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For over a century and a half after his death the memory of the greatest Englishman of the seventeenth century was looked upon with horror by the leaders of English thought, political and literary; the very men who were carrying to fruition Cromwell’s tremendous policies being often utterly ignorant that they were following in his footsteps. At last the scales began to drop from the most far-seeing eyes. Macaulay, with his eminently sane and wholesome spirit, held Cromwell and the social forces for which he stood—Puritanic and otherwise—at their real worth, and his judgment about them was, in all essentials, accurate. But the true appreciation of the place held by the greatest soldier-statesman of the seventeenth century began with the publication of his life and letters by Carlyle. The gnarled genius of the man who worshipped the heroes of the past as intensely as he feared and distrusted the heroes of the present, enabled him to write with a loftiness and intensity that befitted his subject. But Carlyle’s singular incapacity to “see veracity,” as he would himself have phrased it, made him at times not merely tell half-truths, but deliberately invert the truth. He was of that not uncommon cloistered type which shrinks shuddering from actual contact with whatever it, in theory, most admires, and which, therefore, is reduced in self-justification to misjudge and misrepresent those facts of past history which form precedents for what is going on before the author’s own eyes.

Cromwell lived in an age when it was not possible to realize a government based upon those large principles of social, political, and religious liberty in which—at any rate, during his earlier years—he sincerely believed; but the movement of which he was the head was the first of the great movements which, marching along essentially the same lines, have produced the English-speaking world as we at present know it. This primary fact Carlyle refused to see, or at least to admit. As the central idea of his work he states that the Puritanism of the Cromwellian epoch was the “last glimpse of the Godlike vanishing from this England; conviction and veracity giving place to hollow cant and formulism.... The last of all our Heroisms.... We have wandered far away from the ideas which guided us in that century, and indeed which had guided us in all preceding centuries, but of which that century was the ultimate manifestation; we have wandered very far; and must endeavor to return and connect ourselves therewith again.... I will advise my reader to forget the modern methods of reform; not to remember that he has ever heard of a modern individual called by the name of ‘Reformer,’ if he would understand what the old meaning of the word was. The Cromwells, Pyms, and Hampdens, who were understood on the Royalist side to be fire-brands of the devil, have had still worse measure from the Dry-as-Dust philosophies and sceptical histories of later times. They really did resemble fire-brands of the devil if you looked at them through spectacles of a certain color, for fire is always fire; but by no spectacles, only by mere blindness and wooden-eyed spectacles, can the flame-girt heaven’s messenger pass for a poor, mouldy Pedant and Constitution-monger such as these would make him out to be.”

This is good writing of its kind; but the thought is mere “hollow cant and unveracity;” not only far from the truth, but the direct reverse of the truth. It is itself the wail of the pedant who does not know that the flame-girt heaven’s messenger of truth is always a mere mortal to those who see him with the actual eyes of the flesh, although mayhap a great mortal; while to the closet philosopher his quality of flame-girtedness is rarely visible until a century or thereabouts has elapsed.

So far from this great movement, of which Puritanism was merely one manifestation, being the last of a succession of similar heroisms, it had practically very much less connection with what went before than with all that has guided us in our history since. Of course, it is impossible to draw a line with mathematical exactness between the different stages of history, but it is both possible and necessary to draw it with rough efficiency; and, speaking roughly, the epoch of the Puritans was the beginning of the great modern epoch of the English-speaking world—infinitely its greatest epoch. We have not “wandered far from the ideas that guided” the wisest and most earnest leaders in the century that saw Cromwell; on the contrary, these ideas were themselves very far indeed from those which had guided the English people in previous ages, and the ideas that now guide us represent on the whole what was best and truest in the thought of the Puritans. As for Pym and Hampden, their type had practically no representative in England prior to their time, while all the great legislative reformers since then have been their followers. The Hampden type—the purest and noblest of types—reached its highest expression in Washington. Pym, the man of great powers and great services, with a tendency to believe that Parliamentary government was the cure for all evils, followed to a line “the modern methods of reform,” and was exactly the man who, if he had lived in Carlyle’s day, Carlyle would have sneered at as a “constitution-monger.” It was men of the kind of Hampden and Pym who, before Carlyle’s own eyes, were striving in the British Parliament for the reforms which were to carry one stage farther the work of Hampden and Pym; who were endeavoring to secure for all creeds full tolerance; to give the people an ever-increasing share in ruling their own destinies; to better the conditions of social and political life. In the great American Civil War the master spirits in the contest for union and freedom were actuated by a fervor as intense as, and even finer than, that which actuated the men of the Long Parliament; while in rigid morality and grim devotion to what he conceived to be God’s bidding, the Southern soldier, Stonewall Jackson, was as true a type of the “General of the Lord, with his Bible and his Sword,” as Cromwell or Ireton.

