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A great man lays upon posterity the duty of understanding him. The task is not easy even with those well-defined, four-square personalities, who belong to a recognizable type, whose purpose was single and whose career was the product of obvious causes; for we have still in our interpretation to recover an atmosphere which is not our own. It is harder when the man in question falls under no accepted category, and in each feature demands a new analysis. It is hardest of all with one who sets classification at defiance, and seems to unite in himself every contrary, who dominates his generation like some portent of nature, a mystery to his contemporaries and an enigma to his successors. In such a case his interpreter must search not only among the arcana of his age, its hidden forces and imponderable elements, but among the profundities of the human spirit.

Oliver Cromwell has long passed beyond the mists of calumny. He is no longer Hyde’s “brave bad man”; still less is he the hypocrite, the vulgar usurper, the bandit of genius, of Hume and Hallam. By common consent he stands in the first rank of greatness, but there is little agreement on the specific character of that greatness. He is admired by disciples of the most divergent faiths. Some see in him the apostle of liberty, the patron of all free communions, forgetting his attempts to found an established church and his staunch belief in a national discipline. Constitutionalists claim him as one of the pioneers of the parliamentary system, though he had little patience with government by debate, and played havoc with many parliaments. He has been hailed as a soldier-saint, in spite of notable blots on his scutcheon. He has been called a religious genius, but on his religion it is not easy to be dogmatic; like Bunyan’s Much-afraid, when he went through the River none could understand what he said. Modern devotees of force have seen in him the super-man who marches steadfastly to his goal amid the crash of ancient fabrics, but they have forgotten his torturing hours of indecision. He has been described as tramping with his heavy boots relentlessly through his age, but his steps were mainly slow and hesitating, and he often stumbled.

Paradox is in the fibre of his character and career. Like Pompey, he was suarum legum auctor ac subversor; a devotee of law, he was forced to be often lawless; a civilian to the core, he had to maintain himself by the sword; with a passion to construct, his task was chiefly to destroy; the most scrupulous of men, he had to ride roughshod over his own scruples and those of others; the tenderest, he had continually to harden his heart; the most English of our greater figures, he spent his life in opposition to the majority of Englishmen; a realist, he was condemned to build that which could not last. Even at his death the dream-fabric was dissolving, so that Cowley, after watching the splendid funeral, could write: “I know not how, the whole was so managed that, methought, it somewhat expressed the life of him for whom it was made—much noise, much tumult, much expense, much magnificence, much vainglory, briefly a great show, and yet, after all this, but an ill sight.” “The joyfullest funeral I ever saw,” wrote Evelyn, “for there were none that cried but dogs.”

He who studies Cromwell must be prepared for many conundrums. Behind him, largely explanatory of both THE POINT OF CHANGE the man and his work, lies the conundrum of his time. He lived in an era of transition, when the world was moving away from the securities of the Middle Ages and labouring to find new sanctions for the conduct of life. The seventeenth century saw the end of the wars of religion and the beginning of the wars of economic nationalism, and Cromwell stood at the point of change. It was an era of dilapidation and disintegration; dilapidation which is the breakdown of shape and line; disintegration which means the dissolving of things into minute elements. Iconoclasts there had always been, and there were iconoclasts then who would have replaced one idol by another; but more dangerous were the analysts and the atomizers under whose hand belief crumbled altogether. In politics, in thought, in religion, in art there was everywhere a dissolution of accepted things. In 1611 Bacon drew for James the picture of a happy England: “Your People military and obedient; fit for war, used to peace. Your church enlightened with good preachers, a heaven with stars. Your judges learned and learning from you; just, and just by your example. Your nobility at a right distance between Crown and People; no oppressors of the People, no over-shadowers of the Crown. Your servants in awe of your wisdom, in hope of your goodness; the fields growing from desert to garden; the City growing from wood to brick. Your merchants embracing the whole compass of the earth.”^[1] It was a dreamer who spoke, and almost every detail was false. The story of the epoch is one of disillusion and disbelief, and at the same time of a furious endeavour to reach a new stability. The age of faith made one last effort to perpetuate itself before yielding to the age of reason.

Idealisms, contradictory, inept, perverted, ran riot; one man strove to preserve what was best in them and bring out of confusion a settled order; he failed, and the fervour died. The noble obscurity of the opening of the Shorter Catechism, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever,” and Winstanley’s vision of a commonwealth where the Scriptures were “really and materially to be fulfilled,”^[2] were exchanged for the prose of John Locke: “The great and chief end of men uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property”;^[3] and Milton had to seek Paradise regained within his own soul. England, never favourable to revolution, returned, with certain differences, to the old ways, and Hyde could once again eat cherries at Deptford.