Four Lectures on the English Revolution

by Thomas Hill Green

God glowed above
With scarce an intervention …
… his soul o’er theirs.
They felt him, nor by painful reason knew.’ [1]

[1] [ ‘My own East!
How nearer God we were. He glows above
With scarce an intervention, presses close
And palpitatingly, his soul o’er ours!
We feel him, nor by painful reason know!’
BROWNING, Luria.]

Henceforth, whatever authority claimed their submission as divine, must come home to their conscience with a like directness, and this the jus divinum of the presbyterians failed to do. This new spiritual force the ministers had left to itself. While they were wrangling at Westminster or settling warmly into the berths which the episcopal clergy had vacated, it had been gathering strength unheeded. At the outbreak of the war each regiment had a regular minister as its chaplain, but after the battle at Edgehill made it clear that the business would be a longer one than had been expected, these divines, according to Baxter, withdrew either to the assembly or to their livings. Baxter himself lost an opportunity which he afterwards regretted, in declining the chaplaincy of Cromwell’s regiment, ‘which its officers proposed to make a gathered church.’ ’These very men,’ he says, ‘that then invited me to be their pastor, were the men that afterwards headed an army, and were forwardest in all our charges; which made me wish I had gone among them, for all the fire was in one spark.’ [1] The news of the battle of Naseby, however, so far stirred Baxter, then living at Coventry, that he must needs join his old friends, and for two years he moved about with the army, as chaplain to Whalley’s regiment which had been {308} formed out of Cromwell’s. The sectarian spirit he then found too strong for his mild piety to control.

[1] [Reliquiae Baxterianae, p. 51.]

‘We that lived quietly at Coventry did keep to our old principles; we were unfeignedly for king and parliament; we believed the war was only to save the parliament and kingdom from papists and delinquents and to remove the dividers, that the king might return again to his parliament, and that no changes might be made in religion but with his consent. But when I came to the army among Cromwell’s soldiers, I found anew face of things which I never dreamt of. The plotting heads were very hot upon that which intimated their intentions to subvert church and state. Independency and anabaptistry were most prevalent. Antinomianism and arminianism were equally distributed.’

Hot-headed sectaries in the highest places, Cromwell’s chief favourites, were asking what were the lords of England but William the Conqueror’s colonels, or the barons but his majors, or the knights but his captains? ‘plainly showing that thy thought God’s providence would cast the trust of religion and the kingdom upon them as conquerors.’ Of some of these dangerous men, particularly of Harrison and Berry, then reckoned Cromwell’s prime favourites, Baxter gives a more particular account. Berry

‘was a man of great sincerity before the wars, and of very good natural parts, affectionate in religion, and while conversant with humbling providences, doctrines, and company, he carried himself as a great enemy to pride. But when Cromwell made him his favourite and his extraordinary valour met with extraordinary success, and when he had been awhile most conversant with those that in religion thought the old puritan ministers were dull, self-conceited men of a lower form, and that new light had declared I know not what to be a higher attainment, his mind, aim, talk and all were altered accordingly. Being never well studied in the body of divinity or controversy, but taking his light among the sectaries, he lived after as honestly as could be expected in one that taketh error for truth.’

‘Harrison,’ says Baxter, ‘would not dispute with me at all, but he would in good discourse very fluently pour out himself in the extolling of free grace, which was savoury to those that had right principles, though he had some misunderstandings of free grace himself. He was a man of excellent natural parts for affection and oratory; but not well seen in the principles of his religion; of a sanguine {309} complexion, naturally of such a vivacity, hilarity, and alacrity as another man hath when he hath drunken a cup too much; but naturally also so far from humble thoughts of himself, that it was his ruin.’ [1]

[1] [Reliquiae Baxterianae, p. 57.]

One day, during the fight at Langport, Baxter happened to be close to Harrison just as Goring’s army broke before the charge of the Ironsides, and heard him ‘with a loud voice break forth into the praises of God, as if he had been in a rapture.’ [1] Such a temper could only be moderated by one who shared its raptures, its wild energy, its scorn of prescription, and who yet had the practical wisdom, the wider comprehension, of which it was incapable. Such a one was Cromwell, a tumultuous soul, but with a strange method in his tumult. The old notion, that this method consisted in a persistent design of personal aggrandisement, may be taken to have been dispelled once for all by the publication of his letters and speeches. That he was a genuine enthusiast, that he was perfectly sincere in the sense that his real ends were those that he professed, that his own advancement was not his object, but merely the condition or result of his getting work done which others could not do, this is the only theory that will explain the facts, if we include among the facts his own language at times when there can have been no motive for insincerity, and the impression which he made on his contemporaries, not when they looked back on his acts in the light of personal grievance, but at the time when they were done. The life-long hypocrisy which the opposite theory ascribes to him is incompatible with the personal attraction which a revolutionary leader must exercise if he is to do his work. In Napoleon, though he did not so much lead a revolution as turn revolutionary forces to military account, there was no touch of hypocrisy. His hard selfishness and his zeal for the material improvement of European life were equally explicit. The assertion, however, of Cromwell’s unselfish enthusiasm is quite consistent with the imputation to him of much unscrupulousness, violence, simulation, and dissimulation, sins which no one has escaped who ever led or controlled a revolution; from which in times like his no man could save his soul but by such saintly abstraction as Baxter takes credit for to himself, and Mrs. Hutchinson to her husband, which in aspiration to heaven leaves earth to its chance.