King and commonwealth

RICHARD CROMWELL.—ANARCHY.—THE RESTORATION.—1658–1660.

Cromwell, by uniting in his own person the offices of general and protector, had curbed the ambition of his military subordinates, while he established a government capable of winning the respect if not the affection of civilians, The standing army was a fact and a necessity against which it would have been vain for him to contend, but none the less was it a worm in the bud of the Protectorate. The retention of such an army in the hands of the executive must in time have proved fatal to liberty. It was indeed just possible that the new protector might possess both the ability and moderation of his great predecessor, be willing to rule as a constitutional king, and be able to bridle the army till he could dispense with it. But if these qualities were not found combined in the same man, the nation must expect shipwreck on one rock or the other. Should the new protector be capable without being moderate, he would use the army as an instrument of arbitrary power; should he on the contrary be moderate without being capable, his officers might depose him and inaugurate a vicious succession of ephemeral military governments.

The Petition and Advice gave the protector power to appoint his successor, and Richard Cromwell, Oliver’s eldest son, now took office in right of his father’s deathbed nomination. The young man was by nature not ill fitted to play the part of a constitutional king in quiet times; he was unprejudiced and not fanatical; his temper was mild; he was always ready to give ear to counsel. On the other hand he was deficient in those qualities which are most essential for a ruler in troubled times; he had not the qualities which ensure obedience and respect; he had no insight into character; no firmness, no power of command. Hence the ambition of the officers, combined with his own weakness, produced a period of anarchy and misgovernment which caused the Restoration of our English Bourbons to be regarded for a time as a blessing to the country.

RICHARD CROMWELL’S PARLIAMENT.

At first, indeed, the shadow of Oliver’s greatness shielded his son; at home no faction dared raise its head; abroad foreign governments recognized the new protector, and refused to hold any communication with Charles Stuart. This tranquillity, however, lasted but a few months. The Republicans scoffed at the idea of a man of third-rate capacity maintaining a throne they had been at such pains to overthrow; the soldiers despised a general who had never led them to battle. The leading officers were no admirers of privilege, and were unwilling to allow that the weak and vacillating Richard gained any right to stand above themselves from the mere accident of birth. Fleetwood wished to divide the offices of protector and general and to govern as general in Richard’s name. Lambert was believed to aspire to the protectorship itself. “I wish Lambert was dead,” writes a Royalist, “there is no small danger his reputation with the army may thrust Dick Cromwell (who sits like an ape on horseback) out of the saddle, and yet not help the king into it.”[253] The meeting of Parliament was the signal for action to both Republicans and officers (Jan. 27). Vane opposed Richard’s right to the protectorship in words winged to reach the hearts of both Republicans and soldiers. “The people of England,” he said, “are now renowned all over the world for their great virtue and discipline; and yet suffer an idiot without courage, without sense, nay, without ambition, to have dominion in a country of liberty! One could bear a little with Oliver Cromwell, though, contrary to his oath of fidelity to the Parliament, contrary to his duty to the public, contrary to the respect he owed that venerable body from which he received his authority, he usurped the government. His merit was so extraordinary, that our judgments, our passions, might be blinded by it. He made his way to empire by the most illustrious actions: he had under his command an army that had made him a conqueror, and a people that had made him their general. But as for Richard Cromwell, his son, who is he? what are his titles? We have seen that he had a sword by his side, but did he ever draw it? And, what is of more importance in this case, is he fit to get obedience from a mighty nation, who could never make a footman obey him? yet we must recognize this man as our king, under the style of protector!—a man without birth, without courage, without conduct. For my part, I declare, sir, it shall never be said that I made such a man my master.”[254] Richard, however, had many able friends in the House, such as the lawyers St. John and Whitelock, Thurloe his secretary, and other civilians and councillors, who hoped to establish an hereditary and constitutional monarchy under the house of Cromwell. These succeeded in obtaining a majority to follow them. Richard’s ‘right’ to govern, though not his ‘undoubted right’ was recognized, and a vote was carried to transact business with Oliver’s lords, the ‘Other House.’ The officers, however, desiring themselves to govern the country, and jealous of the influence which civilians exercised in Richard’s counsels, determined on the dissolution of the Parliament. Desborough, acting as their spokesman, told the protector that if he would do as they proposed, the officers would take care of him, but if he refused, they would do without him and leave him to shift for himself, Richard yielded, and thus virtually surrendered his authority into their hands (April 22nd).

