Читать книгу Oliver Cromwell - John Buchan - Страница 23
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ОглавлениеIn the forty-five years of Elizabeth’s reign there had been only thirteen parliamentary sessions, and no one had complained; but times had changed, and the eleven years during which Charles governed without summoning the House saw a growing anxiety and discontent. As it chanced, they were years of material prosperity for England, prices were good, commerce expanded, and the only sufferers were the very poor, who were not vocal. They were peaceful years, too, for the war with France ended in 1629, and that with Spain in 1630. But among thoughtful people they were years of ferment.
Abroad the parliamentary interregnum saw the ruin of the Palatine family, the brilliant campaign of Gustavus Adolphus which ended with his death at Lützen in 1632, the assassination of Wallenstein and the treaty of Prague, and the degeneration of the war into a dynastic quarrel. But English eyes were no longer turning overseas, for the critical events were befalling on English 1629-40 soil. Charles was giving his people an example of autocracy in action. The scene at the close of the last session of parliament was not forgiven. Nine members were sent to the Tower for sedition; the judges would give no clear ruling about parliamentary privilege, but in the subsequent trial on a writ of habeas corpus the verdict of the court was for fine and imprisonment; six made their peace with the king, but Strode and Valentine remained in captivity for ten years, and Eliot died in durance—the first, indeed the only true, martyr in the cause of parliament.
For the rest Charles governed the land by means of the competent Tudor machine. Some of its work was admirable. High-placed law-breakers got as short a shrift as humble malefactors, and the Elizabethan poor law was wisely and efficiently administered.[78] The difficulty was money, and, parliamentary subsidies being unavailable, much ingenuity was shown in the matter of ways and means. Charles found government, with prices rising, a costly business, and since he would not accept parliament’s terms, he set himself to scrape together funds from every quarter. Tonnage and poundage were levied without parliamentary grant to the disgust of the merchant community, and many old impositions were resurrected and new ones devised. Persons of standing were compelled to accept knighthood or pay a fine in composition; ancient forest laws were revived, and neighbouring landlords, whose great-grandfathers had encroached on the forest bounds, had to pay heavily for ancestral enterprise;[79] monopolies, forbidden by the act of 1624 to private persons, were granted to corporations, and were extended to the commonest articles of domestic life.[80] SHIP MONEY 1629-40 These imposts were an irritation, but, except the monopolies, they were scarcely felt as a burden, for taxation as a whole was not high.
But one experiment set all men talking, for a great figure chose to test its legality. In 1628 when the land was at war, ship money was levied on the coast towns, and with much grumbling it was levied again in 1634, a time of peace, the excuse being the need to suppress piracy. Next year it was extended to inland towns, and in 1636 it had become a permanent tax. A test was provided by Lord Saye and John Hampden, who refused to pay, and in 1637 Hampden’s case was selected for trial, when seven judges out of a bench of twelve decided for the Crown. ... The result had been expected, but Hampden had brought to a clear issue the debate between king and parliament, for the reasons given by the majority of the judges left no doubt about the implications of the royal prerogative. They laid it down that no statute could impair that prerogative, that a statute was void which weakened the king’s power to defend the country, and that in a case of necessity, of which he alone was the judge, he could dispense with any law.
Two men in these years bulked large in the public view. The first was Wentworth who, having steered the Petition of Right to port, had now entered the royal service. Few characters have been so travestied by legend, for he was far from being the melodramatic devotee of blood and iron of the old history books. He was a simple man, with strong affections, and he wrote the most endearing letters to his children. He would have been happy as a plain country gentleman, busy about his gardens and stables and kennels, for he had a great love of nature and wild sport. In Ireland, whenever he could escape from his duties, he was off to fish for trout, or to hawk—he complains of the absence of partridges around Dublin which compelled him to fly his falcons only at blackbirds—or to oversee the erection of his little shooting-lodge.
His first task was, as president of the Council of the North, to see that the king’s law was enforced beyond 1629-40 Trent, to protect every man in his belongings, and to raise money for the Crown—that is to say, for the services of the State. As a privy councillor he was a member of what was the equivalent of the cabinet. He had to administer the poor law, supervise the draining of the Yorkshire fens, keep the militia up to strength, and wrestle with obstructive nobles and stupid gentry. His methods often lacked tact, for he did not suffer fools gladly, and his fiery honesty made him intolerant of rogues. He could be hasty and harsh, but he put the north into some kind of order, and his many enemies in those parts could substantiate no single charge against him at his trial.
