THE REBELLION AND THE COMMONWEALTH

§ 1

Nearly all the conceivable materials of disaffection, save personal misconduct on the king's part,[1089] went to prepare the Great Rebellion. Religious antipathies, indeed, no longer rested on the naked ground of lands taken and in danger of being re-taken;[1090] but there had been developed an intense animus of Protestant against Catholic, the instinct of strife running the more violently in that channel because so few others were open, relatively to the store of restless brute force in the country. Perhaps, indeed, Presbyterians hated Episcopalians and Arminians, at bottom, nearly as much as they did Catholics; but the chronic panics, from the time of Elizabeth onwards, the mythology of the Marian period, and the story of the massacres of Alva and of St. Bartholomew's Day, served to unite Protestants in this one point of anti-Papalism, and had set up as it were a new human passion in the sphere of English politics. And to this passion James and Charles in turn ran counter with an infatuated persistence. James, who was so much more annoyed by Puritans than by Papists, planned for his son, with an eye to a dowry, the Spanish marriage, which of all possible matches would most offend the English people; and when that fell through, another Catholic bride was found in the daughter of the King of France. The pledges, so natural in the circumstances, to "tolerate" Catholics in England, were a standing ground of panic to the intolerant Protestants, even though unfulfilled; and the new king stood in the sinister position of sheltering in his household the religion for which he dared not claim freedom in the country. Such a ground of unpopularity could be balanced only by some signal grounds of favour; but James and Charles alike chose unpopular grounds of war, and failed badly to boot. To crown all, they exhibited to the full the hereditary unwisdom of their dynasty in the choice of favourites;[1091] and the almost unexampled animosity incurred by Buckingham could not but reflect somewhat towards Charles, whose refined and artistic tastes, besides, made him the natural enemy of the text-worshipping and mostly art-hating Puritans.

Thus everything made for friction between king and subjects; and when Charles, to raise necessary funds, resorted to measures of no abnormal oppressiveness as compared with those of the Tudors, he was doggedly resisted by Parliaments professedly standing on law, but really actuated by a fixed suspicion of all his aims. Teeth were on edge all round. When a merchant, mulcted in a heavy customs duty, happened to be a Puritan, he resisted with a special zest; and one such declared before the Privy Council that "in no part of the world, not even in Turkey, were the merchants so screwed and wrung as in England."[1092] The King, unhappily for himself, conciliated nobody. Not content with alienating nobles by imposing huge fines in revival of the forest laws, he incensed the Corporation of London by confiscating their estates in Ulster, conferred by his father, and levying a fine of £70,000 to boot, for alleged breaches of Charter.[1093] Besides selling many trade monopolies, he passed vexatious sumptuary laws, fixing the prices of poultry, butter, and coals, and insisting on the incorporation of all tradesmen and artificers.[1094] The friction was well-nigh universal; and but for the remarkable prosperity built up by the long peace,[1095] the trouble might have come much sooner. But it is idle to keep up the pretence that what was at stake was the principle of freedom. The first demand of the Parliamentary Opposition was for the more thorough persecution of the Catholics. Parliamentarians such as Eliot were more oppressive in religious matters than Laud himself. He sought only uniformity of worship, they uniformity of doctrine; and they punished for heresy more unpardonably than did the Star Chamber for gross libel.

Nor were they less oppressive in their fiscal policy. After beginning a revolt against illegal taxation, Pym secured the imposition of taxes on beverages (1643), on flesh, salt, textile goods, and many other commodities, "at the sword's point," against the general resistance of the people.[1096] There were at work a hundred motives of strife; and it was only the preternatural ill-luck or unwisdom of Charles that united Parliament against him so long. It needed all the infatuation of an express training in the metaphysics of divine right to enable a king of England, even after James I, to blunder through the immense network of superstition that hedged him round; indeed, the very intensity of the royalist superstition best explains the royal infatuation. So fixed was the monarchic principle in the minds of the people, who, then as later, swore by monarchy but hated paying for it, that in the earlier years of the struggle not even the zealots could have dreamt of the end that was to be. Regicide entered no man's mind, even as a nightmare.