FALL OF RICHARD CROMWELL.

The struggle between the army and the civil power, which Oliver had closed by the establishment of the protectorate, was now renewed. Conscious of their own unpopularity with the country, instead of summoning a new Parliament, the officers restored the Rump (May 7th). At the request of this body, Richard retired from Whitehall and thus formally resigned his ten-months’ dignity (July). The officers intended to govern in the name of their allies; the Rump on its part meant to rule the soldiery. But in revolutionary times might is right, and the people fully understanding the terms on which this extinct Parliament was revived, only derided its assumption of power. “Do the men in the Parliament House signify any more,” says a pamphlet, “than the man that stands upon the clock in Westminster Abbey with the hammer in his hand, and when the iron wheel bids him strike, he strikes: hath it not been so between the army and the Parliament, as it is called?”[255] During Oliver’s protectorate the Presbyterians with all their dislike to his rule would never unite with “malignants” for the restoration of Charles Stuart. But now the dread of military tyrants overcame fears and prejudices. The union of Royalists and Presbyterians, however, itself restored in turn a forced accord between the House and the officers, which for the time crushed the hopes of the rival coalition. The same spies whom Oliver had once employed now revealed to the new government the conspiracies of its opponents. Only in Cheshire did any considerable rising take place. Sir George Booth, who appeared at the head of 4000 men, was defeated by Lambert and brought a prisoner to London. After this success the old quarrel was renewed. The officers asked that a standing senate should carry on the government in conjunction with a House of Commons; and further that no commissions should be revoked without the consent of a court-martial. By the first demand they thought to place the government virtually in their own hands; by the second to secure for the military a complete independence of the civil power. The House in its turn tried to keep the army dependent upon themselves for pay by voting it treason to levy money without consent of Parliament. Having thus as they hoped defended themselves against a sudden dissolution, they proceeded to cashier Lambert, Desborough, and six other colonels; and to put the command of the army in commission, by reducing Fleetwood, whom they had appointed commander-in-chief to check Booth’s rising, to the position of a mere president of a board of seven (Oct. 12th). These votes were equal to a declaration of war, and the next day Lambert marched to Westminster at the head of 3000 soldiers. He found a guard of several regiments, friendly to the Republicans, already stationed round Parliament House. These regiments refused to fight their old comrades in arms, and fraternized with Lambert’s men. Lenthall, the Speaker, tried in vain to recall the troops to allegiance to the House. As the nominal head of the new government he had lately renewed the officers’ commissions. “I am your general,” he said, “I expect your obedience.” “If you had marched before us over Warrington Bridge” (p. 229) “we should have known you,” was the curt reply. The will of the army had been expressed, and the Rump discontinued its sittings.

ANARCHY.—THE RUMP AGAIN.

The officers now conducted the government by a Committee of Safety, consisting of a few Republicans and a majority of their own party. These military rulers, however, were foiled in their turn. There was in Scotland another army and another commander-in-chief, whose consent had not been given to this pronunciamento. General Monk owed no allegiance to Desborough or Fleetwood; locked in his breast he had his scheme of a settlement for the kingdom.Monk marches from Scotland. Setting his army in motion to march south, he astutely proclaimed his intention ‘to stand to, and assert the liberty and authority of Parliament.’ The Republicans understood that he came to restore the Rump; the Cavaliers and Presbyterians that he came to summon a free Parliament, and thus prepare the way for the restoration of the Stuarts. Republicans, Presbyterians, and Cavaliers all took courage and refused obedience to the Committee of Safety, and the country was practically without any government at all. A part of the fleet declared for the Republicans, and took custom duties of all ships passing up and down the Thames. The governor of Portsmouth admitted into the town some regiments of Republican troops. Taxes could only be levied by force, for all over the country the people refused to pay ‘without consent of Parliament.’ The support of Presbyterian London at the opening of the war had enabled the Parliament to make war upon the king. But Presbyterian London was now become strongly Royalist, and its hostility threatened to be fatal to the ascendancy of a divided army. Fleetwood and Desborough tried in vain to cajole the Common Council into advancing a loan of £30,000. Soldiers had to be quartered in the city to prevent the apprentices from rising; quarrels ensued, and lives were lost on both sides. The goldsmiths in Cheapside and Lombard Street closed their shops and concealed their money and goods. The courts in Westminster Hall ceased to sit, for the commissions of the judges had expired, and there was no authority competent to renew them. After having thus brought all government to a standstill, the officers saw only two courses open to them—the one to join with the Presbyterians and restore the House of Stuart; the other to reinstate the Republicans. The latter was preferred, and the members of the Rump resumed their sittings (26th Dec.).

