# Cassell's Illustrated History of England/Volume 3/Chapter 7

CHAPTER VII.
THE COMMONWEALTH.
The king being put to death, it was necessary that the parliament should immediately determine what sort of government should succeed. Had they been disposed to continue the monarchy, and receive the eldest son of Charles, it was still necessary to take efficient means for obtaining from him, before admitting him to the throne, a recognition of all the rights for which they had striven with his father. The very day, therefore, of the king's execution, the house of commons passed an act, making it high treason for any one to proclaim the prince of Wales, or any other person, king or chief magistrate of England or Ireland, without consent of parliament; and copies of this were immediately despatched to all the sheriffs, to be proclaimed in the counties. That done, they proceeded gradually, but promptly, to develop and complete their design of adopting a republican form of government.
The first step was to deal with the lords. That body, or the miserable remnant thereof, still sate in the upper house, and sent repeated messages to the commons, to which they deigned no reply. The lords, in fact, had become contemptible in the eyes of the whole community. They had sunk and trembled before the genius of the commons. Though strongly inclined to stand by royalty, and though all their interests were bound up with it, though they had been created by royal fiat, and made all that they were by it, in honour, power, and estate, and though it required no great sagacity to perceive that they must fall with it, the king himself having repeatedly assured them that such would be the case, they had neither the policy nor the gratitude to hold together and maintain the fountain of their honour, nor the prescience to perceive their case when the crown must fall, and make a merit of going over bodily to the conquering power. They had gone to pieces, some holding with one side, some with the other; some vacillating betwixt, both changing and rechanging, as the balance turned one way or the other. What was still worse, they had discovered no talent whatever on either side, with most rare exceptions, and these not remarkable, even where they had adopted a side and become partisans. Essex, Warwick, Holland, Hamilton, Newcastle, Northumberland, Ormond, and the rest, what had they done? Fairfax and Montrose, out of the whole body—and Montrose had personally been raised to it—had alone won great names. Fairfax, indeed, independent of Cromwell's hand and head, was respectable, but nothing more. The whole peerage had sunk into contemptible eclipse before the bold and vigorous genius of the commoners. Without, therefore, deigning to answer their messages, on the 5th of February they began to discuss the question as to their retention or abolition, and the next day they voted, by a majority of forty-four to twenty-nine, that "the house of peers in parliament was useless and dangerous, and ought to be abolished; that the privilege of peers, of being freed from arrest, should be declared null and void, but that they might be elected knights or burgesses for the commons."
Henry Marten moved that the word "dangerous" should be omitted, and the word "useless" only be retained; or if the word "dangerous" were retained, it should be only with "not" before it, for the peers were certainly not dangerous, but pitiably useless, and they had now come to see verified what Hollis had told them, that if they would not heartily join in saving the nation, it would be saved without them. An act to this effect was soon after brought in and passed.
On the day following, the 7th, the commons proceeded to a more important question, and voted that it had been found by experience that the office of a king in this nation, or to have the power thereof in any single person, was unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty and safety, and public interest of the nation, and therefore that it should be utterly abolished; and to that purpose an act should be forthwith prepared. This was speedily followed by a vote, on the motion of Henry Marten, that the king's statues at the Royal Exchange and other places should be taken down, and on the places where they stood should be inscribed, "Exit Tyrannus, Regium ultimus, Anno Libertatis Angliæ restitutæ primo, a.d., 1648, January 30 (old style). There was, moreover, an elaborate declaration drawn up, to justify the changing of England into a republic, translated into Latin, French, and Dutch, and ​adressed to foreign states. The custody of the new great seal was intrusted to three lawyers—namely, Whitelock, Keble, and Lisle; they were to hold it during good behaviour, and to be called keepers of the liberties of England, by authority of parliament. The King's Bench was henceforth named the Upper Bench, and came to be called the Commons Bench, and Oliver St. John, who had done so much to bring about this revolution, was made chief justice.
Oliver Cromwell.
The next great measure was to dissolve the executive council, which had sate at Derby House, and revive it in a more extended form as the Executive Council of State, to consist of forty members. Three-fourths of these had seats in the house, and several of the late peers—Mulgrave, Pembroke, Denbigh, Fairfax, Lisle, Grey of Groby, Salisbury, and Grey of Wark. The chief heads of the law and officers of the army were included. The principal names were, the late peers already mentioned, and Whitelock, St. John, Cromwell, Skippon, Hazelrig, Milchnay, Vane, Marten, Bradshaw, Ludlow, colonel Hutchinson, governor of Nottingham, &c. Milton, the great national poet, was appointed its secretary, and henceforth prepared its public acts, and employed his mighty talents in the defence of the measures of the republican government.
It was necessary to have an oath, and one was constructed which approved of the king's trial, of the vote against the Scots and their English associates, and of the abolition of monarchy and the house of lords. But as this would not only exclude all conscientious presbyterians, but called on the lords to pass an act of censure on themselves, as well as on all to approve of acts of parliament in which they had had no concern, Fairfax and twenty-one others refused to take it, and it was obliged to be reduced to the undertaking "to be true and faithful to the government established without king or house ​of peers, and never to consent to their re-admission." This was called the "Engagement," and still was effective in excluding all royalists, and all such of the presbyterian party as would not consent to violate their favourite covenant. Of the twelve judges, ten had been appointed by the revolutionary party, and the whole of them had quietly continued their functions through the war against the king; yet six of these now resigned, probably having hoped to the last for an accommodation with the king, and not going in their minds the length of a commonwealth. The other six only consented to hold their offices on the condition that an act of the commons should guarantee the non-abolition of the fundamental laws of the kingdom.
With regard to the church, as the present government was decidedly in favour of ample toleration, it satisfied itself with making a slight modification of the existing presbyterian power, and allowing it to remain, at the same time that it deprived its intolerant clergy of all temporal power whatever. No holders of religious opinions were to be molested, provided that they did not attack the fundamental principles of Christianity, and thus the catholics acquired more civil as well as religious liberty, than they had enjoyed since the days of queen Mary.
Cromwell and Milton.
The army remained in the same able hands which had made it the finest array in Europe, and had won with it such wonderful victories. Fairfax still continued commander-in-chief, though he had held aloof from the king's trial, and the navy was put on a more efficient footing by removing the earl of Warwick and appointing Blake, who had shown remarkable skill and courage on land, with Popham and Dean as admirals. These great changes were chiefly effected by the influence of Cromwell, Ireton, Marten, and Bradshaw, assisted by the talents of Vane, and the legal ability of St. John and Whitlock. They also introduced a parliamentary measure, which essentially modified the character of the house. On the 1st of February they carried a vote that all those who, on the 5th of December, assented to the vote that "the king's concessions were a sufficient ground to proceed to a settlement," should be incapable of sitting, but all others who should previously enter on the journal their dissent from that motion, should be admissible By this means they found the number of members raised to one hundred and fifty, and at the same time they were protected from a wearying opposition from the presbyterian section.
They now proceeded to bring to trial each of the royalist prisoners as had engaged in the last insurrection, whom they regarded as disturbers of the kingdom after it had once conquered the king, and might have proceeded to a settlement. They looked on them, in fact, as a species of rebels to the party in power. And yet that party was not constituted even by its own formal enactments, as a fully recognised government, till these trials were over. They terminated on the 6th of March, and the republic was not formally passed till the 19th of that month, in these words:— "Be it declared and enacted by this present parliament, ​and by the authority of the same, that the people of England, and of all the dominions and territories thereunto belonging, are and shall be, and are hereby constituted, made, established, and confirmed to be, a Commonwealth or Free State; and shall from henceforth be governed as a commonwealth and free state, by the supreme authority of this nation, the representatives of the people in parliament, and by such as they shall appoint and constitute officers and ministers under them for the good of the people, and without any king or house of lords."
Whilst this act was preparing, the trials were going on: the votes for the sitting of the council and the commons were considered sufficient authority. The trials were probably hastened by the news of Charles II. being proclaimed in Scotland, and that the Scots were raising an army to avenge the king's death, and "to punish the sectaries of England for the breach of the covenant." The persons whom it was resolved to try, were the duke of Hamilton, the earl of Holland, lord Goring, lately created by the king earl of Norwich, lord Capel, and Sir John Owen. The high court appointed to try these prisoners consisted of fifty persons of both ex-peers and commons. The duke of Hamilton pleaded that he was not within the jurisdiction of an English court, that he was a subject of Scotland and a prisoner of war; but it was replied that he was also an English peer, as earl of Cambridge, and it was proved that not only was his father naturalised as an English peer, but he himself had been called to sit as such, and had sate. The earl of Holland was ill, and therefore made little defence, except pleading that he had free quarter given him when he was taken at St. Neots; but this was fully disproved. Lord Goring, or, as now called, the earl of Norwich, had been a steady partisan of the king's, and had shown little lenity to the parliamentarians; but he now conducted himself with great respect to the court, and seemed to leave himself in their hands. Lord Capel was one of the bravest and proudest of the royalist generals. During his imprisonment he escaped from the Tower, but was betrayed by the boatmen with whom he crossed the Thames. He had expressed great indignation at the deaths of Lisle and Lucas, and had excited the resentment of Ireton by it. He now demanded to be tried by court martial, and declared that when Lisle and Lucas were adjudged to die, Fairfax had declared that all other lives should be spared, and had evidence to prove it, if he were allowed. Ireton, who really seems to have felt a stern resentment against the free-speaking general, denied that Fairfax had given any such promise, and that if he had, he had no right to supersede the authority of parliament. He demanded that Fairfax should be sent for; but the court satisfied itself with sending to the general, who returned by letter a rather equivocating answer, saying that his promise only applied to a court martial, and not to any such court as parliament might see fit to appoint. Bradshaw told Capel, who was not satisfied with this, that he was tried by such judges as parliament thought proper to give him, and who had judged a better man than himself.
Sir John Owen, who was a gentleman of Wales, in the late outbreak had killed a sheriff. He pleaded quarter, and that he had only done what he thought his duty, in support of the king. As to killing the sheriff, the sheriff had risen against him with force, and was killed in the accident of war, which he might have avoided if he had staid quietly at home. All five were condemned to lose their heads, the earl of Holland as a double turn-coat, and his conduct had certainly been anything but consistent and noble. Sir John Owen, on hearing the sentence, made a low bow and thanked the judge; and being asked why, he replied, that it was a very great honour for a poor gentlemen of Wales to die like a lord, and he had not expected anything better than hanging. No sooner was the sentence passed, than the friends of Hamilton, Holland, and Capel, made great exertions to save their fives. The wives of Holland and Capel appeared at the bar, attended by long trains of females in mourning, to beg for their lives. Two days' respite was granted, and every exertion, persuasion, and bribery were put in force. Hamilton had fewer friends than the rest, but it was urged that his death might occasion trouble with Scotland; but Cromwell knew that they had the interest of Argyll, and that Hamilton's being out of the way would strengthen that interest. The case of Holland occasioned a great debate. The earl of Warwick, his brother, on one side urged his services to the parliament for a long period—his enemies, his revolt from it on the other. Cromwell and Ireton were firmly against them, and the sentences of these three were confirmed. The votes regarding Goring were equal, and Lenthall, the speaker, gave the casting vote in his favour, alleging that he formerly had done him an essential service. Sir John Owen, to the great satisfaction of those who admired his frank and quaint humour, was also reprieved, and ultimately liberated. He had softened even the heart of Ireton, and greatly moved the good colonel Hutchinson, who both spoke in his favour. Hamilton, Capel, and Holland, were beheaded in the Palace Yard on the 9th of March. The reader cannot but regret that the leaders of the commonwealth shed the blood of these men. They had done only what their notions of loyalty had led them to; and though it has been contended that less blood was shed by the successful party in this revolution than in any other on record, and far less than that which the royalists poured out on returning to power, it would have been more to the credit of reformers to have set a still nobler example of clemency. All these prisoners had been condemned, by a resolution of the house of commons in November, to perpetual imprisonment, with a fine on Hamilton of one hundred thousand pounds; and an adherence to that sentence, after the full triumph of the independents, would have been a beautiful example of forbearance.
The parliament was soon called on to defend itself against more dangerous enemies. The country was groaning under the exhaustion and ravages of the civil war. It had been for seven years bleeding at every pore; and now the war had ceased, the suffering people began to utter aloud their complaints, which, if uttered, had been drowned in the din of conflict. There was everywhere a terrible outcry against the burden of taxation; and famine and pestilence, the sure successors of carnage and spoliation, were decimating the people. In Lancashire and Westmoreland numbers were daily perishing, and the magistrates of Cumberland deposed that thirty thousand families in that county had neither ​seed nor bread-corn, nor the means of procuring either. What rendered this state of things the more dangerous, was the turbulence of the levellers. The Actaeon of revolution was in danger of being devoured by his own hounds. The principles of republicanism which had borne on the Leads of the army, threatened in turn to overwhelm them in their progress amongst the soldiers. It is easier to set in motion revolutionary ideas, than to say to them, "hitherto shall ye go and no further." In all revolutions in the world, the class revolutionising wishes to stop at the point that is most convenient to itself; but other classes beyond this line are equally anxious, and have an equal claim to the benefit of levelling principles. It is only power which limits their diffusion. The power now had passed from the king and the lords, and had in the leaders of the army. It was not convenient nor desirable for them that it should go farther. But the soldiers and the lower officers, with free-born John Lilburne at their head, claimed a republic in its more popular sense. They read in their Bibles, and preached from it in the field, that God was no respecter of persons; that human rights were as universal as the human race. They saw that Cromwell, Ireton, Harrison, and a few others were the men who ruled in the parliament, the council, and the army; and they conceived that they were no longer seeking the common rights of the community, but the aggrandisement of themselves. They suspected them of having put down the tyranny of one man to establish that of half a dozen; and they had no notion of a reform which would only leave the multitude where it was. In fact, communism, the bugbear of to-day, had sprung up, and was in full blow in the commonwealth army, and threatened to scatter it into atoms. Colonel John Lilburne was fast preaching primitive Christianity and equality of rights and of possessions to the regiments, a doctrine very Christian, but very unmilitary. He was pouring out pamphlet upon pamphlet, and disseminating them through the ranks and through the people—"England's New Chains Discovered,"
"The Hunting of the Foxes from Triploe Heath to Whitehall by Five Small Beagles." These foxes were Cromwell, Ireton, Fairfax, &c., who had suppressed the mutiny at Triploe Heath—and the five beagles those who had been made to ride the wooden horse for their insubordination, that is, set upon a sharp three-cornered wooden machine, with weights or muskets tied to their feet. News came to parliament that one Everard, a soldier passing for a prophet, and Winstanley, another, with thirty more, were assembled on St. George's Hill, near Cobham, in Surrey, and were digging the ground and planting it with roots and beans. They said they should shortly be four thousand, and invited all to come and help them, promising them meat, drink, and clothes. Two troops of horse were sent to disperse them, of which they loudly complained, and Everard and Winstanley went to the general, and declared "that the liberties of the people were lost by the coming in of William the Conqueror, and that ever since, the people of God had lived under tyranny and oppression worse than our forefathers under the Egyptians. But now the time of deliverance was at hand, and God would bring his people out of this slavery, and restore them to their freedom in enjoying the fruits and benefits of the earth. There had lately appeared to him (Everard) a vision, which bade him arise and dig and plough the earth, and receive the fruits thereof. That their intent was to restore the earth to its former condition; that, as God had promised to make the barren fruitful, so now what they did was to restore the ancient community of enjoying the fruits of the earth, to distribute them to the poor and needy; that they did not intend to break down pales and destroy inclosures as was reported, but only to till the waste land, and make it fruitful for man; and that the time was coming when all men would willingly come in and give up their lands and estates, and submit to this community of goods."
Here was the communism of the nineteenth century clearly enunciated in the seventeenth; but the revolution of Cromwell and Ireton contemplated nothing so primitive, and there was nothing for it but to trample it out as soon as possible. Lilburne had been engaged in the county of Durham, and to win him over, three thousand pounds were voted to him; but this did not move him for a moment. On his return, he appeared at the bar of the house with a petition against the form of the newly adopted constitution, which the officers had named, "The Agreement of the People," but which the people did not accept as their agreement. Lilliburne protested against the provision that parliament should only sit six months every two years, and that the council should rule the other eighteen. This example was extensively followed, and the table of the house was quickly loaded with petitions from officers and soldiers, demanding a new parliament every year; a committee of the house to govern during the recess; no member of one parliament to be a member of the next; the self-denying ordinance to be enforced; the term of every officers' commission in the army to be limited; "the high court of justice and council of state to be abolished as instruments of tyranny; all proceedings in the courts of law to be in English; lawyers reduced, and their fees too. Excise and customs they required to be abolished, and the lands of delinquents sold to renumerate the well affected. Religion to be "reformed according to the mind of God;" tithes abolished, conscience made entirely free, and the incomes of ministers of the Gospel to be fixed at one hundred and fifty pounds each, and raised by a rate on the parishioners.
There were much sound sense and gospel truth in these demands, but the day of their adoption was much nearer to the millennium than to 1649. It was resolved to send Cromwell to settle the disturbances in Ireland, but it was necessary to quash this communist insurrection first. Money was borrowed of the city, and after "a solemn seeking of God by prayer," lots were cast to see what regiments should go to Ireland. Fourteen of foot and fourteen of horse were selected by this mode. The officers expressed much readiness to go; the men refused. On the 26th of April there broke out a terrible mutiny in Whalley's regiment, at the Bull, in Bishopsgate. The men seized their colours from the cornet, and refused to march without many of the communist concessions. Fairfax and Cromwell hastened thither, seized fifteen of the mutineers, tried them on the spot by court martial, condemned five, and shot one in St. Paul's churchyard on the morrow. This was Lookyer, a trooper, a brave young fellow, who had been in all the war, and was only yet three-and-twenty.
​The death of this young man, who was greatly beloved, roused all the soldiers and the working men and women of the city to a fearful degree. He was shot on Friday, amid the tears and execrations of thousands. On Monday his troop proceeded to bury him with all a soldier's honours. Whitelock says, "About a hundred went before the corpse, five or six in a file, the corpse was then brought, with six trumpets sounding a soldier's knell. Then the trooper's horse came, clothed all over in mourning, and led by a footman. The corpse was adorned with bundles of rosemary, one half-stained in blood, and the sword of the deceased along with them. Some thousands followed in rank and file; all had sea-green and black ribbon tied on their hats and to their breasts, and the women brought up the rear. At the new church in Westminster, some thousands more, of the better sort, met them, who thought not fit to march through the city."
