Part 3
Charles set eagerly to work to rule the kingdom by himself. To the Puritan dogma of enforced unity of religious belief—utterly mischievous, and just as much fraught with slavery to the soul in one sect as another—he sought, through Laud, to oppose the only less mischievous, because silly, doctrine of enforced uniformity in the externals of public worship. Laud was a small and narrow man, hating Puritanism in every form, and persecuting bitterly every clergyman or layman who deviated in any way from what he regarded as proper ecclesiastical custom. His tyranny was of that fussy kind which, without striking terror, often irritates nearly to madness. He was Charles’s instrument in the effort to secure ecclesiastical absolutism.
The instrument through which the King sought to establish the royal prerogative in political affairs was of far more formidable temper. Immediately after the dissolution of Parliament Wentworth had obtained his price from the King, and was appointed to be his right-hand man in administering the kingdom. A man of great shrewdness and insight, he seems to have struggled to govern well, according to his lights; but he despised law and acted upon the belief that the people should be slaves, unpermitted, as they were unfit, to take any share in governing themselves. After a while Laud was made archbishop; and Wentworth was later made Lord Strafford.
Wentworth and Laud, with their associates, when they tried to govern on such terms, were continually clashing with the people. A government thus carried on naturally aroused resistance, which often itself took unjustifiable forms; and this resistance was, in its turn, punished with revolting brutality. Criticism of Laudian methods, or of existing social habits, might take scurrilous shape; and then the critic’s ears were hacked off as he stood in the pillory, or he was imprisoned for life.
[Illustration:
Archbishop Laud.
From the portrait at Lambeth Palace, painted by Vandyke.
By permission of the Archbishop of Canterbury. ]
The great fight was made, not on a religious, but on a purely political question—that of Ship Money. The king wished to go to war with the Dutch, and to raise his fleet he issued writs, first to the maritime counties, and then to every shire in England. He consulted his judges, who stated that his action was legal: as well they might, for when a judge disagreed with him on any important point, he was promptly dismissed from office. But there was one man in the kingdom who thought differently, John Hampden, a Buckinghamshire ’squire, who had already once sat as a silent member in Parliament, together with another equally silent member of the same social standing, his nephew, Oliver Cromwell. Hampden was assessed at twenty shillings. The amount was of no more importance than the value of the tea which a century and a half later was thrown into Boston Harbor; but in each case a vital principle—the same vital principle—was involved. If the King could take twenty shillings from Hampden without authority from the representatives of the people in Parliament assembled, then his rule was absolute: he could do what he pleased. On the other hand, if the House of Commons could do as it wished in granting money only for whatever need it chose to recognize in the kingdom, then the House of Commons was supreme. In Hampden’s view but one course was possible—he was for the Parliament and the nation against the King; and he refused to pay the sum, facing without a murmur the punishment for his contumacy.
The King and his ministers did not flinch from proceeding to any length against either political or religious opponents. Charles heartily upheld Laud and Wentworth in carrying out their policy of “thorough”; Laud in England; Wentworth, after 1633, in Ireland. “Thorough,” in their sense of the word, meant making the State, which was the King, paramount in every ecclesiastical and political matter, and putting his interests above the interests, the principles, and the prejudices of all classes and all parties; paying heed to nothing but to what seemed right in the eyes of the sovereign and the sovereign’s chosen advisers. Under Wentworth’s strong hand a certain amount of material prosperity followed in Ireland, although chiefly among the English settlers. There was no such material prosperity in England; 1630, for instance, was a famine year. The net effect of the policy would in the long run have been to bring down a freedom-loving people to a lower grade of political and social development. There was, of course, no oppression in England in any way resembling such oppression as that which flogged the Dutch to revolt against the Spaniards. But it was exactly the kind of oppression which led, in 1776, to the American Revolution. Eliot, Hampden, and Pym, stood for the principles that were championed by Washington, Patrick Henry, and the Adamses. The grievances which forced the Long Parliament to appeal to arms were like those which made the Continental Congress throw off the sovereignty of George III. In neither case was there the kind of grinding tyranny which has led to the assassination of tyrants and the frantic, bloodthirsty uprising of tortured slaves. In each case the tyranny was in its first stage, not its last; but the reason for this was simply that a nation of vigorous freemen will always revolt by the time the first stage has been reached. It was not possible, either for the Stuart kings or for George III., to go beyond a certain point, for as soon as that point was reached the freemen were called to arms by their leaders.