THE RESTORATION.

Monk, meanwhile, was advancing from Scotland at the head of 7000 men. Lambert some weeks previously had marched north to oppose his approach with a force of 10,000 men (Nov.). But when his force had reached Marston Moor, the great Yorkshireman, Lord Fairfax, emerged from his retirement in Wharfedale to decide the fate of England. Like other sincere patriots, he regarded the restoration of the Stuarts as the only means of saving his country from utter anarchy. He had already promised Monk to effect a rising and attack Lambert in the rear as soon as the Scotch army had engaged him in front. But his victory was bloodless. A message came that a whole brigade in the rear of Lambert’s army was ready to join him the next day on Marston Moor. Upon his arrival the troops presented their old general with a petition in favour of a free Commonwealth and against a government by a single person. Fairfax in reply tore the paper in pieces, and placed himself at the head of his raw Yorkshire levies, as though with them alone he were ready to fight a veteran army. His decision produced a strange effect. Troop after troop, regiment after regiment, came over to his side. Lambert, almost entirely deserted, slunk away to a country house[256] (3rd Jan.). Monk was now able to march to London unopposed.Monk declares for a free Parliament. When his troops were once securely quartered in the capital, he declared himself plainly for a ‘free Parliament.’ This meant the return of Charles Stuart, for which every four men out of five now longed (10th Feb.). The city went wild with delight. Bells were rung; loyal healths were drunk in every street; the whole heaven was made aglow with the light of hundreds of bonfires; hardly one without a rump roasting before it, ‘for the celebration of the funeral of the Parliament.’ That funeral was near at hand. The Republicans were still sitting when the old Presbyterian members, who were expelled by Colonel Pride eleven years before, were escorted by a guard to retake their seats at Westminster (21st Feb.).Long Parliament dissolved by its own act. According to promises made to Monk, these members carried the voluntary dissolution of the House, and named the 25th of April for the meeting of a new and free Parliament (16th March). This new Parliament is commonly described as a convention, being summoned without the royal writ. Conventions are, in fact, national assemblies held, when the constitution is in abeyance, for the specific purpose of establishing some form of government. The Lower House was filled with Cavaliers and Presbyterians so Royalist in feeling that the few Republicans who were returned hardly dared show their faces among their fellow-members. The House of Lords was represented at its opening by only ten peers, Presbyterians, who resumed their seats after an absence of eleven years. This Convention at once invited Charles Stuart to return to his kingdom. There was reason, however, to fear that his return might not be accomplished without bloodshed, for, though the nation was united, the national will was opposed by a body of 50,000 fighting men. Every precaution was taken by Monk to divide the army and raise a force that might be able to cope with it. The fleet had now declared itself on the side of the nation; the London train-bands alone numbered 20,000 men; the militia was being trained and organized in every county; the citizens spared neither wine nor money to secure the favour, or at least the neutrality, of Monk’s troops, who were quartered amongst them. Yet men and officers would sooner have fought their new friends than feasted with them. ‘They were like beasts,’ they would say, when feasting in the city halls, ‘set up a-fatting for the slaughter.’ But the army, though numerous, was not capable of combined and decisive action. Numbers, even though backed by bravery and skill, can avail little without a leader. The position of Monk commanded the obedience of the soldiers, while the support of Fairfax conciliated their feelings. On the other hand, neither Lambert, Desborough, nor Fleetwood could inspire the confidence that where they led victory must follow. Charles Stuart returned from his exile in peace and triumph. Yet on the day when the new king made his entry into the capital, and on his way passed through the army which was drawn up on Blackheath to meet him, the officers kissed the royal hand with evident reluctance, while the men, as they stood sullenly amidst rejoicing thousands, looked like some black thunder-cloud that might end the sunny day of triumph by dispersing the crowds of welcomers in terror to their homes (29th May).[257] The dangerous day of entry over, the standing army was within a few months disbanded. The enemies of the royal prerogative feared it might be remodelled into an instrument of tyranny; while zealous Royalists still dreaded the terrible troopers who had raised a Cromwell to the throne. The return of the Stuarts, therefore, benefited the country by saving it from the rule of military governors who might have tried to play the rôle of the great protector without his incomparable genius for statesmanship. The longer the struggle lasted, the fiercer and more sanguinary it must have become, and all peace-loving men dreaded the day when the Fifth-Monarchists, Anabaptists, and Republicans who filled the army should each in succession signalize a short-lived triumph by a proscription of political and religious opponents. The Stuarts or anarchy—that was the only choice. The Restoration may therefore justly be regarded as a necessity, but nevertheless the day that brought back the exiled race to our shores, was the beginning of a brief but dark period of decay. The reaction which follows a revolution is always a heavy drawback on the advantages which may ultimately spring from the triumph of the people in a struggle. With the return of Charles Stuart came a great reaction. An heroic age had gone by, and with it all noble aspirations. The government of Charles II. was the most shameless England ever endured. The leaders of the State and the leaders of society were alike venal and immoral. As in the worst days of the Roman empire, virtue and self-respect vanished together.[258] Avowedly governed by self-interest, cupidity, and mere sensual desires, they refused to believe in the existence of higher motives of action. The king and his courtiers alike lived profligate lives; the king and his ministers alike received pensions from France. The Episcopal Church again set herself to work to teach the divine right of kings and the duty of passive obedience, and repaid the Presbyterians for the active help they had given in the Restoration, by rejecting all proposals for accommodation and inaugurating an universal persecution of nonconformists. The House of Commons, in an excess of loyal zeal, undid much of the best work of the first years of the Long Parliament; it passed persecuting laws, which continued for nearly two centuries to inflame the religious passions of the strong, and corrupt the morals of the weak; broke up the union which the united efforts of Vane and Cromwell had established between the three kingdoms; by repealing the Triennial Bill destroyed the only security then existing for the continuity of Parliamentary life; and, by returning to the old system of representation, placed in power a corrupt oligarchy representing but a mere minority of the nation, which tried to press down the most active forces of opinion, causing upheaval after upheaval, till the buried giants were at last rendered harmless by the outlet given through the Reform Bill of 1832.

