Gardiner Samuel Rawson
Oliver Cromwell
Oliver's whole scheme can only be described as the product of consummate ignorance – ignorance in supposing that Charles X., aggressive, self-centred and careless of everything but his own interests as a king and as a soldier, was another Gustavus Adolphus – or rather another such disinterested enthusiast as Gustavus Adolphus appeared in the imagination of Englishmen – ignorance too in fancying that either Austria and Poland on the one hand, or Brandenburg and Denmark on the other, were likely to govern their movements by religious rather than by political motives.
The crisis came in 1657, the year in which Oliver was raised by Parliament to the constitutional Protectorate. Charles X. having secured a hold on the mouth of the Vistula by his occupation of Western Prussia had naturally become an object of suspicion to Frederick William of Brandenburg – the Great Elector, as he was subsequently styled – who saw with displeasure the growing power of Sweden on the Baltic coast and who was urged by every consideration of policy to secure for himself the strip of land which intervened between part of his own possessions and the sea. Frederick III. of Denmark again, fearing the ultimate loss of his own territory beyond the Sound, took the opportunity of declaring against Charles, and both Brandenburg and Denmark, Protestant as they were, looked for the support of Leopold, who had just succeeded to the Austrian hereditary estates. Leopold, however, instead of hurrying to the assistance of these two States, was held back by purely political interests, and showed little inclination to assist them. Charles X. took the opportunity and led his army through Holstein into Schleswig and Jutland without difficulty, thus gaining possession of the whole of the Continental States of the King of Denmark.
The Swedish King had been ready to fool Oliver to the top of his bent. Though he had nothing of the spirit of the crusader, he was quite prepared to gain what advantage he could out of Oliver's enthusiasm. Happily for England, he had rejected the Protector's proposal – made in the spring of 1657 – to take over the secularised Archbishopric of Bremen as a security for a loan, the Archbishopric being required by Oliver as a basis for an advance into Germany in an attack upon the German Catholic States, a project far more unwise than the occupation of the Flemish ports, and one which, if it had been carried into effect, would have left little room for Oliver's panegyrists to dwell upon the excellence of his foreign policy. For the remainder of the year Charles was quite ready to discuss the Protestant alliance, if only he were not required to carry it into immediate action. No doubt he would be ready at some future time to attack Austria or any other country if there was anything to be gained by it. For the present he was occupied with his quarrel with Denmark, and till that had been brought to a conclusion, there was nothing else to be done.
It was at this moment that Oliver opened the second session of his second Parliament. Full of satisfaction with his own foreign policy, he was also full of grieved surprise at the misconduct of Frederick of Denmark and of Frederick William of Brandenburg, who, not without the good will of the Dutch Republic, had thrown themselves in the path of the new Gustavus Adolphus. Within a few days of the opening of the session, Oliver held up to Parliament a picture of Papal Europe seeking 'everywhere Protestants to devour'. "What is there in all the parts of Europe," he asked at last, "but a consent, a co-operating, at this very time and season, to suppress everything that stands in the way of the Popish powers?" "I have," he added, "I thank God, considered, and I would beg you to consider a little with me, what that resistance is that is likely to be made to this mighty current which seems to be coming from all parts upon all Protestants? Who is there that holdeth up his head to oppose this danger? A poor prince; indeed poor; but a man in his person as gallant, and truly I think I may say, as good as any these last ages have brought forth; and a man that hath adventured his all against the Popish interest in Poland, and made his acquisition still good for the Protestant religion. He is now reduced into a corner; and what addeth to the grief of all – more grievous than all that hath been spoken of before – I wish it may not be too truly said – is, that men of our religion forget this and seek his ruin." The cause of Charles X. had become very dear to Oliver, and ought, he imagined, to be very dear to the English people. The 'Popish plot' against the Swedish king loomed largely in his eyes. "It is a design," he continued, "against your very being; this artifice, and this complex design against the Protestant interest – wherein so many Protestants are not so right as were to be wished! If they can shut us out of the Baltic Sea," – with Oliver the consideration of material prosperity was never far distant from his spiritual enthusiasm – "and make themselves masters of that, where is your trade? Where are your materials to preserve your shipping? Where will you be able to challenge any right by sea, or justify yourselves against a foreign invasion on your own soil? Think upon it; this is the design! I believe if you will go and ask the poor mariner in his red cap and coat, as he passeth from ship to ship, you will hardly find in any ship but they will tell you this is designed against you. So obvious is it, by this and other things, that you are the object; and, in my conscience, I know not for what else, but because of the purity of the profession amongst you, who have not yet made it your trade to prefer your profit before your godliness, but reckon godliness the greater gain."
