Читать книгу Oliver Cromwell - John Buchan - Страница 29
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ОглавлениеEngland had entered upon a civil war of which it may be written, more than of most historic controversies, that neither side had a monopoly of justice. An effective rejoinder could be made to every plea advanced, and men in the end chose their cause for other reasons than cold logic. An argument was sharpened into a formula, and NEUTRALS AND EXTREMISTS 1642 a formula into a war-cry, and the extremest statement of each case became the accepted creed. Most Englishmen refrained from any decision, and, since the issue did not move them, abode in a puzzled neutrality. “They care not what government they live under,” as Haselrig complained, “so as they may plough and go to market.” There were many who sought only a quiet life, like young Mr Evelyn, fresh from Balliol, who, after amusing himself with constructing a fish-pond and a solitude at Wootton, thought England likely to be an uncomfortable dwelling-place and betook himself abroad. There were some like Salisbury and Pembroke who, thinking only of their parks and chases, swung shamelessly with the tide. Even the serious and patriotic found themselves in confusion. “Both sides promisis so fair,” wrote Lady Sussex, “that I cannot see what it is they shoulde fight for.” “I am in such a great rage with the parliament as nothing will passify me,” wrote another country gentlewoman, “for they promised us all should be won if my Lord Strafford’s hed were off, and since then there is nothing better.”[126] But even on the most perplexed a decision was forced. Richard Baxter in his ripe age might write: “I confess for my part I have not such censorious thoughts of those that were neuter as formerly I had, for he that either thinketh both sides raised an unlawful war, or that could not tell which (if either) was in the right might well be excused if he defended neither”;[127] and Andrew Marvell might consider that “the cause was too good to have been fought for,” and that men should have trusted God and the king;[128] but such detachment was for the ordinary thoughtful man strictly impossible. The trumpets had spoken and he must range himself.
Some had no doubts. The extremists on both sides were secure and happy. The young men of pleasure naturally followed the king’s banner, for on the other side was the detested puritanism. Simple and loyal souls answered to the call of a personal allegiance. For men like Hopton and Capel, Sir Marmaduke Langdale and 1642 Sir Jacob Astley, there could be no hesitation, since their sworn fealty was involved. So also the king’s standard-bearer Sir Edmund Verney, though on the merits of the case he was with parliament. “I have eaten his bread and served him near thirty years and will not do so base a thing as to forsake him.”[129] This forthright and unquestioning loyalty was well expressed by Lord Paget, the parliament’s own nominee as lord-lieutenant of Buckinghamshire. “It may seem strange that I, who with all zeal and earnestness have prosecuted, in the beginning of this parliament, the reformation of all disorders in church and commonwealth, should now in a time of such great distractions desert the cause. Most true it is that my ends were the common good; and whilst that was prosecuted, I was ready to lay down both my life and fortune; but when I found a preparation of arms against the king under the shadow of loyalty, I rather resolved to obey a good conscience than particular ends, and am now on my way to his Majesty, where I will throw myself down at his feet, and die a loyal subject.”[130] Grandees like Newcastle were natural royalists because they were themselves semi-royal, and there were younger men, some of them soon to die, who found in the summons a call to manhood and a nobler path. Such was Carnarvon, who was transformed from a virtuoso and sportsman into a most gallant soldier. Such was Northampton, whose luxurious life was exchanged for one of simple hardihood. “All distresses he bore like a common man, and all wants and hardnesses as if he had never known plenty.” These men the war revealed to themselves and to their fellows, so that, in Clarendon’s beautiful words, they were “not well known till their evening.”
But even among the royalists who had no doubts there was little zeal for the conflict. They understood the horrors of a civil war where families, like Verneys and Feildings, Arundells and Godolphins, were divided against themselves, and, like Defoe’s cavalier, they dreaded to hear men cry for quarter in the English tongue. Among FALKLAND 1642 the more reflecting there was a deeper perplexity, and cheerfulness was in inverse proportion to a man’s intellectual stature. Hyde, indeed, had a stalwart argumentative faith in his own special creed, and he believed that, to secure its triumph, it was necessary first of all that the king should read parliament a stiff lesson. He stood for what he regarded as the traditional English constitution, a mixed or limited monarchy. Hobbes with his dialectic has made sport of the doctrine,[131] but Hyde read rightly the instinct of his countrymen and in the long run his view prevailed. Yet he only held his faith by shutting his eyes to one damning fact, the character of Charles. He must have known in his heart that the victory of the king would not mean the kind of monarchy he desired: like Montrose, he had to choose between two perils, and he decided for what seemed to him the lesser. Let monarchy be preserved and by the grace of God it might be mended; if it fell, then the foundations would be removed, and the whole fabric would crumble.
Falkland, a subtler and abler mind, asked more searching questions. He had not, like many, the passion of personal fealty, and in his philosophic detachment he had as little love for one side as for the other. He thought of the rival creeds as Bacon thought of the Grecians and the Alchemists—“That of the Grecians hath the foundations in words, in ostentation, in confutation, in sects, in schools, in disputations; that of the Alchemists hath the foundation in impostures, in auricular traditions and obscurity.” He saw no hope of a fortunate issue, for the triumph of either side would mean the triumph of an extreme, and therefore of unreason; and he feared that Englishmen would presently be divided by an unbridgeable river of blood. Therefore “from the entrance into this unnatural war his natural cheerfulness and vivacity grew clouded, and a kind of sadness and dejection of spirit stole upon him.” He was of a temper and composition, Clarendon adds, “fitter to live in republica Platonis than in faece Romuli.”