§ 2

On Charles, as the greatest "architect of ruin" in English political history, psychological interest fastens with only less intensity than on his great antagonist. The astonishing triple portrait by Vandyke reveals, with an audacity that is positively startling when we think of the other effigies by the same artist, a character stamped at once with impotence and untruth. One slight suggestion of strength lies in the look of grave self-esteem—a quality which would in Charles be fostered from the first by his refined revolt from the undignified ways of his father; but it is withal the very countenance of duplicity. Puritan prejudice could not exaggerate the testimony of the daring artist. We seem to understand at once how he deceived and alienated Holland and Spain as well as the parties among his own subjects. And it was the very excess of duplicity, or rather the fatal combination of duplicity with infirmity of purpose,[1097] that destroyed the man. As the war wore on, and above all after it was closed, the discords of the Parliament and the army were such that the most ordinary practical sagacity could have turned them to the triumph of the king's cause. This is the most instructive phase of the Rebellion. The Presbyterian majority which had grown up in Parliament—a growth still imperfectly elucidated—represented only one of the great warring sects of the day; and if, after Independency, led by Cromwell, had come to daggers drawn with the despots of the Commons, Charles had only agreed to any working settlement whatever, he might with perfect confidence have left the conflicting forces to throttle each other afterwards. Any arrangement he might have made, whether with the Presbyterians or with Cromwell, would have broken down of itself, and he might have set up his own polity in the end. But he so enjoyed his intrigues, as it were indemnifying himself by them for his weakness of will, that he thought to triumph by them alone, and would not wait for the slower chemistry of normal political development; so that the Independents, driven desperate by his deceits, had to execute him in self-preservation.

§ 3

As it was, the history of the Rebellion remains none the less the tragi-comedy of the old constitutionalism. Parliament, resisting as illegal the supremacy of the king, went from one illegality to another in resisting him, till his tyrannies became trivial in comparison. And Cromwell, who must have set out with convictions about the sanctity of law, although doubtless fundamentally moved by the all-pervading fear of Popery, was led by an ironical fate, step by step, into a series of political crimes which, if those of Charles deserved beheading, could be coped with only in the medieval hell.

It was small wonder that posterity came to canonise the king; for in terms even of the Roundhead principles of impeachment he was a political saint in comparison with the "usurper." And royalists might well imagine Cromwell as haunted by remorse; for nothing short of the "besotted fanaticism" of which, as Hallam pronounces, he had sucked the dregs, could keep him self-complacent over the retrospect of the Civil War when he was governing by the major-generals, after failing to govern with farcically packed Parliaments. His fanaticism was, of course, in the ratio of his will-power, but each supported the other. The modern exaltation of his character, as against the earlier and rather saner habit of crediting him with great powers, relatively high purposes, and great misdeeds,[1098] has tended to throw in the shade the blazing lesson of his career, which is that, like most of his colleagues, he had set out with no political insight or foresight whatever. His conscientious beginnings are so utterly at issue with his endings that it is indeed almost superfluous to condemn either—as superfluous as to denounce the infatuation of Charles. But it is of importance to remember that his very success as a Carlylean ruler only emphasises the failure of his original politics. He succeeded by way of repudiating nearly every principle on behalf of which he had taken up arms. Even apart from the invigorating spectacle of his executive genius,[1099] he may well stir our sympathy, which is more subtly and deeply exercised by his inner tragedy, by the deadliness of his success in the light of his aims, than by the simpler ill-fortune of Charles. But as politicians our business is not to divide our sympathies between the powerful pietist who was forced to give the lie to his life to save it, and the weak liar who lost his life because he was at bottom faithful to his life's creed. The superiority of Cromwell in strength of will and in administrative faculty is too glaring to need acknowledging; and the lesson that a strong man can tyrannise grossly where a weak man cannot tyrannise trivially, is not one that particularly needs pressing. What it is essential to note is that the course of events which forced and led Cromwell into despotism was for the next generation a strong argument against free Parliamentary government.

