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Heroes of the Nations

A Series of Biographical Studies presenting the lives and work of certain representative historical characters, about whom have gathered the traditions of the nations to which they belong, and who have, in the majority of instances, been accepted as types of the several national ideals.

FOR FULL LIST SEE END OF THIS VOLUME

Heroes of the Nations

EDITED BY

Evelyn Abbott, M.A.

FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD

FACTA DUCIS VIVENT, OPEROSAQUE GLORIA RERUM.—OVID, IN LIVIAM 265.

THE HERO’S DEEDS AND HARD-WON FAME SHALL LIVE.

OLIVER CROMWELL

OLIVER CROMWELL.
(From a painting by an unknown artist, in the National Portrait Gallery.)

OLIVER CROMWELL
AND THE RULE OF THE PURITANS IN ENGLAND

BY

CHARLES FIRTH, M.A.

BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

The Knickerbocker Press

Copyright, 1900

BY

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

PREFACE

This Life of Cromwell is in part based on an article contributed by the author to the Dictionary of National Biography in 1888, but embodies the result of later researches, and of recently discovered documents such as the Clarke Papers. The battle plans have been specially drawn for this volume by Mr. B. V. Darbishire, and in two cases differ considerably from those generally accepted as correct. The scheme of this series does not permit a discussion of the reasons why these alterations have been made, but the evidence concerning the battles in question has been carefully examined, and any divergence from received accounts is intentional. The reader who wishes to see this subject discussed at length is referred to a study of the battle of Marston Moor printed in Volume XII. of the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (new series), and to a similar paper on Dunbar which will appear in Volume XIV.

The quotations from Cromwell’s letters or speeches are, where necessary, freely abridged.

C. H. F.

Oxford, Feb. 6, 1900.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

OLIVER CROMWELL

CHAPTER I
EARLY LIFE
1599–1629

“I was by birth a gentleman living neither in any considerable height nor yet in obscurity,” said the Protector to one of his Parliaments. Cromwell’s family was one of the many English families which rose to wealth and importance at the time of the Reformation. It owed its name and its fortune to Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, the minister of Henry VIII., and the destroyer of the monasteries. In 1494, Thomas Cromwell’s sister Katherine had married Morgan Williams, a wealthy brewer of Putney, whose family sprang from Glamorganshire. Her eldest son Richard took the surname of Cromwell, entered the service of Henry VIII., and assisted his uncle in his dealings with refractory Churchmen. Grants of land flowed in upon the lucky kinsman of the King’s vicegerent. In 1538, he was given the Benedictine priory of Hinchinbrook near Huntingdon. In 1540, the site of the rich Benedictine abbey of Ramsey and some of its most valuable manors were added to his possessions. Honour as well as wealth fell to his lot. At the tournament held at Westminster on May Day, 1540, to celebrate the espousals of Henry VIII. and Anne of Cleves,—a marriage which was to unite English and German Protestantism,—Richard Cromwell was one of the six champions who maintained the honour of England against all comers. Pleased by his prowess with sword and lance, the King gave him a diamond ring and made him a knight.

Six weeks later fortune turned against the all-powerful Earl of Essex. He had pushed forward the Reformation faster than the King desired and bound the King to a woman he detested. “Say what they will, she is nothing fair,” groaned Henry, and suddenly repudiated wife, policy, and minister. On June 10th, Thomas Cromwell was arrested in the Council Chamber itself and committed to the Tower on the charge of high treason. “He had left,” it was said, “the mean, indifferent, virtuous, and true way” of reforming religion which his master trod. In his zeal to advance doctrinal changes, he had dared to say that if the King and all his realm would turn and vary from his opinions, he would fight in the field in his own person with his sword in his hand against the King and all others; adding that if he lived a year or two he trusted “to bring things to that frame that it should not lie in the King’s power to resist or let it.” On July 28th, Cromwell passed from the Tower to the scaffold.

Few pitied him and only one mourned him. Sir Richard Cromwell, said tradition, dared to appear at the Court in the mourning raiment which the King hated, and Henry, respecting his fidelity, pardoned his boldness. He retained the King’s favour the rest of his life, was made a gentleman of the Privy Chamber and constable of Berkeley Castle, got more grants of lands, and died in 1546.

Sir Richard’s son Henry built Hinchinbrook House, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth, whom he entertained during one of her progresses, and was four times sheriff of Huntingdonshire. As marshal of the county he organised its forces at the time of the Spanish Armada, raised, besides the four soldiers he was bound to furnish, twenty-six horsemen at his own cost, and called on the trained bands to practise “the right and perfect use of their weapons,” and fight for “the sincere religion of Christ” against “the devilish superstition of the Pope.” In their mixture of military and religious ardour his harangues recall the speeches of his grandson. People called him “the golden knight” because of his wealth and his liberality, and he matched his children with the best blood of the eastern counties. One daughter was the mother of Major-General Edward Whalley, one of the Regicides; another married William Hampden, and her son was John Hampden.

Of Sir Henry’s sons, Oliver, his heir, was a man who from love of ostentation pushed his father’s liberality to extravagance. When James I. came to England he was received at Hinchinbrook, “with such entertainment as had not been seen in any place before, since his first setting forward out of Scotland.” James made him a Knight of the Bath at the coronation, and paid him three other visits during his reign.

Robert, Sir Henry’s second son, inherited from his father an estate at Huntingdon, worth in those days about £300 a year, equal to three or four times as much now. He sat for Huntingdon in the Parliament of 1593, filled the office of bailiff for the borough, and was one of the justices of the peace for the county. Robert Cromwell married Elizabeth, widow of William Lynn, and daughter of William Steward of Ely. Her family were well off, and she brought with her a jointure of £60 a year. The Stewards were relatives of the last prior and first Protestant dean of Ely, who had obtained good leases of Church lands, and were farmers of the tithes of the see. Tradition, which loves curious coincidences, has connected them with the royal House of Stuart that their descendant overthrew, but history traces their origin to a Norfolk family originally named Styward. Oliver, the future Lord Protector, was the fifth child of Robert Cromwell, and the only one of his sons who survived infancy. He was born at Huntingdon, on April 25, 1599, baptised at St. John’s Church in that town on April 29th, and christened Oliver after his uncle, the knight of Hinchinbrook. Little is known of his boyhood. A royalist biographer says that he was of “a cross and peevish disposition” from his infancy, while a contemporary panegyrist credits him even then with “a quick and lively apprehension, a piercing and sagacious wit, and a solid judgment.”

Stories are told of his marvellous deliverances from danger, and of strange prognostications of his future greatness. It was revealed to him in a dream or by an apparition “that he should be the greatest man in England, and should be near the King.” Another story was that he had acted the part of a king in a play in his school days, placing the crown himself upon his head, and adding “majestical mighty words” of his own to the poet’s verses. These are the usual fictions which cluster round the early life of great men. All that is certain is that Cromwell was educated at the free school of Huntingdon under Dr. Thomas Beard—a Puritan schoolmaster who wrote pedantic Latin plays, proved that the Pope was Antichrist, and showed in his Theatre of God’s Judgments that human crimes never go unpunished by God even in this world. Beard was an austere man who believed in the rod, and a biographer describes him as correcting the manners of young Oliver “with a diligent hand and careful eye,” which may be accepted as truth. But these disciplinings did not prevent pupil and master from being friends in later life.

At the age of seventeen, Cromwell was sent to Cambridge, where on April 23, 1616, he was admitted a fellow commoner of Sidney Sussex College. The College, founded in 1598, was one of those two which Laud subsequently complained of as nurseries of Puritanism. Its master, Samuel Ward, was a learned and morbidly conscientious divine; a severe disciplinarian, who exacted from his scholars elaborate accounts of the sermons they heard, and had them whipped in hall when they offended. Cromwell did not distinguish himself, but he by no means wasted his time at Cambridge. He had no aptitude for languages. Burnet says he “had no foreign language but the little Latin that stuck to him from his education, which he spoke very viciously and scantily.” When he was Protector he remembered enough Latin to carry on a conversation in that tongue with a Dutch ambassador.

Another biographer tells us that Cromwell “excelled chiefly in the mathematics,” and his kinsman, the poet Waller, was wont to say that the Protector was “very well read in the Greek and Roman story.” His advice to his son Richard bears out this account of his preferences. “Read a little history,” he wrote to him; “study the Mathematics and cosmography. These are good with subordination to the things of God. These fit for public services for which a man is born.” With Cromwell, as with Montrose, Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World was a favourite book, and he urged his son to read it. “’Tis a body of history, and will add much more to your understanding than fragments of story.”

Cromwell’s tutor is said to have observed with great discrimination that his pupil was not so much addicted to speculation as to action, and royalist biographers make his early taste for athletics and sport a great reproach to him. One says: “He was easily satiated with study, taking more delight in horse and field exercise.” Another describes him as “more famous for his exercises in the fields than in the schools, being one of the chief matchmakers and players of football, cudgels, or any other boisterous sport or game.”

THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL, HUNTINGTON.
(From Pike’s “Oliver Cromwell.”)

How long Cromwell remained at the university is not known, but it is certain that he left it without taking a degree. Probably he quitted Cambridge prematurely on account of the death of his father, who was buried at All Saints’ Church, Huntingdon, on June 24, 1617. For a time Cromwell stayed at Huntingdon, no doubt helping his mother in the management of the estate and in the settlement of his father’s affairs. Then he went to London to acquire the smattering of law which every country gentleman needed, and which one whose position marked him out as a future justice of the peace and member of parliament could not do without. “He betook himself,” says a contemporary biographer, “to the study of law in Lincoln’s Inn; that nothing might be wanting to make him a complete gentleman and a good commonwealthsman.” Though his name does not appear in the books of that society, the fact is probable enough, and sufficiently well attested to be accepted.

Three years after his father’s death, Cromwell married, on August 22, 1620, at St. Giles’s Church, Cripplegate, Elizabeth Bourchier. She was the daughter of Sir James Bourchier, a city merchant living on Tower Hill and owning property at Felstead in Essex. It is probable that Cromwell’s wife brought him a considerable dowry, for the day after marriage he contracted, under penalty of £4000, to settle upon her, as her jointure, the parsonage house of Hartford in Huntingdonshire with its glebe land and tithes. Elizabeth Cromwell was a year older than her husband, and is traditionally said to have been a notable housewife. In spite of royalist lampooners she was, if her portraits may be trusted, neither uncomely nor undignified in person. Her affection for her husband was sincere and lasting. “My life is but half a life in your absence,” she writes to him in 1650. “I could chide thee,” says Cromwell in answer to a complaint about not writing, “that in many of thy letters thou writest to me, that I should not be unmindful of thee and thy little ones. Truly, if I love you not too well, I think I err not on the other hand much. Thou art dearer to me than any creature; let that suffice.”

After his marriage, Cromwell settled down at Huntingdon and occupied himself in farming the lands he had inherited from his father. Two-thirds of the income of the estate had been left by Robert Cromwell to his widow for the term of twenty-one years, in order to provide for the maintenance of the daughters, so that Oliver’s means during the early years of his married life must have been rather narrow. It was understood, however, that he was destined to be the heir of his mother’s brother, Sir Thomas Steward, and in 1628 another uncle, Richard Cromwell, left him a small property at Huntingdon. Ere long there was a proof that Cromwell had earned the good opinion of his neighbours, for, in February, 1628, he was elected to represent his native town in the third Parliament called by Charles I. The choice was partly due to the position of his family and its long connection with the borough, but more must have been due also to Cromwell’s personal character and reputation, since the local influence of the Cromwell family, thanks to the reckless extravagance of its head, was already on the wane. In 1627, Sir Oliver to pay his debts had been obliged to sell Hinchinbrook to Sir Sidney Montague, and had retired to Ramsey. He had represented the county in eight Parliaments, but he sat for it no more, and the Montagues were henceforth the leading family in Huntingdonshire.

ELIZABETH, THE WIFE OF OLIVER CROMWELL.
(From a drawing by W. Bond.)

Cromwell’s entry upon the stage of English politics took place at the moment when the quarrel between Charles I. and his Parliaments became a complete breach. To Henry VIII. Parliaments had been the servile tools with which he used to work his will in Church and State. To Elizabeth they had been faithful servants, obedient though sometimes venturing to grumble or criticise. During her reign, the House of Commons had grown strong and conscious of its strength. The spoils of the monasteries had enriched the country gentry, and the development of local government had given them political training, while the growth of commerce had brought wealth to merchants and manufacturers. Into upper and middle classes alike the Reformation had put a spirit which began by questioning authority in matters of religion, and went on to question authority in politics.

It was in religious matters, naturally, that this spirit of opposition first revealed itself. Henry VIII. had separated the English from the Catholic Church, not in order to alter its doctrine, but in order to make himself its master. The doctrinal change which Thomas Cromwell had prematurely attempted, Somerset and Northumberland carried out in the reign of Henry’s son. The only result of the reaction under Mary was to inspire most Englishmen with a passionate hostility to the faith in whose name the Queen’s bonfires had been kindled. Elizabeth restored Protestantism, and re-established the control of the State over the Church. She called herself “Supreme Governor” instead of “Head of the Church,” but kept all the essentials of the supremacy which her father had established. To conciliate the English Catholics she made the doctrine and ritual of the National Church less offensively Protestant, but to impose her compromise she was obliged to use force. Year after year the penalties inflicted upon Catholics who refused to conform became heavier, and their lot was made harder, but thousands remained invincibly constant, and preferred to suffer rather than deny their faith.

Not only did the enforcement of the Elizabethan compromise fail to suppress Catholicism, but it created Puritanism and Protestant Nonconformity. Puritanism represented from the first “the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.” The aim of those who called themselves Puritans was to restore the Church to what they thought its original purity in doctrine, worship, and government. Some remained within its pale, content to accept the rule of bishops and the supremacy of the Crown so long as doctrine and ritual were to their liking. Others, who desired a simpler ceremonial and a more democratic form of government, sought to transform the Anglican Church to the model of that of Scotland or Geneva, and were the predecessors of the Presbyterian party of Charles the First’s time. A small band of extremists separated altogether from the National Church, and founded self-governing congregations, which defined their own creed and chose their own ministers. But though Independency sprang up first in England it made few converts, and never throve till it was transplanted to Holland or New England.

Elizabeth suppressed nascent Presbyterianism, and persecuted with equal vigour Catholic recusant and Protestant separatist. But within the National Church, in spite of repressive measures, the Puritan party grew continually stronger, while Parliament became more aggressively Protestant, and more eager for Church reform. While the Queen lived, no change in the ecclesiastical system was possible. When she died, wise men counselled her successor to adopt a different policy: to try comprehension instead of compulsion, and to make concessions to Puritanism. James refused. “I shall make them conform themselves,” was his answer, “or I shall harry them out of the land.” He began his reign by authorising new canons which enforced more rigid uniformity, and by driving three hundred ministers from their livings. The main cause of his breach with his first Parliament was his refusal to restrict the authority or to reform the abuses of the ecclesiastical courts.

The Church policy of James aggravated the divisions he should have tried to heal; his foreign policy ran counter to the national traditions of his subjects as well as their religious prejudices. It was an axiom with Englishmen that England’s natural allies were the Protestant states of Europe, and that it was her duty when occasion demanded to come forward as the champion of Protestantism against the Catholic powers. But for more than ten years James made a close alliance with Spain his chief object in European politics, partly with the laudable aim of putting an end to religious wars, partly in the hope of paying his debts with the dowry of the Spanish Infanta. For the sake of this alliance he sent Raleigh to the block, declined to help the German Protestants, offered to suspend the penal laws against the Catholics, and forbade Parliament to discuss foreign affairs. The general joy which hailed the breaking off of the Spanish match revealed the depth of the hostility which the King’s schemes had excited.

During the same years, the King’s attitude towards English institutions called into life a constitutional opposition. His theory of monarchy found expression in persistent attempts to extend the power of the Crown and diminish the rights of Parliament. Backed by a judicial decision that the right to tax imports and exports was a part of the royal prerogative, James imposed new customs duties by his own authority, and dissolved his second Parliament when it voted them illegal. Members were imprisoned for their utterances in the House of Commons, and Parliament was forbidden to debate mysteries of State or matters touching the King’s government. When the House asserted its right to freedom of speech James replied that its privileges were derived from the grace and favour of his ancestors, and erased the protest, which claimed that the liberties of Parliament were “the undoubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England.”

Such a policy seemed to proceed from a formed design to destroy English freedom. Throughout Europe, absolute monarchies had risen on the ruins of national liberties, and now the same fate threatened England. When Charles I. succeeded his father, he found the nation he had to govern not only discontented, but also full of suspicion. “We are the last monarchy in Christendom that maintains its rights,” said a parliamentary orator in 1625, and the distrust and fear created by the pretensions of James flung their shadows across the path of his son.

Charles I., with his royal bearing and his kingly graces, seemed fitter to win back the hearts of his subjects than James, who lacked both majesty and manners. But he was as devoid of sympathy for the nation he governed as his father had been; as prone to cherish chimerical schemes, and as blind to facts. James had left him a courtier instead of a statesman to be his guide, and Charles gave Buckingham as complete trust as if he had possessed the experience of Burleigh or the wisdom of Bacon.

