After the "crowning mercy" of Worcester fight, the rule of England lay nominally in the hands of its mutilated and discredited House of Commons, the representative of a mere fraction of the nation. But really the power to move the realm was in the hands of the army, which had made, and could as easily unmake, the mockery of representative government which sat at Westminster. And in the army Cromwell was growing more and more supreme; his old colleague Fairfax had sunk back into civil life; his mutinous subordinates the Levellers had been crushed; the colonels and generals who held power under him were for the most part his humble servants.

Cromwell had as yet no official post corresponding to his real omnipotence. He was commander of the army, and a member of the Council of State, but nothing more. His will, nevertheless, was the main factor in the governance of England.

It is time to say a few words of the character of this extraordinary man, whom we have hitherto seen merely as the heaven-sent leader of the Parliamentary armies, and the guiding spirit of the Independent party. Oliver was a county gentleman of Huntingdonshire, a man of religion from his youth up, and a prominent member of the Parliaments of 1628 and 1640. He was more than forty years old before he ever drew sword or put a squadron in battle array. No general save Julius CÆsar ever started on a great military career so late in life. Cromwell himself aimed at being a reformer of the life and faith of the nation much more than a soldier. He had taken to war because the times required it, but military power and military glory was not his end in life. He wished to see England orderly, prosperous, and free, according to his ideas of freedom in things spiritual and temporal. In religion his ideal was the Independent system, in which the state tolerated most forms of worship, and was itself committed to none. In things temporal he wished to see the realm ruled by a truly representative House of Commons, where every district should be represented according to its population. He had no patience for the existing House, in which a haphazard arrangement, dating back from the middle ages, gave no fair representation to England—where the vanished boroughs of Dunwich or Sarum had as many members as Yorkshire or Norfolk. If Cromwell had found a House of Commons that agreed with his views, he would have worked smoothly with them, and lived and died no more than their first servant.

Unfortunately, however, Cromwell's views did not happen to be shared by any large proportion of the nation. Half England was secretly Episcopalian; a large proportion of the rest was Presbyterian; among his own Independent party there were numberless sects and factions. In the constitution of England, then as now, there was no place for an over-great personality backed by a strong military force. But such a personage existed in Cromwell. The question now arose whether he would consent to see the land governed by men whom he despised, in ways of which he disapproved, or whether he would proceed to interfere. Interference would be unconstitutional; but everything had been unconstitutional in England for ten years, and the temptation to use force was irresistible to a man who had strong political theories, a self-reliant temper, and 20,000 formidable veterans at his back. He could never forget that the "Rump" was the army's creature, and that it had been created to carry out the army's views. His very energy and conscientiousness were certain to drive him into illegalities. It is customary to reproach Cromwell with dissimulation and ambition, to make his whole career turn on a settled desire to make himself despot of England. This view entirely misconceives the man. It is far more correct to look upon him as a man of strong principles and prejudices, who was carried away by his desire to work out his programme, and who struck down—often with great violence and illegality—all that stood in his way. If he finally seized autocratic power, it was because he found that in no other way could he put his plans in practice. Power, in short, was for him the means, not the end. Unfortunately for his reputation, England has always objected to being dragooned into the acceptance of any programme or set of views, and if she would not accept the theories of a Stuart, the child of a hundred kings, it was hardly likely that she would acquiesce tamely in those of a simple country gentleman of Huntingdonshire; the fact that he was the finest general of the seventeenth century did not make him an infallible law-giver.

When Cromwell came back victorious from Worcester field, the small and one-sided House of Commons which had ruled England since Pride's purge was still supreme in the state. Before he had been three weeks in London, Oliver hinted to the members that it was time that they should dissolve themselves, and give place to a freely elected house, where every shire and borough should be represented. Such a house had not been seen since 1642, when the Royalist third of the Commons had seceded at the king's command. But the "Rump" had enjoyed its two years of power, and had no wish to disperse. It was gradually growing to believe itself to be an irresponsible oligarchy with no duties to the nation, and to forget that it purported to represent England. When the question of dissolution was mooted, it proceeded to fix a date three years off as a suitable time for its own suppression, making the excuse that it must recast the constitution of the realm before it dispersed. This gravely vexed Cromwell and all the friends of reform; still more was their anger raised when the members proceeded to waste month after month in fruitless legal discussions, without succeeding in passing any bill of importance.

