Volume Vi Part 2 (2/2)

It was plain that England had no mind to see her old parliamentary liberties set aside for a military rule. But in truth the army itself never dreamed of establis.h.i.+ng such a rule. Still less did it dream of leaving the conduct of affairs in the hands of the small body of members who still called themselves the House of Commons, a body which numbered hardly a hundred, and whose average attendance was little more than fifty. In reducing it by ”Pride's Purge” to the mere shadow of a House the army had never contemplated its continuance as a permanent a.s.sembly: it had, in fact, insisted as a condition of even its temporary continuance that it should prepare a bill for the summoning of a fresh Parliament. The plan, put forward by the Council of Officers is still interesting as the basis of many later efforts towards parliamentary reform. It advised a dissolution in the spring, the a.s.sembling every two years of a new Parliament consisting of four hundred members, elected by all householders rateable to the poor, and a redistribution of seats which would have given the privilege of representation to every place of importance. Paid military officers and civil officials were excluded from election. The plan was apparently accepted by the Commons, and a bill based on it was again and again discussed. But it was soon whispered about that the House had no mind to dissolve itself. Whatever might be the hopes of the soldiers or their leaders, the shrewder statesmen who sate at Westminster knew that the country was eager to undo the work that had been done; and that the first effort of a fairly-chosen Parliament would be to put an end to the Commonwealth and to religious liberty. Their aim therefore was to gain time; to continue their rule till what they looked on as a pa.s.sing phase of national feeling had disappeared, and till the great results which they looked for from their policy both at home and abroad had reconciled the nation to the new system of government. In a witty paraphrase of the story of Moses, Henry Marten was soon to picture the Commonwealth as a new-born and delicate babe, and hint that ”no one is so proper to bring it up as the mother who has brought it into the world.” Secret as this purpose was kept, suspicions of it no sooner stole abroad than the popular discontent found a mouthpiece in John Lilburne, a brave, hot-headed soldier, and the excitement of the army appeared in a formidable mutiny in May. But the leaders of the army set all suspicion aside. ”You must cut these people in pieces,” Cromwell broke out in the Council of State, ”or they will cut you in pieces”; and a forced march of fifty miles to Burford enabled him to burst with Fairfax on the mutinous regiments at midnight, and to stamp out the revolt.

[Sidenote: Cromwell in Ireland.]

But resolute as he was against disorder, Cromwell went honestly with the army in its demand of a new Parliament; he believed, and in his harangue to the mutineers he pledged himself to the a.s.sertion, that the House purposed to dissolve itself. In spite of the delays thrown in the way of the bill for a new Representative body Cromwell entertained no serious suspicion of the Parliament's design when he was summoned to Ireland by a series of Royalist successes which left only Dublin in the hands of the Parliamentary forces. With Scotland threatening war, and a naval struggle impending with Holland, it was necessary that the work of the army in Ireland should be done quickly. The temper too of Cromwell and his soldiers was one of vengeance, for the horror of the alleged ma.s.sacre remained living in every English breast, and the revolt was looked upon as a continuance of the ma.s.sacre. ”We are come,” he said on his landing, ”to ask an account of the innocent blood that hath been shed, and to endeavour to bring to an account all who by appearing in arms shall justify the same.” A sortie from Dublin had already broken up Ormond's siege of the capital; and feeling himself powerless to keep the field before the new army, the Marquis had thrown his best troops, three thousand Englishmen under Sir Arthur Aston, as a garrison into Drogheda.

Cromwell landed in Ireland on the fifteenth of August 1649; and his storm of Drogheda in September was the first of a series of awful ma.s.sacres. The garrison fought bravely, and repulsed the first attack; but a second drove Aston and his force back to the Mill-Mount. ”Our men getting up to them,” ran Cromwell's terrible despatch, ”were ordered by me to put them all to the sword. And indeed, being in the heat of action, I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town, and I think that night they put to death about two thousand men.” A few fled to St. Peter's church, ”whereupon I ordered the steeple to be fired, where one of them was heard to say in the midst of the flames: 'G.o.d d.a.m.n me, I burn, I burn.'” ”In the church itself nearly one thousand were put to the sword. I believe all their friars were knocked on the head promiscuously but two,” but these were the sole exceptions to the rule of killing the soldiers only. At a later time Cromwell challenged his enemies to give ”an instance of one man since my coming into Ireland, not in arms, ma.s.sacred, destroyed, or banished.” But for soldiers there was no mercy. Of the remnant who surrendered through hunger, ”when they submitted, their officers were knocked on the head, every tenth man of the soldiers killed, and the rest s.h.i.+pped for the Barbadoes.” ”I am persuaded,” the despatch ends, ”that this is a righteous judgement of G.o.d upon these barbarous wretches who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood, and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future.”

