Chapter II: Part 2

Before the outbreak of the war, as I have explained, Vane was the only man in the house of commons whose opinions were recognised as definitely opposed both to episcopacy and presbyterianism. In the lords his only recognised follower was lord Brook, known to the readers of Sir Walter Scott as the ‘fanatic Brook,’ really an eminent scholar and man of letters, who was shot in storming the close at Lichfield in the first year of the war, leaving as a legacy to the parliament a plea for freedom of speech and conscience. The majority of the parliament, however, had no special love for the presbyterian discipline and theology. Their favour to it was merely negative. They dreaded arminianism, as notoriously at that time the great weapon in the hands of the jesuits; they objected to the high episcopacy as sacerdotal, and as maintaining a jurisdiction incompatible with civil liberty. In 1641 a modified episcopacy on Usher’s plan was a possible solution of the difficulty. Each shire was to have a presbytery of twelve members, with a bishop as president who, ‘with assistance of some of the presbytery,’ was to ordain, degrade, and excommunicate. Though the pressure of strife with the king prevented anything being done to carry out this resolution, it probably represented the views even of the more advanced parliamentary leaders; but only, however, as afterwards appeared, on the supposition that the presbyters with their bishop should be strictly under civil control. The worldly wisdom of the Long Parliament was, in the party language of the times, essentially erastian.

As the presbyterian claims mounted higher, this became more apparent. The calling of the assembly of divines, and the adoption of the covenant, might seem to give presbyterianism a sufficiently broad charter of privilege; yet both these steps were taken by parliament with restrictions which showed its temper. The ordinance which called the assembly gave it power ‘until further order should be taken by parliament to confer of such matters concerning the liturgy, discipline, and government of the church of England, or the vindicating of the doctrine of the same from false aspersions and misconstructions, as shall be proposed by both or either house of parliament, and no other.’ [1] It concludes by providing {299} that ‘this ordinance shall not give them, nor shall they in this assembly assume to exercise, any jurisdiction, power, or authority ecclesiastical whatsoever, or any other power than is herein particularly expressed.’ This document has nothing revolutionary about it. It is the natural utterance of what Brook pronounced to have been an ‘episcopal and erastian parliament of conformists.’ This parliament, however, had soon under military necessity to raise a spirit which no episcopacy or erastianism could lay. The divines came to Westminster, according to Brook, all conformists, with the exception of eight or nine independents. They came, that is, from the cooling atmosphere of benefices, and had not yet begun to discuss the liturgy or object to a modified episcopacy. If they came conformists, however, they did not long remain so. Contact with each other, and the applause of London congregations, essentially presbyterian in their sympathies, bred a warmer temper. The introduction of the Scotch commissioners, and the adoption of the covenant, gave spirit and strength to their disciplinarian humour, and in a few months, men who had come to the assembly anxious only for some restraint on episcopal tyranny, were clamouring for the establishment of presbyterianism as _jure divino_.

[1] [Rushworth, June 12. 1643.]

I have spoken of the adoption of the covenant in England as matter of military necessity. It was the condition of alliance between parliament and the Scotch; without this alliance the year 1644 would in all probability have been fatal to the parliamentary cause. Supposing the Scotch army to have simply held aloof, the royal party would have been so triumphant in the north as to enable the king to advance with irresistible force on Lichfield. Till the parliament had secured it, however, it could not be trusted to stand aloof; it might at any time have been gained for the king by his consenting, as he did too late in 1648, to the covenant. The English negotiators, of whom Vane was the chief, had hoped to secure the alliance by a merely civil league, and when the Scotch insisted on the adoption of the religious covenant, they still succeeded in having the document entitled ‘league and covenant’ instead of ‘covenant’ alone. In later years, as we shall see, they always insisted on interpreting it as a league in virtue of which each kingdom was to help the other in the establishment of what religion it chose, not as binding either to any particular form. {300} The desirableness of such interpretation is more obvious than its correctness. By the first and second clauses, as they originally stood, the covenanters bound themselves to ‘the preservation of the reformed religion in Scotland,’ and ‘the reformation of religion in England and Ireland, in doctrine, worship, discipline and government’; also to the ‘extirpation of prelacy.’ After the words ‘reformation etc.’ Vane procured the insertion of the qualification ‘according to the word of God,’ in order to avoid committal to any particular form. To ease the conscience of those who favoured Usher’s form of episcopacy, prelacy was interpreted to mean ‘church government by archbishops, bishops, their chancellors and commissaries, deans, chapters, archdeacons, and all other ecclesiastical officers depending on that hierarchy.’ This modified covenant was taken by the parliament and the assembly at Westminster, and enjoined on every one over the age of eighteen. Practically it was by no means universally imposed even on the clergy; in Baxter’s neighbourhood none took it. Still, its operation was to eject from their livings some two thousand clergymen, whose places were mostly filled by presbyterians. A shifty and exacting alliance was thus dearly purchased at the cost of at once spreading loose over the country an uncontrolled element of disaffection to the parliament, and giving vent to a spirit of ecclesiastical arrogance which would soon demand to rule alone. This spirit was not long in showing itself. The Scotch army entered England at the beginning of 1644, and throughout that year the kirk, either by petition or through the commons in England, was pressing for a presbyterian settlement of church government in England. At last the assembly, still under special permission from parliament, was allowed to proceed to the discussion of this question. The first step was to propose a vote in the assembly that presbyterian government was _jure divino_. The only opponents of this decree were the small band of independents headed by Goodwin, the lay assessors Selden and Whitelock representing the erastian majority in parliament, whose only clerical supporter seems to have been Lightfoot the Hebraist. Selden, a layman of vast ecclesiastical lore, had a way of touching the sorest points of clerical feeling. In 1618 he had written his great work disproving the divine origin of tithes, and had been brought, in consequence, before the {301} High Commission court. There, with the ordinary suppleness of the erastian conscience, he signed the following recantation: [1]