The whole history of the movement which resulted in the establishment of the Commonwealth of England will be misread and misunderstood if we fail to appreciate that it was the first modern, and not the last mediæval, movement; if we fail to understand that the men who figured in it and the principles for which they contended, are strictly akin to the men and the principles that have appeared in all similar great movements since: in the English Revolution of 1688; in the American Revolution of 1776; and the American Civil War of 1861. We must keep ever in mind the essentially modern character of the movement if we are to appreciate its true inwardness, its true significance. Fundamentally, it was the first struggle for religious, political, and social freedom, as we now understand the terms. As was inevitable in such a first struggle, there remained even among the forces of reform much of what properly belonged to previous generations. In addition to the modern side there was a mediæval side, too. Just so far as this mediæval element obtained, the movement failed. All that there was of good and of permanence in it was due to the new elements.

To understand the play of the forces which produced Cromwell and gave him his chance, we must briefly look at the England into which he was born.

He saw the light at the close of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in the last years of the Tudor dynasty, and he grew to manhood during the inglorious reign of the first English king of the inglorious House of Stuart. The struggle between the reformed churches and the ancient church, against which they were in revolt, was still the leading factor in shaping European politics, though other factors were fast assuming an equal weight. The course of the Reformation in England had been widely different from that which it had followed in other European countries. The followers of Luther and Calvin, whatever their shortcomings—and they were many and grievous—had been influenced by a fiery zeal for righteousness, a fierce detestation of spiritual corruption; but in England the Reformation had been undertaken for widely different reasons by Henry VIII. and his creatures, though the bulk of their followers were as sincere as their brethren on the Continent. Henry’s purpose had been simple, namely, to transfer to himself the power and revenues of the Papacy, so far as he could seize them, and thus to add to the spiritual supremacy against which the leaders of the Reformation had revolted: the absolute sovereignty which the Tudors were seeking to establish in England. Elizabeth stood infinitely above her father in most respects; but in religious views they were not far apart, and in theory they were both believers in absolutism. They had no standing army, and they were always in want of money, so that in practice they never ventured seriously to offend the influential and moneyed classes. But under Henry the misery and suffering of the lower classes became very great, and the yeomen were largely driven from their lands, while much of Elizabeth’s own administration consisted of efforts to grapple with the vagrancy and wretchedness which had been caused by the degradation of those who stood lowest in the social scale.

When the Stuarts took possession of the throne of England they found a people which, unlike the peoples of most of the neighboring States, had not fought out its religious convictions. The Reformation had deeply stirred men’s souls. Religion had become a matter of vital and terrible importance to Protestant and to Catholic. Among the extremists, the men who had given the tone to the Reformation in Germany, Switzerland, Holland, and Scotland, religion, as they understood it, entered into every act of their lives. In England there were men of this stamp; but in the English Reformation they had played a wholly subordinate part; and indeed had been in almost as great danger as the Catholics. Their force, therefore, had not spent itself. It had been conserved, in spite of their desires.

Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford.

From the miniature at Devonshire House.

By permission of the Duke of Devonshire, K.G.

Thus it happened that the high tide of extreme Protestantism was reached in England, not as in other Protestant countries, in the sixteenth century, but in the seventeenth. The Stuarts were the only Protestant kings who were not in religious sympathy with their Protestant subjects. In theory the Anglican Church of Henry and Elizabeth stood for what we would now regard as tyranny. What Henry VIII. strove to do with the Anglican Church is what has actually been done by the Czars with the Orthodox Church in Russia; but that which was possible with the eastern Slavs was not possible with the westernmost and freest of the Teutonic peoples. Yet in the actual event it was probably fortunate that the English Reformation took the shape it did; for under such conditions it was not marked by the intense fanaticism of the reformers elsewhere.

The Stuarts not only found themselves masters of a kingdom where, supposedly, they were spiritually supreme, while actually their claim to supremacy was certain to be challenged; they also found themselves at the head of a form of government which was to all appearances despotic, while the people over whom they bore sway, though slow to object to the forms, were extremely intolerant of the practices of despotism. The Tudors were unarmed despots, who disliked the old feudal nobility, and who found it for their interest to cultivate the commercial classes, and to form a new nobility of their own, based upon wealth. The men at the lowest round of the social ladder—the workingmen and farm laborers—were yet, as they remained for a couple of centuries, so unfit for the work of political combination that they could be safely disregarded by the masters of England. At times their discontent was manifested, generally in the shape of abortive peasant insurrections; but there was never need to consider them as of serious and permanent importance. The middle classes, however, had become very powerful, and to their material interests the Tudors always took care to defer. At the very close of her reign, Elizabeth, who was at heart as thorough a tyrant as ever lived, but who possessed that shrewd good sense which, if not the noblest, is perhaps on the whole the most useful of qualities in the actual workaday world, found herself face to face with her people on the question of monopolies; and as soon as she understood that they were resolutely opposed to her policy, she instantly yielded. In other words, the Tudor despotism was conditioned upon the despot’s doing nothing of which the influential classes of the nation—the upper and middle classes—seriously disapproved; and this the Stuart kings could never understand.