At the moment when the new reign opened, the rupture with Spain had given both Charles and his minister a factitious popularity. But on both foreign and domestic affairs King and Parliament speedily disagreed. Parliament was eager for war with Spain, but not ready either to furnish funds for a European coalition against the House of Hapsburg, or to buy the alliance of France by repealing the penal laws against English Catholics. It granted the King money to fit out a fleet, but its refusal of a more liberal supply, and its open declaration of want of confidence in the King’s minister, brought the session to a sudden close.

Buckingham hoped to justify himself by success, and launched forth on the sea of European politics with all the boldness of an adventurer. He sent an expedition to sack Cadiz and to capture the Spanish plate-fleet. He promised subsidies to the King of Denmark for his campaigns in Germany. He courted popularity with the Puritans by repudiating the engagements made to France in the King’s marriage treaty, and endeavouring to pose as the protector of the Huguenots. But when a second Parliament met there was nothing but a record of failure to lay before it. The expedition to Cadiz had ended in disaster and disgrace. “Our honour is ruined,” cried Sir John Eliot to the Commons, “our ships are sunk, our men perished, not by the sword, not by the enemy, not by chance, but by those we trusted.” All blame fell on the man who had monopolised power, but the King forbade Parliament to call his servant to account, and put a stop to Buckingham’s impeachment by a second dissolution.

During the next two years Charles tried the “new ways” he had threatened to adopt if Parliament declined to supply his necessities. A forced loan of £300,000 was levied, and those who refused payment were, if rich, imprisoned; if poor, impressed. There were schemes for raising an excise to support a standing army, and Ship-money to maintain a fleet. Judges were dismissed for denying the legality of the forced loan, and divines promoted for declaring it sinful to refuse payment. But abroad failure still dogged the King’s foreign policy. In Germany the King of Denmark was crushed because Charles could not pay the promised subsidies. The French alliance ended in quarrels which grew into a war with France. Buckingham’s expedition to the Isle of Rhé ended in a more ruinous failure than the expedition to Cadiz. “Since England was England,” wrote Denzil Holles, “it received not so dishonourable a blow.” Unable to continue the fight with France and Spain without money, Charles was forced once more to appeal to the nation.

Charles the First’s third Parliament met on March 17, 1628. It opened its proceedings with a debate on the grievances of the nation, and almost the first speech Cromwell heard in the House must have been Eliot’s appeal to his brother members to remember the greatness of the issue before them. “Upon this dispute,” said the spokesman of the Commons, “not alone our goods and lands are engaged, but all that we call ours. Those rights, those privileges that made our fathers freemen are in question. If they be not now the more carefully preserved, they will render us to posterity less free, less worthy than our fathers.” The House voted the King supplies, but made their grant dependent on the redress of grievances. Then followed the drawing up of the Petition of Right, declaring arbitrary imprisonment and taxation without the consent of Parliament henceforth illegal, and at last the Commons, by the threat of impeaching Buckingham again, wrung the acceptance of their petition from the reluctant King.

In the interval between the first and second session of the third Parliament, Buckingham died by Felton’s hand, but his death did not put an end to the quarrel. Charles became his own prime minister, and made evident to all men that the King’s will, not the favourite’s influence, was the source of the policy against which the Commons protested. The beginning of the second session, in January, 1629, was marked by a new dispute about taxation. The Commons asserted that the levy of tonnage and poundage without its grant, and the continued collection of the new customs duties imposed by James I., were contrary to the Petition of Right. The King declared that these were rights he had never meant to part with, and persisted in exacting them despite the votes of the House. Louder still grew the cry against the High Church clergy and the ecclesiastical policy of the King. It was not only of sermons in favour of absolute monarchy or innovations in ritual that the Puritan leaders complained. The dispute about ceremonies had now developed into a dispute about doctrine too. The milder theories about justification and election—known as Arminianism and favoured by the High Church clergy—seemed to Puritans to be sapping the foundations of Protestantism and paving the way for Popery. The King endeavoured to put an end to doctrinal disputes by silencing controversial preaching; the Commons demanded the suppression of Arminianism, and the punishment of all who propagated views deviating from what they regarded as Protestant orthodoxy.

It was during these religious disputes that Cromwell first took part in the debates of the Commons. Inheriting the traditions of a family that owed everything to the Reformation, trained by a Puritan schoolmaster and at a Puritan college, he could take only one side, and he raised his voice to swell the attack upon the friends of Popery in the Church. The House was discussing some charges against Dr. Neile, the Bishop of Winchester, when Cromwell intervened with a story showing that prelate’s leaning to popish tenets. A certain Dr. Alablaster, said Cromwell, had “preached flat Popery” in a sermon before the Lord Mayor, and when Dr. Beard, the next preacher there, came in turn to deliver his sermon, Neile sent for Beard, and “did charge him as his diocesan not to preach any doctrine contrary to that which Dr. Alablaster had delivered.” Beard nevertheless persisted in refuting his predecessor, and was reprimanded by Neile for his disobedience.

Before the charges against Neile and other like-minded prelates were brought to a conclusion, and before the remonstrance of the Commons against the King’s ecclesiastical policy was perfected, Charles put an end to the sitting of Parliament.

Ere it separated, the House of Commons, at Eliot’s bidding, affirmed once more the principles for which it was fighting. Cromwell was one of the defiant crowd who refused to obey the King’s orders for adjournment till they had passed by acclamation Eliot’s three resolutions. Whoever, it was declared, should bring in innovations in religion, or seek to introduce Popery, Arminianism, or any opinion disagreeing from the true and orthodox Church, should be reported a capital enemy to this kingdom and commonwealth. Whoever counselled the levying of tonnage and poundage without a parliamentary grant should also be held an enemy to his country and an innovator in the government; and whoever willingly paid those taxes was proclaimed to be a betrayer of the liberties of England. The significance of the resolutions lay not merely in their challenge to the King, but in the union of political and religious discontents which they indicated. Elizabeth’s policy had called into being a religious opposition. James had created a constitutional opposition. Under Charles the two had combined, and from their alliance sprang the Civil War.

To themselves the parliamentary leaders seemed defenders of the existing constitution in Church and State against the revolutionary changes of the King. In reality the greatest innovation of all lay in the claim of the Commons that Church and State should be controlled by the representatives of the people, not by the will of the King. When that claim was once made, the struggle for sovereignty was an inevitable and irrepressible conflict.

CHAPTER II
THE PREPARATION FOR THE CIVIL WAR
1629–1640

For the next eleven years Charles ruled without a Parliament. “Remember,” he had warned the Commons in 1626, “that Parliaments are altogether in my power for their calling, sitting and dissolution; therefore as I find the fruits of them good or evil, they are to continue, or not to be.” He now announced that their fruits were evil, and that henceforth it would be accounted presumption for anyone to prescribe to him a time for the calling of another. Henceforth he would govern by the authority which God had put into his hands, and so order the state that his people should confess that they lived more happily and freely than any subjects in the Christian world.

Taxation without parliamentary grant became thereafter the regular practice. Tonnage and poundage were levied from the merchants as if the right had never been disputed, and new impositions on trade were added to the old. Obsolete laws were revived and rigorously executed. In 1630, the law which required every person possessing an estate worth £40 a year to take up the honour of knighthood was put in force, and fines to the amount of £170,000 were levied on those who had omitted to comply with it. In 1634, the ancient forest laws were revived. Lands were now declared to be part of the royal forests which for three hundred years had been outside their boundaries, and landowners were heavily fined for encroachments.

The knighthood fines affected all the gentry and all men in easy circumstances; the extension of the forests threatened chiefly the nobility and persons of quality; the revival of the monopolies aggrieved all classes alike. The King, it was calculated, got £38,000 a year from the wine monopolists, the patentees received from the vintners £90,000, and the vintners raised the price of wine to the consumers so that the nation paid £360,000. And besides the wine monopoly there were monopolies of soap, of iron, of tobacco, of salt, of gunpowder, and of many other commodities.

On the one hand, the King’s financial measures discontented the nation, and on the other they failed to meet the wants of the Government. In 1635, the ordinary revenue of the Crown was about £600,000, and the King’s debts were about £1,200,000. When the safety of the seas and the exigencies of foreign policy required a fleet, it became necessary to resort to direct taxation, and Ship-money was invented. In 1634, it was levied on the maritime counties only, and brought in £100,000; in 1635, it was extended to the inland counties, and produced twice that amount.

It was useless to appeal to the law courts for protection or redress. The judges, removable at the King’s pleasure, declined to arbitrate between King and people, and preferred to regard themselves as the servants of the Crown. When called upon to decide on the lawfulness of Ship-money, their decision was avowedly dictated by political rather than legal considerations. One judge declared that the law was the King’s old and trusty servant, that it was not true that lex was rex, but common and most true that rex was lex. Another asserted that no acts of Parliament could take away the King’s right to command the persons and the money of his subjects, if he thought a sufficient necessity existed. It was well said that the reasons alleged by the judges were such as every man could swear were not law, and that their logic left no man anything which he might call his own. To enforce his will, the King had at his disposal, besides the ordinary courts of law, the exceptional courts which the Tudors had created. Their jurisdiction was enlarged at the King’s pleasure. In 1632, the powers of the Council of the North were increased. The Privy Council assumed legislative power by its proclamations, “enjoining this to the people that was not enjoined by law, and prohibiting that which was not prohibited by law.” The Star Chamber enforced the proclamations by fine and imprisonment, and punished opponents or critics with inordinate severity.[^[1]] The fate of Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick showed that no profession could exempt its members from barbarous and ignominious penalties.[^[2]] The fate of Eliot and his friends proved that the privileges of Parliament were no protection against the King’s vindictiveness.[^[3]] There were Privy Councillors who “would ordinarily laugh when the word liberty of the subject was named,” and to wise men it seemed that the very foundations of right were in danger of destruction.

If Englishmen wished to know what the aim of the King’s ministers was they had only to look across St. George’s Channel. “The King,” wrote Wentworth from Ireland in 1638, “is as absolute here as any prince in the world can be.”[^[4]] Parliaments still existed, but the Lord Deputy managed them as he chose, and, as Pym said, Parliaments without parliamentary liberties were but plausible ways to servitude. Juries existed, but when they gave verdicts against the Crown they were fined for their contumacy. The highest officials and the richest noblemen felt the weight of Wentworth’s hand, and submitted to do his bidding. Trade increased, order reigned where it had never reigned before, and the poor lived freer from the oppressions of the great than the poor in Ireland had ever dreamt of doing. But not a vestige of self-government remained save a few idle forms; the government was a machine in which all motion, all force, came from the royal authority. The people had nothing to do but to obey the King. “Let them,” said Wentworth, “attend upon his will, with confidence in his justice, belief in his wisdom, and assurance in his parental affections,” instead of feeding themselves “with the vain flatteries of imaginary liberty.”

Amongst Englishmen the King’s use of his absolute power did not foster this blind faith in his superior wisdom.

A vigorous foreign policy directed towards national ends might have reconciled some of his subjects to the substitution of personal rule for self-government. But Charles had no European policy. When he dissolved his third Parliament he was at war with France and Spain, and want of money obliged him to make peace as soon as possible. In European politics, his only object was to procure the restoration of the Palatinate to his sister and her children. For this he offered his alliance simultaneously to Gustavus Adolphus and to Ferdinand II. For this he negotiated with France and Spain as he negotiated a few years later with Presbyterians and Independents. His policy was a series of intrigues which failed, and a succession of bargains in which he asked much, offered little, and got nothing. As it was purely dynastic in its aim, and at once unprincipled and unsuccessful, it left him with no ally in Europe.

One result it had, attributed by panegyrists to his wisdom, and held by courtiers a compensation for the loss of freedom—England kept out of war. “It enjoyed,” says Clarendon, “the greatest calm and the fullest measure of felicity that any people for so long a time together had been blessed with, to the wonder and envy of all the parts of Christendom.” The Thirty Years’ War was turning fruitful Germany into a wilderness, and its cities into heaps of ruins. All other countries were impoverished or devastated by war, but England was, as it were, “the garden of Christendom” and “the Exchange of Europe.” “Here,” sang a poet, “white peace, the beautifullest of things, had fixed her everlasting nest.” Never had the English Court been gayer, more brilliant, more luxurious; never were masques and banquets more frequent than during the crisis of Protestantism in Germany.

“Let the German drum bellow for freedom,” wrote the poet of the Court, “its noise

“Disturbs not us, nor should divert our joys.”

Puritans felt that these German drums were a call to England to be up and doing. With anxious or exultant eyes, they followed each turn of fate in the death-struggle of Catholicism and Protestantism. It cheered Eliot’s prison in the Tower to think of the progress of “the work abroad.” When Tilly fled before Gustavus at the Breitenfeld, Eliot cried that now “Fortune and Hope were met.” When Gustavus fell at Lützen, every Puritan’s heart sank within him. “Never,” wrote D’Ewes, “did one person’s death bring so much sorrow to all true Protestant hearts—not our godly Edward’s, the Sixth of that name, nor our late and heroic Prince Henry’s—as did the King of Sweden’s at this present.”

It seemed to Puritans as if the same struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism was beginning even now in England. While the foreign policy of Charles seemed to them a cowardly desertion of Protestantism, his ecclesiastical policy seemed an insidious attack upon it, and under Laud’s influence the ecclesiastical policy of Charles was as uniform and consistent as his European policy was feeble and irresolute.[^[5]] To himself, Laud appeared an eminently conservative reformer who sought to enforce only the discipline of the Church and the ecclesiastical laws of the State. His object was to bring the Church back to its true historical position as a branch of the great Catholic Church, and to purge it of the Calvinistic taint it had contracted since the Reformation. Not averse to a certain freedom of speculation amongst learned men, he sought to silence controversial preaching, and was intolerant of diversity in the forms of worship. Unity of belief was essential to the existence of a National Church, and the way to it lay through uniformity, “for unity cannot long continue in the Church when uniformity is shut out at the church door.” “Decency and an orderly settlement of the external worship of God in the Church” was his own definition of the ends for which he laboured.

To the Puritans, Laud appeared an innovator and a revolutionary. Over half the country the observances he sought to enforce had fallen into disuse for years. Each restoration of an authorised form, every revival of ancient usage, brought the Church nearer to Roman practice, and in their opinion nearer to Roman doctrine. A bow was not an expression of reverence, but a confession of idolatry; a surplice, not a few yards of white linen, but a rag of Rome. Laud’s attempts to silence their preachers aggravated their suspicion of his motives and confirmed them in the theory that he was a papist in disguise.

Much of the hostility which Laud brought upon himself was due to the means which he employed. The King’s authority as supreme governor of the Church was the instrument by which the State could be used to carry out the views of a clerical reformer, and he had no scruples about using it. Laud’s reliance on personal government in matters ecclesiastical allied him naturally with its supporters in things secular. Absolutism was with Strafford a political creed, with Laud an ecclesiastical necessity. Each needed the same tool: one to realise his dream of a well governed commonwealth, the other to shape a Church that had grown half Calvinistic into conformity with the Anglican ideal. Each had the same violent zeal. “Laud,” says James I., “hath a restless spirit, and cannot see when things are well, but loves to bring matters to a pitch of reformation floating in his own brain.” Strafford described himself as one “ever desiring the best things, never satisfied I had done enough, but did always desire to do better.”

Laud and Strafford were alike in their impatience of opposition, whether it rose from indolence, corruption, or conscience; whether it pleaded legal technicalities or constitutional rights. Arbitrary though the government of Charles was, it was not vigorous enough to satisfy these two eager spirits. But Strafford’s power to give his views effect was bounded by the Irish Sea, and outside the ecclesiastical sphere Laud’s was hampered by conflicting influences. The correspondence of the Archbishop and the Lord Deputy is full of complaints of the remissness of the King’s other ministers, and of sighs for the adoption of a system of “Thorough.”

Opponents of Ship-money and Puritans in general must be put down with a strong hand. “The very genius of that people,” wrote Strafford, “leads them always to oppose, as well civilly as ecclesiastically, all that ever authority ordains for them, but in good truth were they rightly served they should be whipped home into their right wits.” “It might be done,” answered Laud, “if the rod were rightly used, but as it is used it smarts not.” Thus they took sweet counsel together, never dreaming of “that two-handed engine at the door” which waited to strike them both.

During these eleven years of arbitrary government, Cromwell’s life was obscure, if not wholly uneventful. It was a period of unconscious preparation for his future action, a quiet seed-time which bore fruit hereafter. When the “great, warm, ruffling Parliament” of 1628 ended, Cromwell returned to his little estate at Huntingdon and busied himself with his farming. In May, 1631, he sold his property at Huntingdon for £1800, and rented some grazing lands at St. Ives, about five miles eastward, and farther down the Ouse. In 1636, Sir Thomas Steward of Ely, the brother of Cromwell’s mother, died, and Oliver, whom his uncle had made his heir, succeeded Sir Thomas as farmer of the Cathedral tithes. He removed to Ely, where he lived in “the glebe house” near St. Mary’s Church, which continued to be the residence of his wife and children till 1647. His family now numbered four sons, Robert, Oliver, Richard, and Henry; and two daughters, Bridget and Elizabeth, all born at Huntingdon. Two more daughters, Frances and Mary, were born in 1637 and 1638. The house he occupied is still standing; in 1845 it was an alehouse.

“By no means a sumptuous mansion,” says Carlyle, “but may have conveniently held a man of three or four hundred a year, with his family, in those simple times. Some quaint air of gentility still looks through its ragged dilapidations. It is of two stories, more properly of one and a half; has many windows, irregular chimneys, and gables.”

