Читать книгу Oliver Cromwell - John Buchan - Страница 20
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ОглавлениеOliver’s university life did not last more than a year, and he took no degree. In June 1617 the elder Cromwell died, and, as the only son of the house, he returned to Huntingdon to wind up his father’s estate and manage the property. Two-thirds of the income was left to the widow for twenty-one years to provide for the upbringing of the host of daughters, but Oliver had expectations from his uncles, and could look forward to a reasonable fortune as a country squire. So, the immediate business being completed, he followed what was the common practice of the time and went to London to acquire a smattering of law, for in those days a landed proprietor was his own man of business. His name does not appear upon the books of any of the inns of court, and Lincoln’s Inn and Gray’s Inn have competed for the honour of his membership.
Of his life in London we know little except the episode which concluded it. One would fain believe that, like Eliot, he was present in Palace Yard on that misty morning 1618-20 in October 1618, and saw Walter Raleigh, the last Elizabethan and the author of his favourite book, lay his comely head on the block. Royalist gossip has filled his London years with wantonness, and it may well be that one who had been at Cambridge a boon companion was not averse to hearing the chimes at midnight. But his revelries must have been modest or well concealed, for through his Hampden connections he became a visitor at the home on Tower Hill of a most reputable city merchant, Sir John Bourchier, who had bought himself an estate at Felsted in Essex, but was no kin to the noble Bourchiers of that shire. On August 20th 1620, a few months after he had come of age, he married the daughter Elizabeth, who was a year his senior. She brought him a substantial dowry, but it would appear to have been a love match, and the affection between the two burned strongly till the end. “Truly, if I love thee not too well,” he wrote to her after thirty years of wedlock, “I think I err not on the other hand much. Thou art dearer to me than any creature.”[49] Her portrait shows her comely and full-faced, with arched eyebrows and a strong nose, a countenance at once homely and dignified. She was an excellent housewife and a devoted mother, but she never intermeddled with her husband’s political, and still less with his religious, life.
An early marriage with such a woman does not suggest the rake. When Oliver brought his bride to Huntingdon, the whole family, mother, sisters and wife, lived in the same house. The young husband found much business on his hands. Since prices for farm produce had fallen heavily,[50] it was no easy task to get a profit out of the land. According to royalist pamphleteers Oliver’s early years of marriage were years of extreme profligacy, when he committed every sin in the calendar, and his career of vice did not close till he fell suddenly into religious mania.[51] Later writers have based the same charge on his own confession. In October 1638 he wrote to his cousin, the wife of Oliver St John: “You know what EARLY MARRIED LIFE 1620-28 my manner of life hath been. Oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated the light; I was a chief, the chief of sinners. This is true: I hated godliness, yet God had mercy on me.”[52] Richard Baxter, who was no royalist tattle-bearer, calls him “a prodigal in his youth, and afterwards changed to zealous righteousness.”[53] The courtier Sir Philip Warwick, who lived for a time in Huntingdon, says that “the first years of his manhood were spent in a dissolute course of life, in good fellowship and gaming, which afterwards he seemed very sensible of and sorrowful for, and, as if it had been a good spirit that had guided him therein, he used a good method upon his conversion, for he declared that he was ready to make restitution unto any man who would accuse him or whom he could accuse himself to have wronged.”[54] And there is Dugdale’s story, which may have something in it, of his attempt to have his uncle Sir Thomas Steward certified as a lunatic,[55] and those entries in the Huntingdon parish register, probably forgeries, which suggest that in 1621 and again in 1628 he submitted to some kind of church censure.[56]
Oliver’s own confession need not be taken too seriously. It has been the fashion of the saint from Augustine downwards to paint in dark colours his life before he entered the state of grace, since every action was coloured by the then corruption of his heart. Innocent recreations are seen as “the lusts and fruits of the flesh” now that the old man has been put off. “From a child,” Bunyan wrote, “I had but few equals, both for cursing, swearing, lying and blaspheming the holy name of God”;[57] and we do not believe him. But though Oliver’s self-depreciation was common form in his day, there may be a spice of fact behind the hyperboles. Of certain sins of the flesh we may reasonably acquit him, but he had a wild humour and loved horse-play, and it may well be that at 1620-28 one time he was a riotous companion. He may also have been a gamester, for Doctor Beard’s predestination was a gambler’s creed. He had almost certainly his moments of passion when he could be guilty of acts of violence and injustice. Sir Philip Warwick’s tale of his offers of restitution may be believed, for they are characteristic of the man.
Two facts are certain about his early years of married life. The first is that he was ill. Warwick knew his Huntingdon physician, Dr Simcott, who told him that Oliver was a “most splenetic” man, and had fancies about the town cross, and used to summon him at midnight and other unseasonable hours under the belief that he was dying.[58] We know, too, that as late as September 1628 he consulted a fashionable London physician, Sir Thomas Mayerne, who set him down in his case-book as “valde melancholicus.” The balance of his temperament was maladjusted and he was subject to moods of depression and to nightmarish dreams. The condition was no doubt partly physical, some glandular affection which the body would outgrow, but it was largely the consequence of the second fact—that in those years he was passing through a profound spiritual crisis.
