Читать книгу Oliver Cromwell - John Buchan - Страница 22
IV
ОглавлениеWhen parliament met on March 17, 1628, it was in a troubled atmosphere. Abroad Wallenstein had occupied Holstein, Schleswig and Jutland, and was sitting down before Stralsund; England was at war with France, and Buckingham had miserably bungled the expedition to relieve La Rochelle; the king was clamouring for a new fleet, and various worthy gentlemen had gone to prison for refusing to subscribe to his forced loans. The House was in a dangerous temper. Buckingham must be called to account; security must be found against illegal imprisonment and arbitrary levies; certain rights of parliament must be fixed beyond a peradventure; most important of all, the high-flying wings of Laud, now bishop of London, must be clipped. The king thought only of subsidies, but his faithful Commons asked further questions. If money was needed for the service of the State, was it to be raised by the king at will or by the estates of the realm? Were the men who administered the government to be responsible to the said estates or to the king alone? Was the national church to be guided by the king in defiance of the desires of the representatives of the people? Was a member to be allowed to speak his mind in parliament without fear of punishment? Were the law and the justiciary to be free from arbitrary royal interference? These were searching questions, new, many of them, in substance as well as in form.
When Oliver entered parliament he found a body which fairly represented the wealth, rank and talent of 1628 England. In earlier days the knights of the shire had been usually men of distinction, but the borough members had been nonentities; but with the Tudors the prestige of the House had grown, and now the ordinary borough member was also armiger and generosus. The standard of debate had risen, and scriveners found a ready demand for copies of speeches. Long-descended squires sat on the benches beside noted lawyers from the inns of court, black-letter scholars, and city merchants whose names were known over half the world. When he looked round him he saw Sir Edward Coke bent with the burden of eighty years; Glanvill and Maynard and Denzil Holles; young Ralph Hopton fresh from the German wars; the mocking gaze of Selden; his cousin John Hampden with his long thoughtful face, thin lips, and bright melancholy eyes; Pym, burly and shaggy and vigilant as a watch-dog; and the dark saturnine brows of Wentworth. Not often has destiny brought under one roof at one time so many of her children.
Oliver played but a small part in that parliament, so its tale may be briefly told. In its first session the Commons embodied their grievances in the famous Petition of Right,[68] which after a struggle passed both Houses and was accepted by the king. This second Magna Charta laid down that henceforth no man should be compelled to pay monies to the State without consent of parliament, that the commissions for executing martial law should be cancelled, and that an end should be put to the billeting of soldiers and sailors. It dealt only with immediate grievances, and did not touch the deeper questions at issue. Wentworth would have had it in the form of a bill which would have become statute law in the ordinary way, but, though supported by Pym, he was overruled by the lawyers, with the result that all that was won was a declaratory statement of the existing law assented to by the king in a highly ambiguous form. The House went on to remonstrances about popery and Arminianism, till it was prorogued on June 26th. In August Buckingham died under Felton’s dagger at OLIVER’S MAIDEN SPEECH 1629 Portsmouth, so one main rock of offence was removed. In the second session the House devoted itself to religious questions and to the alleged illegality of tonnage and poundage—a futile session which ended on March 2nd, 1629, in a brawl. The Speaker, Sir John Finch, announcing that the king had decreed an adjournment, tried to stop the debate by leaving the House. Holles and Valentine held him by force in his chair and the door was locked, while Eliot read a comprehensive statement of grievances which was passed by acclamation. Then Black Rod was permitted to enter, and for eleven years parliament ceased to be.
On the 11th day of February 1629 in the second session of this farcical parliament Oliver made his maiden speech. The House then sat from seven in the morning till noon and the afternoon was given up to committees. It was scarcely a speech; rather an anecdote told in the committee for religion with Pym in the chair. The discussion turned on the doings of Dr Neile, the bishop of Winchester, and Oliver intervened to support the charge of romish inclinations with a story of a certain Dr Alablaster who had preached black popery at Paul’s Cross, to which Dr Beard, his old Huntingdon schoolmaster, proposed to reply when his turn came for the sermon. But Neile had sent for him and forbidden him to refute Alablaster, and when Beard disobeyed him had him reprimanded.[69] Thereupon it was ordered that the Speaker should invite Dr Beard to come up and testify against the bishop. The matter has no interest except as Oliver’s first utterance in an assembly which he was in time to dominate and ultimately to destroy. It was probably an ill-delivered and halting affair, for his voice was poor, and he had no fluency. Only after he had become sure of himself did he acquire a vigour and an idiom of his own. “When he delivered his mind in the House,” wrote Winstanley of his maturer days, “it was with a strong and masculine eloquence, more able to persuade than to be persuaded. His expressions were hardy, opinions resolute, asseverations grave and vehement; 1629-40 always intermixt (Andronicus-like) with sentences of Scripture, to give them the greater weight, and the better to insinuate themselves into the affections of the people. He expressed himself with some kind of passion; but with such a commanding, wise deportment, that at his pleasure he governed and swayed the House, as he had most times the leading voice. Those who find no such wisdom in his speeches may find it in the effect of them.”[70] That style of oratory is not learned in a day.