It was Oliver's head – not his heart – that was at fault. But a few days after these words were spoken, Charles X. was tramping with his army over the ice of the two Belts, in that marvellous march which landed him in Zealand, and compelled Frederick III. to sign the Treaty of Roeskilde which abandoned to Sweden the Danish possessions to the east of the Sound. What then were Oliver's Ambassadors doing when that treaty was negotiating? They were but arguing as any Dutchman or Brandenburger might have argued, on behalf of the material interests of their own country. They favoured Charles's wish to annex the Danish provinces beyond the Sound, because it would leave the passage into the Baltic under the control of two Powers instead of one. They opposed his wish to annex more than two provinces of Norway, in order that the monopoly of the timber trade might not fall into his hands. Of the Protestant alliance not a word was spoken.
For all that, the Protestant alliance had not passed out of Oliver's mind. Now that Denmark was crushed, Charles professed himself to be quite ready to attack Leopold of Austria, if only he were allowed to crush Brandenburg first; and in May an English Ambassador was sent to Berlin to plead with the Elector of Brandenburg to join England and Sweden against Leopold, to whose support Frederick William was looking against an unprovoked attack from Charles. Happily for England, Frederick William refused to countenance this insane proposal, and in August Charles renewed the war against Denmark, with a fixed determination to bring the whole of the Scandinavian territory under his own sway, before he involved himself in those further complications in Germany, in which Oliver, supported by Mazarin, was anxious to involve him. "France," said the King of Sweden, "wants to limit me and to prescribe the course I am to take, and England attempts to do the same, but I will put myself in a position to be independent of their orders." His Ministers spoke even more openly of their future plans. When Denmark and Norway had been annexed, and the Baltic brought under the undisputed control of Sweden, Courland and West Prussia must inevitably pass into their master's hands. Then with an army of 40,000 men, supported by a navy of 100 ships, the Swedish army would march through Germany into Italy, visit the Pope, and plunder Rome. "Their first thought is pillage," added the French Ambassador who reported these vapourings perhaps not without exaggeration. Charles X. was a great soldier, but he was by no means the oppressed saint of Oliver's imagination.
There can be little doubt that the maintenance of a war in the heart of Germany, even with a Swedish ally, would have been far beyond Oliver's means. The occupation of the Flemish ports had taxed his resources to the uttermost. In the speech in which he had sung the high praises of the Swedish king, he had been obliged to plead the necessities of the army as a ground for his demand for fresh supplies. The pay of the army was far in arrear, and it was on the army that he depended to keep down hostile parties at home and to stave off a Royalist attack from abroad. Nor was that army needed for purposes of mere defence. Picturing to himself the majority of the Continental nations as actuated by a wild desire to assail England, he inferred that attack was the best defence. "You have counted yourselves happy," he said to Parliament, "in being environed with a great ditch from all the world beside. Truly you will not be able to keep your ditch, nor your shipping, unless you turn your ships and shipping into troops of horse and companies of foot; and fight to defend yourselves on terra firma."