However, there was the greatest reluctance among Englishmen to countenance rebellion, even for the best of causes. This reluctance was eminently justifiable. Rebellion, revolution—the appeal to arms to redress grievances; these are measures that can only be justified in extreme cases. It is far better to suffer any moderate evil, or even a very serious evil, so long as there is a chance of its peaceable redress, than to plunge the country into civil war; and the men who head or instigate armed rebellions for which there is not the most ample justification must be held as one degree worse than any but the most evil tyrants. Between the Scylla of despotism and the Charybdis of anarchy there is but little to choose; and the pilot who throws the ship upon one is as blameworthy as he who throws it on the other. But a point may be reached where the people have to assert their rights, be the peril what it may; and in Great Britain this point was passed under Charles I.
The first break came, not in England, but in Scotland. The Scotch abhorred Episcopacy; whereas the English had no objection whatever to bishops, so long as the bishops did not outrage the popular religious convictions. In Scotland the spirit of Puritanism was uppermost, and was already exhibiting both its strength and its weakness; its sincerity and its lack of breadth; its stern morality and its failure to discriminate between essentials and non-essentials; its loftiness of aim and its tendency to condemn liberality of thought in religion, art, literature, and science, alike as irreligious; its insistence on purity of life, and yet its unconscious tendency to promote hypocrisy and to drive out one form of religious tyranny merely to erect another.
A man of any insight would not have striven to force an alien system of ecclesiastical government upon a people so stubborn and self-reliant, who were wedded to their own system of religious thought. But this was what Laud attempted, with the full approval of Charles. In 1637 he made a last effort to introduce the ceremonies of the English Church at Edinburgh. No sooner was the reading of the Prayer-Book begun than the congregation burst into wild uproar, execrating it as no better than celebrating mass. It was essentially a popular revolt. The incident of Jenny Geddes’s stool may be mythical, but it was among the women and men of the lower orders that the resistance was stoutest. The whole nation responded to the cry, and hurried to sign a national Covenant, engaging to defend the Reformed religion, and to do away with all “innovations”; that is, with everything in which Episcopacy differed from Puritanism and inclined toward the Church of Rome.
In England and Scotland alike the Church of Rome was still accepted by the people at large as the most dangerous of enemies. The wonderful career of Gustavus Adolphus had just closed. The Thirty Years’ War—the last great religious struggle—was still at its height. If, in France, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew stood far in the past, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes yet lay in the future. The after-glow of the fires of Smithfield still gleamed with lurid light in each sombre Puritan heart. The men who, in England, were most earnest about their religion held to their Calvinistic creed with the utmost sincerity, high purpose, and self-devotion: but with no little harshness. Theirs was a lofty creed, but one which, in the revolt against levity and viciousness, set up a standard of gloom; and, though ready to fight to the death for liberty for themselves, they had as yet little idea of tolerating liberty in others. Naturally, such men sympathized with one another, and the action of the Scotch was heartily, though secretly, applauded by the stoutest Presbyterians of England. Moreover, while menaced by the common oppressor, the Puritan independents, who afterward split off from the Presbyterians, made common cause with them, the irreconcilable differences between the two bodies not yet being evident.
Soon the Scotch held a general assembly of the Church, composed of both clerical and lay members, and formally abolished Episcopacy, in spite of the angry protests of the King. Their action amounted in effect to establishing a theocracy. They repudiated the unlimited power of the King and the bishops, as men would do nowadays in like case; but they declared against liberty of thought and conduct in religious matters, basing their action on practically the same line of reasoning that influenced the very men they most denounced, hated, and feared.
[Illustration:
West Tower, Ely Cathedral, from Monastery Close. ]
The King took up the glove which the Scotch had thrown down. He raised an army and undertook the first of what were derisively known as the “Bishops’ Wars.” But his people sympathized with the Scotch rather than with him. He got an army together on the Border, but it would not fight, and he was forced reluctantly to treat for peace. Then Strafford came back from Ireland and requested Charles to summon a Parliament so that he could get funds. In April, 1640, the Short Parliament came together, but the English spirit was now almost as high as the Scotch in hostility to the King, and Parliament would not grant anything to the King until the grievances of the people were redressed. To this demand Charles would not listen, and the Parliament was promptly dissolved. Then, being heartened by Laud, and especially by Strafford, Charles renewed the war, only to see his army driven in headlong panic before the Scotch at Newburn. The result was that he had to try to patch up a peace under the direction of Strafford. But the Scotch would not leave the kingdom until they were paid the expenses of the war. There was no money to pay them, and Charles had to summon Parliament once more. On November 3, 1640, the Long Parliament met at Westminster.