Moreover, apart from the fact that the Stuarts were so much less shrewd and less able than the Tudors, there was the further fact that Englishmen as a whole were gradually growing more intolerant, not only of the practice but of the pretence of tyranny, whether in things material or in things spiritual. There was a moral awakening which rendered it impossible for Englishmen of the seventeenth century to submit to the brutal wrong-doing which marked the political and ecclesiastical tyranny of the previous century. The career of Henry VIII. could not have been paralleled in any shape when once England had begun to breed such men as went to the making of the Long Parliament.

Much of the aspiration after higher things took the form of spiritual unrest. It must always be remembered that the Protestant sects which established themselves in the northern half of Europe, although they warred in the name of religious liberty, had no more conception of it, as we of this day understand it, than their Catholic foes; and yet it must also be remembered that the bitter conflicts they waged prepared the way for the wide tolerance of individual difference in matters of religious belief which is among the greatest blessings of our modern life. An American Catholic and an American Protestant of to-day, whatever the difference between their theologies, yet in their ways of looking at real life, at its relation to religion, and the relations of religion and the State, are infinitely more akin to one another than either is to the men of his religious faith who lived three centuries ago. We now admit, as a matter of course, that any man may, in religious matters, profess to be guided by authority or by reason, as suits him best; but that he must not interfere with similar freedom of belief in others; and that all men, whatever their religious beliefs, have exactly the same political rights and are to be held to the same responsibility for the way they exercise these rights. Few indeed were the men who held such views at the time when Cromwell was growing to manhood. Holland was the State of all others in which there was the nearest approach to religious liberty; and even in Holland the bitterness of the Calvinists toward the Arminians was something which we can now scarcely understand. Arminius was no more at home in Geneva than in Rome; and his followers were prescribed by the most religious people of England, and so far as might be were driven from the realm. Calvinists and Lutherans felt as little inclination as Catholics to allow liberty of conscience to others; and as grotesque a compromise as ever was made in matters religious was that made in Germany, when it was decided that the peoples of the various German principalities should in mass accept the faiths of their respective princes.

Oliver Cromwell.

From a miniature by Cooper. Here reproduced for the first time.

By permission of Sir Charles Hartopp, Bart.

Yet though the Reformers thus strove to establish for their own use the very religious intolerance against which they had revolted, the mere fact of their existence nullified their efforts. Sooner or later people who had exercised their own judgment, and had fought for the right to exercise it, were sure grudgingly to admit the same right in others. That time was as yet far distant. In Cromwell’s youth all the leading Christian churches were fiercely intolerant. Unless we keep in mind that this was the general attitude, an attitude which necessarily affected even the greatest men, we cannot do justice to the political and social leaders of that age when we find them, as we so often do, adopting toward their religious foes policies from which we, of a happier age, turn with horror.

In England hatred of Roman Catholicism had become almost interchangeable with hatred of Spain. Spain had been the one dangerous foe which England had encountered under the Tudor dynasty, and the only war she had ever waged into which the religious element entered was the war which put upon the English roll of honor the names of her great sixteenth-century seamen, Drake and Hawkins, Howard and Frobisher. Throughout the sixteenth century Spain had towered above every other power of Europe in warlike might; and though the Dutch and English sailors had broken the spell of her invincibility at sea, on shore her soldiers retained their reputation for superior prowess, in spite of the victories of Maurice of Orange, until Gustavus Adolphus marched his wonderful army down from the frozen North. During Cromwell’s youth and early manhood Spain was still the most powerful and most dreaded of European nations. Her government had become a mere tyranny; her religion fanatical bigotry of a type more extreme than any that existed elsewhere, even in an age when all creeds tended toward fanaticism and bigotry. It was in Spain that the Holy Inquisition chiefly flourished—one of the most fearful engines for the destruction of all that was highest in mankind that the world has ever seen. Catholics were oppressed in England and Protestants in France; but in each country the persecuted sect might almost be said to enjoy liberty, and certainly to enjoy peace, when their fate was compared with the dreadful horrors of torture and murder with which Spain crushed out every species of heresy within her borders. Jew, Infidel, and Protestant, shared the same awful doom, until she had purchased complete religious uniformity at the price of the loss of everything that makes national life great and noble. The dominion of Spain would have been the dominion of desolation; her supremacy as baneful as that of the Turk; and Holland and England, in withstanding her, rendered the same service to humanity that was rendered at that very time by those nations of southeastern Europe who formed out of the bodies of their citizens the bulwark which stayed the Turkish fury.

