# The Works of Thomas Carlyle/Volume 6/Three Fragments of Speeches

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SELF-DENYING ORDINANCE
The following Three small Fragments of Speeches will have to represent for us some six months of occasional loud debating, and continual anxious gestation and manipulation, in the Two Houses, in the Committee of Both Kingdoms, and in many other houses and places;—the ultimate outcome of which was the celebrated ‘Self-denying Ordinance,’ and ‘New Model’ of the Parliament’s Army; which indeed brings on an entirely New Epoch in the Parliament’s Affairs.
​Essex and Waller had, for the third or even fourth time, chiefly by the exertions of ever-zealous London, been fitted out with Armies; had marched forth together to subdue the West;—and ended in quite other results than that. The two Generals differed in opinion; did not march long together: Essex, urged by a subordinate, Lord Roberts, who had estates in Cornwall and hoped to get some rents out of them, turned down thitherwards to the left; Waller bending up to the right;—with small issue either way. Waller’s last action was an indecisive, rather unsuccessful Fight, or day of skirmishing, with the King, at Cropredy Bridge on the border of Oxford and Northampton Shires, three days before Marston Moor. After which both parties separated: the King to follow Essex, since there was now no hope in the North; Waller to wander London-wards, and gradually ‘lose his Army by desertion,’ as the habit of him was. As for the King, he followed Essex into Cornwall with effect; hemmed him in among the hills there, about Bodmin, Lostwithiel, Foy, with continual skirmishing, with ever-growing scarcity of victual; forced poor Essex to escape to Plymouth by the Fleet, and leave his Army to shift for itself as best might be: the horse under Balfour to cut their way through; the foot under Skippon to lay-down their arms, cease to be soldiers, and march away ‘with staves in their hands’ into the wide world. This surrender was effected 1st September 1644, two months after Marston Moor. The Parliament’s and Cromwell’s worst anticipation, in that quarter, is fulfilled.
The Parliament made no complaint of Essex; with a kind of Roman dignity, they rather thanked him. ‘They proceeded to recruit Waller and him, summoned Manchester with Cromwell his Lieutenant-General to join them; by which three bodies, making again a considerable army, under the command of Manchester and Waller (for Essex lay ‘sick,’ or ​seeming to be sick), the King, returning towards Oxford from his victory, was intercepted at Newbury; and there, on Sunday 27th October 1644, fell out the Second Battle of Newbury. Wherein his Majesty, after four-hours confused fighting, rather had the worse; yet contrived to march off, unmolested, ‘by moonlight, at 10 o’clock,’ towards Wallingford, and got safe home. Manchester refused to pursue; though urged by Cromwell, and again urged. Nay twelve days after, when the King came back, and openly revictualled Dennington Castle, an important strong-place hard by,—Manchester, in spite of Cromwell’s urgency, still refused to interfere.
They, in fact, came to a quarrel here, these two:—and much else that was represented by them came to a quarrel; Presbytery and Independency, to wit. Manchester was reported to have said, If they lost this Army pursuing the King, they had no other; the King ‘might hang them all.’ To Cromwell and the thorough-going party, it had become very clear that high Essexes and Manchesters of limited notions and large estates and anxieties, who besides their fear of being themselves beaten utterly, and forfeited and ‘hanged,’ were afraid of beating the King too well, would never end this Cause in a good way. Whereupon ensue some six months of very complex manipulation, and public and private consultation, which these Three Fragments of Speeches are here to represent for us.
‘That the said Earl hath always been indisposed and backward to engagements, and the ending of the War by the sword; and “always” for such a Peace as a “thorough” ​victory would be a disadvantage to;—and hath declared this by principles express to that purpose, and “by” a continued series of carriage and actions answerable.
‘That since the taking of York, as if the Parliament had now advantage fully enough, he hath declined whatsoever tended to farther advantage upon the Enemy; “hath” neglected and studiously shifted-off opportunities to that purpose, as if he thought the King too low, and the Parliament too high,—especially at Dennington Castle.
‘That he hath drawn the Army into, and detained them in, such a posture as to give the Enemy fresh advantages: and this, before his conjunction with the other Armies, by his own absolute will, against or without his Council of War, against many commands of the Committee of Both Kingdoms, and with contempt and vilifying of those commands;—and, since the conjunction, sometimes against. the Councils of War, and sometimes by persuading and deluding the Council to neglect one opportunity with pretence of another, and this again of a third, and at last by persuading “them” that it was not fit to fight at all’
To these heavy charges, Manchester,—furnished with his confused Crawford Documents, and not forgetting Letter Twentieth which we lately read,—makes heavy answer, at great length, about a week after: of which we shall remember only this piece of countercharge, How his Lordship had once, in those very Newbury days, ordered Cromwell to proceed to some rendezvous with the horse, and Cromwell, very unsuitably for a Lieutenant-General, had answered, The horses were already worn off their feet; ‘if your Lordship want to have the skins of the horses, this is the way to get them!’—Through which small slit, one looks into large seas of general discrepancy in those old months! Lieutenant-General Cromwell is also reported to have said, in a moment of irritation surely, ​‘There would never be a good time in England till we had done with the Lords.’ But the most appalling report that now circulates in the world is this, of his saying once, ‘If he met the King in battle, he would fire his pistol at the King as at another’;—pistol, at our poor semi-divine misguided Father fallen insane: a thing hardly conceivable to the Presbyterian human mind!