Meanwhile the country had become involved in a foreign war. All the powers of Europe looked unkindly upon the regicide Commonwealth of England, and its envoys were maltreated at more than one court. Two were actually murdered—Anthony Ascham at Madrid, Isaac Dorislaus, at the Hague; in each case the slayers were exiled English Royalists, and the foreign government gave little or no satisfaction for the crime. While English relations with Spain remained strained, those with Holland gradually grew to an open rupture. The Dutch had been interested in the Royalist cause because their stadtholder, William II., Prince of Orange, had married Mary, the eldest daughter of Charles I., and had sheltered the Prince of Wales at his court for many months. It was from Holland, too, that the Royalists had received their supplies of arms during the war. But there was more than this recent grudge in the ill-feeling between English and Dutch. They had grown of late to be rivals in the trade of East and West. Their merchants in the Spice Islands had come to blows as early as 1623, and in America the Dutch had planted the colony of "New Amsterdam," so as to cut the connection between Virginia and New England, as far back as 1625. At present they were competing for the carrying trade both of the Baltic and the Mediterranean.

Hence it was that when the indignation of the Parliament against the Dutch came to a head, it found vent in the celebrated Navigation Act (1651). This bill provided that goods brought to England from abroad must be carried either in English ships, or in the ships of the actual country that grew or manufactured them. Thus the Dutch carrying trade would be severely maimed. It was not a wise bill, or one in accordance with the laws of political economy, but it suited the spirit of the times, and even the usually clear-headed Cromwell gave it his support. This obvious blow at Dutch interests led, as was intended, to war (July, 1652).

In the struggle which followed, the English fleets were generally successful. Led by Robert Blake, a colonel of horse who became for the nonce an admiral, and showed no mean capacity in his new employment, they obtained several victories. The conflict was not without its vicissitudes, and on one occasion the Dutch Admiral Van Tromp won a battle, and sailed down the Channel with a broom at his masthead, to show that he had swept the seas clean. But his triumph was not for long; next spring Blake beat him in a fight off the North Foreland (June 3, 1653), and a final victory off the coast of Holland, in which the gallant Dutchman was slain, completed the success of the English fleet. A treaty followed in which the vanquished enemy accepted the bitter yoke of the Navigation Act, and promised to banish the Stuarts from Holland. This they did with the better grace because the republican party among them had just succeeded in excluding the House of Orange from the stadtholdership. The Orange interest, therefore, could no longer be exerted in favour of the exiled royal family of England (1654).

But ere the Dutch war had come to an end, there had occurred a sweeping political change in England. The "Rump" Parliament had persevered in its unwise courses; it had carried no reforms, either in Church or State, but spent all its time in profitless debating. Nor had it improved its popularity in the country by raising taxes by a new system which recalled the "tallages" of John or Henry III. Making lists of all who had taken the Royalist side in the old civil war, it imposed heavy fines on them, for offences of six or seven years ago. The army began to grow desperately impatient with the Parliament that it had made. In August, 1653, a great body of officers petitioned Cromwell, as their chief, to insist on the Commons dissolving themselves. Somewhat frightened, the House passed a bill for a dissolution, but with the extraordinary and preposterous claim that all sitting members should appear again in the next Parliament without having to seek re-election by their constituents.

