of death upon the man who had shown himself so wanting in that elemental quality of veracity upon which laws and constitutions are built up. All that is known of Cromwell's conduct at the trial his anger with Downes's scruples and the pressure which he put upon those who were unwilling to sign the death-warrant point to his contempt for the legal forms with which others were attempting to cover an action essentially illegal.

Tradition has handed down an anecdote which points to the same explanation of the workings of Cromwell's mind. "The night after King Charles was beheaded," it is said, "my Lord Southampton and a friend of his got leave to sit up by the body in the banqueting house at Whitehall. As they were sitting very melancholy there, about two o'clock in the morning they heard the tread of somebody coming very slowly upstairs. By and by the door opened, and a man entered very much muffled up in his cloak, and his face quite hid in it. He approached the body, considered it very attentively for some time, and then shook his head, sighed out the words, 'Cruel necessity!' He then departed in

the same slow and concealed manner as he had come. Lord Southampton used to say that he could not distinguish anything of his face; but that by his voice and gait he took him to be Oliver Cromwell."

Whether the necessity really existed or was but the tyrant's plea is a question upon the answer to which men have long differed, and will probably continue to differ. All can perceive that with Charles's death the main obstacle to the establishment of a constitutional system was removed. Personal rulers might indeed reappear, and Parliament had not yet so displayed its superiority as a governing power to make Englishmen anxious to dispense with monarchy in some form or other. The monarchy, as Charles understood it, had disappeared forever. Insecurity of tenure would make it impossible for future rulers long to set public opinion at naught, as Charles had done. The scaffold at Whitehall accomplished that which neither the eloquence of Eliot and Pym nor the statutes and ordinances of the Long Parliament had been capable of effecting.

So far the work of Cromwell and his associates had been purely negative. They had overthrown everything; they had constituted nothing. They fondly hoped that when the obstacle to peace had been removed, they would be able securely to walk in the ways of peace. It was not so to be. The sword destroys but it can do no more, and it would be left for others than the stern warriors

who guarded the scaffold of the king to build up slowly and painfully that edifice of constitutional compromise for which Cromwell had cleared the ground.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Compare the judgment given above by Gardiner with those rendered by Morley, Firth, and Harrison in their lives of Cromwell. Hallam, Constitutional History, Part I, chap. x. Ranke, History of England, Vol. II, chap. vi.

CHAPTER VI

CROMWELL AND PARLIAMENT

THE Puritans found opposition and fighting a great deal easier than governing a country which was royalist at heart. They did not dare to call a freely elected Parliament and let the nation decide on the form of government to be adopted. The remnant of the Long Parliament which continued to sit after the execution of the king was divided into factions, and many of the members were corruptly seeking their own advancement. When Cromwell urged this Parliament to dissolve itself, it proposed that the members then sitting should be continued in the new Parliament without election and should exercise the right to exclude new members whom they did not approve. This roused the ire of Cromwell, and in April, 1653, he forcibly dissolved the assembly but refused to call an elected Parliament which he had been urging.

§ 1. The Issues between the Army and Parliament 1

1

The military revolution of 1653 is the next tall landmark after the execution of the king. It is almost a commonplace that "we do not know what party means if we suppose that its leader is its master," and the real extent of Cromwell's power over the army is hard to measure. In the spring of 1647, when the first violent breach between army and Parliament took place, the extremists swept him off his feet. Then he acquiesced in Pride's Purge, but he did not originate it. In the action that preceded the trial and despatching of the king it seems to have been Harrison who took the leading part. In 1653 Cromwell said, "Major-General Harrison is an honest man, and aims at good things; yet from the impatience of his spirit, he will not wait the Lord's leisure, but 1 Morley, Cromwell, pp. 329 ff. By permission of The Century Company, Publishers.

hurries one into that which he and all honest men will have cause to repent." If we remember how hard it is to fathom decisive passages in the history of our own time, we see how much of that which we would most gladly know in the distant past must ever remain a surmise. But the best opinion in respect of the revolution of April, 1653, seems to be that the Royalists were not wrong who wrote that Cromwell's authority in the army depended much on Harrison and Lambert and their fanatical factions; that he was forced to go with them in order to save himself; and that he was the member of the triumvirate who was most anxious to wait the Lord's leisure yet a while longer.

66

The immediate plea for the act of violence that now followed is as obscure as any other of Cromwell's proceedings. In the closing months of 1652 he once more procured occasions of conference between himself and his officers on the one hand, and members of Parliament on the other. He besought the Parliament men by their own means to bring forth of their own accord the good things that had been promised and were so long expected — so tender were we to preserve them in the reputation of the people." The list of "good things" demanded by the army in the autumn of 1652 hardly supports the modern exaltation of the army as the seat of political sagacity. The payment of arrears, the suppression of vagabonds, the provision of work for the poor, were objects easy to ask, but impossible to achieve. The request for a new election was the least sensible of all.

When it was known that the army was again waiting on God and confessing its sinfulness, things were felt to look grave. Seeing the agitation, the Parliament applied themselves in earnest to frame a scheme for a new representative body. The army believed that the scheme was a sham, and that the semblance of giving the people a real right of choice was only to fill up vacant seats by such persons as the House now in possession should approve. This was nothing less than to perpetuate themselves indefinitely. Cromwell and the officers had a scheme of their own: that the Parliament should name a certain number of men of the right sort, and these nominees should build a constitution. The Parliament, in other words, was to abdicate after calling a constituent conOn April 19 a meeting took place in Oliver's apartment at Whitehall with a score of the more important members of Parliament. There the plan of the officers and the rival plan of Vane and his friends were brought face to face. What the exact scheme of the Parliament was, we cannot accurately tell, and we

are never likely to know. Cromwell's own descriptions of it are vague and unintelligible. The bill itself he carried away with him under his cloak when the evil day came, and no copy of it survived. It appears, however, that in Vane's belief the best device for a provisional government and no other than a provisional government was then possible was that the remnant should continue to sit, the men who fought deadly battles at Westminster in 1647 and 1648, the men who had founded the Commonwealth in 1649, the men who had carried on its work with extraordinary energy and success for four years and more. These were to continue to sit as a nucleus for a full representative, joining to themselves such new men from the constituencies as they thought not likely to betray the cause. On the whole we may believe that this was perhaps the least unpromising way out of difficulties where nothing was very promising. It was to avoid the most fatal of all the errors of the French Constituent, which excluded all its members from office and from seats in the Legislative Assembly to whose inexperienced hands it was intrusting the government of France. To blame its authors for fettering the popular choice was absurd in Cromwell, whose own proposal instead of a legislature to be partially and periodically renewed (if that was really what Vane meant) was now for a nominated council without any element of popular choice at all. The army, we should not forget, were even less prepared than the Parliament for anything like a free and open general election. Both alike intended to reserve Parliamentary representation exclusively to such as were godly men and faithful to the interests of the Commonwealth. An open general election would have been as hazardous and probably as disastrous now as at any moment since the defeat of King Charles in the field, and a real appeal to the country would only have meant ruin to the good cause. Neither Cromwell, nor Lambert, nor Harrison, nor any of them, dreamed that a Parliament to be chosen without restrictions would be a safe experiment. The only questions were: what the restrictions were to be, who was to impose them, who was to guard and supervise them. The Parliamentary Remnant regarded themselves as the fittest custodians, and it is hard to say that they were wrong. In judging these events of 1653 we must look forward to events three years later. Cromwell had a Parliament of his own in 1654; it consisted of four hundred and sixty members; almost his first step was to prevent more than a hundred of them from taking their seats. He may have been right; but why was the Parliament wrong for acting on the same