Читать книгу Oliver Cromwell - John Buchan - Страница 27
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ОглавлениеPym till his death was the dominating figure in parliament, the first civilian party leader in England. He had all the equipment—a caucus which met in secret, a machine outside the House in the shape of his company of adventurers, and a party chest provided by the wealth of the city of London. He had an elaborate intelligence system, and his agents were in every tavern and in the court itself. He was partisan now, not statesman, for his mind was closed to the arguments of his opponents, and dominated by a single, narrow, inflexible purpose. He had not thought out the consequences of his policy, and he emerged badly from the later controversy with Hyde on abstract matters of government. FIRST REFORMS 1641 His was a destructive rather than a creative mind, but on his main purpose he had not a shadow of doubt. Parliament, not the king, must have the final word on every matter which touched the interest of England.
Few in the House desired that final breach which meant war, but there was no man with the authority and statesmanship to prevent it. But had a Richelieu been the leader of the majority it is likely that he would have failed, the king being what he was. The nicest and wisest delimitation of monarchical powers, which would have satisfied Falkland as well as Pym, Hampden as well as Wentworth, would have shipwrecked upon the character of Charles. He had no gift of reading the temper of his people or of recognizing harsh realities. His principles were blind, irrational devotions. How could an equipoise of rights be established if one side to the bargain was determined to take the first opportunity to upset it? There was a dangerous logic in Pym’s view that there was no half-way house for England at that moment between an enslaved and a supreme parliament, an impotent and an autocratic monarch. Moreover Charles was left to his own devices, for he was soon to have no advisers. Presently Mr Secretary Windebank and Lord Keeper Finch fled the country, and Strafford went to the Tower. Bristol was out of favour, Endymion Porter was only a courtier, and Nicholas no more than a clerk. He turned to the worst of all counsellors, his audacious, light-headed queen.
The first work of parliament was to remedy proven abuses and to this the king offered small opposition. Tonnage and poundage, ship money, and all levies made without parliamentary authority went by the board, and with them the special courts, the Star Chamber and the High Commission, the Council of the North and the Council of Wales and the Marches. Men illegally imprisoned were released. The meeting of parliament was set above the royal caprice, and in February 1641 there was passed a triennial act which bound the king to call a parliament every third year—a measure with the passing of which Oliver had much to do. More, on 1641 May 11, the king assented to a further bill under which, without its consent, he could not dissolve or prorogue the present parliament—a strange concession, for it made that parliament independent not only of the Throne but of its own constituents. Here reform passed clearly into revolution. The vital ecclesiastical question, too, came soon to the forefront. There was a powerful section in the House, including Fiennes, the younger Vane, Hampden and Oliver, who desired the abolition of episcopacy root and branch. A petition on these lines was arranged for from the city, and Oliver in February 1641, and again in May, argued vehemently in its favour. This was an attack less upon the Church than upon the Laudian bishops, and indirectly upon the royal prerogative. On the scandal of the present system almost the whole House was agreed, but some, like Hyde and Falkland, would have had a controlled episcopacy as the best barrier against the kind of ecclesiastical tyranny which flourished in Scotland. Oliver on the other hand preferred to make a clean sweep of clerical dignitaries and to entrust their jurisdiction to parliamentary commissioners. He was still at the stage when the infallible wisdom of parliament seemed to him axiomatic and a cure for all mischiefs.
But the first months of the new House were overshadowed by one urgent question—what was to be done with the man who had threatened the very existence of parliamentaryism by making autocracy efficient? It was a race between the two factions. Strafford tried to induce the king to strike first, and to charge Pym and his friends with treason because of their intrigues with the Scots. But Charles hesitated, and Pym, informed by his agents of all that was happening at court, was the first to get in his blow. Strafford was impeached before the House of Lords, and on November 11, 1640, was arrested and committed to the Tower. A month later Laud followed him.
The trial which followed is no part of our story, for Oliver’s share in it was small. But, since it raised THE HOUSE OF LORDS 1641 certain major issues in an acute form, it deserves a brief consideration.
The first point to note is the tribunal by which Strafford was tried. The House of Lords, flooded with new creations, had lost much of its prestige in the country and its authority over the House of Commons. Its members represented wealth and court influence rather than popular prestige and experience in affairs. The ancient families were apt to be contemptuous of the upstarts. Arundel, “in his plain stuff and trunk hose and his beard in his teeth,” could tell Lord Spencer that his own ancestors had suffered in the king’s service “in such a time as when perhaps the lord’s ancestors that spoke last kept sheep.”[104] Hence, though the majority were likely to take the king’s side, there was a considerable critical opposition inclined to the reformers, and for the most part representing the more ancient nobility. In the discussion of the Petition of Right the Lords stood by the Commons, and after Buckingham’s death the desire of the majority was undoubtedly to work in harmony with the lower House. There were peers, like Saye and Brooke and Warwick, who saw eye to eye with Pym, and there were many, like Bristol, who were prepared to go far in concessions to preserve the unity of the nation. The latter’s words to Charles at York in September 1640 represented the general feeling of his order. “You see, sir, you have lost your kingdom’s heart by your taxes and impositions, and that till you are united to them, by giving them just satisfaction in all their grievances, you are no great king, for without the love and hearts of his people, what can a king do?”[105] When the Long Parliament began, the king could probably count on a majority on most questions among the one hundred and fifty peers, but it was a leaderless majority and it was subject to violent fluctuations of opinion. It desired to live at peace with the Commons and it held no extreme views on the royal prerogative. To Strafford and his ways the great bulk were hostile on public and private grounds. They would give him justice 1641 but no sympathy, but they regarded themselves as a court of law, whose verdict was to be determined by legal evidence.