This strange attempt to perpetuate themselves for ever provoked Cromwell's wrath to boiling-point. He resolved to take a step even more drastic than Pride's purge. On April 20, 1653, he went down to Westminster with a guard of musketeers, whom he left outside the door. Taking his seat as a private member, he presently arose and addressed his colleagues in a fiery harangue, in which he told them that they were a set of worthless talkers with no zeal for religion or reform. When shouted down by the angry Commons, he bade his soldiers enter, and thrust the dismayed politicians out of the door. The Speaker was hustled from his chair and Cromwell bade his men "take away that bauble," the great mace, which lay on the table and represented the dignity of the Commons of England.

Thus perished the last remnant of the mighty "Long Parliament," dissolved by the mere fiat of the great general. Nor did its fall cause much murmuring, for the nation had long ceased to regard it as anything more than a body of garrulous and self-seeking oligarchs.

For the moment there was no legal government in England, for Cromwell's position was quite unconstitutional. He felt this himself, and was anxious to create a new House, which should work with him and carry out his ideas of reform; as yet he had no intention of becoming an autocrat. Accordingly, he summoned in June an assembly which differed from all that had been before it, since the members were not elected by the shires and boroughs, but named by a committee of selection, at which Cromwell presided. This illegally created body was called the "Nominee Parliament," or more frequently "Barebones' Parliament," from a London merchant with the extraordinary name of Praise-God Barebones, who was one of its prominent members.

But Cromwell was to find by repeated experiments that it was impossible for him to discover any body of men who could work with him on exactly the lines that he chose. For his own opinions were not those of the majority of the nation, and hence any assembly that he called was bound, sooner or later, to quarrel with him. And since he possessed in his army a weapon able to dissolve any number of parliaments, he was tempted to bring every quarrel to an end by abruptly dismissing the recalcitrant House. A less self-confident man, or one who did not think that he possessed a mandate from above to reform England, might have learnt to co-operate with a Parliament. But Cromwell was so sure of his own good intentions, and so convinced that those who questioned them must be wrong-headed and factious, that he drove away three parliaments in succession with words of rebuke and of righteous anger.

Barebones' Parliament, a body full of stiff-backed and fanatical Independents, soon proved too restive for its creator. Cromwell smiled on their first efforts, when they began to codify the laws and abolished the Court of Chancery. But he began to frown when this conclave of "the Saints," as they called themselves, commenced to speak of confiscating Church-tithes—the maintenance of the clergy—and the rights both of state and of private patronage to livings. It is even said that they wished to substitute the Mosaic law from the Book of Deuteronomy for the ancient law of England. This drew down a rebuke from Cromwell, whereupon the House very honestly gave their power back into the hands from whence they had taken it, and dissolved themselves (December, 1653).

The dispersion of this unconstitutional assembly was followed by another experiment in illegality. Cromwell published a paper-constitution drawn up by himself, called the "Instrument of Government." This provided that England should be governed by a "Lord Protector" and a House of Commons. Cromwell himself, of course, took the post of Protector, which was to be held for life, and had a quasi-royal character, for it was he who was to summon and dissolve Parliaments, and his assent was required to all bills; but it was stipulated that "the Protector should have no power to reject such laws as were themselves in accordance with the constitution of the commonwealth"—a vague check, since he himself would have to decide on the legality of each enactment. The new House of Commons was a fairly constituted body, for it included members from Scotland and Ireland, and among the English seats all the "rotten boroughs" were disfranchised, while their members were distributed among the rising towns, such as Leeds, Liverpool, and Halifax, and the more populous counties. The Protector was to have no power of dissolving the Commons till they had sat five months at least (December 16, 1653).

For nine months Cromwell ruled as "Lord Protector" without any check on his power, for the Parliament was not to assemble till September, 1654. Pending its arrival, the Protector began to introduce many reforms; he recast the Courts of Justice, and introduced his favourite scheme for the government of the Church. This was the toleration of all Protestant sects, and the distribution of Church patronage among them by a committee of selection called "Triers." This body was only to inquire whether the candidate for a living was of a good life, and held the essential doctrines of Christianity. It was not to inquire whether he was Presbyterian, Independent, or Episcopalian; only Romanists were formally excluded. But, unfortunately for the content of the land, Cromwell's ordinance that the old Church of England Prayer-book was not to be used, effectually prevented any conscientious Episcopalian from applying to the "Triers." The Churchmen could only meet by stealth to celebrate their sacraments, and they formed at least half the nation. Cromwell's well-meant arrangements were gall and bitterness to them, and discontent was always rife.

