"'You call yourselves a Parliament,' continues my Lord General, in clear blaze of conflagration. 'You are no Parliament! Some of you are drunkards,' and his eye flashes on poor Mr Chalmer, an official man of some value, addicted to the bottle; 'some of you are'—and he glares into Henry Martin and the poor Sir Peter, who rose to order, lewd livers both—'living in open contempt of God's, commandments. Following your own greedy appetites, and the devil's commandments. Corrupt, unjust persons,' and here I think he glanced 'at Sir Bulstrode Whitlocke, one of the Commissioners of the Great Seal, giving him and others very sharp language, though he named them not.' 'Corrupt, unjust persons, scandalous to the profession of the Gospel:' how can you be a Parliament for God's people? Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name, of God—go!
"The House is of course all on its feet—uncertain, almost, whether not on its head: such a scene as was never seen before in any House of Commons. History reports with a shudder that my Lord General, lifting the sacred mace itself, said, 'What shall we do with this bauble? Take it away!'—and gave it to a musketeer. And now—'Fetch him down!' says he to Harrison, flashing on the Speaker. Speaker Lenthall, more an ancient Roman than any thing else, declares, He will not come till forced. 'Sir,' said Harrison, 'I will lend you a hand;' on which Speaker Lenthall came down, and gloomily vanished. They all vanished; flooding gloomily, clamorously out, to their ulterior businesses, and respective places of abode: the Long Parliament is dissolved! 'It's you that have forced me to this,' exclaims my Lord General, 'I have sought the Lord night and day, that He would rather slay me than put me upon the doing of this work.' 'At their going out, some say the Lord General said to young Sir Harry Vane, calling him by his name, That he might have prevented this; but that he was a juggler, and had not common honesty.' 'O Sir Harry Vane,' thou, with thy subtle casuistries and abstruse hair-splittings, thou art other than a good one, I think! 'The Lord deliver me from thee, Sir Harry Vane!' 'All being gone out, the door of the House was locked, and the key, with the mace, as I heard, was carried away by Colonel Otley,' and it is all over, and the unspeakable catastrophe has come, and remains."—(Vol. ii. p. 361.)
The usurpation of Cromwell is, we believe, generally considered as the most fortunate event which, under the peculiar circumstances of the country, could have occurred. The people, it is said; were not prepared for a republic. The attempt, therefore, to establish one, would have been attended by incessant tumults; its short and precarious existence would have been supported by the scaffold and the prison. It would have terminated indeed, as did the Protectorate, in a Restoration, but the interval between the death of Charles I. and the accession of his son, would have been passed in a very different manner. Under the Protectorate the country rallied its strength, put forth its naval power, obtained peace at home, and respect abroad. Under a republic, it would have probably spent its force, and demoralised itself, in intestine strife and by a succession of revolutionary movements.
But if this view be quite correct, it will not justify Cromwell. It is one thing to be satisfied with the course of events, quite another with the conduct of the several agents in them. Cromwell, in the position in which he stood, as an honest man and a patriot, should have done his best for the establishment of the Commonwealth; and this he did not. We are far, as we have said, from venturing to give a decisive opinion on the probability (with the united efforts of the victorious general and the Parliament) of forming a republic. But we are not disposed to think that the cause was hopeless. Had the Parliament been allowed to recruit its numbers without dissolving itself—the measure which it constantly desired, and which Cromwell would not hear of, though, without a doubt, it was the very line of conduct which his own practical sagacity would have led him to, if his heart had been in the business—the minds of men would have had time to settle and reflect, and a mode of government, which had already existed for some years, might have been adopted by the general consent.
We look upon the Restoration very calmly, very satisfactorily, for whom a second revolution has placed another dynasty upon the throne, governing upon principles quite different from those which were rooted in the Stuarts. We see the Restoration, with the Revolution of 1688 at its back, and almost consider them as one event. But a most loyal and contented subject of Queen Victoria, would have been a Commonwealthsman in those days. How could it then have been foreseen that all the power, and privilege, and splendour of royalty, should exist only to protect the law, to secure the equal rights of all—that monarchy, retaining a traditionary awe and majesty derived from remote times, should remain amongst us to supply to a representative government that powerful, constant, and impartial executive which, from the mere elements of a republic, it is so difficult to extract? Who could have imagined that a popular legislature, and the supremacy of the law, could have been so fortunately combined and secured under the shadow of the monarchy? Enlightened minds at that time could not have looked calmly towards a Restoration; they probably thought, or would have been led to think, that, in the position they then were, it was better to take the constitution of Holland, than the government of France, for their model.
But the multitude—with what enthusiasm they welcomed the restoration of the Stuarts! Very true. But the Protectorate was no antagonist to monarchy. Republican pride was never called forth to contend in the public mind against the feeling of loyalty, and an attachment to kings. The Protectorate was itself a monarchy without its splendour, or the prestige of hereditary greatness. It was a monarchy under the Geneva gown. Was it likely that the populace would accept of this in lieu of the crowned and jewelled royalty which was wont to fill its imagination?