‘My good lords, I most humbly acknowledge my error
in publishing the history of tithes, and especially
in that I have at all (by shewing any interpretation
of scripture, or by meddling with councils, canons,
fathers, or by what else soever occurs in it) offered any
occasion of argument against any right of maintenance
_jure divino_ of the ministers of the gospel; beseeching
your lordships to receive this ingenuous and humble
acknowledgment, together with the unfeigned protestation
of my grief, that I have so incurred his majesty’s and
your lordships’ displeasure.’

[1] [Neal, _Puritans_, i. p. 471.]

The consciousness of debasement does not strengthen one’s affection for those who have been the occasion of it, and perhaps Selden’s remembrance of his usage by the ‘old priest’ may not have quickened his friendship for the ‘new presbyter.’ ‘In the debates of the divines,’ says Whitelock, ‘Mr. Selden spoke admirably and confuted divers of them in their own learning. Sometimes when they had cited a text of scripture to prove their assertion, he would tell them, “Perhaps in your little pocket bibles with gilt leaves (which they would often pull out and read) the translation may be thus, but the Greek or the Hebrew signifies thus and thus,” and so would totally silence them.’ [1] Whitelock himself opposed much grave law-logic to the claims of the divines, which he quotes at length in his memoirs, but his most satisfactory argument, to modern ears, is the simple one, ‘If this presbyterian government be not _jure divino_, no opinion of any council can make it to be what it is not; and if it be _jure divino_, it continues so still, although you do not declare it to be so.’ [2] The divines, however, thought otherwise. Presbyterianism was duly voted _jure divino_, and parliament in 1645 was applied to to enforce the _jus divinum_ under pains and penalties. That the presbyterian _jus_ was _divinum_ parliament could never be induced to decide. It was very near doing so on one occasion, when the divines had contrived to bring the question on in a packed house, but by the skill of sergeant Glyn and Whitelock in talking against time the danger was averted. At length, however, under pressure from the Scots and city of London, it established a presbyterian régime. This régime, {302} never carried out save in London and Lancashire, was the same in kind as that existing in Scotland, except that the ‘kirk session’ was called a parochial presbytery, and the combination of parochial presbyteries not a presbytery as in Scotland, but a ‘classis.’ This was referred to in Milton’s lines,

‘To ride us with a classic hierarchy
Taught ye by mere A.S. and Rutherford.’ [3]

It was established, however, with such erastian limitations that while it excluded the independents, it gave no satisfaction to the Scots. The independent principle was violated on two points; both by the subjection of the independent congregation to the ‘classis,’ and by the method of ordination adopted which recognised the presbyter as of a distinct order, to be set apart by other presbyters, instead of as a simple officer appointed by a single congregation. The thoroughgoing presbyterians were alienated by the refusal to the church of the absolute power of the keys. The offences for which the presbyteries were allowed to suspend from the sacrament or excommunicate were distinctly enumerated, and an ultimate appeal, in all ecclesiastical cases, was given to the parliament. The whole system, moreover, was declared for the present merely provisional. The restrictions at once raised an outcry among the Scots and the presbyterians of the city, and the assembly itself was bold enough to vote a condemnation of the clause giving a final appeal to parliament. A seasonable threat of a _praemunire_, however, from the commons, laid the rising dust in the assembly; but the mounting spirit of the new forcers of conscience was shown in the opposition made to the petition which the independents offered to parliament, that their congregations might have the right of ordination within themselves, and that they might not be brought under the power of the ‘presbyterian classes.’ It would be tedious to follow the war of committees, sermons, pamphlets, which this request, modest in itself, and more modest in form, excited. The assembly, the city, the Scotch parliament, urged the maintenance of an absolute uniformity. No plea of conscience was to be listened to. To admit one was to admit all. The independent claim was schismatic, and, as such, excluded by the covenant. In the words of a pamphlet of the time; ‘to let men serve God {303} according to conscience is to cast out one devil that seven worse may enter.’ The new synod of the city clergy, meeting at Sion House, petitioned the assembly to oppose with all their might ‘the great Diana of the independents,’ and not to suffer their new establishment ‘to be strangled in the birth by a lawless toleration.’ The language of the Scotch parliament, addressed through their president to the two houses at Westminster, was specially high and irritating. ‘It is expected,’ says the president, ‘that the honourable houses will add the civil sanction to what the assembly have advised. I am commanded by the parliament of this kingdom to demand it, and in their name do demand it.’ The temper in which this demand was made, was shown by a declaration against ‘liberty of conscience and toleration of sectaries,’ published at the same time by the Scotch, in which, after taking due note of ‘their own great services,’ they announce that, ‘being all bound by one covenant, they will go on to the last man of the kingdom in opposing that party in England which was endeavouring to supplant true religion by pleading for liberty of conscience.’ Evidence might be tediously multiplied to show, that if Marston Moor and Naseby had been won by the Scots and the trained bands of the city, the civil sword would really have been applied ‘to force the consciences which Christ set free,’ at a time when these consciences were at their quickest, to a conformity, if not more oppressive than that exacted by Laud, yet more fatal to intellectual freedom.