But if in her relations to one Catholic nation England appeared as the champion of religious liberty, of all that makes life worth having to the free men who live in free nations, yet in her relations to another Catholic people she herself played the rôle of merciless oppressor—religious, political, and social. Ireland, utterly foreign in speech and culture, had been ground into the dust by the crushing weight of England’s overlordship. During centuries chaos had reigned in the island; the English intruders possessing sufficient power to prevent the development of any Celtic national life, but not to change it into a Norman or English national life. The English who settled and warred in Ireland felt and acted as the most barbarous white frontiersmen of the nineteenth century have acted toward the alien races with whom they have been brought in contact. There is no language in which to paint the hideous atrocities committed in the Irish wars of Elizabeth; and the worst must be credited to the highest English officials. In Ireland the antagonism was fundamentally racial; whether the sovereign of England were Catholic or Protestant made little difference in the burden of wrong which the Celt was forced to bear. The first of the so-called plantations by which the Celts were ousted in mass from great tracts of country to make room for English settlers, was undertaken under the Catholic Queen Mary, and the two counties thus created by the wholesale expulsion of the wretched kerne were named in honor of the Queen and of her spouse, the Spanish Philip. Though Philip’s bigotry made him the persecutor of heretics, it taught him no mercy toward those of his own faith but of a different nationality, whether Irish or Portuguese. When England became Protestant, Ireland stood steadfastly for the old faith; and religious was added to race hatred. In Spain the Holy Inquisition was the handmaid of grinding tyranny. In Ireland the Catholic priesthood was the sole friend, standby, and comforter of a hunted and despairing people. In the Netherlands and on the high seas Protestantism was the creed of liberty. In Ireland it was one of the masks worn by the alien oppressor.

Sir John Eliot.

From the portrait by Van Somer at Port Eliot.

By permission of the Earl of St. Germans.

France was Catholic, but her Catholicism differed essentially from that of Spain, and during the first part of the seventeenth century was quite as liberal as the Protestantism of England. When Cromwell was a child Henry of Navarre was on the French throne, and to him all creeds were alike. He was succeeded in the actual government of France by the great Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, who were Statesmen rather than Churchmen; and under them the French Protestants enjoyed rather more toleration than was allowed the Catholics of England. The natural foes of France were the two great Catholic powers of Spain and Austria, ruled by the twin branches of the House of Hapsburg; and her hostility to them determined her attitude throughout the Thirty Years’ War.

Meanwhile, Holland was at the height of her power. She had a far greater colonial empire than England, her commercial development was greater, and the renown of her war marine higher. Drake and Hawkins had but singed the beard of the Spanish king, had but plundered his vessels and harassed his great fleets. Van Heemskirk, Piet Hein, and the elder Tromp crushed the sea-power of Spain by downright hard fighting in great pitched battles, and captured her silver fleets entire.

In Great Britain itself—it must be kept in mind that Scotland was as yet an entirely distinct kingdom, united to England only by the fact that the same line of kings ruled over both—the difference between the Scotch and the English, though less in degree, was the same in kind as that between the English and the Dutch. In Scotland, outside of the Highlands, the mass of the people were devoted with all the strength of their intense and virile natures to the form of Calvinism introduced by Knox. Their Church government was Presbyterian. As both the Presbyterian ministers and their congregations demanded that the State should be managed in essentials according to the wishes of the Church, the general feeling was really in the direction of a theocratic republic, although the name would have frightened them. In Scotland, as in England, no considerable body of men had yet grasped the idea that there should be toleration of religious differences or a divorce between the functions of the State and the Church. In both countries, as elsewhere at the time through Christendom, religious liberty meant only religious liberty for the sect that raised the cry; but, as elsewhere, the mere use of the name as a banner under which to fight brought nearer the day when the thing itself would be possible.

In England there was practically peace during the first forty years of the century, but it was an ignoble and therefore an evil peace. Of course, peace should be the aim of all statesmen, and is the aim of the greatest statesman. Nevertheless, not only the greatest statesmen, but all men who are truly wise and patriotic, recognize that peace is good only when it comes honorably and is used for honorable purposes, and that the peace of mere sloth or incapacity is as great a curse as the most unrighteous war. Those who doubt this would do well to study the condition of England during the reign of James I., and during the first part of the reign of Charles I. England had then no standing army and no foreign policy worthy of the name. The chief of her colonies was growing up almost against her wishes, and wholly without any help or care from her. In short, she realized the conditions, as regards her relations with the outside world and “militarism,” which certain philosophers advocate at the present day for America. The result was a gradual rotting of the national fibre, which rendered it necessary for her to pass through the fiery ordeal of the Civil War in order that she might be saved.

In every nation there is, as there has been from time immemorial, a good deal of difficulty in combining the policies of upholding the national honor abroad, and of preserving a not too heavily taxed liberty at home. Many peoples and many rulers who have solved the problem with marked success as regards one of the two conditions, have failed as regards the other. It was the peculiar privilege of the Stuart kings to fail signally in both. They were dangerous to no one but their own subjects. Their government was an object of contempt to their neighbors and of contempt, mixed with anger and terror, to their own people. They made amends for utter weakness in the face of a foreign foe by showing against the free men of their own country that kind of tyranny which finds its favorite expression in oppressing those who resist not at all, or ineffectually. They were held on the throne only by a mistaken but honorable loyalty, and by an unworthy servility; by the strong habits formed by the customs of centuries; and, most of all, by the wise distrust of radical innovation and preference for reform to revolution which gives to the English race its greatest strength.