CAUSES OF REACTION.

The reaction which set in in favour of the Stuarts was a necessary consequence of the revolution itself. In the beginning of a struggle for freedom, the people start with fresh vigour, believing in the goodness of their cause and the great things they are about to accomplish. Civil war soon engenders strong feelings of partisanship, and these in turn errors and excesses. If the popular revolution is successful, a newly established government, not having prescription on its side, cannot pursue the same mild treatment of political offenders as if it rested on a foundation of centuries. Hence it has recourse to harsh or arbitrary acts, and brings into disrepute the great watchwords in the name of which the struggle for freedom commenced. A generation had now grown up which knew nothing of the sentences of the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission, or of the arbitrary acts committed under Strafford’s policy of “thorough;” while even in the minds of older men the remembrance of all this had been dimmed by the changes and troubles of the past sixteen years. The erection of high courts of justice, the sale and transportation of freeborn Englishmen, government by major-generals, not to mention the forced observance of Sundays and fast days, with the suppression of old-established games, these seemed after all to be the outcome of Republican liberty and justice. If the apostles of liberty only declaimed against tyranny done for them, not by them, then indeed “all men were liars.” It is by thus sowing the seeds of disbelief in the goodness of the best of causes that times of revolution produce immoral politicians. Men see acts of violence, which necessity itself finds hard to justify, constantly committed around them; what is held sacred on one day contemned on another; oaths required to which neither heart nor intellect assents. At last the pressure of the times makes self-interest the rule of action; personal security a point of greater moment than fidelity to friends or country. The career of General Monk, who shared in the government both before and after the Restoration, bears the stamp of his political training. His family was Royalist, and he originally served in the king’s armies in Ireland. On being taken prisoner he changed his side, and received a commission in the Parliament’s army. Cromwell, who noticed his military genius, advanced him to be commander-in-chief in Scotland, and he afterwards served as admiral on board the fleet, and shared with Blake the triumphs of the Dutch war. His fidelity Cromwell had never cause to suspect, and if Richard had had the strength to maintain his own power, and so guard the interests of his friends, Monk would not have withdrawn his support from the protectorate. But no principle bound him to any special form of government, or to the House of Cromwell more than to the House of Stuart. Foreseeing the issue of events, he determined to be the first to act for the king, and thus to gain the credit of the Restoration. His reward was a seat in the council, and the title of Duke of Albemarle. Together with many others, who had taken a leading part in the late government, he did not shrink from sitting as judge in a court of justice which condemned his late friends to death as traitors. Very different to this was the school in which the statesmen of the Long Parliament had been trained. During the first quarter of the century the nation, braced by its triumph over Catholicism and Spain, was nerved for a struggle to make its political liberties more secure, and ‘reform reformation’ in religion. The only weapons it possessed were those offered by a free constitution. A single deviation from principle, a single sacrifice of the cause of the nation for that of the man, a single violent and illegal action, might throw back the work for years if not for centuries. The triumphs of the past, the great future before them, the necessity of courage and self-sacrifice, bred a race of heroes, fired by a strong spirit of patriotism, and by a yet stronger sense of duty, till they were ready to lay down their lives for their country and their conscience. The ‘men who produce revolutions’ are, indeed, of a different stamp from the men ‘whom revolutions produce.’

