In the last lecture I followed the course of events to the time when it became clear that a military republic was the only possible alternative for an unconditional triumph of Charles. Whether this republic should be more or less exclusive, depended on the possibility of bringing the English presbyterians to an understanding with the erastian or independent party in parliament, and both to an understanding with the army. During the spring of 1648 we find Cromwell, true to his instinct of comprehension, working for this end, and rewarded by all parties with jealousy for his pains. He had a conference at his house, Ludlow tells us, ‘between those called the grandees of the house and army, and the commonwealth’s men.’ The grandees of the house would probably be the original members of the Long parliament who might be of erastian or independent sympathies, such as St. John, Nathaniel Fiennes, one or two uninteresting lords, and perhaps Vane, who was not a declared republican. The commonwealth’s men, not grandees, would be members elected to fill up vacancies at the end of 1645, such as Ludlow himself, Hutchinson, and Thomas Scott, officers of the army, but not of Cromwell’s training. Marten, though in standing a grandee, headed this republican party. The grandees, according to Ludlow, with Cromwell at their head, ‘kept themselves in the clouds, and would not declare their judgments either for a monarchical, aristocratical, or democratical government, maintaining that any of them might be good in themselves, or for us, according as providence should direct us. The commonwealth’s men declared that monarchy was neither good in itself, nor for us. That it was not desirable in itself they urged from the eighth chapter of the 1st book of Samuel, where the choice of a king was charged upon the Israelites by God himself as a rejection of him.’ That it was not good ‘for us’ was proved ‘by the infinite mischiefs and oppressions we had suffered under {324} it and by it; that indeed our ancestors had consented to be governed by a single person, but with this proviso, that he should govern according to the direction of the law, which he always bound himself by oath to perform; that the king had broken this oath, and therefore dissolved our allegiance, protection and obedience being reciprocal; that … it seemed to be a duty incumbent upon the representatives of the people to call him to account for the blood shed in the war … and then to proceed to the establishment of an equal commonwealth, founded upon the consent of the people, and providing for the rights and liberties of all men.’ So elaborate an utterance of republican formulae did not look like conciliation, and finally, says Ludlow, ‘Cromwell took up a cushion and flung it at my head and then ran downstairs; but I overtook him with another, which made him hasten down faster than he desired.’

He was not more successful with the presbyterians, whose leaders he got to confer with the independents, and whom he afterwards addressed in the city. ‘The city,’ according to a contemporary presbyterian writer, ‘were now wiser than our first parents, and rejected the serpent and his subtleties.’ The presbyterian zeal in fact, as it boasted of itself, would learn nothing by events. During the summer of 1648, while the army under Cromwell and Ireton was trampling out the royalist risings and scattering the intrusive Scots (no longer led by Lesley), Holles availed himself of the absence of the military members to return to the house and regain his majority. Under his direction, and at the pressure of the city, negotiations in the exclusive presbyterian interest were re-opened with the king. These led to concessions on his part, only made to gain time, which at last, in the beginning of December, in a house of two hundred and forty-four, were voted a sufficient basis of agreement. This vote made the final rent between military and parliamentary power, and Vane, who more than anyone else dreaded this rent, resisted it to the utmost. Marten, however, was already bringing up Cromwell from the north, and Cromwell a few days before had given voice to the ‘great zeal he found among his officers for impartial justice on offenders.’ Soldiers full of the same zeal were already in the suburbs. The day after the vote was passed, colonel Pride ‘purged’ the house of the ‘royalising’ members; within two days Cromwell appeared in it arm in {325} arm with Marten, and the military republic was virtually established.

It is needless to repeat the story of the king’s trial and execution, or tell how his judges wore all the dignity of men who believed themselves in the sight of God and the world to be violating the false divinity of consecrated custom that a true divinity might appear, or how Charles, after a few bursts of misplaced contempt or passion, yet at the last, in Marvell’s words,

‘Nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene,
But with his keener eye
The axe’s edge did try;

Nor called the gods, with vulgar spite,
To vindicate his helpless right;
But bowed his comely head
Down, as upon a bed.’

The new government, in the exhilaration of sudden success, and conscious that its strength lay in the awe which it inspired, ‘went on roundly with its business.’ Considering its position, however, it kept its hands strangely free from blood. It had the temptation, generally so fatal in times of revolution, of feeling irresistible force at its command for the moment without the least guarantee of permanent stability. Yet its severity was confined to inflicting banishment and confiscation on fifteen magnates who had been prominent in the second war, to imprisoning a few others, and to killing Hamilton, Holland, Capel, and colonel Foyer. Of these, Capel alone, according to the ideas of the time, could have hoped for a better fate, for he alone was exempt from the charge of treachery, but the very greatness of his character, as Cromwell with his usual explicitness stated, made it necessary for the commonwealth that he should die.