Cromwell's New-Model Parliament met on September 3, 1654, the third anniversary of Worcester fight. It was a body that well expressed the wishes of the Puritan half of the nation, but the Royalists were, of course, excluded. The sense that it was a strong and representative body made it confident and haughty; it at once began to discuss the legality of the "Instrument of Government," and to pass bills restricting the Protector's power. Cromwell with some difficulty kept his temper for the statutory five months, and then dissolved it (January 22, 1655).

Once more the Lord Protector was left alone as autocrat of Great Britain. He was not happy in the position; the dissolution of the New-Model Parliament had angered Independents and Presbyterians alike. They murmured that a despotic Protector was no better than a despotic King. Conspiracies began to be formed against Cromwell, both by Royalists and extreme republicans. Some were for open rebellion, some for secret murder, for autocrats are easy to make away with. No one save Guy Fawkes ever tried to slay a whole Parliament, but the power of the individual despot is often tempered by assassination. Cromwell promptly got the better of a few wild spirits who tried to raise open war, for the army was still devotedly loyal to him. But his spirit was sorely tried by the assassination plots; the pamphlet which Colonel Sexby, the Leveller, published, under the title of Killing no Murder, especially incensed him. For the future he went on his way resolute, but nervously expecting a pistol-shot from every dark corner.

For eighteen months after the dissolution of the New-Model Parliament Cromwell ruled as autocrat without any House of Commons to check him (January, 1655, to September, 1656). This time he tried another unconstitutional experiment for the governance of the realm. He divided England into twelve districts, and set over them twelve major-generals picked from the army, whose despotic power replaced that of lords-lieutenant and sheriffs. This expedient made even more evident than before the fact that the army was holding down the nation by force, and provoked much adverse comment. As a matter of fact, Cromwell's rule, though utterly illegal, was very efficient. He gathered around him many capable men: the poet Milton—though a convinced republican—served as his foreign secretary; Thurlow, a very able man, was his Secretary of State. Both Monk, who governed Scotland, and Henry Cromwell, the Lord-Deputy of Ireland, the Protector's youngest son, were skilled administrators; and Blake, who had charge of the fleet, was the greatest admiral that England had yet seen. But no amount of good governance suffices to content a nation held down by armed force against its will, and Cromwell's rule could never be popular.

It was, however, successful and glorious, both in neighbouring lands and far abroad, if it was hated at home. Scotland was orderly and prosperous; Cromwell had much in common with the Covenanters, though he had suppressed them so sternly, and after 1651 there was not much opposition to him. In Ireland the matter was very different; Cromwell loathed Romanists with the hatred of the old Protestants of the Elizabethan age. His scheme of government for that realm was the drastic and cruel expedient of thrusting all the native Irish into the single province of Connaught, and of dividing up the rest of the land among English and Scots settlers, just as Ulster had been treated in the time of James I. The expulsion was carried out with merciless rigour, and thousands of Cromwell's discharged veterans and other colonists were planted in Munster and Leinster. But the settlement was only to be a very partial success; the old soldiers did not make good farmers in a pastoral country, and the native Irish gradually crept back to act as the servants and labourers of the conquerors, so that a homogeneous English and Protestant colony was never established. When the Protector died a few years later, many of the colonists departed, others were merged in the Irish masses, and only in limited districts did traces of his cruel work survive. But the "curse of Cromwell" remained the bitterest oath in the Irish peasant's mouth.