Then came his appointment in 1632 as lord deputy of Ireland, in succession to the incompetent elder Falkland. If England was disturbed, Ireland was ancient chaos; the land was poverty-stricken, and the “great” Earl of Cork was making a fortune out of money-lending; the coasts were harried by pirates, the plantation system was breaking down, and the rule of the lord-justices in Dublin was a farce. A more seemingly hopeless task never confronted a man with a passion for order. It is on his eight years of Irish government that his chief title to fame must rest, and it may fairly be said that no British pro-consul ever undertook a severer labour or in a short time produced more miraculous results. He raised the status of the alien protestant church and the character of its divines. He did not attempt to press the Laudian policy of conformity, and he disbelieved in penal measures; “it is most certain,” he wrote to Laud, “that the to-be-wished Reformation must first work from ourselves,” so he made war on simony and corruption, and told refractory bishops that he would have their rochets pulled over their ears. He refused to bear hardly on the catholics, postponing any attempt at their conversion till he had provided a church worth being converted to, while Pym across the water was declaring that he “would have all Papists used like madmen.” In Ulster he tried mild measures to bring the high-fliers to reason, though he detested “the vanity WENTWORTH 1629-40 and lightness of their fantastic doctrine,” and it was only in the interests of public peace that he was compelled in the end to make the life of men like Robert Blair so uncomfortable that they retired to Scotland. His method with the ministers had much of the initial patience and ultimate firmness of Cromwell’s. He believed that for the sake of peace Ireland should be economically dependent upon England, but he did not interpret this maxim harshly, and in many respects his economic views were ahead of his time. He succeeded to a revenue which fell far short of the expenditure, and to a heavy debt, and he left the country solvent, largely by checking peculation. He had to struggle against the vested interests of monopolists and land-grabbers and corrupt officials, who had great purchase in England both at court and in parliament, and, like most servants of the Stuarts, he had to fight with his flank turned and his rear threatened. He was determined that Ireland should not be the milch cow of “that nation of people or rather vermin, which are ever to be found at the courts of great princes.”
He toiled with resolution, energy and invincible courage, and his successes far outbalanced his failures. He ended with a surplus instead of a deficit, and a large reserve fund. He put the plantations in order, and, though he had no military experience, provided an efficient defence force, much of which he trained himself; he cleansed the foul stables of officialdom, set the church on a sound basis of temporalities, and vastly improved its quality; he so enlarged the export trade that it was nearly double the value of the imports; above all, he put into the land a new spirit of ease and hopefulness. Ireland, as he told the king, was now “a growing people in their first Spring.” He did all this by a prodigal expenditure of mind and body. He had never been strong, and all his life he was plagued with gout and the stone. Ireland made him an old man in his early forties. “I grow extremely old and full of grey hairs since I came into this kingdom,” he wrote, “and should wax exceeding melancholy, were it not for two little girls 1629-40 that come now and then to play by me. Remember, I tell you, I am of no long life.” He was always oppressed by the thought that his time on earth would be too short for the work he had to do. But he consoled himself with the reflection that “he lives more that virtuously and generously spends one month, than some other that may chance to dream out some years and bury himself alive all the while.”[81]
There was no doubt felt in England of the success of Wentworth’s work, for every post and every traveller out of Ireland told the tale of it. He had few illusions about how his old parliamentary comrades would now look on him. “I am not ignorant,” he wrote to Laud in 1634, “that my stirring herein will be strangely reported and censured on that side, and how I shall be able to sustain myself against your Prynnes, Pims and Bens, with the rest of that generation of odd names and natures, the Lord knows.” By his former colleagues he was regarded with mingled admiration, hatred and fear, but principally fear. They felt towards him as an extreme Marxist might feel towards an enlightened, humane and successful capitalist. He was making autocracy efficient and therefore respectable, breaking cheerfully all their pet laws to the profit of the lieges, and thereby buttressing that very fabric which they sought to demolish.