THE PURITANS AND EDUCATION.

The general fall in the moral tone of the nation may be also in part ascribed to errors into which the Puritans were led through their intense earnestness. The Puritans held that it is one of the first duties of a government to attend to the subject’s welfare as a spiritual and intellectual being. This truth was capable of a right and wise application, as well as a fanatical perversion. Protection of person and property touches the lower man only; to instruct his mind and soul concerns the ordering of his higher existence. Thus Milton’s noble longing was that every faculty of a man’s whole being should be educated, so that he might have liberty, and know how to use it. “Make it a shame,” said Cromwell in the same spirit to one of his Parliaments, “to see men bold in sin and profaneness, and God will bless you. You will be a blessing to the nation; and by this, will be more repairers of breaches than by anything in the world. Truly these things do respect the souls of men, and the spirits—which are the men—the mind is the man. If that be kept pure, a man signifies somewhat; if not, I would very fain see what difference there is betwixt him and a beast. He hath only some activity to do some more mischief.”[259] With these feelings, Cromwell was specially careful of educational institutions; he fostered the old universities of the south, and founded a new one at Durham for the north; he reformed the character of the ministry—then the only educators—by exacting a strict inquiry before admission, so that the benefices of the Church might no longer be the refuge of the idle and the ignorant. The Long Parliament, when confiscating the property of bishops and ‘delinquents,’ spared any revenues that were devoted to educational uses. In the New England States, where Puritans held absolute sway, while the popular voice required the adoption of the foolish policy of punishing sins as crimes, yet the legislators really raised the level of society by enacting a law of compulsory education. But though the chief leaders of the Puritan movement were advanced enough to perceive the slow but sure effect of education in bringing about a real improvement in the morals of a people, the large majority of their followers were allured by the deluding appearances of immediate reform produced by a policy of coercion. Influenced by Hebrew precedents, these sanguine spirits hoped by their legislation to compel the nation to live up to a higher and sterner ideal. Republicans, Independents, and Presbyterians alike took delight in fencing virtue about with penal laws, which often related to acts indifferent in themselves. In this they defeated their own end. Outward conduct was influenced, but the heart and intellect revolted at the interference. Had the Puritans wished to excite a desire of raising Maypoles, dancing on Sundays, and attending play-houses, they could not have done better than forbid any to take part in such amusements under pain of a fine or a whipping. To enact for swearing, drinking, and gambling, punishments out of all proportion to the offence, was the most efficacious means to create sympathy for offenders. Many, after figuring awkwardly as unwilling saints, as soon as the unnatural bonds were loosed, wallowed more than ever in vice, and scoffed at virtue as mere cant and hypocrisy. The mass of the nation, however, was not so much affected by this reaction as might be supposed from the profligacy of the court. The Puritan spirit had too much that was noble in it to be easily extinguished. It still lives as one of the great moral forces of the nation, and is still to be seen in its two aspects—in the consuming zeal of the far-sighted reformer on the one hand, in the narrow but elevating austerity of the unintelligent and uneducated on the other. It still helps men to prefer the higher to the lower, the future to the present. England would not have been what it is had the salt of the nation been transported elsewhere by a succession of ‘Mayflowers,’ or exterminated by St. Bartholomew massacres.