This was not a promising beginning for the generals, but they were not men to be put down. They arrested Lilburne and his five small beagles, who published, on the 1st of May, their "Agreement of the People," and clapped them in the Tower, and hastened down to Salisbury to quell the insurrection which had broken out in Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, and Wilts in the army. The regiments of Scrope, Ireton, Harrison, Ingoldsby, Skippon, Reynolds, and Horton, all declared for the Lilburne "Agreement," and swore to stand by each other. At Banbury, a captain Thompson, at the head of two hundred men, issued a manifesto called " England's Standard Advanced," demanding the completion of public freedom, vowing justice on the murderers of Arnold and Lockyer, and threatening, if a hair of Lilburne's was touched, they would avenge it seventy-and-seven fold. Reynolds, the colonel of the regiment, attacked Thompson, put him to flight, and prevailed on the soldiers to lay down their arms; but another party of ten troops of horse, a thousand strong, under cornet Thompson, brother of the captain, marched out of Salisbury for Burford, increasing their numbers as they went., But Fairfax and Cromwell were marching rapidly after them. They came upon them in the night at Burford, took them all prisoners, and the next day, Thursday, the 17th of May, shot cornet Thompson and two corporals in Burford churchyard. The rest were pardoned, and agreed to go to Ireland. A few days after captain Thompson was overtaken in a wood in Northamptonshire, and killed. The mutiny was at an end, if we except some partial disturbances, in Devon, Wilts, and Somersetshire. Fairfax and Cromwell were received at Oxford in triumph, and feasted and complimented, being made doctors; and on the 7th of June a day of thanksgiving was held in London, with a great dinner at Grocers' Hall, given to the officers of the army and the leaders of parliament, and another appointed for the whole kingdom on the 21st.
Cromwell was already appointed lord-lieutenant of Ireland, and on the 10th of July he set forth at five in the evening from London, by way of Windsor to Bristol. He set out in state approaching to royalty. He rode in a coach drawn by six Flanders mares, whitish grays, a number of carriages containing other officers following, attended by a life-guard of eighty men, the meanest of whom was a commander or esquire; many of them were colonels in very rich uniforms, and the whole procession attended by a resounding flourish of trumpets. But before following the farmer of Huntingdon, now risen to all but royal grandeur, we must notice the affairs of Scotland. Though Argyll held the chief power in Scotland, and was on friendly terms with Cromwell, he could not prevent a strong public feeling showing itself on the approaching trial of the king. The Scots reproached themselves for giving up Charles to the English army, and considered that heavy disgrace would fall upon the country if the king should be put to death. They demanded, therefore, that a strong remonstrance should be sent to the parliament of England, and Argyll was too timid or too cautious to oppose this. The commissioners in London received and presented the remonstrance, but obtained no answer till after the execution of the king, and that which they did then receive was in very unceremonious terms. Forth^with the authorities in Edinburgh proclaimed Charles as king, and the commissioners at London, protesting against what was done, and against the alteration of the government into a republic, and declaring themselves guiltless of the blood of the king, hastened to Gravesend, to quil the kingdom. But the parliament, resenting this language as grossly rebellious, and calculated to excite sedition, sent an officer to conduct them under guard to the frontiers of the kingdom.
Passing over this insult, the Scots in March despatched the earl of Cassilis to the Hague, attended by four commissioners, to wait on Charles and invite him to Scotland. They found there the earl of Lanark, now duke of Hamilton by the execution of his brother, earls of Lauderdale, Callendar, Montrose, Kinnoul, and Seaforth. Some of these were old royalists, some of whom were called "Engagers," or of the party of Hamilton. The court of Charles, small as it was, was rent by dissensions, and both the engagers and the commissioners under Cassilis, joined in protesting against any junction with Montrose, whose cruelties to the covenanters, they said, had been so great, that to unite with him would turn all Scotland against the king. They insisted on Charles taking the covenant, but this Montrose and the old royalists vehemently resisted, declaring that to do that would alienate both catholics and episcopalians, and exasperate the independents to tenfold bitterness.
Whilst matters were in this unsatisfactory state. Dr. Dorislaus arrived as ambassador from the English parliament to the states of Holland. He was a native of that country, but had lived some time in England, had been a professor of Gresham College, and drew the charge for parliament against the king. That very evening, six gentlemen with drawn swords entered the inn where he was at supper, and desiring those present not to alarm themselves, as they ha,d no intention of hurting any one but the agent of the English rebels who had lately murdered their king, they dragged Dorislaus from the table, and one of them stabbed him with a dagger. Seeing him dead, they sheathed their swords, and walked quietly out of the house. They were known to be all Scotchmen and followers of Montrose; and Charles, seeing the mischief this base assassination would do his cause, and especially in Holland, prepared to quit the country. It was first proposed that he should go to Ireland, where Ormond was labouring in his favour, and where ​Rupert was off the coast with a fleet; but he changed his mind and went to Paris, to the queen, his mother. Before doing that, he sent chancellor Hyde and lord Cottington as envoys to Spain, to endeavour to move the king in his favour, and he returned an answer to the Scottish commissioners, that though he was and always had been ready to grant them the freedom of their religion, he could not consent to bind himself to the covenant. They admitted that he was their king and therefore they ought to obey him, and not he them, and this he must expect from the committee of estates, the assembly of the kirk, and the whole nation of Scotland. With this answer they departed in no very satisfied mood.
The war in Ireland being now undertaken by Cromwell, we must take a brief retrospective glance at what had been passing there. Perhaps no country was ever so torn to pieces by different factions, religious and political. The catholics were divided amongst themselves: there were the catholics of the pale, and the old Irish catholics, part of whom followed the faction of Rinuccini, the pope's nuncio, who was at the head of the council of Kilkenny, and others, general Preston and viscount Taafe. The Irish royalists ranged themselves under the banner of Ormond, consisting chiefly of episcopalians. The approach of Cromwell warned them to suppress their various feuds and unite against the parliament. To strengthen the parliament force, Jones, the governor of Dublin, and Monk, who commanded in Ulster, made overtures to Owen Roe O'Neil, the head of the old Irish in Ulster. Ormond had arrived in Ireland, and Inchiquin and Preston, the leaders of the forces of the Irish council, which had now repudiated the pope's nuncio, joined him; but O'Neil held back, not trusting Ormond, and he sent a messenger to Charles in France, offering to treat directly with him. But Ormond ordered the earl of Castlehaven to attack O'Neil, which he did, and speedily reduced his garrisons of Marlborough and Athy. Enraged at this whilst he was offering his services to the king, O'Neil listened to the proposals of Monk, who was himself hard pressed by the Scottish royalists, and had been compelled to retire from Belfast to Dundalk. Monk supplied O'Neil with ammunition, and O'Neil undertook to cut off the communication betwixt the royalists of the north and Ormond in the south. Monk sent word of this arrangement, and the "grandees," as they were called, or members of the great council, entertained the plan in secret, publicly they dared not, for these followers of O'Neil wore those Ulster Irish who had committed the horrible massacres of 1641. No sooner, however, did the rumour of this coalition become public, than the greatest excitement prevailed. The army and the public at large were filled with horror and indignation. They appealed to the solemn engagement of the army to avenge the blood of their fellow protestants slaughtered by these savages; they reminded the council and the parliament of the invectives heaped by them on the late king for making peace with these blood-stained natives; and now, they said, you expect us to become the allies and associates of these very men. The parliament saw how vain it was to strive against the feeling, and annulled the agreement. Hugh Peters harangued the public from the pulpit, excusing the council on account of the real facts of the case having been concealed from them, and the whole weight of the transaction fell on Monk, who was just then in London, and who was assured that nothing but his past services saved him from the punishment of his indiscretion.
Whilst matters were in this position, and the parliament was compelled to reject a very useful ally, Ormond advanced to besiege Jones in Dublin. He advanced on both sides of the Liffey, and cast up works at Bogotrath, to cut off the pasturage of the horses of the parliamentary force in Dublin. Jones, however, made a sally an hour before sunrise, and threw the enemy into such confusion, that the whole army on the right bank of the river fled in headlong panic, leaving their artillery, ammunition, tents, and baggage. In vain did Ormond hasten to check the route, his men followed the example. Two thousand prisoners were taken by Jones, of whom they are said to have slaughtered there hundred in cold blood. Such was the defeat, and such the inequality of the forces, that it cast great disgrace on the generalship of Ormond, and the royalists made great questionings of treason; but Charles himself would not listen to any such surmises: he hastened to send Ormond the order of the garter, and to assure him of his unshaken favour. The most exaggerated statements were made of the forces of Ormond, and of the number of his men killed and taken. Ormond himself says that he had only eight thousand; but Cromwell, no doubt from the statements of Jones, states the number to have been nineteen thousand against five thou sand two hundred of Jones's, and that Jones lulled four thousand on the place, and took two thousand five hundred and seventeen prisoners, of whom three hundred were officers. The battle was fought at a place called Rathmines, on the 2nd of August, 1649, and contributed to quicken the movements of Cromwell, who was collecting his forces for the passage at Milford Haven.
Cromwell had twelve thousand veterans, with whom he sailed on the 13th of August, and arrived in Dublin with the first division on the 15th, Ireton following with the main body. He was received with acclamations by the people of Dublin, and made them a speech in the streets, which greatly pleased them. He then allowed the army a fortnight to refresh themselves after the voyage, before leading them to action. At this period, the only places left to the parliament in Ireland were Dublin and Derry. On the 9th of September he besieged Drogheda, and summoned it to surrender. The governor of the place was Sir Arthur Ashton, who had about three thousand troops, foot and horse, commanded by Sir Edmund Varney, whose father was killed at Edge Hill. Ashton, who had acquired the reputation of a brave and experienced officer, refused to surrender, and the storm commenced, and on the second day a breach was made. A thousand men entered by the breach, but were driven back by the garrison. On this, Cromwell placed himself at the head of his men, and made a second assault. This time, after some hard fighting, they succeeded in getting possession of the intrenchments and of a church. According to Ormond, Carte, and others, Cromwell's officers then promised quarter to all who would surrender. "All his officers and soldiers," says Carte, "promising quarter to such as would lay down their arms, and ​performing it as long as any place held out, which encouraged others to yield. But when they had done all in their power, and feared no hurt that could be done them, then the word 'no quarter' went round, and the soldiers were, many of them, forced against their wills to kill their prisoners."
This has always been regarded as a great reproach to Cromwell. He himself, of course, does not confess that he broke his word, or forced his officers to break theirs; but he does something very like it. He tells us plainly, in his letter to Lenthall, the speaker, that " our men, getting up to them, were ordered by me to put them all to the sword. And indeed, being in the heat of the action, I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town; and I think that night they put to the sword about two thousand men."
That some of them escaping to the church, he had it set fire to, and so burnt them in it; and he records the exclamations of one of them in the fire. The rest of the fugitives, as they were compelled to surrender, were either slaughtered, or, to use his own words, "their officers were knocked on the head, and every tenth man of the soldiers killed, and the rest shipped for Barbadoes."
Great Seal of the Commonwealth
He says that one thousand people were destroyed in the church that he fired. He adds that they "put to the sword the whole of the defendants. I do not think thirty of the whole number escaped with their lives; those that did are in safe custody for Barbadoes."
This is, perhaps, the most awful confession that ever was made by a man in cool blood, for these letters were written about a week after the assault, and by a man undoubtedly of a thoroughly religious mind. Nay, so much so, that he attributes the whole "to the spirit of God;" says "This hath been a marvellous great mercy;" and prays that "all honest hearts may give the glory to God alone, to whom, indeed, the praise of this mercy belongs." And this he says at a time when he had given no mercy to three thousand men! Nay, it is assorted by trustworthy historians, that for five days Drogheda was given up to the wild fary of the soldiers, who considered that they were doing God service in exterminating papists, and that neither sex nor age was spared. That the thousand people in the church were almost wholly innocent inhabitants who had fled there for refuge; indeed, Cromwell himself says they were the people, not soldiers, and that "all their friars were knocked on the head promiscuously except two, and these two, one the brother of lord Taafe, were by the soldiers put to death."
Cromwell endeavoured to justify this horrible massacre by this plea, "that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future;" and Thomas Carlyle, in his "Letters and Speeches of Cromwell," has been at much pains, in a medley of very strange language, to excise his hero on that ground. But the business of the historian is not to erect men into demigods, but to represent them as they are, with all their power and weakness, their virtues and defects; and we are bound to say no amount of reasoning, much less of grotesque and rampant imagery, can ever wipe the blood of Cromwell's bloody campaign in Ireland out of memory. Even had it been warrantable to do evil that good might come of it, it is unfortunately not true that Cromwell's massacre here prevented the future effusion of blood. We shall find him immediately repeating the monstrous cruelty at Wexford, and his conduct producing its certain effect, that, of making his opponents defend their towns and garrisons with a desperation which not only greatly increased the bloodshed, but the difficulty and length of the campaign. Whitelock, the parliamentary historian, relating the siege of Clonmel, on the 9th of the following May, eight months afterwards, says "that they found in Clonmel the stoutest enemy this army had ever met in Ireland, and that there was never seen so hot a storm of so long a continuance, and so gallantly defended, wither in England or Ireland."
CHARLES II., AFTER THE DEFEAT AT WORCESTER, DISCOVERED IN A BARN, WHERE HE HAD TAKEN REFUGE
From Drogheda Cromwell returned to Dublin, and then marched on Wexford, taking and burning minor places by the way. On the 1st of October he summoned Wexford to surrender, and though the governor refused, the officer who commanded the castle traitorously yielded it, and the soldiers then perceiving the enemy quit the walls of the town, scaled them with their ladders, and encountering the forces in the market place, they made a stout resistance; but Cromwell informs the parliament that they were eventually all put to the sword, "not many less than two thousand, and I believe not twenty of yours from first to last of the siege. The soldiers got a very good booty; and the inhabitants," he says, "were wither so completely killed, or had run away, that it was a fine opportunity for honest people to 'go and plant themselves there." According to various historians, no distinction was made between the soldiers and the innocent inhabitants; three hundred women, who had crowded around the great cross, and were shrieking for protection to Heaven, were put to death with the same ruthless ferocity. Some authors do not restrict the numbers of the slain like Cromwell to two, but calculate them at five thousand.
Ormond now calculated greatly on the aid of O'Neil, to create a division in the north, and divide the attention and the forces of Cromwell, for that chieftain had begun to justify the treaty made with him through Monk, by compelling Montgomery to raise the siege of Londonderry, and rescuing Coote and his small army, the only force which the parliament had in Ulster. But the cry in London against this alliance with the Irish papist, had done its work, and after the victory of Rathmines, the parliament refused to ratify the treaty made with O'Neil. Indignant at this breach of faith, he had listened to the offers of Ormond, and was on his march to join him at Kilkenny. O'Neil died at Clocknacter, in Cavan, but his son took the command. By his assistance, the operations of Cromwell's generals were greatly retarded at that place, and at Duncannon and Waterford.
On the 17th of October, Cromwell sate down before Ross, and sent in a trumpeter, calling on the commander to surrender, with this extraordinary statement, "Since my coming into Ireland, I have this witness for myself, that I have endeavoured to avoid effusion of blood; "which must have been read with wonder, after the recent news from Drogheda and Wexford. General Taafe refused. There were one thousand soldiers in the place, and Ormond, Ardes, and Castlehaven, who were on the other side of the river, sent in fifteen hundred more. Yet on the 19th the town surrendered, the soldiers being allowed to march away. O'Neil had now joined Ormond at Kilkenny with two thousand horse and foot, and Inchiquin was in Munster. Soon after Cork and Youghall opened their gates, admiral Blake co-operating by water. In the north, Su' Charles Coote, lord president of Connaught, took Coleraine by storm, and forming a junction with colonel Venables, marched on Carrickfurgus, which they soon after reduced, Cromwell marched from Ross to Watcrford, his army having taken Innerstioge, Thomastown, and Carrick. He appeared before Waterford on the 21th of November. Here, too, he received the news of the sun-ender of Kinsale and Baudon Bridge, but Waterford refused to surrender, and Cromwell was compelled to march away to Cork for winter quarters. His troops, however, took the Fort of Passage near Waterford; but they lost lieutenant-general Jones, the conqueror of Rathmines, by sickness at Dungarvon.
Cromwell did not rest long in winter quarters. By the 29th of January he was in the field again, at the head of thirty thousand men. Whilst major-general Ireton and colonel Reynolds marched by Carrick into Kilkenny, Cromwell proceeded from Youghall over the Blackwater into Tipperary, various castles being taken by the way, and quartering themselves in Fethard and Cashel. On March 28th he succeeded in taking Kilkenny, whence he proceeded to Clonmel. In this campaign the royalist generals accuse Cromwell of still perpetrating most unnecessary cruelties, though they endeavoured to set him a different example.
"I took," says lord Castlehaven, "Athy by storm, with all the garrison (seven hundred) prisoners. I made a present of them to Cromwell, desiring him by letter that he would do the same to me, if any of mine should fall into his power. But he little valued my civility, for in a few days after he besieged Gouvan, and the soldiers mutinying and giving up the place with their officers, he caused the governor Hammond and some other officers to be put to death." Cromwell avows this in one of Ids letters. "The next day the colonel, the major, and the rest of the commissioned officers were shot to death; all but one, who, being very earnest to have the castle delivered, was pardoned." And this, he admits, was because they refused to surrender at his first summons. He seemed to consider a refusal to surrender, at once and unconditionally, a deadly crime, and avenged it most bloodily. Were all war to be carried on on this principle, it would be a war, not of saints, but of devils. On the other hand, Ormond, in one of his letters, says, " Rathfarnham was taken by our troops by storm, and all that were in it made prisoners; and through five hundred soldiers entered the castle before any officer of note, yet not one creature was killed; which I tell you by the way, to observe the difference betwixt our and the rebels' making use of a victory."
The parliament, seeing the necessity of having their best general for the impending Scotch war, sent towards the end of April the President Bradshaw frigate, to bring over Cromwell from Ireland, and to leave Ireton, lord Broghill, and the other generals to finish the war by the reduction of Clonmel, Waterford, Limerick, and a few lesser places. But Cromwell would not go till he had witnessed the fall of Clonmel. There Hugh O'Neil, the son of old Owen Roe O'Neil of Ulster, defended the place gallantly with twelve hundred men. The siege lasted from the 28th of March to the 8th of May. Whitelock says, "They found in Clonmel the stoutest enemy this army had met in Ireland, and there never was seen so hot a storm, of so long a continuance, and ​so gallantly defended, either in Ireland or England." The English troops had made a breach, and endeavoured to carry the town by storm in vain. On the 9th they stormed the breach a second time. "The fierce death-wrestle," says a letter from one of the besiegers, "lasted four hours," and Cromwell's men were driven back with great loss. But the ammunition of the besieged was exhausted, and they stole away in the night. The inhabitants, before this was discovered, sent out and made terms of surrender. On discovering the retreat of the enemy, pursuit was made, and two hundred men killed on the road. Oliver, however, kept his agreement with the inhabitants.
Cromwell had spent about ten months in Ireland, and certainly had reduced the natives to a more general subjection than any general before him in the same time, and had, according to Carlyle, "left a very handsome spell of work done there." If a blood-thirstiness almost imparalleled be "handsome work," history has indeed some very handsome scenes to show; but we are persuaded that Cromwell, had he mingled with his usual prompt action and impressive severity a humane liberality, would have done his work still more rapidly and effectually, and far more like a Christian commander. Ireton, who remained, died in Ireland, November 26th, 1651. This bloody campaign has always been remembered in that country as "The Curse of Cromwell."
The siege of Clonmel finished, Cromwell set sail in the President frigate, and landed at Bristol towards the end of May, where he was received with firing of guns and great acclamations for his exploits in Ireland. On the 31st of the month he approached Hounslow Heath, where he was met by the lord-general Fairfax, and numbers of other officers and members of parliament, besides crowds of other people. They conducted him to London, and on reaching Hyde Park corner, he was received by the discharge of artillery from colonel Barkstead's regiment, there drawn up; and thus, with increasing crowds and acclamations, he was attended to the Cockpit near St. James's, a house which had been assigned to him, and where his family had been residing for some time. There the lord mayor and aldermen waited on him, to thank him for his services in Ireland. Thence, after some time of rest and refreshment, he appeared in his place in parliament, where he also received the thanks of the house. Some one remarking what crowds went out to see his triumph, Cromwell replied, "But if they had gone to see me hanged, how many more there would have been!"