When Oliver Cromwell took his seat in the Long Parliament he was forty-one years old. He had been born at Huntingdon on April 25, 1599, and by birth belonged to the lesser gentry, or upper middle-class. The original name of the family had been Williams; it was of Welsh origin. There were many Cromwells, and Oliver was a common name among them. One of the Protector’s uncles bore the name, and remained a stanch Loyalist throughout the Civil War. Oliver’s own father, Robert, was a man in very moderate circumstances, his estate in the town of Huntingdon bringing an income of some £300 a year. Oliver’s mother, Elizabeth Steward of Ely, seems to have been of much stronger character than his father. The Stewards, like the Cromwells, were “new people,” both families, like so many others of the day, owing their rise to the spoliation of the monasteries. Oliver’s father was a brewer, and his success in the management of the brewery was mainly due to Oliver’s mother. No other member of Oliver’s family—neither his wife nor his father—influenced him as did his mother. She was devoted to him, and he, in turn, loved her tenderly and respected her deeply. He followed her advice when young; he established her in the Royal Palace of Whitehall when he came to greatness; and when she died he buried her in Westminster Abbey. As a boy he received his education at Huntingdon, but when seventeen years old was sent to Cambridge University. A strong, hearty young fellow; fond of horse-play and rough pranks—as indeed he showed himself to be even when the weight of the whole kingdom rested on his shoulders. He nevertheless seems to have been a fair student, laying the foundation for that knowledge of Greek literature and the Latin language, and that fondness for books, which afterward struck the representatives of the foreign powers at London. In 1617 his father died, and he left Cambridge. When twenty-one years old he was married in London, to Elizabeth Bouchier (who was one year older than he was), the daughter of a rich London furrier. She was a woman of gentle and amiable character, and though she does not appear to have influenced Cromwell’s public career to any perceptible extent, he always regarded her with fond affection, and was always faithful to her.
For twenty years after his marriage he lived a quiet life, busying himself with the management of his farm. Nine children were born to him, of whom three sons and five daughters lived to maturity. About this time his soul was first deeply turned toward religious matters, and, like the great majority of serious thinkers of the time, he became devoted to the Puritan theology; indeed no other was possible to a representative of the prosperous, independent, and religious middle-class, from which all the greatest Puritan leaders sprang. While a boy Oliver had been sent to the free school at Huntingdon, and his first training had been received under its master, the Reverend Thomas Beard, a zealous Puritan and Reformer, as well as a man of wide reading and sound scholarship, and lastly, an inflamed hater of the Church of Rome. All his surroundings, all his memories, were such as to make the future Dictator of England sincerely feel that the Church of Rome was the arch-antagonist of all, temporal and spiritual, that he held most dear. In the first place his ancestors were among those who had profited by the spoliation of the monasteries; and the only way to avoid uncomfortable feelings on the part of the spoiler is for him to show—or if this is not possible, to convince himself that he has shown—the utmost iniquity on the part of the despoiled. When Oliver was a small boy the Gunpowder Plot shook all England. When he was a little older Henry of Navarre was stabbed in Paris; and though Henry was a cynical turncoat in matters of religion, and a man of the most revolting licentiousness in private life, he was yet a great ruler of men, and had been one of the props of the Protestant cause. Before Oliver came of age the Thirty Years’ War had begun its course. To Oliver Cromwell, warfare against the Church of Rome, broken by truces which, whether long or short, were intended only to be breathing-spells, must have seemed the normal state of things.
In 1631 Oliver sold his paternal estate in Huntingdon and managed a rented farm at St. Ives for five years; then he removed to Ely, in the fen country, and again took up farming, being joined by his mother and sisters. He served in the great Parliament which passed the Petition of Right, but played no part of prominence therein: standing stoutly, however, for Puritanism and Parliamentary freedom. During the ensuing eleven years of unrest, while all England was making ready for the impending conflict, Oliver busied himself with his farm and his family. He showed himself one of the strongest bulwarks of the Puritan preachers; zealous in the endeavor to further the cause of religion in every way, and always open to appeals from the poor and the oppressed, of whom he was the consistent champion. When certain rich men, headed by the Earl of Bedford, endeavored to oust from some of their rights the poor people of the fens, Oliver headed the latter in their resistance. He was keenly interested in the trial of his kinsman, John Hampden, for refusal to pay the Ship Money; a trial which was managed by the advocate Oliver St. John, his cousin by marriage.
