Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

fixed

to be recon

conscience;

to the new

peers;

chiefs of the army. A fixed revenue was, however, settled given a upon him, and a liberal sum provided for the maintenance of revenue; war and naval forces. While uniformity was to be restored through a confession of faith to be agreed upon between the protector and the new parliament, those who saw fit to reject uniformity it were to be secured liberty both of conscience and of wor- ciled with ship, unless they rejected the mystery of the trinity, or the liberty of inspiration of the Scriptures, or professed prelatic, popish, or blasphemous doctrines. Thus at the height of his power Cromwell pressed on in his career of military glory, entailing upon the treasury as a necessary consequence demands for which only a new parliament could provide. In order to comply with the terms of the new constitution, he issued in De- writs issued cember, 1657, writs copied from those formerly used by the sovereign to sixty-two persons, who were to compose the upper house as hereditary peers, subject to certain limitations contained in the "petition and advice."1 As the ancient peerage shrank from the new dignity, the writs had to be directed to lawyers and officials, to a few dangerous opponents, and to certain gentlemen of fortune who had risen to position through recent events. In order to emphasize the fact that the old parliamentary system was to be revived, the protector met the protector collective body in the upper chamber on the 20th of January, collective 1658, where he began his speech with the ancient address: body in "My lords and gentlemen of the house of commons." 2 The chamber new legislature thus carefully built up was destined, however, 1658; soon to suffer the fate already imposed by Cromwell upon three of its predecessors. The moment that a conflict arose out of the contention of the lower house that the new upper chamber had simply judicial and not legislative powers, the protector, who was moved to "rage and passion like unto madness" by this attempt to prevent a return to the older forms of English political life, threw himself into a coach, and with a few guards at his back drove to Westminster, where, on the 4th of February, he pronounced an angry address in which he said, "I think it high time that an end be put to your sitting; dissolved it and I do dissolve this parliament; and let God judge between February 4;

1 Thurloe, vol. vi. p. 752. These writs neither granted nor denied an hereditary character to the new peerage.

2 For a full account, see Commons' Journals, vol. vii. pp. 578-587; Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, vol. iii. pp. 392-399.

met the

the upper

January 20,

of Dunkirk

in June;

Cromwell

died September 3;

estimates

of his character;

me and you."1 And yet, in spite of the feverish impatience which now began to possess him as the result of disease, fortune did not forsake him. The overthrow of the reactionary body which he drove out only strengthened his hold on the army, whose triumph in Flanders, as a part of the allied forces capitulation of France and England, was crowned in June by the capitulation and cession of Dunkirk. But in the midst of all his glory the fever crept steadily on, until death set its signet seal upon his face as a sign to those around him that his hour had come. On the 3d of September, the great day that had witnessed his victories at Worcester and Dunbar, he breathed his last, leaving to posterity a mighty name, which has never ceased to be the subject of blind adulation, on the one hand, and of pasconflicting sionate execration, on the other. While Thurloe, in announcing his death to the deputy of Ireland, declared, "He is gone to heaven, embalmed with the tears of his people, and upon the wings of the prayers of the saints," not "the mourners," but dancers "went about the streets" when the news reached Amsterdam, and "the language at every turn" was, "The Devil is dead." In our own time, a great hero-worshipper has attempted to make him tell his own story through a careful collection of extracts from his "Letters and Speeches," which a consummate critic has declared to be "an invaluable store of documents, edited with the care of an antiquarian and the genius of a poet."4 As a counterblast to that effort to create a new conception of Cromwell out of documentary evidence that could not be questioned, a notable literary man, after great research, has recently published a book in which he avers that such evidence has been deliberately garbled and perverted in order to clothe the Puritan hero in a false glory. "Carlyle," he says, "sought to obscure the 'shot-rubbish' of the protectorate era with 'lurid twilight,' to enhance the whiteness of his own 'amorphous' creation. The showman blackened the background, to render the phosphorated face of his 'Brave one' the more conspicuous." 5 The nearest approach, perhaps,

the nearest

approach portrait.

to a true

3

1 Commons' Journals, vol. vii. p. 592;
Thurloe, vol. vi. pp. 778, 781, 788.
2 Ludlow, vol. ii. p. 153; Thurloe,
vol. vii. p. 373.

8 Clarendon, State Papers, vol. iii. p.

4 Green's comment upon the work of Carlyle in the Hist. of the Eng. People, vol. iii. p. 4.

5 Sir Reginald F. D. Palgrave's Oliver Cromwell, The Protector, p. xviii.

to a true portrait has been made by the great historian of that epoch, who, after a calm, judicial review of all the facts, has concluded that Cromwell was "no divinely inspired hero, indeed, or faultless monster, but a brave, honorable man, striving, according to his lights, to lead his countrymen into the paths of peace and godliness." 1