Charles II., though invited to assume the crown of Scotland, was invited on such terms as would have afforded little hope to a man of much foresight. Those who were to support him were divided into two factions, which could no more mix than fire and water. The covenanters, and the royalists under Montrose, hated each other with a deadly and inextinguishable hatred. So far from mixing, they were sure to coma to strife and bloodshed amongst themselves. If the covenanters got the upper hand, as they were pretty certain, he must abandon his most devoted followers, the old royalists and engagers, and take the covenant himself, thus laying down every party and principle that his father had fought for. He must take upon him a harsh and gloomy yoke, which must keep him not only apart from his royalist and episcopalian followers, but from his far more valuable kingdom of England, where the independents and sectaries reigned, and which the Scotch covenanters could not hope to conquer. But Charles was but a poor outcast and wanderer in a world, the princes of which were tired of both him and his cause, and he was, therefore, compelled to make an effort, however hopeless, to recover his dominions by such means as offered. He therefore sent off Montrose to raise troops and material amongst the northern courts, and then to pass over and raise the Highlands, whilst he went to treat with the covenanters at Breda.
Montrose was strongly suspected of having headed the party who assassinated Dorislaus, a very bad beginning, assassination being the fitting business of thieves, and not of heroes. The fame of Montrose, nevertheless, gave him a good reception in Denmark and other courts, and he is said to have raised an army of twelve thousand men, and embarked these, and much ammunition and artillery, at Gottenburg, under lord Kinnoul, in the autumn. The equinoctial gales appeared to have scattered this force in all directions, dashing several of the ships on the rocks, so that Kinnoul landed in October at Kirkwall, in the Orkneys, with only eighty officers, and about one hundred common men. Montrose followed with five hundred more, and having received the order of the garter from Charles as a token of his favour, he once more raised his banner in the Highlands, bearing on it a painting of the late king decapitated, and the words, "Judge and avenge my cause, O Lord!" But the Highlanders had been taught caution by the repeated failures of the royalists, and the chastisements they had received from the stern covenanters; they stood aloof, and in vain did Montrose march through Caithness and Sutherland, calling on the Gaels to rise and defend the king before the covenanters could sell him to the English, as they had done his father. This was a fatal proclamation, for whilst it foiled to raise the Highlands, it added to the already deep detestation of him in the Lowlands, where his proclamation was burnt by the common hangman.
The covenanters did not merely burn his proclamation, they despatched a force of four thousand men against him. Colonel Strachan came almost upon him in Corbiesdale, in Rosshire, and calling his men around him under the shelter of the high moorland broom, he informed them that God had given "the rebel and apostate Montrose, and the viperous brood of Satan, the accursed of God and the kirk," into their hands. He gave out a psalm, which they sung, and then he dispersed them in successive companies, the whole not amounting to more than four hundred men, the main army being with David Leslie at Brechin. Aa soon as Strachan's handful of men came in sight of Montrose's levies, they were attacked by his cavalry, but scarcely were they engaged, when a second, and then a third detachment appeared. On perceiving this, Montrose believed the whole army of Leslie was marching up, and he ordered his infantry to fall back and screen themselves amongst the brushwood. But first his horse, and then the whole of his force was thrown into confusion. His standard-bearer and several of his officers were slain. The foreign mercenaries demanded quarter and received it, the rest made their escape as well as they could. Montrose had his horse killed under him, and though he got another horse, ​and swam across a rapid river, he was compelled to fly in such haste, that he left behind him the star and garter with which he had been so newly invested, his sword, and his cloak. He once more made for the mountains of Sutherland with Kinnoul, disguised as peasants. Kinnoul soon sank with fatigue, and was left behind and perished. Montrose at length reached the house of Macleod of Assynt, who had formerly served under him; but this base man sold him to the covenanters for four hundred bolls of meal. This treason was soon avenged by the neighbouring Highlanders, who ravaged the lands of Assynt; but the Scottish parliament compelled the traitor with twenty thousand pounds Scots, to be raised on the royalties of Caithness and Orkney. These islands, as well as the Isles of Man, Scilly, Jersey, the colony of Virginia, and the islands of the Caribbean Sea, long held out for the royal cause.
Montrose was conveyed down to Edinburgh, where he arrived on the 18th of May; and having been carried through the city in an open cart, bare-headed, and exposed to the insults and execrations of the mob, he was condemned as a traitor, hanged on the 21st of May on a gibbet thirty feet high, and his head was fixed on a spike in the capital, and his limbs sent for exposure in different cities. Such was the ignominious end of the gallant but sanguinary Montrose. But if the conduct of his enemies was ungenerous, what was that of his king? No sooner did Charles hear of his defeat, than fearing that his rising might injure him with the covenanters, he sent to the parliament, protesting that he had never authorised him to draw the sword; nay, that he had done it contrary to the royal commands: so early did this worthless man display the meanness of his character, and put in practice the wretched maxims of the Stuart doctrine of kingcraft.
Charles had now complied with the demands of the Scottish parliament, agreeing to lake the covenant, never to tolerate the catholic religion in any part of his dominions, not even in Ireland, where the catholics were a majority; to govern entirely by the authority of parliament, and in religious matters by that of the kirk. Thus did this man, for the sake of regaining the throne of one of his kingdoms, bind himself to destroy the religion of which he was at heart a believer, and to maintain a creed that he abhorred and despised. He landed in June in the Frith of Cromartie, and a court was established for him at Falkland, and nine thousand pounds sterling was allowed for its expenditure monthly.
But the pious Scots were speedily scandalised at the debauched habits of their royal puppet. He had delayed the expedition for some weeks, because he could not tear himself from his mistress, Mrs. Barlow, and now he came surrounded by a very dissipated crew—Buckingham, Wilmot, and others, whom nothing could induce him to part with, though many others were forbid the court.
Whilst these things were taking place in Scotland, in London as active measures were on foot for putting to flight this covenanting king. On the 14th of June the commons again appointed Fairfax commander-in-chief, and Cromwell lieutenant-general. Fairfax, so far from favouring the invasion of Scotland, strongly argued against it, as a breach of the solemn league and covenant. Fairfax's wife is said to have been resolute against his taking up arms any further against the king. She had sufficiently shown her spirit, that of a Vere, of the martial house of Vere, on the king's trial; and now Fairfax, not only thus strongly influenced by his wife, but belonging to the presbyterian party, resigned his command, and retired to his estates in Yorkshire. It was in vain that a deputation, consisting of Cromwell, Lambert, Harrison, Whitclock, and St. John, waited on him at Whitehall, opening their meeting with prayer; Fairfax stood firm, and on the 26th, two days after, the parliament appointed Cromwell commander-in-chief, in place of Fairfax.
Much abuse has been heaped on Cromwell, as acting in all this with hypocrisy, appearing to press Fairfax to go to Scotland, and yet wishing it himself. It would be well if Oliver had no greater sins to answer for. We believe that he had much rather have been prosecuting the complete settlement of Ireland, which country he had evidently quit fed with reluctance. But once appointed, he went to work with his accustomed activity. On the 20th, only three days afterwards, he set out from London for the north. He had Lambert as major-general, Whalley as commissary-general. Pride, Overton, Monk, and Hodgson, as colonels of regiments. The Scottish parliament had appointed the old earl of Leven generalissimo, but only nominally so out of honour, for he was now old and infirm. David Leslie was the real commander. The Scottish army was ordered to amount to sixty thousand men, and it was to lay waste all the country betwixt Berwick and Edinburgh, to prevent the English obtaining any supplies. To frighten the country people away from the English army, it was rumoured that every male betwixt sixteen and sixty would have their right hands cut off, and the women's breasts be bored through with red-hot irons.
Cromwell passed the Tweed at Berwick on the 22nd of July, with a force of sixteen thousand men. They found the country desolated and deserted, except by a number of women, who on their knees implored mercy, and were set by the officers to bake and brew for the soldiers. That night the beacon fires of Scotland were lighted, and the English army encamped at Mordington, where they lay three days, and then marched to Dunbar, and thence to Musselburgh. They found the Scotch army under Leslie postal betwixt Edinburgh and Leith, and well defended by batteries and entrenchments. Nothing could induce the wary Scotch commander to quit his vantage ground, and the country afforded no supplies to the English army; but their fleet followed them along the coast, and furnished them with provisions.
For a month Cromwell found it impossible to draw the Scottish general out of his strong position. He sometimes marched up close to his lines to tempt him to come to action, but it was in vain, and he did not think it prudent to attack him in his formidable position, which must have cost him an awful number of men even if he carried it.
The weather being very wet he fell back upon Musselburgh, the enemy then making a sally, and harassing his rear, and wounding General Lambert. Cromwell and the Scottish assembly, as well as Cromwell and general Leslie, who lay in the ground now occupied by the New Town of ​Edinburgh, have a voluminous correspondence, in which they quote much Scripture, and each declares himself the favourite or justified of heaven. The Scots reproached Cromwell and his party with breaking the league and covenant, and Cromwell retorted on them, that though they pretended to covenant and fight against malignants, they had entered into agreement with the head and centre of the malignants himself, which he said he could not understand. Cromwell, leaving a force to invest Dunbar, which was said to suffer extreme famine, being cooped by the English both on land and sea, about the 13th of August shifted his camp to the Pentland Hills to the west of Edinburgh, in order to cut off Leslie's supplies.
Whilst lying there the young king himself made a visit to the army at Leith, where he was received by the soldiers with acclamations; but the assembly of the kirk was soon scandalised by the drunkenness and profanity which his presence brought into the camp, and set on foot an inquiry, the result of which was that eighty officers, with many of their men, were dismissed that they might not contaminate the rest of the army. They also required Charles to sign a declaration to his subjects in his three kingdoms, informing them that he lamented the troubles which had been brought on the realm by the resistance of his father to the solemn league and covenant, and by the idolatry of his mother. That for himself he had subscribed the covenant with all his heart, and would have no friends or enemies but the friends or enemies of the covenant. That he repented making a peace with the papists of Ireland, and now declared it null and void; and that he detested all popery, prelacy, idolatry, and heresy. Finally, that ho would accord to a free parliament of England the propositions agreed upon by the commissioners of the two kingdoms, and would settle the English church according to the plan organised by the Westminster assembly of divines.
Never was so flagrant a set of falsehoods forced on a reluctant soul! Charles read the declaration with imagination, and declared that he would sacrifice everything rather than thus to cast reproach on his parents and their supporters, who had suffered so on their behalf, or belie his own sentiments. But he was soon convinced that he must in reality see his cause totally abandoned if he did not comply, and at the end of three days he signed with tears and shame the humiliating document. The exulting kirk then proclaimed a certain victory from heaven over "a blaspheming general and a sectarian army."
And truly, affairs appeared very likely to come to such a conclusion. Cromwell found it difficult to feed his army; the weather continued stormy and wet, and his soldiers suffered extremely from fevers and other illness from exposure to the weather. Cromwell made a sudden march in the direction of Stirling, as though he intended to cut off that that city from communication with the capital. This set Leslie in motion; he hastily sent forward his forces, and the vanguards came to skirmishing, but could not engage in complete battle on account of the boggy ground between them. Cromwell as suddenly retreated, and firing his huts on the Pentlands, retreated towards Dunbar. This effectually roused the Scots; they knew his distress from sickness and lack of supplies, and they thought he meant now to escape into England. To prevent that, and to make themselves masters of the whole English army, as they now confidently expected, they marched rapidly along the feet of the Lammermoor Hills, and Leslie managed to outstrip him, and hem him in betwixt Dunbar and Doon hill. A deep ravine called Cockburn's Path, or, as Oliver pronounced it, Coppers Path, about forty feet deep and as many wide, with a rivulet running through it, lay betwixt Oliver and the Scotch army, which was posted on Doon Hill. On Oliver's right lay Belhaven Bay, on his left Brocksmouth House, at the mouth of a brook, and where there is a path southward. Leslie had secured the passes of Cockburn's Path, and imagined that he had Cromwell and his army secure from Sunday night to Tuesday morning, the 3rd of September. But on Monday afternoon, Cromwell observed Leslie moving his right wing down into the plain towards Brocksmouth House, evidently intending to secure that pass also; but Cromwell at once espied his advantage. He could attack and cut off this right wing, whilst the main body of Leslie's army, penned betwixt the brook and the hills, could not manœuvre to help it. On observing this, Cromwell exclaimed to Lambert, "The Lord hath delivered us!" and arrangements were made to attack the right wing of Leslie at three o'clock in the morning. Leslie had twenty-three thousand men—Cromwell about half as many; but by a vigorous, unexpected attack on this right wing, after three hours of hard fighting, Cromwell throw the Scots into confusion, and Oliver exclaimed, "They run! I profess they run!" In fact, the horse of the Scots dashed frantically away over and through their own foot, and there was a wild flight in all directions. Three thousand slain lay on the spot, the Scotch army was in wild rout, and as the sun just then rose over St. Abb's Head and the sea, Oliver exclaimed to his soldiers, "Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered!" "The lord-general," says Hodgson, "made a halt till the horse could gather for the chase, and sung the 117th Psalm. Then the pursuit was made as far as Haddington. Ten thousand prisoners were taken, with all the baggage, artillery, and ammunition of the enemy. A thousand men were slain in the pursuit. By nine o'clock in the morning, David Leslie, the general, was in Edinburgh, old lord Leven reached it by two, and what a city! The general complained that the ministers had occasioned the disaster; they would not let him rest till he descended from his height to attack the enemy on a disadvantageous ground. The ministers, though all their prophecies of victory were falsified, had yet plenty of other reasons for it. They published a "Short Declaration and Warning," in which they enumerated no less than thirteen causes for this terrible overthrow. The general wickedness of the country, the especial wickedness of the king's house, and the number of malignants amongst the king's followers, &c. &c. Cromwell told them plainly in letters which he addressed to them, that it was for taking up a family that the Lord had so eminently lifted up his hand against, and in pretending to cry down malignants, and yet receiving and setting up the head of them all. He advanced to Edinburgh and took up his quarters there, closely blockading the castle, which was soon compelled to surrender.
As for Charles II., he was rather delighted than ​otherwise with the defeat of his fanatic friends at Dunbar. He was grown most thoroughly tired of imperious dictation and morose religion, and he took the opportunity to steal away to join Murray, Huntley, Athol, and the royalists in the highlands. On the afternoon of the 4th of October, on pretence of hawking, he rode out of Perth, and dashed away for the braes of Angus. After galloping forty miles he came to a wretched hovel of a place called Clova, where he had nothing but a turf pillow to sleep on. There he was overtaken by colonel Montgomery—for Argyll was speedily apprised of the flight of his royal prisoner, and finding two regiments of horse at hand, he knew escape was hopeless, and returned. But "the Start," which Charles's elopement was called, had opened the eyes of the covenanters to the danger of pressing him too far. They now considerably relaxed their vigour towards him, admitted him to their deliberations in council, and they thus induced him to prevail on Athol, Middleton, and the highland forces to disband.
Boscobel House.
Cromwell's attention was soon attracted towards the west, where an army of five thousand men was raised, by order of the committee of estates, by colonels Kerr and Strachan, in the associated counties of Renfrew, Ayr, Galloway, Wigton, and Dumfries. These people were of strict whiggamore notions, and were directly in correspondence with John Warriston, the clerk register of parliament, and Gillespie and Guthrie, two ministers of the kirk, who protested against having anything to do with the son of the beheaded Charles Stuart, who was an enemy to the kirk, and whose son himself was a thorough malignant. They drew up a remonstrance of the western army, in which they termed the king an incarnate solecism, and refused to fight under either him or Leslie. Cromwell, who saw little to prevent a union with this party, professing all his old veneration for the covenant, opened a communication with thorn, arguing that Charles ought to be banished, and thus remove the need of an English interference. In order to effect a coalition with these commanders, Cromwell marched to Glasgow, where he arrived on Friday, October 18th; and on Sunday, in the cathedral, listened to a violent sermon against him and his army from the reverend Zachery Boyd. Coming to no agreement with Kerr and Strachan, ho returned on Monday towards Edinburgh, and found many men advising that they shall give up the "hypocrite," meaning Charles, and make peace with England; but Kerr and Strachan, though their remonstrance was voted a scandalous libel by parliament, could not agree to this. They, in fact, differed in opinion. Strachan resigned his commission, and soon after came over with eighty troopers to Cromwell. Kerr showed a hostile aspect, thus neither agreeing with one party nor another. and soon came to nothing. Cromwell sent Lambert to look after him with three thousand horse, and Lambert, whilst lying at Hamilton, found himself suddenly attacked by Kerr. He, however, repulsed him, took him prisoner killed a hundred of his men, losing himself only six, and took two hundred prisoners, horse and foot. The western army was wholly dispersed. The condition of the covenanting Scots was now deplorable; the remonstrants, though they had lost their army, still continued to quarrel with the official or Argyll's party, and the country was thus torn by the two factions, under the name of Remonstrants and Resolutionists, when it should have been united against the enemy. Cromwell was now master of all the Lowlands, casting longing glances towards Stirling and Perth, which were in the hands of the royal party, and thus ended the year 1650.
ESCAPE OF CHARLES II. IN THE DISGUISE OF A SERVANT.
If Cromwell's movement had been rapid and successful, he was now in his turn astonished by one as extraordinary on the part of the king. Charles saw that all the south of Scotland and a great part of England was clear of the enemy, and he at once announced his determination to march towards London. On the 31st of July his army was actually in motion, and Argyll, denouncing the enterprise as inevitably ruinous, resigned his commission, and retired to Inverary.
On discovering Charles's object, Cromwell put the forces to remain in Scotland under the command of general Monk, sent Lambert from Fife to follow the royal army with three thousand cavalry, and wrote to Harrison in Newcastle to advance and harass the flank of the king's army. He himself, on the 7th of August, commenced his march after it with ten thousand men.
Charles advanced at a rapid rate, and he had crossed the Mersey before Lambert and Harrison had formed a junction near Warrington, and attempted to draw him into a battle on Knutsford Heath. But Charles continued his hasty march till he reached Worcester, where he was received with loud acclamations by the mayor and corporation, and by a number of county gentlemen, who had been confined there on suspicious of their disaffection, but were now liberated. But such had been the sudden appearance of the king, that no expectation of it, and therefore no preparation for it, had been made by the royalists; and the bigoted ministers attending his army sternly refused all who offered to join them, whether presbyterians, episcopalian, or catholics, because they had not taken the covenant. It was in vain that Charles gave orders to the contrary, and Bent forward general Massey to receive and bring into order these volunteers; the committee of the kirk rejected them, whilst Cromwell's forces on their march were growing by continual reinforcements, especially of the county militias. Colonel Robert Lilburne met with a party of the king's forces under the earl of Derby, betwixt Chorley and Wigan, and defeated them, killing the lord Widdrington, Sir Thomas Tildesloy, and colonels Boynton, Trollope, and Throckmorton. Derby himself was wounded, but made his escape.