[1] [Whitelock, _Memorials_, i. p. 209, Ed. 1853.]

[2] [Whitelock, i. p. 294.]

[3] [_On the new forcers of conscience under the Long Parliament._]

Meanwhile the parliamentary erastians had a power at their back, no child of their own, too strong for the Scots and the assembly, and soon to prove too strong for parliament itself. The first note of alarm at this power had been sounded by the wary Scots about the end of 1644.

‘One evening,’ says Whitelock, ‘Maynard and I were
sent for by the Lord General’ (Essex) ‘to Essex House.
There we found with him the Scotch commissioners, Mr.
Hollis, Sir Philip Stapleton’ (presbyterian leaders in
the commons) ‘and others of his special friends. After
compliments, and that all were set down in council, the
lord chancellor of Scotland was called on to explain the
matter on which he desired the opinion of Maynard and
Whitelock. ‘Ye ken verra weel that lieutenant-general
Cromwell is no friend of ours, and not only is he no
friend to us and to the government of our church, but he
is also no well-wisher to his excellency” {304} (Essex),
“whom you and we all have cause to love and honour; and
if he be permitted to go on his ways, it may endanger
the whole business; therefore we are to advise of some
course to be taken for prevention of this business. Ye
ken verra weel the accord’ ’twixt the two kingdoms, and
the union by the solemn league and covenant, and if any
be an incendiary between the two nations, how he is to
be proceeded against. Now the matter is, wherein we
desire your opinions, what you tak the meaning of this
word _incendiary_ to be, and whether lieutenant-general
Cromwell be not sike an incendiary as is meant thereby,
and which way wad be best to tak to proceed against
him, if he be proved to be sike an incendiary, and that
will clepe his wings from soaring to the prejudice of
our cause. Now, ye may ken that by our laws in Scotland
we clepe him an incendiary whay kindleth coals of
contention in the state to the public damage; whether
your law be the same or not, ye ken best who are mickle
learned therein; and therefore, with the favour of his
excellency, we desire your judgment in these points.”’ [1]

In reply, Maynard and Whitelock, after much disquisition on the meaning of the word ‘incendiary,’ one ‘not much conversant in our law,’ explain that lieutenant-general Cromwell is ‘a gentleman of quick and subtle parts, and one who hath (especially of late) gained no small interest in the house of commons, nor is he wanting of friends in the house of peers, nor of abilities in himself to manage his own defence to the best advantage,’ and that on the whole, till more particular proof of his incendiarism should be forthcoming, it would be better not to bring the matter before parliament. The incendiarism of lieutenant-general Cromwell really consisted in this, that he had (again to quote Whitelock) ‘a brave regiment of horse of his countrymen, most of them freeholders, or freeholders’ sons, who upon matter of conscience engaged in this quarrel. And thus being well armed within by satisfaction of their own consciences, and without by good iron arms, they would as one man stand firmly and charge desperately.’ [2] Nearly every military success of importance that had been won for the parliament had been won by these soldiers of conscience, and unhappily their conscience was not of a kind that would brook presbyterian uniformity. At the time of the conference at Essex House, {305} Cromwell, with the help of the persuasive arts of Vane, was moving the parliament, disgusted with the practical inefficiency of its conservative and presbyterian commanders, to measures which would give it an army led by officers mostly of his own training, and fired by that religious inspiration of which freedom of conscience was the necessary condition.

[1] [Whitelock, i. pp. 343-7.]

[2] [_ib_. i. p. 209.]

The story of the new-modelling of the army, of the self-denying ordinance, and of the special exemption of Cromwell from its operations, is too well known to need repetition. Two points deserve special notice; one, the long discussion against the imposition of the covenant on the new army, ending in an ordinance of parliament after the army was already formed, that it should be taken by the officers within twenty days, which does not appear to have been ever carried into effect; the other, that the self-denying ordinance, as originally passed by the commons, excluded from military command, during the war, all members of either house of parliament. It would thus have been general and prospective in its operation. In this form, the lords, with judicial blindness, rejected it. The commons then sent it up in a new form, merely discharging from their present commands those who were at present members of either house of parliament. In this form it was passed, and thus when Vane at the end of 1645 carried a measure, declaring vacant the seats of those members who had adhered to the king and ordering them to be filled, the officers of the new-model army were eligible, and elected in large numbers. If the party of the army and the sectaries had not thus gained a footing in the house, the course of history would probably have been very different.