Oliver returned to Huntingdon with much to think about. He had sat in the great council of the nation and watched the wheels of government. He had observed and listened to the king—heard him speak the insolent sentence that he did not threaten the House, since he would scorn to threaten any but his equals; he had been present at the wild scene at the session’s close when the king was defied. His opinion of royalty had not risen. He had heard the convictions to which he had been feeling his way expounded with eloquence and precision. Eliot’s neurotic fervour was perhaps little to his taste. As his writings show, Eliot was in some ways the most far-sighted and logical political thinker of his generation, but in practical life he was not fitted for leadership, but only for martyrdom. He was always in a fever of rhetoric, trembling with emotion, ruining his case by vain extravagance, without sense of atmosphere, and beyond belief tactless. The result was that in all but a few intimates he roused little affection, and in his opponents the most strenuous dislike. But Pym was another matter, and Pym’s speeches in that parliament were one of the germinal influences in Oliver’s career.
For Pym then was at his best. He had not yet shown himself one of the adroitest party managers in our political history, but he had given proof, as never before or after, of a broad statesmanship. Even his weakest side, his papist-baiting and his heresy-hunting, Oliver would not find antipathetic, for some earlier words of Pym’s on the catholics were his own creed. “If they should once obtain a connivance, they will press for a toleration, PYM 1629-40 from thence to an equality, from an equality to a superiority, from a superiority to an extirpation of all contrary religions.”[71] Unlike the lawyers he did not lose himself in antique precedents.[72] He was a reformer, but not as yet a revolutionary, a puritan but no fanatic; above all he had an English robustness and hard good sense, and a supreme competence in business. To Oliver, Pym’s expositions must have come as a welcome change from Coke’s subtleties and Eliot’s rhapsodies. We can still feel the power of those earlier speeches. “If, instead of concord and interchange of support, one part seeks to uphold an old form of government, and the other part introduces a new, they will miserably consume one another. Histories are full of the calamities of entire states and nations in such cases. It is, nevertheless, equally true that time must needs bring about some alterations.... Therefore have these commonwealths been ever the most durable and perpetual which have often reformed and recomposed themselves according to their first institution and ordinance. By this means they repair the breaches, and counterwork the ordinary and natural effects of time.”[73] It is the high constitutional wisdom of Edmund Burke.
Among parties at that moment, even between the stoutest antagonists, there seemed to be a curious agreement on ultimate principles; the difference was rather in interpretation and application. Eliot, for example, could declare: “Where there is division in religion, as it doth wrong divinity, so it makes distraction among men.... For the unity I wish posterity might say we had preserved for them that which was left for us”—which were almost the words of Laud on the scaffold. Both sides flattered themselves that they sought the preservation of ancient rights and ancestral liberties. Yet the House of Commons in 1628 was in very truth a revolutionary assembly, a far more daring innovator than the king, though it innocently believed itself conservative. 1629-40 Only Wentworth saw whither the current was bearing it. In some of its demands it had history behind it. Freedom of speech, for instance, had long been claimed formally at the beginning of each session, and even Elizabeth, though she dealt faithfully with too candid critics, nominally recognized it. The Commons indeed had no very high motive in the matter, and cared little for free speech as such: they asked to be themselves protected from the king’s vengeance, but in 1621 at Pym’s instigation they had dealt summarily with one of their own members who had annoyed them by some badinage about Sunday sports. The control of the purse strings had also a good, if somewhat patchy, historical warrant. But to ask that the executive should be responsible to parliament, and that Church and State should be directly governed by the desires of the people’s representatives and not by the will of the king was a demand for the transfer of sovereignty and an act of revolution.[74]
Parliament’s case did not rest on any antiquarian precedents but on the changed mood of the nation. The Tudor autocracy, as typified by Charles, simply did not represent the religious and political desires of the English people; of these desires parliament was the only mouthpiece; if parliament was overridden the people were impotent. That on the broadest lines was Pym’s case, as it was also the case of Wentworth and Hyde and Falkland. The old constitution had broken down and must be put together again. The solution by means of an adjustment of powers and a balance of functions was made difficult by the current unitary habit of thought, which sought a single fount of authority. Yet something like this was the original policy of the reformers. It seems to have been Pym’s; it was certainly Wentworth’s—“To the joint well-being of sovereignty and subjection do I here vow all my care and diligence.”