Charles issued a proclamation for all his male subjects betwixt the ages of sixteen and sixty to join his standard on the 26th of August; but on that day he found that the whole of his forces amounted to only twelve thousand men, whilst Cromwell, who arrived two days after, was at the head of at least thirty thousand. On the 3rd of September, the anniversary of the battle of Dunbar, Cromwell determined to attack the royal army. Lambert, overnight, crossed the Severn at Upton, with ten thousand men, and the next morning Cromwell and Fleetwood, with the two other divisions of the army, crossed, Cromwell, the Severn, and Fleetwood, the Team; and Charles, who had been watching their progress from the tower of the cathedral, descended and attacked Fleetwood before he had effected his passage but Cromwell was soon up to the assistance of his general, and after a stout battle, first in the meadows, and then in the streets of the town, the forces of Charles were completely beaten. Charles fought with undaunted bravery, and endeavoured to rally his soldiers for a last effort, but they flung down their weapons and surrendered. It was with difficulty that he was prevailed upon to fly, and save his life. Three thousand of the royalists were slain, and six or seven thousand made prisoners, including a considerable number of noblemen—the duke of Hamilton, but mortally wounded, the earls of Rothes, Derby, Cleveland, Kelly, and Lauderdale, lords Sinclair, Kenmure, and Grandison, and the generals Leslie, Massey, Middleton, and Montgomery. The duke of Buckingham, lord Talbot, and others, escaped with many adventures.
It was an overthrow complete, and most astonishing to both conquered and conquerors. Cromwell, in his letter to the parliament, styled it "a crowning mercy." The earl of Derby and seven others of the prisoners suffered death and traitors and rebels to the commonwealth. Derby offered the Isle of Man for his ransom, but his letter was read by Lenthall to the house too late, and he was executed at Bolton, in Lancashire.
As for Charles himself, the romance of his escape has been celebrated in many narratives. After being concealed for some days at Whiteladies and Boscobel, two solitary houses in Shropshire, and passing a day in the boughs of an oak, he made his way in various disguises, and by the assistance of different loyal friends, to Brighton, whence he passed in a collier over to Fecamp in Normandy, but this was not till the 17th of October, forty-four days after the battle of Worcester.
On the 12th of September Cromwell arrived in town; Bulstrode, Whitelock, and three other gentlemen had been sent down to meet him and conduct him to London. They met him near Aylesbury, and they all joined a hawking party by the way. At Aylesbury they passed the night. ​Oliver was very affable, and presented to each of the commissioners a horse taken in the battle and a couple of Scotch prisoners. At Acton, the speaker of the commons, the lord-president, and many other members of parliament and of the council, the lord-mayor, aldermen, and sheriffs, and crowds of other people, met him, and congratulated him on his splendid victory and all his successes in Scotland. The recorder, in his address, said he was destined to "bind kings in chains and their nobles in fetters of iron." Oliver, in his usual style, assigned all the glory to God. In London he was received with immense shoutings and acclamations. Parliament voted that the 3rd of September should be kept ever after as a holiday, in memory of his victory; and, in addition to twenty-five thousand pounds a year already granted in land, settled on another forty thousand pounds a year in land.
O'Brien and Ireton.
Thus the royal party was for a time broken and put down. In Ireland Cromwell had left his son-in-law Ireton as his deputy, who went on with a strong hand putting down all opposition. The catholic party growing weary of Ormond, he had resigned his lord-deputyship for the king, and Clanricarde had succeeded him. Still the catholic party was divided in itself, and Ormond, and after him Clanricarde, entered into a treaty with the duke of Lorraine, who agreed to send an army to Ireland to put down the Parliament, on condition that he should be declared protector-royal of Ireland, with all the rights pertaining to the office; an office, in fact, never before heard of. The Irish royalists obtained, however, at different times, twenty thousand pounds from Lorraine, and his agents were still negotiating for his protectorship, when the defeat of Charles at Worcester showed Lorraine the folly of his hopes. Disappointed in this expectation of assistance from abroad,the Irish royalists found themselves vigorously attacked by Ireton. In June he invested Limerick, and on the 27th of October it surrendered. Ireton tried and put to death seven of the chief leaders of the party. The court-martial refused to condemn the brave O'Niel, though Ireton urged his death for his stubborn defence of Clonmel. When Terence O'Brien, bishop of Emly, was condemned, he exclaimed to Ireton, "I appeal to the tribunal of God, and summon thee to meet me at that bar." These words were deemed prophetic by many, and were remembered with wonder when, about a month afterwards, Ireton fell ill of fever and died.
Cromwell appointed general Lambert his deputy in Ireland. This appointment was set aside before Lambert could pass over to that country, as it is said, through the management of Ireton's widow, Cromwell's daughter Bridget. Meeting the handsome and showy wife of Lambert in St. James's-park, that lady, as her husband was now lord-deputy, refused to give precedence to Mrs. Ireton. Offended at this, she prevailed on her father to revoke the appointment, and give it to Fleetwood, whom she soon after married, and so Lambert returned to Ireland in his former position. But there is reason to believe that Lambert never forgave the affront, though Cromwell endeavoured to soothe him, and made him compensation in money; for he was found to be one of the first to oppose Richard Cromwell after his father's death, and depose him from the protectorate. Ludlow and three other commissioners were joined with Fleetwood, so far as the civil administration was concerned, and they were ordered to levy sufficient money for the payment of the forces, not exceeding forty thousand pounds a month; and to exclude papists from all places of trust, from practising as barristers ​or teaching in any kind of school. Thus the bullk of the natives were deprived of all participation in the affairs of their own country, and, what was worse, might be imprisoned or removed from one part of the country at the will of these dictators.
In Scotland Monk carried matters with the same high hand. On the 14th of August he compelled Stirling to surrender, and sent off the royal robes, part of the regalia, and the national records to London. He then commenced the siege of Dundee, and whilst it was progressing he sent colonels Alured and Morgan to Alyth in Angus, where he suprised the two committees of the estates and the kirk, with many other noblemen and gentlemen, to the number of three hundred, and amongst them poor old Leslie, earl of Leven, met on royalist affairs, and sent them after the regalia to England. On the 1st of September Monk stormed Dundee, and gave up the city to the plunder and violence of the soldiery. There were said to be eight hundred soldiers and inhabitants killed, of whom three hundred were women and children. The place had been considered so safe that many people had sent their property there for security, and that and the ships in the harbour all fell into the hands of the conquerors. They are said to have got two hundred thousand pounds in booty, and perpetrated the most unheard-of atrocities. The fate of Dundee induced Montrose, Aberdeen, and St. Andrews to open their gates. The earl of Hutley and lord Balcarras submitted, and scarcely any noblemen of note, except Argyll, held out; and that was merely for the purpose of making good terms with the parliament.
The most vigorous means were adopted to keep the country in check. Military stations were appointed through out the highlands, and sites fixed upon for the erection of strong forts at Ayr, Leith, Perth, and Inverness. The property and estates of the crown were declared forfeited to parliament, as well as the lands of all who had taken arms under the duke of Hamilton or the king against England. English judges were sent to go the circuits, assisted by Scotch ones, and one hundred and thirty thousand pounds a year was voted for the maintenance of the army in Scotland, which was raised to twenty thousand men. These were galling measures for the Scots, who had hoped to subject England again to the king, but they were far from the most humiliating. Vane, St. John, and six other commissioners were appointed to settle a plan for the incorporation of Scotland with England. They met at Dalkeith, and summoned the representatives of the counties and the burghs to assemble and consult with them on the matter. The ministers thundered from their pulpits against a union, and especially against putting the kirk under the power of the state; but twenty-eight out of thirty shires, and forty-four out of fifty-eight burghs complied, and sent up twenty-one deputies to sit with the parliamentary commissioners at Westminster, to settle the terms of the union. The power of the English parliament, or rather of the army, was now so supreme, that both in Scotland and Ireland resistance was vain.
The all-absorbing interest of the events of the last several unexampled years within the kingdom, have prevented us noticing the transactions of the commonwealth with the other kingdoms of Europe. We must now bring them up Prince Rupert, by his cruising on the coasts of England and Ireland, had not only kept the nation in alarm, but had inflicted great injury on the coasts and commerce of the realm. In the spring of 1649 he lay in the harbour of Kinsale, keeping the way open for the landing of the foreign troops expected to accompany Charles II. to Ireland. But Vane, to whom was intrusted the naval affairs, commissioned Blake, Dean, and Monk, three army officers, who showed themselves as able at sea as on land, to look after him, and the victories of Cromwell in Ireland warned him in the autumn to remove. He found himself blockaded by the English fleet, but in his impetuous way he burst through the inclosing squadron with the loss of only three ships, and took refuge in the Tagus. In the following March Blake presented himself at that river, and demanded of the king of Portugal permission to attack the pirate, as he termed him, at his anchorage. The king refused; Blake attempted, notwithstanding, to force his way up the river to Rupert's fleet, but he was assailed by the batteries from both shores, and was compelled to retire. This was deemed a declaration of war by the republic, and Blake was ordered to seize any Portuguese ships that fell in his way. Don John thereupon seized the English merchants in his dominions, and confiscated their goods. But the ravages committed by Blake on his subjects, soon induced him to order Rupert to retire from the Tagus, who sailed thence into the Mediterranean, where he continued to practise open piracy, capturing ships of almost all nations. He afterwards sailed to the West Indies to escape the English admirals, and inflicted there great injuries both on the English and Spanish. His brother Maurice was there lost in a storm, and in 1652 Rupert, beset by the English captains, made his way again to Europe, and sold his two men-of-war to cardinal Mazarin. The Portuguese, freed from the presence of Rupert, soon sent Don Guimaraes to London to treat for a pacification, but the treaty was not finally concluded till after Cromwell had attained to supreme power.
The king of Spain, who never forgave Charles I. the insult put upon his sister and the whole kingdom, acknowledged the republic from the first moment of its establishment by continuing the presence of Cardenas, his ambassador. The king of Spain made use of his ambassador in London to excite the commonwealth against Portugal and the United Provinces, but an unlucky accident threatened to disturb even this alliance, the only one betwixt the commonwealth and the courts of the continent. As Spain kept an ambassador in London, the parliament resolved to send one to Madrid, and for this purpose they selected a gentleman of the name of Ascham. He did not understand Spanish, and, therefore, he employed three friars, who accompanied him, and informed him of all that he wanted to know regarding Spain. But he was no sooner arrived than half-a-dozen royalist English officers, who had served in the Spanish army against Portugal, and in Calabria, went to his inn, and finding him at dinner, exclaimed, "Welcome, gallants, welcome!" and ran him and Riba, one of the friars, through with their swords. This was precisely what some royalists had done to Dorislaus, the parliamentary ambassador to the Hague, in 1649; for these cavaliers, with all their talk of honour, had no ​objection to an occasional piece of assassination. One of the servants of Charles II.'s ambassadors, Hyde and Cottington, was one of the assassins, which brought the ambassadors into suspicion; but they protested firmly against any participation in so base a business. The assassins fled to a church for sanctuary, except one who got to the Venetian ambassador's, and 80 escaped. The other five were brought from their asylum, tried, and condemned to die, but the courtiers sympathised so much with the royalists, that they were returned again to their asylum, except a protestant of the name of Sparkes, who, being taken a few miles from the city, was put to death. This matter blowing over, the peace with Spain continued. With Holland the case was different.
Holland, being itself a republic, might have been expected to sympathise and fraternise with the English commonwealth, but the circumstances of the court prevented the spread of this feeling. The stadtholder, William II., had married the princess royal of England, the daughter of Charles I., and sister of Charles II. From the first of the contest, therefore, Holland had supported the claims of both the Charles's. The second Charles had spent much of his exile at the Hague, not being at all cordially received in France, where his mother resided. His brother, the duke of York, had long resided there, as Rupert and Maurice had done before. There was thus a great league betwixt the family of the stadlholder and the Stuart faction, and the stadtholders themselves were gradually making themselves as despotic as any princes of Europe. All the money which enabled the Stuarts in England to make head and invade it from Scotland, came from the Hague. On the other hand, the large republican party in Holland, which was at strife with the stadtholder on account of his regal and despotic doctrines, looked with favour on the proceedings of the English parliament, and this awoke a deep jealousy in the stadtholder's court of the English parliament, which entertained ideas of coalescing with Holland into one great republic.
From these causes no satisfaction could ever be obtained from the stadtholder for the murder of Dr. Dorislaus, nor would he admit Stricland, the ambassador of the parliament, to an audience. But in November, 1650, William died of small-pox, and a few days afterwards, on the 6th of that month, his widow gave birth to William II., who afterwards became king of England. The infancy of the stadtholder now encouraged the republican party to abolish that office, and to restore the more democratic form of government. On this, the Parliament of England, in the the commencement of 1681, determined to send ambassadors to the states, and in addition to Strickland sent St. John, the chief justice of the common pleas. But no good was done; there were numbers of English royalists still hanging about at the Hague, and the Dutch, through the internal wars of Holland, France, and Spain, had grown so prosperous, that they were become proud and insolent, and had grown to regard the English parliament, through the representation of their enemies, as a power that they might treat with contempt. St. John found insurmountable difficulties in negotiating with the rude, haughty states-general. He was openly insulted in the streets of the Hague; the ignorant populace hooted and hissed him and hie colleague, and the royalists were suffered to annoy them with impunity. Edward, a younger brother of Rupert and Maurice, publicly called the ambassadors rogues and dogs; the royalists scornfully styled them "the things called ambassadors;" the servants of Strickland were attacked at his door by the cavaliers with drawn swords. They attempted to break into St. John's bedchamber, where, had they succeeded, they would, no doubt, have murdered him, as they did Ascham; and the duke of York meeting St. John in the streets, because he did not give him the wall, snatched his hat from his head, and flung it in his face, saying, "Learn, parricide, to respect the brother of your king." St. John was not a man to submit tamely to such an insult; he replied that he did not acknowledge any of that race of vagabonds, and the duke drawing his sword, there would have been bloodshed, had not the spectators interfered.
The parliament of England had in good faith proposed their scheme of confederacy against their common enemies both by sea and land, but the states-general made so many objections and delays that the term fixed for the negotiation expired, and the English ambassadors took their leave in disgust. The battle of Worcester awoke the Dutch to their mistake, and they then sent in haste to propose terms of alliance on their part, but it was too late. St. John, strong ill his feelings as he was deep in his intellect, had represented their conduct in such terms that the English parliament received them with a earl haughtiness the counterpart of their own in the Late attempt at treaty. St. John had also employed himself in a measure of revenge on the Dutch which was in its effects most disastrous to them. Owing to the embarrassments of the other European states, the Dutch had grown not only to be the chief merchants of the nations, but the great carriers of all mercantile goods. St. John passed a navigation act, by which it was forbidden to introduce any of the products of Asia, Africa, or America into England, except in English bottoms, or any of the manufactures of Europe, except in English ships or the ships of the countries which produced them. This at one blow lopped off the greater part of the commerce of Holland, and the demands of the ambassador that this terrible act should be repealed, or at least suspended till the conclusion of a treaty, were totally disregarded. But this was not the only offensive weapon which St. John's resentment had found. Letters of marque had been issued against French vessels, and they were permitted to be used against Dutch ones, on pretence that they had French property on board. Still more, the massacre of the English at Amboyna, which had been slightly passed over, owing to the desire of the English court to maintain the alliance of Holland against Spain, had never been forgotten by the English people, and there were now loud demands, especially from the sailors, that all survivors of the Dutch concerned in that murder should be given up. In fact, a determined spirit of hostility had sprung up betwixt the two maritime nations.
The Dutch, at the call of their merchants for protection, prepared a fleet, and placed at the head of it the three greatest admirals that their nation ever produced—Van Tromp, De Ruyter, and De Witt. The English parliament, on its part, ordered its admirals to insist on the same homage being paid to their flag in the narrow seas as had boon paid ​to that of the king. They also demanded indemnification for the losses sustained in the East Indies from the Dutch, and insisted on the stipulated contribution of the tenth herring from the Dutch fishermen in the British seas.
Charles II. hidden in the Oak Tree.
It was impossible, under such circumstances, that hostilities should be long deferred. Commodore Young was the first to call on the convoy of a fleet of Dutch merchantmen to salute the British flag. They refused, and Young attacked them so smartly, that in the end they complied. In a few days Van Tromp, who was a zealous partisan of Orange, and therefore of the house of Stuart, appeared in the Downs with two-and-forty sail. To the commodore Bourne, whom he found there, he disclaimed any hostile intentions, but pleaded the loss of several anchors and cables for putting in; but the next day, being the 19th of May, he encountered Blake off Dover, and that commander, though he had only twenty ships, demanded that Tromp should do homage to his flag. Van Tromp refused, and sailed right on till he came nearly opposite Blake, when the English admiral fired a gun three successive times at the Dutch admiral's flag. Van Tromp returned the compliment by firing a broadside into Blake's ship; and the two fleets were instantly engaged, and a desperate battle was fought from three in the afternoon till darkness separated them. The English had taken two ships, one of which, on account of the damage done it, was allowed to sink.
There was much dispute betwixt the two countries which was the aggressor; but it appears the most probable fact ​that Van Tromp sought an occasion to resist the demand of lowering the Dutch flag to the English one, and found an admiral as prepared to assert that superiority as he was to dispute it.
Admiral Blake. From an Authentic Portrait.
The English parliament immediately issued strict orders to all its commodores to pursue and destroy all the ships of the Dutch fleet that they could find on the seas; and in the space of a month they took or burnt seventy sail of merchantmen, besides several men-of-war. The Dutch, on their parts, protested that the battle had not been sought by them, and proposed inquiry, and the punishment of whichever of the commanders should be proved the aggressor; but the parliament replied that it was satisfied that the states were bent on usurping the lights of England on the seas, and to destroy the fleets, which were the walls and bulwarks of the nation, and therefore that it was necessary to stand on the defensive. The States sent De Pauw to reiterate the assurances of their peaceful intentions, and to urge the court of inquiry but the parliament was now as high as the States had been before, and insisted on reparation and security. De Pauw demanded what these terms meant, and was answered, full compensation for all the expense that the commonwealth had been put to by the hostile preparations of the States, and a consideration for the mutual protection of the two nations. De Pauw knew that the first of these terms would be declined, and took his leave. On the 19th of July the parliament proclaimed war against the States.
The Dutch were by no means afraid of the war, though they dreaded the destruction of their trade, which it would occasion. They had acquired a great reputation as a naval people, and the sailors were eager to encounter the English, and revenge their defeat upon them. Van Tromp once more appeared with seventy sail of the line, and boasted that he would sweep the English from the face of the ocean. The vice-admiral Sir George Ayscough had just returned ​victorious from the reduction of Barbadoes, and was left in charge of the channel whilst Blake went northward, in quest of the squadron which protected the Dutch fishermen. Tromp could not come up with Ayscough, owing to a change of wind, he, therefore, went northward after Blake, who had captured the Dutch squadron, and made the fishermen pay the tenth herring, but a storm dispersed Tromp's fleet, several of his ships falling into the hands of the English. When he again returned to port, he was received with great indignation by the people, who had expected wonders from him, and in his mortification he resigned.