CROMWELL’S HOUSE, ELY.
(From a photograph.)

Some writers, more especially poets, have spoken of these years of Cromwell’s life as a time given up entirely to domesticity and agriculture. Marvell praises the Protector for an early abstention from public affairs which was by no means voluntary:

“For neither didst thou from the first apply

Thy sober spirit unto things too high;

But in thine own fields exercisedst long

A healthful mind within a body strong.”

Elsewhere he pictures the ascent of the future general of the Republic:

“From his private gardens, where

He lived reservèd and austere,

As if his highest plot

To plant the bergamot.”

Yet even to these private gardens and sequestered fields the echo of the German drums must have penetrated, and the Thirty Years’ War must have stirred Cromwell as it stirred D’Ewes and Eliot. His later life suffices to prove it. In 1647, when the English Civil War seemed over, Cromwell thought of taking service in Germany himself. When he became Protector, his European policy was inspired by the passions of the Thirty Years’ War. Its memories governed his attitude towards Austria and Sweden; he thought that Leopold I. would be a second Ferdinand II., and dreamt of finding a new Gustavus in Charles X. But to the Puritan farmer, prescient of a future struggle, the war was not merely a spectacle but a military education. Some of the best accounts of the battles and the mode of fighting of Gustavus were published in England, and between 1630 and 1640 few books were more popular than The Swedish Intelligencer and The Swedish Soldier. It cannot be doubted that Cromwell read these narratives, and absorbed from them that knowledge of military principles and military tactics which supplied for him the place of personal experience.

“I find him,” says a modern military writer, “at the very first entrance into the war acting on principles which past experience had established, following closely upon just that stage which the art of war had reached under Gustavus, using the very same moral stimulus which Gustavus had made so effective, using the very words on one occasion which Gustavus used on another, and indicating in various ways that he had most carefully studied the past, though he had not had the opportunity of doing any peace parade work.”

Cromwell watched the growth of arbitrary government in England with a still keener interest. In 1630, he was one of the many gentlemen prosecuted for omitting to go through the ceremony of knighthood, and finally had to pay ten pounds for his neglect. Presumably he also paid Ship-money, for there is no mention of his opposition to it amongst the State papers. If he refused to pay, the sheriff doubtless distrained upon his goods for the required amount, and there the matter ended. On another question Cromwell came into conflict with the local authorities, and was brought into collision with the King’s Council. Up to 1630, Huntingdon had been an ancient prescriptive corporation, governed by two bailiffs and a common council of twenty-four inhabitants who were elected yearly. On July 15, 1630, the town obtained a new charter from Charles I. “To prevent popular tumult,” the old common council was dissolved, and the government of the town vested in twelve aldermen elected for life, with a mayor, chosen annually out of the twelve, and a recorder. An oligarchy replaced a democracy. The chief agent of this change seems to have been Mr. Robert Barnard, a barrister who lived at Huntingdon, had lately bought an estate at Brampton hard by, and afterwards became Recorder of the town. The old common council had consented to the change in the government of Huntingdon, but when the terms of the new charter were examined a widespread discontent was aroused. Complaints were heard that it gave the mayor and aldermen power to deprive the burgesses of their rights in the common lands, and to levy exorbitant fines on burgesses who refused municipal office. Cromwell had assented to the change, and in the new charter he was appointed one of the three justices of the peace for the borough. But he thought these complaints well founded, and made himself the spokesman of the popular dissatisfaction. Perhaps Cromwell felt that he had been overreached by Barnard, whom in a later letter he significantly warns against too much subtlety. In his anger he made “disgraceful and unseemly speeches” to the new mayor and Barnard, and the corporation complained to the Privy Council. On November 2, 1630, the council committed Cromwell and one of his associates to custody. The case was heard on December 1st and referred to the arbitration of the Earl of Manchester, who, in his report, blamed Cromwell’s conduct, but ordered the charter to be amended in three points to meet his objections. The rights of the poorer burgesses were secured by an order that “the number of men’s cattle of all sorts which they now keep, according to order and usage, upon their commons, shall not be abridged or altered.” As to the personal question Manchester’s report was:

“For the words spoken of Mr. Mayor and Mr. Barnard by Mr. Cromwell, as they were ill, so they are acknowledged to be spoken in heat and passion and desired to be forgotten; and I found Mr. Cromwell very willing to hold friendship with Mr. Barnard, who with a good will remitting all the unkind passages past, entertained the same. So I left all parties reconciled.”

This quarrel was doubtless one of the reasons why Cromwell left Huntingdon. At St. Ives and Ely, he showed the same zeal to defend the rights of his poorer neighbours. In 1634, a company was incorporated for the drainage of the fens round Ely, which were known as the Great Level. The “Adventurers,” who were headed by the Earl of Bedford, were to be paid by a share of the lands they rescued from the water, and in 1637 the work was declared completed, and the reward claimed. By these drainage works the commoners lost the rights of pasturage and fishing they had previously enjoyed, and Cromwell made himself the champion of their interests against the “Adventurers.”

“It was commonly reported,” says a complaint, “by the commoners in Ely Fens and the Fens adjoining, that Mr. Cromwell of Ely had undertaken, they paying him a groat for every cow they had upon the commons, to hold the drainers in suit of law for five years, and that in the meantime they should enjoy every foot of their commons.”

In 1638, the King intervened, declared the work of drainage incomplete, and undertook to complete it himself, announcing that the inhabitants of the district were to continue in possession of their lands and commons till the work was really finished. Nothing else is known of Cromwell’s part in these disputes except a vague story told in the Memoirs of Sir Philip Warwick, that “the vulgar” grew clamorous against the scheme, and that Mr. Cromwell appeared as the head of their faction. Warwick, writing long after the events he referred to, assumed as a matter of course that Cromwell opposed the King, and the mistake found easy credence.

Some years later, Cromwell came forward in the same way to defend the rights of his old neighbours at St. Ives. The waste lands at Somersham near St. Ives had been enclosed without the consent of the commoners and sold to the Earl of Manchester. When the Long Parliament met, the aggrieved commoners petitioned the House of Commons for redress. The Lords intervened with an order in favour of Manchester. The commoners replied by proceeding “in a riotous and warlike manner” to break down the hedges and retake possession. Then the Lords sent the trained bands to reinstate Manchester, and Manchester issued sixty writs against the commoners. Without seeking to justify the violence of the commoners, Cromwell got the House of Commons to appoint a committee to consider the rights of the case. Hyde, its chairman, was greatly scandalised by the vehemence with which Cromwell advocated the rights of the commoners before it. Cromwell “ordered the witnesses and petitioners in the method of their proceeding, and enlarged upon what they said with great passion.” He reproached the chairman for partiality, used offensive language to the son of the noble earl who claimed the land, and “his whole carriage was so tempestuous, and his behaviour so insolent,” that the chairman threatened to report him to the House.

This persistent championship of the rights of peasants and small freeholders was the basis of Cromwell’s influence in the eastern counties. Common rights were something concrete and tangible, which appealed to many who were not Puritans, and came home to men to whom parliamentary privileges were remote abstractions. Every village Hampden looked to Cromwell as a leader, and was ready to follow him. In 1643, a royalist newspaper nicknamed him “The Lord of the Fens,” but his popularity with the fenmen began long before the military exploits which gained him the title.

In a more limited sphere Cromwell was well known as a zealous Puritan, but his opposition to Laud’s ecclesiastical policy did not bring him into any general notoriety. Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, was Cromwell’s kinsman, and lived during these years at Buckden near Huntingdon. He was wont to relate afterwards that his relative was in those days “a common spokesman for sectaries, and maintained their part with great stubbornness.” A part of Laud’s policy to which Cromwell was particularly hostile was the suppression of lectureships. The Puritans in the towns, discontented with the negligence of the established clergy in preaching, or with their doctrine, clubbed together to support lecturers, that is, clergymen whose sole business was preaching. Most corporations maintained a lecturer, and in 1625 a small society was formed for buying up impropriated tithes, and using the proceeds for the payment of lecturers. Laud sought to suppress these lectureships, and in 1633 the Star Chamber dissolved the Feoffees of Impropriations, and gave their patronage to the King.

At St. Ives or somewhere else in Huntingdonshire, there was a lectureship which Cromwell was anxious to keep up. It had been founded by some London citizens, and in 1636 was in danger of coming to an end through the stoppage of their subscriptions. Cromwell’s first letter is an appeal to a forgetful subscriber, worded with singular care and tact. “Not the least of the good works of your fellow citizens,” he begins,

“is that they have provided for the feeding of souls. Building of hospitals provides for men’s bodies; to build material temples is judged a work of piety, but they that procure spiritual food, they that build up spiritual temples, they are the men truly charitable, truly pious. Such a work as this was your erecting the lecture.”

He goes on to say that the lecturer is a good and able man, and has done good work; help him therefore to carry it on.

“Surely, it were a piteous thing to see a lecture fall in the hands of so many able and godly men, as I am persuaded the founders of this are; in these times, wherein we see they are suppressed, with too much haste and violence by the enemies of God his Truth.... To withdraw the pay is to let fall the lecture; for who goeth to warfare at his own cost. I beseech you therefore ... let the good man have his pay. The souls of God’s children will bless you for it and so shall I.”

The changes which Laud introduced in the externals of worship were as abhorrent to Cromwell as the suppression of Puritan preaching. “There were designs,” said Cromwell, looking back on Laud’s policy in 1658,

“to innovate upon us in matters of religion, and so to innovate as to eat out the core and power and heart and life of all religion, by bringing on us a company of poisonous popish ceremonies, and imposing them upon those that were accounted the Puritans of the nation and professors of religion among us, driving them to seek their bread in a howling wilderness. As was instanced to our friends who were forced to fly to Holland, New England, almost anywhither, to find liberty for their consciences.”

ST. IVES AND THE RIVER OUSE, AND MEDIÆVAL CHAPEL ON THE BRIDGE.
(From Pike’s “Oliver Cromwell.”)

A persistent tradition asserts that Cromwell himself thought of emigrating to New England, and there are many grounds for accepting it as true.

If he ever entertained such a design, it was probably between 1631 and 1636. When he left Huntingdon in May, 1631, he converted all his landed property into money, as a man intending to emigrate would naturally do. The cattle he bought and the lands he hired could be disposed of at short notice. The time at which this took place renders it more significant, for in 1630 and 1631 the Puritan exodus was at its height, and most of the New England colonists came from East Anglia. In March, 1632, the Earl of Warwick granted the old Connecticut patent to Lord Say and his associates, amongst whom was John Hampden. Nothing can be more probable than that Cromwell should have thought of settling in a colony of which his cousin was one of the patentees.

If Cromwell wished to emigrate, what was it that prevented him? The eighteenth century story that he was on board one of the ships stopped by order of council in May, 1638, is demonstrably false, for on the petition of the passengers they were allowed to continue their voyage. The contemporary story supplies a much more credible explanation. It is that a kinsman died leaving him a considerable fortune, and this kinsman is identified with Sir Thomas Steward, whose death took place in January, 1636. A story which fits in so well with ascertained facts, and is intrinsically so probable, should not be lightly put aside as a fiction.

There is another fact in Cromwell’s history during this period of which one of his letters gives us evidence. If he had ever written an account of his own early life, little conflicts with local authorities or any alterations in his worldly fortunes would have seemed to us of less moment than the change which took place within him. Before 1628 he had become a professor of religion, and in all externals a Puritan, but by 1638 a formal acceptance of the Calvinistic creed had become the perfect faith which casts out all fears and doubts. His conversion had been followed by a time of depression and mental conflict which lasted for many years. Other Puritans passed through the same struggle. Bunyan relates how he “fell to some outward reformation in his life,” and his neighbours thought him to be “a very godly man, a new religious man, and did marvel to see such a great and famous alteration.” And yet for a long time afterwards he was “in a forlorn and sad condition,” afflicted and disquieted by doubts. “How can you tell if you have faith?” said the inner voices. “How can you tell if you are elected? How if the day of grace be past and gone?” “My thoughts,” he says, “were like masterless hell-hounds; my soul, like a broken vessel, driven as with the winds, and tossed sometimes headlong into despair.”

By some such “obstinate questionings” Cromwell, too, was haunted and tormented. An unsympathetic physician who knew him at Huntingdon described him as splenetic and full of fancies; another whom he consulted at London wrote him down as “valde melancholicus.” A mind diseased and a soul at war with itself were beyond their art. This internal conflict was at its height between 1628 and 1636. A friend who knew Cromwell then, wrote, many years afterwards, the following account of it:

“This great man is risen from a very low and afflicted condition; one that hath suffered very great troubles of soul, lying a long time under sore terrors and temptations, and at the same time in a very low condition for outward things: in this school of afflictions he was kept, till he had learned the lesson of the Cross, till his will was broken into submission to the will of God.” Religion was thus “laid into his soul with the hammer and fire”; it did not “come in only by light into his understanding.”

In 1638, at the request of his cousin, Mrs. St. John, Cromwell confided to her the story of this crisis in his life.

“You know,” he said, “what my manner of life hath been. Oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated light; I was a chief, the chief of sinners. This is true, I hated godliness, yet God had mercy on me.” Even now the struggle was not ended. “I live in Meshec, which they say signifies Prolonging; in Kedar, which signifies Blackness: yet the Lord forsaketh me not. Though He do prolong, yet He will I trust bring me to His tabernacle, to His resting-place. My soul is with the Congregation of the First-born, my body rests in hope.... He giveth me to see light in His light.”

It would be wrong to take these self-accusings as a confirmation of the charges which royalist writers brought against Cromwell’s early life. They refer to spiritual rather than moral failings, perhaps to the love of the world and its vanities against which he so often warns his children. They denote a change of feeling rather than a change of conduct, a rise from coldness to enthusiasm, from dejection to exaltation.

Full of thankfulness for this deliverance, Cromwell longed to testify to his faith. “If here I may honour my God, either by doing or suffering, I shall be most glad. Truly no poor creature hath more cause to put himself forth in the cause of his God than I have. I have had plentiful wages beforehand, and I am sure I shall never earn the least mite.” The time for doing was near at hand, for when he wrote the resistance of the Scots had begun. The friend quoted before points out how strangely the turning-point in Cromwell’s spiritual life coincided with the turning-point in the history of his cause. “The time of his extreme suffering was when this cause of religion in which we are now engaged was at its lowest ebb.” When the cause began to prosper, “he came forth into comfort of spirit and enlargement of estate.” And so “he suffered and rose with the cause, as if he had one life with it.”

The year 1638 was the turning-point in the history of English Puritanism. When it began, the King’s power seemed as firmly established as his heart could desire. The decision of the judges that Ship-money was lawful gave absolute monarchy a legal basis, and a vantage-ground for any future demands. The arguments which proved that the King had a right to levy taxes at will for the support of a navy, justified him, if he chose, in raising money for the maintenance of an army. Thus royalty, in Strafford’s phrase, was “for ever vindicated from the conditions and restraints of subjects.” “All our liberties,” wrote a Puritan lawyer, “were now at one dash utterly ruined.”

There had been rumours in 1637 of some tumults in Scotland. “Horrible ado against the bishops for seeking to bring in amongst them our service book,” wrote Strafford’s news-purveyor to the Lord Deputy, but neither thought it of much significance. At the end of March, 1638, the Scots took the Covenant, and the little cloud in the north became a threatening tempest. If Hampden and his friends could have read Laud’s letters to Strafford, they would have laughed for joy. In May, the Archbishop was thoroughly uneasy about “the Scotch business.” “If God bless it with a good end, it is more than I can hope for. The truth is that snowball hath been suffered to gather too long.” Ten days after the decision against Hampden, he was thoroughly alarmed. “It is not the Scottish business alone that I look upon, but the whole frame of things at home and abroad, with vast expenses out of little treasure, and my misgiving soul is deeply apprehensive of no small evils coming on.... I can see no cure without a miracle.”

Charles was resolved to suppress the resistance of the Scots by arms. “So long as this Covenant is in force,” he said, “I have no more power in Scotland than a Duke of Venice, which I will rather die than suffer.” He sent the Marquis of Hamilton to negotiate with the Scots, “to win time that they may not commit public follies until I be ready to suppress them.” But negotiations and intrigues failed to break their union, and in May, 1639, Charles gathered twenty thousand men and marched to the border to begin the work of suppression. Alexander Leslie, a soldier of Gustavus, with an equal force of Scots, barred his entrance to Scotland. Leslie’s army was well disciplined, well paid, and well fed; his men “lusty and full of courage, great cheerfulness in the faces of all.” The King’s troops were ill-armed and ill-provided, and with no heart in their cause. The English nobility were as half-hearted as the troops, and the King had emptied his treasury to raise this army.

There was nothing left but to make peace, and on June 24, 1639, the Treaty of Berwick was signed. If the war had been a farce, the treaty was high comedy. Everything was forgiven, almost anything was promised. The King himself played the leading part in the negotiations with the Scots, who found him “one of the most just, reasonable, sweet persons they had ever seen.” “His Majesty,” wrote a Scot, “was ever the better loved of all that heard him, and he likewise was the more enamoured of us.”