This was not the view of Pym and his following. They were determined on Strafford’s death, for it was the only alternative to their own destruction. They paid him the tribute of extreme fear. “Stone-dead hath no fellow” was the counsel even of the just and gentle Essex. If the law of treason would not cover his case, a new law must be made. They would permit no juridical etiquette, no rules of fair dealing, to stand in their way. For them the question was not legal but political. “He had endeavoured to subvert the fundamental laws of England and Ireland, and instead thereof to introduce an arbitrary and tyrannical government against law”; “he had laboured to subvert the rights of parliaments and the ancient course of parliamentary proceedings.” Pym’s speeches were all a deification of law and a demand for its reign, but in the stages of the trial it was made clear that the law he glorified was not the standing law of the realm but a political dogma favoured by the single estate of the Commons.
The trial began on March 22, 1641, and by dawn each morning the great hall of Westminster was packed. Mr Robert Baillie, the emissary of the Scottish Covenanters, looked on at the spectacle with wondering provincial eyes and has left us a vivid picture;—the tall bowed figure of the accused in deep black wearing the George, the Lords in their robes and the Commons members within and without the rails, the vacant throne, the king in his box breaking the trellis with his own hands that he might hear better, the other boxes to the roof crowded with ladies and foreign notables, the chattering and laughter and guzzling while the grim drama was played out.[106] From the first Strafford had no shadow of a chance. TRIAL OF STRAFFORD 1641 He had made enemies of the most powerful forces in the land: the implacable place-hunters whom he had foiled, the parliamentary theorists, the grim Scots whom he had known and disliked in Ulster, and who made a god of things “purely and simply indifferent.” He faced his enemies with unflinching courage, though his body had become very frail. “My heart is good,” he wrote, “and I find nothing cold within me.”
Of the details of the trial this is not the place to write, or of the conduct of the two Vanes which largely determined his fate.[107] Strafford defended himself with a patient reasonableness, though he was tortured by pain, and it was soon clear that he could not be convicted of treason as the law then stood. After fourteen sittings this became patent to the Commons leaders and they resorted to other means. There was a general alarm as to what the king might do—march up the army from Yorkshire or seize the Tower to overawe parliament—and on this wave of fear, assisted by organized London mobs, they carried to success a simpler plan. It was Strafford’s head or theirs. All pretence of judicial proceedings was relinquished. A bill of attainder was passed by the Commons and defended in the Lords by Oliver St John with arguments alien to any civilized code. “Why should he have law himself who would not that others should have any? We indeed give law to hares and deer because they are beasts of chase; but we give none to wolves or foxes, wherever they are found, because they are beasts of prey.”[108] The Lords passed the bill on May 8th; Strafford urged the king to assent to it in the interests of peace, and Charles, renouncing his plighted word, accepted the sacrifice. The doomed man met death with calm eyes; it was all one to him whether he laid his head on the block or was torn to pieces by the mob; his race was accomplished.[109] Ussher, who accompanied 1641 him to Tower Hill, said that he “had never known a whiter soul”—the verdict, let it be remembered, of one who differed widely from him in temperament and doctrine.
Another judgment was that of Richelieu—“the English were so foolish that they killed their wisest man.”[110] A great man beyond doubt, perhaps the greatest Englishman of action in two centuries except that member for Cambridge whose harsh face was to be seen among the jostling Commons at the bar. But wise in Richelieu’s sense he was not, for he misread his times, and he lacked that tact des choses possibles which is of the essence of statesmanship. He had a theory of government much of which was eternal truth, and which applied by a man like him might have insured prosperity and peace. But there was no second Strafford, and above him was Charles. One man could not direct every detail of a country’s administration, and in the hands of Charles and his ordinary advisers the Strafford plan would have been only a more potent weapon of misgovernment. It is no answer to say that the House of Commons proved little less tyrannous and far more inefficient; the House of Commons was the English people’s own creation, and the nation could only learn wisdom by the old method of trial and error. That Pym, for all the violence of his methods, represented a deep-seated and universal feeling is clear from the passage of the attainder. Selden, indeed, outraged as a lawyer in his innermost sanctities, voted against it, but men like Falkland and Hyde and Capel did not oppose it.
Yet beyond question it was an act of revolution, a challenge which, when men began to reflect, was to THE BISHOPS ATTACKED 1641 cause a deep and final division in English minds. The choice was now between two forms of arbitrary rule. Digby in his courageous speech in the Commons put the point clearly. “I do not say but the rest may represent him as a man worthy to die, and perhaps worthier than many a traitor. I do not say but they may justly direct us to enact that such things shall be treason for the future. But God keep me from giving judgment of death on any man and of ruin to his innocent posterity upon a law made a posteriori.”[111] The House of Commons in the name of law had begun to defy the law; in the name of free speech to persecute those who, like Strafford’s few friends, had the temerity to differ from it; in the name of liberty to behave like a more intolerant court of High Commission. The hounds of revolution had been unleashed and in Strafford they had pulled down the one man who might have controlled them. “Sure I am,” wrote Sir Philip Warwick, “that his station was like those turfs of earth or sea-banks, which, by the storm swept away, left all the inland to be drowned by popular tumult.”[112]