De Ruyter was advanced into his post, and put to sea in charge of a merchant fleet, and in return fell in with Ayscough off Plymouth, who broke through his line, but was not followed up vigorously by the captains of the other vessels, and the Dutch ships escaped. Ayscough was superseded, the parliament suspecting him of a royal tendency.
De Ruyter joined De Witt, and attacked Blake, who had under him admirals Bourne and Peun, and a fierce engagement took place, which lasted the whole of the 28th of September. The next morning the Dutch were seen bearing away for their own coasts, several of their vessels having gone down, and one of them being taken. Blake gave chase as far as Goree, but could not pm-sue them amongst the shoals and sandbanks, whither the small vessels of the Dutch took refuge. Wherever English and Dutch ships now met, there was battle. There was an affray betwixt them in the Mediterranean, where Van Galen, with a greatly superior force, attacked and defeated captain Baily, but was himself slain; the king of Denmark also, joined the Dutch with five ships, laid an embargo on English merchandise in the Baltic, and closed the Sound against them. There were, moreover, numerous vessels under the French flag cruising about in quest of merchantmen.
As winter, however, approached, Blake, supposing the campaign would cease till spring, dispersed a number of his vessels to different ports, and was lying in the Downs with only thirty-seven sail, when he was surprised by a fleet of eighty men-of-war, and ten fire-ships. It was Van Tromp, whom the States had again prevailed on to take the command, and who came vehement for the recovery of his tarnished reputation. Blake's stout heart refused to shrink from even so unequal a contest; some say the wind foiled him, had he wished it; but, be that as it may, he fought the whole Dutch fleet with true English bulldogism, from ten in the morning till six in the evening, when darkness compelled a pause. Blake took advantage of the darkness to get up the river as far as Leigh. He had managed to blow up a Dutch ship, disabled two others, and to do much damage generally to the Dutch fleet; but he had lost five ships himself. Tromp and De Ruyter sailed to and fro at the mouth of the river, and along the coast from the North Foreland to the Isle of Wight, in triumph, and then convoyed home the Dutch and French fleets; and there was a wonderful rejoicing over the great English admiral, which, considering the immense inequality of the fleets, was really an honour to Blake, for it showed how they esteemed his genius and courage. The whole of Holland was full of bravado of blocking up the Thames, and forcing the English to an ignominious peace. Van Tromp was so elated, that he stuck a besom at his mast-head, intimating that he would sweep the seas of the English.
The English parliament, during the winter, made strenuous efforts to wipe out this disgrace. They refitted and put in order all their ships, ordered two regiments of infantry to be ready to embark as marines, raised the wages of the seamen, ordered their families to be maintained during their absence in service, and increased the rate of prize money. They sent for Monk from Scotland, and joined him and Dean in command with Blake.
The Dutch navy was estimated at this period at a hundred and fifty sail, and was flushed with success; but Blake was resolved to take down their pride, and lay ready for the first opportunity. This occurred on the 18th of February, 1653. Van Tromp appeared sailing up the channel with seventy-two ships of war and thirty armed traders, convoying a homeward-bound merchant fleet of three hundred sail. His orders were, having seen the merchantmen safe home, to return and blockade the Thames. Blake saved him the trouble, by issuing from port with eighty men of war, and posting himself across the channel. Van Tromp signalled the merchant fleet under his convoy to take care of themselves, and the battle betwixt him and Blake commenced with fury. The action took place not far from Cape La Hague, on the coast of France. Blake and Dean, who were both on board the Triumph, led the way, and their ship received seven hundred shots in her hull. The battle lasted the whole day, in which the Dutch had six ships taken or sunk, the English losing none, but Blake was severely wounded.
The next day the fight was renewed off Weymouth as fiercely as before, and was continued all day, and at intervals through the night; and on the third day the conflict still raged till four o'clock in the afternoon, when the wind carrying the contending fleets towards the shallow waters betwixt Bologne and Calais, Tromp, with his lesser ships, escaped from the English, and pursued his course homewards, carrying the merchant fleet, for the most part, safely there. In the three days' fight the Dutch, according to their own account, had lost nine men-of-war and twenty-four merchantmen; according to the English account, eleven men-of-war and thirty merchantmen. They had two thousand men killed, and fifteen hundred taken prisoners. The English had only one ship sunk, though many of their vessels were greatly damaged, and their loss of killed and wounded was very severe. But they had decidedly beaten the enemy, and the excitement in Holland, on the return of the crest-laden though valiant boaster Van Tromp, was universal. It was now the turn of the English sailors to boast, who declared that they had paid off the Dutch for Amboyna. But the defeat of their navy was nothing in comparison to the general mischief done to their trade and merchant shipping. Their fisheries employed one hundred thousand persons: these were entirely stopped; the channel was now closed to their fleet, and in the Baltic the English committed continual ravages on their traders. Altogether, they had now lost sixteen hundred ships, and they once more condescended to seek for accommodation with the English parliament, which, however, treated them with ​haughty indifference; and it was, therefore, with great satisfaction, that they now beheld the change which took place in England.
The reformers of various shades and creeds had at first been combined by the one great feeling of rescuing the country from the absolute principles of the Stuarts. They had fought bravely side by side for this great object; but in proportion as they succeeded, the differences betwixt themselves became more apparent. The presbyterians, Scotch and England, were bent on fixing their religious opinions on the country as despotically as the catholics and episcopalians had done before them. But here they found themselves opposed by the independents, who had notions of religious freedom far beyond the presbyterians, and were not inclined to yield their freedom to any other party whatever. Their religious notions naturally disposed them towards the same exercising system in the state, and as the chiefs of the army were of this denomination, they soon found themselves in a condition to dictate to the parliament. Pride's Purge left parliament almost purely independent, and it and the army worked harmoniously till the sweeping victories of Cromwell created a jealousy of his power. This power was the more supreme because circumstances had dispersed the other leading generals into distant scenes of action. Monk and Lambert were in Scotland till Monk was called to the fleet, Fleetwood was in Ireland, Ireton was dead. The long parliament, or the remnant of it, called the Rump, ably as it had conducted affairs, was daily decreasing in numbers, and dreaded to renew itself by election, because it felt certain that anything like a free election would return an overwhelming number of presbyterians, and that they would thus commit an act of felo de se.
In no period did what is called the commonwealth of England present any of the elements of what we conceive by a republic, that is, by a government of the free representatives of the people. Had the people been allowed to send their representatives, There would have been a considerable number of catholics, a much greater number of episcopalians, and both of these sections royalists. There would have been an overwhelming number of presbyterians, and a very moderate one of independents: The government was, therefore, speedily converted into an oligarchy, at the head of which were the generals of the army, and some few of the leaders of parliament. The army, by Pride's Purge, reduced the parliament to a junta, by turning out forcibly the majority of the representatives of the people, and the time was now fast approaching when it must resolve itself into a military dictatorship.
Cromwell had long been accused by his own party of aiming at the possession of the supreme power. At what period such ideas began to dawn in his mind is uncertain; but as he felt himself rising above all his contemporaries by the energy and the comprehensive character of his mind, there is no doubt that he secretly indulged such ideas. Ludlow, Whitellock, Hutchinson, and others, felt that such was the spirit growing in him, and many of those who had most admired his genius, fell away from him, and openly denounced his ambitious intentions as they became more obvious. The excellent colonel Hutchinson and Sir Henry Vane charged him with the ruin of the commonwealth. But Cromwell must have long felt that nothing but a military power could maintain the ascendancy of those principles which he and his fellow independents entertained and held sacred. The world was not prepared for them. The roots of royalty were too deeply struck into the heart of the nation by centuries of its existence, to be torn out by the follies and tyrannics of one family. Republicanism;, in its pure and free from, injuries a state of things in which the whole community is imbued with the principle of equal rights, and the love of their exercise A state in which men arc become educated into a living sense, not only of their own rights, but of the rights of their neighbours; not only of their rights, but of their duties. A state in which the resolve to exercise the fullest franchise is admirably blended with a sense of the necessity of subordination to self-constituted authorities. A state in which enlightened liberty shall produce, not faction, but patriotism. In a word, as a republic is the highest conceivable form of government, so it clearly demands the highest moral as well as intellectual development of society for its maintenance. Such a state of things none but enthusiasts like Lilburne could suppose was existing then.
But if a free parliament, which it had been the proud boast of the reformers to be the sole seat of the national power, could not exist; if the sitting body calling itself a parliament, could not even add to its members without endangering its own existence either from itself or from the jealousy of the army—what could exist? Clearly nothing but a dictatorship—and the strongest man must come uppermost. That strongest man was without a question Cromwell. In the senate or the field he was alike clear sighted, energetic, and predominant by sheer force of character. He was said to be no orator, to be even confused and bewildered in speech; but on all occasions for speaking out strongly, so far as we can judge by his remaining speeches, he had a power and common-sense force in his speech, which burst through all mystification, like the sun through clouds. No man better or more instinctively did what is called hitting the nail on the head; and feeling his pre-eminence—feeling practically every day how completely they were his own judgment and action which were steering the vessel of the state through all the storms of faction and the quicksands of party jealousy; it is no wonder that he came habitually to hold the reins of power, and persuade himself that he must hold them. There is no doubt that he had in such a course to do the very things which ho and his party had made mortal crimes in Charles; but the human mind is inimitable in excusing to itself what it deems necessary for the preservation of what it desires. Cromwell, pious but ambitious, for he was no hypocrite, but a zealot, soon came to satisfy him self, though not without some stout wrestlings of conscience, that he was destined to save the nation by the power of God working in him. All history has shown how easily the religious enthusiast slides into the belief that all which he deems necessary is dictated by God. From the date of the battle of Worcester the career of Cromwell was decided; he felt that he must embrace the republic in his own person. Friends and foes saw and felt that ultimatum. His enemies had long declared that he was in all but name "a king;" and both civil and military authorities addressed him in ​terms all but royal. By universal consent he stood before the nation the ruling spirit of the time. From the army, from the parliament, and from the people he was appealed to in language of the profoundest deference and flattery. The general officers laid their despatches "humbly at his excellency's feet"; petitioners presented their "lowly addresses to his godly wisdom," and besought his interest, seeing that "God had put the sword into bis hand."
So early as 1649 two bills had been brought in to settle questions urgently demanded by the public, an act for a general amnesty, and for the termination of the present parliament. On his return from the battle of Worcester, Cromwell reminded parliament that these essential measures had not been completed. He carried the amnesty, so that all acts of hostility against the present government previous to the battle of Worcester were pardoned, and the royalists relieved from the fear of fresh forfeitures. The termination of parliament was fixed for the 3rd of November, 1654:, and the interval of three years was to be zealously employed in framing a scheme for the election of a new parliament on the safest principles. At the same time Cromwell was living at Whitehall, in the house of the decapitated king, and with almost the state and power of a king himself. He summoned, therefore, the council of the army, and discussed amongst them what they deemed necessary to be done.
In this council it was agitated as to the best form of government for England, whether a pure republic, or a government with something of monarchy in it. The officers were for a republic, the lawyers for a limited monarchy. Cromwell agreed that the government must have something of monarchy in it, and asked who they would choose if that were decided? The lawyers said Charles Stuart, or if they found him too much bent on power, his brother the duke of Gloucester. There can be little doubt but that this was a feeler on the part of Cromwell, and as he was never likely to acquiesce in the restoration of a family which they had put down at so much cost, it would have the effect of causing him to proceed with caution. He had ascertained that the army was opposed to a king, the lawyers thought of no king but one from the old royal line. These were facts to be pondered.
Meantime the parliament, without proceeding to lay a platform for its successor, evidenced a jealousy of the ascendancy of the army; it voted a reduction of one-fourth of the army, and of the monthly assessment for its support from one hundred and twenty thousand pounds to ninety thousand pounds. In June, 1652, it proposed a fresh reduction, but this was opposed by the military council, and in August the officers appeared at the bar of the house with a petition, calling the attention of the parliament to the great question of the qualifications of future parliaments, to reform of the law, of religious abuses, to the dismissal of disaffected and scandalous persons from office, to the arrears due to the army, and to reform of mal-practices in the excise and the treasury.
The contest betwixt the army and the parliament was evidently growing every day more active. The commons had no desire to lay down their authority, and to retain their existence, even showed a leaning towards introducing a number of presbyterians under the name "neuters." To such a project the army was never likely to assent, and Cromwell proposed, in the council at Whitehall, that parliament should be at once dissolved, and a national council of forty persons, with himself at their head, should conduct affairs till a new parliament could be called on established principles. The conclusion, however, was that such a proceeding would be dangerous, and the authority of the council looked upon as unwarrantable.
Whilst these matters were in agitation, Whitelock say a that Cromwell, on the 8th of November, 1652, desired a private interview with him, and in this urged the necessity of taking prompt and efficient measures for securing the great objects for which they had fought, and which he termed the mercies and successes which God had conferred on the nation. He inveighed warmly against the parliament, and declared that the army began to entertain a strange distaste to it; adding that he wished there were not too much reason for it. "And really," he continued, "their pride, their self-seeking, their engrossing all places of honour and profit to' themselves and their friends; then- daily breaking forth into new and violent parties and factions; their delays of business, and designs to perpetuate themselves, and to continue the power in their own hands; their meddling in private matters between party and party, contrary to the institution of parliament; their injustice and partiality in these matters, and the scandalous lives of some of the chief of them, do give much ground for people to open their mouths against them, and to dislike them." He concluded by insisting on the necessity of some controlling power over them, to check these exorbitances, or that nothing could prevent the ruin of the commonwealth.
Whitelock admitted the truth of most of this, but defended the parliament generally, and reminded Cromwell that it was the parliament which had granted them their authority, and to Cromwell even his commission, and that it would be hard for them, under those circumstances, to curb their power.
But Cromwell broke out—"We all forget God, and God will forget us. God will give us up to confusion, and these men will help it on if they be suffered to proceed in their ways." And then, after some further talk, he suddenly observed, "What if a man should take upon him to be king?" Whitelock saw plainly enough what Oliver was thinking of, and replied as if he had directly asked whether he should assume that office himself. He told him that it would not do, and that he was much better off, and more influential as he was. "As to your person," he observed, "the title of king would be of no advantage, because you have the full kingly power already concerning the militia." He reminded him that in the appointment of civil offices, though he had no formal veto, his will was as much considered as if he had, and so in all other departments, domestic and foreign. That he now had the power without the envy and danger which the pomp and circumstance of a king would bring.
Cromwell still argued the point; contending that though a man usurped the title without royal descent, yet the possession of the crown was declared by an act of Henry VII. to make a good title, and to indemnify the reigning king and all his ministers for their acts. Whitelock replied that, let ​their enemies once get the better of them, all such bills and indemnifications would be little regarded; and that to assume the crown would at once convert the quarrel into one not betwixt the king and the nation, but betwixt Charles Stuart and Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell admitted this, but asked what other course he could propose. Whitelock said that of making a good bargain with Charles, who was now down, and might be treated with just on what terms they pleased; or if they thought him too confirmed in his opinions, there was the duke of York or the duke of Gloucester. Cromwell did not appear pleased with this suggestion; in fact, he had resolved to seize the chief power in some shape himself—and even had he not, he had too much common sense to agree to admit any one of the deposed family again to the throne, which would be to put their necks in the certain noose of royal vengeance. The death of Charles I. could never be forgiven. From this time, Whitelock says, Cromwell, though he made no accusation against him, yet "his carriage towards him from that time was altered, and his advising with him not so frequent and intimate as before."
Cromwell again, however, broached the subject amongst the officers and members of the council—St. John, Lenthall, his speaker, Desborough, Harrison, Fleetwood, and Whalley, not in so direct a manner, but that "a settlement, with something of the monarchical in it, would be very effectual." It does not appear that the project was very unanimously received by them, but they were unanimous that a new representation must take place, and no "neuters" should be admitted. Cromwell said emphatically, "Never shall any of that judgment who have deserted the cause be admitted to power." On the 19th of April the debate on this subject was continued very warmly till midnight, and they separated, to continue the discussion till the next day. Most of the officers had argued that the parliament must be dissolved "one way or another;" but the parliament men and lawyers, amongst them Whitelock and Widdrington, contended that a hasty dissolution would be dangerous, and Cromwell appeared to lean towards the moderate view. But scarcely had they met the next morning, and found a strange absence of the members of parliament, and an almost equal absence of officers, when colonel Ingoldsby hastened in and informed them that the commons were hard at work pushing forward their bill for increasing their own numbers by the introduction of the neuters; and that it was evident that they meant to hurry it through the house before the council could be informed of their attempt. Vane and others, well aware of Cromwell's design, were thus exerting themselves to defeat it.
At this news Cromwell instantly ordered a file of musketeers to attend him, and hastened to the house of commons, attended by Lambert, Harrison, and some other officers. He left the soldiers in the lobby of the house, and entering, went straight to his seat, where he sate for some time listening to the debate. He first spoke to St. John, telling him that he was come for a purpose which grieved him to the very soul, and that he had sought the Lord with tears not to impose it upon him; but there was a necessity, and that the glory of God and the good of the nation required it. He then beckoned Harrison to him, and said that he judged that the parliament was ripe for dissolution, Harrison, who was a fifth-monarchy man, and had been only with much persuasion brought over to this design, replied, "Sir, the work is very great and dangerous; I desire you seriously to consider before you engage in it." "You say well," answered the general, and sate yet about a quarter of an hour longer. But when the question was about to be put, he said to Harrison, "This is the time; I must do it;" and starting up, he took off his hat, and began speaking. At first he spoke of the question before the house, and commended the parliament for much that it had done, and well he might; for whatever its present corruption, it had nobly supported him and the fleet and army in putting down all their enemies, and raising the nation in the eyes of foreigners far beyond its reputation for the last century. But soon he came round to the corruption and self-seeking of the members, accusing them of being at that moment engaged in the very work of bringing in the presbyterians to destroy all that they had suffered so much to accomplish. Sir Harry Vane and Peter Wentworth ventured to call him to order, declaring that that was strange and unparliamentary language from a servant of the house, and one that they hid so much honoured. "I know it," exclaimed Cromwell; then stepping forward into the middle of the floor, and putting on his hat, and walking to and fro, casting angry glances at different members, exclaimed, "I tell you, you are no parliament. I will put an end to your prating. For shame! get you gone! Give place to honest men; to men who will more faithfully discharge their trust. You are no longer a parliament. The Lord has done with you. He has chosen other instruments for carrying on his work."