Our generation, proceeding mainly on the work of Carlyle, who never really elucidates or even seeks to comprehend political and social developments, has in large part lost sight of the fact that Cromwell was more and more clearly becoming a military despot; and that with twenty more years of life he might have established a new military and naval empire. Yet at the time of his death his financial position was that of a military adventurer at his wits' end, and his unscrupulous attack on Spain was plainly planned by way of coming at money.[1100] Dr. Gardiner, who has been the first English[1101] historian to handle the case with comprehensive insight, rightly compares the position of Cromwell with that of Napoleon. He was in fact just another sample of the recurrent type of the military ruler establishing himself as despot on the ruins of faction. "Except for four months ... the whole of the Protectorate was a time either of war or of active preparation for war; and even during those months the Protector was hesitating, not whether he should keep the peace or not, but merely what enemy he should attack."[1102] Finally he made war on Spain, by the admission of the friendly historian, "after the fashion of a midnight conspirator," deceiving the other side in order to gain a mean advantage.[1103] To such a policy there was no limit in national conscience, any more than in his. He had a standing army of 57,000 men, an immense force for the England of that day; his revenue stood at two millions and a quarter, nearly four times the figure of twenty years before; and still he was in desperate financial straits, his outlays being nearly half a million in excess of the income.[1104] The result was "a war for material gains"; and it consists with all we know of history to say that with continued success in such undertakings during a lengthened life he would have won the mass of his countrymen to his allegiance.

A few dates and details make the process dramatically clear. Admiral Blake won his first notable victory over Van Tromp in February, 1653; and in April Cromwell felt himself in a position to expel the recalcitrant Parliament, though that had always specially favoured the navy. In this act he had the general approval of the people;[1105] but he took care to change some of the naval commanders.[1106] The next Parliament was the nominated one called the "Barebones," wherein none were elected, and which went to pieces in the strife of its factions, since even nomination could not secure concord among Puritans. Then came the Parliament of 1654, elected from purged constituencies. From this were excluded a hundred members who refused to sign an engagement not to alter the system in force; and finally the remnant was angrily dissolved, and military rule established under the major-generals. Yet again, in 1656, driven by need of money, the Protector called another packed Parliament, from which he nevertheless lawlessly excluded 102 elected members; and on their protesting there was a distinct increase of the already obvious public displeasure at such repeated acts of tyranny. This was in September; but in October came the news of Stayner's capture of the Spanish treasure-ships; and in November the treasure arrived—what the naval officers had left of it. On this the Parliament promptly voted everything that its master asked for;[1107] new taxes were laid to carry on the wanton war with Spain; and in January 1657 it was proposed to offer him the Crown. Yet when, after a six months' adjournment, that Parliament debated points on which he wanted submission, he furiously dissolved it as he had done its predecessors.

Such is the process of imperialism. With a few more years of ostensibly profitable conquest, Cromwell, acclaimed and urged on in the career of aggression by such different types of poet as Waller[1108] and Marvell,[1109] would as a matter of course have been made king, with the final consent of the army, and would have ruled as the crowned imperator. In that case his Puritanism, instead of putting any conscientious check on his egoism, would have fed it as Mohammed's faith did his.[1110] Thus his early death was one of the important "accidents" of history.[1111]

§ 4

As it was, Cromwell lived only long enough to create an intellectual as well as a conservative reaction. Surprise has been sometimes expressed, and must have been oftener felt, at the virtual High Toryism of the doctrine of Hobbes,[1112] who was so little conservative in his general habit of mind. The truth is that in 1651, or at least in 1660, the monarchism of Hobbes was the ostensible Liberalism of the hour. Parliamentarism had meant first sectarian tyranny, then anarchy, then military despotism; and there was not the slightest prospect of a parliamentary government which should mean religious or intellectual freedom all round. Hobbes would infallibly have been at least thrown into prison by the Long Parliament if in its earlier time of power he had published his remarks on the Pentateuch. They punished for much milder exercises of critical opinion. A strong monarchy was become, from the point of view of many enlightened men, positively the best available security for general freedom of life, at a time when the spirit of religion had multiplied tenfold the normal impulses to social tyranny and furnished the deepest channel of social ill-will compatible with national unity. It lay in Christianity, as it lay earlier in Judaism, to breed an intensity of religious strife such as the pagan world never knew. Various countries had seen sects arise and grapple with each other on the score of this or that interpretation of the Hebrew sacred books, and men of conservative bias felt that they were face to face with insane forces incompatible with a democratic system. Religious lore, above all other learning, could make men more "excellently foolish," as Hobbes put it, than was possible to mere ignorance, making new and uncontrollable motives to disunion.