Meanwhile the purged house of commons was constituting itself a sovereign power. Only such members were re-admitted to it who would declare dissent from the vote that the king’s concessions afforded a ground of settlement. First and last about a hundred and fifty members seem to have been admitted on these terms. Two days after the king’s death the lords sent a humble message to the commons inviting them to a conference on the condition of the state. The commons took no heed of the message, which was {326} repeated several times, till February 6, when they responded by a vote that the tipper house was ‘useless, dangerous, and ought to be abolished.’ The next day ‘kingship’ was abolished by a formal vote, and soon afterwards the executive government was delegated to a council of state of forty members, to be nominated yearly by the commons. The accessories of republicanism were arranged mainly by Marten, who clearly did his work with glee. At his instance the old ‘great seal’ was broken, and a new one made with the arms of England and Ireland on one side, and a ‘sculpture or map of the commons sitting’ on the other. Under this new seal, and under oath to ‘the parliament and people,’ the judges were to hold their commissions, which six of the twelve agreed to do. A new coinage was also issued with a cross and harp and the motto ‘God with us’ on one side; the arms of England between a laurel and palm, with the legend ‘Commonwealth of England,’ on the other. At the same time the royal statues were all taken down, and on the pedestals was inscribed with the date, ‘Exit tyrannus regum ultimus.’ All these were the devices of Mr. Henry Marten. A more serious business was the issue of an ‘engagement’ to the new government. This, though at first promulgated in a severe retrospective form, was finally reduced to a promise of fidelity to the ‘commonwealth, as established without king or lords.’ Without taking this engagement, no one was to have the benefit of suing another at law, ‘which,’ says Baxter, ‘kept men a little from contention, and would have marred the lawyers’ trade.’

The question whether Charles deserved his death, is one which even debating societies are beginning to find unprofitable. His death was a necessary condition of the establishment of the commonwealth, which, again, was a necessary result of the strife of forces, or more properly, the conflict of ideas, which the civil war involved. At first sight, indeed, it might seem the result merely of accident, or at any rate of personal action and character, of the military talent of Cromwell, of the nature of the army which he got together, of the parliamentary animosities begotten of the self-denying ordinance, of the foolish confidence of Charles in his ability to shatter the two parties against each other, and lastly of the resolution of Cromwell in self-defence to command the situation. Beneath the confused web of personal relations, {327} however, may be seen the conflict of those religious ideas which I have spoken of as resulting from the action of the Reformation on the spirit of Christendom. On the one hand was the jus divinum of a sacerdotal church; not simply appealing by ritual or mystery to the devout, but applied at once to strengthen and justify a royal interest. To this was opposed the jus divinum of the presbyterian discipline, resting, not on priestly authority, but on the popular conscience, yet claiming to be equally absolute over body and soul with the other. Their antagonism elicited the jus divinum of individual persuasion, a right hitherto unasserted in christendom, which, while the old recognised rights were in the suspense of conflict, became a might. In the rapture of war it felt its strength, and a master-hand gave it the form and system which it lacked. The ancient order, too weak to regulate or absorb it, tried blindly, while it was still armed and exultant, to crush it, and itself necessarily fell to pieces in the attempt. But this might of individual persuasion, though in a revolutionary struggle it could conquer, was unable to govern. It was a spirit without a body, a force with no lasting means of action on the world around it. Even at the present day its office is to work under and through established usage and interests, rather than to control them. Much less capable was it of such control, when it was still in the stage of mere impulse or feeling, with none of the calm comprehension which comes of developed thought.

When it first faced the world in organic shape as a military republic, it already presented practical contradictions which ensured its failure. The republic claimed, and claimed truly, to be the creation of the impulse of freedom, yet it found nothing but sullen acquiescence around it; it spoke in the name of the people, not half of whom, as lady Fairfax said, it represented; it asserted parliamentary right, though parliament had been ‘purged’ (nearly clean) to make room for it; it was directed by men of a ‘civil’ spirit, and had civil right to maintain, while it rested on the support of armed enthusiasts, who cared only for the privilege of saints. It was, in fact, founded on opinion, the opinion of a few, brought to sudden strength and maturity, as it might have been in an Athenian assembly, by debate in and about the parliament and in the council of the army, but which had {328} no hold either on the sentiment or the settled interests of the country. In the counties which throughout the war had served as the screen of London, those, that is, which formed the eastern association, together with Buckinghamshire and Berkshire, it seems to have had a certain amount of genuine support. Here the influence of Cromwell and his immediate friends, in Berkshire especially the influence of Marten, was strong; and the sentiment emanating from London, through the pervasive action of sectarian preachers was quickly felt. Even here, however, the sympathy was with the new government as a source of religious reform and protection of tender consciences, rather than as republican; and close at its doors the commonwealth had evidence of a different feeling, not only opposed to it, but on which it could not hope to work. In the spring of 1648, before Cromwell took the field, when the whole country was simmering with insurrection, the parliament had been specially troubled with a movement under its own eyes, of which Whitelock has given a particular account. [1] A petition from Surrey was brought up by some hundreds of the petitioners in person, that the king might ‘forthwith be established on his throne, according to the splendour of his ancestors.’ The petition was not presented to the commons till the afternoon, ‘when some of the countrymen, being gotten almost drunk, and animated by the malignants, fell a quarrelling with the guards, and asked them “why they stood there to guard a company of rogues.” Then words on both sides increasing, the countrymen fell upon the guards, disarmed them, and killed one of them’; till more soldiers were brought up, and the countrymen dispersed. About the same time there was a ‘high and dangerous riot’ in the city, which began in Moorfields about ‘sporting and tippling on the Lord’s day,’ contrary to the ordinance of parliament. [2] For a whole day the rioters seem to have been masters of the city. They seized the lord mayor’s house, and took thence a ‘drake.’ With this they ‘possessed a magazine in Leadenhall,’ and then ‘beat drums on the water to invite the seamen for God and king Charles.’ The next day a couple of regiments crushed the tumult. All the time a general lawless riot was spreading over Kent, got up by malignants, who circulated a rumour that the parliament meant to hang two men in every town.