This last attitude, the dislike of revolution, was entirely wholesome and praiseworthy. On the other hand, the doctrine of the divine right of kings, which represented the extreme form of loyalty to the sovereign, was vicious, unworthy of the race, and to be ranked among degrading superstitions. It is now so dead that it is easy to laugh at it; but it was then a real power for evil. Moreover, the extreme zealots who represented the opposite pole of the political and religious world, were themselves, as is ordinarily the case with such extremists, the allies of the forces against which they pretended to fight. From these dreamers of dreams, of whose “cloistered virtue” Milton spoke with such fine contempt, the men who possessed the capacity to do things turned contemptuously away, seeking practical results rather than theoretical perfection, and being content to get the substance at some cost of form. As always, the men who counted were those who strove for actual achievement in the field of practical politics, and who were not misled merely by names. England, in the present century, has shown how complete may be the freedom of the individual under a nominal monarchy; and the Dreyfus incident in France would be proof enough, were any needed, that despotism of a peculiarly revolting type may grow rankly, even in a republic, if there is not in its citizens a firm and lofty purpose to do justice to all men and guard the rights of the weak as well as of the strong.

James came to the throne to rule over a people steadily growing to think more and more seriously of religion: to believe more and more in their rights and liberties. But the King himself was cursed with a fervent belief in despotism, and an utter inability to give his belief practical shape in deeds. For half a century the spirit of sturdy independence had been slowly growing among Englishmen. Elizabeth governed almost under the forms of despotism; but a despotism which does not carry the sword has to accommodate itself pretty thoroughly to the desires of the subjects, once these desires become clearly defined and formulated. Elizabeth never ventured to do what Henry had done. She left England, therefore, thoroughly Royalist, devoted to the Crown, and unable to conceive of any other form of government, but already desirous of seeing an increase in the power of the people as expressed through Parliament. James, from the very outset of his reign, pursued a course of conduct exactly fitted both to irritate the people, with the pretensions of the Crown, and to convince them that they could prevent these pretensions from being carried out.

Besides, he offended both their political and their religious feelings. England had been growing more and more fanatically Protestant; that is, more and more Puritan. Under Elizabeth there had been more religious persecution of Puritans, and of Dissenters generally, than of Catholics. But this could not prevent the growth of the spirit of Puritanism. During the reign of James there were marked Presbyterian tendencies visible within the Anglican Church itself, and plenty of Puritans among her divines. Unfortunately, both Presbyterian and Anglican were then at one in heartily condemning that spirit of true religious liberty, of true toleration, which we of to-day in the United States recognize as the most vital of religious rights. The so-called Independent movement, from which sprang the Congregational and indeed the Baptist Churches as we know them to-day, had begun under Elizabeth. Its votaries contended for what now seems the self-evident right of each congregation, if it so desires, to decide for itself important questions of doctrine and of church management. Yet Elizabeth’s ministers had actually stamped this sect out of existence, with the hearty approval of the wisest men in the realm and of the enormous majority of the people. Such an act, and, above all, such approval, shows how long and difficult was the road which still had to be traversed before the goal of religious liberty was reached.

The people were relatively less advanced toward religious than toward political liberty. Nevertheless, they were distinctly in advance of the King, even in matters religious. The resolute determination to fight for one’s own liberty of conscience, when it once becomes the characteristic of the majority, cannot but tend toward securing liberty of conscience for all; whereas, for one man, who claims supremacy in the Church as well as overlordship in the State, to seek to impose his will upon others in matters both spiritual and political, cannot but produce a very aggravated form of tyranny. The Stuarts represented an extreme, reactionary type of kingship; a type absolutely alien to all that was highest and most characteristic in the English character. They possessed the will to be despots, but neither their own powers nor the tendencies of the times were in their favor. The tendency was, however, very strongly in favor of hereditary kingship; so strongly, indeed, that nothing but the extreme folly as well as the extreme baseness of the Stuart kings could overcome it. Stability of government, and therefore order, depends in the last resort upon the ability of the people to come to a consensus as to where power belongs. This consensus is less a matter of volition than of long habit, of slow evolution; to Americans of to-day, the rule of the majority seems part of the natural order of things, whereas to Russians it seems utterly unnatural, and they could by no possibility be brought into sudden acquiescence in it. To Englishmen, in the early decades of the seventeenth century, hereditary kingship seemed the only natural government, and they could be severed from this belief only by a succession of violent wrenches.

All Saints’ Church, Huntingdon.

Containing the registry of Oliver Cromwell’s birth and baptism—a fac-simile of which is here given. Above the record of his birth someone had written “England’s plague for five years;” but this is now partially obliterated.

