CHAPTER X.

THE ENGLISH COMMONWEALTH.

Commonwealth, 1649.

Oliver Cromwell, Protector, 1653.

Civil war of 1648.

Richard Cromwell, Protector, 1658.

DURING the year 1648, a struggle took place in England in which the Ironsides won a victory against tremendous odds. The King, in the hands of his captors, seeking to draw advantage from the distractions which prevailed among them, at last leagued himself secretly with the Presbyterians of Scotland, promising them indulgence for their form of worship and an extirpation of the party of tolerance, if by their help he could come again to the enjoyment of his own. The warfare which followed was more desperate than that of the earlier civil war. The King was not in the field, and the disposition to spare was far less. To the Scotch, the English Presbyterians joined themselves in multitudes, men who till now had fought stubbornly for the Houses; while the old Cavaliers, whether Catholic or Anglican, rode forth again in actual combat, or with sword on thigh only waited for a favorable moment. But the Independents, now thoroughly united, were without fear, and matchless both in the field and in counsel. While Vane headed off plots at Westminster, Ireton and Fairfax, and above all Cromwell, smote with a warlike efficiency scarcely ever paralleled. Royalism

in Wales was trampled under foot. In Southern England, the King's cause, fiercely fought for about London, went down utterly at last in the fall of the stronghold of Colchester, in Essex; while Colchester Cromwell, in midsummer, with an army and Preston. small but perfect, sweeping in long detour from Western Wales to Central England, then far north into Lancashire, untouched by heat or fatigue, fell upon the flank of the invading Scots, and, eight thousand against twenty thousand, swept them from the earth at the battle of Preston. At the end of the summer all resistance had ceased; the Ironsides were masters of England, and their hands were hard. Presently the programme of the victors was announced. The captains now stood thoroughly with their men and with the chiefs at St. Stephen's.

strance.

The Grand Army Remonstrance,1 written by Ireton, is the long and carefully prepared work of a scholar and lawyer. Though addressed The Grand to the House of Commons, it was intended Army Remonto express to the nation the position of the Army, and the plan they meant to pursue. The attempt to treat with the King was solemnly denounced; "though the Lord had again laid bare his arm, and that small Army which they had ceased to trust, and had well-nigh deserted and cast off, had been enabled to shiver all the banded strength of a second English insurrection, aided by Scotland, even after the rebuke from God, were they not pursuing the same phantom of accommodation?" The principle was laid down that the "Representative Council of Parliament must be supreme;

1 Rushworth, VII, pp. 1297-98, 1311-12, 1330. Whitlocke, II, p. 436.

that any form of monarchy must be regarded as a creation of that freely elected council for special ends and within special limits; and that the monarch, if in any way derelict, could justly be called to account. It was urged that Charles deserved to be so called to account. If there were any hope of amendment, he might be treated tenderly. "If there were any good evidence of a proportionable remorse in him, and that his coming in again were with a new or changed heart, . . . his person might be capable of pity, mercy, and pardon, and an accommodation with him, with a full and free yielding on his part to all the aforesaid points of public and religious interest in contest, might, in charitable construction, be just, and possibly safe and beneficial." But the King had been utterly faithless, it was urged, and continued to be so. In a passage showing how thoroughly they penetrated the King's falseness, it was declared that even now, after his complete second ruin, he was plotting and prevaricating, while secretly expecting aid from the Irish rebels. "Have you not found him at this play all along, and do not all men acknowledge him most exquisite at it?" At length came the immediate demands, and, first, that the King might be brought to justice; that his heirs, the boys afterward to be Charles II and James II, should return to England and submit themselves completely to the judgment of the nation; and that a number of the chief instruments of the King in the wars should be brought with him to capital punishment. All obdurate delinquents were to undergo banishment and confiscation of property, and all claims of the Army to be fully satisfied. In the prospective demands, with which

the noble document ends, the Army require: 1, a termination of the existing Parliament within a reasonable time; 2, a guaranteed succession of subsequent Parliaments, annual or biennial, the franchise to be so adjusted that Parliament shall really represent all reputable Englishmen; 3, the temporary disfranchisement of all who had adhered to the King; and, 4, a strict provision that the representation of the people should be supreme in all things, only not to re-question the policy of the Civil War itself, or touch the foundations of common right, liberty, and safety. the polity indicated, the kingship, if kept up, was to be a purely elective office, every successive holder of which should be chosen expressly by Parliament, and should have no veto on laws passed by Parliament, in other words, an American President, elected by Congress, however, instead of an Electoral College, and shorn of his great power of the negative voice.

In

These were the ideas of the soldiers, but not of the majority of Parliament. While the Army-men had been setting forth their Grand Remon- Parliament

Army.

strance, a committee from Parliament had resists the been negotiating a new treaty with the King. The latter, untaught by his more recent reverses, as also he had been untaught by those of the earlier war, would make no concessions upon which any reliance could be placed. Nevertheless, the majority of Parliament voted for concluding peace with him, taking action which would have restored Charles at once to the throne, possessed of a power which would have enabled him to put an end straightway to those who had upheld freedom, and to all they had fought for. To secure their own lives, to secure

what was more precious to them than life, the popu lar freedom for which they had been so long fighting, Pride's Purge, only revolutionary means were now ade

quate: Colonel Pride took his place at the door of St. Stephen's and turned out one hundred and forty-three members, cutting down the Long Parliament into the famous Rump, in which none were allowed to sit but those who accepted the principles of the Army.

Ireton's declarations.

As to Pride's Purge, it is hard to see, at the present time, what other course it was possible for the Army to take in order to save their cause. Nothing can be finer, at any rate, than the manifestoes of Army and Rump at this crisis, for the composition of which Ireton must be especially credited. "We are not," it was declared, "a mercenary Army, hired to serve any arbitrary power of the state, but called forth and conjured by the several declarations of Parliament to the defence of our own and the People's just rights and liberties; and so we took up in justice and conscience, to those ends, and are resolved... to assert and vindicate them against all arbitrary power, violence, and oppression, and all particular interests and parties whatsoever."

What were the ideas with which this wonderful Rump, still the Long Parliament, though purged, began its career? The 4th of January may be set down as the beginning of the new order of things. That day, it was resolved by the little company now left in the great emptiness of St. Stephen's for not only were the excluded members absent, but many timid ones, "That the Commons of England in Par

1 Commons Journal (under date).