[1] [Whitelock, ii. 313.]

[2] [April 10, Rushworth, vii. 1051.]

{329} If such things could happen where the parliament could make itself felt most quickly, we may imagine the popular condition in regions where there was the same ignorance, the same liability to panic, the same tendency to tippling and gaming not on Sundays only, for malignants to work on in the interest of ‘God and king Charles,’ and where no voice from the republican headquarters ever penetrated. ‘The inconstant, irrational, image-doting rabble,’ as the proud republicans called it, which, when the king was being brought from Newcastle to Holmby, had thronged his path to be touched for the evil, which eagerly bought up fifty editions in twelve months of the Eikon BasilikÈ with the picture of the king at his prayers, was constant enough in two feelings, of which the republicans would have done well to take account, a reverence for familiar names, and a resentment against virtues which profess to be other than customary and commonplace. It was at once the merit and the weakness of the commonwealth’s men that they irritated these feelings at every point.

‘Before them shone a glorious world,
Fresh as a banner bright, unfurled
To music suddenly;’ [1]

and they could not wait to attain it by slow accommodations to sense and habit. They believed that God through them was ‘casting the kingdoms old into another mould,’ and in the pride of triumphant reason they took pleasure in trampling on the common feelings and interests, through which reason must work, if it is to work at all. In the writings of Milton, the true exponent of the higher spirit of the republic, we find on the one hand a perfect scorn of the dignities and plausibilities then as now recognised in England (which makes him the best study for a radical orator that I am acquainted with), on the other, a free admission of the sensual degradation of the people, which estranged them from a government founded on reason. In the latter respect there is a marked contrast between the language he held at the beginning of the war, when ‘he saw in his mind a noble and puissant nation rousing itself like a strong man after sleep,’ and the language of the ‘Eiconoclastes,’ where he admits that the people ‘with a besotted and degenerate baseness of spirit, except some few who yet retain in them the old English {330} fortitude and love of freedom, imbastardised from the ancient nobleness of their ancestors, are ready to fall flat and give adoration to the image and memory of this man, who hath more put tyranny into an act than any British king before him.’ To him, throughout, the puritan war had seemed a crisis in the long struggle between the spirit and the flesh, a great effort to reclaim the spirit from ‘the outward and customary eye-service of the body,’ and a system of political asceticism was its proper result. Such a system to its believing supporters was the commonwealth. Its claim was not gradually to transmute, but suddenly to suppress, the feeling of the many by the reason of the few; a claim which all the while belied itself, for it appealed to popular, and even natural right, and which implied no concrete power of political reconstruction. It was a democracy without a d???, [2] it rested on an assertion of the supremacy of reason, which from its very exclusiveness gave the reason no work to do.

[1] [Wordsworth, Ruth.]

[2] [Greek demos = people, Tr.]

The great interests of the nation at that time may be taken as the landed, the mercantile, and the clerical; and the republic at starting might reckon on hostility from each of them. With the landed interest it dealt at once too severely to have its friendship, and too lightly to crush it. If it had adopted a sweeping measure of confiscation, as other revolutionary governments have done, and as it did itself in Ireland, it might have settled the soldiers on the confiscated lands, thus easing itself of their too obtrusive support, while it established a permanent interest in its favour over the whole country. As it was, the land was only confiscated in a few special cases, when it was given to the various grandees of the parliament, in reward of services, and in return for money spent on the public behalf. The ordinary gentry who had been in arms for the king, ‘delinquents,’ as they were called, were allowed to retain their estates on payment by way of composition of some part of the income. They thus retained their old means of influence, along with a memory of a grievance to intensify their natural royalism. Nor was the trouble got over once for all at the foundation of the commonwealth. The composition paid on the estates was one of the chief sources of revenue, and when, through a Dutch war or the like, the republic was short of money, delinquents were hunted out who had hitherto escaped. Thus the sore was kept running, and if the humbled gentry, like {331} colonel Poyer of Pembroke, were ‘sober and penitent in the morning,’ they were also like him often ‘drunk and full of plots in the afternoon.’ Their meetings for horse-races and cock-fighting were reckoned nurseries of disaffection, and the best security against them was that secrets sworn to over the bottle were not generally well kept.

