Читать книгу Charles I and Cromwell - G. M. Young - Страница 5

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On a spring morning of 1646, old Sir Jacob Astley, marching from Worcestershire to Oxford, was brought to battle at Stow-on-the-Wold. A few hours later he was sitting on a drum, talking cheerily to the victors. 'Well, boys,' he said, 'you have done your work and may go home and play—unless you will fall out with one another.' The Civil War was over, but the real difficulties were just beginning.

They were not insuperable. There was a universal desire for peace and little desire for vengeance. Nothing had been done on either side that could not be forgiven. The war had been fought for the most part with mutual chivalry and good feeling, often with exemplary politeness, and there cannot, I feel sure, be any other instance in history of the victors in a four years' conflict applying to the Courts for an injunction to stop the vanquished from making unkind remarks about them. Mrs. Carter said that the Parliamentary garrison of Warminster had been stealing linen. The garrison, deeply hurt by a charge which, 'we conceive, refflecks not so much uppon us as uppon the High Court of Parliament', could only petition the Justices of the Peace to do something about it, in the intervals of reducing redundant alehouses, abating unlawful weirs, and reproving Miss Gibbs for sticking a pin in Miss Courtley, in time of Divine Service, in Imber Parish Church.

This is not the atmosphere in which revolutions are conceived. It had indeed passed through some minds that the best course would be to depose King Charles, and start afresh with one of his sons—the little Duke of Gloucester for choice—and a trusty peer as Regent. But even this seemed more drastic a measure than circumstances warranted. Hopelessly beaten in the field, the King had recovered the initiative in Council. It was his move.

The chief pieces on the other side of the board were: the City of London, rich, well-armed, and devoted to the Parliament; the Lords and Commons at Westminster (thirty peers still sat there); their army under Fairfax and Cromwell; and the Scots. A Tudor would have seen in an instant the weak place in this combination. Elizabeth—if we can imagine Elizabeth ever getting herself into such a tangle—would have ridden straight for the Army, played a dazzling succession of parts, from the Puritan maiden in distress to the Queen among her loving people, flirted with the inarticulate Fairfax, made audacious jokes about our Brethren in Christ and their precious Covenant, and in a few weeks would have had Lords, Commons and City weeping at her feet, and the Scots flying for their lives.

But the note—'a King, and a King of England, too'—which Elizabeth and her father knew so well how to strike, was not within the Stuart compass. The egoism of the race, which brought Mary to Fotheringay and was to send James II to St. Germain, had been qualified in James I by an earthy, vulgar shrewdness. He was not a good King, but he was a very clever, amusing Scotsman. Charles was neither vulgar, nor earthy, nor amusing, nor clever, and in both his kingdoms he was always something of an alien. A solitary child, short, bandy, with a slight stammer, he had formed himself by reading and exercise—by conscious admiration of his brilliant Elizabethan brother, and conscious reaction, perhaps, from his drunken mother and exuberant father—into the grave, dignified, self-controlled young King of 1625. To the end of his life his health and dignity never failed him, his self-control rarely. Two people only ever got past these outworks and lodged themselves in his affections. To Buckingham he yielded as a repressed self-centred boy will often yield to an elder, radiant with adventure, success and irresponsibility. To Mary, when Buckingham had gone, he gave his heart. And Mary (he would never call her Henrietta), of all those who came near him, was perhaps the one least able to understand or reach the central nerve of his intricate and contradictory conscience, his devotion to the Church of England.

He was not only a King, he was an Anglican King. Every man who fought on his side was fighting for the Elizabethan Settlement, for a Catholic hierarchy dependent on the Crown, and a theology and liturgy to which, read together, no man from the day of their formulation to this has ever been able to attach a convincing label. Protestant is the best, because it means least.[2] But a true instinct on both sides made the Prayer Book the test. The Church of England is the church which uses the Prayer Book, and Elizabeth never meant it to bear any other mark. All through the bad years, with Eikon Basilike and Martin Parker's songs, it was the Prayer Book that kept up the morale of the subjugated Royalists. 'The people dote on it', one observer wrote in 1659; when Ussher died, the Lord Protector gave him such a funeral as befitted a Prince of the Church, and the Anglican service was read over the grave; and Lady Mary Cromwell herself—or so it was said—having been married with such ceremonies as pious Independents allowed, insisted on being privately remarried by Prayer Book rites.

