Читать книгу Oliver Cromwell - John Buchan - Страница 11
IV
Оглавление“I had as lief be a Brownist as a politician,” said Sir Andrew Aguecheek, but the happy aloofness of Shakespeare’s age was gone, and politics had become the nation’s daily bread. The practical problem was how the State was to take over the direction of that side of human life which had been the province of the old church, and how the intricacies of feudalism could be superseded by a simpler and more unified system. It was a problem for all Europe, and on the Continent it was solved in the main by an increase in monarchical absolutism. The State everywhere had to take cognizance of more and more social interests and not confine itself to public order and national defence. But England was not prepared for any such summary answer, having in her bones an old tradition of law and popular consent. Protestantism, as we have seen, was a dissolvent on the DIVINE RIGHT political as well as on the religious side, for, like a new chemical added to a compound, it left no element unchanged. There were those who sought an answer in a restoration of what they believed to be the ancient custom of the land—which is the reason why, in the first year of the Long Parliament, conservative royalists like Falkland and Hyde, Capel and Hopton, worked harmoniously with Pym and Hampden. There were others who sought not restoration but revolution, and on this issue the ultimate battle was joined. It became a matter of the interpretation of “law,” and the theorists on all sides were forced to a growing abstractness, so that political thought tended more and more to adopt the categories of dogmatic theology. The nascent physical science provided a few conceptions; the notion of a constitutional balance or equilibrium, for example, was common to both Harrington and Cromwell.[23] But even the secular thinker was forced by the prevailing atmosphere to give his conclusions a semi-religious sanction.[24] Let us glance briefly at the main ideas which formed the intellectual background to the political strife.
The first is the famous dogma of the divine right of kings. James I, lacking the wisdom of his Tudor predecessors, chose to theorize about the prerogative instead of contenting himself with using it. His crude assumptions met with a not less crude rejoinder, and the excess of his claim was equalled by the exaggerations of the counter-claim; if Bacon, for example, would have made the judiciary a slave of the Crown, Coke would have exalted it above Crown and parliament. But the doctrine of divine right, rationally stated, had a sound historical warrant. It was at least as respectable as the opposite notion of some original social compact. When extreme theories of popular rights were promulgated, it took on a corresponding extravagance, but in its essence it had a real justification. It was based upon two deep popular instincts; the need for continuity in national institutions, and the need of a sanction for the secular power not less august than had been claimed for the mediæval church. It was the first step in the emancipation of politics from clerical interference and in the development of the organic view of the State. It was in substance anti-clerical. “The only way to escape from the fetters imposed by traditional methods was to assert from the old standpoint of a Scriptural basis and to argue by the accustomed fashion of Biblical quotations, that politics must be forced from theology and that the Church must give up all attempts to control the State. The work of the Reformation was to set men free in all departments of thought and enquiry from subjection to a single method and a single subject. In the case of politics the achievement of this result was possible only through claiming at first theological sanction for the non-theological view of politics. Only when this result is achieved will politics be free to develop theories which shall be purely philosophical and historical.”[25]
The instinct which gave the doctrine birth may have been utilitarian, but it soon acquired a mystical element. Men may be faithful to institutions, but their passionate loyalty is reserved for persons, and in an unfaltering fidelity to a king many found a firm lodgment among the quicksands. The Throne attracted to itself an imaginative glamour which was the last sunset glow of the Middle Ages. Its occupant, bearing divine authority, was priest as well as king. When Charles before his execution was denied his chaplains, he could say—and his words found an echo in many hearts—that it was no matter, since the regal and sacerdotal offices were one.
The second class of germinal idea was connected with sovereignty and law. Where lay the ultimate authority—in the people at large, in parliament as representing the people, in a divinely ordained king, or in some mystical body of custom and ordinance which bore the name of Law? Some answer must be found if government was THE LAW FUNDAMENTAL to be carried on. There must be some final power which could make laws, and therefore was above the law. Men were feeling their way to the Austinian conception of sovereignty, and the novelty of the idea made the different sides state their conclusions with a stark absoluteness. A clear thinker like Montrose might seek the solution in an equilibrium of rights and functions, but most minds hankered after one single, ultimate, and unquestionable fount of power. “There is a necessity that somebody must be trusted.” The fanatics of divine right found an easy answer, but many royalists who were not of that school agreed in principle with Strafford’s practical view that in the last resort there must be a power in the executive above the law, since the highest law is the safety of the people: it was Charles’s blundering which discredited what to-day is a maxim of all government, for he acted so as to make the extreme medicine of the constitution its daily bread.
The doctrine of a balance of powers was not acceptable in an epoch which both on practical and theoretical grounds craved for a simple dogma, and those who turned from it, as well as from the extreme view of the royal prerogative, endeavoured to find solid ground either in the rule of law or in the plenary power of parliament. The first mode of thought included many besides the lawyers like Coke whose doctrines really involved the sovereignty of the judiciary.[26] Ancient precedents looked many ways, and to give the judges the right to determine a rapidly changing constitution was to lay on them an impossible burden. The strict legalist confused the whole question, for he was in the habit of construing political principles as legal rights. But there was a profounder instinct among men of all parties in favour of a “law fundamental” to which king and people alike were subject. This was the true sovereign, the “law of the land”; it was cited by Charles and Montrose at their deaths, and it was the heart of Pym’s attack on Strafford. Parliament men like Prynne and St John and Selden made it their foundation and Lilburne appealed to it at his trial; but so did a royalist like Judge Jenkins, who wrote in 1647: “The Law of this Land hath three grounds: First, Custome; Second, Judiciall Records; Thirdly, Acts of Parliament. The two latter are but declarations of the Common Law and Custome of the Realme touching Royall Government, and this law of Royall Government is the Law Fundamentall.”[27] Englishmen could not violate it if England was to remain England. The doctrine remains valid to-day, for there must be internal and external limits to all sovereignty.[28] But this idealization of the common law, of traditional reason and the wisdom of the ancients, provided no instrument of governance: the law fundamental might be an ultimate court of appeal and a guide in policy, but it could not control the administration of the State without putting the prerogative into the hands of the judges; moreover it had no means of change and of adaptation to new conditions. A suppler mechanism was needed, and this was found by general consent in parliament. No royalist, it should be remembered, was hostile to parliamentary institutions as such; he opposed only what he regarded as their maleficent extension.