The royalist squire, when he was not at a cock-fighting, would often have his loyalty fanned by an excluded episcopal clergyman whom he had taken as his chaplain. A large number of the clergy, as we have seen, had been driven from their livings by the imposition of the covenant. A fifth of the yearly income of their several benefices was set apart for the benefit of their families (an example not followed at the ejectment of St. Bartholomew’s day), but the excluded clergy themselves were liable to be driven from their old parishes, and would generally take refuge with the royalist gentry. It would seem indeed that under the commonwealth, which, in England at least, was true to its principle of toleration, there was nothing to prevent an episcopalian clergyman who would recognise the republican government from being presented to a living or from using the Common Prayer in his church. Some residue of the old assembly still sat at Westminster, to examine men who presented themselves for ordination or induction to livings, but they had no power to compel such presentation, and there is no sign that they were uniformly resorted to. From passages in Baxter’s life we may infer that many moderate episcopalians, men, that is, who were in favour, according to the technical language of the time, of compresbyterial, as distinct from prelatical, episcopacy, held benefices under the new rÉgime. Still there were no doubt numbers of excluded ‘prelatical divines’ about the country, and while they were natural enemies of the commonwealth, the presbyterian ministers were not its friends. Whatever was not sectarian in it, was erastian. Its very existence they reckoned a violation of the covenant, and, if its abolition of kingship could have been borne, its refusal to give the presbyteries a coercive jurisdiction, its declared intention to remove all penal ordinances in matters of conscience, they could not brook. They refused to read its ordinances from the pulpit, as had previously been done, they prayed openly against it, and turned the monthly fast into a general exercise of disaffection. The parliament on its part issued stringent {332} injunctions that all ministers should subscribe the engagement of fidelity to the commonwealth, and finding that the monthly fast had become a ‘fast for strife and debate,’ it declared its abolition and appointed fasts of its own on special occasions. The ministers, however, ‘condemned the engagement to the pit of hell’ and shut up the churches on the new fast days. According to Baxter, as a general rule only the sectarians and the old cavaliers, who were seldom ‘sick of the disease of a scrupulous conscience,’ would swallow the engagement. He not only refused it himself, but circulated letters against it among the soldiers, ‘barking monitories and mementoes,’ in Milton’s phrase. Yet he seems to have been left undisturbed, nor except at the universities do we hear of any penalties for the refusal of the engagement being inflicted. The parliament knew that the presbyterian pulpit was the most powerful lever of popular opinion in the country, and showed a magnanimous patience in dealing with it. It put out declarations, promising protection to the ministers in their benefices, and a maintenance of all ordinances that had been made for reformation in doctrine, worship, and discipline, except such as were penal and coercive. At last it passed an order that state affairs were not to be discussed in sermons, and appointed a committee to receive informations against such as disregarded it. The beneficed ministers, however, stimulated by missives from the Scotch kirk, now in arms for Charles II., continued, says the gentle Mrs. Hutchinson, to ‘spit fire out of their pulpits,’ and even the rout of their allies at Dunbar, though it made their tongues less dangerous, did not make them more smooth.

The reason of the case is obvious. It is the true nemesis of human life that any spiritual impulse, not accompanied by clear comprehensive thought, is enslaved by its own realisation. Presbyterianism at the beginning of the war had been a struggling impulse, noble, but not understanding its own nobleness. It had now, with success, hardened into an interest; its inarticulate idea had become a shallow, though articulate formula; and it was seeking to suppress the spiritual force in which it had itself originated. The genuine commonwealth’s men, on the other hand, were still in the stage of the ‘unbodied thought.’ They announced principles. In practice the presbyterian clergy should be supported and well paid, but universal toleration must be maintained, and tithes were {333} declared judaic and objectionable. The offensiveness of such principles did more to provoke the clergy than the excellence of the practice, which Baxter, at least, was obliged to confess, did to conciliate them.

The best illustration of the real feeling of the republican clique in London towards the preaching presbyterian royalists is to be found in Milton’s treatise on the ‘Tenure of kings and magistrates,’ written just at this crisis, when he was in constant communication with the chief commonwealth’s men.

‘Divines, if we observe them, have their postures and their motions no less expertly than they that practise feats in the artillery ground. Sometimes they seem, furiously to march on, and presently march counter; by-and-by they stand, and then retreat; or if need be, can face about or wheel in a whole body, with that cunning and dexterity as is almost unperceivable, to wind themselves by shifting ground into places of more advantage. And providence only must be the drum; providence the word of command, that calls them from above, but always to some larger benefice…. For while the hope to be made classic and provincial lords led them on, while pluralities greased them thick and deep, to the shame and scandal of religion, more than all sects and heresies they exclaim against; then to fight against the king’s person, and no less a party of his lords and commons, or to put force on both the houses was good, was lawful, was no resisting of superior powers; they only were powers not to be resisted who countenanced the good, and punished the evil. But now that their censorious domineering is not suffered to be universal, truth and conscience to be freed, tithes and pluralities to be no more, though competent allowance provided, and the warm experience of large gifts, and they so good at taking them, yet now to exclude and seize on impeached members, to bring delinquents without exemption to a fair tribunal by the common law against murder, is to be no less than Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. He who but erewhile in the pulpits was a cursed tyrant, an enemy to God and saints, laden with innocent blood, is now, though nothing penitent, a lawful magistrate, a sovereign lord, the Lord’s anointed, not to be touched, though by themselves imprisoned.’ [1]

[1] [Milton’s Prose Works, ii. pp. 45 and 6, ed. 1848.]

When we reflect that the men of whom this was written were the most active and popular section of the beneficed {334} clergy, and that the other section, the accommodating episcopalians, had been covertly hostile to the parliament all along, we shall appreciate the estrangement of the ideas, that were ruling for the time, from the average sentiment of the country. The only agency through which the government could now hope to work on this sentiment was that of the independents and sectaries, who were unbeneficed, and even the support of the independents was not very hearty, for independency in the larger towns was becoming an ‘interest,’ while that of the sectaries might at any time become unmanageable.