The new-model army went to the war, according to May, the clerk of the Long parliament, ‘without the confidence of their friends and an object of contempt to their enemies.’ [1] Their outward triumph it is needless to describe; we should rather seek to appreciate the nature of the spiritual triumph which the outward one involved. It used to be the fashion to treat the sectarian enthusiasm of the ‘Ironsides’ as created, or at least stimulated, by Cromwell. The army went mad, and it was to gain Cromwell’s private ends. The prevalent conception of our time, that the great men of history have not created popular ideas or events, but merely expressed or {306} realised them with special effect, excludes such a view. The sectarian enthusiasm, as we have seen, was a necessary result of the consciousness of spiritual right elicited by the Reformation, where this consciousness had not, as in Scotland, been early made the foundation of a popular church, but had been long left to struggle in the dark against an unsympathetic clergy and a regulated ceremonial worship. The spirit which could not ‘find itself’ in the authoritative utterance of prelates, or express its yearnings unutterable in a stinted liturgy, was not likely, when war had given it vent and stimulus, to acquiesce in a new uniformity as exact as that from which it had broken. It had tasted a new and dangerous food. Taught as it had been to wait on God, in search for new revelations of him, it now read this lesson by the stronger light of personal deliverances and achievements, and found in the tumultuous experience of war at once the expression and the justification of its own inward tumult.

[1] [_Breviary of the History of the Long Parliament_, Maseres, Tracts, i. 74.]

It is a notion which governs much of the popular thought of the present day, and which the most cultivated ‘men of feeling’ are not ashamed to express, that the world is atheised when we regard it as a universe of general laws, equally relentless or equally merciful to the evil and to the good. If such a notion, through mere impatience of thought, can dominate an educated age, we may well excuse uncultivated men, who clung close to God, for believing him to manifest himself to his favoured people by sudden visitation and unaccountable events. This was indeed the received belief of Christendom at the time of our civil war. The man who was to vindicate a higher reason for God’s providence, and to be called an atheist for doing so, was still at Mr. van den Ende’s school in Amsterdam. It was in the realisation of the belief by individuals that the difference lay. Where the bible was not in the hands of the people, it could be regulated by priests and ceremonial. Elsewhere it was controllable by state-churches, or by ecclesiastical authority, claiming to be _jure divino_ like the presbyterian, and which appealed to popular reason, but to this reason as regulated by fitting education and discipline. Everywhere, in ordinary times, law and custom would put a veil on the face which the believer turned towards God. But now in England the bands were altogether loosed. Enthusiasts who had been waiting darkly on God while he was hidden behind established {307} worships and ministrations of the letter, who had heard his voice in their hearts but seen no sign of him in the world, were now enacting his work themselves, and reading his strange providences on the field of battle. Their own right hand was ‘teaching them terrible things.’ Here was the revelation of the latter days, for which they had been bidden to wait. That which they had sought for literally ‘with strong crying and tears,’ which they had not found in the system of the church, in the reasoning of divines, in the ungodly jangle of the law, was visible and audible in war. There

God glowed above
With scarce an intervention ...
... his soul o’er theirs.
They felt him, nor by painful reason knew.’ [1]

[1] [ ‘My own East!
How nearer God we were. He glows above
With scarce an intervention, presses close
And palpitatingly, his soul o’er ours!
We feel him, nor by painful reason know!’
BROWNING, Luria.]

Henceforth, whatever authority claimed their submission as divine, must come home to their conscience with a like directness, and this the _jus divinum_ of the presbyterians failed to do. This new spiritual force the ministers had left to itself. While they were wrangling at Westminster or settling warmly into the berths which the episcopal clergy had vacated, it had been gathering strength unheeded. At the outbreak of the war each regiment had a regular minister as its chaplain, but after the battle at Edgehill made it clear that the business would be a longer one than had been expected, these divines, according to Baxter, withdrew either to the assembly or to their livings. Baxter himself lost an opportunity which he afterwards regretted, in declining the chaplaincy of Cromwell’s regiment, ‘which its officers proposed to make a gathered church.’ ’These very men,’ he says, ‘that then invited me to be their pastor, were the men that afterwards headed an army, and were forwardest in all our charges; which made me wish I had gone among them, for all the fire was in one spark.’ [1] The news of the battle of Naseby, however, so far stirred Baxter, then living at Coventry, that he must needs join his old friends, and for two years he moved about with the army, as chaplain to Whalley’s regiment which had been {308} formed out of Cromwell’s. The sectarian spirit he then found too strong for his mild piety to control.

[1] [_Reliquiae Baxterianae_, p. 51.]

‘We that lived quietly at Coventry did keep to our old
principles; we were unfeignedly for king and parliament;
we believed the war was only to save the parliament
and kingdom from papists and delinquents and to remove
the dividers, that the king might return again to his
parliament, and that no changes might be made in religion
but with his consent. But when I came to the army among
Cromwell’s soldiers, I found anew face of things which
I never dreamt of. The plotting heads were very hot
upon that which intimated their intentions to subvert
church and state. Independency and anabaptistry were most
prevalent. Antinomianism and arminianism were equally
distributed.’

Hot-headed sectaries in the highest places, Cromwell’s chief favourites, were asking what were the lords of England but William the Conqueror’s colonels, or the barons but his majors, or the knights but his captains? ‘plainly showing that thy thought God’s providence would cast the trust of religion and the kingdom upon them as conquerors.’ Of some of these dangerous men, particularly of Harrison and Berry, then reckoned Cromwell’s prime favourites, Baxter gives a more particular account. Berry

‘was a man of great sincerity before the wars, and of
very good natural parts, affectionate in religion, and
while conversant with humbling providences, doctrines,
and company, he carried himself as a great enemy to
pride. But when Cromwell made him his favourite and his
extraordinary valour met with extraordinary success, and
when he had been awhile most conversant with those that
in religion thought the old puritan ministers were dull,
self-conceited men of a lower form, and that new light
had declared I know not what to be a higher attainment,
his mind, aim, talk and all were altered accordingly.
Being never well studied in the body of divinity or
controversy, but taking his light among the sectaries, he
lived after as honestly as could be expected in one that
taketh error for truth.’