[Sidenote: Charles and the Scots.]

A detachment sufficed to relieve Derry and to quiet Ulster; and Cromwell turned to the south, where as stout a defence was followed by as terrible a ma.s.sacre at Wexford. A fresh success at Ross brought him to Waterford; but the city held stubbornly out, disease thinned his army, where there was scarce an officer who had not been sick, and the general himself was arrested by illness. At last the tempestuous weather drove him into winter quarters at Cork with his work half done. The winter of 1649 was one of terrible anxiety. The Parliament was showing less and less inclination to dissolve itself, and was meeting the growing discontent by a stricter censors.h.i.+p of the press and a fruitless prosecution of John Lilburne. English commerce was being ruined by the piracies of Rupert's fleet, which now anch.o.r.ed at Kinsale to support the Royalist cause in Ireland. The energy of Vane indeed had already re-created a navy, squadrons of which were being despatched into the British seas, the Mediterranean, and the Levant; and Colonel Blake, who had distinguished himself by his heroic defence of Taunton during the war, was placed at the head of a fleet which drove Rupert from the Irish coast, and finally blockaded him in the Tagus. But even the energy of Vane quailed before the danger which now broke on England from the Scots. ”One must go and die there,” the young king cried at the news of Ormond's defeat before Dublin, ”for it is shameful for me to live elsewhere.” But his ardour for an Irish campaign cooled as Cromwell marched from victory to victory; and from the isle of Jersey, which alone remained faithful to him of all his southern dominions, Charles renewed the negotiations with Scotland which his hopes from Ireland had broken. They were again delayed by a proposal on the part of Montrose to attack the very Government with whom his master was negotiating; but the failure and death of the Marquis in the spring of 1650 forced Charles to accept the Presbyterian conditions; and while an army was raised in the North, the young king prepared to cross to his Scottish dominions.

[Sidenote: Cromwell in Scotland.]

Dismayed as they were, the English leaders resolved to antic.i.p.ate the danger by attacking the new enemy in his own home; but the Lord-General Fairfax, while willing to defend England against a Scotch invasion, scrupled to take the lead in an invasion of Scotland. The Council recalled Cromwell from Ireland, but his cooler head saw that there was yet time to finish his work in the west. During the winter he had been busily preparing for a new campaign, and it was only after the storm of Clonmell and the overthrow of the Irish army under Hugh O'Neill in the hottest fight the army had yet fought, that he embarked for England. The new Lord-General entered London amidst the shouts of a great mult.i.tude; and in July 1650, but a month after Charles had landed on the sh.o.r.es of Scotland, the English army crossed the Tweed fifteen thousand men strong. But the terror of his ma.s.sacres in Ireland hung round its leader, the country was deserted as he advanced, and he was forced to cling for provisions to a fleet which sailed along the coast. The Scotch general, Leslie, with a larger force, refused battle, and lay obstinately in his lines between Edinburgh and Leith. A march of the English army round his position to the slopes of the Pentlands only brought about a change of the Scottish front; and as Cromwell fell back baffled upon Dunbar, Leslie encamped upon the heights above the town, and cut off the English retreat along the coast by the seizure of c.o.c.kburnspath. His post was almost una.s.sailable, while the soldiers of Cromwell were sick and starving; and their general had resolved on an embarkation of his forces when he saw in the dusk of evening signs of movement in the Scottish camp. Leslie's caution had at last been overpowered by the zeal of the preachers, and on the morning of the third of September the Scotch army moved down to the lower ground between the hillside on which it was encamped and a little brook which covered the English front. Leslie's horse was far in advance of the main body, and it had hardly reached the level ground when Cromwell in the dim dawn flung his whole force upon it. ”They run, I profess they run!”

he cried as the Scotch horse broke after a desperate resistance, and threw into confusion the foot who were hurrying to its aid. Then, as the sun rose over the mist of the morning, he added in n.o.bler words: ”Let G.o.d arise, and let His enemies be scattered! Like as the mist vanisheth, so shalt Thou drive them away!” In less than an hour the victory was complete. The defeat at once became a rout; ten thousand prisoners were taken, with all the baggage and guns; three thousand were slain, with scarce any loss on the part of the conquerors. Leslie reached Edinburgh, a general without an army.