Master of Great Britain, the Lord Protector resolved that this country should resume the great place in the counsels of Europe which it had held in the time of Elizabeth. His foreign policy was the same as that of the great queen—resolute opposition to Spain as the foe of Protestantism and the monopolist of the trade of the Indies. In 1655 Cromwell declared war on Philip IV., and sent forth his fleets under Blake to prey on the Spaniards. The great admiral stormed the strongly fortified harbour of Teneriffe, in the Canary Islands, and sent home several silver-laden galleons from America which were lying therein (April, 1656). After several other successes he died at sea, just as he was returning to England. Another expedition under Venables captured the fertile island of Jamaica, in the West Indies, though it failed to get possession of the larger and stronger island of San Domingo. On the European continent Cromwell allied himself with France, the eternal enemy of Spain, and sent a strong brigade of his formidable regulars to aid the troops of the young Lewis XIV. This force much distinguished itself in the war, and won the ports of Dunkirk and Mardyke in Flanders (1657-58), which by agreement with the French were kept as English possessions. At this time Cromwell's arm reached so far that he was even able to interfere to prevent the Duke of Savoy from persecuting his Protestant subjects the Waldenses (1655), an event which called forth Milton's celebrated sonnet, commencing—

But though victorious abroad, the Lord Protector was still vexed that he could not build up a stable constitution at home. In the midst of his successes he summoned his third and last Parliament in September, 1656. He had now resolved to experiment in the direction of restoring many of the time-honoured arrangements of the monarchy. He had determined to create a second chamber, like the old House of Lords, and to assimilate his own position as Protector to that of the old kings. By excluding from election about a hundred persons who had been active in the Parliaments of 1653 and 1654, he obtained a House of Commons somewhat more docile than either of his earlier assemblies. In an address called "the humble Petition and Advice," they besought him to assume all the old prerogatives of royalty, and even the name of king. The last he refused, knowing the discontent it would arouse among his sternly republican followers in the army. But he accepted a status which gave him all that the regal name would have implied. At the same time he endeavoured to make his position less unconstitutional, by abolishing the major-generals, and giving the Commons complete control over taxation. But even with this loyal and obedient house the Lord Protector could not long agree. They fell out upon the question of the setting up of his new House of Lords, a body whose authority they utterly refused to acknowledge. On this point the Commons proved so recalcitrant that Oliver dissolved them after they had sat sixteen months (January, 1658).

This would not have been the last of his constitutional experiments if his life had been spared. But in the summer of the same year, while designs for a new Parliament were already being mooted, he was taken ill. His health had been broken by the constant nervous strain of facing perpetual assassination plots, and wrangling with refractory Parliaments. He died on September 3, 1658, the seventh anniversary of the "crowning mercy" of Worcester.

He left England great and prosperous, but discontented and unhappy. An autocrat, however well meaning, is never pardoned if he fails to understand and obey the feeling of the nation. Oliver was so much out of sympathy with the majority that he could not escape bitter hatred. Therefore all his work was built on the sand, and all that he had accomplished vanished with his death, save the mere material gains of commerce and colonies that he had won for England. His name, very unjustly, became a byword for ambition and religious cant. A whole generation had to pass before men dared speak well of him.

The moment that Cromwell died, his system began to break up; in six months it had disappeared; in eighteen months England once more was ruled by a Stuart king. The Lord Protector had named no successor, but the Council of State took the step of nominating his son Richard to his place, as being the man who would divide parties the least. Richard Cromwell was an easy-going country gentleman, without any of his father's characteristics. He was neither self-confident, nor a soldier, nor a man of fervent religion. When saluted as Protector, he observed that he would never make anything more than a fair chief-constable. He bore himself modestly and discreetly, and proceeded at once to endeavour to put himself right with the nation by calling a Parliament. It met in January, 1659, and was found to contain many concealed Royalists, and many more stiff republicans of the old Presbyterian type, who objected on principle to the protectorship. Such a body was bound to fall into internal quarrels; all parties in it concurred in treating the unfortunate Richard with disregard.