The teaching of his parents and his schoolmaster, the puritan background to the pleasant life of Cambridge, talks maybe with his cousin Hampden and Hampden’s friends, the atmosphere of the age, stray words remembered from sermons, texts recollected from the Bible, and his own fundamental gravity of mind had produced their fruit at last. Oliver had to face a grim communion with his soul. Of this struggle we have no record, and can judge of its nature only by the character of the man thus re-created. We may believe that it was bitter and protracted, for his mind was always tortuous, and clearness came only after desperate strivings and confusions. We know something of the spiritual development of two other great puritans, Milton and Bunyan, but it is not likely that Oliver’s crisis was of the same type as theirs. He had none of Milton’s intellectual elasticity CONVERSION 1620-28 or his steady confidence in the power and value of the human reason; and, starting with a wider education than Bunyan, he must have escaped many of the more fantastic doubts which are described in Grace Abounding. But in effect he had to face Bunyan’s problem, the awful conundrums of election and predestination, and his vivid imagination, his scrupulous candour with himself, and his strong and stiff-necked spirit made the Slough of Despond and the Valley of Humiliation no easier for him than for Bunyan’s Pilgrim. He had to struggle with a literal interpretation of the most terrible words of Scripture, groping among vast and half-understood conceptions with no guide but his own honesty, goaded all the while by the knowledge that the quest was a matter of life and death, that for him, as for Bunyan, “above Elstow Green was heaven, and beneath was hell.” He had to go through all the items of the grim Calvinistic schedule—conviction of sin, repentance, hope of election, assurance of salvation—the experience which theology calls “conversion,” and which, in some form or other, is the destiny of every thinking man. “Wilt thou join with the dragons; wilt thou join with the Gods?”
The end was peace, for, in the language of his faith, he “found Christ”—not by any process of reasoning, but by an intense personal experience in which his whole being was caught up into an ecstasy of adoration and love. We shall not understand Oliver unless we realize that he was in essence a mystic, and that the core of his religion was a mystical experience continually renewed. Much of his life was spent in a communion outside the world of sense and time. “You cannot find nor behold the face of God but in Christ,” he wrote to his son; “therefore labour to know God in Christ, which the Scriptures make to be the sum of all, even life eternal. Because the true knowledge is not literal or speculative but inward, transforming the mind to it.”[59]
Two further things may be said of Oliver’s conversion. The religion based on it was not that narrow legal compact with the Almighty, tinctured with emotion, which 1620-28 belongs to a shallow later evangelicalism; nor was it, as with so many puritans, a creed based on prudential fears. It had more in common with Ralph Cudworth’s famous sermon,[60] or the Calvinism of the Cambridge Platonists. His view was that of Whichcote, that “he is the best Christian whose heart beats with the truest pulse towards heaven, not he whose head spinneth out the finest cobwebs.” It made him impatient of minor dogmatic differences among Christians, since his own faith was based on personal experience, and no man could look into another man’s heart. Isaac Pennington’s words, startling words for the seventeenth century, might have been his, had he been capable of so precise a statement: “All truth is shadow except the last truth. But all truth is substance in its own place, though it be but a shadow in another place. And the shadow is a true shadow, as the substance is a true substance.”
Again, with this toleration went a strange tenderness. Oliver was a man of a profound emotional nature who demanded food for his affections. His religion, being based not on fear but on love,[61] for fear had little place in his heart, made him infinitely compassionate towards others. A sudden anger might drive him into harshness, but he repented instantly of his fault. Tears were never far from his eyes. I can find no parallel in history to this man of action who had so strong an instinct for mercy and kindness, even for what in any other would have been womanish sentiment, and it sprang directly from his religion. He writes to a friend on the loss of a son in language which has still power to move us: “There is your precious child full of glory, to know sin nor sorrow any more. He was a gallant young man, exceeding gracious. God give you his comfort.”[62] His own agony at the death of his eldest son was remembered even on his death-bed. His letters to his family are full of a wistful affection. Of his favourite daughter Elizabeth he writes: “She seeks after (as I hope also) that which will satisfy. And thus to be a seeker is to be of the best sect next to a finder, and such an one shall every THE WAY OF PEACE 1620-28 faithful humble seeker be at the end.”[63] And he could appeal thus to the Barebone Parliament on behalf of all honesty and simplicity: “We should be pitiful ... and tender towards all though of different judgments.... Love all, tender all, cherish and countenance all, in all things that are good.... And if the poorest Christian, the most mistaken Christian, shall desire to live peaceably and quietly under you—I say, if any shall desire but to lead a life of godliness and honesty, let him be protected.”[64] That is a height to which even the charity of Bunyan scarcely attained, and to the common puritan it must have seemed no better than a blasphemous and slack-lipped folly.