In his refusal to abandon the Church of Elizabeth, therefore, Charles was at one with his people and with the future: in 1660 the King, the Bishops, and the Prayer Book all came back together, and Presbytery, after imparting to the sister kingdom the blessings of the Westminster Confession and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, faded into Unitarianism. To account for its success in Scotland and its complete failure in England it is not necessary to sound the imaginary depths of national psychology. In England there was historically no need for it, spiritually no room for it. Scotland, after its brief Renaissance glow, shattered by disaster in the field and the turbulence of long minorities, was remade by its ministers, the bearers of a new revelation which imported a new social order. In England there was nothing to re-make. Here, the transition from the Middle Ages had been conducted by a strong crown operating on a compact and law-abiding society, and after a few violent lurches to left and right the Church was steadied down into the official channel, with scientific articles, a traditional liturgy, and a hierarchy which might with equal truth be regarded as an inheritance from Apostolic times or a branch of the Civil Service. For the multitude, whose religion is a matter of use and wont, the Elizabethan Church was enough. It was enough for those whose religion was also a matter of order, authority, and history. But it was not stimulating to the inert; it was not satisfying to the impatient; and in an age profoundly, often hysterically, preoccupied with the Unseen, with ghosts and devils and the fires of hell, it furnished no equivalent for the Catholic discipline of devotion and observance, or the Puritan discipline of prayer and preaching, the one to protect, the other to fortify the soul, in its warfare with the powers of darkness. The one bad mistake Elizabeth ever made was in not providing the Church with preachers. The craving, active or passive, for sermons must be taken as a psychological datum of the age, and as there were few parsons competent to preach the true Church doctrine, the flock turned gladly to those who preached something different, not because it was different, but because it was preached.

But Presbytery was, in England, only an alternative form of Church government. It was not, like Anabaptism and Independency, a new source of spiritual power to the believer, and it was quite as hard as Episcopacy, perhaps rather harder, on the unauthorized expounder, on the man with a private revelation, on the tinker, tailor, ploughboy, sailor, convinced of sin and yearning to impart the story of his redemption. Even as an alternative, it was handicapped by the historic appeal of the Elizabethan Church, and its perfect adaptation to the social structure of the country. If the Borough had been dominant over the Manor, Presbytery might have won. But the day of the great towns was far ahead and, when it came, Evangelicalism, Anglican or Methodist, was in occupation of the ground.

In the nature of things, therefore, Presbytery could be no more than an episode in our history, a swerve which sooner or later was bound to rejoin the main-road of an Established episcopal church surrounded by tolerated sects. Yet good reasons can be given why this swerve should have set in when it did. In Elizabethan days, Presbytery—against Prelacy—was the creed of the young, the ardent, the self-sufficient. In James's time, when England had been hardened by war and the Jesuits into a vigilant anti-Papalism, Presbytery was the most emphatic repudiation of Rome, from which the Anglican system was a reluctant, uncompleted departure, retaining, too, far more than the independent clergyman or layman cared for of the coercive power of the old Catholic Church. The bishop, with the Crown and the Court of High Commission behind him, could make things very uncomfortable for a non-conforming parson and for laymen who declined the ministrations of a more orthodox pastor. Technically, he could still condemn a heretic to the stake, and require the sheriff to execute the sentence. Actually, the power was never exercised after 1614; but it may be questioned whether the occasional burning of some outrageous heretic would not have done the Church less harm than the perpetual worrying of peaceful congregations and earnest ministers over the minutiæ of ceremony and doctrine; and an active archdeacon, exercising a kind of petty police jurisdiction over Drunks, Incontinents and Irregular Churchgoers, could be as vexatious to the easy-living layman as the Bishop's Court to the independent-minded minister.