This then was what Oliver's much-lauded foreign policy had come to – more regiments, and even higher taxation than what the vast majority of Englishmen believed to be far too high already. A great Continental war, with all its risks and burdens, was dangled before the eyes of a Parliament to which such an outlook had no attractions. That Parliament was no longer the body which had voted the new constitution. Not only were there now two Houses, but the composition of the older House had been significantly altered. The most determined supporters of the Protectorate had been withdrawn to occupy the benches of the new House, whilst the clause of The Humble Petition and Advice, which prohibited the Protector from ever again excluding members duly elected from what had now become the House of Commons, opened its doors to his most determined enemies. The men who now found their way to their seats, such as Hazlerigg and Scott, were opposed heart and soul to the whole system of the Protectorate, and longed for the re-establishment of Parliamentary supremacy. Such men were the more dangerous because they were sufficiently versed in Parliamentary tactics to know the advantage of a rallying cry which would bring the lukewarm to their side. The powers and attributes of the other House were ill-defined in the constitutional document to which it owed its birth, and it was easy to gain adherents by urging that it was not entitled either to the name or the privileges of the House of Lords of the Monarchy. After some days of wrangling, the Protector resolved to put an end to the debates. It was hard, he complained, to have accepted a constitutional settlement on the invitation of that very Parliament, and then to have it brought into question. "I can say," he continued, "in the presence of God – in comparison with whom we are but like poor creeping ants upon the earth – I would have been glad to have lived under my wood side to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than to have undertaken such a government as this. But undertaking it by the advice and petition of you, I did look that you who had offered it unto me should make it good."
Such language must appear to those who judge by the recorded words and actions of this Parliament to be without adequate justification. It is undeniable that the constitution contained no definition of the powers of the new House, and if there had been no other than the ostensible question at issue, it would have been unreasonable in Oliver to hurry on a crisis before attempting, directly or indirectly, to suggest terms of compromise. As a matter of fact this question of the other House was very far from covering the whole ground of debate. A petition to which thousands of signatures were appended was being circulated in the City, asking for a complete restitution of Parliamentary supremacy and – no doubt to catch the support of a certain section of the army – for an enactment that no officer or soldier should be cashiered without the sentence of a court martial. Oliver was perfectly right in holding that the attack on the other House was equivalent to an assault on the constitutional Protectorate. He had himself looked to that House as restoring to him in another form the powers which he had abandoned when he let fall the Instrument. By keeping in his own hands the selection of its members, and providing that that House should have a veto on subsequent nominations – the principle of inheritance being totally excluded – he imagined that he had sufficiently provided for the future. His objects in so doing may be taken as those set forth by a writer who had ample means of gathering his intentions. "It was no small task for the Protector to find idoneous men for this place, because the future security of the honest interest seemed – under God – to be laid up in them; for by a moral generation, if they were well chosen at the first, they would propagate their own kind, when the single person could not, and the Commons, who represented the nation, would not, having in them for the most part the spirit of those they represent, which hath little affinity with a respect of the cause of God." It is easy to criticise such a principle from a modern point of view. Yet if the morality of Oliver's political actions are ever to be judged fairly, it must never be forgotten that the right of an honest Government to prevent the people from injuring themselves by out-voting the saner members of the community was – rather than any democratic or Parliamentary theory – the predominant note of his career. It is this at least which explains his assent to the choice of the nominated Parliament, as well as his breach with the Parliaments which he dismissed in 1655 and 1658.
Such views could not but lead the Protector to a breach with his second Parliament as well. The men who were grumbling at the insolence of his new lords were, as he well knew, prepared to follow up their attack by another more directly aimed at his own authority. The remainder of the Protector's speech is only intelligible on this supposition. Professing his intention to stand by the new constitution, he accused his opponents of a design to subvert it. "These things," he asseverated, "lead to nothing else but to the playing of the King of Scots' game – if I may so call him – and I think myself bound before God to do what I can to prevent it; and if this be so, I do assign it to this cause – your not assenting to what you did invite me to by your Petition and Advice, as that which might prove the settlement of the nation; and if this be the end of your sitting, and this be your carriage, I think it high time that an end be put to your sitting. And I do dissolve this Parliament! And let God be judge between you and me!"
No man knew better than Oliver the weight of the blow that had fallen on him. His attempt to govern constitutionally with a Parliamentary constitution had proved as impracticable as his attempt to govern constitutionally with a military constitution. For a whole week he shut himself up, meditating apart from his Council on the means of repairing the disaster. Only once during the whole time did he even appear in his family circle. Then after prolonged consultation with advisers gathered from far and near, he resolved to summon another Parliament to meet in that very spring. He at least would stand firmly by the constitution to which he had sworn, and he could but hope that the nation would be equally loyal when the choice between ordered liberty and the unrestricted government of a single House was fairly set before the electors. It was the remedy applied afterwards by William III. to a similar mischief, and not applied in vain.