THE REBELLION—THE REVOLUTION.

In the political sphere, again, although much failed of immediate accomplishment, the work of Cromwell and his compeers was never really undone. To use the words of Burke, “a great deal of the furniture of ancient tyranny was torn to rags.” Taxation without consent of Parliament was never attempted after the Restoration. Torture was never employed in England after the meeting of the Long Parliament.[260] The temper of the nation never again could bear the jurisdiction of arbitrary courts of justice, Above all there remained in the recollection of the nation the precedent of the Great Rebellion, The signal successes of that rebellion were convincing proofs of the power of the people. In great crises the consciousness, that power lies in the last resort with the people, can remove aristocratic prejudices that seem to lie like lead on the minds of legislators. The glories of Louis Quatorze blinded the eyes of the French court till the lessons of the Revolution revealed the secret; but to English legislators the secret was open, that beneath them lay an invisible force, which they might be allowed to trifle with, but never to trample on. Twenty-eight years after Charles II. was restored, James II. fled to France. A coward, a bigot, and a fool, unable to read aright his father’s history, he endeavoured to establish in England at once arbitrary government, and the ascendancy of the Catholic religion. Even the natural supporters of the prerogative went against him. Ministers, courtiers, and nobles, while loudly avowing their detestation of treason and rebellion, turned against the tyrant who excluded from his council all but Papist converts and Jesuits. The clergy, though regardless of their country’s liberties, turned against the spoiler of their Church. The people, detesting the tyrant and the bigot alike, were glad enough to see the upper classes do the work of resistance for them. The crown was declared vacant, and offered by Parliament to William and Mary of Orange. By the change of succession a fatal blow was given to the pernicious doctrine of divine right, and the law was, once for all, declared superior to the prerogative. William, by accepting the crown as a gift of Parliament, virtually admitted that he would reign as a constitutional king, holding sacred the authority of the law, and carrying out whatever reforms Parliament should consider essential for the welfare of the people. Thus was the Revolution terminated, after a struggle which has lasted for nearly all the ninety years of the Stuart régime. The executive was brought into dependence upon the legislature, and the government of the country fixed as a constitutional monarchy. Laws granting toleration to Catholics and to Puritans, laws securing the liberty of the press, laws securing the independence of the judges, are all fruits, that time has ripened, of the armed resistance offered by the Long Parliament to Charles I.

FRANCE AND ENGLAND.