A great authority has called the Civil War a struggle of the common law against the king;[29] but it was also a struggle of parliament against the common law as then interpreted. Could that law be altered or added to, and, if so, by whom? This was the true question, and a lawyer of the old school was as little inclined to concede this power to parliament as to the Throne. Look on a parliament, Bacon had told James I, as not only a necessity, but as a precious means of uniting the Crown with the nation, and he advised him to have a store of PARLIAMENT “good matters to set the Parliament on work, that an empty stomach do not feed on humour.” But James not only checked the natural development of parliament’s functions in a new age, but opposed its ancient and indubitable rights. Yet no body at the start offered a more fruitful alliance, since the House of Commons represented all that was most vigorous in the nation. The growing expenses of the Crown, which were mainly the needs of the government of England, would have not found it niggardly had it been honestly taken into the royal confidence, for the Englishman, in Fuller’s words, cared not how much his purse was let bleed, so it was done by the advice of the physician of the State.[30] The members were neither courtiers nor office-seekers: those long-descended squires represented in the main “a type of character that has never reappeared in our history—directness of intention and simplicity of mind, the inheritance of modest generations of active and hearty rural life; now at last informed by Elizabethan culture; and now at last spiritualized by a Puritan religion.”[31] But parliament had to learn its business as much as the king. The House of Commons of 1621 numbered among its members men like Wentworth and Pym, Hampden and Coke and the elder Fairfax; but its conduct in the cases of Sheppard and Lloyd showed how much it lacked in decency and common sense.[32]
The first duty of the House of Commons was to safeguard its privileges which the king denied—the right of free debate and the control of taxation, and this was the special task of Sir John Eliot, the purest and most logical of them all. It knew that it represented what was best and sanest in England, and that especially it represented England’s wealth, for, as an observer said of the 1628 Parliament, it could have bought out the upper House thrice over.[33] In its defence of its privileges it had the support of the black-letter lawyers, but presently it parted company with them, for it was forced by the pressure of circumstances to demand an authority which seemed to the antiquary as alien to the constitution as the extravagant claims of the king. Step by step, since the country must be governed, it was driven to demand a legal sovereignty. The change began in 1629 after Buckingham’s murder, when it attempted to lay down an ecclesiastical policy in the first of the historic resolutions which Denzil Holles put to the House. The boldness of the innovation was recognized, and at first, while divesting the king of certain prerogatives, parliament did not assume them for itself. “We cannot,” said Pym of Charles, “leave to him sovereign power.... We were never possessed of it.”[34] But the practical conundrum had somehow to be solved, and, conscious of popular support, it entered upon what in the eyes of the jurists was nothing short of a revolution. Its view was that of Hobbes: “it is not wisdom but authority that makes the law.” Against it were now arrayed not only those who held the mystic view of the royal prerogative, but the sticklers for the ancient usages, the lawyers who had been the first to oppose the king, so that Milton, zealous for parliamentary omnipotence, could write of “that old entanglement of iniquity, their gibberish laws.”[35]
What we loosely call “democratic” ideals had scarcely come to birth in the political world, though, as we have seen, there was a certain emotional socialism and egalitarianism implicit in the Reformation. When Milton speaks of the sovereign people he only expresses his belief in the right of rebellion against political or religious oppressors. The elementary rights of the poor were better championed by the Crown than by middle-class puritans or aristocratic parliamentarians. There were strange ferments in the under-world of England, but they only revealed themselves by an occasional jet of steam from some crack in the volcanic crust. But one issue in the strife lay at the root of all democracy—the right to personal liberty, the denial of any power to dispense with that law which normally protected a subject’s life THE FINAL ANTAGONISM and property, the hostility to special tribunals which usurped the duties of the common courts of justice. A settled law and the equality of all men before it were claims which survived the wreckage, for they had behind them the essential spirit of England.
From such a tangle of political dogma there was little chance of escape except by violence. A nation, which is only by slow degrees becoming politically self-conscious, is apt to pin its faith to abstractions, and with abstract thinkers there can be no settlement, since each takes his stand on what he holds to be eternal truth. Puritan and Laudian clashed in a final antagonism; absolutist lawyer and absolutist revolutionary had between them no common ground. Charles’s bleak abstraction of kingly honour was faced with an abstraction scarcely less bleak of a sovereign Commons. The cool Erastian had his jibe at the theological dervishes, and then, if he were a wise man, held his tongue. The political realist was forced in the end to choose the side which repelled him least, and often to die for a cause in which he only half believed.... One man alone shook himself clear of the melee, and tried out of the chaos to build up a new England.