Unfortunately for Cromwell the circumstances were not the same. It is unnecessary here to discuss the relative merits of written and unwritten constitutions on the one hand, or of a dominant Parliament and a dominant executive on the other. The one form of government or the other may be desirable in different nations or at different times. The one thing needful is that the institutions of a nation, whatever they be, shall be supported by the national sentiment. It was this that Oliver had never succeeded in evoking, because he had never appealed to it, and he was hardly likely to succeed in evoking it now. He could, for a time – and only for a time – rule England with an army. He could not rule it with a piece of paper. At no long distance, as he already saw, the unchecked supremacy of Parliament would bring back the Stuarts, because the traditional hold of the old monarchy upon the minds of men was the only power capable of keeping in check alike the tyranny of the army, and the anarchy which could not but arise if contending parties were left to struggle for the mastery without fear of military intervention. Oliver's own power for good was growing feebler. Financial embarrassments gathered round him. The sailors and soldiers went unpaid, even though Bremen had not been occupied and no English army was struggling – it can hardly be doubted – towards certain defeat in the heart of Germany.
The Parliament he contemplated never came into existence. Another great Royalist plot took up for a time all the energies of the Government. Oliver, with his usual clemency, contented himself with two executions, those of Dr. Hewit and Sir Henry Slingsby, whilst three more victims expiated their share in a project for raising a tumult in London. Once again affairs appeared to take a more favourable turn. The victory of the Dunes, in which the French army, aided by 6,000 English troops, overthrew the Spaniards, was won on June 4, whilst the surrender of Dunkirk on the 14th, together with the subsequent gains of the allies in Flanders put out of the question any landing of the exiled King in England with Spanish aid. The thought of bringing a new Parliament together might seem capable of realisation under these happy auspices, and preparations were made for its meeting in November.
Whether that Parliament, if ever it had met, would have supported the Protectorate more firmly than its predecessors, is a question which can never be answered. All that can be said is that the radical elements of the situation remained unchanged. Oliver had been deeply saddened by his failure, and his anxious thoughts told on his already enfeebled health. Death had been busy in his family circle. Young Rich, the newly wedded husband of his daughter Frances, died in February.5 On August 6 his best-beloved daughter, Lady Claypole, passed away after a long and painful illness. Oliver's sorrowing vigils by her bedside broke down what remained to him of bodily endurance. Now and again indeed he was able to take the air, and on one of these occasions George Fox coming to talk with him on the persecutions of the Friends, marked the changed expression of his face. "Before I came to him," noted Fox, "as he rode at the head of his life-guard, I saw and felt a waft of death go forth against him; and when I came to him he looked like a dead man." On August 24 the Protector moved to Whitehall. The ague from which he suffered increased in violence. On Sunday, August 29, prayers were offered up in the churches for his recovery. The following day was the day of that great storm which fixed itself in the memory of that generation. The devil, said the Cavaliers, had come to fetch home the soul of the murderer and tyrant. Around the bedside of the dying potentate more friendly eyes were keeping watch. "The doctors," wrote Thurloe to Henry Cromwell far away in Ireland, "are yet hopeful that he may struggle through it, though their hopes are mingled with much fear." Twenty-four hours later the hopeful signs were still dwelt on. "The Lord," wrote Fleetwood, "is pleased to give some little reviving this evening; after a few slumbering sleeps, his pulse is better." Scriptural words of warning and comfort were constantly on the sick man's lips. "It is a fearful thing," he three times repeated, "to fall into the hands of the living God." The anxious questioning was answered by his strong assurance of mercy. "Lord," he muttered, as the evening drew in, "though I am a miserable and wretched creature, I am in covenant with Thee through grace, and I may, I will come to Thee for Thy people. Thou hast made me, though very unworthy, a mean instrument to do them some good, and Thee service, and many of them have set too high a value upon me, though others wish, and would be glad of my death. Lord, however Thou do dispose of me, continue and go on to do good for them. Give them consistency of judgment, one heart, and mutual love; and go on to deliver them, and with the work of reformation, and make the name of Christ glorious in the world. Teach those who look too much on Thy instruments to depend more upon Thyself. Pardon such as desire to trample upon the dust of a poor worm, for they are Thy people too. And pardon the folly of this short prayer; even for Jesus Christ's sake. And give us a good night, if it be Thy pleasure. Amen."