The Scots returned home full of loyalty, with permission to settle their ecclesiastical affairs in their own General Assembly, and their civil affairs in their own Parliament. Charles went back to London, and plotted to nullify his concessions. He refused either to rescind the acts establishing Episcopacy, or to confirm the acts of the Scottish Parliament, and summoned Strafford from Ireland to whip the Scots into their right minds. Strafford had ready both his plan of campaign and his policy. The English navy was to blockade the Scottish ports and destroy their trade. The Irish army was to threaten a landing in West Scotland, or to be transported to Cumberland. The English army was to invade Scotland and from a fortified camp at Leith keep Edinburgh and the Lowlands in awe, till the English Prayer-book was accepted and the bishops restored to their authority; “nay, perchance till I had conformed that kingdom in all, as well for the temporal as ecclesiastical affairs, wholly to the government and laws of England; and Scotland was governed by the King and council of England.” Strafford’s first step on reaching England was to procure the summoning of a Parliament. No Englishman, he thought, could refuse to give his money to the King in such an extremity, against so foul a rebellion. If any man resisted, he should be “laid by the heels,” till he learnt to obey and not to dispute. But he repudiated the suggestion that the King had lost the affections of his people. In April, the Parliament met; its members were described as sober and dispassionate men of whom very few brought ill purposes with them. Amongst them was Cromwell, whose opposition to the “Adventurers” for the drainage of the fens had gained him a seat for the borough of Cambridge. All these sober and dispassionate men united in demanding the restoration of Parliament to its proper place in the constitution. Pym enumerated all the grievances in Church and State, and asserted that their source was the intermission of parliaments, for Parliament was the soul of the body politic. The Commons answered the King’s demand for money by saying that “till the liberties of the House and the kingdom were cleared they knew not whether they had anything to give, or no.” Charles tried to bargain with them, and offered to abolish Ship-money if they gave him £840,000 in return. They demanded not only the abolition of Ship-money but the abolition of the new military charges which the King had imposed on the counties for the support of their train-bands. Hearing that they meant to invite the Lords to make a joint protest against the intended war with the Scots, Charles cut short their project by a sudden dissolution (May 5, 1640). At this stroke moderate men were filled with melancholy, but the faces of the opposition leaders showed “a marvellous serenity.” The cloudy countenance of Cromwell’s cousin, St. John, was lit with an unusual light. “All was well,” he said; “things must be worse before they could be better, and this Parliament would never have done what was necessary to be done.”

With or without Parliament’s aid, Charles was resolved to force the Scots to submission. Some of his council, knowing the emptiness of the exchequer, urged him to stand on the defensive.

“No defensive war,” cried Strafford; “go on vigorously or let them alone. The King is loose and absolved from all rules of government. In an extreme necessity you may do all that your power admits. Parliament refusing, you are acquitted towards God and man. You have an army in Ireland you may employ here to reduce this kingdom. One summer well employed will do it.”

At every step, however, the old difficulties gathered round the King’s path. London refused a loan; France and Spain would lend nothing; even the Pope was applied to for men and money, but in vain. Not a tenth of the Ship-money imposed was paid, and Coat- and Conduct-money were universally refused. In his desperation, Charles thought of debasing the coinage and seizing the bullion which the Spanish Government had sent to England to be coined. The military outlook was equally depressing, for the army was smaller and worse than the army of 1639. The general of the cavalry at Newcastle described his task as teaching cart-horses military evolutions, and men fit for Bedlam and Bridewell to keep the ten commandments. The commander of the infantry in Yorkshire answered, that his mutinous train-bands were the arch-knaves of the country. Of this army, on August 18th, Strafford, half dead but indomitable, was appointed commander-in-chief.

Only a touch was needed to make the fabric of absolutism collapse. As the commander-in-chief was struggling towards his army in a litter, Leslie crossed the Tweed with twenty-five thousand Scots. On August 28th, he forced the passage of the Tyne at Newburn, driving before him the three thousand foot and fifteen hundred horse who strove to defend it. Newcastle was evacuated; Northumberland and Durham fell into Leslie’s power; Strafford met his beaten troops streaming back into Yorkshire with the Scots close on their heels. “Never came any man to so lost a business,” cried the unhappy statesman. It was not only that the army was untrained, necessitous, and cowardly, but the whole country was apathetic or hostile. “An universal affright in all, a general disaffection to the King’s service, none sensible of his dishonour.” With desperate energy Strafford laboured to reorganise his shattered forces, and to keep the Scots out of Yorkshire. At his breath the dying loyalty of the country flashed up into a momentary blaze. It seemed as if the Scottish invasion might revive the forgotten hostility of the two nations.

Vain labours and vainer hopes. Twelve peers presented a petition demanding peace and a Parliament, and another to the same purpose came in from the City of London. Charles called a Council of Peers to patch up a truce with the Scots, and announced to them the summons of a Parliament for November 3rd. Absolutism had had its day.

CHAPTER III
THE LONG PARLIAMENT
1640–1642

The Long Parliament met at Westminster on November 3, 1640. Most of its members, even as Cromwell himself, had sat in the Parliament of the preceding May, but they came together now in a different temper, and with far greater power in their hands. Charles could not venture to dissolve them so long as the Scottish army was encamped on English soil. “No fear of raising the Parliament,” wrote a Scot, “so long as the lads about Newcastle sit still.”

There were three things which the Long Parliament was resolved to do. The first was to release the sufferers from arbitrary government; the second, to punish the men by whose hands the King had sought to establish his arbitrary power; the third, to amend the constitution so that arbitrary rule should be impossible hereafter. Pym’s long experience in Parliaments made him the undisputed leader of the popular party, and his maxim was that it was not sufficient to remove grievances, but necessary to pull up the causes of them by the roots.

A master of parliamentary tactics in days when party discipline was unknown, Pym retained his ascendancy until the day of his death. But he remained to the end a great party leader rather than a great statesman. He was too much of a partisan to understand the feelings of his opponents, too closely attached to precedents and legal formulas to perceive the new issues which new times brought. When it was necessary to leave the beaten road, he was incapable of finding fresh paths. Pym was the chief orator of his party as well as its guiding spirit. In long, methodical expositions of the grievances of the nation, he pressed home the indictment against arbitrary government with convincing force. But sometimes he rose to a grave and lofty eloquence, or condensed the feeling of the hour in brief, incisive phrases that passed current like proverbs.

Hampden came next to Pym in authority with the House and had a far greater fame outside it. Ship-money had made him famous. “The eyes of all men were fixed on him as their patriæ pater, and the pilot that must steer their vessel through the tempests and rocks that threatened it.” A poor speaker, but clear-sighted, energetic, and resolute, “a supreme governor over all his passions and affections,” he was a man who swayed others in council, and whom they would follow when it came to action.

JOHN PYM.
(From a miniature by Cooper.)

Next to these in importance came St. John—Hampden’s counsel in the Ship-money case, and the ablest of the opposition lawyers,—Holles and Strode,—men who had suffered for their boldness in the Parliament of 1629,—and Rudyard, whose oratory had gained him renown in still earlier Parliaments. Of the younger men, the most prominent were Nathaniel Fiennes and Sir Henry Vane, notorious for their advanced religious views, and Sir Arthur Haslerig and Harry Marten, equally notorious for their democratic opinions. The headquarters of the popular party was Sir Richard Manly’s house in a little court behind Westminster Hall, where Pym lodged. There, while Parliament was sitting, Pym, Hampden, and a few others kept a common table at their joint expense, and during their meetings much business was transacted. Cromwell, as the cousin of Hampden and St. John, was doubtless one of this group. Though he was known to the party in general only as a rather silent country squire who had been a member of the two last Parliaments, it is evident that he had some reputation for business capacity. During the first session of the Long Parliament, he was specially appointed to eighteen committees, not counting those particularly concerned with the affairs of the eastern counties, to which the member for Cambridge was naturally added. Cromwell’s first intervention in the debates of the House was on November 9, 1640, when the grievances of the nation and the wrongs of those who had suffered under Star Chamber and High Commission were being set forth at large. He rose to deliver a petition from John Lilburn, a prisoner in the Fleet, and how he looked and spoke is recorded in Sir Philip Warwick’s memoirs.

“The first time I ever took notice of him,” says Warwick, “was in the beginning of the Parliament held in November, 1640, when I vainly thought myself a courtly young gentleman; for we courtiers valued ourselves much on our good clothes. I came into the House one morning, well clad, and perceived a gentleman speaking whom I knew not, very ordinarily apparelled; for it was a plain cloth suit which seemed to have been made by an ill country tailor; his linen was plain, and not very clean, and I remember a speck or two of blood upon his little band, which was not much larger than his collar; his hat was without a hatband; his stature was of a good size; his sword stuck close to his side; his countenance swollen and reddish; his voice sharp and untunable, and his eloquence full of fervour. For the subject matter would not bear much of reason, it being in behalf of a servant of Mr. Prynne’s, who had dispersed libels against the Queen for her dancing, and such like innocent and courtly sports; and he aggravated the imprisonment of this man by the Council-table unto that height that one would have believed the very government itself had been in great danger by it. I sincerely profess it much lessened my reverence unto that great council, for he was very much hearkened unto.”

When the grievances of the nation had been heard and the petitions of individual sufferers referred to committees, the Long Parliament turned to punish the King’s ministers. Charles himself was never mentioned but with great honour, as a King misled by evil counsellors, who had prevented him from following the dictates of his native wisdom and goodness. In the interests of both King and subjects, argued Rudyard, these evil advisers must be removed and punished. As the Bible said: “Take away the wicked from the king and his throne shall be established.”

Accordingly Strafford was arrested and impeached, just as he was himself about to accuse the parliamentary leaders of high treason for encouraging and aiding the invasion of the Scots (November 11th). A month later, Laud followed Strafford to the Tower. Windebank, the Secretary of State, and Lord Keeper Finch, likewise accused, fled beyond the seas. Two more bishops and six judges were impeached and imprisoned, while all monopolists were expelled from the House of Commons. It seemed “a general doomsday.” Strafford was the first to suffer, and his trial in Westminster Hall riveted all eyes.

It was not only as “the great apostate to the commonwealth,” the oppressor of the English colonists in Ireland, the moving spirit of the unjust war against the Scots, that Strafford was accused. The essence of the charge against him was that he had endeavoured by words, acts, and counsels to subvert the fundamental laws of England and Ireland, in order to introduce an arbitrary and tyrannical government. In him seemed incarnate the rule of arbitrary will as opposed to the reign of law which the Parliament strove to restore. Pym’s speeches against Strafford are, throughout, a glorification of the reign of law. “Good laws,” he said, “nay, the best laws, were no advantage when will was set above law.” All evils hurtful to the State were comprehended in this one crime.

“The law is that which puts a difference betwixt good and evil, betwixt just and unjust. If you take away the law, all things will fall into a confusion. Every man will become a law to himself, which, in the depraved condition of human nature, must needs produce great enormities. Lust will become a law, envy will become a law, covetousness and ambition will become laws; and what dictates, what decisions such laws will produce, may easily be discerned in the government of Ireland.”

Nor was the substitution of arbitrary power for law hurtful to subjects only.

“It is dangerous to the King’s person, and dangerous to his Crown. If the histories of those Eastern countries be pursued, where princes order their affairs according to the mischievous principles of the Earl of Strafford, loose and absolved from all rules of government, they will be found to be frequent in combustions, full of massacres and of the tragical ends of princes.”

Strafford struggled to show that the offences proved against him did not legally amount to high treason. Parliament through the Attainder Bill answered that it was necessary for the safety of the State to make them treasonable. “To alter the settled frame and constitution of government,” said Pym, “is treason in any state. The laws whereby all other parts of a kingdom are preserved would be very vain and defective, if they had not a power to secure and preserve themselves.”

Charles was anxious to save Strafford’s life, but his blundering interventions during the course of the trial ended in failure. When it was discovered that the King’s agents were plotting to get possession of the Tower and to bring the English army up from Yorkshire to overawe the Parliament, the Earl’s fate was sealed. Pressed by both Houses to yield, and threatened by the London mob if he refused, Charles assented to the Bill of Attainder, and on May 12, 1641, Strafford was beheaded.

Side by side with the prosecution of the King’s evil advisers went on the work of providing against arbitrary government in the future. The extraordinary courts which had been the instruments of oppression were swept away. Down went the Star Chamber and the High Commission Court, the Council of the North, and the Council of Wales and the Marches. The Tonnage and Poundage Act declared that henceforward it was illegal to levy customs duties without a parliamentary grant. The extension of the forests was prohibited, the exaction of knighthood fines forbidden, and Ship-money declared unlawful. Henceforward to govern without a Parliament was to be as impossible as to tax without a Parliament. On February 15, 1641, Charles assented to the Triennial Act, which bound him to call a Parliament every third year, and provided machinery for its convocation, if he neglected to summon it at the appointed time. On May 11th, he assented to a second act, which prohibited him from dissolving the present Parliament, or even proroguing it save by its own consent.

Cromwell had taken no part in the prosecution of Strafford, for he was neither an orator nor a lawyer, but his name is closely associated with one of these constitutional changes. The origin of the Triennial Act was a bill introduced by Strode for reviving the old law of Edward III. by which a Parliament must be summoned every year. On December 30th, Cromwell moved its second reading, and he was one of the committee from whose deliberations it finally issued as a bill for summoning a Parliament every three years. In ecclesiastical affairs, he was more prominent by far. On constitutional questions, the popular party had been almost unanimous, but on religious questions its unanimity ended. The general aim of its leaders was to subject the Church to the control of the State as represented by Parliament, instead of leaving it to the authority of the King as its “supreme governor.” But while some desired to abolish the Prayer-book, and to make the doctrine of the Church more frankly Calvinistic, others wished merely the abolition of a few offensive formulas or ceremonies. On Church government there was the same diversity of opinion. A few wished to maintain bishops as they were, a few to abolish them altogether; the majority desired to retain Episcopacy, but to limit the power of the bishops. Hence the popularity of Ussher’s plan for a limited Episcopacy, in which every bishop was to be assisted and controlled by a council of diocesan clergy. As yet there was no party in Parliament which proposed to introduce Presbyterianism or Independency, but those who wished for the complete extirpation of Episcopacy were very numerous. In the Commons, Fiennes and Sir Henry Vane were for its abolition, “root and branch,” and Hampden afterwards joined them. Amongst these “root and branch” men was Cromwell, and he was more closely connected with the attack on the Church than with any other part of the proceedings of the Long Parliament. The only one of his letters which belongs to this period shows his interest in religious questions. It is addressed to a bookseller, and asks for a copy of the printed “reasons of the Scots to enforce their desire of uniformity in religion.” “I would peruse it,” he writes, “against we fall upon the debate, which will be speedily.”

The only recorded speech of Cromwell in these ecclesiastical discussions was delivered on February 9, 1641, about the question whether a petition for the total abolition of Episcopacy, signed by fifteen thousand citizens of London, should be referred to a committee. A member urged its rejection, arguing that the bishops were one of the estates of the realm, and a part of the constitution. Equality (or, as he termed it, “parity”) in the Church would lead to equality in the State. Cromwell stood up, and very bluntly denied his inferences and suppositions, on which “divers interrupted him and called him to the bar.” Pym and Holles defended him, and he was allowed to continue.

“Mr. Cromwell went on and said: ‘He did not understand why that gentleman that last spake should make an inference of parity from the Church to the State, nor that there was any necessity of the great revenues of bishops. He was more convinced touching the irregularity of bishops than even before, because like the Roman hierarchy they would not endure to have their condition come to a trial.’”

In May, Cromwell took another opportunity of attacking the bishops. The Commons had passed a bill excluding clergymen in general from holding secular office either as judges, councillors, or members of the House of Lords, and the Upper House showed a resolution not to pass it. On this the “root and branch” men replied with a bill for the abolition of bishops altogether, which Sir Edward Dering, a noted speaker, was persuaded to introduce. Afterwards Dering repented and explained. “The Bill,” he said, “was pressed into my hands by Sir Arthur Haslerig, being then brought to him by Sir Henry Vane and Mr. Oliver Cromwell.”

The “root and branch” bill never got farther than committee, but its introduction further accentuated the division in the popular party. A section, headed by Hyde and Lord Falkland, severed themselves definitely from their former friends. Naturally conservative in temper, they were satisfied with the reforms already achieved, and were more willing to trust the King with the constitution than Parliament with the Church. Before the end of the session, Hyde was in communication with the King, and a party of constitutional Royalists based on the defence of the Church was in process of formation. Charles was equally determined to maintain the Church, and full of schemes for regaining his lost power. The prospect of obtaining support in the House of Commons itself increased his confidence of ultimate success, and in August he set out for Scotland, hoping to win the Scottish nobility to his side, and to use one kingdom against the other.

In October, 1641, when the second session of the Long Parliament began, the position of affairs was greatly altered. The popular party was weakened by its differences on the religious question, and the division was rapidly spreading to the nation. At the same time, the parliamentary leaders had lost, through the withdrawal of the Scottish army, the military force which had protected them from an attempted coup d’état. That the fear of such a stroke on the King’s part was by no means groundless, the news from Scotland proved. It was rumoured that with the King’s sanction a party of royalist soldiers had plotted to seize Hamilton and Argyle, whose hasty flight from Edinburgh had alone saved their lives. On the top of this came the news of a rebellion in Ireland, of an attempt to surprise Dublin Castle, and of a massacre of the English colonists in Ulster. The rebellion spread daily, and as tattered fugitives straggled into Dublin, each with his story of murder and pillage, the excitement in England rose to fever heat. It came to be an article of faith that fifty thousand Englishmen had been barbarously murdered, and some said 150,000.

