Four Lectures on the English Revolution

by Thomas Hill Green

The addresses of congratulation which came in from all parts of the country quite bore out this statement. It was not from the pagan republicanism of the commonwealth-clique that Cromwell had difficulty to apprehend, but from the smothered fire of the fifth-monarchy men, with whom the necessities of settlement compelled him, to break. This soon became apparent in the assembly of notables. They elected an executive council, of which Cromwell was an ordinary member, and for five months all went smoothly along. Then the fifth-monarchy enthusiasm, represented by general Harrison, and stimulated by anabaptist ministers who met with him ‘at one {361} Mr. Squib’s house,’ became unmanageable. It fell foul of ‘ministry and magistracy,’ demanding the simple abolition of tithes and of the court of chancery, and the establishment of the judicial law of Moses, to be administered ‘according to the wisdom of any man that would interpret the text this way or that.’ [1] This led to the resignation of the assembly, whether under pressure from Cromwell it is difficult to say, but certainly with his good-will. Henceforth he let it be known explicitly that the world must have its due and settled interests be maintained. A few days after the council of state presented him with an ‘instrument of government,’ establishing a protectorate with a free parliament, to be elected according to the original scheme of Ireton, Vane, and Cromwell himself. Under this instrument he ruled for about four years, when ‘the petition and advice,’ passed by his second parliament, took its place, which did not materially alter the system, but put it on a parliamentary basis.

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

The protectorate must have the credit of having been at least perfectly true to the great end of settlement, and of having been, however arbitrary, yet perfectly honest in its arbitrariness. It was quite free from the jugglery with recognised names and institutions which is the chosen device of modern despotism. The three points of the Cromwellian programme—restoration, so far as might be, of the old constitution, reform of the law, and the protection of the godly interest—were really inconsistent with each other, for to restore the constitution was impossible without a restoration of royalism, and the restoration of royalism meant the subjection of the godly, while a reformation of the law, not resting on a constitutional basis, hung only on the thread of a single life. His effort, however, to govern constitutionally was genuine and persistent. Two conditions he always announced as fundamental, the sovereignty of the protector, and the maintenance of liberty of conscience. The protectorate was ‘what he would be rolled in the grave and covered with infamy sooner than give up.’ It was for a liberty of conscience, he always said, better than episcopacy or presbyterianism had allowed, that the army, the true national representative, had shed its blood. To surrender it would be to violate his most sacred trust. Subject to these two conditions he would give parliament its way, but {362} in the first the republican minority, in the second the presbyterian majority, would not acquiesce. One of his parliaments imprisoned Biddle the socinian, the other was very near burning poor James Nayler, the quaker, but finally let him off with putting him on the pillory and boring through his tongue. In both cases Cromwell interfered. The final breach, however, with each of his parliaments was due to its insisting on a discussion of the basis of government by a single person. To tolerate this, in the presence of royalist plots, sanctioned by a proclamation in Charles Stuart’s name for the assassination of ‘the base mechanic fellow, Oliver Cromwell,’ and of fifth-monarchy men who were gathering arms to fight for ‘king Jesus’ under the standard of the tribe of Judah, would have been ‘to let all run back to blood again.’

He was thus constrained to carry out the reform of law, and the settlement of religion, by the method of ordinances of council, most of which were subsequently confirmed by his second parliament. In this way he reformed chancery and simplified legal procedure. As regarded the church, since the dissolution of the assembly, there had been, as I before explained, no regular system, but the only recognised way of becoming eligible for a benefice was through presbyterian ordination, though it was probably not uniformly resorted to. For this Cromwell substituted a board of ordination, representing presbyterians, independents, and baptist preachers alike, and containing a certain number of laymen. No one was to have a claim to levy tithes till approved by this board, which seems, however, to have had power to delegate its authority to subordinate boards in the provinces. Other county boards were established for ‘detecting and rejecting scandalous, ignorant, and insufficient ministers.’ An ordinance for the more equal distribution of church property completed the ecclesiastical reform.