In estimating the debt of gratitude that England owes the leaders of the Great Rebellion, the moderation with which they did their work must never be forgotten. Even in the heat of civil strife they respected constitutional forms. That they fought for the king, and not against him, was not a mere quibble, but the secret of their strength. It might, in fact, be not unfairly said, that in the first instance the rebels were not those who maintained the supremacy of law, but the supporters of the new theory of divine right and the usurpations they called prerogative. It is indeed remarkable how, throughout the whole course of English history, the cause of liberty has less often been advanced by the concession of new rights than by the ratification of old. Thus the Petition of Rights and the Bill of Rights, far from introducing any great change into the constitution, are mainly the reassertion of rights already recognized at law. Such a course of conservative progress was impossible in France, where the monarchy destroyed its own foundations by its excesses. The permanence of kingship in England is due to its association with a popular constitution. The French monarchy had its constitutional limits, till a centralized absolutism took the place of free institutions. Then when the crash came there was nothing known of the constitution except what was detested. Hence constitutional monarchs in France, instead of being looked on as representatives of an honoured past, are simply judged upon their own merits. The first storm of unpopularity drives them out of office as if their rule was no more than that of an English ministry. Thus, since the first break in continuity, no form of government in France has lasted for more than twenty years together. Again, the English revolution was far less sanguinary than the French, because its causes were not, as in France, social. In France an aristocracy, answering both to nobility and gentry in England, possessed many privileges, which appeared the more odious, because exercised by men who took no part in the government. In England the people were not ground down; taxes did not fall heaviest upon those who had least; a large portion of the nobles and gentry made common cause with the people; the watchwords of an absolute and envious “equality” never assumed any prominence in the struggle. There was no rising of a famine-stricken peasantry; no burning of châteaux; no flight of a whole aristocracy, to be avenged by foreign invasion. Had Strafford succeeded in establishing an arbitrary throne, supported by a standing army; had the English nobles and gentry, in compensation for the loss of political rights, obtained exemption from taxation and other exclusive privileges, the revolution might have been deferred indeed, but its character, when it came, might have been as violent and sanguinary as the French. Equality before the law, a free press, every political and social reform that our constitution has been found capable of adopting without any violent change of form, might then have been only obtainable by rooting up the old order of things, and severing all the links that now bind the present to the past. The nation, divided into factions, hating and fearing one another too much for conciliation or even for the preservation of political morality, might have fallen a prey to the ambition of military usurpers, and found itself incapable of constructing a free and lasting government. De Tocqueville justly remarks that the effect of two centuries of absolute government on the French was to make the nation so little prepared to act for itself, that it could not reform all without destroying all: and hence the same revolution, which destroyed so many institutions, ideas, and customs opposed to liberty, destroyed, at the same time, so many others which are the necessary conditions of liberty, that, like the monarchy, it destroyed its own foundations by its excesses. Such revolutions may be said, like Saturn of old, to devour all their own children except the one who is born the new tyrant to supplant themselves.

FATE OF REGICIDES.

The moderation of the leaders of the Rebellion was remarkable enough, but their faith was even more remarkable; they did not know how to despair. “If Pope and Spaniard and devil and all set themselves against us,” says Cromwell, “though they should compass us like bees, yet in the name of the Lord we should destroy them.” A sort of spiritual pride, based on the cause for which they fought, was shared by these Puritan leaders with their less gifted followers, but the faith which engendered this pride inspired them with a rare humility. Though they gave proof enough of remarkable abilities, they never regarded their own personal success, and the success of their cause as bound up together. “It was a most indifferent thing to him to live or die,” said Pym; “God could carry on His work by others.” “Truly,” said the Lord Protector, “I have, as before God, often thought that I could not tell what my business was, nor what I was in the place I stood in, save comparing myself to a good constable, to keep the peace of the parish.” Cromwell’s pre-eminent ability sufficed to ward off the Restoration, while he lived. But the same spirit of faith that in seasons of greatest peril ‘shone in him like a pillar of fire,’ did not fail in evil days to sustain and animate those who had been his companions in the camp and the senate-house. Evil days indeed there were to come, for though the transition itself was accomplished without bloodshed, the old leaders were not suffered to escape, The new king, before he left Holland, published a proclamation, commanding his father’s judges to surrender themselves up within fourteen days, on pain of being excepted from any pardon or indemnity either as to their lives or estates. Ludlow, putting no faith in royal promises, escaped in time to the continent; his gravestone stands in the churchyard at Vevay, overlooking the Lake of Geneva, near which he lived on long enough to hear that the Revolution was consummated by the accession of William and Mary, though even then he found his presence was not tolerated in his country. Hutchinson, who surrendered upon the proclamation, died in prison in the course of a few months from the effects of confinement and bad air. Marten, after twenty years’ imprisonment, died an old man of seventy-eight at Chepstow Castle, in Monmouthshire (1681). Through all his sufferings he never regretted what he had done. We are told that towards the end of his life, he was allowed to take walks with his guard beyond the castle walls. An inhabitant of a neighbouring village used to ask him to rest in his house, and one day put the critical question, whether, supposing the deed were to be done over again, he would again sign the king’s death-warrant. The stern old regicide lost his entry to the house by his indomitable “Yes.” The blind Milton suffered with the friends whose cause his pen had so ably defended. His losses he regretted no more than he had regretted the loss of the eyes he sacrificed in writing his defence of the king’s execution against the attack of Salmasius—

THE RESTORATION—REVENGE.