To modern historians the Irish rebellion seems only the natural result of the English system of governing Ireland, but to contemporary Englishmen it came like a bolt from the blue. The native Irish were embittered and impoverished by the confiscations of the last sixty years, and filled with fury and fear by Strafford’s intended plantation of Connaught. Now that the Puritans were in power, the complete suppression of the Catholic religion, only threatened before, seemed imminent and inevitable. The impeachment of Strafford and his most trusted counsellors had crippled the strong Government which Strafford had built up, and the disbanding of his army had filled the country with men trained to arms. The opportunity for a successful revolt had come at last, and it was no wonder that the Irish seized it. At its beginning, the rebellion of October, 1641, was a rising of the native Irish with the object of recovering the lands from which they had been expelled. It broke out first in the six counties of Ulster, planted in the reign of James I., and next in Wicklow, the most recent of the later plantations. But bloody and barbarous as the rebellion was, no general massacre was either planned or carried out. The first object of the rebels was simply to drive the colonists from their houses and lands, and in the process some were murdered, and all plundered. The number of persons killed in cold blood during the first month or two of the rebellion probably amounted to about four thousand, and perhaps twice as many perished from hardships and destitution.

To English Puritans, the only possible explanation of the rebellion was that it was the natural result of Popery. On December 4, 1641, the Long Parliament passed a resolution that they would never consent to any toleration of the Popish religion in Ireland, or in any other of his Majesty’s dominions. Equally fatal was the resolve that the funds for the reconquest of Ireland should be raised by fresh confiscations of Irish land, and the assignment of two and a half million acres for the repayment of those who advanced the money. One vote turned a local insurrection into a general rebellion; the other made the rebellion an internecine war.

Both parties in Parliament approved of these votes. A public subscription was opened, to which members of Parliament and merchants of London contributed freely. “Master Oliver Cromwell,” who knew nothing of Irish history, thought the plan wise and just, and put his name down for £500, which was about one year’s income. He shared the general ignorance of his contemporaries about the causes of the rebellion, and believed the prevalent exaggerations about the massacre.

“Ireland,” he told the Irish clergy eight years later, “was once united to England. Englishmen had good inheritances, which many of them had purchased with their money; they and their ancestors, from you and your ancestors. They had good leases from Irishmen, for long times to come; great stocks thereupon; houses and plantations erected at their own cost and charge. They lived peaceably and honestly among you. You had generally equal benefit of the protection of England with them; and equal justice from the laws, saving what was necessary for the State, out of reasons of State, to put upon some people apt to rebel upon the instigation of such as you. You broke this union. You unprovoked put the English to the most unheard-of and barbarous massacre (without respect to sex or age) that ever the sun beheld. And at a time when Ireland was in perfect peace.”

To reconquer Ireland an army had to be raised at once, and it was impossible for the parliamentary leaders to trust the King with its control. Less than six months before, Charles had plotted to bring up an army to overawe their debates. In his recent journey to Scotland he had again been tampering with the officers of the same army, and its disbandment had only just been effected. If they gave him a new army, who could doubt that before six months were over he would be turning it against the Parliament? Pym had no doubts, and, on November 6th, he brought forward an address saying that unless the King would employ such ministers as Parliament approved “they would take such a course for the securing of Ireland as might likewise secure themselves.” And while Pym proposed to seize upon the executive power as far as Ireland was concerned, Cromwell proposed to lay hands on it in England also. On November 6th he carried a motion that the two Houses should vote to the Earl of Essex power to command all the train-bands south of the Trent, and that those powers should continue till this Parliament should take further order. A month later, Haslerig brought in a militia bill, which gave a general appointed by the Parliament the supreme command of all the train-bands in England. The question whether the King or the Parliament should command the armed forces of the nation was thus definitely raised.

In the same November the Long Parliament appealed to the nation for support. The Grand Remonstrance set forth all the ills the nation had suffered in the fifteen years of the King’s reign, and all the Parliament had done in the last twelve months to remove them. It pointed out the obstacles which hindered them in their task, and announced what they hoped to do in the future. The root of every evil was a malignant design to subvert the fundamental laws and principles upon which the religion and justice of the kingdom were based. Let “the malignant party be removed,” and the reformation of Church and State could be completed. The Remonstrance bade the nation judge whether its representatives had been worthy of its confidence, and asked it to continue that confidence. It brought war nearer, not because it was an indirect indictment of the King, but because the ecclesiastical policy set forth in its last clauses divided the nation into two camps. In them the House declared its intention of taking in hand the work of church-reform, and demanded the calling of a general synod of divines to aid it in the task. Over these clauses of the Remonstrance the debate was long and bitter (November 22nd). When it passed by but eleven votes, and the majority proposed its printing, it seemed as if the Civil War would begin at once, and on the floor of the House. Members protested, and shouted, and waved their hats, and some took their sheathed swords in their hands as if they waited for the word to draw them. “I thought,” said an eye-witness, “we had all sat in the valley of the shadow of death; for we, like Joab’s and Abner’s young men, had catched at each other’s locks, and sheathed our swords in each other’s bowels.”

When the tumult was allayed, and the members went home, Cromwell’s whispered words to Falkland showed how much that night’s decision meant. “If the Remonstrance had been rejected,” he said, “I would have sold all I had the next morning, and never seen England more; and I know there are many other honest men of the same resolution.”

Three days after the passing of the Remonstrance, Charles returned to Whitehall. He came back resolved to make no further concessions, and to rid himself of the parliamentary leaders under the form of law. Their relations with the Scots during the late war, their attacks on his royal power, and the changes they sought to make in the constitution were sufficient in his opinion to prove them guilty of high treason. His first step was to remove the guards round the House; his next, to ingratiate himself with the City; his third, to place a trusty ruffian in command of the Tower. When the Commons petitioned for the restoration of their guard, Charles told them that, on the word of a king, their security from violence should be as much his care as the preservation of his own children. On the day the House received this answer, Charles sent the attorney-general to impeach five members, and a sergeant-at-arms to arrest them.[^[6]] The Commons refused to give them up. The next day he came to arrest them in person, with four hundred armed men at his back, but found the birds flown, and faith in the royal word fled too (January 4, 1642). The House of Commons adjourned to the City, which refused, as the House itself had done, to surrender the accused members. Petitioners poured in from the country in thousands to support their representatives, and it was evident that the feeling of the nation was overwhelmingly on the side of the Parliament. The King’s coup d’état had completely failed. On the 11th of January, the House of Commons returned to Westminster, while the King left London to avoid witnessing their triumph.

Charles had not intended to act treacherously, and believed that his actions were perfectly legal, but it was natural that the parliamentary leaders, refusing to trust him, should press with renewed vigour for the control of the armed force. Cromwell felt this as strongly as his leaders, and three days after the return to Westminster he moved for a committee to put the kingdom in a posture of defence (January 14th). The motion was a little premature. It was necessary, Pym felt, that the two Houses should act together, and the Lords were slow to move. It was not till Pym told them that unless they would join the Commons in saving the kingdom the Commons would save the kingdom without them, that the Upper House gave way. In February, they passed the bill for the exclusion of the bishops, and joined in the demand for the control of the militia. In March, they united with the Commons in a vote to put the kingdom in a posture of defence by authority of both Houses.

For the present, however, both King and Parliament were unwilling to appeal to arms: the King strove to gain time in order to gain strength; the Parliament still hoped that the King would grant the securities they sought. So for six months they argued and negotiated, each appealing to the nation by declarations and counter-declarations, and preluding by these paper skirmishes the opening of real hostilities. Charles had two policies which he followed alternately, each of which demanded time for its success. The one was the policy of the Queen and the courtiers; the other was the policy of Hyde and the constitutional Royalists. The Queen’s policy was active preparation for the inevitable war, regardless of any constitutional doctrines that stood in the way. Help was to be sought from France, or Denmark, or the Prince of Orange, and a port was to be secured, in which foreign troops could be landed. Hyde’s policy was that the King should remain passive, that he should “shelter himself wholly under the law,” granting anything which the law obliged him to grant, and denying anything which the law enabled him to deny and his position made it inexpedient to concede. “In the end,” said Hyde, “the King and the Law together would be strong enough for any encounter that might happen.”

Neither the King’s character nor his position made it possible for him to adopt an entirely consistent policy. Some concessions he was obliged to make, either to conciliate public opinion by a show of yielding, or to gain time for his preparations for war. He withdrew the impeachment of the Five Members; he removed the governor of the Tower; he temporised about the Militia Bill; he even consented to the exclusion of the bishops from the House of Lords. Sorely against his own conscience was the latter concession granted, but the Queen insisted upon it, and to secure her safe passage to the continent Charles yielded. She bore with her to Holland the crown jewels to be pawned to provide arms and ammunition, and when she had sailed Charles took his way to Yorkshire to gather his friends around him and to secure the indispensable seaport. As he journeyed north, a deputation met him at Newmarket, and renewed the petition for the militia. But the necessity for concessions was past, and he refused even a temporary grant. “By God,” he cried, “not for an hour! You have asked that of me in this, was never asked of a king, and with which I will not trust my wife and children.”

When the King reached York, he set in operation an attempt to get possession of Hull. It was not only the most convenient port for the landing of succours from Holland and Denmark; it was also the great arsenal where the arms and munitions collected for the Scottish war had been stored. On April 23rd, Charles appeared before Hull with three hundred horsemen and demanded admission. But Sir John Hotham, the Governor, drew up the drawbridge, and taking his stand on the wall refused to admit the King. After proclaiming him a traitor, Charles rode away.

While the policy which the Queen had urged met with failure, the policy of which Hyde was the advocate gained for Charles adherents every day. Opinion veered to the King’s side. The change was mainly due to the ecclesiastical policy of the Parliament, for those who loved the Church feared to see its liturgy and its government delivered up to the rough hands of a Puritan Parliament and a synod of Puritan divines. But Hyde’s skilful advocacy did much to further the reaction. The declarations he wrote for the King, with their fluent, florid rhetoric, and their touches of humour and sarcasm, were far more effective than the ponderous legal arguments published by the Parliament. More was due to the art with which he represented the King as the guardian of the constitution, and the Parliament as its assailant. Pym’s panegyric of the law was turned against Pym himself. The King was made the champion of “the known laws of the land,” against revolutionists who wished to make the long-established rights of king and subject dependent on a vote of the House of Commons. He was made the defender of the “ancient, equal, happy, well poised, and never-enough-commended constitution,” against those who sought to introduce “a new Utopia of religion and government.”

That the Parliament was claiming new powers and the King standing on old rights it was impossible to deny, and it was difficult for the Parliament to prove the necessity which justified its demands. They could intimate the “fears and jealousies” which made them distrust the King, but the reality of their grounds for distrusting him is proved by evidence which they could only conjecture, and which later historians were to bring to light.

A mere argumentative victory could do nothing to solve the question the English nation had to decide. It was no longer a dispute whether the law gave certain powers to King or Parliament, but whether King or Parliament was to be sovereign. In the Nineteen Propositions which formed the Parliament’s ultimatum, they demanded all the branches of sovereignty for themselves. The control of foreign policy, of ecclesiastical policy, of the army and the navy, the appointment of ministers, councillors, and judges, the right to punish and the right to pardon, were all included. Government, in short, was to be carried on by persons chosen by the Parliament, instead of persons chosen by the King. The King might reign, but henceforth he should not govern.

In that sense Charles understood the Nineteen Propositions.

“These being passed” he answered, “we may be waited upon bareheaded, we may have our hand kissed, the style of majesty continued to us, and the King’s authority declared by both Houses of Parliament may still be the style of your commands, we may have swords and maces carried before us, and please ourselves with the sight of a crown and sceptre, but as to true and real power we should remain but the outside, but the picture, but the sign of a king.”

On the other side, their demand, as it presented itself to the minds of the Parliamentarians, was rather defensive than aggressive in its intention. Without this transference of sovereignty, they held it impossible to transmit to their descendants the self-government they had received from their ancestors.

“The question in dispute between us and the King’s party,” says Ludlow, “was, as I apprehended, whether the King should govern as a god by his will and the nation be governed by force like beasts; or whether the people should be governed by laws made by themselves, and live under a government derived from their own consent.”

Only the sword could decide. On July 4th, Parliament appointed a Committee of Safety; on July 6th, they resolved to raise ten thousand men; on July 9th, they appointed the Earl of Essex their general. The King set up his standard at Nottingham on August 22nd.

CHAPTER IV
THE FIRST CAMPAIGN
1642

From the day when King Charles raised his standard at Nottingham, and even before that date, England was divided into two camps, according as men elected to obey the King or the Parliament. The country was about to learn by experience what civil war meant, and to suffer as it had not suffered since the fifteenth century. In the Wars of the Roses, two rival houses had laid claim to the allegiance of the people; now its obedience was demanded by two rival authorities. Moreover, apart from the question which authority ought to be obeyed, the fact that the Parliament itself was divided made a choice difficult and obscured the main issue. The House of Commons was no longer the almost unanimous body which it had been in November, 1640. About 175 members followed the King’s flag, while nearly three hundred remained at Westminster. In the Upper House the preponderance was overwhelmingly on the King’s side. Rather more than thirty peers threw in their lot with the popular party, while about eighty supported the King, and about twenty took no part in the struggle.

Very various, therefore, were the motives which led men to choose one side or the other. To many peers, the fate of the King and the nobility seemed inseparably linked together, and like Newcastle they loved monarchy as the foundation and support of their own greatness. Some, lately ennobled by Charles and his father, had personal obligations to the House of Stuart, which they were ready to repay by any sacrifice. “Had I millions of crowns or scores of sons,” wrote Lord Goring to his wife, “the King and his cause should have them all with better will than to eat if I were starving.... I had all from the King, and he hath all again.” Of the parliamentary peers, a few like Brooke, Saye, and Warwick were ardent Puritans and were moved by religious zeal quite as much as by political motives. In Northumberland, “the proudest man alive,” the independent spirit of the feudal baron seemed to live again. Holland was ambitious and in disfavour at Court; he hoped to be one of the Parliament’s generals. Others thought the Parliament stronger than the King, and were resolved to be on the winning side. “Pembroke and Salisbury,” says Clarendon, “had rather the King and his posterity should be destroyed than that Wilton should be taken from the one and Hatfield from the other.”

Amongst the gentry, there was the same mixture of motives. The bulk of them indeed adhered to the King, but great numbers supported the Parliament, especially in districts where Puritanism was prevalent.

Of the towns, cathedral cities such as York and Chester were usually royalist in feeling. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge were for the King, but the representatives of the towns were in each case Parliamentarians. “London,” which Milton calls “the mansion house of liberty,” and Clarendon, “the sink of the ill-humours of the kingdom,” was the headquarters of Puritanism, and most manufacturing or trading towns were anti-royalist. “Manchester,” says Clarendon, “from the beginning, out of that factious humour which possessed most corporations and the pride of their wealth, opposed the King and declared magisterially for the Parliament.” Birmingham, though little more than a village, “was of as great fame for hearty, wilful, affected disloyalty to the King as any place in England.” The clothing towns of the West Riding of Yorkshire and the manufacturing districts of Somersetshire and Gloucestershire were also hostile to Charles. In the latter counties, according to Clarendon,

“the gentlemen of ancient families were for the most part well affected to the King, yet there were a people of inferior degree, who by good husbandry, clothing, and other thriving arts, had gotten very great fortunes, and by degrees getting themselves into the gentlemen’s estates were angry that they found not themselves in the same esteem and reputation with those whose estates they had; and therefore studied all ways to make themselves considerable. These from the beginning were fast friends to the Parliament.”

In purely agricultural districts, the influence of the great landowners was generally decisive, but there were many notable exceptions. In the eastern counties, many of the chief gentry were disposed to take up arms for the King, but “the freeholders and yeomen in general adhered to the Parliament.”

Yet, though the bulk of the upper classes was on one side, the war never became a social war, but remained a struggle of opinions and ideas. From the very beginning, men who were determined to maintain the Church intact adopted the King’s cause, and those who desired to change the government of the Church, or sought freedom of worship outside of it, supported the Parliament. At first, even to Puritans, the political question seemed more important than the religious. Colonel Hutchinson read the manifestos of both parties till “he became abundantly informed in his understanding and convinced in his conscience of the righteousness of the Parliament’s cause in point of civil right.” But “though he was satisfied of the endeavours to bring back Popery and subvert the true Protestant religion, he did not think that so clear a ground for the war as the defence of English liberties.”

No contemporary record reveals the precise motives which led Cromwell to take up arms: we are left to infer them from his earlier acts and his later utterances. “I profess,” he wrote in 1644, “I could never satisfy myself of the justness of this war, but from the authority of the Parliament to maintain itself in its rights.” Like Hutchinson, he regarded the King’s Church policy as subversive of Protestantism, and defined the war as undertaken for “the maintenance of our civil liberties as men, and our religious liberties as Christians.” As the war progressed, religious liberties grew more and more important in his eyes, and what had been originally a struggle against innovations became an attempt to establish freedom of conscience.

“Religion,” said Cromwell in 1654, “was not the thing at first contested for, but God brought it to that issue at last, and gave it unto us by way of redundancy, and at last it proved to be that which was most dear to us. And wherein consisted this more than in obtaining that liberty from the tyranny of the bishops to all species of Protestants to worship God according to their own light and conscience?”