However, the experiment—fortunately for us, as the result has turned out—was never destined to be made. Cromwell dissolved the Long Parliament. He now stood alone, he and the army, the sole power in the state. His first measure, that of sending a summons in his own name, to persons of his own choice, and thus, without any popular election whatever, assembling what is called the Little Parliament, or Barebones Parliament, shows a singular audacity, and proves how little trammelled he was himself by traditionary or constitutional maxims. He who would not allow the Long Parliament to recruit its numbers, and thus escape the perils of a free election of an altogether new assembly, extricates himself from the same embarrassment by electing the whole Parliament himself. Some historians have represented this measure as having for its very object to create additional confusion, and render himself, and his own dictatorial power, more necessary to the state. It has not appeared to us in this light. We see in it a bold but rude assay at government. In this off-hand manner of constituting a Parliament, we detect the mingled daring of the Puritan and the Soldier. In neither of these characters was he likely to have much respect for legal maxims, or rules of merely human contrivance. Cromwell was educating himself for the Statesman: at this juncture it is the Puritan General that we have before us.
The Little Parliament having blundered on till it had got itself entangled in the Mosaic dispensation, resigned its power into the hands of him who had bestowed it. Thereupon a new Instrument of Government is framed, with the advice of the council of officers, appointing Cromwell Protector, and providing for the election of a Parliament.
This Parliament being elected, falls, of course, on the discussion of this very Instrument of government. Henceforth Cromwell's great difficulty is the management of his Parliaments. The speeches he delivered to them at various times, and which occupy the third volume of the work before us, are of high historical interest. They are in every respect superior to his letters. Neither will their perusal be found to be of that arduous and painful nature which, from the reputation they have had, most persons will be disposed to expect. The sermon may weary, but the speech is always fraught with meaning; and the mixture of sermon and speech together, portray the man with singular distinctness. We see the Puritan divine, the Puritan soldier, becoming the Puritan statesman. His originally powerful mind is excited to fresh exertion by his onerous and exalted position. But he is still constant to himself. Very interesting is the exhibition presented to us of this powerful intellect, breaking out in flashes of strong sense, and relapsing again into the puerilities of the sect. But as it falls upon the strong sense to act, and on the puerilities only to preach, the man comes out, upon the whole, as a great and able governor.
The reputation which Oliver's speeches have borne, as being involved, spiritless, tortuous, and even purposely confused, has resulted, we think, from this—that an opinion of the whole has been formed from an examination of a few, and chiefly of those which were delivered on the occasion of his refusing the offered title of king. His conduct on this occasion, it would be necessary for an historian particularly to investigate, and in the discharge of this duty he would have to peruse a series of discourses undoubtedly of a very bewildering character. They are the only speeches of Cromwell of which it can be said that their meaning is not clearly, and even forcibly expressed. And in this case it is quite evident, that he had no distinct meaning to express; he had no definite answer to give the Parliament who were petitioning him to take the title of king. He was anxious to gain time—he was talking against time—an art which we moderns only have thoroughly mastered. How could Cromwell, who was no great rhetorician, be otherwise than palpably confused, and dubious and intricate? Nothing can be clearer than that he himself leant towards the opinion of the Parliament, that it would be good policy to adopt the royal title. It was so connected with the old attachments and associations of Englishmen, it had so long given force to the language of the law, its claims were so much better known, its prerogatives so much better understood than those of the new title of Protector, that the resumption of it must have appeared very advisable. But the army had been all along fighting against the King. Whilst to the lawyer and the citizen the title was still the most honourable and ever to be venerated, to the soldier of the Commonwealth it had become a term of reproach, of execration, of unsparing hostility. Oliver Cromwell might well hesitate before assuming a title which might forfeit for him the allegiance of a great portion of the army. He deferred his answer, to have an opportunity for estimating the nature and amount of the resistance he might expect from that quarter; and he came to the conclusion, that the risk of unsettling the affections of the army was not to be incurred for either any personal gratification to himself (which we take to have not weighed much with him) in assuming the title of king, or for the advantages which might accrue from it in the ultimate settlement of the nation. His addresses, therefore, to the Parliament on this occasion not being definite answers to the Parliament, nor intended to be such, but mere postponements of his answer, were necessarily distinguished by indecision, uncertainty, and all sorts of obscurities. But, these excepted, his speeches, however deficient in what pertains to the art of composition, in terseness, or method, or elegance of phrase, are never wanting in the great essentials—the expression of his meaning in a very earnest and forcible manner. The mixture of sermon and speech, we allow, is not inviting; but the sermon is just as clear, perhaps, as any which the chaplain of the House would have preached to them, and it must be remembered, that to explain his meaning, his political sentiments, the sermon was as necessary as the speech.