With that he stamped upon the floor, and the soldiers appearing at the door, he bade Harrison bring them in. The musketeers instantly surrounded him, and laying his hand on the mace, he said, "What shall we do with this bauble? Take it away," and he handed it to a soldier. Then looking at Lenthall, the speaker, he said to Harrison, "Fetch him down!" Lenthall declared that he would not move from his proper post unless he were forced out of it. "Sir," said Harrison, "I will lend you a hand," and taking hold of him, he brought him down, and he walked out of the house. Algernon Sydney, then but a young member, happened to sit next to the speaker, and Cromwell said, "Put him out!" Sydney, like the speaker, refused to move, but Cromwell reiterated the command, "Put him out!" and Harrison and Worsley, the lieutenant-colonel of Cromwell's regiment of Ironsides, laying each a hand on his shoulder, the young patriot did not wait for the ignominy of being dragged from his seat, but rose and followed the speaker. Cromwell then went on weeding out the members, with epithets of high reproach to each of them. Alderman Allen bade him pause and send out the soldiers, and that all might yet be well; but Cromwell only replied, "It is you that have forced me upon this. I have sought the Lord day and night that he would rather slay me than put me upon this work." He then charged the alderman with embezzlement, as treasurer to the army, and taking first one and then another by the cloak, he said to Challoner, "Thou art a drunkard!" To Wentworth, "Thou art an adulterer!" To Marten, "Thou art a still more lewd character!" Vane, ​as he was forced past him, exclaimed, "This is not honest; yea, it is against morality and common honesty." "O, Sir Harry Vane! Sir Harry Vane!" exclaimed Cromwell, "the Lord deliver me from Sir Harry Vane!" Thus he saw the house cleared, no one daring to raise a hand against him, though, says Whitelock, "many wore swords, and would sometimes brag high." When all were forth, Cromwell looked the door, and put the key in his pocket. He then returned to Whitehall, and told the council of officers, who yet remained sitting, what he had done.
Cromwell addressing the Parliament.
"When I went to the house," he said, "I did not think to do this, but perceiving the spirit of the Lord strong upon me, I resolved no longer to consider flesh and blood."
Such was the manner in which the last vestige of representative government was swept away by Cromwell. Charles I. roused the fiery indignation of parliament, and of all England, as a violator of the privileges of parliament, by entering the house to seize four members who had offended him. Cromwell, who had been one of the first to resist and to avenge this deed, now marched in his soldiers and turned out the whole parliament, about fifty members, with impunity. "They went away so quietly," said Cromwell, "that not a dog barked at their going." Such is the difference betwixt a private man with a victorious army at his back, and one who, though with the name of a king, has lost a nation's confidence by his want of moral honesty. The act of Cromwell was the death of all constitutional life whatever, it was in opposition to all parties but the army; yet no man dared assume the attitude of a patriot, the military Dictatorship was accomplished.
Cromwell's whole excuse was necessity; that without his seizure of the supreme power, the commonwealth could not exist. It ceased to exist by his very deed, and if he saved the faint form of a republic, it was only for five years. As we have seen the great example to the nations of the responsibility of kings, we have now to see an equally significant one of the impossibility of maintaining long any form of government that is not based on the mature opinion and attachment of the people. Republicanism was not the faith of England in the seventeenth century, and therefore neither the despotism of Charles could create a republic with any permanence in it, nor the strenuous grasp of Cromwell maintain it beyond the term of his own existence.
CROMWELL TAKING THE OATH AS PROTECTOR
Cromwell and his party immediately held a council on what steps wore now to be taken, and on the 22nd July issued a declaration in the name of the lord-general and his council of officers, ordering all authorities to continue their functions as before; and in return, addresses of confidence arrived from generals and admirals. On the 6th of June Oliver, in his own name as captain-general and commander-in-chief of all the armies and forces, issued a summons to one hundred and forty persons to meet and constitute a parliament. Six were also summoned from Wales, six from Ireland, and five from Scotland. On the 4th of July about one hundred and twenty of these pensions, of Cromwell's own selection—persons, according to his summons, "fearing God, and of approved fidelity and honesty"—met in the council-chamber at Whitehall. Many of these were gentleman of good repute and abilities—some of them were nobles, others of noble families—as colonel Montague, colonel Howard, and Anthony Ashley Cooper. Others, however, were of little worldly standing, but had been selected on account of their religious zeal and character. Amongst them was one Barbon, a leather-seller in Fleet Street, who had acquired the cognomen of Praise-God, and whose name being purposely misspelled, became Praise-God Barebone, and the royalist wits of the time, therefore, dubbed the parliament Barebone's Parliament. Hume has represented the zealous independents of that age giving their children such names as Accepted Trevor, Redeemed Compton, God-Reward Smart, Stand-fast-on-high Stringer, and even to a brother of Barbone's, "If Christ had not died for you, you had been damned Barebone," whence, he says, "the name being too long for common use, they shortened it to Damned Barebone." All this, however, cannot be received as the truth, as there is reason to believe that much is due to the hatred of the royalists.
The more common appellation of this singular parliament was "The Little Parliament." Cromwell opened their session with a very long and extraordinary speech, in which he gave a history of the past contest with the monarchy, and the mercies with which they had been crowned at Naseby, Dunbar, Worcester, and other, places; of the backslidings of the Long Parliament, and the "necessity" to remove it and call this assembly. He quoted a vast quantity of Scripture, and told them that they were called of God to introduce practical religion into state affairs; and he then delivered into their hands an instrument, consigning the supreme power in the state into their hands till the 3rd of September, 1651, three months previous to which date they were to elect their successors, who were to sit only for a year, and in their turn elect theirs.
This resignation of the supreme power once in his hands, has been described by historians as a gross piece of hypocrisy, used to avoid the odium of seizing for himself the power of the parliament, which he had forcibly dissolved. Whether that were the case or not, it certainly was a prudent policy, and a safe one, for he knew very well that he possessed supreme power as head of the army, and could, if necessary, dismiss this parliament by that power as he had done the former one. In their character of pietists or saints, as they were called, this parliament opened its session, electing Francis Rouse their speaker, and by exercises of devotion, which continued from eight in the morning till six at night. Thirteen of the most gifted members preached and prayed in succession, and they adjourned, declaring that they had never enjoyed so much of the spirit and presence of Christ in any meetings for worship as they had done that day. It was moved the next morning that they "should go on seeking the Lord" that day too, but this was overruled, and Monday, the 11th, was fixed for that purpose. They then voted themselves the parliament of the commonwealth of England, invited Cromwell and four of his officers to sit as members amongst them, and on the 9th of July reappointed the council of state, amongst whom we find the names of colonel Montague, afterwards earl of Sandwich, the uncle of the poet Dryden, Sir Gilbert Pickering, lord viscount Lisle, brother of Algernon Sydney, Sir Ashley Cooper, and other names of equal note; and however they might be ridiculed on account of their religion, they soon showed that they were conscientious and independent men. The strongest proof of this was that they did not shrink from opposing the power and interests of Cromwell, who had selected them. Scarcely were they met, when they were appealed to to decide upon the case of John Lilburne, who, on the dissolution of the Long Parliament, petitioned Cromwell to allow him to return from his banishment. Cromwell gave no reply, but independent John took the liberty of appearing in London. He was at once seized and committed to Newgate. Lilburne, supported by his friends, petitioned the house to hear and decide the case, though it was the proper business of a jury. They might now have gratified their patron, whom Lilburne had continually assailed as a robber, a usurper, and a murderer; but they declined to interfere, and left him to the ordinary criminal court. There Lilburne so ably defended himself that he was acquitted; but he was again seized on the plea of libellous and seditious language used on his trial, and the house could then no longer refuse, at the instigation of the council, to imprison him. Being removed from the Tower to Elizabeth Castle, in Jersey, and thence to Dover Castle, he there became a convert to the principles of George Fox, a remarkable end for so fiery and democratic a character. The parliament lost no time in proceeding to assert that divine commission, which Cromwell, in his opening speech, had attributed to their call through him. They declared that they were appointed by the Lord, and would have greatly alarmed Cromwell had he not taken care to include among them a sufficient number of his staunch adherents But they excited the same alarm in a variety of other classes. They set to work resolutely in cutting down the expenditure of the government; they abolished all unnecessary offices; they revised the regulations of the excise; reformed the constitution of the treasury; reduced exorbitant salaries, and examined thoroughly the public accounts: they adopted measures for the sale of the confiscated lands, and enacted rules for the better registration of births, deaths, and marriages; in fact, they introduced those salutary regulations for registration, to which we have only reverted of late years. They went further; they made marriage by a civil magistrate valid, and, indeed, necessary for the enjoyment of the civil ​effects of marriage. Marriage by a clergyman was left optional still.
They next attacked the unequal and oppressive modes of raising the one hundred and twenty thousand pounds a month for the maintenance of the army; the assessments in some cases amounting to two, in others, to ten shillings in the pound. From taxation they proceeded to law, and prepared a bill to abolish the court of chancery, in which the abuses and delays had been a constant source of complaint in petitions to parliament for years. The enormities of that court equalled what they have been in our own times, and there were said to be no less than twenty-three thousand causes undecided, some of which had been ten, twenty, and even thirty years before it, involving enormous costs, and the utter ruin of many families. This parliament voted the abolition of the whole system, and had a bill in progress for the removal of the causes to a more efficient tribunal, when it was suddenly dissolved.
But they were not content with destroying the court of chancery, they set about a general reform of the laws. They contended that every Englishman should understand the laws of his country, and that by a proper digest they might be reduced to the compass of a pocket volume. They, in fact, anticipated Napoleon in his code, and appointed a committee to make the necessary revision, and to weed the real and useful statutes out of the chaotic mass of contradictory, obsolete, and unjust laws which overlayed them; the dicta of judges in many cases superseded and prevented the original enactments, so that men's lives and properties were at the mercy, not of the decrees of parliament, but the opinions of individuals. It may be imagined what a consternation this daring innovation excited throughout Westminster Hall, and all the dusky, cobwebby cells of the lawyers. A terrible cry was raised that a set of ignorant men were about to destroy the whole noble system of British jurisprudence, and to introduce instead the law of Moses!
The church was in equal terror. In the first place, these zealous reformers indulged their bigotry, for even the independents had only made half the discovery of toleration. Cromwell, whilst professing to allow the enjoyment of all, forms of Christianity in Ireland, refused to allow the catholics to celebrate mass, and his Little Parliament now passed an act for the extirpation of popish priests and Jesuits, and for seizing two-thirds of the real and personal property of recusants. They then advanced to the more just and enlightened war on advowsons and tithes. They contended that no individual ought to possess the power of imposing a minister on his neighbours, but that every man had a right to choose for himself. They therefore voted that advowsons should be abolished. As for tithes, they contended that they ought to be abolished, and a proper maintenance provided for the clergy by other means. They appointed a committee to consider the necessary step towards this end.
But the projects of these radical reformers, who were centuries before their time, were cut short by the universal outcry from lawyers, churchmen, officials, and a host of interested classes. They were represented as a set of mad fanatics, who in parliament were endeavouring to carry out the wild doctrines which the anabaptists and fifth-monarchy men were preaching out of doors. They were assailed by every species of ridicule and calumny, most of which had travelled unmolested down to our own time, and the Barebone's Parliament became a byword for everything fanatic and absurd, though they were in reality only too far a-head of their age, and were attempting what our most philosophic reformers are yet indicating and endeavouring to establish. Borne down by public opinion, Cromwell was compelled to dissolve them, in fact, to resume the supreme power which he had committed to them. Accordingly, on the 12th of December, Cromwell's friends mustered in full strength, and colonel Sydenham moved, that as the proceedings of parliament were regarded as calculated to overturn almost every interest in the country, they could not proceed, and that they should restore their authority to the hands whence they had received it. The motion was vehemently opposed, but the independents had adopted their plan. The mover declared that he would no longer sit in an assembly which must be rendered abortive by general opposition. He therefore rose: the speaker, who was one of the party, rose too, and the independents, forming a procession, proceeded to Whitehall, and resigned their commission into the hands of Cromwell. The stanch dissentients remained and engaged in prayer, in which act two officers, Goffe and White, sent to close the house, found them. White asked them what they did there. They replied, "We are seeking the Lord." "Then," said he, rudely, "you may go somewhere else, for to my certain knowledge, the Lord has not been here these many years."
Cromwell affected to receive with reluctance the onerous charge of the supreme power and responsibility; but the officers urged its necessity, and the document being soon signed by eighty members, he acceded to it. The council of officers and ministers decided that it was necessary to have "a commonwealth in a single person;" and a new constitution was drawn up; and on the 16th of December Cromwell, dressed in a suit and cloak of black velvet, with long boots and a broad gold band round his hat, proceeded in his carriage from Whitehall to the court of chancery. The way was lined by files of soldiers consisting of five regiments of foot and three of horse. A long procession followed, including the lord mayor, aldermen, and city officers, the two commissioners of the great seal, the judges, the councillors of state and of the army. On reaching the court of chancery, Cromwell took his place before a chair of state, which had been placed on a rich carpet, the commissioners of the great seal standing on his right and left, the judges ranging themselves behind, and the civil and military officers disposing of themselves on each hand. Lambert then stepped forward and addressed the lord-general. He spoke of the dissolution of parliament, and of the necessity of a strong government, not liable to be paralysed by contending opinions; and he prayed the lord-general, in the name of the army and of the official authorities of the three kingdoms, to accept the office of Lord-Protector of the Commonwealth. and to govern it for the public good by a constitution already drawn up. Cromwell assented, and thereupon Jessop, a clerk of the council, read what was called, "The Instrument of Government," consisting of forty-two articles. The chief of these were, that the legislative power should be invested in the ​lord-protector and the parliament; but chiefly in the parliament, for every act passed by them was to become law at the end of twenty days, though the protector should refuse it his consent. Parliament should not be adjourned, prorogued, or dissolved, without its own consent, for five months; and there was to be a new parliament called within three years of the dissolution of the last. The members of the parliament were adopted from a plan by Vane, brought forward during the Long Parliament—namely, three hundred and forty members for England and Wales, thirty for Scotland, and thirty for Ireland. The members were to be chosen chiefly from the counties, and no papist, malignant, or any one who had borne arms against the parliament, was admissible. In the protector resided the power of making war or peace with the consent of the council; he held the disposal of the militia, and of the regular forces and the navy, the appointment of all public offices with the approbation of parliament, or during the recess of parliament with that of the council, subject to the after approval of parliament; but he could make no law, nor impose taxes without consent of parliament. The civil list was fixed at two hundred thousand pounds, and a revenue for the army capable of maintaining thirty thousand men, with such a navy as the lord-protector should deem necessary. The elective franchise extended to persons possessed of property worth two hundred pounds, and sixty members of parliament should constitute a quorum. All persons professing faith in Jesus Christ were to enjoy the exercise of their religion except papists, prelatists, or such as taught doctrines subversive of morality. Cromwell was named lord-protector for life, and his successor was to be elected by the council, and no member of the family of the late king, or any one of his line, should be capable of election. A council was specially named by the Instrument, to consist of Philip, lord viscount Lisle, brother of Algernon Sydney, Fleetwood, Lambert, Sir Gilbert Pickering, Sir Charles Wolsey, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, Edward Montague, John Desborough, brother-in-law of Cromwell, Walter Strickland, Henry Lawrence, William Sydenham, Philip Jones, Richard Major, father-in-law of Richard Cromwell, Francis Rouse, Philip Skipton, Esqrs., or any seven of them, with a power in the protector, and a majority of the council, to add to their number. Thurloe, the historian, was secretary of the council, and Milton Latin secretary.
This instrument being ready, Cromwell swore solemnly to observe it, and to cause it to be observed; and then Lambert, kneeling, offered the protector a civic sword in the scabbard, which he took, laying aside his own, as indicating that he thenceforward would govern by the new constitution, and not by military authority. He then seated himself, covered, in the chair of state, all besides standing uncovered; he then received from the commissioners the great seal, and from the lord mayor the sword and cap of maintenance, which he immediately returned to them. On this the court rose, and the lord-protector returned in state to Whitehall, the lord mayor bearing the sword before him, amid the shouting of the soldiers and the firing of cannon. The next day, the 17th of December, the lord-protector was proclaimed by sound of trumpet in Westminster and in the city, and thus had the successful general, the quondam farmer of Huntingdon, arrived at the seat of supreme power, at the seat of a long line of famous kings, though not with the name of king, to which many suspected him of aspiring. Yet even without the royal dignity, he soon found the position anything but an enviable one, for he was surrounded by hosts of men still vowed to his destruction and the restoration of the monarchy; and amongst those who had fought side by side with him towards this august eminence, were many who regarded his assumption of it as a crime, to be expiated only by his death. Before we proceed, however, to notice the protector's struggles with his secret or avowed enemies, and with his new parliament, we must notice what had been doing meantime in the war with Holland, which had still been raging.
In May, 1653, the fleets of England and Holland, each amounting to one hundred sail, put to sea. That of England was under the command of Monk, Dean, Penn, and Lawson; that of Holland under Van Tronip, De Ruyter, De Witt, and Evertsens. At first they passed each other, and whilst Monk ravaged the coast of Holland, Van Tromp was cannonading Dover. At length, on the 2nd of June, they met off the North Foreland, and a desperate conflict took place, in which Dean was killed at the side of Monk. Monk immediately threw his cloak over the body, to avoid discouraging the men, and fought on through the day. In the night Blake arrived with eighteen additional sail, and at dawn the battle was renewed. The result was, that the Dutch were beaten, lost one-and-twenty sail, and had thirteen hundred men taken prisoners, besides great numbers killed and wounded. The English pursued the flying vessels to the coast of Holland, and committed great ravages amongst their merchantmen. But the undaunted Van Tromp, on the 29th of July, appeared again at sea with above a hundred sail. Monk, on his appearance, stood out to sea for more battle-room, and one of the Dutch captains seeing this, said to Tromp that they were running; but Tromp, who knew the English better, replied curtly, "Sir, look to your own charge, for were there but twenty sail, they would never refuse to fight us." Monk, on his part, ordered his captains to attempt making no prizes, but to sink and destroy all the ships they could. The battle, therefore, raged furiously, from five in the morning till ten; but at length the gallant Tromp fell dead by a musket shot, and the courage of the Dutch gave way. In this fight the Dutch lost thirty ships, about one thousand prisoners, besides the numbers of slain, the English losing only two vessels.
These splendid victories enabled Cromwell to conclude advantageous treaties with Holland, France, Denmark, Portugal, and Sweden. Most of these states sent over ambassadors to congratulate him on his elevation, and these were received at Whitehall with much state. The royal apartments were furnished anew in a very magnificent style, and in the banqueting-room was placed a chair of state raised on a platform with three steps, and the lord-protector gave audience seated in it. The ambassadors were instructed to make three obeisances, one at the entrance, one in the middle of the room, and the third in front of the chair, which the protector acknowledged with a grave inclination of the head. The same ceremony was repeated on retiring. ​Cromwell received the ambassadors of Holland to dinner, sitting on one side of the table alone, and the ambassadors with a few of the lords of the council on the other. The lady protectress at the same time entertained their ladies. in his appearances abroad the protector assumed very much the state of a king, with state coaches, life guards, pages, and lacqueys richly clothed. He took up his abode instantly in the royal palaces, quitting the Cock-pit altogether, Whitehall being his town house, and Hampton Court his country one, where he generally went on Saturday afternoon, and spent the Sunday.
It was not, however, without many heartburnings and some plots for his destruction that his wonderful elevation was witnessed by many of his old comrades, as well as his natural enemies,
The anabaptists and fifth-monarchy men, who carried their notions of political liberty as far beyond Cromwell as the chartists or communists of our time carry theirs beyond the whigs, were exceedingly violent, and denounced him as an apostate and deceiver. Feak and Powell, two anabaptist preachers in Blackfriars, thundered from their pulpits against him, as the beast in the Apocalypse, the old dragon, and the man of sin. "Go, tell your protector," they cried, "that he has deceived the Lord's people, and is a perjured villain." They declared that he was worse than the last tyrant usurper, the crookback Richard, and would not reign long.