James I. stood for absolutism in Church and State, and quarrelled with and annoyed his subjects in the futile effort to realize his ideas. Charles I., whom James had vainly sought to marry to a Spanish princess, and succeeded in marrying to a French princess (Henrietta Maria), took up his father’s task. In private life he was the best of the Stuart kings, reaching about the average level of his subjects. In public life his treachery, mendacity, folly, and vindictiveness: his utter inability to learn by experience or to sympathize with any noble ambition of his country: his readiness to follow evil counsel, and his ingratitude toward any sincere friend, made him as unfit as either of his sons to sit on the English throne; and a greater condemnation than this it is not possible to award. Germany was convulsed by the Thirty Years’ War: but Charles cared nothing for the struggle, and to her humiliation England had to see Sweden step to the front as the champion of the Reformation. At one period Charles even started to help the French king against the Huguenots, but was brought to a halt by the outburst of wrath this called forth from his subjects. Once he made feeble war on Spain, and again he made feeble war on France; but the expedition he sent against Cadiz failed, and the expedition he sent to Rochelle was beaten; and he was, in each case, forced to make peace without gaining anything. The renown of the English arms never stood lower than during the reigns of the first two Stuarts.

At the outset of his reign Charles sought to govern through Buckingham, who was entirely fit to be his minister, and, therefore, unfit to be trusted with the slightest governmental task on behalf of a free and great people. Under Buckingham the grossest corruption obtained—not only in the public service, but in the creation of peerages. His whole administration represented nothing but violence and bribery; and when he took command of the forces to be employed against Rochelle, he showed that the list of his qualities included complete military incapacity.

It was after the failure at Rochelle that Charles summoned his third Parliament. With his first two he had failed to do more than quarrel, as they would not grant him supplies unless they were allowed the right to have something to say as to how they were to be used. He had, therefore, dissolved them, holding that their only function was to give him what may be needed.

With his third Parliament he got on no better. In it two great men sprang to the front—Sir Thomas Wentworth, afterward Lord Strafford, and Sir John Eliot, who had already shown himself a leader of the party that stood for free representative institutions as against the unbridled power of the King. Eliot was a man of pure and high character, and of dauntless resolution, though a good deal of a doctrinaire in his belief that Parliamentary government was the cure for all the evils of the body politic. Wentworth, dark, able, imperious, unscrupulous, was a born leader, but he had no root of true principle in him. At the moment, from jealousy of Buckingham, and from desire to show that he would have to be placated if the King were awake to self-interest, he threw all the weight of his great power on the popular side.

Instead of giving the King the money he wanted, Parliament formulated a Petition of Right, demanding such elementary measures of justice as that the King should agree never again to raise a forced loan, or give his soldiers free quarters on householders, or execute martial law in time of peace, or send whom he wished to prison without showing the cause for which it was done. The last was the provision against which Charles struggled hardest. The Star Chamber—a court which sat without a jury, and which was absolutely under the King’s jurisdiction—had been one of his favorite instruments in working his arbitrary will. The powers of this court were left untouched by the Petition: yet even the service this court could render him was far less than what he could render himself if it lay in his power arbitrarily to imprison men without giving the cause. However, his need of money was so great, and the Commons stood so firm, that he had to yield, and on June 7th, in the year 1628, the Petition of Right became part of the law of the land. The first step had been taken toward cutting out of the English Constitution the despotic powers which the Tudor kings had bequeathed to their Stuart successors.

Cromwell’s House at Ely.

The tall spire is that of St. Mary’s Church, and the Cathedral tower is seen in the distance.

Immediately afterward Buckingham was assassinated by a soldier who had taken a violent grudge against him, and the nation breathed freer with this particular stumbling-block removed, while it lessened the strain between the King and the Commons, who were bent on his impeachment.

There were far more serious troubles ahead. If the King could raise money without summoning Parliament, he could rule absolutely. If Parliament could control not only the raising, but the expenditure of money, it would be the supreme source of power, and the King but a figure-head; in other words, the government would be put upon the basis on which it has actually stood during the present century. For many reigns the Commons had been accustomed to vote to each king for life, at the outset of his reign, the duties on exports and imports, known as tonnage and poundage; but during the years immediately past men had been forced to think much on liberty and self-government. Parliament was in no mood to surrender absolute power to the King.

With the right to lay taxes and to supervise the expenditure of money—that is, to conduct the government—was intertwined the question of religion. The mass of Englishmen adhered rather loosely to the Anglican communion, and were not extreme Puritans; on certain points, however, they were tinged very deeply with Calvinism. They were greatly angered by the attitude of those bishops, who under the lead of Laud showed themselves more hostile to Protestant than to Catholic dogmas. These bishops preached not only that the views in Church matters held by the bulk of Englishmen were wrong, but furthermore that it was the duty of every subject to render entire obedience to the sovereign, no matter what the sovereign did, and they insisted that parliaments were of right mere ciphers in the State. Such doctrines were not only irritating from the theological stand-point; they also struck at the root of political freedom. The religious antagonism was accentuated by the fact that at this time the Protestant cause in Germany had touched the lowest point it ever reached during the Thirty Years’ War, and the anger and alarm of the English Protestants, as they saw the Calvinists and Lutherans of Denmark and North Germany overcome, were heightened by the indifference, if not satisfaction, with which the King and the bishops looked at the struggle.