Nine of the king’s judges were executed as traitors, besides Cook, the solicitor at the High Court of Justice, Hacker and Axtell, the commanders of the guard on the day of the execution, and Hugh Peters, the Independent minister, through whose good offices Juxon had been allowed to attend the king during his last hours. They all died bravely, expressing confidence in the justice of their cause. Amongst their judges sat the Presbyterians, Denzil Hollis and the Earl of Manchester; the Independent, Lord Say-and-Sele; and even Monk himself, now Marquis of Albemarle, and Sir Antony Ashley Cooper, afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury, both of whom had been leading members of the government under the protectorate, but were now trying to efface the memories of their own acts by the severity of the measures they dealt to their old friends and accomplices. Well might Lord Fairfax indignantly exclaim, that ‘if any man must be excepted, he knew no man that deserved it more than himself, who was the general of the army at the time.’ Not satisfied with wreaking their vengeance upon the living, the Royalists insulted the remains of the dead. The remains of the historian May, the two victorious admirals, Blake and Popham, the great constitutional statesman, John Pym, and even those of the protector’s mother, and his daughter, Lady Claypole, were torn out of their graves in Westminster Abbey, and flung together into a pit near the back-door of one of the prebendaries’ houses at Westminster; while the bodies of Bradshaw, of Ireton, and of Cromwell himself, the greatest ruler that England ever produced, were dragged to Tyburn and there hanged on gibbets.

EXECUTION OF VANE.

But of all the enormities of the Restoration, the most iniquitous was the trial and execution of Sir Henry Vane. Charles and Hyde, now Lord Chancellor Clarendon, had obtained the exception of Vane’s name out of the Act of Indemnity, as passed by the Convention Parliament, by promising that if he were attainted, his sentence should be remitted. In 1662, that Parliament had given place to one more reactionary and more sanguinary; the ruse had served its turn; and while renegades obtained life and pardon by giving false witness against the living and defaming the dead, the noble Republican statesman was accused of high treason against Charles II. for having exercised civil and military functions under the usurping government. A law of Henry VII., drawing a distinction between the king de facto and the king de jure, had assured indemnity to all persons who obeyed the king for the time being on the throne. Vane, therefore, could fairly defend himself by arguing that the Parliament being the government for the time being, there was no treason in acting under it, since this law limited the word ‘king’ in the statute of treasons to a king actually on the throne, and declared, in fact, there could be no treason in acting against one who was merely king de jure. He also pleaded the undoubted fact that he had opposed the act of the regicides at the time, and refused approbation afterwards. He was not, however, suffered to escape because law and justice were on his side. The chief justice was reported to have said, “Though we know not what to say to him, we know what to do with him.” The court decided that Charles II. had been king de facto as well as de jure from the moment of his father’s death, though “kept out of the exercise of his royal authority by traitors and rebels.” Vane heard with composure that the Restoration was to be consummated by his death. “This dark night and black shade,” he wrote to his wife, “which God hath drawn over His work in the midst of us, may be, for aught we know, the ground-colour to some beautiful piece that He is now exposing to the light.” True to his principles, he ascribed his country’s calamities to the imperfections of himself and her ministers, and gloried in his trial as a means of showing how death may be contemned by him who suffers in a good cause. “Ten thousand deaths,” he said to his friends, “rather than defile my conscience, the chastity and purity of which I value beyond all the world! I would not for ten thousand lives part with this peace and satisfaction I have in my own heart, both in holding to the purity of my principles and to the righteousness of this good cause, and to the assurance I have that God is now fulfilling all these great and precious promises, in order to what He is bringing forth. Although I see it not, yet I die in the faith and assured expectation of it.” On the day of execution, Tower Hill and the roofs of the neighbouring houses were crowded with spectators. When Vane attempted to address them, the trumpets were ordered to blow, in fear of the impression his last words might make. “It is a bad cause,” he said, “which cannot bear the words of a dying man.” His last words at the block were: “Father, glorify Thy servant in the sight of men, that he may glorify Thee in the discharge of his duty to Thee and to his country.” The crowd dispersed awe-struck, regarding his constancy as a “miracle.” “He was great in all his actions, but to me he seemed greatest in his sufferings,” wrote a friend of his family; while a Royalist present at the scene remarked that “the king lost more by that man’s death than he will get again for a good while.” Such was the death of the great English stoic, a fitting close to the history of an heroic age.