In short, Cromwell was far more concerned in righting specific cases of oppression than in advancing the great principles of constitutional government which alone make possible that orderly liberty which is the bar to such individual acts of wrong-doing. From the stand-point of the private man this is a distinctly better failing than is its opposite; but from the stand-point of the statesman the reverse is true. Cromwell, like many a so-called “practical” man, would have done better work had he followed a more clearly defined theory; for though the practical man is better than the mere theorist, he cannot do the highest work unless he is a theorist also. However, all Cromwell’s close associations were with Hampden, St. John, and the other leaders in the movement for political freedom, and he acted at first in entire accord with their ideas: while with the religious side of their agitation he was in most hearty sympathy.
It is difficult for us nowadays to realize how natural it seemed at that time for the Word of the Lord to be quoted and appealed to on every occasion, no matter how trivial, in the lives of sincerely religious men. It is very possible that quite as large a proportion of people nowadays strive to shape their internal lives in accordance with the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule; indeed, it is probable that the proportion is far greater; but professors of religion then carried their religion into all the externals of their lives. Cromwell belonged among those earnest souls who indulged in the very honorable dream of a world where civil government and social life alike should be based upon the Commandments set forth in the Bible. To endeavor to shape the whole course of individual existence in accordance with the hidden or half-indulged law of perfect righteousness, has to it a very lofty side; but if the endeavor is extended to include mankind at large, it has also a very dangerous side: so dangerous indeed that in practice the effort is apt to result in harm, unless it is undertaken in a spirit of the broadest charity and toleration; for the more sincere the men who make it, the more certain they are to treat, not only their own principles, but their own passions, prejudices, vanities, and jealousies, as representing the will, not of themselves, but of Heaven. The constant appeal to the Word of God in all trivial matters is, moreover, apt to breed hypocrisy of that sanctimonious kind which is peculiarly repellent, and which invariably invites reaction against all religious feeling and expression.
At that day Cromwell’s position in this matter was, at its worst, merely that of the enormous majority of earnest men of all sects. Each sect believed that it was the special repository of the wisdom and virtue of the Most High: and the most zealous of its members believed it to be their duty to the Most High to make all other men worship Him according to what they conceived to be His wishes. This was the mediæval attitude, and represented the mediæval side in Puritanism; a side which was
## particularly prominent at the time, and which, so far as it existed,
marred the splendor of Puritan achievement. The nobleness of the effort to bring about the reign of God on earth, the inspiration that such an effort was to those engaged in it, must be acknowledged by all; but, in practice, we must remember that, as religious obligation was then commonly construed, it inevitably led to the Inquisition in Spain; to the sack of Drogheda in Ireland; to the merciless persecution of heretics by each sect, according to its power, and the effort to stifle freedom of thought and stamp out freedom of action. It is right, and greatly to be desired, that men should come together to search after the truth: to try to find out the true will of God; but in Cromwell’s time they were only beginning to see that each body of seekers must be left to work out its own beliefs without molestation, so long as it does not strive to interfere with the beliefs of others.
The great merit of Cromwell, and of the party of the Independents which he headed, and which represented what was best in Puritanism, consists in the fact that he and they did, dimly, but with ever-growing clearness, perceive this principle, and, with many haltings, strove to act up to it. The Independent or Congregational churches, which worked for political freedom, and held that each congregation of Protestants should decide for itself as to its religious doctrines, stood as the forerunners in the movement that has culminated in our modern political and religious liberty. How slow the acceptance of their ideas was, how the opposition to them battled on to the present century, will be appreciated by anyone who turns to the early writings of Gladstone when he was the “rising hope of those stern Tories,” whose special antipathy he afterward became. Even yet there are advocates of religious intolerance, but they are mostly of the academic kind, and there is no chance for any political party of the least importance to try to put their doctrines into effect. More and more, at least here in the United States, Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Gentiles, are learning the grandest of all lessons—that they can best serve their God by serving their fellow-men, and best serve their fellow-men, not by wrangling among themselves, but by a generous rivalry in working for righteousness and against evil.
This knowledge then lay in the future. When Cromwell grew to manhood he was a Puritan of the best type, of the type of Hampden and Milton; sincere, earnest, resolute to do good as he saw it, more liberal than most of his fellow-religionists, and saved from their worst eccentricities by his hard common-sense, but not untouched by their gloom, and sharing something of their narrowness. Entering Parliament thus equipped, he could not fail to be most drawn to the religious side of the struggle. He soon made himself prominent; a harsh-featured, red-faced, powerfully-built man, whose dress appeared slovenly in the eyes of the courtiers—who was no orator, but whose great power soon began to impress friends and enemies alike.
II THE LONG PARLIAMENT AND THE CIVIL WAR