But it was not the Parliament which was to upset the new Lord Protector. The army saw that with Oliver's death their old power was gone, for neither Richard nor the two Houses had any sympathy with them. A council of officers met, and resolved to seize control of affairs. They petitioned for the appointment of a general-in-chief who should represent them and act as their leader. When this was refused, a deputation of colonels called on the weak Richard, and hectored him, by threats of violence, into dissolving Parliament (April, 1659). Equally unwilling and unable to become a military autocrat, the Lord Protector immediately after resigned his office, and went off in joy to his quiet country seat of Hursley. He lived there as an obscure squire for more than forty years, and survived till the reign of Queen Anne.

England was now without a Protector and without a Parliament, left in the hands of a ring of ambitious and fanatical military men. Looking round for the fittest tool to serve their purposes, the committee of officers resolved on restoring the old "Rump Parliament" which had disappeared so ignominiously six years before. Accordingly, they sought out the Independent members who had once sat in that body, and restored them to Westminster Hall. Forty survivors under Speaker Lenthall took their old places, and claimed to be the governing power of England (May 9).

Of all the bodies which had ever ruled England, the "Rump" had been the most incapable and the most despised. The whole nation was indignant at seeing its miserable remnant replaced in power. Meanwhile the officers began to fall out with each other: Lambert, Fleetwood, Desborough, had each his party among the soldiery, and aspired to fill Oliver's vacant place. Eight months of anarchy followed; the various generals bullied the Parliament and intrigued against each other. Royalist risings took place in Cheshire and the West. Finally Lambert, the most vigorous of the military men, entered London with his regiments and drove out the Parliament, just as Oliver had done six years before. But Lambert was no Cromwell; he only ruled a fraction of the soldiery, and had no party among the people (October, 1659).

The divisions of the army had at last broken the formidable military power which had so long repressed the wishes of the nation. Commonwealths and Protectors had been tried in the balance and found wanting. There was a general feeling that the only way out of anarchy was the restoration of the old constitution of England, with King, Lords, and Commons. The majority even of the original Parliamentarians of 1642 were ready to acknowledge that they had done unwisely, in breaking up the foundations of law and order by abolishing the monarchy. Calvinistic fervour had worked itself out; the majority of the old Puritans of the days of Charles I. had come to realize that Levellers, Fifth-monarchy men, and military saints were even more objectionable and impracticable than the Episcopalians whom they had once hated so sorely.

Meanwhile there was a man who saw clearly the one way to restore a stable government and to content the nation. George Monk, a calm, self-reliant soldier who commanded the army in Scotland, had resolved to use his regiments, on whose obedience he could implicitly count, to restore legal and constitutional rule. His own private ambition lay in the direction of a quiet and assured competence, not of an unsteady grasp on supreme power. He put himself secretly in communication with the exiled Prince of Wales and the chiefs of the English Royalists. No one else knew his design. Crossing the Tweed with 7000 men, he scattered the troops of Lambert and seized London. Then he summoned all the surviving members of the old "Long Parliament," as it had sat in 1642, to meet at Westminster, on the ground that it had been the last undoubtedly legal and constitutional government that England had possessed. The members met, now for the most part elderly men, cured of their old fanaticisms by ten years of military despotism, and ready for any reasonable compromise. By Monk's direction they issued writs for a new Parliament, and then formally dissolved themselves.

The new or Convention Parliament met on April 26, 1660; it was full of Royalists, who for the first time since the civil war dared show themselves and avow their opinions. Monk now openly began to negotiate with Prince Charles for a restoration of the monarchy, on the basis of oblivion of the past, and toleration and constitutional government for the future. The exiled Stuart promised these things in his "Declaration of Breda," though there were in his promises certain reservations, which cautious men regarded with distrust.

But the realm was yearning for repose and peace, and the Parliament accepted Charles's offer with haste and effusion. Lambert and a few fanatical regiments vainly attempted to struggle against the popular will, but Monk crushed them with ease. In May 1660, the Prince of Wales was formally invited to return and resume his hereditary rights. On the 29th of the month he landed at Dover, and was saluted as Charles II. by the unanimous voice of a rejoicing nation.