[Sidenote: Break with Holland.]

The effect of Dunbar was at once seen in the att.i.tude of the Continental powers. Spain hastened to recognize the Republic, and Holland offered its alliance. But Cromwell was watching with anxiety the growing discontent at home. He was anxious for a ”settlement.” He knew that for such a settlement a new Parliament was necessary, and that England would never consent to be ruled against her will by the mere rump of members gathered at Westminster. Yet every day made it plainer that it was their purpose to continue to rule her. The general amnesty claimed by Ireton and the bill for the Parliament's dissolution still hung on hand; the reform of the courts of justice, which had been pressed by the army, failed before the obstacles thrown in its way by the lawyers in the Commons. ”Relieve the oppressed,” Cromwell wrote from Dunbar, ”hear the groans of poor prisoners. Be pleased to reform the abuses of all professions. If there be any one that makes many poor to make a few rich, that suits not a Commonwealth.” But the House was seeking to turn the current of public opinion in favour of its own continuance by a great diplomatic triumph. It resolved secretly on the wild project of bringing about a union between England and Holland, and it took advantage of Cromwell's victory to despatch Oliver St. John with a stately emba.s.sy to the Hague. His rejection of an alliance and Treaty of Commerce which the Dutch offered was followed by the disclosure of the English proposal of union. The proposal was at once refused by the States; and the envoys, who returned angrily to the Parliament, attributed their failure to the posture of affairs in Scotland. Charles was preparing there for a new campaign. Humiliation after humiliation had been heaped on the young king since he landed in his northern realm.

He had subscribed to the Covenant; he had listened to sermons and scoldings from the ministers; he was called on at last to sign a declaration that acknowledged the tyranny of his father and the idolatry of his mother. Hardened and shameless as he was, the young king for a moment recoiled. ”I could never look my mother in the face again,” he cried, ”after signing such a paper”; but he signed. He was still however a king only in name, shut out from the Council and the army, with his friends excluded from all part in government or the war. But he was freed by the victory of Dunbar. ”I believe that the king will set up on his own score now,” Cromwell wrote after his victory, as he advanced to occupy Edinburgh while the royal forces fell back upon Stirling and Perth. With the overthrow of Leslie in fact the power of Argyle and the narrow Presbyterians whom he led came to an end. Hamilton, the brother and successor of the Duke who had been captured at Preston, brought back the Royalists to the camp, and Charles insisted on taking part in the Council and on being crowned at Scone.

[Sidenote: Worcester.]

Master of Edinburgh, but foiled in an attack on Stirling, Cromwell waited through the winter and the long spring of 1651, while intestine feuds broke up the nation opposed to him, and while the stricter Covenanters retired sulkily from the king's army on the return of the ”Malignants,” the Royalists of the earlier war, to its ranks. With summer the campaign recommenced, but Leslie again fell back on his system of positions, and Cromwell, finding his camp at Stirling una.s.sailable, crossed into Fife and left the road open to the South. The bait was taken. In spite of Leslie's counsels Charles resolved to invade England, and call the Royalist party again to revolt. He was soon in full march through Lancas.h.i.+re upon the Severn, with the English horse under Lambert hanging on his rear, and the English foot hastening by York and Coventry to close the road to London. ”We have done to the best of our judgement,” Cromwell replied to the angry alarm of the Parliament, ”knowing that if some issue were not put to this business it would occasion another winter's war.” At Coventry he learned Charles's position, and swept round by Evesham upon Worcester, where the Scotch king was encamped. Throwing half his force across the river, Cromwell attacked the town on both sides on the third of September, the anniversary of his victory at Dunbar. He led the van in person, and was ”the first to set foot on the enemy's ground.” When Charles descended from the cathedral tower to fling himself on the division which remained eastward of the Severn, Cromwell hurried back across the river, and was soon ”riding in the midst of the fire.” For four or five hours, he told the Parliament, ”it was as stiff a contest as ever I have seen”; for though the Scots were outnumbered and beaten into the city, they gave no answer but shot to offers of quarter, and it was not till nightfall that all was over. The loss of the victors was as usual inconsiderable. The conquered lost six thousand men, and all their baggage and artillery.