The republic, having thus to reckon on open hostility from the clergy, and on a deeper hatred, tempered with fear, from most of the gentry, had no countervailing influence with the commercial class. This class, which never loves experiments in government, took its political tone largely from the presbyterian preachers; and in the city, as we have seen, gave great strength in the crisis of 1648 to the royalist reaction. The financial necessities, moreover, of an armed republic aggravated the offence of its moral and spiritual innovation. Hitherto the army had been supplied with provisions by a system of free quarter. Its leaders had been quite aware of the popular grievance which this system caused, and which only its admirable discipline prevented from being far greater. The removal of it had been a constant topic in the documents issuing from the army-council; but this implied the introduction of new and heavy taxation. The purged parliament, however, had spirit for the work, and quickly imposed an ‘assessment’ of 90,000_l_. a month (more than 1,000,000_l_. a year). Such a burden was sure to be a permanent source of complaint, but for the present the impressive display of restrained power, with which the new government had begun its rule, and the apprehension that it might be the only present alternative for a worse rule of levellers, had made the city more civil. At the special instance of Cromwell and Vane it advanced money on security of the tax, and the lord mayor, with other city magnates, was placed on the committee of assessment. A prompt suppression of a levelling mutiny by Cromwell, in May 1649, seems for the time to have composed the commercial mind, and a few days after a great banquet was given by the city to the parliament and officers of the army, remarkable chiefly {335} for the description of it by Whitelock, which indicates that in one respect at least, good taste, superior to that of our times, went along with puritan gravity. ‘The feast was very sumptuous, the music only drums and trumpets, no healths drunk, nor any incivility.’ The mercantile interest was further conciliated by an act passed soon afterwards (the beginning of legislation which was gradually to transfer the carrying trade of the world from the Dutch to the English), to the effect that no foreign ship should bring merchandise to England except such as was of the growth or manufacture of the country to which the ship belonged. Still the breach between the high spiritual endeavour on which alone the republic really rested, and the aspiration of the smug citizen who left such endeavour to his minister and to Sundays, was too great for orderly and vigorous administration to fill. The condition of this administration, moreover, was that Cromwell should keep its enemies at a distance.

With such dangerous elements all around it, the household of the republic was by no means united in itself. It rested on a temporary coalition between three sets of men, between whom as we have seen there was no real love; the genuine commonwealth’s men, a section of the ‘grandees of the parliament,’ and the leaders of the army. The ‘grandees of the parliament’ had, with scarcely an exception, kept their hands from the death-warrant of Charles. They recognised the new order of things partly to avoid a breach with the army, partly from fear of presbyterian ascendency and an unchecked royalist reaction. So far as they looked ahead at all, they probably contemplated a re-establishment of monarchy in the person of the duke of Gloucester, the late king’s youngest son, whom the parliament had in its keeping. This at least was the case with Whitelock, who was in his way a representative man. On the new council of state (of forty), which included seven peers or eldest sons of peers, five baronets, four knights, and some temporising lawyers, this section had a numerical majority. On the other hand, the stiff republicans were in a decided minority on the council. Only ten regicides were upon it, and from these must be deducted Cromwell and one or two officers whom he could command, and who were not republican on principle. The most eminent of this section were Marten, Bradshaw, Ludlow, and Scott. Bradshaw, a special friend of Milton, had presided at the trial of Charles, {336} in a high beaver hat lined with steel, with the composure, according to Milton, of a man with whom the trial of kings had been the business of life. He was afterwards president of the council of state, where Whitelock, a rival and perhaps jealous lawyer, complains that he did not understand the nature of his office, and made long discourses of his own that no one wanted to hear. Scott had been an officer in the new-model army, but seems already to have been jealous of Cromwell, being one of those men with whom hatred of the ‘rule of a single person’ was a principle of life. In later days, when Monk was supreme, the restoration inevitable, and the republicans fleeing, he stood up in parliament and said that, though he knew not where to hide his head, yet he must say that not his hand only but his heart had been in the execution of Charles. As might be expected, the restoration brought him the honour of martyrdom for his cause. Ludlow was a man of the same temper. His qualities were clearly much valued by Cromwell, and there seems to have been more real friendship between them at this time than Ludlow, looking back upon it from his exile at Vevay in the light of subsequent events, was willing to admit. Marten alone had some touch of the modern French republican about him. We have seen with what zest he arranged the more sensational incidents of the commonwealth. When the motion for the abolition of the house of lords, as ‘useless and dangerous,’ was being discussed, he proposed to substitute the words ‘useless but not dangerous.’ On another occasion, it is said, in drawing up a republican document, he spoke of ‘England being restored to its ancient government of commonwealth,’ and in answer to an objection that a commonwealth never before existed in England, quoted a text which had always puzzled him, where a man blind from his birth was said to be ‘restored’ to the sight he should have had. Under cover of this gaiety, however, and of a life reputed to be lewd, Marten had a strong republican enthusiasm, which he carried with him to his death through an imprisonment of twenty years.