Having borne the violent abuse of these men for sometime, he at length sent them to the Tower. But amongst his own generals and former colleagues were men not less exasperated. Harrison and Ludlow were fifth-monarchy men, who believed that none but Christ ought to reign, and they joined the most disaffected. Harrison being asked if he would own the new protectoral government, answered fiercely, "No!" and Cromwell was obliged to send him to his own house in the country, and afterwards to commit him also to the Tower. Vane and others were not less angered, though less openly violent.
Cromwell expressed much sorrow at these symptoms of resentment amongst his old friends, and declared that he would much rather, so far as his own inclinations were concerned, have taken a shepherd's staff than that of the protector. In Scotland and Ireland there was much dissatisfaction at the new evolution, as it was called. Even Fleetwood, his son-in-law, scarcely knew how to receive it, and Ludlow and Jones expressed in unequivocal discontent. Colonel Alured had been sent to Ireland to conduct certain forces to Monk in the Scottish Highlands, but he was an anabaptist, and became so insubordinate, that Cromwell dismissed him both from his commission and from the army. Ludlow refused to continue on the Irish civil commission. Cromwell, however, sent over his son Henry on a visit to Fleetwood, so that he might learn the true state of the army, and the most active or formidable of the malcontent officers were removed to England, or by degrees dismissed from the service.
In Scotland similar disaffection was apparent, but there active service against the royalists, who were also astir with fresh vigour on this occasion, tended to divert their attention from their discontents. Charles II., from Paris, about Easter, issued a proclamation, supposed to be drawn up by Clarendon, offering five hundred pounds a year, and colonelcy in the army, to any one who would take off by sword, pistol, or poison, "a certain base, mechanic fellow, by name Oliver Cromwell," who had usurped his throne. His partisans in Scotland seized the opportunity to renew the war. The earls of Glencairn and Balcarras, Angus, Montrose, Seaforth, Athol, Kenmore, and Lorne, the son of Argyll, were up in arms. Charles sent over general Middleton to take the chief command, and Cromwell ordered Monk again from the victorious fleet to hasten to the Highlands to oppose him, colonel Robert Lilburne having in the meantime made a successful assault upon them. Monk speedily defeated Middleton and his associates, and the Scotch lords lost no time in making their submission. Cromwell had subdued the rebellion completely by August, but still earlier he had abolished all separate rule in Scotland. In April he published three ordinances, by which he incorporated England with Scotland, abolished the monarchy and parliament in that country, and absolved the people from their allegiance to Charles Stuart, erecting courts baron instead of those suppressed. The people who contended through so many bloody wars against English monarchs who had attempted the same thing, now quietly submitted to this plebeian but energetic conqueror, and the kirk only defied his authority, by meeting in assembly in Edinburgh on the 20th of July. But there presently appeared amongst them colonel Cotterel, who bade them depart, and marched them a mile out of the city betwixt two files of soldiers, to the astonishment and terror of the inhabitants, where he informed them, that if any of them were found in the capital after eight o'clock the next morning, or attempted to sit or meet more than three together, he would imprison them as disturbers of the public peace. Our old acquaintance, Baillie, beheld this amazing spectacle with consternation. "Thus," he exclaimed, "our general assembly, the glory and strength of our church upon earth, is by your soldiery crushed and trodden under foot. For this our hearts are sad, and our eyes run down with water." Yet it does not appear that real religion suffered at all by Cromwell's innovations, either in Scotland or in England, for Kirton says of the kirk, "I verily believe there were more souls converted unto Christ in that short period of time than in any season since the reformation. Ministers were painsful, people were diligent. At their solemn communions many congregations met in great multitudes, some dozens of ministers used to preach, and the people continued, as it were, in a sort of trance, so serious were they in spiritual exercises, for three days at least." Baxter, in England, though a decided enemy of Cromwell, confessed that, by his weeding out scandalous ministers, and putting in "able, serious preachers, who lived a godly life," though of various opinions, "many thousands of souls blessed God" for what was done.
The proclamation of Charles, rendered abortive in the Highlands, was not without its effects in England. A major Henshaw came over from Paris, and proposed to assassinate Cromwell as he went to Hampton Court. His plan was to get thirty stout men for the purpose. A young enthusiastic gentleman named Gerard undertook to procure ​twenty-five of them, and colonel Finch and Henshaw were to bring the other five. Vowel, a schoolmaster of Islington, was very zealous in the plot, and engaged in procuring arms; and Billingsley, a butcher of Smithfield, engaged to seize the troopers' horses grazing in Islington fields. The soldiers wore then to be fallen upon at the mews, Charles II. proclaimed, Rupert was to appear with a large force of royalists, English, Irish, and Scotch, and there was to be a general rising. Saturday, the 20th of May, was the day fixed for Cromwell's assassination; but before this wild scheme could be commenced, forty of the conspirators were seized, some of them in their beds. Vowel was hanged, and Gerard was beheaded on the 10th of July—the manner of the latter's punishment being thus changed at his own request, being a gentleman and a soldier.
Cromwell Dissolving the Parliament
The same day, and on the same scaffold as Gerard, was executed Don Pantaleon Sa, the brother of the Portuguese ambassador. Sa had a quarrel with this same Gerard, who was called "Generous Gerard," an enthusiastic royalist. They came to fighting at the Royal Exchange, where Gerard, drawing his rapier, forced the Don to fly, whereupon the next day he returned to the Exchange in search of Gerard, with a body of armed followers, and mistaking a man of the name of Greenway for Gerard, they killed him, wounded colonel Mayo, and were not subdued without much riot. Sa was sezied, tried, and condemned for this ​deliberate murder. He pleaded that he belonged to the embassy, and was therefore exempt from the tribunals of this country; but neither this, nor the zealous exertions of his brother, the ambassador, could save him; he was condemned to die.
Richard Baxter. From an authentic Portrait
Cromwell, though on the verge of concluding a treaty with Portugal, would not concede a pardon to the blood-thirsty Portuguese, who had been found guilty by a jury of half Englishmen and half foreigners. He went to Tower Hill to a coach and six, attended by numbers of the attaches of the embassy in morning, and his brother signed the treaty and left the country. Such an exhibition of firmness and impartiality, refusing to make any distinction in a murderer, whether noble or a commoner, evinced great moral courage in Cromwell; but another execution, which took place a short time before, namely, on the 23rd of June, was not so creditable to him. This was hanging an old catholic priest, of the name of Southworth, who had been convicted thirty-seven years before, under the bloody laws of James against popish priests, and had been banished. Being now discovered in the country, he was tried for that offence and put to death. On the scaffold he very justly upbraided the government with having taken arms for liberty, yet shed the blood of those who differed from them on religious grounds. The stern persecution of popery was, in fact, a blot on Cromwell's character; he had not in that respect at all outgrown his age.
Whilst these and other plots were exacting from the protector a severe compensation for the eminence of his position, he was yet steadily prosecuting measures for the better administration of the national government. Being empowered by the instrument of government, with his council, not only to raise sufficient money for the necessary demands of government, but also "to make laws and ordinances for the peace and welfare of these nations," he actually made no less than sixty ordinances, many of them of singular wisdom and excellence. He and his council, in fact, showed that they ​were in earnest to make the execution of justice cheap and prompt, and to revive a pure and zealous ministry of the gospel. In one of these ordinances, they effected the herculean labour which the Barebone parliament had aimed at—the reformation of the court of chancery, the ordinance for this purpose consisting of no less than sixty-seven articles. Well might Cromwell, on the opening of parliament, refer with pride to this great event, an event which would have taken our modern law-makers twenty years to accomplish, which, in fact, they have not accomplished yet. "The chancery," he said in his speech, "is reformed." What a speech in four words, sufficient to have made the reign of any king famous! "The chancery is reformed—I hope to the satisfaction of all good men." This had partly been done by distributing the causes through the other "courts of law at Westminster, where Englishmen love to have their rights tried." In order, too, to effect a most just and speedy discharge of the laws, ho put better judges on the bench, amongst them the pious and ever-memorable Sir Matthew Hale, and made Thurloe, the friend of Milton, secretary of state.
Two other of his ordinances were intended to purify the church of unfit ministers, and to introduce fit and pious ones. This established two commissions, one for the examination of all clergymen offering themselves for the incumbency of any church living, and the other for inquiring after and expelling any "scandalous, ignorant, or insufficient ministers who already occupied such." These commissioners were to be permanent, so that the church in all parts of the country should be purged of improper preachers, and supplied with able and good ones. The supreme commission for the trial of public preachers consisted of thirty-eight members—twenty-nine clergymen, nine laymen—and these were both presbyterian and independents, some even anabaptists, for the protector was less interested in what sect they belonged to, than in the fact that they were pious and able men. The commission for purging the church of scandalous or unfit ministers consisted of from fifteen to thirty distinguished puritan gentlemen and puritan clergymen for each county; and when they dismissed a minister for unfitness, his family had some little income allowed them. Many of the members of these last boards were chosen indiscriminately from the friends or enemies of the protectorate, so that they were known men of real piety and judgment. Amongst these were lord Fairfax, Thomas Scot, a zealous republican, admiral Blake, Sir Arthur Haselrig, Richard Mayor, the father-in-law of Richard Cromwell, for whom Cromwell entertained a high regard and respect, and had him in both parliament, council, and various commissions. Baxter was one of them, and, as we have said, spoke well of the operation of the system. Indeed, if governments must meddle with the church at all, which it would be much better for both church and state to let alone, it is not easy to conceive a more judicious and necessary discipline.
But the 3rd of September arrived, Oliver's fortunate day, on which he had appointed the meeting of parliament. As the day fell on a Sunday, the members met in the afternoon for worship in Westminster Abbey, where they waited on the protector in the Painted Chamber, who addressed them in a speech, and they then went to the house and adjourned to the next morning. Cromwell went that day to the house in great state, in his carriage, with his life guards, a, captain of the guard walking on each side, and the commissioners of the great seal and other state officers following in coaches. After a sermon in the Abbey church they proceeded to the Painted Chamber, where the protector made a speech of three hours in the delivery. A chair of state, marvellously resembling a throne, raised on steps, and with a canopy, was placed for the protector, who sat with his hat on, whilst the members sat bareheaded. On rising to speak he took off his hat, and made what Whitelock styles "a large and subtle speech," and which a distinguished modern historian terms "verbose, involved, and obscure." The reader, on referring to it, would probably deem it one of the most clear, business-like, and pregnant speeches that he ever read. It was largely illustrated by scripture quotations, it is true, for that was inseparable from the religious temperament of Cromwell; but it gave a clear review of the causes which had led to the overthrow of the monarchy, the rise of the commonwealth, and particularly of its then form, as well as of the measures which he had adopted in council, in the interim betwixt his appointment and the meeting of parliament. He told them that he regarded their greatest function to be at that time "healing and settling;" a profound truth—for the nation, and in it every class of men, had been so torn and rent in every fibre, that to soothe and heal was the highest art and policy. Every man's hand, and every man's head, he justly observed, had been against his brother, and no sooner had they put down despotism, than liberty itself began to grow wild, and threaten them with equal danger. The levellers, the fifth-monarchy men, the communists of St. George's Hill, had compelled them to put the drag on the chariot wheels of freedom, or it would soon have taken fire. In all such revolutions, the principles of human right are pushed on by sanguine men, beyond all chance of support from a settled public opinion; and Oliver truly told them that had they gained their object for a moment, it could not have lasted long, but would have in the meantime served the turn of selfish men, who, having obtained public property, would have "cried up property and interest fast enough."
He referred with satisfaction to the means taken to insure a pure ministry, and argued for the necessity of state interference in religion, a matter on which he might, at the present day, have had different views; but he still contended that such interference should only be for promoting a good and virtuous ministry, and by no means infringe on "liberty of conscience and liberty of the subject, two as glorious things," he asserted, "as any that God hath given us." His fears of religious license were chiefly excited by fifth-monarchyism, yet not denying that such a monarchy must come in process of time. "It is a notion," he said, "that I hope we all honour, and wait and hope for the fulfilment of, that Jesus Christ will have a time to set up a reign in our hearts, by subduing those lusts, and corruptions, and evils that are there, which now reign more in the world than I hope in due time they shall do. And when more fulness of the Spirit is poured forth to subdue iniquity, and bring in everlasting righteousness, then will the approach of that glory be. The carnal divisions and contentions, among ​Christians so common, are not the symptoms of that kingdom. But for men on this principle to betitle themselves, that they are the only men to rule kingdoms, govern nations, and give laws to people, and determine of property and liberty, and everything else, upon such a pretension as this is, truly they had need to give clear manifestations of God's presence with them, before wise men will receive or submit to their conclusions." Still he recommended tenderness towards them, and that if their extravagancies necessitated punishment, it should "evidence love, and not hatred."
He next referred to the treaties with foreign nations, amongst which, he said, that with Portugal had obtained "a thing which never before was since the inquisition was set up there; that our people who trade thither have liberty of conscience—liberty to worship God in chapels of their own."
He finally inculcated on them the necessity for maintaining as much peace as possible, not only that they might restore the internal condition of the nation, and reduce the excessive taxation occasioned by the war on land and sea, but also to prevent foreign nations depriving us of our manufacturing status, as they had been busily doing during our internal dissensions.
To one of his assertions we are bound to demur. "One thing more this government hath done—it had been instrumental to call a free parliament, which, blessed be God, we see here this day. I say a free parliament, and that it may continue so, I hope is in the heart and spirit of every good man in England, save such discontented persons as I have formerly mentioned. It is that which, as I have desired above my life, so I shall desire to keep it above my life."
The truth was, that it was as free, and much freer a parliament than the circumstances of the times would admit, as was soon seen. A free parliament would have brought back royalty in the state, or presbyterian absolutism in religion. Republicanism and independency, though in the ascendant through the genius of Cromwell and the power of the army, was in a minority. Republicanism even was divided against itself, divided into moderate republicanism and levelling, fifth-monarchy and sans culottism in alliance. In this so-called free parliament, episcopalians and catholics were excluded; this so-called free parliament had been carefully watched during the elections, the lists of the returned sent up to the council, and such as were deemed too dangerous were disallowed, amongst others lord Grey of Groby. But even then it was found too free, and the very first thing that it set about, was to call in question the government which had authorised it.
There was a stiff contest for the speaker, but Lenthall was chosen instead of Bradshaw, who was also put in nomination, because Lenthall had been speaker of the Long Parliament, and its old members had still hope of restoring it. Amongst the members were old Sir Francis Rouse, lord Herbert, the son of the earl of Worcester, Fleetwood, Lambert, the Claypoles, one of whom had married a daughter of the protector's, Cromwell's two sons, his friends the Dunches, Sir Ashley Cooper, and lord Fairfax. Amongst the republicans there were Bradshaw, Haselrig, Scott, Wallop, and Wildman, old Sir Harry Vane, but not the younger; and amongst the Irish members lord Broghill, who had fought so stoutly against Charles, and commissary general Reynolds. No sooner did they begin business than they opened a debate on the question of sanctioning the present form of government, a question from which they were precluded by the very instrument which had made them a parliament. The debate was carried on with great heart for no less than eight days, during which Bradshaw, Scott, Haselrig, and other republicans contended that the members of the Long Parliament had been illegally deprived of their right, and that the government in one person and a parliament was but another form of tyranny One speaker declared that he had fought to put down one tyrant, and was ready to fight to put down another. What right but the sword, it was asked, had one man to put down a legal parliament, to command his commanders? They moved to go into committee on the subject, and carried it.
Cromwell was not the man to suffer this. He sent to the lord mayor, and ordered him to take measures to preserve the peace of the city, marched three regiments into it, and then summoned Lenthall, and bade him meet him in the Painted Chamber, on Tuesday, the 12th of September, with the commons. Harrison, who was zealously getting up petitions for the support of the inquiry into the constitution, was clapped in the Tower. When Cromwell met the commons, he expressed his surprise that a set of men from whom so much healing management had been expected, should immediately attempt to overturn the government which called them together. That the instrument consisted of incidentals and fundamentals. The incidentals they were at liberty to discuss, but the fundamentals, of which the article that the power resided in one person and a parliament was one, were out of their range. He very zealously asserted that he had been called to the head of the nation by God and the people, and that none but God and the people should take his office from him. That his own wish had been to lead the life of a country gentleman, but necessity had forced him thence, and three several times he had found himself placed by the course of events at the head of the army, and by them at the head of the government. As to the dismissal of the Long Parliament, he had been compelled to that by its endeavouring to perpetuate itself, and by its tyranny and corruption. "That poor men, under its arbitrary power, were driven like flocks of sheep, by forty on a morning, to the confiscation of goods and estates, without any man being able to give a reason why two of them hart deserved to forfeit a shilling." That he had twice resigned the arbitrary power left in his hands, and having established a government capable of saving the nation, he would sooner he rotting in his grave and buried with infamy than suffer it to be broken up. That they had now peace at home and abroad, and it would be a miserable answer to give to the people, "Oh, we quarrelled for the liberty of England; we contested and went to confusion for that."
To prevent any such evil consequences, he informed them that he had caused a stop to be put to their entrance into the parliament house; he did not turn them out this time, he shut them out—and that none would be readmitted that did not first sign an engagement to be true and faithful to the protector and commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, not to propose or consent to alter the government as settled in a single person and parliament.
​On hearing this, the honourable members looked at one another in amazement, but one hundred and forty thought well to sign the engagement, which lay in the lobby of the house that day, and within a month three out of the four hundred had signed. Of course all the ultra republicans refused to sign, and were excluded—Bradshaw, Haselrig, Scott, Wildman, and the rest.
This summary dealing did not cure the parliament of meddling with the question for touching which they had thus been purged of a hundred members. On the 19th of September, only a week after the check they had received, they went into committee to discuss the "Instrument of Government." They took care not to touch the grand point which they had now pledged themselves not to meddle with—the government by a protector and parliament; but they affected to consider all the other articles as merely provisional ones, decreed by the protector and the council, to be confirmed or rejected by the parliament. They discussed these one by one, and on the 16th of October proceeded to the question, whether the office of protector should be elective or hereditary. Lambert advocated the office being hereditary, and pointed out the many disadvantages of the elective form. He strongly recommended the office being confined to the Cromwell family, and this, of course, was attributed to the instigation of Cromwell himself. They decided for the elective form. On the 11th of December they voted that the protector should have a veto on his touching liberty of conscience, but not such as suppressed heresies, as if what they called suppressing heresies were not direct attacks on liberty of conscience. Thus they crept round the very roots of the protectorate authority, nibbling at the powers he had forbidden them to discuss, and they proceeded to give proof of their intention to launch into all the old persecutions for religion, if they possibly could, by summoning before them John Biddle, who may be regarded as the father of the Unitarians. He had been thrice imprisoned by the Long Parliament, for holding that he could not find in Scripture that Christ or the Holy Ghost were styled God. The parliament committed him to the gate-house, and ordered a bill to be prepared for his punishment.