It is not to be assumed, indeed, that a revolution begun on any motive whatever would have maintained itself at the then developed stage of political intelligence; for the English people, which constantly accuses others of lack of faculty for union, had never shown itself any better fitted for rational compromise than the Irish, given conditions of equal stress. Scandinavian, German, Dutch, English—all the Teutonic sections alike had in all ages shown in the fullest degree the force of the primary passions of self-assertion and mutual repulsion, cordially uniting only, if at all, for purposes of aggression. But in the case under notice it was the religious passions that dug the channels of strife; and they must be held to have added to the volume of blind emotion. Thus intensified, the principle had shown itself potent to wreck any commonwealth; and there remained only the choice between a usurper governing through an army and a "legitimate" monarch governing as of old by way of Parliament and a civil service. Parliament had been the most offensive tyrant of all, for while making most parade of legality it had been the most self-seeking,[1113] and perhaps even the least respectable as regards its personnel. The Liberals of the latter time had their cue given to them by the memorable Falkland, who, grievedly "ingeminating Peace, Peace," had recoiled from the intolerant Puritans, and sadly joined the intolerant Royalists. Macaulay's thrust at him for this,[1114] if technically just, was hardly seemly on the critic's part, for Falkland represented exactly the temper of Macaulay's own politics. He was an ideal Whig of the later school—the very saint of moderation. Falkland had indeed special ground for withdrawal from the Puritan party, in that he was convinced that Hampden and Pym had deceived him as to the king's complicity in the Irish Rebellion and other matters. He had been "persuaded to believe many things which he had since found to be untrue."[1115] But in most things the Puritans must have jarred on him.[1116] Where he had consented to go, albeit deliberately to his death, as a Cavalier, his disciples might well become theoretic monarchists when the whole torrent of public opinion went for the Restoration.

Of course, the hope of social freedom was destined to frustration under the restored monarchy just as before, since there was still no culture force sufficient to purify the animal instinct of antagonism. The Restoration only meant that the Episcopalian dog was uppermost and the Nonconformist under. But all the same, Commonwealth principles were profoundly discredited; and it is notable that never since has Republican principle ostensibly regained in England the stature it had reached in the hotbeds of the Great Rebellion and the Protectorate. The long struggle against the king had educated many of the strivers into democratism, as did the later struggle of the American colonies against George III. Even in the Parliament of Richard Cromwell, after Republican hopes had been so blasted, there were forty-seven avowed Republicans,[1117] the remnant of the breed. With the return of the monarchy it virtually disappears from English politics for a hundred and thirty years;[1118] when again it rises for a moment in the hot air of the French Revolution, only to disappear again for nearly another century. It was after the Rebellion, and not before, that the dogma of divine right became completely current orthodoxy in England.[1119]

§ 5

The collapse of Republicanism meant the collapse of the class politics that had grown up in the war and in the Commonwealth alongside of the creed politics. The creed politics itself, when carried to the lengths of the doctrine of the Independents, meant a challenge to the political system; and among the more advanced reasoners of the period were some who saw that to put down kingly tyranny was of little avail while class inequalities remained. The Long Parliament, though not going this length, went far in the way of putting down some established abuses; and there are many records of a more searching spirit of innovation. It is important to realise that alike under Charles I and Cromwell the Parliaments tended to be partly composed of and ruled by the more audacious spirits of the time, simply because these had the advantage in discussion wherever they were. The incapacity for speech which in later times has made the Conservative party welcome adventurers as its mouthpieces meant the partial obliteration of the conservative class in the early days of unorganised parliamentary strife; and Cromwell's own Parliaments baffled him in virtue of their large elements of upstart intelligence. He himself, having entered the war from a mixture of motives in which there was no idea of social reconstruction, was merely irritated by the ideals of the more radical agitators, which he could not out-argue, but on which he promptly put his foot. It is true that in the immense ferment set up by the Rebellion impracticable ideas abounded, and that they suggested risks of civil anarchy, even as the multitude of sectaries threatened chaos in religion. We find indeed an express affirmation of anarchism in the literature of the period;[1120] and generally the English Revolution had in it most of the subversive elements which later evolved the French, the determining difference being that the English was not attacked from the outside. But there were practical plans also. Lilburne had a really constructive scheme of popular enfranchisement,[1121] which might have built up a democratic force of resistance to royalism as such; but Cromwell, while ready to overthrow any part of the constitution that hampered him, would build up nothing in its place. He would have no alteration of the social structure, save in so far as he must protect his Independents from the Presbyterians and Episcopalians alike. And of course, when his polity fell, the ideals of the independents of politics—who had represented only a tribe of scattered intelligences, much fewer than the mere religious sectaries, who were themselves but a vigorous minority—speedily disappeared from English affairs. The standards of the average orthodox class became the standards of public life.