In 1629 the Commons, under the lead of Eliot and Pym, took advanced ground alike on the questions of religion and of taxation. Pym was supplementing Eliot’s work, which was to make the House of Commons the supreme authority in England, by striving to associate together a majority of the members for the achievement of certain common objects; in other words, he was laying the foundation of party government. Under the lead of these two men, the first two Parliamentary and popular leaders in the modern sense, the House of Commons passed resolutions demanding uniformity in religious belief throughout the kingdom and condemning every innovation in religion, and declaring enemies to the kingdom and traitors to its liberties whoever advised the levying of tonnage and poundage without the authority of Parliament, or whoever voluntarily paid those duties. The first clause hit Catholics and Dissenters alike, but was especially aimed at the bishops and their followers, who stood closest to the King; and the second was, of course, intended to transfer the sovereignty from the King to Parliament—in other words, from the King to the people. Charles met the challenge by dissolving Parliament. Eleven years were to pass before another met. Meantime, the King governed as a despot; and it must be remembered that when he deliberately chose thus to govern as a despot, responsible to no legal tribunal, he at once threw his subjects back on the only remedies which it is possible to enforce against despotism—deposition or death.

Charles was bitterly angry at the sturdy independence shown by the Commons, and marked out for vengeance those who had been foremost in thwarting his wishes. His course was easy. The Petition of Right formulated a principle, but as yet it offered no safeguard against an unscrupulous king; while the Star Chamber court, and the other judges for that matter, held office at his pleasure, and acted as his subservient tools in fining and imprisoning merchants who refused payment of the duties, or men whose acts or words the king chose to consider seditious. Eliot and some of his fellow-members were thrown into prison because of the culminating proceedings in Parliament. Eliot’s comrades made submission and were released, but Eliot refused to acknowledge that the King, through his courts, had any right to meddle with what was done in Parliament. He took his stand firmly on the ground that the King was not the master of Parliament, and of course this could but mean ultimately that Parliament was master of the King. In other words, he was one of the earliest leaders of the movement which has produced English freedom and English government as we now know them. He was also its martyr. He was kept in the Tower without air or exercise for three years, the King vindictively refusing to allow the slightest relaxation in his confinement, even when it brought on consumption. In December, 1632, he died; and the King’s hatred found its last expression in denying to his kinsfolk the privilege of burying him in his Cornish home.

Charles set eagerly to work to rule the kingdom by himself. To the Puritan dogma of enforced unity of religious belief—utterly mischievous, and just as much fraught with slavery to the soul in one sect as another—he sought, through Laud, to oppose the only less mischievous, because silly, doctrine of enforced uniformity in the externals of public worship. Laud was a small and narrow man, hating Puritanism in every form, and persecuting bitterly every clergyman or layman who deviated in any way from what he regarded as proper ecclesiastical custom. His tyranny was of that fussy kind which, without striking terror, often irritates nearly to madness. He was Charles’s instrument in the effort to secure ecclesiastical absolutism.

The instrument through which the King sought to establish the royal prerogative in political affairs was of far more formidable temper. Immediately after the dissolution of Parliament Wentworth had obtained his price from the King, and was appointed to be his right-hand man in administering the kingdom. A man of great shrewdness and insight, he seems to have struggled to govern well, according to his lights; but he despised law and acted upon the belief that the people should be slaves, unpermitted, as they were unfit, to take any share in governing themselves. After a while Laud was made archbishop; and Wentworth was later made Lord Strafford.

Wentworth and Laud, with their associates, when they tried to govern on such terms, were continually clashing with the people. A government thus carried on naturally aroused resistance, which often itself took unjustifiable forms; and this resistance was, in its turn, punished with revolting brutality. Criticism of Laudian methods, or of existing social habits, might take scurrilous shape; and then the critic’s ears were hacked off as he stood in the pillory, or he was imprisoned for life.

Archbishop Laud.

From the portrait at Lambeth Palace, painted by Vandyke.

By permission of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The great fight was made, not on a religious, but on a purely political question—that of Ship Money. The king wished to go to war with the Dutch, and to raise his fleet he issued writs, first to the maritime counties, and then to every shire in England. He consulted his judges, who stated that his action was legal: as well they might, for when a judge disagreed with him on any important point, he was promptly dismissed from office. But there was one man in the kingdom who thought differently, John Hampden, a Buckinghamshire ’squire, who had already once sat as a silent member in Parliament, together with another equally silent member of the same social standing, his nephew, Oliver Cromwell. Hampden was assessed at twenty shillings. The amount was of no more importance than the value of the tea which a century and a half later was thrown into Boston Harbor; but in each case a vital principle—the same vital principle—was involved. If the King could take twenty shillings from Hampden without authority from the representatives of the people in Parliament assembled, then his rule was absolute: he could do what he pleased. On the other hand, if the House of Commons could do as it wished in granting money only for whatever need it chose to recognize in the kingdom, then the House of Commons was supreme. In Hampden’s view but one course was possible—he was for the Parliament and the nation against the King; and he refused to pay the sum, facing without a murmur the punishment for his contumacy.