Cromwell,

uary 27,

6. So safely did the fabric of Cromwell's power pass through Richard the ordeal of his death that the council was able to proclaim protector: the peaceful succession of his son Richard, despite the grave doubt that existed as to the fact of his nomination. A mere verbal statement that he had been designated by his father as his successor a short time before the end was accepted as sufficient, and to the surprise of all the new protector, who was supported neither by personal merit nor public services, promptly summoned a parliament, the popular branch of which called a new parliament, was constituted on the old plan, thus reviving the representa- which tion of many boroughs disfranchised by the scheme of reform recently employed on several occasions. In the new assembly that met on the 27th of January, 1659, a strong party that met Janfavored the continued existence of the protectorate was at once 1659; confronted by a fierce and resolute republican opposition, sup- republiported by secret royalists, who, under the leadership of Vane, royalists not only denounced Cromwell's political system, but also the combine for army, which they said had not only "conquered Scotland and throw; Ireland, but rebellious England, too; and there suppressed a malignant party of magistrates and laws."8 Angered by that assault, the army, with Richard's consent, at once established a permanent council of general officers, whose demonstrations were so menacing that the house demanded a cessation of their meetings and a dismissal of all who refused to promise in writing neither to disturb the sittings nor to infringe the freedom of parliament. Thus in a new form was revived the old strug- a fresh gle between the army and the houses, and Richard, who was between the forced to choose between them, cast his lot with the former, army and and at the bidding of the officers dissolved the parliament on latter the 22d of April. With that event the authority of the new April 22;

1 Gardiner, Hist. of the Great Civil War, vol. i. p. x.

2 Thurloe, vol. vii. p. 372. See also Ibid., pp. 364, 365.

8 The declaration of Cooper.

4 Thurloe, pp. 555, 557, 662; Burton's Diary, vol. iv. pp. 448-463; Whitelock, p. 677; Ludlow, vol. ii. pp. 174, 176, 178.

cans and

his over

conflict

the houses;

dissolved

protecto

rate set

aside.

Rump returned to power May 7, 1659;

members

protector really came to an end, and the supreme power again passed to the military chiefs who, in the hope of composing the country, then in a state of anarchy, agreed with the republicans that the protectorate should be set aside in favor of the remnant of the Long Parliament, which had been expelled from St. Stephen's on the 20th of April, 1653.

7. On that memorable occasion Bradshaw had warned Cromwell that "no power under heaven can dissolve them but themselves,"1 and upon that theory forty-two members of the Rump, with Lenthall, the former speaker, at their head, returned to the house on the 7th of May, 1659, to there resume, at the invitation of the army, the direction of affairs which the same power five years before had forcibly taken from their hands. without the From the republican body thus reconstituted were carefully excluded by excluded those members, at once royalist and presbyterian, of Colonel whom the house had been purged by Colonel Pride on the 6th December of December, 1648.8 The new coalition thus formed for the 6, 1648; defence of republicanism and civil liberty endured, however, only for a moment. Dissensions at once arose out of demands made by the army which the parliament regarded as unbearable, and thus began a new conflict, that culminated on October 13 in a fresh expulsion of the Rump by the officers, who undertook to secure the public peace, and to prepare a new form of government for submission to a new parliament.

Pride

Rump expelled in October;

General
Monk,

who com

Scottish

At a division this point it was that the army finally divided against itself. in the army; The troops in Scotland and Ireland protested against the action of their brethren in England, and General Monk, the commander of the Scottish forces, the moment that he heard manded the of the expulsion of the members, openly appeared as their patron, under the title of "asserter of the ancient laws and liberties of the country." Although Lambert was sent to oppose him, the tide of opposition to the acts of the English army rose so high that before the end of December it was forced to reinstate the Rump in all its former authority. Early in January, 1660, Monk crossed the border, and marched first to York and

forces,

crossed the border January, 1660;

1 See above, p. 346.

2 Ludlow, vol. ii. pp. 179-186; Whitelock, p. 677. By gradual additions the house at last numbered seventy members.

four were still alive, eighty of whom actually resided in the capital."— Lingard, vol. viii. p. 573.

4 Commons' Journals, December 26; Ludlow, vol. ii. pp. 268, 276, 282, 290; 8" Of these, one hundred and ninety- Whitelock, pp. 689, 690, 691.

members

Parliament

solved

then to London, where on the 21st of February he agreed to admit the royalist presbyterian members who had been ex- excluded cluded from the house in 1648, upon their promise to settle admitted; the arrears of the army, to issue writs for a new parliament to sit at an early day, and to dissolve themselves before that time.1 Under the terms of that compact a bill was read for the third time on the 16th of March, dissolving "the parlia- Long ment assembled on the 3d of November, 1640," and conven- finally dising at the same time a new assembly to be composed of lords, and the knights, citizens, and burgesses, which was to meet on the 25th of April. Before its dissolution, however, the Rump had appointed Monk, who was secretly arranging for the return of the king, commander-in-chief of the forces of the three kingdoms, and commander of the fleet jointly with Admiral Montague. At the appointed time the Convention Parliament, so Convention designated by reason of the fact that it was called without the met April king's writ, met; and after the organization of the lower house 25, with the presbyterians in the majority, and with the presence in the upper of the greater part of the peerage,2 the scheme of restoration was laid bare by the presentation to the two houses of letters directed to them from Breda by the king, who briefly set forth therein the conditions under which he was willing to ascend the throne of his ancestors. Upon the faith of that and settled declaration, which was accepted as a royal charter, the houses, tion of after declaring that "the government is, and ought to be, by king, lords, and commons," invited Charles to return and continue his reign, which was proclaimed as having commenced from the day of his father's execution.1

1 Commons' Journals, February 11, 13, 15, 17, 21; Price, pp. 768–773; Lingard, vol. viii. p. 604.

2 The peers who sat in the king's parliament at Oxford and those whose patents bore date after the beginning

of the civil war did not demand ad-
mission for the moment.

8 Lords' Journals, vol. xi. pp. 7, 10.
4 1660 is described in the Statute-
Book as the twelfth of the reign.

Parliament

the restora

Charles II.

« AnteriorContinuar »