On the side of international relations, finally, Cromwell and the Commonwealth did nothing to improve politics. Commerce began to spread afresh; and commercial and racial jealousy, under the Puritan as later under the Restoration rule, bred war with the Dutch, just as religious hatreds had made war between England and Spain. The final proof of Cromwell's lack of political wisdom is given in his utterly fantastic scheme for a constitutional union of the English and Dutch republics, a scheme which could not have worked for a week. When this proposal was declined by the Dutch States-General, he seems to have been as ready as any filibuster in England to go to war with the States;[1122] and it is evident that the Navigation Act of 1651 was at once an act of revenge for the insults put upon the English ambassadors by the Dutch Orangeist populace, against the will of the Dutch Government, and a wanton effort to punish the States for declining the Protector's absurd proposals.[1123] The two Protestant republics thereupon grappled like two worrying dogs; and for their first ostensible victory the English Parliament publicly thanked God as unctuously as for any of the victories of the Civil War.[1124] In their hands and Cromwell's international politics sank at once to the normal levels of primitive instinct.

§ 6

While thus showing that in his foreign relations in general he had no higher principle than that which led him to protect the Protestant Vaudois, Cromwell himself could not or would not tolerate Catholicism in England. What was immeasurably worse, he had put thousands of Irish Catholics to the sword, and reduced tens of thousands more to the life conditions of wild animals. His policy in Ireland, if judged by the standards we apply to the rule of other men, must be pronounced one of blind brutality. He had helped to make a civil war in England because his class was at times arbitrarily taxed, and had fears that its worship would be interfered with; and in so doing he felt he had the support and sanction of Omnipotence. When it came to dealing with Irishmen who stood up for their race ideals and their religion, he acted as if for him principles of moral and religious right did not exist.[1125] His most ferocious deeds he justified by reference to the Ulster massacre of 1641, as if all Irishmen had been concerned in that, and as if the previous English massacres had not been tenfold more bloody. Under his own Government, by the calculation of Sir William Petty, out of a population of 1,466,000, 616,000 had in eleven years perished by the sword, by plague, or by famine artificially produced. Of these, 504,000 were reckoned to be of Irish and 112,000 of English descent. And it was planned to reduce the survivors to a life of utter destitution in Connaught and Clare. By the settlement of 1653, ten of the thirty-two Irish counties were allotted to the "Adventurers" who in 1641 had advanced sums of money to aid in putting down the Irish Rebellion; twelve were divided among Cromwell's soldiers; seven, with all the cities and corporations of the kingdom, were reserved for the Commonwealth; and three of the most barren counties—for the most part unreclaimed—were left for the natives. The settlement could not be carried out as planned by the Government, and as evidently desired by Fleetwood, the Lord Deputy, and many of the officers. The very greed of the soldiery defeated the project of a "universal transplantation," for they were as eager for Irish labour as for Irish land.[1126] But the confiscation of the land was carried out to the full, and multitudes were forced into Connaught. The worst tyranny of Charles is thus as dust in the balance with Cromwell's expropriation of myriads of conquered Irish. For them he had neither the show of law nor the pretence of equity. They were treated as conquered races had been treated, not by the Romans, who normally sought to absorb in their polity the peoples they overcame, but by barbarians in their mutual wars, where the loser was driven to the wilderness. Far from seeking to grapple as a statesman with the problem of Irish disaffection, he struck into it like a Berserker, on the same inspiration of animal fury as took him into the breach at Drogheda; and his or his officers' enactments, providing for the slaughter of all natives who did not carry certificates of having taken the anti-Royalist oath, are to be matched in history only with the treatment of the conquered Slavs by the Christianising Germans in the Dark Ages.