The other dominant figure was William Laud, first known to Oliver as archdeacon of Huntingdon, and since then in succession bishop of St David’s, of Bath and Wells, and of London, and now archbishop of Canterbury and the occupant of high civil posts which it was not wise for a churchman to hold. The character of Laud has waited long for a fair assessment, for till the other day Macaulay’s coarse abuse was apparently the verdict of history. But this little man,[82] with his horseshoe brows LAUD 1629-40 and prim mouth and sharp restless eyes, is too subtle a figure for an easy verdict. It is clear that he had great natural gifts of head and heart, and that there was honesty in his dreams and much valuable matter in his work. He had a spacious conception of the Church as the guardian of sane progress not in England only but throughout the globe, a missionary church, the spiritual counterpart of a great terrestrial empire. Only through such a church, he believed, could the perilous encroachments of Rome be stayed.[83] He was tolerant in matters of dogma. The disciple of Lancelot Andrewes and the friend and counsellor of George Herbert and Nicholas Ferrar had a sincere personal religion. He had always an honourable tenderness towards poverty. He had a passion for sound learning, and as chancellor he set Oxford upon a new and better road.
Even on the more dubious side of his career, his work in the Star Chamber and the High Commission, there is something to be set to his credit. These courts, on the testimony of Sir Matthew Hale, filled a gap in the legal system, and could reach offenders who laughed at the ordinary tribunals. Laud knew neither fear nor favour, and his normal administration was not harsh, for he put no man to death, and the fines imposed were beyond all comparison less than those imposed by parliament. He had to administer a cruel law—of which he did not recognize the cruelty, for there was a cold donnish insensitiveness about him—and we are shocked at the barbarous punishments inflicted upon Prynne and Leighton, Bastwick and John Lilburne; but it may be questioned if they really shocked the moral sense of the 1629-40 community, though they gave superb material to his enemies. These men had been guilty of libels which in earlier times would have been construed as treasonable and for which they would have suffered death, and it is better to lose your ears than to lose your head.
Laud’s tragedy, and that of his country, was that he was an able and honest man set in a place where his ability and honesty were the undoing of himself and his master. “A busy logical faculty, operating entirely on chimerical element of obsolete delusions, a vehement, shrill-voiced character, confident in its own rectitude as the narrowest character may the soonest be. A man not without affections, though bred as a College Monk, with little room to develop them; of shrill, tremulous, partly feminine nature, capable of spasms, of much hysterical obstinacy, as female natures are.” So Carlyle,[84] and his verdict does not greatly differ from that of James I: “He hath a restless spirit, and cannot see when things are well, but loves to bring matters to a pitch of reformation floating in his own brain.” Laud forgot Bacon’s profound sentence: “It were good that men in their Innovations would follow the example of Time itself, which, indeed, innovateth greatly, but quietly, and by degrees scarce to be parceived.” He applied the brain of a college pedant to the spacious life of England.
We cannot deny vigour to a mind to which Wentworth turned for advice, but it was vigour without perspective. He had Wentworth’s love of order, but he insisted on it in the one sphere which was not ripe for it, and, unlike Wentworth, he could not distinguish between essentials and things “purely and simply indifferent.” Laud was at utter variance with the great mass of the English people. He put the emphasis upon uniformity of worship when the serious minds of his age were absorbed in spiritual struggles which had nothing to do with ceremonial. He preached the doctrine of one great, unified, comprehensive church, when the popular tendency was towards minute schisms. He was a devotee of ritual, and most of the usages he would have made compulsory HUNTINGDON CONTROVERSIES 1629-40 seemed to the plain man to be what Oliver called “poisonous popish ceremonies.” His church courts were so active and meddlesome that the ordinary man’s life was made a burden.[85] If Wentworth’s doings filled the parliamentarians with fears because he seemed to be making a success of autocracy, Laud’s were a blessing to them because they made the Church, and the king the Church’s protector, hated and despised. The small, untiring, resolute, courageous archbishop is a tragic figure, for he had no inconsiderable faith to preach but not the gifts to make it acceptable. He was a devoted priest and a great ecclesiastic, but what the world sought was a prophet.[86]
