Читать книгу Charles I and Cromwell - G. M. Young - Страница 4

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I wrote this essay partly to lay a ghost in my own mind, and partly as an exercise in form. With the departure of the King from Oxford in 1646, we enter a labyrinth from which, three years later, we emerge on to the scaffold at Whitehall, and when we endeavour to recount our steps and recall the turnings, we are constantly baffled by some interruption of the clue, to extricate which is my one object in this book.

In this perplexing story there are two decisive moments between which, I think, a very close psychological nexus must have existed, even if it can no longer be with any certainty traced. One is the collapse of the Hampton Court negotiations in 1647. The other is Ireton's violent revulsion from the King. The Trial follows logically—not inevitably, because Cromwell and even Fairfax might have intervened to prevent it—from Pride's Purge, and Pride's Purge from Ireton's manifesto, the Remonstrance of the Army. But this carries us no farther than October 1648, and, still moving backwards, we can say that to October 1647 almost anything might have happened. Political bets were sometimes made in Presbyterian London, and a sportsman might safely have laid, any time in those twelve months, a hundred to one against the King's execution, and ten to one against even his deposition. When we go behind September 1647, the odds lengthen out of all calculation. The King personally, the Monarchy politically, were as safe in the summer of 1647 as Queen Victoria and her Monarchy in the summer of 1847. All the signs pointed to a brilliant and popular restoration of the King.

Yet, as we know, the prospect was dashed. Between July and October something happened. Carlyle's treatment of the period is perfunctory. Gardiner had the advantage of knowing the Clarke papers, but he was at the disadvantage, perhaps unperceived by himself, of always picturing Cromwell as a Good Man, like Mr. Gladstone, and Charles as a Bad Man, like Mr. Disraeli. Mid-Victorian Liberalism is not a satisfactory instrument by which to measure the convulsions of the seventeenth century, and the French publicist who wrote in 1911 of Mr. Lloyd George, type du Puritanisme anglais, flashed a signal which lets much light into dark corners. The shifting of the political centre of gravity in the nineteenth century from the upper to the middle classes, and from the middle classes to the working classes, offers an instructive analogy to the much swifter process of the Civil War, if for the three classes we substitute the Crown, the Presbyterian gentry, and the Saints. In its turn, the rise of the Saints, the Independents of the Army, was leading in 1646 and 1647, as post-Gladstonian Liberalism did lead, to democracy, and the apprehension, at least, of subversion 'not of the Government but of government'. Manhood Suffrage and the March on London sounded as ominous in 1647 as the Unauthorized Programme in 1885 and the General Strike in 1926. In those critical months, between July and October, the line of development became clear, and Cromwell, whose profound anxiety is manifest in the reports of the Putney debates, set himself to arrest the Liberalism of the Independents at the point where it was just about to turn into the Democracy of the Levellers, to keep it satisfied, and to take the edge off its more dangerous appetites.

Did this necessarily involve the sacrifice of the Monarchy or the King? Cromwell, it is plain, did not think so: as late as October 1648 he was prepared for a Restoration. Ireton's mind was swifter, and it was spurred by the exasperation of the honest man who is conscious of his own sincerity and has been deceived, of the intellectual man whose plans have been spoilt, and who will not acknowledge to himself that the fault was in the plans. His device for restoring the Monarchy in 1647 is a masterpiece of political construction, but without any political appeal for either of the parties to whom it was addressed. It would have made Charles a powerful sovereign of a new kind, and Parliament not only the most august but the most efficient Council in Christendom. Charles had no idea of being a new sort of King, and Parliament had to go through a long process of tuition and experience before it learnt to govern. The Remonstrance of 1648 was the fruit of Ireton's bitter resentment when the Heads of Proposals were set aside by Parliament, and the vindictive rage that followed the discovery that the King had never taken the Proposals, or their author, seriously. He saw red and went red.

It is only by fixing our minds on the fact that in July 1647 the Army leaders, Parliament and the City of London, all desired the restoration of the King on terms, and that nine tenths of the good people of England desired it too, that we can estimate the force and the peculiar character of the King's resistance on one side, and, on the other, of the Anabaptist resolution which Cromwell and Ireton made their own. The King did not want terms, and the Anabaptists did not want a King. I use the word Anabaptist as a contemporary would have used it, to cover the whole of that mingled, explosive mass, which, always running no doubt in secret veins under the compact surface of medieval society, gathered and swelled upwards through the fissures made by the great convulsion of the sixteenth century. To a foreign observer, Cromwell is a simpler figure than he is to us: he is the last and greatest of the Anabaptists, and the execution of King Charles in 1649 is the culmination and termination of a train of explosions first fired by John of Leyden in 1533. After that there was nothing for it but to go back and start all over again, and we had to go back farther than we need have gone. The Restoration of 1660 was, broadly speaking, a Clarendon restoration, which had to be undone and redone in 1688. The frustrated Restoration of 1647, an Ireton restoration, would have jumped the interim. And, in history, as Cromwell once pointed out, you can't jump.

At least Charles could not, and it is the King's character, his intellectual make-up much more than his moral disposition, that brings the threads together. If he could have made the deeper part of his mind move, and kept the surface part quiet, all would have been well. But his intellect was all eddy and no tide. In many ways his dealings with Parliament and the Army remind me of his grandmother's dealings with Elizabeth, just as Cromwell's dizzying changes of front, and the nerve-storms which accompany them, often recall the great Queen whose subject he was proud to have been born, whose true successor he felt, and showed, himself to be. For what is Cromwell, once released from the servitudes, falsities and austerities of party, but a rustic Tudor gentleman, born out of due time, of the stock of Hunsdon and Henry Sidney, rejoicing in hawk and hound, pictures and music, Scotland subjugated, Ireland prostrate, and England, the awe of the Western world, adorned and defended with stout yeomen, honourable magistrates, learned ministers, flourishing universities, invincible fleets? Aubrey once went to see the great man dine in state at Hampton Court. He was seated between a Presbyterian and a Catholic Lord, Fitzwilliam of Lifford, who founded the fortunes of his family by marrying a City widow, and Arundell of Wardour, who bred the hounds from which the Quorn pack is descended. Fitzwilliam had been turned out of Parliament by the soldiers: Arundell had destroyed his own castle that it might not be a fortress for rebels. But all that was long ago. The Lord Protector spoke. 'I have been in all the counties of England,' he said, 'and I think the husbandry of Devonshire is the best.'

In Charles, as before in Mary and again in his son James, we are aware of the same professional detachment from the feelings and interests of their subjects, the same gap between the serene central conviction of their royalty and the surface workings, which in James are mostly temper, in Mary mostly conspiracies to murder. Of Charles, his nineteenth-century historian has observed that he was always looking back to the Monarchy of Elizabeth instead of forward to the Monarchy of Victoria. Really, the poor gentleman was not called upon to attempt any such extravagant feat of imagination. He was only asked to do what Elizabeth had done, when she recalled the Monopolies, to realize that the other side were serious and must be taken seriously. On the evening of the first day in Westminster Hall the King asked one of his gentlemen who the judges were. Members of Parliament, he was told, officers, City men. 'I looked at them carefully,' the King replied, 'but there were not above eight whose faces I knew.' There was one he knew very well, the dark, sunken-eyed face of the man who would have made him once more a great king. But there is no reason to suppose that Charles ever regretted that he had declined the offer, or even realized that it had been made. 'A subject and a sovereign are clean different things.'[1]