These republicans, one would suppose, must have felt the uneasiness of their position. They had been the first to appeal from the unpurged parliament to the army. Ludlow, indeed, in his memoirs professed to have been shocked when Cromwell, in the spring of 1647, whispered to him in the house {337} that Holles and his party would never leave ‘till the army pulled them out by the ears’; yet by his own confession a few months later, during the treaty of Newport, he urged Ireton to put force on the parliament before Ireton himself was prepared to do so, and Marten had done the like with Cromwell. To the army they had thus appealed, but to the army, now that they were successful, they no longer meant to go. Its enthusiasm was not theirs. They had too much of the ancient Roman in them, Marten, perhaps, rather of the ancient Greek, to sympathise with the ‘foolishness of Christ’ as it was presented in the army. It was not in them that men, whose pastime was preaching and being preached to, who discovered strange lights in their bibles to interpret strange events, could find a natural leader, but in one who in his private prayers would ‘throw himself on his face and pour out his soul with tears for a quarter of an hour,’ who never went into battle without a text to feed on, who sang psalms as he led them to victory. The army, though it had no representative of its peculiar spirit on the council of state except Cromwell, was the real constituency of the republican parliament. It contained dangerous elements over which parliament had not the least control, and which might at any time overturn the parliamentary system. These may be summed up as the spirit of simple military arrogance, represented by Lambert, the levelling spirit represented by Lilburne and Wildman, and the ‘Fifth Monarchy’ spirit represented by Harrison. Lambert appears to have had the most conspicuous military talent of any of Cromwell’s officers. In the critical spring of 1648 he held an independent command in the north of England. He showed great skill in hanging on the skirts of Hamilton’s army before Cromwell joined him, and afterwards headed the pursuit. At Dunbar he led the fatal attack on the Scotch right wing, and next year when Charles was marching to Worcester, hung on his flank with cavalry, as he had before done on Hamilton’s. But as soon as he was off active service, he became mischievous. Vain, restless, and of extravagant habits, he perpetually chafed alike against Cromwell’s control and the authority of the parliament. He alone of the leading officers had never obtained a seat in parliament, and thus never became habituated to its civilising influence. Mrs. Hutchinson, while including him and Cromwell in the same condemnation, admits that there was this difference, {338} that while the one was gallant and great, the other had nothing but an unworthy pride, most insolent in prosperity and as abject and base in adversity.’ The term ‘leveller,’ then as now, was very loosely and ambiguously applied. According to Mrs. Hutchinson, who is a good authority on this point, the nickname was originally given to a:

‘certain sort of public-spirited men,’ who, when the presbyterian and independent factions were at their hottest, ‘declared against the ambition of the grandees of both and against the prevailing partiality, by which great men were privileged to do those things for which meaner men were punished. Many then got shelter in the house and army against their debts, by which others were undone. The lords, as if it were the chief privilege of nobility to be licensed in vice, claimed many prerogatives, which set them out of the reach of common justice, which these good people would have had equally belong to the poorest as well as to the mighty.’ ‘But,’ continues Mrs. Hutchinson, taking a turn at philosophy, ‘as all virtues are mediums and have their extremes, there rose up after under the same name a people who endeavoured the levelling of all estates and qualities, which these sober levellers were never guilty of desiring.’ [1]

[1] [Life of colonel Hutchinson, ii. 125; ed, 1885.]

This account corresponds with the tenor of the petitions which we read of as presented to the republican parliament by ‘levellers.’ They are simply a continuation of the agreements and remonstrances issued by the council of the army during the agitation of 1648, which in the main no doubt expressed the mind of Cromwell and Ireton. Their demand is for reforms, which for the most part stood over for nearly another two hundred years, till they began to be carried out by the ‘purged parliament’ of 1832. With minor variations according to circumstances, they pray, firstly, for a cheap and expeditious process of law, to be the same for all, with no exemptions in virtue of tenure or privilege; the laws to be written and in English; secondly, the abolition of all feudal courts, payments, and privileges; thirdly, the maintenance of the clergy by some other method than tithes, which, let us remember, were not then commuted, but were a perpetual source of carnal dispute between the clergy and the farmers; fourthly, the removal of monopolies, custom-duties, and excise, and the imposition of equal taxation; fifthly, the abolition of imprisonment for debt; all {339} estates to be liable for debt, and the rich not to turn prisons into places of protection; sixthly, the establishment of perfect freedom of conscience; and seventhly and lastly comes the demand, which presented the real difficulty, the dissolution of the sitting parliament, with provision for calling a new one at regular intervals.