In every civil war, political and religious convictions must often conflict with family ties. Few families were like the Fairfaxes and Sheffields, of whom it was said that there was not one of those names but was on the side of the Parliament. Royalists might have made a like boast of the Byrons, the Comptons, and many less distinguished houses, but in very many cases the nearest relations took opposite sides. At Edgehill, the Earl of Denbigh and the Earl of Dover charged in the King’s guard, while their sons, Lord Feilding and Lord Rochford, fought under Essex. In Cromwell’s own family, his uncle, Sir Oliver, and his cousin, Henry Cromwell, were both ardent Royalists, and owed the preservation of their estates, after the defeat of their party, to the intercession of their kinsman.

While this division of families and friends made the war more painful, it tended to humanise the manner in which it was conducted. The men who found themselves reluctantly arrayed in arms against each other could not forget old friendship and old kinship.

“My affections to you,” wrote Sir William Waller to his old comrade, Sir Ralph Hopton, when their two armies were about to meet in battle, “are so unchangeable that hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person, but I must be true to the cause wherein I serve. The great God, who is the searcher of my heart, knows with what reluctance I go upon this service, and with what perfect hatred I look upon a war without an enemy. The God of peace in His good time send us peace, and in the meantime fit us to receive it. We are both upon the stage, and we must act the parts that are assigned us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour, and without personal animosities.”

On the whole, the war was honourably and humanely carried on. The savage cruelty which marked the Thirty Years’ War in Germany is absent in the contemporaneous war in England. Little blood was shed except in the heat of battle; quarter was liberally granted, and the lives of non-combatants were respected. But inevitably the prolongation of the war embittered the temper of both parties, and when, as in Scotland and Ireland, their hostility was inflamed by national animosity a fiercer spirit showed itself.

War broke out in England in the summer of 1642, and there were many local struggles between the partisans of King and Parliament before the royal standard was set up at Nottingham (August 22, 1642). In many counties a royalist lord-lieutenant endeavoured to put in force the King’s commission of array, while a parliamentary lord-lieutenant tried to carry into effect the Parliament’s militia ordinance. Each called on the local train-bands to gather round him, and sought to obtain possession of the magazine in which the arms and munitions of the county were stored. The first of these collisions—a bloodless one—took place at Leicester in June; blood was shed in an affray at Manchester on July 15th. In July, the King attempted to besiege Hull, and some lives were lost in a sally. In August, the Marquis of Hertford proclaimed the commission of array in Somersetshire, the Governor of Portsmouth declared for the King, and the flame spread from the north and the midlands to the western counties. As yet there was no serious fighting, but everywhere men gathered in arms, and preparations for the campaign began.

In this preliminary trial of strength, no man was more active for the Parliament than Cromwell. On June 5th, he subscribed five hundred pounds to the fund for raising an army. Next month, after sending to his constituents at Cambridge a hundred pounds’ worth of arms at his own expense, he obtained a vote empowering them to train and exercise volunteer companies. The King sent to the university for its money and its plate, but Cromwell, aided by his brothers-in-law, Valentine Walton and John Desborough, raised men and beset the north road to intercept them. Early in August, he marched to Cambridge, seized the county magazine, and secured most of the plate, worth, it is said, twenty thousand pounds, for the Parliament’s service. At the same time he prevented the attempt to execute the commission of array in the county, and sent the heads of three of the colleges, Jesus, Queen’s, and St. John’s, prisoners to London. The House of Commons passed a vote for his indemnity, but the promptitude with which he assumed responsibility and anticipated their orders by his acts was extremely characteristic. There were many gentlemen of greater rank in Cambridge and Huntingdonshire willing to fight for the Parliament, but from the very first Cromwell’s energy and readiness to act made him a leader. At the end of August, Cromwell returned to London, and shortly afterwards joined with a troop of sixty horse the army which Parliament was gathering under the Earl of Essex.

From the moment that preparations for war began, the Parliament had two great advantages over the King, which it retained as long as the war lasted. In July, the fleet in the Downs accepted the Earl of Warwick as its admiral and declared for the Parliament. The possession of the navy meant the command of the sea and the interception of the King’s communications with the continent. He looked to Holland and France for arms and ammunition, but the parliamentary cruisers constantly captured his ships and stopped his supplies. All the chief ports were in the power of the Parliament; Charles held Newcastle and Chester, but the recapture of Portsmouth was one of the first results of the defection of the navy. Thanks to its ships, in 1643 and 1644 the Parliament was able to preserve Hull when the rest of Yorkshire was subdued, and to keep Lyme and Plymouth when the King’s forces were triumphant in the west. Thanks to its ships, the King’s plans for procuring French or Danish or Walloon mercenaries to restore his falling cause were made impossible to carry out, even if he could raise money to hire them.

The second advantage of the Parliament was that it had far more money at its disposal than the King. It was strongest in the richest parts of the country. With London and the trading classes in general devoted to it, it had no difficulty in raising loans. The possession of London and most of the seaports secured it the customs, which formed the largest and the most expansive part of the revenue of the State. As the war continued, voluntary loans developed into forced loans, customs were supplemented by the imposition of an excise, monthly assessments were levied on all counties under the Parliament’s rule, and the sequestration of the lands of Royalists provided a new source of income. Yet, great though the resources of the Parliament were, its financial system was so imperfect that after the first few months the pay of the soldiers was constantly in arrears.

On the other hand, Charles had scarcely any regular sources of income, and very little money to equip or support an army. To provide arms and ammunition for his men he was driven to pawn the Crown jewels and to mortgage the Crown lands. Loans from corporations or men of means, the sales of peerages or other titular dignities, customs duties in the few ports under his control, and contributions levied in the districts within range of his garrisons made up his scanty budget. Throughout, the King’s chief resource was the devotion of his followers. Loyal merchants in London secretly forwarded him their offerings. The University of Oxford sent him ten thousand pounds, and its colleges gave up their plate to be coined for his cause. Rich noblemen contributed regiments or troops, and poor gentlemen served at their own expense. The Marquis of Newcastle raised some thousands of men on his own estates; the Earl of Worcester and his son, Lord Herbert, furnished the King with £120,000 between March and July, 1642. Thanks to the zeal of his followers, and above all to the territorial influence of the great landowners, Charles was able ere long to oppose Parliament with forces equal to its own. At the end of August the King had with him at Nottingham only a few hundred half-armed foot. His artillery and several regiments of infantry were left behind at York, and his cavalry under Prince Rupert in the Midlands. The general of his little army told the King that he could not secure him against being taken in his bed, if the enemy made a brisk attack. The parliamentary forces assembling at Northampton amounted early in September to fourteen thousand men, and Essex had in all about twenty thousand men under his command. This was “an army which,” as the historian of the Long Parliament said, “was too great to find resistance at that time from any forces afoot in England.”

ROBERT DEVEREUX, EARL OF ESSEX.
(From Devereux’s “Lives of the Devereux.”)

But instead of hastening to crush the King while he was weak, Essex gave him time to grow strong. From Nottingham, Charles moved to Shrewsbury, increasing his forces as he went, and equipping them with weapons taken from the train-bands, or from the armouries of loyal noblemen. Essex moved to Worcester and established himself there, making no effort to find the King and fight him, and reducing his forces by leaving garrisons in different towns. Now that he had an army, Charles boldly took the offensive and marched to London, hoping to end the war at a blow. Essex hurried eastwards to defend the capital, and at Edgehill, on October 23rd, Charles was obliged to turn and give battle to his pursuer.

The two armies were now not unequally matched. Each numbered about fourteen thousand men, but the Parliamentarians were far better armed than the Royalists. Clarendon thus describes the equipment of the King’s army:

“The foot, all but 300 or 400 who marched without any weapons but cudgels, were armed with muskets, and bags for their powder, and pikes, but in the whole body there was not one pikeman who had a corselet and very few musketeers who had swords. Amongst the horse, the officers had their full desire if they were able to procure old backs and breasts and pots (i. e., helmets), with pistols or carbines for their two or three front ranks and swords for the rest; themselves and some soldiers by their example having gotten besides their pistols and swords a short poleaxe.”

The regiments who followed Essex, thanks to the Parliament’s control of money and its possession of the magazines of Hull and the Tower, were armed with more uniformity and more completeness. His musketeers had their swords, his pikemen, who constituted a third of each foot regiment, had their corselets, and his horsemen pistols and defensive armour. In both armies, the officers consisted mostly of gentlemen who had neither military training nor experience of war, mixed with a certain number of soldiers of fortune who had served in the armies of France, or Holland, or Sweden. In foot regiments, the major or lieutenant-colonel was usually an old soldier; in troops of horse, the lieutenant. “The most part of our horse were raised thus,” says a royalist playwright: “The honest country gentleman raises the troop at his own charge, then he gets a low-country lieutenant to fight his troop for him, then sends for his son from school to be cornet.”

PRINCE RUPERT, K.G.
(From a painting by Sir Peter Lely, in the National Portrait Gallery.)

On both sides, the generals possessed the training which their soldiers lacked. Essex had fought with honour in the Palatinate and Holland; Balfour, who led his cavalry, had served many years in the Dutch army. The King’s commander-in-chief, the Earl of Lindsey, was another Dutch officer, and Prince Rupert had seen some fighting under the Prince of Orange, and one disastrous campaign in Germany. Yet despite Rupert’s lack of experience the King gave him charge of all his horse as an independent command, and followed his advice rather than Lindsey’s in the ordering of the battle. One great advantage Charles had which counterbalanced the superior armament of the parliamentary forces. His cavalry was superior to theirs both in quantity and quality. He had four thousand horse to Essex’s three thousand, and his troopers were flushed with confidence by their easy victory in a skirmish near Worcester. Rupert resolved to utilise this advantage to the full. Massing the bulk of the cavalry on the right wing under his own command, he swept the horse opposed to him from the field, routed four regiments of Essex’s foot, plundered Essex’s camp at Kineton, and followed the fugitives for some miles. Wilmot, with the cavalry of the left, charged with like success, and even the reserves joined in the chase. Meanwhile, Essex and those of his foot regiments who stood firm attacked the royalist infantry front to front, while Balfour, with two regiments of cavalry forming the parliamentary reserve, fell upon their exposed flanks. The Earl of Lindsey was mortally wounded and made prisoner, the King’s standard taken and regained, several regiments were cut to pieces, and two only held their ground. When Rupert returned from the chase, his cavalry were too disordered to be brought to attack, but their arrival saved the King’s infantry from further attack, and night brought the dubious battle to a close. Before day broke, Hampden, with two fresh regiments of foot and ten troops of horse, joined Essex, and urged him to advance and drive the King from his position. Essex, discouraged by the misbehaviour of his cavalry, and by his heavy losses, was disinclined to risk anything, and retreated to Warwick. All the fruits of victory fell to the King, and, capturing Banbury Castle without a blow, he pursued his march to Oxford and made that city his headquarters for the remainder of the war (October 29th).

Early in November, Charles resumed his advance upon London. Reading was abandoned as he drew near, but by this time Essex had placed his army between the King and the capital, and there was no ground for the panic which filled the citizens. In the Parliament, the peace party for a moment gained the upper hand and sent commissioners to open negotiations. Charles expressed his willingness to treat, but said nothing about a suspension of hostilities, and still continued to advance. By his orders, on November 12th, Rupert, taking advantage of a mist which concealed his movements, fell upon Essex’s outposts at Brentford, and cut to pieces the two regiments of Holles and Brooke. Hampden came to their rescue and covered the retreat of the survivors, but Brentford was thoroughly sacked by the Royalists. The City expected to share the same fate, and, says Clarendon, “the alarum came to London with the same dire yell as if the army were entered their gates.” Negotiations were broken off, with loud accusations of treachery against the King. The train-bands rushed to arms, and, all night, regiments streamed forth from the City to reinforce Essex. Next day, Charles found twenty thousand men blocking his way at Turnham Green, while three thousand more occupied Kingston and threatened his line of retreat. Some cannon shots were exchanged, but the King was too weak to attack, and Essex too cautious. Once more Hampden urged him to action, and for a moment he seemed inclined to take the offensive. He had two men to the King’s one, and his citizen soldiers were eager to fight, and cheered “Old Robin” whenever he appeared amongst them. But, as after Edgehill, “the old soldiers of fortune, on whose judgment the general most relied,” were against fighting, and he called back Hampden, evacuated Kingston, and suffered Charles to draw off his troops undisturbed. The march on London was stopped, at least for this year; the shops of its citizens were safe, and neither “captain or colonel or knight-at-arms” threatened the “defenceless doors” of Puritan poets. Charles retired to Oxford; the parliamentary army went into winter quarters, and the campaign ended as indecisively as Edgehill had ended. With a larger and better equipped army, and with greater pecuniary resources at his disposal, Essex had throughout allowed the King to take the initiative, and neglected every opportunity offered him by fortune. Charles, on the other hand, as soon as he got together an army, adopted a consistent strategic plan, and pursued it with energy and even audacity. His outposts were now within thirty miles of London, and all over England his followers were gaining ground and gaining heart.

Ever since September, Cromwell had been serving under Essex, and this unsuccessful campaign was his sole training in the art of war. At Edgehill, his troops formed part of the regiment commanded by Sir Philip Stapleton, one of the two regiments which did such splendid service on that day. In later years, it pleased party pamphleteers to assert that he was not even present in the battle, but a contemporary account specially mentions Captain Cromwell in a list of officers who “never stirred from their troops, but fought till the last minute.” One lesson at least he learned at Edgehill: that was the necessity of keeping a reserve in hand, and the importance of energetically using it. Another thing which the battle taught him was that the Parliament’s arms would never be victorious till its cavalry was equal in quality to the King’s. Some of Essex’s foot regiments were excellent, but the ranks of his cavalry were filled with men attracted solely by high pay and opportunities of plunder-men who were neither soldiers nor good material for making soldiers. The consequences were what might have been expected. “At my first going out into this engagement,” said Cromwell, “I saw our men beaten at every hand.” Accordingly he spoke to his cousin, Hampden, and urged him to procure the raising of some new regiments to be added to Essex’s army.

“I told him I would be serviceable to him in bringing such men in as I thought had a spirit that would do something in the work. ‘Your troops,’ said I, ‘are most of them old decayed serving-men, tapsters, and such kind of fellows; do you think that the spirits of such base, mean fellows will ever be able to encounter gentlemen that have honour, and courage, and resolution in them? You must get men of a spirit that is likely to go as far as gentlemen will go, or you will be beaten still.’”

Hampden answered that the notion was a good notion, but impracticable. Impracticable was not a word which Cromwell understood. He obtained leave of absence for himself and his troop and went down into the eastern counties in January, 1643, “to raise such men as had the fear of God before them, and made some conscience of what they did.”

CHAPTER V
CROMWELL IN THE EASTERN ASSOCIATION
1643

At the opening of the campaign of 1643, the strength of the Royalists had greatly increased, and before its close the advantage had passed to the King. In almost every county, towns and castles were garrisoned, and rival leaders, raising troops for King or Parliament, waged war against each other with varying fortunes. In the north and in the west of England, the Royalists rapidly gained the upper hand, and these local successes exercised a decisive influence on the course of the general war.

In April, 1643, Essex with sixteen thousand foot to three thousand horse advanced towards Oxford and captured Reading (April 27th). Hampden urged him to follow up this advantage by besieging Oxford, which was weakly fortified and ill provisioned. But Essex’s army was mutinous for want of pay, and decimated by a great sickness which broke out in his camp after the fall of Reading. He did not resume the movement on Oxford till June, and in the meantime the King had been strongly reinforced. With his diminished numbers, Essex was unable to invest Oxford, and in the small encounters which took place round it his troops were generally worsted. At Chalgrove Field, on June 18th, Hampden was mortally wounded, and his death a week later was as great a blow to his party as the loss of a battle. “Every honest man,” wrote a fellow officer, “hath a share in the loss, and will likewise in the sorrow. He was a gallant man, an honest man, an able man, and, take all, I know not to any living man second.” In his short military career, he had shown an energy, a decision, and a strategic instinct which seemed to mark him out as a future general.

After Hampden’s death, Essex fell back from Oxford and remained inactive, permitting the King to effect a junction with the Royalists of the north and the west. In the north, the Marquis of Newcastle had overrun the greater part of Yorkshire and cooped up Lord Fairfax and his son Sir Thomas in the West Riding. On June 30th, he routed the two Fairfaxes at Adwalton Moor, near Bradford, and forced them to take refuge in Hull—the only fortress which the Parliament now held in Yorkshire. The Queen had landed at Bridlington in February, and these successes enabled her to march south and join Charles at Oxford with arms, ammunition, and reinforcements.

In the west, during the same period, a little army of Cornishmen under Sir Ralph Hopton won victory after victory over the Parliamentarians. At Bradock Down, on January 19, 1643, Hopton defeated General Ruthven; at Stratton, on May 16th, he beat Lord Stamford. Then, joined by Prince Maurice and the Marquis of Hertford, he advanced into Somersetshire and fought a drawn battle with Sir William Waller at Lansdown, near Bath, on July 5th. Followed by Waller, Hopton continued his march towards Oxford, and was blocked up in Devizes with his infantry by his pursuer. But the retreat of Essex had enabled the King to move freely, and had left Waller unsupported. On July 13th, the very day when the Queen reached Oxford, Wilmot and a body of horse sent from Oxford routed Waller’s army at Roundway Down, and rescued Hopton’s hard-pressed army.