‘Harrison,’ says Baxter, ‘would not dispute with me at
all, but he would in good discourse very fluently pour
out himself in the extolling of free grace, which was
savoury to those that had right principles, though he had
some misunderstandings of free grace himself. He was a
man of excellent natural parts for affection and oratory;
but not well seen in the principles of his religion; of a
sanguine {309} complexion, naturally of such a vivacity,
hilarity, and alacrity as another man hath when he hath
drunken a cup too much; but naturally also so far from
humble thoughts of himself, that it was his ruin.’ [1]

[1] [_Reliquiae Baxterianae_, p. 57.]

One day, during the fight at Langport, Baxter happened to be close to Harrison just as Goring’s army broke before the charge of the Ironsides, and heard him ‘with a loud voice break forth into the praises of God, as if he had been in a rapture.’ [1] Such a temper could only be moderated by one who shared its raptures, its wild energy, its scorn of prescription, and who yet had the practical wisdom, the wider comprehension, of which it was incapable. Such a one was Cromwell, a tumultuous soul, but with a strange method in his tumult. The old notion, that this method consisted in a persistent design of personal aggrandisement, may be taken to have been dispelled once for all by the publication of his letters and speeches. That he was a genuine enthusiast, that he was perfectly sincere in the sense that his real ends were those that he professed, that his own advancement was not his object, but merely the condition or result of his getting work done which others could not do, this is the only theory that will explain the facts, if we include among the facts his own language at times when there can have been no motive for insincerity, and the impression which he made on his contemporaries, not when they looked back on his acts in the light of personal grievance, but at the time when they were done. The life-long hypocrisy which the opposite theory ascribes to him is incompatible with the personal attraction which a revolutionary leader must exercise if he is to do his work. In Napoleon, though he did not so much lead a revolution as turn revolutionary forces to military account, there was no touch of hypocrisy. His hard selfishness and his zeal for the material improvement of European life were equally explicit. The assertion, however, of Cromwell’s unselfish enthusiasm is quite consistent with the imputation to him of much unscrupulousness, violence, simulation, and dissimulation, sins which no one has escaped who ever led or controlled a revolution; from which in times like his no man could save his soul but by such saintly abstraction as Baxter takes credit for to himself, and Mrs. Hutchinson to her husband, which in aspiration to heaven leaves earth to its chance.

[1] [_Reliquiae Baxterianae_, p. 54.]

{310} When Baxter was with the army he found that ‘Cromwell and his council took on them to join no religious party, but to be for the equal liberty of all.’ This account corresponds with the conception of Cromwell’s views to be gathered from his own letters. His relation to the sectaries was the same practically as we have seen Vane’s to have been more speculatively. Without any of Vane’s theosophy, he had the same open face towards heaven, the same consciousness (or dream, if we like,) of personal and direct communication with the divine, which transformed the ‘legal conscience’ and placed him ‘above ordinance.’ Having thus drunk of the spring from which the sectarian enthusiasm flowed, he had no taste for the reasonings which led it into particular channels, while he had, more than any man of his time, not indeed the speculative, but the political instinct of comprehension. In this spirit he entered on the war, where it soon took practical body from the discovery that ‘men of religion’ alone could fight ‘men of honour,’ and that the men of religion, once in war, inevitably became sectaries. To him, as to his men, the issues of battle were a revelation of God’s purpose; the cause, which in answer to the prayers of his people God owned by fire, had the true _jus divinum_. The practical danger of such a belief is obvious. To Cromwell is due the peculiar glory, that it never issued, as might have been expected, in fanatic military licence, but was always governed by the strictest personal morality and a genuine zeal for the free well-being of the state and nation.

His extant letters, written during the first years of the war, written, be it remembered, by a farmer-squire, forty-four years old, simply exhibit a man of restless and infectious energy, gathering about him, without reference to birth or creed, the men who had the most active zeal for the common cause and promoting of religion, and gradually, as the work of these men grew in importance and was more visibly owned by God, asserting their claims in a louder key. In their tone they sometimes recall the man who some years before, in a parliamentary committee of enclosures, had defended the cause of some injured countrymen of his with so much passion and so ‘tempestuous a carriage,’ that the chairman had been obliged to reprehend him. Among the most frequent topics are the discouragement of his soldiers by their want of pay and supplies (to be borne in mind with reference {311} to subsequent history), his anxiety for godly men and the offence he was giving by the promotion of men of low birth or sectaries. A letter to his cousin, solicitor-general St. John, may be taken as an instance. It was written during the period of feeble management that preceded the self-denying ordinance, before Vane had got the upper hand in the house. [1]

‘Of all men I should not trouble you with money matters,
did not the heavy necessities my troops are in, press
upon me beyond measure. I am neglected exceedingly!...
If I took pleasure to write to the house in bitterness,
I have occasion.... I have minded your service to
forgetfulness of my own and soldiers’ necessities.... You
have had my money; I hope in God, I desire to venture my
skin, so do my men. Lay weight upon their patience; but
break it not!... Weak counsels and weak actings undo all!
all will be lost, if God help not! Remember who tells
you.’

[1] [Carlyle, _Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches_, No. xvii.]