It was high time that they were stopped in their incorrigible spirit of persecution; and by now proceeding to frame a bill to include all their votes on the articles of the instrument, they were suddenly arrested in their progress. The instrument provided that parliament should not be adjourned under five months. On the 22nd of January, 1655, the protector chose to consider that the months were not calendar but lunar months, which then expired. The parliament, counting the other way, deemed themselves safe till the 3rd of February, but on the 22nd of January Oliver summoned them to the Painted Chamber, and observed to them, that though ho had met them at first with the hope that their hearts were in the great work to which they had been called, he was quite disappointed in them. He complained that they had sent no message to him, taken no more notice of his presence in the republic than if he had not existed, and that with all patience, he had forborne teasing them with messages, hoping that they would at length proceed to some real business. "But," added he, "as I may not take notice of what you have been doing, so I think I have a very great liberty to tell you that I do not know what you have been doing; that I do not know whether you have been dead or alive. I have not once heard from you all this time. I have not, and that you all know."
He then reminded them that various discontented parties, the royalists, the levellers, and others, had been encouraged by their evident disposition to call in question the government, to raise plots, and that if they were permitted to sit, making quibbles about the government itself, the nation would soon be plunged again into bloodshed and confusion. He, therefore, did then and there dissolve them as a parliament.
The plots to which the protector alluded had been going on for some time, and even yet were in full activity. We shall trace their main features, but before that we may notice an incident which showed that Cromwell was prepared for them, resolved to sell his life manfully if attacked. On the 24th of September, immediately after compelling the parliament to subscribe the engagement, the protector was out in Hyde Park, taking a dinner under the shade of the trees, with Thurloe, the secretary, a man with whom he took much council on the affairs of the nation. After this little rural dinner, which gives us a very interesting idea of the simplicity of the great general's habits and tastes, he tried a team of six fine Friesland coach horses, presented to him by the duke of Oldenburg. Thurloe was put into the carriage, Cromwell mounted the coachman's seat, and a postilion rode one of the fore horses. The horses soon became unruly, plunged, and threw the postillion, and then, nearly upsetting the carriage, threw the protector from his seat, who fell upon the pole and had his legs entangled in the harness. On went the mad horses at full gallop, and one of Cromwell's shoes coming off, which had been held by the harness, he fell under the carriage, which went on without hurting him, except by some bruises. In the fall, however, a loaded pistol went off in his pocket, thus revealing the fact that he went armed.
And indeed he had great need. His mother, who died just now, on the 16th of November, and who was ninety-four years old, used, at the sound of a musket, says Ludlow, to imagine that her son was shot, and could not be satisfied unless she saw him once a day at least. Her last words to him do not give us any idea of hypocrisy in mother or son—"The Lord cause his face to shine upon you, and enable you to do great things for the glory of the Most High God, and to be a relief unto his people. My dear son, I leave my heart with thee. A good night!" Both mother and son undoubtedly believed him to be doing God's work. Amongst the plotters were both royalists and republicans.
The ejected members of parliament, in their different quarters, were stirring up discontent against Cromwell, and even declaring that it were better to have Charles Stuart back again. Colonel Overton, who had been questioned at the time of colonel Alured's dismissal, was once more called up and questioned. In Scotland, where he lay, the protector discovered an agitation to supersede Monk, and make the republican Overton commander-in-chief, and leaving only the garrisons, to march the rest of the army into England on the demand of pay and constitutional reform. Overton was committed to the Tower.
​Allen, who, with Sexby and another agitator, in 1647 presented a remarkable petition from the army to the Long Parliament, now become adjutant-general, was arrested at his father-in-law's house, in Devonshire, at the end of January, on a charge of plotting disturbances in Ireland, and exciting discontent about Bristol and in Devon. Allen was a zealous anabaptist, and the excitement amongst them and other army republicans was great and extensive. Pamphlets were published, letters and agitator's passed from one regiment to another, and a general rising was planned, with the seizure of Edinburgh Castle, Hull, Portsmouth, and other strong places. Cromwell was to be surprised and put to death. Colonel Wildman, one of these fanatics, who had been ejected from parliament by refusing to sign the recognition, was taken on the 12th of February at Exton, near Marlborough, in Wilts, by a party of horse, as he was in his furnished lodgings upstairs, leaning on his elbows, and in the act, with the door open, of dictating to his clerk, "A Declaration of the free and well affected people of England, now in arms against the tyrant Oliver Cromwell." He was secured in Chepstow Castle, and his correspondents, Harrison, lord Grey of Groby, and others, were secured in the Tower. Colonel Sexby for the time escaped.
About the same time a royalist plot was also in progress. Charles Stuart, who had removed from Paris to Cologne—the French government not wishing to give offence to Cromwell—had concocted a plot with Hyde, his chancellor, to raise the royalists in various quarters at once, fancying that as Cromwell had given so much offence to both people and parliament, there was great hope of success. Charles went to Middleburg, on the coast of Holland, to be ready at a call, and Hyde was extremely confident. In Yorkshire there was a partial outbreak under lord Mauleverer and Sir Henry Kingsby, which was speedily quelled, and Kingsby seized and imprisoned in Hull. This abortive attempt was under the management of lord Wilmot, now earl of Rochester, who was glad to make his escape. Another branch of the plot, under the management of Sir Joseph Wagstaff, who came over with Rochester, fared no better. Wagstaff attempted to surprise Winchester on the 7th of March, during the assizes. Penruddock, Grove, and Jones, royalist officers, were associated with him, and about two hundred others entered Salisbury about five o'clock on the morning of the 11th, posted themselves in the market place, liberated the prisoners from the gaol, and surprised the sheriff and two judges in their beds. Wagstaff proposed to hang the judges, but Penruddock and the rest refused to allow it; he then ordered the high sheriff to proclaim Charles Stuart, but neither he nor the crier would do it, though menaced with the gallows. Hearing that captain Unton Crook was after them with a troop of horse, and seeing no chance of a rising, they quitted the town about three o'clock, and marched through Dorsetshire into Devonshire. At Southampton captain Crook came up with them, and speedily made himself master of fifty of the insurgents, including Penruddock, Grove, and Jones—Wagstaff escaped. They had expected a body of conspirators from Hampshire to join them at Salisbury, and these were actually on their way when they heard of the retreat of Wagstaff's body, and immediately dispersed. Similarly feeble outbreaks took place in the counties of Northumberland, Nottingham, Shropshire, and Montgomery. Penruddock, Grove, and Jones, were beheaded at Exeter, and about fifteen others suffered there and at Salisbury; the rest of the deluded prisoners were sold to Barbadoes. Charles returned crest-fallen to Cologne, and Hyde, convinced that his plans had been betrayed, attributed the treason to Manning, whom, having secured, they had shot in the following winter, in the territory of the duke of Neuburg.
To prevent more of these outbreaks, Cromwell planned to divide the whole country into military districts, over each of which he placed an officer, who was to act chiefly with the militia, and not with the levelling regulars. These officers he created major-generals, beginning first with Desborough in the south-wast, and, finally, before the year was out, he had distributed the other major-generals. Fleetwood, Skippon, Whalley, Kelsey, Goffe, Berry, Butler, Wortley, and Barkstead, each to their district, who effectually preserved the peace of the nation. During the spring also, undaunted by these disturbances, Cromwell progressed with his internal reforms, and with the greatest; of all, the reform of chancery. This was no easy matter. The lawyers were as turbulent as the anabaptists in the army. Two of the commissioners of the great seal, Whitelock and Widdringtou, refused to enforce the reform, and were obliged to resign. Lisle and Finnes, the other commissioners, dared to carry out the change. Old Lenthall, the speaker, now master of the rolls, protested that he would be hanged at the Rolls gate before he would obey; but he saw fit to alter his mind, and the protector, so far from bearing any ill-will to the two conscientious commissioners, Whitelock and Widdrington, soon after made them commissioners of the treasury.
We may now look back a little, to observe what Cromwell had been doing beyond the shores of the kingdom. We have seen that almost all the nations of Europe sent embassies to congratulate him on his elevation to the protectorate. The vigour of his will soon made them more anxious to stand on good terms with him. He soon made peace with Sweden as a protestant country, and from a natural sympathy with the protestant fame of the great Gustavus. He concluded peace also with Holland, but with France and Spain there were more difficulties. France had, both under Richelieu and Mazarin, lent continued aid and refuge to the royalist cause against the reformers. The queen, whom the republicans had chased from the throne, was a princess of France, and was living there with numbers of the royalists about her. Charles, the heir to the throne of England, was pensioned by France, and maintains a sort of court in Paris, whence continual disturbances and alarms were coming. It is true, the French court had never been very munificent to the exiled queen of England and her family. Henrietta was found by cardinal Retz without fire, and almost without food, and Charles and his countrymen so miserably poor, that Clarendon, in June, 1653, wrote, "I do not know that any man is yet dead for want of bread, which I really wonder at. I am sure the king owes all that he has eaten since April, and I am not acquainted with one servant who hath a pistole in his pocket. ​Five or six of us eat together one meal a day for a pistole a week; but all of us owe, for God knows how many weeks, to the poor woman that feeds us." He adds that he wanted shoes and shirts, and that the marquis of Ormond was in no better condition. The court of Charles was as much rent with divisions and jealousies as it was poor. His brave conduct in England raised great hopes of him, but on his return to France he relapsed into all sorts of dissipations and intrigues, which made him contemptible. Amongst a troop of mistresses, Lucy Walters, or Barlow, as she was called, the mother of the afterwards celebrated duke of Monmouth, was the most notorious.
View in the Mountains of Piedmont.
ACCIDENT TO CROMWELL IN HYDE PARK
But there were motives which always weighed heavily with Cromwell—religion and the honour of the English flag. He had a deep and enduring repugnance to the catholic faith, as the mother of superstition and cruelty, and Spain was essentially catholic, and at the same time was maintaining an insolent domination in the waters of the West Indies. The fame of her exclusion of the flags of all other nations from her colonies thence, and of her many atrocities committed on our colonies, as at St. Kitts in 1629, at Tortuga in 1637, and Santa Cruz in 1650, was an irresistible provocative to the combative spirit of the protector. He demanded of the Spanish ambassador that Spain should abolish the inquisition, and admit the English flag to the West Indian seas. De Leyda replied that he was asking from his king his two eyes, and as Cromwell would not concede either point, he demanded his passports in June, 1651, and took his leave.
Cromwell lost no time enforcing his views on Spain, which he, no doubt, felt bound conscientiously to do on the great principle of suppressing popish cruelties, and spreading the triumph of protestantism. He sent Blake with a powerful fleet in October of that year into the Mediterranean, and another powerful armament under admirals Penn and Venables, with secret orders, which were not to be opened till they arrived in certain latitudes. This fleet, whose preparation and destination kept all Europe in wonder and anxiety, sailed west, and was, in fact, destined for the West Indies. Blake, with his fleet, passed the straits of Gibraltar, and presented to the inhabitants of the shores of the Mediterranean, a spectacle such as they had not seen since the days of the Crusades—a powerful English fleet. It consisted of thirty sail, and its commission was to seize the French vessels wherever it could find them, especially seek out and attack the fleet under the duke of Guise. It was besides this to demand satisfaction from various offending powers. The grand duke of Tuscany had, whilst the parliament was struggling with Charles, allowed prince Rupert to sell English prizes in his ports. The pope was, as the antichrist, an object to be humbled, or at all events impressed sensibly with the fact that England could at any moment visit him in his capital, and that the British power was in hands both able and ready to do it. There were many injuries to our merchantmen to be avenged on the pirates of Tunis and Algiers. Cromwell's favourite maxim was, that a ship of the hue was the most effective ambassador. Blake sailed along the papal shores, exciting a deep terror, but he passed on and cast anchor before Leghorn, and demanded compensation for the offence against English honour and shipping, which was speedily granted. Not being able to discover the duke of Guise, he proceeded to Algiers, and compelled the day to sign an engagement not to suffer further violences by his subjects on English vessels. Thence sailed to Tunis, and sent in the same demand, but the haughty barbarian of that place sent him word to give a look at his ports of Porto Farino and Goletta, with their fleets, and take them if he could. Blake sailed away as in despair, but suddenly returning, he entered the harbour of Porto Farino, silencing the castle and batteries as he advanced, and set fire to the whole fleet. Both Tunis and Tripoli now found it the best policy to give the required engagement, and Blake left the Mediterranean, having given these lawless pirates a specimen of the power of England, which was not likely to be soon forgotten.
Blake had orders to look out for the next Spanish Plate fleet coming home, and he lay for some time off Cadiz; but there was now at the court of Madrid colonel Sexby, the leveller, who had long been engaged with Allen, Wildman, and the anabaptists. He had gone over to the continent to raise some force either in conjunction with Charles or with Spain, to invade England and kill Cromwell. Sexby revealed to the Spaniards not only the object of Blake, but the real design of the fleet under Venables and Penn. More than thirty sail were mustered by the Spanish, under Don Pablos de Contreras, which kept close watch on Blake. Blake longed to attack them, but his orders did not sanction it; and after hearing that the Plate fleet was detained at Carthagena, he retired to England to refit, his ships being in a bad condition, and his men suffering from bad provisions.
During the absence of Blake, a great excitement had been occasioned in England by the news of dreadful atrocities committed on the protestants of the mountains of Piedmont. The protestants called the Vaudois were a race who, through all ages, had, in the obscurity of their Alpine valleys, retained the doctrines of the primitive church, and had set at defiance both the persuasions and persecutions of Rome. They were said to be descended from the ancient Waldenses, and were a bold, independent race of mountaineers. It was pretended that the duke of Savoy, whose subjects they chiefly were, had granted them the free exercise of their religion so long as they remained in their ancient places of abode, the valleys of the sources of the Po, in the Savoy Alps; but that being found in Lucerna and other places, these were decided to be beyond their bounds, and they were ordered to conform to the church of Rome, or sell their lands and retire from these territories. They refused to be driven from their homes on account of their religion, and being always an eyesore to the court of Rome, the fury of persecution was let loose upon them. Friars were sent amongst them to convert them, or to denounce their destruction; they disregarded the friars, and then six regiments of soldiers were sent to drive them into the mountains. Amongst these were two regiments of refugee Irish, whose name of karisers has greatly puzzled Carlyle in his life of Cromwell, the word being simply a corruption of cuirassiers. These fellows, ardent catholics, smarting under the protestant scourge which had driven them from their native land, did their work con amore. From the district of Lucerna they were driven into the higher Alpine ​fastnesses, and pursued with the most terrible ferocities of fanatic savagery, with fire and sword and extermination, these horrors were aggravated by winter and famine, and the news of this fearful butchery rung through protestant England with a sensation which revived all the memory of the popish horrors in the Marian times. There was one loud outcry for interference on their behalf. Press and pulpit resounded with demands of sympathy and redress: the ministers of all classes waited on Cromwell in a body to solicit his protection of the Vaudois: the army in Scotland and Ireland sent up addresses. No one appeared, however, more excited than Cromwell himself. He immediately gave two thousand pounds, and appointed a day of general humiliation, and a collection on their behalf, which was observed, and thirty-eight thousand two hundred and twenty-eight pounds were speedily raised, and sent by envoys to Geneva, to be conveyed to the sufferers. Nor did Cromwell satisfy himself with having done this. The day of the arrival of the news, June 3rd, 1655, he was about to sign a treaty of peace with France; but he refused to sign it till he had seen whether the French king and Mazarin would heartily unite with him in compelling protection from the duke of Savoy for the sufferers. Mazarin was loth to stir in such a business, but Cromwell soon let him see that there would be no peace for France unless he did, and he consented. Three Latin letters were written by Milton at the order of the protector to different states of Europe, calling on them to co-operate for this great end, and the mighty poet sent forth also his glorious sonnet, commencing,
   Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saint, whose bones Lie blenching on the Alpine mountains cold!
which remains like a perpetual trumpet-note through all time. The astonished duke of Savoy was soon compelled to give ample guarantee for the religious liberty and security of his protestant subjects.
What a striking contrast to the conduct of the Palmerston ministry in our own time, who suffered Englishmen to endure, even to the cost of their health and intellect, the horrors of an unjust imprisonment from the bigoted royal monster of Naples! This proud and magnanimous display of English spirit by Cromwell, forced even from the prejudiced pen of Hume a warm eulogium. "The conduct of the protector in foreign affairs, though imprudent and impolitic, was full of vigour and enterprise, and drew a consideration to his country, which, from the reign of Elizabeth, it seemed to have totally lost. The great mind of this successful usurper was intent on spreading the renown of the English nation; and while he struck mankind with astonishment at his extraordinary fortune, he seemed to ennoble, instead of debasing, that people whom he had reduced to subjection. It was his boast that he would render the name of an Englishman as much feared and revered as ever was that of a Roman. And the tory historian was even compelled to add, "It must also be acknowledged that the protector, in his civil and domestic administration, displayed as great regard both to justice and clemency, as his usurped authority, derived from no law, and founded only on the sword, could possibly permit. All the chief offices in the courts of judicature were filled with men of integrity. Amid the virulence of faction, the decrees of the judges were upright and impartial; and to every man but himself, and to himself, except where necessity required the contrary, the law was the great rule of conduct and behaviour."
The expedition to the West Indies, in its commencement, was not so successful as the protector generally experienced. The fleet was bound for Hispaniola, consisting of sixty sail, and carried four thousand troops; and in Barbadoes and other English settlements, the force was augmented by volunteers, incited by promise of plunder, to ten thousand. But these fresh forces were of the worst possible description, being prisoners of a loose description shipped thither; the commanders were divided in opinion, and the attack was so wretchedly managed, that it failed with great loss. St. Domingo, which they intended to take, was deserted on their approach, but instead of entering it at once, they landed their forces forty miles off, and marched them through woods towards the town. The heat of the weather, the want of water, and the consequent disorder of the troop, prepared them for what ensued. They were suddenly attacked in a thick wood, and repulsed with great slaughter. Nothing could bring these ragamuffin forces to renew the attempt, and the commanders sailed away, but afterwards fell on Jamaica and took it. That island was then, however, considered of so little value, that it did not satisfy the government for the loss of Hispaniola, and on their return Venables and Penn were committed to the Tower. Notwithstanding this, however, Cromwell determined to make secure the consequent of Jamaica, and extend, if possible, the West Indian possessions. Vice-admiral Goodson was ordered to take the command at Jamaica, and with him general Fortescue, Serle, governor of Barbadoes, and general Sedgwick, from New England, were appointed commissioners for the management of the island.
Cromwell's letters to these officers that autumn, inform his that there were twenty-eight men-of-war on that station, and people from Barbadoes, from New England, and from England and Scotland were being sent to occupy and settle the island. A thousand Irish girls were sent out. Cromwell pointed out to the commissioners how advantageously the island lay for keeping in check the Spanish main, and the trade with Peru and Carthagena. His comprehensive glance was alive to all the advantages of the conquest, and his resolution engaged to make the most of it. Whatever is the value of Jamaica now, we owe it to him. He believed that he was not only serving the nation but religion by humbling Spam. He wrote to the commissioners, "The Lord himself hath a controversy with your enemies, even with that Roman Babylon of which the Spaniard is the great underpropper. In that respect we fight the Lord's battles, and in that respect the Scriptures are most plain." Spain, of course, proclaimed war against England, to her further loss, and the glory of Cromwell and his invincible puritan admiral, Blake. Penn and Venables resigned their commissions, and were set at liberty. October 24th, the day after the Spanish ambassador quitted London, Cromwell signed the treaty of peace with France, by which Conde and the French malcontents were to be excluded from the ​British dominions, and Charles Stuart, his brother, the duke of York, Ormond, Hyde, and fifteen others of the prince's adherents, were to be excluded from France