flood of prelatical reaction was not able wholly to submerge. But while protecting the godly interest, he was obliged more and more to silence its pretension. A gradual detachment from the saints, and approximation to the ancient interests, was the necessary policy of his later years.

[1] [Carlyle, ib. Speech III.]

The dissolution of the Rump caused no derangement of administration. As captain-general in a council of officers, Cromwell directed all officials to continue their work, and summoned a body of notables to act as a constitutive assembly. The change was generally acceptable to puritan sentiment.

‘I told the parliament,’ said Cromwell afterwards, ‘what I knew better than anyone else, because of my manner of life, which took me up and down the country, thereby giving me to know the temper of all men, that the nation loathed their sitting. I knew it, and when they were dissolved, there was not so much as the barking of a dog, or any general and visible repining at it.’ [1]

[1] [ib.]