This, we shall agree, is a sufficiently large and reasonable programme of reform. Sometimes farther details appear, of a kind which show a curious forecast of modern legislation, such as the establishment of registers of mortgage and the sale of lands. The rational desire for reform, however, which these petitions indicate, was always liable in the army to pass into a spirit of mutiny and disaffection, or into an ecstatic revolt, such as constantly appeared in those times against the clothing, literal and metaphorical, with which custom has covered the nakedness of human life. The grand mover of the mutinous spirit was John Lilburne, the object of Marten’s well-known joke, that if he were the only man left in the world, John would quarrel with Lilburne and Lilburne with John. His obligations to Cromwell were of long standing. In a tract published in 1647 he says to Cromwell, ‘You took compassion on me when I was at death’s door, and in 1640 set me free from the long tyranny of the bishops and the Star chamber.’ (In 1640 no one will suppose that Cromwell’s sympathy was other than disinterested.) ‘I have looked on you,’ he proceeds, ‘as the most absolute, single-hearted great man in England, untainted and unbiassed with ends of your own.’ He did not long continue, however, to use this language. He had made himself useful to Cromwell in the matter of the self-denying ordinance by showing up certain scandals in connection with the earl of Manchester and other officers of the original army. This made him many enemies, one of the obscurer of whom prosecuted him for damaging his character. The case was decided against Lilburne, who was called on for heavy damages. He appealed to the parliament, and its disregard of his appeal was the beginning of a long series of grievances, accumulating in intensity as grievances do, and gradually drawing within the circle of his animosity every one who declined to make his vindication the sole object of political action. Cromwell and Marten seem really to have done what they could to help him, but he would not wait to be helped. From time to {340} time a parliamentary committee was appointed to consider his case, but before anything could be done, there would appear some violent pamphlet of his against parliament and its grandees in general, for which he would be lodged in the tower. ‘Jonah’s cry,’ ‘The oppressed man’s oppression,’ ‘The just man’s justification,’ ‘Jugglers discovered,’ are among the titles of his tracts, all most trenchantly written, that appeared during the military agitation which culminated in the rendezvous at Ware. Because Cromwell would not break on his account with ‘the grandees of the parliament’ and the more worldly-wise of the officers, he became one in Lilburne’s eyes who had bartered his high calling for the glory of the world. His supposed machinations were exhibited in a pamphlet published during the first months of the commonwealth, under the title ‘The hunting of the foxes from Triploe Heath to Whitehall by five small beagles’; the foremost ‘beagle’ being Lilburne. [1] It strongly illustrates the freedom of discussion allowed in the army, which indeed was the condition of its peculiar enthusiasm, that this and other seditious manifestoes from the same hand, such as ‘England’s new chains discovered,’ had apparently unchecked circulation in it, and that at a time when a strong leaven of mutiny was at work. At three different places in the spring of 1649, in London, at Banbury, and at Salisbury, while the ‘five beagles’ were happily under lock and key in the tower, the troops broke into open revolt. Through want of leaders, and the swift energy of Cromwell, the revolt was suppressed without bloodshed, and of the captured mutineers, altogether some two thousand in number, only five were shot. It is a fact probably unique in military history, that the one who was shot in London was carried to the grave with military honours, followed by the whole body of troops quartered about the city with the ‘levelling’ badges in their hats. The fact is unique because the army also was unique, being not a mercenary machine, or even an embodiment of patriotic impulse, but an armed organisation of opinion.

[1] [“Lilburn” amended to “Lilburne”, twice. Tr.]

Contemporaneously with this outburst of mutiny, the levelling spirit had taken another direction, sufficiently peaceable, but equally tending to sap the foundation of a government resting on opinion.

‘In April of the year 1649,’ says Whitelock, [1] ‘the council of state had intelligence of new {341} levellers at St. Margaret’s Hill, near Cobham in Surrey, and at St. George’s Hill, and that they digged the ground and sowed it with roots and beans; one Everard, once of the army, is the chief of them.’ A few days after Everard was brought before the general. He said that he ‘was of the race of the Jews; that all the liberties of the people were lost by the coming in of William the Conqueror, and that ever since the people of God had lived under tyranny and oppression worse than that of our forefathers under the Egyptians. But now the time of deliverance was at hand…. And that there had lately appeared to him a vision, which bade him arise, and dig and plough the earth, and receive the fruits thereof; that their intent is to restore the creation to its former condition…. That they intend not to meddle with any man’s property … but only with what is common and untilled; … that the time will suddenly be that all men shall willingly come in, and give up their lands and estates, and submit to this community …, For money, there was not any need of it, nor of clothes more than to cover nakedness…. As their forefathers lived in tents, so now it would be suitable to live in the same,’ with more to the like effect. ‘I have set down this the more largely,’ adds Whitelock, ‘because it was the beginning of the appearance of this opinion, and that we might the better understand and avoid these weak persuasions.’

[1] [iii. p. 17.]

This ‘persuasion,’ ‘weak’ though it might be, was simply an expression of that individual consciousness of spiritual capacity and right, which had been strong enough to pull down an ancient church and monarchy, and was now tearing off the encumbrances by which, as it seemed, ages of selfish activity had clogged its motion. It was the sectarian enthusiasm, seeking wildly to withdraw itself from secular, as it had already done from religious ordinance. Ultimately clothed and in its right mind under the form of quakerism, it was to serve as a permanent protest against the plausibilities of the world, and to supply a constant spring of unconventional beneficence to English life. Even in this rude agricultural form, which it took among the diggers on Cobham Heath, it was perfectly peaceable. ‘They would not defend themselves with arms, but would submit unto authority, and wait till the promised opportunity be offered, which they conceived to be at hand.’ Their existence, however, showed that the enthusiasm which {342} had created the commonwealth was taking the inevitable course which made it useless as a support for any civil government whatever.

A kindred impulse to theirs, moreover, was at work in high places of the army, where it did not forswear the use of a carnal sword. Major-general Harrison was now directing his course by a verse in the prophet Daniel, which promises the kingdom of the world to the saints of the Most High, and was looking to the Rump parliament to introduce this kingdom with all speed. If their factions and worldly interests prevented them from doing so, Cromwell, he held, by some method above that of civil government, could and would. It was not for a constitutional theory or a pagan republicanism that he had been fighting, but for a dominion of grace, and he would not long be still while grandees of parliament, whom God had never owned in war, wrangled over the legal adjustment of his mercies. Overton, the governor of Hull, was the most eminent of those who shared his view, which, however, was but the legitimate doctrine of the military saint.

