[3] [On the new forcers of conscience under the Long Parliament.]
Meanwhile the parliamentary erastians had a power at their back, no child of their own, too strong for the Scots and the assembly, and soon to prove too strong for parliament itself. The first note of alarm at this power had been sounded by the wary Scots about the end of 1644.
‘One evening,’ says Whitelock, ‘Maynard and I were sent for by the Lord General’ (Essex) ‘to Essex House. There we found with him the Scotch commissioners, Mr. Hollis, Sir Philip Stapleton’ (presbyterian leaders in the commons) ‘and others of his special friends. After compliments, and that all were set down in council, the lord chancellor of Scotland was called on to explain the matter on which he desired the opinion of Maynard and Whitelock. ‘Ye ken verra weel that lieutenant-general Cromwell is no friend of ours, and not only is he no friend to us and to the government of our church, but he is also no well-wisher to his excellency” {304} (Essex), “whom you and we all have cause to love and honour; and if he be permitted to go on his ways, it may endanger the whole business; therefore we are to advise of some course to be taken for prevention of this business. Ye ken verra weel the accord’ ’twixt the two kingdoms, and the union by the solemn league and covenant, and if any be an incendiary between the two nations, how he is to be proceeded against. Now the matter is, wherein we desire your opinions, what you tak the meaning of this word incendiary to be, and whether lieutenant-general Cromwell be not sike an incendiary as is meant thereby, and which way wad be best to tak to proceed against him, if he be proved to be sike an incendiary, and that will clepe his wings from soaring to the prejudice of our cause. Now, ye may ken that by our laws in Scotland we clepe him an incendiary whay kindleth coals of contention in the state to the public damage; whether your law be the same or not, ye ken best who are mickle learned therein; and therefore, with the favour of his excellency, we desire your judgment in these points.”’ [1]
In reply, Maynard and Whitelock, after much disquisition on the meaning of the word ‘incendiary,’ one ‘not much conversant in our law,’ explain that lieutenant-general Cromwell is ‘a gentleman of quick and subtle parts, and one who hath (especially of late) gained no small interest in the house of commons, nor is he wanting of friends in the house of peers, nor of abilities in himself to manage his own defence to the best advantage,’ and that on the whole, till more particular proof of his incendiarism should be forthcoming, it would be better not to bring the matter before parliament. The incendiarism of lieutenant-general Cromwell really consisted in this, that he had (again to quote Whitelock) ‘a brave regiment of horse of his countrymen, most of them freeholders, or freeholders’ sons, who upon matter of conscience engaged in this quarrel. And thus being well armed within by satisfaction of their own consciences, and without by good iron arms, they would as one man stand firmly and charge desperately.’ [2] Nearly every military success of importance that had been won for the parliament had been won by these soldiers of conscience, and unhappily their conscience was not of a kind that would brook presbyterian uniformity. At the time of the conference at Essex House, {305} Cromwell, with the help of the persuasive arts of Vane, was moving the parliament, disgusted with the practical inefficiency of its conservative and presbyterian commanders, to measures which would give it an army led by officers mostly of his own training, and fired by that religious inspiration of which freedom of conscience was the necessary condition.
[1] [Whitelock, i. pp. 343-7.]
[2] [ib. i. p. 209.]
The story of the new-modelling of the army, of the self-denying ordinance, and of the special exemption of Cromwell from its operations, is too well known to need repetition. Two points deserve special notice; one, the long discussion against the imposition of the covenant on the new army, ending in an ordinance of parliament after the army was already formed, that it should be taken by the officers within twenty days, which does not appear to have been ever carried into effect; the other, that the self-denying ordinance, as originally passed by the commons, excluded from military command, during the war, all members of either house of parliament. It would thus have been general and prospective in its operation. In this form, the lords, with judicial blindness, rejected it. The commons then sent it up in a new form, merely discharging from their present commands those who were at present members of either house of parliament. In this form it was passed, and thus when Vane at the end of 1645 carried a measure, declaring vacant the seats of those members who had adhered to the king and ordering them to be filled, the officers of the new-model army were eligible, and elected in large numbers. If the party of the army and the sectaries had not thus gained a footing in the house, the course of history would probably have been very different.
The new-model army went to the war, according to May, the clerk of the Long parliament, ‘without the confidence of their friends and an object of contempt to their enemies.’ [1] Their outward triumph it is needless to describe; we should rather seek to appreciate the nature of the spiritual triumph which the outward one involved. It used to be the fashion to treat the sectarian enthusiasm of the ‘Ironsides’ as created, or at least stimulated, by Cromwell. The army went mad, and it was to gain Cromwell’s private ends. The prevalent conception of our time, that the great men of history have not created popular ideas or events, but merely expressed or {306} realised them with special effect, excludes such a view. The sectarian enthusiasm, as we have seen, was a necessary result of the consciousness of spiritual right elicited by the Reformation, where this consciousness had not, as in Scotland, been early made the foundation of a popular church, but had been long left to struggle in the dark against an unsympathetic clergy and a regulated ceremonial worship. The spirit which could not ‘find itself’ in the authoritative utterance of prelates, or express its yearnings unutterable in a stinted liturgy, was not likely, when war had given it vent and stimulus, to acquiesce in a new uniformity as exact as that from which it had broken. It had tasted a new and dangerous food. Taught as it had been to wait on God, in search for new revelations of him, it now read this lesson by the stronger light of personal deliverances and achievements, and found in the tumultuous experience of war at once the expression and the justification of its own inward tumult.
[1] [Breviary of the History of the Long Parliament, Maseres, Tracts, i. 74.]
It is a notion which governs much of the popular thought of the present day, and which the most cultivated ‘men of feeling’ are not ashamed to express, that the world is atheised when we regard it as a universe of general laws, equally relentless or equally merciful to the evil and to the good. If such a notion, through mere impatience of thought, can dominate an educated age, we may well excuse uncultivated men, who clung close to God, for believing him to manifest himself to his favoured people by sudden visitation and unaccountable events. This was indeed the received belief of Christendom at the time of our civil war. The man who was to vindicate a higher reason for God’s providence, and to be called an atheist for doing so, was still at Mr. van den Ende’s school in Amsterdam. It was in the realisation of the belief by individuals that the difference lay. Where the bible was not in the hands of the people, it could be regulated by priests and ceremonial. Elsewhere it was controllable by state-churches, or by ecclesiastical authority, claiming to be jure divino like the presbyterian, and which appealed to popular reason, but to this reason as regulated by fitting education and discipline. Everywhere, in ordinary times, law and custom would put a veil on the face which the believer turned towards God. But now in England the bands were altogether loosed. Enthusiasts who had been waiting darkly on God while he was hidden behind established {307} worships and ministrations of the letter, who had heard his voice in their hearts but seen no sign of him in the world, were now enacting his work themselves, and reading his strange providences on the field of battle. Their own right hand was ‘teaching them terrible things.’ Here was the revelation of the latter days, for which they had been bidden to wait. That which they had sought for literally ‘with strong crying and tears,’ which they had not found in the system of the church, in the reasoning of divines, in the ungodly jangle of the law, was visible and audible in war. There