In the same letter he says, ‘My troops increase. I have
a lovely company; you would respect them, did you know
them. They are no “anabaptists”; they are honest sober
christians; they expect to be used as men.’

Of the way in which this ‘lovely company’ had been got
together we have such indications as this in a letter
[1] to the Suffolk committee. ‘I beseech you be careful
what captains of horse you choose, what men be mounted.
A few honest men are better than numbers. If you choose
godly honest men to be captains of horse, honest men will
follow them.... I had rather have a plain, russet-coated
captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what
he knows, than that which you call a gentleman, and is
nothing else. I honour a gentleman that is so indeed.’

[1] [Carlyle, _Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches_, No. xvi.]

In another letter [1] he says, ‘It may be it provokes
some spirits to see such plain men made captains of
horse. It had been well that men of honour and birth
had entered into these employments; but why do they not
appear? Who would have hindered them? But seeing it was
necessary the work must go on, better plain men than
none; but best to have men patient of wants, faithful and
conscientious in their employment.... If these men be
accounted “troublesome to the country,” I shall be glad
you would send them all to me. I’ll bid them welcome. And
when they have fought for you, and endured some other
difficulties of war {312} which your “honester” men will
hardly bear, I pray you then let them go for honest men!’

[1] [Carlyle, _Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches_, No. xviii.]

Writing to a rigid presbyterian general, who had got
the ear of the Earl of Manchester, and had suspended an
officer for unconformable opinions, he says, [1] ‘The
state in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of
their opinions; if they be willing faithfully to serve
it, that satisfies.... I desire you would receive this
man into your favour and good opinion. I believe, if he
follow my counsel he will deserve no other but respect
from you. Take heed of being sharp, or too easily
sharpened by others, against those to whom you can object
little but that they square not with you in every opinion
concerning religion. If there be any other offence to be
charged upon him, that must in a judicial way receive
determination.’

[1] [Carlyle, _Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches_, No. xx.]

I will quote extracts from other letters of Cromwell, as illustrating the temper in which he won his victories, and his view of them as the consecration of a new military church, having claims that were not to be put by. One is from a letter written just after the battle of Marston Moor, [1] to his brother-in-law, colonel Walton, who had lost a son in it.

‘Truly England and the church of God hath had a great
favour from the Lord, in this great victory given unto
us, such as the like never was since this war began. It
had all the evidences of an absolute victory gained by
the Lord’s blessing upon the godly party principally, We
never charged, but we routed the enemy.... God made them
as stubble to our swords. We charged their regiments of
foot with our horse, and routed all we charged. ... Sir,
God hath taken away your eldest son by a cannon-shot.
It brake his leg. We were necessitated to have it cut
off, whereof he died. Sir, you know my own trials this
way; but the Lord supported me with this, that the Lord
took him into the happiness we all pant for and live
for. There is your precious child, full of glory, never
to know sin or sorrow any more.... Before his death he
was so full of comfort that to Frank Russell and myself
he could not express it, “It was so great above his
pain.” This he said to us. Indeed, it was admirable. A
little after, he said one thing lay upon his spirit. I
asked him what that was? He told me it was that God had
not suffered him to be any more the executioner of his
enemies.... Truly he was exceedingly beloved in the army
of all that knew him. But {313} few knew him; for he was
a precious young man, fit for God. You have cause to
bless the Lord. He is a glorious saint in heaven; wherein
you ought exceedingly to rejoice. Let this drink up your
sorrow; seeing these are not feigned words to comfort
you, but the thing is so real and undoubted a truth. ...
Let this public mercy to the church of God make you to
forget your private sorrow.’

[1] [Carlyle, _Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches_, No. xxi.]

The other quotation is from the conclusion of his account of the storming of Bristol, addressed to the Speaker of the house of commons; [2]

‘All this is none other than the work of God. He must
be a very atheist that doth not acknowledge it.... Sir,
they that have been employed in this service know that
faith and prayer obtained this city for you. I do not
say ours only, but of the people of God with you and all
England over, who have wrestled with God for a blessing
in this very thing. Our desires are that God may be
glorified by the same spirit of faith by which we ask all
our sufficiency, and have received it. It is meet that
he have all the praise. Presbyterians, independents, all
have here the same spirit of faith and prayer; the same
presence and answer; they agree here, have no names of
difference; pity it is it should be otherwise anywhere!
All that believe have the real unity, which is most
glorious; because inward and spiritual, in the body, and
to the head. For being united in forms, commonly called
uniformity, every Christian will for peace-sake study and
do as far as conscience will permit. And for brethren, in
things of the mind we look for no compulsion but that of
light and reason.’

[1] [Carlyle, _Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches_, No. xxxi.]