During more than two years, from the midsummer of 1649 to the autumn of 1651, the republican oligarchy was able to shut its eyes to the real situation. The military spirit was absorbed in the conquest under Cromwell of Ireland and Scotland, and the English royalists, hardly recovered from their crushing failure at home, were watching the fortune of war in these other countries. The only chance for the permanence of republicanism was that it should avail itself of this interval to establish itself on a more popular basis, and initiate practical reforms. If it had had the will or ability to do so, the levelling clamour, which with the return of the army was sure to be heard again, would have had nothing in popular sentiment to appeal to. The name of a ‘free parliament’ had been made to English ears, by the very men to whom it was now a word of ill omen, the familiar symbol of good government. The interference with the ordinary course of justice by special courts and parliamentary committees was a grievance that everyone could understand. An ecclesiastical anarchy, such as the journal of George Fox the quaker exhibits to us, was a scandal that came home to the parochial mind. In an ordinary parish, a presbyterian clergyman would be in possession of the benefice, to attempt {343} an irritating but ineffectual discipline and haggle over tithes, while in the same place there would be a knot of ‘common-prayer men’ with an excluded minister at hand to stimulate their zeal, and a congregation of baptists or independents, who, now that their friends were in power, would see no reason why their enemies should be beneficed. In the absence of any settled rule, each party might hope by local faction or intrigue to get the tithes for itself, and meanwhile would resist the payment of them to its adversaries.

The only hopeful line then for the commonwealth’s men to take would have been to provide for the election of a new parliament by reformed constituencies, to abolish all criminal prosecution not sanctioned by the common-law, to reform chancery and simplify legal process, and to resettle the church on some plan that would admit at least the independents and the ‘moderate’ or anti-prelatist episcopalians, and substitute a fixed salary for tithes. Whether this line was practicable for them is another question. They had no hold on popular feeling; a powerful Scotch army, with the young king in its keeping, was in the field against them, and the presbyterian clergy were praying for its success. Under such circumstances there was much plausibility in Henry Marten’s argument that their ‘commonwealth was yet an infant, of a weak growth and a very tender constitution’; and therefore his opinion was, ‘that nobody could be so fit to nurse it as the mother who brought it forth; and that they should not think of putting it under any other hands till it had obtained more years and vigour.’ Marten, however, had forgotten that the true mother of the republic was not the Rump parliament, but the army, whose maternal discipline, unless some foster-parentage could be found in popular interests, would be too much for the child as soon as it sought to take a way of its own.

The essential difficulty of the situation was aggravated by the oligarchical temper which it bred in the republican leaders. With the best of them this temper took that higher form which appears in Milton’s complaint, [1] that when God has given the victory to a cause in the field of battle, ‘then comes the task to those worthies which are the soul of it, to be sweat and laboured out amidst the throng and noses of vulgar and irrational men.’ Even in this form it cannot face facts, for it is {344} not this pride of exclusion but the higher pride, which can possess itself in sympathy and comprehension, that represents the divine reason in the world. But the pride of protected intellect, once clothed with political power, soon passes into the jealousy of a clique. So it was within our memory in France under the Orleanist rÉgime, and so it was with the leading spirits of the Long parliament. They mistook the success of their military administration for a real faculty of government, and hugged power for its own sake, in the mood of a self-conscious aristocracy of virtue. If this was the case with the best of them, a more vulgar kind of self-interest was sure to prevail among the rest. Thus, though their administration was singularly pure, they got credit even among their best friends, if Milton’s ‘Second defence’ may be taken as expressing his real mind, for a spirit of faction and obstructiveness.

[1] [Tenure of kings and magistrates.]

The one man among them who seems really to have comprehended the situation, was Sir Henry Vane. Shrinking from the touch of military violence, he had withdrawn from parliament after Pride purged it, though the purgation was specially in his interest, and had only been induced to join the council of state at the pressing instance of Cromwell. He at once saw the need of popularising the government, and stirred the question of new elections. A committee for considering the question seems to have been constantly sitting during the first year of the commonwealth, with Vane as its chairman, which reported at the beginning of 1650 in favour of a new parliament of four hundred members, and a re-arrangement of constituencies. A corresponding resolution was voted by the house, but no bill was introduced, and meanwhile Vane’s energies were absorbed by the management of the wars with the Scots and the Hollanders. On this, as on the other pressing questions, parliament could never get beyond the stage of resolutions. It resolved to deal with the question of tithes, to provide for popular education out of ecclesiastical funds, and to simplify the law, but no actual legislation was achieved. Thus by the autumn of 1651 it could take credit for an effective administration of war and finance, and for the introduction of a preaching ministry and schoolmasters into Wales. Towards facing the hostile forces which only slumbered around them, towards meeting the demands of the enthusiasm of reformation to {345} which they owed their temporary power, they had done absolutely nothing. On September 6 they heard the speaker read Cromwell’s account of the battle of Worcester, ‘a mercy’ of which ‘the dimensions are beyond my thoughts,’ ‘it is for aught I know a crowning mercy.’ Cromwell, meanwhile, was riding up to London with a look which Mr. Peters, his chaplain, interpreted, or afterwards believed himself to have interpreted, to mean that he would be king of England yet. At Aylesbury he was met, on behalf of the parliament, by St. John and Whitelock, both special representatives of the lawyer’s desire for ‘settlement,’ and ‘government by a single person,’ with whom, especially with St. John, he had long discourse. On the 16th, we read in Whitelock, he took his seat in the house, and there is the significant addition, ‘the parliament resumed the debate touching a new representative,’ also ‘of an act of oblivion and general pardon, with some expedients for satisfaction of soldiery and the ease of the people.’ The question of settlement was now in the hands of one who would not allow it to tarry.