Three facts rendered compromise impossible and made PARLIAMENT’S CLAIM
1629-40it certain that parliament would in the long run claim an absolute and overriding authority. The first was that it had already won so much. In the days of Elizabeth privy councillors arranged and controlled the business of the Commons. They sat on every committee. They promoted all the legislation. Parliament might pass laws, but the Crown in council made them. Had James in his later years had managers like Burleigh and Cecil the system might have been bequeathed to his son. But in the first decade of the seventeenth century the Crown grew slack in this business of management and the House produced its own leaders. We see this in the 1621 parliament when the privy councillors were elbowed aside by men like Coke and Sandys and Phelips, and each succeeding parliament made it clearer. The new system of committees aided the development, and the privy council, so far as the House was concerned, was no longer an effective cabinet. A new and powerful machine had come into being, the working of which the king and his advisers did not understand. The Commons had snatched the initiative in law-making, and from that it was but a short step to the claim that the king should act only through parliament.[75] The second fact was the religious aspect of the strife. The king as head of the Church claimed to direct belief and worship, and he had so used this power as to quicken the popular fear of Rome and of romanizing practices. Against these, if he retained his prerogative, there was no bulwark, and there is nothing on which men are so little ready to compromise as on religion. The third fact was the character of Charles. Buckingham’s death had left him face to face with his people; his policy now was his own and could not be blamed on any favourite. If a residual authority was vested in him, could he be trusted to use it wisely? Men might assent to the abstract ideal of monarchy, but it was a different thing to agree to leaving large prerogative powers in the hands of this particular monarch, 1629-40 who, it was already plain, was in his way as stubborn as Prynne or Leighton, and who was not likely to abide by any bargain.
All these considerations were present to a cool observer like Sir Thomas Wentworth, and he was slow to make up his mind. One motive for decision he did not possess, for he was a Laodicean about the religious strife. He could not understand why the lesser matters of belief and discipline should be allowed to bulk so large; to him much of the quarrel was about things “purely and simply indifferent.” He looked at the problem with a shrewd secular eye, a practical eye, for he was in no way interested in theories. The delicate adjustment for which some of his friends argued seemed to him unworkable, for it would end in stagnation; it was necessary to emphasize the power of one part of the machine in order to make the wheels go round. That part he decided must be the monarchy. Clearly parliament could not take over the executive, for it had simply not the means; these the Crown alone possessed, an inheritance from a long past, and a substitute could not be easily improvised. He did not rank high the practical sagacity of the tearful House which had carried the Petition of Right. Moreover the safety of the nation in a crisis might depend upon an executive power above and beyond the ordinary law. He hated inefficiency, corruption and oppression, and when it came to fighting these there must be an authority to act swiftly in emergencies. “Let us make what law we can,” he told the Commons; “there must be—nay, there will be—a Trust left in the Crown.”[76] Charles might have his faults, but could not ministers be found who would counteract them, for nations had often been prosperous under feeble kings? The Tudors by aggrandizing monarchical power had saved the land from anarchy; there was a risk of a new anarchy, and where else lay salvation? Therefore he placed the emphasis on the Crown, though he gave it no autocracy. It was the central point of national unity, and, if it failed, the land would be delivered up to the strife of sects and YEARS OF FERMENT 1629-40 factions. There was a sound democratic instinct in him, for he was much concerned for the welfare of the “meaner people”—Montrose’s very phrase: and he would have assented to Montrose’s appeal to the commonalty:
Do you not know, when the monarchical government is shaken, the great ones strive for the garlands with your blood and your fortune? Whereby you gain nothing ... but shall purchase to yourselves vultures and tigers to reign over you.[77]
So, the Petition of Right having been accepted, and Buckingham being out of the way, he turned from the House of Commons to a different task, entered the royal service, and set out to contend with indisputable vultures and tigers. His decision is memorable, for the day was to come when Oliver, who now thought him an apostate from the cause of God and country, had to face the same problem and reach, unwillingly, a like conclusion.