The King and his ministers did not flinch from proceeding to any length against either political or religious opponents. Charles heartily upheld Laud and Wentworth in carrying out their policy of “thorough”; Laud in England; Wentworth, after 1633, in Ireland. “Thorough,” in their sense of the word, meant making the State, which was the King, paramount in every ecclesiastical and political matter, and putting his interests above the interests, the principles, and the prejudices of all classes and all parties; paying heed to nothing but to what seemed right in the eyes of the sovereign and the sovereign’s chosen advisers. Under Wentworth’s strong hand a certain amount of material prosperity followed in Ireland, although chiefly among the English settlers. There was no such material prosperity in England; 1630, for instance, was a famine year. The net effect of the policy would in the long run have been to bring down a freedom-loving people to a lower grade of political and social development. There was, of course, no oppression in England in any way resembling such oppression as that which flogged the Dutch to revolt against the Spaniards. But it was exactly the kind of oppression which led, in 1776, to the American Revolution. Eliot, Hampden, and Pym, stood for the principles that were championed by Washington, Patrick Henry, and the Adamses. The grievances which forced the Long Parliament to appeal to arms were like those which made the Continental Congress throw off the sovereignty of George III. In neither case was there the kind of grinding tyranny which has led to the assassination of tyrants and the frantic, bloodthirsty uprising of tortured slaves. In each case the tyranny was in its first stage, not its last; but the reason for this was simply that a nation of vigorous freemen will always revolt by the time the first stage has been reached. It was not possible, either for the Stuart kings or for George III., to go beyond a certain point, for as soon as that point was reached the freemen were called to arms by their leaders.

However, there was the greatest reluctance among Englishmen to countenance rebellion, even for the best of causes. This reluctance was eminently justifiable. Rebellion, revolution—the appeal to arms to redress grievances; these are measures that can only be justified in extreme cases. It is far better to suffer any moderate evil, or even a very serious evil, so long as there is a chance of its peaceable redress, than to plunge the country into civil war; and the men who head or instigate armed rebellions for which there is not the most ample justification must be held as one degree worse than any but the most evil tyrants. Between the Scylla of despotism and the Charybdis of anarchy there is but little to choose; and the pilot who throws the ship upon one is as blameworthy as he who throws it on the other. But a point may be reached where the people have to assert their rights, be the peril what it may; and in Great Britain this point was passed under Charles I.

The first break came, not in England, but in Scotland. The Scotch abhorred Episcopacy; whereas the English had no objection whatever to bishops, so long as the bishops did not outrage the popular religious convictions. In Scotland the spirit of Puritanism was uppermost, and was already exhibiting both its strength and its weakness; its sincerity and its lack of breadth; its stern morality and its failure to discriminate between essentials and non-essentials; its loftiness of aim and its tendency to condemn liberality of thought in religion, art, literature, and science, alike as irreligious; its insistence on purity of life, and yet its unconscious tendency to promote hypocrisy and to drive out one form of religious tyranny merely to erect another.

A man of any insight would not have striven to force an alien system of ecclesiastical government upon a people so stubborn and self-reliant, who were wedded to their own system of religious thought. But this was what Laud attempted, with the full approval of Charles. In 1637 he made a last effort to introduce the ceremonies of the English Church at Edinburgh. No sooner was the reading of the Prayer-Book begun than the congregation burst into wild uproar, execrating it as no better than celebrating mass. It was essentially a popular revolt. The incident of Jenny Geddes’s stool may be mythical, but it was among the women and men of the lower orders that the resistance was stoutest. The whole nation responded to the cry, and hurried to sign a national Covenant, engaging to defend the Reformed religion, and to do away with all “innovations”; that is, with everything in which Episcopacy differed from Puritanism and inclined toward the Church of Rome.

In England and Scotland alike the Church of Rome was still accepted by the people at large as the most dangerous of enemies. The wonderful career of Gustavus Adolphus had just closed. The Thirty Years’ War—the last great religious struggle—was still at its height. If, in France, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew stood far in the past, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes yet lay in the future. The after-glow of the fires of Smithfield still gleamed with lurid light in each sombre Puritan heart. The men who, in England, were most earnest about their religion held to their Calvinistic creed with the utmost sincerity, high purpose, and self-devotion: but with no little harshness. Theirs was a lofty creed, but one which, in the revolt against levity and viciousness, set up a standard of gloom; and, though ready to fight to the death for liberty for themselves, they had as yet little idea of tolerating liberty in others. Naturally, such men sympathized with one another, and the action of the Scotch was heartily, though secretly, applauded by the stoutest Presbyterians of England. Moreover, while menaced by the common oppressor, the Puritan independents, who afterward split off from the Presbyterians, made common cause with them, the irreconcilable differences between the two bodies not yet being evident.

Soon the Scotch held a general assembly of the Church, composed of both clerical and lay members, and formally abolished Episcopacy, in spite of the angry protests of the King. Their action amounted in effect to establishing a theocracy. They repudiated the unlimited power of the King and the bishops, as men would do nowadays in like case; but they declared against liberty of thought and conduct in religious matters, basing their action on practically the same line of reasoning that influenced the very men they most denounced, hated, and feared.