Leslie was among the prisoners: Hamilton among the dead. Charles himself fled from the field; and after months of strange wanderings and adventures made his escape to France.

[Sidenote: Activity of the Parliament.]

”Now that the king is dead and his son defeated,” Cromwell said gravely to the Parliament, ”I think it necessary to come to a settlement.” But the settlement which had been promised after Naseby was still as distant as ever after Worcester. The bill for dissolving the present Parliament, though Cromwell pressed it in person, was only pa.s.sed, after bitter opposition, by a majority of two: and even this success had to be purchased by a compromise which permitted the House to sit for three years more. Internal affairs were almost at a deadlock. The Parliament appointed committees to prepare plans for legal reforms or for ecclesiastical reforms, but it did nothing to carry them into effect. It was overpowered by the crowd of affairs which the confusion of the war had thrown into its hands, by confiscations, sequestrations, appointments to civil and military offices, in fact the whole administration of the State; and there were times when it was driven to a resolve not to take any private affairs for weeks together in order that it might make some progress with public business. To add to this confusion and muddle there were the inevitable scandals which arose from it; charges of malversation and corruption were hurled at the members of the House; and some, like Haselrig, were accused with justice of using their power to further their own interests. The one remedy for all this was, as the army saw, the a.s.sembly of a new and complete Parliament in place of the mere ”rump” of the old, but this was the one measure which the House was resolute to avert. Vane spurred it to a new activity. In February 1652 the Amnesty Bill was forced through after fifteen divisions. A Grand Committee, with Sir Matthew Hale at its head, was appointed to consider the reform of the law. A union with Scotland was pushed resolutely forward; eight English Commissioners convoked a Convention of delegates from its counties and boroughs at Edinburgh, and, in spite of dogged opposition, procured a vote in favour of the proposal. A bill was introduced which gave legal form to the union, and admitted representatives from Scotland into the next Parliament. A similar plan was proposed for a union with Ireland.

[Sidenote: War with Holland.]

But it was necessary for Vane's purposes not only to show the energy of the Parliament, but to free it from the control of the army. His aim was to raise in the navy a force devoted to the House, and to eclipse the glories of Dunbar and Worcester by yet greater triumphs at sea. With this view the quarrel with Holland had been carefully nursed; a ”Navigation Act,” prohibiting the importation in foreign vessels of any but the products of the countries to which they belonged, struck a fatal blow at the carrying trade from which the Dutch drew their wealth; and fresh debates arose from the English claim to salutes from all vessels in the Channel. In May 1652 the two fleets met before Dover, and a summons from Blake to lower the Dutch flag was met by the Dutch admiral, Tromp, with a broadside. The States-General attributed the collision to accident, and offered to recall Tromp; but the English demands rose at each step in the negotiations till war became inevitable. The army hardly needed the warning conveyed by the introduction of a bill for its disbanding to understand the new policy of the Parliament. It was significant that while accepting the bill for its own dissolution the House had as yet prepared no plan for the a.s.sembly which was to follow it; and the Dutch war had hardly been declared when, abandoning the att.i.tude of inaction which it had observed since the beginning of the Commonwealth, the army pet.i.tioned, not only for reform in Church and State, but for an explicit declaration that the House would bring its proceedings to a close. The Pet.i.tion forced the House to discuss a bill for ”a New Representative,” but the discussion soon brought out the resolve of the sitting members to continue as a part of the coming Parliament without re-election. The officers, irritated by such a claim, demanded in conference after conference an immediate dissolution, and the House as resolutely refused. In ominous words Cromwell supported the demand of the army. ”As for the members of this Parliament, the army begins to take them in disgust. I would it did so with less reason.”

There was just ground, he urged, for discontent in their selfish greed of houses and lands, the scandalous lives of many, their partiality as judges, their interference with the ordinary course of law in matters of private interest, their delay of law reform, above all in their manifest design of perpetuating their own power. ”There is little to hope for from such men,” he ended with a return to his predominant thought, ”for a settlement of the nation.”

[Sidenote: Blake.]