‘It is now a time to speak, or for ever hold the tongue. The important occasion now, is no less than To save a Nation, out of a bleeding, nay almost dying condition: which the long continuance of this War hath already brought it into; so that without a more speedy, vigorous and effectual prosecution of the War,—casting off all lingering proceedings like “those of” soldiers-of-fortune beyond sea, to spin out a war,—we shall make the kingdom weary of us, and hate the name of a Parliament.
‘For what do the Enemy say? Nay, what do many say that were friends at the beginning of the Parliament? Even this, That the Members of both Houses have got great places and commands, and the sword into their hands; and, what by interest in Parliament, what by power in the Army, will perpetually continue themselves in grandeur, and not permit the War speedily to end, lest their own power should determine with it. This “that” I speak here to our own faces, is but what others do utter abroad behind our backs. ​I am far from reflecting on any. I know the worth of those Commanders, Members of both Houses, who are yet in power: but if I may speak my conscience without reflection upon any, I do conceive if the Army be not put into another method, and the War more vigorously prosecuted, the People can bear the War no longer, and will enforce you to a dishonourable Peace.
‘But this I would recommend to your prudence, Not to insist upon any complaint or oversight of any Commander-in-chief upon any occasion whatsoever; for as I must acknowledge myself guilty of oversights, so I know they can rarely be avoided in military affairs. Therefore, waving a strict inquiry into the causes of these things, let us apply ourselves to the remedy; which is most necessary. And I hope we have such true English hearts, and zealous affections towards the general weal of our Mother Country, as no Members of either House will scruple to deny themselves, and their own private interests, for the public good; nor account it to be a dishonour done to them, whatever the Parliament shall resolve upon in this weighty matter.’
‘Mr. Speaker,—I am not of the mind that the calling of the Members to sit in Parliament will break, or scatter our Armies. I can speak this for my own soldiers, that they look not upon me, but upon you; and for you they will fight, and live and die in your Cause; and if others be of that mind that they are of, you need not fear them. They do not idolise me, but look upon the Cause they fight for. You may lay upon them what commands you please, they will obey your commands in that Cause they fight for.’
To be brief, Mr. Zouch Tate, Member for Northampton, ​moved this day a Self-denying Ordinance; which, in a few days more, was passed in the Commons. It was not so easily got through the Lords; but there too it had ultimately to pass. One of the most important clauses was this, introduced not without difficulty, That religious men might now serve without taking the Covenant as a first preliminary,—perhaps they might take it by and by. This was a great ease to tender consciences and indicates a deep split, which will grow wider and wider, in our religious affairs. ‘The Scots Commissioners have sent for Whitlocke and Maynard to the Lord General’s, to ask in judicious Scotch dialect, Whether there be not ground to prosecute Cromwell as an ‘incendiary’? ‘You ken varry weel!’—The two learned gentlemen shook their heads.
This Self-denying Ordinance had to pass; it and the New Model wholly; by the steps indicated below. Essex was gratified by a splendid Pension,—very little of it ever actually paid; for indeed he died some two years after: Manchester was put on the Committee of Both Kingdoms: the Parliament had its New-Model Army, and soon saw an entirely new epoch in its affairs.
* ↑ Clarendon.
* ↑ 29th June 1644, Clarendon, ii. 655.
* ↑ His own distinct, downright and somewhat sulky Narrative, in Rushworth, v. 701.
* ↑ Clarendon, ii. 717.
* ↑ Directly after Marston Moor.
* ↑ Waller’s and Essex’s at Newbury.
* ↑ Rushworth, v. 732; Commons Journals, iii. 703-5.
* ↑ Rushworth, v. 734.
* ↑ Old Pamphlets sæpius, onwards to 1649.
* ↑ Rushworth, vi. 4.
* ↑ Cromwelliana, p. 12.
* ↑ Whitlocke, iii. p. 111 (December 1644).
* ↑ Rushworth, vi. 7, 8: Self-denying Ordinance passed in the Commons 19th December, and is sent to the Lords; Conference about it, 7th January; rejected by the Lords 15th January,—because ‘we do not know what shape the Army will now suddenly take.’ Whereupon, 21st January, ‘Fairfax is nominated General’; and on the 19th February, the New Model is completed and passed: ‘This is the shape the Army is to take.’ A second Self-denying Ordinance, now introduced, got itself finally passed 3d April 1645.