Thus by the end of July the Royalists were masters in the field, and Charles could take the offensive. The King’s original plan had been that he should hold Essex in check, whilst Newcastle advanced from the north into Essex, and Hopton made his way through the southern counties toward Kent. All three were then to close in upon London, and strike down rebellion in its headquarters. But now Newcastle’s army refused to march southwards whilst Hull was uncaptured, and the western army hesitated to advance farther whilst Plymouth was not taken. Local feeling was too powerful to be neglected, and Charles was forced to complete the subjugation of the west instead of advancing upon London.

JOHN HAMPDEN.
(From Nugent’s “Life of Hampden.”)

On July 26th, Bristol, the second port in the kingdom, surrendered to Prince Rupert. Gloucester was besieged on August 10th, and though vigorously defended by Colonel Massey it seemed certain to fall, for the Parliament had no army available to relieve it. “Waller,” exulted the Royalists, “is extinct, and Essex cannot come.” Once more Pym and the Parliament appealed to the City, and London responded with a zeal which no disasters could chill. The citizens closed their shops, six regiments of London train-bands joined the shattered army of Essex, and with fifteen thousand men at his back the Earl marched for Gloucester. Vainly Rupert and the King’s horse strove to delay his progress; at his approach, the besiegers drew off their forces without fighting, and Gloucester was saved.

As the Parliamentarians returned to London, the King barred their way at Newbury, and forced them to cut their way through or perish (September 20th). This time the parliamentary horse fought well, but it was the firmness and courage of Essex’s infantry which preserved the army. The London train-bands, whom the Cavaliers had derided, “stood as a bulwark and rampire to defend the rest,” and received charge after charge of Rupert’s horse with their pikes as steadily as if they had been drilling on their parade ground. Long training in military exercises had given them a “readiness, order, and dexterity in the use of their arms,” which compensated for their inexperience of actual war. Step by step the parliamentary army gained ground, till the failure of the King’s ammunition obliged him to retreat and leave the passage free. Essex re-entered London in triumph. Gloucester was safe, and his army was safe, but Reading, the one trophy of his year’s fighting, was abandoned again to the Royalists.

The year 1643 closed gloomily for the Parliament. Except Gloucester, Plymouth, and a few ports in Dorsetshire, all the west was the King’s; the north was his except Hull and Lancashire, and in the midlands the Parliamentarians held their own with difficulty. Only in the eastern counties had the Parliament gained strength and territory, and it was to Cromwell more than any other man that this isolated success was due. At the close of 1642, Parliament had passed an ordinance associating the five counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridge, and Hertfordshire for the purpose of common defence (December 10, 1642). The Eastern Association, as it was termed, was completed by the accession of Huntingdonshire (May 26, 1643) and finally of Lincolnshire (September 20, 1643). Cambridge was its headquarters and Cromwell was from the first its guiding spirit. On his march from London in January, 1643, Cromwell seized the royalist high sheriff of Hertfordshire as he was proclaiming the King’s commission of array in the market-place of St. Albans, and sent him up to London (January 14th). In February, he was at Cambridge busily fortifying the town and collecting men to resist a threatened attack from Lord Capel. In March, he suppressed a royalist rising at Lowestoft, taking prisoners many gentlemen and “good store of pistols and other arms.” A few days later, he disarmed the Royalists of Lynn; in April, those of Huntingdonshire shared the same fate, and on April 28th he recaptured Crowland where the King’s party had established a garrison. Whenever royalist raiders made a dash into the Association, or disaffected gentry attempted a rising, Colonel Cromwell and his men were swift to suppress them. “It’s happy,” he wrote, “to resist such beginnings betimes,” and he never failed to do so.

Meanwhile the notion which Hampden had thought impracticable was rapidly becoming a fact. Cromwell’s one troop of eighty horse had become the nucleus of a regiment. By March, 1643, he had five troops, and by September, ten. When the New Model army was constituted, his regiment had become a double regiment of fourteen full troops, numbering about eleven hundred troopers. Above all they were men of the same spirit as their colonel. His original troop had been carefully chosen. “He had a special care,” writes Baxter, “to get religious men into his troop; these men were of greater understanding than common soldiers ... and making not money but that which they took for public felicity to be their end, they were the more engaged to be valiant.” The new additions were of the same quality. “Pray raise honest, godly men and I will have them of my regiment,” Cromwell promised the town of Norwich. “My troops increase,” he told a friend a few weeks later; “I have a lovely company; you would respect them did you know them; they are no Anabaptists, they are honest, sober Christians.”

The officers were selected on the same principle. “If you choose godly, honest men to be captains of horse, honest men will follow them; and they will be careful to mount such,” wrote Cromwell to the Committee of Suffolk. When he could get gentlemen he preferred them, but godliness and zeal for the cause were the essentials.

“I had rather have,” said he, “a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows, than that which you call ‘a gentleman,’ and is nothing else. I honour a gentleman that is so indeed.... It may be it provokes some spirits to see such plain men made captains of horse. It had been well that men of honour and birth had entered into these employments—but why do they not appear? But seeing it was necessary the work must go on, better plain men than none.”

What struck observers first was the rigid discipline which Cromwell enforced not only in his own regiment but in all men under his command. No plundering was permitted, reported a newspaper; “no man swears but he pays his twelvepence; if he be drunk he is set in the stocks or worse. How happy were it if all the forces were thus disciplined!” The next notable fact was that they were better armed than other regiments, as well as better disciplined. Besides the sword, each trooper had a pair of pistols, but not carbines or other firearms. For defensive arms, they had simply a light helmet or “pot,” and a “back and breast” of iron. Thus while adequately protected they were lighter and more active than fully equipped cuirassiers, and while adequately armed they had no temptation to adopt the tactics of mounted infantry or dragoons. Moreover, from the beginning, Cromwell’s men were taught to charge home, and to rely on the impact of their charge and the sharpness of their swords. They were well mounted and many of them owned the horses they rode, being, as Whitelocke says, “freeholders or freeholders’ sons, who upon matter of conscience engaged in this quarrel.” Others were provided from the stables of Royalists, and one of Cromwell’s letters is a defence of an officer who had seized the horses of “Malignants” to mount his troop. A great lover of horses and arms himself, Colonel Cromwell made his men keep both in good condition. “Cromwell,” says a royalist writer, “used them daily to look after, feed, and dress their horses, and, when it was needful, to lie together on the ground; and besides taught them to clean and keep their arms bright and to have them ready for service.” Men of such a spirit, armed, mounted, drilled, and disciplined with care, soon proved their superiority both to the King’s troops and to those of Essex and Waller.

“That difference,” says Clarendon, “was observed shortly from the beginning of the war: that though the King’s troops prevailed in the charge, and routed those they charged, they never rallied themselves again in order, nor could be brought to make a second charge again the same day, whereas Cromwell’s troops if they prevailed, or though they were beaten and routed, presently rallied again, and stood in good order till they received new orders.”

In May, 1643, Essex ordered the forces of the eastern counties and the east midlands to unite in order to relieve Lincolnshire, and if possible to penetrate to Yorkshire and assist the Fairfaxes. Cromwell was eager to carry out his orders, but first one then another local commander declined to leave his particular locality unprotected. “Better it were that Leicester were not,” said Cromwell, “than that there should not be found an immediate taking of the field by our forces to accomplish the common ends.” He himself set out for Lincolnshire, and at Grantham on May 13th defeated a royalist force twice the size of his own. The Royalists were beaten mainly through their inferior tactics. Their commander had twenty-one troops and some dragoons to Cromwell’s twelve, but he never attempted to charge. The two bodies of horse stood about musket-shot from each other, and their dragoons exchanged shots for about half an hour.

“Then,” says Cromwell’s despatch, “they not advancing toward us we agreed to charge them ... we came on with our troops at a pretty round trot, they standing firm to receive us: and our men charging fiercely upon them, by God’s providence they were immediately routed and ran all away, and we had the execution of them two or three miles.”

Ten days later, Cromwell reached Nottingham and joined the forces of Lincolnshire and Derbyshire, but with all his eagerness he could get no farther. The three commanders quarrelled, and one of them, Captain John Hotham, was secretly in correspondence with the Royalists. To add to Cromwell’s difficulties, some of his soldiers were unpaid and mutinous, though he wrote urgently for money. It was a trouble continually recurring in his letters throughout this campaign, because parts of the Association were always behindhand in paying the men they raised.

“Lay not too much,” he appealed to one defaulter, “upon the back of a poor gentleman, who desires, without much noise, to lay down his life and bleed the last drop to serve the cause and you. I ask not your money for myself; if that were my end and hope—viz: the pay of my place—I would not open my mouth at this time. I desire to deny myself, but others will not be satisfied.”

Till the end of June, Cromwell stayed at Nottingham, defeating the Newark garrison in skirmishes, and hoping at least to bar the Queen’s march south, but his fellow commanders left him, and so he was obliged to fall back into the Association, and leave the Fairfaxes to be crushed at Adwalton Moor.

Now came the hour of danger for the Association. Backed by Newcastle’s army, the Royalists of the neighbouring counties began to press over its borders. One party threatened Peterborough, and garrisoned Burleigh House near Stamford. Another body besieged Lord Willoughby, the commander of the Lincolnshire Parliamentarians, in Gainsborough. Cromwell came to the rescue with his usual speed, captured Burleigh House and its garrison on July 24th, and, gathering what force he could get from Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire, hurried to the relief of Gainsborough. Colonel Cavendish faced him with a body of royalist horse posted on the edge of a sandy plateau outside the town, and Cromwell’s men had to mount it before they could attack. Before they were completely formed, the royalist horse advanced, but Cromwell would not wait to receive their charge.

“In such order as we were,” says he, “we charged their great body. We came up horse to horse, where we disputed it with our swords and pistols a pretty time, all keeping close order, so that one could not break the other. At last they a little shrinking, our men, perceiving it, pressed in upon them, and immediately routed the whole body.”

Part of the Parliamentarians followed the chase five or six miles, but Cromwell halted three troops of his regiment as soon as he could, and it was well he did so; for in the meantime Cavendish and his reserve beat the Lincoln troops forming the parliamentary second line, and were hotly pursuing them when Cromwell with his three troops fell on their rear, and drove them down the hill and into a bog. Cavendish was killed by Cromwell’s lieutenant, and his regiment scattered to the winds. Powder and provisions were thrown into the besieged town, and the van of the Parliamentarians were actively engaged in attacking a body of Royalists discovered on the other side of Gainsborough, when Newcastle’s army arrived, fifty companies of foot, “and a great body of horse.” To fight was hopeless. There was nothing left for the Parliamentarians but to retreat if they could. The foot drew off with some confusion and took refuge in the town; the horse, under Cromwell’s command, were withdrawn in good order from position to position. Four troops of his regiment under Major Whalley, and four Lincoln troops under Captain Ayscough, alternately retiring and facing the enemy, covered the withdrawal.

“They with this handful faced the enemy, and dared them to the teeth in, at the least, eight or nine several removes, the enemy following at their heels; and they, though their horses were exceedingly tired, retreating in order near carbine shot of the enemy, who thus followed them, firing upon them; Colonel Cromwell gathering up the main body and facing them behind those two lesser bodies.”

In this order he effected his retreat to Lincoln without loss.

Without a greater force it was impossible to drive Newcastle back, and in announcing his victory Cromwell appealed for reinforcements.

“God follows us with encouragements.... They come in season; as if God should say, ‘Up and be doing, and I will stand by you and help you.’ There is nothing to be feared but our own sin and sloth.... If I could speak words to pierce your hearts with the sense of our and your condition I would.”

Two thousand foot must be raised at once if they meant to save Gainsborough. “If somewhat be not done in this you will see Newcastle’s army march up into your bowels, being now, as it is, on this side Trent. I know it will be difficult to raise thus many in so short a time: but let me assure you, it’s necessary and therefore to be done.”

Parliament realised the imminence of the danger. On the day of Cromwell’s victory at Gainsborough, it had appointed him Governor of the Isle of Ely. A week later, he received the special thanks of the House for his “faithful endeavours to God and the kingdom,” and was voted three thousand pounds for his troops. On August 10th, an ordinance passed authorising the Associated Counties to raise ten thousand foot and five thousand horse to be commanded by the Earl of Manchester. It seemed, however, as if the eastern counties would be overrun before the new army could be raised. Gainsborough was taken, Lincoln was abandoned, all Lincolnshire except Boston fell into the power of the Royalists. In Norfolk, Lynn raised the King’s standard. However, Newcastle turned back with the bulk of his forces to besiege Hull, and while Manchester with all the foot he could get together besieged Lynn, Cromwell with his cavalry made a bold march into Lincolnshire. Sir Thomas Fairfax, who was shut up in Hull with his father, had with him twenty-one troops of horse, useless for the defence of the town, but capable of changing the fortune of the campaign if added to Cromwell’s force. Fairfax shipped them down the Humber in boats to Saltfleet in Lincolnshire, thus evading the attempts of Newcastle’s cavalry to intercept him, and effected his junction with Cromwell. Both then joined Manchester, who had by this time captured Lynn, and in October the joint army set about the reconquest of Lincolnshire.

The Cavaliers of Lincolnshire and part of Newcastle’s cavalry, headed by Lord Widdrington and Sir John Henderson, fought them at Winceby on October 11th. Cromwell led the van, seconded by Sir Thomas Fairfax.

“Immediately after their dragooners had given the first volley,” says a parliamentary narrative, “Colonel Cromwell fell with a brave resolution upon the enemy; yet they were so nimble, as that within half pistol shot, they gave him another; his horse was killed under him at the first charge, and fell down upon him; and as he rose up he was knocked down again by the gentleman who charged him; but afterwards he recovered a poor horse in a soldier’s hands, and bravely mounted himself again. Truly this first charge was so home given, and performed with so much admirable courage and resolution by our troops, that the enemy stood not another; but were driven back upon their own body which was to have seconded them; and at last put them into a plain disorder; and thus in less than half an hour’s fight they were all quite routed.”

Thirty-five colours, and nearly a thousand prisoners were the trophies of the victors; Lincoln and Gainsborough fell into their hands a few weeks later. Moreover, on the very day of the victory of Winceby, Lord Fairfax sallied forth from Hull, beat Newcastle from his trenches, and forced him to raise the siege in disorder. Thus the Association was secured from invasion, Lincolnshire conquered, and the Parliament’s hold on Yorkshire maintained.

So closed Cromwell’s second campaign. He had shown a skill in handling cavalry very rare amongst the courageous knights and squires who “rode forth a-colonelling.” He kept his promise to Hampden,—raised men of such a spirit that they never turned their backs to the enemy, and disciplined them so that they were an example to all the troops of the Parliament in camp or in battle. The general recognition of his great services was shown by two facts. On February 16, 1644, Parliament appointed a new committee for the management of the war, called, because it included representatives of Scotland, the Committee of Both Kingdoms. Cromwell had not been a member of the Committee of Safety appointed when the war began, but he was from the first a member of this new one. The second fact was Cromwell’s appointment as Lieutenant-General of the army of the Eastern Association. He had been practically Manchester’s second in command since the army was formed, and on January 22, 1644, he received his commission. The appointment had important results, political as well as military. Manchester himself, “a sweet, meek man,” says the Presbyterian Baillie, “permitted his Lieutenant-General to guide all the army at his pleasure.” Of Cromwell he adds: “the man is a very wise and active head, universally well-beloved as religious and stout; being a known Independent most of the soldiers who loved new ways put themselves under his command.” Thus Cromwell’s influence spread to the whole army of the Eastern Association, and officers and men became permeated by the spirit of his regiment. By March, 1644, Manchester’s army was reported to be fifteen thousand strong.

EDWARD MONTAGUE, EARL OF MANCHESTER.
(From Birch’s “Heads of Illustrious Persons.”)

“Neither,” said a newspaper, “is his army so formidable in number as exact in discipline; and that they might be all of one mind in religion, as of resolution in the field, with a severe eye he hath looked into the manners of those all who are his officers, and cashiered those whom he found to be in any way irregular in their lives or disaffected to the cause.”

CROMWELL CREST.

CHAPTER VI
MARSTON MOOR
1644

As yet neither party had decidedly gained the upper hand, though the tide seemed setting against the Parliament. Both parties, therefore, looked outside England for allies, one to make its success complete, the other to regain what it had lost. The King turned to Ireland, and to the army there, which with little support from the Parliament was striving to put down the rebellion. On September 15, 1643, Ormond, the Lord-Lieutenant, concluded a cessation of arms with the rebels, and was able to send several regiments of experienced soldiers to the King’s assistance during the following months. The English Puritans turned to their brethren in Scotland; in September, the Solemn League and Covenant pledged the two nations to unite for the reformation of religion according to the word of God and the example of the best reformed churches; in November, the Scottish Parliament agreed to send twenty-one thousand men to the assistance of the English Parliamentarians. In January, 1644, Alexander Leslie, now Earl of Leven, crossed the Tweed with the promised army.

The campaign of 1644 opened badly for the King. In January, Sir Thomas Fairfax defeated Lord Byron and the King’s Irish forces at Nantwich. In March, Waller defeated Hopton at Cheriton in Hampshire, and frustrated his intended advance into Sussex. In April, Newcastle, after striving in vain to bar Leslie’s progress in Durham, was forced to throw himself into York, where Leslie and the Fairfaxes besieged his army. In May, the forces of Waller and Essex advanced upon Oxford. The Royalists evacuated Reading and Abingdon, and Charles, fearing to be blockaded in Oxford, left the city to be defended by its garrison, and with about six thousand men made his escape to Worcester. But Essex, instead of pursuing and crushing the King’s weak army as he ought to have done, delegated the task to Waller, and set out himself to recover the south-western counties and relieve Lyme.