In theology, the two sides were wheeling into reverse positions: the Anglicanism of 1640 was a much more modern creed than its Puritan alternative; but there was no statesmanship to make the appeal of the Church effective. The bishops were the trouble. Materially, as a logician would have put it, they were usually right: formally, they were nearly always wrong. Mr. Sherfield ought not to have poked an unauthorized stick through the stained glass window in St. Edmund's, Salisbury. But it was monstrous to fine him £500 for doing it. The churchwardens ought not to have provided vintage wine for masters and mistresses, and vin ordinaire for servants, at the Holy Communion. But Laud gained no more goodwill by docking the middle classes of their privileges than by rebuking the upper classes for their adulteries. To pull down the tabernacles where Dutch navvies in the fens met to sing Dutch hymns was simply foolish; and if the people of Lancashire wanted to spend their Sundays like circumcised Jews, the only sensible course was to leave them alone until they were tired of it. Nor, while loyal churchmen were mourning over the unwisdom of their rulers, could it escape the calculations of City men and their friends in Parliament that, as the Tudor nobility had been financed by the plunder of the monasteries, so a new aristocracy might be raised on the proceeds of the Bishops' Lands. In a sense, perhaps the deepest sense of all, the Civil War was, like the unlucky Scottish campaign of 1639, Bellum Episcopale.

Now it was over, and the victors were under contract to replace the episcopal by the presbyterian system throughout the land—which did not, in fact, in the least desire it. This was the price of Scottish assistance in the dark days of 1643 when Hampden had fallen, the Fairfaxes had been defeated in the north, and the King's army of the west was forging along, by Bath and Devizes, to join hands with the Royalists of Kent and encircle London from the south. But there was an immense difference between the political state-regulated Presbytery of English politicians and the militant dogma in defence of which the Scots had risen against the King. They had asked for an undertaking that the Church of England should be reformed according to the example of the Best Reformed Churches, meaning particularly their own; and the English negotiators, by introducing a pious and subtle reference to God's Holy Word as well, had left themselves free to remodel the Church very much as they liked.

The bishops were removed; the Prayer Book was more or less effectively superseded by the Directory for Public Worship; the churchwardens dutifully spent ninepence on 'a Parliamentary ordinance for the establishment of a Presbytryall Government': as they might have bought a new shovel or bell-rope, and there left it. And where it did establish itself—among the middle classes of the City, for example—it was subject to legal restrictions of the kind most abhorrent to the Presbyterian conscience. To the pure Genevan model two things are essential: the free election of elders, and the uncontrolled right of the ministers and elders to exclude any member of the congregation from communion. In Presbyterian London, the elections were regulated by a Parliamentary Board, and the aggrieved communicant was given an appeal to Parliament itself. The Best Reformed Churches would not have recognized themselves. In a society so coherent and socially so mature as that of England there was no standing-ground for a new theocracy with ten thousand church courts thrust in upon the ancient, popular, and efficient machinery of Petty Sessions and Quarter Sessions. Elizabeth had settled that.[3]

Yet to an observer from outside, Presbytery in 1646 must have seemed very formidable. It had, apart from the Scots, an army of its own, the City militia, and those who had been at Newbury could tell how London shopboys fight. It had the wealth of the City, the prestige of Parliament on its side. The Queen was baffled. If Paris was worth a mass, surely London was worth the letters C.R. at the top of the Covenant. Her father would not have hesitated. Nor would her son. Why should her husband? Henry of Navarre and Charles II were very astute men: they would have taken the Covenant, if it suited them, as often as they were asked, because they would have seen that, in England, there was nothing in it. Charles I, for good and evil, had not that kind of mind; he could realize as clearly as any Revolution Whig that there might be two Established Churches in one island; and if he refused to take the Covenant it was simply because he thought that Presbytery, an unfortunate necessity in Scotland, was in England not only impolitic but wrong.

Note. It is perhaps worth recalling here that The Whole Duty of Man, which, for its vitality and diffusion, must be called our most successful attempt at an Ethical Code, was the product of a group of sequestered Anglican ministers, living in retirement under the Commonwealth.