For the moment the crisis was averted by the events of the war. A terrible storm had separated the two fleets when on the point of engaging in the Orkneys, but Ruyter and Blake met again in the Channel, and after a fierce struggle the Dutch were forced to retire under cover of night. Since the downfall of Spain Holland had been the first naval power in the world, and the spirit of the nation rose gallantly with its earliest defeat. Immense efforts were made to strengthen the fleet; and the veteran, Tromp, who was replaced at its head, appeared in the Channel with seventy-three s.h.i.+ps of war. Blake had but half the number, but he at once accepted the challenge, and throughout the twenty-eighth of November the unequal fight went on doggedly till nightfall, when the English fleet withdrew shattered into the Thames. Tromp swept the Channel in triumph, with a broom at his masthead; and the tone of the Commons lowered with the defeat of their favourite force. A compromise seems to have been arranged between the two parties, for the bill providing a new Representative was again pushed on; and the Parliament agreed to retire in the coming November, while Cromwell offered no opposition to a reduction of the army. But the courage of the House rose afresh with a turn of fortune. The strenuous efforts of Blake enabled him again to put to sea in a few months after his defeat; and in February 1653 a running fight through four days ended at last in an English victory, though Tromp's fine seamans.h.i.+p enabled him to save the convoy he was guarding. The House at once insisted on the retention of its power. Not only were the existing members to continue as members of the new Parliament, thus depriving the places they represented of their right of choosing representatives, but they were to const.i.tute a Committee of Revision, and in this capacity to determine the validity of each election and the fitness of the members returned.

[Sidenote: The Parliament driven out.]

A conference took place between the leaders of the Commons and the officers of the Army, who resolutely demanded not only the omission of these clauses, but that the Parliament should at once dissolve itself, and commit the new elections to a Council of State. ”Our charge,”

retorted Haselrig, ”cannot be transferred to any one.” The conference was adjourned till the next morning, on an understanding that no decisive step should be taken; but it had no sooner rea.s.sembled on the twentieth of April than the absence of the leading members confirmed the news that Vane was fast pressing the bill for a new Representative through the House. ”It is contrary to common honesty,” Cromwell angrily broke out; and, quitting Whitehall, he summoned a company of musketeers to follow him as far as the door of the Commons. He sate down quietly in his place, ”clad in plain grey clothes and grey worsted stockings,” and listened to Vane's pa.s.sionate arguments. ”I am come to do what grieves me to the heart,” he said to his neighbour, St. John; but he still remained quiet, till Vane pressed the House to waive its usual forms and pa.s.s the bill at once. ”The time has come,” he said to Harrison. ”Think well,” replied Harrison, ”it is a dangerous work!” and Cromwell listened for another quarter of an hour. At the question ”that this bill do pa.s.s,” he at length rose, and his tone grew higher as he repeated his former charges of injustice, self-interest, and delay. ”Your hour is come,” he ended, ”the Lord hath done with you!” A crowd of members started to their feet in angry protest. ”Come, come,” replied Cromwell, ”we have had enough of this”; and striding into the midst of the chamber, he clapt his hat on his head, and exclaimed, ”I will put an end to your prating!” In the din that followed his voice was heard in broken sentences--”It is not fit that you should sit here any longer! You should give place to better men! You are no Parliament.” Thirty musketeers entered at a sign from their General, and the fifty members present crowded to the door. ”Drunkard!” Cromwell broke out as Wentworth pa.s.sed him; and Marten was taunted with a yet coa.r.s.er name. Vane, fearless to the last, told him his act was ”against all right and all honour.” ”Ah, Sir Harry Vane, Sir Harry Vane,” Cromwell retorted in bitter indignation at the trick he had been played, ”you might have prevented all this, but you are a juggler, and have no common honesty!

The Lord deliver me from Sir Harry Vane!” The Speaker refused to quit his seat, till Harrison offered to ”lend him a hand to come down.”

Cromwell lifted the mace from the table. ”What shall we do with this bauble?” he said. ”Take it away!” The door of the House was locked at last, and the dispersion of the Commons was followed a few hours after by that of their executive committee, the Council of State. Cromwell himself summoned them to withdraw. ”We have heard,” replied the President, John Bradshaw, ”what you have done this morning at the House, and in some hours all England will hear it. But you mistake, sir, if you think the Parliament dissolved. No power on earth can dissolve the Parliament but itself, be sure of that!”

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