On the parliament side there were also the doubters 1642 and the half-hearted. To many, especially the plain soldiers like Sir Thomas Fairfax and Sir William Waller, it was a cruel necessity, in which they could only pray that they might comport themselves like Englishmen and Christians. Waller’s letter to Hopton is an expression of this sad chivalry:
My affections to you are so unchangeable that hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person, but I must be true to the cause wherein I serve.... The great God, who is the searcher of my heart, knows with what reluctance I go upon this service, and with what perfect hatred I look upon a war without an enemy.... The God of peace in his good time send us peace, and in the meantime fit us to receive it. We are both upon the stage and we must act the parts that are assigned us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour, and without personal animosities.[132]
Sir Simonds D’Ewes, stout parliament man as he was, had no heart to write his diary. Hampden, too, must have had heavy thoughts. He was clear on the immediate issue, but beyond that he saw only darkness, and his long face became graver and the deep eyes more melancholy, though the mouth was firmer set.
But to some it seemed to be the dawn of a new world. Milton, rapt from academic visions, was filled with illimitable hopes which were soon to shape themselves in splendid prose. It was a time of “jubilee and resurrection” an “age of ages wherein God is manifestly come down among us, to do some remarkable good to our church and state.”[133] It seemed “as if some divine commission from heaven were descended to take into hearing and commiseration the long and remediless afflictions of this kingdom.”[134] His heart swells with admiration for his countrymen, and his eyes glow with ecstatic visions of his country’s destiny. “Let not England forget her precedence of teaching the nations how to live.” He abounds in a lover’s hyperboles—“a right pious, right honest, and right hardy nation”[135]—“an eagle mewing her mighty youth”—“a nation not MILTON 1642 slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit; acute to invent, subtle and sinewy in discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.”[136] Soon he was to be disillusioned and to find the bulk of Englishmen “imbastardized from the ancient nobleness of their ancestors”;[137] but for the moment he was in a honeymoon rapture. Yet the thought to which he gave utterance three years later was always in his mind. There could be no freedom without discipline, and if old bonds were cast off new ones must be forged by the enlightened spirit. Pearls must not be cast before swine,
That bawle for freedom in their senseless mood,
And still revolt when truth would set them free.
License they mean when they cry libertie;
For who loves that, must first be wise and good.
Something of this rapture was shared by certain of the parliamentary leaders, by men like the younger Vane, the fanatics of puritanism, the seekers after a republic. But not by Pym, the most confident of all. He had suffered the fate of many great partisans, and had allowed a fighting cause so to obsess him that it shut out the rest of the world. He thought only of the immediate purpose and the instant need, not of what lay beyond—which is proper for a subordinate commander, but not for a general-in-chief, and still less for a statesman. As much as Strafford he had lost the tact des choses possibles, and, if Browning’s vision be true, and in some better world he “walks once more with Wentworth,” the two rivals may have discovered in the same lack the reason of their ultimate failure.
As for Oliver he had the fewest doubts of any. Half the strife in parliament had been about questions which he scarcely understood and had little interest in, and on these he dutifully followed his leader. Clearly he was all the time in a state of high excitement, finding his temper hard to control, and impatient of the rules of procedure. But on three matters he had his resolution 1642 fixed. Fourteen years later, as the undisputed ruler of England, he was to tell a parliament, “our business is to speak Things,”[138] and now his views were a plain deduction from facts as he saw them. In the first place parliament must be predominant, for it alone represented the “plain people.” The other two principles were negative, for his thoughts were not yet in a constructive phase: “I can tell you, sir, what I would not have,” he told certain questioners; “though I cannot, what I would.”[139] Episcopacy must be abolished, since it was the bishops, as he knew from his own experience, who were foremost in starving the nation of the Gospel and in coquetting with Rome. This was his deepest conviction, for religion was his major interest. Lastly Charles could not be trusted, and some way must be found of making him impotent for evil. That way could only be war. Already Oliver had shown that he had the courage of his opinions, for he had somewhat embarrassed his colleagues by moving to demand the dismissal of Bristol from the king’s council, and he had been the first to propose to put the land in a state of defence. He cared nothing for the republican theories in which Vane dabbled, but, looking at facts, he saw that if parliament did not beat the king, the king would assuredly destroy parliament, and indeed might at any moment achieve a coup d’état. Therefore he was for war—war at once—war to a finish.
As soon as he was permitted he acted, for here was something which he understood. In July he spent £100 of his own money in sending down arms to Cambridgeshire, and he obtained a vote permitting the town of Cambridge to raise two companies of volunteers. With his brothers-in-law, Valentine Wauton and John Disbrowe, he prevented the University from sending £20,000 worth of plate to the king, and seized the local magazine. When the Bishop of Ely tried to put into force the royal commission of array, he fell upon him with a hastily raised levy, surrounded the colleges during service in chapel, and packed off three heads of houses OLIVER ACTS 1642 as prisoners to London.[140] The member for the borough had taken command of the shire. By the end of August he was back in town, having raised a troop of sixty light horse, with Disbrowe as their quartermaster, for the army of Essex. At forty-three he had found his proper calling, and a force of incalculable velocity had been unloosed on the world.