With such a spirit and such a cause, with a leader who could so express it, and as it seemed manifestly owned by God, the army rested victoriously from its labours in the field by midsummer 1646. For the next year it was looking on, with an impatience that gradually became unmanageable, while the presbyterian majority in parliament was contriving its suppression. The leaders of this majority were, on the one hand, the lawyers, Holles, Glyn, and Maynard, on the other, the military members, such as Sir Philip Stapleton, who had been removed from their command by the self-denying ordinance. The motives of these men were a mixture of zeal for presbyterian uniformity, fear of unsettling the monarchical basis of government, and animosity to the army, as sectarian, {314} democratic, and generally irreverent to dignities, or, in their language, dangerous to gentry, ministry, and magistracy. The ministry and magistracy of the city backed them, vigorously worrying parliament every week with statements of church grievances. In December, 1646, the lord mayor in person presented a petition, complaining specially of the contempt put on the covenant, and of the growth of heresy and schism, the pulpits being often usurped by preaching soldiers. To cure these evils they pray that the covenant may be imposed on the whole nation, under penalties; that no one be allowed to preach who has not been regularly ordained, and that all separate congregations be suppressed. In answer to this parliament passed an order against lay-preachers, to be enforced by local magistrates, an order not very likely to be effective, when the preachers were soldiers. A glimpse of what was going on is given by an extract from Whitelock’s Memoirs (ii. 104) of about the same date: ‘A minister presented articles to the council of war against a trooper, for preaching and expounding the scripture, and uttering erroneous opinions. The council adjudged that none of the articles were against the law or articles of war, but that only the trooper called the parson “a minister of antichrist;” for which reproach they ordered the trooper to make an acknowledgment; which he did, and was one night imprisoned.’ In contrast with this lenience of the council of war may be placed a declaration of the provincial assembly of the London ministers, which after a denunciation of twelve specific heresies, winds up with the following résumé: [1] ‘We hereby testify our great dislike of prelacy, erastinianism, brownism, and independency, and our utter abhorrency of anti-scripturism, popery, arianism, socinianism, arminianism, antinomianism, anabaptism, libertinism, and familism; and that we detest the error of toleration, the doctrine that men should have liberty to worship God in that manner as shall appear to them most agreeable to the word of God.’ Edwards, in his ‘Gangrena,’ published while this storm was at its height, had been even more minute. He enumerated a hundred and seventy-six erroneous doctrines then prevalent, distributed among sixteen sects, and appealed to parliament, taking warning from the example of Eli, to use coercive power for their suppression, or to put an end to a {315} toleration, ‘at which the dear brethren in Scotland stand amazed,’ and which is ‘eclipsing the glory of the most excellent Reformation.’ To us this agitation has its comic side. To Milton, a competent judge, it was serious enough;

‘Men whose life, learning, faith, and pure intent
Would have been held in high esteem with Paul,
Must now be named and printed heretics
By shallow Edwards and Scotch what d’ye call.’

[1] [Neal’s _Puritans_, ii. 265.]

To the sectarian soldiers, who had been fighting, not for a theory of parliamentary right, but for a spiritual freedom which the sacerdotal establishment had not allowed, ‘who knew what they fought for, and loved what they knew,’ it represented a power which threatened to rob them of all for which they had shed their blood. The danger was at its height when the Scotch army was still in England and the king in its keeping. If the king had then closed with the presbyterian offers, he might have returned to London and directed the whole power of parliament (which had still Massey’s soldiers at command), the presbyteries, and the Scotch against the sectarian army. A new and more desperate civil war must have followed, to end probably in a reaction of unlimited royalism. Charles, however, with all his ability, had not enough breadth of view even to play his own game with advantage. He would play off the two parties against each other, without committing himself to either, trusting that while they tore each other to pieces, Montrose’s army and the ‘Irish rebels,’ with whom he had already a treaty, would come in and settle the business in his favour. Thus while he was still with the Scotch, or even before, he was tampering unsuccessfully with Vane and the independents, till at last the Scotch got tired of him, and having received their arrears of pay from the parliament at the beginning of the year 1647, returned back to their own country.