In April, while Waller and Essex were preparing for their movement on Oxford, the army of the Eastern Association under Manchester took the field. Its first business was to reconquer Lincolnshire,—the debatable land between the north and east,—for Rupert’s defeat of the besiegers of Newark in March, 1644, had thrown Lincolnshire once more into the hands of the Royalists. On May 6th, Manchester’s army recaptured Lincoln, and at the beginning of June he joined the two armies which beleaguered York with about nine thousand men. Of these nine thousand, three thousand were cavalry under the command of Cromwell. York held out stubbornly; some detached forts were taken and the suburbs burnt, but an attempted assault was bloodily repulsed. At the end of June, news came that Prince Rupert with fifteen thousand men had crossed the hills from Lancashire, and was marching to the relief of the city. The three generals, Leven, Fairfax, and Manchester, raised the siege in order to give battle to Rupert’s army, but when they assembled their forces on the south bank of the Ouse, Rupert crossed to the northern bank, and reached York without striking a blow. On the morning of July 2nd, the parliamentary generals, finding themselves outmanœuvred, and the resumption of the siege rendered impossible, were in full retreat to the south, when Rupert’s attacks on their rearguard forced them to halt and offer battle. They drew up their army on some rising ground between Tockwith and Marston, overlooking the open moor on which the Royalists had taken their post. Between the armies, and marking the southern boundary of the moor, ran a hedge, and ditch, which Rupert had lined with musketeers, and some similar obstacles strengthened the royalist left flank. Rupert’s army, reinforced by Newcastle’s forces from York, numbered about eighteen thousand men, while the Parliamentarians amounted to about twenty-seven thousand, but the Royalists had the advantage of a strong defensive position, and of open ground on which their cavalry could manœuvre freely.

For three hours the two armies faced each other in battle array; a few cannon-shots were exchanged, but neither army advanced. The Roundheads fell to singing psalms, and the royalist generals came to the belief that there would be no fighting that day. About five, the whole parliamentary line began to move forward, and Cromwell, with the cavalry forming its left wing, attacked Lord Byron and the royalist right. Cromwell had under his command all the horse and dragoons of the Eastern Association, half a regiment of Scottish dragoons, and three weak regiments of Scottish cavalry who formed his reserve,—in all not less than four thousand men, of whom one thousand were dragoons. The dragoons rapidly drove the royalist musketeers from the ditch, and enabled the cavalry to pass it. Cromwell led the way, and with the first troops who crossed charged the nearest regiment of Royalists. His own division, says a contemporary narrative, “had a hard pull of it; for they were charged by Rupert’s bravest men both in front and flank.” But as fast as they could form, the other troops of Cromwell’s first line charged in support of their leader, erelong the foremost regiments of the Royalists were broken, and, pursuing their victory, Cromwell’s men engaged the second line.

In this hand-to-hand combat Cromwell was wounded in the neck by a pistol-shot fired so near his eyes that it half blinded him, but, though for a short time disabled, he did not leave the field. Meanwhile Rupert himself, who had been at supper in the rear when the attack began, galloped up with fresh regiments and, rallying his men, drove back Cromwell’s troopers. It was but a temporary check, for David Leslie with Cromwell’s second line fell on Rupert’s flank, and the royalist cavalry was irretrievably routed. Sending the light Scottish regiments of the reserve in pursuit of the flying Cavaliers, Cromwell and Leslie reformed their tired squadrons, and halted to find out how the battle had gone in other quarters of the field. Tidings of disaster soon reached them, and it became plain that the battle was more than half lost for the Parliament. Sir Thomas Fairfax, wounded and almost alone, came with the news that the horse of the right wing under his command were defeated and flying. His own regiment had charged with success, and broken through the enemy; those who should have supported him, disordered by the furze and the rough ground they had to pass through to debouch upon the moor, had been charged by the Royalists, and completely scattered. The infantry of the parliamentary centre had fared little better. The advance had been at first successful all along the line, some guns had been taken, and the ditch passed. On the left, Manchester’s foot, led by Major-General Crawford, had outflanked the infantry opposed to them, and were still gaining ground. In the centre, Lord Fairfax’s foot and the Scottish regiments supporting them, repulsed by Newcastle’s white-coated north-countrymen, and trampled down by their own flying horse, were in full flight. On the right, the main body of the Scottish infantry was hard pressed; some regiments gave way as their brethren in the centre had done; others maintained their ground manfully. Yet with the centre of the parliamentary line pierced, and the cavalry of the right wing driven from the field, the position of these isolated regiments, exposed to attack in front and flank both, seemed hopeless. So thought old Leven, who, after striving in vain to rally the runaways, gave up the day for lost, and galloped for Leeds. Lord Fairfax, too, was carried off the field in the rout of his infantry, though he returned later.

While Goring’s victorious horse pursued the fugitives, or stopped to plunder the baggage, Sir Charles Lucas, with another division of Goring’s command, employed himself in attacking the Scottish infantry. Maitland’s and Lindsey’s regiments on the extreme right of the line stood like rocks, and beat off three charges with their pikes. Like their ancestors at Flodden, and with better fortune,

“The stubborn spearmen still made good

Their dark, impenetrable wood,

Each stepping where his comrade stood

The instant that he fell.”

Help was now at hand. Sweeping across the moor behind the royalist centre, Cromwell and Leslie came with their whole force to the relief of the Scots. With them too marched Crawford and the three brigades of Manchester’s foot. As they advanced, Lucas’s horse suspended their attack, and Goring’s men streamed back from pursuit and pillage to meet this new antagonist.

Cromwell’s cavalry now occupied the very ground where Goring’s men had been posted when the battle began, and met them at “the same place of disadvantage” where Sir Thomas Fairfax had been routed. The struggle was short but decisive, and when the last squadrons of the royalist horse were broken, Cromwell turned to co-operate with Crawford and the Scots in attacking the royalist infantry. Some of Rupert’s veteran regiments made good their retreat to York; Newcastle’s white-coats got into a piece of enclosed ground, and sold their lives dearly; the rest scattered and fled under cover of the protecting darkness. About three thousand Royalists fell in the battle, while sixteen guns, one hundred colours, six thousand muskets, and sixteen hundred prisoners were the trophies of the victors. Rupert left York to its fate, and made his way back to Lancashire with some six thousand men, and the city itself surrendered a fortnight later.

In the despatch which the three Generals addressed to the Committee of Both Kingdoms, they gave no account of the details of the battle, and made no mention of Cromwell’s services. Private letters were more outspoken. One described him as “the chief agent in obtaining the victory.” Some people spoke of him as “the saviour of the three kingdoms,” though Cromwell repudiated the title with some anger. The friends of the Scottish army depreciated his services, attributed what his cavalry achieved to David Leslie, and circulated reports that Cromwell had taken no part in the battle after his first charge.

The utterances of the royalist leader both before and after the battle showed that he appreciated Cromwell’s importance more justly. “Is Cromwell there?” asked Rupert of a prisoner taken just before the battle, and it was Rupert too who, after the battle, gave Cromwell the nickname of “Ironside” or “Ironsides.” The title was derived, according to a contemporary biographer, “from the impenetrable strength of his troops, which could by no means be broken or divided,” and it was extended later from the leader to the soldiers themselves.

Cromwell’s only account of the battle is contained in a few lines written to his brother-in-law, Colonel Valentine Walton.

“England,” he said, “and the Church of God hath had a great favour from the Lord in this great victory given unto us, such as the like never was since this war began. It had all the evidences of an absolute victory, obtained by the Lord’s blessing upon the godly party principally. We never charged but we routed the enemy. The left wing, which I commanded, being our own horse, saving a few Scots in our rear, beat all the Prince’s horse. God made them as stubble to our swords. We charged their regiments of foot with our horse, and routed all we charged. The particulars I cannot relate now; but I believe of 20,000 the Prince hath not 4000 left. Give glory, all the glory, to God.”

Cromwell’s letter has been charged with concealing the services of David Leslie and the Scots. But every word of his brief account was true. He did not give the particulars of the fight, because he was writing a letter of condolence, not a despatch. Walton’s son, a captain in Cromwell’s own regiment, had fallen in the battle, and Cromwell wrote to tell the father details of his son’s death. He began with the news of the great victory in order that Walton might feel that his son’s life had not been idly thrown away. Then he turned suddenly to the real subject of the letter. “Sir, God hath taken your eldest son away by a cannon shot. It brake his leg. We were necessitated to have it cut off, whereof he died.” Next he praised the dead—the “gallant young man,” “exceeding gracious,” “exceedingly beloved in the army of all that knew him,” who had died “full of comfort,” lamenting nothing save that he could no longer serve God against his enemies, and rejoicing in his last moments to “see the rogues run.” In the spring, Cromwell had lost his own son, Captain Oliver, who died not in battle, but of smallpox in his quarters at Newport. “A civil young gentleman, and the joy of his father,” said a newspaper recording it. He referred to this now while seeking to comfort Walton. “You know my own trials this way; but the Lord supported me with this, that the Lord took him into the happiness we all pant after and live for.” Let the same faith support Walton, and let “this public mercy to the Church of God” help him to forget his “private sorrow.” So closed the letter, revealing in its tenderness and sympathy, its enthusiasm and its devotion to the cause, the depths of Cromwell’s nature, and the secret of his power over his comrades in arms.

After the fall of York, the three parliamentary armies separated. Leven and the Scots turned northwards again to besiege Newcastle, the Fairfaxes remained to capture the royalist strongholds in Yorkshire, and Manchester, taking on his way Sheffield Castle and a few smaller garrisons, returned to Lincoln. All August he remained there idle, declining even to besiege Newark. He was weary of the war, anxious for an accommodation with the King, and shocked at the spread of sectarian and democratic opinions in his army and in the kingdom. Cromwell, as the protector of the sectaries, was at daggers-drawn with Major-General Crawford, who attempted to suppress them; Crawford cashiered an officer on the ground that he was an Anabaptist, and Cromwell and some of his colonels threatened to lay down their commissions unless Crawford was removed. A compromise of some kind was patched up, but Cromwell’s influence over Manchester was at an end.

Meanwhile, in the south of England the campaign so prosperously begun was ending in disaster. Charles had turned on his pursuer, and defeated Waller at Cropredy Bridge, in Oxfordshire, on June 29th. Leaving Waller’s disorganised and mutinous army too weak to do any harm, he followed Essex into the west, and, joined by the forces of the western Royalists, threatened to overpower him. At the end of August, the Committee of Both Kingdoms ordered the army of the Eastern Association to go to the succour of Essex. Cromwell was eager to do so. “The business,” he wrote to his friend Walton, “has our hearts with it, and truly, had we wings we would fly thither.” Manchester’s army, though ill provided with necessaries, and slandered by evil tongues as factious, was ready to serve anywhere. “We do never find our men so cheerful as when there is work to do.” But he went on to hint that there were obstructives in high places, who were less willing to fight than their soldiers. “We have some amongst us much slow in action; if we could all intend our own ends less, and our own ease too, our business would go on wheels for expedition.”

Before Manchester stirred from Lincoln the anticipated disaster came. At Lostwithiel on September 2nd, Skippon and the infantry of Essex’s army were forced to capitulate and to lay down their arms. The horse escaped by a night march through a gap in the royalist lines, while Essex himself and a few officers fled by sea. After his victory the King returned slowly to Oxford, and Manchester with the greatest reluctance moved south-west to meet him. “My army,” he said openly, “was raised by the Association and for the guard of the Association. It cannot be commanded by Parliament without their consent.” It was imperative that Charles should be fought before he could get to his old headquarters at Oxford, while his army was weakened by the forces left behind in the west, but Manchester’s refusal to advance allowed the Royalists to reach Newbury before the King was obliged to fight. At Newbury, on October 27th, Manchester’s army, strengthened by Waller’s forces and by what remained of Essex’s troops, made a joint attack on the King. Charles had only ten thousand men to oppose to the nineteen thousand brought against him, but he had chosen a strong position between two rivers, protected on one side by Donnington Castle, and covered, where it was most assailable, by intrenchments. Above all, his army was under a single commander, while the Parliament’s was directed by a committee. Essex was absent from illness, and the Committee of Both Kingdoms hoped to avoid disputes by putting the command in commission.

The parliamentary scheme was that Skippon’s foot, with the horse of Cromwell and Waller, should attack the King’s position on the west, while Manchester assaulted it on the north-east. It failed through lack of combination. Skippon’s infantry carried the royalist intrenchments, and recaptured several guns they had lost in Cornwall, but the cavalry, impeded by the nature of the ground, could effect little. Manchester delayed his attack till it was too late to assist them, and was repulsed with heavy loss. Nevertheless the result of the day’s fighting was that the King’s position was so seriously compromised that only a retreat could save his army. In the night, the royalist army silently marched past Manchester’s outposts, and by morning it was half way to Wallingford. Waller and Cromwell set out in pursuit with the bulk of the cavalry, but as Manchester and the majority of the committee refused to support them with infantry Charles made good his retreat to Oxford. A fortnight later, the King, reinforced by Rupert with five thousand men, returned to relieve Donnington Castle and carry off the artillery he had left there (October 9, 1644). He offered battle, and Cromwell was eager to fight, but Manchester and a majority of the committee declared against it. Foot and horse alike were greatly reduced in numbers, and the latter “tired out with hard duty in such extremity of weather as hath been seldom seen.” Manchester, in addition to military reasons, urged political arguments against risking a battle.

“If we beat the King ninety-nine times, yet he is King still, and so will his posterity be after him; but if the King beat us once we shall all be hanged, and our posterity made slaves.” “My Lord,” retorted Cromwell, “if this be so, why did we take up arms at first? This is against fighting ever hereafter. If so, let us make peace, be it ever so base.”

But much as he might despise Manchester’s logic, he had to bow to the logic of facts, and to accept the view of the committee in general.

So ended the campaign of 1644. The north of England had been definitely won, and with capable leadership the defeat of Essex in Cornwall might have been compensated by the defeat of the King in Berkshire. When Cromwell came to reflect on the incidents of the last few months, he attributed the failure to obtain this victory entirely to Manchester. He had failed, apparently, not through accident or want of foresight, but through backwardness to all action. And this backwardness, concluded Cromwell, came “from some principle of unwillingness to have the war prosecuted to a full victory; and a desire to have it ended by an accommodation on some such terms to which it might be disadvantageous to bring the King too low.” On November 25th, Cromwell rose in the House of Commons, told the story of the Newbury campaign, and made this charge against Manchester. Manchester vindicated his generalship in the House of Lords, alleging that he had always acted by the advice of the council of war, and that Cromwell was a factious and obstructive subordinate. Then, leaving military questions alone, he made a bitter attack on Cromwell as a politician. He had once given great confidence to the Lieutenant-General, but latterly he had become suspicious of his designs, and had been obliged to withdraw it. For Cromwell had spoken against the nobility, and had said that he hoped to live to see never a nobleman in England. He had expressed himself with contempt against the Assembly of Divines, and with animosity against the Scots for attempting to establish Presbyterianism in England. Finally, he had avowed that he desired to have none but Independents in the army of the Eastern Association, “so that in case there should be propositions for peace, or any conclusion of a peace, such as might not stand with those ends that honest men should aim at, this army might prevent such a mischief.”

Cromwell did not deny these utterances, and their revelation produced the effect which Manchester had anticipated. An enquiry into errors in the conduct of the war developed into a political quarrel. The Lords took up the cause of Manchester as the cause of their order. The Scots intrigued against Cromwell as the enemy of their creed. “For the interest of our nation,” wrote Baillie, “we must crave reason of that darling of the sectaries,” and talked of breaking the power of that potent faction “in obtaining his removal from the army, which himself by his over-rashness has procured.” Some of the Scottish leaders consulted together on the feasibility of accusing Cromwell as an “incendiary” who had sought to cause strife between the two nations, but the English lawyers consulted advised against it.

“Lieutenant-General Cromwell,” said Mr. Maynard, “is a person of great favour and interest with the House of Commons, and with some of the peers likewise, and therefore there must be proofs, and the most clear and evident proofs against him, to prevail with the Parliament to judge him an incendiary.”

As the controversy proceeded, the Lower House declared on Cromwell’s side, and the conviction of Manchester’s incapacity spread amongst its members. But, instead of pressing the charge home, Cromwell drew back. A personal triumph, to be gained at the cost of a rupture between the two Houses, and perhaps a rupture between England and Scotland, was not worth gaining. What he wanted was military efficiency and the vigorous conduct of the war, and he resolved to use the dissatisfaction which Manchester’s slackness had roused in order to obtain these ends, and to abandon the personal charges to secure them. The moment was propitious, for on November 23rd the Commons had ordered the Committee of Both Kingdoms to consider the reorganisation of the whole army. On December 9th, when the report on the charges against Manchester was brought in to the House of Commons, Cromwell turned the debate to the larger issue. The important thing now, he said, was to save the nation out of the bleeding, almost dying condition, which the long continuance of the war had brought it into.

“Without a more speedy, vigorous, and effectual prosecution of the war, we shall make the kingdom weary of us, and make it hate the name of a Parliament.”