This scheme was liberally worked, and except to the believers in the necessity of episcopal ‘succession,’ for which Cromwell had no bowels, opened a wider door than has been open since. It appears that episcopalians in Baxter’s sense, and arminians, had now access to the benefices, though the ordainers might sometimes be more severe with them than with others. Even the high prelatists, so long as they kept free from plots, were allowed to form congregations and use the common prayer, which had never been the case under {363} the presbyterian régime. Of the fidelity of Cromwell to the work of reformation and godliness, which he had undertaken to reconcile with a general settlement, the best evidence is the eye-witness of Baxter and Burnet; both were royalists, and Baxter, at least, personally unfriendly to Cromwell.

The unruliness of the elements which Cromwell had wrought into a system of rational government became sufficiently apparent at his death. My limits do not allow me to trace minutely the course of events which led to the restoration. For some time a triangular contest went on between the junto of officers, headed by Fleetwood and Lambert, which Cromwell had kept in hand to the last, the court party of real statesmen, such as Thurloe and Whitelock, who supported Richard Cromwell, and the republicans headed by Vane and Scott. The slumbering fanaticism of Fleetwood once more broke out into a zeal for a dominion of grace. He allowed the officers, whom Cromwell had kept at their commands at a distance, to get together in London, and collogue with the more violent clergy. Henry Cromwell, watching events from Ireland, saw what was coming and warned Fleetwood in a tone worthy of his father’s son. Fleetwood, however, was deaf to such advice, and finally combined with the republicans to overthrow Richard Cromwell and restore the Rump parliament. Tho republicans, however, though they did not scruple now any more than they had done in 1648, to apply to the soldiers for support, could not long agree with them. The Rump soon took courage to cashier the dangerous officers, and afterwards, at the request of Monk, who was advancing from Scotland with an army purged of enthusiasts, removed their regiments from London. The situation was now at Monk’s command. The presbyterians, still in possession of most of the pulpits, began to reassert their claims, and Monk, a man without ideas, combined with them as the stronger party. After a brief saturnalia of ordinances against quakers and sectaries, they listened to the fair promises of Charles Stuart, and gave themselves over to a king who was already a papist, and a court which had but one strong conviction, that presbyterianism was no religion for a gentleman.

Thus ended, apparently in simple catastrophe, the enterprise of projecting into sudden reality the impulse of spiritual freedom. Its only result, as it might seem, had been to {364} prevent the transition of the feudal into an absolute monarchy, and thus to prepare the way for the plutocracy under feudal forms which has governed England since the death of William III. This, however, is but a superficial view. Two palpable benefits the short triumph of puritanism did win for England. It saved it from the catholic reaction, and it created the ‘dissenting bodies.’ If it seems but a poor change from the fanatic sacerdotalism of Laud to the genteel and interested sacerdotalism of modern English churchmanship, yet the fifteen years of vigorous growth which Cromwell’s sword secured for the church of the sectaries, gave it a permanent force which no reaction could suppress, and which has since been the great spring of political life in England. The higher enthusiasm, however, which breathed in Cromwell and Vane, was not puritanic or English merely. It belonged to the universal spiritual force which as ecstasy, mysticism, quietism, philosophy, is in permanent collision with the carnal interests of the world, and which, if it conquers them for a moment, yet again sinks under them, that it may transmute them more thoroughly to its service.

‘Death,’ said Vane on the scaffold, ‘is a little word, but it is a great work to die.’ So his own enthusiasm died that it might rise again. It was sown in the weakness of feeling, that it might be raised in the intellectual comprehension which is power. ‘The people of England,’ he said again, ‘have been long asleep. I doubt they will be hungry when they awake.’

They have slept, we may say, another two hundred years. If they should yet wake and be hungry, they will find their food in the ideas which, with much blindness and weakness, he vainly offered them, cleared and ripened by a philosophy of which he did not dream.