The man – it is ever so with the noblest – was greater than his work. In his own heart lay the resolution to subordinate self to public ends, and to subordinate material to moral and spiritual objects of desire. His work was accomplished under the conditions to which all human effort is subject. He was limited by the defects which make imperfect the character and intellect even of the noblest and the wisest of mankind. He was limited still more by the unwillingness of his contemporaries to mould themselves after his ideas. The blows that he had struck against the older system had their enduring effects. Few wished for the revival of the absolute kingship, of the absolute authority of a single House of Parliament, or of the Laudian system of governing the Church. In the early part of his career Oliver was able to say with truth of his own position: "No one rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going". The living forces of England – forces making for the destruction of those barriers which he was himself breaking through, buoyed him up – as a strong and self-confident swimmer, he was carried onward by the flowing tide. In the latter portion of the Protector's career it was far otherwise. His failure to establish a permanent Government was not due merely to his deficiency in constructive imagination. It was due rather to two causes: the umbrage taken at his position as head of an army whose interference in political affairs gave even more offence than the financial burdens it imposed on a people unaccustomed to regular taxation; and the reaction which set in against the spiritual claims of that Puritanism of which he had become the mouthpiece. The first cause of offence requires no further comment. As for the second, it is necessary to lay aside all sectarian preoccupations, if ever a true historic judgment is to be formed. It was no reaction against the religious doctrines or ecclesiastical institutions upheld by the Protector that brought about the destruction of his system of government. It is in the highest degree unlikely that a revolution would ever have taken place merely to restore episcopacy or the Book of Common Prayer. So far as the reaction was not directed against militarism, it was directed against the introduction into the political world of what appeared to be too high a standard of morality, a reaction which struck specially upon Puritanism, but which would have struck with as much force upon any other form of religion which, like that upheld by Laud, called in the power of the State to enforce its claims.
Nor is this all that can be said. Even though Oliver was in his own person no sour fanatic, as Royalist pamphleteers after the Restoration falsely asserted; it is impossible to deny that he strove by acts of government to lead men into the paths of morality and religion beyond the limit which average human nature had fixed for itself. In dealing with foreign nations his mistake on this head was more conspicuous, because he had far less knowledge of the conditions of efficient action abroad than he had at home. It may fairly be said that he knew less of Scotland than of England, less of Ireland than of Great Britain, and less of the Continent than of any one of the three nations over which he ruled. It has sometimes been said that Oliver made England respected in Europe. It would be more in accordance with truth to say that he made her feared.
It is unnecessary here to pursue this subject further. The development of this theme is for the historian of England rather than for the biographer of the Protector. Oliver's claim to greatness can be tested by the undoubted fact that his character receives higher and wider appreciation as the centuries pass by. The limitations on his nature – the one-sidedness of his religious zeal, the mistakes of his policy – are thrust out of sight, the nobility of his motives, the strength of his character, and the breadth of his intellect, force themselves on the minds of generations for which the objects for which he strove have been for the most part attained, though often in a different fashion from that which he placed before himself. Even those who refuse to waste a thought on his spiritual aims remember with gratitude his constancy of effort to make England great by land and sea; and it would be well for them also to be reminded of his no less constant efforts to make England worthy of greatness.
Of the man himself, it is enough to repeat the words of one who knew him well: "His body was well compact and strong; his stature under six feet – I believe about two inches – his head so shaped as you might see it a store-house and shop both – of a vast treasury of natural parts. His temper exceeding fiery, as I have known; but the flame of it kept down for the most part, or soon allayed with those moral endowments he had. He was naturally compassionate towards objects in distress, even to an effeminate measure; though God had made him a heart wherein was left little room for any fear but was due to Himself, of which there was a large proportion – yet did he exceed in tenderness towards sufferers. A larger soul, I think, hath seldom dwelt in a house of clay."