There are men who to-day will still applaud Cromwell because he quenched the Irish trouble for the time in massacre and devastation; and others, blenching at the atrocity of the cure, speak of it with bated breath as doing him discredit, while they bate nothing of their censure of the arbitrariness of Charles. Others excuse all Puritan tyranny because of its "sincerity," as if that plea would not exculpate Torquemada and Alva. The plain truth is that Cromwell in no way rose above the moral standards of his generation in his dealings with those whom he was able to oppress. He found in his creed his absolution for every step to which blind instinct led him, in Ireland as in England; and it seems to be his destiny to lead his admirers into the same sophistries—pious with a difference—as served to keep him on good terms with his conscience after suppressing an English Parliament or slaughtering an Irish garrison.

It is too much even to say, as a more scrupulous critic has done, that the phenomenon of the Commonwealth represented a great attempt at a higher life on the part of men nobler and wiser than their contemporaries.[1127] It was simply the self-assertion of energetic men of whom some were in some respects ahead of their time; while the others were as bad as their time, and in some respects rather behind it—men bewildered by fanaticism, and incapable of a consistent ethic, whose failure was due as distinctly to their own intellectual vices as to their environment. No serious poetry of any age is more devoid of moral principle than the verses in which Marvell and Waller exult over the wanton attack on Spain, and kindle at the prospect of a future of unscrupulous conquest. Both men were religious; both as ready to sing of "Divine Love" as of human hate; and both in their degree were good types of the supporters of Cromwell. The leaders from the very outset are visibly normal agitators, full of their own grievances, and as devoid of the spirit of fellow-feeling, of concern for all-round righteousness, as any of the men they impeached. Their movement went so far as it did because, firstly, they were vigorous men resisting a weak man, and later their own natural progress to anarchy was checked by the self-assertion of the strongest of them all. Thus their and his service to progressive political science is purely negative. They showed once for all that an ignorance guided by religious zeal and "inspiration" is more surely doomed to disaster than the ignorance of mere primary animal instinct; and that of the many forms of political optimism, that of Christian pietism is for the modern world certainly not the least pernicious. The Puritan name and ideal are in these days commonly associated with high principle and conscientiousness; and it is true that in the temper and the tactic of the early revolutionary movement, despite much dark fanaticism, there was a certain masculine simplicity and sincerity not often matched in our politics since. But as the years went on, principles gave way, dragged down by fanaticism and egoism; and the Puritan temper, lacking light, bred deadly miasmas. Milton himself sinks from the level of the Areopagitica to that of the Eikonoklastes, an ignoble performance at the behest of the Government, who just then were suppressing the freedom of the press.[1128] In strict historical truth the Puritan name and the ideal must stand for utter failure to carry on a free polity, in virtue of incapacity for rational association; for the stifling of some of the most precious forces of civilisation—the artistic; and further for the grafting on normal self-seeking of the newer and subtler sin of solemn hypocrisy.

This holds good of the Puritan party as a whole. It is possible, however, to take too low a view of the judgment of any given section of it. Dr. Gardiner, for instance, somewhat strains the case when he says (Student's History, p. 567) of the Barebone Parliament: "Unfortunately, these godly men [so styled by Cromwell] were the most crotchety and impracticable set ever brought together. The majority wanted to abolish the Court of Chancery without providing a substitute, and to abolish tithes without providing any other means for the support of the clergy." It seems clear that it was the intention of the majority to provide an equivalent for the tithes (see Vaughan, pp. 508, 509; cp. Hallam, ii, 243, 244); and the remark as to the Court of Chancery appears to miss the point. The case against that Court was that it engrossed almost all suits, and yet intolerably delayed them; the proposal was to let the other Courts do the work. Cp. Dr. Gardiner's Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii, 241, 262; and as to the tithes, i, 192; ii, 32, 240, 275, 276.