During all this interval, Cromwell was at his place in parliament, watching events. His position was a strong one. The quartering of the army in the midland counties prevented any sudden advance of the Scots on London, and the election of several of his military friends, notably his son-in-law Ireton, to the vacant seats at the end of 1645, established a regular communication between the army and parliament. Among the old members his supporters were chiefly Vane, Marten, and St. John, men in several respects antipathetic to {316} Cromwell and each other, but for the present held together by a common antagonism. Vane’s interest was for freedom of opinion on deep religious grounds. So far he and Cromwell were at one; but Vane had qualities, as appeared in the sequel, which unfitted him to lead a revolution when it took military form. He was reputed physically a coward; he had none of the rough geniality which gives personal influence at such times; military interference and the predominance of an individual were specially abhorrent to him. Marten was of a rougher type. In the earlier stages of the war he alone had avowed republicanism. He was the wit of the house of commons, the one man of the time whose recorded speeches can be read with pleasure. Presbyterian uniformity Marten hated with a hearty hatred, but he was avowedly void of religious feeling, and thus out of sympathy with the moving spirit of the time. On him, even less than on Vane, could Cromwell have any personal hold. In August, 1643, when the house was censuring Mr. Saltmarsh, a minister who had urged that if the king would not grant the parliamentary demands, he and the royal line should be ‘rooted out,’ Marten vindicated him, saying that ‘it were better one family should be destroyed than many.’ Upon this, we are told, there was a storm in the house, and many members ‘urged against the lewdness of Mr. Marten’s life, and the height and danger of his words.’ The indignation was such that he was committed to the tower for a time, and did not resume his seat for a year and a half. St. John was an erastian lawyer, who had pleaded for Hampden in the ship-money business, and was now about head of his profession. There was a darkness both in his skin and his character, which in contrast with his intellectual light won him the nickname of the ‘dark-lantern.’ He was strong for liberty of conscience, but had a lawyer’s belief in the necessity of monarchy, and would always take the shortest road to his end. With him Cromwell’s friendship was personal, and like all his personal friendships, lasting. He was the practical link between the enthusiasm of the military saint and the wisdom of the world. In concert with these men, Cromwell had anxiously watched and hastened the negotiations for the withdrawal of the Scotch. Their withdrawal, however, and the removal of the king in parliamentary custody to Holmby, though it simplified the dangers by which the cause was {317} threatened, by no means removed them. During the first half of 1647, the presbyterian managers were pressing forward their two projects of a reconciliation with the king and the disbanding of the army, necessary for the success of their cause. Their plan for dealing with the army was to send part of it to Ireland, under Massey and Skippon as generals, of whom one was a creature of their own, the other a strong presbyterian; to disband the rest, with the exception of a few regiments that could be managed; and to retain no one except Fairfax above the rank of colonel, a restriction aimed specially at Cromwell. Votes to this effect passed the house in the spring of 1647, not apparently without great pressure from the city, which was constantly presenting petitions against the army and lay preachers, roughly enforced by mobs of apprentices. But meanwhile the army had got a parliament of its own. The several troops in a regiment elected each a representative to form the regimental council, from which again one member was delegated to join the general council of the army. The president of this council seems generally to have been Berry, one of Cromwell’s special friends, whose character we have heard described by Baxter. The army had thus a regular organisation of opinion, and henceforward came to regard itself and to act as the true representative of the ‘godly interest’ in England, sanctioned by a higher than parliamentary authority. At first its demands were modest enough. They were all ready to go to Ireland, if only Cromwell and Fairfax might lead them; they were ready to disband so soon as they should get their arrears of pay and be secured by an act of indemnity against punishment for offences committed during war. The nominal difficulty at last was about the arrears of pay. Parliament would only agree to pay arrears for eight weeks, and the army asserted its claim for at least fifty weeks. Meanwhile the militia of the city had been placed in trusty presbyterian hands; the king had accepted provisionally (with what insincerity his correspondence showed) the preliminary presbyterian propositions, and pressed for a personal treaty. The lords so far assented to this as to vote that he should be brought to Oatlands, in the neighbourhood of London. If once this had been done, he would have been in direct communication with interests hostile to the army, and the fusion of royalism and presbyterianism would for the time have been {318} complete. Holles and his friends thought the prize was within their grasp, and against the discreet advice of Whitelock pressed the disbanding. The tone of the army grew higher, till one day at the beginning of June, news was brought to the parliament that a troop of horse, under one cornet Joyce, had appeared at Holmby and demanded the king of the commissioners. ‘The commissioners,’ in the words of Whitelock, ‘amazed at it, demanded of them what warrant they had for what they did; but they could give no other account but that it was the pleasure of the army.’ The king afterwards asked them for their commission. Joyce answered, ‘that his majesty saw their commission; the king replied that it had the fairest frontispiece of any he ever saw, being five hundred proper men on horseback.’ [1] On the same day that this happened, Cromwell had ridden out of town with one servant to the quarters of the army, just in time to escape forcible detention by Holles’s friends. The plot now thickened. The army had a general rendezvous at Triploe Heath, and greeted the parliamentary commissioner who met them there with cries of ‘justice! justice!’ Thence gradually moving towards London, they sent up articles of charge against Holles and ten other members, for obstructing the business of Ireland, and acting against the army and the liberty of the subject. During two months they waited for the execution of their demands, sending parliament a reminder now and then, but maintaining perfect self-restraint. Holles and his party, on the other hand, showed all the precipitation of weakness. Under their management the authorities of the city got together a loose army of militiamen, of which the command was given to Massey, and organised the mob of apprentices, which finally put so much pressure on parliament that the speaker and many members of both houses took refuge with the army. This was the turning-point. The army, now under parliamentary sanction, easily walked through Massey’s lines, and quartered in the suburbs. The city was in a panic. ‘A great number of people attended at Guildhall. When a scout came in and brought news that the array made a halt, or other good intelligence, they cry “one and all!” But if the scouts reported that the army was advancing nearer them, then they would cry as loud, “Treat, treat, treat!”’ [2] The corporation, {319} its cheap vaunts at an end, sent resolutions to the army in favour of ‘a sweet composure.’ In calm indifference to its good words and its bad, the army on August 6 marched through London, ‘in so orderly and civil a manner, that not the least offence was offered by them to any man in word, action, or gesture.’

[1] [Whitelock, ii. 154.]

[2] [_ib_. ii. 189.]

The king, now in the hands of the army, had been following its movements, and when it finally established its headquarters at Putney, he was allowed to live in considerable state at Hampton Court, with his own attendants, but under the guard of Colonel Whalley, Cromwell’s trusted cousin. Here he stayed till his flight to Carisbrook in the Isle of Wight, in the following November. Those who explain Cromwell’s life by its result, as a long scheme for his own elevation, suppose that during this period he carried on private negotiations with the king, first perhaps with the view of restoring him to power under his own direction, but afterwards to lure him on to destruction; that with this object he encouraged him by vain hopes to refuse the proposals of parliament, and finally to escape from Hampton, whence by some mysterious means he was guided to an asylum of Cromwell’s own preparing at Carisbrook. Such a view is expressed even in the panegyric of Marvell, written on Cromwell’s return from Ireland in the summer of 1650;